How are you, everyone?  Here’s another helping of bonus blurting on the Classic English Literature Subcast.  

Here in America, or ‘Murca as a disturbingly large number of my fellow citizens increasingly pronounce it, usually with guttural bravado, it is the 4th of July.  Well, surely it’s the 4th of July in many places, but here in the good ol’ US of A, we celebrate Independence Day, commemorating the passage of the Declaration of Independence, when the 13 American colonies severed the political bands that bound them to Great Britain.  In the general telling of this event, we make sure to stress that this was the first time a colonial people had separated from the parent nation.  We also note that America is as much an idea as a nation: you will still hear it referred to as “the American Experiment,” as if it were an intellectual and empirical endeavor.  It was the only country that became a nation not through centuries or even millennia of cultural accretion: geography, customs, language, and religion eventually congealing into a political entity.  No, America is the result of a logical argument.  Read the declaration and you’ll find that it’s structured as an “if, then, therefore” proposition. If people have inalienable rights, then the King of England has violated them, therefore we have the right to independence.  We like to think of this as a rather revolutionary idea.

But its roots go very much deeper than 18th century Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, or Virginia.  In fact, they go back at least to the early Renaissance – to Germany, in fact – when a troubled monk legendarily posted 95 theses, or propositions for argument, on the doors of Wittenberg Cathedral.  Yes, America’s independence is the direct result of the religious struggles of 16th century Europe, the very struggles that underlie the work of poets like Edmund Spenser.  

One of the great doctrines that grounded Martin Luther’s challenge to the Catholic Church’s authorities is sola scriptura – it means “only scripture” – and it posits the Bible’s supremacy, not that of the Church hierarchy or its traditions.  In a world of increasing literacy due to the printing press, the greater influence and prestige of vernacular languages, and improved education, this doctrine places the onus of salvation on the individual reader of scripture.  You can attend the word of God yourself – without the mediation of a priest, or bishop, or Pope.  You have direct access to divine authority.  Now, it’s not a huge step from “I don’t need a pope to tell me how to get to heaven” to “I don’t need a king to tell me how to run my life.”  That dawning realization has some powerful effects on Renaissance political thought.

In the previous subcast episode, I talked a little about Queen Elizabeth 1’s political rhetoric, how she identified with her people, saw the kingdom of England as her metaphorical husband.  This is more than just oratory – it marks a Protestant shift in the political zeitgeist of early modern Europe.  In a speech to the Lord Mayor of London before her coronation in 1558, Elizabeth assures: 

I will be as good unto ye as ever a Queen was unto her people. No will in me can lack, neither do I trust shall there lack any power. And persuade yourselves that for the safety and quietness of you all I will not spare if need be to spend my blood. 

King James 6 of Scotland, who would succeed Elizabeth as James I, makes a similar argument in his “The True Law of Free Monarchies” from 1598:

By the Law of Nature the King becomes a natural Father to all his Lieges at his Coronation: And as the Father of his fatherly duty is bound to care for the nourishing, education, and virtuous government of his children; even so is the king bound to care for all his subjects. As all the toil and pain that the father can take for his children, will be thought light and well bestowed by him, so that the effect thereof redound to their profit and weale; so ought the Prince to doe towards his people. As the kindly father ought to foresee all inconveniences and dangers that may arise towards his children, and though with the hazard of his own person press to prevent the same; so ought the King towards his people. 

James uses the paternal analogy to justify the rule of kings – and this document is surely a step toward absolutism – but that justification rests upon the exercise of responsibilities to his people, his children.  

To do so takes God’s care for humanity as its model.  God is both parent and monarch to all creation; in a smaller way, as a prince is to their people; in a smaller way still, as a father is to his family.  

While this hierarchical chain of being and analogy presents a rather stable and orderly conception of the universe, implicit in the declaration of order is the potential for disorder and indeed, reordering.

Let’s look at an argument by John Ponet, the Protestant Bishop of Winchester and polemicist against tyranny.  His “Short Treatise of Political Power” of 1556 justifies the break with Rome, stating, 

Whereupon this is a general rule, that the pope is not to be obeyed, but in lawful and honest things, and so by good argument from the more to the less, that princes (being footstools and stirrup holders to popes) commanding their subjects to do that which is not godly, not just, not lawful, or hurtful to their country, ought not to be obeyed, but withstood.

Ponet asserts that the law of God is a natural law, and that it is above the laws of prelates or princes, and that if they do not uphold the natural law of God, they must be disobeyed.  Ponet goes on to point out that a king cannot be king without the commonwealth, and that a commonwealth “may live when the head is cut off, and may put on a new head.”   A ruler must concern herself with the poor man’s house, his ease, his pleasure, and his quietness: “And as the sun never standeth still but continually goeth about the world, doing his office, with his heat refreshing and comforting all natural things in the world, so ought a good prince to be continually occupied in his ministry, not seeking his own profit, but the wealth of those committed to his charge.”

Theologian Richard Hooker concurs in his “The Laws of an Ecclesiastical Polity,” written in response, not to Catholic objectors, but to Puritans who denied Elizabeth’s right to rule Church and State.  He argues for a rule of law that countenances and limits the monarch’s power.  He says,

We cannot properly term him a king, of whom it may not be said, at the leastwise as touching certain the very chiefest affairs of state, “his right in them is to have rule, not subject to any other predominant.” I am not of the opinion that simply always in kings the most, but the best limited power is best, that which in dealing is tied unto the soundest, perfectest, and most indifferent rule, which rule is the law.  I mean not only the law of nature and of God, but very national or municipal laws consonant thereunto.

OK, there you go: the clear enunciation, two centuries before Thomas Jefferson put quill to paper, that the monarch is not above the law, that the government is beholden to the will and good of the people since that is the purpose for which nature and God have devised governments.  That is why Elizabeth must be willing to shed her blood for England, why she must take England as her husband, why James must be its father, and why, in the fulness of time, James’ son Charles will become the first European monarch executed by his own people for “‘a wicked design totally to subvert the fundamental laws and liberties of this nation, and, in their place, to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government.”  That is, treason against the citizens of England.  Because the forces unleashed by Martin Luther’s Reformation, his almost totemic stress on reading and writing, gradually produce an understanding of each human’s place not in a hierarchical chain of being, but as equal before God and before the law.

Just something to think about as you chow down some hot dogs and potato salad today.  Have a second slice of apple pie while you’re at it.

Talk to you soon, everybody.