them,” Philip Hunton wrote in 1643, “is to demand which of them shall be absolute … if the nondecision be tolerable, it must remain undecided.”1 Unfortunately in 1643 war between the king and Parliament had made nondecision increasingly impracticable. In that case Hunton advised “every person … [to] … aid that part which in his best reason and judgement stands for the publike good.” It was not a choice anyone had wished to make. At the beginning of the seventeenth century Englishmen prided themselves on their government’s nice balance between liberty and authority. It was this balance they hoped they had restored as the century closed. But in the years between, the scales tipped one way and then another as dissension, civil war, revolution, restoration, dissension, and revolution followed one another in giddy and unprecedented procession goaded by, and in turn setting in motion, probing of virtually every aspect of the relationship between the individual and the state.2 Central to these events and this relationship were rival claims for sovereignty. Claims were advanced for the sovereignty of nearly every component of English government—for the sovereignty of the king alone, for the king in Parliament, for the two houses of Parliament and the House of Commons alone, for the sovereignty of the law and that of the people.
If the scope of the controversy was unprecedented, so was the opportunity for debate. For the first time in their history Englishmen had the opportunity for political argument on a grand scale, and for the first time they were in a position to choose between political visions. Happily the shifting, intense, and at times profound debate on sovereignty was published, largely in the form of hastily written tracts printed in unprecedented quantities.3 Thanks to the “swarming number of pamphleteers” stricken with what a correspondent of Lord Conway diagnosed as “a powerful disease, this writing,” we can read for ourselves the political theories and analyses of scores of the best minds of that talented, turbulent, and pivotal age.4 The literature they left has been of the greatest consequence for succeeding generations across the entire political spectrum.
There are a variety of compelling justifications for a collection of these essays. The most general was touched upon by the royalist Bishop Brian Duppa in 1656 when he praised Photius, whose anthology Bibliotheca included the names and works of many classical authors “which else had utterly perished” and heartily wished “there wer found som to imitate him; for besides preserving the memory, both of greater and more especially lesser tracts and treatises (which ar commonly lost like pinns and needles, and never recovered again), there might be great use made of it, both in the exercising of every man’s own judgement, and giving an edge to the judgement of others.”5 It is hoped this collection of seventeenth-century tracts might be of similar “great use.” Issues of sovereignty are chronic, and the struggles of seventeenth-century men to achieve liberty with order speak to us still. Moreover, while much study has been lavished upon those few seventeenth-century theorists later centuries have deemed original and important, the works of other excellent thinkers, such as Henry Ferne, Francis Rous, and Gilbert Burnet, now nearly as lost as Duppa’s “pinns and needles,” were frequently more typical of their age and more influential during it, and furnish an intellectual context in which a Hobbes and a Locke can be better understood and more justly evaluated.
Beyond such a general purpose is the historian’s purpose. As Bernard Bailyn wrote of the pamphlets of the American Revolution, these tracts “reveal not merely positions taken but the reasons why positions were taken; they reveal motive and understanding: the assumptions, beliefs, and ideas—the articulated world view—that lay behind the manifest events of the time.”6
Lastly, many seventeenth-century historians now question the assumption that clashing constitutional theories played a prominent role in the civil war. They rightly stress the political concepts most Englishmen shared, but some have gone on to marginalize and belittle the importance and the quality of the political theories so passionately argued prior to, and during, the civil war era.7 Indeed, one scholar maintained that “from the time religious and ecclesiastical splits seriously damaged parliamentary unity to the time when that unity was, after a fashion, restored at dreadful cost, constitutional thought was suspended.”8 The political treatises of the Restoration period have suffered less belittlement only because until recently they have not been the subject of serious consideration.9 In both instances exposure to the published tracts of influential, if lesser known, authors provides an opportunity for a larger audience to evaluate their quality and significance and hopefully arrive at a richer understanding of the century’s political thought and conflicts.
When I first traveled to Great Britain I was cautioned, “Just because you speak the same language, don’t think you understand each other.” That advice is just as sound for the time traveler determined to fathom the tangled intellectual milieu of seventeenth-century Englishmen. In addition to the need to understand a battery of then commonly accepted political notions, it is important to be aware that the vocabulary central to the debate over sovereignty—words such as “sovereign” and “absolute”—had meanings so various and shifting that the protagonists themselves were often confused. This brief introduction can do no more than point out the major landmarks and landmines of that philosophical universe. The fascinating implications and nuances of the discussion will be left to the authors themselves.
Let us begin with those political understandings Englishmen shared, for their inherent contradictions were at the root of the trouble.10 We will then consider the various claims for supremacy. The English king was head of both church and state. His political position was ancient, his role as supreme head of the Church of England less than a century old when James I came to the throne in 1603. This double role had great potential to ensure a secure and powerful monarchy but also generated inconsistent constitutional expectations.
The glory of the constitution was regarded by many as its balance and reciprocity: balance between the king’s prerogatives and people’s liberties and between the king’s duty to his subjects and their obedience to him. This last was viewed as a kind of contract in which the king was bound to maintain the customs and liberties of his subjects by his coronation oath while his subjects were bound to him by oaths of loyalty and supremacy.11 Thus, while the English government was a hereditary monarchy—then considered the most stable form of polity—it was no simple monarchy since the king’s powers were limited by the laws and customs of the realm and, in the critical areas of legislation and direct taxation, were shared with Parliament. Parliament comprised the monarch and representatives of the three estates of the realm—the lords spiritual and the lords temporal who sat in the House of Lords, and the townsmen and gentry whose representatives sat in the House of Commons.12 This gave credibility to the belief of Englishmen that their government was a judicious mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy possessing the advantages and avoiding the weaknesses of each.13 Although the concepts of the contract theory and mixed government imbedded in these notions, with their implication that the king might be held to account by his people, were prudently silenced in the immediate aftermath of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, both theories resurfaced in the late 1630s.14
The king’s relationship with Parliament was complex. It shared his legislative and fiscal authority, and the king in Parliament was regarded as English government at its most potent. But Parliament was, in many respects, a creature of the Crown. The king decided when it should be summoned and when dissolved, and no bill could become law without his consent.15 Moreover, he had numerous opportunities to manipulate the membership of the Commons, while in the House of Lords the spiritual lords—the bishops—were royal appointees and the ranks of lay peers could be supplemented at his pleasure.16 Then too enforcement of parliamentary statutes was left to the king and his courts, and the right to dispense with or suspend a law was part of his prerogative.17 Nonetheless, Parliament was the highest court in the realm because it alone was able to legislate and, so it contended, best able to interpret the law. It also served as a council to the king. In it “the whole body of the realm, and every particular member thereof, either in person or by representation (upon their own free elections) … [were] by the laws of the realm deemed to be personally present.”18
