Regal Power Research Articles

The Right to Rule in England: Depositions and the Kingdom's Authority, 1327-1485

A SERIES OF FIVE DEPOSITIONS between 1327 and 1485 drove the English to conjure up arguments and principles justifying a change in kings. Five sovereigns-Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI, Edward V, and Richard III-lost the throne permanently; and four usurpers-Henry IV, Edward IV, Richard III, and Henry VII-claimed to be lawfully seised and possessed of the said in their stead. To sanction the removal of an unsatisfactory sovereign and his successor's usurpation, men of law-both common and canondevised apologias. These justificatory declarations, taken seriatim, created a doctrine of restraint upon the regal power that eventually became a part of England's constitutional, or public, law. On each of these occasions, God and His Englishmen had the chance to choose a new king. As they did so, their spokesmen defined further the right to rule and the authority to govern, thereby limiting the English monarchy, for to define is to curb. The deposers, to justify their deeds, alleged deceit, deviousness, distrust, and uselessness in those they removed; and sometimes irresponsibility, bad faith, and a breach of the coronation oath. The deposed kings had governed, they said, without good counsel and consent, or against England's laws and customs. Positively, the usurpers claimed the crown through inheritance or by God's will, conquest, or election. Thereby they brought into play and into public law God's authority, the people's, and the kingdom's-authority that was expressed through the three estates of the realm and, finally, through parliament. These indictments of beaten kings and the vindications of their conquerors contained much bad history. In due season they made good law. Again and again the official apologias raised basic questions about public law and governance. To whom was, or ought, the good king to be responsible? And for what and how much was he himself to be answerable, and to whom? To God alone? Yet that position was hardly satisfactory. To medieval men, the kingdom possessed authority of its own that in several ways complemented God's, thus suggesting that the king was, in some measure, also

The Radical Phase of the Oxford Movement

Hitherto we have depended on the State, i.e. on the ruling powers in the country—the King and the aristocracy … But these recollec-tions of the past must not engross our minds, or hinder us in looking at things as they are, and as they will be soon, and inquiring what is intended by Providence to take the place of the time-honoured instrument which he has broken (if it is yet to be broken) the regal and aristocratic power, I shall disgust many men when I say, we must look to the people’. (J. H. Newman, British Magazine, 1833).

The Impeachment of Roger Maynwaring

DOGER MAYNWARING' was one of five significant men impeached X in England during the i 62o's. Although he is widely known as an extreme exponent of the king's prerogative, his impeachment has received little attention. From the standpoint of demonstrating the positions of Parliament and crown, the proceedings against him, and their aftermath, rival if they do not surpass the importance of the more famous cases involving Sir Giles Mompesson; Viscount St. Albans, the lord chancellor; and the earl of Middlesex, the lord high treasurer.2 In the year I627 England was at war with Spain. John Eliot had easily convinced the Parliament of I626 that accountability for the past should precede any financial provision for the king for the future. Charles I had then tried to exact a forced loan equivalent to five subsidies, with everyone carried in the subsidy books contributing a proportionate amount. Charles, in a letter to the archbishop of Canterbury urging the clergy to preach unity and charity, told the church that since he had gone to war on the advice of Parliament, he could now be forsaken only with sin and shame.3 Roger Maynwaring, chaplain in ordinary to the king, responded enthusiastically to the appeal. Maynwaring, during his month of attendance, preached before Charles I on July 4, I627, at Oatlands. After he had shown that logically all power must be either derived from some higher cause or uncreated and independent, he added that only God has uncreated and independent power. Since, according to Maynwaring, the regal power is the highest power that God has ordained, kings are above

Procum Patricium

‘The sovereign power of the dictator, theimperium, was … an unrestricted regal power, taken over ca. 504 B.C. by the 300 horsemen of the noblemen-bodyguard, who constituted then the patriciate, i.e. the closed circle of the potential holders of the imperium’. This is a quotation from A. Alföldi's latest book,Early Rome and the Latins(Ann Arbor), 1965, p. 44, and summarizes his theory of the origins of the Roman Republic. According to Alföldi the aristocracy of the monarchic period was an aristocracy of knights, and theircoup d'étatof about 504 B.C. brought about the end of the monarchy. As is well known, Alföldi developed this theory in a previous book,Der frührömische Reiteradel und seine Ehrenabzeichen(Baden-Baden, 1952) which is chiefly meant to prove that the various attributes of the senatorial order—including the special shoe for the patrician senators, thecalceus patricius—were originally characteristic of the archaic knights. To the best of my knowledge, Alföldi never says explicitly that the senators of the monarchic period must have been identical with the 300 ‘celeres’ who were the king's bodyguard according to some of the ancient sources (Livy 1, 15, 8; Plut.,Rom.26; Zonaras 7, 3, 4). But this seems to be Alföldi's implication—in fact it was already Niebuhr's hypothesis.

Regal Power and the Rule of Law: a Tudor Paradox

Tudor statesmen, in their statutes and debates, and Tudor jurists, in reports and treatises, recorded their awareness of an antithesis between regal power and political law. Political action and juridical argument made them increasingly sensitive to an oppugnancy between executive authority and constitutional control. Medieval men of law, too, had noted this inconsonance in England's polity. Sir John Fortescue, while Henry VI's Chancellorin-exile in 1468, faced the dilemma; but he resolved it only verbally. He wrote: “regal power is restrained by political law.” Then he added, “such is the law of the Kingdom” of England. So facile a formula as Fortescue's might make nice theory, yet it was one easier to prescribe than to apply to a live monarch.The pragmatic Tudors, however, succeeded in surmounting the antithesis between political law and regal power, paradoxically, by augmenting both. To solve immediate political crises and to enhance the effectiveness of government, Privy Councilors and parliamentarians passed act after act that increased the King's prerogatives. At the same time, moreover, these very statutes afforced, by implication, the principles of political, or public, law. Kings and queens, judges and councilors, Lords and Commons during the sixteenth century formulated a concept of the rule of law and made it transcendant. By the 1590's they had accorded the rule of law statutory, judicial, and regal recognition. For the Tudor time-being, this principle served to balance regal power and political law and to give to this antinomy a congruity.

Book Review: The Regal Power of the Church

Book Review: The Regal Power of the Church