Their power seems inescapable–but so did the divine right of kings.
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They're using the blood bugs to enforce the Divine right of kings.
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The American republic was founded on the repudiation of the divine right of kings to rule.
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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.
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Globally, authoritarians who act as if they rule by the divine right of kings are on the rise.
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He invoked the divine right of kings only as a perfect foil to the divine right claimed by officialdom.
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Rejecting the "Divine Right of Kings" to rule them, they embraced a representative model in which rights were lodged in the polity itself.
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"We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings," she said during a speech at the 2014 National Book Awards.
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But we also don't rule by mob—the tyranny of the majority is something everyone from Hobbes to Payne to Isaiah Berlin feared as much as the Divine Right of Kings.
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Photo: APGoogle, along with fellow tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter has drawn increasing scrutiny this year over concerns that its "concentrated authority resembles the divine right of kings," as the New York Times put it.
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But Count Tolstoy insists that monarchists are not pining for the days of absolute rulers and the divine right of kings, when Henry VIII of England could order up the execution of unwanted wives and political foes.
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If we couldn't find anything to delight or instruct us in the works of sexists, racists, anti-Semites and people who believe in the divine right of kings, our literary canon would barely fill a medium-size handbag.
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To keep up an aesthetic of a divine mysticism, not far from the ancient idea of the divine right of kings, British courtiers have generally exerted power to keep as much mystery around the royals' lives as possible.
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They're the ones drawn into the cult of personality, or who worship at the altar of the iron-fisted leader, or who endorse the divine right of kings, or who do none of these things but understand the value of remaining in this person's orbit to benefit from their favor or reflected power.
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James VI had the work published in 1598. It is considered remarkable for setting out the doctrine of the divine right of kings in Scotland, and latterly England, for the first time. James saw the divine right of kings as an extension of the apostolic succession.
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Eventually, the divine right of kings fell out of favor and this idea ascended; it formed the basis for modern democracy.
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Robert Sibthorpe or Sibthorp (died 1662) was an English clergyman who gained notoriety during the reign of King Charles I of England for his outspoken defense of the divine right of kings.
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During the French Wars of Religion, the monarchomachs began to contest the divine right of kings, setting up the bases for the theory of popular sovereignty and theorizing the right of tyrannicides.
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106 Milton's controversial denial of the divine right of kings prevented widespread acceptance of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Curse my Name by the German metal band Blind Guardian is an interpretation of Milton's tract.
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More traditional theologians legitimized the conquest while at the same time limiting the absolute power of the sovereign, which was celebrated in others parts of Europe under the developing notion of the divine right of kings.
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But, at the same time while a stateless society is seen as a possibility, much of Hindu political thought focuses on the inherently mixed nature of man (benign and malign) and therefore of the divine right of kings to govern so long as they protect the people from harm; in the event that kings do not govern on the basis of dharma, Chanakya sutras allow that it is better not to have a king than have one who is wanting in discipline. This contrasts with the Western notion of a universal divine right of kings regardless of the consequences.
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The British historian Keith Thomas discussed the royal touch in the context of religion and magic, while his colleague and compatriot J. C. D. Clark attributes the survival of the practice into the 18th century to the persisting notion of the divine right of kings.
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Henry VIII declared himself the Supreme Head of the Church of England and ushered in the theory of divine right of kings. The divine right of kings, divine right, or God's mandate is a political and religious doctrine of political legitimacy in a monarchy. It stems from a specific metaphysical framework in which a king (or queen) is pre-ordained to inherit the crown before their birth. Under this theory of political legitimacy the subjects of the crown are considered to have actively (rather than merely passively) turned over the metaphysical selection of the king's soul – which will inhabit the body and rule them – over to God.
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Calvert's replacement for Talbot was another Roman Catholic, William Joseph, who would also prove controversial. In November 1688 Joseph set about offending local opinion by lecturing his Maryland subjects on morality, adultery and the divine right of kings, lambasting the colony as "a land full of adulterers".
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One of the reasons why Luther urged that the secular authorities crush the peasant rebellion was because of St. Paul's teaching of the doctrine of Divine Right of Kings in his epistle to the , which says that all the authorities are appointed by God, and should not therefore be resisted.
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In early Mesopotamian culture, kings were often regarded as deities after their death. Shulgi of Ur was among the first Mesopotamian rulers to declare himself to be divine. This was the direct precursor to the concept of "Divine Right of kings", as well as in the Egyptian and Roman religions.
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27, No. 4, pp. 1853–1888 (2006). The Deuteronomic social vision may have influenced opponents of the divine right of kings, including Bishop John Ponet in sixteenth-century England.Brett, Mark G. “National Identity as Commentary and as Metacommentary”, in Historiography and Identity (Re)formulation in Second Temple Historiographical Literature, p.
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In July 1946, Nehru pointedly observed that no princely state could prevail militarily against the army of independent India. In January 1947, he said that independent India would not accept the Divine right of kings,Lumby, E. W. R. 1954. The Transfer of Power in India, 1945–1947. London: George Allen & Unwin. p.
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Monarchical rule is among the oldest political institutions. Monarchies have existed in some form since ancient Sumeria. Monarchy has often claimed legitimacy from a higher power (in early modern Europe the divine right of kings, and in China the Mandate of Heaven). In England, royalty ceded power elsewhere in a gradual process.
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His power extends beyond government into the private religious life of his subjects. Under this system, citizens were often persecuted and imprisoned for their religious beliefs. It is this divine right of kings government that Sidney strongly opposed. In 1698, his Discourses Concerning Government was published outlining what he believed constituted a valid civil government.
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Bodin had numerous followers as political theorist, including Pierre Grégoire, in whom with François Grimaudet legislative authority starts to become closer to the divine right of kings, and William Barclay.Richard Tuck (1993), Philosophy and Government (1572–1651), p. 28; Google Books.Douglas M. Johnston, The Historical Foundations of World Order: the tower and the arena (2008), p.
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G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government I (1974), p. 268. Edward Coke took from Bodin on sovereignty; and like him opposed the concept of mixed monarchy.Cooper, p. 98-102. While Bodin's ideas on authority fitted with the theory of divine right of kings, his main concern was not with the choice of the sovereign.
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It implies an account of the divine right of kings, but in religious rather than legal terms.Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642 (1993), p. 136. Theodidactus, who leads the dialogue, justifies the penal laws.W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (2000), p.
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A history of religion in Britain: practice and belief from pre- Roman times to the present. (1994), 168-274. The Church of England was not only dominant in religious affairs, but it blocked outsiders from responsible positions in national and local government, business, professions and academe. In practice, the doctrine of the divine right of kings persistedJ.
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Political parties first appeared during the Exclusion Crisis of 1678–1681. The Whigs, who believed in limited monarchy, wanted to exclude James, Duke of York, from succeeding to the throne because he was a Roman Catholic. The Tories, who believed in the "Divine Right of Kings", defended James's hereditary claim. Political parties were not well organised or disciplined in the 17th century.
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Charles's many conflicts with Parliament, stemming from his belief in the divine right of kings and the many religious conflicts that pervaded his reign, triggered the English Civil War in 1642.Keay, pp. 37–38. Parliament deemed the regalia as "Jewels of the Crown", vested in the monarch because of his public role as king, and not owned by him personally.Barker, p. 46.
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Price (1997), p. 96. Concerns had been expressed that extending the privileges of English subjects to all Scots would cause England to be flooded by "an influx of 'hungry Scots'".Price (1997), p. 97. Objections were also raised that granting naturalisation to all the Scots would have encouraged the legal philosophy, espoused by James, of absolute monarchy and the divine right of kings.
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The works of the French philosophers Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot to name a few are paragon for political analysis, social science, social and political critic. Their influence leading to the French revolution has been enormous in the development of modern democracy throughout the world. Like Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, well known for his theory of the social contract, believed that a strong central power, such as a monarchy, was necessary to rule the innate selfishness of the individual but neither of them believed in the divine right of kings. John Locke, on the other hand, who gave us Two Treatises of Government and who did not believe in the divine right of kings either, sided with Aquinas and stood against both Machiavelli and Hobbes by accepting Aristotle's dictum that man seeks to be happy in a state of social harmony as a social animal.
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The Association's premier debating event is 'Port and Policy', which is held around three times a term. In its current format, three motions are presented. Typically the final motion is tongue-in-cheek or less serious: the divine right of kings is a recurring topic, as is the health of Western Civilisation. After speeches for and against the motion, the floor is invited to participate.
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In practice, the doctrine of the divine right of kings persistedJ.C.D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: ideology, social structure and political practice in the ancien regime (1985), pp 119–198 Old animosities had diminished, and a new spirit of toleration was abroad. Restrictions on Nonconformists were mostly either ignored or slowly lifted. The Protestants, including the Quakers, who worked to overthrow King James II were rewarded.
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Ercole Consalvi (8 June 1757 - 24 January 1824) was a deacon and cardinal of the Catholic Church, who served twice as Cardinal Secretary of State for the Papal States and who played a crucial role in the post-Napoleonic reassertion of the legitimist principle of the divine right of kings, of which he was a constant supporter.Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911), vol. 6, p. 969.
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As a > matter of fact, they were servants of the country. Later on ... kings became > so conceited that they thought that people had nothing to do with choosing > them. It was God himself, they said, that had made them kings. They called > this the “divine right of kings.” For long years, they misbehaved like this > and lived in great pomp and luxury while their people starved.
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According to the opinion of W. Jordan, the divine right of kings was dealt a blow from which it never completely recovered, yet unfettered authority and Caesaropapism was not something the later Mediaevals and Early Moderns understood by the phrase "by the grace of God" (which many of them ardently defended). If anything, a blow was dealt to subconsciously remaining pre-Christian Germanic feelings of "royal hail".
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"The Divine Right of Kings" is attributed to Edgar Allan Poe, though not fully proven. It appeared in Graham's Magazine in October 1845. The "King" of the title is Ellen King, possibly representing Frances Sargent Osgood, to whom the writer pledges his devotion. It was first identified as Poe's in an article on November 21, 1915, using the poem's signature of "P." as evidence.
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Augsburg Fortress, Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2001. p. 32. Friedrich Julius Stahl led the High Church Lutherans. Though raised a Jew, he was baptized as a Christian at the age of 19 through the influence of the Lutheran school he attended. As the leader of a neofeudal Prussian political party, he campaigned for the divine right of kings, the power of the nobility, and episcopal polity for the church.
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Liberal ideals in the political and economic fields developed and spread through the Atlantic Revolutions across most of the Western world. The concept of the divine right of kings was questioned by the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, by the oft-quoted statement that "all men are created equal" in the United States Declaration of Independence and even by the Spanish church.Abad de Santillán, p.
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Sir Robert Filmer (c. 1588 – 26 May 1653) was an English political theorist who defended the divine right of kings. His best known work, Patriarcha, published posthumously in 1680, was the target of numerous Whig attempts at rebuttal, including Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government, James Tyrrell's Patriarcha Non Monarcha and John Locke's Two Treatises of Government. Filmer also wrote critiques of Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, Hugo Grotius and Aristotle.
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David Owen from Anglesey was one "proto-Arminian" who both advocated the divine right of kings, and regarded Hooker's works as supporting it. His works were brought back into print two decades after his death in 1623. Of the two most notorious clerical supporters of royal prerogative of the reign of Charles I, Robert Sibthorpe at least had Arminian associations (with Owen and others in the diocese of Peterborough); while Roger Maynwaring did not.
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The Doctor Who serial The Image of the Fendahl takes place on Lammas Eve. In the Inspector Morse episode "Day of the Devil", Lammas Day is presented as a Satanic (un)holy day, "the Devil's day". Katherine Kurtz's alternate World War II fantasy "history" takes its title, Lammas Night, from pagan tradition surrounding the first of August and the Divine Right of Kings. The English football club Staines Lammas F.C. is named after the festival.
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The core Jacobite belief was in the divine right of kings, and the restoration of the House of Stuart to the throne. However, Jacobitism was a complex mix of ideas; in Ireland, it was associated with tolerance for Catholicism and the reversal of the land settlements of the 17th century. After 1707, many Scottish Jacobites wanted to undo the Acts of Union that created Great Britain but opposed the idea of Divine right.
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It also provided a framework to legitimize his claim to the right to rule both Germany and northern Italy. In the old days of Henry V and Henry VI, the claim of divine right of kings had been severely undermined by the Investiture controversy. The Church had won that argument in the common man's mind. There was no divine right for the German king to also control the church by naming both bishops and popes.
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Henry is also known as "the father of the Royal Navy," as he invested heavily in the navy, increasing its size from a few to more than 50 ships, and established the Navy Board.J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (1968) pp. 500–1. Domestically, Henry is known for his radical changes to the English Constitution, ushering in the theory of the divine right of kings. He also greatly expanded royal power during his reign.
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A Roundhead by John Pettie Roundheads were the supporters of the Parliament of England during the English Civil War (1642–1651). Also known as Parliamentarians, they fought against King Charles I of England and his supporters, known as the Cavaliers or Royalists, who claimed rule by absolute monarchy and the principle of the 'divine right of kings'. The goal of the Roundhead party was to give the Parliament supreme control over executive administration of the country/kingdom.
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Literary critic Hugh M. Richmond notes that Richard's beliefs about the Divine Right of Kings tend to fall more in line with the medieval view of the throne. Bolingbroke on the other hand represents a more modern view of the throne, arguing that not only bloodline but also intellect and political savvy contribute to the makings of a good king.Richmond, Hugh M. "Personal Identity and Literary Personae: A Study in Historical Psychology,"PMLA 90.2 (Mar. 1975), 214–217.
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He also established his rule under the Mandate of Heaven (1272), which was a Chinese political and religious doctrine used to justify kingship over China. This doctrine helped Kublai Khan establish his legitimate rule as he was considered to have the Divine right of kings. Not only did he establish religious and political rule over China, he kept his ancestral roots as a Mongolian leader by following Confucianism. Kublai Khan expanded the Chinese commercial, scientific, and cultural industries.
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Two years later he married the Bourbon princess Henrietta Maria of France. After his succession in 1625, Charles quarrelled with the Parliament of England, which sought to curb his royal prerogative. Charles believed in the divine right of kings, and was determined to govern according to his own conscience. Many of his subjects opposed his policies, in particular the levying of taxes without parliamentary consent, and perceived his actions as those of a tyrannical absolute monarch.
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It can be applied to ethnic nationalism as well as civic nationalism. Romantic nationalism arose in reaction to dynastic or imperial hegemony, which assessed the legitimacy of the state from the top down, emanating from a monarch or other authority, which justified its existence. Such downward-radiating power might ultimately derive from a god or gods (see the divine right of kings and the Mandate of Heaven).Joseph Theodoor Leerssen, Anne Hilde van Baal, and Jan Rock, eds.
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The division of the English church into "high" and "low" was extremely significant at the time of the Restoration. The High Church resisted the Calvinistic levelling of church hierarchy that had been seen in the Commonwealth. The High Church party supported the divine right of kings, episcopal church government, and establishment of the Church of England by the civil government. It was primarily Tory, and was more hierarchical than either the "low" (more Puritan/Presbyterian) or "broad" (latitudinarian or tolerant) churches.
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Dalleo 44. > The writing of history becomes ever more difficult. The power of God or the > weakness of man, Christianity or the divine right of kings to govern wrong, > can easily be made responsible for the downfall of states and the birth of > new societies. Such elementary conceptions lend themselves willingly to > narrative treatment and from Tacitus to Macaulay, from Thuycidides to Green, > the traditionally famous historians have been more artist than scientist: > they wrote so well because they saw so little.
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Jacques-Bénigne Lignel Bossuet (; 27 September 1627 – 12 April 1704) was a French bishop and theologian, renowned for his sermons and other addresses. He has been considered by many to be one of the most brilliant orators of all time and a masterly French stylist. Court preacher to Louis XIV of France, Bossuet was a strong advocate of political absolutism and the divine right of kings. He argued that government was divinely ordained and that kings received sovereign power from God.
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260–1, 451 and passim. Charles I of England generally recognised that Catholics could not conscientiously take the Oath of Supremacy, and frequently exerted his prerogative to help them to avoid it. On the other hand, his theory of the divine right of kings induced him to favour the Oath of Allegiance, and he was irritated with the Catholics who refused it or argued against it. Pope Urban VIII is said to have condemned the oath again in 1626,Reusch, 327.
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The Book of the Dead was a guide to the deceased's journey in the afterlife. Beliefs in the divine and in the afterlife were ingrained in ancient Egyptian civilization from its inception; pharaonic rule was based on the divine right of kings. The Egyptian pantheon was populated by gods who had supernatural powers and were called on for help or protection. However, the gods were not always viewed as benevolent, and Egyptians believed they had to be appeased with offerings and prayers.
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At the same time, the revolution also challenged the theological basis of royal authority. The doctrine of popular sovereignty directly challenged the former divine right of kings. The king was to govern on behalf of the people, and not under the orders of God. This philosophical difference over the basis of royal and state power was paralleled by the rise of a short-lived democracy, but also by a change first from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy and finally to republicanism.
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Under the doctrine of the divine right of kings, only the Church or God could interfere with the right of a monarch to rule. Thus the attack on the French absolute monarchy was seen as an attack on God's anointed king. In addition, the Church's leadership came largely from the classes most threatened by the growing revolution. The upper clergy came from the same families as the upper nobility, and the Church was, in its own right, the largest landowner in France.
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Ettinger, 10-12. Charles II was succeeded by his brother, James II, who rewarded the Oglethorpes’ continued loyalty by making Eleanor Lady Oglethorpe and knighting Theophilus. James II was Catholic as well as a believer in the theory of divine right of kings advanced by his grandfather, James I. In order to restore a Protestant monarchy and balanced government, Parliament engineered a coup d’état, soon known as the Glorious Revolution, that brought William III and Mary II to power.Ettinger, 10-12.
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The phrase "Divine Right of Kings" has been incorrectly interpreted as equivalent to absolutism.Robert Bucholz & Newton Key, Early Modern England, 1485-1714: A Narrative History, 2d edition and David Cressy & Lori Anne Ferrell, Religion and Society in Early Modern England, 2d. Laud used his authority over the prerogative courts to humiliate the gentry, who were largely Puritan and Presbyterian. As Puritans and Presbyterians, the gentry were opposed to Laud's beliefs and opposed to the idea of a parliament-independent monarchy.
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The theme was [doing away with] the Divine > Right of Kings, a Britain that was challenged by the barons who brought the > king down to Runnymede and then they had the Magna Charta, and suddenly your > "Divine Right" is based on Parliament and [the barons] are in Parliament. > That gave the space for the barons to grow and the middle class eventually > emerged. When the King got too uppity, Charles I got beheaded. > Now this series was produced in a communist state, you know.
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Croft, p 63. the sensational discovery of the Gunpowder Plot aroused a potent wave of national relief at the delivery of the king and his sons and inspired in the ensuing parliament a mood of loyalty and goodwill which Salisbury astutely exploited to extract higher subsidies for the king than any but one granted in Elizabeth's reign.Croft, p 64. In his speech to both houses on 9 November, James expounded on two emerging preoccupations of his monarchy: the divine right of kings and the Catholic question.
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This reference from the Bible forms the foundation for the doctrine known as the divine right of kings, or, in the German case, the divine right of the princes. Second, the violent actions of rebelling, robbing, and plundering placed the peasants "outside the law of God and Empire", so they deserved "death in body and soul, if only as highwaymen and murderers." Lastly, Luther charged the rebels with blasphemy for calling themselves "Christian brethren" and committing their sinful acts under the banner of the Gospel.Mullett, 166.
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Controversy over the details notwithstanding, the sheer number of events like this and their continued power to excite controversy shows a broader significance beyond the immediate religious arguments. As part of the political ferment leading to the Revolution in both Scotland and England, they represent the emergence of the people's voice against government policy and the development of modern ideas of democracy and the limits of government in the face of popular opposition. These views eventually supplanted the Stuart dynasty's view of the Divine right of kings.
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Paris was throughout the 19th century the permanent theater of insurrectionary movements and headquarters of European revolutionaries. Following the French Revolution of 1789 and the First French Empire of Napoleon I, the former royal family returned to power in the Bourbon Restoration. The Restoration was dominated by the Counter-revolutionaries who refused all inheritance of the Revolution and aimed at re-establishing the divine right of kings. The White Terror struck the Left, while the ultra-royalists tried to bypass their king on his right.
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Allegory of the Tudor dynasty (detail), attributed to Lucas de Heere, c.1572: left to right, Philip II of Spain, Mary, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Elizabeth The new power of the monarch was given a basis by the notion of the divine right of kings to rule over their subjects. James I was a major proponent of this idea and wrote extensively on it. The same forces that had reduced the power of the traditional aristocracy also served to increase the power of the commercial classes.
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Unfortunately Talbot proved to be a poor choice, stabbing to death a Royal customs official on board his ship in the Patuxent River, and thereby ensuring that his uncle suffered immediate difficulties on his return to London. Calvert's replacement for Talbot was another Roman Catholic, William Joseph, who would also prove controversial. In November 1688, Joseph set about offending local opinion by lecturing his Maryland subjects on morality, adultery and the divine right of kings, lambasting the colony as "a land full of adulterers".
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At any rate, Machiavelli presents a pragmatic and somewhat consequentialist view of politics, whereby good and evil are mere means used to bring about an end—i.e., the acquisition and maintenance of absolute power. Thomas Hobbes, well known for his theory of the social contract, goes on to expand this view at the start of the 17th century during the English Renaissance. Although neither Machiavelli nor Hobbes believed in the divine right of kings, they both believed in the inherent selfishness of the individual.
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He was a captain in the cavalry regiment Royal Picardie, the regiment having been reinstated under the military reforms of December 1762. France at that time was still an autocracy based on the divine right of kings. This meant the whole country belonged to the monarch, whose government was one of rights rather than obligations. The French nobility had certain privileges, with the rank of officer in the army and navy being restricted to those with at least two generations of nobility on either side.
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Freedom of speech and press were declared, and arbitrary arrests outlawed. The Declaration also asserted the principles of popular sovereignty, in contrast to the divine right of kings that characterized the French monarchy, and social equality among citizens, "All the citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally admissible to all public dignities, places, and employments, according to their capacity and without distinction other than that of their virtues and of their talents," eliminating the special rights of the nobility and clergy.
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The concept was institutionalized and gained its elaborate manifestations in ancient Java and Kambujadesha, where monuments such as Prambanan and Angkor Wat were erected to celebrate the king's divine rule on earth. The devaraja concept of divine right of kings was adopted by the indianised Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms of Southeast Asia though Indian Hindu Brahmins scholars deployed in courts. It was first adopted by Javanese kings and through them by various Malay kingdoms, then by the Khmer empire, and subsequently by the Thai monarches.
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Over decades and centuries, principles of law have been derived from customs. The divine right of kings, natural and legal rights, human rights, civil rights, and common law are early unwritten sources of law. Canon law and other forms of religious law form the basis for law derived from religious practices and doctrines or from sacred texts; this source of law is important where there is a state religion. Historical or judicial precedent and case law can modify or even create a source of law.
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In 1790 Chaumette reviewed the work of Saint-Martin, a French Catholic philosopher wishing for a theocratic society in which the most devout people would commission and guide the rest of the population. The review provides a substantiated outline of Chaumette's philosophies. He criticizes Saint-Martin's ideal due to its similarity to France's feudal order before the Revolution in which the rule of the monarch was legitimized by the Divine right of kings. The review soon develops into a much broader affront towards religion, though.
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The title page to the 1611 first edition of the Authorized Version Bible. Bilson gave the sermon at the coronation on 25 July 1603 of James VI of Scotland as James I of England. While the wording conceded something to the divine right of kings, it also included a caveat about lawful resistance to a monarch. This theme was from Bilson's 1585 book, and already sounded somewhat obsolescent.Peter E. McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (1998), pp. 104.
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All were noted for the doctrinal coherence of their principles and the dialectical rigidity of their arguments. The object of the party as defined by the future duc Decazes was to "nationalize the monarchy and to royalize France". The king, who had been king of France during the Ancien Régime, ultimately became king of the French under the July Monarchy. This illustrated the change from the divine right of kings to national sovereignty as sovereignty was not derived from God anymore, but from the people.
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In 1597–8, James wrote two works, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies and Basilikon Doron (Royal Gift), in which he established an ideological base for monarchy. In the Trew Law, he sets out the divine right of kings, explaining that for Biblical reasons kings are higher beings than other men, though "the highest bench is the sliddriest to sit upon"."Kings are called gods by the prophetical King David because they sit upon God His throne in earth and have the count of their administration to give unto Him." Quoted by Willson, p 131.
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It had been a central issue in the reign of Pope Gregory VII and his battles with Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor.Bellitto, Christopher M., pp 49–56 “The General Councils: A History of the Twenty-one Church Councils from Nicaea to Vatican II”, Paulist Press, Mahway, N. J. 2002 The issue was never settled. Years of teaching by Roman trained priests and bishops in Germany had led to an educated generation which rejected the idea of divine right of kings. Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor died leaving his kingdom in a much weakened condition.
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The disastrous consequences of Macbeth's ambition are not limited to him. Almost from the moment of the murder, the play depicts Scotland as a land shaken by inversions of the natural order. Shakespeare may have intended a reference to the great chain of being, although the play's images of disorder are mostly not specific enough to support detailed intellectual readings. He may also have intended an elaborate compliment to James's belief in the divine right of kings, although this hypothesis, outlined at greatest length by Henry N. Paul, is not universally accepted.
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The French Revolution also boosted liberal ideals in political and economic fields. Some of the most notable political liberal authors, who opposed monarchies and absolutism, were Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, while the most notorious economic liberal was Adam Smith. Liberal ideas also reached the church, and the concept of the divine right of kings started to be questioned. Francisco Suárez claimed that political power did not pass directly from God to the governor, but to the population and through it to the governor.
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Sidney, Algernon: Discourses concerning government, London 1698 For Sidney absolute monarchy was a great political evil. His Discourses Concerning Government (the text for which Sidney lost his life) was written during the Exclusion Crisis, as a response to Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, a defense of divine right monarchy, first published in 1680. The divine right of kings is a political system in which all powers of government are vested solely in the king and granted to him by God. Under this system, the king acts as God's hand on earth.
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Tensions were high, with the Duke of Gordon holding Edinburgh Castle for James and Viscount Dundee recruiting Highland levies. This exaggerated the Presbyterian majority in the Convention which met behind closed doors guarded by its own troops. The English Parliament held James had 'abandoned' his throne; in Scotland, the Convention argued he 'forfeited' it by his actions, listed in the Articles of Grievances. This was a fundamental change; if Parliament could decide James had forfeited his throne, monarchs derived legitimacy from Parliament, not God, ending the principle of Divine Right of Kings.
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The Dutch revolt against their lawful sovereign, most obviously illustrated in the Act of Abjuration (1581), implied that a sovereign could be deposed by the population if there was agreement that he did not fulfill his God-given responsibility. This act by the Dutch challenged the concept of the divine right of kings and eventually led to the formation of the Dutch Republic. The acceptance of a non-monarchic country by the other European powers in 1648 spread across Europe, fueling resistance against the divine power of Kings.
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That was the aristocratic model that was favoured by the Tory party and had been used to propose the divine right of kings. The other view was that power flowed up from the people to the leaders, that leaders were no more intrinsically better than those led, and God gives out revelation freely. That Whig view was also the view of the Puritans and the "Independents" (the various Congregational and Baptist churches, Quakers etc.). George I favoured the Whigs in Parliament and favoured a latitudinarian ecclesiastical policy in general.
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The work is unique compared to other works during its time because Milton emphasises the deeds of individuals as the only way for there to be justice. The work also emphasises the freedom of the individual, and only through such freedom is an individual able to develop properly. Citing classical and biblical references, this emphasis refutes Hobbes’s divine right of kings. Milton argues that no man is better than another, having all been created in God's image, free and equal, and that all have a right to dispose of themselves.
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John Locke in particular exemplified this new age of political theory with his work Two Treatises of Government. In it Locke proposes a state of nature theory that directly complements his conception of how political development occurs and how it can be founded through contractual obligation. Locke stood to refute Sir Robert Filmer's paternally founded political theory in favor of a natural system based on nature in a particular given system. The theory of the divine right of kings became a passing fancy, exposed to the type of ridicule with which John Locke treated it.
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Orthodox Christian icon of nine orders of angels Each link in the chain might be divided further into its component parts. In medieval secular society, for example, the king is at the top, succeeded by the aristocratic lords and the clergy, and then the peasants below them. Solidifying the king's position at the top of humanity's social order is the doctrine of the divine right of kings. The implied permanent state of inequality became a source of popular grievance, and led eventually to political change as in the French Revolution.
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However, one of the story's major characters is a sympathetically portrayed Roundhead named Heatherstone, the Intendant given the task of managing the Forest lands. Marryat had been wounded several times in his naval career; he understood the nature of war and makes clear his hostility to extremists on both sides. He suggests that good governance lies somewhere between King Charles's insistence on the divine right of kings and Parliament's unjustifiable execution of him. The homecoming and reconciliation at the end of the story are deliberately associated with the restoration of the monarchy.
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James VI and I wearing the Three Brothers on his hat, c. 1605 When the Spanish match failed to materialise and James died in March 1625, the newly crowned Charles I instead married French princess Henrietta Maria. Charles continuously quarrelled with the Parliament of England during his reign; one bone of contention was the 'divine right of kings', which led him to consider the crown jewels as his personal possessions. Charles was plagued by financial problems and had already pawned the Brothers away in the Netherlands in 1626, redeeming them only in 1639.
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The relations between the Catholic Church and the state have been constantly evolving with various forms of government, some of them controversial in retrospect. In its history it has had to deal with various concepts and systems of governance, from the Roman Empire to the medieval divine right of kings, from nineteenth- and twentieth-century concepts of democracy and pluralism to the appearance of left- and right-wing dictatorial regimes. The Second Vatican Council's decree Dignitatis humanae stated that religious freedom is a civil right that should be recognized in constitutional law.
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Thus, Locke labeled fundamental change as a natural consequence of when liberty no longer receives protection. He criticized competing theories such as the divine right of kings, which the thinker viewed as folly. In terms of individual thinking on principles, Locke never wrote a single work laying down in depth his conceptual understanding of ethics and morality. However, Lockean thought as described in various writings have emphasized holding to prominent ideals about human behavior in terms of the rational capacity for good, a particular topic of Locke's concern having been the power of education.
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William Shakespeare, whose works include Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, remains one of the most championed authors in English literature.. Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sydney, Thomas Kyd, John Donne, and Ben Jonson are other established authors of the Elizabethan age.. Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes wrote on empiricism and materialism, including scientific method and social contract. Filmer wrote on the Divine Right of Kings. Marvell was the best-known poet of the Commonwealth,. while John Milton authored Paradise Lost during the Restoration.
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The state was first advocated by Plato, then found more acceptance in the consolidation of power under the Roman Catholic Church. European monarchs then gained power as the Catholic Church was stripped of temporal power and was replaced by the divine right of kings. In 1648, the powers of Europe signed the Treaty of Westphalia which ended the religious violence for purely political governance and outlook, signifying the birth of the modern 'state'. Within this statist paradigm, only the state and its appointed representatives were allowed to bear arms and enter into war.
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In political philosophy, the phrase consent of the governed refers to the idea that a government's legitimacy and moral right to use state power is only justified and lawful when consented to by the people or society over which that political power is exercised. This theory of consent is historically contrasted to the divine right of kings and had often been invoked against the legitimacy of colonialism. Article 21 of the United Nations' 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government".
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300 The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote praising "the idea of a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed".Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Oxford University Press, 2008, . Liberalism has its roots in the Age of Enlightenment and rejects many foundational assumptions that dominated most earlier theories of government, such as the Divine Right of Kings, hereditary status, and established religion. John Locke is often credited with the philosophical foundations of classical liberalism.
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They were no longer understood as autonomous authorities but merely agents in service of God's will. The divine right of kings was thus gradually recreated in a Christian context, continuing even when monarchs might choose to forgo the anointment ceremony altogether. The supposedly indelible nature of anointment was alluded to in Shakespeare's Richard II: In Eastern Orthodoxy, the anointing of a new king is considered a Sacred Mystery. The act is believed to empower him—through the grace of the Holy Spirit—with the ability to discharge his divinely appointed duties, particularly his ministry in defending the faith.
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The Concordat of Worms and the First Lateran Council changed forever the belief in the divine right of kings to name the pope and bishops and reshaped the nature of church and state forever.Biographies by Pandulphus Aletrinus, Aragonius and Bernardus Guidonis (Muratori, Script. Rer. Ital. III, 1, 418Watterich, “Vitae Rom. Pontif. II, 115, Migne, P. L., CLXIII, 1071Migne, P. L., CLXIII, 1073–1383Hardouin Concilia (VI, 2, 1949–1976D’ Achery Spicilegium, Paris 1723, II, 964; III, 478, 479Robert, Bullaire du pape Calixte II (Paris, 1891)MAURER, Papst Calixtus II, in 2 parts (Munich, 1886, 1889)MacCaffrey, J. (1908).
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139 1976 In his lecture Society Must Be Defended, Foucault examines biopolitical state racism, and its accomplished rationale of myth-making and narrative. Here he states the fundamental difference between biopoliticsSecurity, Territory, Population pp. 363-91 2007 and discipline: Foucault argues that the previous Greco-Roman, Medieval rule of the Roman emperor, the Divine right of kings, Absolute monarchy and the popesSecurity, Territory, Population pp. 363-401 2007 model of power and social control over the body was an individualising mode based on a singular individual, primarily the king, Holy Roman emperor, pope and Roman emperor.
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A dignitary of Asia Minor in Achaemenid style, circa 475 BC. Karaburun tomb near Elmalı, Lycia. Although the first large-scale use of satrapies, or provinces, originates from the inception of the Achaemenid Empire under Cyrus the Great, beginning at around 530BCE, provincial organization actually originated during the Median era from at least 648BCE. Up to the time of the conquest of Media by Cyrus the Great, emperors ruled the lands they conquered through client kings and governors. The main difference was that in Persian culture the concept of kingship was indivisible from divinity: divine authority validated the divine right of kings.
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Parliament had passed the Act of Settlement in 1701 and the Act of Security in 1704, which transferred The Crown to the House of Hanover, ending the line of Stuart monarchs. James claimed the Divine right of kings – meaning that he believed his authority to rule was divinely inspired. He considered his decisions were not subject to 'interference' by either Parliament or the Church, a political view that would remain remarkably consistent among his Stuart successors. When Parliament passed the acts that ended the rule of the House of Stuart, they effectively claimed that the monarch's power was derived from Parliament, not God.
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Particular significance and concern were the Papal claims of authority over both the Church, through Apostolic succession, and the State, through the Divine right of Kings. When the Papacy aspires to exercise authority beyond its religious realm into civil affairs, on account of the Papal claim to be the Vicar of Christ, then the institution was fulfilling the more perilous biblical indicators of the Antichrist. Martin Luther wrote this view, which was not novel, into the Smalcald Articles of 1537. It was then widely popularized in the 16th century, via sermons, drama, books, and broadside publication.
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23 Manuel Belgrano as a student at the University of Salamanca Belgrano studied near the intellectual elite of Spain, and by that time there were heated discussions about the ongoing French Revolution. The principles of equality and freedom, the universal scope of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and criticism of the divine right of kings were constant topics of debate. Among the supporters of these ideas it was thought that Spain should be remade under similar principles, and critics of such thought were rejected as tyrants or proponents of outdated ideas.Luna, p.
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In general, the term applies to temporal as well as spiritual kingship and leadership, particularly in Buddhism and Jainism. In Hinduism, the term generally denotes a powerful ruler whose dominion extended to the entire earth. The Indian concept of Chakravarti later evolved into devaraja concept of divine right of kings, which was adopted by the indianised Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms of Southeast Asia through Indian Hindu Brahmins scholars deployed in courts. It was first adopted by Indonesian Hindu-Buddhist empires (Srivijaya and Majapahit) and through them by various Indianised Malay kingdoms, then by the Khmer Empire, and subsequently by the Thai monarches.
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Some were even sovereigns in their own right, while the Pope himself ruled the Papal States. Three archbishops played a prominent role in Holy Roman Empire as electors. As late as the 18th century in the era of the Enlightenment, Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, preacher to Louis XIV, defended the doctrine of the divine right of kings and absolute monarchy in his sermons. The Church was a model of hierarchy in a world of hierarchies, and saw the defense of that system as its own defense, and as a defense of what it believed to be a god-ordained system.
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A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, by Joseph Wright, 1766 Derby was significant in the eighteenth century for its role in the Enlightenment, a period in which science and philosophy challenged the divine right of kings to rule. The enlightenment has many strands, including the largely philosophical "Scottish enlightenment" centred around the philosopher David Hume, and political changes that culminated in the French revolution, but the English Midlands was an area where many key figures of industry and science came together. The Lunar Society included Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestley and Josiah Wedgwood with Benjamin Franklin corresponding from America.Lunar , jquarter.members.beeb.
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His reign is known for his conflicts with the Parliament of England, which sought to curb his royal prerogative. Charles believed in the divine right of kings, which was against the belief of many of his subjects, leading to them perceiving his actions as those of a tyrannical absolute monarch. His religious policies, coupled with his marriage to a Roman Catholic, made him an enemy of the Puritans and Calvinists. Most of his actions as monarch ultimately helped precipitate his own downfall, and his eventual deposition and beheading in 1649 and the declaration of the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell.
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Laud exploited his secular and religious roles to implement the policy of Thorough in England. Laud used his authority as Archbishop of Canterbury to appoint only Arminian clergymen as bishops; this in turn meant that most vicars they appointed would also be Arminian. Arminianism is a sect of Protestant Christianity which believes in the "Divine Right of Kings" and the (Catholic reminiscent) "Beauty of Holiness". Laud hoped that his new Arminian Church of England would make the English conform to believing in the "Divine Right", supporting Charles I's personal rule and setting up a parliament-independent monarchy.
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He had a privileged childhood in Rome, where he was brought up Catholic in a loving but argumentative family. As the legitimate heirs to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland—according to the Jacobite succession—his family lived with a sense of pride, and staunchly believed in the divine right of kings. His grandfather, James II of England, Ireland and VII of Scotland, ruled the countries from 1685 to 1688. He was deposed when Parliament invited the Dutch Protestant William III and his wife, Princess Mary, King James's eldest daughter, to replace him in the Revolution of 1688.
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William Laud, later Archbishop of Canterbury, supporter of the divine right of kings and author of the Laudian reforms held the living here 1617–26. At the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642, John Lufton, then Rector of Ibstock, was accused in the House of Commons of interrupting the execution of the militia ordinance. His living was sequestrated by the County Committee in August 1646. The parish of Ibstock formerly included the dependent chapelries of Donington le Heath and Hugglescote but the increase of population led to the establishment of a separate ecclesiastical parish in the 19th century.
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Use of the phrase can be traced to 16th-century Britain and in the following century the Scottish theologian Samuel Rutherford employed it in arguing against the divine right of kings. John Locke wrote that freedom in society means being subject only to laws made by a legislature that does not apply to everyone, with a person being otherwise free from both governmental and private restrictions upon liberty. "The rule of law" was further popularized in the 19th century by British jurist A. V. Dicey. However, the principle, if not the phrase itself, was recognized by ancient thinkers.
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Policraticus is a pseudo Greco-Roman neologism term, meaning "the statesman." Salisbury drew his arguments from several different sources, including the Bible and the Justinian Code. He argued for the divine right of kings, saying that > ...the prince stands on a pinnacle which is exalted and made splendid with > all the great and high privileges which he deems necessary for himself. And > rightly so, because nothing is more advantageous to the people than that the > needs of the prince should be fully satisfied; since it is impossible that > his will should be found opposed to justice.
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An adherent of the concept of the divine right of kings, Louis continued his predecessors' work of creating a centralised state governed from the capital. He sought to eliminate the remnants of feudalism persisting in parts of France and, by compelling many members of the nobility to inhabit his lavish Palace of Versailles, succeeded in pacifying the aristocracy, many members of which had participated in the Fronde rebellion during his minority. By these means he became one of the most powerful French monarchs and consolidated a system of absolute monarchy in France that endured until the French Revolution. He also enforced uniformity of religion under the Gallican Catholic Church.
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In the late Middle Ages, it saw much of the aggrandisement associated with the New Monarchs elsewhere in Europe.Mackie, Lenman and Parker, A History of Scotland, . Theories of constitutional monarchy and resistance were articulated by Scots, particularly George Buchanan, in the sixteenth century, but James VI of Scotland advanced the theory of the divine right of kings, and these debates were restated in subsequent reigns and crises. The court remained at the centre of political life, and in the sixteenth century emerged as a major centre of display and artistic patronage, until it was effectively dissolved with the Union of the Crowns in 1603.
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James VII, who was deposed in 1688 The Glorious Revolution in Scotland was part of a wider series of events between 1688–1689 in England and Scotland known as the Glorious Revolution. It covers the deposition of James VII, his replacement by his daughter Mary II and her husband William III of Orange and the political settlement thereafter. Scotland and England were linked but separate countries, each with its own Parliament; decisions in one did not bind the other. Issues included religious freedom but also arbitrary rule and the divine right of kings; the Revolution ended a century of political dispute by confirming the primacy of Parliament over the Crown.
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Francis, from March 2013 the sovereign of the Vatican City State, an ex officio role of the Pope Since antiquity, various dynasties or individual rulers have claimed the right to rule by divine authority, such as the Mandate of Heaven and the divine right of kings. Some monarchs even claimed divine ancestry, such as Egyptian pharaohs and Sapa Incas, who claimed descent from their respective sun gods and often sought to maintain this bloodline by practising incestuous marriage. In Ancient Rome, during the Principate, the title ('divine') was conferred (notably posthumously) on the emperor, a symbolic, legitimating element in establishing a de facto dynasty.
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This returned "a preponderance of MPs opposed to the King", including Selden, Coke, John Pym and a young Oliver Cromwell. Released to attend Parliament, Hampden was closely involved in its efforts to limit the king's power, the first being adoption of the Petition of Right in June 1628. This opened the way to a new impeachment of Buckingham, which ended when he was assassinated in August by a disgruntled soldier. The next issue was that of Roger Maynwaring and Robert Sibthorpe, two priests who published sermons supportive of supporting the divine right of kings, passive obedience, and implying Charles did not need Parliament's approval to raise taxes.
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249 Matters came to a head when in 1680 James, Duke of York replaced Lauderdale as High Commissioner in Scotland. A parliament was held in 1681, Argyll bearing the crown at the opening on 13 August. James told Argyll that the king thought him an over-mighty subject: Argyll, finding himself isolated, assured James of his loyalty, and signed a letter of the council to Charles confirming the divine right of kings. The same month, James paid a solemn visit of ceremony to Argyll at Stirling, and directly asked him if he would convert to Catholicism, promising him great influence in Scotland if he did.
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In the late Middle Ages, it saw much of the aggrandisement associated with the New Monarchs elsewhere in Europe.Mackie, Lenman and Parker, A History of Scotland, . Theories of constitutional monarchy and resistance were articulated by Scots, particularly George Buchanan, in the 16th century, but James VI of Scotland advanced the theory of the divine right of kings, and these debates were restated in subsequent reigns and crises. The court remained at the centre of political life, and in the 16th century emerged as a major centre of display and artistic patronage, until it was effectively dissolved with the Union of the Crowns in 1603.
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Roy Strong, "Three Royal Jewels", in The Tudor and Stuart Monarchy, pp. 69–75. A contemporary source estimated the total cost of the Mirror at over £70,000. James would typically wear the piece as a hat jewel, with the ruby at the nine o'clock position to the left of the diamonds. When James died in March 1625, the jewel passed to his son Charles I. In his decades-long struggle with the Parliament of England that would ultimately lead to the First English Civil War, Charles continuously asserted the divine right of kings, which meant personal ownership of crown jewels such as a Mirror.
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Monarchy takes an extreme view of the same idea, and may prop up its assertions against the claims of mere aristocrats by invoking divine sanction (see the divine right of kings). On the other hand, more democratically inclined theorists have pointed to examples of meritocratic leaders, such as the Napoleonic marshals profiting from careers open to talent. In the autocratic/paternalistic strain of thought, traditionalists recall the role of leadership of the Roman pater familias. Feminist thinking, on the other hand, may object to such models as patriarchal and posit against them "emotionally attuned, responsive, and consensual empathetic guidance, which is sometimes associated with matriarchies".
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Modern natural law theories were greatly developed in the Age of Enlightenment, combining inspiration from Roman law with philosophies like social contract theory. It was used in challenging theory of the divine right of kings, and became an alternative justification for the establishment of a social contract, positive law, and government—and thus legal rights—in the form of classical republicanism. In the early decades of the 21st century, the concept of natural law is closely related to the concept of natural rights. Indeed, many philosophers, jurists and scholars use natural law synonymously with natural rights (), or natural justice, though others distinguish between natural law and natural right.
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In 1624, he was elected for Tavistock, a seat controlled by Earl of Bedford, which he retained for the rest of his career. He was one of the prime movers behind an attempt to impeach the Duke of Buckingham in 1626, an action that led to Parliament being dissolved. Only Buckingham's assassination in August 1628 prevented a second attempt, while Pym supported the presentation of the Petition of Right to Charles I in 1628. Pym, his stepbrother, Francis Rous, and John Hampden, also led the Parliamentary attack on Roger Maynwaring and Robert Sibthorpe, two clergymen who published sermons supporting the Caroline precepts of the divine right of kings, and passive obedience.
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Liberalism became a distinct movement in the Age of Enlightenment, when it became popular among Western philosophers and economists. Liberalism sought to replace the norms of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, the divine right of kings and traditional conservatism with representative democracy and the rule of law. Liberals also ended mercantilist policies, royal monopolies and other barriers to trade, instead promoting free trade and free markets. Philosopher John Locke is often credited with founding liberalism as a distinct tradition, based on the social contract, arguing that each man has a natural right to life, liberty and property and governments must not violate these rights.
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This meant opposition to the King's authority, legal or otherwise, now became a political act. In 1681, the future James VII & II was sent to Edinburgh as Lord High Commissioner and in August, the Scottish Parliament passed the Succession Act. This confirmed the divine right of kings, the rights of the natural heir 'regardless of religion,' the duty of all to swear allegiance to the King and the independence of the Scottish Crown. The Scottish Test Act passed at the same time required all public officials and MPs to swear 'to uphold the true Protestant religion' but also to acknowledge the supremacy of Royal authority in all religious matters.
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The political authority in the British context can be traced to James VI and I of Scotland who wrote two political treatise called Basilikon Doron and The Trve Lawe of free Monarchies: Or, The Reciprock and Mvtvall Dvtie Betwixt a free King, and his naturall Subiectes which advocated his right to rule on the basis of the concept of the divine right of kings, a theological concept that has basis in multiple religions, but in this case, Christianity, tracing this right to the apostolic succession. The King in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth states are considered the foundations of judicial, legislative and executive authority.
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In feudal Europe the most widespread justification of the state was the emerging idea of the divine right of kings, which stated that monarchs draw their power from God, and that the state should only be an apparatus that puts the monarch's will into practice. The legitimacy of the state's lands derived from the lands being the personal possession of the monarch. The divine-right theory, combined with primogeniture, became a theory of hereditary monarchy in the nation states of the early modern period. The Holy Roman Empire was not a state in that sense, and was not a true theocracy, but rather a federal entity.
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The political ideas current in China at that time involved the idea of the mandate of heaven. It resembled the theory of divine right in that it placed the ruler in a divine position, as the link between Heaven and Earth, but it differed from the divine right of kings in that it did not assume a permanent connection between a dynasty and the state. Inherent in the concept was that a ruler held the mandate of heaven only as long as he provided good government. If he did not, heaven would withdraw its mandate and whoever restored order would hold the new mandate.
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The term "mercantile system" was used by its foremost critic, Adam Smith, but Mirabeau (1715–1789) had used "mercantilism" earlier. Mercantilism functioned as the economic counterpart of the older version of political power: divine right of kings and absolute monarchy. Scholars debate over why mercantilism dominated economic ideology for 250 years.. One group, represented by Jacob Viner, sees mercantilism as simply a straightforward, common-sense system whose logical fallacies remained opaque to people at the time, as they simply lacked the required analytical tools. The second school, supported by scholars such as Robert B. Ekelund, portrays mercantilism not as a mistake, but rather as the best possible system for those who developed it.
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In response, Argyll quoted Montesquieu in support of his argument that multiple jurisdictions were a check on the Crown and thus a defence of liberty. Since Argyll was one of the main beneficiaries, his intervention was simply to enable Hardwicke to highlight the House of Stuart's outdated belief in the divine right of kings and unquestioning obedience. He did so by agreeing such safeguards were required for states ruled by an absolute monarch but 'fortunately, Britain was not in that position.' This was because the constitution limited the powers of the Crown and ensured liberty; on the other hand, private jurisdictions endangered it by encroaching on the legal authority of a constitutional monarchy.
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In July 1946, Nehru pointedly observed that no princely state could prevail militarily against the army of independent India. In January 1947, he said that independent India would not accept the divine right of kings, and in May 1947, he declared that any princely state which refused to join the Constituent Assembly would be treated as an enemy state. Other Congress leaders, such as C. Rajagopalachari, argued that as paramountcy "came into being as a fact and not by agreement", it would necessarily pass to the government of independent India, as the successor of the British. Patel and Menon, who were charged with the actual job of negotiating with the princes, took a more conciliatory approach than Nehru.
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The monarchies of Europe in the Christian Middle Ages derived their claim from Christianisation and the divine right of kings, partly influenced by the notion of sacral kingship inherited from Germanic antiquity. The great powers of Europe in the Early Modern period were the result of a gradual process of centralization of power taking place over the course of the Middle Ages. The Early Middle Ages begin with a fragmentation of the former Western Roman Empire into "barbarian kingdoms". In Western Europe, the kingdom of the Franks developed into the Carolingian Empire by the 8th century, and the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England were unified into the kingdom of England by the 10th century.
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J. C. D. Clark depicts England before 1828 as a nation in which the vast majority of the people believed in the divine right of kings, the legitimacy of a hereditary nobility and in the rights and privileges of the Anglican Church. In Clark's interpretation, the system remained virtually intact until it suddenly collapsed in 1828 because Catholic emancipation undermined Anglican supremacy which was its central symbolic prop. Clark argues that the consequences were enormous: "The shattering of a whole social order [...]. What was lost at that point [...] was not merely a constitutional arrangement, but the intellectual ascendancy of a worldview, the cultural hegemony of the old elite".J. C. D. Clark (1985). pp. 90, 409.
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The crown jewels were the property of the current Empress, but Marie refused to relinquish them to Alexandra. Marie begrudgingly surrendered the magnificent collection when Alexandra threatened not to wear jewels to official court events. Alexandra was unpopular in the Imperial family. She was a fervent advocate of the "divine right of kings" and believed that it was unnecessary to attempt to secure the approval of the people, according to her aunt, German Empress Frederick, who wrote to Queen Victoria that "Alix is very imperious and will always insist on having her own way; she will never yield one iota of power she will imagine she wields..."King, G, The Last Empress, p.
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King James held strong convictions on the Divine right of kings, and even wrote a book on the subject. To that end, he continued to suppress many of the important aspects of the Puritan movement, including the many Puritan's Congregationalist and Presbyterian views of Church government. The King knew though that he needed the Puritans to strengthen the Protestant establishment in England, as well as every aspect of the nation's prosperity and success. To that end, King James supported and even advanced many of the Puritan pastors, academics, and gentry, just as Queen Elizabeth did, if and when they were willing to work with the Anglican establishment under the authority of the bishops.
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Charles was distrustful of Puritans, who began defining themselves against "Arminian" moderates on church and foreign policy, simply as an opposition group, believing as he did in the Divine Right of Kings and lacking his father's deftness in these matters. Charles had no particular interest in theological questions, but preferred the emphasis on order, decorum, uniformity, and spectacle in Christian worship. Whereas James had supported the Canons of the Synod of Dort, Charles forbade preaching on the subject of predestination altogether. Where James had been lenient towards clergy who omitted parts of the Book of Common Prayer, Charles urged the bishops to enforce compliance with the Prayer Book, and to suspend ministers who refused.
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Many European monarchies outlawed the public expression of communist views and the Communist Manifesto, which began "[a] spectre [that] is haunting Europe", stated that monarchs feared for their thrones. Advocacy of communism was illegal in the Russian Empire, the German Empire and Austria-Hungary, the three most powerful monarchies in continental Europe prior to World War I. Many monarchists (except constitutional monarchists) viewed inequality in wealth and political power as resulting from a divine natural order. The struggle between monarchists and communists was often described as a struggle between the Right and the Left. By World War I, in most European monarchies the divine right of kings had become discredited and was replaced by liberal and nationalist movements.
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Adomnan of Iona. Life of St Columba. Penguin Books, 1995 The Byzantine Empire can be seen as the progenitor of this concept (which began with Constantine I), which in turn inspired the Carolingian dynasty and the Holy Roman Emperors, whose lasting impact on Western and Central Europe further inspired all subsequent Western ideas of kingship. In the Middle Ages, the idea that God had granted earthly power to the monarch, just as he had given spiritual authority and power to the church, especially to the Pope, was already a well-known concept long before later writers coined the term "divine right of kings" and employed it as a theory in political science.
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In China and East Asia, rulers justified their rule with the philosophy of the Mandate of Heaven, which, although similar to the European concept, bore several key differences. While the divine right of kings granted unconditional legitimacy, the Mandate of Heaven was dependent on the behaviour of the ruler, the Son of Heaven. Heaven would bless the authority of a just ruler, but it could be displeased with a despotic ruler and thus withdraw its mandate, transferring it to a more suitable and righteous person. This withdrawal of mandate also afforded the possibility of revolution as a means to remove the errant ruler; revolt was never legitimate under the European framework of divine right.
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Though it was not unprecedented, execution of the King, or "regicide", was controversial, if for no other reason due to the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Thus, even after a trial, it was difficult to get ordinary men to go along with it: "None of the officers charged with supervising the execution wanted to sign the order for the actual beheading, so they brought their dispute to Cromwell...Oliver seized a pen and scribbled out the order, and handed the pen to the second officer, Colonel Hacker who stooped to sign it. The execution could now proceed." Although Fairfax conspicuously refused to sign, Charles I was executed on 30 January 1649.
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One political scientist described this new thinking as follows: "In the liberal understanding, there are no citizens within the regime who can claim to rule by natural or supernatural right, without the consent of the governed".Zvesper, p. 93. Locke had other intellectual opponents besides Hobbes. In the First Treatise, Locke aimed his arguments first and foremost at one of the doyens of 17th century English conservative philosophy: Robert Filmer. Filmer's Patriarcha (1680) argued for the divine right of kings by appealing to biblical teaching, claiming that the authority granted to Adam by God gave successors of Adam in the male line of descent a right of dominion over all other humans and creatures in the world.Copleston, p. 33.
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A brief flow chart depicting the flow of auctoritas in the transfer of the Mandate of Heaven at the transition of dynastic cycles. The Mandate of Heaven does not require a legitimate ruler to be of noble birth but how well that person can rule, depending on the just and able performance of the rulers and their heirs. Chinese dynasties such as the Han and Ming were founded by men of common origins, but they were seen as having succeeded because they had gained the Mandate of Heaven. The concept is in some ways similar to the European concept of the divine right of kings; however, unlike the European concept, it does not confer an unconditional right to rule.
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The English Parliament held James 'abandoned' his throne by fleeing from London to France; since the same argument could not be used in Scotland, the Convention argued he 'forfeited' it by his actions, listed in the Articles of Grievances. This was a fundamental change; if Parliament could decide James had forfeited his throne, monarchs derived legitimacy from Parliament, not God, ending the principle of Divine Right of Kings. The throne was offered to Mary and William, who was granted regal power on the basis he held the throne de facto, by right of conquest. In an attempt to preserve Episcopalianism, the Scottish Bishops proposed Union with England but this was rejected by the English Parliament.
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In this case, the King, anointed (by God) in the ceremony of coronation as temporal and spiritual leader of England; it draws from the Judeo-Christian Bible, I Samuel . King Charles I, who had been beheaded during the English Civil War had attempted to introduce the doctrine of Divine Right of Kings to England. After the rule of Oliver Cromwell, Charles II (son of Charles I) was restored to the throne. Charles II was more moderate than his father, but the leading political theorist of the absolutist side, Sir Robert Filmer (the target of John Locke's Two Treatises of Government), had argued that the king is appointed directly by God and is, by nature, inherently superior to those he ruled.
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In his famous essay Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment? (, ), Immanuel Kant defined the Lumières thus: The Lumières' philosophy was thus based on the realities of a systematic, ordered and understandable world, which required Man also to think in an ordered and systematic way. As well as physical laws, this included ideas on the laws governing human affairs and the divine right of kings, leading to the idea that the monarch acts with the consent of the people, and not the other way around. This legal concept informed Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theory of the social contract as a reciprocal relationship between men, and more so between families and other groups, which would become increasingly stronger, accompanied by a concept of individual inalienable rights.
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For much of the reign of Louis XIV, who was known as the Sun King (French: le Roi Soleil), France stood as the leading power in Europe, engaging in three major wars—the Franco-Dutch War, the War of the League of Augsburg, and the War of the Spanish Succession—and two minor conflicts—the War of Devolution, and the War of the Reunions. Louis ruled according to the Divine Right of Kings, the theory that the King was crowned by God and accountable to him alone. Consequently, he has long been considered the archetypal absolute monarch. Louis XIV continued the work of his predecessor to create a centralized state, governed from the capital to sweep away the remnants of feudalism that persisted in parts of France.
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The Rutherford Institute was named after Samuel Rutherford, a 17th-century theologian who wrote a book, Lex, Rex, which challenged the concept of the divine right of kings. When the Rutherford Institute was founded, conservative Protestants in the United States were reconsidering their role in American political and legal life, perceiving that the federal government was intent on encroaching on Americans' religious liberties. Organizations such as the Rutherford Institute pursued matters of religious liberties in the courts, and the Rutherford Institute became the model for groups such as the National Legal Foundation, the Liberty Counsel, and the American Center for Law and Justice. Bryan McKenzie of the Charlottesville Daily Progress described the institute as "a more conservative American Civil Liberties Union" (ACLU).
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Whether men were seen as naturally more prone to violence and rapine (Hobbes) or cooperation and kindness (Rousseau), the idea that a legitimate social order emerges only when the liberties and duties are equal among citizens binds the social contract thinkers to the concept of popular sovereignty. A parallel development of a theory of popular sovereignty can be found among the School of Salamanca (see e.g. Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) or Francisco Suarez (1548–1617)), who (like the theorists of the divine right of kings and Locke) saw sovereignty as emanating originally from God, but (unlike divine right theorists, and in agreement with Locke) passing from God to all people equally, not only to monarchs. Republics and popular monarchies are theoretically based on popular sovereignty.
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During the next 150 years, England would fight with Spain, the Netherlands, and France for control of the continent, while religious division in Ireland between Protestant and Catholic has lasted for 400 years. By actively pursuing more than just a personal union of his realms, he helped lay the foundations for a unitary British state. According to a tradition originating with anti-Stuart historians of the mid-17th-century, James's taste for political absolutism, his financial irresponsibility, and his cultivation of unpopular favourites established the foundations of the English Civil War. James bequeathed Charles a fatal belief in the divine right of kings, combined with a disdain for Parliament, which culminated in the execution of Charles I and the abolition of the monarchy.
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Walter Raleigh, who was languishing in the Tower owing to his involvement in the Main Plot, and whose wife was a first cousin of Lady Catesby, declared he had had no knowledge of the conspiracy. The Bishop of Rochester gave a sermon at St. Paul's Cross, in which he condemned the plot. In his speech to both Houses on 9 November, James expounded on two emerging preoccupations of his monarchy: the divine right of kings and the Catholic question. He insisted that the plot had been the work of only a few Catholics, not of the English Catholics as a whole, and he reminded the assembly to rejoice at his survival, since kings were divinely appointed and he owed his escape to a miracle.
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Most of the barbarian kingdoms established in the 5th century (the kingdoms of the Suebi, Burgundi, Vandals, Franks, Visigoths, Ostrogoths) recognised the Roman Emperor at least nominally, and Germanic kingdoms would continue to mint coins depicting the Roman emperor well into the 6th century.Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne (1937), 46-48. It was this derivation of the authority of kingship from the Christian Roman Empire that would be at the core of the medieval institution of kingship in Europe and its notion of the divine right of kings, as well as the position of the Pope in Latin Christendom, the restoration of the Roman Empire under Charlemagne and the derived concept of the Holy Roman Empire in Western and Central Europe.
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One of Francia's special targets was the Roman Catholic Church, which had provided an essential support to Spanish rule by spreading the doctrine of the "divine right of kings" and inculcating the native masses with a resigned fatalism about their social status and economic prospects. In 1824 Francia banned all religious orders, closed the only seminary, "secularized" monks and priests by forcing them to swear loyalty to the state, abolished the fuero eclesiástico (the privilege of clerical immunity from civil courts), confiscated Church property, and subordinated its finances to state control. The common people benefited from the suppression of the traditional elites and from the expansion of the state. Francia took land from the elite and the church and leased it to the poor.
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The Obedience of a Christen man, and how Christen rulers ought to govern, wherein also (if thou mark diligently) thou shalt find eyes to perceive the crafty convience of all iugglers. is a 1528 book by the English Protestant author William Tyndale. The spelling of this title is now commonly modernized and abbreviated to The Obedience of a Christian Man. It was first published by Merten de Keyser in Antwerp, and is best known for advocating that the king of a country was the head of that country's church, rather than the pope, and to be the first instance, in the English language at any rate, of advocating the divine right of kings, a concept mistakenly attributed to the Catholic Church.
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He was given a post in the King's Life Guards, which was intended to keep him out of danger. Despite this, he was "casually shot" by a Parliamentarian in the rout of the Royalists at Rowton Heath, near Chester, on 24 September 1645. Although the King was in mourning for his kinsman Bernard Stuart (killed in the same defeat), he instituted a special mourning for Lawes, apparently honouring him with the title of "Father of Musick." The author of his epitaph, Thomas Jordan, closed it with a lachrymose pun on the fact that Lawes had died at the hands of those who denied the divine right of kings: Lawes' body was lost or destroyed and his burial site is unknown.
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The divine right of kings, or divine-right theory of kingship, is a political and religious doctrine of royal and political legitimacy. It asserts that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority, deriving his right to rule directly from the will of God. The king is thus not subject to the will of his people, the aristocracy, or any other estate of the realm, including (in the view of some, especially in Protestant countries) the church. A weaker or more moderate form of this political theory does hold, however, that the king is subject to the church and the pope, although completely irreproachable in other ways; but according to this doctrine in its strong form, only God can judge an unjust king.
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The doctrine implies that any attempt to depose the king or to restrict his powers runs contrary to the will of God and may constitute a sacrilegious act. One passage in scripture supporting the idea of divine right of kings was used by Martin Luther, when urging the secular authorities to crush the Peasant Rebellion of 1525 in Germany in his Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, basing his argument on St. Paul's Epistle to the . It is related to the ancient Catholic philosophies regarding monarchy, in which the monarch is God's vicegerent upon the earth and therefore subject to no inferior power. However, in Roman Catholic jurisprudence, the monarch is always subject to natural and divine law, which are regarded as superior to the monarch.
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The doctrine of the divine right of kings came to dominate mediaeval concepts of kingship, claiming biblical authority (Epistle to the Romans, chapter 13). Augustine of Hippo in his work The City of God had stated his opinion that while the City of Man and the City of God may stand at cross-purposes, both of them have been instituted by God and served His ultimate will. Even though the City of Man – the world of secular government – may seem ungodly and be governed by sinners, it has been placed on earth for the protection of the City of God. Therefore, monarchs have been placed on their thrones for God's purpose, and to question their authority is to question God.
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Since a substantial amount of wealth and land was usually associated with the office of a bishop or abbot, the sale of church offices—a practice known as "simony"—was an important source of income for leaders among the nobility, who themselves owned the land and by charity allowed the building of churches. Emperors had been heavily relying on bishops for their secular administration, as they were not hereditary or quasi- hereditary nobility with family interests. They justified their power by the theory of the divine right of kings. Many of the papal selections before 1059 were influenced politically and militarily by European powers, often with a king or emperor announcing a choice which would be rubber-stamped by church electors.
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At the end of the 16th century there was an upsurge in interest in Magna Carta. Lawyers and historians at the time believed that there was an ancient English constitution, going back to the days of the Anglo-Saxons, that protected individual English freedoms. They argued that the Norman invasion of 1066 had overthrown these rights, and that Magna Carta had been a popular attempt to restore them, making the charter an essential foundation for the contemporary powers of Parliament and legal principles such as habeas corpus. Although this historical account was badly flawed, jurists such as Sir Edward Coke used Magna Carta extensively in the early 17th century, arguing against the divine right of kings propounded by the Stuart monarchs.
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James was sent to Edinburgh in 1681 as Lord High Commissioner; in August, the Scottish Parliament passed the Succession Act, confirming the divine right of kings, the rights of the natural heir 'regardless of religion', the duty of all to swear allegiance to that king and the independence of the Scottish Crown. It then went beyond ensuring James's succession to the Scottish throne by explicitly stating the aim was to make his exclusion from the English throne impossible without '...the fatall and dreadfull consequences of a civil war.' The issue reappeared during the 1688 Glorious Revolution. The English Parliament generally supported replacing James with his Protestant daughter Mary II, but resisted making her Dutch husband William III & II joint ruler.
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Charles I's accession also marked the beginning of an intense schism between King and Parliament. Charles's adherence to the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, a doctrine foreign to the English mentality he had inherited from his father, fuelled a vicious battle for supremacy between King and Parliament. Therefore, when Charles approached the Parliament to pay for a campaign against the Scots, they refused, declared themselves to be permanently in session and put forward a long list of civil and religious grievances that Charles would have to remedy before they approved any new legislation. Meanwhile, in the Kingdom of Ireland, Charles I's Lord Deputy there, Thomas Wentworth, had antagonised the native Irish Catholics by repeated initiatives to confiscate their lands and grant them to English colonists.
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The Enlightenment has been frequently linked to the French Revolution of 1789. One view of the political changes that occurred during the Enlightenment is that the "consent of the governed" philosophy as delineated by Locke in Two Treatises of Government (1689) represented a paradigm shift from the old governance paradigm under feudalism known as the "divine right of kings". In this view, the revolutions of the late 1700s and early 1800s were caused by the fact that this governance paradigm shift often could not be resolved peacefully and therefore violent revolution was the result. Clearly a governance philosophy where the king was never wrong was in direct conflict with one whereby citizens by natural law had to consent to the acts and rulings of their government.
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Charles has unenthusiastically summoned Parliament for the first time in twelve years, as he needs money to fight wars against both the Scots and the Irish. Although to appease the Commons he reluctantly agrees to execute his hated adviser the Earl of Strafford, the Parliament of England will still not grant him his requests unless he agrees to reforms that could lead to a constitutional monarchy. Committed to the divine right of kings, and under pressure from his queen to stand firm, Charles refuses. When he attempts to arrest five members of Parliament (in reality Cromwell was not one of them), war breaks out in England itself, Parliament against the king, both sides convinced that God is on their side.
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He believed that humans really desired to live in a state of extreme order, deeming a societal hierarchy to be natural and inevitable. Generally opposed to democracy, except within small groups in which every person knew the individual being elected, Michell instead believed that communities should be led by a strong leader who personified the solar deity. This embrace of the Divine Right of Kings led him to believe that Queen Elizabeth II should take control of Britain as an authoritarian leader who could intercede between the British people and the divine. He was critical of multiculturalism in Britain, believing that each ethnic or cultural group should live independently in an area segregated from other groups, stating that this would allow a people's traditions to remain vibrant.
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Louis XIV of France, the "Sun King" Louis XIV, known as the "Sun King", reigned over France from 1643 until 1715 although his strongest period of personal rule did not begin until 1661 after the death of his Italian chief minister Cardinal Mazarin. Louis believed in the divine right of kings, which asserts that a monarch is above everyone except God, and is therefore not answerable to the will of his people, the aristocracy, or the Church. Louis continued his predecessors' work of creating a centralized state governed from Paris, sought to eliminate remnants of feudalism in France, and subjugated and weakened the aristocracy. By these means he consolidated a system of absolute monarchical rule in France that endured until the French Revolution.
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Goodwin was one of the earliest clerical supporters of the democratic puritans, and then of the army against the Parliament. His Anti-Cavalierisme (1642) proclaims the need of war to suppress the party 'now hammering England to make an Ireland of it.' The doctrine of the divine right of kings he assailed in his Os Ossorianum, or a Bone for a Bishop, against Griffith Williams, bishop of Ossory. He also attacked the presbyterians as a persecuting party in his Θεομαχία, or the grand imprudence of ... fighting against God (1644). In May 1645 he was ejected from his living for refusing to administer indiscriminately in his parish the baptism and the Lord's Supper, setting up a covenanted community within his parish.
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Apotheosis of George Washington The Apotheosis of Homer Alphonse Mucha's The Slav Epic cycle No.20: The Apotheosis of the Slavs, Slavs for Humanity (1926) Apotheosis of Gdańsk by Isaak van den Blocke. Later artists have used the concept for motives ranging from genuine respect for the deceased (Constantino Brumidi's fresco The Apotheosis of Washington on the dome of the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.), to artistic comment (Salvador Dalí's or Ingres's The Apotheosis of Homer), to mock-heroic and burlesque apotheoses for comedic effect. Many modern leaders have exploited the artistic imagery if not the theology of apotheosis. Examples include Rubens's depictions of James I of England at the Banqueting House (an expression of the Divine Right of Kings) or Henry IV of France, or Appiani's apotheosis of Napoleon.
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Throughout much of European history, the divine right of kings was the theological justification for absolute monarchy. Many European monarchs claimed supreme autocratic power by divine right, and that their subjects had no rights to limit their power. James VI of Scotland (later also James I of England) and his son Charles I of Scotland and England tried to import this principle. Charles I's attempt to enforce episcopal polity on the Church of Scotland led to rebellion by the Covenanters and the Bishops' Wars, then fears that Charles I was attempting to establish absolutist government along European lines was a major cause of the English Civil War, despite the fact that he did rule this way for 11 years starting in 1629, after dissolving the Parliament of England for a time.
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From earliest historical times, with the Egyptian and Mesopotamian monarchs as well as in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion, the king held sacral functions directly connected to sacrifice or was considered by their people to have divine ancestry. In Germanic antiquity, kingship was primarily a sacral function. The king was directly hereditary for some tribes, while for others he was elected from among eligible members of royal families by the thing. The role of the Roman emperor as the protector of Christianity led eventually to monarchs ruling 'by the Grace of God' in the Christian Middle Ages, only later in the Early modern period there being a conflation of (increased) power with these sacral aspects held by the Germanic kings bringing forth the notion of the "divine right of kings".
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In Scotland, doctrinal differences with the majority Church of Scotland meant they preserved their independence, which continues today in the Scottish Episcopal Church; many of those who participated in the Rising came from non-juring Episcopalian congregations. However, the most powerful single driver for Scottish support in 1745 was opposition to the 1707 Union, whose loss of political control was not matched by perceived economic benefit. This was particularly marked in Edinburgh, former location of the Scottish Parliament, and the Highlands. In summary, Charles wanted to reclaim the throne of a united Great Britain and rule on the principles of the divine right of kings and absolutism, ideas rejected by the 1688 Glorious Revolution but which were reinforced by his trusted advisors, most of whom were long-term English or Irish Catholic exiles.
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Outside of Christianity, kings were often seen as either ruling with the backing of heavenly powers or perhaps even being divine beings themselves. However, the Christian notion of a divine right of kings is traced to a story found in 1 Samuel, where the prophet Samuel anoints Saul and then David as mashiach or king over Israel. The anointing is to such an effect that the monarch became inviolable, so that even when Saul sought to kill David, David would not raise his hand against him because "he was the Lord's anointed". Although the later Roman Empire had developed the European concept of a divine regent in Late Antiquity, Adomnan of Iona provides one of the earliest written examples of a Western medieval concept of kings ruling with divine right.
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In England the doctrine of the divine right of kings was developed to its most extreme logical conclusions during the political controversies of the 17th century; its most famous exponent was Sir Robert Filmer. It was the main issue to be decided by the English Civil War, the Royalists holding that "all Christian kings, princes and governors" derive their authority direct from God, the Parliamentarians that this authority is the outcome of a contract, actual or implied, between sovereign and people. In one case the king's power would be unlimited, according to Louis XIV's famous saying: "L' état, c'est moi!", or limited only by his own free act; in the other his actions would be governed by the advice and consent of the people, to whom he would be ultimately responsible.
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Jurist Edward Coke made extensive political use of Magna Carta. In the early 17th century, Magna Carta became increasingly important as a political document in arguments over the authority of the English monarchy. James I and Charles I both propounded greater authority for the Crown, justified by the doctrine of the divine right of kings, and Magna Carta was cited extensively by their opponents to challenge the monarchy. Magna Carta, it was argued, recognised and protected the liberty of individual Englishmen, made the King subject to the common law of the land, formed the origin of the trial by jury system, and acknowledged the ancient origins of Parliament: because of Magna Carta and this ancient constitution, an English monarch was unable to alter these long-standing English customs.
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The influence of Richard Hooker was crucial to an evolution in this understanding in which bishops came to be seen in their more traditional role as ones who delegate to the presbyterate inherited powers, act as pastors to presbyters, and holding a particular teaching office with respect to the wider church. Paul Kwong, Anglican Archbishop and Primate of Hong Kong Anglican opinion has differed as to the way in which episcopal government is de jure divino (by the Divine Right of Kings). On the one hand, the seventeenth century divine, John Cosin, held that episcopal authority is jure divino, but that it stemmed from "apostolic practice and the customs of the Church ... [not] absolute precept that either Christ or His Apostles gave about it" (a view maintained also by Hooker).Cosin, Works, Vol.
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Religious disputes centered on questions such as whether religion was to be dictated by the monarch or was to be the choice of the people, and whether individuals had a direct relationship with God or needed to use an intermediary. Civil disputes centered on debates about the extent of the King's power (a question of the Divine right of kings), and specifically whether the King had the right to raise taxes and armed forces without the consent of the governed. These wars ultimately changed the relationship between king and subjects. In 1638, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland voted to remove bishops and the Book of Common Prayer that had been introduced by Charles I to impose the Anglican model on the Presbyterian Church of Scotland.
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Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix The French First Republic appeared following the 1789 French Revolution. It replaced the ancient kingdom of France, ruled by the divine right of kings. Hobsbawm highlighted the role of conscription, invented by Napoleon, and of the 1880s public instruction laws, which allowed mixing of the various groups of France into a nationalist mold which created the French citizen and his consciousness of membership to a common nation, while the various regional languages of France were progressively eradicated. The 1870 Franco-Prussian War, which led to the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871, was instrumental in bolstering patriotic feelings; until World War I (1914–1918), French politicians never completely lost sight of the disputed Alsace-Lorraine region which played a major role in the definition of the French nation and therefore of the French people.
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Though predicated on the description of a landscape or piece of scenery, topographical poetry often, at least implicitly, addresses a social or political issue or the meaning of nationality in some way. The description of elements in the landscape thus becomes a poetic vehicle through which a personal interpretation is delivered. For example, in John Denham's "Cooper's Hill", the speaker discusses the effects of religious intolerance in a poem published at the start of the First English Civil War: The chapel and abbey in ruins on top of a nearby hill were the result of the reformist zeal that led to the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Now the religious spirit unleashed under royal auspices had come to question the constitutionality of the Divine right of kings which had allowed the dismantling of those ancient institutions in the first place.
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It implies that only divine authority can judge an unjust monarch and that any attempt to depose, dethrone or restrict their powers runs contrary to God's will and may constitute a sacrilegious act. It is often expressed in the phrase "by the Grace of God", attached to the titles of a reigning monarch; although this right does not make the monarch the same as a sacred king. Historically, many notions of rights were authoritarian and hierarchical, with different people granted different rights, and some having more rights than others. For instance, the right of a father to respect from his son did not indicate a right for the son to receive a return from that respect; and the divine right of kings, which permitted absolute power over subjects, did not leave a lot of room for many rights for the subjects themselves.
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The Scots textbooks of the divine right of kings were written in 1597–1598 by James VI of Scotland despite Scotland never having believed in the theory and where the monarch was regarded as the "first among equals" on a par with his people. His Basilikon Doron, a manual on the powers of a king, was written to edify his four-year-old son Henry Frederick that a king "acknowledgeth himself ordained for his people, having received from the god a burden of government, whereof he must be countable". He based his theories in part on his understanding of the Bible, as noted by the following quote from a speech to parliament delivered in 1610 as James I of England: James's reference to "God's lieutenants" is apparently a reference to the text in Romans 13 where Paul refers to "God's ministers".
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American leaders had rejected the divine right of kings in the New World, but recognized the necessity of proving their credibility in the Old World., Howard Jones, Crucible of power: a history of American foreign relations to 1913 John Trumbull's 1819 painting, Declaration of Independence, depicting the five-man drafting committee presenting the Declaration of Independence to Congress Congress formally adopted the resolution of independence, but only after creating three overlapping committees to draft the Declaration, a Model Treaty, and the Articles of Confederation. The Declaration announced the states' entry into the international system; the model treaty was designed to establish amity and commerce with other states, and the Articles of Confederation established "a firm league" among the thirteen free and independent states. These three things together constituted an international agreement to set up central institutions for conducting vital domestic and foreign affairs.
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J. C. D. Clark (1985) depicts England before 1828 as a nation in which the vast majority of the people believed in the divine right of kings, and the legitimacy of a hereditary nobility, and in the rights and privileges of the Anglican Church. In Clark's interpretation, the system remained virtually intact until it suddenly collapsed in 1828, because Catholic emancipation undermined its central symbolic prop, the Anglican supremacy. Clark argues that the consequences were enormous: "The shattering of a whole social order....What was lost at that point... was not merely a constitutional arrangement, but the intellectual ascendancy of a worldview, the cultural hegemony of the old elite." Clark's interpretation has been widely debated in the scholarly literature, and almost every historian who has examined the issue has highlighted the substantial amount of continuity between the periods before and after 1828–1832.
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However, Suárez also conceived many particular cases -- a casuistry -- in which conquest was legitimized. Hence, war was justified if the indigenous people refused free transit and commerce to the Europeans; if they forced converts to return to idolatry; if there come to be a sufficient number of Christians in the newly discovered land that they wish to receive from the Pope a Christian government; if the indigenous people lacked just laws, magistrates, agricultural techniques, etc. In any case, title taken according to this principle must be exercised with Christian charity, warned Suárez, and for the advantage of the Indians. Henceforth, the School of Salamanca legitimized the conquest while at the same time limiting the absolute power of the sovereign, which was celebrated in others parts of Europe under the notion of the divine right of kings.
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Hannah Arendt considered auctoritas a reference to founding acts as the source of political authority in ancient Rome. She took foundation to include (as augeō suggests), the continuous conservation and increase of principles handed down from "the beginning" (see also pietas). According to Arendt, this source of authority was rediscovered in the course of the 18th-century American Revolution (see "United States of America" under Founding Fathers), as an alternative to an intervening Western tradition of absolutism, claiming absolute authority, as from God (see Divine Right of Kings), and later from Nature, Reason, History, and even, as in the French Revolution, Revolution itself (see La Terreur). Arendt views a crisis of authority as common to both the American and French Revolutions, and the response to that crisis a key factor in the relative success of the former and failure of the latter.
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The 1689 Parliament "ended up going much further than James would have liked, while ... falling short of what many Irish Catholics hoped for." Called in order to raise funds for the war, Parliament approved a subsidy of £20,000 per month, for 13 months but had no way to raise the funds. The Act of Recognition recognised James's right to the Crown of Ireland and compared the usurpation by William III to the murder of James' father Charles I. It emphasised indefeasible hereditary rights and the Divine right of kings; these contradicted the 1689 English Bill of Rights and Scottish Articles of Grievances, which made explicit an assumed Social contract between a king and his subjects. The Declaratory Act affirmed the Kingdom of Ireland as always having been "distinct" from England, and no Act of the English Parliament was binding unless ratified by the Irish Parliament.
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Although most in Britain accepted William and Mary as sovereigns, a significant minority refused to acknowledge their claim to the throne, instead believing in the divine right of kings, which held that the monarch's authority derived directly from God rather than being delegated to the monarch by Parliament. Over the next 57 years Jacobites pressed for restoration of James and his heirs. Nonjurors in England and Scotland, including over 400 clergy and several bishops of the Church of England and Scottish Episcopal Church as well as numerous laymen, refused to take oaths of allegiance to William. Battle of the Boyne between James II and William III, 12 July 1690, Jan van Huchtenburg Ireland was controlled by Roman Catholics loyal to James, and Franco-Irish Jacobites arrived from France with French forces in March 1689 to join the war in Ireland and contest Protestant resistance at the Siege of Derry.
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In the third usage, extensions of divinity and divine power are credited to living, mortal individuals. Political leaders are known to have claimed actual divinity in certain early societies — the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs being the premier case — taking a role as objects of worship and being credited with superhuman status and powers. More commonly, and more pertinent to recent history, leaders merely claim some form of divine mandate, suggesting that their rule is in accordance with the will of God. The doctrine of the divine right of kings was introduced as late as the 17th century, proposing that kings rule by divine decree; Japanese Emperors ruled by divine mandate until the inception of the Japanese constitution after World War II. Less politically, most faiths have any number of people that are believed to have been touched by divine forces: saints, prophets, heroes, oracles, martyrs, and enlightened beings, among others.
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Scottish Politics: Being a Scotsman himself, Moore also includes a debate on the state of Scottish politics about three quarters of the way through the novel, in which two proud Scottish servants – Buchanan and Targe – argue about the Jacobite Rising of 1745, during which Charles Edward Stewart attempted to reclaim the British throne. This eventually leads to an argument about Scottish nationalism, including whether Mary, Queen of Scots plotted to kill her husband Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, and whether Scotland should have joined with England under the Acts of Union 1707. The issues are presented as polarizing the Scottish nation, showing the divisions between the Whig and Tory parties in particular, and especially their opinions on kings and the rights of royalty. Targe – the Tory – has loyalty for the divine right of kings, whereas Buchanan – the Whig – is more loyal to country than king.
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Earl of Melfort, leader of the Scottish Court Party, which included Dumbarton James was sent to Edinburgh in 1681 as Lord High Commissioner to the Parliament of Scotland; over the next two years, he established a Scottish Court Party, a mixture of Catholics like the Earl of Melfort and Dumbarton, plus supportive Protestants such as his brother, the Duke of Hamilton.Glozier, p.195. In August 1681, the Scottish Parliament passed the Succession Act, which confirmed the divine right of kings, the rights of the natural heir 'regardless of religion,' the duty of all to swear allegiance to that king and the independence of the Scottish Crown. However, tolerance for personal Catholicism did not extend to Catholicism in general; the 1681 Scottish Test Act also required all public officials and MPs to swear unconditional loyalty to the King but with the crucial qualifier they 'promise to uphold the true Protestant religion.
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In March 1791 Pope Pius VI had condemned the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, reluctantly signed by Louis XVI, which reduced the number of bishops from 132 to 93, imposed the election of bishops and all members of the clergy by departmental or district assemblies of electors, and reduced the Pope's authority over the Church. Religion played an important role in the life of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, both raised in the Roman Catholic faith. The queen's political ideas and her belief in the absolute power of monarchs were based on France's long-established tradition of the divine right of kings. On 18 April, as the royal family prepared to leave for Saint-Cloud to attend Easter mass celebrated by a refractory priest, a crowd, soon joined by the Garde Nationale (disobeying Lafayette's orders), prevented their departure from Paris, prompting Marie Antoinette to declare to Lafayette that she and her family were no longer free.
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The second section considers monarchy first from a biblical perspective and then from a historical perspective. He begins by arguing that since all men are equal at creation, the distinction between kings and subjects is a false one. Paine then quotes a sequence of biblical passages to refute the divine right of Kings. After citing , he highlights Gideon’s refusal to heed the people’s call to rule, citing . He then reproduces the majority of (wherein Samuel relays God’s objections to the people’s demand for a king) and concludes: “the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government...” Paine then examines some of the problems that kings and monarchies have caused in the past and concludes: Paine also attacks one type of "mixed state," the constitutional monarchy promoted by John Locke, in which the powers of government are separated between a Parliament or Congress, which makes the laws, and a monarch, who executes them.
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St Peter's Qualified Chapel in Montrose, Angus A Qualified Chapel, in eighteenth and nineteenth century Scotland, was an Episcopal congregation that worshipped liturgically but accepted the Hanoverian monarchy and thereby "qualified" under the Scottish Episcopalians Act 1711 for exemption from the penal laws against the Episcopal Church of Scotland. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, many Scottish Episcopalians, holding the Divine Right of Kings, remained true to their oaths to James VII and II and refused in conscience to recognise or pray for William III and Mary II. The Episcopalians were ejected from parish churches by the Presbyterians. After the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745 in which many Episcopalians participated, harsher restrictions were imposed on Episcopalians under the Toleration Act of 1746 and Penal Act of 1748. Priests who did not swear allegiance to George II, pray for him by name and register their Letters of Orders were forbidden to minister to more than four people ("the prescribed four") at any one time.
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Historian Frank McLynn identifies seven primary drivers in Jacobitism, noting that while the movement contained "sincere men [..] who aimed solely to restore the Stuarts", it was "rarely [...] a positive doctrine" and "provided a source of legitimacy for political dissent of all kinds". Alexander Forbes, 4th Lord Forbes of Pitsligo; his support of the doctrine of indefeasible hereditary right placed him in a minority of Jacobites by 1745 Its four main ideological tenets drew on a theology shared by Nonjurors, High Church Anglicans and Scots Episcopalians. They were, firstly, the divine right of kings, their accountability to God, not man or Parliament; secondly that monarchy was a divine institution; thirdly, the crown's descent by indefeasible hereditary right, which could not be overturned or annulled; and lastly the scriptural injunction of passive obedience and non-resistance, even towards monarchs of which the subject might disapprove. Jacobites attempted, however, to draw a distinction between 'absolute' and 'arbitrary' power.
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Hume wrote several appendices and discursions, which may be classed in their apparent order of composition, covering: 1) the Shakespearean period; 2) the period up until the restoration; 3) the period ending with the Revolution; 4) the period of the Tudors; 5) the Anglo-Saxon period; 6) the period up until the signing and gradual implementation of Magna Carta; 7) the era of Edward III; and 8) the period ending with the overthrow of Richard Plantagenet. This last discursion at the end of vol 2 is a summary of some of Hume's most developed thoughts (chapter XXII). An anti-Jacobite shibboleth that Hume wanted to refute held that absolute monarchy was an innovation brought to England by James I. When James was writing his Basilicon Doron expounding the divine right of kings, he was king of Scotland alone. He wanted to bring the authoritarian English model of kingship to his unruly northern kingdom.
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The declaration was drawn up by Charles and his three chief advisors, Edward Hyde, James Butler, and Nicholas MonckNicholas Monck was a clergyman and brother of General George Monck, who carried letters between his brother and Charles II., in order to state the terms by which Charles hoped to take up "the possession of that right which God and Nature hath made our due".See the Divine Right of Kings, on which the Stuarts insisted. The declaration promised a "free and general pardon" to any old enemies of Charles and of his father who recognised Charles II as their lawful monarch, "excepting only such persons as shall hereafter be excepted by parliament". However it had always been Charles's expectation, or at least that of his chancellor, Edward Hyde (later Earl of Clarendon), that all who had been immediately concerned in his father's death should be punished, citing Life of Clarendon, p. 69.
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François Gérard, The French people demanding destitution of the Tyran on 10 August 1792 In the Enlightenment, thinkers applied the word tyranny to the system of governance that had developed around aristocracy and monarchy. Specifically, John Locke as part of his argument against the "Divine Right of Kings" in his book Two Treatises of Government defines it this way: "Tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to; and this is making use of the power any one has in his hands, not for the good of those who are under it, but for his own private, separate advantage."Two Treatises of Government (199) Locke's concept of tyranny influenced the writers of subsequent generations who developed the concept of tyranny as counterpoint to ideas of human rights and democracy. Thomas Jefferson referred to the tyranny of King George III of Great Britain in the Declaration of Independence.
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However, it also involved the principles of absolutism and divine right of kings, and his deposition ended a century of political and civil strife by confirming the primacy of Parliament over the Crown. James inherited the thrones of England, Ireland and Scotland from his elder brother Charles II with widespread support in all three countries, largely based on the principles of divine right or birth.Harris, 6–7 Tolerance for his personal Catholicism did not apply to it in general and when the English and Scottish Parliaments refused to pass his measures, James attempted to impose them by decree; it was a political principle, rather than a religious one, that ultimately led to his removal. In June 1688, two events turned dissent into a crisis; the first on 10 June was the birth of James's son and heir James Francis Edward, threatening to create a Roman Catholic dynasty and excluding his Anglican daughter Mary and her Protestant husband William of Orange.
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In it, he defended the divine right of kings as having title inherited from Adam, the first man of the human species, according to Judeo-Christian tradition. However, in the latter half of the 18th century, clerical sentiments of patriarchy were meeting challenges from intellectual authorities – Diderot's Encyclopedia denies inheritance of paternal authority stating, "... reason shows us that mothers have rights and authority equal to those of fathers; for the obligations imposed on children originate equally from the mother and the father, as both are equally responsible for bringing them into the world. Thus the positive laws of God that relate to the obedience of children join the father and the mother without any differentiation; both possess a kind of ascendancy and jurisdiction over their children...." In the 19th century, various women began to question the commonly accepted patriarchal interpretation of Christian scripture. One of the foremost of these was Sarah Grimké, who voiced skepticism about the ability of men to translate and interpret passages relating to the roles of the sexes without bias.
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Through most of the 17th century the Presbyterian Church in Scotland struggled against the will of the Stewart Kings in their attempts to impose Anglican and even (with James II) Catholic practices in the Scottish Church. The Presbyterian Church claimed that every man was equal in the eyes of God, could read and understand the Bible for himself and therefore needed no hierarchical form of priesthood, especially one which was appointed under the patronage of the most powerful people in the land, to act between them and their God. The covenanters believed that the reformation settlement in England had simply replaced the power of the Pope over the church with the power of the king over it and they would not have their religious freedom laid down for them by the crown. In some ways their principles were political harbingers on the path towards later principles of democratic forms of government and were seen at the time as dangerous sedition by kings who still believed in the Divine right of kings.
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An adherent of the theory of the "Divine Right of Kings", which advocates the divine origin of temporal power and any lack of earthly restraint of monarchical rule, Louis XIV continued his predecessors' work of creating a centralized state governed from the capital of Paris. He sought to eliminate the remnants of feudalism still persisting in parts of France and, by compelling the noble elite to regularly inhabit his lavish Palace of Versailles, built on the outskirts of Paris, succeeded in pacifying the aristocracy, many members of which had participated in the earlier "Fronde" rebellion during Louis' minority youth. By these means he consolidated a system of absolute monarchy in France that endured 150 years until the French Revolution.William Beik, Louis XIV and Absolutism: A Brief Study with Documents (2000) McCabe says critics used fiction to portray the degraded Turkish Court, using "the harem, the Sultan court, oriental despotism, luxury, gems and spices, carpets, and silk cushions" as an unfavorable analogy to the corruption of the French royal court.
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Originally, it had a literal meaning: the divine will was invoked—notably by Christian monarchs—as legitimation (the only one above every earthly power) for the absolutist authority the monarch wielded. This is also known as the divine right of kings, that is, the endorsement of God for the monarch's reign. While the Christian Roman emperors during the late Dominate, especially in the East (as continued in Byzantium after the fall of Rome), came remarkably close to acting out the role of God's voice on earth, centralizing all power in their hands, e.g. reducing the Patriarch of Constantinople to their "(State) Minister of the Cult" and proclaiming their "universal" authority (in the Oriental tradition, as in Persia, but also in the original Muslim Caliphate), for most dynasties it would rather prove to be a never-ending battle up the hills of political resistance, both from rival power poles within their state (nobility, clergy; even within a dynasty) and from foreign powers claiming independence or even hegemony, usually constraining them in constitutional limitations (not necessarily written statutes, more often a matter of customary law and established privileges).
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Foucault is not denying that genetic or biological study is inaccurate or is simply not telling the truth what he means is that notions of this newly discovered sciences were extended to include the vast majority (or whole populations) of populations as an exercise in "regimes change".Foucault argues that the conceptual meaning from the Middle ages and Canon law period, the Geocentric model, later superseded by the Heliocentrism model placing the position of the law of right in the Middle ages (Exclusive right or its correct legal term Sui generis) was the Divine right of kings and Absolute monarchy where the previous incarnation of truth and rule of political sovereignty was considered absolute and unquestioned by political philosophy (monarchs, popes and emperors). However, Foucault noticed that this Pharaonic version of political power was transversed and it was with 18th-century emergence of Capitalism and Liberal democracy that these terms began to be "democratized". The modern Pharaonic version represented by the President, the monarch, the Pope and the Prime minister all became propagandized versions or examples of symbol agents all aimed at towards a newly discovered phenomenon, the population.
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The royal arms of Mary, Queen of Scots incorporated into the Tolbooth in Leith (1565) and now in South Leith Parish Church Government in early modern Scotland included all forms of administration, from the crown, through national institutions, to systems of local government and the law, between the early sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth century. It roughly corresponds to the early modern era in Europe, beginning with the Renaissance and Reformation and ending with the last Jacobite risings and the beginnings of the industrial revolution. Monarchs of this period were the Stuarts: James IV, James V, Mary Queen of Scots, James VI, Charles I, Charles II, James VII, William III and Mary II, Anne, and the Hanoverians: George I and George II. The crown remained the most important element of government throughout the period and, despite the many royal minorities, it saw many of the aspects of aggrandisement associated with "new monarchy" elsewhere in Europe. Theories of limited monarchy and resistance were articulated by Scots, particularly George Buchanan, in the sixteenth century, but James VI advanced the theory of the divine right of kings, and these debates were restated in subsequent reigns and crises.
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Parliamentary sovereignty is often seen as a central element in the UK constitution, although its extent is contested.See generally, AW Bradley, ‘The Sovereignty of Parliament – Form or Substance?’ in J Jowell, The Changing Constitution (7th edn 2011) ch 2 It means that an Act of Parliament is the highest form of law, and also that "Parliament cannot bind itself."cf AW Bradley and KD Ewing, Constitutional and Administrative Law (2015) 65, it ‘is not possible to predict the outcome of changes made by Parliament to the ‘manner and form’ of the legislative process since, depending on the nature and reasons for such changes, the courts might still be influenced by a deep-seated belief in the proposition that Parliament cannot bind itself.’ Historically, Parliament became sovereign through a series of power struggles between the monarch, the church, the courts, and ordinary people. The Magna Carta 1215, which was later annulled leading to the First Barons' War, granted the right of Parliament to exist for "common counsel" before any tax,Magna Carta 1215 cl 12, ‘No scutage [tax on knight's land or fee] nor aid shall be imposed on our kingdom, unless by common counsel of our kingdom...’ against the supposedly "divine right of kings" to rule.
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Parliamentary sovereignty is often seen as a central element in the UK constitution, although its extent is contested.See generally, AW Bradley, 'The Sovereignty of Parliament – Form or Substance?’ in J Jowell, The Changing Constitution (7th edn 2011) ch 2 It means that an Act of Parliament is the highest form of law, but also that "Parliament cannot bind itself."cf AW Bradley and KD Ewing, Constitutional and Administrative Law (2015) 65, it 'is not possible to predict the outcome of changes made by Parliament to the 'manner and form' of the legislative process since, depending on the nature and reasons for such changes, the courts might still be influenced by a deep-seated belief in the proposition that Parliament cannot bind itself.' Historically, Parliament became sovereign through a series of power struggles between the monarch, the church, the courts, and the people. The Magna Carta 1215, which came from the conflict leading to the First Barons' War, granted the right of Parliament to exist for "common counsel" before any tax,Magna Carta 1215 cl 12, 'No scutage [tax on knight's land or fee] nor aid shall be imposed on our kingdom, unless by common counsel of our kingdom...’ against the "divine right of kings" to rule.
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