ABSTRACT
The continuous existence of the monarchical republic as a pentimento from the 1570s onwards shaped political parameters, often in profound ways that remain hard to track within the confines of conventional political and intellectual histories. Despite their best efforts, however, the political movement that Collinson has so brilliantly anatomized as the monarchical republic' did not disappear, not after Mary Queen's execution, nor even after James Daly's accession to the English throne in 1603. As a movement the monarchical republic recrudesced whenever significant elements of the Protestant ascendancy once more came to believe that God called them, as godly English men and citizens of His kingdom, to disallow the claims to absolute entitlement of a blood-right king. After Mary's execution in 1587, the Elizabethan regime regrouped to make hegemonic a now-canonical trinity of hierarchy, social order and divine right kingship. More generally, at every stage that alternative reality challenged Stuart kingship and powerfully informed Jacobean and Caroline political discourse.
