ABSTRACT
Robert Persons and William Allen may well have been pinning their hopes on a post-Armada scenario where the English Catholic Church would be able to play off Sir Philip Sidney and James Stuart in order to direct the reconstruction of the nation as a Catholic state. Even William Crichton, the Scottish Jesuit with powerful connections among the Catholic Scottish earls and great expectations of being able to influence the king, had virtually given up hope of James's conversion and was backing the earls against him. The beneficent combination of succession and election in the making of a king, as Persons sees it, is enhanced by a telling medicinal metaphor. Persons's contribution to the development of parliamentary democracy was somewhat fortuitous, therefore. Francisco Suarez is concerned to define the relationship between human and divine elements in constituting royal potestas: the right of a king derives immediately from men, a necessary consequence of living in a community, but mediately from God.
