From Foreign War to Civil War

During the civil war and its aftermath, two competing foundational claims for the sovereignty of princes coexisted. On the one hand, supporters of the monarchy sought to justify the king’s legitimacy on the basis of divine right, the legacy of James I’s famous tract, The True Law of Free Monarchies, which maintained both that the king owed his authority to his role as GoD's representative and that, on that basis, there could be no basis for the resistance against a legitimate sovereign. ¹ On the other hand, a competing claim, first put forward in the sixteenth-century anonymous Huguenot tract, Vindiciae, contra Tyrannos, that legitimate authority could only be justified on the basis of a social contract between the people and their sovereign, became the preferred theory of the supporters of the parliament, since it justified the deposition of Charles on the basis of the claim that such an implied contract had been violated. ² The civil war and the execution of King Charles I had done great damage to the first rationale for legitimate sovereignty, but as I show in this chapter, Sir Richard Fanshawe sought to use the epic to reinvent the tradition of divine right by linking it to ancient protective and mutually beneficial alliances between threatened Christian sovereigns. As I show, this is one legacy of the earlier religious-inspired form of cosmopolitanism that sought to protect and correct legitimate sovereignty and correct and depose illegitimate sovereigns.