ABSTRACT
On Monday 16 July 1683, in the wake of the so-called Rye House Plot to assassinate King Charles II and his brother James Duke of York, the hebdomadal council of the University of Oxford instructed William Jane, Regius Professor of Divinity, together with the university’s leading doctors of divinity to identify the subversive political principles that had inspired the outrage. Within six days, these pillars of the Anglican establishment had assembled a comprehensive list of twenty-seven propositions that were then read out in full by Jane to the University’s convocation on Saturday. The convocation in turn unanimously passed its Judgment and decree … against certain pernicious books and damnable doctrines, destructive to the sacred persons of princes, their state and government, and of all humane society.1 Of these propositions, the one that is most relevant to the theme of this chapter is the twenty-third, according to which
Those who are said to have held this doctrine about who may put to death a tyrant include ‘Buchanan, Knox, Goodman, Gilby, Jesuits’. This represents a confessional melange of Calvinists, in the shape of Scotsmen (George Buchanan and John Knox) and Englishmen (Christopher Goodman and Anthony Gilby), and Jesuits (in this case, Robert Parsons and Robert Bellarmine).3 Although the collection of names may strike us as eclectic, it had long been an Anglican belief that resistance theory was associated with the confessional extremes. Indeed, it can be argued that there was more than a grain of truth in what the Oxford convocation was alleging. As Quentin Skinner has observed in his account of the development of Calvinist political thought, since ‘the arguments taken by the Calvinist from the Lutherans had originally been taken by the Lutherans from the civil and canon law, we may say with very little exaggeration that the main foundations of the Calvinist theory of revolution were in fact constructed entirely by their Catholic adversaries’.4
