ABSTRACT
Tudor governments needed to persuade or convince their subjects to remain passive through a generally accepted theory of obligation and submission. The need became more acute with the changes of the 1530s and the dangers attending on them. Modern western societies make a clear distinction between Church and state, but in Tudor England this was not so. The concept of a secular ‘state’ is not easily applied to the secular jurisdictions of early modern Europe, since they were normally tied to the fortunes and personalities of a great family such as the Tudors, and they also had pretensions to have been created by the providence of God. The royal supremacy implied the identification of Church and civil commonwealth. The purpose of the doctrine of the godly prince, elaborated by Tudor writers, was to assert, in the words of the Henrician Protestant writer Richard Taverner, that kings ‘represent unto us the person even of God himself’.
