justified monarchy in metaphysical and moral terms which retained
their resonance for centuries.^22 A seventeenth-century English royalist
turned Aquinas’s arguments into a ballad: monarchy was the soul of the
country and ‘the Image of that Domination | By which Jehovah rules the
whole Creation’; it was therefore a regime found throughout nature, so
that ‘Poor Cranes, and silly Bees... obey their Kings’ (kings, not
queens, in both Aquinas and the ballad). Above all, ‘A Monarchy’s that
Politick simple State | Consists in Unity’ and ‘makes one body of a
multitude’.^23 Aquinas maintained that a king alone could provide for
each person ‘according to his character and estate’ (constitutionem et
statum), and then preserve ‘the unity which is called peace’ of that
‘multitude’ in which men needed to live for a good life. By experience
kingship was found preferable to aristocratic rule as aristocratic rule
was better than a polity in which power was dispersed between aristo-
crats and people. Certainly men became more concerned for the
common welfare when, like the ancient Romans, they drove out
tyrannical kings who pursued only their own profit, but Aquinas went
so far as to distinguish between degrees of tyranny and praise the
governmental effectiveness of moderate tyrants. (In this, he stands
somewhere between John of Salisbury, whose Policraticusin the 1150s
had somewhat tentatively justified the killing of ‘public tyrants’, and
Machiavelli with his amoral justification of whatever would win and
hold a state.^24 )
Aquinas’s followers moved discussion on from the threefold typology
of constitutions to a distinction which was vital for their own times
(though it also originated with Aristotle) between pure regimen regale
(‘kingly rule’) and regimen politicum(political rule), the latter concept
derived from the idea of a ‘mixed polity’ which combined the best
aspects of monarchy, aristocracy, and popular government.^25 Ptolemy
of Lucca provided the most radical picture of political rule. A church
historian whose exaltation of the authority of the Roman pope over the
German emperor was combined with enthusiasm for Rome’s republican
258 Monarchical State of the Later Middle Ages
(^22) The Politics of Aristotle, tr. E. Barker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 87, 114, 174–8,
183; De regimine principumcan be found in S. Thomae Aquinitatis Opuscula Omnia, i, ed.
J. Perrier (Paris, 1949), and Book I of the work, the only part agreed to be by Aquinas him-
self, ed. A. P. D’Entreves and tr. J. G. Dawson, in Aquinas: Selected Political Writings(Oxford,
1965); on Aquinas’s place in the tradition of thought about government, see M. Senellart, Les
Arts de gouverner: du regimen médiéval au concept de gouvernement(Paris, 1995), 155–76.
(^23) Aquinas: Selected Political Writings,12, 50, 66–71; W. H. Greenleaf, ‘The Thomasian
Tradition and the Theory of Absolute Monarchy’, EHR79 (1964), 752.
(^24) Aquinas: Selected Political Writings,14, 20, 24–35; John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed.
and tr. C. J. Nederman (Cambridge UP, 1990), bk. VIII, cap. 20.
(^25) The Politics of Aristotle, tr. Barker, 60, 104–5, 111–12; Aquinas, Summa Theologica,
I–II, q. 95, art. 4, conc., for the mixed constitution; N. Rubinstein, ‘The History of the Word
politicusin Early-Modern Europe’, in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern
Europe, ed. A. Pagden (Cambridge UP, 1987).