order of policy... of all politic Rule... and also the Laws of Nature
and of England’ had been perverted at the end of Edward IV’s reign. In
three lengthy drafts of parliamentary sermons in that year Bishop
Russell of Lincoln struggled to give the political turmoil constitutional
legitimacy. According to the sermon for the intended parliament of
Edward V, the ‘policy of christian realms... over all in the days that
we be in’ showed ‘their public body’ to consist of prince, nobles, and
people, ‘the which to my purpose implieth the present estate of our
nobles, our commons, and of our glorious prince’. In the two drafts for
Richard III’s parliament, the lords spiritual, lords temporal, and
commons are described as meeting in parliament to provide how ‘this
great public body of England’ may be ‘kept in estate’, and the king, his
court, and his council become the belly which digests ‘all manner of
meats’, from domestic disturbances to external wars and diplomacy.
The ‘thing public of a realm or city’ is also likened to a child under the
wardship of ‘such as have the governance of the community [comine]’.
At Henry VII’s first parliament in 1485 the chancellor began by
expounding the benefits of a mutual loyalty between king and subjects
and an ending of the discord between the stomach and the other
members of the body politic, which Livy had ‘treated at length’, then
greeted the first Tudor as another Joshua, sent to lead this famous realm
with its ordered and ‘splendid laws and institutions’ into Ovid’s Golden
Age. The sermon of 1487 set out what was needed for ‘the care of the
Commonwealth’ [curam Reipublicae]; that of 1489 discoursed on the
types of justice, of which peace was deemed the end, the discipline of
laws and statutes and the proper distribution of offices were declared
the means, and the best source of justice for a flourishing respublicawas
proclaimed to be a prince ruling alone as God ruled the universe. In
1491 and 1497 the same chancellor as in 1489, John Morton, arch-
bishop of Canterbury and eventually cardinal, brought examples
from Roman history into play, and in 1504 another archiepiscopal
chancellor invoked the authority of Aristotle, Cicero, and Augustine,
and the experience of the best commonwealths, indeed of human
society itself, to show the overriding need of justice for the common
welfare in a well-founded respublica.^18
The influence of humanism is evident in the sermons of Henry VII’s
chancellors, and in the sixteenth century the humanist tradition of
description and criticism of the commonwealth was continued by a
succession of writers who were first and foremost lawyers: Edmund
Dudley, Thomas More, Christopher St Germain, Thomas Elyot, and
Thomas Smith. Dudley wrote an allegorical Tree of Commonwealthas
Comparing and criticizing states of commonwealths 303(^18) RPvi. 237, 240, 267, 385, 409, 424, 440, 458, 509, 520; Chrimes, English Constitu-
tional Ideas, 167–91.