These are reforms of ‘the state of the commonwealth’. But ‘state’
also appears in the Dialoguein the other sense of the state of the regime
which makes law for the commonwealth. Though none of its elements
was entirely new to humanist thought, the programme of reformation
put together by Starkey was a radical one that would always have
required a strong form of government to carry through. With his
Italian education Starkey was well equipped to apply humanist theory
about the different states of regime to the English situation. Pole is made
to explain that what he calls ‘now policy, now civil order and now
politic rule’ has grown by the devising by politic men of laws which
accorded with the natures of particular peoples, so that some were
‘governed and ruled by a king or prince, some by a common council of
certain wise men and some by the whole body and multitude’—it did
not matter which, provided ‘they which hath authority and rule of the
state look not to their own singular profit nor to the private weal of
any part, but... to the common weal of the whole’, and everyone
did his duty according to his ‘state, office or degree’. Since the perfect
state is not the weal of any particular part but of all together, this
‘common weal determineth to it no particular state, which by politic
men have been reduced to iii, neither the rule of a prince, neither of a
certain number of wise men, neither yet of the whole multitude and
body of the people, but in every one of these, it may be found perfect
and stable... so long as every part is kept in his order with prosperity’
(35 ff.).
England was clearly a country that had long been ruled ‘under the
state of princes, which by their regal power and princely authority have
judged all things pertaining to the state of our realm, to hang only upon
their will and fantasy’, and Pole does find it a fault in the ‘order and
rule of the state of our country’ that such a prince is not elected. It is
a ‘most perfect and excellent state of a policy’ to be ruled by a wise
prince like the present king, ever ‘content to submit himself to the order
of counsel’, but history shows that hereditary succession does not
guarantee one: if inheritance must continue to prevail over election
in England, ‘high authority’ should be kept from the prince and
committed ‘only to the common counsel of the realm and parliament’.
The king is under the law, and it is wrong that the prince’s proclama-
tions—or the pope’s dispensations—should nullify ‘laws and statutes in
parliament ordained’. Lupset marvels that Pole will thus ‘allow the state
of a prince’ but not give him a prince’s authority ‘to moderate all things
by his pleasure and will’. Pole replies that such a tyrannical order might
have been convenient at the first entry of William the Conqueror, but
was nothing like ‘the perfect state and true common weal’ which he
hoped might be established, whereupon Lupset complains that Pole is
310 From Law to Politics: ‘The Modern State’