always stopping his mouth ‘with this consideration of the perfect state’,
which itself ‘smelleth a little of tyranny’ (67 ff., 82).
In the third part of the Dialogue, after they have gone to mass and
invoked the Holy Spirit, Pole and Lupset consider ‘how to restore to our
politic body its perfect state and commonwealth’, treating ‘by way of
governance’ the faults they have enumerated. Pole harks back to his
belief that actual princes are rarely adequate to the princely state, and
that to guard against ‘frenzy’ in the head of the body politic the people
should have the power to choose and depose their rulers. But what was
essential in ‘such a kind of state’ as existed in England was that laws
made with the consent of parliament ‘must rule and govern the state
and not the prince after his own liberty and will’. The king should do
nothing ‘pertaining to the state of his realm’ without the authority of
his council, over which should be set another council comprising two
bishops (‘as of London and Canterbury’), ‘four of the chief judges and
four of the most wise citizens of London’, who are to exercise the
authority of ‘the great parliament’ when that is not in session, and call
it when ‘the reformation of the whole state of the commonalty’ is
necessary. This supreme council would also choose the king’s ‘proper
council’, with the king appoint to ‘all bishoprics and all high offices of
dignity’ so as to avoid the worst effects of royal favouritism, and
make peace and war with foreign countries. Thus a princely state
would become the ‘mixed state’ which men affirmed to be the best, a
‘temperate and sober’ body politic like Venice, which had ‘continued
above a thousand years in one order and state’.
The emphasis in these uses of state is on the nature of the regime, but
it shifts back on to the whole commonwealth in the context of the pro-
posals which conclude the Dialoguefor the translation of the gospels
and the laws of the land into the tongue of the people; for the devotion
of ecclesiastical wealth to charitable purposes; for the better education of
nobility and clergy; and lastly for the appointment of ‘conservators of
the common weal’ to ‘see to the policy’ by ensuring that every under-
officer does his duty and thus ‘conserve the whole state marvellously’.
Though Lupset fears that the power of law can never bring men to
reason and virtue, Pole believes that it can point them on the way. And
the Tudor monarchy seems to have acted on the same belief, to judge
from the statutes, exemplified by Elizabeth I’s great poor laws, through
which it assumed the social and charitable responsibilities of the Church
and delegated them to overseers of the poor and to the justices or ‘con-
servators’ of the peace who would govern the English shires well into
the nineteenth century.
As soon as it lost the qualifying ‘of the king’ as well as ‘of the realm’
or ‘the commonwealth’, as it did in Starkey’s Dialogue, the word ‘state’
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