their sovereign ruler and governor’, not in ‘the dread and fear of laws’,^35
but in a time of religious turmoil such love was difficult to hold,
especially for women rulers. Theories justifying on religious grounds
political resistance to regimes perceived as malignant originated with
the protestant leaders who went into exile in Strasbourg and Geneva
when Mary Tudor came to the throne, restored papal authority, and
ruled with her husband Philip of Spain. In his Shorte Treatise of Politike
Power(1556), John Ponet, the exiled bishop of Winchester, cites the
example of Queen Athalia, the ‘woman tyrant’ rightfully killed by the
‘nobility and commons’ of Israel when they learnt ‘by experience what
misery it was to live under the government of a mischievous woman’,
and chides the ‘Lords and commons of England’ for not heeding ‘the
preachers of God’s word in the time of the godly Josias king Edward
the Sixth’, who prophesied the miseries to come—the ‘subversion of the
policy and state of the realm’, under the rule of a strange king and
strange people.^36
According to Ponet, ‘states, bodies politic, and common wealths’
were ordained by God to make for themselves positive laws (e.g. on the
use of moderate diet and apparel), which kings might not override.
Even kings to whom ‘the whole state and body of their country’ had
surrendered power to make law, and by an ‘evil custom’ to dispense
from the law, might use it only ‘in matters indifferent’, ‘of themselves
... neither good nor evil’—and such kings were still tyrants. A king
cannot break the laws ‘godly and profitably ordained for the common
wealth’; if he could, ‘then were it in vain to make solemn assemblies of
the whole state, long Parliaments etc... yea (I beseeech thee) what
certainty should there be in anything?’. Men should respect their
country and the commonwealth rather than their princes who were only
members of it; ‘commonwealths and realms may live, when the head is
cut off, and may put on a new head’. This ‘whole state’ of the common-
wealth preserved so well in Venice, is unambiguously good, but there is
sometimes in Ponet’s usage also a sense of state as regime, which is to
be feared, along with its ‘courts and parliaments’, when it does not live
up to his ideal of the ‘mixed state’ and act for the sake of ‘the multi-
tude’. ‘Kings, governors and states’ are seen as no longer intervening in
other cities and realms to relieve the oppressed, but simply to annex
territory.^37
When Elizabeth became queen in 1558, John Aylmer, a future bishop
of London, answered (also from Strasbourg) John Knox’s invective
State and sovereignty 313(^35) SRiv. 198.
(^36) Ponet’s Treatiseis printed at the end of W. S. Hudson, John Ponet (1516?–1556):
Advocate of Limited Monarchy(Chicago UP, 1942), with a separate pagination: see pp. 11,
62, 69, 98, 114–15, 161, 173; for the biblical Queen Athalia, see 2 Chronicles: 22 and 23.
(^37) Ponet, Treatise, 9, 18, 22, 25–8, 61, 108, 110, 140–1.