chief, but what really challenged royal sovereignty was the attribution
of overriding authority to the conscience of the citizen in a time of
religious conflict. The threat religious fanaticism posed to the stability
of a commonwealth could be seen in the final proposition of the
Vindiciae declaring that neighbouring princes were ‘obliged to aid
the subjects of another prince who are persecuted for the exercise of true
religion or are oppressed by manifest tyranny’; and in the intransigence
of the Catholic League when the French monarchy attempted to make
peace with the Huguenots, which led in 1588 to the killing of the
Catholic leaders, the Duke and the Cardinal of Guise, on royal orders,
and the assassination in turn of Henry III, an act inspired and justified
by Catholic propagandists.^57
Bodin provided inspiration to the apologists for monarchy who
countered the sectarian ‘monarchomachs’ with the doctrine of the
king’s ‘divine right’ to rule. Other writers, who shared his fears but
not his metaphysics, looked to a more pragmatic political morality
and justification of the state, as humanists seeking them first in the
experience of the classical Roman commonwealth and the writings of
Tacitus, whose ironical histories of the despotic and cruel reigns of
Tiberius and Nero received a vast number of editions and commentaries
in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth century. The Belgian Justus
Lipsius, a Jesuit-educated teacher at Leiden famous for his editions of
Tacitus and Seneca, wrote his Six Books of Politics or Civil Doctrine,
which went through fifteen editions within ten years of its publication
in 1589 and was translated into all the main European languages, amid
the ‘civil calamities’ of the Low Countries, torn between the rule of
Catholic Spain and aspirations of the Protestant Dutch Republic.
Lipsius saw ‘the state of Europe’ being ruined by ‘pretext of piety’,
which placed government at the mercy of a light-headed, seditious,
and quarrelsome people, inclined to believe every rumour, use extreme
language, and follow ‘hot and fiery fellows’.^58
Lipsius was a leader among those who embraced the Stoic virtues
of constancy and obedience out of an abhorrence of both sectarian
anarchy and the amoral ‘reason of state’ which his contemporary
Giovanni Botero found in the writings of Tacitus and Machiavelli. He
did not preach a metaphysics of absolute sovereignty, but rather what
State, nation, and politics in France 323(^57) J. H. M. Salmon, ‘Catholic resistance theory’, ch. 8 of The Cambridge History of Political
Thought, 1450–1700.
(^58) Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine, written in Latine by Iustus Lipsius: which
doe especially concerne Principalitie, Done into English by William Iones Gentleman
(London, 1594: repr. as The English Experience, no. 287, Amsterdam and New York, 1970),
pp. Aiii, 17–18, 63, 68–9, 187; I have compared this translation with Iusti Lipsii Politicorum
sive civilis doctrinae libri sex(Lyon, 1628); cf. J. H. M. Salmon, Renaissance and Revolt:
Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France(Cambridge UP, 1987),
27–53, 119–35.