the fusion of laws foundered on the attachment of both nations to their
fundamental laws and customs. The speaker of the House of Commons
in 1604 replied to the king at equally unprecedented length, first pray-
ing for his majesty’s renown, the advance of religion, and the security of
the king’s ‘State and People’ from ‘Popes Cursings’, then expatiating
on the laws which were the life of the body politic and framed accord-
ing to the nature of the people, so that England’s differed from ‘the
Laws of other States Government’ and could not be assimilated. The
king, the speaker went on, could not govern ‘the whole Estate’ without
the help of a senate, a ‘council of estate’, which ‘ought to know the Law,
the Liberties, the Customs, the Use, and Discipline, wherewith the State
is governed’. The stream of tracts produced in 1603–5 on ways of unit-
ing ‘states and kingdoms’ often worried about the effect on ‘estate
inward or matter of law’, for Aristotle had taught that no laws were
ever altered ‘without great danger of the eversion of the whole state’.
The adoption of the style ‘King of Great Britain’ was resisted precisely
because it could be taken to enact ‘a new kingdom or estate’, abrogate
existing English and Scottish laws and threaten the legislative powers of
both parliaments, since only the king would be able to make law for the
whole island. There could be no true union without ‘a meeting of both
states’ in a common parliament, such as the Swiss cantons had estab-
lished alongside the parliaments of ‘every estate particular’.^74
Though its durability proved the ‘Union of the Crowns’ a consider-
able political success,^75 James’s ambition to make a more perfect union
of laws and institutions opened an ideological gap between king and
parliament in their conception of the state. The king rejoiced before
parliament in 1605 at the frustration of the Gunpowder Plot against
himself and ‘the whole Body of the State in general’, and the consequent
salvation of the ‘whole Commonwealth’ and of parliament ‘as being the
Representative Body of the State’, but then reverted to his favourite
theme, that kings were God’s lieutenants on earth, indeed called Gods
‘in the Word of God itself’. In further speeches to parliament in 1607,
1610, and 1614, he repeated his desire for ‘a perfect Union of Laws and
persons, and such a Naturalizing [of his Scottish subjects in English law]
as may make one body of both kingdoms’. He was resolved to govern
England ‘according to the ancient form of this State, and the Laws of
this Kingdom’, and had no intention, as it was rumoured, to replace the
Common Law by Civil Law. But English laws were too intricate and
The English ‘commonwealth and free state’ 331(^74) CJi. 146–8, 254–5; The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of 1604, ed. B. R. Galloway and
B. P. Levack (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1985), pp. xvi–xxvii, xxxv, xxxvii,
xxxviii, xlii, xliii, 64, 92, 146–7, 185, 189, 217; Burns, The True Law of Kingship, 262–5.
(^75) C. Russell, ‘The Anglo-Scottish Union 1603–1643: a success?’, in Religion, Culture and
Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, ed. A. Fletcher and
P. Roberts (Cambridge UP, 1994).