acquired the ambiguity which Raleigh noted and which has given it its
special resonance ever since. It was an ambiguity appropriate to a
commonwealth in which the sixteenth-century reformation of religion
and society was bringing to a climax medieval reform of the status
regni, doing so by statutes which the ‘estate royal’ made in conjunction
with the estates of lords and commons. The statute of 1532 which cut
off the payment of annates from England to the see of Rome has ‘the
whole body of this realm now represented by all the estates of the same
assembled in this present Parliament’ declaring it the king’s duty as ‘a
good Christian prince’ to stop such abuses, ‘for the conservation and
preservation of the good estate and commonwealth of this his realm’.^30
In 1536 Lord Chancellor Audley justified the demand for a second
Succession Act after the failure of Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn by
the dependence of ‘the state and safety [statum et incolumitatem] of this
his realm of England’ on the royal person; and five years later he pro-
claimed the Respublicato be the work of the king, who had summoned
the three estates, as ‘the whole body of the commonwealth of England’,
to provide the medicine of new laws for unheard of diseases.^31 The
statute of 1539 ‘that proclamations made by the King shall be obeyed’
gave parliamentary authority to the exercise of the king’s prerogative,
and in 1543 Henry claimed to have been ‘informed by our judges that
we at no time stand so highly in our estate royal as in the time of Parlia-
ment, wherein we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit
together into one body politic’.^32 At the beginning of Edward VI’s reign
A Homily on Obedienceemphasized the authority of princes and magis-
trates ‘and such states of God’s order’, but especially that of anointed
kings, appointed by God to make laws, judgments, and officers.^33
Henry VIII’s claim for the monarchy of the headship of both body
politic and the church in England, combined with a growing awareness
that the commonwealth was ‘compact of all sorts and degrees of people’
(in the words of the Act in restraint of appeals) and that the monarch
ruled through a fast developing court and administration set far above
what Sir Thomas Elyot called a multiple ‘discrepance of degrees’,^34
made the nature of the regime increasingly contested. An act of Queen
Mary in 1553 repealing her father’s treason statutes might declare that
‘the state of every king, ruler and governor of every realm, dominion or
commonalty’ consisted in the ‘love and favour of the subjects toward
312 From Law to Politics: ‘The Modern State’
(^30) SRiii. 385–8.
(^31) Journal of the House of Lords, i. 54, 164–5.
(^32) Elton, Tudor Constitution, 15, 27, 270, 342.
(^33) Ibid. 15–16.
(^34) SRiii. 427; Elyot, The Book Named the Governor, 1–5; for the growth of the Royal
court-based administration, see The English Court: from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil
War, ed. David Starkey (London, 1987).