Pierre Charron also wrote his De la Sagesse(first edition 1601) from
experience of the religious wars and reached the same conclusion as his
acquaintance Montaigne that the violent alteration of received laws was
the chief political danger. It was ‘one of the vanities and follies of men,
to prescribe laws and rules that exceed the use and capacities of men’
and, like Plato or Thomas More, to construct commonwealths which
were mere ‘castles in the air’: a man should conform to the ‘the laws and
customs which he findeth established in the country where he is’.
Charron’s definition of ‘the public state’, as it appears in the translation
quickly published in England by Samson Lennard, is: ‘the Rule,
dominion, or a certain ordering in commanding and obeying, is the
prop, the cement, and the soul of human things; It is the bond of
society, which cannot otherwise subsist; It is the vital spirit, whereby so
many millions of men do breathe, and the whole nature of things.’ But
it is also the target of the hatreds of great and small, and liable to
collapse through both ‘hidden and unknown causes’ and the ‘wicked
manners of sovereigns’. And the sovereignty that directs it can be seen
both in Bodin’s terms, as ‘the power to give laws to all in general’, but
also (in the way Seneca and Tacitus described it) as a ‘derogation from
the common law’ and comparable ‘to fire, to the sea, to a wild beast’.^65
Charles Loyseau’s Treatise of Orders and Plain Dignities(1610) more
soberly describes how ‘one general order is formed out of many orders,
and of many estates a well-ordered state’, though he too can use ‘state’
as a mere synonym for ‘sovereignty’. ‘Degrees of nobility [he writes]
differ in accordance with the diversity of states or sovereignties (Estats
ou Souverainetez) from which they depend’: for example, in England the
only estates are the high nobility and the common people, to judge by
the constitution of parliament.^66
The English ‘Commonwealth and Free State’
Sir Walter Raleigh thus represented accurately the alternative uses of
‘State’ in the early seventeenth century when he said in The Prince; or,
Maxims of State(which, like Lennard’s translation of Charron, was
written for James I’s son, Prince Henry, and must predate his death in
1612) that it means ‘the frame or set order of a Common-wealth, or of
the Governors that rule the same, especially of the chief and Sovereign
Governor that commandeth the rest’. Raleigh certainly drew upon
The English ‘commonwealth and free state’ 327(^65) Pierre Charron, De la Sagesse trois Livres, 3rd edn. (Paris, 1607), 266; Of Wisdome
Three Books Written in French by Peter Charron, tr. Samson Lennard (London, before 1612),
189–91, 197 (Bk.1, caps. 49, 51).
(^66) Les Oeuvres de Maistre Charles Loyseau(Lyon, 1707), 1, 33; cf. Loyseau, A Treatise of
Orders and Plain Dignities, ed. Howell A. LLoyd (Cambridge UP, 1994), 5–6, 117.