Charron, and the numerous translations of French works show how the
political speculations of the period of religious wars were found relevant
to England’s condition, as similar tensions increased towards the break-
ing-point of the English civil war. But Raleigh’s ‘five points’ in which the
‘State or Sovereignty consisteth’ are very like those of Sir Thomas Smith
in De Republica Anglorum(the first of them the ‘Making and annulling
of laws’); and his juxtaposing of this ‘state of the governor’ to ‘the state
of the commonwealth’ may reflect not French ideas but the actual
tension between the royal law-maker and a parliament beginning to
stand against the king in defence of ‘the ancient constitution and the
common law’ of the English people.^67
Raleigh’s nemesis, King James VI and I, was king of Scotland for
thirty-five years before he inherited Elizabeth’s throne in 1603, and
suffered from the ‘infamous invectives’ of John Knox and George
Buchanan, whose chronicles he saw as justifying popular rebellion and
the deposition of his own mother. His encounters with the Presbyterian
kirk bred in him a fear of ‘Puritans, very pests in the Church and
commonweal of Scotland’, who preferred ‘holy wars to an ungodly
peace’: the sectaries he would describe to his first parliament in England
as not so far differing ‘from us in Points of Religion, as in their confused
Form of Policy, and Parity [of ministers]; being ever discontented with
the present Government, and impatient to suffer any Superiority’. But
even more than the ‘new Puritanical strains, that make all things
popular’ he detested the Jesuits ‘who are nothing but Puritan-Papists’;
and he expressed his horror of ‘the superstitious rebellion of the
[French] Leaguers’, and the claim that the pope had ‘an Imperial Civil
Power over all Kings and Emperors’, so that the murder of kings
deemed heretical was no sin but rather ‘matter of salvation’.^68
In reaction to the sectarian threat and (it is likely) with the help of
Bodin’s works, James developed an ideology of ‘free and absolute
monarchy’ and expressed it in vigorous tracts, which gave the speaker
of the English Commons in 1604 reason to accord him ‘Precedence
before all other Princes in divine and moral literature’. His Daemono-
logie(1597) culminates in a Bodinian insistence that witches must be
punished as enemies of divine and civil order. His Trew Law of Free
Monarchies(1598), which aims to lay down the grounds of political
328 From Law to Politics: ‘The Modern State’
(^67) Remains of Sir Walter Raleigh(London, 1664), 1–2; E. A. Strathmann, Sir Walter
Ralegh: A Study in Elizabethan Skepticism(New York: Columbia UP, 1951), 137–8, 232–3;
J. H. M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought(Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1959).
(^68) King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. J. P. Sommerville (Cambridge UP, 1994), 6,
46, 82, 89, 138, 218–19; Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought, 71,
79; R. A. Mason, ‘George Buchanan, James VI, and the Presbyterians’, in Scots and Britons:
Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603,ed. R. A. Mason (Cambridge UP, 1994);
Burns, The True Law of Kingship, 188, 206, 218, 222, 241, 245–6.