needed to be made ‘more certain’. If any law was not convenient, let
parliament amend it, but in the mean time do not call it a grievance, ‘for
to be grieved with the Law, is to be grieved with the King’. The ‘State
of Monarchy’ was the ‘supremest thing on earth’, and the king in a
settled kingdom was lex loquens(the voice of law). The chief purpose
of parliaments, which in England were too long, was to relieve his‘state
and necessities’, for ‘if the King want, the State wants... and woe be
to him that divides the weal of the King from the weal of the kingdom’.
‘The will of the King and of the State’ could not be ‘disjoined’.^76
Later in the reign, the king’s tone became more strident. Addressing
the judges in Star Chamber in 1616, James complained of the busy-body
justices of the peace, and another sort of gentlemen ‘who cannot be
content with the present form of Government, but must have a kind of
liberty in the people... and in every cause that concerns Prerogative,
give a snatch against a Monarchy, through their Puritanical itching after
Popularity’. In 1621–2, a parliament which presumed to discuss such
‘mysteries of state’ as the projected marriage of Prince Charles to a
Spanish princess, saw itself dissolved, the Commons’ Protestation of its
right to free speech torn from the Journal, and a Declaration issued
by the king that the Protestation attacked his ‘Crown and State’ and
invaded the prerogatives that were ‘the very marks and Characters of
Monarchy and Sovereignty’; the Commons should remember that the
liberties they dared to claim as their ‘ancient and undoubted right and
inheritance’ had in fact been ‘granted unto them by the grace and favour
of Our Predecessors’.^77
In the constitutional arguments of James I’s reign, ‘(e)state’ in its
various meanings can be seen playing a leading part. By the final session
of the first Stuart parliament in 1610, Lord Chancellor Ellesmere was
already saying that ‘in this present state’, the ‘popular state’, represented
by the Commons, was growing so ‘big and audacious’ against the other
two estates in parliament through its questioning of the Union and of
the imposition of taxes that, if it ‘be suffered to usurp and encroach too
far upon the regality, it will not cease until it break out into demo-
cracy’.^78 But Ellesmere’s other worry, that the lower House, though not
a court of record, was presuming to examine judgments in courts of
law, along with the encounters of 1616 and 1621–2, shows that the
main challenge to the monarchical state of the Stuart kings did not come
332 From Law to Politics: ‘The Modern State’
(^76) LJii. 357; King James VI and I: Political Writings, pp. xxiv, xxviii, 161–2, 167, 172–4,
180–6, 195; Historical MSS Commission Report on the Manuscripts of Reginald Rawdon
Hastings, iv, ed. F. Bickley (London, 1947), 230–6, 239–40; Burns, The True Law of
Monarchy, 276–7.
(^77) King James VI and I: Political Writings, 222, 258, 261–3, 266.
(^78) Proceedings in the Parliament of 1610, ed. E. R. Foster, 2 vols. (Yale UP, 1966), i.
276–83.