part of it was replaced. It was because the common laws of England and
Scotland had led different lives that they turned out not to be capable of
fusion as James VI and I desired.^2
For political thought the renaissance of humanist ideas may be con-
sidered less important than the longer and more continuous develop-
ment of a public culture based on the administration of justice. From
this there emerged at the end of the middle ages the notion that there
were ‘fundamental laws’ of a polity, the chief of which for James VI was
the responsibility of the king to establish ‘the estate and form of govern-
ment’ in Scotland, and to maintain, in accordance with his coronation
oath, ‘the whole country, and every state therein, in all their ancient
Privileges and Liberties, as well against all foreign enemies, as among
themselves’. When king of Great Britain, James must have been
encouraged in 1614 to receive a report from his ambassador in Paris
of an article proposed for the cahier of the Third Estate in the French
Estates General. This wanted it declared and taught by the clergy
‘pour loi fondamentalle de lestat’ that no one (in particular, not the
Jesuits) had power to dispense Frenchmen from their fidelity to the king,
or (in a more theoretical version of the article) that the king be recog-
nized as ‘souverain en son état, ne tenant sa couronne que de Dieu
seul’.^3
The work in which Thomas Hobbes presented, two years after the
execution of Charles I, the bleak but lasting image of ‘that great
Leviathan called a Commonwealth, or State, in Latin Civitas’, took its
urgency from the same fear of the destructive clash of religious sects that
motivated the Third Estate’s article of 1614, and the writings of Bodin,
Montaigne, and King James. But Hobbes’s science of politics aimed
to transcend both Machiavelli’s lessons from history and Bodin’s
moralism. The only fundamental law Hobbes could observe was the
natural law of self-preservation, which compelled men trapped in the
State of Nature in a ‘war of every man against every man’ to agree to
grant unconditionally to a ‘common power’ (it might be one man or an
assembly of men) a sovereignty which he followed Bodin in insisting
must be absolute and undivided; without this sovereign power, a
commonwealth was ‘but a word without substance’ and could not
stand. An early work of Hobbes on the Elements of Law, Natural and
Politicargued that the need was for an absolute sovereign to make and
Conclusion: Law and the State in History 337(^2) J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Two kingdoms and three histories? Political thought in British contexts’,
in Scots and Britons: Scottish political thought and the union of 1603(Cambridge UP, 1994),
304 ff.
(^3) King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. J. P. Sommerville (Cambridge UP, 1994),
65, 73; E. W. Nelson, ‘Defining the Fundamental Laws of France: The Proposed First
Article of the Third Estate at the French Estates General of 1614’, EHR115 (2000), 1216–
30.