The second generation of the Reformation was dominated by the followers of John Calvin. Calvin, to be sure, was but one of a number of theologians who provided intellectual leadership to the new type of Protestantism that emerged in these years. And he built upon a base that had already been constructed by Huldreich Zwingli in Zurich, Martin Bucer in Strasburg, and others. But he achieved such prominence within the movement, both among its advocates and its opponents, that it can fairly be called Calvinist. This new type of Protestantism was created in a number of free cities in what is now southern Germany and Switzerland, and continued to bear traces of its civic origins. It developed institutions that were able to penetrate into hostile parts of Europe outside of the Holy Roman Empire, and thus came to be the form of Protestantism most common in areas outside the German heartland of the movement. And it also tended to become particularly militant, not hesitating to mobilise political and military forces in order to win its way. This militant posture made it necessary for Calvinists to develop theories in justification of political resistance: they did develop such theories, some being both subtle and influential.

In the development of Calvinist resistance theory, Calvin himself played a role which was seminal but not major. For the greatest political challenges to his movement developed after his death. Calvin first won intellectual prominence in 1536, with the publication of the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, but he did not win institutional prominence until 1555, the year his supporters won control of the city of Geneva, and he did not gain an international role until the 1560s, when his followers took the leadership in promoting militant movements in his native France, in the Netherlands, in Britain, and in parts of Germany.

Hobbes

Such was Hobbes' own account, written twenty-one years later, of the origins of his first work of political theory, The Elements of Law. Hobbes had himself been an unsuccessful candidate for election to the Short Parliament (Beats 1978, pp. 74–6), so no doubt he followed its proceedings closely. The disputed ‘points of the regal power’ emerged most pointedly in John Pym's famous speech of 17 April, which asserted fundamental constitutional rights of parliament against the crown (‘Parliament is as the soule of the common wealth’, ‘the intellectual parte which Governes all the rest’) and attacked ‘the Doctrine that what property the subject hath in any thinge may be lawfully taken away when the King requires it’. The latter point was taken up by Sir John Strangways on the following day: ‘for if the Kinge be judge of the necessitye, we have nothing and are but Tennants at will’ (Cope and Coates 1977, pp. 149, 155, 159).

The polemic against Hobbes: the theological premises

The German philosopher Leibniz, the most persistent and percipient of Hobbes' continental critics, believed that the crux of the quarrel between them lay in Plato's Euthyphro Dilemma. Socrates wanted to know of Euthyphro whether a thing was ‘just’ (or ‘good’ or ‘true’) by virtue of God having willed it, or whether God willed it because it was of itself just. If the former, then justice is arbitrary, having no essential nature; it subsists contingently, by divine fiat, and can be humanly known only as empirical knowledge of the facts of God's utterances. This is called the voluntarist, or nominalist, doctrine. But if the latter answer is correct (and Socrates thought it was), then justice does have an essence distinct from its being willed, and it can be intuited by rational agents. This answer is known as the essentialist, or realist, doctrine. In the biblical terms of seventeenth-century debate this dilemma was expressed as the choice between the awesome, peremptory God of Abraham and Isaac, or of Job, and the philosophical, rational God of the Johannine Logos. Because God told Abraham to kill Isaac it seemed that killing one's son was not an immutable evil, but only evil until God said otherwise: justice is contingent upon God's command. Yet if, on the other hand, God is the supreme light of reason, then He will act only in accordance with self-consistent rules embodied in the natural order.

A new history centring on law and government, pervasive respect for common law, and an increasingly confident and aggressive House of Commons – this congruence of elements nourished in Stuart England the doctrine of an ancient constitution. The authors of the new history were usually common lawyers with scholarly interests, often referred to as legal antiquaries, who interpreted the historical past from the standpoint of their own day. Assuming the antiquity of Englishmen's rights and liberties and their constant assertion through the centuries, they ransacked historical records for the requisite evidence and interpreted their findings in light of common law. Their list of rights and liberties, composing in toto the ancient constitution, proved surprisingly protean, ranging from freedom of speech in parliament to its regular meetings and, after civil war directed political thought into new channels, even legal rights concerned with parliamentary representation and the role of the House of Commons in law making – subjects little scrutinised in the pre-1642 political world.

Whether the human source of these rights and liberties was the king or community became a leading question in Stuart political thought. According to the Jacobean House of Commons, reasoning from common law, the rights and liberties of the commons of England, enjoyed from time immemorial, were an inheritance from their ancestors, a statement making the community their human source. James I's rejoinder expressed impatience with ‘anti-monarchical’ words about ancient liberties unless it were added that he and his ancestors had granted them; but the king pledged, of his own will, to respect privileges enjoyed by long custom and lawful precedent.

Reason of state

The historian Friedrich Meinecke, a bold climber of what he liked to call the ‘mountain-peaks’ in the history of ideas, once wrote despairingly of the literature on reason of state that ‘There are real catacombs here of forgotten literature by mediocrities’ (Meinecke 1957, p. 67n). All the same, these catacombs are well worth the effort of exploration to any historian concerned with the history of arguments, attitudes, and mentalities as well as with the achievements of outstanding individuals. Shifts in political attitudes are generally marked, sooner or later, by the coinage of new terms, as the traditional vocabulary comes to appear increasingly inadequate to express the new insights. In the later sixteenth century, an important new ‘keyword’ was ‘reason of state’.

To be exact, the Italian phrase ragione degli stati had been employed, around the year 1547, by Giovanni della Casa – the archbishop best known for his courtesy book – in an oration to the emperor Charles V, but it was only in 1580s or thereabouts that the new coinage passed into general currency. By the time Giovanni Botero published his Ragione di Stato (1589), the first of a whole shelf of books bearing that sort of title, it was, as he noted in the dedication, a ‘constant subject of discussion’ in some courts. The claim is plausible enough, since Botero's book went through at least five more Italian editions by 1606, while the phrase ragion di stato appears in the titles of at least eight more Italian treatises on politics by the year 1635.

The context o f Grotius’ career

When the history of recent moral philosophy was written at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, a consistent account was given of the role of Hugo Grotius. In the eyes of men like Samuel Pufendorf, Christian Thomasius, Jean Barbeyrac, and their successors, he was the one who ‘broke the ice’ after the long winter of Aristotelianism; who provided a new theory of natural law which could supplant both the discredited theories of the scholastics and the anti-scientific and sceptical writings of Renaisance authors such as Montaigne and Pierre Charron. He was the inventor of a new ‘science of morality’, which was taken up in various ways by all the major figures of the seventeenth century, including Hobbes, Locke, and Pufendorf himself. His first important follower, they also all agreed, was John Selden, though the relationship between the two men was by no means a straightforward one (see Tuck 1979, pp. 174–5).

As we shall see, there is a sense in which these historians were absolutely correct; Grotius did see something for the first time which was to be crucially important in the succeeding century, namely that there could be a systematic moral and political philosophy which met the objections levelled against such an enterprise in the late sixteenth century. But this insight was hard-won, and embodied in a series of works which were to some extent pièces d'occasion; to understand the generation of his political philosophy, it is necessary to look first at his public career.

The Leveller movement

The Levellers were a political movement united around the programme of the first Agreement of the People (3 November 1647; Wolfe 1944, pp. 223–34). That Agreement is the first proposal in history for a written constitution based on inalienable natural rights. It embodied three essential principles. The first, though ambiguously expressed, was taken by contemporaries to be that any property qualification for the franchise should be abolished: even the poor should have the right to vote. The second was that the representative assembly should have supreme authority in making law, appointing magistrates, and conducting foreign policy: the king, if any, was to be accountable to his subjects. The third principle was that the powers of government be limited by the principles of natural justice. This meant, first, that all laws must apply equally to all subjects: there must be no privileged estate or corporation. This also implied the illegality of all monopolies. Second, all subjects had the right to freedom of conscience, entitling them to dissent from any established state religion. This also implied a right to freedom of expression. Third, conscription was banned: subjects could not be compelled to serve in an army if they disapproved of the cause for which it was to fight, although they could be compelled to pay taxes. Finally, all laws ‘must be good, and not evidently destructive to the safety and well-being of the people’. This implied both the right of juries to refuse to enforce bad law, and an ultimate right of revolution: if the people's representatives betrayed their trust, the nation as a whole could assert its ultimate sovereignty.

The meaning of absolutism

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the main tenets of absolutist and royalist thinking in the seventeenth century. That century, we are often told, saw the making of absolutism, especially in France. There, the Estates General fell into disuse after 1615, and its demise brought death to the principle that taxation requires the consent of the taxed. In the 1620s Louis XIII subdued the Huguenots in a crusade which harnessed militant Catholicism to the service of the monarchy. In the 1630s war with Spain led to a massive increase in the crown's military capacity – and troops could be used to suppress insurrection at home as well as to defeat enemies abroad. The introduction of intendants brought local government under central control, and this development was given added impetus when the intendants assumed military powers. After the temporary setback of the Fronde, royal power resumed its progress, and in the latter decades of the century French absolutism entered its golden age. Louis XIV completed the work of Richelieu and Mazarin. In 1673 the parlement of Paris was formally deprived of the right to remonstrate against royal edicts before registering them. In 1682 the Declaration of the clergy of France unambiguously asserted the independence of kings from papal control in temporal matters.

Elsewhere events often ran a similar course. In 1660 the Danish Estates met for the last time. In 1680 the Swedish Riksdag engineered a constitutional revolution which effectively introduced absolutism. In Prussia the Great Elector taxed without consent and used troops to enforce his will. By the end of the century, we might argue, absolutism was made or in the making in most European states. Even in England its triumph sometimes looked likely, and was averted only by the execution of one king and the deposition o f another. Even in republics — Holland, Venice — there were those who expressed absolutist ideas.