[Sidenote: Absolutism of the Tudors, 1485-1603]
Absolutism had reached its high-water mark in England long before the power and prestige of the French monarchy had culminated in the person of Louis XIV. In the sixteenth century—the very century in which the French sovereigns faced constant foreign war and chronic civil commotion—the Tudor rulers of England were gradually freeing themselves from reliance upon Parliament and were commanding the united support of the English nation. From the accession of Henry VII in 1485 to the death of his grand-daughter Elizabeth in 1603, the practice of absolutism, though not the theory of divine-right monarchy, seemed ever to be gaining ground.
How Tudor despotism was established and maintained is explained in part by reference to the personality of Henry VII and to the circumstances that brought him to the throne. [Footnote: For the character and main achievements of Henry VII (1485-1500), see above, pp. 4 ff.] It is also explicable by reference to historical developments in England throughout the sixteenth century. [Footnote: For the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth, see above, pp. 86, 97 ff., 150 ff.] As Henry VII humbled the nobility, so Henry VIII and Elizabeth subordinated the Church to the crown. And all the Tudors asserted their supremacy in the sphere of industry and commerce. By a law of 1503, the craft gilds had been obliged to obtain the approval of royal officers for whatever new ordinances the gilds might wish to make. In the first year of the reign of Edward VI the gilds were crippled by the loss of part of their property, which was confiscated under the pretext of religious reform. Elizabeth's reign was notable for laws regulating apprenticeship, prescribing the terms of employment of laborers, providing that wages should be fixed by justices of the peace, and ordering vagabonds to be set to work. In the case of commerce, the royal power was exerted encouragingly, as when Henry VII negotiated the Intercursus Magnus with the duke of Burgundy to gain admittance for English goods into the Netherlands, or chartered the "Merchant Adventurers" to carry on trade in English woolen cloth, or sent John Cabot to seek an Atlantic route to Asia; or as when Elizabeth countenanced and abetted explorers and privateers and smugglers and slave-traders in extending her country's maritime power at the expense of Spain. All this meant that the strong hand of the English monarch had been laid upon commerce and industry as well as upon justice, finance, and religion.
The power of the Tudors had rested largely upon their popularity with the growing influential middle class. They had subdued sedition, had repelled the Armada, had fostered prosperity, and had been willing at times to cater to the whims of their subjects. They had faithfully personified national patriotism; and the English nation, in turn, had extolled them.
Yet despite this absolutist tradition of more than a century's duration, England was destined in the seventeenth century to witness a long bitter struggle between royal and parliamentary factions, the beheading of one king and the exiling of another, and in the end the irrevocable rejection of the theory and practice of absolutist divine- right monarchy, and this at the very time when Louis XIV was holding majestic court at Versailles and all the lesser princes on the Continent were zealously patterning their proud words and boastful deeds after the model of the Grand Monarch. In that day a mere parliament was to become dominant in England.
[Sidenote: Accession of the Stuarts: James I, 1603-1625]
The death of Elizabeth, the last of the Tudors, and the accession (1603) of her cousin James, the first of the Stuarts, marked the real beginning of the struggle. When he was but a year old, this James had acquired through the deposition of his unfortunate mother, Mary Stuart, the crown of Scotland (1567), and had been proclaimed James VI in that disorderly and distracted country. The boy who was whipped by his tutor and kidnapped by his barons and browbeaten by Presbyterian divines learned to rule Scotland with a rod of iron and incidentally acquired such astonishing erudition, especially in theology, that the clever King Henry IV of France called him "the wisest fool in Christendom." At the age of thirty-seven, this Scotchman succeeded to the throne of England as James I. "He was indeed," says Macaulay, "made up of two men—a witty, well-read scholar who wrote, disputed, and harangued, and a nervous, driveling idiot who acted."
[Sidenote: The Stuart Theory of Absolutist Divine-right Monarchy]
James was not content, like his Tudor predecessors, merely to be an absolute ruler in practice; he insisted also upon the theory of divine- right monarchy. Such a theory was carefully worked out by the pedantic Stuart king eighty years before Bishop Bossuet wrote his classic treatise on divine-right monarchy for the guidance of the young son of Louis XIV. To James it seemed quite clear that God had divinely ordained kings to rule, for had not Saul been anointed by Jehovah's prophet, had not Peter and Paul urged Christians to obey their masters, and had not Christ Himself said, "Render unto Cæsar that which is Cæsar's"? As the father corrects his children, so should the king correct his subjects. As the head directs the hands and feet, so must the king control the members of the body politic. Royal power was thus the most natural and the most effective instrument for suppressing anarchy and rebellion. James I summarized his idea of government in the famous Latin epigram, "a deo rex, a rege lex, "—"the king is from God, and law from the king."
[Sidenote: Stuart Theory Opposed to Medieval English Tradition]