[1150] My old friend, Mr. Alfred Marks, whose masterly book, Who Killed Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey? (Burns and Oates, 1905), decisively establishes the suicide theory, and disposes of the counter-theory of Mr. John Pollock, did not dispute the fact of the vague plotting of Coleman. No one can say how much of such loose and futile scheming there was.
[1151] How odious it was may be gathered from Dryden's Annus Mirabilis and Marvell's Character of Holland, pieces in which two men of genius exhibit every stress of vulgar ill-feeling that we can detect in the Jingo press and poets of our own day.
[1152] Dryden's charge, in The Medal, of "bartering his venal wit for sums of gold" during the Rebellion, is pure figment. It is an established fact that even as Councillor of State, to which office there was attached a salary of £1,000, Shaftesbury, then Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, received no salary at all. See note to Mr. Christie's (Globe) ed. of Dryden's poems, pp. 127, 128.
[1153] Christie's Life of Ashley Cooper, ii, 293, note. Perhaps it is not sufficiently considered by Mr. Christie that Sidney regarded France as a possible ally for the overthrow of monarchy in England. Cp. Hallam, ii, 460-61. His position was not that of an ordinary Parliamentary bribe-taker. See Ludlow's Memoirs, iii, 165, et seq. And the English Government had sought to have him assassinated.
[1154] In 1603 Lord Mountjoy in Ireland laid it down as the doctrine of the Church of England that his master was "by right of descent an absolute king," and that it was unlawful for his subjects "upon any cause to raise arms against him." These words, says Dr. Gardiner (History 1604-43, i, 370), "truly expressed the belief with which thousands of Englishmen had grown up during the long struggle with Rome." For earlier discussions see Stubbs, i, 593, More's Utopia, bk. i, and Hooper's Early Writings, ed. 1843, p. 75.
[1155] As Hallam notes (Middle Ages, 11th ed. ii, 157), the French bishops in the ninth century had claimed sacerdotal rights of deposing kings in as full a degree as the Popes did later. In that period, however, bishops were often anti-papal; and the papal claim practically arose in the Roman and clerical resistance to the nomination of Popes by the Emperor, though Pope John VIII had in his time gone even further than Gregory VII did later, claiming power to choose the Emperor. Id. pp. 165-83.
[1156] Buckle is wrong (i, 394) in dating the beginning of the revival of the doctrine "about 1681." Saunderson's edition of Usher was first published in 1660.
[1157] The words of Thomas are extremely explicit: "Si [principes] non habeant justum principatum sed usurpatum, vel si injusta præcipiant, non tenentur eis subditi obedire." Summa, pt. ii, q. civ, art. 6. The right of the Pope to depose an apostate prince was, of course, constantly affirmed.
[1158] Tractatus de Legibus, lib. ii, c. ii, § 3.
[1159] Hallam, Literature of Europe, ed. 1872, iii, 161.