And it is in this dispensing spirit that James I, having delivered it for a maxim of state, “that the king is above law,” goes on to affirm, in one of his favourite works, that general laws, made publickly in parliament, may, upon known respects to the king, by his authority be mitigated and SUSPENDED upon causes only known to him[22].
We perceive the ground of that claim, which was carried so high by the princes of the house of Stuart, and, as we have just seen, brought on the ruin of the last of them. And to how great a degree this prerogative of the dispensing power had at length possessed the minds even of the common lawyers, (partly from some scattered examples of it in former times, and partly from reasons of expediency in certain junctures, but principally from the inveteracy of this notion of the papal supremacy) we had an alarming proof in Hale’s case, when eleven out of the twelve judges declared for it.
SIR J. MAYNARD.
Your lordship has indeed shewn that the poison of the papal supremacy began to work very fatally. If this blessed revolution had not happened, what could have been expected but that the next step would be, to set the crown above all divine as well as human law? And methinks, after such a judgment in Westminster-Hall, it could not be surprising if another set of men had served the king, in the office of the pope’s janissaries, and maintained his right of dispensing with the gospel itself[23], as well as the statute-book.
MR. SOMERS.
I must needs think, Sir John, you are a little severe, not to say unjust, in this insinuation; for which the churchmen of our days have surely given you no reason. And as for the reverend judges, methinks my lord of Salisbury might be allowed to expose their determination, at the same time that he so candidly accounts for it.
BP. BURNET.
I perceive, my Lord Commissioner, with all his goodness and moderation, is a little apt to surmise the worst of our order. But I will try to reconcile him to it; and it shall be in the way he most likes, by making a frank confession of our infirmities.
For another source of the regal dominion in latter times, and still springing from out of the rock of supremacy (which followed and succoured the court-prerogative, wherever it went, just as the rock of Moses, the Rabbins say, journeyed with the Jewish camp, and refreshed it in all its stations) was the opinion taken up and propagated by churchmen, from the earliest æra of the Reformation, concerning the irresistible power of kings, and the PASSIVE OBEDIENCE that is due to it.