THE CHARAOTEK AND CONDUCT OF JAMES I. 289 



niati, as some of his admirers have absurdly styled JameSj that as 

 kings reigned by the appointment of heaven, so to resist their 

 commandsj just or unjust, was opposition to the divine will, is 

 evidenced in almost every page of his singular performance. The 

 Law of Free Monarchies. The whole treatise is, indeed, an un- 

 varnished and elaborate exposition of the duty of passive obedience 

 on the part of the subject, without any qualification or restriction 

 whatever on the part of the prince, and a claim to absolute uncon- 

 ditional power. Never was the title of a book more calculated to 

 mislead the reader, since it conveys a meaning quite different from 

 that which we are accustomed to annex to the foregoing precepts ; 

 it being the drift and scope of the royal author to give the English 

 people a clear idea of a government directed by the sovereign, re- 

 leased from every check or controul, or, as James aptly designates 

 him, " a free and absolute monarch," such as he appears in the con- 

 stitution of England, as is laid down in the writings of prerogative 

 lawyers,* where he is an ideal king above law, and not a real king 

 subject to law. 



This monarchical theory of James, in which he communicates to 

 his own person a legal and religious character at once despotic and 

 divinejt was made by him so much the idol of his affections, that he 



* In reading Blackstone's Description of the Powers of the Royal Prerogative, 

 vol. i., p. 160, 162, one fancies that we are perusing those dicta of the ancient 

 lawyers which make the king of England an absolute sovereign. 



■f The extremes to which James pushed his ultra monarchical ideas, has 

 led the Republican Historian Harris to say, " that he entertained notions of 

 his prerogative amazingly great, and bordering on impiety." But in adorn- 

 ing his person " with some sparkles of divinity." it must in justice to James 

 be remembered, that under the Norman, Plantagenet and Tudor line, we 

 have the same pretensions of reigning by divine right, and therefore of being 

 accountable to none on earth. True also it is, that Bracton and the author 

 of Fleta, represent the king as the vicar of God and substitute of Christ upon 

 earth; but then lest flattery should draw improper influences from these 

 titles, they again tell us, when they speak of a real king, and not of the theo- 

 retical prerogative of an ideal one, that the law is superior to him, and by 

 which he is made a king. " In populo rigendo," says the last writer, supe- 

 riorcs hahet (rex) per q nam f actus est rex." — Lib. i., cap. 5. It ought never to 

 be forgotten indeed, that these two most learned, and as Warburton justly 

 observes, " ahnost the only learned of the ancient lawyers." (See Letters to 

 Hurd, p. 193). So far from allowing Despotism to find favour in their eyes, 

 give a decisive evidence for our free and limited government, and deduce 

 what some with extreme deficiency of information have stigmatized as a 

 modern theory, and others, though versed in legal lore, have contemplated 

 with a sort of horror as haters of Democracy, the origin of civil power from 

 the people. 



