James I and the Divine Right of Kings

Published date01 February 1957
DOI10.1111/j.1467-9248.1957.tb00858.x
Date01 February 1957
Subject MatterArticle
JAMES
I
AND
THE
DIVINE
RIGHT
OF
KINGS
W.
H.
GREENLEAF
University
of
Hull
THE
history of political ideas has normally occupied an important place
in
political studies and there is still, as we have recently been reminded, a case
for its retention.’ It is to be encouraged; but it is not necessarily a simple
business. The apparently straightforward text may mask a complex fusion
of
ideas, and there is always the danger that analysis may be in historically
inappropriate terms and
so
productive of misleading interpretation. The
only safeguard against anachronism and what
is
possibly faulty commen-
tary is always to
go
back to the original works and to look at them after
a
careful survey of the proper historical perspective. In this sense, the basic,
or rather the initial, problem is to get at the ‘actual’ author and his inten-
tions, at what he had in mind when he wrote, to see what he was trying to
convey given the attitudes he and his readers accepted and the arguments
and data he had to hand. This is especially important when it
is
remembered
that the criteria of what constitutes
a
rational manner
of
thinking alter from
time to time. Consequently it
is
essential for the proper interpretation of
a
text to consider its style of thought in terms of the modes
of
discussion
current when it was written. This in turn implies an understanding of the
general outlook in the context of which these modes of discussion were
persuasive. The motto might be: look at the text and know the context-
know in particular the tradition
of
the style of thought
in
which the text is
cast?
To try to understand such
a
tradition may involve
a
study of fields the
relevance of which to political theory is not apparent at first sight.
I
shall
try here to illustrate how they may illumine our understanding of
a
text
and of
a
set of political ideas, how, in the case
I
have chosen, they may even
give cause to alter the established judgement
of
their significance. The text
is
The
Political
Works
of
James
Z3
and the set of ideas is James’s version
of the divine right of kings.
Wilfrid Harrison, ‘Texts in Political Theory’,
Political
Studies,
iii (1955),
pp.
2844.
These considerations are discussed briefly by Harrison, ibid.,
pp.
35-37, 38-39.
The
Political
Works
of
James
I,
edited with an introduction by
C.
H.
McIlwain,
Cambridge,
Mass.,
1918.
(I
refer to this as
PWJ.)
Political
Studies,
Vol.
V,
No.
1
(1957,
36-48).

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