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.Thewars of religion bred a conviction in some jurists that the one essentialrequirement for the stability of a commonwealth was rule by asovereign, who need not be an hereditary prince, but must have absolutepower to make and unmake law.Such an insight might be termed a fundamental law , but this was the time when the model of  the state ofthe commonwealth began to be transformed from a country s legalheritage to its political institutions, for arguments about sovereigntyformulated in legal terms proved to be resolvable only by the violentexercise of power.King James the Sixth of Scotland and First ofEngland provides an example of a king who attempted to forge a newstate, in this case out of the laws of his two kingdoms, but he wasfrustrated by the opposition of both countries parliaments, and helpedto provoke the temporary overthrow of monarchy in Britain.If  themodern state is anything more than the body politic in an arbitrarilydemarcated  modern period of history, it must be the state that cameinto being in the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies, when it lost the qualifications  of the king and  of the king-dom.It was thus left a permanently ambiguous concept signifyingeither the whole commonwealth or the sovereign authority which gavethe commonwealth its laws and transacted business with other sovereign states on its behalf.296 From Law to Politics:  The Modern Statecomparing and criticizing states ofcommonwealthsIn later medieval and early modern Europe war and diplomacy fosteredthe comparison and criticism of the laws and institutions of individualcommonwealths and a sense of their distinctive histories.The com-parison of constitutions appears already in Philippe de Mézières sallegorical pilgrimage to test the moral currency of European kingdomsand city-states.During the Hundred Years War Frenchmen and English-men made propaganda out of the workings of each others polities,especially (since the royal will was their very foundation) the fortunes oftheir kings, the French (for instance) labelling the English as habitualmurderers of their rulers as well as disturbers of other nations peace.1It is true that from 1327 to 1649 Englishmen killed kings whom theydid not know what to do with, once they had deprived them of their state for misgovernment, for to keep alive a captive king invited thefate of Simon de Montfort.But in fact the political commentators offifteenth-century England absorbed the royalism of French writers.Thomas Hoccleve, a high-living clerk in the privy seal office at West-minster who drew on the doctrines of Giles of Rome in his Regiment ofPrinces, a work in English verse he completed in 1411, begins bylamenting his personal ill-fortune, but then remembers how  not longago | Fortune s stroke down-thrust estate royal (in the person ofRichard II).2 In the course of the fifteenth century the French politicaltract of 1347 was put into English as The III Consideracions RightNecesserye to the Good Governaunce of a Prince, and Christine dePisan s influential work of 1406 7 was translated as The Body ofPolycye.3 Around 1436, a work called The Libelle of Englyshe Polycyeintroduced a new theme: it proclaimed the command of the sea,  whichof England is the round wall , to be as vital as good governance athome, if an English ruler was to keep the realm in peace and anyforeign prince from making  fade the flowers of English state.No onehad been able to withstand the  majesty of the Saxon king Edgar,whose  labour for the public thing had added the construction of agreat navy to the enforcement of the  right and laws of his land  acombination of good policies the writer believed was shown again byHenry V, that recent king  of most estately magnanimity.41P.S.Lewis,  War Propaganda and Historiography in Fifteenth-Century France andEngland , TRHS, 5th ser.15 (1965).2Selections from Hoccleve, ed.M.C.Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 30.3Four English Political Tracts, ed.Genet, 174 219; The Middle English Translation ofChristine de Pisan s Livre du Corps de Policie, ed.D.Bornstein (Heidelberg, 1977).4The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, ed.Sir George Warner (Oxford: Clarendon Press), linesComparing and criticizing states of commonwealths 297The language of the late medieval English Parliament Rolls reflectedthe same exaltation that is found in French writers of a kingshipexercised for the good of the whole community.The record of thechancellor s initial  pronouncement and sermon might describe thebusiness of a parliament as provision  for the state and defence [prostatu et defensione] of the kingdom of England and the English church[ecclesiae Anglicanae] , and contain lectures on  royal majesty , theobedience due to the king, and the different sorts of law (of nature,nations, and the gospel; Mosaic, civil, and canon).And it would repeatinjunctions to sustain the king s  high and royal estate , and to keep thepeace and duly execute the laws of the land,  without which no realmor country can long be in prosperity.5In the fifteenth century,  commonwealth became established as thefavourite term for polity in the English vernacular, which it wouldremain down to the actual establishment in the seventeenth century of a Commonwealth and Free State without any king or House of Lords.6John Gower s huge philosophical poem, Confessio Amantis (written inEnglish, despite its Latin title, and probably between 1386 and 1390,though it exists in versions dedicated to both Richard II and Henry IV)sets out in book seven the three divisions of philosophy as Aristotleexplained them to Alexander the Great, and under the third division(Practique) has a discussion of the ethics, economics, and  policy ofkingship [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]