Since the publication of Michael Walzer's Revolution of the Saints and Quentin Skinner's influential revision of Walzer's arguments, historians of Britain and Ireland have most often conjoined Calvinism (or Reformed Orthodoxy) with the political theories of limited monarchy, resistance, and revolution.Footnote 1 Walzer argued that the theory of revolution espoused by mid-seventeenth-century Puritans arose out of a distinctively Reformed theology; Skinner preferred to trace Calvinist revolutionary theory to late medieval Scholasticism. However, both agreed (in the manner of Max Weber or Ernst Troeltsch) that whatever its sources, this radical Calvinist theory played a vital role in the emergence of European modernity, in the form of either a new individualism and affinity for revolution or a new secular and impersonal theory of the state.Footnote 2 John Coffey's study of the Scottish Covenanter Samuel Rutherford steered a middle course between Skinner and Walzer, acknowledging Rutherford's medieval debts while insisting on the transformative capacity of radical Calvinism.Footnote 3 A leading German scholar of Calvinist political thought, Christoph Strohm has explained the practical element to this Reformed antiabsolutism: the German emperor was a Catholic, and so imperial absolutism posed an existential threat to Germany's Calvinist theologians, whose influence extended across Europe.Footnote 4 But Calvinists were not inevitably committed to nonabsolutist politics; Heinz Schilling and Bodo Nischan pointed out alliances between Calvinism and absolutism in the county of Lippe and the electorate of Brandenburg.Footnote 5 To the distinguished Calvinist absolutists noticed by Schilling and Nischan, this article will add Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh, primate of all Ireland between 1625 and his death in 1656.
The character of the division between revisionist and postrevisionist British scholarship on the English Civil War is such that a study of the nature and development of Ussher's political thought will enrich our knowledge of both Calvinism and absolutism in Britain and Ireland. Peter Lake and Johann Sommerville have usefully defined an absolutist political theory as one in which the ruler's power was granted directly by God, whether or not the ruler had been designated by the people. While the ruler might choose to respect human laws and choose to take counsel, he or she was free to override those laws (common law or civil law, criminal law or the law of property) or that counsel whenever he or she judged it necessary. Although the ruler was thus free (independent or absolute) from all human law, he or she remained bound by natural law: only God could punish breaches of this natural law. If an absolute monarch began to act tyrannically, that monarch's subjects had just recourse only to prayers and tears.Footnote 6 Whiggish accounts of the English Civil War as an episode in the unfolding of English freedom had argued that Stuart absolutist theory was a significant cause of war, while revisionist historians led by Conrad Russell denied this.Footnote 7 Glenn Burgess reinforced Russell's argument that there were almost no absolutists in England before the civil war.Footnote 8 Revisionist scholarship tended to shift emphasis from constitutional to religious causes of war. Indeed, John Morrill argued convincingly that it was a religious war in that religion drove militant minorities to fight and forced the moderate majority to make reluctant choices.Footnote 9
Absolutist political theory was certainly not a cause of war in itself, but revisionist arguments on the nonexistence of British and Irish absolutists went too far. Russell, Burgess, and Perez Zagorin all pointed out that although many theorists stated that the king was free from human laws, few before 1642 went on to argue openly that the king should make law without Parliament. This was true, but Russell and Burgess then wrote that because only the latter were truly absolutists, absolutism was an ideology of no importance in the Stuart kingdoms before 1642.Footnote 10 Sommerville has comprehensively refuted this argument on the basis that many contemporaries identified a lack of royal limitation by human law as intolerable, arbitrary, and absolute, and were thus deeply alarmed by the thought that Charles I should, for example, be able to impose customs duties at will.Footnote 11 Sommerville's position on the reality of English absolutism has been reinforced by Cesare Cuttica's study of Sir Robert Filmer, which contextualized Filmer's absolutist political theory amid discourses of limited monarchy in Kent in the 1620s.Footnote 12 According to the revisionists, these theorists of limited monarchy or just resistance were also nonexistent in England before the civil war. This claim has been undermined by Sommerville and Cuttica, by Richard Cust's research into discourses of patriotism among those who opposed the royal court, by Skinner's emphasis on the potentially explosive consequence of the fact that all university men were educated in a classical tradition that equated the mere potential of coercion (perhaps by the royal prerogative) with slavery, and by Janelle Greenberg, who identified an early Stuart discourse of limited monarchy gathered around medieval texts like the Modus tenendi Parliamentum, the Mirror of Justices, and the so-called laws of St. Edward the Confessor.Footnote 13 It should also be noted that during the 1610s Sir John Davies had defended the supremacy of law made by judges in the king's interest over law made in Parliament, while in the 1630s absolutists like John Cusacke, Sir Robert Filmer, and Archbishop Ussher tended to redefine Parliament so that it would be incapable of any action other than swift obedience.Footnote 14 The fact that, as David Smith has explained, many, if not most, royalists during and after 1642 could favor some subtle limitation of the king's powers by human law is further testimony to the real distinction between absolute and limited monarchy.Footnote 15
Accepting the religious character of conflict in the Three Kingdoms in the late 1630s and 1640s, and the importance of militant minorities in forcing moderates to choose sides, an instance of absolutist political theory embedded in the Reformed Orthodox or Calvinist political tradition becomes significant. How did one become a Calvinist absolutist? What stresses and strains were involved in adhering to this doctrine? What was the character or quality of a specifically Calvinist absolutism? It will be argued below that many of the same anxieties that troubled continental Calvinist intellectuals such as David Pareus or Lambert Daneau also troubled Anglophone Calvinists such as Ussher. Sommerville's contention that little separated Catholic and Protestant theories of reason and law is incorrect.Footnote 16 The Protestant absolutist political discourse that appears, on the basis of currently available evidence, to have been dominant in Dublin's viceregal court from 1633 to Strafford's fall was different in fundamentals to the Jesuit-influenced discourse of the Irish Catholic revolutionaries. The anthropology was different, as were the major points of stress and controversy: few Irish Catholic intellectuals were worried about the ability of human reason to perceive the natural law, and they did not argue about the inferior magistrate's right of execution.
This article will employ Ussher's manuscript notebooks in conjunction with his printed writings to describe his formation as a Calvinist absolutist, providing both an intellectual context in international Calvinism for his theory of human society and an account of the development of his theory of royal power from the 1620s to the 1640s. Ussher was not unique in being a Calvinist bishop and absolutist; Sommerville has characterized Thomas Morton, bishop of Durham, in this way, although Morton's theory was not at all as learned or extensive as Ussher's.Footnote 17 Following a preliminary characterization of both Ussher's Calvinism and his absolutism, the connections between Ussher's mature absolutism and his ethical and political education at Trinity College Dublin in the 1590s will be examined. The second section of the argument will relate Ussher's absolutism to Calvinist resistance theory and to the revolutionary theory of his Catholic enemies. Finally, although this article chiefly analyzes Ussher's formation as a Calvinist absolutist and the character of his absolutism, a remarkable treatise by one of Wentworth's servants will enable an estimate of the relationship between Ussher's Calvinist absolutism and the viceregal court.
There can be no doubt about the nature of James Ussher's theological commitments. As Jack Cunningham has recently explained, the archbishop consistently emphasized the nothingness of humankind, the fundamental damage done to all human capacities by original sin, and the utter dependence of humans on God's grace for salvation. Ussher carefully defended those two vital components of Reformed Orthodoxy: supralapsarian determinism and double predestination. These doctrines meant that before God created the world he had already declared who would be elect, the minority chosen for salvation, and who would belong to the damned majority.Footnote 18 Ussher hammered at these themes through his long preaching life before two Stuart kings and the nobility and gentry of Ireland and England; they are summed up conveniently in a catechism printed in 1644 but composed while he was in his twenties.Footnote 19 Even relatively early in his career Ussher was keen to institutionalize this theology. Alan Ford has argued that Ussher was prominent among those who wrote Irish Protestantism's first national confession, the 1615 articles, which committed the Church of Ireland to supralapsarian determinism and double predestination as well as other Calvinist staples such as fasting, sabbatarianism, and the identification of the pope as anti-Christ.Footnote 20 Ussher was not unique as a determined Calvinist among the early Stuart episcopate. Hugh Trevor-Roper included George Abbott, archbishop of Canterbury; John Williams, bishop of Lincoln; John Davenant, bishop of Salisbury; and Bishop Morton among that number. But Trevor-Roper also insisted that Ussher was the most distinguished of them all: “the acknowledged leader of all those Jacobean clergy who, in the reign of Charles I, found themselves suddenly excluded, or extruded, from authority.”Footnote 21
The doctrinal core of Ussher's absolutism is also unambiguous, although the nature of its publication is more complex. Writing in 1661, Ussher's former chaplain Nicolas Bernard explained that during the summer of 1639, when the Scots under their National Covenant were successfully resisting King Charles I's religious innovations, Bernard was contacted by Sir George Radcliffe, privy counselor and legal expert to the lord deputy. Radcliffe requested that Ussher, then in his diocese, provide a statement on the injustice of Scottish resistance. This was about the same time that the Irish Privy Council moved most of the army to the northeast and commanded all adult Scots in Ulster to swear an oath abjuring the Covenant.Footnote 22 It was presumably at this time also that Radcliffe sent Ussher his own treatise on royal power, “Of the originall of Government.”Footnote 23 In any case, the archbishop complied with Radcliffe's request immediately. Later that year or early in 1640 when Ussher came to Dublin, he was asked by Wentworth (made Earl of Strafford in January 1640) to preach in Christchurch Cathedral on the same subject. Ussher again complied, and he gave his two sermons at the opening of the Irish Parliament on 16 March 1640.Footnote 24 Pleased by their content, Strafford told Ussher that it was his desire and the king's that the sermons be published in some form. It was then that Ussher wrote his most substantial political work, The Power Communicated by God to the Prince, bringing it with him to England in May 1640 for presentation to the king.Footnote 25 The book then disappeared, perhaps because both Ussher and the king's other servants felt that the archbishop would be more use to the king's cause by presenting himself in public as a Calvinist episcopalian rather than as a Calvinist absolutist.Footnote 26 At the Restoration, Ussher's grandson, Sir James Tyrrell, brought a text to Robert Sanderson, bishop of Lincoln, who saw to its publication.Footnote 27
Reviewing all this, one might suspect that Ussher adopted the theory of absolute monarchy only under pressure from the king and his servants. Bernard, however, was anxious to dispel such suspicions. He insisted that Ussher had preached the same political doctrine for many years, not only annually on the day of the king's inauguration, but also at the openings of the Irish Parliaments of 1634 and 1640, at Dublin Castle in 1622, before Lord Deputy Henry Carey, viscount Falkland, at Dublin Castle in 1627, on the king's birthday in 1630, and then later in England during the civil war.Footnote 28 Several of these sermons survive and confirm Bernard's claims. In particular, Ussher's sermon delivered on 14 July 1634, the first day of Wentworth's first Irish Parliament, anticipated The Power Communicated by God to the Prince, including the crucial argument that royal power must be “uncontrollable power,” or no government was possible.Footnote 29 Another sermon given at Oxford on 3 March 1643 summarized Ussher's (yet unprinted) book on royal authority.Footnote 30 Certainly by early 1640 Ussher was arguing that God had ordained that the king's power should be free of the control of human laws and parliaments. This absolute monarchy, he asserted, was the best form of government, and the Stuart kings ruled as just such absolute monarchs. Even monarchs who commanded devil worship, Ussher insisted, were to be honored and could not be actively resisted. Such resistance would earn eternal damnation.Footnote 31 Moreover, the Stuarts' hereditary right was indefeasible: succession to monarchy was regulated by the law of primogeniture and could never be forfeited.Footnote 32 Neither Cunningham nor Ford hesitated to label Ussher's theory of government absolutist.Footnote 33 Ussher's absolutist political theory, conveniently cloaked in 1640, was not merely a response to royal pressure. Rather, it developed gradually, and its roots must be sought earlier in his intellectual development.
USSHER'S CALVINIST EDUCATION IN ETHICS AND POLITICS
At Trinity College Dublin during the 1590s James Ussher was taught an Aristotelian theory of human society and government. Ussher completed his four-year BA probably in 1598 and his two-year MA by 1600.Footnote 34 From Ussher's student notebooks, it seems probable that his study in the 1590s followed that later prescribed in the Trinity statutes of 1615 and 1628, in which Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics were assigned for the BA and Aristotle's Politics for the MA.Footnote 35 One of these notebooks contains a study scheme for the Ethics, starting in December with book 2 and finishing the following September with book 10. The same notebook contains a diagram outlining the Politics.Footnote 36 Another notebook contains notes on a complete course of Aristotelian ethics, starting with diagrams outlining the Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero's De Officiis (On Duties).Footnote 37
The theory of human society contained in the Ethics and Politics can be outlined briefly. Humans, Aristotle argued, should during the course of their lives aim at eudaimonia, happiness or flourishing.Footnote 38 Because humans were distinguished from animals by logos (one word meaning both reason and speech), and each creature should strive to satisfy what was best in it, humans would reach that state of eudaimonia when they used their reason excellently, virtuously, and to the utmost.Footnote 39 It was in political life (rather than, say, domestic life) that humans used their reason to the utmost, governing each in turn and reasoning with one another, and so political life was both natural to humans and the best life for them.Footnote 40 In a moment of suggestive exaggeration, the radical absolutist Thomas Hobbes pointed to such Aristotelian eudaimonic theories, which tended to conflate a lack of self-directing political life with slavery, as an important cause of civil war.Footnote 41
Ussher's student notebooks provide ample evidence of his comprehension of this eudaimonic politics. One notebook contains a Latin oration in praise of Aristotle dated March 1598. In it Ussher claimed that the doctrine of living well, developed by Plato and others, found its finest expression in Aristotle's works and that the essence of human happiness (felicitas in Latin) lay in the exercise of virtue or human excellence.Footnote 42 Another notebook built up during the ethics course contained a treatment of the rival Aristotelian ends of political life and contemplation, as well as definitions of key ethical terms, including eudaimonia.Footnote 43 Finally, Ussher argued publically that Aristotle and Cicero shared the same eudaimonic politics. In another of his Latin student orations, paraphrasing De Officiis 1.50, Ussher explained that Cicero held that reason and eloquence (ratio et oratio) were humankind's highest distinctions and the principal bonds of human society. By speaking, communicating, and disputing, humans used reason and eloquence to join in a society truly natural.Footnote 44
Ussher was also familiar with ways of integrating this eudaimonic politics into a theory of Christian government. No Christian could allow that humankind's ultimate end was flourishing in this world; rather, the ultimate end was God. Thomas Aquinas and other theologians had distinguished between a this-worldly felicitas, which humans might achieve through their own efforts in roughly the way that Aristotle had described, and a next-worldly beatitudo (blessedness), which lay in God's gift alone. Aquinas also developed a distinctive theory of the laws that governed relationships both within and between human societies. The eternal law was God's reason because it directed things to their ends. Humans, as rational beings, could direct their own actions to good ends; this human participation in the eternal law was natural law. All humans thus perceived that natural law enjoined self-preservation (forbidding murder), the preservation of the species (forbidding the disruption of family life), knowing God, and living in political society (forbidding things harmful to the commonwealth), while any human act or positive law that contravened natural law would be wrong and void.Footnote 45 The young Ussher listed Aquinas as a key authority in ethics, and later in life Ussher drew freely from Aquinas.Footnote 46 Moreover, Ussher maintained a keen interest in the writings of Richard Hooker, an Elizabethan Protestant conformist and determined enemy of Calvinism (at least with regard to ecclesiology). Ussher had acquired the manuscript of books 6 and 8 of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity and had them printed in 1648.Footnote 47 Book 1 of the Laws, first printed in 1593, explained that all humans sought a triple perfection: the first perfection, to which all animals might attain, lay in securing those material things necessary to life; the third perfection was unity with God. But between those two lay intellectual perfection, proper to rational human nature and available in the political life that Aristotle had described.Footnote 48
Nevertheless, when one turns to the theory of human society employed in The Power Communicated by God to the Prince, it is clear that the archbishop had left even the Christianized Aristotle of Aquinas and Hooker far behind. God, Ussher wrote, had instituted political power among humans. God first told Eve that her husband Adam “shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16), then as families multiplied, God said to Cain in similar terms, “thou shalt rule over him” (Genesis 4:7). God thus instituted “a principality in one man over divers Families and thereby laid the foundation of political government.”Footnote 49 However, even if God had not done this, reason itself would have instructed humans to join their families together into one political society under the government of a superior, in order to escape the ruin that would certainly otherwise ensue. Ussher supported this argument with the words of Rabbi Hananiah from the Abot in the Mishnah (a second century AD Jewish law code): “Pray for the peace (or prosperity) of the kingdom; for if it were not for fear of Authority every one would swallow down quick his neighbour.”Footnote 50 This was an explication, thought Ussher, of God's injunction to the exiled Jews that they should seek the peace of the city in which they were captive, for in its peace they would find their own peace (Jeremiah 29:7).
Ussher thus turned toward a Hebrew political tradition that saw political life as a matter of domination rather than human flourishing. He joined this with a purposeful misreading of Aristotle. It was a central pillar of Aristotle's politics that the total power exercised by an adult male over his domestic inferiors (women, children, and slaves) was entirely different from political power; true human flourishing was found in public negotiation and contest with equals.Footnote 51 However, it was important for Ussher that domestic and political power should seem the same thing, so that obedience should be the chief action available to subjects in the political sphere. Thus, he carefully sought out those phrases in Aristotle's Ethics and Politics that, if utterly divorced from their context, might imply that fatherly and royal power were the same.Footnote 52 Ussher shared this anti-Aristotelian patriarchalism with Sir Robert Filmer (whose Patriarcha was probably completed about 1630) and many other absolutists.Footnote 53 Ussher also discarded the Thomist way of speaking about natural law. Natural law did exist, was accessible to human reason, and bound all humans including kings, but Ussher was not certain whether natural law had been “written in the hearts of men,” as St. Paul put it (Romans 7:14–15), delivered directly by God to humankind in the Ten Commandments, or was “by just consequence deduced from the grounds of either of them.”Footnote 54
Ussher's student notebooks indicate a range of possible sources for this uneudaimonic political vision. One notebook contains a list of authorities taught in various ethics classes during his BA. Aquinas is on that list, but so are John Duns Scotus, John Buridan, Peter Martyr Vermigli, William Temple, and Lambert Daneau.Footnote 55 Scotus is especially important here: the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Franciscan theologian believed that all eudaimonic ethical and political theories were useless to Christians.Footnote 56 He argued that a moral action was a free action for which one was responsible and might be justly punished or rewarded, but if that action was purely the result of a natural disposition, which impelled one toward an end, then it was not free and therefore not moral.Footnote 57 Against Aristotle and Aquinas, who believed the will was aimed at naturally impressed ends, Scotus's account of virtue (human excellence) emphasized the free power of the will informed by right reason. Scotus's account of natural law was also very different. The theologian ignored Aquinas's eternal law and any talk of the agent's end-directed nature and began with the Ten Commandments or Decalogue (Exodus 20:2–17). The first table, which comprised the first two commandments (“thou shalt have no other Gods before me” and “thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”) and possibly the third (“remember the sabbath day”), belonged to the natural law in the strict sense because these commandments were principles “nota ex terminis,” known on the basis of the concepts used in formulating them, or because they followed necessarily from such self-evident principles.Footnote 58 The second table of the Decalogue belonged to natural law in a looser sense, because its commandments accorded with the first table commandments but their opposites would not (for example, “thou shalt not kill”). Other divine commands might accord with the first table, but so might their opposites (for example, the laws on sacrifice in the Old Testament), and so they were part of divine positive law but not natural law.Footnote 59
All of these arguments were available in Scotus's commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences, which was easily accessible to Ussher and his teachers, not least in printings edited by the Irish Franciscan Maurice O'Fihely.Footnote 60 Ussher thought Scotus himself was Irish.Footnote 61 But as Bonnie Kent has established, this Scotist-inflected hostility to eudaimonic ethics was widespread, having been promoted in the very popular commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics by John Buridan (a fourteenth-century philosopher and another of the young Ussher's key authorities in ethics), which was reprinted at Oxford as late as 1637.Footnote 62 The Scotist ethical tradition is thus a probable source for the second part of Ussher's reflection on natural law: that such a law might be deduced from the grounds of the commandments themselves. This tradition, taught to the young Ussher in the 1590s, is also one likely source for the archbishop's generally uneudaimonic thinking about human society.
But Ussher's political thinking was also indebted to those he listed among the “more recent” authorities in ethics: Protestants such as Peter Martyr Vermigli, William Temple, and Lambert Daneau, who believed that human reason itself was gravely compromised by the Fall.Footnote 63 Martin Luther distrusted classical and Scholastic philosophy because he believed it taught that depraved human reason could oppose evil without the aid of the Holy Spirit. But from 1527, confronted by Anabaptists and rioting peasants, Luther's lieutenant Philip Melanchthon argued that while internal, spiritual human actions related to salvation were indeed utterly depraved, human reason, instructed by philosophy and perceiving natural law, could nevertheless achieve good external, natural actions, such as civil justice and government.Footnote 64 Against Aristotle and many Catholics, Melanchthon insisted that this knowledge of natural law rested on innate ideas. Aristotle had argued in the Posterior Analytics that the universal principles of knowledge were not innate but that the power by which this knowledge was attained was innate. This position was supported by both Aquinas and Scotus against medieval Augustinians who wished to emphasize the damage done to human reason by the Fall.Footnote 65 Melanchthon revived this Augustinian position in his Commentarius de Anima of 1540. God, Melanchthon wrote, had placed the basic principles of logic, dialectics, arithmetic, ethics, politics, and law directly into each human mind; damaged humanity could not have arrived at these principles by its own powers.Footnote 66 All of these positions were reflected in Vermigli's popular theology textbook first printed in 1571, and Ussher was also taught William Temple's treatment of whether virtue itself was innate.Footnote 67 Ussher endorsed the separation of human capacities into internal and external, and also innate ideas, in an anti-Catholic work printed in 1624. He repeated this endorsement in a sermon delivered in Oxford in 1640.Footnote 68 This doctrine of innate ideas made it particularly easy for Protestants to interpret St. Paul's reference to a natural law written on the hearts even of Gentiles (Romans 2:14–15), which caused Ussher's Catholic contemporaries rather more labor.Footnote 69
The young Ussher was also taught a ferocious Calvinist critique of this moderate Protestant politics from Lambert Daneau's Ethices Christianae Libri Tres of 1577.Footnote 70 Daneau, an accomplished French student of John Calvin, did not distinguish between internal and external human capacities as sharply as the Lutherans, and he believed that even the postlapsarian human reason relevant to political life was very gravely damaged.Footnote 71 Calvin himself insisted that because the human will was necessitated toward sin, any insight that humans had into the natural or moral law was due to the continuing grace of God and, especially, to the ongoing guidance of the Holy Spirit. Humanity's best chance for understanding the moral law lay in the Decalogue, but even the second table of the Decalogue (those commandments that regulated human affairs) could not be understood without the aid of the Holy Spirit.Footnote 72 Daneau's Ethices elaborated these two elements, God's ongoing intervention in human affairs in the person of the Holy Spirit and the dominant place of the Decalogue in securing order among Christians, into a distinctively Reformed system of ethics. Because humans possessed a will free to sin but not to do good, the Holy Spirit was the source of all human knowledge of the good and the honorable, even among non-Christians.Footnote 73 Virtue, human excellence, was not the result of careful education and long practice, but rather the work of the Holy Spirit.Footnote 74 Both the philosophy of the pagans and the theology of the Scholastics were likewise useless because they were based on corrupted human reason. Christians should draw their ethics directly from the Decalogue.Footnote 75 For example, Daneau deduced from the second commandment on graven images that inferior magistrates like the electors of the Holy Roman Empire were obliged to destroy idols.Footnote 76 And Daneau developed from the fifth commandment (“honor thy father and thy mother”) the position that the end of civil power was the conservation of human society in the tranquility necessary for a godly life. Not only was Aristotle's eudaimonia excluded from Daneau's politics, even the ability to perceive natural law was now questionable.Footnote 77
Ussher remained convinced of the value of classical philosophy, a conviction that rested on his faith in the capacity of natural, human reason to pursue the good and the honorable in political life, even if he could not subscribe to a fully Aristotelian ethics. This conviction was explicit in his major anti-Catholic work of 1624 and in the sermons he gave at Oxford in late 1640.Footnote 78 The account of human society in The Power Communicated by God to the Prince was thus exceptionally minimalist by Ussher's standards. The cautious attitude to natural law (Was it simply innate? Could it only be derived from the Decalogue? Could reason deduce it from the grounds of the Decalogue?) that his book adopted seems most likely a response to the pressure that Daneau's critique of classical and Scholastic ethics exerted on the Reformed throughout Europe. Certainly The Power Communicated by God to the Prince was a book addressed to the most severe of Calvinist Covenanters; it aimed to win them back to obedience. One might speculate therefore that Ussher purposefully built the arguments of this book on a vision of human society congruent with that of the most severe Calvinism.
USSHER, CALVINIST RESISTANCE THEORY, AND CATHOLIC REVOLUTION
Conrad Russell has established that the belief of the king's supporters in the 1640s that royal power was divinely ordained and sanctioned did not mark them out from the king's opponents; that all power of government was divine in origin was an entirely normal position among educated Protestants. What mattered was not whether people believed in the king's divine right, “but their views, often shaded and obscure, on the relationship between his divine right and other divine rights.”Footnote 79 This problem is thrown into sharp relief when one considers the Calvinist resistance theorists against whom Ussher wrote The Power Communicated by God to the Prince.
The purpose of Ussher's book was to undermine Scottish resistance to Stuart power, but Ussher named no Scottish opponents in his book and did not even mention the National Covenant of 1638. Indeed, the nature of Ussher's knowledge of the arguments advanced by the Scots since 1638 is unclear. The Covenant itself, drafted by Alexander Henderson and Archibald Johnston, had restricted itself to condemning the innovations introduced by Charles I's government. It assumed, but did not attempt to prove, the king's subordination to human law and thus implied that authority to enact and repeal legislation lay with the Scottish Parliament. Henderson provided the relevant proofs in his manuscript “Instructions for Defensive Arms” of 1639. This text was copied, circulated, and read from the pulpits, but it was not printed until 1642.Footnote 80 However, it was quoted in full in an anti-Covenant pamphlet by John Corbet, who fled to Dublin from Scotland in 1639 and claimed to have seen many manuscript copies of the “Instructions” circulating in Dublin when he arrived.Footnote 81 If that was the case, Ussher had presumably heard the outlines of Covenanter resistance theory from avenues other than just his communications with Radcliffe. Henderson's argument (which he stated somewhat obliquely) was that inferior magistrates within a political community were duty-bound to defend their subjects from royal tyranny.Footnote 82
The only Calvinist resistance theorist named in Ussher's book was David Pareus, theology professor at the University of Heidelberg between 1598 and 1619. He was also Ussher's primary opponent in the 1643 sermon, The Soveraignes Power, and the Subjects Duty. Pareus was one of the most prominent Reformed Orthodox theologians of the early seventeenth century, a far more substantial opponent for Ussher than Henderson or the other Covenanters of 1638–40. Moreover, Pareus's theology was not just widely received in the Scottish universities (partly because of his personal links with Scottish theologians) but was a mandatory part of their curricula.Footnote 83 In England, Pareus was notorious. In 1612, a short book containing a version of Pareus's argument that inferior magistrates might resist tyrants (and so the Calvinist Frederick V, Elector Palatine, might resist his Catholic emperor) was dedicated by a German printer to King James I.Footnote 84 A hum of interest surrounded Pareus's political theory in the English universities thereafter, which led to his commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans being burned at Oxford, Cambridge, and St. Paul's Cross in London in 1622.Footnote 85 Ussher's 1643 sermon briefly mentioned other Calvinist resistance theorists (Theodore Beza, George Buchanan, and the author of the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos), but Pareus was a prestigious, lucid, and comprehensive primary opponent.Footnote 86 And picking out a dead fellow-scholar as interlocutor meant that Ussher, always sincerely concerned for Protestant unity, might hope better to avoid an ugly exchange with Covenanters like Alexander Henderson.Footnote 87
Ussher and Pareus both agreed that all political power was ordained by God. These were St. Paul's words in Romans 13: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers; for there is no power but of God, and the powers that be are ordained of God: whosoever resisteth the power, resisteth the Ordinance of God.”Footnote 88 But what was this power exactly, and what did it mean to say that God had ordained it? Pareus explained this very precisely:
God first instituted the right of the sword in humankind. Genesis 9:6: “Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.” But the shedding of all human blood by a private person is forbidden by God: “thou shalt not kill.” Therefore, the bloodshed which is sanctioned by God is that which might be shed by the magistrate. And thus the power of the magistrate has been ordained by God, that is to say, he has the right of the sword from God.Footnote 89
To put it a different way, all individual humans clearly possessed a right of self-defense. But the ius gladii (right of the sword), by which a magistrate might execute a criminal who had done that magistrate no personal harm, was clearly a different thing to the right of self-defense. This right (and by ius Pareus here meant a lawful subjective power, rather than an objective right at which a just man might aim, or any kind of law) was the true mark of a magistrate, and it could only be granted by God.Footnote 90 Moreover, because Pareus and his contemporaries did not distinguish between the inside and outside of the territorial state as sharply as state theorists of the nineteenth century and later, the ius gladii was a right of executing criminals and also a right of making war.Footnote 91 Pareus went on to reinforce this theory with historical examples of God instituting and deposing kings (King Saul, King David, King Rehoboam, and so on), concluding with the words of Daniel 2:21, God “removeth kings, and setteth up kings,” and Ecclesiasticus 10:8, “because of unrighteous dealings, injuries, and riches got by deceit, the kingdom is translated from one people to another.”Footnote 92 Ussher's The Power Communicated by God to the Prince agreed entirely with all these doctrines. Christ himself had said to Pilate, Ussher noted, that Pilate's power could only have come from God.Footnote 93 Nevertheless, it was characteristic of the archbishop's love of irony and the indirect that Pareus, “no very great friend to the supreme power of Kings,” was only brought into the book's argument to support the position that St. Peter referred to government as the “ordinance of man” (1 Peter 2:13) only with regard to the object of government, not with regard to its cause.Footnote 94
It was when it came to their doctrine of the right of inferior magistrates to resist that Ussher's relationship with his Reformed colleagues became more complex. The printed version of Ussher's 1643 sermon, The Soveraignes Power, and the Subjects Duty, contained abbreviated translations of all of Pareus's most controversial conclusions on civil government.Footnote 95 Inferior magistrates, Pareus wrote, might lawfully defend themselves, the commonwealth, the Church, and true religion against the superior magistrate. Even private subjects, if they were threatened by a tyrant and could neither appeal to any established power nor flee, might lawfully defend themselves and their families from that pressing danger, as if from a mere robber.Footnote 96 Pareus justified the resistance of lesser magistrates by arguing that superior magistrates were subject not only to divine laws but also to the human laws of their commonwealths; Deuteronomy 17:18–19 commanded the king to keep divine law, and Genesis 9:6, which prescribed the death penalty for murder, applied to tyrants just as much as robbers. Moreover, Pareus continued, the inferior magistrate was charged by God no less than the superior with the sword to defend the life and health of his subjects from atrocious injury inflicted by tyrants. Superior and inferior magistrates were socii gubernationis, partners in government. The obvious text to cite in support of this argument, though curiously omitted by Pareus, was 1 Peter 2:13–14, which, after demanding submission to divinely sanctioned authority, continued, “whether it be to the king, as supreme; Or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers.” This passage thus distinguished between the king and his magistrates, but it implied that both ruled by God's ordinance. In any case, Pareus made it clear that these lesser magistrates too were entrusted with the ius gladii.Footnote 97 As for the lawfulness of private resistance to extreme tyranny, it seemed absurd to Pareus that biblical injunctions to obedience should be understood to mean that the destruction of societas humana, human society itself, must be endured without resistance.Footnote 98
Ussher's position on the lesser magistrates argument derived from 1 Peter 2:13–14 took time to harden. When speaking on 1 September 1622 at the inauguration of Falkland as lord deputy, Ussher first distinguished civil from ecclesiastical power, and then explained that, according to St. Peter, the civil officer was either supreme or subordinate. Lords deputy were just such subordinate officers, Ussher wrote in his preliminary notes, “who receive Gods sword, as well as the kings.”Footnote 99 In 1622, then, Ussher seems to have believed that lesser magistrates received their ius gladii not only by delegation from the king but also directly from God; this is significant because for Pareus and the Reformed Orthodox tradition generally such an independent ius gladii included the obligation to defend one's subordinates from tyranny. Writing in 1639–40, Ussher had not entirely discarded that view. He suggested that St. Peter's distinction between the king (basileus) and the governors (hegemones) should be understood to be the same that the orator Dio Chrysostom made between magistracy (arkhe) and regality (basileia): the former was “a legal administration of men according to the Law,” whereas the latter was “such a government as is not subject to the controll of any.” And the law, as Chrysostom put it, was simply “the decree of the king.”Footnote 100 From all this, one might expect Ussher to conclude that St. Peter meant that the power of inferior magistrates was mediated through the superior magistrates and did not come directly from God. But the archbishop did not spell this out. Much later, he admitted that Gregory Nazianzen, St. Augustine, and Epiphanius of Salamis all clearly believed that these lesser magistrates had indeed received the ius gladii from God, even though they were still subordinate to their superiors.Footnote 101 Ussher finally clarified his position on divine power and the inferior magistrate in the sermon he delivered before the king in 1643. The king's power came immediately from God, and the lesser magistrates also derived their power from God, but in a mediated manner through the king. Ussher did indeed see Britain and Ireland as, in Russell's words, “a patchwork of divine rights.”Footnote 102
While Ussher's thinking on divine power and the inferior magistrate was developing, he resorted to a different branch of political philosophy to neutralize the inferior magistrate's power.Footnote 103 Speaking at the opening of Wentworth's Parliament in 1634, Ussher explained to those assembled that there had to be a supreme and uncontrollable power located within every government, a power from which there could be no appeal; if there was no such power, then there was no government. Ussher's example of what such anarchy looked like came from Judges 21:26: “In those dayes there was no King in Israel: every man did that which was right in his owne eyes.”Footnote 104 This was despite the fact, Ussher said, that there were still inferior magistrates in Israel, because the same chapter mentioned the “Elders of the Congregation” (Judges 21:16), and the previous chapter stated that Phineas remained the high priest before the ark (Judges 20:28). A supremacy of power from which there could be no appeal, Ussher went on, was essential to all government, and the formal differences between kinds of government were determined from its location. So the Swiss cantons, he explained, which were governed by magistrates, might look like aristocracies but in fact were democracies deriving their authority from the people and ultimately answerable to them. As Ussher adduced further examples from Venice and Sparta, it became clear that he believed that any government that was not an absolute monarchy might as well have been anarchy.Footnote 105 Although the archbishop did not cite Jean Bodin either here or in his printed work, this distinctive line of argument was probably borrowed either from Bodin's Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem of 1566 or the Six livres de la république of 1576, which had become well known in Ireland through the work of Sir John Davies, the former attorney general.Footnote 106 Finally, Ussher reached his point:
And although in this great and honourable assemblye, the Knights and Burgesses representing the whole body of the Commons bear the shew of a little Democratie among us and the Lords and Nobles as the Optimates of the kingdome, of an Aristocratie: yet are we not therfore to imagine, that ours is a mixt government, but an absolute monarchye: because the supreme authoritye resteth neither in the one nor in the other, either severallye or jointlye, but solelye in the person of the Soveraigne, by whose power they are both assembled and dissolved, and all their acts at his pleasure either allowed or disallowed. Whereupon by consent of all the States as well of this kingdome as of the other, the oathe of Supremacy as framed: wherein the Kings highness is acknowledged to be the only supreme governour of his dominions in all causes whatsoever.Footnote 107
This was a sermon that the lord deputy afterward commended as “very excellent and learned.”Footnote 108 Ussher clearly felt the arguments he had made were sound, because he repeated them almost exactly in The Power Communicated by God to the Prince. He probably argued similarly in his sermon before the Irish Parliament of 1640, because his book was apparently based on this sermon.Footnote 109 John Salmon wrote that Ussher believed the king supreme over mutable law only, which might imply that the king was not empowered to change the fundamental laws constitutive of the kingdom.Footnote 110 But by mutable laws Ussher meant all human positive laws: immutable law was natural law that never altered (unless altered by God) and to which the king was always subject (although punishable only by God).Footnote 111 Ussher stated bluntly that subjects were obliged to obey even tyrants who altered “the whole frame of the Common-wealth.”Footnote 112 It is a measure of the strength of Ussher's absolutism that Ussher's endorsement of Bodin's sovereignty theory should be so unreserved; his fellow Calvinists in Germany were generally much more cautious.Footnote 113
Ussher's conviction that royal power had by definition to be unlimited, whether by Parliament or by any other human institution, placed him in the mainstream of prewar Stuart absolutism, along with writers of substantial treatises such as the cleric Hadrian Saravia, King James I and VI, Sir John Davies (attorney general for Ireland), Alberico Gentili and John Cowell (regius professors of civil law at Oxford and Cambridge), Sir Francis Kynaston (esquire of the body to Charles I), the projector John Cusacke, Peter Heylin (royal chaplain and associate of Laud), Sir Robert Filmer, and, as will be argued below, Strafford's servant Sir George Radcliffe.Footnote 114 Thomas Hobbes was also an absolutist of a kind, but because of his unorthodox Christianity he is better treated as sui generis. Ussher added to this basic position an anti-Aristotelian patriarchalism that he shared with at least Saravia, Filmer, and Radcliffe. The determined anti-Aristotelianism that Ussher and Filmer, in particular, held in common (but independently) is remarkable. It is very prominent in Filmer's Patriarchia, composed in the late 1620s and early 1630s, and in the Observations upon Aristotles Politiques of 1652.Footnote 115
Patriarchia ascribed to both Jesuits and Calvinists the doctrine that God granted power to kings via the people, who might justly limit their king's power.Footnote 116 Ussher did not lump Jesuits and Calvinists or Covenanters together in this way, despite expert, firsthand knowledge of the basically Jesuit theory of revolution advanced by radical Irish Catholics. This ideology and the institutions that propagated it were established in the Spanish empire by the generation of Irish Catholics who left Ireland after the conclusion of the Nine Years' War in 1603.Footnote 117 Philip O'Sullivan Beare and his successors developed the ideology's main line in a series of printed books, manuscript position papers, and manuscript histories published between the 1610s and the 1660s. The heart of this tradition was the contention that the kingdom of Ireland was a valid political community that possessed the power to defend itself against destruction, just as an individual might. To govern the commonwealth for the good of a narrow, Protestant faction alone was to attempt its destruction. The Catholics of Ireland were thus empowered to defend their commonwealth, with or without the pope's consent, and force their king onto a just course. Some authors went on to state openly that the Irish might replace their king with another. Jesuit-educated writers such as O'Sullivan Beare assumed that natural law was easily accessible to human reason and that there was a kind of political flourishing that humans could hope to attain. The inferior magistrate went unmentioned.Footnote 118 Ussher's notebooks contain multiple sets of notes on O'Sullivan Beare's seminal version of this theory.Footnote 119 Moreover, when Ussher spoke before Lord Deputy Falkland at Dublin Castle in April 1627, it was O'Sullivan Beare's revolutionary theory he chose to emphasize in order to attack the efforts of the Catholic elite to secure toleration in exchange for financial subsidy.Footnote 120 It seems clear then that Ussher had long been convinced that Stuart royal power had to remain free from whatever legal or parliamentary obstruction that even the more moderate kind of Irish Catholics might still be capable of effecting. In the late 1630s, this ongoing Catholic threat was joined by a Scottish rebellion that gravely endangered episcopacy throughout the Stuart kingdoms. The Power Communicated by God to the Prince, however, addressed the Covenanters alone, and Ussher never confused his two sets of antagonists.
USSHER'S ABSOLUTISM AND THE VICEREGAL COURT
Historians of seventeenth-century Ireland have long regarded the contention that Thomas Wentworth's program of government was an absolutist one as uncontroversial. The lord deputy clearly meant to free royal power in Ireland from the guidance and restraint of the local elites, of the Irish Parliament, and of the English common law. Both Hugh Kearney and Aidan Clarke argued that Wentworth demonstrated a ruthless disregard for the common law as it was traditionally employed in Ireland while seeking to recover church land, and he extended the policy of confiscation and colonization from Irish Ireland to those parts of Ireland where estates were held by English law.Footnote 121 Wentworth orchestrated a series of senior prerogative courts (the court of castle chamber, court of wards, commission for defective titles, and court of high commission) to effect this massive increase in royal wealth and power; and Jon Crawford, although concerned to stress the long-term development of these courts, nevertheless wrote that Wentworth distorted these organs of prerogative justice into instruments of “despotism.”Footnote 122 Dougal Shaw has explained how Wentworth expressed this program through political ritual. Viceregal ceremonies more elaborate than Dublin had ever seen demanded the submission of noble bodies as well as of noble wills and fortunes.Footnote 123 Moreover, Anthony Milton has argued that there was an absolutist tenor to the private correspondence among Wentworth, Charles I, and the king's other ministers. The practical expression of this tenor was Wentworth's separation of supply from the redress of grievance in his Irish Parliament of 1634–45 and his attempt to do the same in the English Parliament of 1640. Just as one did not bargain with God, so one did not bargain with the king.Footnote 124 Wentworth told both his Privy Council in April 1634 and then both Houses on the opening day of the Irish Parliament in July 1634 that parliaments had a duty of obedience to their monarch and that obedient parliaments should trust in the king's gracious reward. There was no question of Parliament having any right in policy or administration.Footnote 125 In response to Milton's argument, Kevin Sharpe objected that Wentworth “wrote no new theory of state.”Footnote 126 Perhaps this was true of Wentworth, but it was not true of Sir George Radcliffe, Wentworth's most trusted servant.Footnote 127
Probably about the same time that he asked Ussher to publish a defense of royal power in the summer of 1639, Radcliffe composed his own treatise on the subject. Radcliffe's talents were prodigious. Educated at University College, Oxford, and Gray's Inn, he was as adept at deriving effective legal arguments from obscure points of medieval ecclesiastical history (such as Wentworth successfully urged against the Earl of Cork) as at election management.Footnote 128 The three-page treatise in question, “Of the originall of Government,” is bound with other documents that passed through Ussher's hands, and it carries Ussher's attribution to “Sir George Radcliffe” on the first page.Footnote 129
Radcliffe began by arguing that God had first granted dominion, a type of moral power, to Cain (Genesis 4:7). This grant was the first distinction between governors and subjects, and meant that future instructions from governor to subject were not just rules backed by force but laws binding in conscience. God's grant to the governor included the power to punish disobedience with the sword. Radcliffe then reviewed the divinely ordained power of government as it operated in three kinds of human society. In domestic society, the father of the family held power over his wife, children, and servants. In ecclesiastical society, the “Fathers of the Church” held power over the lower clerical orders. And in political society, the pater patriae (father of the fatherland) held a paternal power over his good subjects and a lordly (“dominical”) power over those servi poenis (slaves for reason of punishment) who deserved death. That both domestic and ecclesiastical power was directly from God, Radcliffe wrote, was uncontroversial; it was political power that was the problem. Most agreed that it came from God in some sense, and here Radcliffe quoted all the usual proof texts. But some thought, Radcliffe wrote, “that the power of government is originally and radically in the people; and from them by common consent desired to one or more, and so the people's consent, ratified by God's ordinances or approbation, is thought to be the adaequaete cause of the authoritie of the Magistrate.” This could not be right, he insisted, because the texts that proved God's institution clearly meant that God did more than merely approve a human institution.Footnote 130
Radcliffe offered seven further reasons why the power of government could not lie originally in the people. Of these, the most important were the third, fifth, and seventh. Radcliffe's third reason was that magistracy required excellent wisdom and other virtues, but many of the people were servi a natura (slaves by nature), too stupid to own either themselves or any property.Footnote 131 Not naturally qualified for government, they could have no natural right to govern. Radcliffe's fifth reason was that there was no evidence that God ever granted political power to any people or community, rather than to an individual. His seventh reason was that no human might take his or her own life, and neither did groups of humans have the power to take a life, but magistrates might justly kill even thieves. This “power of the sword” cannot have been communicated other than immediately from God.Footnote 132
While the modern reader will be struck by the Aristotelian flourishes to his arguments (especially natural slavery), Radcliffe felt obliged to admit to his contemporary readers that the arguments he advanced (especially the identity of domestic and political power) could not be reconciled with Aristotle's Politics. But Aristotle, Radcliffe continued, was a heathen and so he was ignorant of the divine institution of political power; the Greek's views should be placed to one side. This account of government was also very different, Radcliffe wrote, from those of the Scholastics and modern Catholic divines. The modern Catholics to whom Radcliffe referred included Jesuit theologians such as Francisco Suárez, who argued that political power flowed from nature, rather than being the result of God's special action separate from creation.Footnote 133 Radcliffe insisted that the Catholics argued this only because either they preferred Aristotle to St. Paul or they wished to advance spiritual monarchy (the power of the pope) and so they deprecated political monarchy. It thus served these Catholics, Radcliffe explained, to judge that spiritual monarchy was divine “both in respect of the Institution and object” but that the political was only human in both institution and object.Footnote 134
Finally, Radcliffe wrote, his theory of government was very different from that of “our Protestant divines beyond seas” who had lived in states where the magistrate was opposed to Protestantism and so favored advancing the people's power in order to further the Reformation. According to Radcliffe, these divines argued that because God had not recently chosen to nominate magistrates directly (as in the Old Testament), he acted through the people as a medium, which gave the people a causal role in the institution of magistrates. This argument was not quite the same as the one made by the Catholics, because it preserved the fundamentally divine character of magisterial power. Radcliffe responded by writing that while the proximate cause might be the people, the first cause was always God: peoples might “designe this man or that Stock to be king” during a vacancy, but the nature and power of the office of king was established by God, the purpose of which was to sustain “humane societies in Peace and order.”Footnote 135
Either because the treatise remained unfinished or in order to be discrete, Radcliffe did not take the final step and draw the conclusion that Charles I's power was absolute, free of human control. But no other conclusion could be coherent. Radcliffe's insistence on the necessity of the highest form of obedience for royal authority, the patriarchal nature of that authority, and his attacks on both Catholic and Protestant doctrines of limited monarchy and just resistance left absolute monarchy as the only alternative.
The similarities between Radcliffe's theory and that of Archbishop Ussher are striking. Both theories posited a direct divine ordination for a political power that was patriarchal in nature, though Radcliffe was much more frank than Ussher in explaining the incompatibility of this with Aristotelian politics. Both saw the moment of divine institution occurring when God addressed Cain at Genesis 4:7, and both gave prominent place to the ius gladii in their explanation of what that divine institution meant. Nevertheless, Radcliffe did not address the lesser magistrate theory of resistance at all, whereas for Ussher it was a constant, nagging problem. The argument that Radcliffe attributed to continental Protestants does not seem very much like that employed by early Covenanters such as Henderson. Ussher's arguments were much more precise: he addressed himself to the fountainhead of Calvinist resistance theory, he did not argue that Presbyterians and Jesuits were all the same, and he took particular care over the theory of resistance that granted an independent divine right to lesser magistrates. These targets, arguments, and anxieties mark Ussher's political theory as a Calvinist one. Fundamentally, however, and despite Ussher's disagreement with the Laudian religious policies of the viceregal court, he was at one with the court on the superiority of royal power over any human law.
CONCLUSION
James Ussher was not just a Calvinist whose absolutism was a functional response to a series of threats from Catholics and antiepiscopal Protestants. Rather, there was a Reformed Orthodox quality to his theory of royal power. Despite Ussher's thorough education in Aristotelian ethics and politics, there was no Aristotelian eudaimonism left in his mature political theory. Further research may reveal that this antipathy to eudaimonism was common to Calvinists, or at least very frequent among them, which might explain the positive reception that the early Enlightenment received in Calvinist countries, complementing Philip Gorski's neo-Weberian thesis on the importance of Calvinism to state formation in early modern Europe.Footnote 136 In The Power Communicated by God to the Prince, Ussher adopted a yet more minimalist vision of human life, questioning the human ability to perceive natural law in a manner reminiscent of Lambert Daneau. Overall, this anti-Aristotelianism was the first aspect of the Calvinist quality to his political theory. Ussher's commitment to the essence of Reformed Orthodox political theory, the divine institution of power, was fundamental. This left him in some difficulty when facing the problem of whether lesser magistrates were obliged to resist tyrants. Ussher's slow retreat from the position that inferior magistrates received their ius gladii directly from God (which implied that they were obliged to resist tyranny), and his remarkable obfuscation of the matter in 1640, betrayed a distinctly Calvinist anxiety: this is the second aspect of the Calvinist quality to his political theory.
Ussher's absolutism did not isolate him in 1630s Dublin. It is now clear that along with the absolutist political practice pursued by Strafford and identified by historians such as Kearney, Clarke, and Crawford, the viceregal court was also characterized by absolutist political theory. Radcliffe might only have written his opinions down in 1639, but Ussher, his fellow Privy counsellor, had been preaching a patriarchal, Bodinian absolutism since 1634. Ussher's theory, Radcliffe's theory, and Strafford's policy and ceremony marched in step and reinforced one another, amounting to an absolutist discourse of government in Dublin in the 1630s. Absolutists such as these men were perhaps a minority in early Stuart Britain and Ireland, but this particular group, at least, was an important minority. Strafford's words and deeds in Ireland were a significant solvent of trust between crown and subject in Scotland and England.Footnote 137 This is not to restore Stuart absolutism as a major cause of civil war, but absolutism's importance as a conceptual tool for a government that failed must no longer be in doubt.
