Divine Right of King

The divine right of kings was the central doctrine used to justify monarchy in early modern Europe. It claimed that kings received their earthly power by divine mandate and, as a result, could not be subject to any temporal or secular authority. Divine right theory is, therefore, a version of political absolutism. It draws heavily on the analogy between the rule of a father over his children and that of a king over his subjects. In some ways, divine right theory may be seen as a descendant of the late medieval doctrine of the two swords.

The theory was most prominent in Tudor and Stuart England and received its most powerful intellectual justification in the writings of King James I (James VI of Scotland) and in Robert Filmer's Patriarcha. King Louis XIV of France was also a significant representative of the tradition. Following the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688 and the French Revolution of 1789, monarchs in those countries were no longer able to base their claims to sovereign power on a divine mandate. In the contemporary world, few if any sovereigns base their legitimacy on a claim of divine right.

Divine right theory emerged out of various ideas that were central to medieval European political thought, notably the claim that God granted power to both secular and religious authorities on Earth, the notion of the Great Chain of Being, and the metaphor of the body politic. The claim that the king was the head of the body politic is powerfully illustrated in the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, in which the king's body is literally made up of the bodies of myriad subjects. (It should be noted, however, that Hobbes, although an absolutist, was not a divine right theorist but one of the founders of the social contract tradition.) Given that the human body has but one head and that a two-headed being would be seen as either a monster or an ungovernable being, divine right theorists argued that the king's authority [Page 400]must not be challenged or divided. In their view, multiple sources of authority would inevitably lead to political strife or even to civil war. Any attempt to oppose the king could thus be construed as treason. For this reason, King Charles I of England refused at his trial to accept that the British Parliament had any right to hold him accountable for his actions as the country's monarch.

The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made prominent the idea that human beings were created equal and thus called into question the notion of a divinely ordained sovereign. Furthermore, many of the traditions associated with medieval monarchy, such as the idea that kings could cure scrofula—then known as “the King's Evil”—simply by touching sufferers, could no longer be maintained. Divine right theory slowly fell out of fashion and was replaced by natural law theory as the preeminent justification of political power. John Locke's Two Treatises of Government was fundamental in the replacement of divine right theory. The first of the two treatises is dedicated to a thorough critique of Robert Filmer's Patriarcha.

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