The First Kings Were Fathers of Families
Since the rise of scholastic theology, a common opinion has taken hold among theologians and other learned thinkers alike: that mankind is naturally endowed with freedom from all subjection, born with the liberty to choose whatever form of government it pleases, and that any power one man holds over others was originally granted at the discretion of the people.
This idea was first hatched in the schools of medieval theology and has been enthusiastically promoted by Catholic thinkers ever since as sound doctrine. The theologians of the Reformed churches have embraced it as well, and ordinary people everywhere have taken it warmly to heart, since it appeals so naturally to human instinct. After all, it generously distributes a share of liberty even to the lowest members of society, who celebrate liberty as though it were the highest form of human happiness, never pausing to remember that the desire for liberty was the very cause of Adam's fall.
However much this popular opinion has gained ground in recent times, it cannot be found among the ancient fathers and doctors of the early church. It contradicts the teaching and history of the Holy Scriptures, the consistent practice of all ancient monarchies, and the very principles of natural law. It is difficult to say whether it is more mistaken as theology or more dangerous as political philosophy.
Yet on the basis of this doctrine, both the Jesuits and certain zealous supporters of the Geneva Discipline have constructed a dangerous conclusion: that the people or the multitude have the power to punish or depose a prince if he violates the laws of the kingdom. Parsons and Buchanan are the clearest examples. The former, writing under the name Dolman, devotes the third chapter of his first book to arguing that kings have been lawfully disciplined by their own commonwealths. The latter, in his book De jure Regni apud Scotos (on the right of kingship among the Scots), defends the people's liberty to depose their prince. Cardinal Bellarmine and Calvin both lean in the same direction.
This reckless assertion, by which kings are made subject to the censure and removal by their own subjects, follows (as its authors believe) as a necessary consequence of that earlier position: the supposed natural equality and freedom of mankind, and humanity's liberty to choose whatever form of government it pleases.
Although Sir John Heyward, Adam Blackwood, John Barclay, and several others have ably refuted both Buchanan and Parsons, and have boldly defended the rights of kings on most points, all of them, when they reach the argument drawn from the natural liberty and equality of mankind, concede it without exception as an unquestionable truth. Not one of them so much as challenges or denies it. Yet if they had simply dismantled this first mistaken premise, the entire edifice of this vast machinery of popular sedition would collapse on its own.
The rebellious implications that flow from this foundational claim about the natural freedom of mankind are sufficient justification for a careful examination of whether it is actually true. Much has been said, and by many, in favor of the affirmative. Fairness requires that we give at least some hearing to the negative.
In this discourse, I will set certain boundaries for myself. First, I have no intention of meddling with matters of state, the arcana imperii (secrets of power) and cabinet deliberations that ordinary people are not meant to examine. We extend implicit trust to the humblest craftsman within his own trade; how much more, then, is that trust owed to a prince in the deep mysteries of governance? The causes and purposes behind the greatest political actions and movements of state dazzle the eyes and exceed the understanding of all but those who are daily immersed in managing public affairs.
Yet since no man can learn when to obey his prince without some working knowledge of the areas in which a sovereign may legitimately command, it becomes necessary, when the commands of those in authority go out and call for obedience, that every man understand how to govern his own actions or his own endurance. The nature of what is commanded determines whether active or passive obedience is required. This is not about limiting the prince's power; it is about defining the extent of the subject's obedience, by rendering to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and so forth.
Second, I have no intention of challenging or disputing the rights and liberties of this or any other nation. My purpose is chiefly to ask where those rights originally came from, not to debate what they are or how many there may be, but whether they were derived from the laws of natural liberty or from the grace and generosity of princes. My sincere hope is that the people of England may enjoy, and do enjoy, as broad a range of privileges as any nation on earth. The greatest liberty in the world, properly understood, is for a people to live under a monarch. That is the true Magna Carta of this kingdom. Every other appearance or claim to liberty amounts to nothing more than varying degrees of servitude, a freedom that exists only to destroy freedom itself.
If those who champion the natural liberty of mankind take offense at the freedom I exercise in examining it, they should be careful not to deny in practice what they affirm in principle. If the thesis is true, then the logical conclusion follows: all people may examine the charters, deeds, and evidence by which they claim and hold the inheritance of their liberties.
Third, I must not diminish the achievements of the many learned men who hold a contrary view on natural liberty. Even the most profound scholar who ever lived has not been able to uncover every discoverable truth, whether we speak of Aristotle in philosophy or Hooker in divinity. They are only human, yet I respect their judgments on most points, and I will freely admit that I owe something to their errors as well. Noticing what was wrong in their opinions helped guide me toward the truth that, I am convinced, they missed.
A dwarf can sometimes see what a giant overlooks, because while one truth is being carefully pursued, another is inevitably left behind. Later writers have borrowed too much on faith from the clever Scholastics, who, determined to place the king below the pope, found it safest to elevate the people above the king, so that papal authority could supersede royal authority. In this way, many an ignorant subject has been deceived into believing that a man can become a martyr for his country by being a traitor to his prince. Yet this newly invented distinction between "royalists" and "patriots" is deeply unnatural, since the bond between king and people is so close that their well-being is entirely bound up in each other.
To clarify what's actually at stake in the debate about the natural liberty of mankind, let me lay out some key passages from Cardinal Bellarmine that best capture the heart of the controversy. "Secular or civil power," he writes, "is instituted by men; it resides in the people unless they transfer it to a prince. This power belongs immediately to the whole community as its proper subject, for while this power derives from divine law, divine law has given it to no particular man. If positive law were removed, there would be no reason why, among a multitude of equals, one person rather than another should rule over the rest. Power is given by the multitude to one man or to several by that same law of nature, for the commonwealth cannot exercise this power directly and is therefore bound to confer it on one man or on a few. It belongs to the consent of the multitude to establish over themselves a king, a consul, or other magistrates; and if there is sufficient cause, the multitude may transform a kingdom into an aristocracy or a democracy." So far Bellarmine. These passages contain, in essence, the strongest case for the natural liberty of the subject that I have ever read or heard advanced.
Before I examine or refute these doctrines, I want to make a few observations about his words.
First, he says that by the law of God, power resides immediately in the people. In saying this, he makes God the direct author of a democratic form of government, since democracy is nothing other than the power of the multitude. If this is true, then not only aristocracies but all monarchies are entirely illegitimate, having been (on his account) established by men, while God Himself chose democracy.
Secondly, he holds that although a democracy is ordained by God, the people have no power to actually exercise the power God has given them; they can only give that power away. It follows from this that there can be no truly democratic government, because he says the people must give their power to one man or to a few, which produces either a royal or aristocratic state. The people are bound to do this by the very same law of nature that originally gave them the power in the first place. Why, then, does he claim that the people may change a kingdom into a democracy?
Thirdly, he concludes that if there is a legitimate cause, the people may change the kingdom. Here I would very much like to know who gets to judge whether the cause is legitimate. If it is the people themselves (and I see no one else who could), then this is a dangerous and destructive conclusion.
I come now to examine the argument used by Bellarmine, which is the one and only argument I can find in my author's work offered as proof of the natural liberty of the people. It runs as follows: that God has given or ordained power is clear from Scripture; but God has not given it to any particular person, because by nature all men are equal; therefore He has given power to the people, or the multitude.
To answer this argument from the natural equality of mankind, I will first draw on Bellarmine himself, whose exact words are these: "If many men had been together created out of the earth, they all ought to have been princes over their posterity." In these words we have a clear admission that creation made man a prince over his descendants. Indeed, not only Adam but the patriarchs who followed him held royal authority over their children by right of fatherhood. Bellarmine does not dare deny this either. The patriarchs, he says, were endowed with kingly power, as their deeds confirm; for just as Adam was lord over his children, so his children under him held command and authority over their own children, though always in subordination to the first parent, who remains lord paramount over his children's children through all generations, as the grandfather of his people.
I cannot see, then, how the children of Adam, or of any other man, can be free from subjection to their parents. Since this subjection of children is the very foundation of all royal authority, established by God's own ordinance, it follows that civil power is not merely divine in its general existence but also in its specific assignment to the eldest parents. This entirely dismantles the new and fashionable distinction that attributes only universal and absolute power to God, while leaving the particular form of government to the choice of the people.
The lordship that Adam held over the entire world by divine command, and which the Patriarchs enjoyed by right of descent from him, was just as broad and absolute as the dominion of any monarch who has ruled since Creation. On the matter of life and death, we see that Judah the father pronounced a death sentence against Tamar his daughter-in-law for prostituting herself: "Bring her forth," he said, "that she may be burnt" (Gen 38:24). On the matter of war, Abram commanded an army of 318 soldiers drawn from his own household, and Esau met his brother Jacob with 400 armed men. On the matter of peace, Abraham made a treaty with Abimelech and sealed its terms with an oath. These acts, judging capital crimes, waging war, and concluding peace, are the clearest marks of sovereignty found in any monarch.
This patriarchal power did not end with the Flood but continued well beyond it, as the very name "Patriarch" itself partly suggests. Noah divided the entire world among his three sons, for from them the whole earth was populated, in keeping with the blessing given to him and his sons: "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth" (Gen 9:1). Most of the world's more civilized nations trace their origins back to one of the sons or nephews of Noah who scattered abroad after the confusion at Babel. In that dispersion, we can almost certainly locate the foundation of royal power throughout the kingdoms of the world.
It is a common view that the confusion of tongues produced 72 distinct nations, none of which were leaderless mobs free to choose whatever rulers or government they liked. They were, instead, distinct families governed by their fathers. This shows that even amid the confusion, God was careful to preserve the authority of fathers, distributing the diversity of languages according to the diversity of families. The biblical text makes this plain. After listing the sons of Japheth, it concludes: "By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands, every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations" (Gen 10:5). Similarly, we read: "These are the sons of Ham after their families, after their tongues, in their countries, and in their nations" (Gen 10:20). And again: "These are the sons of Shem after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations. These are the families of the sons of Noah after their generations in their nations, and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood" (Gen 10:31-32).
As for how the world was actually divided, opinions differ. Some believe Noah used lots to distribute the land among his descendants. Others hold that he sailed around the Mediterranean over ten years, assigning each son his portion as he went, thereby dividing the known world into Asia, Africa, and Europe, one region for each son, with the boundaries of all three meeting at that inland sea.
Whatever the precise method of this division may have been, one thing is beyond dispute: the division itself was carried out through families descending from Noah and his children, with the parents serving as heads and rulers over them.
Among these was Nimrod, who (as Sir Walter Raleigh affirms) was by right the lord and king over his own family, yet wrongfully expanded his empire by seizing the domains of other family rulers by force. In this sense, he can be called the author and first founder of Monarchy. All those who attribute to him the origin of royal power agree that he obtained it through tyranny and usurpation, not through any legitimate election by the people or any agreement with them.
This Patriarchal Power continued through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, right up to the Egyptian captivity, and we find the same pattern among the sons of Ishmael and Esau. Scripture records: "These are the sons of Ishmael, and these are their names by their castles and towns, twelve princes of their tribes and families. And these are the names of the dukes that came of Esau, according to their families and their places by their nations" (Gen 25:16; 36:40).
Some might assume that these princes and dukes of families were merely minor lords serving under greater kings, since there were so many of them that their individual territories could only have been small, hardly worthy of the title of kingdoms. But they need to consider that early kings did not hold anything like the vast dominions rulers possess today. In the time of Abraham, roughly 300 years after the Flood, we find nine kings meeting in battle within a small corner of Asia, most of them ruling nothing more than a single city and its surrounding land: Sodom, Gomorrah, Shinar, and others like them. That same chapter mentions Melchizedek, king of Salem, which was simply the city of Jerusalem. In the catalogue of the kings of Edom, each king is identified by the name of his city alone, as if that were the only meaningful marker of his domain. In Canaan, a territory of quite modest size, Joshua defeated thirty-one kings. Around the same period, Adonibezek had subjugated seventy kings, cutting off their thumbs and big toes and forcing them to scavenge scraps beneath his table. A few years later, thirty-two kings came to the aid of Ben-hadad king of Syria, and roughly seventy kings of Greece sailed together to the wars of Troy. Caesar found more kings in Gaul than there are princes there today, and when he crossed over to this island, he discovered four kings within our own county of Kent. This abundance of kings within each nation is strong evidence that their territories were small, and it powerfully supports our argument that kingdoms first arose simply through the natural division of families.
We can trace this pattern of paternal government clearly through history, following it right up to the Israelites' arrival in Egypt, where the exercise of supreme patriarchal authority was suspended because they were subject to a more powerful ruler. After the Israelites returned from bondage, God, in His special care for them, chose Moses and Joshua to govern in succession as princes, standing in the place of the supreme fathers. After them, He raised up judges for a time to defend His people in moments of danger. But when God gave the Israelites kings, He restored the ancient and original right of lineal succession to paternal government. And whenever He chose a particular person to be king, He intended that person's descendants would also benefit from that choice, since they were understood to be included in the father's person, even when only the father was named in the grant.
It may seem absurd to argue that kings today are the fathers of their people, since experience appears to show otherwise. It is true that not all kings are the natural parents of their subjects. Yet all kings either are, or should be regarded as, the nearest heirs to those original ancestors who were the natural parents of the whole people, and they succeed to the exercise of supreme jurisdiction by that right. Such heirs are lords not only over their own children, but also over their brothers and all others who were subject to their fathers. This is why we find God telling Cain regarding his brother Abel, "His desires shall be subject to you, and you shall rule over him" (Gen 4:7). In keeping with this principle, when Jacob purchased his brother's birthright, Isaac blessed him with these words: "Be lord over your brothers, and let the sons of your mother bow before you" (Gen 27:29).
