DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS

doctrine in defense of monarchical absolutism, which asserted that kings derived their authority from God and could not therefore be held accountable for their actions by any earthly authority such as a parliament. In its origins in Europe the divine right theory may be traced to the medieval conception of God's award of temporal power to the political ruler, paralleling the award of spiritual power to the church. By the 16th and 17th centuries, however, the new national monarchs were asserting their authority in matters of both church and state. King James I of England (reigned 160325) was the foremost exponent of the doctrine of the divine right of kings, but the doctrine virtually disappeared from English politics after the Revolution of 1688. In the late 17th and the 18th centuries, kings such as Louis XIV of France continued to profit from the divine-right theory, even though many of them no longer had any truly religious belief in it. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Era deprived the doctrine of most of its remaining credibility. One of the principal French theorists of divine right, the bishop Jacques-Bnigne Bossuet (16271704), asserted that the king's person and authority were sacred; that his power was modeled on that of a father's; that his power was absolute, deriving from God; and that he was governed by reason (that is, custom and precedent). The English Royalist squire Sir Robert Filmer, in his Patriarcha (1648), likewise held that the state was a family and that the king was a father, but he went on, in an interpretation of Scripture, to pronounce that Adam was the first king and that Charles I ruled England as Adam's eldest heir. The philosopher John Locke's antiabsolutist First Treatise of Civil Government (1689) was written to refute such arguments.