David Ogg On the Divine Right

Theory in 17th-Century England

and France

David Ogg, Europe in the Seventeenth Century

(London: Adam & Charles Black; 1961), pp. 318, 319.

The theory of Divine Hereditary Right attained its highest expression in England and France at the same time . . . .

What the political theorists of the Renaissance had based on Roman law, or classical precedent or expediency, the apologists of Louis XIV based on religion, or rather on the Old Testament, which was considered to be not only verbally inspired but also to provide a canon for the regulation of the whole conduct of life, and so, by implication, a guide for the statesman and lawgiver.

In the seventeenth century Hebrew was much more widely studied than it is now; in consequence, educated men were mostly familiar with the characteristic conceptions and institutions of early Jewish history.

The despotism of monarchs divinely appointed to be the instruments of God’s wrath on earth was accepted as the highest possible form of human government; so long as this attitude to the Old Testament was unquestioned, the Divine Right theory was a perfectly consistent one and the doubters were guilty of heresy and sacrilege.

But by the second half of the seventeenth century it would be untrue to say that this was the universal attitude towards the Old Testament, for the spirit of inquiry had long been awake; men were beginning to feel that Religion had more to gain than to lose by exploration of the secrets of nature, and were refusing to believe that the whole compass of human knowledge was limited to one book.

To the clergy, however, the Divine Right theory seemed inseparable from all that they held sacred, consequently, in both England and France, they obstinately clung to it long after it had lost its force. . . .

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