Becoming Spiritual: Authority and Legitimacy in the Early Modern English Family

Summary

IN his 1598 political tract The True Lawe of Free Monarchies, James VI oddly asserts, “By the Law of Nature, the king becomes a naturall father to all his lieges at his coronation.” This claim is curious for three reasons.

First, James insists that the pre-cultural injunction of natural law not only informs but plays an active role in a performance that seems wholly cultural. It is not so much the invocation of “the Law of Nature” that rings false, because contemporary authors frequently employed natural law to support paternal authority. For example, Richard Hooker, in the first book of Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, argues, “To fathers within their private families Nature hath given a supreme power.” Hooker even speculates on the reasons kings are called fathers. Instead, it the specific transformation James argues for that is so surprising. Neither Hooker nor any other period writer, for that matter, uses the law of nature to support a king’s “naturall” paternity. Nature may support power relations at both home and the court, but for writers other than James, a king’s metamorphosis is hardly natural.

Second, James uses the word “naturall” ambiguously, as the word has several meanings during the Early Modern period. For instance, in the context of family, the word signified genetic relation. However, the alternate title of James’s tract reveals another definition: “The Reciprock and Mvtvall Duetie Betwixt a Free King, and His Naturall Subjects.” When it modifies “subjects,” “naturall” means “innate; not acquired or assumed” and thus implies the inherent subjection of a king’s people. Consequently, when James modifies father with “naturall,” he collapses these two definitions by asserting a king’s innate right to govern based on the legitimacy and authority of genetic paternity.

Third, James bases this assertion on the privilege and signifying stability of the natural father. The force and ideological weight of this claim are unmistakable. For James, coronation enacts an ontological transformation: the king does not become like a natural father, the king actually becomes a natural father. Thus, James implicitly appeals to the widely held assertion that nature gives fathers their power and then extends natural law by forgoing analogy and predicating an actual ontological equivalence between king and father.