The history of the relationship between the executive and the administration has been largely invisible to lawyers and constitutional law. The provision of the Magna Carta 1215 in which King John promises to ‘[ ] appoint as justices, constables, sheriffs, or other officials, only men that know the law of the realm and are minded to keep it well’ is not well known.

This chapter explores the trial of the St Osyth witches and the witches from surrounding communities, and follows them to their judgement and - in some cases - their deaths. It examines the creation of the news pamphlet that recounted the story of the witch trial, and suggests an author for that famous account, showing how it shaped the story of the St Osyth witches that has been handed down to modern readers.

This chapter theorizes that sovereignty is the interplay of two contrasting modalities. In Idealized Sovereignty, sovereign authority is represented exclusively in “the state” per the doctrine of indivisibility developed by early modern theorists and reified in IR theory. In Lived Sovereignty, achieving sovereign competence involves divisible practices of state and nonstate actors in a variety of social relations. We would do a disservice to sovereignty’s complexity if only one of the two modes persevered in analyses of sovereignty. Instead, the chapter intervenes in major IR debates to argue that sovereignty should be hybridized. This overarching framework guides the ideal-types of public/private hybridity developed in the next chapter and the empirical analyses in the remainder of this book, where hybrid sovereignty is necessary to build a global empire, go to war, regulate global markets, and protect rights.

In 16th-century France, absolutism was initially written in the legal idiom of sovereignty by a group of lawyers concerned to find a way to end the religious conflicts. This effort was translated in the following century by Cardinal Richelieu and his jurists into precepts for the practice of ruling designed to limit and coordinate the privileges of the great nobles as well as economic actors (merchants, bankers, financiers etc.) with the interests of the court. As a result, the state in France turned into more or less stable oligarchic arrangements that united the interests of French elites under the sovereignty of the king, as exemplified in the massively expanded system of office venality. In the end, however, the Sun King’s exorbitant interest in glory on the battlefield undermined the search for a stable system to exploit the realm’s resources; by the time of the Peace of Utrecht (1713), French elites were desperately looking for something new.

Beginning with an analysis of the ceremonies held to celebrate Louis XIII’s capture of La Rochelle in 1628, this chapter explores how the psalms became central to the identity of the French monarch over the course of the sixteenth century. Originally ‘shared’ between Catholics and Huguenots, translations of the psalms into French began to adopt a more sharply divided confessional identity by the 1560s. At the same time, the concept of kingship, which had for some time been inspired by humanist writings, began to reflect Biblical models more closely. Jean Bodin’s seminal Six livres de la république of 1576, for example, was followed by numerous other treatises that framed the king as an agent of God in the temporal domain, especially after the assassinations of Henri III and Henri IV. By the time Louis XIII came to the throne, then, King David, author of the psalms, agent of the Holy Spirit, and known for his musical talents, had become the preferred model of kingship, a model that provided the context for numerous psalm translations, and for the identity of Louis XIII himself, now viewed as the perfect musician, warrior, and king.