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The absolute monarchy of the Tudors seemed impregnable, but it gradually succumbed to the will of Parliament
Much of British and European history has been traditionally told through the lives of kings and queens – individual rulers who may have had to scheme and connive and fight to acquire and keep their thrones, but who were all-powerful for as long as they sat on them.
Of course, in reality, the power of individual monarchs varied enormously. And medieval monarchs in general tended to be rather weak and dependent on the nobility for their position and power. The Church, too, enjoyed immense authority, wealth and influence, which often limited a sovereign's ability to act independently.
From the Renaissance onwards, however, a new form of centralised state began to appear in Europe, under which power was removed from the nobles and their local power bases and concentrated in the person of the monarch and his court. In addition, with the Protestant Reformation, the power of the pope and the Catholic Church was diminished. New models of politics and kingship began to emerge, as exemplified in Machiavelli's The Prince (1513).
God v force of arms
In Europe as a whole, the concentration of state power in the hands of the sovereign reached its apogee in the 'absolute monarchy' of the Bourbon kings of France and Spain. It was accompanied – and justified – by the philosophy of the 'divine right' of kings. This held that a monarch's right to rule came about by birth and was bestowed by God alone. An act of rebellion against the sovereign, therefore, was also an act of rebellion against God and the natural order of things.
In England, the concentration of power in the monarch took place, in particular, under the Tudor kings Henry VII and Henry VIII. It came under sustained challenge – as did the notion of a monarch's divine right to rule – during the Stuart dynasty of the 17th century. During this period, conflict between the king and Parliament over their respective powers ultimately led to civil war and regicide.
Divine authority did not determine who was to sit on the English throne in the turbulent years that preceded the relative stability of the Tudor era. Rather, it was force of arms that settled matters, and never more so than during the dynastic struggles between the Houses of Lancaster and York, which began with Henry Bolingbroke's seizure of power from Richard II in 1399 and culminated in the Wars of the Roses. These started with the first battle of St Albans in 1455 and were not finally settled until Henry Tudor, the future Henry VII, defeated and killed the last Yorkist king Richard III at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.
Sir John Fortescue
A decade and a half earlier, around 1470-1, the greatest English political philosopher of the age, Sir John Fortescue, had completed two of the earliest works of English legal and constitutional theory. These were to become among the most important works in the history of English law and government, and laid the philosophical and practical foundations for much that followed. The first, written in Latin, was De laudibus legum Angliae (In praise of English law). The second, written in English so that it would be read by the king and his nobles and not just by scholars trained in Latin, was The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy (also known as The Governance of England, under which title it was republished at the end of the 19th century).
Fortescue, chief justice of the Lancastrian king Henry VI from 1442 to 1461, had fled to France when Henry was toppled by the Yorkist Edward IV. Despite the fact that he had supported the attempt in 1471 to restore the House of Lancaster, he was given a general pardon by Edward.
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