Page 117 - DPOL201_WESTERN_POLITICAL_THOUGHT_ENGLISH

Unit 7: John Locke

Marshall (1994: 205–291) and Wootton (1993: 49–89) agreed with Ashcraft, but made some Notes
clarifications. Wootton contended that the Second Treatise was written in late 1681. Marshall, on
the other hand, pointed out that the First Treatise was written in 1681 and the Second Treatise in late
1682 or early 1683, after Charles II began quo warranto proceedings against the charter of the
London corporation, giving the crown control of the franchise in the city and supervision of the
sheriffs who appointed London juries. Both these actions undermined the Whig position.
The seventeenth century was an important period, a watershed in English political and
constitutional history. Broadly, four distinct phases could be identified: (a) from the accession of
James I to the Civil War in 1641; (b) from 1642 to 1660, a commonwealth under Cromwell;
(c) restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660 to the Exclusion crisis of 1679–1681; and
(d) the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In all these four phases, the main question centred around the
relevance of absolute monarchy, and the need to limit the power of the monarch against the
growing assertiveness of the parliament.
The Civil War failed to resolve the problem. The execution of Charles I brought about a breach in
the monarchial tradition. While resistance against the king as a person was justified, the title and
authority of the king remained intact. On the one hand, the idea that the king could do no wrong
gave the king a sense of independence from the parliament. On the other hand, the parliament
desired to legislate without the king. In the political tug of war, the idea of absolute, divine,
hereditary powers of the king came in handy for the royalists. The parliamentarians, and in
particular the Whigs, chose to articulate the idea of political power as a trust, with the parliament
or legislature defining the purposes of the trust. In this sense, the character of the English revolution
was limited (Laski 1920: 70). Its most distinctive aspect according to Franklin (1978) was (unlike
elsewhere in Europe), the House of Commons—the arena where opposing factions advanced their
rival theories of sovereignty.
Charles II being childless decided that James II, his younger brother, a devout Catholic, would
succeed him to the throne. This meant a reign by unending Catholic monarchs in a Protestant
country. The English Parliament would have had to change or ignore the rule of hereditary
succession. The problem, unlike in the Civil War, was not the breakdown of sovereignty, but one
of its presence and limits. The immediate question was the right of resistance to the sovereign, and
if so, when Charles II dissolved the parliament so as to prevent it from excluding James a group
of Whigs faced treason. Following the Rye House plot, Lord Russell and Sidney were arrested and
executed.
Had James II died without a son, the next in succession would have been his daughter Mary, who
along with her husband William of Orange indicated their willingness to accept the English
throne. On hearing this news, James II fled unofficially, abdicating and thus avoiding the issue of
whether Parliament had indeed appointed William and Mary as joint monarchs.
In this debate between divine, hereditary sovereigns and republican democracy, a need was felt
for a theory that could preserve individualism, stability, and consent of the governed, while
acknowledging the right of resistance. Hobbes’ Leviathan was not fully acceptable because of its
atheism, harsh egoism and defence of absolute monarchy with a consensual basis. With the
Restoration of 1660, the debate between the Royalists and Republicans died down, but resurfaced
when the succession of James II became imminent. In the renewed controversy, Filmer’s long-
forgotten Patriarcha or the Natural Power of the King became politically and ideologically important
to defend the claims of Charles II. Patriarcha was written in 1653–1654 but was published for the
first time in 1680 to counter the pressure of the exclusionists and the Whigs. Filmer’s theory was
refuted by Locke, Tyrrell (Patriarcha non Monarcha in 1681) and Sidney (who denounced Filmer
from the scaffold).

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