the political bible in early modern england

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Hanging up Kings: The Political Bible in Early Modern England Kevin Killeen The disputatious George Walker, preaching on the flaws of rulers and their councillors before the Commons in 1644, noted the occasional necessity of reprisals even against monarchs: Adonibezek felt this, and had full experience of it: for as he had cut off the Thumbs, and great Toes of seventy Kings; so his Thumbs and great Toes were cut off, and then he, though an hea- then King, confessed and said, As I have done, so God hath requited me. 1 Despite being ‘‘an heathen king,’’ Adoni-bezek admits the justice of his punishment, when Judah and Simeon cut off in turn, his thumbs and big toes. Charles I, in the opinion of many, had no such sense that the mild chastisements parliament was able to inflict, prior to the regicide, had any fairness to them. Closer still to the moment when such biblical exemplarity burst into regicidal life, a 1649 text, Little Benjamin or Truth Discovering Error , relates it still more directly to the English regicide, and the decision ‘‘to execute justice upon the grand Delinquent’’: for that the King, their conquered and captivated Prisoner, by the rule, Lex talionis, ought to be done unto as he did unto others; 1 George Walker, A Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons at their Late Solemne Monethly Fast Januarie 29th, 1644 (1645) 39, Judges 1.7. Copyright by Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 72, Number 4 (October 2011) 549

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Page 1: The Political Bible in Early Modern England

Hanging up Kings: The Political Biblein Early Modern England

Kevin Killeen

The disputatious George Walker, preaching on the flaws of rulers and theircouncillors before the Commons in 1644, noted the occasional necessity ofreprisals even against monarchs:

Adonibezek felt this, and had full experience of it: for as he hadcut off the Thumbs, and great Toes of seventy Kings; so hisThumbs and great Toes were cut off, and then he, though an hea-then King, confessed and said, As I have done, so God hathrequited me.1

Despite being ‘‘an heathen king,’’ Adoni-bezek admits the justice of hispunishment, when Judah and Simeon cut off in turn, his thumbs and bigtoes. Charles I, in the opinion of many, had no such sense that the mildchastisements parliament was able to inflict, prior to the regicide, had anyfairness to them. Closer still to the moment when such biblical exemplarityburst into regicidal life, a 1649 text, Little Benjamin or Truth DiscoveringError, relates it still more directly to the English regicide, and the decision‘‘to execute justice upon the grand Delinquent’’:

for that the King, their conquered and captivated Prisoner, by therule, Lex talionis, ought to be done unto as he did unto others;

1 George Walker, A Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons at theirLate Solemne Monethly Fast Januarie 29th, 1644 (1645) 39, Judges 1.7.

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and this Adoni-bezek, a Heathen King, acknowledged, saying, AsI have done, so God hath done unto me; and they brought him toJerusalem (the place of publike Justice) and there he died.2

There is, it is evident, a heavy political and ideological freight in such exe-getical mining of the historical books of the Bible. However Adoni-bezektends not to figure in our maps of civil war exemplarity and nor, indeed,do the intricacies of the many biblical actors—kings, judges, priests, andgenerals—who featured in the vast biblical discourse that constituted amajor, though now largely invisible, language of political thought.3 Thoughhistorians have dealt exhaustively with the political and constitutionalwrangles of the period, with theories of tyranny and resistance, there is apropensity to see the scriptural in early modern political writing, the resortto an Old Testament figure like Adoni-bezek, as a kind of biblical Tourette’sSyndrome, without its having much substantive content.

There are modern correlates to this phenomenon: the vocabularies ofnineteenth- and twentieth-century thought are waning and have largelyfallen into disrepair if not disrepute: few would deem the notions of the‘‘proletariat’’ or the ‘‘bourgeoisie,’’ with all their ideological bogginess, asuseful categories for thinking. ‘‘Laissez-faire’’ and commodity capitalismtend not to trip from the tongues of politicians any longer. Even ‘‘left’’ and‘‘right,’’ as political denominations, no longer firmly designate. This is ofcourse far from saying that there will be no need to reformulate ideas andlanguage that may bear some strong family resemblance to terminologythat has decayed. Moreover, for the historian of ideas, there is an importantgeology of political thought in such vocabulary. The fossils of the twentieth-century ideological landscape are there in the terms it fought over and,though we may no longer use them, we would surely not want to forget thepower and nuance that such language once held. This essay contends thatone such language of seventeenth-century thought—the biblical—once fullyformed, vibrant and bitterly partisan, has been largely forgotten and, alongwith it, a swathe of political opinion has shifted, effectively, beyond ouraudible range.

2 John Reading, Little Benjamin or Truth Discovering Error (1649), 13.3 On Adoni-bezek, see further instances in William Guild, The Throne of David (London,1659), 10; John Bewick, Confiding England under Conflicts, Triumphing in the Middestof her Terrors (London, 1644), 9; Henry Adis, A Fannaticks Mite Cast into the KingsTreasury (London, 1660), 31; Francis Bland, The Souldiers March to Salvation (London,1647) 33; Edmund Calamy, The Godly Mans Ark, or, City of Refuge, in the Day of hisDistresse (London, 1658), 49.

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While ‘‘religion’’ as an ecclesiastical, institutional, and doctrinal phe-nomenon in seventeenth-century England has been subject to intensive scru-tiny, the language of scriptural thinking—deployed by royalist as much asparliamentarian—remains a blind-spot to scholarship. The scriptures pro-vided both a sledgehammer and a scalpel for political analysis, amenable tosubtle as well as crude deployment. In making such an argument, this essayhas in its sights firstly, the historiography of seventeenth-century politics.At stake more broadly, however, beyond the specifics of the early modernconstitutional crises, is the nature of political languages that decay or, as isthe case with the Bible, a language whose discursive arena migrates. TheBible has continued to play a part in intellectual history across later centu-ries, but its operative territory is something other than (and smaller than)its remit in the seventeenth century.

Such migrations are both rare and revealing in tracing the movementof ideas that constitute intellectual history, how ideas reformulate, not onlyin different historical circumstances, but when disciplines—in this casepolitical theory—shift their terms of reference. Early modern historians ofthe civil war have, it is true, long tussled over how far religion was a causeof events—of war, republic, and restoration—but they have not sufficientlytaken stock of the way in which biblical exegesis was seen as an analyticallens for political affairs. The preponderance of scripture in early modernwriting is evident from even a cursory dip into the subject, but historianshave nevertheless been reluctant to allow the Bible to be more than a deco-rative, and ultimately delusional, drape of piety around events, the part ofthought destined to wither, to reveal the secular core of history. This is thecase, in particular, when early modern voices speak about constitution: theorigin of statehood, the allotment, distribution, and nature of politicalpower. The first part of this essay substantiates this claim of historiographi-cal neglect, and engages too with a number of exceptions, while the latterhalf demonstrates biblical politics in its gory regicidal action.

One interesting example of this inattention to the Bible as a workingcurrency of political thought in the seventeenth century is the widespreadnotion of the English regicide as unprecedented and, by and large, unthink-able in the early modern mind before it actually occurred, surprising mostright-thinking opponents of the king. J.G.A. Pocock and Gordon J. Scho-chet, tracing the fast moving evolution of political theory over two decades,write of the constitutional shockwave of the regicide, or rather the shock ofwho had killed the king: ‘‘Kings had been killed before, but only as a resultof baronial rebellions or dynastic feuds . . . internal to the institution of

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monarchy.’’4 England, in such an account, could make sense of late medie-val wars, when the aristocracy killed its own, but there was no template inEnglish history for imagining such an act as occurred in 1649, with itsmilitary and demotic act of king-killing.

Such a claim presumes the essentially secular nature of historical mem-ory and historical lineage. However, the claim that emerges in this paper isthat the English political imagination in the seventeenth century registeredthe events of the reigns of Jehu, Rehoboam or Jehoshaphat with as immedi-ate a presence and relevance as that of William or Edward the Confessor,and with a far greater immediacy than the affairs of classical Rome. Nordid these latter models elicit the visceral emotional response or the vastintellectual resources that the Bible regularly garners. This is not to say thathistorical, classical, and biblical ideas of statehood worked at odds witheach other: most political theory of the era tends to allow some form ofamalgam. It is to say that the status of the biblical in these amalgams isfrequently neglected and, further, that a large corpus of political writing,whose idiom is scriptural, is ignored and excluded from the landscape ofpolitical thought.

This is, of course, far from virgin territory.There is a good deal of writ-ing that registers the presence of the scriptures in early modern politics,and, given the amount of such writing, and by such eminent figures, that ishardly surprising. Nevertheless, it is considered, on the whole, somethingof a second tier language of politics, lacking the gravitas of classical refer-ence and often being treated as evidence of a blind religious zeal, ratherthan political thought. Exceptions, even with such a qualification, includesome very impressive works by, for example, Eric Nelson on the ‘‘HebrewRepublic’’ and Achsah Guibbory on political Hebraism.5 Most importantly,

4 J.G.A. Pocock and Gordon J. Schochet, ‘‘Interregnum and Restoration’’ in J.G.A.Pocock, Gordon J. Schochet, Lois G. Schwoerer (eds), The Varieties of British PoliticalThought, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 146–79 (148).5 Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of Euro-pean Political Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); AchsahGuibbory, Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2010). Other works featuring the specificity of Old Testamentfigures—and I do not aim to be comprehensive here—include John Morrill and PhilipBaker, ‘‘Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide and the Sons of Zeruiah,’’ in Cromwell and theInterregnum: The Essential Readings, ed. David L. Smith (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell,2003), 15–36; Warren Chernaik, ‘‘Biblical Republicanism,’’ Prose Studies 23 (2000):147–60; James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (Lon-don: Verso, 2000), 327–52; Blair Worden, ‘‘Oliver Cromwell and the Sin of Achan,’’ inHistory, Society and the Churches: Essays in Honour of Owen Chadwick, ed. DerekBeales and Geoffrey Best (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 125–45; GlennBurgess, ‘‘Stuart Monarchy and the Case of the Regicide’’ in Robert von Friedeburg,

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perhaps, Christopher Hill, in his thorough and brilliant explication of theuse of biblical language in the period, investigates the ‘‘revolutionarybible,’’ and argues that it functioned as an Aesopian language of dissentand ideological discussion.6 This, it seems to me, is not the case: there wasnothing covert in a scriptural allusion to a culture so suffused in the Bible.Indeed, lacking the largely anti-monarchical resources of classical politicaltheory, royalists tended to be more reliant on the pliable authority of theBible. Nor is this simply a resort to a set of ‘‘traditional’’ conceptions ofpolitics, even if divine right or Jesuit political theory provides some prece-dent. On the contrary, it was an idiom that served very much for on-the-hoof political theory, worked out in response to the twists and turns ofevents across the 1640s.

Anti-monarchical feeling in the seventeenth century has been largelysubsumed under the difficult, if not deceptive term ‘‘classical republican-ism,’’ which for all its importance, has had something of a color-blindnessto anything with a biblical hue.7 One interesting instance to the contrary isMartin Dzelzainis’s engagement with biblicism and the regicide. He con-cludes, and a double negative best suggests the argument here, not that itwas not a relevant language and mode of political thought—he traces ratherbrilliantly the early modern deployment of Phineas to show that the guilty,monarchs among them, must be brought to bloody brook—but that anemphasis on the biblical is nevertheless detrimental to our understanding ofevents, hiving off the regicide as an aberrant moment, committed by zeal-ots: ‘‘How reassuring to find that this violent project was after all exclu-sively the work of religious fanatics, how fortunate that normal politicallife resumed so swiftly once more sober counsels gained the upper hand.’’8

Murder and Monarchy: Regicide in European History 1300–1800 (Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2004), 212–36; John Morrill, ‘‘How Oliver Cromwell Thought’’ in Liberty,Equality, Formality: Political Thought and Culture 1600–1900, ed. John Morrow andJonathan Scott (Exeter: Academic Imprint 2008), 89–112; Jason Peacey (ed.), The Regi-cides and the Execution of Charles I (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2001). Recentworks on the scripturalism of political thinkers includes Walter S.H. Lim, John Milton,Radical Politics, and Biblical Republicanism (Newark: University of Delaware Press,2006); Kim Parker, The Biblical Politics of John Locke (Waterloo: Ontario, 2004).6 Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution (London:Penguin, 1993).7 Martin Dzelzainis, ‘‘Milton’s Classical Republicanism,’’ in Milton and Republicanism,ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1995), 3–24 (5); Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1998).8 Martin Dzelzainis, ‘‘Anti-monarchism in the English Republiic,’’ in Republicanism: AShared European Heritage, 2 vols., eds. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1:32–33.

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This is a point well made, and much in need of making. Against ‘‘thosehistorians who seek to bury the events of 1649 in charges of fanaticismand obscurantism,’’ an isolated moment of religious terrorism, Dzelzainisinsists on the political continuity of events, that the regicide must be seenas a fact at one with the subsequent republic, as an instance of decisive, ifshocking, political and demotic action.9 However, such an argumenterases an equally important, and certainly more invisible, continuity—therelentlessly biblical idiom of political theory across the two revolutionarydecades and beyond. This ‘‘idiom,’’ if we can term it so, is entirely imbri-cated in the minds of early modern thinkers with emergent ideas on gov-ernment. A tendency to see a biblical slant on radicalism as simply ‘‘pre-secular,’’ struggling towards republicanism, misrepresents the vibrancyand flexibility of that thought.

The suspicion of the Bible as a medium of thought runs deep, no doubtwith good reason, but not, I would argue, with good historiographical rea-son. Unlike republicanism, which can still stir the blood, the scripturalismI describe here is of no use at all. It does not translate into the modern,except in objectionable fashion. It has no respectable heritage, as doesEnglish republicanism as precursor to the French, American or Russian rev-olutions. However, history which claims to be alert to context and the intel-lectual tools through which an era perceived itself should, surely, put asidethe essential uselessness of the Bible as a tool of modern political theory.The very fact that it is so alien and incomprehensible a mode of thoughtmakes it all the more interesting. The remainder of the essay will exemplifythis in early modern practice, looking first at the vast repertoire of regicidalinstances in the Bible, which were so embedded in English historical mem-ory—and second, exploring the ways in which these biblical instances werewoven into constitutional arguments about the abolition of monarchy.10

KILLING KINGS: THEORY AND PRACTICE

Regicide, then, to return to that most central historical moment, wasentirely familiar and widely debated in seventeenth-century England before,during, and after the long years of troubled debate on what to do with a

9 Dzelzainis, ‘‘Anti-monarchism,’’ 40.10 I do not deal in depth with such loci classici as 1 Samuel 8 or Romans 13 in this essay,which have been covered in a number of places, e.g. Chernaik, ‘‘Biblical Republicanism,’’147. See Nelson, The Hebrew Republic, 23–56.

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recalcitrant king. Far from conceiving monarchs hedged in untouchability,the era was wholly, obsessively aware of the contingency and, indeed, the‘‘killability’’ of kings. Less a bulwark of stability to a nation, monarchswere its weakness and the cause of its troubles, its collective griefs and itsloss of integrity. The only response to such kingship, it was plain, was therazing of the royal line. It was not, of course, the history of England thatprompted such ideas, but rather the fragility, culpability, and terrible fatesof biblical kings. The early modern reader and sermon-goer—and therewere few more avid audiences than parliament, which sat on occasionthrough ten hours per day of fast sermons—met in its scriptures a historyof regicide and usurpation, much of it commissioned and at the bidding ofGod: regicide with an apparently quotidian ease.11

The number of kings killed and indeed the manner of their dispatchand ill-treatment, including both foreign and domestic regicides, comes assomething of a shock to the modern reader, unschooled in the etiquette ofdispatching monarchs, whether it be princes drawn with hooks in theirnoses and bridles in their mouths, or the seventy heads in baskets of seventysons of Ahab, Zimri besieged and burnt in his own palace, or Jezebelthrown from a window to the dogs.12 These and other acts of regicide were,however, entirely familiar to early modern readers. This is not to say, byany means, that prior to 1649, many people had conceived of regicidalpossibilities. That, plainly, is not the case. It is to say that after the killingof Charles, there were evident and already familiar ways of conceiving ofthe act, in a scriptural framework whose presence in a text was not intrinsi-cally a sign of a frenzied mind.

For all that kings might be anointed, they were not thereby inviolable.Algernon Sidney, writing in his Court Maxims (c.1663), notes: ‘‘For Mosesand Joshua slew thirty-one kings, that is, in the phrase of our divines, mur-dered thirty-one of God’s anointeds. Joshua hanged five of them at one timebefore the Lord.’’13 The early history of the kings of Israel, as it was per-ceived by early modern writers, was one of domino kingship, in which oneregicide after another destroys a series of royal houses. Thomas Hall, writ-

11 On December 18, 1644, the Lords and Commons together listened for ‘‘either or tenhours,’’ Fast Sermons to parliament, ed. Robin Jeffs (London: Cornmarket, 1971), 15: 4.On the early modern pulpit more generally, see The Oxford Handbook of the EarlyModern Sermon, eds. Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington, and Emma Rhatigan (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2011).12 Isaiah 37:29, Ezekiel 38:3–4, 2 Kings 10:7; 1 Kings 16:18; 2 Kings 9:3313 Algernon Sidney, Court Maxims (c.1663), eds. Hans W. Blom, Eco Haitsma Mulier,Ronald Janse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 43; Joshua 10:26.

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ing provocatively in 1660, produced an extensive account of the kings ofIsrael, and the just destruction of dynasties: ‘‘there were twenty Kings ofIsrael, of ten several stocks, whereof one destroyed another. Jeroboam’sstock was cut off by Baasha, and Baasha’s by Zimri, and Tibni’s by Omri,and Omri’s by Jehu. . . .’’14 John Richardson, in his Choice observationsand explanations upon the Old Testament (1655), notes that even in theKingdom of Judah, the Davidic and less corrupt line, regicide was a regularcourse of events, in the blur of kings and queens who were killed: ‘‘Ahaziah,Joash, Amaziah, Kings of Judah, and Athaliah the Queene, all succeedingone another, were all slaine. Amon likewise, and his son Josiah bothslaine.’’ Richardson notes too the regularity of dynastic ruptures in the his-tory of Israel’s kings: ‘‘And ten Kings of Israel, the half of all their number,were likewise slaine.’’15 The constitutional conclusions drawn from suchstories differed greatly, of course, but it remained startlingly obvious to theera that kings were regularly overthrown with God’s blessing. Pocock andSchochet’s supposition, quoted earlier, that non-aristocratic regicide wasbeyond the English imagination looks less firm if that imaginary vista andmemory goes more directly to the Bible than to baronial wars. In the 1648tract An Abridgment of the late remonstrance of the army, probably pennedby John Rushworth, the parliamentary messenger and news gatherer, todebate the king’s repeated breaking of agreements, extensive notes are pro-duced, including a detailed gathering of every biblical regicide. It makes forstaccato reading, but is not the less significant for that:

Josuah slayes all their Kings Jos. 11.17. being thirty one, 12. Cap.last, and hangs up some Josh. 10.24.28.30.40. Gideon moresolemnely executes the Kings of Midian then other enemies, Judges8.1.21. Ehud slayes King Eglon, Judg. 3.21. So Jehoiadah, and theCommanders put Athalia to death, 2 Chro. 23.14. and if it be saidthat these two last Princes came to the Crown by force & blood,and so were without a title, it may be replyed, that such was theentrance of the first of the English, French, &c. Royall race fromwhom the present Kings claime; . . . further, these two hadRaigned, and the people been subject to them (which makes themost usuall title,) the one for 18. yeares, Judg. 3.14. the other six

14 Thomas Hall, Samaria’s Downfall . . . very Suitable to, and Seasonable for, these Pres-ent Times (London, 1660), 113.15 John Richardson, Choice Observations and Explanations upon the Old Testament(London, 1655), 100.

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yeares, 2 Chro. 22.12. Jehu did slay both the Kings of Israel andJudah 2 Kings 9.16

Modern parliamentary marginalia, it has to be conceded, is far less bracing.Such lists of condensed biblical reference are not unfamiliar material toreaders of early modern texts, and are easily skipped over. But it is impor-tant to note that they can function in such a shorthand fashion, preciselybecause they are so familiar. Any of the biblical characters glossed so speed-ily here might be shown to accrue their own and vast glossary of meanings,their own discourse of regicide, nuanced, battled over and applied to con-temporary circumstances. Among the most troubling figures in this respectwas Jehu, a captain made king with an unambiguous commission to destroythe royal house of Ahab and to commit two acts of regicide.

In what is often seen as one of the most beautiful and meditativemoments of the Old Testament, Elijah, the fiercest of prophets, persecutedout into the wilderness by King Ahab, is harried by a series of cataclysms,of wind and earthquake and fire, in all of which he can find no sign of God,till at last between the thundering, he hears the still small voice:

And behold, the Lord passed by and a great and strong wind rentthe mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; butthe Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake;but the Lord was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquakea fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still smallvoice. And it was so, when Elijah heard it.17

The passage, so beautifully rendered here in the Authorized Version, is notquite the tale of retreat and spirituality that it might seem. The still smallvoice of God has one instruction for Elijah, to commission a soldier to killa king: ‘‘Jehu the son of Nimshi shalt thou anoint to be king over Israel.’’When the anointing comes, at the instigation of Elisha, it is with the specificassignment to commit regicide by killing Jehoram of Judah, and then totake the throne of Israel: ‘‘Thou shalt smite the house of Ahab thy master. . . and I will make the house of Ahab like the house of Jeroboam, the sonof Nebat, and like the house of Baasha the son of Ahijah and the dogs

16 John Rushworth, An Abridgment of the Late Remonstrance of the Army (London,1648), 8.17 1 Kings 19:11–13.

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shall eat Jezebel in the portion of Jezreel.’’18 Jezreel was the site of thatconsummate act of biblical oppression, the confiscation of Naboth’s vine-yard and the judicial farce by which he was condemned to death, a tale inwhich property rights, tyranny, misuse of the law, and the idolatry of mon-archs coalesced, followed by the retaliation of God’s regicide. This was, forany oppositional Civil War reader, a tale for the times. Thomas Fuller,though he could by no means be seen as an anti-monarchist reader, notesin his ‘‘Life of Jehu’’ in The Holy State the symbolic desecration of the bodyof the king on the site of his most oppressive act: ‘‘The corps of Jehoram heorders to be cast into Nabaoths vineyard, a garden of herbs royally dung’d,and watered with bloud.’’19

Jehu, in the words of Edward Lane, was given ‘‘full commission toexecute the vengeance of God upon these Tyrants, the enemies of God andthe people,’’ but the commission also ‘‘that he should take away the peoplesoppressions and bondage in matters of Worship, as well as in their outwardestate.’’20 Lane, himself a colonel in the New Model Army, pursues theparallel to the present:

you will not wonder or be prejudiced in your thoughts, if I tellyou, that this story of Jehu is an exact description of part of ourReforming times, or of a great part of our Reformers. . . . SurelyAhab was an absolute Soveraign, had ser’d up Prerogative to thehighest pin. And this mans wife (Jezebel) was more absolute thenhe: he rul’d the Kingdom but she rul’d the king.21

Again and again, writers fashion the action of Jehu, and his speedy dispatchof political change, to the present. John Milton similarly depicts Jehu as animitable model of political action among a sequence of biblical kings,whose depiction is a direct and incontrovertible mandate for deposition:

Jehu killed a king at the command of the prophet. He even saw tothe killing of Ahaziah, his own lawful king. If God had not wanted

18 2 Kings 9: 7–10.19 Thomas Fuller, The Holy State (Cambridge, 1642), 390.20 Col. Edward Lane, An Image of our Reforming Times: or, Jehu in his Proper Colours(London, 1654), 4. See too George Gillespie, Wholesome Severity Reconciled with Chris-tian Liberty (London, 1645), 9; Robert Johnson, Lux & Lex, or The Light and the Lawof Jacobs House: held forth in a Sermon before the Honourable House of Commons(London, 1647), 12–13.21 Lane, An Image of our Reforming Times, 3.

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the tyrant to be killed by a citizen, if this had been impious, a badprecedent, why did he order it to be done? If he ordered it, surelyit was lawful, praiseworthy and glorious. Yet killing a tyrant wasnot good and lawful because God ordered it, but God ordered itbecause it was good and lawful.22

This is a passage that has received a good deal of attention, with its inver-sion of human lawfulness and divine injunction, and it is worth noting thatMilton’s series of biblical tyrannies in this text remain important becausethey preface consecrated acts of king-killing and deposition, rather thanany kind of autonomous secular justice.

It is of some relevance in the argument here that the political turn toscriptural analysis is not, by any means, the exclusive province of radicalsand regicides. Though royalists would refute all the connotations ascribedto Jehu by a Milton or a Lane, they addressed such texts with equal fre-quency and vigor. The kings and judges were the basis of statehood and themarrow of political origins, across the political spectrum and royalist writ-ing by no means shied away from engagement with biblical regicides suchas Jehu. The idea that he offered a regicidal precedent was dismissed byroyalists on the grounds of the specificity of his case, that Jehu acted onGod’s specific command. Thomas Bayly, a staunch royalist, makes muchthe same argument as Milton about biblical regicides, in The royal chartergranted unto kings (1649), in talking of Jehu’s commission, to kill the king,making the evidently counterfactual claim: ‘‘I utterly deny that either Jehudid, or that God gave Jehu any such authority as to slay King Joram.’’ LikeMilton, he argues that at the moment of the killing, Joram (Jehoram) hadalready been deposed:

Jehu slew Joram, but Jehu did not slay the King, for Jehu by theLords immediate appointment was King himself, before ever helaid hand upon Joram; Joram was but then a private man . . .therefore here is no regicidium, as yet here is but plaine man-slaughter, and a lusty warrant for that too.23

22 John Milton, A Defence of the People of England (London, 1658) in Political Writingsed. Martin Dzelzainis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 136. See too JoadRaymond, ‘‘The King is a Thing,’’ in Milton and the Terms of Liberty, eds. Graham Parryand Joad Raymond (Cambridge: Brewer, 2002), 69–94.23 Thomas Bayly, The Royal Charter Granted unto Kings, by God Himself and Collectedout of his Holy Word, in both Testaments (London, 1649), 80–81.

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Bayley’s royalist conclusion is the opposite of Milton’s, but his logic closelyparallels it and exactly parallels Milton’s argument in The Tenure of Kingsand Magistrates, that Charles, having already been deposed, was a privateman when he was executed: ‘‘Who knows not that the King is a name ofdignity and office, nor of person: Who therefore kills a King must kill himwhile he is a king.’’24 Unlike Milton, Bayly insists there is no precedent inJehu’s warrant:

But stay untill you have this warrant, and then we will allow it tobe lawfull; for though every one is apt enough to be a Jehu in hisown case, yet every one is not a God-almighty, we must not claphis seal to our own warrants; what God commands at one time,we are not to make it our warrant to doe the like at all times, thisis a prerogative of the Almighty, no priviledge of a Subject.25

John Ramsey explains similarly, in a 1660 text, that although God mayhave ‘‘commissioned’’ Jehu to overthrow the king, that evidently did notmean that he had ‘‘dispenced with the general and standing rule’’ not to killone’s monarch. On the contrary, Jehu’s act needed the warrant of a ‘‘privyseal’’: ‘‘the case of Jehu was extraordinary and singular . . . a particularpriviledg under the privy seal of a special command never afforded Zimrior any other.’’26

It is certainly the case that the 1640s and 50s saw a swell of interest inthe biblical deposition of kings and regicide, but this is by no means itsorigin. When William Prynne, in 1643, produced his inflammatory legal-constitutional work, The soveraigne power of parliaments and kingdomes,he incorporated large portions of the 1579 Huguenot text, Vindiciae, con-tra Tyrannos, a text which together with George Buchanan’s De Jure regniapud Scotos (1579) continued to outrage royalist opinion over the courseof the following century and which was burned in both Cambridge (1622)and Oxford (1683). Recent work on the Vindiciae by Anne McLaren hasnoted the somewhat skewed practices of glossing the text by reference toRoman law and a secularized republicanism which ignores ‘‘the over-

24 John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in Martin Dzelzainis, Milton: Politi-cal Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).25 Bayley, The Royal Charter, 79–80.26 John Ramsey, Zimri’s Peace: or the Traytor’s Doom and Downfall (London, 1660),23. See similarly John Digby, An apologie of John, Earl of Bristol consisting of two tracts(London, 1657), 16; Mary Pope, Heare, heare, heare, heare, a Word or Message fromHeaven; to all Covenant Breakers (whom God hates) (London, 1648), 8.

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whelming dominance of scriptural references’’ a transposition of scripturalpolity to contemporary resistance theory.27 Prynne has the bible’s regicidalstories forming a mainstay of political comprehension, insisting, like Mil-ton, on the common knowledge of king-killing: ‘‘Who is such a stranger tothe sacred Story, but hath oft-times read, how God anoynted Jehu King, ofpurpose to extirpate and cut off the whole house of K. Ahab.’’ This is, nodoubt, too early a date to imagine that Prynne is prefiguring the Englishregicide as such. The point is rather that the multiple instances of king-killing are a naturalized vector for thought in the era, a series of acts evi-dently praised by God ‘‘executing that which is right in mine eyes.’’28

We might easily go further back beyond Prynne, in attempting to dis-cern when biblical regicide entered into the marrow of English politicalthought, though the regicides at issue in the earlier part of the century werethought to be Catholic, riding the long slow wave of paranoia at Jesuitplotting.29 William Vaughan, writing in 1630, notes the ways that Satan‘‘insinuates into you slanderous suggestions concerning your Prince his sov-eraigntie, advising you to vent them out at your mouthes,’’ and how at suchpromptings we must catch and check ourselves. This, Vaughan explains, iswhat the Jesuits so signally fail to do with their insistence on the lawfulnessof resistance:

Laugh on yee Kingkillars, laugh on for a little while in this earthlyworld, and yee shall surely weepe in the world to come. Davidsheart smote within him, because hee cut but the lap of King Saulsgarment. And yet our mortified Schoolemen, our Ghostly RomishFathers make no conscience to cut off the heads of our annointedKings, to compare these Regicides with renowned Judith.30

27 Anon. (Philippe de Mornay), Vindiciae contra tyrannos, or, Concerning the LegitimatePower of a Prince over the People, and of the People over a Prince, ed. and trans. GeorgeGarnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Anne McLaren, ‘‘RethinkingRepublicanism: Vindiciae contra tyrannos in context,’’ Historical Journal 49 (2006):23–52 (32), with reference to Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern PoliticalThought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol. 2.28 William Prynne, The Soveraigne Power of Parliaments and Kingdomes (London, 1643),100.29 On Jesuit thought and reactions to it, see Harro Hopfl, Jesuit Political Thought: theSociety of Jesus and the State, c. 1540–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2004); Thomas Clancy, S.J, Papist Pamphleteers: The Allen-Persons party and the Politi-cal Thought of the Counter-Reformation in England, 1572–1615 (Chicago: Loyola Uni-versity Press, 1964); Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: the Political Thought ofthe Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).30 William Vaughan, The Arraignment of Slander Perjury Blasphemy, and other MaliciousSinnes (London, 1630), 315.

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Robert Bolton, preaching in 1635 on the Catholic menace, citing theauthority of King James’s printed altercation with Cardinal Perron, noteshow ‘‘their learnedest Professours and greatest Doctors, blurre their bookeswith these bloody lines, and teach this most abhorred Trade of King-killing,and murdering Princes.’’31 Patrick Forbes in 1627 cites the Jesuit Marianaon regicide and ‘‘the exemple of Ehud.’’32

We should not suppose these to be isolated comments. They are on thecontrary wholly ingrained and the regular fare of political dialogue andexamples might be multiplied here.33 But, to conclude this brief excursioninto the quotidian use of biblical regicides, long before the issue becamepressing in England, I will cite a story told by Jeremiah Burroughs in 1639and repeated with some spectacular theatrics by Alexander Ross in 1641,on ‘‘The Jesuites Blasphemous Conjurations’’ to encourage their proselytesto king-killing treacheries, via the hypnotic liturgy of biblical violence. Witha certain degree of black-cloak drama, he explains, ‘‘These infernall fire-brands kneele all downe, who in their prayers observe their time; and putbefore the intended Traitor, a knife folded up in a scarfe; shut up in a littleBox, covered with an Agnus Dei; written about with black letters of per-fumes, odorifirous Characters.’’ Then, to sanctify the killer, they pronouncea litany of biblical warriors and regicides as warrant for the act:

Goe now like Jephte, with the Sword of Sampson in thy hand, theSword with which David did cut off Golia’s head, the Sword ofGedion; yea, the Sword with which Judith did cut off Holopherneshead, the sword of the valiant Machabees.34

After this, ‘‘they carry the thus inchanted bloody Regicide, and set himbefore an Altar,’’ where more incantations are said. Ross’s text ends with aprayer against such regicidal intent, explaining that this is no historical,

31 Robert Bolton, Two Sermons Preached at Northampton at two Severall Assises there(London, 1635), 27.32 Patrick Forbes, Eubulus, or A Dialogue (London, 1627), 121.33 Nehemiah Rogers, A Strange Vineyard in Palaestina (London, 1623), 117; ThomasScott, The Interpreter (London, 1622), 13, William Struther, A Looking Glasse forPrinces and People (London, 1632), 69; Jeremiah Burroughs, The Excellency of a Gra-cious Spirit (London, 1639), 101; Richard Ward, The Principall Duty of Parliament-men(London, 1641), 34–35.34 Alexander Ross, The Black Box of Rome, or, A True and Short Discourse Shewing theBlasphemous Treacheries and Conjurations of the Wicked Jesuites when they Intend andEncourage any of their Impious Disciples to Murther a King and Overthrow a Kingdome(London, 1641), 4.

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Elizabethan memory, but a clear and present danger: ‘‘O Lord preserve ourNoble King Charles, and all his posteritie, from the power of all such Rom-ish regicides and bloody Traitors, who thus plot and practice to build uptheir Romish Synagogue with blood.’’35

Regicides were plentiful in the English political memory of the era, heldas close to the heart as any classical or historical example. To argue that thenational memory went as readily to King David of Israel as to King Williamof Normandy demands, of course, a certain shift in our conception of thehistorical genealogies we construct, even granting that the era had fewdoubts about the historicity of the Bible. However Israel and Judah, forbetter or worse, were relentlessly transposed into Englishness across thedenominational spectrum. As the nation was Protestant, so its naturalinheritance was from the scriptural foundation of nations. There is, it mightbe noted, little in such a claim that touches on the more usual argumentabout the role of religion in the civil war, relating to ecclesiastical differ-ences, or any stance on the toleration of churches, nor any godly frenzy orapocalyptic presuppositions. There is, rather, political analysis and a work-ing body of language that is not reducible to a ‘‘secular’’ equivalent, thoughit is certainly intertwined with it.

THE SWEET FRUIT OF THE SCAFFOLD

Up to now, this essay has been describing a scriptural discourse—a publicand comprehensible sub-language around the kings of the bible—and indoing so, it has been necessary to cite widely, if only to avoid the suspicionthat it represents the private neuroses of selected ‘‘puritans,’’ but such astrategy risks the decontextualization of such references. To counter thesense of such chopped and minced passages (even if it is a great number ofthem), it is necessary to deal also with responses to the regicide in depth aswell as breadth. The following discussion, then, presents two hard-headedpolitical commentaries on the regicide, which are not rooted in any specifi-cally republican terms. The historiography on the abolition of English mon-archy has been conducted largely in relation to the red herring ofrepublicanism, though most scholars will admit the difficulty of finding anycard-carrying republicans. Blair Worden has complained of a too lax usageof the term, a tendency to term ‘‘any criticism of absolutism or tyranny asrepublicanism’’ and argues ‘‘doctrines of popular or parliamentary sover-

35 Alexander Ross, The Black Box of Rome, 7.

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eignty in the seventeenth century were not inherently republican.’’36 How-ever, there seems to me to be a still more fundamental objection to the term‘‘republican’’ used to describe anti-monarchist sentiment or a desire forkingless government. It would be hard to apply the term ‘‘republic,’’ withall its classical connotations, to the world of the biblical Judges, who weredeterminedly kingless and who, more importantly, were at the forefront ofEnglish thought over the period.

Writing in 1651, the lawyer and legal theorist, John Cooke, produceda thorough-going evisceration of the office of king, a defense of the regicidewhose indictment he had himself drafted. The detailed attack on the mon-archy does not draw on any of the ‘‘classical republican’’ arguments thatare so often used to characterize the political thinking of radicals. It does,however, engage in extensive detail on the relationship of kings and people,the rights and excesses of monarchs and models of exemplary rebellion.Cooke is rarely taken to be a political theorist, nor often as a legal theorist,though his account of statehood and polity is extensive and driven by thatmost central constitutional occasion, the execution of the king.37 Cookewas clearly immersed in the details of ‘‘republican’’ argument—he bothdefended the leveller Lilburne in a 1646 retrial of the 1637–38 prosecutionby Star Chamber and then prosecuted him in 1649. He argued the case forpro bono legal representation. He was involved in some ambitious schemeson behalf of the poor, in his 1648 tract Unum necessarium, or, The PooreMans Case and later in practice in Ireland, where he angered landlords withhis vigorous policies, ‘‘to provide cheap, accessible, and summary justice inMunster by reducing fees, office-holders, and professional lawyers, amal-gamating law and equity.’’38 Cooke was a multi-faceted radical and practi-cal lawyer. He also conceived of political events in resolutely biblical terms.For many writers, however, Cooke, at least in his post-facto account of theregicide, typifies the religious mania at the aberrant root of the regicidalact: ‘‘For Cooke, the temporal world must be ruled by Old Testamentinjunctions which overrode human law and constitution,’’ writes one histo-rian.39 This is a conclusion that fails to register the relentless presence and

36 Blair Worden, ‘‘Republicanism, Regicide and Republic: The English Experience’’ inRepublicanism, eds. Gelderen and Skinner, 1: 307–27, 313, 318–19.37 But see the useful legal-historical biography by Geoffrey Robertson, The TyrannicideBrief (London: Chatto, 2005).38 Wilfred Prest, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2004).39 Glenn Burgess, British Political Thought, 1500–1660: The Politics of the Post-Reformation (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 238–44 (241).

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discursive normality of the Old Testament in the political writings through-out (and indeed extending beyond) the revolutionary period.

In his major post-regicide work, Monarchy No Creature of Gods Mak-ing, Cooke traces a detailed narrative of kings in the Bible, in which mon-archs emerge repeatedly as a punishment upon the people. Marshalling therich patterns of regicide in the scriptures, he traces a set of injustices forwhich the kings were condemned and applies them to his own historicalcircumstances. For Cooke, the king and his court had woven conditions ofsuch endemic injustice upon the poor that nothing other than speedy justicewould suffice:

I have seriously thought that oppressions in Courts of Justice havebeen spun by the late Courtiers with so fine a threed that few butthose that daily meet with it in practise can see it . . . it will lyevery remote from the understandings of many worthy publike spir-ited men what course to take therein; without which all the warreshave been but as purgings and vomitings; the health of a Stateconsisting in the equallity and harmony of Justice; and all MartiallJustice is sanctified by the Civill Justice.40

The lawyer Cooke clearly has a professional investment in the arguments,but his case addresses a wider question of polity and the underpinnings ofpolitical constitution. Corruption for Cooke is not a question of the king’sobstinate personality, nor whether or not he fulfils some criterion of‘‘tyrant,’’ but is rather endemic to a situation in which the magistrate is inthrall to and dependant upon the king. Though fully capable of deployingclassical theorists when he chooses, Cooke places the burden of his argu-ment on scriptural precedent by tracing the rulers of Israel through Adam,Moses, Joshua, and the Judges, those non-republican anti-monarchists, bydistinguishing firmly between magistrate and monarch, and by demonstra-ting the significant number of monarchs killed in the Bible. With the almostinvariable blur of biblical Israel into contemporary England, Cooke takesthe Bible to be the textbook of regicide, noting how its more righteousmagistrates did not demur from king-killing with scruples about their beinganointed. Indeed, they killed kings by the handful, and he suggests, scrip-tural kings at least had the moral fiber to accept their deaths with goodgrace:

40 John Cook, Monarchy No Creature of Gods Making, Wherein is proved by Scriptureand Reason, that Monarchicall Goverment [sic] is against the mind of God (London,1651), 25–26.

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Hee hangs up five Kings, makes quicke worke with them, they didnot plead that their persons were sacred, that they were the Lordsanointed and not to be toucht, but said Josua [10:25] thus shallthe Lord your God doe to all your enemies against whom ye fight,as if he should say, if there be at any time so long as God hath apeople in the world, a King in England, Scotland, or any other partof the world fighting against them, the Captains of the men ofWarre must put their feet upon the necks of such Kings who everthey be, and they must be smitten, slaine, and hanged up untill theevening; and never did trees in England yeeld and bring forth suchsweet fruit as those wherof the Scaffolds were made at Whitehall,January 30. 1648.41

There is, simply, no such potent model of regicide to parallel the Bible’sevident disdain for the office of king, and no Tarquin is dealt with in suchsummary fashion. Cooke’s uncompromising defense of regicide proceedsthrough the Bible, tracing its many anti-kingly instances, from the slayingof Eglon by Ehud to how the people of Israel urge Gideon to take the crownand establish it as a hereditary monarchy. But ‘‘Gideon rejects the motionwith disdaine, hereditary Kingdomes have no footstep in Scripture, but theLord is said to rule when fit men rule by the Lawes of God.’’42 The nextinstance of kingship raised among the Israelites is when ‘‘Abimeleck makesno bones to kill seventy of his brethren to make himselfe King,’’ on whichCooke comments that ‘‘so undoubtedly whoever shall by plots and conspir-acies endeavour to introduce any of Abimelecks race or conditions to beKing of England, Ireland or Scotland, or act any thing against the late stat-ute for the abolishing of Kingly power shall perish by the sword of Jus-tice.’’43 This is, undoubtedly, fierce stuff, and we would surely be justifiedin seeing the text as slightly fevered in its simultaneous aggressive anddefensive stances. Fevered it may be; political it certainly is. Given the legalstature and standing of Cooke, together with his social radicalism, and thepolitical imperatives he urges to pull down recidivist authorities, it isentirely inadequate to relegate his importance on the grounds, implicit inmost writing on republicanism, that biblical rhetoric is second-division pol-itics.

Cooke’s concerns are not, firstly, ‘‘religious,’’ but rather legal, though

41 Cook, Monarchy No Creature, 18–19.42 Cook, Monarchy No Creature, 20. Judges 6:14, 8:33–35.43 Cook, Monarchy No Creature, 20–21.

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his major constitutional-legal writing on the regicide is overwhelmingly a‘‘historical’’ analysis of the Bible. Many of the terms in such a claim needtheir caveat. In one sense, it might be wrong to claim his motives are notreligious, in a work so overwhelmingly biblical. However, the term ‘‘reli-gion,’’ in the context of regicide quickly, almost inevitably, descends into acaricature of mechanical puritans, hearing the whisper of divine injunc-tions, while the sensitive ‘‘republican’’ and secular tyrannicide maintainshis high principles. ‘‘Religious’’ has acquired so much useless freight, andis evoked in so many and such tired narratives of the emergence of secular-ity that, in the context of Civil War politics, it is effectively moribund. Thereis, however, little justification, aside from a Whiggish view of modernity,for elevating classical tyrannicide over biblical rhetoric of regicide. Thereis, at least, no such stark distinction in the writings of seventeenth-centuryanti-monarchists.

Edmund Ludlow, the regicide and diarist, kept meticulous records ofevents, both before and after the Restoration, although the earlier part islost. His Memoirs, or at least a portion of them, were published in 1698–99and came as something of a sensation, in contrast to the ‘‘dry diet of Resto-ration histories’’ previously published.44 However, as noted by the moderneditor of his manuscripts, the Memoirs were abridged: ‘‘The Memoirs donot suggest that religion entered frequently into Ludlow’s political calcula-tions’’ in contrast to the manuscript in which ‘‘spiritual intensity and apoc-alyptic prophecy are woven into the narrative.’’45 Ludlow’s account of theRestoration, with the utterly dashed hopes for the godly nation, is incompa-rably detailed and richly punctuated with biblical thinking. Blair Worden’sfine account of Ludlow, and the historiography on him in Roundhead Rep-utations, does much to reconstitute his role in affairs and to dispel thenotion of a ‘‘secular’’ thinker, but does not go so far as to suggest thatscriptural analysis might constitute any kind of default mode of conceptual-izing events, or that it constitutes a language in which Ludlow did his politi-cal reckoning. Instead, the memoirs, as they exist in Voyce from the WatchTower, are said to show a set of ‘‘puritan’’ impulses underlying his concep-tualization of events that he filled with a ‘‘spiritual intensity and apocalyptic

44 Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower, ed. A.B. Worden (London: CamdenSociety, 1978), 1–2. On the complex and instructive manuscript and publication history,see Worden’s introduction and notes on the prior editions, Edmund Ludlow, Memoirs ofEdmund Ludlow Esq., 3 vols., ed. Darby (1698–99). Also see C.H. Firth (ed.) Memoirsof Edmund Ludlow Esq., 2 vols (Oxford, 1894).45 Ludlow, Voyce, 5.

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prophecy.’’46 Puritanism is too loaded a term here, one that tends to short-circuit any attempt to describe sophistication in the thought of a Civil Warwriter. As with Cooke and others, Ludlow’s biblicism should be seen asstraightforward and indeed rigorous political analysis, rather than beingseen as a sideline in diary-keeping piety.

Ludlow’s journal is a less formal and capacious argument thanCooke’s, but in some ways it is more valuable for that. The scriptures arebrought into the weave of events and for the interpretation of action.Though it is not a political treatise, it nevertheless is a work which engagesthe range of questions on the constitution and rulership that recur in theperiod. When considering where final authority lies in the kingdom, Lud-low muses on a series of examples in which scriptural avengers have tosacrifice the peace of the kingdom for a godly cause:

Did not Jehu, by the command of God himself, destroy Joram thatking of Israel . . . and Jehoiada the high priest, that good manmade no scruple when he had a power in his hand, to put Achaliahto death for . . . usurpation, notwithstanding her crying, Treason,treason . . . Amaziah slain in Lachish, and Uzziah his son put onthe throne. Uzziah himself afflicted with leprosy for violating thelaw.47

As name piles upon name, we might properly ask, with some exasperation,what the weight or importance of such rhetoric, such copia, could be? Suchlists seem to reiterate the same point; however, it is not necessarily exactlythe same point. In both public and private writings, whether sermons, dia-ries or political treatises, early modern authors register distinctions, which,it is clear, they expect will be understood. It is the specificity of the individ-ual regicidal acts which constitute them as such a versatile language andwhich moves them along as scriptural argument. If they blur together, itmay very well be due to our inability to discern differences among the kings.Amaziah and Uzziah are not merely more examples of godly and providen-tial king-killing. They are also, in Ludlow’s usage, particularly pertinentexamples of a constitution interrupted. Uzziah, planted on the throne bythe same people who had killed his father, Amaziah, does not seek bloodyrevenge, but rules with some equanimity and godliness, until, for a separate

46 Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions ofPosterity (London: Penguin, 2001), 39–64.47 Ludlow, Voyce, 137; Jehoiada at 2 Chronicles 23:12–2; Uzziah at 2 Kings 14:5–6

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offense, he is stricken with leprosy.48 Ludlow, in the 1660s, has an evidentinterest in kings who might want revenge.

Charles II (similarly placed on the throne by the acquiescence of thosewho had killed his father—Parliament) was plainly not, in Ludlow’s opinion,heeding the scriptural message that should be learnt from such an example.His journal, at this point, is a plaint to the systematic revenge being taken onthe government of the previous two decades. In some accounts, the restora-tion regime was a model of restraint and moderation in its vengeance, but itsounds anything but restrained as Ludlow narrates the executions of seniorstatesman, generals, clergymen, and judiciary: ‘‘Major General Harrison, MrJohn Carew, Chief Justice Cooke and Mr Hugh Peters . . . at the place whereCharing Cross stood, as well to revenge the wrong done to that sacredrelique, as to gratify Nero with the sight of that tragedy, the shedding theblood of those eminent servants of the Lord.’’49 Ludlow is bracingly unrepen-tant, weaving instances of the continuing yoke of kingship and biblical tyr-anny into his account of historical events. He is also scathing about theconstitutional legitimacy of Charles’s new courts: these are illegitimate instru-ments of government with little care for the law. When discussing Charles II’sselection of forty-seven new additions to the judiciary, the ‘‘bloodhounds’’chosen to wipe the constitutional memory of parliament’s authority away,Ludlow notes how the new magistrates were attempting, though in his viewfailing, to adopt a biblical basis for their authority. Judge Turner, in tryingthe regicides, proclaims a scriptural rationale for revenge upon the rulers ofthe Commonwealth. Yet, Ludlow notes with disdain, he can only achieve hisaim by lopping off the most significant part of the narrative:

When Turner came to act his part, his memory served him to recitewhat Amaziah did when he was established in his throne, in callingto an account his father’s servants who had murthered him; buttakes no notice of the men of Jerusalem sending after the sameAmaziah (as in the latter end of that chapter) to Laish, and slayingof him there, and bring him upon a horse to Jerusalem and buryinghim there, and setting up Uzziah his son to reigne in his stead; whowe never reade did question any who slew his father, because itwas done by the people.50

48 Uzziah is also known as Azariah (in Kings), though this is, rather confusingly, the nameof the high priest who resisted the king (2 Chron 26:16–23) and struck him with leprosy.49 Ludow, Voyce, 199.50 Ludow, Voyce, 210, re. 2 Kings 14:5 ‘‘Now it happened, as soon as the kingdom wasestablished in his hand, that he exectured his servants who had murdered his father the

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King Amaziah may have taken revenge for the murder of his father Joash,but he is in turn killed for this impiety. His son, Uzziah, by contrast, doesnot engage in any such retribution and lives in comparative peace. Theparallels, for Ludlow, are evident: Charles II and the judiciary should learnfrom a son who was set upon a throne by the people who had killed hisfather. Uzziah has evidently a different rhetorical function than Amaziah,Jehoiada or Jehu. He becomes in the early Restoration an important prece-dent for those seeking rehabilitation with the new regime and exemplifiesthe ways in which a son of a murdered monarch might act. But there isanother point to be made here: the continuing currency of scriptural argu-ments on both sides of the political, and judicial, fence. Ludlow is con-temptuous of the judge’s skewed exegesis, but both he and Turner findthemselves arguing on the familiar terrain of (what seems to us to be) scrip-tural hair-splitting as a default language of politics.

Ludlow is by no means always engrossed in biblical frames of thinking,but I take this to be a point in support of the claims I make here. Thescriptural does not occupy a separate and distinct world of thinking fromother modes of legal and secular political philosophy. It is rather aresource—and a rich one at that—which early modern thinkers dip intoand whose authority is immense, for royalists as much as parliamentariansor ‘‘puritans.’’ It is possible to dismiss the language that we find in Cookeand Ludlow as mere efforts at justification after the act. It is also possiblesimply to ignore such writings, and see the regicide in either republican oropportunistic terms, as a brutal power grab. This essay has argued thatto write off scriptural language as merely the ‘‘religious convictions’’ ofa particular figure—with all the damp piety that such a characterizationimplies—is to misrepresent the political discourse of the era. The scripturalin the seventeenth century was a primary mode of reading the nation andCatholicism, and indeed, although I do not engage with it here, the widerpolitics of Europe. To ignore it, as is so often done in constitutional analy-sis, is akin to reading the ideological disputes of the twentieth century, whileinsisting that the terms of communism, fascism or capitalism, no matterhow ideologically laden, have nothing to tell us that we cannot get from ajudicious translation of those heated ideas into post-ideological terms.

University of York.

king.’’ Amaziah’s killing in a conspiracy and raising of his son to the throne is at 2 Kings14:19–21.

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