Buried deep in the third volume of John Adams’ A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787-1788) is a curious but potentially profound statement by one of America’s preeminent founders. In the course of examining the right constitution of a commonwealth, Adams paid homage to the English tradition and inheritance. “Americans too ought for ever to acknowledge their obligations to English writers, or rather have as good a right to indulge a pride in the recollection of them as the inhabitants of the three kingdoms.”11. John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: William Young, 1797), 3:209. Adams then identified three periods in English history “in which the principles of government have been anxiously studied, and very valuable productions published.”22. Adams, A Defence, 3:210. Those periods were the Protestant Reformation, the English Interregnum (1640-1660), and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.33. Technically the English Interregnum, the period between the execution of Charles I and the restoration of the Stuart Crown by Charles II in 1660—the dynamic rule of Oliver Cromwell’s republican commonwealth—is usually dated from 1649 to 1660. However, in this case, Adams specifies that he’s talking about “the whole interval between 1640 and 1660” (Adams, A Defence, 3:209–10). Adams is dating the Interregnum roughly from the beginning of the English Civil War. As a prelude to the Protestant Reformation, Adams brazenly includes Machiavelli, “who is called the great restorer of the true politics” (Adams, A Defence, 3:210). On Machiavelli’s reception in England, see Paul A. Rahe, ed., Machiavelli’s Liberal Republican Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Of the first, Adams identified a little-known author, John Ponnet, who wrote The Short Treatise of Political Power in 1556. Of this tract, Adams makes his profound statement: “[it] contains all the essential principles of liberty which were afterwards dilated on by Sidney and Locke.”44. Adams, A Defence, 3:210.
The critical point is not that Ponnet’s tract “contains all the essential principles of liberty,” but that the works of John Locke and Algernon Sidney were downstream of the sixteenth-century English churchman and theologian. This observation has far-reaching implications for how we understand the founding of America, as scholars have long established the central role of Locke and Sidney in providing the ideas that inspired the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution. In this article, I will use Ponnet’s political theory to show his continuity with Locke and Sidney, and to argue that reconceiving Locke and Sidney—and thus the American founding—as transmitters of the Protestant political tradition, and not primarily as Enlightenment thinkers or radical Whig theorists, will help recast the American founding as an essential project of magisterial Protestantism. Importantly, I do not attempt to trace the full chain of transmission through Theodore Beza, the Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos, and the Huguenot and Scottish political traditions—a project for a longer study. Here, I merely establish the doctrinal continuity at the two endpoints Adams himself identified.
Locke and Sidney: The Traditional Story
It is undeniable that the American founders were greatly influenced by the works of John Locke, especially his Two Treatises of Government (1689), as well as Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government(posthumously published in 1698). Outside of the Bible, Locke was probably the most cited philosopher during the revolutionary period, if, like Adams, we date that period from 1760-1775.55. Steven M. Dworetz, The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism, and the American Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 43–45; Donald S. Lutz, “The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought,” The American Political Science Review 78, no. 1 (Mar. 1984): 189–97. Citations of Locke drop off after 1775/1776. Sermons like Connecticut’s Elisha Williams’ The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants (1744) follow a Lockean sequence from the state of nature, where men are free and equal, to the creation of civil society by compact and the establishment of a majoritarian legislature. Sidney, for his part, was cited far less frequently, yet he is mentioned positively dozens of times by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin, James Otis, James Madison, Jonathan Mayhew, and in many anonymous pamphlets during the imperial crisis (1763–1776). Of note, Jefferson, in a famous letter to Henry Lee on May 8, 1825, asserted that the Declaration was “an expression of the American mind” and that its authority “rests … on the harmonizing sentiments of the day” as found in the works of “Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, and Sidney.”66. “Jefferson to Henry Lee,” in Jefferson: Political Writings, eds. Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 148.
Locke and Sidney were not identical in their political thought, even if they are often lumped together. Scholars have often classified Locke as an Enlightenment thinker (i.e., liberal) and Sidney as a classical republican. Bernard Bailyn, in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, described Locke as part of the European Enlightenment and an “Enlightenment rationalist” due to his adherence to natural rights, the consent of the governed, and the right to revolution.77. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 27–30. In contrast, Sidney has often been cast as a classical republican, with his emphasis on citizen virtue and public-spiritedness. However, the best scholarly works rightly note that Locke and Sidney both contain elements of ancient republican and modern liberal political thought.88. On Sidney as a bridge between the republican and liberal traditions, see Alan Craig Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). Sidney has also, at times, been classified as a “real Whig” or a “radical Whig” (see the discussion in Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1959], 38–43 and throughout).
For our purposes, John Adams implicitly identified the unity between Locke and Sidney: both of their works dilate upon “the essential principles of liberty.” This is unsurprising, for not only were they contemporaries in the lead-up to the Exclusion Crisis and eventually the Glorious Revolution, but, more importantly, both of their principal works (mentioned above) were responses to Sir Robert Filmer’s divine-right argument. Filmer, in his best-known work, Patriarcha, had argued a series of propositions: that kings were fathers of families, that it is neither natural nor right for the people to choose their rulers or govern through elected representatives, and that human law does not constrain the natural and fatherly power of kings.99. I am indebted to Tom West for this succinct summary (Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, ed. Thomas G. West [Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1996], xviii–xix).
Locke’s Two Treatiseswas a direct response to Filmer’s ideas. His First Treatise is a detailed analysis and refutation of Filmer’s patriarchal power and divine right thesis, while the Second Treatiseis Locke’s positive proposition of the origin, form, and purposes of civil government, meant as a competitive account to Filmer’s theories. Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government were likewise a direct response to Filmer in an attempt to rebuff his theories in the wake of the Exclusion Crisis (1679–1681) that pitted Protestant and Country Party Whigs against James, Duke of York (King Charles II’s Catholic brother) and the Court Party Tories.1010. Filmer had written Patriarcha in the 1630s, and the manuscript had limited circulation in the ensuing decades. It was not officially published until 1680, in the middle of the Exclusion Crisis, and was distributed as Tory propaganda in defense of hereditary divine right kingship and primogeniture. Together, Locke and Sidney argued the inverse of Filmer: that political power is distinct in kind from patriarchal power; that just government requires government by the consent of men who are equal in their natural liberty; that civil law must adhere to the law of nature and nature’s divine lawgiver; that the best form of government will prioritize the popular or representative element; and that every ruler, no matter his claims to a divine donation or right, is subject to the law that also obligates all other men in the commonwealth as legally passed by the legislature (i.e., Parliament). In addition, critically, both Locke and Sidney advocated a doctrine of the right to revolution as a corollary to these precepts.
If these ideas consist of the essential principles of liberty, then, according to Adams’ assertion, all these ideas should be present in John Ponnet’s works. Neither Locke nor Sidney was inventing new political modes and orders, nor should we think of them essentially as Enlightenment rationalists or radical Whigs. Instead, they carried on and developed a political tradition much older than themselves.
John Ponnet’s A Short Treatise of Political Power: A Brief Guide
John Ponnet (1514/1516–1556) was a churchman and the Anglican Bishop of Winchester. He attended Cambridge, where he earned a BA and MA from Queens’ College before entering the ministry. Ponnet began his adult work in the middle of the intense religious wars following the Reformation, and his life was marked with conflict. He defied the ban on clerical marriage in 1548 and was married; he was arrested in 1549 on accusations of court intrigue; and when Mary I came to the throne in 1553, Ponnet and a few hundred others fled England for Strasbourg. It was from this vantage point, with indignation toward a Catholic despot on the English throne, that Ponnet wrote A Short Treatise of Political Power shortly before his death.
The treatise is divided into seven chapters and a concluding exhortation that treat the origin of civil power, absolute power, obedience and subjection to law, and whether tyrants can be resisted. It begins with Ponnet’s consideration of the origin of civil government—from what right does true political authority come? Ponnet opens with a bold assertion: that man’s reason is weak and corrupted and cannot serve as the basis for civil rule—a position that seems at odds with Locke and Sidney’s exaltation of human reason. Ponnet explains his view that it was “because through the fall of the first man, [that] his reason is radically corrupt, and sensuality has gotten the upper hand, [and] he is not able by himself to rule himself, but must have a more excellent governor.”1111. John Ponet, A Short Treatise of Politike Pouuer (Strasbourg, 1556), 2–3 . Ponnet’s name can be spelled “Ponet” or “Poynet,” but I will keep Adams’ spelling with the double “n.” All citations of Ponnet are taken from the 1556 facsimile reproduced at the end of Winthrop S. Hudson’s book, John Ponet (1516?–1556): Advocate of Limited Monarchy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), 1–183. All spellings of Ponnet’s work have been modernized. For any paragraph that makes extensive use of Ponnet, a single footnote will be used to show the range of pages from which the citations are taken, in the order in which they occur. If all men are equally corrupt, then who among men can serve as “a more excellent governor”? Ponnet answers that God and his law are this governor and men’s civil rule must thereby abide by God’s law.1212. “Such were desirous to know the perfect and only governor of all … [and] so at length to confess, that it was one God that ruled all. By Him we live, we move, and we have our being. He made us, and not we ourselves. …He has taken upon Himself the order and government of man, His chief creature, and prescribed a rule to him, how he should behave himself, what he should do, and what he may not do” ( Short Treatise, 4). How is God’s law mediated to men? Primarily by divine revelation: “God set this rule forth in writing in the Decalogue, or the Ten Commandments.” Ponnet, like many others, sums up the Ten Commandments by Christ’s two greatest commandments, “You will love the Lord your God above all things, and your neighbor as yourself,” and in the Golden Rule, “Whatever you would want done unto yourself, do that unto others.”1313. Ponnet, 4.
At the same time, however, Ponnet explains that divine law and the law of nature align. The rule that God prescribed for man to guide and direct him “is the law of nature, first planted and grafted in the mind of man.” It was only after man’s mind was “defiled by sin, filled with darkness, and encumbered with many doubts” that God also revealed this rule in the Ten Commandments and in Jesus Christ. Elsewhere, Ponnet makes it clear there is no conflict between reason and revelation, for God’s laws are the name “by which … also the laws of nature are comprehended.” For Ponnet, natural law is subsumed under divine law and teaches the same precepts.1414. Ponnet, 4, 22–23.
Equality and Political Power
By disparaging man’s reason and by placing all men under God’s revelation, Ponnet not only asserts a type of human equality but tempers the power of both kings and people alike. All are fallen and in need of divine instruction; none can claim a right to absolute or arbitrary power based on magnitude (majority assembly rule) or wisdom (aristocracy) or hereditary purity (monarchy). Ponnet’s understanding of men’s equality, however, was not just in their common corruption, but in their equal liberty. Men are at liberty to dispose of themselves and their possessions, but only within the bounds of God’s law in nature and revelation. In speaking of liberty, Ponnet contrasts the Anabaptists with “Papists.” The first erroneously confuses license with liberty, while the latter confuses despotism with liberty:
For the Anabaptists mistake Christian liberty, thinking that men may live without sin, and forget the fall of man, whereby … he is no more able to rule himself by himself, than one beast is able to rule another: and that therefore God ordained civil power (his minister) to rule him, and to call him back, whenever he should pass the limits of his duty. … And the Papists neither consider the degree of powers, nor over what things civil power has authority, nor how far subjects ought to obey their governors.1515. Ponnet, 47–48.
Thus, a commonwealth that has too much or too little obedience to God’s law will destroy liberty. “If obedience is too much or too little in a commonwealth, it causes much evil and disorder. For too much makes the governors forget their vocation, and to usurp upon their subjects; too little breeds a licentious liberty, and makes the people to forget their duty.” Both errors will undermine the commonwealth by reducing it to “havoc and utter destruction,” but if the people are so fortunate as to live in a commonwealth that avoids both pitfalls, they will be blessed by God with peace and prosperity. True liberty, Ponnet claims, is “Christian liberty,” and true commonwealths are “a body of free men, and not of bondmen.”1616. Ponnet, 47, 69.
Ponnet’s account of man’s natural liberty and equality is strikingly different from Locke and Sidney’s in that Ponnet does not talk about men being equally free and independent in the state of nature which leads to the creation of civil government by consent. Even so, in substance their understanding of natural equality is the same. All men are equal before God, all are fallen and corrupted, all have God-given reason, but sin has weakened and deformed it, and all need enlightenment and guidance from God (whether from the law of nature or divine revelation). In addition, all men possess a natural liberty that must adhere to God’s law to avoid the bondage of both licentiousness and despotism, but which is successfully exercised with the guidance of a civil law that maintains public order and virtue.1717. The counterpart to civil law that trains men in the proper use of their liberty is ecclesiastical law. We do not have space in this article to explore Ponnet’s understanding of the two kingdoms doctrine of the magisterial Reformers, but it is present in his limitation of civil power to temporal matters (Ponnet, 50).
The Origin of Political Power
What does this mean for the origin of government? First and foremost for Ponnet, “all political power and authority comes … from God.”1818. Ponnet, 40. However, this power is not given as a divine donation to a particular king or royal family. Ponnet argues that God “instituted political power and gave authority to men to make laws” when he gave the Ten Commandments; and that in so doing, God “gave man authority over the body and life of man, because He would have man live quietly with man, that all might serve him quietly in holiness and righteousness all the days of his life,” and “He gave him [man] authority over goods, lands, possessions, and all such things that might breed controversy and discord.”1919. Ponnet, 7–8. Political power devolves from God to men, and they can delegate it to kings, representatives, and officers after the formation of the commonwealth.
For Ponnet, kings or governors will rule, but only as ministers of God—the highest power—accountable to his law and dependent on the consent of the people. “God is the highest power, the power of powers, from him is derived all power. All people are his servants made to serve and glorify Him. All other powers are but his ministers, set to oversee that everyone behaves himself, as he should towards God, and to do those things, that he is justly commanded to do by God.” In speaking of kings, the Anglican bishop asserted that there were only two types. The first are absolute kings “who alone may make positive laws” because “the whole state and body of their country … have resigned to them their authority to do so”; yet this king, Ponnet contends, “is rather to be considered a tyrant than a king.” The other kind of king is limited by the people, who retain sovereignty: “the other be such, unto whom the people have not given such authority, but keep it themselves.” Thus, legitimate kings “cannot make laws but with the consent of the people.”2020. Ponnet, 52, 25–26, 28.
Ponnet held to the trusteeship theory of government: the people under God hold political authority collectively, which they then delegate as a trust to representatives and rulers. Ponnet speaks of rulers as those who are “put in trust and authority to make the laws and statutes,” and of the people as those “who have appointed an office upon trust.” Who appointed them? Both God and the people. Rulers, as ministers of God, hold their power and the people’s respect in good faith. When this is abused, however, God will judge them, and the people will lose trust. “How much more will the Almighty God abhor, condemn, and exercise His severe judgment upon them that abuse their authority given to them by Him, and deceive and undo those poor sheep of His, in whom (as His ministers) they put their trust?”2121. Ponnet, 10, 107, 16. Thus, for Ponnet, civil power comes from both God and man: from God as the origin and end of political power and from men, who, as divine representatives, exercise a delegated power from God.
The Popular Spring of Political Power
Ponnet believed civil power was maintained as a trust between the people and kings, or between the people and their elected government, like Parliament. Ponnet only briefly mentions Parliament in A Short Treatise. In the first chapter, Ponnet denounces rulers who force the people to lend to them and then never repay the loan. In a possible allusion to Henry VIII’s forced loans in 1522-1523 that went unpaid, Ponnet says, “he [the ruler] causes a Parliament to be assembled as if he had been lent nothing at all, and they [Parliament] dare not displease him. To please him, they remit this general debt. This is a wicked and unjust law.”2222. Ponnet, 6. It is wicked and unjust not only because it is a form of theft, but because it perverts the purpose of Parliament, which is to represent the people’s interests. In chapter two, when speaking of the people’s political authority, Ponnet argues that
Now where the people have given their authority to their governor to make such laws, he cannot break or dispense with the positive laws: how much less may such governors, kings, and princes to whom the people have not given their authority (but they with the people, and the people with them make the laws) break them or dispense with them? If this were tolerable, then is it in vain to make solemn assemblies of the whole state and long parliaments? What certainty should there be in anything, where all should depend on one’s will and affection?2323. Ponnet, 27.
Note that Ponnet assumes that “solemn assemblies … and long parliaments” are representative of the “whole state.” The people may choose a king to lead them, but they are not obligated to do so. “Kings, princes, and governors have their authority of the people, as all laws, usages, and policies do declare and testify.” Ponnet continues his exposition, explaining that “in some places and countries they have more and greater authority, in some places less. And in some, the people have not given this authority to any other, but retain and exercise it themselves. And is any man so unreasonable as to deny that the whole may do as much as they have permitted one member to do?”2424. Ponnet, 106–107. In saying of the people they “retain and exercise it [political power] themselves,” Ponnet may be referring to a direct democracy. Clearly, for Ponnet, the power of kings and governors (and Parliaments) flows from the people: the people may not delegate a power they do not first have from God, and kings cannot exercise a power the people have not granted them.2525. This may seem confusing, but Ponnet’s basic view could be reduced to the belief that civil power in its formal and final causes comes from God, but in its material and efficient causes comes from the people. In this way, kings, governors, and representatives have political power both from God and from the people. This means, among other things, that both the people and kings are constrained by a higher law; neither can exempt themselves from God’s laws, pass a law that contravenes a divine command, or turn a moral evil into a moral good.
Forms of Political Power
Ponnet leaves it to the people to decide their form of government, but he prefers a mixed regime for the English people. Adams extolled Ponnet for his advocacy of mixed government: “this writer is clearly for a mixed government, in three equiponderant branches.”2626. Adams, A Defence, 3:210. In his discussion of the form of government, Ponnet argues that “whether this authority to make laws, or the power to execute the same, shall be or remain in one person alone, or in many, it is not expressed, but left to the discretion of the people to make so many and so few, as they think necessary for the maintenance of the state.”2727. Ponnet, Short Treatise, 8. In other words, neither nature nor divine command obliges or prohibits the many, the few, or the one from ruling. The form of government is prudentially chosen by the people based upon their needs and character, as well as the quality of statesmen among them.
Even so, after naming the three classical forms of government (monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy), Ponnet goes on to champion a combination of the three as the best regime: “where all [are] together, that is, a king, the nobility, and commoners, [you have] a mixed state: which men by long continuance have judged to be the best sort of all. For where the mixed state was exercised, there did the commonwealth long continue.”2828. Ponnet, 9. Did Ponnet think these three elements were to be weighted equally? When read carefully, Ponnet’s prioritization of the consent of the governed—of a popular basis for kings and nobles—shines through. Civil power comes from God to the people collectively, and every king and noble is accountable to the law and its purpose of providing for the general welfare of the people.
The Ends of Political Power and Equal Protection of the Laws
In his Short Treatise, Ponnet argues that every state, no matter the form, “tend[s] to one end, that is, to the maintenance of justice, to the wealth and benefit of the whole multitude, and not for the superior and governors alone.”2929. Ponnet, 9; cf. pp. 40, 78. Justice entails, first, following God’s law as specified in the Ten Commandments. For “whatever God commands man to do, he ought not to consider the matter, but be straight to obey the commander. For we are sure, what He commands, is just and right: for from Him, that is, all together just and right, no injustice or wrong can come.”3030. Ponnet, 52. Absolute authority in one man too often leads to breaking God’s commandments, resulting in public injustice and ruin.3131. Ponnet equates arbitrary political power with the right to break God’s commandments with impunity. Thus, Ponnet concludes, “kings, princes, and governors of commonwealths have not, nor can justly claim, an absolute authority, but the end of their authority is the maintenance of justice, to defend the innocent, and to punish evil.” Ponnet’s understanding of justice was deeply scriptural, as he explicitly turned to Paul’s famous passage in Romans 13 to prove that political power comes from God and is designed to reward good and punish evil.3232. Ponnet, 33, 53–54.
Second, justice also requires that all men in the commonwealth be equal under the law. Ponnet spends a significant amount of the Short Treatise proving that even kings are subject to the positive laws of their country. His argument comes in two parts. In the first part, he argues that just civil law adheres to God’s law, and kings (as well as all men) are under God’s law and bound to obey God’s commandments, so kings are not exempt from the civil law. As Ponnet succinctly puts it, “A king may no more commit idolatry than a private man: he may not take the name of God in vain, he may not break the Sabbath, no more than any private man.”3333. Ponnet, 35. In short, since all men are equally responsible before God, equal treatment under just laws naturally and necessarily follows; the king cannot arbitrarily exempt himself from following the law for his own self-interest.3434. Ponnet does not take up the issue of royal or executive prerogative or states of exception where the ruler might have a good reason to contravene a law or exempt himself (or others) from the law. This may be one area where Locke “dilates” on Ponnet, in Locke’s treatment of prerogative power (see John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], chap. XIV [pp. 374–80]).
In the second part of his argument, Ponnet artfully inverts the traditional aristocratic belief that allowed legal exemptions for nobles in political office due to their high status—not because justice or the public good demanded it. Political leaders are not merely private persons who may use the trust of civil power for their own advantage, but they are public representatives—they are ministers of God and represent the interests of their commonwealth collectively, and thus they should be held to an even higher standard: “he [the king] is bound and charged under great pains to keep them [God’s law] because he is both a private man in respect to his own person, and a public figure in respect to his office.”3535. Ponnet, 36. Kings that do make exemptions for themselves, and in so doing cover over egregious evils (such as murder, theft, and persecution), will be dealt with mercilessly by God, for “mercy is granted unto the simple, but those that are in authority shall be punished.”3636. Ponnet, 38. This is another form of Ponnet’s argument from equality and difference: all men are equal because they will be equally punished by God for breaking his law, yet each man will also receive his due given his respective station and responsibilities in life. Ponnet concluded his argument with the stirring assertion that “kings and princes ought, both by God’s law, the law of nature, man’s law, and good reason, to be obedient and subject to the positive laws of their country, and may not break them, and are not exempt from them, nor may dispense with them, unless the makers of the laws give them express authority to do so.”3737. Ponnet, 46. This sentence hints at prerogative power, but a prerogative granted to a public official by the people.
The Right to Resistance and Revolution
In the final chapters of his treatise, Ponnet turns to the question of resistance to tyranny. Previously, Ponnet had argued that commonwealths must have neither too much obedience and deference toward their leaders (like the Papists), nor too little (like the Anabaptists). In speaking of obedience, Ponnet compared the commonwealth to a human person, which requires every part to function in harmony under submission of the highest, rational part.3838. Ponnet prefigures Hobbes in speaking of the “sinews” of the body politic that bind the people together (“as the body of man is knit and kept together in due proportion by the sinews, so every commonwealth is kept and maintained in good order by obedience” [Ponnet, 47]). Likewise, obedience to God’s law and civil law, and thus to those in power, is paramount for the commonwealth—yet this obedience can only go so far. Ponnet was well aware of the doctrines of unlimited submission and passive resistance to the higher powers that had cowed many into submitting to tyrants, but he briskly rebuffed them.3939. See Ponnet, 48–49.
Ultimately, men are responsible in their consciences before God, not to other men. Ponnet appeals to the magisterial doctrine of the two kingdoms in denying that civil magistrates have power over the salvation of men’s souls and their consciences:
Civil power is a power and ordinance of God, appointed to certain things, but no general minister over all things. God has not given it power over the one and best part of man, that is, the soul and conscience of man, but only over the other and worst part of man, that is, the body, and those things that belong unto the temporal life of man.4040. Ponnet, 50.
If one finds oneself having to choose between obeying God and obeying the king, “he must seek out what God would have him to do, and not what the subtlety and violence of wicked men will force him to do.” He must not do wrong in resisting evil; nor must he submit to evil and fall under God’s judgment. Ponnet’s exhortation was to suffer for God’s sake, or, if that was too much, to flee persecution (as he had done).4141. Ponnet, 50, 73–74.
Up to this point, Ponnet has been speaking of the private man and individual acts of resistance. But what should the people collectively do—could they rightfully do—if their king were to oppress the whole commonwealth? Ponnet denied that the people must suffer in silence and so be enslaved: “God does not so severely require of his people, that they should offer themselves to the prince’s slaughterhouse…”4242. Ponnet, 74. In speaking of the body of the commonwealth and of the king’s relationship to the people, Ponnet rejected the medieval theory of the king’s two bodies—the belief that the king’s natural, physical body and the body politic were legally fused as one in the king’s person and under his reign. The theory undergirded the continuity of the royal line and the sacredness of the crown, but it had often led kings to treat their people as their personal property.4343. This theory is explored most fully by Ernst Kantorowicz , The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). Ponnet drove a wedge between the office of civil magistracy (ordained by God and to be respected) and the person of the king (who merits conditional respect), and he elevated the commonwealth as being prior to and more important than the king.
“Without a commonwealth, there can be no king,” Ponnet declared. Continuing, he asserted that “men ought to have more respect to their country than to their prince: to the commonwealth than to any one person. For the country and commonwealth is a degree above the king.”4444. Ponnet, 61. The commonwealth can survive the death of a king because the king’s body and the body politic were not mystically fused into a sacred union. The king is a minister of God, a human like all other men, and thus liable to corruption and sin. One of the king’s main duties is to be a minister of God’s wrath in punishing evil; yet if the king himself became evil and threatened the order and survival of the commonwealth, resistance to him was justified.
Ponnet listed three kinds of evil princes, of whom only the third and most egregious merits collective resistance. That evil king is the kind “that claim all their subjects’ goods for their own.”4545. Ponnet, 82–85. Ponnet called this an “untruth” and proceeded to defend the right of private property.4646. Ponnet, 91. Ponnet’s defense of private property—“that every man may keep his own, and none may take it from him”—was a consequence of his rejection of the king’s two bodies. If the body politic is not fused with the king’s own body, then the king cannot make an absolute, royal, or sacred claim to other men’s bodies or property. Thus, in his duty to protect his subjects and the commonwealth, the king must protect the private property of others. How should the commonwealth deal with “such a monster and cruel beast covered with the shape of a man”? Ponnet answered that “it is lawful to kill a tyrant” because it is part of the law of nature that “testifies to every man’s conscience” that “it is natural to cut away an incurable member, which would destroy the whole body.”4747. Ponnet, 107–108. Ponnet argues that citizens who go along with the unjust laws of an evil king will likewise have the blood of innocent men on their hands (Ponnet, 33). Despite the fact that the king is part of the body politic, he is not the whole of it—nor even the most important part. Kings may be “chief members” of the commonwealth, but “the people [are not] ordained for them, but they are ordained for the people.”4848. Ponnet, 108. Just punishment requires that the king answer for his crimes, regardless of his royalty.
Finally, as to who should offer resistance up to the point of regicide, Ponnet claims that it is both the responsibility of all the people of the commonwealth and, more specifically, of lesser magistrates: “the nobility, and those to be called to common Councils … should be the defenders of the people.”4949. Ponnet, 117. Ponnet also adds that if lesser magistrates refuse to do this, then it falls to ecclesiastical authorities. In other words, the people collectively act through their other civil representatives to punish a wicked king and remove him when he threatens the commonwealth.
Conclusion: The Tradition of Political Protestantism
Ponnet was neither the first nor the most important Protestant theologian, philosopher, or statesman articulating and defending the core elements of political Protestantism that would be transmitted to Locke and Sidney. He is valuable because, as Adams notes, his treatise is short and clearly elucidates the essential principles of liberty. The tradition of political Protestantism is too long, complex, and variegated to trace in all its detail here. Yet there were hundreds of Protestant theologians, philosophers, and statesmen—if not thousands of clergy and common folk—who adhered in one form or another to Ponnet’s essential principles of liberty: that civil power originates from God and is bound by God’s law; that men possess a natural equality and common liberty; that the consent of the governed is necessary for a just commonwealth; that various forms of government are permissible, though a mixed state is often best; that the end of government is the protection of life and property, the maintenance of justice, and rewarding the virtuous while punishing the guilty; that everyone is subject to the law, including kings; and that resistance and even regicide of tyrannical kings is justifiable in the gravest situations.
John Locke and Algernon Sidney belong squarely in this tradition. As Adams himself asserted, Locke and Sidney do dilate upon—enlarge or expand—Ponnet’s ideas in certain ways.5050. One of the clearest examples of this is that Locke and Sidney maintain a more popular, or perhaps individualist, means of revolution, whereas Ponnet relied more upon lesser magistrates. Yet such developments, I am convinced, stay within the Protestant political tradition and do not depart from it. While there are many legitimate differences between Locke, Sidney, and Ponnet, on the “essential principles of liberty” they do not disagree.5151. For the sake of simplicity, in this essay I am passing over subversive interpretations of Locke (such as Leo Strauss’) that make him out to be a closeted anti-Christian. This would need to be addressed at length elsewhere. And if the American Revolution and U.S. Constitution owe their success to Locke and Sidney, then without John Ponnet—and all those Protestant Reformers before and after him—American independence and her founding as a new nation two hundred and fifty years ago likewise would not have happened.
