Status: Idea inventory, not a draft. The goal here is coverage, not prose. Every node is a claim, a source, a question, or a gap. Prune later; expand now.
Conventions used below:
[CLAIM] — a thesis-level assertion to be defended
[EV] — evidence / primary source that supports the node above it
[Q] — open question I could not settle; needs James's judgment
[GAP] — something the current research folder does not have and probably should
[TENSION] — an internal conflict in the argument that must be resolved, not papered over
All bibliographic detail is deferred to Part IX: Reference Inventory. Inline citations here are shorthand only (author + short title).
What is actually being argued? Three candidate theses, in descending strength. Pick one before drafting.
Strong thesis: Monarchy is the divinely-normed political form; other forms are defective participations in it.
Cost: has to explain the NT's silence on form, and the 1689's silence.
Benefit: matches Filmer, Bossuet, Dante; gives the eschatology real teeth.
Moderate thesis: Monarchy is the natural form (in the Aristotelian sense of the telos toward which political community tends) and is positively instituted and regulated by God in Israel, but is not commanded for all nations.
This is probably the defensible one and the one that survives Reformed scrutiny.
[Q] Is this too weak to be interesting? It ends up close to "monarchy is legitimate and underrated."
Narrow thesis (oath-only): Whatever the best form, the oath/covenant mode of constituting authority is theologically superior to the contract/election mode, and monarchy is the form that best carries it.
This is the most novel contribution and the least attackable. It also does not require winning the "monarchy is best" fight up front.
[CLAIM] The real intellectual center of gravity of this project is the oath, not the crown.
Confessional guardrails (must be stated explicitly in the paper's methodology section).
Scripture is the sole infallible rule. Natural law and tradition are corroborating witnesses, never independent foundations.
[GAP]The research folder contains zero confessional sources. For a 1689 project this is the biggest hole. See IX.2.
1689 LBCF ch. 24 (Of the Civil Magistrate) — must be engaged directly.
1689 ch. 23 (Of Lawful Oaths and Vows) — this is directly on the oath thesis and is currently unused. This is the single most important missing citation in the whole project.
WCF 23 + WCF 22 for comparison; note where the 1689 deliberately diverges from Westminster on the magistrate's power circa sacra.
[TENSION] The 1689 revision of WCF 23removes the magistrate's authority over the church. A high monarchist argument that leans on Eusebius, Byzantium, and James I is leaning on exactly the caesaropapism the 1689 pruned away. This must be addressed head-on, not avoided.
Genre and audience. Decide early; it changes everything.
Confessional Reformed readers who assume 1 Sam 8 settles the matter against monarchy.
Politically-curious readers arriving via Yarvin/neoreaction who need the theology supplied.
[Q] Serving both may be impossible. The second audience needs 30 pages of throat-clearing the first audience finds tedious.
What this paper is not.
Not a call for restoration of any particular dynasty.
Not an argument that democratic citizens may rebel or withhold obedience.
Not an endorsement of Yarvin's project, which is used as a hostile witness only.
[CLAIM] Stating the negatives early buys enormous goodwill and prevents the paper being read as reactionary politics with a Bible varnish.
Definitions to fix before Part I.
Monarchy — rule of one, where sovereignty is formally undivided and personally located.
Distinguish from absolutism (no law above the king) — the paper defends the first and denies the second.
Tyranny — rule of one against the law of God and the good of the ruled. Note Aquinas defines by end (private good vs. common good), not by procedure.
Oath vs. contract vs. covenant — the load-bearing distinction of the entire paper.
Contract: bilateral, performance-conditioned, dissolvable on breach, no third party.
Oath: invokes God as witness and avenger; breach is perjury, a sin, not merely a default.
Covenant: oath-constituted relationship creating ongoing status, not merely obligations.
[Q] Are all three needed, or does "oath-constituted covenant" collapse two into one?
Natural — Aristotelian teleological sense (what a thing tends toward when unimpeded), not statistical frequency and not "state of nature."
[TENSION] But Part I does use statistical frequency as evidence. Either admit two senses of "natural" and relate them, or drop the anthropological argument to a supporting role.
Purpose of this part: establish the explanandum. Before arguing monarchy is right, show that it is what humans overwhelmingly do. This is the weakest kind of argument (is/ought) but the best rhetorical opener.
The empirical observation.
[CLAIM] Kingship emerges independently across civilizations with no plausible diffusion path: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Shang China, Vedic India, Mesoamerica, sub-Saharan Africa, Polynesia, pre-Roman Europe.
[EV] Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods — divine kingship in Egypt and Mesopotamia as the assumed cosmological order, not an innovation.
[EV] Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order — a non-monarchist tracing monarchy as the default pre-modern institutional form. Hostile witness; therefore valuable.
[GAP] Need at least one comparative anthropology source outside the Near East / Europe axis, or the "universal" claim is really "Eurasian."
[CLAIM] Democracy is historically anomalous — geographically narrow, chronologically brief, and unstable where transplanted.
[Q] Is the Athens/Rome-republic counterexample fatal? They are early, and they are the tradition's own self-image. Handle rather than ignore.
The move from frequency to nature. This is the hinge and it is where the argument is most vulnerable.
Bad version: "everyone does X, therefore X is right." Naturalistic fallacy. Do not ship this.
Better version: universal emergence is evidence of a shared human nature ordered toward unified rule, which is then evaluated by Scripture and reason. Frequency is a symptom, not a warrant.
Best version: [CLAIM] The universality of kingship is a datum about the imago Dei — man made to be ruled, and to recognize rule, because he is made by and for a King. It is an anthropological trace of a theological fact. This makes Part I a pointer to Part VI, not an independent argument.
[Q] Does this over-claim? A Reformed reader will ask whether the universality of idolatry proves anything good about idols. Same logic. Need a principled distinction between universal-because-created and universal-because-fallen.
Possible answer: monarchy is a created structure (Adam's dominion, headship) that the fall corrupts into tyranny — same pattern as marriage, fatherhood, and worship. Universality of the corrupted form is evidence of the underlying created form.
The household as the seed of the polity.
[EV] Aristotle, Politics I — the polis grows from household → village → city; the political is continuous with the domestic.
[EV] Filmer, Patriarcha — the strong form: royal authority is Adam's paternal authority, transmitted.
[EV] Rutherford, Lex Rex Q.2 — direct denial. Paternal power is not political in kind; if it is natural at all it is a "secondary law of nature."
See research/lex-rex/lex-rex.md Question 2 notes.
[EV] Aquinas, De Regno I.1 — sidesteps the kind-of-authority question and argues from man's social nature to the necessity of some governing principle. Eccl. 4:9, "where there is no governor, the people shall fall."
[TENSION]Filmer vs. Rutherford is the fault line of the whole project. A 1689 Baptist inherits Rutherford's side of this fight. If the paper adopts Filmer's patriarchalism it is arguing against its own confessional tradition. Options:
Adopt Aquinas's weaker route (social nature → need for rule → best rule is one) and drop Filmer entirely.
Adopt Filmer and openly flag the divergence from the Reformed tradition.
Argue Rutherford concedes more than he thinks: he grants monarchy is lawful and that natural law ordains government, disputing only whether it ordains this government. That is a narrower dispute than usually assumed.
[Q] My instinct is option 3 then option 1. James should decide; this determines the paper's posture toward the Reformed tradition.
[GAP] Locke's First Treatise is the canonical demolition of Filmer and is not in the reference set. If Filmer is used at all, Locke must be answered.
Purpose: show that monarchy is rationally defensible on its own terms, so that the scriptural case is not carrying the entire load. Corroboration, not foundation.
Aristotle — unity of rule as the terminus of virtue.
[EV]Politics III.13 — pambasileia: where one man's virtue is incommensurable with the rest, he is "a god among men" and cannot justly be reckoned as merely one among equals.
[EV]Politics III.12 — the flute analogy. The superior instrument goes to the superior artist, not to the better-born. Merit is measured by fitness for the function, not by birth or by counting heads.
[CLAIM] This is quietly devastating to democracy: rule is a craft with a standard of excellence, and craft excellence is not determined by vote.
[TENSION] It is also quietly devastating to hereditary monarchy, which distributes the flute by birth. Aristotle's argument supports aristocracy of virtue, not dynasty. This must be answered, not glossed. See II.6.
[EV]Politics III — the five types of kingship; the taxonomy matters because the paper should say which it defends.
[Q] Does Aristotle actually endorse pambasileia as practical policy, or is it a limiting case used to test the theory of distributive justice? The scholarly consensus leans toward the latter. Overreading here is a credibility risk.
Plato — rule by knowledge.
[EV]Statesman — the true king rules by episteme, not by law; law is a second-best approximation for when the true statesman is unavailable.
[EV]Republic — philosopher-king; the ordered soul as the template for the ordered city.
[CLAIM] The soul/city isomorphism is the pagan anticipation of the Christian cosmological argument (one God, one soul, one reason, one king). Useful as a bridge to Aquinas.
[Q] Plato's rule-above-law is precisely what the paper needs to reject in Part V. Use with care or the paper hands ammunition to the tyranny objection.
Xenophon and Cicero — the character of the ruler.
[EV] Xenophon, Cyropaedia — the most influential ancient text on ideal kingship; voluntary obedience as the mark of true kingship. Subjects love the good king.
[CLAIM] "Voluntary obedience" is an early anticipation of the freely-sworn oath in Part IV.
[EV] Xenophon, Hiero — the tyrant is miserable; tyranny is bad for the tyrant. Useful because it grounds the king/tyrant distinction in something other than the ruled's preferences.
[EV] Cicero, De Re Publica — the rector, guardian of the commonwealth; monarchy can be the best form.
[EV] Cicero, De Legibus — natural law as the ground of magisterial authority; magistrates and oaths.
[EV] Seneca, De Clementia — the emperor as the soul of the state; clemency as the defining royal virtue. Written for Nero, which is either poignant or damning.
Aquinas — the cosmological and teleological argument.
[EV]De Regno I.1 — man is naturally social; society requires a governing principle; without a governor the people fall (Eccl. 4:9). "Each man would be a king unto himself, under God, the highest King."
[EV]De Regno I.2–3 — the argument from unity: what is one in itself produces unity better than what is many. The end of government is the unity of peace; the cause most apt to produce unity is itself one.
Analogical chain to develop: one God over creation → one soul over body → reason over the passions → one heart, one leader bee, one helmsman → one king over the polity.
[Q] How much weight can analogy bear? Reformed readers are rightly suspicious of arguing from cosmological analogy to political prescription — it is the same move that grounded the divine right of bishops. Flag the method's limits.
[EV]De Regno I.6–7 — monarchy is best but corrupts worst; therefore the king must be chosen so as to make tyranny improbable, and the constitution must remove the opportunity to tyrannize. Cites 1 Sam 13:14, "the Lord sought a man according to his own heart."
[CLAIM] Aquinas is already a limited-monarchy theorist. The Filmer/Bossuet absolutism is a later and separable development. The paper can have Aquinas without buying absolutism.
[EV]Summa Theologiae I-II q.105 a.1 — Israel's constitution as a mixed regime: monarchy in Moses, aristocracy in the seventy elders, democracy in that they were chosen from and by the people.
[TENSION]This is a serious problem for the strong thesis. Aquinas reads the divinely-given Israelite polity as mixed, not as pure monarchy. If the best political theologian in the tradition reads the God-designed constitution as mixed, "monarchy simpliciter is the divine form" is hard to hold.
Possible responses: (a) the mixed regime is monarchy tempered, not monarchy diluted, and Deut 17 is the tempering; (b) Aquinas is reading Aristotle back into Moses; (c) concede and adopt the moderate thesis from 0.1.2.
[Q] This may be the single strongest internal objection in the whole project. Do not bury it.
The medieval synthesis.
[EV] Isidore, Etymologiae — rex a recte regendo, "king from ruling rightly." The title is earned by function; a king who rules unrighteously forfeits the name.
[CLAIM] Etymological, but it encodes the whole normative theory: kingship is a moral office, not a status. Excellent one-line epigraph material.
[EV] John of Salisbury, Policraticus — the most systematic 12th c. treatment; the body-politic metaphor (prince as head, judges as eyes, soldiers as hands, peasants as feet); the prince as image of God.
Note: Policraticus also contains the most notorious medieval defense of tyrannicide. Both are in the same book. Handle in Part V.
[EV] Dante, De Monarchia — universal monarchy; the sun/moon analogy; one emperor under God as the condition of universal peace and of the full actualization of the human intellect.
[EV] Christine de Pizan, Book of the Body Politic — oath-keeping as the central princely virtue. Useful because it comes from outside the usual scholastic voice.
The hereditary problem.[GAP] The current research does not address this and it is the obvious question.
If monarchy is justified by the virtue of the ruler (Aristotle, Aquinas), heredity is arbitrary and routinely produces the unvirtuous.
Candidate defenses to develop:
Stability/succession: clear succession rules prevent civil war. The cost of an occasional bad king is lower than the cost of a contested throne. [EV] Yarvin's Schelling-point argument is exactly this, secularized.
Time preference:[EV] Hoppe — the hereditary monarch owns the capital stock and so has a low discount rate; the elected official rents it and extracts. Note Hoppe is anarcho-capitalist and does not actually want a king; hostile witness, which strengthens it.
Formation: the heir is raised to rule from birth. [EV] James I, Basilikon Doron, is literally this document — a king's manual of formation written for his son.
Providence: God gives the king; Dan 2:21, 4:17. This is the theological answer and it is the one that actually fits the confession — but it proves too much unless carefully bounded, since it equally "justifies" every tyrant and every republic.
[Q] Is hereditary succession essential to the thesis or incidental? The oath argument in Part IV works for elective monarchy too (Saul, David, the Holy Roman Empire, the Byzantine acclamation). Consider defending personal undivided sovereignty and treating heredity as a prudential mechanism.
Modern secular corroboration — use as hostile witnesses only.
[EV] Hobbes, Leviathan — undivided sovereignty from the war of all against all; the covenant that constitutes the sovereign. Not a traditional monarchist; his sovereign may be an assembly.
[CLAIM] Hobbes's covenant is horizontal (subjects with each other) and God is not a party. This is precisely the contract the paper must distinguish from the oath. Hobbes is the perfect foil for Part IV.
[EV] Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth — sovereignty as indivisible and perpetual; monarchy as its natural home. Bodin also insists the sovereign is bound by divine and natural law. Useful precisely because he is not an absolutist in the caricatured sense.
[EV] Yarvin, "A Formalist Manifesto" — formalism: align formal power with actual power; the primary political evil is violence; divided sovereignty conceals rather than limits power.
[EV] Yarvin, "Patchwork" — sovereign micro-states; "all exit, no voice"; the Bourbon-legitimacy passage on arbitrary rules as Schelling points of nonviolent agreement.
[EV] Yarvin, Gray Mirror — the monarchy/fascism distinction (calm autocratic neutrality vs. mass populist mobilization).
[EV] Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Liberty or Equality — Catholic monarchist; democracy as inherently leveling.
[CLAIM]The Yarvin critique — this needs its own subsection, it is the sharpest thing in the paper.
Yarvin's accountability mechanism is exit. Exit is the mechanism of a consumer, not a subject.
Exit generates zero ongoing obligation, invokes no witness, binds no conscience, and evaporates the instant preference changes.
[CLAIM] Yarvin has replaced covenant with consumerism. He has reproduced the form of monarchy while removing the thing that made it a moral relation. His system is a subscription service with a crown on it.
His denial that tyranny exists as a category is the tell: without a transcendent standard, "tyrant" can only mean "ruler I dislike," so the concept dissolves into preference. Consistent atheism, fatal politics.
[CLAIM] The paper's strongest rhetorical position: the secular monarchists are right that democracy hides power, and wrong that formalizing power is sufficient. Power must not merely be visible; it must be sworn.
[Q] How much Yarvin is too much? He is radioactive in some readerships. Recommend: engage the arguments, cite sparingly, never endorse the program, and state the disagreement in the same breath.
Purpose: the load-bearing part. Everything else is corroboration.
Pre-monarchical kingship structures.[GAP] Currently the argument starts at Deut 17. It should start earlier.
Adam's dominion (Gen 1:26–28) — created rule, before the fall. Rule is not a post-fall concession.
Noah (Gen 9:6) — the sword given after the flood; the origin of coercive authority.
Melchizedek (Gen 14:18) — king and priest; the type that Ps 110 and Hebrews pick up. Directly load-bearing for Part VI.
Gen 17:6, 16; 35:11 — "kings shall come from you" as blessing in the Abrahamic covenant. Monarchy is promised to the patriarchs centuries before Deut 17.
[CLAIM] This alone refutes the "monarchy is a concession to Israel's sin" reading. Kings are covenant blessing language.
Gen 49:10 — the scepter shall not depart from Judah. Dynastic monarchy embedded in the patriarchal blessings.
Num 24:7, 17 — Balaam's oracle; a king and a scepter out of Israel, from a pagan prophet's mouth.
[CLAIM] Cumulatively: God promises Israel kings long before Israel asks for one. The only reading that survives Genesis is that the institution was always intended.
Structure: anticipation ("when you come… and say, I will set a king over me"), permission ("you may indeed set a king over you"), and regulation.
The four regulations, each with a rationale to develop:
Chosen by the LORD, from among your brothers — divine designation + national identity.
Not multiply horses, nor return to Egypt for them — no standing military-industrial dependency, no reversal of the exodus.
Not multiply wives — no dynastic marriage-alliance foreign policy; guards the heart.
Not multiply silver and gold — no fiscal extraction.
[CLAIM] These are precisely the four charges Samuel lists in 1 Sam 8:11–18. Samuel is not describing monarchy; he is describing Deut 17 violation. This is the strongest exegetical move available and it should be the centerpiece of Part III.
[CLAIM] And they are precisely the four things Solomon does (1 Kgs 10:26–11:8). The Deuteronomist is grading Solomon against Deut 17 and failing him. The narrative logic confirms the reading.
The positive command: the king writes his own copy of the law, in the presence of the Levitical priests, and reads it all the days of his life.
[CLAIM] The king is the law's most devoted student, not its author. Lex facit regem is in Torah before it is in Bracton.
The stated purpose: "that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers." The king is a brother. This is anti-absolutist in the constitutional text itself.
[Q] Is Deut 17 permissive ("if you insist") or anticipatory ("when the time comes")? The Hebrew allows both. The whole argument leans on the second. Need to actually work the grammar rather than assert it. [GAP] No Hebrew-language commentary in the reference set.
1 Samuel 8 — the standard objection, and the reframe.
The standard reading: Israel's request is apostasy; God's grant is judgment; monarchy is a concession to hardness of heart (parallel to the divorce certificate in Deut 24 / Matt 19).
[CLAIM] This reading must be stated at full strength before answering it. It is the majority Reformed reading and the paper is dead if it strawmans it.
The reframe — the sin is not the institution but three defects in the asking:
Whom they reject: "they have rejected me from being king over them" (v. 7). The rejection is of this king, not of kingship as such.
What they want: a king "like all the nations" (vv. 5, 20) — i.e., precisely not the Deut 17 king. They are asking for the forbidden model.
Why they want it: to "go out before us and fight our battles" (v. 20) — fear, not faith. Compare the immediate context: Samuel's corrupt sons (vv. 1–3) is the stated occasion, and the corruption of the judges is real. Their diagnosis is right; their remedy is faithless.
[Q] Is v. 7 fatal? "They have rejected me from being king" is strong. Best answer available: the rejection is of the theocratic-direct mode of God's kingship, which was always a stage, not the terminus. God's kingship continues through the anointed king. Needs development.
Samuel's warning (vv. 11–18): mishpat ha-melek, the "manner/custom of the king."
[CLAIM] This is descriptive of the ANE king, not prescriptive of the Israelite king. It maps onto the Canaanite/Egyptian pattern, which is exactly what Deut 17 was legislated against.
[GAP] Need Ishida, Kings and Kinship in Early Israel, and ANE comparative material to substantiate that "the manner of the king" is a recognizable ANE type.
God's response: "Obey their voice and make them a king" (v. 22). God does not merely tolerate; He commands Samuel to install.
1 Samuel 9–12 — the institution actually happens, and it happens covenantally.
1 Sam 9–10:16 — Saul privately anointed; the Spirit comes upon him.
1 Sam 10:17–27 — public selection by lot before the LORD; Samuel writes "the rights and duties of the kingship" in a book and lays it up before the LORD.
[CLAIM] A written constitution, deposited in the sanctuary. This is a covenant document deposit, the standard ANE treaty procedure. The monarchy is founded as a covenant, in writing, with God as depositary. This is enormous for Part IV and is currently underused.
1 Sam 11:14–15 — the kingdom "renewed" at Gilgal before the LORD; peace offerings; great rejoicing.
Covenant-renewal vocabulary. God is not sulking.
1 Sam 12 — Samuel's farewell. He rebukes the request and confirms the king. "Behold the king whom you have chosen… behold, the LORD has set a king over you." Both agencies affirmed in one breath.
[CLAIM] v. 14–15: the conditions are the same conditions as before the monarchy — fear the LORD and obey. The covenant terms did not change. Monarchy is placed inside the Sinai covenant, not outside it.
Note James's repo has active readings in scripture-readings/09-1-samuel/ covering chs. 11–16. Mine those notes before drafting this section.
The elders come to David (v. 1) — the initiative is theirs; the oath is freely entered.
Three grounds given: kinship ("we are your bone and flesh"), demonstrated fitness ("you led out and brought in Israel"), divine designation ("the LORD said to you, you shall be shepherd of my people").
[CLAIM] Nature + merit + divine appointment, all three, in one verse. The whole of Parts I–III in miniature.
David makes a covenant with them before the LORD at Hebron; then they anoint him.
[CLAIM] The structure is king / people / God-as-witness. Three parties, not two. This is the exegetical anchor of the oath thesis and should be quoted in the abstract.
Order of operations: covenant precedes anointing. The people's role is real but responsive — they recognize and swear, they do not create.
God refuses the temple and instead builds David a house. The pun is the theology.
Unconditional dynastic promise: "your throne shall be established forever" (v. 16).
v. 14–15: chastening for iniquity, but steadfast love not removed. [CLAIM] Conditional in administration, unconditional in promise — the same structure as the covenant of grace. This is where Baptist covenant theology can do real work.
[CLAIM] God binds His own name to the persistence of a monarchy. Whatever monarchy is, it is not a regrettable concession that God is waiting to be rid of.
Ps 89 and Ps 132 as the covenant's liturgical expansion; Ps 89:30–37 restates the conditional/unconditional structure explicitly. [GAP] The Psalms are almost entirely absent from scripture.csv.
The royal psalms and wisdom literature.[GAP] Badly underdeveloped in the current references.
Ps 2 — the LORD's anointed; the nations' kings warned to "kiss the Son." Both a coronation psalm and a messianic one; the doubleness is the point.
Ps 72 — the ideal king: justice for the poor, defense of the needy, crushing the oppressor. [CLAIM] The biblical king's legitimacy is measured by his treatment of those who cannot repay him. This is the scriptural answer to the tyranny objection and it is far stronger than anything in Aristotle.
Ps 110 — priest-king after Melchizedek; the LORD's right hand.
Ps 45 — the royal wedding psalm; Heb 1:8 applies it to the Son.
Prov 8:15–16 — "by me kings reign"; Wisdom as the source of just rule.
Prov 16:10–15; 25:2–6 — the king's word, judgment, and glory; searching out a matter as royal glory.
Prov 24:21–22 — "fear the LORD and the king"; the pairing is theologically loaded and belongs in Part IV.
Eccl 8:2–5 — the anchor verse. Treated fully in Part IV.
Eccl 4:9 (via Aquinas) and Eccl 10:16–17 — "woe to you, O land, when your king is a child."
The prophetic critique — the counter-evidence, engaged honestly.
[GAP] The current references have no prophetic material against kings. The paper will look one-sided.
1 Kgs 12 — Rehoboam; the kingdom torn in two by royal arrogance. The elders' counsel rejected.
1 Kgs 21 — Naboth's vineyard. The paradigm case of royal theft, and Elijah's confrontation. [CLAIM] The prophet's standing to rebuke the king is itself an institutional feature of the Israelite constitution. Israel had an office of accountability, and it was not a legislature.
Jer 22:1–5, 13–19 — the covenant lawsuit against the house of David; woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness.
Ezek 34 — the shepherds who feed themselves; God will shepherd the flock Himself and set up "one shepherd, my servant David." The critique of bad kings terminates in the promise of a better king, not in the abolition of kingship. [CLAIM] This is the master pattern of the whole biblical witness.
Hos 13:11 — "I gave you a king in my anger, and I took him away in my wrath." [Q] This is the hardest verse against the thesis. It must be answered directly. Candidate: the referent is the northern kingdom's illegitimate non-Davidic monarchy, not kingship as such. Verify the context before relying on it.
Judg 9 — Jotham's parable of the bramble. Anti-kingship on its face; but the target is Abimelech, a self-appointed usurper, not a divinely designated king.
Judg 17:6, 21:25 — "in those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes." [CLAIM] The book of Judges ends by naming kinglessness as the diagnosis of the chaos. The canonical editor is pro-monarchy. This is a strong and underused datum.
New Testament.
Rom 13:1–7 — authorities instituted by God; the ruler as diakonos bearing the sword; conscience, not merely wrath, as the ground of subjection. Note the actual emperor in view is Nero.
[CLAIM] The apostolic command to submit is given regarding a pagan monarch who would shortly execute the author. This is a very high doctrine of the office as distinct from the man. Connect to Kantorowicz's king's-two-bodies.
1 Pet 2:13–17 — "honor the emperor"; fear God, honor the king. The Prov 24:21 pairing reappears in the NT.
John 19:11 — "you would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above." Said to a governor, about an unjust trial.
1 Tim 2:1–2 — prayers for kings and all in high positions.
Acts 5:29 — "we must obey God rather than men." The limiting principle. Belongs in Part V.
Mark 10:42–45 — "the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them… but not so among you." [Q] Does this relativize all earthly rule for the Christian? It is at minimum a definitive rejection of the manner of pagan kingship, and it defines the true king as the one who serves. Servant-kingship, not anti-kingship.
[CLAIM] The NT never prescribes a political form. This is a genuine constraint. The honest conclusion is that the NT assumes monarchy without commanding it, which supports the moderate thesis and not the strong one. Say so plainly rather than overreaching; the credibility gained is worth more than the ground lost.
[TENSION] The NT's political-form silence is the best argument against the strong thesis and the paper should concede it explicitly in Part VII.
Daniel and divine sovereignty over kings.
Dan 2:21 — "He removes kings and sets up kings."
Dan 4:17, 25, 32 — "the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will," said over the humiliation of the greatest pagan monarch.
Dan 4:34–37 — Nebuchadnezzar's restoration and doxology. The pagan king's conversion to right theology is the acknowledgment of a higher throne.
[CLAIM] The consistent biblical assumption is monarchical: God deals with nations through their kings, and He deals with kings personally. There is no biblical analogue to an electorate.
Text and the translation crux: "Keep the king's command, because of God's oath" vs. "because of your oath before God." [Q] The Hebrew is ʿal dibrat shevuʿat elohim — literally "on account of the oath of God." Both readings are defensible and both serve the argument. Say so; do not force one.
[CLAIM] Whichever reading, the ground of political obligation is neither (a) the king's power, (b) the king's justice, nor (c) the subject's consent-as-preference, but an oath before God. Political obligation is theologically mediated. Everything else in Part IV unpacks this.
vv. 3–5 develop it: do not be hasty to leave his presence; do not join a bad cause; the king's word has power.
The taxonomy: contract vs. covenant vs. oath. Build this as a formal comparison, not a table.
Parties. Contract: two. Covenant/oath: three — God is invoked as witness and avenger.
Ground of obligation. Contract: mutual consideration. Oath: the honor and name of God.
Effect of breach. Contract: damages, rescission. Oath: perjury — a sin against the third commandment, with eschatological consequence.
Scope. Contract: specified performances. Oath: the whole person, comprehensively.
Termination. Contract: on performance, breach, or expiry. Oath: not at will; it binds "to his own hurt" (Ps 15:4).
Relation created. Contract: exchange. Covenant: status — a new standing that persists.
[EV] 1689 LBCF ch. 23, Of Lawful Oaths and Vows — "the name of God only is that by which men ought to swear"; an oath binds even when it is to one's own disadvantage. [GAP] This chapter is made for this argument and is currently uncited anywhere in the repo.
[EV] Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis — the oath to a sovereign as a natural-law obligation; breach is perjury before God, not merely breach of contract.
[CLAIM] The modern state is contractual all the way down: taxation is a transaction, voting is a preference-registration, citizenship is a bundle of entitlements. Nothing in it invokes God, binds conscience, or covers the person. It cannot generate the obligation it constantly demands.
Occasion: Duke William V of Aquitaine asks what a vassal owes his lord. The answer is a compact treatise.
The six negatives — the vassal must be incolumem, tutum, honestum, utile, facile, possibile: he must not harm the lord's body, betray his secrets, endanger his defenses, injure his justice, damage his possessions, or obstruct his capacity to act.
The crucial escalation: "it is not sufficient to abstain from evil, unless what is good is done also." The vassal owes counsel and aid (consilium et auxilium), positively, in all six.
[CLAIM] Positive duty, not mere forbearance. Compare the law's summary: not merely "do no harm" but "love your neighbor." The oath has the moral structure of law, not of contract.
The reciprocity clause: "The lord also ought to act toward his faithful vassal reciprocally in all these things. And if he does not do this he will be justly considered guilty of bad faith."
[CLAIM]Mutuality is in the founding text of feudal oath theology. The lord who fails is infidelis — the same charge, in the same words, as the faithless vassal. Feudalism-as-one-way-servitude is a modern caricature.
The threefold structure to extract and then use everywhere: the oath is mutual, before God, and comprehensive.
[Q] Fulbert is describing vassalage, not kingship. Is the extension to the king/subject relation legitimate, or is it an equivocation? Defensible via the Anglo-Saxon fealty oath and the coronation oath, which are king-facing — but the move must be argued, not assumed.
The oath formulas themselves.
[EV]Anglo-Saxon oath of fealty: "I will be faithful and loyal to N. and love all that he loves and shun all that he shuns."
[CLAIM]Love and shun — the oath binds the affections, not merely the behavior. No modern political obligation reaches that far. Compare the shema: love the LORD with all your heart. The grammar of political fealty is borrowed from the grammar of covenant love.
Predates Norman feudalism — the tradition has Germanic/Anglo-Saxon roots, not merely Frankish-legal ones.
[EV]Assizes of Jerusalem (1197) — homage and fealty in the crusader states; obligations of king and vassal; consequences of breach. Useful because it is a legal code, not a moral exhortation.
[CLAIM] The oath binds because it was freely entered. Voluntariness is not the opposite of binding obligation — it is its precondition. This dissolves the standard modern objection that hierarchy is inherently coercive.
[Q] How much was actually voluntary in practice versus in theory? The paper should not romanticize. [GAP] Need a social-historical source on how freely fealty was in fact chosen, or the claim is idealized.
The coronation oath — the king is bound too.
[EV]English coronation oath, Leofric Missal form (King Edgar, 973): three promises — that the Church of God and all Christian people keep true peace; that he forbid rapacity and all iniquities to all degrees; that he enjoin justice and mercy in all judgments.
[EV] The 1689 statutory form (Coronation Oath Act) — note the date. [CLAIM] The same year as the LBCF, and the product of a deposition. Worth remarking: 1689 is simultaneously the year of James's confession and the year England removed a king for oath-breach. That is not an accident of the paper's framing; it is the argument in historical form.
Order of the rite: recognition/acclamation → oath → anointing → investiture → enthronement → homage.
[CLAIM] The people acclaim before the anointing but they do not confer. They recognize what God does. The anointing is the constitutive act and it is sacramental in structure.
[EV]Byzantine coronation — acclamation by army and senate, axios ("he is worthy"); coronation by the Patriarch; the emperor as christos in a derivative sense.
[TENSION] Byzantine caesaropapism is exactly what a 1689 Baptist rejects (LBCF 24 vs. WCF 23). Use the oath structure while explicitly repudiating the church-state fusion. Do this in the text, not in a footnote.
[EV]Magna Carta (1215) — even the paradigm document of limitation on royal power is oath-based, not election-based. [CLAIM] Constitutional limitation historically arrives through the oath structure, not as an alternative to it.
The theological grammar of oaths.
God swears by Himself (Gen 22:16; Heb 6:13–18) because there is none greater. The oath is a divine act before it is a human one.
Third commandment (Ex 20:7) — taking the name in vain is primarily false swearing, not casual profanity. Oath-breaking is a commandment-level offense.
Ps 15:4 — "who swears to his own hurt and does not change." The definition of the man who may dwell on God's holy hill includes keeping a costly oath.
Num 30 — the law of vows; a vow binds absolutely, with narrowly specified release.
Josh 9 — the Gibeonite deception. Israel is bound by an oath obtained by fraud, and 2 Sam 21 shows God avenging Saul's later breach of it centuries afterward.
[CLAIM] This is the strongest single biblical demonstration of oath-weight in the canon and it is currently unused. An oath sworn in error, to deceivers, still binds — and God punishes the nation for its breach generations later. Nothing in contract law behaves like this.
Judg 11 — Jephthah's vow. The dark side; oaths bind, and rash oaths destroy.
Matt 5:33–37 and Jas 5:12 — "let your yes be yes." [Q] Does Christ abolish oaths? The Reformed answer (LBCF 23, WCF 22) is no: He forbids casual and evasive swearing, while lawful oaths before the magistrate remain. The Anabaptist reading is the opposite. [CLAIM] The paper must handle this or a Baptist reader will stop here. Note the irony that the Baptist confession is on the pro-oath side.
[EV] Calvin, Institutes IV.20 — magistrates as God's deputies; the binding force of the oath of loyalty; the lesser magistrate.
Why democratic consent cannot replicate this.
A vote is anonymous, discrete, revocable, and secret. [CLAIM] A secret ballot is the precise structural inverse of a public oath. One conceals the person; the other commits him.
A vote creates no ongoing relation and no personal fidelity; it registers a preference at a moment.
No third party is invoked; God is not witness to a ballot.
The loser of an election is obligated by nothing he did — his obligation is imposed by an aggregate he opposed. [CLAIM] Democratic obligation is therefore less consensual than fealty, not more. This inversion is the most counterintuitive and most defensible claim in the paper.
The oath of naturalized citizens is a real counterexample and should be conceded: it is an actual oath, publicly sworn, invoking God. [Q] Why does it feel thin? Candidate answers: it is one-directional (the state swears nothing back), it is administrative rather than liturgical, and it is asked of immigrants only — the native-born are bound by nothing at all.
[CLAIM] A polity that requires an oath of its immigrants and none of its natives has an incoherent theory of obligation. Sharp, and empirically true. Worth a paragraph on its own.
Military and judicial oaths are the surviving fragments of the older structure inside the modern state. [CLAIM] Where the modern state genuinely needs binding fidelity — soldiers, judges, witnesses, presidents — it reverts to the oath. It cannot generate the obligation any other way. The oath survives exactly where the stakes are real.
[EV] Hobbes as the foil: his covenant is horizontal, mutual among subjects, with God as no party. The sovereign is outside the covenant and therefore owes nothing. Fulbert's lord is inside it and owes everything. [CLAIM] This is the exact moment the Western tradition traded covenant for contract, and it is datable.
The king's two bodies.
[EV] Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies — the natural body and the body politic; the office persists through the person's death and failure.
[CLAIM] The oath is sworn to the office, which is why it survives a bad king. This answers "what if the king is wicked?" without either dissolving the obligation or endorsing tyranny.
Connect to Rom 13's "the authority" as distinct from Nero the man.
[GAP] Berman, Law and Revolution — the Gregorian reform's effect on oath and fealty structures. Currently in the CSV, unused in any draft.
The part that keeps the paper from being read as an apology for despotism. It should be long.
Defining tyranny without collapsing into preference.
Aquinas: the ruler who governs for private good rather than the common good. Defined by end, not procedure.
Isidore: rex a recte regendo — the unjust ruler forfeits the name of king.
[CLAIM] The biblical measure is Ps 72 and Deut 17: how the king treats the poor, the widow, the alien; and whether he keeps the law he copied out. Concrete, not subjective.
[CLAIM] Yarvin cannot define tyranny at all, since he has no standard above the sovereign. His "exit" is a procedural substitute for a moral category he has abolished. This is the decisive theological difference and the paper should not be shy about it.
Structural limits internal to monarchy.
The law the king copies (Deut 17) — the king is under a text he did not write.
The prophet (Nathan to David, Elijah to Ahab, Jeremiah to Jehoiakim) — an office of rebuke, external to the crown and not accountable to it.
The priesthood — a separate sphere the king may not enter. Uzziah's leprosy (2 Chr 26:16–21) is the case law. [CLAIM] Israel's constitution enforced separation of the sacred and civil spheres by miracle. A 1689 Baptist should find this delightful and should say so.
The elders and the assembly — 2 Sam 5, 1 Kgs 12; the king negotiates with them and is destroyed when he does not.
The coronation oath — the king is bound by what he swore.
[CLAIM] Cumulatively: biblical monarchy is constitutional monarchy, and it was so a thousand years before the word existed. The paper's real target is not democracy but unaccountable power in any form.
Occasion: 1644, against royalist absolutism; the king is under the law, lex is rex.
Q.1 — natural law is divine law; natural revelation is admissible in determining valid government. (See research/lex-rex/lex-rex.md.)
Q.2 — paternal power is not political in kind; if natural at all, only by a "secondary law of nature." Direct denial of Filmer.
Q.3 — aristocracy, democracy, and monarchy are "contractions" of the one governing power; all three valid.
[CLAIM] James's own note here is the sharpest observation in the repo: the modern American system resembles none of the three, and may therefore be invalid on Rutherford's own terms — not because it is democratic, but because it is formless. It has no locatable sovereign at all.
[CLAIM] This converges exactly with Yarvin's formalism from the opposite direction. A Covenanter Presbyterian and an atheist neoreactionary agree that concealed sovereignty is the disease. That convergence is worth an entire section; it is the most interesting thing in the project.
[TENSION] Rutherford is the Reformed political text and he is against the strong thesis. The paper must either refute him, absorb him, or narrow to the oath thesis he does not touch.
Recommended: absorb. Rutherford's target is absolutism, not monarchy. He explicitly grants monarchy's lawfulness. The paper can defend covenantal monarchy while conceding Rutherford's case against arbitrary monarchy — indeed, using it.
[GAP] Only four pages of Lex Rex have been read (Questions 1–3 of 44). The full work needs a proper pass. This is the single largest research task remaining.
The resistance question.
Acts 5:29 — the floor: obedience is limited by God's command. Not optional, not disputed.
The lesser-magistrate doctrine: [EV] Calvin, Institutes IV.20.31 — private men may not resist, but constituted inferior magistrates may.
[EV] Barclay, De Regno et Regali Potestate — the royalist reply to the monarchomachs; coined the term. Useful to represent the other side at strength.
John of Salisbury on tyrannicide — the medieval extreme; note it, do not endorse it.
[CLAIM] The oath framework gives the right answer here: an oath is not dissolved by the other party's breach (it is not a contract), but it was sworn before God, and therefore cannot bind to sin. The limit on obedience is internal to the oath, not an exception to it. This is a genuinely elegant result and it should be highlighted.
[Q] Does the oath's mutuality (Fulbert: the faithless lord is infelis) license the subject's release? Fulbert says the lord is guilty of bad faith; he does not say the vassal is thereby freed. Work out whether the tradition draws that inference, and where.
The 1689 and the civil magistrate.
LBCF 24 — the magistrate ordained by God for His own glory and the public good; lawful for Christians to serve; subjection due.
What the 1689 removed from WCF 23: the magistrate's authority to call synods, suppress heresy, and order the church. [CLAIM] The Baptist confession is deliberately less Erastian.
[TENSION] Therefore: the paper may defend a strong monarchy in the civil sphere while denying the Constantinian/Byzantine fusion that most historical monarchist sources assume. This is the paper's most distinctive position and the thing that makes it worth writing rather than being a rehash of Bossuet.
[CLAIM]Frame this as the paper's actual contribution: a Baptist monarchism. Sworn fealty in the civil sphere; a free church the crown may not touch. Nobody has written this. Historically the monarchists were Erastian and the Baptists were dissenters — the combination is genuinely novel and genuinely defensible from the 1689's own text.
[Q] Is a monarchy that cannot touch the church even recognizably the monarchy the tradition defended? Or has the paper conceded so much that "monarchy" now names only a civil-executive arrangement? This objection deserves a real answer.
Purpose: this is what makes it theology rather than political science with proof texts. It should also be where the paper is at its most confident, because here the Reformed tradition is unanimously on its side.
The typological structure.
Every earthly king is a type; the type is fulfilled, not abolished, in Christ.
Melchizedek → Ps 110 → Heb 7. Priest-king, without genealogy, forever.
David → the Son of David. The Gospels open (Matt 1:1) and close (Rev 22:16) on the Davidic title.
Solomon → the greater than Solomon (Matt 12:42); wisdom and temple-building fulfilled.
[CLAIM] The failure of every Israelite king is not an argument against monarchy but the mechanism by which the OT generates longing for the true king. The institution is pedagogical, and its failures are part of the pedagogy.
The messianic promises.
Isa 9:6–7 — the government upon His shoulder; of the increase of His government there shall be no end; established on the throne of David with justice and righteousness.
Isa 11:1–5 — the shoot from Jesse; judgment for the poor with righteousness; the exact Ps 72 criteria.
Jer 23:5–6 — the righteous Branch, "the LORD our righteousness," who shall reign as king.
Ezek 34:23–24 — "one shepherd, my servant David."
Zech 9:9 — the king comes humble, riding on a donkey. [CLAIM] The mode of the true king's coming is the permanent rebuke of every earthly king's pomp. Include this or the paper reads as triumphalist.
Dan 7:13–14 — the Son of Man given dominion, glory, and a kingdom that shall not pass away.
The kingship of Christ enacted.
Nativity: Magi seek "he who has been born king of the Jews" (Matt 2:2); Herod, a rival king, responds with slaughter. The gospel opens on a succession crisis.
Triumphal entry — a deliberate royal-entry liturgy, fulfilling Zech 9.
Trial and crucifixion: "Are you the King of the Jews?" (John 18:33); "My kingdom is not of this world" (18:36); "We have no king but Caesar" (19:15); the titulus, "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews," posted in three languages (19:19–22).
[CLAIM] John's passion is structured as a coronation — purple robe, crown, acclamation, enthronement on the cross, proclamation in three languages. The evangelist is deliberately writing an anti-coronation that is the true coronation.
[CLAIM] "We have no king but Caesar" is the chief priests' apostasy stated as a political formula — the exact inversion of 1 Sam 8:7. Israel's story ends where it began: rejecting God as king. That inclusio should be exploited; it is the most powerful single point available to this paper.
Ascension and session — seated at the right hand, all authority given (Matt 28:18); Ps 110 fulfilled.
[EV] 1689 LBCF ch. 8 on Christ the Mediator in His threefold office; ch. 26 on Christ as head of the church. [GAP] Uncited.
The eschatological consummation.
Rev 17:14; 19:16 — King of kings and Lord of lords; the kings of the earth make war and are defeated.
Rev 21:24 — "the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it." [CLAIM] Earthly kingship is not abolished in the new creation but brought in and offered. Kings, plural, persist in the consummation. This is a strong and underused text.
1 Cor 15:24–28 — Christ delivers the kingdom to the Father, having destroyed every rule and authority. [TENSION] Every earthly rule is abolished here and glorified in Rev 21:24. Work out the relation rather than picking the convenient one.
[CLAIM] The final political order revealed in Scripture is a monarchy. Not a senate, not an assembly, not a council. The eschaton is not democratic. Whatever else is uncertain, the terminus of political history is the undivided personal rule of one.
[CLAIM] And the saints reign with Him (Rev 5:10; 20:6; 22:5) — so the eschatological form is neither egalitarian nor solitary. It is a king with a co-reigning people bound to him by covenant. [CLAIM] That is exactly the Fulbert structure, perfected: mutual, before God, comprehensive. The whole paper converges here.
The eschatological argument's actual force — be honest about it.
[Q] Does "heaven is a monarchy" entail "earth should be"? The inference is not automatic; heaven is also celibate (Matt 22:30) and that entails nothing about earthly marriage.
Better formulation: earthly monarchy is fitting as a type, not mandatory as a rule. Fittingness is a real theological category and is enough to carry the moderate thesis.
[CLAIM] But the direction of the type matters: God chose this image, sustained it across the whole canon, and consummated it. The imagery is not arbitrary. God did not describe the eschaton as a republic.
Each objection stated at maximum strength before any reply. Any objection that cannot be stated in a form its proponents would endorse has not been understood.
"1 Samuel 8 settles it — God opposed monarchy." — Reply: Part III.2–4. Deut 17 precedes; the patriarchal promises precede that; God commands the installation; the kingdom is renewed covenantally; 2 Sam 7 binds God's name to a dynasty.
"Hosea 13:11 — 'I gave you a king in my anger.'" — Reply: context is the northern kingdom's illegitimate monarchy. [Q] Verify. If the verse resists, concede it as genuine counter-evidence rather than forcing it.
"The NT never commands monarchy." — Reply: true, and conceded. The NT assumes and honors it without prescribing form. This bounds the thesis to the moderate version. [CLAIM] Conceding this is a strength.
"Christ's kingdom is not of this world, so political forms are adiaphora." — Reply: John 18:36 denies the kingdom's origin and mode, not its earthly relevance; and Christ presently reigns over the nations (Ps 2, Rev 1:5, "ruler of kings on earth").
"Monarchy produces tyrants." — Reply: Part V. Also: so does democracy, at scale, with more anonymity and less accountability. [CLAIM] The 20th century's worst tyrannies were plebiscitary, not dynastic. Watch the rhetoric here; it is easy to overstate and lose the reader.
"The argument from nature is a naturalistic fallacy." — Reply: Part 0.5.4 and I.2. Frequency is a symptom pointing to a nature, evaluated by Scripture. This must be stated carefully or the objection lands.
"You are proof-texting Israel's theocracy into general political theory." — Reply: this is the strongest methodological objection. [CLAIM] Answer honestly: Israel's monarchy is uniquely covenantal and cannot be simply transposed. What transfers is (a) the created structures Israel's law codifies, (b) the oath/covenant grammar, which is presented as generally binding (Eccl 8, Rom 13), and (c) the typology. What does not transfer is the theocratic union of cult and crown — which is exactly what the 1689 denies.
"The oath argument proves too much — it would validate any oath-bound regime, including a wicked one." — Reply: yes, partly, and that is the point (Rom 13, Nero). But V.4's limit holds: no oath binds to sin.
"The oath argument works for elective and constitutional monarchy, so it does not establish monarchy." — Reply: correct. [CLAIM] It establishes personal, oath-bound, undivided sovereignty. If the paper's real thesis is that, say so — it is more defensible and more interesting than a brief for hereditary kingship.
"Feudalism was brutal exploitation dressed in covenantal language." — Reply: the ideal is not the practice, for any system. But do not romanticize. [GAP] Need serious social history; the reference set is entirely normative-texts and no historians of actual peasant conditions.
"You are borrowing from Yarvin, whose project is post-Christian and whose politics are noxious." — Reply: he is used as a hostile witness against democratic self-description, and refuted on the covenant question in II.7.7. Name the disagreement explicitly and early.
"Aquinas says Israel's polity was mixed, not monarchical." — Reply: II.4.6. This is the strongest internal objection. Answer or concede; do not omit.
"Christ forbids oaths (Matt 5:34)." — Reply: IV.6.7 and LBCF 23. Note that the Baptist confession is firmly on the pro-oath side.
"Restoration is impossible, so the argument is academic." — Reply: the paper is normative, not a program. [CLAIM] Even if no king is coming, the diagnosis stands: a polity that binds no one by oath and locates sovereignty nowhere cannot ground the obedience it demands. That is worth establishing on its own.
What follows practically for a Christian under a modern republic?
Rom 13 and 1 Pet 2 apply regardless of form. Obedience is not contingent on the regime being ideal.
[CLAIM] The most important practical yield is not political but ecclesial and domestic: the church and the household are the two institutions where covenantal, oath-bound, personal authority still actually operates. Church membership is a covenant; marriage is an oath. [CLAIM] The recovery the paper wants begins there, not in politics.
This also connects the monarchy project to the prenup project in the same repo. Same underlying theology of the oath. [Q] Worth a shared "theology of oaths" chapter serving both?
Everything currently in the reference CSVs under monarchy/research/references/, plus items identified as gaps. Marked [GAP] where not yet in the repo. This section is a working inventory, not a formatted bibliography — formatting comes at draft time.
Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture, 1709 — the most thorough biblical defense of monarchy. Unused so far; high priority.https://archive.org/details/politicsdrawnfro0000boss
Bossuet, Discourse on Universal History, 1681 — providence through monarchs.
Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 1594–97 — consent within ordered hierarchy.
Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, 1625 — the oath to a sovereign as natural-law obligation; breach as perjury.
Samuel Rutherford, Lex Rex, 1644 — the king under law. Notes on Questions 1–3 in research/lex-rex/lex-rex.md; 41 questions unread.
William Barclay, De Regno et Regali Potestate, 1600 — against the monarchomachs.