The theory of popular revolution developed by the radical Calvinists in the 1550s was destined to enter the mainstream of modern constitutionalist thought. If we glance forward more than a century to John Locke's Two Treatises of Government – the classic text of radical Calvinist politics – we find the same set of conclusions being defended, and to a remarkable extent by the same set of arguments. When Locke asks in the final paragraphs of the Second Treatise ‘who shall be judge’ of whether a government is discharging the duties of its office, he insists that the authority to give the answer, and to resist any ruler who exceeds his lawful bounds, lies not merely with the inferior magistrates and other representatives of the people, but also with the citizens themselves, since ‘the proper umpire in such a case should be the body of the people’ (pp. 444–5). And when he defends this conclusion in his closing chapters on Tyranny and the Dissolution of Government, the argument he chiefly invokes is the private-law theory of resistance. His basic assumption is that anyone in authority who ‘exceeds the power given to him by the law’ automatically ‘ceases in that to be a magistrate’. His main conclusion is thus that anyone ‘acting without authority’ may be lawfully opposed, even though he may be the king, in the same way that ‘any other man’ may be opposed ‘who by force invades the right of another’ (pp. 418–19).