INTRODUCTION

The revolutionary potential of St. Edward's laws, the Modus tenendi Parliamentum, and the Mirror of Justices was first fully realized during the period from 1642 to 1660, when rebels of all stripes deployed them to justify rebellion, regicide, and republicanism. Modern scholars, as has already been noted, sometimes suggest that in the civil war period “political rationalism” and natural law theories began to rival ancient constitutionalist argumentation and eventually to supplant it. While it is true that other idioms of political thought appeared in parliamentarian discourse, I suggest in this chapter that the suppleness of the medieval canon has been greatly under-estimated. Not only did St. Edward's laws, the Modus, and the Mirror remain central to dissident theorizing, their value even increased. Indeed, they gave rebels familiar and convincing historical arguments with which to counter the royalists' powerful defense of the king. More particularly, the three sources served as ballast for a new line of anti-royalist argumentation. This was the doctrine of coordination, which the Long Parliament and its supporters fashioned from Charles I's Answer to the XIX Propositions.

To appreciate the critical role of St. Edward's laws, the Modus, and the Mirror, we must first get the lay of the ideological land. By mid-century, two divergent views of political society shaped the political thought of Stuart England.