In 1613 a book was officially condemned and ceremonially burned in London. An English king and a Spanish cardinal were the chief actors in the latest installment of a by now protracted dispute at the highest levels of civil and ecclesiastical government. James I's dramatic denunciation of Francisco Suarez's Defensio Fidei Catholicae framed the momentous struggle over competing claims of authority. On the one side was a king who claimed that his power derived originally and directly from God. And on the other side was a Jesuit scholastic defending the pope's claim to a divinely ordained right to depose heretical civil rulers. This dispute brought to a head a long-simmering controversy over the English Oath of Allegiance, which required English Catholics to renounce papal pretensions in temporal politics. For the better part of a decade following the enactment of the oath by Parliament in 1606, Jesuit thinkers including Suarez, Roberto Bellarmine, and the Englishman Robert Parsons had criticized James' claim to rule by divine right, even as James and his supporters, such as John Hayward and William Barclay, just as vehemently affirmed the king's right against the claims of papal supremacy.

While it is a long way from the Jesuit College at Coimbra to the streets of Revolution-era America, this inauspicious Counter-Reformation backdrop is a fitting point of departure for the study of the philosophical foundations and historical development of the modern politics of liberty.