The second part of this book discusses the writings of Sir John Fortescue: both those that were issued in an attempt to undermine the claim of the house of York to the throne and the more theoretical works which dealt with wider issues of natural and human law, the origins of the English polity and how it should be governed. References have already been made to some of these works, the Somnium Vigilantis in which he may have had a hand and the articles he sent to the French government in the later 1460s in an attempt to engage them with the project to restore the Lancastrians to power. What follows seeks to trace Fortescue's thought from the practicalities of the polemical tracts to the fullscale theory of how England should be governed as it emerged and was developed in the De Natura Legis Naturae, the De Laudibus Legum Anglie and the Governance of England.

The Tracts on the Succession

This chapter discusses the writings of Sir John Fortescue in exile that were intended to undermine the claim that the house of York had a title to the English crown that was superior to Lancaster's. In this first section the four short tracts that can safely be attributed to Fortescue are evaluated and in the second the contents and purpose of the long treatise De Natura Legis Naturae are assessed. The latter presents a problem of classification since, whilst the second part deals with the rights of succession in kingdoms in a general way, the first part is a philosophical dissection of the law of nature and how it relates to both divine and human law. Some of Fortescue's most original ideas on sovereignty were aired there for the first time and the treatise is didactic rather than polemical since, as he later stated in the De Laudibus Legum Anglie, it was written for the instruction of Prince Edward of Lancaster. These factors might seem to place it more appropriately in Chapter 5 with that treatise, which was also written for Prince Edward. The compromise is to describe the De Natura's contents here while the ideas that it contains on good governance will be discussed together with those of the De Laudibus and the Governance of England in the next chapter.