Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/25

Rh the Commons for censuring the government, “as if kings were bound to give an account of their regal actions, and of their manner of government, to their subjects assembled in Parliament.” The representative assembly of the Church of England had endorsed the doctrine of king and judges. The bishops and delegates assembled in convocation after the dissolution of the Short Parliament had promulgated a series of canons that based the king’s title on divine right, enjoined an extreme form of passive obedience on his subjects, and pronounced that in consideration of the divine right of their ruler they owed him tribute, subsidy, and aid. Nor had the churchmen failed to discover a higher sanction than the statute law for their own position in the state. In one of the canons of 1640 they had prescribed to laymen an oath of fidelity to the church government as it then stood. Certain bishops, too, claimed that they held their bishoprics by divine right rather than by the law of the land. Bishops, king, and judges, all alike appeared to be setting themselves above the law of the land.

However, the great mass of the members of the Long Parliament who worked in concert during the first months of 1641, acted on a far different theory