Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/62

 of all humane laws, for rather than a Nation shall perish, anything shall be held necessary, and legal by necessity.” P. 7. Parliament itself gave the doctrine of salus populi official sanction when it justified the Militia Ordinance on the ground of its own right to interpret the law of England by the dictates of public safety.

The parliamentary party in the early days of the Parliament was the more cautious in supporting their position with arguments drawn from the law of God and the law of nature because both had been industriously used to support the unwarrantable extensions of prerogative power. Not only had the judges in the matter of ship money affirmed the right of the king, in the case of a great and declared necessity of which he was judge, to override the ordinary laws of the kingdom, but Banks in his argument on ship money had declared this right so inherent in the king that it was not derived to him from the people, but had been reserved to him when positive laws first began. “All Magistracy,” he said, “is of nature, and Obedience and Subjection is of nature; and before any positive Laws were written, or any municipal Law, people were governed by the Law of Nature.” The obnoxious canons of 1640 declared that “Tribute, and Custome, and Aide, and Subsidie, and all manner of necessary support and supply, be respectively due to Kings from their subjects by the Law of God, Nature, and Nations.” Rushworth, II, 548; Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiasticall.

The parliamentary party, therefore, generally eschewed the doctrine that the law of nature was more than a very general principle governing the relations between people and prince. They relied on the more definite “laws of the land.” “The Law of Nature,” says Henry Parker in A Discourse Concerning Puritans, “best determines, that all Princes being publike Ministers for the common good, that their authority ought to be of sufficient latitude for that common good; and since Scripture is not expresse concerning that latitude, as to all people, the same not being to all alike necessary, the severall Lawes of severall Countries best teach that certaine latitude.” P. 4. Parker regarded the book in which Samuel “wrote the manner” of Saul’s kingdom as possibly the constitution of the Jewish monarchy; unfortunately it had not survived!

Fiennes voiced the Parliament’s distrust of ecclesiastical applications of the law of nature. “But there was somewhat in it that these Divines aimed at, I suppose it was this. If Kings were of Divine Right, as the Office of a Pastour, in the Church, or founded in the prime Lawes of Nature, as the power of a Father in a Family; then it would certainly follow, that they should receave the fashion and manner of their government, onely from the Prescript of Gods Word, or of the Lawes of Nature,