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This chapter focuses on France, where both James’s Oath of Allegiance and Bellarmine’s theory were vivaciously and dramatically debated, especially after the assassination of King Henri IV by a Catholic fanatic and supporter of the Jesuits in 1610. The first section of this chapter offers an overview of the issues at stake by exploring the link between Papal authority, tyrannicide, and the doctrine of Papal deposition of heretical princes. A second section shows how Bellarmine’ theories were at the forefront of a crucial political debate involving Rome, London, and Paris by analyzing the reaction of the Parlement to Bellarmine’s theory. Another section of this chapter illustrates the significance of Bellarmine’s theory in another, parallel, debate, involving the role and nature of the Catholic Church in France, the relationship between the French Gallican tradition and the Roman centralizing tendencies, the political and ecclesiological force of Conciliarist theories. More specifically, this section will examine closely the theological debate within the Sorbonne between Edmond Richer and André Duval.

This chapter discusses the historical events that served as the prelude to the Reformation. It then explored the impacts of the Black Death plague in Europe, and its influence in the fifteenth century thinking and economics. It also discusses the power of Conciliarism in the fifteenth century, across Europe. Conciliarism is the testament of the papal power in the political field of Europe, as it encroached even beyond the royal supremacy in most kingdoms in Europe.

Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex remains a source of perennial fascination for historians of political thought. Written in 1644 in the heat of the Civil Wars it constitutes an intellectual and theological justification of the entire Covenanting movement and a landmark in the development of Protestant political theory. Rutherford’s argument in the Lex Rex was deeply indebted to scholastic and Conciliarist sources, and this chapter examines the way he deployed these, especially the political philosophy of John Mair and Jacques Almain, in order to construct a covenantal model of kingship undergirded by an interwoven framework of individual and communal rights. In doing so it shows the ongoing influence of the Conciliarist tradition on Scottish political discourse and also highlights unexpected connections between Rutherford’s Covenanting and his Augustinian and Scotistic theology of grace and freedom.