Le serment de Jacques Ier d’Angleterre : souveraineté royale contre souveraineté pontificale

Abstract

When James VI of Scotland succeeded Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 as king of England, under the name of James I, he faced the same politico-religious issues as in Scotland. The last of the Tudors had left him an entangled heritage since the 1559 ecclesiastical settlement. On the one hand, the problem of puritan dissidence was left unsolved; on the other hand, the more serious problem of Catholicism had to be settled. English Catholicism was divided into two trends: the first one – represented by the secular clergy – favoured a compromise with the Crown while the second one – represented by the Jesuits – would have none of it and insisted on having Catholicism restored in England. King James, who wrote political treatises in which he defended the theory of the divine right of kings, could apply it to solve the problem. The opportunity presented itself in the aftermath of several plots against his person, among which the most serious was the Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605. He then decided to impose an oath of allegiance in order to make sure that the Catholics who intended to reconcile their faith with their obedience to the Crown would be loyal to him. This oath revealed the division inside the English catholic community. Moreover, inasmuch as the oath forced Catholics to renounce several doctrines of the Roman Church (especially the one dealing with the pope’s excommunicating power), the pope intervened to dissuade Catholics from taking it. That was the beginning of a controversy that took European proportions, starting with the publication of King James’s Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance (Triplici nodo). Pope Paul V asked Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, a Jesuit, to respond to this Apologie, a work which revealed, for the first time in an English context, James’s theologico-political conceptions of royal power. The argumentative structure through which the two opponents debated to justify their pleas (in favour of divine right monarchy for the one, and of the papacy for the other) shed light on two interpretations of the European history of the relations between temporal and spiritual powers. These two visions, unbeknownst to their authors, give us a valuable testimony of the ancient genesis of democratic and political modernity.