Royal ecclesiastical supremacy and the Restoration church

Abstract

The nature and extent of the royal supremacy over the Church of England proved contentious in Restoration England, especially when Charles II and James II sought to use their ecclesiastical prerogative to legitimate Nonconformist worship. Although the supremacy was a long-established institutional fact of the English church-state, it could be presented in diverse ways. This article outlines six versions of royal supremacy which were expressed, arguing that it was a contested and multiform entity which was manipulated by polemicists for their own purposes. Its location in the monarch alone, in crown-in-parliament, or in delegation to a lay vicegerent was unclear.

Sovereignty and Common Law Judicial Office inTaylor's Case(1675)

“…16 Elsewhere, Rose approached the conflict over ecclesiastical supremacyover who made laws governing the Church-as one between crown and Church, eliding the lawyers entrusted with administering the law. 17 This tendency to assume that the common lawyers carried out the will of their superiors is even more acute among historians of early modern sovereignty. Quentin Skinner, for example, sees the emergence of a stable concept of the state in the seventeenth century as contingent, in particular, on the emergence of an idea of sovereignty as an exclusive lawmaking power held by a centralized authority, a move that he sees most clearly in the work of Thomas Hobbes.…”