Reasons to protect the CBC - the case as put in 1579

Here is a look at the text of Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos, a French Calvinist work written in 1579 during the period of that nation’s Wars of Religion.  It was published pseudonymously, and the authorship is still something of a mystery. The work was translated fully into English from the original Latin and French in 1648 a year before King Charles I lost his head, and it reappeared again in 1689 on the occasion of the Glorious Revolution, when absolutism apparently ended.  Generally it can be considered a work of “reform”.  The following section asks whether the “king” is the “proprietary lord ... of the public domain”, and it explains why we should keep the modern-day CBC:

So what? Just because someone has made you a shepherd for the sake of the flock, did he hand over that flock to be skinned, sold off piecemeal, driven, and plundered at your pleasure?  And because the people has constituted you as duke or judge of some city or region, has it empowered you to alienate, sell, or ruin that city or region?  Since the people would be alienated together with the region, did it therefore give you authority in order for you to pull it apart, prostitute it, and to dispose of it to whomsoever you wished?  Then again, is the royal dignity a possession, or is it rather a function?  If it is a function, what does it have in common with property?  But if it is a possession, is it not at least of the type whereby the people – by whom it is handed over – retains the property to itself in perpetuity.  And finally, if the patrimony of the fisc – that is, the domain – is truly called the dowry of the commonwealth, and, indeed, a dowry at the piecemeal dismantling and ruination of which the commonwealth itself, the kingdom, and eventually the king himself perish, then by what law will it be licit to alienate that dowry?[1] ...

Consequently, if an owner who is squandering his own resources is consigned to agnates or other relatives by public authority and forced to keep his hands off his own things, it is clearly much more equitable that a curator of the commonwealth who diverts public resources to the public ruin, or who completely overturns them, could be deprived of all administration by those whose concern and office this is, if he failed to desist after a reproof.

It is easily shown that in all legitimate realms the king is not the proprietary lord of the royal patrimony.[2]

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[1]Stephanus Junius Brutus, the Celt, Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos: or, concerning the legitimate power of a prince over the people, and of the people over a prince, ed. and tr. George Garnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 113,114.

[2] Ibid., p. 119.

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