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Bilder on Constitutional Regicide
Mary Sarah Bilder, Boston College Law School, has posted Hater of Kings: Catharine Macaulay’s Constitutional Regicide and the Declaration of Independence, which is forthcoming in Americans in Revolution, ed. Tom Cutterham and Sara Georgini (University of Virginia Press, 2026):
Charles I (LC)
The American Revolution was a constitutional regicide. At first glance it does not much resemble a regicide. Charles I had been executed in 1649. George III went on to live nearly half a century beyond 1776. But read the Declaration of Independence carefully and notice how large the king looms. The “present King of Great Britain” aimed to establish “an absolute Tyranny.” The eighteen usurpations each began with He, the king. The king embodied two particular political typologies: Prince and Tyrant. As such, he was “unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” This constitutional justification for regicide had been developed by British historian Catharine Macaulay in the fourth volume of her History of England. Macaulay’s history from James I to the execution of Charles I provided a historical model, theoretical explanation, and blueprint for would-be patriots. Because of Macaulay, on the far side of the Atlantic, American revolutionaries renounced their allegiance to the king–and to any king–without the complications and consequences of executing one.
--Dan Ernst
![• I extract this from an elegant and animated encomium. " He, with the divine Milton, thought no exertion was loft. This [maxim] was the guide of his practice; is replete with good sense and philofophy ; and has even had the fanction of obfervation and experience. Nor was he totally difappointed.
He lived to see tyranny defeated, and the
seeds of freedom planted in another world. He lived to see the principles of liberty propagated far and wide; and that knowledge, with which his own mind was peculiarly illuminated, diffused to an extent for which he could scarcely have hoped."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:qunxd6yue3igcj6qdubntwlb/bafkreicbgpjfiu4lgj3hlqzluoz7w7q36olvyt5u4hnnimbnhnod4lc35a)
![Screen capture of article title and abstract:
England's Erastus? Or, James Morice and the Law of Excommunication
Adam B. Forsyth
Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Abstract
The Elizabethan reign has lately emerged as a formative period for English ideas about the liberties of the subject and the 'ancient constitution' of the realm. Recent work has described the development of such ideas as having been driven by an organized campaign against the English ecclesiastical courts: a legal and intellectual effort that had emerged from the misgivings of certain 'puritan' lawyers about the powers claimed by new prerogative jurisdictions.
The primary grievance of the campaign has been identified as having been the church courts' use of the oath ex officio, and the campaign's primary defensive tool has been identified as having been the twenty-ninth chapter of Magna Carta. But overlooked manuscripts reveal a more complex story. This article shows that the law of excommunication was as important to the campaign in question as Magna Carta. In addition, a re-examination of the life and work of James Morice, one of the principal lawyers responsible for the campaign, demonstrates that the law of excommunication deeply structured his understanding of the royal supremacy, and of the legal relationship between England's secular and ecclesiastical polities - particularly as they had existed in the distant medieval past.
[Introduction]
Where did English 'ancient constitutionalism' come from? How did the medieval common law begin to be associated with personal liberty in early modern England; and how did certain conceptions of freedom start to become an integral part of what (for some) it meant to be English? Seeking to answer these questions, among others,](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:qunxd6yue3igcj6qdubntwlb/bafkreicbycyvq23lukysr3fu6swvdraw6axxsdgdm5ekjgznqsixhxglyi)
![that all customs granted since i Edward i shall be taken away non obstante Charta Mercator because it is against
the great Charter; and according to that good precedent,*® I hope that it will be granted by this parliament that all new customs or impositions granted or any way encroached upon the subjects' goods or merchandise without parliament since the first year of Edward I shall be taken away as then they were, notwithstanding Charta Mercatoria" or any grant, ordi-nance, or judgment in the Exchequer or elsewhere had or made since that time, sith that the same appear to be contrary to the laws of the realm and directly contrary to the great Charter, which laws having once a settled allowance cannot be altered, changed, or made void by act of prince or peo-ple, but by mutual consent in parliament [fol. 64] of prince and people as all learned men know. And therefore when there was occasion and complaint made in parliament by the Commons at one time against the Lord Latimer and another time against one Richard Lyons for causing of impositions to be laid upon the merchants' goods without consent of parliament,3 neither those persons who were accused, nor any of the King's learned counsel at law did or could justify the same to be lawfully done by color of the prerogative or otherwise, but they were both punished for their so doing although that the same impositions were laid to continue for a very short time and in case of great necessities, whereas the impositions of late laid upon merchants' goods without the consent of parliament (now complained of) is excessive great and expressed to continue forever or at the least without any limitation of time, whereof the like was never seen in this land to the knowledge of us that profess the law.
And it is manifest that according to the said rule of law and right](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:qunxd6yue3igcj6qdubntwlb/bafkreidg7g325sytae4staw7zx3zl6aewjrgvh4va55hu6vd25lsz23s2m)
