A King Answerable to God Alone

The doctrine of the divine right of kings holds that a monarch's authority to rule comes directly from God rather than from the consent of the governed, the nobility or any other human institution, and that the king is therefore accountable to God alone for the exercise of his power, not to his subjects, parliament or the church acting on its own authority. The doctrine reached its most systematic and influential statement in early modern Western Europe, particularly in France under the Bourbon monarchy, where the bishop and court preacher Jacques-Benigne Bossuet argued from scripture that royal authority was sacred, paternal and absolute, and in England, where James I wrote and spoke on the theory himself before his son Charles I's conflict with Parliament over the same claim contributed directly to the English Civil War.

The doctrine drew on biblical language describing kings as God's anointed and on a longer medieval tradition of sacral kingship, but its early modern form was developed with particular sharpness as a response to specific political threats, including Catholic theories permitting the deposition of heretical monarchs and Protestant theories of resistance to tyranny, both of which divine right theory was constructed to foreclose.