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King James 'True Law Of Free Monarchies'

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For James I, one of the central problems his monarchic rules must face is quite simple. I examine his identification of the many-headed monster, the metaphor for ignorance, as the problem he confronts, how he and supporters of monarchic rule use it, what the metaphor does, and its inaccuracy. By inaccuracy I mean that it is merely the preferred image of those intending to exclude the people from holding power. It contributes to preventing people from changing the political status quo and renders the possibility that ignorance is anything more than a violent force threating political order unthinkable. At the same time, the caricaturing of a growing population of those who do not neatly fit the monarchic political order as a monstrous abomination limits the scope of potential remedies.
The monarchic distribution of ignorance and the problem it supposedly remedies come through in King James I’s own words in the “True Law of Free Monarchies” (1598). Written by the King of Scotland just five years prior to becoming the King of England and Ireland, this treatise rationalizes unequal distribution of ignorance that sets the monarch apart from others. This …show more content…
The problem to which the tract in part responds, appears right at the outset: “…So hath the ignorance, and (which is worse) the seduced opinion of the multitude blinded by them, who thinke themselues able to teach and instruct the ignorants, procured the wrack and ouerthrow of sundry flourishing Common-wealths; and heaped heauy calamilites, threatening vtter destruction vpon others” (James 2002: 53-54). In this discourse it is unfathomable that ignorance could be productive without James’s strict supervision. The people’s destructive ignorance and their seduced opinion appear as a problem threating to disintegrate order and entail disaster and

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