Lawyers in The Lawes: English Jurists and Richard Hooker's Theology

Lawyers in The Lawes: English Jurists and Richard Hooker's Theology

The chapter explores the theology and jurisprudence of Richard Hooker in his seminal work, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. Hooker is the most significant theologian of the English Reformation and, in justifying the political initiative in religious reform, among the most magisterial of the Protestant theologians of the 16th century. The chapter gives an account of The Lawes’ well-known debt to Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica in providing a structure for, what was in substance, a Reformed theology of church and state. Particular emphasis is given to Hooker’s reliance on the work of the medieval and Tudor jurists Henri de Bracton, Sir William Stanford and, possibly, Sir John Fortescue. Together, this theology and jurisprudence justified a significant role for monarchy in the government of the church—albeit, as influenced by the English jurists, a monarchy limited by natural and positive law. It also led to Hooker’s exceptional classification of the common law (and English equity) as a form of natural law. In bringing the English jurists into The Lawes’ apology for the role of civil government in the English Church, Hooker not only proposed a conception of a unified visible church and the state but created a magisterial jurisprudence capable of supporting this vision.