Dieu et mon droit | The Divine Right of Kings

And the Lord said to Samuel, “Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. According to all the deeds that they have done, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you. Now then, obey their voice; only you shall solemnly warn them and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.”

So Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking for a king from him. He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”

But the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel. And they said, “No! But there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.”

I Samuel 8:7-20 (English Standard Version)

Throughout history, leaders have claimed their positions in a variety of ways: military conquests, electoral mandates, revolutionary uprisings, etc. But probably the most common and certainly the furthest from modern democratic sensibilities is the divine right of kings. While it is present in a variety of religious and social traditions, most audiences today are familiar with the Judeo-Christian concept that originates from both the Old and New Testaments. Using the words of Jesus Himself—“render unto Caesar that which is his”—and those of His apostles Paul and Peter, Christian rulers from Late Antiquity to the Enlightenment proclaimed themselves beyond criticism because their thrones had come from Almighty God.

The divine right traces its roots back to at least the fourth-century Rome when Emperor Constantine I legalized Christian practices and presided over the Council of Nicaea. The organized Church, both East and West, began to sanction imperial and royal rule by men like Justinian I, Clovis of the Franks, and Charlemagne. In those days, unions of crown and faith were often political rather than spiritual. Both the Catholic and Orthodox churches owned vast tracts of land and needed military protection from outsiders who might invade and seize them. Charles, King of the Franks, symbolized this marriage of convenience in 800 AD when Pope Leo III named him “emperor of the Romans” after the king’s armies had defended the Papal States from the Lombards. That title inherited down to the elected Holy Roman Emperors of the 10th to 19th centuries, who’s ruled with spiritual sanction from the Roman pontiff.

Monarchs claiming the divine right were, however, subject to Church authority in varying degrees. Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich IV pushed these limits too far in the 11th century by refusing to allow Pope Gregory VII’s bishops to serve in German lands. This led to a fifty-year civil war in central Europe known as the Investiture Controversy that saw an imperial army capture Rome and imprison the pope. It ended only after the deaths of both Heinrich and Gregory when their successors agreed to the Concordat of Würms. Under its terms, the pope would appoint bishops within the empire, but since these clergymen were also landowners, they would swear allegiance to the emperor.

Numerous other medieval rulers sought to define the limits of the divine right, especially in England. Henry II found himself at odds with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, in the late 12th century and ultimately ordered his assassination by royal decree. Because his throne had come from God, no mere bishop could restrict his power. Becket’s death and subsequent canonization was merely the first in a long series of Church-state conflicts in the island kingdom. Both of Henry’s sons who sat the English throne also shaped that country’s idea of the divine right. Richard I declared publicly in 1193 that he was “born in a rank which recognizes no superior but God” and, five years later, took the words Dieu et mon droit (“God and my right”) as his personal motto. His brother John’s efforts to rule without limits were less successful and culminated in his forced signing of the Magna Carta in 1215.

The gradual shift in European power politics from the divine right of kings to either limited monarchies or popular democracies would require volumes of books to cover in detail. So instead, I’d like to compare two nations’ unique journeys to one or the other and examine both through our “good idea, bad idea” lens.

Good Idea: Parliamentary Monarchy

The divine right reached its summit in England under the Tudor and Stuart monarchs of the 16th and 17th centuries. With the Reformation’s wildfire-like spread across Europe had come new threats to the Church-state relationship. King Henry VIII, a man whom one historian described as being alternately “praised and reviled but never ignored,” ran afoul of the Church over matters of both love and politics. Over the course of fifteen years, Henry’s parliaments passed acts that limited the Church’s power in England, seized its properties and transferred them to the Crown, and proclaimed Henry to be the lawful and supreme head of the Church of England. This national reformation, unique in all of Europe, kept the structures of the late medieval Church but simply replaced the pope of Rome with the king of England. But the divine right, symbolized by the words “Dieu et mon droit” of Richard the Lionheart, remained firmly in place.

Religious warfare plagued England under Henry’s three children: Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. Edward and Elizabeth were both committed Protestants and Mary a devout Catholic, and each pursued vicious policies toward dissenters. Queen Elizabeth’s religious settlement—both in law with the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity and in battle against the Spanish Armada—secured the Church of England’s independence from Rome but failed to quell the violence tearing the country apart. When Elizabeth died childless and the Stuart King James I succeeded her, Catholics tried to assassinate him in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. His harsh reprisals put English Catholics under intense pressure and seemed to quiet things down in the country.

But James’ son, King Charles I, faced an even worse religious crisis that ultimately cost him his life. A committed believer in “God and my right,” Charles’ high-church approach to government rested on the divine right and gave both religious and political opponents a rallying cry against him. Civil war broke out in 1642 after Charles tried to arrest five dissenting members of Parliament. Seven bloody years later, Parliament tried the king for the crime of tyranny and executed him publicly in London. The severing of his head appeared to sever England from its divinely appointed monarchs.

England became a republic under the brutal tyrant Oliver Cromwell, but the idea of monarchy survived the civil war. In 1660, Parliament offered the crown to Charles’ son, Charles II. The new king retained the motto “Dieu et mon droit” but pledged to govern as a limited monarch under Parliamentary supremacy. Though there were both religious and political disputes later in his reign, a new precedent soon took hold, one seen first in the discarded pages of the Magna Carta. But there was one last gasp of the divine right in England.

Charles II died without issue in 1685 and the throne passed to his younger brother, James II. He had been too young to understand the crisis that had cost his father his head and had grown up in the regal, absolutist court of the great King Louis XIV of France. As a Catholic, James’ accession worried both high- and low-church English Protestants who worked to protect England from the Church of Rome. The new king crushed two rebellions in his first year on the throne and soon began offering high state offices to English Catholics. More worrying was James’ Declaration of Indulgence in 1687 that allowed Catholics to practice their faith openly. This proved to be too much for the Protestant nobility (among them John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough and ancestor to a great prime minister). After a second indulgence declaration in 1688, they invited the Dutchman William, Prince of Orange, to take the English throne with his wife Mary, James II’s eldest daughter.

What followed is known to history as the “Glorious Revolution,” so named because it achieved a popular change in government with very limited bloodshed. King James saw his support across the country collapse soon after William landed in southern England with an army at his back. There was a brief skirmish west of London, but James finally surrendered the throne and departed for a second exile in France. With William on the throne, the new Parliament finished the work begun at Runnymede in 1215. The Bill of Rights 1689 enshrined parliamentary supremacy in law and placed the English—and later British—kings and queens under its authority. (It also included language on religious tolerance, but true freedom of conscience was still decades away.)

Now, you might be thinking, “So what’s the good idea here?” The divine right of kings certainly led to a lot of bloodshed in England, but if we look at the subsequent history of England and Great Britain under the Hanoverian and Windsor dynasties, we can see a good idea in practice. The phrase “divine right” has always meant the divine right to rule. But the Glorious Revolution and Bill of Rights altered this idea in principle, though not on paper, to the divine right to reign. Every monarch from William III to Charles III has been crowned in a religious ceremony, showing a divine sanction at least, if not a divine right, to the Crown. The monarch remains Head of the Church of England as well. Their reign as the source of all political power, though never exercised, is still a reflection of that divine right. When looking at the United Kingdom’s growth from island state to global imperial superpower, with all the good and bad that produced, monarchists could at least make the case that a divine right of kings and queens to reign coupled with parliamentary supremacy in law is a good idea.

Bad Idea: Absolute Monarchy

This section will be much shorter because it’s pretty simple, and we need only look across the English Channel to France for our bad idea. (And I invite your best French jokes in the comments.) The French monarchy was always more powerful than its English counterpart because it lacked elected representatives with political power such as the English Parliament. Instead, the kings of France received input on important matters from the Estates-General, deputies from the three social classes—clergy, nobles, and commoners—who advised the king but had no power to compel royal action or, more importantly, control the nation’s finances. The estates met a total of six times between 1500 and 1614 but rarely managed to complete their work before the kings grew tired of talk and sent the deputies home.

On the death of King Louis XIII in 1643, the four-year-old Louis XIV found himself a puppet of his mother in her feud with nobles his father had appointed to rule as regents. Political and religious tensions then exploded into violence in 1648, as it had done in England six years earlier. The civil war known as the “Fronde” (“slingshot,” named for the weapons used by Parisian rebels) meant that the young king was a virtual prisoner in his lavish palace in the capital. Louis watched his country burn as his mother and the nobles worked to crush the rebellion, and the Fronde ultimately turned the king against the very people whom God had given him to rule.

French monarchs from Hugh Capet to Louis XIII had usually ruled with the help of a chief minister, but Louis announced when he came of age that he intended to govern France personally. (He eventually appointed officials to help with day-to-day matters but regularly dismissed them if he disliked their work.) The king waged war across the European continent—usually by invading the Netherlands first to secure food supplies for his armies—and spent money lavishly to improve French education, science, and culture. Louis was constantly raising taxes to pay for these expenses, but here he faced a problem rooted in medieval French politics. Centuries ago, the crown had promised that it would only raise taxes on the nobility with their consent, and Louis refused to do so. Instead, he simply taxed the commoners, city-folk and peasants alike, to the point that records indicate the average bourgeois Frenchman was paying over fifty percent of his income in taxes.

But unlike in England, where Parliament opposed the personal rule of Charles I and eventually murdered him publicly, no one could oppose the mighty “sun-king” of France. As he built his lavish palace of Versailles outside Paris (far removed from the Parisian mob that had once threatened his reign and his life), he surrounded himself with sycophantic “yes-men” at the court. His reign, the longest verified in world history, brought France military glory and wondrous public buildings, but it ultimately lay the foundations for a fall of epic proportions.

King Louis’ health and vitality, combined with the dreadful state of medical care for children in those years, meant that his long life exceeded those of all his children and grandchildren. On his death in 1715 after 72 years and 110 days on the throne, the five-year-old Louis XV took the throne and ruled during a turbulent period of French history. Daily operations at the court of Versailles was costing the government almost 15% of its total revenue (for comparison, imagine the American president spending $700 billion annually on his life and staff at the White House), and France found itself enmeshed in repeated wars against Great Britain that cost the state in both money and lives. The disastrous Seven Years’ War of 1754-63 led to the collapse of the French em-pire in North America and coupled with corruption at Versailles to bring the monarchy to its lowest point in the public mind for centuries. When his grandson succeeded in 1774 as King Louis XVI, the country was in desperate need of reform and its people on the verge of revolt.

Like his predecessors, Louis XVI was a committed absolutist with little understanding of or desire to learn about affairs in the kingdom God had given him. He ruled in splendid isolation at Versailles, coming to Paris only for public engagements like the birth of his daughter before a crowd of onlookers. When a finance minister suggested the king moderate his expensive tastes to save money, Louis dismissed him with the words, “a king takes his advice from God, not from mere mortals.” His rule sat upon the edge of a knife, but daily levees and nightly dances with fawning courtiers showed little concern.

When the Israelites asked Samuel to give them a king, the Lord spoke the warning to his prophet that I quoted at the start of this podcast. The history of France from Louis XIV to Louis XVI is the second-best example of the dangers of unchecked royal power (the best being that of King Saul of Israel). The French kings, lacking any personal or political restraint, spent their kingdom into financial ruin. And what was the result? (American politicians might want to listen here…) A bloody revolution that cost Louis XVI and his wife their heads. Brutal mob rule enforced by the guillotine. A corrupt oligarchy followed by a military dictatorship. Then another disengaged and unpopular monarchy overthrown in another revolution. Another imperial dictatorship. A republic hated by every political party. Two catastrophic world wars. A corrupt and faltering postwar regime. And finally, just seventy years ago, a government that has seemed to find its footing and resting on the support of its people, that today, in 2025, is once again in the grip of political uncertainty.

Now, did absolute monarchy cause each of those disasters? Of course not. But France’s underlying political culture had been so weakened by centuries of absolute rule and financial mismanagement that it could not stand against rulers who abused its people for their own gain and foreigners who invaded the country to seize what wealth it had. It is an obvious point but one that needs to be made: absolute rule by those who believe their power comes from any source other than a popular mandate and lacking any restraints will always bring that nation to ruin.