A Holy Commonwealth is Richard Baxter's invisible masterpiece. It is high time that it was made more visible. It was written in 1659, but its author disowned it publicly in 1670. This did not save the work from being part of a great book-burning by repressive authorities in 1683. Baxter's A Holy Commonwealth was in good company there, alongside Hobbes's Leviathan and Milton's writings.

This is to flatter Baxter. He is not in the same league as Hobbes or Milton. His book is a curiously constructed work, which begins with a number of high-minded generalities, and only relatively late in the text gets down to discussing the practical alternative ways of governing the country. There is a very important chapter on resistance theory, in which he draws upon the writings of William Barclay, Thomas Bilson and Hugo Grotius to show the exceptional circumstances in which a ruler should be disobeyed. The last chapter is in the form of a confessional: the application of these theories to his own personal reasons for disobeying Charles I in 1642. A careful reading of the text, we shall see, will show that there is a logic to the whole, and if he ends with a personal apologia, rather than some grand summing-up statement of political theory, we have to remember that it is an unfinished treatise. Before Baxter could finish his work, it was overtaken by events.

In editing this text for the modern reader certain principles were followed. Baxter's ‘Theses’ were retained in their entirety; the additional comments upon each only when they added fresh material. The omissions were indicated in the conventional way. There are arguments for and against retaining the original spelling, but it was decided in this case not to modernise it. Nevertheless there are many obvious original printer's errors which it would have been pedantic to preserve – e.g. ‘everlastiug’ for ‘everlasting’ – and these have been silently corrected, rather than choosing to impose a rather wearying (for the reader) repetition of ‘sic’. Either Baxter, or his printer, got confused with the numbering. There are sometimes, for instance, 1, 2 and 4, and the 3 has been forgotten. Again the decision was taken to correct silently. Italicising in the seventeenth century was not an exact art. The bulk of the text has, therefore, been printed in ordinary roman type, and italicisation has been retained only for genuine emphasis, for foreign words and quotations, and for titles of books. Although many of the original typographical conventions have been preserved, along with the spelling, these have not been observed when they are outside the modern typesetter's apparatus. Where the original printer had used 1, 2, 3 in lists of numbered points, an arabic 1 (instead of a roman numeral) is used to begin the series of numbers.

Having laid down these fore-going Grounds, it would not be here unseasonable to render a publick account of my own actions, in answer to that Question, which I have been urged with by so many, ‘By what Reasons was I moved to engage myself in the Parliaments Warre?’ But (though I have not leisure to render so full an account to each particular Quærist, as may be satisfactory, and therefore could be content to dispatch it here at once for all, yet) it will require so long a History of my own affairs, and also so many ungratefull recitals of the abuses and evils of those times, that I shall not undertake so unpleasant a task, till I am called to it by such necessity, as will excuse these inconveniences: but only cursorily shall cast in these following brief accounts instead of a fuller Declaration.

§. I. The malignant hatred of seriousness in Religion, did work so violently in the rabble where I lived, that I could not stay at home with any probable safety of my life. My life was sought before I went away: Sober, pious men of Neighbour-Parishes, that thought the rabble had been upon my head in a tumult (when indeed I was out of Town) were knockt down in the streets, to the hazzard of their lives, when they went among them to look after me; and meerly because they were accounted Puritans. And all this was but on a false rumour, that the Churchwardens were about to obey the Parliaments Order, in taking down the Images of the Trinity about the Church.

Loyseau's life

Charles Loyseau's paternal grandfather was a husbandman of Nogent-le-Roi in the Eure valley, some thirteen kilometres southwest of Dreux. To the north of Dreux, in the same valley, lies Anet with the remains of its château which Diane de Poitiers, mistress of King Henry II, made into one of the masterpieces of French Renaissance architecture. The patronage wielded by La Grande Sénéschalle was instrumental in shaping the career of Loyseau's father, Regnauld. Trained as an advocate, he became Diane's regular legal representative when his predecessor in that role, the distinguished lawyer Christofle de Thou, was appointed through the same patroness's good offices to a senior judgeship in the Paris parlement. Regnauld Loyseau himself built a successful practice at the Paris bar, and it was probably in the capital that his son Charles was born in 1564. Diane de Poitiers stood godmother to him (Offices III.iii.45). Eclipsed in influence at court since Henry II's death in 1559, she was to die in 1567; but protégés of hers remained conspicuously in place. And with his father's own contacts to help him on his way, a brilliant future for the young Loyseau may well have been anticipated.

Such expectations were not entirely fulfilled. Doubtless Loyseau received the university education and qualifications in civil and in canon law which, as he states (Orders 8.15), were necessary for all aspiring advocates, hard though the statement is to reconcile with his later remarks on the minimum age for admission into the profession (Orders 8.44), and those remarks in turn with his own experience.

1. The closing remarks of the last chapter put me in mind of an amusing question which Chasseneuz and Tiraqueau raise: whether the common saying of our country gentlemen can be sustained, ‘that they are as much gentlemen as the king’. Both of them reject it, partly on the strength of the passages from Cicero and Aristotle that have just been cited, but above all because, as is well known, there are many degrees in the order of nobility.

2. For my part, I freely confess that this comparison of the subject with his king is odious, insolent and well-nigh blasphemous. Yet I consider it to be inherently true, given that whoever is absolutely and perfectly a gentleman cannot be more so, as that passage from Aristotle clearly states. It is also the case that true order is a substantive quality, positive and – as with substance in dialectic – not susceptible of increase nor of decrease. Thus, it is true to say that the lowest priest is as much a priest as the greatest bishop; and the lowest bishop, so to speak, is as much a bishop as the pope. This is the solution to the famous passage from St Cyprian which those of the so-called reformed religion allege against us: ‘the rest of the apostles undoubtedly formed, with Peter, a community equal in both honour and power’ – that is, to the extent that they were apostles.

1. Nature herself has so distinguished between various plants and beasts that in one and the same species some are free and domestic, while others are rustic and wild. As they infallibly retain these qualities in propagating themselves, the wild never beget the domestic, nor vice versa. Further, it is naturally the case that plants and beasts retain the quality of their seed, because their vegetative or sensitive soul proceeds absolutely ‘from the power of matter’, say the philosophers. But the rational soul of men comes immediately from God, Who created it expressly when He sent it into the human body. So it has no natural participation in the qualities of the generative seed of the body where it is relegated.

2. That is why almost all the most admired philosophers and poets astonish me by not attending to this difference of souls. They have deluded themselves that there are certain principles of virtue which are transferred from fathers to children by the act of begetting. Witness the sorites or induction of Socrates who concluded that, as the best-bred apple, wine or horse was the best, so is it with the man of most noble lineage. Aristotle, too, says that all nations honour and esteem nobility because of the likelihood that whoever is excellent is born of excellent parents; and therefore he defines nobility as ‘excellence of birth’, virtue of lineage.

1. In as much as order is a species of dignity the third estate of France is not properly an order: for, as it embraces all the rest of the people, apart from churchmen and nobles, all the people of France would have to be in dignity. But in as much as order signifies a condition or occupation or else a distinct species of persons, the third estate is one of the three orders or estates general of France.

2. Nevertheless, in ancient Gaul no account was taken of it, nor was it held in any respect or regard. So Caesar says:

3. M. Pasquier observes very pertinently that in the first two dynasties of our kings there was no mention of the third estate, and that the common people were not summoned at all to the general assemblies convened for the state's constitutional affairs.

4. At those assemblies, which were then called parlements and are now called estates-general, there were only prelates and barons: that is, the principal members of the clergy and the nobility. Hence our courts of parlement are at present composed of clerics and laymen who were formerly nobles and men of the sword, as the old books testify.

1. In Rome, as in France, there were three orders, or estates, which included all the people. But they were different from ours: for whereas we have the clergy, the nobility and the third estate, they had the senate, the knights and the common people. ‘Rome, city of Mars, has three orders: knights, plebeians, senators’, says Ausonius. The senate was for counsel, the knights for the exercise of force, and the common people for supplying the needs of the commonwealth.

2. Some ascribe this differentiation of the people to Romulus. As [Servius] and Dionysius of Halicarnassus say, he chose a hundred elders from among the most noble of his people for his council, and called them priests. He also chose three hundred young men for his guard, and called them ‘the swift’ either because of their speediness or after the name of their first captain who, indeed, was the second person in the kingdom, just as afterwards in the Republic the master of the horse was the second person after the dictator, and in the Empire the praetorian prefect after the emperor.

3. But [the elder] Pliny tells us that the Roman knights never constituted a distinct order until the time of the Gracchi and when they had acquired the authority and duty of judging cases at law.

1. Two modern jurisconsults have engaged in a great debate as to whether the Roman senate was an order or else a company of officers. Budé says that it was an order, on the grounds that in law and in other fine books it is always termed ‘the most honourable order’ and the senators are never called officers or magistrates. Cagnolus takes him up on this, supporting Accursius and the ancient doctors who share his own opinion. These, misled by the usage of their time, have agreed that the Roman senate was a body of officers.

2. Much the same difficulty occurs with the dignity of decurions, that is, the town councillors of the Roman Empire. In law this is sometimes called an ‘order’ and sometimes an ‘honour’, meaning an office of a town or commonwealth: ‘For an honour is an administrative position in a commonwealth with the rank of dignity’, says Callistratus.

3. Now it is only order that I have left to consider, the nature of office having been sufficiently explained in my Offices. Order, then, to which this book is devoted, is a species of dignity, or honourable quality, which appertains in the same way and by the same name to several persons. It does not of itself ascribe to them any particular public power; but, beyond the rank which it gives them, it brings them a particular aptitude and capacity to attain either offices or lordships.

1. The three estates of France are very different from those of the Romans. In the first place we have no senatorial order. Budé's comment is very true, that our parlements scarcely resemble the Roman senate. The senate was not a body of officers, but an order from which public functionaries of war, justice or finance were ordinarily taken. In France, however, military officers ought to be taken from the order of the nobility; judicial officers are taken indiscriminately from the three estates, apart from the fact that ecclesiastics cannot hold offices of criminal justice; and financial officers are taken from the third estate, because the clergy and the nobility for the most part disdain them.

2. But in this most Christian kingdom we have reserved the first rank of honour for the ministers of God, making the clergy, or the ecclesiastical order, the first of the three estates of France, with good reason.

3. On the other hand, the Romans, being more interested in the state than in religion, did not make of their priests a separate order, but commingled them with the three estates, just as justice is with us. This is how matters are arranged in almost all the states of Christendom. Scarcely anywhere else are the clergy a separate order as is the case in France which has always been more Christian and has honoured the church more highly than has any other nation in the world.

1. Just as order is different from office, so too is its deprivation different. Deprivation of office is called ‘forfeiture’; that of order is commonly termed ‘degradation’, in as much as grade or degree is understood to be synonymous with order, although degrees are, properly, the ranks of a particular order. That is why, strictly speaking, the degradation which our jurisconsults call de gradu dejectionem and the laws of the Code call regradationem (for degradatio is not Latin) is not properly the absolute deprivation of order, as the vulgar think, but only a demotion or deprivation of a higher degree or rank, being put or thrown back to a lower degree whilst nevertheless remaining in the order.

2. In Greek this is called ‘demotion’, and in Latin regradatio where ‘re’ either is a privative particle or signifies ‘backwards’.

3. It is in this sense that St Jerome says that ‘Heraclius was demoted from a bishop to a priest’; and he says, ‘Let anyone demoted from the power of a tribune by his fault be deprived of every office of the service and be reduced to the designation of tiro’. He also says that ‘In the book of Ezekiel, priests who transgressed were demoted to sacristans and doorkeepers’. The passage in Ezekiel contains these words: ‘The Levites who strayed from the Lord after their idols shall be ministers in the sanctuary of God and keepers of the gates’.

1. I call plain dignities all the titles and qualities with which one can be titled and qualified solely by honour without their being in effect true orders, offices or lordships.

2. Now there are two kinds of them: to wit, honorary dignities which are plain titles of honorary orders, offices or lordships, and ‘held by title’, but otherwise without performance or practice or reality; and epithets of honour, that is, the honourable qualities ascribed to every dignity, whether order, office or lordship.

3. And there is this difference between them: that an honorary dignity is a substantive name ascribed immediately to the person and because of himself; and an epithet is an adjectival name ascribed mediately to him because of some real dignity of order or of office or of lordship.

4. Let us begin, according to our custom, with the custom of the Romans. Let us speak first of their honorary dignities, then of their epithets. For, as they had only two kinds of dignities, to wit, orders and offices, and did not have the use of lordships, it is true that they had various orders, and above all various honorary and nominal offices.

5. As for orders, first they had nominal senators: to wit, all those who had exercised great offices, called ‘curule magistrates or magistrates of the Roman people’, and thereafter had entry and voice in the senate and had also the senatorial ornaments, so that only the name of senators remained any longer to them.