¹ Maclean, A. H., ‘George Lawson and John Locke’, Cambridge Historical Journal, ix, 1 (1947), 69–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Salmon, J. H. M., The French religious wars in English political thought (Oxford, 1959), PP. 119–20.Google Scholar

² Franklin, Julian H., John Locke and the theory of sovereignty (Cambridge, 1978), pp. ix–x, 124–5, 86.Google Scholar

³ Franklin, John Locke, chs. 3ff.

⁴ Franklin, John Locke, pp. 66–8.

⁵ Franklin, John Locke, p. 69. Lawson's generic reference to ‘Authors of Politics’ who follow Aristotle is misread as a reference to the singular Politico methodice digesta of Althusius.

⁶ Defensor pacis, ed. Kutch, H. (Berlin, 1958), 11, ii, 2–3Google Scholar; George, Lawson, Politico sacra et civilis (London, 1660 and 1689), pp. 273–4. Like Franklin, I have used the second edition.Google Scholar

⁷ Marsilius, Defensor, 1, i, 1–7; Lawson, Politico, epistle to the reader, and pp. 9–10. Peace is the last word in both titles.

⁸ Marsilius, Defensor, 1, iv, v, 11–14; vi, 7–8; Lawson, Politico, pp. 2–3, chs. 2, 3, 9.

⁹ Marsilius, Defensor, II, vi, 9; xxvii, 3; Lawson, Politico, pp. 258, 352.

¹⁰ Marsilius, Defensor, 1, i, 8; Lawson, Politico, p. 11.

¹¹ Lawson, Politico, pp. 219, 340. In the limited context of this argument, only the second reference is discussed. The first, referring to the sacrament of ordination, appears to be a reference to Defensor, 11, xv.

¹² Franklin, John Locke, p. 125. It is not clear to me if it is the historian who is encouraged to interpret Lawson generously, or whether it was enthusiastic contemporaries of Locke who did not interpret him accurately.

¹³ Both Lawson and Marsilius, as good Aristotelians, rejected democracy as they understood the term; cf. Defensor, 1, viii, 2–3; Politica, pp. 144, 258.

¹⁴ Marsilius, Defensor, 1, xii, 4; Lawson, Politica, p. 26.

¹⁵ Franklin, John Locke, pp. 70–1: ‘When the community acts as a community, the jus suffragii, or right of decision, is the same for all its members.’

¹⁶ Lawson, Politica, p. 26, where the community is considered ‘abstractly and antecedently to a form of Government not yet introduced…’.

¹⁷ Lawson, Politica, p. 143; cf. Marsilius, Defensor, 1, xiii, 3, where Marsilius admits into the community ‘agricoli, artifices et huiusmodi’.

¹⁸ Lawson, Politica, p. 25; Franklin, John Locke, p. 70.

¹⁹ Marsilius, Defensor, 1, xii, 3.

²⁰ Lawson would have nothing of the state of nature fiction, yet amongst the members of the community considered only as a community of citizens, ‘…there is Equality, for there is not Superiour or Inferiour in respect of Government, because there is no Government, no Sovereign, no subject…’ (p. 26).

²¹ Lawson, Politico, p. 383; Marsilius, Defensor, 1, xiii, 2.

²² Lawson, Politico, p. 383.

²³ ‘For although not every citizen nor the greater number of citizens be discovers of the laws, yet every citizen can judge of what has been discovered and proposed to him by someone else, and can discern what must be added, subtracted, or changed.’ Defensor, 1, xiii, 3. I quote from Gewirth's translation, Marsilius of Padua, 11 (New York, 1956), 51, in order to emphasize that the similarity is independent of my reading of Marsilius.Google Scholar

²⁴ Franklin, John Locke, p. 82

²⁵ Lawson, Politica, p. 25.

²⁶ Lawson, Politica, p. 339, cf. p. 383.

²⁷ Lawson, Politica, p. 340.

²⁸ Lawson, Politica, pp. 339–40.

²⁹ Marsilius, Defensor, 1, xii, 2–5; xiv, 1.

³⁰ Marsilius, Defensor, 1, xii, 3; cf. Lawson, Politica, p. 25.

³¹ Marsilius, Defensor, 1, xii, 5: ‘quod pro eodem de cetera supponatur’.

³² Marsilius, Defensor, 1, xii, 3.

³³ On an overwhelming number of occasions throughout the text Marsilius refers to the legislator or (seu) its pars valentior, implying their equivalence.

³⁴ Marsilius, Defensor, i, xii, 4.

³⁵ William Marshall, The Defence of Peace (1535), glossing the valentior pars, writes ‘ in all this longe tale he speaketh not of the rascall multytude, but of the pariyament’ (29a).

³⁶ Lawson, Politico, pp. 155ff.; p. 378.

³⁷ The ecclesiological analogues are no less striking: Lawson's community of believers (brethren) or Church properly understood, stands to contingent Church hierarchies and governments with respect to the power of the keys, as Marsilius’ legislator humanus fidelis stands to the hierarchies of the Roman Church, also with respect to the power of the keys. The authority of the weightier part of the believers is accepted by both as inevitable and desirable.

³⁸ Marsilius, Defensor, 1, xviii; Lawson, Politica, p. 359.

³⁹ Lawson, Politica, p. 358.

⁴⁰ Lawson, Politica, p. 362.

⁴¹ Lawson, Politica, p. 367.

⁴² Lawson, Politica, p. 364.

⁴³ Lawson, Politica, p. 361.

⁴⁴ Lawson, Politica, p. 375.

⁴⁵ Lawson, Politica, pp. 375ff.

⁴⁶ Lawson, Politica, p. 93.

⁴⁷ Franklin, John Locke, pp. 83–5, and p. 72n., where he writes of Lawson's ‘aberration’ and clear ‘ deviations’ from the essentials of his position.

⁴⁸ Franklin, John Locke, p. 85.

⁴⁹ Lawson, Politica, p. 27.

⁵⁰ Lawson, Politica, p. 88; cf. De Tyranno, chs. 1 and 11.

⁵¹ Lawson, Politica, pp. 87–8.

⁵² Lawson, Politica, ch. v.

⁵³ An examination of the political part of Mr. Hobbs, his Leviathan (London, 1657). On the date of the two works see Maclean, ‘George Lawson’, pp. 68ff.; Franklin, John Locke, p. 53.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Lawson, Politica, p. 98: ‘That a bare title is no power. For as the sword in possession without Wisdom and Justice is insufficient, so Wisdom and Justice, with a Title, without the Sword cannot actually govern: because it cannot protect and punish.’

⁵⁵ Lawson, Politico, ch. xvi, where we are left in no doubt as to the rights of the members of a particular Church to separate from its hierarchy, if justice requires it.

⁵⁶ Franklin, John Locke, p. 54.

⁵⁷ For example D'Entreves, A. P., ‘La fortuna di Marsilio da Padova in Inghilterra’, Giomale degli economisti e annali di economia, ii (1940), esp. pp. 150ff.Google Scholar; Perez, Zagorin, A history of political thought in The English Revolution (London, 1954), pp. 187–8.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ John, Bowie, Hobbes and his critics (London, 1951), p. 205.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ For example, Gewirth, Marsilius i, 304.

⁶⁰ Gewirth, Marsilius, 1, 304 suggests Hooker as a link; Bowie, Hobbes, pp. 90–1 sees Lawson as a mediator of medieval thought, though he styles it ‘Thomistic’.