or adultery, for obedience is the root of all virtues
and the cause of all felicity, and "rebellion is not a single fault,
like theft or murder, but the cesspool and swamp of all possible sins
against God and man." Bonner was charged by the government of Mary to
preach that all rebels incurred damnation. Much later Richard Hooker
warned his countrymen that Puritanism endangered the prerogatives of
crown and nobility.

[Sidenote: and republicans]

But there were not wanting champions of the people. Reginald Pole
asserted the responsibility of the sovereign, though in moderate
language. Bishop John Ponet wrote _A Treatise on Politic Power_ to
show that men had the right to depose a bad king and to assassinate a
tyrant. The haughty Elizabeth herself often had to listen to drastic
advice. When she visited Cambridge she was entertained by a debate on
tyrannicide, in which one bold clerk asserted that God might incite a
regicide; and by a discussion of the respective advantages of elective
and hereditary monarchy, one speaker offering to maintain the former
with his life and, if need be, with his death. When Elizabeth, after
hearing a refractory Parliament, complained to the {605} Spanish
ambassador that "she could not tell what those devils were after" his
excellency replied, "They want liberty, madam, and if princes do not
look to themselves" they will soon find that they are drifting to
revolution and anarchy. Significant, indeed, was the silent work of
Parliament in building up the constitutional doctrine of its own
omnicompetence and of its own supremacy.

[Sidenote: Tyrannicide]

One striking aberration in the political theory of that time was the
prominence in it of the appeal to tyrannicide. Schooled by the
ancients who sang the praises of Harmodius and Aristogiton, by the
biblical example of Ehud and Eglon, and by various medieval publicists,
and taught the value of murder by the princes and popes who set prices
on each other's heads, an extraordinary number of sixteenth century
divines approved of the dagger as the best remedy for tyranny.
Melanchthon wished that God would raise up an able man to slay Henry
VIII; John Ponet and Cajetan and the French theologian Boucher admitted
the possible virtue of assassination. But the most elaborate statement
of the same doctrine was put by the Spanish Jesuit Mariana, in a book
_On the King and his Education_ published in 1599, with an official
_imprimatur_, a de