In rejecting natural law theory, Montaigne was rejecting the dominant European understanding of universal morality. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries all the universities taught their students the basic points of the theory; and it was important outside the academy as well. In 1594 the Protestant Richard Hooker produced a magnificent restatement of Thomistic natural law doctrine in order to justify, against Catholics and Calvinists, his claim that the English government could rightly determine what its churches taught and how they were to be organized. Sixteenth-century Spanish Catholic theologians were prolific sources of commentary on both intellectualist and voluntarist theories of natural law. Their greatest successor was Francisco Suarez, whose early seventeenth-century synthesis was designed to support his efforts to justify papal supremacy over all baptized Christians, including such heretics as King James I, and to defend tyrannicide. Hooker addressed a local issue and was influential only in England. Suarez spoke to problems of international order, and was read everywhere.

Hooker restated the Thomistic belief that under a divine supervisor all things follow laws directing them to act for the common good of the universe as well as their own, and that natural law directs us in particular to both ends equally. Quietly incorporating some elements of voluntarism, he tried to make his position acceptable to Calvinists as well as to members of his own church.