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III. The Authorship of the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2011

Ernest Barker
Ernest Barker
Affiliation:
Professor Ernest Barker, Peterhouse, Cambridge
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Extract

The authorship of the Vindidae has been a vexed question for 350 years, and perhaps it is not likely to be solved. The book belongs, in the main, to a body of Huguenot literature which appeared after 1572 and was concerned with the dangerous question of the right of resistance. A good deal of this literature was sedulously and obstinately anonymous. There was a reason. If a writer advocated resistance, and, still more, if he advocated or even condoned “tyrannicide,” he would be committing himself to something as abhorrent to the general opinion of his age as “Bolshevism”is to the general opinion of ours. If in addition he backed his opinions by his name, and his name were that of a known adherent of the Calvinist cause, he would be committing that cause to certain obloquy and possible danger. He would be trespassing beyond the bounds of cautious and guarded discretion which Calvin had imposed upon himself in this matter: he would be giving to the enemies of Calvinism the very handle which they desired. In these conditions anonymity flourished: pseudonyms were rife; and calculated puzzles were set to baffle future ages. Not only are we confronted by problems of authorship: we have also to face other and lesser problems. Sometimes, for example, the place and the date of publication are falsified. There was indeed a particular reason for such falsification. Printers as well as authors—perhaps even more than authors—had to be wary; and a genuine place and date of publication afforded too easy a clue.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Historical Journal , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , 1930 , pp. 164 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1930

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References

1 See Elkan, Die Publizistik der Bartholomäusnacht, pp. 46, 53.

2 It is only fair to James I to add that it was a favourite device of controversy in those days for a Romanist to pretend to be a Protestant and vice versa, and under that guise to write something which would damage the cause the writer pretended to espouse.

3 Mr J. W. Allen, however, in his recent work on Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (p. 319, note 2) pronounces against Mornay and has doubts about Languet.

4 I would add, in corroboration, that I have noticed that Languet sent to George Buchanan a copy of the Apology, with a letter, reminding him that they had once met some twenty years ago, in the course of 1581. One naturally thinks of an author's way of sending out copies of an off-print or pamphlet of his own—particularly when one reflects that Languet had not had any contact with Buchanan for twenty years.

5 This of itself seems to exclude his having written the 240 pages of the solid Latin argument of the Vindidae contra Tyrannos, or even his re-writing of some old draft of the argument, during this period.

6 It may be noticed in this connexion that the author of the Vindiciae, p. 164, refers to the form of the coronation oath in the chapter library at Beauvais. When, again, the author of the Vindiciae, p. 150, refers to a form used in the accounts of the French Chamber of Accounts (Trop donné, soit répété), and when he refers, p. 62, to documents in the Archiva Camerae Ratiociniorum, we cannot but think of the travelled and inquiring Languet, who lived for some time in Paris as diplomatic agent, and may well have studied archives and forms of account.

7 I would add that references in the Vindidae to events which happened in 1574 show that it must have been written after that date.

8 The theological bent of his pen is illustrated by a passage in his wife's Memoirs under the year 1579 about his book on the Christian religion. “He had been turning it over a long time, and all his early studies had only been a preparation for writing it.”