THE LITERARY AND POLITICAL CONTEXT OF LEX, REX

If Rutherford's posthumous popularity was secured by his Letters, it is his political treatise, Lex, Rex, which is best known to historians. Published in London in 1644, it presented a thorough defence of the Covenanters' armed resistance to Charles I. Although for this reason it was very much a product of the post-1638 period, it is possible that Rutherford had held some of its radical tenets since his student days in the 1620s. There is no direct evidence for this, but an incident in the life of his radical Presbyterian colleague, Robert Blair, is revealing. Blair lost his position as a regent at Glasgow University in 1623 because his lectures on Aristotle's Politics and Ethics were regarded as subversive. He was accused of teaching that the people did well in rescuing Jonathan out of the hands of Saul, and that election to the throne was better than succession. Both of these points are to be found in Lex, Rex, and it is significant that when Rutherford drafted a political treatise in manuscript form before leaving Scotland, he asked Blair to read it. It seems possible that these men did not just develop a radical political theory after 1638, but had remained substantially loyal to the tradition of natural-law contractualism stemming from Buchanan.

What is certain is that the success of the Covenanter revolution led Rutherford to write about political theory.