For a good time, call James I

While reading the book below that stole my ideas, I came across a discussion of The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, of which I have very fond memories. The Trew Law (full title: The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: The Reciprock and mutuall duetie betwixt a free King and his naturall Subiects) was assigned in my first quarter American Civ class during my first year of college, which was a time when, as I've discussed before, everything seemed to happen in caps lock. Chronologically, it's pretty much the first thing you could reasonably assign in an American history class, so it also happened to be one of the first things I had to read in college. Needless to say, I was pretty fuzzy at the time about everything that occurred in England between about the Cenozoic era and WWII, I had no idea how to read 17th century print, and I could not fathom how someone could seriously argue that, not only was monarchy totally legitimate, but kings receive their authority from God. In sum, I spent many hours at the Reg trying hopelessly to understand how such a document could exist and trembling to think that The Trew Law was the first of four years of such assignments. This strongly contributed to my collegiate terror and sense of DOOM.

The following year, I attempted to take a second class on early America which also started with readings on the English Civil War and the Restoration. I dropped it after being unable to determine who these mysterious but clearly pivotal "Stuarts" were. As far as I could tell, there was no one named "Stuart" in any of the assigned texts--Oliver's last name was Cromwell, there were a bunch of Dukes and Earls of Such-and-such (who, to my great consternation, were also indistinguishable from their predecessors and descendants), all the political writers had other surnames, and the Jameses and Charleses were either "Thefirst" and "Thesecond" or, like Jesus, too important to need surnames. But no Stuarts to be found.

Finally, in my fourth year, I took a class on Burke whose professor spent most of the quarter lamenting the difficulty of teaching early modern British thought to twenty-first century American college students, who simply could not understand or imagine ideas that most Englishmen took absolutely for granted at the time, like that entail meant that your family land was not a commodity. By this time, I could kind of see his point.