under the jurisdiction of
the President and Council of Wales, a court whose constitution and
procedure rested on the sheer will of the Crown. The province of the
spiritual courts was as busily enlarged. It was in vain that the judges,
spurred no doubt by the old jealousy between civil and ecclesiastical
lawyers, entertained appeals against the High Commission, and strove by
a series of decisions to set bounds to its limitless claims of
jurisdiction or to restrict its powers of imprisonment to cases of
schism and heresy. The judges were powerless against the Crown; and
James was vehement in his support of courts which were closely bound up
with his own prerogative. What work the courts spiritual might be
counted on to do, if the king had his way, was plain from the
announcement of a civilian named Cowell that "the king is above law by
his absolute power," and that "notwithstanding his oath he may alter and
suspend any particular law that seemeth hurtful to the public estate."

[Sidenote: The claims of the king.]

Cowell's book was suppressed on a remonstrance of the House of Commons;
but the party of passive obedience grew fast. Even before his accession
to the English throne James had formulated his theory of rule in a work
on _The True Law of Free Monarchy_, and announced that "although a good
king will frame his actions to be according to law, yet he is not bound
thereto, but of his own will and for example giving to his subjects."
With the Tudor statesmen who used the phrase, "an absolute king" or "an
absolute monarchy" meant a sovereign or rule complete in themselves and
independent of all foreign or Papal interference. James chose to regard
the words as implying the freedom of the monarch from all control by law
or from responsibility to anything but his own royal will. The king's
theory was already a system of government; it was soon to become a
doctrine which bishops preached from the pulpit, and for which brave men
laid their heads on the block. The Church was quick to adopt its
sovereign's discovery. Some three years after his accession Convocation
in its book of Canons denounced as a fatal error the assertion that "all
civil power, jurisdiction, and authority were first derived from the
people and disordered multitude, or either is originally still in them,
or else is deduced by their consent naturally from them; and is not
God's ordinance originally descending from him and depending upon him."
In strict acc