Popular Sovereignty & the Right to Resist

1. Scope and evidence

The core facts of Buchanan's life, authorship and arguments are Established and rest on primary texts and modern critical scholarship (notably Roger Mason's and Martin Smith's critical edition, and J.H. Burns's work on Scottish monarchy). The characterisation of Buchanan as the most radical resistance theorist of his generation in extending tyrannicide to private individuals is Established but is a matter of scholarly emphasis and interpretation. Buchanan's influence on later thinkers (Milton, Sidney, the Covenanters, Locke, and — more remotely — American revolutionaries) ranges from Established (seventeenth-century British reception) to Disputed (direct, demonstrable influence on Locke or 1776). Crucially, readers should note Buchanan's direct conflict of interest: he was an active partisan in the deposition of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the author of propaganda against her, and his De Jure Regni was in part a retrospective justification of that deposition. His theoretical work is a genuine intellectual achievement and a document of factional politics; both are true simultaneously.

2. Buchanan's life and the irony of tutoring both Mary and James

George Buchanan was born in February 1506 at the farm of Moss (Mid Leowen) in the parish of Killearn, Stirlingshire, the third of eight children of a family of modest means; his father died young, leaving his mother, Agnes Heriot, to raise the household in hardship. Sent to Paris at fourteen by an uncle, he studied at St Andrews (BA 1525) chiefly to hear the celebrated philosopher-theologian John Mair, then followed Mair back to Paris. Over the following decades he became the most admired Latin poet and humanist in Scotland — indeed one of the foremost in Europe — teaching at Sainte-Barbe in Paris, at Bordeaux (where Montaigne was his pupil), and at Coimbra in Portugal, where he fell foul of the Inquisition. Contemporaries and later historians rated him extraordinarily highly: the historian Keith Brown has called him "the most profound intellectual sixteenth-century Scotland produced."

Returning to Scotland around 1561 and aligning openly with the Reformation, Buchanan was appointed in 1562 to read Latin with Mary, Queen of Scots. The English ambassador Thomas Randolph, in an April 1562 letter to Sir William Cecil, reported that "The Queen readeth daily after her dinner, instructed by a learned man, Master George Buchanan." He wrote court masques and celebratory verse for her, including for her marriage to Darnley. Yet within a few years he had turned decisively against her. After Mary's fall he was appointed, from 1570, a tutor to her infant son, King James VI.

Herein lies one of the most striking ironies in the history of political thought: the same scholar tutored both the deposed queen and the son installed in her place — figures on opposite sides of the very political rupture Buchanan's writings sought to justify. His treatment of the boy king was famously severe; James reportedly retained a lifelong "awe" and remembered fear of his formidable tutor, even as he came, in adulthood, to repudiate Buchanan's political doctrines root and branch.

3. Buchanan's role in Mary's downfall examined

The "accuracy over hagiography" standard demands that this be stated plainly: Buchanan was not a detached philosopher theorising in the abstract. He was an active participant in the political destruction of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the principal literary architect of the case against her.

After the murder of Darnley in 1567 and Mary's marriage to the Earl of Bothwell, Buchanan cast his lot with the Protestant lords led by the Regent Moray (Mary's half-brother), who had been his patron. In 1568 he travelled with Moray's commission to the conferences at York and Westminster, where the case against the deposed queen — including the notorious Casket Letters, alleged to prove her adultery with Bothwell and complicity in Darnley's murder — was laid before commissioners. Buchanan then drew up the indictment that was published in 1571 as the Detectio Mariae Reginae Scotorum (translated into Scots as Ane Detectioun of the Duinges of Marie Quene of Scottes), a savage tract designed to render Mary, in one scholar's summary, "totally unacceptable as a queen in the eyes of God and man."

Modern scholarship treats the Detectio as partisan propaganda and Buchanan as an unreliable witness on Mary. Roger Mason describes Buchanan's account of the 1560s in the Historia as "not just notoriously one-sided, but is also as a result dramatically colourless," and his portrait of Mary as "an assemblage of stereotypes devoid of individuality" — the more damning because Buchanan had once been an intimate of the queen, reading Livy with her of an evening, and "demonstrably changed sides and, famously, repaid the queen's patronage with vitriol." The authenticity of the Casket Letters remains one of the great historiographical disputes; most modern scholars doubt their unaltered genuineness and suspect manipulation or interpolation, and Mason judges that "it is conceivable that Buchanan had a hand in their production," while his role in compiling the indictment is beyond doubt. Buchanan's biographer I.D. McFarlane offered only a "half-hearted defence," describing him at best as "an amanuensis of a high order."

The consequence for reading De Jure Regni is important and cuts two ways. On one hand, the treatise is, in part, a philosophical apologia for a deposition Buchanan had personally helped to bring about; its theory of justified resistance conveniently licenses precisely the actions he and his allies had taken in 1567. To ignore this would be naïve. On the other hand, the argument stands or falls on its own logical and textual merits, which are considerable, and it draws on a genuine and long-standing tradition of European and Scottish political reflection that predates the Marian crisis. The honest verdict is that the work is both a serious contribution to political theory and a document of factional self-justification — and that its power in later centuries derived from the former, even as its origins lay in the latter.

4. The deposition of 1567: theory meets practice

The historian John Guy, in his biography of Mary (2004), opens with the idea at the centre of this card. Elizabeth I, he argues, understood that executing an anointed queen would boost "the theory of popular sovereignty — the belief that political power lies in the people and not in the ruler", the ideology Mary's rebel lords had already used to depose her. Guy also suggests the idea reached America when the Scot William Small taught Thomas Jefferson at William and Mary. That link is suggestive rather than proven, and it does not show that Buchanan himself was read by the founders. (Shared.)

Knox came first. On 4 September 1561, in his first interview with Mary at Holyroodhouse, Knox defended armed resistance to an idolatrous ruler. Guy explains the move behind it: Knox read St Paul's "powers" in Romans 13 as plural, so that the nobility, as an "inferior power" also ordained by God, might resist and depose a ruler in a godly cause. That is the inferior-magistrate theory which, as the next section explains, Buchanan went beyond. (Established.)

The deposition itself was not carried out in Buchanan's language. After Mary's surrender at Carberry Hill on 15 June 1567, the confederate lords imprisoned her at Lochleven. On 24 July 1567, Lord Lindsay put three documents before her: an abdication in favour of her son, a commission naming Moray as regent, and another naming interim regents. By Guy's account Lindsay threatened her life before she signed, and she protested that it was done against her will. James VI was crowned at Stirling five days later. In their public statements the lords justified themselves chiefly by accusing Mary of complicity in Darnley's murder and of "inordinate passion"; the full theory of a people's right to remove a ruler was set out afterwards, in Buchanan's writings. (Established.)

Buchanan supplied the theory and the case. Guy describes him as first a client of the Lennox family, Darnley's kin, who served as moderator of the General Assembly after Carberry Hill and, in June 1568, compiled for Moray the Latin dossier against Mary that Moray sent to William Cecil. Guy adds that Buchanan regarded the forced abdication as one of the best practical illustrations of his theory of accountable kingship. The dossier became the core of the Detection published in London in late 1571 with Cecil's backing. Guy finds its chronology repeatedly wrong, for example in its account of Mary's ride to Bothwell at the Hermitage in 1566. (Established for Buchanan's role; Shared for Guy's judgement of the dossier.)

Guy's wider argument is that William Cecil, Elizabeth's chief minister, encouraged a quasi-republican rule of the lords as "States of Scotland" from 1559 and was Mary's chief antagonist. This is his interpretation and is contested: Jenny Wormald, in Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (1988), places far more weight on Mary's own political failures, and other historians, including Antonia Fraser, Retha Warnicke and Kate Williams, read the evidence differently again. Either way, the events of 1567 show the gap between the high theory of De Jure Regni and the factional politics in which it was born. (Shared.)

5. De Jure Regni apud Scotos — the core arguments explained

De Jure Regni apud Scotos is cast as a Ciceronian/Platonic dialogue between Buchanan himself and Thomas Maitland, a young kinsman of the Maitlands of Lethington who voices the objections of the sceptic and the defender of obedience. Though published in 1579 and dedicated to the young James VI, internal references to Darnley's murder and Mary's abdication indicate it was substantially drafted around 1567–68, in the immediate aftermath of the deposition. In his dedicatory letter Buchanan tells James that he wrote it "at a time of great public disturbance" to "trace, from their beginnings, the rights and the respective powers of the king and of citizens."

Its principal arguments may be summarised as follows:

1. Human society and the origin of kingship are natural. Following Aristotelian and Ciceronian premises reached "by way of Ciceronian Stoicism," Buchanan holds that humans are made for society, and that kings were originally created by the people to serve the common good.

2. Political authority originates in the people. All legitimate power derives from the community and is committed to the king conditionally — a mandate, not a possession. As the standard formulation runs, "the source of all political power is the people," and "the king is bound by those conditions under which the supreme power was first committed to his hands."

3. The king is under the law (rex sub lege). Because unchecked royal passion produced disorder, "statutes were enacted by the people, and kings were, in their judicial decisions, obliged to adopt, not what their own licentious fancies dictated, but what the laws, sanctioned by the people, ordained." The law is imposed on the king as a "colleague, or rather as a regulator of his passions." Kingship is thus a limited, constitutional office.

4. The king–people relationship is a mutual contract. There is a reciprocal bond: the king owes just government; the people owe obedience only so long as he keeps his side. This is a contractual (pactum) conception of monarchy.

5. A tyrant forfeits authority and becomes a public enemy. A king who rules for himself rather than the people, treating a free people as slaves, ceases to be a true king and becomes a tyrant — "the public enemy of all mankind." Buchanan draws his catalogue of tyrants from Scripture, Roman history (Caligula, Nero, Domitian) and Scottish precedent.

6. Resistance — up to and including killing — is lawful; and it may fall to the individual. Here Buchanan is at his most radical. In the dialogue's climactic exchange he asks: "What do you call a war undertaken against the public enemy of all mankind — a tyrant?" Maitland answers: "The justest of all wars." Buchanan then reasons that in a just war it is lawful not only for the whole people but for individuals ("non modo universo populo sed singulis") to exact the penalties of war against the enemy — concluding that, in principle, "anyone will be entitled to kill the tyrant" (cuique tyrannum occidere licebit).

This last move is what marks Buchanan out. Where the mainstream Lutheran and Calvinist "inferior magistrate" theory (and even the Huguenot Vindiciae contra tyrannos) reserved active resistance to lesser magistrates or the constituted representatives of the realm, Buchanan lodged the right, at least in argument, in every citizen. Quentin Skinner characterises this as "a highly individualist and even anarchic view of political resistance," noting that Buchanan endorses the near-anarchic conclusion that even a man from among the lowest and meanest who kills a tyrant may be judged to have done rightly. J.H. Burns calls the doctrine "explosive and intoxicating stuff" and observes how far it moves "away from the scholastic caution of a writer like John Mair." (Scholars note the argument is developed largely at the level of principle; Buchanan does not provide an institutional mechanism for identifying and authorising the tyrannicide, which is part of what made the doctrine so alarming to contemporaries.)

Notably, Buchanan grounds his case primarily in natural law and reason rather than in Scripture. When Maitland presses the standard biblical objection — St Paul's command in Romans 13 that Christians submit to "the higher powers" — Buchanan accepts Scripture as a guide but interprets it "in the light of reason," making theology secondary to a philosophical argument from nature. This secular, rationalist cast is one reason the work travelled so far beyond its Calvinist origins.

6. Intellectual sources and the monarchomach tradition

Buchanan was not building from nothing, and modern scholarship is careful to place him within, rather than above, the traditions he drew on. His materials were largely traditional; his conclusions were radical.

Classical and Roman sources. Buchanan explicitly invokes Cicero — especially De Officiis and De Oratore — and the Roman-law and Stoic inheritance, and his definition of tyranny is Aristotelian. Martin Dzelzainis and others have traced a distinct "Ciceronian theory of tyrannicide" running from Buchanan to Milton, resting on the idea that a tyrant is a beast and a public enemy against whom killing is simply an act of just war.

Scholastic and conciliarist theory. Through his teacher John Mair (Major), Buchanan had contact with the conciliarist tradition — the argument (associated with Jacques Almain and Mair) that authority in both Church and commonwealth rests ultimately in the whole community, which empowers its ruler as a delegate and may hold him to account. Francis Oakley's classic essay "On the Road from Constance to 1688" traces exactly this line from conciliarism to Mair to Buchanan. J.H. Burns notes the "contractual element in Buchanan's thinking may perhaps recall … the pactismo of the Scotist tradition," transmitted via Mair. Quentin Skinner argues that when Buchanan stated "a fully secularized and populist theory of political resistance, he was largely restating a position already elaborated by … John Mair."

The wider "monarchomach" moment. The term monarchomach ("king-fighter") was coined, pejoratively, by the Scottish absolutist William Barclay, who lumped Buchanan together with the Huguenot tracts — François Hotman's Francogallia (1573), Theodore Beza's De jure magistratuum (1574), and the pseudonymous Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579) — as works owing their origin to "Luther's kitchen." Strikingly, Buchanan's De Jure Regni and the Vindiciae appeared in the same year, 1579. Current scholarship treats this as parallel development and convergence within a shared European Calvinist-humanist milieu rather than direct borrowing in either direction: the Vindiciae is a more cautious, scripturally-framed, magistrate-centred work, whereas Buchanan's is more secular, more classical, and considerably more radical in extending the right of resistance to individuals. Later French and German writers did engage Buchanan directly (studies by Robert von Friedeburg on the German monarchomachs, and Astrid Stilma on Dutch reception, document this), but the 1579 coincidence is best read as two independent flowerings of the same intellectual season.

The Scottish constitutional tradition and the Declaration of Arbroath. Buchanan's Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582) supplied a supporting narrative: a long line of Scottish kings (beginning with the legendary Fergus I) portrayed as elected and accountable, with tyrants "inevitably com[ing] to a sorry end at the hands of the people." This "ancient constitution" of elective, limited monarchy became, for Buchanan, historical proof of his theory — though modern historians regard much of it as legend. As for the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath and its famous clause envisaging the removal of a king who betrayed the community: the connection between Buchanan and Arbroath is best understood as a modern historians' retrospective linkage rather than something Buchanan himself foregrounded. Roger Mason's essay title "Beyond the Declaration of Arbroath" signals precisely this — that a broadly constitutionalist strand of "kingship, counsel and consent" ran through late-medieval and early-modern Scotland, of which both Arbroath and Buchanan are expressions, without Buchanan explicitly building his case on the 1320 document. (The site's History-series treatment of Arbroath's contested "conditional kingship" clause is the fuller reference point here; readers should note that the constitutional reading of Arbroath is itself only one of several scholarly interpretations.)

On the central question of originality, the scholarly consensus is nuanced. Buchanan is regarded as a sophisticated synthesizer of classical, Roman-law and conciliarist materials who pushed them to a strikingly radical, individualist and secular conclusion — rather than an inventor of wholly new concepts. His practical conclusion (individual tyrannicide grounded in popular sovereignty) was arguably the most radical of the age; his building-blocks were traditional. Both things are true, and the best modern scholarship (Skinner, Burns, Mason) holds them together.

Roger Mason urges caution about one popular reading: that Buchanan stood at the end of a native "radical tradition" running from the Declaration of Arbroath through Hector Boece and John Mair. Boece's Scotorum Historia (Paris, 1527) did show some thirteen of the first forty mythical kings resisted or deposed for tyranny. But Mason argues these were humanist moral examples rather than constitutional precedents. Boece approved the supposed 10th-century switch to male primogeniture and criticised over-mighty nobles. Mason suggests that the evidence for such a medieval tradition is thin, and that it may owe much to 18th- and 19th-century Whig historians. What medieval Scotland did produce was an aristocratic conciliarism, the nobles' claim to be the king's natural counsellors. Buchanan was the one who made the constitutional reading explicit. He turned the change to hereditary succession into a bargain in which the community kept the right to depose a tyrant, and he claimed that Highland clans still elected their chiefs (phylarchi) and bound them to follow their councils. Mason notes that this idealised real Gaelic practices of tanistry and chiefly councils without inventing them.

7. Contemporary condemnation and censorship

The work's reception measures its perceived danger. Contemporary opponents were quick: the Scottish absolutist Adam Blackwood and later William Barclay (De regno et regali potestate adversus Buchananum … et reliquos monarchomachos, 1600) wrote direct refutations.

Officially, the Scottish Parliament of 1584 — the session that produced the "Black Acts" consolidating royal and episcopal authority — condemned both De Jure Regni and the Historia. The act recited that Buchanan's books "conteinis sundrie offensive matters, worthie to be detecte," and ordained that those who held copies bring them in to be "purged" (expurgated of the offending passages) within a set period under a financial penalty; the precise deadline and penalty figures are withheld pending verification against the Records of the Parliaments of Scotland. The suppression was renewed in 1664, and in 1683 the book was publicly burned at the University of Oxford. The Oxford burning came in the Judgment and Decree of the University of Oxford of 21 July 1683, passed in the wake of the Rye House Plot to assassinate Charles II and his brother; the decree ordered a list of "pernicious books and damnable doctrines" to be publicly burnt, naming verbatim "Lex Rex. Buchanan de Jure Regni. Vindiciae contra tyrannos. Bellarmine … Milton. Goodwin. Baxter." Buchanan's book, in short, was still considered live and dangerous a full century after its publication.

The deepest irony is dynastic. De Jure Regni was dedicated to James VI, Buchanan's own pupil — and James grew up to become the most articulate royal opponent of everything it stood for. In The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598) and Basilikon Doron (1599), James set out a full-blown theory of the divine right of kings, in which the monarch is answerable to God alone and subjects owe non-resistance even to a bad ruler. Scholars (Jenny Wormald, Roger Mason) read the Trew Law as a direct reaction against "the secular theory of Buchanan." James is said to have worked to expunge his tutor's influence, and it was he who arranged the parliamentary condemnation of Buchanan's books. The pupil spent his reign fighting the ideas of the master.

8. Later influence and legacy

Buchanan's afterlife was long and politically charged, but it must be described with care to avoid overstatement.

Seventeenth-century Britain (well documented). Buchanan became a canonical reference for opponents of absolutism. John Milton — who wrote "For Scotland I refer you to Buchanan" in his Defence of the People of England — drew on him so heavily that Dryden accused Milton of theft. Algernon Sidney and the Whigs invoked him; the regicides of 1649 could appeal to his historical precedents for deposing kings. Within Scotland, the Covenanters absorbed him into their tradition, and Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex (1644) — the subject of the next card in this series — belongs recognisably to the same Scottish resistance-theory lineage, though scholars such as John Coffey rightly caution that Rutherford's actual debts were as much to continental Catholic scholasticism (the School of Salamanca, Aquinas) and to English parliamentarian writers as to Buchanan specifically, and that the extent to which Buchanan's individual right of resistance shaped Covenanter thought should not be exaggerated. Historian Keith Brown has argued that "the ease with which King James VII was deposed in 1689 shows the power of Buchananite ideas."

Locke and the social contract (contested). It is common to see Buchanan described as a forerunner of Locke, and there is a real historical channel: Julian Franklin, J.H. Burns and others traced an "alternative theory of popular resistance" running Buchanan → Rossaeus → Locke, and Mason's own edition notes Buchanan's contribution to "the debates over the nature and location of sovereignty which would finally bear fruit in the writings of John Locke." But direct, demonstrable influence is not established, and the safest statement is that Buchanan was an early and important voice in a contractual-resistance tradition that Locke later brought to its most influential expression — not a proven direct source for the Two Treatises.

The American Revolution (heavily contested). An eighteenth-century American edition of De Jure Regni was printed in Philadelphia in 1766, a decade before independence, and booksellers and enthusiasts sometimes call it "a key text in American Revolutionary political theory." This claim should be treated with considerable scepticism. The historiography of the Revolution's intellectual origins is famously contested — between "Lockean liberal" and "classical republican" readings — and even Locke's own direct causal role has been questioned (John Dunn's classic argument). There is no strong evidence that Buchanan specifically was a significant influence on the American founders; the more defensible claim is that his ideas formed one distant tributary of the broad Whig/commonwealth stream that eventually reached the colonies. Overstated "Buchanan inspired 1776" claims are not supported by the scholarship and should be avoided.

Modern assessment. Contemporary specialists — above all Roger Mason and J.H. Burns — present Buchanan as a genuinely radical theorist of popular sovereignty whose conclusions were the boldest of his generation, but whose methods and materials were those of a learned synthesizer working within deeply traditional (medieval, conciliarist, humanist) frames. Harold Laski once called De Jure Regni "the most influential political text of the sixteenth century" — a judgement Burns gently corrects as "an exaggeration, no doubt." The measured modern verdict is that Buchanan produced one of the most rigorous and radical statements of contractual, accountable government of the early modern period, foundational to the Scottish tradition of popular sovereignty and a significant contributor — one voice among several — to the European current that fed later constitutional thought.