The King’s Three Bodies: Resistance Theory and Richard III

In recent decades, the concept of resistance has ‘assumed singular significance in narratives about sovereignty, democracy, liberty, liberalism, and individualism’ among historians of early modern political thought, as Conal Condren observes, and yet at the same time, it is not entirely clear how much cohesion there is to be found in the diverse group of texts that we typically collect under the rubric of resistance theory1 If we were to throw a dinner party for early modern ‘resistance theorists’, our guest list would include Huguenot monarchomachs, Catholic ultramontanists, Puritan dissenters, contractualists who maintained that the king’s authority should be circumscribed by parliament or by the law, republicans who fantasized about dissolving the monarchy outright, and School of Night skeptics who, under the influence of Machiavelli, Tacitus, and Livy, envisioned politics unsentimentally as a system fueled by the self-interest of unscrupulous individuals. This would seem to make for quite the motley crowd, with anarchists and Anabaptists, constitutionalists and classicists, overreachers and Levellers all interspersed with one another. My concern is that by collecting these diverse critics of Tudor and Stuart monarchical absolutism under the single heading of resistance, we are constructing a category of dubious coherence. This often happens, I suggest, when we structure our analyses around negatively defined positions (which is to say, positions defined by what they reject rather than by what they support) in order to provide ourselves with tidy dichotomies.