Jurisdiction Regal, Episcopal, Papal

What is the role of the crown in the wake of the gunpowder plot?

In November 1605, English Roman Catholics came within hours of killing the King. The famed Gunpowder Plot was a watershed moment in the conflict between England’s Protestant monarchs and their Roman Catholic subjects, stretching back to Henry VIII’s break with Rome in 1533.

The event triggered several years of fevered writing by Protestants and Catholics alike regarding the jurisdictions of the crown, the Church, and the Pope. Eloquent works were published on both sides by the likes of the Catholic Cardinal Bellarmine, and even the King himself. In 1610, George Carleton (1559 – 1628) made a decisive Protestant contribution by publishing Jurisdiction Regal, Episcopal, Papal. A delegate at the Synod of Dort, and later Bishop of Llandaff, he first outlines the biblical and theological basis for a Protestant view of church and state. Then, he exhaustively surveys church history to expose how Rome gradually robbed kings and churches of their rightful power, theologically justifying itself after-the-fact.

This new edition presents the original text with a new scholarly introduction and extensive footnotes, and the time is ripe for its publication. With debates about the relationship of church and state resurfacing in a post-liberal and post-pandemic era, it is vital that Protestants and Catholics alike return again to the sources of our understanding of the body politic.