chapter three

FAMILY VALUES

In the mental cosmos of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth cen- turies, the family played a dual role. It simultaneously mediated be- tween the organic and aggregate elements in early modern social the- ory and between the individual and society in practice. It could do this because families represented a key stage in the creation of the body politic in both Bible-based and contractual versions of the ori- gins of human society. In this view the family was, as Thomas Picker- ing put it in his introduction to the 1609 edition of William Perkins’s Christian Oeconomie, “the Seminarie of all other Societies,” so it fol- lowed that “the holie and righteous government” of the family was “a direct meane for the good ordering, both of Church and Common- wealth.”1 In Bible-based versions, society evolved gradually out of the ever- increasing descendants of Adam. Drawing parallels between Adam’s family and monarchical society remained a favorite royalist device even after the Price Revolution drew to a close. Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, written around 1640 although not appearing in print until 1680,would not have been possible without on such parallels: For as Adam was lord of his children, so his children under him had a command over their own children, but still with subordination to the first parent, who is lord paramount over his children’s children to all generations, as being the grandfather of his people. I see not then how the children of Adam, or of any man else, can be free from subjection to their parents. And this subordination of children is the fountain of all regal authority, by the ordination of God himself. From whence it follows, that civil power … is by Divine institution… Nor leaves it any place for such imaginary pactions between Kings and their people as many dream of.2

1 Perkins, Christian Oeconomie, 2a–3b. 2 Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha §3,inPatriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949), 57. 68 chapter three

Bishop Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History (1681) also reminded its readers that “All men are born from a single marriage, in order to belong forever to but one and the same family, however dispersed or multiplied.”3 In any of the social contract theories of the age that relied upon Aristotle, it was not autonomous individuals but the heads of families who came to together to form societies. According to Aristotle’s Poli- tics, all began with the first “coupling” of man and wife. As their family increased in size over generations, their related descendants formed a village. Because an individual village was not large enough or strong enough to provide its inhabitants with everything needed for a “good life,” the heads of households in the villages eventually united to form acity-state.4 Such an evolution of society could be neatly folded into Biblical theories, both by monarchists and those who put more empha- sis on the consensual nature of the change from village to state. Mar- silius of Padua, whose Defensor Pacis (1324) enjoyed a sixteenth-century revival thanks to Henry VIII’s desire for a male heir, had relied upon it: For the first and smallest combination of human beings, wherefrom the other combinations emerged, was that of male and female, as the foremost of the philosophers says in the Politics, Book I, Chapter 1,and as appears more fully from his Economics.5 During the chaos of the French religious wars of the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin constructed his Six Books of a Commonwealth (1576)onafirmly Aristotelian foundation, defining a “Republique”asthe“droit gouverne- ment” of several households under a “souveraine” power and, conversely, a household as the “droit gouvernement” of several individuals under the rule of “un chef de famille,” making “la famille” the true “source et orig- ine” of all republics.6 Bodin’s work was immensely popular. Fourteen French language editions had appeared by 1629 and nine Latin edi- tions by 1641. For those in England who could read neither French nor Latin, an English language translation by Richard Knolles (otherwise known for a frequently reprinted history of Turkey) appeared in 1606,

3 Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Discourse on Universal History (1681), trans. Elborg Forster, ed. Orest Ranum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 119 [II.1]. 4 Aristotle, Politics, bilingual ed., trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Loeb Classical Library, 1932), 5 [I.1.4.], 7 [I.1.7], and 9 [I.1.8]. 5 Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis (1324), ed. and trans. Alan Gewirth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 8 [I.3.3]. 6 Bodin, Six Livres, 1:27 [I.1]and1:39 [I.2].