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Hello in Macbeth Malcolm describes the magical healing powers of the King

How his elicits heaven himself best knows but strangely visited people all swollen and ulcerous pitiful to the eye the mere despair of surgery

He cures hanging a golden stamp about their necks

The idea that a monarch could heal with his touch

Floored from the idea that a king was sacred appointed by God and above the judgment of earthly powers

This was called the divine right of kings and it ended so powerfully into British culture during the 17th century

That he shaped the pomp and circumstance of the true Stuart Monarchs

Embued the writing of Shakespeare

Provoked the political thinking of Milton and Locke and helped a reggislide about a century and a half before the French Revolution

With me to discuss the divine right of kings are just in champion professor of the history of early modern ideas at Royal Holloway College University of London

Claire Jackson lecturer and director of studies in history at Trinity Hall Cambridge and Tom Haley professor of our National Studies at Birkbeck College

University of London just in champion

This is an idea that can be traced back the idea of the ruler as a god can be traced back a long way

But it became particularly important in Europe during and after the Reformation in the 16th century

Can you explain why it emerged so and became so powerful at that particular time?

I think if we go all the way back to the pre-reformation period that the idea of divine right monarchy or divine right government is it's commonplace

It's an assumption the basic tools really for thinking about

Politics and obligation and perhaps even sovereignty

It's a a theocratic argument

So it's driven in one sense by Catholic theology with the reformation the fracturing of that

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