BARCLAY, William

(1546-1608)

William Barclay was a Scottish scholar and lawyer who was known for his legal texts dealing with the rights of kings, the state, and the temporal powers of the pope, works that aroused controversy from both the Roman Catholic (Robert Bellarmine) and the Protestant (Samuel Rutherford) sides. Barclay stud­ied at King's College, Aberdeen, Paris, and Bourges, at which institution he studied law under Jacques Cujas and received a doctorate. He was then invited by his uncle, the Jesuit Edmund Hay, to teach law at a new university at Pont-à-Mousson in Lorraine, where he was appointed by the duke of Lorraine and made a counsellor of state. After marriage to a French woman, he spent the years 1603-4 in England, where King James I* offered him positions on condition that he become Anglican. He refused, returned to France, and was ap­pointed professor and then dean of law at Angers, where he died in 1608.

His major works were De regno et regali potestate (Concerning the Kingship and Royal Power, 1600) and De potestate papae (Concerning the Power of the Pope, 1609). In the former he strongly defended the rights of kings and rejected the arguments of Hubert Languet, Jean Boucher, and George Buchanan,* the last mentioned of whom had argued in his De iure regni (Concerning the Rights of kings) that the people hold extensive powers against the king. King James VI of Scotland (James I of England) used Barclay to support his own divine-right theory. The latter work, Barclay's De potestate papae, published posthu­mously by his son John in London, attacked the papal claim to authority in temporal matters, a position sharply rejected by Robert Bellarmine.

Bibliography

J. N. Figgis, The Theory ofthe Divine Right ofKings, 1896 (1965).

Iain S. Maclean