The Book the Hangman Burned

Before there was a Constitution, there was a Scottish minister who said the law is king.

In 1644, a Scottish Presbyterian minister published a book with a title that was itself the whole argument.

Lex, Rex.

The Law is King.

Not Rex, Lex — the King is Law, which is what every crown in Europe had been insisting for a thousand years. Samuel Rutherford simply reversed the two words and detonated the divine right of kings.

The book was an answer. John Maxwell, a bishop in exile, had published a defense of absolute monarchy arguing that the king answered to God alone and to no man on earth. Rutherford, one of the Scottish commissioners to the Westminster Assembly, wrote a reply of some four hundred pages.

His claim was simple and, at the time, close to insane.

Power originates in the people. The people covenant with a ruler. The covenant has terms. A king who breaks the terms is not a king exercising authority but a man committing a crime, and resisting him is not rebellion — it is moral law enforcement.

Rutherford went further. All men are born equal in the sense that none is born with a natural right to rule another. There is no royal blood. There is only a trust, granted conditionally, revocable when abused.

He was not writing political theory in the abstract. He was writing in the middle of a civil war, for a movement of Scottish Covenanters who had signed their names to a document binding themselves to God and to each other — sometimes, according to tradition, in their own blood.

That is worth pausing on. The idea of a written covenant, publicly subscribed, that limits the powers of rulers and binds a people together did not arrive in America with the Constitutional Convention. It arrived on ships, in the heads of Scots and Ulster Scots and Puritans who were already practicing it.

The Crown understood exactly what it was reading with Lex, Rex.

The account passed down holds that when King Charles saw Lex, Rex, he remarked that it would scarcely ever get an answer.

It never did — not the kind he meant.

What it got instead came in 1661, when the Restoration Parliament in Scotland ordered the book burned at the cross of Edinburgh by the hands of the hangman. Rutherford was stripped of his offices, confined to his own house, and summoned to appear before Parliament at Edinburgh on a charge of treason.

Struck with a sudden illness, Rutherford lay dying when he heard word that some of his closest Covenanter friends had been executed by the Crown. He said to those gathered about his bed: “My blessed Master, He is a Kingly King. And soon I shall shine--I shall see Him as He is--I shall see Him reign and all His fair company with Him.”

Several days later, the summons came for him to stand before Parliament on charges of high treason. The reply attributed to him is one of the greatest lines in the history of civil courage: “Tell them I have summons before a Superior Judge. I behoove to answer my first summons; and ere your day arrive, I will be where few kings and great folk come.”

He died in March of 1661. Parliament could burn the book. It had no jurisdiction over the argument.

Here is why this matters for Americans, and why it belongs at the beginning of the story rather than as a footnote.

Ideas do not travel by citation. They travel by formation.

Very few of the men who met in Philadelphia in 1787 sat down with a copy of Lex, Rex open on the desk. That is not how influence works. What they had instead was an entire inherited grammar of politics — covenant, consent, limited authority, lawful resistance — carried across the Atlantic by the Presbyterian and Puritan churches, taught from pulpits, argued in kirk sessions, and eventually installed in the curriculum of American colleges by Scottish schoolmasters.

One of those schoolmasters was John Witherspoon, who arrived at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) in 1768 and taught some of the Founding generation, including a shy Virginian named James Madison.

Witherspoon, heavily influenced by Rutherford and Lex, Rex, and his own Calvinist beliefs, helped shape much of Madison’s thinking regarding human nature and its flaws, religious freedom, the rule of law and the need to diffuse power.

From the tradition and philosophy of Rutherford to Witherspoon to the Father of the Constitution, Madison, came this belief: No man is above the law. Not a bishop, not a parliament, not a king. Not, eventually, an unelected administrator.

We’re so far removed from the realities of the 17th and 18th centuries that the sentence sounds like a platitude now. It is worth remembering though that in that moment it got a book burned in the public square by an executioner and the man who wrote it died under indictment for saying it out loud.

The law is king.

Everything else in the American experiment is commentary on that line.

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Thread of Liberty follows the entire thread of the American experiment — from ancient Rome and the Puritans, through the Revolution and the Constitution, to Tocqueville, Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, and the modern Administrative State.

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