As Mary I's reign neared its end, her extreme policies created a backlash among the serious thinkers of the day, who began challenging the very pillars of the monarchy itself.
Among them was the zealous Protestant John Ponet, former bishop of Rochester and Worcester, who fled to exile in Strasbourg when the burnings began. In his book A Short Treatise on Political Power, published in 1556, Ponet argued that the whole foundation of the Supremacy – the idea that the monarch was God's anointed, ordained by him to rule his Church on Earth – was utterly wrong.
On the book's title page was a line from Psalm 118: 'It is better to trust in the Lord than to trust in princes.' This meant that kings, far from being the god-like figures imagined by Thomas Cranmer and Henry VIII, were human at best and sub-human at their all-too-frequent worst. And if they were a human creation, they should be subject to human control.
If therefore, Ponet went on to argue, a king or queen broke human or divine law, they should be reproved or even deposed. And if, like Mary, they were cruel and persecuting idolaters, then it was a virtuous act to assassinate them as tyrants.
Ponet died at Strasbourg the same year the Treatise was published, but he had sown a seed that struck at the very heart of the English monarchy. The consequences of the Supremacy were becoming clear: for the monarch to control the religion of the country was to invite rebellion and dissent.
For more about A Short Treatise on Political Power, see The cross and the crown.
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 A Short Treatise on Political Power
www.constitution.org/cmt/ponet/polpower.
htm
The complete text of the treatise online.
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