The Divine Right of Kings

The seventeenth Century Spanish notion of kingship which is reflected in the national drama of the Golden Age is in dissimilarity to the historical realism of the authority and prestige of medieval rulers. Lope de Vega invests even medieval rulers with the status and rights enjoyed by Hapsburg monarchs; he stated that because the king is the only authority to whom a private resident may appear for redress of the authoritarian overlord, so God is the only one who can judge or punish a king. The consequence is the appearance of medieval proceedings and personality taken out of their own political structure and understood in the light of the Golden Age principles and seventeenth century political theory. Moreover, medieval political speculation symbolizes a mixture of political morals inherited from the ancient world and a lot of customs and traditions of the barbarian people which directed to a close association with the medieval politics and divinity. According to St. Augustine, in order to keep the ancient view of the origin in human civilization and management as a divine solution for the fall of man, he visualized the rulers as an instrument of God. Therefore, an evil ruler might be given by him to bad people as a punishment in order to give out divine justice more efficiently. Also, the inherited right of the individual ruler was hence conceived to develop directly from God without an intervention of popular will.
Base on St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, he says that civil government is of divine motivation and to oppose, it is to resist God. Consequently, there is a religious obligation by the Christian to obey civil authority; Pope Gregory VII therefore stated that good people will not resist a wicked ruler. As a result of this view, supporters quoted it later of the theory of the Divine Right of Kings which was very different from the medieval principle of the supremacy of the law. According to this theory, the institution of monarchy is of divine origin;