The Protestant Family

Abstract

Early modern minds, fascinated by supposedly significant ‘correspondences’, constantly drew parallels between political and domestic institutions: the macrocosm of state, church and city resembling the microcosm of the family. The family or household (the terms were virtually synonymous) was ‘a small commonwealth’, ‘a little church’. What was meant was more than a telling analogy. It was believed, for example by the mid-Tudor statesman Sir Thomas Smith, that complex social and political structures had their origins in the family, which contained ‘the first and most natural beginning and source of cities, towns, nations, kingdoms and of all civil societies’.¹ The Fifth (in catholic arithmetic Fourth) Commandment, ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’, was universally construed to extend far beyond its immediate frame of reference to define the ground of all social and political being, articulating what the title of a Jacobean book called The doctrine of superioritie and of subiection (Robert Prick, 1609). This was no fantasy. In an age of personal and dynastic monarchy, politics really was a family affair. How else to explain the Italian Wars or the War of the Spanish Succession? Or, for that matter, King Lear?