Lex, Rex, or The Law and the Prince
A treatise in forty-four questions, printed in London in October 1644, in which Samuel Rutherford defends the Scots’ armed resistance to Charles I and argues that the power of kings is limited by law.
The title page describes the book as a dispute for the just prerogative of king and people, containing “the reasons and causes of the most necessary defensive wars of the Kingdom of Scotland” and of the Scots’ expedition to help their brethren in England, and as an answer to a royalist tract. It is dated London, 7 October 1644, when its author was a commissioner to the Assembly sitting at Westminster. The first questions ask whether government is by divine law and by the law of nature.
It is cited in the entry for Samuel Rutherford as his own statement of his political teaching.