The Oath of Allegiance, Hannah Arendt, and the Trials of Jacobean Political Theology

This essay uses the theories of Hannah Arendt to characterize the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance as a problem of political theology, one in which the judicial performance of the oath must balance the interjection of sovereign authority over matters of individual conscience. The essay asks if that balance can include the necessarily plural, and potentially destabilizing, negotiations of promise-making. To answer those questions, the essay draws on accounts of the 1607 trial and execution of Robert Drury, an English Catholic priest captured less than a year after the infamous Gunpowder Plot. These accounts reveal how individual Catholic encounters with the Oath and the state machinery that enforced it demonstrate—in real time and before real audiences—an engagement with questions of sovereignty, conscience, and the competing claims of religion and nation that occupied more learned commentators. In this instance, Drury's attempt to negotiate a private submission to the king's decree, rather than a public one, runs aground on what I argue is the state's desire to control not only the allegiance of its Catholic (and Protestant) subjects, but also the creative and political agency that inheres in moments of socio-political compacting. The result is an account that complements recent theoretical studies by providing a sense of the lived experience of political theology in Jacobean England.