Mary’s death would alter the way that monarchy was regarded in the British Isles. A regicide would give a massive boost to Parliament, diminishing forever the “divinity that hedges a king.” It would help to propagate the theory of popular sovereignty—the belief that political power lies in the people and not in the ruler—and the idea that the representatives of the people were those they elected to Parliament. This was the ideology invoked by Mary’s rebel lords in Scotland to depose her. And the same theory would be instilled there, and more subversively in parts of France, for 250 years after
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