Politics & Power Quote by Jonathan Mayhew

Gratitude here is a veil, and Mayhew knows exactly how thin it is. He praises the “happiness” of living under a prince “satisfied with ruling according to law,” but the compliment is booby-trapped: the only “good prince” is one who consents to limits. In other words, legitimacy isn’t mystical or hereditary; it’s conditional. The sentence reads like loyalist piety while smuggling in the radical claim that law stands above the ruler, and that any monarch who refuses that hierarchy forfeits the right to be obeyed.

The subtext tightens with the phrase “proper and expedient for us.” At face value it sounds modest, almost deferential: we’re content with a reasonable portion of liberty. But it also plants a measuring stick. Liberty is not a royal gift handed down at whim; it is calibrated to a people’s needs, and “we” get to judge what’s “proper.” That collective pronoun quietly shifts sovereignty away from the crown toward the governed.

Context does the rest. Mayhew preached in a British Atlantic world where “rule of law” was the sanctioned language of constitutional monarchy, yet colonists increasingly felt the law was being manipulated into an instrument of extraction and discipline. As a clergyman, he could frame political resistance as moral discernment rather than sedition, using the safe vocabulary of obedience to argue for its limits. The intent isn’t to flatter power; it’s to domesticate it, turning loyalty into a contract and hinting what happens when the contract is breached.