"The power of kings and magistrates is nothing else but what is only derivative, transferred, and committed to them in trust from the people to the common good of all, in whom the power yet remains fundamentally, and cannot be taken from them without a violation of their natural birthright." Hooker, fifty years earlier (1592-3), in his "Ecclesiastical Polity," Book I., had affirmed the sovereignty or legislative power of the people as the ultimate authority, and had also declared for an original social contract, "all public regiment of what kind soever seemeth evidently to have risen from deliberate advice, consultation, and composition between men, judging it convenient and behoveful." Hobbes made the social contract a justification for Royal absolutism, and Locke, with a Whig ideal of constitutional government, enlarged on the right of a people to change its form of government, and justified the Revolution of 1688.

The writings of Hobbes and Locke have had a lasting influence, and Locke is really the source of the democratic stream of the eighteenth century.

It rises in Locke to become the torrent of the French Revolution.
But Huguenots and Jesuits, Hooker and Milton--what influence had their writings on the mass of English people?
None whatever, as far as we can see.

Milton could write of "the power" of "the people" as a "natural birthright," but the power was plainly in Cromwell's army, and "the people" had no means of expression concerning its will, and no opportunity for the assertion of sovereignty.

Lilburne and the Levellers held that democracy could be set up on the ruins of Charles I.'s Government, and the sovereignty of the people become a fact; and with a ready political instinct Lilburne proposed the election of popular representatives on a democratic franchise.