Resistance theories could justify disobedience on religious grounds to monarchs, and were significant in European national politics and international relations in the century leading up to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648.
Reference was made, for example by Althusius to classical history: to the ephors of the Spartan Constitution, as "lesser magistrates", or to the optimates of the late Roman Republic.
[9] Hugo Grotius, expelled from the Dutch Reformed Church because of his Remonstrant views, altered the question of resistance theory in two ways.
[10] In the French context, Catholic resistance theory grew on the ultramontanism of the time, and developed through controversy and political alignment.
This situation came about because the opposite "cismontane" tendency, Gallicanism, came to be allied with the politiques, and the royalist view tending to divine right.
These opinions he did not vary on becoming king in England five years later; as for religious strife he was a conciliarist of an older tradition, in harmony with the views of Richard Hooker.
[20] A context for resistance theory in England was in the theoretical discussions of common law about how to incorporate monarchy into the "ancient constitution".
Political conflicts that were stoked up by the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War took place in the 1620s with a shared consensus assumption against the legitimacy of resistance.
[23] The Whig faction was founded at the time of the Exclusion Crisis around 1680 in British politics, and its initial purpose was to resist the legitimate succession to the throne of James, Duke of York.
[24] John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, written at the time of the Exclusion Crisis but published after the Glorious Revolution, went back to the Calvinist resistance theory as in George Buchanan.
Constantine Phipps defended Sacheverell, and Benjamin Hoadley who was an extreme Whig in his The Original and Institution of Civil Government Discuss'd (1710), made opposite and incompatible claims about the treatment of resistance in Richard Hooker, who by now was an iconic figure in Anglican theology.