A political doctrine claiming that monarchy was a divinely ordained institution in which kings and queens were answerable only to God. It therefore followed that it was a sin for the subjects of even the most evil or incompetent monarchs to disobey them. The doctrine evolved in the middle ages, partly as a reaction to interference in the affairs of a nation by the pope and partly to strengthen the hand of monarchs in their dealings with parliaments. In its practical, rather than its mystical, aspects the doctrine can therefore be seen as an early form of the idea of national sovereignty and as an attempt to form a strong centralized executive.

In England, divine right was ardently espoused by James I, not only in his writings and his speeches but also in his dealings with Parliament. The alienation of Parliament became complete when his successor, Charles I, used divine right as a pretext for levying illegal taxes. Although Charles's appointee Archbishop Laud preached that "the king could never depart from God's service," Parliament finally demanded his execution. From the scaffold the doomed king continued to maintain that the people's freedom "consisted in the enjoyment of laws by which their life and liberty would be secure" rather than by sharing in government. In practice the divine right of kings in England died with Charles I, although the theory was revived after the Restoration. Following the deposition of James II in the Glorious Revolution, the theory itself became untenable, and most political thinkers justified the status quo by reference to some form of social-contract philosophy, in which authority derives from the (supposed) consent of the governed, rather than the will of God.

In France, the divine right persisted throughout Louis XIV's reign and in a less pronounced form until the Revolution of 1789. After the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period the theory was revived by conservative thinkers to justify the restoration of hereditary rulers throughout Europe. However, most of the restored monarchies were reduced to constitutional status by the mid-19th century. Only in Russia did an active belief in divine right survive (until the Revolutions of 1918).

In the UK the legacy of divine right survives not only in the religious nature of the coronation service and the mystique that surrounds hereditary constitutional monarchs but also in the doctrine that Parliament is sovereign--i.e. that the Crown, acting in Parliament, cannot be challenged by any other entity (such as the courts or a written constitution).