Long held belief that monarchs were God's political stewards on earth. Because their authority to rule supposedly came directly from God, the decision making of monarchs was held to be infallible and thus could not be questioned. Some of England's Stuart kings in the seventeenth century viewed themselves as ruling by divine right, a position that numerous subjects rejected, even to the point of civil war in the 1640s and the beheading of Charles I in 1649.