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Who is here so vile, that will not love his country? But when I tell him he hates flatterers, He says he does, being then most flattered. The interplay between the positive and negative registers of the vocabulary of office was persistent in the disputes concerning the offices of counsellor and patriot. Although plausibly combined, one office was universally accepted and largely institutionalised, the other was not. Discussion of each can help explore the range of contention over the duties of political personae and the dynamics of the resources employed. Brief comment on republican theory in the context of patriotism, and sovereignty theory in that of counsel, will illustrate the importance of not confusing the vocabulary of office with specific theoretical development. The direction of argument can be indicated by preliminary reference to the words patriot and patriotism. Conventionally they have been studied as markers for a doctrine in relative counterpoint to the ideology of nationalism. In exploring their use as responses to offices asserted or denied, however, it will become apparent that there may be no single doctrinal history to be written. The English ‘patriot’ dates from the early sixteenth century and is closely related to ‘nation’, a term sometimes referring to the people of a given country. Thus the patriot could serve nation, or country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

And woe unto the people that is brought into such straights and perplexities. The scene set, I shall now turn to the moral vocabulary of office from which disparate doctrines were developed. A concluding section, however, will comment on the king's two bodies, perhaps the best known of such doctrines, prior to a fuller exploration of the discourse of office in the following chapters. By the end of the sixteenth century, there was a clearly related set of covering terms used to abridge understandings of office: vocation, calling, profession, trade, sphere and end. These were not always synonymous, but their use made claim to similar senses of the ethics of office-holding and to the same complementary registers of justification and critique. To begin with what I am taking to be the central word: office was often used as a general term for a world of duties and purposes, carried out by a persona who enjoyed concomitant liberties to those ends. Casually employed, it might indicate only a specific ad hoc favour. Shakespeare, who uses the term office and its cognates some 150 times, employs it thus in Twelfth Night when Viola asks Sir Toby Belch to ‘do me this courteous office’ of saying how she has offended. It sometimes meant a specific field of responsibility and by extension a dedicated function; Walter Charleton surmised that the ‘parenchyma’ had the ‘office of a strainer’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]