Denmark wrote absolute royal power into a constitution in 1665
Constitutions are usually imagined as limits on rulers. Denmark–Norway's King's Law of 1665 did the opposite, declaring the monarch the most perfect person on Earth, answerable to God alone, and authorising him to sweep away every rival centre of power. It was the first written charter for absolutism in Europe.
An absolute monarch is the only source of political authority, free of any constitution, parliament or other check. That sets the system apart both from constitutional monarchies, where a legislature, custom or a prime minister restrains the crown as in Britain and the Nordic countries, and from hereditary dictatorships such as North Korea or Duvalier Haiti. Most counts today agree on Brunei, Eswatini, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, while broader lists add states such as Bhutan, Morocco and Vatican City.
The pattern is ancient and global. Rulers in Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria held unchecked power; Chinese emperors, and one empress, Wu Zetian, claimed the Mandate of Heaven; the Sapa Inca was revered as the son of the sun god Inti; and Ottoman sultans bore titles such as Shadow of God on Earth. In Europe the justification was the divine right of kings, the claim that subjects had no standing to limit a sovereign chosen by God.
France became the model. Louis XIV, who supposedly declared that he was the state, held legislative, executive and judicial power at once, could order executions without appeal, and made and cancelled laws at will; his Versailles became a byword for extravagance. Prussia offered a twist, casting the king as the first servant of the state, and the Hohenzollerns ruled it absolutely from 1701 to 1848. The Danish King's Law, meanwhile, abolished the Council of the Realm, and absolutism lasted there until 1848 and in Norway until 1814.
Britain resisted. Both James VI and I and, after him, Charles I attempted to bring divine right into their kingdoms, and Charles's attempt to impose bishops on the Scottish church sparked the Bishops' Wars. Suspicion that he wanted a continental-style absolutism then helped drive England into civil war, and he had indeed governed without Parliament for eleven years from 1629.
Source: Absolute monarchy
