Algernon Sidney

“This hand, enemy to tyrants, by the sword
seeks peace under liberty.”-- Algernon Sidney

Involved in some of the same anti-monarchical causes as John Locke,
Algernon Sidney was caught up in the conspiracy to oust King Charles II. He was
beheaded on December 7, 1683, a martyr to the English Whig cause.
Fifteen years after his death, his Discourses Concerning Government
was published. A hero to John Adams and widely read in the American
colonies, some of his writings sound like Madison.
Sidney famously inscribed the following in the Visitor’s Book at
the University of Copenhagen: “This hand, enemy to tyrants, by the sword
seeks peace under liberty.” This inscription later inspired the state motto
of Massachusetts.

In Discourses Concerning Government he attacks the absurdity of the rights of kings and the inheritance of those rights:

"And we may justly conclude that God having never given the whole world to be governed
by one man, not prescribed any rule for the division of it; nor declared
where the right of dividing or subdividing that which every man has should
terminate; we may safely affirm that the whole is forever left to the will and
discretion of man: We may enter into, form, and continue in greater or lesser
societies, as best pleases ourselves: The right of paternity as to dominion is at
an end, and no more remains, but the love, veneration, and obedience, which
proceeding from a due sense of the benefits of birth and education, have their
root in gratitude, and are esteemed sacred and inviolable by all that are sober
and virtuous. And as ’tis impossible to transfer these benefits by inheritance,
so ’tis impossible to transfer the rights arising from them."

And the danger of applying qualities to leaders that are not common to men:

"And as ’tis folly to suppose that princes will always be wise, just and good,
when we know that few have been able alone to bear the weight of a government,
or to resist the temptations to ill, that accompany an unlimited power, it
would be madness to presume they will for the future be free from infirmities
and vices...."