The reading in public of his two treatises De Potestate ecclesiastica and De Reformatione Ecclesiae revealed, besides ideas very peculiar to himself on the reform and constitution of the church, his design of reducing the power of the English in the council by denying them the right of.
For his work in connexion with gunpowder, the invention of which has been claimed for him on the ground of a passage in his De mirabili potestate antis et naturae, see Gunpowder.
It is entitled Vindiciae contra tyrannos, sive de principis in populum populique in principem legitima potestate, Stephano Junio Bruto Celta auctore, and is thought to have been published at Basel (1579) although it bears the imprint of, Edinburgh.
When health failed him, he retired to Monte Pulciano, where from 1607 to 1611 he acted as bishop. In 1610 he published his De Potestate summiPontificis in rebus temporalibus directed against the posthumous work of William Barclay of Aberdeen, which denied the temporal power of the pope.
Under the empire, on the other hand, it had the ordinary magistrates of a colony, the chief being duoviri, charged with the administration of justice, whose place was taken every fifth year by duoviri censoria potestate quinquennales, then quaestores (or financial officials) and then aediles (building officials).