In the Shadow of Leviathan: John Locke and the Politics of Conscience 1108478816, 9781108478816

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Note on the Text
List of
Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1 John Locke and Interregnum Hobbism
Chapter 2 The Restoration Projects of Thomas Hobbes
Chapter 3 Locke and the Restoration Politique
Chapter 4 Non-domination Liberty in Spiritual Context
Chapter 5 Locke, Conscience, and the Libertas Ecclesiae
Chapter 6 Locke and Catholicism: The ‘Roman Leviathan’
Chapter 7 Locke and a ‘More Liberal’ Hobbism
Conclusion: Conscience and Liberalism’s Two Paths
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

IN THE S HADOW O F L EVIATHAN

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke sit together in the canon of political thought but are rarely treated in common historical accounts. This book narrates their intertwined careers during the Restoration period, when the two men found themselves in close proximity and entangled in many of the same political conflicts. Bringing new source material to bear, In the Shadow of Leviathan establishes the influence of Hobbesian thought over Locke, particularly in relation to the preeminent question of religious toleration. Excavating Hobbes’s now forgotten case for a prudent, politique toleration gifted by sovereign power, Jeffrey Collins argues that modern, liberal thinking about toleration was transformed by Locke’s gradual emancipation from this Hobbesian mode of thought. This book investigates those landmark events – the civil war, Restoration, the popish plot, the Revolution of 1688 – which eventually forced Locke to confront the limits of politique toleration, and to devise an account of religious freedom as an inalienable right. jeffrey r. collins is Associate Professor of History at Queen’s University, Canada. He is the author of The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (2005) and numerous articles on early modern religion and political thought in journals such as Modern Intellectual History and the Journal of Modern History. He is also a regular book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal and the Times Literary Supplement.

ideas in context

Edited by David Armitage, Richard Bourke, Jennifer Pitts and John Robertson The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions and of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that were generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the contemporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of the evolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences, it is hoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in their concrete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions between the history of philosophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature may be seen to dissolve. The series is published with the support of the Exxon Foundation. A list of books in the series can be found at the end of the volume.

IN THE SHADOW OF LEVIATHAN John Locke and the Politics of Conscience

JEFFREY R. COLLINS Queen’s University, Ontario

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108478816 doi: 10.1017/9781108778879 © Jeffrey R. Collins 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-1-108-47881-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Mark Kishlansky, in memoriam

Contents

Acknowledgements Note on the Text List of Abbreviations

page viii x xi 1

Introduction 1 John Locke and Interregnum Hobbism

15

2 The Restoration Projects of Thomas Hobbes

63

3 Locke and the Restoration Politique

116

4 Non-domination Liberty in Spiritual Context

172

5 Locke, Conscience, and the Libertas Ecclesiae

212

6 Locke and Catholicism: The ‘Roman Leviathan’

271

7 Locke and a ‘More Liberal’ Hobbism

315

Conclusion: Conscience and Liberalism’s Two Paths

360 378 421

Bibliography Index

vii

Acknowledgements

Any new book on canonical figures such as John Locke or Thomas Hobbes, and still more a book on both, is necessarily a collaborative enterprise. Working on this project over too many years, I have benefited enormously from the published research, correspondence, and personal advice of a large number of colleagues. My sincere thanks are therefore extended to Arash Abizadeh, Donald Akenson, Teresa Bejan, Ronald Beiner, William Bulman, Paul Cheney, Robin Douglass, Paul Halliday, John Harpham, Robert Ingram, Andrew Jainchill, Andrew Lister, John Marshall, John Morrill, Eric Nelson, Jon Parkin, Steve Pincus, Timothy Raylor, Jacqueline Rose, David C. Smith, Timothy Stanton, Richard Tuck, Laurens von Apeldoorn, and Sam Zeitlan. I have presented portions of this book at many seminars and workshops. My thanks go to those who organized or attended presentations at the University of Chicago, McGill University, Concordia University, the University of Toronto, Queen’s University, the Huntington Library, the Folger Library, several sessions of the North American Conference of British Studies, the annual conference of the International Society for Intellectual History, the Triangle Intellectual History Seminar at Duke University, Leiden University, the University of Helsinki, the Institute for Historical Study, and (on more than one occasion) Cambridge University. For financial and institutional support during the research and writing of this book I am grateful to Queen’s University, the history department of Queen’s University, the Huntington Library, Clare Hall of Cambridge University, the Hoover Institute, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Paul Monod, my first mentor in the discipline of history, read the entire manuscript of this book, as did my friend and colleague Brent Sirota. Both provided invaluable advice. Felix Waldmann and I have corresponded regularly and productively as we pursued related research projects, and on two occasions (in the latter instance in coordination with his co-author J. C. Walmsley) he very generously shared manuscript discoveries with me viii

Acknowledgements

ix

before their publication. I must reserve particular expressions of gratitude for two pre-eminent scholars of John Locke. Professors Mark Goldie and John Milton both read this manuscript closely and provided me with very extensive and supportive critiques. Their technical knowledge, interpretive skill, and collegial generosity improved the book immeasurably. Remaining faults are entirely my own. I am also deeply grateful to the librarians and archivists, too numerous to name, who have assisted me with their collections. I warmly thank David Armitage, who encouraged me to submit this manuscript to Cambridge University Press’s outstanding Ideas in Context series, and Elizabeth Friend-Smith, under whose exemplary editorship the series happily falls. My final words of gratitude are of a more personal nature: to my parents, Randall and Patricia Collins, for ongoing support; to my wife and fellow historian, Ana Siljak (whose advice greatly improved this book); and to our three children, Theodore, Natalia, and Alexander (who undoubtedly delayed its appearance but made the years of its composition infinitely more joyous). Mark Kishlansky, my doctoral supervisor, mentor, and friend, passed away too soon in 2015. We discussed this book on many occasions, and I wish that he had lived to see it between covers. With gratitude and sadness I dedicate it to his memory.

Note on the Text

Citations in this book follow Cambridge’s short-title method, or the List of Abbreviations. Fuller publication information is provided in the Bibliography. Quotations follow the spelling and punctuation of the source text, except in rare instances where this might entail serious confusion. Abbreviations have been silently expanded in most instances, as have ampersands (which Locke, in particular, used with some frequency). Where translations are sourced to a modern, critical translation, I have followed that translation. Otherwise translations are my own. In cases where I have consulted original documents but a reliable, modern printed edition is available, I have quoted the former but cited both. All dates in this book presume the year to have begun on 1 January. Where a single date is provided, it follows the Old Style Julian Calendar used in the British Isles until 1752. In cases of documents or correspondence originating on the continent, both Old Style and New Style dates are provided.

x

Abbreviations

AB

ABL AO Beh. Beinecke Bodl. BL CH CJ CL CSPD CSPV DC DCL

Thomes Hobbes, An Answer to a Book Published by Dr. Bramhall, late Bishop of Derry; called the Catching of the Leviathan Together with an Historical Narration concerning Heresie, and the Punishment Thereof (London, 1682). Brief Lives: Chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, between the years 1669 & 1696, ed. Andrew Clark (2 vols., Oxford, 1898). Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss (4 vols., London, 1813–20). Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, ed. Paul Seaward (Oxford, 2010). Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. British Library, London. The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcolm (2 vols., Oxford, 1994). Journals of the House of Commons (London, 1802), British History Online. The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. de Beer (9 vols., Oxford, 1976–). Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, British History Online. Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, British History Online. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen [De Cive], ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge, 1998). Thomas Hobbes, A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student, of the Common Laws of England, in Writings on Common Law and Hereditary Right, eds. Alan Cromartie and Quentin Skinner (Oxford, 2005). xi

xii EcHU EcT ELN Epistola HE HMC HN

Huntington Lev. LHW LJ LL LPQ MHC MS Locke ODNB PNP PE

List of Abbreviations John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975). John Locke, An Essay concerning Toleration, and Other Writings on Law and Politics, 1667–1683, ed. J. R. Milton and Philip Milton (Oxford, 2006). John Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature and Associated Writings, ed. W. von Leyden (Oxford, 1954). John Locke, Epistola de Tolerantia, ed. Raymond Klibansky, trans. J. W. Gough (Oxford, 1968). Thomas Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica Carmine Elegiaco Concinnata, trans. and ed. by Patricia Springborg, Patricia Stablein and Paul Wilson (Paris, 2008). Historical Manuscripts Commission. Thomas Hobbes, Historical Narration concerning Heresie and the Punishment thereof [Printed in, and continuously paginated with, An Answer to a Book published by Dr. Bramall . . . (London, 1682)]. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm (3 vols., Oxford, 2012). John Locke, Literary and Historical Writings, ed. J. R. Milton (Oxford, 2019). Journals of the House of Lords (London, 1767–1830), British History Online. The Library of John Locke, ed. John Harrison and Peter Laslett, 2nd. ed. (Oxford, 1971). Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country (London, 1675). Thomas Hobbes, Mr Hobbes Considered in His Loyalty, Religion, Reputation, and Manners. By Way of a Letter to Dr. Wallis (London, 1662). Bodleian Library, MS Locke. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [online]. John Locke, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul to the Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, and Ephesians (2 vols., Oxford, 1987). John Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1997).

List of Abbreviations PV RLP SLT TLT TNA TTG TT VRC VV

xiii

Prose Vita of Hobbes. Translated in The Elements of Law, Human Nature, and De Corpore Politico, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford, 1994), 245–53. The Reception of Locke’s Politics, ed. Mark Goldie (6 vols., London, 1999). John Locke, A Second Letter concerning Toleration (London, 1690). John Locke, A Third Letter for Toleration, to the author of the Third Letter concerning Toleration (London, 1692). National Archives, Kew. Two Treatises of Government: A Critical Edition, ed. Peter Laslett (2nd edition, Cambridge, 1967). John Locke, Two Tracts on Government, ed. Philip Abrams (Cambridge, 1967). Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. Victor Nuovo (Oxford, 2012). Verse Vita of Hobbes. The Life of Mr Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Written by himself in a Latin poem and now translated into English (London, 1680).

Introduction

Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588, and John Locke died in 1704. Together they lived longer than the Stuart dynasty ruled England. Contemporaries for nearly half a century, they were virtual neighbours for several years in the 1660s and 1670s, while domiciled in the town houses of their titled patrons on the Strand.1 Their political theories, moreover, contain striking structural similarities. Rejection of natural or divine political hierarchies; the state of nature device; a modernized account of natural rights; individualism; a theory of social contract: these traits mark both Hobbes and Locke as participants in the new natural rights thinking of the seventeenth century. It is, therefore, a surprising truth that the influence of Thomas Hobbes over John Locke has been studied only sporadically. This is true even though – or, in fact, because – Hobbes and Locke are habitually juxtaposed in textbooks and on university syllabi. Despite their regular geographic proximity, there is no direct evidence that Hobbes and Locke ever met or that the older man knew even the name of the younger. Late in life Locke disavowed Hobbes’s influence (albeit in a particular context). His most famous political work, the Two Treatises of Government, barely mentions Leviathan. Locke certainly owned and read works by Hobbes, but his voluminous manuscripts contain no sustained commentary. Throughout the Interregnum and Restoration, Hobbes and Locke navigated the same political waters and developed common interests. The standard source material, however, rarely keeps them in the frame together. Furthermore, the predominant methods of intellectual history have cast suspicion on the question of Hobbes’s influence over Locke. The so-called Cambridge school contextualism dominant for generations has had a great deal to say about Hobbes and Locke individually. Both have been subject to prodigious research production. Yet interpretive fashion has long kept 1

Rogers, ‘The Intellectual Relationship between Hobbes and Locke – A Reappraisal’, 61.

1

2

Introduction

the two figures at arm’s length from one another. It has been a mainstay of Cambridge contextualization to disavow canon-formation and to deny that ‘great minds’ necessarily developed their ideas in dialogue. From this perspective the individual fame and influence of Hobbes and Locke militate against any effort to study them jointly. The savvy contextualist is encouraged to seek less obvious patterns of influence. Effacing Locke’s engagement with Hobbes, indeed, became a signature move of the Cambridge school founders. Peter Laslett sketched out the case in his path-breaking edition of Locke’s Two Treatises.2 There he argued that the Two Treatises ‘cannot’ have been ‘written as a refutation of Thomas Hobbes’, who is largely missing in the text because he was not an ‘absolutist writer’ favoured by Locke’s foils, the Tories.3 This presumed that Locke, had he engaged Hobbes, would have repudiated him on constitutional grounds. Laslett’s case proved broadly influential. John Dunn further entrenched it as Cambridge dogma, concluding that ‘lining Locke up against Hobbes and comparing their various dimensions was not the way to approach the study of Locke’. Locke supposedly evaded ‘the dense and threatening mass of intellection which [Hobbes] represents’. Hobbes, if perhaps a ‘ghostly adversary’ in Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, was in the Two Treatises ‘merely and blandly ignored’.4 This soon hardened into a historiographical orthodoxy. John Higgins-Biddle used the ‘case of Hobbes and Locke’ to exemplify the ‘common fallacy of intellectual history’ that great minds of proximate generations were inevitably drawn into dialogue.5 Gordon Schochet concurred that this ‘standard myth’ needed to be ‘dispelled’.6 To Quentin Skinner the notion that Locke wrote against Hobbes served as an illustrative example of lazy canon-formation.7 Suspicions were elevated by the tendency of Straussian interpreters to associate Hobbes and Locke as fellow travellers on the low road from ancient political philosophy to modern political science.8 Erasing any presumption of a consequential Hobbes–Locke dialogue became something of a shibboleth of Cambridge school method. This scepticism did disrupt some less historically plausible schemes for understanding Hobbes and Locke in a common tradition. It is certainly correct to suspect the hoary interpretive model pitting an ‘absolutist’ Hobbes 2 3 5 6 7 8

On Laslett, see Pocock, ‘Quentin Skinner: The History of Politics and the Politics of History’, 126–7. Laslett, Introduction to TTG, 67. 4 Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, 77–83. Higgins-Biddle, Introduction to Locke, Reasonableness of Christianity, lxxiv. Schochet, ‘The Family and the Origins of the State in Locke’s Political Philosophy’, 81. Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding’, 25; Sagar, Opinion of Mankind, 109n. Strauss, Natural Right and History; Cox, Locke on War and Peace; Zuckert, Launching Liberalism, 1–4.

Introduction

3

against a ‘liberal, constitutional’ Locke. Nevertheless, it is a premise of the present book that Hobbes did exert an influence over Locke, first positively and then negatively. The chapters that follow will suggest how John Locke should be read in the shadow of Leviathan. The book excavates Locke’s direct commentary on Hobbes, which proves more extensive and thematically consistent than is often recognized. This book also reconstructs the biographical and political context of the Interregnum and Restoration, on the theory that – whatever his reticence in print – Locke wrote on fundamentally Hobbesian themes in a context saturated with polemical disputes over Hobbes’s influence. Locke’s engagement with Hobbes was thus often deflected or glancing, a by-product of his more explicit entanglements with third parties. It emerges clearly only when situated in a reconstructed political, and polemical, setting. Political contextualization will thus constitute a primary method of this book. Alongside, the study will reconstruct the polemics over Hobbism that pervaded Locke’s entire career. The book will chart his own experience of this printed debate as it left marks in his notes and library. Finally, the evidence of Locke’s direct engagement with Hobbes will be reconsidered. This evidence takes the form of excerpts, allusions, brief unpublished commentaries, and suggestive mentions of Hobbes in manuscripts. The evidence for direct engagement is uneven but not nearly as fragmentary or accidental as is often assumed. Closely examined, it emerges as both intellectually significant and thematically consistent. This thematic consistency, indeed, occasions another preliminary observation: namely, that the following book mines deeply a somewhat narrow vein. It is common, for instance, to compare Hobbes and Locke on the state of nature, or to contrast their accounts of natural law.9 The present book, however, has not found these or similar topics dispositive. Instead, it pursues the influence over Locke of Hobbes’s account of conscience, confessional governance, and religious freedom. Locke’s explicit commentary on Hobbes, and much of his implicit engagement with him, consistently orbited these subjects. Locke and Hobbes shared a dominant concern with the problems of confessionalism and conscience in the new age of sovereignty. This was the context for their most consequential theoretical entanglement. This claim will not surprise recent scholars of either Hobbes or Locke. The original and still powerful Cambridge scepticism of any ‘Hobbesian 9

Harris finds a consequential opposition to Hobbes on epistemology and natural morality. Harris, Mind of Locke, 91–107.

4

Introduction

Locke’ privileged the epistemological or constitutional concerns that long dominated study of the two thinkers.10 Recent scholarship, by contrast, has explored the theology, political theology, and ecclesiology of both. These two literatures, however, still largely operate in isolation. In particular, Locke scholars have been slow to accommodate the most recent work on Hobbes’s theories of conscience and toleration. It is not surprising that Laslett and Dunn, writing in the mid-twentieth century, did not consider the toleration debates as a possible context for Locke’s engagement with Hobbes. We should be considerably more surprised to find that the preeminent scholar of Lockean toleration, the authoritative John Marshall, has virtually nothing to say about Hobbes in this context.11 Hobbes does not appear as a potential tolerationist in Marshall’s account.12 Richard Ashcraft, in his contextual studies of Locke, had somewhat more to say about Hobbes but primarily for his rival versions of the state of nature and sovereignty. He largely ignored the ecclesial dimension of Hobbism and did not accommodate tolerationist readings of Leviathan.13 Scholars of Locke still typically present Hobbes as a confessional absolutist and apologist for church establishment.14 So understood, Hobbes can only serve as a foil for Locke’s tolerationism, Latitudinarianism, and ‘Christian humanism’.15 It is still common among Locke scholars to find ‘Hobbism’, in the ecclesial context, interpreted as coercive, conformist, and deferential to the restored episcopal church. This is a fundamental misreading, one that only slightly recodes the old opposition of ‘absolutist’ Hobbesianism and ‘liberal’ Lockeanism. In urging a reconsideration of Hobbes’s influence over Locke, and in construing it around religious and ecclesiological categories, this study critiques an older and still influential historiography.16 But it also contributes 10 11

12

13 14 15 16

Grant, Locke’s Liberalism, 71–2; Tully, Locke in Contexts, 295–7, 301–9; Aaron, John Locke, 26–6, 29–31, 147, 270–6; Ryan, ‘Hobbes’s Hidden Influence’, 189–205 at 193–5. This book will not traverse ground covered in John Marshall’s magisterial John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture. Marshall foregrounds continental contexts and is chronologically limited to the late 1670s and early 1680s. The present book views Locke’s developing tolerationism primarily within an English political and polemical setting. Marshall’s account is broad and largely synchronic, fixing a single work in diversity contexts. Mine is narrower and diachronic, following the development of Locke’s thought across his life, using his evolving engagement with Hobbes as a structuring device. Marshall, Locke, Toleration, 1–3. Ibid., 8. Locke’s clearest engagements with Hobbes predate and postdate the chronology of Marshall’s account. For passing references to Hobbes, see Marshall, Locke, Toleration, 130, 210, 324, 705, 717, 713. Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, 293, 307, 570, 576. Stanton, ‘Locke and the Politics and Theology of Toleration’, 92. Nuovo, Introduction to Locke, Writings on Religion, xviii–xxi. Hobbes hardly appears in Marshall’s important John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility.

Introduction

5

to an emerging body of more recent work, where the problem of Hobbes and Locke is either explicitly or implicitly reopened. Much of this revisionist work takes Restoration Hobbism as its primary subject, and it has not been adequately absorbed into the scholarship on Locke. Jon Parkin has mapped Hobbes’s Restoration reception and in that context has made brief but shrewd observations regarding Locke. Jacqueline Rose’s study of Restoration debates over the Royal Supremacy has recovered the diverse theoretical arguments (including Hobbesian ones) open to dissenters and tolerationists. Mark Goldie’s masterful articles on Restoration political theology never keep Hobbes and his influence far from view. Richard Tuck, in an important article of 1990, first discussed the critical proximity of Hobbes and Locke to the Cabal ministry of the late 1660s. Historians of Lockean toleration, such as Tim Stanton, Ian Harris, and Nicholas Jolley – investigating natural law and epistemology – have remained open-minded about Hobbes’s possible influence. All students of Locke must acknowledge a profound debt to the impeccable critical scholarship of Philip and J.R. Milton. A final word of grateful acknowledgement must go to Felix Waldmann. While this book was under final revision, Dr. Waldmann communicated to me an important manuscript discovery suggesting Locke’s Interregnum reading of Leviathan, and thus confirming aspects of my first chapter as it then stood. The present book does not always confirm the interpretations of these scholars, but it draws on all of them in its effort to knit together – with fresh evidence – a cohesive narrative of John Locke’s experience of Hobbism. There are two things that readers will not find in this book. The first is a comprehensive history of Lockean toleration. Locke’s mature tolerationist theory has been located within a large variety of contexts: read as an implication of epistemic scepticism, of Locke’s theory of natural law, of his Latitudinarian religious inclinations, or as an artefact of his European experience, particularly his late Dutch exile. A study that balances these diverse contexts would risk replicating the detailed studies of John Marshall. In doing so it would lose track of its chosen problem: the influence of Hobbes and Hobbism on Locke. Instead, I follow a narrower evidentiary and argumentative path. Nor will this book exhaustively survey every Hobbesian doctrine that might conceivably have influenced Locke’s broad philosophy. It instead interprets Locke against Hobbesian themes that seem to have directly impressed themselves on his mind: Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty, right, and prerogative; his account of conscience and toleration; his histories of heresy. Less attention will be paid to alternative topics – such as the state of

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Introduction

nature or epistemology – which have traditionally commanded more comment. The present work constructs its narrative around the surviving evidence base pertaining to Hobbes and Hobbism found in Locke’s reading and writing. This evidence largely pertains to questions of religious conscience and religious governance. An exploration of other themes would regularly force the discussion into a speculative method, whereby common subjects in Hobbes and Locke are juxtaposed and shepherded into a single tradition. Political theorists write such ‘juxtaposed’ analyses as a matter of course, but the tendency can bedevil historical work as well.17 Hewing closer to the explicit evidence, and eschewing the methodology of juxtaposition, renders this book a more focussed study. It is hoped that narrowness will also bring sharper precision and that the book will offer both a historical corrective to speculative theoretical musings about ‘Hobbes and Locke’ and a new vantage on the general literature discussing Lockean toleration. Thematically and methodologically, this book extends my first, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes. That study detailed the implications, within the Interregnum context, of the language of conscience and the ecclesiology of Independency introduced by Hobbes into Leviathan. Chapter 1 of the present book locates the young John Locke within debates at Interregnum Oxford concerning these subjects and influenced by Hobbes. The remainder of the book moves through the transformed context of the Restoration. It argues that ‘late Hobbism’ critically informed the setting in which Locke developed his own thinking about conscience, the church, and the confessional state. The argument posits an initial and fairly durable connection between the two thinkers, followed by a gradual emancipation of Locke from Hobbesian patterns of thought. The core problems of the study are when, and why, Locke escaped the strictures of a politique, Hobbesian account of religious conscience, and developed an account oriented around natural rights, individual religious duty, and resistance theory. Political history and political polemics, I argue, played a crucial role in this development. Particularly important were the contingencies of the Stuarts’ Indulgence policies. This context explains much of Locke’s direct commentary on Hobbes and also the predominant understanding of Hobbism that Locke encountered in printed debate. Locke’s view of Hobbes, it is argued, was 17

The online bibliography of the John Locke Society contains scores of entries on ‘Hobbes’, but most are by political theorists deploying a method of textual paralleling. The model is exemplified by W. von Leyden’s Hobbes and Locke: the Politics of Freedom and Obligation, where the two thinkers are said to ‘belong together’ as ‘the first to build their political systems on the twin notions of freedom and obligation’ (preface).

Conscience in the History of Liberalism

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heavily – not exhaustively but perhaps decisively – shaped by the Restoration toleration wars. I further argue that, within this context, the development of Locke’s tolerationism was dialectic. Originally favourable to the prerogative tolerantia encountered in Hobbes, Locke abandoned it partly to counter powerful clerical critics who opposed Hobbism as a violation of ecclesiae libertas. His own theory of toleration thus emerged as a translation of their churchly anti-politics and their sustained critique of the Stuarts’ politique mode of religious governance. Locke’s translation produced a more individualized, voluntarist understanding of religious duties and rights, but it preserved this hostility to civil religion and a fairly traditional understanding of church mission. In this regard the book supports the interpretation of Locke emerging from recent work by Tim Stanton and Ian Harris, who challenge the ‘liberal, individualist’ reading of Lockean religious freedom and recover its important communal and ecclesial dimensions.

Hobbes and Locke: Conscience in the History of Liberalism This book offers a focussed historical inquiry. Nevertheless, it directs us to the heart of a very broad subject: namely, the place of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke within the liberal tradition. This book aims to make a contribution to the historiography of liberalism. In doing so, it further risks the discontent of the Cambridge contextualists, who rightly attribute a great deal of teleological myth-making to this historiography.18 It is, however, a premise of what follows that the most plausible efforts to locate the origins of European liberalism within the new natural law thinking of the seventeenth century attend chiefly to the subject of conscience. The final section of this book will argue that Locke’s account of religious conscience played an important role in shaping the eighteenthcentury idiom of ‘liberal’ politics. This finding will partly accord with, and partly dissent from, important strains in the modern historiography of liberalism. When in the midtwentieth century the Cambridge contextualists first critiqued efforts to historicize liberalism within the seventeenth century, their dominant foils were the interpretations developed in Harold Laski’s The Rise of European Liberalism (1936), his student C.B. Macpherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), and Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America (1955). This socialist tradition interpreted liberalism primarily, in 18

Stanton, ‘John Locke and the Fable of Liberalism’; Bell, ‘What Is Liberalism?’.

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Introduction

J.G.A Pocock’s words, as a political economy oriented around ‘propertied individualism’.19 Hobbes and Locke both played a role in this interpretation, but in truth any actual language of liberal politics defined in Macpherson’s terms only traced back to mid-eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment figures such as Adam Smith and William Robertson. In this idiom neither Hobbes nor Locke figured as a significant intellectual forbearer. The case is different with historiographies of liberalism taking individual conscience as their master category. This, it can be argued, is the currently dominant understanding of historic liberalism. This is particularly true of the Rawlsian tradition, as Chapter 7 will demonstrate. Early in his career, Rawls kept his attention fixed on questions of property and redistribution. But the communitarian critique of his work reoriented Rawls’s priorities by targeting the ethical or metaphysical axioms of his system. Communitarians rejected his supposed neutrality, his notion of ‘public reason’, and his methodological individualism. The primary context for this was political conflicts over the public role of religion in liberal societies. Scholars began to investigate Rawls’s own religious upbringing as a liberal Protestant, seeking there the seedbed of his later philosophy. Rawls’s lectures and writing began to reconstruct the history of liberalism within a potted history of religious conflict and reformation. Locke enjoys a heroic role in this Rawlsian mythology, but a revisionist reading of Hobbes can also be accommodated. That this is true is in no small part thanks to an interpretive understanding of liberalism again developed (as with Laski and Macpherson) by anti-liberals, this time situated within interwar German culture. The liberal Hobbes and Locke emerged not least from the works of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, which were composed partly in dialogue. In their hostile interpretations of the English natural rights tradition, the subject of conscience was afforded a priority. Schmitt’s early Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922) cast Hobbes and Bodin as thinkers who ‘understood the question of sovereignty to mean the question of the decision on the exception’.20 Hobbesian absolutism cast the sovereign as God’s ‘representative on earth’, using will and command to fashion sovereignty and (he later theorized) to impose the critical ‘friend/enemy’ distinction on the polity.21 Against this, Locke functioned for Schmitt as an early exemplar of the emerging liberal tradition, which ignored the state of exception (and 19 20

Pocock, ‘The Myth of John Locke and the Obsession with Liberalism’, 1–5. Schmitt, Political Theology, 9–10. 21 Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 25, 37, 42, 65–7.

Conscience in the History of Liberalism

9

the requirement for ultimate, arbitrary decision) in favour of a rationalist constitutionalism.22 Lockean or Kantian liberalism futilely demanded that ‘all personal elements must be eliminated from the concept of the state’ and that specious ‘objectively valid norms’ and constitutional proceduralism must supplant the ‘personal right to command’.23 Crucially, Schmitt attached this interpretive scheme to an inventive account of political theology, the notion that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’. Religion was crucial to Hobbes’s merger of a scientific, mechanistic state with ‘personalistic’, representative authority. Hobbes ‘heightened his state, the Leviathan, into an immense person and thus point-blank straight into mythology’.24 By subordinating religion to the state, he managed to endow the state with the charismatic ‘representative capacity’ of the medieval church.25 The church had long represented God as ‘a man in historical reality’, but this powerful Catholic ‘form’ could not endure on the ‘electrified earth’. Only Hobbes, anticipating Schmitt’s own decisionism, managed to preserve charismatic, quasi-divine authority within the new scientific statecraft. In his 1932 Concept of the Political, with his theory now serving the full-blown Nazi project, Schmitt wrote that ‘the juridic formulas of the omnipotence of the state are in fact only superficial secularizations of the theological formulas of the omnipotence of God’. Hobbes, ‘truly a powerful and systematic political thinker’, had drafted the ‘theological dogma of the evilness of the world and man’ for a purely political mode of logic.26 Locke, by contrast, led the revolt in favour of purely procedural, depersonalized, and disenchanted forms of authority. The liberal ‘machine state’ supplanted the church (and Hobbes’s charismatic Leviathan) and rendered religion a mere private matter. The rise of disenchanted, procedural politics was partly the fruit of the Reformation. ‘Privatization has its origins in religion’, Schmitt wrote. ‘The first right of the individual in the sense of the bourgeois order was the freedom of religion.’27 Schmitt’s tracing of liberal society to the privatization of religious conscience was more original than might appear to us today. It affirmed an absolutist reading of Hobbes and a liberal reading of Locke in terms of political theology, and, as suggested above, this interpretation has endured in many quarters. This reading of Hobbes finds support in those passages 22 24 25 26

Schmitt, Political Theology, 13–5. 23 Ibid., 29, 31–2. Ibid., 47; see also Schmitt, Political Theology II, 57–8. Themes explored in Schmitt’s Roman Catholicism and Political Form, 5–7. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 25, 37, 42, 65–7. 27 Schmitt, Political Theology, 16, 28–32.

10

Introduction

of Leviathan which present the sovereign as a ‘Mortall God’ and which subordinate ecclesiastical (even prophetic and sacramental) power to temporal sway. Hobbes, Schmitt would later write, had managed to ‘dispel the anarchistic nature of Christianity while leaving it a certain legitimating effect, if only in the background . . . A clever tactician does not abandon anything, unless it is completely useless. This was not yet the case with Christianity.’28 Hobbes had co-opted the power of God for the state. This affront to ecclesial Christianity had been a staple of anti-Hobbesian polemic for centuries. Schmitt’s originality lay in his appreciative evaluation. However, in a consequential interpretive manoeuver, Schmitt eventually overturned this reading of Hobbes. Partly in dialogue with Leo Strauss, he re-evaluated Hobbes’s account of religious conscience and, by this mechanism, levered him into a new mythology of liberalism. In a 1932 critique of Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, Strauss argued that Hobbes – far from being the antithesis of the Lockean liberal tradition – belonged within it. Strauss’s particular argument was that the right of every individual to secure his own life, because it had the ‘character of an inalienable human right’, gave individuals ‘precedence over the state and determines its purpose and limits’. Schmitt had ignored this and the way that it allowed individuals to use their own judgement in arbitrating their obedience to sovereignty. He thus evaded the individualistic, proto-liberalism of Hobbes’s system, which Strauss would himself further elucidate in his 1936 study of Hobbes.29 In the Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Strauss continued to argue that Hobbesian ‘rights’ sprang from the principle of individual self-preservation.30 But he hinted that Hobbesian individualism might also have a religious implication. ‘In believing that the moral attitude, conscience, intention, is of more importance than the action, Hobbes is at one with Kant as with the Christian tradition . . . In the state of nature every action is in principle permitted which the conscience of the individual recognizes as necessary for self-preservation.’31 This fundamental right of ‘conscience’ was structurally Christian, a point missed in Schmitt’s enthusiastic portrayal of Hobbes as an anti-liberal.32 28 29

30 32

Schmitt’s Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947–51, from May 23, 1949, quoted in Roman Catholicism and Political Form, introduction. Strauss, ‘Notes on the Concept of the Political’, in Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 91–3. Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes. My thanks to Sam Zeitlin for comments on a longer version of this section. Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 17. 31 Ibid., 23. Strauss noted Hobbes’s endorsement of ‘Independentism’. Ibid., 74–8.

Conscience in the History of Liberalism

11

Strauss’s hints as to the importance of Hobbes’s theory of conscience were suggestive.33 Challenged, and more attentive to questions of political theology than Strauss, Schmitt reversed course and presented his own liberalization of Hobbes in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol (1938).34 This was a pernicious book, rife with anti-Semitism. There is, however, no denying its influence (acknowledged or otherwise) as an interpretation of Hobbes’s theory of conscience (not least because it was incorporated into Reinhart Koselleck’s profoundly influential Critique and Crisis).35 Borrowing from historians such as Tönnies,36 Schmitt demonstrated a new contextual awareness of Hobbes’s clerical enemies, the potential Calvinism of Hobbes’s theology, and his need to construe his Erastian state church in the tradition of ‘covenanted theology’.37 And it was here, Schmitt now argued, that Hobbes had failed. A Henrician sovereign seeking to supplant the papacy might have borne the absolute authority of Catholicism into the age of statecraft. But Hobbes was hampered by a need to define the spiritual sovereign in quasi-Protestant terms. This required an upward act of representation; the sovereign spoke not just for God but for the collected consciences of believers. Leviathan thus introduced a grand evasion, ‘the differentiation between inner faith and outer confession’. Hobbes left ‘to the individual’s private reason whether to believe or not to believe and to preserve his own judicium in his heart, intra pectus suum’. The Hobbesian sovereign controlled only public confession, not private belief. Thus was born the ‘modern, individualistic right of freedom of thought and conscience and thereby the characteristic individual freedoms embodied in the structure of the liberal constitutional system’. The ‘liberal Jew’ Spinoza, Schmitt hissed, widened this ‘barely visible crack in the theoretical justification of the sovereign state’. Schmitt wished to make Spinoza the malignant genius behind a compromised regime of liberal privacy, but he could not shield Hobbes.38 The ‘decisionist’ potential of Hobbes’s Calvinist God had faltered before the ‘inner and outer’ distinction of Lutheran anthropology. The inability of the Hobbesian sovereign to inherit the ‘representational’ power of Catholic political form, and the inability of Protestant political 33 34 35 36 37

Strauss developed the point in his preliminary, unpublished work, ‘Hobbes’s Critique of Religion’. See Strauss, Hobbes’s Critique of Religion and Related Writings, 31–2, 49, 52. Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, 22–3, 34–8. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, chapter 2, especially 37–40, 198. Bond, ‘Rational Natural Law and German Sociology: Hobbes, Locke, and Tönnies’, 1175–1200. 38 Schmitt, Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 10–11, 32–3. Ibid., 56–7.

12

Introduction

form to replace it, spawned liberalism. Hobbes slid towards Lockean conscience theory and the notion that ‘the laws of the state must become independent of subjective content, including religious tenets’.39 Carl Schmitt’s authoritarianism and anti-Semitism, particularly conspicuous in his Hobbes study, have polluted his reputation. There is no denying, however, that his reading of Hobbes on conscience was shrewd. It is indeed the case that Leviathan’s logic of sovereignty as a representational phenomenon does not successfully empower the sovereign in absolute spiritual terms. Hobbes was forced into a series of contradictions. It is impossible, according to Leviathan, to accuse the sovereign of injustice without absurdity (because such an accusation contradicted one’s original transfer of right to the sovereign).40 Only subjects could act unjustly. The sovereign, as the representative person, acts for subjects in a totalizing manner. There is no normative remainder which might adjudicate the ‘justice’ of a sovereign’s actions: ‘by this Institution of a Common-wealth, every particular man is Author of all the Soveraigne doth’.41 As Quentin Skinner has written, the ‘theory of attributed action lies at the heart of the politics of Leviathan’. Schmitt’s decisionism is anticipated in these Hobbesian doctrines.42 However, Hobbes could not accomplish the parallel task of rendering it impossible to accuse the sovereign of impiety.43 In religion, Hobbes could only justify outward conformity. He allowed individuals to distance themselves inwardly from the sovereign’s religious commands. Christians must obey pagan sovereigns outwardly as Naaman had bowed to the Idol Rimmon with the tacit permission of Elisha. But Hobbes did not justify this spiritual conformity with a theory of attributed action. Instead, he deployed a rhetoric of distancing. ‘This we may say’, he wrote, ‘that whatsoever a Subject, as Naaman was, is compelled to in obedience to his Soveraign, and doth it not in order to his own mind, but in order to the laws of his country, that action is not his, but his Soveraigns; nor is it he that in this case denyeth Christ before men, but his Governour, and the law of his countrey.’ Likewise, the Muslim could obey a Christian sovereign while remaining ‘inwardly in his heart of the Mahometan Religion’.44 The religious wills of subjects could be silenced but not surrendered. Leviathan repeatedly affirmed that individual conscience on religious questions could not be forced. It was thus not absurd to accuse the sovereign of impiety. Christians were to ‘tolerate their Heathen Princes, or 39 41 42 43 44

Ibid., 43–5. 40 Lev., 200–2. Lev., 270; Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State’, 202–3. Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State’, 207. For a different view, see Stanton, ‘Hobbes and Schmitt’, 160–7. Lev., 784, 786. Emphasis added.

Conscience in the History of Liberalism

13

Princes that . . . authorize the teaching of an Errour’.45 To speak of tolerating a sovereign’s injustice was an absurdity to Hobbes, not so the ‘toleration’ of a sovereign’s ‘infidelity’ or heresy.46 The liberalization of Hobbes undertaken by Strauss and Schmitt in the interwar period proved a significant intervention. Their reading, oriented around the category of conscience, has endured more successfully than the possessive individualist interpretation offered by Macpherson and Hartz. Current historians commend what the interwar Germans despised, celebrating rather than regretting the individualism of the seventeenth-century jus naturalists. But the structure of the interwar German reading has endured. This is true as regards Strauss’s emphasis on Hobbes’s doctrine of selfpreservation as a shelter for the right of private judgement.47 It is even truer of Schmitt’s emphasis on Hobbes’s account of religious conscience. Alan Ryan, for instance, rejects the ‘bourgeois’ Leviathan and foregrounds Hobbes’s deference to private conscience.48 Perez Zagorin, likewise, wrote of ‘a marked strain of religious liberalism’ in Hobbes, in that ‘he was not concerned with the individual’s private thoughts but only with publicly stated opinions and doctrinal dispute that might be dangerous to the peace of the Common-wealth’.49 Richard Tuck writes that in Leviathan, Hobbes had ‘worked out how religion could be seen as an area of personal liberty for the citizen’.50 Intellectual historians have demonstrated the disjunction in Hobbes’s discussion of confessionalism. His insistence on outward religious conformity – it is now widely recognized – was mitigated by a rhetorical emphasis on the inviolability of individual conscience. This produced, as part of Hobbes’s counsel to the prudent sovereign, elements of a prerogative tolerationism: a hostility to complex public creeds, a theological minimalism, and an endorsement of Interregnum Independency as a church form. This recast interpretation of Hobbes – cautiously tolerationist and at least theoretically open to sectarian church establishment – has not been accommodated by students of Locke’s more famous tolerationism. It is the purpose of the present book to address this failure and thereby interpret anew the seventeenth-century theories of conscience and toleration that have played such a large role in twentieth-century mythologies of liberal politics. Suffice it here to say that Schmitt’s effort to locate Hobbes within 45 47 48 50

Lev., 922. 46 Lev., 920. Slomp, ‘The Liberal Slip of Thomas Hobbes’s Authoritarian Pen’, 357–69; also Jaume, ‘Hobbes and the Philosophical Sources of Liberalism’, 199–216. Ryan, Making of Modern Liberalism, 217–8. 49 Zagorin, Hobbes and the Law of Nature, 123. Tuck, ‘Hobbes, Conscience, and Christianity’, 498.

14

Introduction

a Lockean tradition of free conscience – while insightful – ultimately claims too much liberality for Hobbes and too little for Locke. The political context in which their respective theories became differentiated is the subject of what follows. Locke’s liberalized account of conscience had Hobbesian roots but flourished only when planted in new soil.

chapter 1

John Locke and Interregnum Hobbism

On 20 October 1659, John Locke, in a dark mood, wrote to a friend: ‘Tis Phansye that rules us all under the title of reason . . . we are all Quakers here and there is not a man but thinks he alone hath this light within and all besids stumble in the darke. Tis our passions that bruiteish part that dispose of our thoughts and actions . . .’ Right reason broke itself against the rocks of mere opinion. ‘Men live upon trust’, Locke continued, ‘and their knowledg is noething but opinion moulded up betweene custome and Interest, the two great Luminarys of the world, the only lights they walke by.’1 At age 27, Locke had known only a world shaped by civil war. The demolition of England’s church and a splintering sectarianism had shaken the country’s religious life. The Quakers, among the new sects to rise from this rubble, would be a lifelong interest of Locke: a sect of outlying radicalism against which he would measure his own shifting commitment to either confessional order or indulgence. Here they epitomized intractable disagreement, a loss of intellectual cohesion, and the unstable admixture of opinion and custom that could dominate conscience. Locke spent the latter years of the Interregnum at Oxford, a cockpit of political and intellectual dispute. Particularly in the eventful two years running up to the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Locke’s letters were peppered with anxious rumours of political upheaval and prayers for preservation ‘from oppression and bloud’.2 This upheaval conditioned John Locke’s intellectual maturation and his first political writings. His career during the 1650s has been neglected by historians, partly for a dearth of source material and partly because Locke failed to publish his early writings, which are thus easily dismissed as youthful false starts. Locke’s initial career as a political writer has been studied only cursorily.3 Young Locke is often 1 2 3

Locke to Tom [Westrowe?], 20 October 1659, CL, 1:123. Locke to John Locke, sen., [6 April 1658?], CL, 1:61. Though see Rose, ‘John Locke, “Matters Indifferent”’, 601–21; Harris, Mind of Locke, 60–71.

15

16

John Locke and Interregnum Hobbism

cast as a ‘wholehearted monarchist’ and episcopal man or as an ‘unselfconfident Oxford don . . . prepared to go to great lengths to secure quiet’.4 This perspective neglects the formative influence that Interregnum political thought, including that of Hobbes, likely exerted over Locke’s initial political writings. These writings emerged from the intellectual context of Interregnum Oxford, where Hobbes found some of his most dedicated enthusiasts and critics.

John Locke’s Politics in the Interregnum Milieu Locke certainly was not raised a royalist. His father, John Locke, a Somerset attorney and estate steward, had fought for parliament under Alexander Popham, his employer and a prominent Protestant militant during the civil war.5 The senior Locke, to judge from his memoranda book, shunned church Laudianism and entertained the radical suggestion that ‘the voice of the people be requird’ in the election of ministers.6 As late as 1658–9, the younger Locke would, in reading notes, describe the divisive Grand Remonstrance of December 1641 as ‘a very excellent remonstrance of the state of these kingdoms’.7 Popham secured the younger Locke a place at the prestigious Westminster School.8 The school’s governance was divided during Locke’s attendance. Its examiners included the trimming episcopalian Richard Busby, the Presbyterian Thomas Hill, and the pre-eminent Independent John Owen. It was Owen, however, who apparently patronized Locke. In November 1652, Locke matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, where Owen had been appointed dean in 1651. Locke later recounted that his university studies were dominated by Calvinists. Among the colleges, Christ Church inclined towards Independency, and Locke was tutored by the Independent Thomas Cole (dubiously remembered by Anthony Wood as a ‘fanatical tutor’).9 Locke was considered, according to his colleague James Tyrrell, one of the ‘most learned and ingenious young men in the College’.10 John Owen was an eminence of Interregnum Independency. As Cromwell’s vice chancellor at Oxford, he pursued university and church reform and agitated on behalf of the Congregational way. Fragmentary 4 5 7 9 10

Cranston, Locke, 57–62; Marshall, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 7–26; J. R. Milton, ‘Locke’s Life and Times’, 7; ODNB; Abrams, Introduction to TT, 8–9; Laslett, Introduction to TTG, 20. 6 ODNB; BL Add. MS 4222, ff. 224v, 226. Harris, Mind of Locke, 50–1. 8 MS Locke f. 14, p. 8. Locke to Alexander Popham, May 1652 [?], CL, 1:11. Marshall, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 5–6; AO, 4:638. Damaris Masham to Jean Le Clerc, 12 January 1704, in Woolhouse, ‘Lady Masham’s Account of Locke’, 172.

John Locke’s Politics in the Interregnum Milieu

17

evidence suggests Locke’s favourable inclination towards the Independent patriarch. In September of 1655, with Owen at the height of his influence, Locke’s colleague Samuel Tilly described Owen to him as ‘your reverend Deane’ and wished that his ‘honour may be proportionate to his person, and merit’.11 In 1658, Locke referred to the reinstitution of Oxford’s academic dress dismissively, implying sympathy with Owen’s effort to abolish it.12 Locke’s correspondent presumed his distaste for the academic traditionalists opposed by Owen.13 Locke himself suggested as much by gleefully reporting the jeering of the poet Payne Fisher when, in the spring of 1658, he delivered a commemoration of the moderate Archbishop James Ussher.14 Locke’s family identified with those ‘well affected to the commonwealth’.15 Cromwell’s pre-eminence did not faze them. In May 1654, Locke glowingly referenced his reception at Hampton Court and the ‘bounty’ he received there. (That these references were later scratched out may indicate their political significance.16) In the same year, Locke – along with Owen and several of his other clients – published verses honouring the Lord Protector.17 Locke may later have helped draft an obsequious letter to Cromwell on behalf of a friend, effusively thanking him for some morsel of patronage.18 Locke’s patchy, early correspondence suggests sympathy with the army, the Oxford Independents, and the Protectorate. The only notes of estrangement are Locke’s frequent and morbidly fascinated observations about the ‘uncouth’ Quakers.19 But contempt for sectarian antinomianism was perfectly common among the mainstream Independents. Even in 1659–60, Locke betrayed no late flowering royalist or episcopal enthusiasm.20 A letter from his friend John Strachey in May of 1659, after the fall of Richard Cromwell, dubbed Locke a ‘man for the good old cause’.21 We know less than we would like to about Locke’s early opinions; his letters offer mere hints and strands. In September of 1659, however, we are 11

Samuel Tilly to Locke, 11 September 1655, CL, 1:30. Locke to William Carr, 23 January 1658, CL, 1:53–4. 13 William Carr to Locke, 20 January 1658, CL, 1:56. An obscure letter in Locke’s papers mentions Owen’s politicking during elections to Richard Cromwell’s parliament. ? to ?, 24 January 1659, CL, 1:66. 14 Locke to Locke, sen., 6 April 1658, CL, 1:62. 15 Locke, sen. to ? [summer 1656?], CL, 1:40. 16 Locke to ?, 1 May 1654, CL, 1:19. 17 Musarum Oxoniensium elaiophoria sive ob Faedera, Auspiciis Serenissimi Oliveri, 45, 94–5; LHW, 3–4, 191–2. 18 Carr to My Lord P: Secretary [Lord Protector?], 1656/7, CL, 1:45. 19 Locke to Locke, sen., 25 October 1656, CL, 1:41–2; Locke to Locke, sen., 15 November 1656, CL, 1:43; Locke to Locke, sen., 22 June 1659, CL, 1:83–4. 20 Locke to Locke, sen., 6 April. 1658, CL, 1:61. 21 John Strachey to Locke, 28 May 1659, CL, 1:79. 12

18

John Locke and Interregnum Hobbism

afforded our first full view of his mind on the sharply contested matter of religious toleration. It came in a letter to the physician and writer Henry Stubbe. Stubbe and Locke overlapped at both Westminster School and Christ Church. Stubbe eventually became deputy keeper of the Bodleian Library. His patrons included Henry Vane, on whose behalf he often wrote. He belonged to Owen’s Oxford circle and composed attacks on Presbyterianism and defences of Independency.22 In their sole surviving letter, Locke responded to one of Stubbe’s more consequential tracts, his Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause, or, A Discourse concerning the Rise and Extent of the power of the Civil Magistrate in reference to Spiritual Affairs. Stubbe’s Essay is often tagged as a defence of religious toleration, a characterization suggesting both too little and too much.23 Produced during the chaotic late Interregnum debates over ecclesial and constitutional reform, the work promoted an ‘unequal commonwealth’, reserving full civil rights for defenders of the ‘Good old cause’. Stubbe feared resurgent royalism and worried that in an ‘equal commonwealth’ landed elites might ally with the Presbyterian and episcopal clergy against ‘sectarian-toleration’. A ‘disaffected ministry’ seeking ‘religious sovereignty’ threatened the army and the Independents. Clerical traditionalists, Stubbe warned, continued to lurk at the universities.24 Considering ‘whether the Civil Magistrate hath any power in things of Spiritual concernment’, Stubbe offered a qualified denial. He began with natural men, who, out of necessity, promise to obey their governor while securing ‘each individuall in such rights as they respectively shall agree upon towards each other’.25 The sovereign was required by this social contract to secure property and rights, including some measure of individual religious liberty; the Old Testament revealed that ‘Magistrates were purely civill, and that though they might have a Nationall religion . . . yet did they not entermeddle with the particular religion of their subjects, or them that sojourned amongst them.’ Religious persecution was a tool of illegitimate absolute monarchies. Mixed regimes, grounded on consent, permitted religious liberty, though they might also erect establishments to their ‘particular Gods’.26 Stubbe’s tolerationism presumed a church establishment of some kind. He avoided adjudicating how much authority sovereigns – justly concerned with restraining clerical power – might wield over these 22 23 24

ODNB. The letter is not discussed in Jacob, Henry Stubbe. Abrams mischaracterizes this as an ‘early letter in which Locke criticizes a defense of religion toleration’. Introduction, TT, 4. Stubbe, Essay in Defence, preface. 25 Ibid., 2. 26 Ibid., 13–16.

John Locke’s Politics in the Interregnum Milieu

19

establishments. However, noting the ‘particular sentiments arising from different illuminations and prejudices’, Stubbe did not require individuals to delegate their own religious judgement to the arbitration of sovereignty. The ‘undeniable defect of common evidence in the delivering of spirituall matters’ made such deference unreasonable. Stubbe’s pamphlet ranged over the early history of Christianity, borrowing from post-Eusebian historians such as Sozomen and Socrates Scholasticus. This excursus into ecclesiastical history, somewhat unusually, foregrounded the history of Byzantine Christianity, using it (rather than Protestantism) to rebuke the growth of Western papalism. It read the early church as ecumenical and ‘tolerationist’, passive towards pagan rulers and indulgent of individual opinion. Coercion was rare and was done only ‘upon a secular and politique account for preservation of the civil peace, when men began to opinionate it, and promote faction instead of religion’.27 When ‘humane policy began to mould a Catholique church’, this ‘pragmaticalness’ gave way to persecution. The Independent Stubbe, rejecting any corporate ‘Church organical’, cast the early church as a network of ‘particular’ associations espousing different opinions or ‘heresies’.28 Christian emperors generally permitted this salutary pluralism, using their prerogative authority to suspend religious laws. Resisting clerical pressures, they established toleration and even favoured pagans and heretics. ‘Outward actions’ might be ‘commanded’, but ‘affection and mental acts’ were necessarily ‘free and uncontroll’d’. Only for ‘political’ purposes did emperors authorize persecutions.29 Stubbe sporadically deployed a language of ‘humane equity and natural right to allowe each man to worship what he thinks fit’,30 but his tolerationism relied more on the notion of enlightened sovereignty deploying prerogative power. He cited Bodin, who had implicitly praised the politique Theodosius for overriding the objections of Bishop Ambrose. Even Justinian, the emperor most associated with spiritual coercion, acted for ‘Reason of State’ and was willing to overlook violations of orthodoxy when convenient.31 Toleration ‘policy’ protected sovereignty from religious faction and clerical usurpation. Stubbe borrowed arguments from John Selden, who had established that the ancient Jewish blasphemy law did not apply to non-Jews and therefore did not bind later non-Jewish polities.32 There were thus heavily Erastian overtones to the tolerationism of the Essay.

27 31

Ibid., 59. 28 Ibid., 60–2, 130. Ibid., 80, 91–2. 32 Ibid., 107–15.

29

Ibid., 60–1, 73–4.

30

Here quoting Tertullian; ibid., 96.

20

John Locke and Interregnum Hobbism

Stubbe extended toleration in radical directions. He appeared indifferent to Trinitarian doctrine and indulgent of Socinianism. He was willing to tolerate some English Catholics and episcopalians. The latter might enjoy freer practice, he wrote, if they obeyed and prayed for their governors. ‘In like manner’, Stubbe wrote, I should plead for such Catholicks as adhere to the doctrine of Widdrington, or Preston, and Blackwel, etc., denying the Pope’s power any way in Temporals, to depose Magistrates, to dispose of lands, or the civil obedience of subjects, such being ready to sacrifice their lives as well as fortunes for the defence of their Heretical Governours in secular lawful quarrels.33

Stubbe’s tolerationist tract thus had a disparate profile. Contractarian, explicitly dependent on Selden and Grotius, it invoked the new natural law theory. It viewed conscience as a right and as properly Christian but was more concerned to marshal a politique defence of toleration. Anticlerical and hostile to the ‘organic’ Church, it nevertheless envisioned conditions under which loyalist Catholics and episcopalians might secure indulgence. This was the work that Locke, in the autumn of 1659, read with ‘satisfaction’ and evaluated with suggestive praise. He commended Stubbe’s ‘strength and vigor’ and his ‘clearnesse of reason’. Specifically mentioning Poland, the Dutch Republic, and France (‘nearest examples have the greatest influence’), he implied slight dissatisfaction with Stubbe’s late imperial models. But Locke agreed that ‘men of different professions may quietly unite (antiquity the testimony) under the same government and unanimously cary the same civill intrest and hand in hand to march to the same end of peace and mutuall society, though they take different way towards heaven’.34 He only chided Stubbe for lowering his guard vis-à-vis Catholicism, a subject to which we will return.35 Locke foresaw the success of Stubbe’s tract and requested a copy to circulate at Oxford.36 In commending Stubbe’s toleration but recommending stricter vigilance of clerical factions, Locke may have spoken for the ‘magisterial Independency’ of the Protectoral period. In his papers, bundled with this letter to Stubbe, survives an undated note recording provisions of the Cromwellian Instrument of Government (Article 37, as promulgated by 33 34 35

36

Ibid., 132. Locke to S H [Henry Stubbe], [mid-September 1659?], TNA, PRO 30/24/7/493 (CL, 1:109–12); misread in Woolhouse, Locke, 32, 39. On this basis Marshall construes Locke as politely sceptical of Stubbe’s case. Marshall, Resistance, Religion, 6–7. But the question of Catholic toleration was habitually separated from the broader question of toleration, not least in all of Locke’s relevant works. Locke to Stubbe, mid-September 1659, TNA, PRO 30/24/7/493.

John Locke’s Politics in the Interregnum Milieu

21

‘his Highness the Lord Protector’s special commandment’). These protected Christians in their diverse religious ‘exercises’, excepting only those inclined to ‘popery’ or ‘prelacy’.37 Sympathetic to Independency, Stubbe’s tract endorsed a primitive ecclesiology of ‘gathered’ Christian congregations. If Locke did bring a copy to Oxford, he could not have expected either Presbyterian or episcopal appreciation. This likely did not trouble him. In June of 1659, indeed, Locke may have positively referenced another tract attributed to Stubbe, his Sundry Things from Severall Hands concerning the University of Oxford.38 This blasted the university’s increasingly conservative clerical leadership and called for the introduction of new learning.39 The most extensive airing of his political views surviving from the Interregnum, Locke’s letter to Stubbe thwarts the common view that Locke was by this time a convinced ‘conservative’, ‘authoritarian’, or ‘royalist’. However anxious about disorder, Locke seemingly remained fixed within the Independent circle at Oxford. He appreciated Stubbe’s republicanism, his anticlericalism, his politique tolerationism, and his advocacy of a Congregationalism deferential to state authority. The letter also suggests the broad Hobbesian influences that may have helped to shape Locke’s early political opinions. It has not, to date, been read within a Hobbesian milieu. By contrast, Locke’s ‘Two Tracts’, composed a few years later, often are. Philip Abrams, in his important edition of the tracts (1967), cast Locke as a ‘conservative’ and conceded the likelihood of some Hobbesian influence.40 Jon Parkin also places the ‘Two Tracts’ in a ‘Hobbesian vein’.41 There are distinct Hobbesian overtones in the ‘Two Tracts’, as we shall see, and their anti-tolerationist position conforms to a conventional scheme in which a young ‘conservative authoritarian’ is contrasted with the later ‘proto-liberal’ Locke. The tracts are thus taken to represent a brief loss of balance. This venerable narrative of Locke’s intellectual development is undermined by a close reading of Stubbe’s Essay and of Locke’s praise for it. Locke’s tolerationism of 1659, no less than his anti-tolerationism of 1660–1, was fed by the Hobbesian currents of the Interregnum. Between the letter to Stubbe and the ‘Two Tracts’, Locke no doubt reassessed the political 37 38 39 40

MS Locke c. 27, f. 11. Locke to Locke, sen., 22 June 1659, CL, 1:83–4; seemingly attributed to Stubbe by Wood in AO, 3:1076. Stubbe, Sundry Things from Several Hands, 1–7. De Beer disputes that Locke was referencing this tract, but he did not know of Stubbe’s probable authorship. Introduction to TT, 75–9. 41 Parkin, Taming, 209; Jolley, Toleration and Understanding, 14.

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feasibility of toleration. But his underlying logic – of a contractual state serving temporal ends, of a monopolistic sovereignty trumping the liberty of the church and constantly watchful of clerical conspiracy – remained consistent. And that Hobbes might have influenced Locke as he moved from a politique tolerationism to a politique confessionalism should not surprise. Hobbes himself migrated between these two positions during these very years. Furthermore, situated amidst the Oxford Independents around John Owen, Locke was well positioned to grasp the anticlerical, Independent, and tolerationist potential of Leviathan. Hobbes’s masterwork had reflected his gradual estrangement from the ecclesial politics and political theology of the royalist cause. As early as 1641, Hobbes had tentatively justified the abolition of English episcopacy, on the grounds that the rivalry between spiritual and secular sovereignty was the root cause of civil war. In De Cive, Hobbes had reiterated this thesis and clarified – to clerical outrage – that the diagnosis directly incriminated the English episcopate.42 By the time Hobbes composed Leviathan, the English bishops and prayer book had been outlawed and an attempted Presbyterian settlement (equally obnoxious to Hobbes) had failed. This result had been achieved by an alliance of Erastians and Independents, the latter of whom sought a national church of autonomous congregations supervised by Godly magistracy. The leading Independents rejected both radical separatism and clerical hierarchy and trumpeted the ‘Congregational way’ as the church form most subservient to sovereign power.43 They rejected free-will theology and pursued university reform, in part to cull residual ‘popery’ and clericalism. Hobbes’s close friend Robert Payne had struggled fruitlessly to dissuade him from publicly abandoning the episcopal church.44 We now know that much of the anti-Catholic rhetoric of Leviathan was framed to strike the English bishops as well, a fact that they immediately divined and resented.45 Hobbes implicitly blamed them for the travails of Charles I and explicitly endorsed their abolition (along with Presbyterianism) as relics of ‘praeterpolitical church government’. In an extended and rhetorically powerful appeal, 42 43

44

45

The next two paragraphs distil Collins, Allegiance, chapters 2–4. J. P. Sommerville minimizes Hobbes’s Independency by effacing these distinctions, creating a composite ‘Independent’ that is sectarian and separatist, holds radical political views, and rejects magisterial spiritual authority. Skinner follows Sommerville. Sommerville, ‘Hobbes and Independency’, 155–73; Skinner, Republican Liberty, 170n. Payne to Hobbes, 1649, in Collins, ‘Christian Ecclesiology and the Composition of Leviathan’, 229–31. In her fine study, Rose nevertheless neglects this letter in arguing that Leviathan targeted only Presbyterians and Catholics, not ‘Anglicans’. Rose, Godly Kingship, 218–9. Raylor, ‘Anglican Attack on Hobbes’, entire.

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Leviathan endorsed the establishment of Independency. It also offered a suggestive reading of the primitive church as a patchwork of independent congregations without differentiated officers. Leviathan granted the primitive power of excommunication to congregated assemblies (rather than to proto-episcopal, apostolic authorities). It interpreted ancient ordination as a function of individual congregations ‘holding up’ hands, rather than an apostolic-cum-episcopal officer ‘laying on hands’.46 These historical arguments militated in favour of Independency, as was recognized by friendly and hostile contemporaries.47 James Harrington borrowed Hobbes’s account of ordination in his own defence of an Erastian–Independent settlement.48 Henry Hammond and his colleagues attacked Hobbes for precisely the same argument. Hobbes warned that Independency should be ‘without contention, and without measuring the Doctrine of Christ by our affection to the Person of his Ministers’. But even this oft-misunderstood proviso evidenced his new appreciation of Congregationalism. The proviso is often assumed by sceptical historians to have qualified, or perhaps even revealed as ironic, Leviathan’s Independency.49 But in fact the qualifier was not of Hobbes’s own devising. He almost certainly borrowed it from Independent apologias, where it served to interpret Paul’s anger at the Corinthians as a rebuke of their lack of charity, rather than the autonomy of their congregations.50 The latter interpretation was favoured by Presbyterian and episcopal commentators. Hobbes’s proviso against contention did not undermine his endorsement of Independency but embedded within it a Congregationalist interpretation of schism. Independency appealed to Hobbes partly because it stripped away dangerous clerical hierarchy. It also protected individual conscience on contested points of theology. Leviathan presented Christian orthodoxy as a system of obscurity designed to augment the power of churches. It advanced a minimal slate of theological fundamentals and recommended indulgence outside of these. Conscience liberty was not, for Hobbes, an enforceable individual right, and Leviathan certainly understood restless, 46 47

48 49 50

Lev., 796, 836, 1114–6. Malcolm minimizes these points by observing that Hobbes did not view primitive church practice as ‘binding’. But Hobbes certainly commended primitive practice in ways that augmented his endorsement of Independency. Malcolm, Introduction, Lev., 61–4. Harrington, Pian Piano, 4, 66–7. Including Jon Parkin, Alan Cromartie, Kinch Hoekstra, but at greatest length Bejan, ‘Difference without Disagreement’, 3–6. Including, in a work Hobbes later commended, Owen, Of Schisme, 26–8; for the more traditional view, see Baille, Disssuasive from Errours, 218–19.

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conscientious actors as political threats. The book nevertheless insisted on the impossibility, and thus folly, of attempting to coerce consciences. While the realm of conscience was purely internal, Hobbes advised sovereigns, as a matter of prudence, to eschew intricate orthodoxies and heresy hunting. Independency also promised to subject individual consciences to less harassing surveillance. All of this rendered Leviathan a notable, if unexpected, service to the ecclesial agenda of the Interregnum Independents. It also aligned Hobbes, for the first time, with the tradition of politique toleration. Hobbes’s ecclesiology and views on conscience had thus undergone politically consequential transformations by 1651. Nowhere was this clearer than at Interregnum Oxford, among the members of the set that surrounded Locke. Henry Stubbe, indeed, campaigned to ally Hobbes with Owen’s circle of Oxford Independents.51 Thomas Hobbes, by this time, lived primarily in London, enjoying the ‘learned conversation’ of the revolutionary capital.52 With the old censorship regime in disrepair, radical and heretical works appeared unmolested – Leviathan prominent among them. Its political deference, theological heterodoxy, and ecclesial Independency incited episcopal and Presbyterian observers. Hobbes stood charged with advancing the religious project of the Cromwellian Independents: a ‘dissolution of Ecclesiastical Power into the Secular’, sheltering sectarian licence on the one hand and using religion to brace civil power in the manner of the ‘Machiavellians’ on the other.53 The association of Independency with Hobbesian Erastianism became particularly pronounced after the establishment of Cromwell’s Protectorate late in 1653. Cromwell erected an Independent church establishment, replacing clerical authority with state-appointed, largely lay committees empowered to approve clerical appointments and purge the disaffected. This establishment of atomized congregations was designed to protect not only a measured liberty for some individual subjects but also the power of the state in ecclesiastical matters. Leviathan defended this mixture of sovereign ecclesial control and individual spiritual liberty. Richard Baxter denounced Leviathan before Cromwell’s parliament as an affront to ‘ministerial office’.54 To the pre-eminent apologist for apostolic episcopacy, Henry Hammond, Hobbes had reduced the church to a mere ‘engine of state, and saecular contrivance’.55 By contrast, London’s anticlerical propagandists read 51 52 53 54

Collins, Allegiance, chapter 6; Jacob, Stubbe, 8–24; Jesseph, Squaring the Circle, 335–9; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 336. ABL, 1:337–8. Thorndike, Epilogue to the Tragedy, 146; Thorndike, Letter concerning Religion amongst Us, 2–4, 7, 12–18. 55 Baxter, Humble Advice, 2–6, 9. Hammond, Power of the Keyes, preface.

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Leviathan as the manifesto for a new age. Marchamont Nedham, William Petty, Francis Osborne, John Davies, and James Harrington feted Hobbes for exposing the ‘Black-Coats’, who were ‘discontented that these Prerogatives of religion are taken away . . . and are invested in the Supream power of the Nation, be it of what perswasion it will’.56 Hobbes was a master deconstructor of the ‘power ecclesiastical’.57 His hostility to clerical religion, and his politique tolerationism, spoke to the revolutionary moment. ‘My Hobbs’, reported one hostile contemporary, ‘is at London much caressed, as one that hath by his Writings justified the Reasonableness and Righteousness of their Arms and Actions.’58 Leviathan, Richard Baxter would later rue, had delighted the ‘Pretorian Sectarian Bands’. Hobbes was befriended by the ‘best wits’ and enjoyed the ‘vogue of those youths that pretend to anything of ingenuity’.59 Is it possible that John Locke numbered among these ingenious youths? His letter to Stubbe is suggestive. Stubbe was a key promoter of the Hobbesian vogue and tried to deploy Leviathan for the causes of Independency and toleration. Hobbes ‘much esteemed’ him.60 With Hobbes’s encouragement, Stubbe laboured on an eventually aborted Latin translation of Leviathan. The work strongly resonated with Stubbe’s own anticlericalism and with his belief that free conscience reinforced the religious authority of sovereignty.61 Stubbe enticed Hobbes into the polemical disputes roiling Interregnum Oxford. Hobbes and the Oxford Independents shared enemies, including the future Bishop, Seth Ward and the Presbyterian mathematician, John Wallis.62 Both assailed Leviathan for ‘furiously attacking and destroying our Universities . . . and especially ministers and the clergy’.63 Hobbes, they charged, had pitched his university and church reform proposals as projects for Oliver Cromwell, John Owen, and the Independents around them.64 In an acidic riposte, Hobbes skewered Wallis and Ward for propping up ‘incomprehensible mysteries of religion’ and the ‘Power ecclesiasticall’.65 He excoriated them

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Davies, ‘Preface’, to Hobbes, Of Libertie and Necessitie; Mercurius Politicus 84 (8–15 January 1652); Collins, Allegiance, chapter 5. William Rand to Benjamin Worsley, 11 August 1651, Hartlib Papers, 62/21/1b. Edward Nicholas to Lord Hatton, 12/22 February 1652, BL Add. MS 4180, f. 55. Ralph Balthurt to Hobbes, 27 May 1651; Samuel Sorbière to Hobbes, 13/23 December 1656; Franҫois du Verdus to Hobbes, 12/22 March 1657; Stubbe to Hobbes, 30 January 1657, CH, 180, 389, 454, 440. ABL, 1:371. Stubbe to Hobbes, 25 October 1656, 9 November 1656, and 30 January 1657, CH, 333–4, 339, 439–440. Stubbe was one of Aubreys’s sources on these ‘irreconcileable Contests’. Aubrey, Brief Lives . . ., ed. Bennett, 1:300. Wallis to Christian Huygens, 1659, quoted in Jacob, Stubbe, 14. 65 Ward, Vindiciae Academiarum, 52–3, 59, 61. Hobbes, Six Lessons, 61.

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for resisting Cromwell’s effort to resolve the ‘competition between the Ecclesiasticall and the Civill power’.66 In October of 1656, Stubbe asked Hobbes to print something further defending Independency.67 Hobbes responded with a letter, now lost, echoing Stubbe’s own drafted defence of Owen and the Congregational way. Hobbes’s praise, Stubbe wrote, would ‘redound to Dr. Owen’s honor’, who was defending ‘liberty of conscience’ and ‘other fundamentalls of this government’. Stubbe specifically reported that Owen’s Oxford faction included ‘any Westminster scholar, who are Dr. Owen’s creatures now of late’. It was in this context that Stubbe assured Hobbes of his ‘many favourers [at] this university’.68 Westminster and Christ Church had a close connection, with five or six students of the former elected to college ‘studentships’ (essentially fellowships) yearly. Studentships were for life but, on average, were held for approximately fifteen years.69 This meant that the college was perpetually full of Westminsters. But Stubbe’s comments suggest that Hobbes’s potential favourers were those younger and often sectarian students connected to Owen, who became Dean of Christ Church in 1651. Westminster graduates who entered Christ Church between 1651 and late 1656 (the date of Stubbe’s letter to Hobbes) numbered nearly three dozen. Many of these are now total obscurities, and others seem unlikely to have favoured Hobbes or the cause of free conscience. Stubbe himself and Edward Bagshaw are the only two Westminster students who have left evidence of direct correspondence with Hobbes. Locke knew them both. (Locke would maintain long ties with many of his Westminster School colleagues.70) Stubbe clearly considered Locke a supporter of conscience and recommended (or perhaps lent) to him political readings of relevance, including Jeremy Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesying and a large number of works by John Milton.71

66 68

69 70

71

Ibid., 56–7, 60–2. 67 Stubbe to Hobbes, 25 October 1656, CH, 337. Stubbe to Hobbes, 9 November 1656, 29 November 1656, and 8 December 1656, CH, 338, 379, 384; John Potenger, fellow of Corpus Christi, recalled ‘spending most of my time’ reading books such as ‘Milton’s works, Hobbs his Leviathan’. Fowler, History of Corpus Christi, 335. J.R. Milton, ‘Locke at Oxford’, 30. See his letters from Percivall in which Lower, South, Vernon, and Bold are mentioned; George Percivall to Locke, 29 August 1660, 19 December 1660, 12 January 1662, and 12 July 1662, CL, 1:153–4, 161–2, and 192–3. Locke mentions Nourse in Locke to William Carr, 23 January 1658, CL, 1:53. Locke knew James Carkesse and South late into his life; Robert Pawling to Locke, 27 January 1694, CL, 4:795; Robert South to Locke, 25 March 1697, CL 6:62–3. Godolphin was a close associate into the middle 1660s. Marshall, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 6.

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Locke, indeed, kept abreast of the latest political writing and corresponded about it with Stubbe and others of the Westminster cohort at Christ Church.72 Based on Locke’s surviving reading notes, J. R. Milton has argued that Locke’s political reading during his Oxford years was concentrated in the late 1650s.73 It was around the year 1659 that Locke provided the first evidence of his interest in Thomas Hobbes. In one of his commonplace books he copied the following quotation from Robert Filmer: Hobs. With noe small content I read Mr Hobs booke De Cive & his Leviathan about the rights of Soveraignty which noe man that I know hath soe amply & Judiciously handled. Filmore. Obser: preface.74

This remark appeared at the start of Filmer’s Observations concerning the Originall of Government, Upon Mr Hobs Leviathan, Mr. Milton against Salmasius, H. Grotius De Juri Belli (1652).75 Like a large number of the titles recorded in Locke’s notes, this excerpt from Filmer is accompanied by a notation reading ‘C. Stub’. Notations beside other titles read ‘C. Ward’ and ‘C. Barlo’ (presumably Seth Ward and Thomas Barlow, both at Oxford during these years. The former was a vocal foe of Hobbes, the latter a perhaps wary but respectful correspondent of his.76) The meaning of the ‘C’ in these notes has eluded interpreters, but it seems overwhelmingly likely that they indicate the person who recommended or lent Locke a given title. Henry Stubbe is by far the name most frequently so noted in Locke’s early notebook, indicative of a close intellectual association. It was Stubbe who recommended Filmer to him. More intriguing still is Locke’s further notation referencing ‘his Chapter of power’. During this period both Filmer and Stubbe composed brief works, none of which (including Filmer’s Observations) were organized into chapters. This raises the distinct possibility that Locke – either following Stubbe’s advice or on his own accord – was here referencing a chapter of Leviathan itself. In that case there would be several candidates from Hobbes’s masterwork. Given the connection to Filmer, the most likely might be Chapter 19, ‘Of several Kinds of Common-wealth by Institution; and of Succession to the Soveraign Power’. Other candidates 72 73 74 75 76

He and Godolphin, for instance, exchanged remarks on Harrington. William Godolphin to Locke, 2 July 1658, and Locke to Godolphin [August 1659?], CL, 1:85–6, 95–6. MS Locke f. 14, pp. 5–6, 8; Milton, ‘Locke at Oxford’, 40–1. MS Locke f. 14, p. 16; J. R. Milton ‘Locke’s Early Political Reading’, 81–93. The title is recorded twice in Locke’s notebook, on both occasions with a notation to Stubbe. The second mention contains this note. The first is at MS Locke f. 14, p. 10. Thomas Barlow to Hobbes, 23 December 1656, CH, 420–1.

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include Chapter 42, ‘Of Power Ecclesiastical’ (a favourite of Stubbe’s), and (less likely) Chapter 10, ‘Of Power, Worth, Dignity, Honour, and Worthiness’, or Chapter 23, ‘Of the Publique Ministers of Soveraign Power’. In any case, Filmer does not explicitly mention any of Hobbes’s chapter titles, and so Locke’s note (if it indeed referenced Hobbes, as appears likely) must have been based on supplementary knowledge and quite possibly on his own familiarity with Leviathan. Around this time Locke may also have read the Presbyterian Edward Gee’s The Divine Right and Original of the Civill Magistrate from God. Illustrated and Vindicated.77 Stubbe apparently recommended or lent it, and Locke recorded the title in his notebook. At the very least Gee represented the kind of advanced thinking about sovereignty that interested Locke’s circle in these years. As demonstrated below, Gee’s book attacked Filmer’s paternalism and borrowed substantially from Hobbes. Stubbe also appears to have recommended to him Matthew Wren’s Monarchy Asserted, where Hobbes was explicitly mentioned and was an obvious influence over Wren’s account of sovereignty.78 That Locke was reading appropriations of and responses to Hobbes during the late Interregnum and around the time that he wrote his ‘English Tract’ is striking. Laslett misdated the relevant commonplace book to 1667, and so this evidence has not been accommodated by most interpreters of Locke’s ‘Two Tracts’.79 The conventional ascription of Hobbesian features to those texts (where it is accepted) has relied on textual parallels, but the contextual indications are stronger than those parallels alone might suggest. The passage from Filmer cannot resolve whether Locke was himself acquainted, at this early date, with Hobbes’s writing, but it seems very likely. Further evidence suggesting that this was indeed the case has recently emerged. Felix Waldmann has brought to light a short memoir of Locke written down by the Huguenot Pierre Des Maizeaux, dating to around 1718. This manuscript purports to record the direct memories of a lifelong associate of Locke’s, almost certainly the theorist and historian James Tyrrell.80 Tyrrell entered Queen’s College, Oxford, in January of 77 78

79 80

MS Locke f. 14, p. 5; J. R. Milton ‘Locke’s Early Political Reading’, 89. MS Locke f. 14, p. 5; in the cases of Gee and Wren, we have only Locke’s record of these titles and no further notes. His knowledge of these books must remain conjectural, but the notes suggest his intellectual context, proximity to Henry Stubbe, and perhaps his sympathy with Stubbe’s political and religious views. Wren, Monarchy Asserted, 16. Laslett, Introduction to TTG, 33, and appendix B, 131; J. R. Milton, ‘Date and Significance of Two of Locke’s Early Manuscripts’, 47–89. Waldmann’s convincing attribution of the source of this memoir is currently in manuscript under the title, ‘John Locke as a Reader of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: a New Manuscript’. I am grateful

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1657, taking his MA degree in 1663. During these years he came to know Locke and became a sympathetic intellectual associate. The two men later fell out somewhat, but at Oxford, and for decades thereafter, they were close colleagues and correspondents.81 Most famously, the two would compose parallel responses to Sir Robert Filmer during the early 1680s, and Tyrrell acted as custodian of Locke’s books and papers when the latter was in exile in the Netherlands. Of their early acquaintance, Tyrrell reported to Des Maizeaux: When [Locke] was at Oxford he did not study at all; he was lazy and nonchalant, and he amused himself with trifling works of wit. The English translation of Voiture’s Lettres was all his delight, and occupied him the most. He despised Science and Erudition. Nonetheless, he almost always had the Leviathan by H. on his table, and he recommended the reading of it to his friends. [Tyrrell] bought it at his recommendation; however, [Locke] affected to deny, in the future, that he had ever read it. He prided himself on being original, and he mistrusted that which he was unable to pass off as his own.82

Tyrrell’s suggestion that Locke would deny ever reading Leviathan quite possibly references Locke’s published rejoinders to Richard Willis and Bishop Edward Stillingfleet in 1697 and 1699, where, as we will see, he denied writing any of his own theology under the influence of either Hobbes or Spinoza. If so, Tyrrell exaggerated his point. Locke did not offer Stillingfleet an exceedingly implausible denial of all knowledge of Leviathan (as he presumably would have, if in a position to). The unfriendly tone of Tyrrell’s account is notable. Before his death Locke had begun to tire of Tyrrell, irritated over trifles such as a small unpaid loan and more serious matters such as public speculation about his authorship of works that Locke had published anonymously.83 Later passages in Tyrrell’s reminiscences suggest that he resented Locke’s refusal to acknowledge his own contributions to their collaborative projects. Their relations never ruptured entirely, but – years after Locke’s death – Tyrrell clearly nursed resentments at how Locke had treated him. Nevertheless, the details recorded in Tyrrell’s account are plausible and specific, and

81 82 83

to Dr. Waldmann for sharing his research with me. The memoir, which has been known but badly neglected, is among the manuscripts left to the British Museum by the eighteenth-century antiquarian, Thomas Birch. BL Add MS 4222, ff., 245–7. Nearly seventy of their letters survive. ODNB; Gough, ‘James Tyrrell’, 581–3. BL Add MS 4222, f, 245. Translation by Waldmann. Gough, ‘James Tyrrell’, 589–93. As we shall see below, Tyrrell also objected to aspects of Locke’s account of natural law, to Locke’s irritation.

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fabricating them would have required brazen lies rather than merely uncharitable interpretation. This is particularly true as Tyrrell implicated himself in Locke’s promotion of Leviathan, which would have been unnecessary if his account were entirely fabulous. In later years, as we shall see, Tyrrell seems to have suspected Locke of Hobbesian tendencies. This might be taken as a motive for him, late in life, to invent his report of Locke’s reading Leviathan. But more likely, his suspicions of Locke’s sympathies with Hobbes (to be voiced in the 1690s) were informed by his actual knowledge of that reading and by his long and close intellectual collaboration with Locke. In short, the account in Des Maizeaux’s hand seems likely to have reflected Tyrrell’s memory, albeit after many decades.84 It suggests much more than a passing acquaintance with Hobbes on Locke’s part. It is possible that Tyrrell was recalling Locke’s early Restoration career at Oxford. However, the assertion of a youthful insouciance about study might imply an earlier date, before Locke assumed serious teaching duties of his own at Oxford (duties he executed diligently). That the English translation of Voiture’s Letters of Affaires, Love, and Courtship was published in 1657 is suggestive of timing, though not decisively so. That Locke owned this edition, however, may provide modest external confirmation of one detail of Tyrrell’s account.85 Finally, we have seen that Locke was reading explicitly anti-Hobbesian works in the later 1650s, which makes it unlikely that he was himself unacquainted with the famous target of these works. On the whole, the evidence suggests that Locke was a close reader of – and perhaps promoter of – Leviathan at Oxford during the later Interregnum. It thus appears likely that Locke may have been among those in mind when Stubbe referenced the Oxford Westminsters devoted to free conscience and susceptible to Hobbes’s influence. Certainly, given the surviving evidence, he is a stronger candidate than any others beyond his associates Stubbe and Bagshaw.86 Locke was a young Westminster student attached to 84

85 86

Sceptics of this source may observe a passage within De Maizeaux’s copy of Tyrrell’s report reading ‘Tous les faits raportés dans cette Piece sont ou faux ou mal rapportés’. BL Add MS 4222, 245v. Dr. Waldmann, however, demonstrates that this remark is by Tyrrell himself and is followed by several points rebutting claims of Le Clerc’s Elogie of Locke, which Tyrrell disliked and discounted. Des Maizeaux himself was born in the early 1670s, and was in no position to refute the factual claims of eyewitnesses to events before his own birth. Tyrrell’s account cannot, to be sure, be treated as decisive. The other evidence gathered in the present chapter, however, lends it greater credibility. LL, 3102. Welch, List of the Queen’s Scholars; dates of matriculation from Alumni Oxonienses. See also The Record of Old Westminsters. They include Robert South, William Godolphin, Henry Bold, Henry Bagshaw, Edward Campion, Robert Osbalston, James Carkesse, Arthur Salway, George Nurse,

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Owen. He supported free conscience, discussed political writing with Stubbe, read polemical responses to Hobbes, and would shortly produce a manuscript that has long been considered argumentatively and rhetorically Hobbesian. Direct and credible, if retrospective, testimony survives as to his constant reading of Leviathan during these formative Oxford years. For his part, Hobbes obliged Stubbe with additional printed jibes at Wallis. He spoke favourably of Oxford under the reforming regime of Owen and Cromwell and rebutted Wallis’s attack on Independency. The sovereign must purge such ‘undutiful and seditious principles’ from the churches and surveil clergy who knew all too well ‘how to trouble and sometimes undoe a slack Government’.87 Delighted, Stubbe reported to Hobbes that both Owen and his ally Louis du Moulin had produced works defending Independency, which ‘subjected the ministry to the Magistracy sufficiently, for which he and Owen are cryed out upon’. In February 1657, Stubbe wrote that Hobbes’s ‘reconcilement to the university pleaseth, and so I give out that du Moulin’s booke and the Vicechancellor’s [Owen’s] are the pieces that have gained your good esteeme’.88 Hobbes understood Independency – combining a measured liberty for private conscience, hostility to corporate clerical authority, and deference to the state’s religious power – to be fundamentally compatible with his project. Not all Independents were eager for his support. Both Owen and du Moulin would offer conflicted assessments of Leviathan, and they could not afford to let Independency be tainted with heresy. The Presbyterians pressed these difficulties home, and Owen forbade Stubbe from completing his translation of Leviathan.89 The ‘Presbyterians’, Stubbe informed Hobbes in February of 1657, ‘have so filled men’s eares against you, that none would dare exhibite’ their true ‘respect’.90 But none of this diminishes the evidence that Hobbes’s ecclesiological doctrines enjoyed a real influence in Oxford circles. Locke seems to have followed the polemics between Owen and the Wallis–Ward faction, which had dragged Hobbes into their swirl.91 And in praising Stubbe’s Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause, Locke praised a work marked by decidedly

87 88

89 91

William White, Arthur Brett, John Salway, Richard Lucie, Thomas Martin, Francis Vernon, William Vutter, Charles Danvers, George Percival Ralph Fenwicke, Barnabas Poole. Hobbes, Markes of an Absurd Geometry, 16–19. Stubbe to Hobbes, 26 December 1656, and 14 February 1657, CH, 426, 449; Stubbe and Hobbes corresponded over the controversy with Wallis into the spring. Stubbe to Hobbes, 24 May 1657, European Magazine 35 (1799), 232–3. I thank Professor John Milton for calling this letter to my attention. Collins, Allegiance, 235–8. 90 Stubbe to Hobbes, 14 February 1657, CH, 449. This is indicated, if vaguely, in Locke to Locke, sen., 6 April 1658[?], CL, 1:60–2.

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Hobbesian themes: defence of a strictly individualized free conscience; a pronounced anticlericalism; fear of the political implications of theological obscurantism; and deference to the sovereign’s religious authority. Locke also knew another of Hobbes’s Oxford admirers, Edward Bagshaw. Bagshaw and Locke had followed similar arcs through the civil war years. The former finished his education at Westminster School in 1646 and was elected to a studentship at Christ Church. He adopted Independency and attached himself to Owen.92 At Christ Church he rose to the position of senior censor, responsible for supervising the academics and discipline of undergraduates. Known for ‘Commonwealth principles’, he was hostile to the vestigial ‘popery’ of university ceremony.93 He certainly agitated against the use of caps and robes in convocation, though whether he forced university disputants to condemn monarchy and episcopacy (as witnesses later claimed) is harder to say. He reportedly participated in John Harrington’s Rota Club.94 During Stubbe’s campaign to promote Hobbes at Oxford, Bagshaw wrote to Hobbes, fulsomely apologizing as to ‘how much injury they doe to the Commonwealth of Learning, who doe in the least manner, divert you from those great designes you are now upon’.95 The subject of their one surviving letter was the ‘Excellent Tract about Necessity’ that Hobbes had composed against Bishop Bramhall. In a subsequent work attacking freewill theology, Bagshaw invoked Hobbes as a theological authority.96 With Hobbes, Bagshaw viewed the ‘idol’ of free will as both a foundation for clerical power and a chain on conscience. The notion that the will (on spiritual questions) was directed by intention served to cast nonconformity as ‘obstinacy’.97 Though Bagshaw surpassed Hobbes in constraining the magistrate’s authority to enforce conformity, he agreed with Hobbes that the inner conscience could not be effectively coerced. In 1659, Bagshaw published an explicit denial that elect ‘saintship’ conferred a right to rule. This was sustained with scriptural exegesis emphasizing – as Hobbes had – the political quietism of the primitive Christians under pagan sovereigns. It was ‘in the nature of Civil government in general’ that sovereignty belongs to ‘men not as they are Christians, but as they are men’. In a distinctly Hobbesian passage, Bagshaw wrote of contracted sovereignty: ‘When once a man hath sworne, he cannot resume againe that naturall Liberty, which he was before possessed of, because by his 92 95 97

ODNB. 93 Pope, Life of Seth Ward, 39–40. Bagshaw to Hobbes, 1 March 1658, CH, 497–8. Bagshaw, Doctrine of Free-Grace, preface.

94 96

AO, 3:944–6, 1120. Bagshaw, Letter to Mr. Thomas Pierce, 19.

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owne voluntary Act he hath divested himself of it, and thereby bound himselfe over to Divine vengeance, if he do not performe the Condition of his Covenant.’ Further, ‘no pretence of Sanctitie can absolve us now from such Ties of Obedience’.98 In later tracts Bagshaw echoed Hobbes in assailing Bellarmine’s case for papal infallibility and by associating the Laudian faction of the Church of England (including Hobbes’s critic Herbert Thorndike) with popery. His insistence that ecclesia, in scripture, denoted only ‘particular Congregations’ also recalled Leviathan.99 And in a later dispute with Bishop George Morley, Bagshaw attacked high-flying bishops – in fundamentally Hobbesian terms – as enemies of ‘Regal Dignity’ and ‘true and undoubted sovereignty’. The bishops ‘mangled the King’s authority’ with an ‘Absurd and Insignificant distinguishing between Civil and Ecclesiastical Causes’. They left ‘nothing of Supremacy but the Name’.100 Bagshaw’s Hobbesian credentials coloured – as they did with Stubbe – his dedication to free conscience. Bagshaw was more deferential to conscience than Hobbes, but this did not require wholesale repudiation of the principles of Leviathan. Recognizing this is important if we are to correctly interpret the first work of political thought produced by the young John Locke.

Locke’s ‘Two Tracts’ and the Influence of Hobbes On the 29th of May, 1660, eleven years after the beheading of Charles I, Charles II returned to Whitehall Palace, scene of his father’s final moments. The fugitive monarch returned triumphantly as a symbol of order. Thousands cheered his progress from Dover to Canterbury and on to London. The capital glowed with celebratory bonfires. ‘I stood in the Strand and beheld it and blessed God’, wrote John Evelyn.101 In dying, Charles I had adopted the persona of the suffering Christ, forgiving his enemies and embracing martyrdom for the Church. Through its own sufferings, the episcopal church cultivated the memory of the martyred King. The revised prayer book of 1662 would establish 30 January as a red-letter day of commemoration for ‘K. Charles Martyr’.102

98 99 100 101

Bagshaw, Saintship no Ground of Soveraignty, 24–6. Bagshaw, Brief Enquiry into the Grounds and Reasons whereupon the Infallibility of the Pope and Church of Rome is said to be Founded, preface, 13–4, 30. Bagshaw, Letter . . . Containing some Animadversions on the Bishop of Worchester’s Letter, 2–3. Evelyn, Diary, 1:332. 102 Keeble, Restoration, 37.

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The motif of a Christ-like triumph through suffering had envisioned the resurrection of the monarchy, and so it came to pass. The Restoration, wrote Evelyn, was ‘the Lord’s doing, et mirabile in oculis nobis’. The sudden event, wrote Bishop Morley, was ‘like the Resurrection from the Dead’.103 But in truth, the return of the Stuarts was not a true second coming for the church. Charles II was not entirely his father’s son. He had little moral uprightness, no domestic propriety, and his religious observance was decidedly casual. Worse, he betrayed politique impulses when it came to religious governance. In 1650, he had horrified loyal episcopalians by swearing to the Covenant in order to secure the Scottish crown. Later, positioning himself for restoration, he had promised to stabilize England’s fractured religious scene with some measure of toleration. The Declaration of Breda – composed from exile in April of 1660 – promised ‘a Liberty to Tender Consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matters of Religion, which do not disturb the peace of the Kingdom’.104 The Declaration of Breda was a masterpiece of magnanimous evasion. It promised liberty of conscience but deferred to parliament. It acknowledged England’s traumatic schisms but envisioned a restored ‘unity’. Nevertheless, free conscience for individuals, hedged only by the political calculation necessary to ensure peace, threatened the Church of England. To its servants the church was ‘one, true, holy and apostolic’, not merely a favoured entrant in a religious marketplace. Nor were they inclined to succour those who had dismantled the church and persecuted its devotees. Sensing trouble, Edward Hyde, Charles’s chief minister, had warned royalist clergy to ‘temper’ their ‘unskillful passion’ in the interest of conciliation. The surviving bishops were instructed not to attend the King’s arrival at Dover.105 We now know what contemporaries would increasingly suspect, that Charles II’s tolerationism was partly motivated by his personal Catholicism. The later Stuarts wielded the Royal Supremacy over an alien church. This contradiction would destroy the monarchy of James, but it also destabilized that of Charles. Charles’s promises of toleration had broader aims as well. To sustain power, Charles would placate the nonconformists who had warred against his father. The inviolable religious principles of Charles I gave way to the politique logic of his son. 103 104 105

Ibid., 32–3. King Charles II. His Declaration . . . from his court at Breda in Holland (London, 1660). Montano, Courting the Moderates, 56–7.

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At Charles’s return, the Church’s prospects were thus unsettled. His subjects watched with varying degrees of expectation, hope, or dread. Thomas Hobbes had reason to worry. His flight from the exiled court, precipitated by Leviathan, had been on the worst of terms. Royalists had considered him a political and religious traitor, and he had done little in the intervening decade to disabuse them of this notion. Mere months before the Restoration, Hyde refused to ‘absolve’ Hobbes ‘from the Mischief he hath done to the King, the Church, the Laws, and the Nation’.106 Throughout 1659 and early 1660, Hobbes remained at Chatsworth, the Derbyshire estate of his lifelong patrons, the Cavendishes. Hobbes had scant expectation of royal favour and could be assured of the determined hostility of Hyde and the episcopal clergy. John Locke, much more obscure, had less to fear. With the whole nation ‘reeleing’, he followed events with disquiet. ‘There are few know what probably to hope or desire’, he wrote, ‘and the best and wisest are faine to wish for the generall thing settlement without seeing the way to it.’ Locke was full of indecision. ‘I have a long time thougt the safest condition to bee in armes could I be but resolvd from whome I ought to receive them and for whome to imploy them . . . I must confesse in this posture of affairs I know not what to thinke, what to say.’107 His father died in December of 1660, cutting him off from family counsel. After the Restoration, Locke may have feared the loss of his studentship. Ousted royalists resumed their places in the church and the universities. In the summer of 1660, a royal visitation to Oxford was launched, and this clearly worried Locke. The university, he wrote in August, was ‘clouded and disturbd by noe ordinary feare’. His own ‘composdnesse’ was ‘shaken with continuall earth quakes and is every minute tottering’.108 The scrum to retain places surely partly explains the volume of celebratory verses, Britannia Rediviva, produced by Oxford fellows in 1660. Here we find more early verse by Locke, ripely celebrating Charles II as the champion of order against chaos, light against darkness.109 The enthusiasm may have been sincere. It certainly followed the general mood. As one correspondent put it in May, not twenty ‘Antimonarticks’ could be found in London, once the capital of anti-Stuart sentiment.110 This constellation of factors framed Locke’s first sustained political writing. The country had rallied to the Stuart dynasty, but with hopes of 106 107 108 109 110

Hyde to Barwick, 25 July 1659, in Schuhmann, Chronique, 167. Locke to Locke, sen., c. 9 January 1660, CL, 1:136–7. Locke to J.O., early August 1660, CL, 1:150–1. Britannia Rediviva, unpaginated; LHW, 193–4. John Strachey to Locke, sen., 24 May 1660, CL, 1:147.

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conciliation rather than retribution. The re-establishment of the episcopal church was expected but on terms that remained unknown and were likely to be moderate and to include some toleration. In these circumstances Locke composed two short treatises on the question of church governance. They were never published but are today known as the ‘Two Tracts’. They offer us further possible evidence of Locke’s contact with the Hobbesian milieu of the Interregnum. The ‘Two Tracts’ are often characterized as defences of the restored Church of England. This is misleading. The ‘English Tract’, by far the more consequential of the two because it was intended for publication, was finished no later than December of 1660 when Locke sent it to his correspondent Gabriel Towerson.111 (The later Latin version, composed as an academic oration, was probably intended for teaching and almost certainly not for publication.112) Late 1660 was a period of rising hopes for the episcopal party, but no more. The spontaneous return to prayer book worship, and enthusiastic burnings of the Solemn League and Covenant, augured well for the old church. But against this weighed the King’s promises of toleration and his concern to soothe, rather than suppress, religious strife. Presbyterians had expected that the winds of religious conservatism might blow their way, and for a time in 1659 they had.113 Now they hoped for a comprehensive church settlement with a moderated episcopacy ‘assisted’ by presbyters, rather than a relapse into full-blown Laudianism. Independents hoped for some toleration outside of the coming establishment.114 None of these hopes were decisively realized or dashed until after Locke’s ‘English Tract’ was finished. When he landed at Dover, Charles had been greeted by a delegation of Presbyterians and none of the surviving bishops.115 The conservative Cavalier Parliament, which would prove critical to the eventual church restoration, had not yet been elected. Over the summer of 1660, the Oxford visitation had removed fifty fellows to make way for ejected royalists, but many Interregnum fellows remained in place.116 Late into 1660, observers remained uncertain as to whether the church settlement would satisfy the episcopal party.117 The Privy Council included both episcopalians and Presbyterians, as did the new cohort of royal chaplains. Charles encouraged Presbyterian proposals for a revised liturgy and a moderated episcopacy. He offered bishoprics to several 111 112 115 117

Locke to Gabriel Towerson, 11 December 1660, CL, 1:160. 113 Von Leyden, Introduction to ELN, 24. Hutton, Restoration, 102. 114 Ibid., 52. Sutch, Sheldon, 63. 116 Hutton, Restoration, 131. Samuel Bonnell to John Johnson, 13 September 1660, Cambridge Add. MS 7, letter 6.

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Presbyterian clergymen. In October, the Worcester House Declaration announced an interim settlement requiring bishops to seek the assistance of presbyters and allowing clergy to omit parts of the prayer book. The plan provided no toleration for sectarians and thus exacerbated the split between Presbyterians seeking comprehension and Independents requiring toleration.118 But as an effort at securing ecclesial peace it pleased the King.119 The Convention Parliament narrowly rejected the Worcester House Declaration as the basis for a permanent settlement, but by that time, Locke was composing or had completed his ‘English Tract’.120 The Convention had also signalled moderation with an act confirming the living of any minister ordained in any manner since 1 January 1642, unless an ejected predecessor was still living. The act outraged those who considered episcopal ordination essential.121 In the summer of 1660, rumours circulated that the King would demand ‘that both Episcopall Divines and Presbyterians should mutualy condescend’.122 In August, a royal letter into Scotland promised to protect the settled government of the Kirk, which had lacked bishops for two decades.123 Presbyterian hopes for a mild settlement only died lingeringly. In the elections of March 1661, outside of London at least, a wave swept episcopal loyalists into parliament. Still, at the opening of parliament in May, Chancellor Hyde urged the members to honour the Declaration of Breda. Charles issued an edict forbidding the imprisonment of Quakers for refusing oaths. He also worked to soften the penal laws against Roman Catholics. As late as December of 1661, the informed Presbyterian doyen Lady Frances Hobart held out hope for ‘Liberty in the things of God’ and for ‘private religious exercises’.124 Gradually, the more unyielding nature of the emerging settlement revealed itself. London’s Bishop Gilbert Sheldon, promoted by Hyde, gathered influence and launched a print campaign for episcopacy.125 Hyde himself, capable of strategic flexibility, was nevertheless generally loyal to the traditional church constitution.126 Recovery of the ‘ancestral church’ was the 118 119 120 122 123 124 125 126

Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics, 13. Henry Hasting to the Countess of Huntingdon, 24 October 1660; Huntington, Hastings Correspondence, box 22, 5586. Hutton, Restoration, 145–6. 121 Keeble, Restoration, 80–1. Thomas Smith to Daniel Fleming, 4 June 1660, Flemings in Oxford, 1:133. Raffe, ‘Presbyterian Politics and the Restoration of Scottish Episcopacy’, 145–7. Frances Hobart to her brother, 30 December 1661, Huntington, Ellesmere MS 8543. Sutch, Sheldon, 64–71. Seaward, ‘Circumstantial Temporary Concessions: Clarendon, Comprehension, and Uniformity’, 68–75.

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work of a clerical–gentry alliance, obstructing the King’s moderation.127 Parliament ordered the burning of the Solemn League and Covenant. Bishops were readmitted to the Lords in June of 1661, strengthening the church’s clout.128 The Oath of Allegiance became mandatory for all religious sects, and their meetings were outlawed. The slowly stirring church courts began to prosecute recusancy, non-payment of tithes, and the failure to baptize children. In Scotland, the King executed a U-turn. The first Scottish bishops were consecrated in December of 1661.129 At the Savoy Conference, convened in April 1661 to reform the prayer book, the episcopal clergy impeded all significant revisions. In May, the Convocation issued a revised prayer book unacceptable to the Presbyterians.130 Royal efforts to secure a partial waiver of some of its provisions were defeated. The central pillar of the church restoration, the Uniformity Act, advanced throughout the summer and autumn of 1661. Enacted in May of 1662, it ejected any minister who had not accepted the new prayer book and repudiated the Covenant by St. Bartholomew’s Day.131 However, it was only in late 1661 that the Laudian restoration began to seem inevitable. Even then, as hopes for a moderate, comprehensive establishment faded, they were replaced by monarchical efforts to secure a toleration in the image of Breda. Clarendon proposed an explicit proviso to the Uniformity Act allowing the King – a ‘most discerning, generous, and merciful prince’ – to suspend its ‘sharp’ effect on ‘tender consciences’.132 The bishops impeded this effort, holding that ‘it was not in the king’s power to dispense with ecclesiastical laws’.133 Archbishop Sheldon, writes one authority, ‘called in public opinion to defend his concept of religion against the King himself. It was a manoeuvre he was to repeat with equal success during the next thirteen years.’134 But Charles resisted. Sir Henry Bennet, Lord Ashley, and other counsellors urged him to strengthen his authority’ and stave off ‘discontented partyes’ by tempering uniformity. Dissenters and Catholics lobbied for a merciful suspension of the penal laws.135 Clarendon was nervous, but the King was determined to defuse the ‘great spirit of malice abroad’.136 127 129 131 132 133 134 135 136

Beddard, ‘The Restoration Church’, 158. 128 Swatland, House of Lords, 163. Raffe, ‘Presbyterian Politics’, 146–7. 130 Sutch, Sheldon, 82–3. Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, 173–9; Hutton, Restoration, 166–76. Beddard, ‘The Restoration Church’, 161, 167; Swatland, House of Lords, 167–70. Seaward, Reconstruction, 176–7; Patterson, Long Parliament of Charles II, 147. Hutton, Restoration, 176. Lister, Life of Clarendon, 3:198–9; Seaward, Reconstruction, 179; Abernathy, ‘Clarendon and the Declaration of Indulgence’, 58–60. Clarendon to Ormond, 31 January 1663, Lister, Life, 3:233.

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In December of 1662, the ‘Declaration to Tender Consciences’ was issued. This was a statement of intent, rather than an actual mechanism instituting an indulgence, but it previewed a governing strategy that would roil politics for decades to come. It responded to dissenting and Catholic petitions asserting that the King ‘had in himself the power to dispense in such cases, as he did with the Dutch and French churches’. Independents supposedly rallied to this argument, willing – according to Baxter – to use the Catholics as ‘a means for their own ends’.137 Defending the Declaration before parliament in February, Charles cleverly associated religious coercion (and thus its present episcopal advocates) with ‘Popish times’. He disavowed any intention of favouring Catholicism and promised to keep the established church ‘pure and uncorrupted’. But if ‘Dissenters will demean themselves peacefully and modestly under government, I could heartily wish I had such a power of indulgence’ to reward them.138 The King asked parliament to confirm this royal power with a bill that afforded him wide latitude to suspend the Uniformity Act (and potentially the Corporation Act) and to license nonconformist worship. This ‘conjured up a Hobbesian vision of a religion governed by royal decree’.139 The Commons proved deeply hostile to this ‘schism by law’. In the Lords, the bishops spoke against the design.140 Sheldon was its most vigorous enemy, warning the Privy Council that indulgence would ‘not only render the parliament cheap, and have influence over all other laws, but in truth let in a visible confusion upon Church and State’.141 Indulgence, like comprehension, failed. The victorious bishops, however, now realized that the autonomy and authority of the church could only be cautiously advanced in alliance with the court. Charles’s prerogative authority loomed as a double-edged sword. John Locke’s ‘English Tract’ must be located not within a context of triumphant, ecclesiastical traditionalism but within a complex, unstable period during which the court and church were often at odds. The tract sought to establish that the ‘Civil Magistrate may lawfully impose and determine the use of indifferent things in reference to religious worship’. It is an error to associate affirmation of this sovereign power with the episcopal cause, or to presume that Locke’s Independent associates would have objected to it. Locke’s ‘English Tract’ was a strictly Erastian intervention, written when the episcopal party did not enjoy the unalloyed 137 138 140

Kennett, Register and Chronicles, 851–2; Witcombe, Charles II and the Cavalier House of Commons, 8–11. Letters, Speeches, and Declarations of Charles II, 139–40. 139 Seaward, Reconstruction, 182. Lister, Life, 2:211–16; Rose, Godly Kingship, 95–6. 141 Seward, Reconstruction, 180.

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support of sovereignty. With a few cosmetic changes, it might well have appeared during the Interregnum, as a Congregationalist apology for magisterial authority over spiritual causes. From one perspective, Locke’s ‘English Tract’ positioned itself within an intramural dispute between two variations on Hobbesian ecclesiology. The work answered Edward Bagshaw’s The Great Question concerning Things Indifferent in Religious Worship. Bagshaw rejected the notion of an earthly Christian kingdom. He adopted a Hobbesian contractual account of sovereignty and spurned conceits about the sacred qualities of power.142 At the Restoration, Bagshaw retired briefly to the country. The King reportedly attempted to employ him in December of 1662, at the moment when he was issuing his Declaration of Indulgence. The court perhaps envisioned Bagshaw as a hired pen, agitating for a toleration based on a high view of the King’s spiritual authority. A Hobbesian sectarian would have been well suited to such purposes. But Bagshaw demurred.143 A strong sympathy with the sects, and hostility to the restored church, derailed his career. He did seek episcopal ordination as early as 1659, and he managed to maintain his studentship at Christ Church until 1661.144 But in 1663 he was imprisoned for seditious speech, and in 1671 for refusing the oaths of supremacy. Shortly thereafter, he died. John Owen would memorialize him for ‘patience’ amidst persecution.145 Bagshaw’s published controversies with figures such as Bishop Morley and Richard Baxter could be acrimonious.146 But his later reputation as a seditious malcontent should not colour his early controversy with Locke. His full radicalism had not yet emerged. As his episcopal ordination and brief service as chaplain to the Earl of Anglesey indicate, he was capable of trimming his sails (albeit in service to a broad-minded aristocrat who supported dissenters). In the Great Question, he presented himself as a loyal royalist and Church of England man.147 This marriage of tolerationism and loyal monarchism perhaps appealed to the court. Bagshaw’s tract went through several editions, and in March of 1661 Locke’s associate Gabriel Towerson complained that the work was ‘well liked’.148 As late as April of 1661, Bagshaw preached from no less a pulpit than that of Saint Mary’s – the university church – where he apparently 142 143 145 147 148

Bagshaw, Saintship no Sovereignty, 14, 24, 55. Kennett, Register and Chronicle, 854; Pope, Life of Seth Ward, 39. 144 AO, 3:945. Ibid., 362. 146 ODNB. [Bagshaw], Great Question concerning Things Indifferent, epistle to the reader. Towerson to Locke, 12 March 1661, CL, 1:167; Locke’s tattered copy of the tract survives, bound in the vellum of an old will dated 1628. Bodl. Locke B 10.2.

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prayed for the restored bishops but also swiped at the imposing of ‘ceremonies’.149 Locke knew Bagshaw at Christ Church. He had followed the war over the re-imposition of caps and gowns that animated his colleague.150 Both men belonged to the clientage of John Owen. Towerson would refer to Bagshaw as Locke’s ‘freind’, and though by 1661 this was ironic in some measure, it suggested a growing estrangement rather than distance.151 The gap between their ecclesiology and politics should not be exaggerated. Bagshaw was undoubtedly more sympathetic to sectarianism than Locke, and he would eventually become a determined resister of the restored establishment. But in 1660 his background was similar to Locke’s, and he loudly proclaimed his allegiance to the King and bishops. Indeed, Locke never publicly avowed as clearly as Bagshaw did any allegiance to episcopacy and the liturgy.152 Bagshaw’s Great Question often reads like an effort to flatter and cajole Charles II, urging him to deploy his prerogative to moderate the church’s reestablishment. As to whether the sovereign might legitimately determine the use of indifferent things in religious worship, it offered a qualified negative, hoping to carve out space for diversity within a re-established church and indulgence for those who remained outside it. This programme was not a challenge to Charles II; it closely hewed to the court’s preferred approach. Bagshaw offered a Pauline reading of primitive Christianity and of that ‘perfect law of Liberty’ which bound us only to God and not to ‘Humane Ordinances and Outside Rites’.153 He conceded that some aspects of religious observance were ‘indifferent’ but argued that many potentially indifferent practices ‘by Abuse have become occasions of Superstition’ and idolatry. He exemplified this with a list of Laudian practices, such as bowing at Christ’s name, surplices, and kneeling for the Eucharist. Thus did Bagshaw signal his distaste for formalism, even as he avowed devotion to bishops. Such ceremonies were not unlawful but could not be imposed by force.154 In this Bagshaw was not commenting on the sovereign’s right as such.155 He viewed political power as a profane inheritance, unbound by the strictures of Christianity. The Christian magistrate was, however, more limited: 149 150 151 152 153 155

Gabriel Towerson to Locke, 9 April 1661, CL, 1:170. Locke to William Carr, 23 January 1658, and William Carr to Locke, 30 January 1658, CL, 1:54, 56. Gabriel Towerson to Locke, 9 April 1661, CL, 1:170–1. A point made by Marshall, Resistance, Religion, Responsibility, 18. Bagshaw, Great Question, 3–4. 154 Ibid., 2. Woolhouse misreads Bagshaw on this point. Woolhouse, Locke, 40.

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John Locke and Interregnum Hobbism Though as a Magistrate he hath a power in Civil things, yet as a Christian he ought to have a care that in things of spirituall concernement he grieve not the minds of any, who are upon that Relation, not his Subjects, so much as his brethren: and therefore since they have left their Naturall, and voluntarily parted with their Civill, they ought not to be entrenched upon in their Spirituall freedome: especially by such a Magistrate, who owning the same Principles of Religion with them, is thereby ingaged to use his Power, only to support and not to ensnare them: to Bound perhaps, but not to abridg their Liberty; to keep it from running into Licentiousness (which is a Morall Evill) but not to Shackle, Undermine, and Fetter it, under pretence of Decency and Order.156

Bagshaw’s account of civil sovereignty – as a contracted surrender of natural liberty – did not subordinate it to scriptural revelation. King Charles was constrained as a Christian but not as a sovereign. In light of this, Bagshaw’s tract offered supplementary, prudential arguments against religious coercion. Imposition itself, rather than liberty, he argued, ‘begat all manner of Disorder and Confusion’. ‘Variety’ in Godliness was an ‘excellent and most comely thing’, and ‘liberty is so far from weakening, that it is indeed the security of a Throne’, as it earned princes both popularity and divine protection.157 Bagshaw’s Great Question, in short, was partly an effort to counsel Charles II on his Christian duty and partly an effort to reinforce the King’s politique tolerationism. Bagshaw urged ‘all Parties . . . to referre the whole cause of Ceremonies to his Majesties single Decision’. He was confident that the author of the Declaration of Breda would remove the ‘Apples of Ecclesiastical Contention’, but he promised ‘that should his Majesty be prevailed upon for some Reason of State, to enjoyn Outward Conformity, this writer is resolved by the help of God, either to submit with Chearfullness, or else to suffer with silence . . . Whatever he cannot Conscientiously do, he thinks himself obliged to suffer for . . .’158 Bagshaw’s Great Question did not disavow religious authority over indifferent matters as a note of sovereignty but merely as a violation of the religious duty of Christian princes. Bagshaw emphasized the sinfulness of imposition more thoroughly than Hobbes had, but his portrait of the primitive church was compatible with Leviathan, as was his suggestion that ceremonial imposition was an imprudent policy serving clerical, rather than secular, authority. Bagshaw recognized that the scope of religious liberty would be determined by sovereign power and that the sovereign’s 156

Bagshaw, Great Question, 4.

157

Ibid., 12, 16.

158

Ibid., epistle.

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relative valuation of pious and worldly considerations would be his own. In many respects these arguments paralleled those advanced by Henry Stubbe a few years earlier. Both began with a contractual account of sovereignty that was likely informed by Hobbes, but they counselled some religious freedom as a matter of prudent statecraft and (particularly for Bagshaw) as a particular religious duty of Christian sovereigns. John Locke had favoured this position in the latter years of the Interregnum. In 1660 he broke from it, but only in limited ways. Why Locke composed his ‘English Tract’, prepared to print it, and then abandoned it, is obscure. Speculation that he might have written it at the behest of John Fell, who became Dean of Christ Church in November 1660, is without evidence. Fell ascended to power only as Locke’s tract was finished. In any case, the work was not well judged as a piece of advocacy for Fell’s position, which was committed to Laudian ceremonialism and episcopal authority.159 Locke’s associate Gabriel Towerson, an All-Soul’s fellow, was certainly involved. Locke and Towerson began their collaboration considering the question of natural law.160 Bagshaw’s Great Question appeared in October, when Locke was often in Pensford with his dying father. By November he was back in Oxford. The original epistle to his ‘English Tract’, apparently written to Towerson and later replaced with a more formal preface, was dated 11 December 1660. It indicated that Locke and Towerson had discussed Bagshaw’s tract and that Locke’s response ‘owed [its] original’ to Towerson. He had been ‘careful’, Locke said, to otherwise ‘sequester my thoughts both from books and the times, that they might only attend those arguments that were warranted by reason, without taking any upon trust from the vogue or fashion’.161 Locke’s ‘English Tract’ should thus be read not as a party document but as a general commentary on magisterial authority. It has nevertheless been construed as an enthusiastic endorsement of the episcopal church and its forms of worship.162 But neither the ‘English Tract’ nor its Latin version 159 160 161 162

Abrams, Introduction to TT, 9–12; on Fell, see Beddard, ‘Restoration Oxford and the Remaking of the Protestant Establishment’, 803–8. Gabriel Towerson to Locke, 3 November 1660, CL, 1:158–9. Locke to [Towerson?], 11 December 1660, Locke: Selected Correspondence, ed. Goldie, 22–3. Marshall, Resistance, Religion, Responsibility, 9. Marshall sees both early tracts as part of an enthusiastic ‘Anglican’ resurgence, linking Locke, Towerson, James Tyrrell, Robert Boyle, Thomas Barlow, Samuel Tilly, and John Parry. But no cohesive religious identity other than conformism can be said to mark this group in 1660. Barlow was an Interregnum ally of Owen’s, a dedicated Erastian, and a friendly correspondent with Hobbes. Tyrrell’s 1661 edition of a tract by his grandfather James Ussher is weak evidence of any particular ‘Anglican’ piety.

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offered a word supporting the restoration of the English episcopal hierarchy, nor the re-imposition of the prayer book. The preface to the ‘English Tract’ did celebrate the Protestant English establishment as the ‘purest church of the later age’, but this imprecise paean (written after the tract itself) did not clearly mark Locke’s allegiances. With the exception of an openness to the use of surplices, neither of the tracts promoted the return of ceremonial formalism or sacramentalism. The ‘English Tract’ denied that crossing oneself, bowing at the name of Jesus, and other notes of formalism might particularly encourage ‘superstition’, but it did so by even-handedly equating them with less formal worship practices. In truth, Locke’s ‘Two Tracts’ scarcely consider the church at all. The ‘English Tract’ says nothing about the autonomy of the church, its episcopacy order, or its traditional sacraments and ceremonies. Its structuring query, the power of magistrates over ‘indifferent things in reference to religious worship’, did not neatly divide episcopal churchmen from dissenters. Locke’s clearest foils were the radical sects.163 The tract would not have bothered more Erastian Independents. In fact, its subordination of external worship to sovereignty may have given the neo-Laudians pause. In 1660, the King’s spiritual power was by no means consistently at their service. The ‘English Tract’ is, moreover, peppered with Hobbesian arguments, closely paralleling doctrines of Leviathan.164 The conventional reading of the ‘English Tract’ as Hobbesian focusses on Locke’s account of the state of nature, but the textual parallels between the tract and Hobbes are more extensive than that. Locke based his case for sovereign power over spiritual adiaphora on a contractual theory of sovereignty. Natural and revealed law might constrain sovereignty in the spiritual realm. All religious matters not so restricted might enjoy natural liberty, but natural liberty could be surrendered to another. God’s law, after such a surrender, obliges submission. Indeed, every particular man must unavoidably part with this right to his liberty and intrust the magistrate with as full a power over all his actions as he himself hath, it being otherwise impossible that any one should be subject to the commands of another who retaines the free disposure of himself and is master of an equal liberty. Nor do men as some fondly conceive enjoy any greater share of this freedome in a pure commonwealth, if anywhere to be

163 164

MS Locke e.7, f. 1; TT, 124. Cranston, Locke, 47; Jolley, Toleration and Understanding, 15–18.

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found, than in an absolute monarchy, the same arbitrary power being there in an Assembly (which acts like one Person) as in a Monarch.165

This understanding of sovereignty strikingly resembled the jus naturalist contractualism of Leviathan (and of Stubbe and Bagshaw).166 The passage evokes Leviathan’s theory of sovereign representation, as well as its claim that civil liberty was no greater in republican Lucca than in despotic Constantinople.167 In marginal notes Locke, with Hobbes, expressed a preference for monarchy, but he defined sovereignty as the ‘supreme legislative power not considering the form’. If supreme power was grounded on popular consent, ‘then it is evident that they have resigned up the liberty of their actions into his disposure, and so all his commands are but their own votes and his edicts their owne injunctions made by proxy which by mutual contract they are bound to obey’. Like Hobbes, Locke construed this political covenant not as an agreement between sovereign and people but as a foundational act of consent among subjects, creating a ‘supreme power’ that would thereafter represent their collective will.168 Locke cannot have written this description of attributed action in ignorance of Hobbes’s revolutionary account. We now have reason to think that he was studying Leviathan diligently, and his reading of Filmer (and perhaps of Gee and Wren) from around this time dealt precisely with these dimensions of Hobbesian theory. Ideally, we would possess Locke’s reading notes from Leviathan. In the absence of such notes, his choice of anti-Hobbesian reading offers suggestive evidence. Locke’s quotation from Filmer is oddly truncated and implies appreciation for Hobbes, but in the remainder of the sentence, Filmer rejected Hobbes’s account of the creation of sovereignty. Criticism of Hobbes, rather than praise, filled the short but discerning eleven pages that begin Filmer’s Observations, pages that Locke very likely read. Defending his own paternalist monarchism, Filmer rebuffed Hobbes’s depiction of the sovereign as an ‘artificial man’. He rejected the constitutional indeterminacy that typified the ‘person of a Commonwealth’ in Leviathan. He derided the 165 166

167

MS Locke e.7, f. 1; TT, 124. The word ‘native’ appears before the word ‘right’ in the manuscript but is deleted. See also the Latin ‘tract’. MS Locke c. 28, f. 1–2; TT, 211–14. (Locke’s page or folio 1 appears on the Bodleian’s folio 3. I have followed Locke’s numbering.) That Locke construed sovereign power as a ‘divine commission’ is perhaps less significant than is suggested by many commentators. (For discussion, see Stanton, ‘Authority and Freedom in the Interpretation of Locke’s Political Theory’, 14–16.) Hobbes used similar language (Lev., 900–1), as did Edward Gee. That Locke was truly undecided on whether the ‘divine’ authority of magistrates was mediated or direct seems difficult to credit, thought it was an affectation he preserved as late as the ‘Essay concerning Toleration’ (1667). Lev., 332. 168 MS Locke e.7, ff. 1–3; TT, 125–7.

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notion of a social contract to which the sovereign himself was not a party.169 He denied that natural individual right had ever existed in a ‘horrid condition of pure nature’, understood as a war of all against all. Filmer accused Hobbes of preserving popular judgement by permitting subjects an abiding right of self-defence. He even implicitly rejected Hobbes’s Erastianism, by preserving the distinction (effaced by Hobbes) of Joshua’s ‘magisterial’ power from the ‘ministerial’ power of Eleazar, the high priest.170 On virtually all of these points, Locke’s ‘English Tract’, and indeed his lifelong views, accorded with Hobbes’s account and rejected Filmer’s. (In this sense, Locke’s later Two Treatises could not have viewed Filmer and Hobbes as alternative possible foils, as is often suggested. Attacking Filmer entailed a defence of Hobbes’s fundamental principles.) In the ‘English Tract’ Locke adopted a version of the state of nature and the social contract that he clearly would have understood as Hobbesian. Locke’s ‘English Tract’, for instance, espoused the equation of civil liberty under republics and monarchies that Filmer expressly rejected as a Hobbesian paradox.171 Likely more congenial to Locke was the quasi-Hobbesian theory of sovereignty found in Edward Gee’s The Divine Right and Original of the Civill Magistrate from God. Illustrated and Vindicated.172 Misleadingly titled, this book followed Hobbes in construing ‘divine right’ as an honorific for all warranted sovereigns. Gee’s reformed scholastic terminology would not have appealed to Hobbes, but De Cive numbered among Gee’s favoured authorities. He did reject Hobbes’s undiluted theory of political obligation according to which mere possession of power conferred sovereign right. Only legitimate authority enjoyed the deference counselled by Romans chapter 13. But Gee was no divine right monarchist, and much of his book assailed Filmer’s paternalism. ‘Justifiable’ sovereignty, whatever its constitutional form, relied on an original act of consent. Alongside copious scriptural interpretation, Gee invoked Bodin, Grotius, Selden, and Hobbes to argue from ‘State-maxime’ that ‘Political power is originally in the people, and in the Magistrate only derivatively’.173 Hobbes provided 169

170 171 172 173

Locke also seems to have encountered Filmer’s arguments against Philip Hunton’s claim that ‘the sole mean or root of all Soveraignty is the consent and fundamentall contract of a Nation of men’. See his early notes on Filmer’s 1648 Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy. MS Locke d. 10, p. 185. I thank John Milton for calling this to my attention. Filmer, Observations concerning the Originall of Government, Upon Mr Hob Leviathan, 1–11; Hobbes presented Eleazar as a sovereign priest. Lev., 748. See above; Filmer, Observations concerning the Original of Government, Upon Mr Hobs Leviathan, 5. And also in Wren’s Monarchy Asserted, 22–3, 48–9, 76–80. Gee, Divine Right and Original of the Civill Magistrate, 294. On Filmer, see 182–6.

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Gee with crucial aspects of this hybrid theory of a sovereignty that was legitimate and de jure on the one hand and artificial and contractual on the other. From De Cive he borrowed notions of natural human equality, a theory of consent in conditions of conquest, and an account of the link between protection and obligation.174 But chiefly he took from Hobbes what Locke surely did: an account of sovereignty as the artificial construction of men naturally ‘equal and free’ and bound not by any divine constitution but by natural law alone. A ‘common power’ required the union ‘of the wils of many in the will of one man, or of one council’.175 Locke also characterized the absence of sovereignty in ways that strongly recalled Hobbes’s state of nature: ‘in its absence no peace, no security, no enjoyments, enmity with all men and safe possession of no thing, and those stinging swarms of miseries that attend anarchy and rebellion’. It is difficult to imagine that Locke wrote this with Leviathan out of mind, particularly given his reading of Filmer, perhaps Gee, and most likely Leviathan itself, as well as his engagement with known Hobbists such as Stubbe and Bagshaw. This account of contracted sovereignty, Locke wrote, was a thing ‘which I thinke my author [Bagshaw] will not deny’.176 As he wrote to Towerson: I have chosen to draw a great part of my discourse from the supposition of the magistrate’s power, derived from, or conveyed to him by, the consent of the people, as a way best suited to those patrons of liberty, and most likely to obviate their objections, the foundation of their plea being usually an opinion of their natural freedom, which they are apt to think too much intrenched upon by impositions in indifferent things.

He would not ‘meddle’ with divine right defences of monarchy.177 The claim that the ‘magistrate’s power derived from the people’ was a ‘hypothesis’ dear to tolerationists. (Gee had also declared this ‘of late the Chief Maxime in Politicks’.178) Locke accepted the theory but sought to demonstrate that it would ‘afford but a very weak foundation’ to any denial of magisterial authority over spiritual adiaphora. We must jettison outdated notions of Hobbes’s standing among the ‘patrons of liberty’, which wrongly presume that Leviathan could only have rebuked rather than informed them. Locke cast his ‘English Tract’ as a rejoinder to Bagshaw based upon Hobbesian theoretical precepts that Bagshaw and Locke, and indeed Stubbe, all accepted. 174 177 178

Ibid., 22, 82–3. 175 Ibid., 128, 141. 176 MS Locke e.7, f. 2; TT, 125. Locke to [Towerson] 11 December 1660, Locke, Selected Correspondence, 23. Gee, Divine Right and Originall of the Civill Magistrate, 295.

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Locke then defended magisterial authority over indifferent things with a series of claims further recalling Leviathan. Importantly, the ‘English Tract’ did not distance itself from the cause of free conscience. Hobbes had asserted that inward conscience and belief could not be forced by the power of law.179 Locke agreed: ‘Understanding and Assent’ were in God’s gift alone. Magistrates ‘would in vain assault that part of man which owes no homage to his Authority, or endeavour to Establish his religion by those ways which would only increase an aversion and make enemys rather than proselytes’.180 Free conscience was thereby preserved, if only in Hobbes’s narrow, internal sense.181 This deflationary understanding of conscience proved the primary point of contention between Bagshaw and Locke. At issue was whether ‘the Magistrate hath an absolute command over all the actions of men whereof they themselves are free and undetermined agents’.182 Older scholarship generally failed to recognize that Locke and Hobbes offered similar accounts of conscience. In his edition of the ‘Two Tracts’, Abrams’s influential scepticism of Locke’s Hobbism hung on a misreading of Hobbes on this point. Abrams believed that Hobbes espoused a complete ‘alienation of judgement’ to the sovereign. In truth, Leviathan preserved conscience freedom, albeit strictly in the internal realm. Abrams was wrong to distance Locke from Hobbes by saying that the latter ‘eliminates the freedom of conscience as well as that of action’.183 More recent scholarship on Hobbes’s theory of conscience reveals the compatibility of the young Locke and Hobbes on this crucial point. Locke adopted the Hobbesian strategy of hedging free conscience into an internal realm and, as regarded outward behaviour, effacing the distinction between temporal and spiritual actions. Conscience could not command action, ‘conscience being nothing but an opinion of the truth of any practical position, which may concern any action as well moral as religious, civil as ecclesiastical’. Leviathan had similarly defined conscience as ‘private opinions’ or individual ‘secret facts and secret thoughts’.184 ‘Indifferent things’, wrote Locke, ‘of civil as well as religious concernment being of the same nature, and will always be so, till our author [Bagshaw] can show where God hath put a distinction between them.’185 Though 179 181 183 184

185

Lev., 1096, 1116. 180 MS Locke e.7, 3–4; TT, 127. See also the Latin ‘tract’. MS Locke c. 28, f. 3; TT, 214. 182 MS Locke e.7, f. 5; TT, 129. Introduction to TT, 77. Lev., 502, 100. The use of ‘opinion’ here may push against Stanton’s claim that conscience was defined traditionally in the ‘English Tract’. Stanton, ‘Natural Law, Nonconformity, and Toleration’, 44. MS Locke e.7, f. 18; TT, 153.

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Bagshaw had limited conscience’s specifically political claims, as Locke admitted, yet ‘if he thinks others would not soe far improve his principles, let him look some years back he will find that a liberty for tender consciences was the first inlett to all those confusions and unheard of and destructive opinions that overspread this nation’. Locke continued: Indeed having observed that allmost all those Tragicall revolutions which have exercised Christendom these many years have turned upon this hinge, That there hath been no designe soe wicked which hath not worne the Vizor of religion, nor Rebellion which hath not beene soe kinde to itself as to assume the specious name of Reformation, proclaiming a designe either to supply the defects or correct the Errors of Religion. That none ever went about to ruine the State but with pretence to build the temple . . . men finding noe cause that can soe rationally draw them to hazard his life, or compound for the dangers of a warr as that which promises them a better, all other arguments of Liberty, Country, Relations, Glory being to be enjoyed only in this life can give but small encouragements to a man to endanger that and to improve their present enjoyments a little, run themselves into a danger of an irreparable loss of all.186

This important passage contained several Hobbesian themes. Leviathan had denounced as seditious the doctrine that ‘whatsoever a man does against his Conscience is Sinne’. If not, ‘in such diversity, as there is of private Consciences, which are but private opinions, the Common-wealth must needs be distracted, and no man dare to obey the Soveraign Power, farther than it shall seem good in his own eyes’.187 Locke’s concern about ‘tender consciences’ mobilizing resistance paralleled this closely. ‘Order and decency’ could not ‘depend wholly on the opinions and fancies of men’. As for Locke’s argument that revolutions and war turned on religious factions, Hobbes asserted the same thesis on many occasions. And Locke’s claim that the promise of a better afterlife trumped all earthly, political interests strikingly recalled Hobbes’s admonition that ‘terrour’ of eternal damnation and hope of eternal salvation would always overtake the sovereign’s temporal punishments and rewards.188 Locke and Bagshaw contested the boundaries of the domain of conscience. Locke followed Hobbes in presenting it as internalized and private. But the dispute was also framed around the related notion of adiaphora.189 Bagshaw conceded that indifferent things existed but sought to limit sovereign power over them by arguing that ceremonies of this kind had 186 189

MS Locke e. 7, f. 24; TT, 160. 187 Lev., 502 188 Lev., 512. On the vellum back cover of his copy of Bagshaw’s Two Questions, Locke at some point wrote the single word ‘Indifferent’. Bodl. Locke B 10.2.

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‘by abuse become occasions of superstition’.190 Against Bagshaw’s wideranging understanding of superstition, Locke offered a narrow Hobbesian one. ‘Superstition if I understand it aright’, he wrote, ‘is a false apprehension of god, or of a false god, attended with a slavish feare of severity and cruelty in him, which they hope to mittigate by a worship of their own invention . . . But that superstition in this sence cannot by applyd to the limitation of Indifferent things is cleare.’191 This recalled both Hobbes’s projection theory of religion (as belief in an anthropomorphized abstraction born of fear) and his definition of superstition: ‘Feare of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales’ that were not ‘publiquely allowed’.192 Locke’s ‘false god’ closely resembled Hobbes’s ‘feigned’ gods.193 Hobbes also anticipated Locke’s expansive definition of adiaphora. Hobbes, contrasting ‘natural and arbitrary worship’, designated some ‘signes of Honour (both in Attributes and Actions)’ as ‘natural’. Prayers, thanks, and obedience were some of these. ‘Others are so by Institution, or Custome of men; and in some times and places are Honourable; in others Dishounourble; in others Indifferent: such as are the Gestures in Salutation, Prayer, and Thanksgiving, in different times and places, differently used.’ These customary matters constituted ‘Arbitrary Worship’, and Hobbes concluded that they might sometimes be ‘Commanded’ by sovereignty and sometimes left ‘Voluntary’. Hobbes, notably, did consider some actions ‘naturally’ honourable or dishonourable and conceded that the latter ‘cannot be made by humane power a part of Divine worship’.194 Locke agreed that some worship practices would be forbidden by natural law. But he also categorized, with Hobbes, virtually any ceremonial or linguistic act of worship as adiaphora.195 Both men argued that even the heathens – though they worshipped ‘false Gods’ – exercised ‘reasonable’ discretion in ordering their ceremonies and sacrifices as they did.196 Bagshaw viewed these practices themselves as superstitious, while Locke and Hobbes limited pagan superstition to the falsity of their gods. Locke’s ‘English Tract’ was primarily an argument about the extent of sovereignty. The ‘light of reason and nature of government itself’, he wrote, made it ‘evident that in all Societys it is unavoidably necessary that the supreme power (whether seated in one or more), must be still supreme, i.e. have a full and unlimitted power over all indifferent things and actions 190 193 196

Bagshaw, Great Question, 2. 191 MS Locke e. 7, f. 16; TT, 147. 192 Lev., 86. Ibid., 162. 194 Ibid., 562 572. 195 MS Locke e. 7, ff. 4–5; TT, 127–9; Lev., 570. MS Locke e. 7, f. 5; TT, 130; Lev., 570; see also MS Locke c. 28, f. 5; TT, 218.

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within the bounds of that society’.197 Bagshaw’s tract, however, did not argue a general limitation on sovereignty but particularly limits on Christian sovereigns as Christians. (Locke pressed on this paradox: ‘Tis strange that doctrine that enjoins submission to a Nero, should be thought to free us from subjection to a Constantine.’198) Locke was thus required to respond to Bagshaw’s scriptural interpretations, and here again we find Hobbesian parallels. Locke, like Hobbes, spurned any theory that would ‘strengthen a heathen’ but ‘weaken a Christian’ magistrate.199 Interpreting the twenty-third chapter of Matthew, Bagshaw had taken Christ’s rebuke of the Pharisees as a general prohibition on rules concerning indifferent things. Locke followed Hobbes, reading this as a rebuke to the hypocrisy and rigour of the Pharisees but not a denial of their sovereign right (they sit in ‘Moses’ Chaire’).200 Bagshaw interpreted John, chapter 8 (where Christ confronts the Pharisees: ‘If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed’) as a radical Christian freedom from imposition. Hobbes and Locke read this as a characterization of the primitive church’s freedom from Jewish ceremonial law, rather than a limitation on the ‘Civill Laws of the State’.201 Bagshaw thus differed with both Hobbes and Locke over the limitations that Christianity imposed on sovereignty. On behalf of sovereignty per se, Bagshaw accepted very broad power claims and could only urge toleration as a matter of prudent statecraft. This accorded with the tolerationist counsel of Leviathan, and we find similar advice intimated in Locke’s ‘English Tract’. Locke wrote that ‘the magistrate’s concernments will always teach him to use no more rigour than the temper of the people and the necessity of the age shall call for’.202 Magisterial impositions were necessary acts of border maintenance in contentious times. ‘If men would suffer one another to go to heaven everyone his own way’, Locke wrote, echoing his letter to Stubbe, ‘our author’s doctrine of toleration might promote a quiet in the world.’203 But as ‘pity and persuasion’ had not typified recent generations, a firmer hand was required. Locke and Bagshaw engaged in an internal dispute over toleration between two men committed to a similar Hobbesian understanding of sovereignty. Locke certainly offered no defence of restored Laudianism. He did not view the episcopal church as a divine institution, with autonomous powers or hallowed liturgical practices beyond the reach of sovereignty. He did not 197 199 201 203

198 MS Locke e.7, ff. 32v–33; TT, 172. MS Locke e. 7, f. 5; TT, 130. 200 MS Locke e. 7, f. 6; TT, 131. Lev., 886; MS Locke e.7, f. 6; TT, 132. 202 Lev., 826; MS Locke e.7, ff. 7–8; TT, 134–5. MS Locke, e.7, 172, f. 22; TT, 158. MS Locke e. 7, f. 25; TT, 161.

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present Charles II as beholden to the old church. For a church long sustained by the pious deference of Charles I, Locke’s generic defence of an Erastian uniformity might have seemed ambiguous. Perhaps this explains why the ‘English Tract’ was never published. Locke had finished it by December of 1660. In the following March, Towerson complained to him of the troubling popularity of Bagshaw’s tract. ‘You may perhaps doe God and the church a peice of seasonable service’, he wrote, ‘if you would be pleas’d to print your answer to it.’204 In a preface drafted later, Locke conceded reluctance. He did not wish to fuel contention or disturb ‘the beginnings of our happy settlement’.205 This may sufficiently explain Locke’s hesitation. Towerson and Samuel Tilly worked to dissipate it. In April, the former reported a sermon by Bagshaw which blasted church ceremonies: ‘there may be some necessity that your papers should see the light’.206 In December, Tilly – speaking for unnamed ‘others’ who had read Locke’s manuscript – also urged publication.207 But by early 1662 the church settlement – defying the King – had assumed a more hard-line form. The ‘English Tract’ was not well suited as a defence of this emerging dispensation. Locke’s preface emphasized the tract’s Erastian and politique elements; he had ‘drawn his sword in the same side with the magistrate, with a design to suppress not begin a quarrel’. He sought to allay ‘suspicions and disquiets’, to encourage ‘a ready and entire obedience’.208 Locke characterized ceremonial and liturgical traditions inviolable to the churchmen as ‘occasion of hatred and quarrels amongst us as leeks and onions and other trifles described’ in Juvenal’s Satire 15. Juvenal’s ‘Leeks and Onyons’ had, infamously and vividly, served a similar function in Leviathan.209 Given Locke’s religious background, it is probable that he either did not wish to write in support of the emerging Restoration church or did not feel that his Erastian defence of uniformity would be welcomed by those who increasingly dominated it. What in 1660 was a defence of the sovereign’s religious prerogative useful to the designs of Charles II, by 1662 may have seemed poorly suited to the more uncompromising episcopal piety emerging in parliament and the country.210 204 206 207 208 209 210

Gabriel Towerson to Locke, 12 March 1661, CL, 1:167. 205 Locke, ‘preface’, in TT, 118. Gabriel Towerson to Locke, 9 April 1661, CL, 1:170. Samuel Tilly to Locke, 5 December 1661 and 7 March 1662, CL, 1:182–3, 185. Locke preface, TT, 118. Lev., 968; on these polemics, see Raylor, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes, 266–71. Abrams and Woolhouse speculate that the tract was no longer ‘necessary’. This seems dubious, given the concerns of Towerson and Tilly. Abrams, Introduction to TT 14; Woolhouse, Locke, 46.

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While the likely Hobbism of Locke’s ‘Two Tracts’ has at times been conceded, more recent contextual work has tended to present these early Lockean works as deriving from the century-long English Protestant debate over the status of adiaphora. In this reading, Locke arrayed himself with episcopal conformists such as Henry Hammond, Jeremy Taylor, and Robert Sanderson, all of whom wrote in the shadow of the preeminent Hooker. The best case for this interpretation is made by John Marshall and Jacqueline Rose, and some influence is certainly likely.211 Sanderson is the clearest case. But it is important to note that the later and less politically significant ‘Latin Tract’ is the primary source of evidence for textual parallels between Sanderson and Locke. Even there, Abrams makes a compelling case that Locke’s borrowings from Sanderson’s De Obligatione Conscientiae (1660) are more ‘formal’ than substantial and that Locke far outstrips Sanderson’s account of sovereignty, moving in a Hobbesian direction.212 As for the ‘English Tract’ – more consequential in the present context – Locke referred to Hooker and Sanderson only in response to Bagshaw. He claimed to have read Hooker’s preface but no more, and Sanderson only with ‘haste and inadvertancy’.213 Leviathan, by contrast, appears to have been a constant object of his diligent study. The Anglican debate over adiaphora, measured against Locke, tended to be far more scriptural in flavour, foregrounded questions of natural law and God’s moral pre-eminence, and did not attach itself to the era’s new notions of sovereignty. Particularly in the ‘English Tract’, Locke diverged from these patterns. Though the concept of adiaphora remained important to him, he drew from it more strictly Erastian conclusions. Where Anglicans had found it difficult to cordon Christian conscience into an inner realm, or to fully subordinate it to a voluntarist sovereign, Locke does so. Furthermore, Locke shared none of the concern over ecclesiology and church tradition that marked the work of Taylor, Hammond, and Sanderson. As Marshall notes, where Sanderson understood ‘church governors’ as synodical and canonical, Locke wrote ‘as if church governors meant simply the civil magistrate’.214 Rose, while emphasizing the traditional, Anglican understanding of adiaphora in her discussion of the ‘Two Tracts’, acknowledges that Locke shared none of its concern for proper ecclesiastical form.215 211 212 214 215

Sommerville, ‘Conscience, Law, and Things Indifferent: Arguments on Toleration from the Vestiarian Controversy to Hobbes and Locke’, 166–79. Abrams, Introduction to TT, 72. 213 MS Locke e. 7, f. 32; TT, 170–1. Acknowledged by the scrupulous Marshall. Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 13–15. Rose, ‘John Locke, “Matters Indifferent”’, 617–9. Sommerville, ‘Conscience, Law, and Things Indifferent’, 177.

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Locke and the churchmen also diverged over the nature of conscience. Locke’s ‘English Tract’ parallels Hobbes, defining conscience as ‘nothing but an opinion of the truth of any practical position’.216 This conflation of conscience with subjective opinion, which would later rile Locke’s orthodox critics, does not resemble Sanderson’s definition of conscience as a ‘faculty’ or ‘light’ implanted in the mind and allowing the ‘discourse of reason’ to be applied to ‘particular moral acts’.217 For Sanderson, Hammond, or Taylor, the conscience could ‘know’; for Hobbes and Locke, it could merely believe.218 Locke’s ‘Two Tracts’, while they contained ecclesiological implications, did not offer a positive account of the church. Locke mediated religious obedience between atomized individuals and their sovereigns, within the theoretical horizons provided by the new natural rights theory. On innumerable points – especially regarding the nature of sovereignty and the extent of conscience – Locke echoed the language of Leviathan, which was reportedly constantly at his fingertips. He did so within an intellectual milieu steeped in Hobbesian controversy and in dialogue with figures whom we can identify as enthusiastic Hobbesians. Were a historian seeking to identify the Oxford Hobbists of the Interregnum to have encountered the ‘English Tract’ as the composition of a more obscure university associate of Stubbe, he or she would not hesitate to locate its author within that cohort. Locke and his opponents took the Hobbesian definition of sovereignty for granted. They disputed whether, given this understanding of politics, the bounds of free conscience should be narrow or broad. In this, they reflected the ambiguities of Leviathan itself. The requirements of stability might suggest, alternatively, the need for an ordered uniformity in worship or for a prudential toleration of nonconformity. Consistently unacceptable was either an enforceable natural right of free exercise or an autonomous church power policing the borders of orthodoxy and proper worship for sovereign and subject alike. Locke’s neglected early writings help us to locate him within the sovereignist revolution launched by the new jus naturalism and particularly crystalized by Leviathan. Locke, in every

216 217 218

MS Locke e. 7, f. 10; TT, 138. Sanderson, De Obligatione Conscientiae Praelectiones Decem, 3, 15–6, 31; Hammond, Of Conscience, 2–3. That Locke’s conformism has been overstated is argued by Ashcraft, ‘Latitudinarianism and toleration: historical myth versus political history’, 176n. Marshall acknowledges the limitations of the affinity in the same volume. Marshall, ‘Locke and Latitudinarianism’, 253–274.

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meaningful sense, had adopted the fundamental doctrines of this new political thinking.

Civil Religion and the Turn to Sovereignty It is not uncommon to read Locke out of the seventeenth century ‘turn to sovereignty’.219 Though the terms ‘sovereign’ or ‘sovereignty’ occur more than one hundred times in the Two Treatises, Locke would not offer a clear or consistent, abstract definition. He tended to use these terms to characterize an unlimited power allowable only to God or to pejoratively characterize Filmer’s illegitimate monarchs. However, the claim that Locke rejected ‘all forms of sovereignty except the sovereignty of God’ is an overstatement.220 The phrase ‘civil sovereign’ denotes something other than Filmerian tyrants in the four Letters on toleration, and Locke seems to have intended the terms ‘civil’ or ‘political society’ to signify the ultimate authority of natural individuals acting as one body. But it is Locke’s earliest text, the ‘English Tract’, that offers the clearest evidence of his adoption of a fundamentally Hobbesian understanding of sovereignty, as when he defined a ‘magistrate’ as ‘the supreme legislative power of any society not considering the form of government or the number of persons wherein it is placed’.221 Locke’s earliest writings also shared the Erastian hostility to independent religious authority that was pronounced within the theories of sovereignty devised by Bodin, Grotius, and Hobbes.222 The logic of abstract, contractual sovereignty did not sit well with the Restoration churchmen. Such theory eschewed the divine right that they preferred as a foundation for both monarchy and episcopacy. Most of all, they suspected any failure to construe the Royal Supremacy as a feature of the true church, constituted by providence at the Reformation. The new theories of sovereignty did not understand the Supremacy as a note of the universal church enjoyed only by worthy royal patrons but as a generalized sovereign power over ‘religion’. When Leviathan spoke of the ‘Christian Commonwealth’, it presumed that Christianity did not alter the fundamental 219

220 222

Tuck, Sleeping Sovereign, 117–20; Davis, ‘Locke’s Political Society: Some Problems of Terminology in the Two Treatises of Government’, 209–31; Scott, ‘The Sovereignless State and Locke’s Language of Obligation’, 547–61. Davis, ‘Locke’s Political Society’, 226. 221 MS Locke e. 7, ff. 1–2; TT, 125. Grotius and Bodin appear listed in Locke’s early notes from 1658 to 1660, the latter described as ‘the great politician’. MS Locke f. 14, pp. 7, 13–14. Other texts in his notes, such as Wren’s Monarchy Asserted, deployed the language of sovereignty. Locke apparently encountered an appreciative precis of Bodin’s theory of sovereignty in Filmer’s Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy, 30–1; MS Locke d. 10, p. 185.

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requirements of well-maintained sovereignty. Locke’s response to Bagshaw took this as its main challenge: demonstrating, to an advocate of the new contractual theories of sovereignty, that Christianity did not fundamentally alter sovereign powers. Such thinking threatened the established order of Christendom, not chiefly by advancing Erastianism, or even by advocating toleration, but by amplifying an important discourse of civil religion. Early modern civil religion remains an ill-defined concept. If we take it to denote religion rendered into a political ideology, or religion consciously framed to legitimate power, the term ‘civil religion’ can be redundant to scholars who understand the history of ideas to be a history of ideologies.223 The historicist and sociological tendency to translate all religion into ‘other factors (economic, ideological, political, and so on)’ can render the specific phenomenon of civil religion all but invisible.224 Critically examining, rather than just adopting, the proto-sociological understanding of ideology that we have inherited from the Enlightenment opens up the possibility of seeing ‘instrumentalized’ religion as a specific and distinct tradition. It also exposes to view a rival tradition of autonomous or ‘prophetic religion’, which often understood itself in explicit opposition to civil religion. Accurate historical reconstruction requires that the viewpoint on religion shared by the Enlightenment’s proto-sociological thinkers be vectored with lines of argument emitting from Christian theology and ecclesiology itself. These were, after all, the two sides of an important early modern debate. Perceptive analysis is offered in Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology. Civil religion, he writes, is a corruption to which the church is liable when it enjoys a close cooperation with the state. It is not a matter of servicing the interests of government solely – civil religion can flourish in opposition too – but the interests of the state at large, bolstering its legitimacy, supporting its political philosophy, inculcating virtues, both active and passive, which are useful to the political constitution of society.

Civil religion, O’Donovan concludes (from within the Christian tradition, to be sure), produces an ‘inculturated’ church ‘liable to lose its critical distance on society’.225 The discourse of civil religion can be understood as 223 224 225

Skinner, Introduction, Visions of Politics, Volume One: Regarding Method, 6–7. Sheehan, ‘Thomas Hobbes, D.D.: Theology, Orthodoxy, and History’, 250; Chappel, ‘Beyond Tocqueville: A Plea to Stop “Taking Religion Seriously” ’, 689–9. O’Donovan, Desire of the Nations, 224–6; Taylor, Secular Age, 160, 175.

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the conscious effort to buttress and thus benefit from political and social power.226 If such a function is presumed to be an imperative of all religious forms, the category of civil religion is rendered meaningless and a great many religious and political debates of early modernity are obscured. It is particularly important not to limit the civil religious impulse to the ancient Roman, Machiavellian, or Rousseauian republican traditions that often frame it in historical memory.227 Mark Goldie has perceptively observed that the civil religious tradition has been neglected in part because it seems alien to a ‘liberal’ tradition often defined in anti-republican or anti-totalitarian terms.228 The notion that liberalism privatized or ‘separated’ religion from political power has tended to keep presumed liberal forefathers like Hobbes and Locke distant from the civil religious tradition. But long before Rousseau influentially deployed the term ‘civil religion’, Hobbes wrote of ‘Civill Worship’ in Leviathan, and broad debates over the status of ‘state religion’ proliferated in early modern Europe.229 Whether the project of sanctifying the new ‘manners and institutions’ of the sovereign age could be pursued within a recognizable Christianity was a vital question of the period.230 Civil religion could operate from within a church establishment or from outside it. It could pursue strategies of exclusion or inclusion, of coercion or tolerance. What was required was solely that the purposes of political order, rather than autonomous religious or ecclesial purposes, be prioritized in a conscious way. Equally, thinkers hostile to the notion of civil religion could be found on both sides of the establishment question. The debate over establishment, though it has dominated historical attention, was important but contingent. More basic was the struggle over whether the church should primarily seek autonomy and distance from political power, or whether it should adapt itself in order to legitimate that power. This axis, running between the autonomous and the acculturated church, cut across any axis running between establishment and disestablishment, or between tolerationists and anti-tolerationists. The alternative to civil religion was not necessarily disestablishment or toleration but (to use O’Donovan’s terminology) ‘prophetic religion’. Arraying the factions of early modernity along an axis dividing ‘prophetic religion’ from ‘civil religion’ can prove a clarifying exercise. It captures the 226 227 228 230

For a similar definition, see Beiner, Civil Religion: a Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy, 1–2. Beiner, ‘Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau on Civil Religion’, 617–38; Lilla, Stillborn God, entire. Goldie, ‘Civil Religion of James Harrington’, 197. 229 Lev., 1028. Goldie, ‘Civil Religion and the English Enlightenment’, 34–5; Kidd, ‘Civil Theology and Church Establishments in Revolutionary America’, 1010.

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anxieties of a transforming Christendom better than traditional interpretations foregrounding the divide between tolerationists and anti-tolerationists. Civil religion often split apart factions that are assumed to have been united. The logic of civil religion, for instance, could tempt defenders of established episcopacy, but many high churchmen defended their establishment with a highly prophetic notion of the autonomous church. This was a divide that Hobbes exploited in his Restoration polemics. Most consequentially for the present book, civil religion divided the cause of toleration. Across the later seventeenth century, the presses churned out tolerationist works deploying the logic of sovereignty, prosperity, and stable order. In Sir Charles Wolseley’s Liberty of Conscience the Magistrate’s Interest (1668), for example, any prince interested in his own ‘quiet and repose’ was urged to offer a ‘prudent liberty’ to Protestants. The tract conceded the necessity for a ‘publick Profession’ or ‘State-Religion’, but it was not this state religion that served as the locus for Wolseley’s civil religion. Civil religion – favourable to order and prosperity – thrived in conditions of pluralism and ‘Indulgence’. Indulgence cultivated an ‘equal Tendency in all to love that Prince or State wherein they find favour and protection’. Geo-political power and trading wealth would also follow from toleration and the advance of wisdom that free conscience encouraged. Coerced uniformity merely brought faction and enabled the ‘sinister influence’ of the clergy.231 The anonymous Second Thoughts, or the Case of a Limited Toleration counselled toleration as ‘policy’ because tolerated sects would ‘naturally and necessarily fall in sunder, and remain as divided in point of Faction and party as they are in tenets and principles’. Men tended to follow their ‘Interest; how much that over-rules Conscience in all Religions is but too visible in the world’. Dissenters would be pacified with ‘ease and prosperity’, the securing of which was the ‘great art and secret of Government’.232 The sometime Hobbesian Peter Pett, in a 1661 tract that Locke read, also urged toleration as policy. ‘Nor shall I at all in these papers’, he wrote, ‘consider what Liberty to the Consciences of others Religion, but purely what politicall interest prompts us to give.’233 However, as the author of the Second Thoughts acknowledged, toleration might be defended not just according to ‘Humane prudence’ but also ‘Christian piety’ and the ‘interest of the Church’.234 Some contemporaries 231 232 233 234

Liberty of Conscience, the Magistrate’s Interest, 3–8, 16–18. Second Thoughts, or the Case of a Limited Toleration, 2–5, 6–7. Pett, Discourse concerning Liberty of Conscience, 3–4; J. R. Milton, ‘Locke’s Early Political Reading’, 92; LL, 2820. (References to Laslett and Harrison’s Library of Locke refer to entry numbers.) Second Thoughts, 8–9.

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were uneasy about subordinating religion to political prudence. The broad-minded jurist Matthew Hale warned that prophetic, scriptural Christianity should never become mere ‘Politick Contrivances, for attaining or upholding Power, Wealth or Interest’. ‘Politicians’ would ‘easily conform religion to State-Policy, and make it indeed a more excellent and incomparable Engine for it, and nothing else’.235 A fuller case against civil religious logic was offered by Jeremy Taylor, the Laudian prelate and chaplain to Charles I.236 His most significant work was the 1647 Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying. This tolerationist work is often presented (by historians and contemporaries237) as an anomalous effort to flatter parliament, based upon the assumption that it cannot be reconciled with Taylor’s otherwise staunch support for bishops and the established church. These charges of inconstancy, in fact, speak to the interpretive confusions generated by the presumption that toleration, or the freedom of ‘prophecy’ and exercise, was the exclusive possession of dissenters. In both his Discourse and his defences of the episcopal establishment, Taylor wrote as a critic of civil religion and the allures of politique statecraft. His tolerationism offered an expansive view of the prophetic purposes of religion, and it constrained the ambit of the state. Politics was a cockpit of turbulent wills, interests, and violence – all antithetical to religious truth. Taylor’s ecclesiology offered an anti-politics: the integrity of theology, church mission, and salvation attainable only through revealed truths, insulated from political violence and carnal ends. This liberated the church and its ‘spiritual authority’ from the ‘corporall institutions’ of sovereigns. Evangelism could not be served by ‘politick consideration’. The ‘ends of a Temporall Prince’ and the ‘honour of Christ’s kingdom’ were too often confused in the manner of the ‘Mahumetan Religion’. Defending both individual conscience and church liberty, Taylor warned Christian princes to resist the ‘whispers [of] some Politiques’, who would subordinate Christianity to temporal interest.238 Taylor’s defences of episcopacy sounded similar themes. ‘Human prudence’ and ‘conveniences’ could not be allowed to corrupt ecclesial governance. Bishops were to ‘instruct the King in righteousness, by their sanctity to be a rule to the Court’. The ‘liberties of the church’ should never be sacrificed to ‘secular interests’.239 235 237 238 239

Hale, Several Tracts, 9, 27–8. 236 ODNB; Spurr, Restoration Church, 305. Lloyd, Memoirs of the Lives, Actions, Sufferings, and Deaths, 702–3. Taylor, Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying, 1–3, 13, 162, 166–7, 184–7, 206–9. Taylor, Sacred Order and Offices of Episcopacy, 8–9, 360–1, 365–8; Taylor, Sermon Preached at the Opening of the Parliament of Ireland, 36.

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It is indication of the cross-cutting nature of the causes of civil and prophetic religion that Taylor’s Discourse became an unlikely authority among more radical dissenting tolerationists. The 1661 Plea for Toleration, by the Baptist preacher John Sturgion, invoked Taylor in asking King Charles to establish toleration not as a matter of prudence but according to the ‘Rule which God himself hath been pleased to lay before you’. Christ was the only ‘Law-giver’ in the church, and ‘Kings sitting in the throne of Government’ were not ‘exempted’ from his laws.240 Similarly, an anonymous tolerationist author of 1687 wrote that Taylor was ‘so far from saying that the Prince may Tolerate, that he saith he must, and leaves it not in his choice’. Toleration was no mere ‘measure’, and it was ‘out of the [sovereign’s] power to be concern’d with Men’s Consciences’.241 This uncompromising, prophetic quality of Taylor (a ‘new way of soul freedom’) appealed to Roger Williams, himself a scourge of ‘Erastian’ state religions.242 So too did William Penn appeal to both Taylor and Henry Hammond in asserting free conscience as a ‘divine prerogative’. Mere ‘prudential’ toleration reduced religion to ‘State-policy’. Christianity was threatened where ‘Religion is suited to the Government, and Conscience to its Conveniency.’243 For many tolerationists, the logic of civil religion proved an irresistible strategy for alluring sovereigns with the promise of augmented power. But a significant body of opinion, ranging from high church to low, rallied against such instrumentalism. For them, material concerns must be hedged and inhibited by revealed truth. There was a palpable sense among such figures that the reduction of religion to the calculus of political logic was a waxing threat. Oliver Cromwell had personified the temptation to govern religion with ‘Politick Aphorisms of Machiavells’, but Charles II had also shown himself willing to ‘prevail as a serpent’ rather than ‘suffer as a dove’.244 Richard Baxter characterized the ecumenical nature of the resistance to civil religion in his Catholic Unity of 1660: ‘Talk no more childishly about our petty differences in ceremonies and forms of Worship. . . . There’s a difference between you that is a hundred times greater than these; some of you are for Heaven and some for Earth; some of you live to the Spirit, and 240 241 242 243 244

Sturgion, Plea for Tolleration of Opinions and Perswasions, 4, 10, 13–5, 19. Toleration Tolerated: or a Late Learned Bishops Opinion concerning Toleration, 3. Jordan, Development of Religious Toleration in England, 3:305. Penn, Great Case of Liberty of Conscience, 24–6, 42. The English Devil: Or Oliver Cromwell and his Monstrous Witch Discovered, 7; Nicholas to Ormond, 19 February/1 March 1651, BL Add. MS 4180, f. 30v.

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some to the Flesh. . .’ Division was caused by those who allowed the ‘rulers of the world’ to be ‘masters of their religion, more than God’.245 Likewise, Andrew Marvell regretted of his times that ‘men instead of squaring their Governments by the Rule of Christianity, have shaped Christianity by the Measures of their Government’.246 Again, this rhetoric could appeal within the established church as well. John Gauden blamed civil war and religious schism on the ‘great Statists’ and ‘grave polititians’, who turned ‘piety into Policy, and Religion into reason of State’.247 Civil religion allured different strands of sovereignist thinking and could justify divergent strategies of religious governance. It was adaptable, pressing – according to circumstance – either with or against establishment, either with or against toleration. Alternatively, the tradition of prophetic religion could unite high-church clericalists and nonconformists in opposition to the moral domination of the state. According to this understanding, Christianity did not merely serve as an instrument of hierarchy and order but as a potential sphere of autonomous moral thinking and communal action that might justly hamper sovereignty. The antithetical causes of civil or prophetic religion could produce strange alliances. Bishop Taylor could inspire dissenters, but so too could Thomas Hobbes. During the Interregnum, Hobbes had held out his theology and ecclesiology – perhaps the purest theorization of civil religion yet devised – to the attention of the Independents. In the later 1660s, he would use it as an instrument to split the restored episcopal church. The initial theoretical forays of the young John Locke can likewise be understood in these terms. Bagshaw’s considerable sympathy with Hobbesian thinking gave way, ultimately, to a prophetic understanding of Christianity and the requirements it made of Christian magistrates. The young Locke hewed more closely to the logic of the new sovereignty and the Hobbesian politique. The following chapters will examine the Restoration careers of Hobbes and Locke and will read their writings on religious coercion and freedom against the unfolding of political events. The great issue of ‘toleration’ which so often transfixes us moderns will be of central concern, but that topic must itself be positioned within a broader reading of the period and the new notions of sovereignty that it spawned. Locke approached the issue of religious governance within an environment saturated with polemical constructions of ‘Hobbism’. Most relevantly, 245 246 247

Baxter, Catholic Unity, 8, 21, 152, 169, 260, 341. Marvell, Account of the Growth of Popery, 34. Gauden, Kakourgoi, sive Medicastri: Slight Healers of Publique Hurts, 10, 34–6, 61, 79–80.

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Hobbism denoted a theory of instrumentalized, civil religion. And while ecclesial Hobbism could be construed to defend a priestly hierarchy subordinated to the King, more commonly contingent factors encouraged the equation of Hobbism and politique toleration. These contextual factors included the religious profile of the King and his court, the implications of prerogative indulgence as a governing strategy, and – as we shall now see – the implications of Hobbes’s own late writings.

chapter 2

The Restoration Projects of Thomas Hobbes

After the Restoration, Thomas Hobbes, coaxed by Aubrey, eventually made a cautious return to the capital, where he lived at Little Salisbury House with the Earl of Devonshire.1 The King, generally promoting reconciliation, rehabilitated his old mathematics instructor. He enjoyed Hobbes’s ‘smart repartees’, and even awarded him a pension.2 Hobbes was not a reliable Stuart loyalist, nor Leviathan a particularly powerful theoretical defence of monarchy. Nevertheless, its absolutism could certainly allure kings. In July of 1663, the French Ambassador, le Comté de Comminges, described Hobbes as ‘Assertor Regum’. Over dinner, Hobbes supposedly peppered him with ‘a thousand questions’ about Louis XIV and viewed the French king as a ‘hero’.3 The Bourbon dynasty projected a politique style, particularly on religion, and this apparently appealed to Hobbes. Perhaps more telling was his remark to the young French aristocrat Balthasar de Monconys in May of 1663. Monconys, touring England, was thrilled to meet ‘M. Hobbes fameux par la Philosophie’. Hobbes informed his admirer that he was tormented by the ‘aversion of all men of the church, both Catholic and Protestant’, specifically because of ‘his book de Cive, where he upheld royal authority independent of all other, if it is not immediately of Jesus Christ’.4 Hobbes’s position was indeed uneasy. Edward Hyde, now Earl of Clarendon, dominated the government in alliance with the bishops. He would later blast Hobbes for ‘malice and acrimony against the Church of England, when it was scarce strugling in its own ruines’.5 The bishops themselves had developed a deep antipathy to Hobbes during the 1650s and were now positioned to make the sting of their displeasure felt.6 1 2 3 4 5

Hobbes was there by the coronation in May of 1661. Samuel Sorbière to Hobbes, 2/12 May 1661, CH, 519. ABL, 1:340. Comminges to Lionne, 23 July 1663, Jusserand, French Ambassador at the Court of Charles the Second, 60. Journal des Voyages de Monsieur de Monconys, 2:25; Locke owned this work. LL, 2016. Hyde, Brief View and Survery, 305. 6 Collins, Allegiance, chapter seven.

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Hobbes’s ecclesial politics would not have similarly disquieted Charles II, who was sufficiently cynical on such matters. Nor was his strategic and uneasy alliance with the bishops necessarily incompatible with a Hobbesian understanding of the requirements of power. In an Interregnum era memo of ‘advice’ to Charles II, the Earl of Newcastle – a patron of Hobbes – urged episcopacy as a model of church government. It was essential, Newcastle wrote (strongly echoing Leviathan), that ‘the state Civill and the state Ecleseasticall’ be governed ‘by one and the same person’. Any rivalry between these two powers would distract the ‘people’ and re-fire civil war.7 Newcastle did regret the political meddling of the Laudian clergy, which had doomed the Caroline church. But he nevertheless asserted that the English episcopacy pretended ‘to no power over the kinge att all, nor no power under the Kinge neyther, but from him’. Charles was ‘not only an absolute king, but pope within your Dominions nexte & immediately after Christe’.8 But Charles would come to discover that the English church was not reliably this deferential to any crowned ‘pope’. Hobbes would eagerly exploit this breech between the king and the church. Hobbes retreated into scientific pursuits, though even here he found enemies. He exchanged polemics with the experimenting gentlemen of the Royal Society,9 and tilted again at John Wallis.10 He found his materialism attacked by Robert Boyle, who considered Hobbes more notable for ‘wit than learning’.11 Robert Hooke provided a vivid portrait of Hobbes around this time arriving with Devonshire to select a magnifying glass. He sealed ‘every observation with a round othe’, belittled the opinion of others, and had a ‘high conceipt of his own abilitys’.12 He was thought, another wrote, to be possessed of an ‘insuperable impertinence’.13 That Hobbes would receive a license to publish on politics or religion was unimaginable. Still, his scientific writings did smuggle in political commentary. In his Seven Philosophical Problems, which first appeared in Latin in 1662, Hobbes offered a ‘short apology for my Leviathan’. He absurdly maintained that the work contained nothing ‘against Episcopacy’, and attributed the hostility of the bishops to their dislike of ‘Regal Power’ in spiritual causes.14 In the same year, Hobbes produced a more extensive 7 8 10 11 12 13 14

Ideology and Politics on the Eve of the Restoration: Newcastle’s Advice to Charles II, 12–3. 9 Ibid., 16–19. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the Royal Society’, 317–35. Jesseph, Squaring the Circle, chapters 7–8; Pell was dragged in. BL Add. MS 4425, f. 238. Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science, 136. Hooke to Boyle, c. 1664, BL Add MS 6193, f. 68v–69. Robert Moray to Christaan Huygens, 17 November 1662, quoted in Schuhmann, Chronique, 179. Thomas Hobbes, Problemata Physica (1662), ‘to the king’. The translation appeared posthumously. Hobbes, Seven Philosophical Problems (1682).

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self-defence from the continued sallies of Wallis. In Mr Hobbes Considered in his Loyalty, Religion, Reputation and Manners, he tendentiously presented his writings as consistently supportive of the Stuarts. Hobbes also strategically advertised his own Erastianism and the clericalism of his enemies. He slyly intimated to the King that the deposed bishops had largely stayed in England and accepted ‘Oliver’s protection’. He defended (against Wallis’s Presbyterianism) the Royal Supremacy over all ‘Churchgovernment’.15 Most remarkably, Hobbes digressed into an attack on the restored bishops, whose hostility he attributed to ‘the venome of Popish Ambition, lurking in that seditious distinction and division between Power Spiritual and Civil, which they that are in love with a Power to hurt all those that stand in competition with them for Learning (as the Roman Clergy had to hurt Galileo) do not willingly forsake’. Hobbes revealingly styled the King not ‘Head of the Church’ but ‘Head of all the Churches within his own Dominions’, thus empowering Charles not with a constitutionally bounded Supremacy over the true church but with expansive sovereignty over all religion. This enabled the King to define doctrine, command ‘all Power Sacerdotal’, and – crucially – ‘dispence with Ceremonies or with anything else that is not against the Scriptures, nor against natural equity’.16 Nor did Hobbes believe that the safety of a State depends upon the safety of the Church, I mean of the Clergy: for neither is a Clergy essential to a Common-wealth; and those ministers that preached sedition pretend to be of the Clergy, as well as the best. He believes rather that the safety of the Church depends on the safety of the King, and the entireness of the Soveraign Power; and that the King is no part of the Flock of any Minister or Bishop, no more than the Shepherd is of his Sheep, but of Christ only; and all the Clergy, as well as the people, the King’s Flock.17

This was the language of civil religion, capped by the radical notion of a ‘bishop king’. Hobbes concluded by boldly proposing – as he had during the Interregnum – that Leviathan be deployed as a university textbook: ‘If [Wallis’s] Principles produced Civil War, must not the contrary Principles, which are his [Hobbes’s], produce Peace? And consequently his Book, as far as it handles Civil Doctrine, deserved to be taught’ to the ‘Preachers’.18 Mr Hobbes Considered was a disingenuous and defensive revision of Hobbes’s career. It was also a remarkably assertive text, placing before Charles II the core doctrines of Leviathan on the question of church power, and recapitulating its critique of Laudianism (past and present). This 15

MHC, 23, 14, 30.

16

Ibid., 44–6.

17

Ibid., 46.

18

Ibid., 58–9; Lev., 1139.

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would become a favoured rhetorical pattern for Hobbes: apology and faux modesty, combined with a sly reassertion of his core doctrines. In 1662, like Locke, Hobbes was necessarily uncertain as to the direction of the King’s ecclesiastical policies. Comprehension had sunk, but Charles’s hopes for indulgence were still afloat. Hobbes’s insistence that the King could determine church ceremonies, and dispense with them when prudent, should be read in this light. So too his claim that the King enjoyed authority over the multiple religions of the kingdom, and not merely its traditional church.19 Finally, consider Hobbes’s most remarkable plea: a plea for his own conscience. Referencing the hopes of dissenters for some indulgence, Hobbes wrote, ‘If tenderness of Conscience be a good Plea, you must give Mr Hobbes also leave to plead tenderness of Conscience to his new Divinity . . .’20 Mr Hobbes Considered, among the last political writings that Hobbes would live to see in print, provides a glimpse of his project adapting to a transitional moment. In Leviathan he had accommodated his Erastian sovereignism to the conditions of the Interregnum, endorsing the statemanaged Independency favoured by the Cromwellians. Now he wrote for a new sovereign, needing to atone for past sins and yet preserve the viability of his work. He swallowed hard and accepted the restoration of episcopacy, but he brandished his anticlericalism and sided with the King on the question of indulgence. It was positioning similar to that assumed by Locke in the ‘English Tract’.

Hobbes’s Intellectual Reassertion: The Late Writings in Context After 1662, Hobbes fell into a politic silence for several years. Roughly between 1667 and 1671, however, he produced a remarkable burst of late career works. These included extensive appendices to the Latin Leviathan, which was printed in 1668 in Amsterdam as part of Hobbes’s collected works. By June of that year he had written An Historical Narration concerning Heresie, which was denied a printer’s license.21 Around that time, he composed his final effort against the late Bishop Bramhall, An Answer to a Book Published by Dr Bramhall, late Bishop of Derry, Called the Catching of Leviathan (published in 1682). Hobbes likely wrote Behemoth sometime between 1666 and 1669.22 Hobbes’s verse history of the Christian 19 21

Rose, Godly Kingship, 221. 20 MHC, 42–3. Hobbes to Joseph Williamson, 30 June 1668, CH, 699.

22

Seaward, Introduction, Beh, 6–9.

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church, Historia Ecclesiastica, was fully drafted by 1671.23 Finally, his Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student, of the Common Laws of England was written after 1668, and (like Behemoth) circulated in manuscript in the early 1670s.24 The antiquarian Thomas Blount reported in the summer of 1671: ‘Mr. Hobbs, who has so long been silent, hath 2 or 3 peeces now goeing to the presse.’25 There is a consistency and a unity to these late productions. They were far more historically oriented than Hobbes’s earlier work. As efforts to circumvent censorship, they deployed a circumspect genre: philosophy coded as history. Their major subject was the history of heresy and its prosecution. They maintained the Erastian sovereignism that had become virtually synonymous with ‘Hobbism’. But they also remodelled Hobbes’s tolerationism to suit new political conditions. That the conditions of the later Restoration might encourage Hobbes towards intellectual assertiveness has generally not been recognized.26 His late writings are typically presented as defensive efforts designed to ward off a heresy prosecution. The Restoration sunshine had faded by 1666, a year, according to Evelyn, ‘of nothing but prodigie in this Nation: Plage, War, fire, raines, Tempest, Comets’.27 National misfortune and political disaffection provoked parliament and the church. In October, the Commons struck a committee to augment laws against ‘atheism, profaneness, debauchery, and swearing’. The resultant bill targeted a raft of theological errors: denying the ‘Essence, person, or attributes’ of the Trinity; denying God’s providence; undermining the ‘canonical scriptures’.28 Hobbes was soon explicitly named as a principle target. One MP reported that Leviathan would be burned, among other ‘atheistical books’.29 Episcopal clergymen were almost certainly behind these developments.30 By October of 1667, language had been added outlawing denial of the immortality of the soul or the afterlife. Many felt that Leviathan denied both.31 The Atheism Bill never passed, but Hobbes deplored that supposedly ‘rational men’ had advanced unphilosophical theology, and had asked that 23 24 25 26 28 29 30 31

Spingborg, Introduction, HE, 86. Cromartie, Introduction, Introduction to Hobbes, Writings on Common Law, xvi–ii. Blount to Anthony Wood, 13 July 1671, Bodl. Wood MS F 40, f. 114, in Pritchard, ‘Last Days of Hobbes’, 179. Though see Parkin, Taming, 240–42. 27 Keeble, Restoration, 159–60. Parkin, ‘Baiting the Bear’, 430–3. CJ, vol. 8, 17 October 1666, 636; Diary of John Milward, 25; Life and Times of Wood, 2:91. Parkin identifies John Dolben, Dean of Westminster as a likely mover. Parkin, ‘Baiting the Bear’, 430–1. Ibid., 439.

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the ‘High Court of Parliament corroborate such Doctrines with a Law’.32 Hobbes also worried that his alleged heresy might be prosecuted under the common law.33 Parliamentary lawyers affirmed that a bishop could apply for a common law writ of de haeretico comburendo against obstinate heretics.34 Hobbes was certainly rattled. His Historical Narration concerning Heresy blamed this persecution on the bishops and Presbyterians.35 Hobbes, according to Aubrey, ‘feared that his papers might be searched’, and thus ‘burn’t part of them’.36 In the Answer to Bramhall, Hobbes quoted Bramhall’s call for ‘another manner of confutation’ against Hobbes’s heretical account of the Trinity. ‘This Bishop’, he wrote, ‘and others of his opinion had been in their Element, if they had been Bishops in Queen Maries time.’37 The clergymens’ malicious vigilance had everything to do with their sense of vulnerability, their fear that Charles II was an uncertain protector. These fears fixated on the same twin spectre that had haunted the church’s Interregnum exile: the two-headed beast of Erastianism and tolerationism. The year 1667 was a pivot point in Restoration political history.38 Facing impeachment, the unpopular Clarendon fled to France in November. No dominant figure immediately succeeded him. The King governed with a small clutch of aristocrats.39 Among these was Anthony Ashley Cooper, later Earl of Shaftesbury, Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, John Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale, and Sir Thomas Clifford. This political revolution represented a potential catastrophe for the church, exposing the ‘fatal flaw’ in its ‘ecclesiastical polity’.40 The bishops' chief pillar of political support was not absolute monarchy but the constitutional royalism represented by Clarendon. The new regime was less solicitous of the traditional constitution in church and state. The ‘Cabal’ was a religiously diverse group. Lauderdale was a Presbyterian, Clifford a Catholic, and none of the Cabal were notably pious conformists. The group represented the politique royalism that had rivalled constitutional royalism since the 1640s.41 Lauderdale, a veteran of past Scottish deals with the Stuarts, now governed Scotland with a pitiless realism. During the exile, Arlington had allied with the Louvre faction of Henrietta Maria, 32 33 34 38 40 41

Hobbes, AB, 19. Aubrey dated this to 1660. White Kennett more plausibly to 1666. Kennett, Memoirs of the Cavendish Family, 15. Parkin, ‘Baiting the Bear’, 447–9. 35 AB, 160. 36 ABL, I: 339. 37 AB, 46. Witcombe, Charles II and the Cavalier House, 60–77. 39 Lee, Cabal, 1–2. Bennett, Tory Crisis in Church and State, 8. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c. 1640–49.

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which had promoted ‘reason-of-state’ strategies. After 1660, Arlington, something of a crypto-Catholic, allied with George Digby, Earl of Bristol, and Clarendon’s implacable enemy. As Secretary of State, he was perhaps the most powerful counsellor of the Cabal. Shaftesbury, John Locke’s eventual patron, was even more estranged from constitutional royalism and episcopalianism. From 1667 to 1672, this group dominated court, though not the King, who maintained his own initiative. These were years of diplomatic intrigue, parliamentary discontent, and royal assertion. Charles struck the Treaty of Dover (1670), which lent English military support for the expansionist designs of Louis XIV. Secret codicils promised toleration for English Catholics and Charles II’s own public conversion. These dealings were greased with French subsidies designed to free Charles from parliament. Dover represented at once Charles’s high view of monarchical authority and the triumph of a culture of arcana imperii. Domestically, the major initiative of these years was a renewed push for religious toleration. In 1667–8, various comprehension bills were floated to the consternation of distrustful MPs. Gilbert Sheldon, now Archbishop of Canterbury, led a rear-guard action. When, in April of 1668, a motion was made to refer contentious religious questions back to the King, it was defeated by one hundred votes.42 A new Declaration of Indulgence was promulgated in 1672, days before Charles and Louis launched war against the Dutch Republic. Referencing his past policy of confessional uniformity, the King announced that the ‘sad experience of twelve years’ now forced a course correction. Given the ‘little fruit of all of these forcible courses, we think ourselves obliged to make use of that supreme power in ecclesiastical matters, which is not only inherent in us, but hath been declared and recognized to be so by several statutes and Acts of Parliament’. The established church would continue to enjoy its monopoly on tithes and place, but it was otherwise the royal ‘will and pleasure’ that ‘all manner of penal laws in matters ecclesiastical, against whatsoever sort of Nonconformists or recusants, be immediately suspended’. Buildings would be permitted to hold Protestant nonconforming services, with approved teachers. Catholics were allowed worship in their private homes.43 As we shall see, the second Restoration Indulgence would come to grief as the first had. This eventuality would fuel a political recovery for the church. But between 1667 and that time, the episcopal church was 42 43

CJ, 8 April 1668, vol. 9, 77. Declaration of Indulgence, March 15 1672, Letters, Speeches, and Declarations of Charles II, 247–9.

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vulnerable. The King appeared more as its Machiavellian master than its nursing father. The church’s position was now a chit in court calculation. The Privy Council inclined towards dissent or Catholicism, ‘half Oliverian and half papistical’.44 The bishops and the court flaunted open hostility. Persecution during the civil war had driven the ecclesiology and theology of the Restoration churchmen higher, towards a more sacramental piety and a jure divino view of clerical authority.45 The King had restored the ecclesial constitution, but few churchmen naively assumed that he had inherited his father’s piety. The cult of Charles the martyr, indeed, represented a nostalgic yearning for the common purpose of the Laudian era. The second Charles was not necessarily appreciative of the apostolic or divine origins of episcopacy, which the bishops promoted in court sermons.46 English bishops had long insisted on the distinction of administrative and sacramental authority and denied the latter to the King. But they harped on this point – that the ‘King was not an ecclesiastical person’ – with a new vigour after the Restoration.47 Nor did the King’s lax morality help matters. The court was ‘full of pimps and bawds’, and sermons regularly denounced its debauchery.48 None of this gratified Charles II. At various points during the mid1660s, Archbishop Sheldon was banned from court and removed from the Privy Council. In 1667 the King forbade him from preaching on Christmas.49 By 1669 Sheldon was convinced that the Uniformity Act could only be saved by parliament.50 Enraged at the King’s moral dissipation, he went so far as to deny Charles the sacrament.51 The ‘disorders’ of the ‘sad church’, Sheldon wrote, ‘have arisen from the King’s family and servants’.52 Charles had warned the bishops around this time that they would ‘repent’ their ‘obstinacy’.53 Bishop Matthew Wren, in response, assured the King that ‘he knew his way to the Tower’. Samuel Pepys recorded in December of 1667 that ‘the Archbishop of Canterbury is called no more to the Caball’, and that ‘everyone is encouraged now a-days to 44 45 46 47 48 50 51 52 53

Goldie, ‘Danby, the Bishops, and the Whigs’, 76. McAdoo, Spirit of Anglicanism: A Survey of Anglican Theological Method in the Seventeenth Century; Spurr, Restoration Church; Packer, Transformation of Anglicanism. Gauden, Loosing of St. Peter’s Bands, 11; Lucy, Treatise on the Nature of a Minister in all its Offices, 231. Laney, Sermon Preached before his Majesty at Whitehall, March 18 1665, 126–38; Sanderson, Episcopacy not Prejudicial, 27; Collins, ‘The Restoration Bishops and the Royal Supremacy’, entire. Keeble, Restoration, 172. 49 Newsletters quoted in Patterson, Long Parliament, 149. Sheldon to James Gresham, 16 August 1668, BL Harley MS 7377, f. 4v. Sutch, Sheldon, 103. Sheldon to Ormond, 25 February 1666, Bodl. Carte MS 45, f. 212; ODNB. Simon, Restoration Episcopate, 69.

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speak and even to print . . . as bad things against [the bishops] as ever in the year 1640, which is a strange change’.54 The Italian visitor Lorenzo Magalotti wrote that the ‘conduct of the bishops’ was ‘abhorred in the whole country’. A broad faction, he exaggerated, favoured abolishing the episcopate. He paradoxically characterized the bishops as simultaneously ‘subordinate’ and ‘insolent’ to the King, neatly capturing the church’s political dilemma.55 Sir William Berkley, reporting intelligence sent from London to Virginia, compared the year 1668 to 1638: ‘A Toleration of al Religions is granted, the papist only excepted and prosecuted, and many of the Kings servants are questioned for what they did in his Majesty’s [service].’56 Gilbert Burnet later characterized the atmosphere: ‘The king was highly offended at the behaviour of most of the bishops: and he took occasion to vent it at the council board, upon the complaints that were made of some disorders, and of some conventicles. He said the clergy were chiefly to blame for these disorders.’57 When the churchmen lashed out at public license, blasphemy, and atheism, they did not do so from a position of strength. Capturing the mood of vulnerability, Sheldon wrote that the ‘King hath cut himself loose from the advice of those that used to counsel him’ in religion. ‘Many extravagant things have been attempted that way and daily will be so yet.’58 The Supremacy, the old sword of pious monarchs, now threatened to advance the politique interests of a less reverential sovereign. Inklings of this had been glimpsed in 1660–1, but in 1667, with Clarendon gone, the threat rose to its full height. So menaced, the church rallied against toleration, but also against a hyper-Erastian tendency now widely characterized as Hobbesian.59 Leviathan had ‘removed all Religion from its basis of divine right’, thus grounding it ‘upon Humane Constitution’.60 Hobbism became a byword for the clergy’s degrading ‘submission and obedience’.61 In genres of wide circulation – not only sermons, but also literature and plays – Hobbes was associated with cynical ‘state religion’. Nathaniel Ingelo’s popular romance, for instance, Bentivolio and Urania, casts its villain in a Hobbesian mode. Among other base doctrines the evil Antitheus declared 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Diary of Pepys, 21 December 1667, 8:585; for Pepys’ own sympathies with Hobbism, see Loveman, Samuel Pepys and His Books, 238–9. Lorenzo Magalotti at the Court of Charles II: His Relazione d’Inghilterra of 1668, 20–23. Berkley to Richard Nicholls, 26 April 1668, Huntington, Blathwayt Papers, BL 80. Burnet, History, 1:464. Sheldon to Bp. of Armagh, MS Harleian 7377, quoted in Parkin, ‘Baiting the Bear’, 444. Goldie, ‘Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, 332–4. Lloyd, Cabala: Or the Mystery of Conventicles, 52. Sprat, Observations on Monsieur de Sorbier’s Voyage to England, 132–3.

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morality ‘but the Arbitrary Commands of the Civil Magistrate’, and ‘true Religion’ merely that which ‘the Governour thereof prescribes’. Hobbists favoured the ‘Politick Religion by which the Grandees rul’d the world’.62 The threat of Hobbesianism was partly theological, but it was also political and ecclesiological. In the latter sense, the Hobbesian and tolerationist causes might dangerously mingle. Dissenters, and particularly Independents, had abandoned any hope of a national church in their own image. A prudential toleration of difference necessarily became their new object. Nor did the Erastian tendencies of Independency entirely dissipate after 1660. Their appeals were redirected, from a Godly and righteous magistrate to a suspect but potentially indulgent prince. As Jacqueline Rose has demonstrated, Independents did appeal to the Royal Supremacy.63 In doing so from outside the ecclesial establishment, from what were slowly cohering into alternate ‘denominations’, nonconformists implicitly presented supremacy over religion (as such) as a note of sovereign power. The supremacy they envisioned broke from the shared – if contested – religious culture of the pre-civil war era. Traditional Supremacy over the Church of England now vied with a sovereignist supremacy over national ‘religion’. The latter version slipped closer to a Hobbesian account. The bishops understood this. As in the dark 1650s, ‘Hobbesianism’ appeared to them as a pincer, advancing from both the tolerationist and Erastian wings. Polemics and sermons against Hobbes became ubiquitous.64 Clergy rehearsed the compromised political past of Hobbes and the Independents, and sounded warnings about the rise of a new politique tolerationism. These rhetorical strategies accelerated during the Cabal years. In 1670 the arch-high churchman Herbert Thorndike paired, as solvents of ecclesial catholicity, both ‘Independent Congregations’ and the domineering Erastianism of ‘Leviathan, that Monster of a Christian’.65 In the same year, Thomas Tenison’s The Creed of Mr Hobbes Examined attacked Hobbes’s atheistic materialism and his subjection of scripture to the ‘Civil Powers’. Leviathan had turned the gentry against the church, and empowered sovereigns to use doctrine for mere ‘temporal security’. Tenison thus voiced fresh concerns over court politiques, but linked these to memories of Hobbes’s Independency. He recalled the utility of Leviathan for the 62 63 64 65

Parkin, Taming, 203–4; Ingelo, Bentivolio and Urania in Four Bookes, 132, 137–41, 148, 165–6. Rose, Godly Kingship, chapter four. Robert Hooke’s record of this period is peppered with references to coffee house ‘disputes’ about Hobbes. Diary of Robert Hooke, 1672–1680, 390, 419. Thorndike, Discourse of the Forbearance or the Penalties which a Due Reformation Requires, 29, 178–9.

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usurper ‘Oliver’. ‘In your Leviathan’, Tenison fumed, ‘you called Episcopacy a Praeterpolitical Church government, and preferred Independencie above all other forms.’66 Bishop Thomas Barlow condemned Hobbes’s ‘wild Erastianism’, and the favour that Leviathan had directed towards Cromwellian Congregationalism.67 Perhaps the most influential of Hobbes’s clerical animadverters was John Eachard, the master of St Catherine’s College, Cambridge. His ‘buffoonery’ against Hobbes was more effective, claimed Dryden, than any ‘blunt, heavy Arguments drawn from Orthodox divinity’.68 In 1670, Eachard’s popular The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion satirized (with unpredictable literary effects) the ‘disesteem’ plaguing the Restoration clergy. Among the ‘more shrewd and judicious Despisers’ of the clergy, Eachard wrote, were the ‘Disciples of Mr. Hobbs’.69 Fashionable Hobbism not only was a vice of court atheists, but also revived the philosophical mayhem of the Interregnum. Eachard’s attack on the ‘Politician’ Hobbes, written at the bidding of Archbishop Sheldon, urged that the King be ‘content with his place’. (The King could not ‘make Bibles, nor turn God out of the world’.) Eachard linked the Cabal’s Erastianism with Hobbes’s past Cromwellianism, his anticlerical Interregnum tracts, and most notably his specious ‘appeals to Conscience’.70 A sermon by William Jane not only targeted nonconformity, but also sought to ward off a grasping monarchy. In an era where the ‘work of the Ministry is become the derision of Fools’, sectarians and Hobbesian Erastians posed a duel threat.71 Hobbes’s quasi-Congregationalist interpretations of the primitive ecclesia reduced the clerical estate ‘into the Kings deputation of Commissioners for the Administration of Ecclesiastical Affairs’. Leviathan rendered the sacred ‘assemblies of the church’ mere playthings of power. It was dangerous folly to succour dissent, relax the demands of conscience, and treat religion as a mere ‘politick Engine’.72 These polemics reprised presbyterian and episcopal critiques of Hobbes as 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Tenison, Creed, 9, 48–9, 147, 154–5. Tenison was the scandalized tutor of the Cambridge Hobbist Daniel Scargill. Scargill to Tenison, 19 January 1669, BL Add. MS 38693, f. 132. Barlow, ‘Animadversions on a MS Tract Concerning Heresy’, Oxford, Queen’s College MS 204, f. 19. ODNB; A Letter from Dr. Robert Wild to his Friend, 14. Eachard, Some Observations upon the Answer to an Enquiry into the Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy, 195–7. Eachard, Some Opinions of Mr Hobbes considered in a Second Dialogue, epistle, 36–41, 246–8, 276–8; Parkin, Taming, 288–98. Jane, Sermon Preached at the Consecration of the Honourable Dr. Henry Compton, lord Bishop of Oxford, 23. Ibid., 28–34.

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an Erastian sectarian that had first appeared during the 1650s. (Bramhall, for instance, had blasted Hobbes for favouring the authority of ‘the pastors of one particular church’.)73 The damage that Hobbes’s endorsement of Independency had done to his reputation is best gauged by Clarendon’s Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and Pernicious Errors to Church and State in Mr. Hobbes’s Book entitled Leviathan. The Survey was written from exile and published in 1674 at conformist Oxford. Clarendon was himself no arch-Laudian, but – like many parliamentary cavaliers – a Hookerian Erastian. But Hobbes’s ecclesiology was far too statist to appeal in these circles. Leviathan had turned the Supremacy against the very church constitution of which it was the centrepiece. Monarchs, Clarendon wrote, were empowered to ‘assist’ in the apostolic functions of episcopacy. Hobbes, by making ‘all Ecclesiastical power to be of no signification’, was perhaps a ‘good Courtier’, but not a worthy Christian. He posed, moreover, a once and future threat. Hobbes had broadcast the ‘good opinion he had of Independency when he published his book, because it left every man to do what liked him best in Religion, as he saies, but in truth because Cromwell was thought to be of that faction’.74 This understanding of Hobbism fuelled the campaign against the Cambridge fellow Daniel Scargill. A fellow of Corpus Christi, Scargill, was suspended for atheism in December of 1668. In March, he was convicted of Hobbism before a consistory court and expelled.75 In Scargill’s published recantation of July 1669, Hobbism was constructed primarily around propositions grounding ‘moral Righteousness’, religion, and the scriptures ‘onely in the positive Law of the Civil Magistrate’.76 Scargill was thus identified with the vogue for Hobbesian absolutism and the secular politique, trends abetting every ‘faction’ and ‘sect’ (perhaps an allusion to indulgence).77 The church cannot have been reassured when Scargill rallied some inside the Cabal to his cause, apparently through the auspices of the Earl of Arlington. In June, a royal letter demanded Scargill’s reinstatement, and a presumably reluctant Archbishop Sheldon urged compliance.78 Scargill eventually secured reinstatement of his degree, but Corpus Christi never did restore his fellowship. The college’s petitions urged the gravity of Scargill’s offenses and asserted the independent jurisdiction of their ‘society’. This brought Sheldon back on side, protecting 73 75 76 77 78

AB, 79. 74 Hyde, Brief View and Survey, 248, 252, 254, 265, 308–9. Parkin, ‘Hobbism in the later 1660s: Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker’, 85–108. Recantation of Daniel Scargill, 1. Ibid., 6; written under the pressure of the consistory court. Lambeth MS 941, f. 108. Lambeth MS 674, f. 1

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clerical authority against overweening royal power.79 Both the substance and the procedural details of the Scargill affair thus evidence the profound tension between royal and priestly power during the years of the Cabal, and the fear that the court might enlist Hobbesian principles as it tried to resolve this tension on favourable terms.80 In this environment, churchmen of all stripes rallied to the antiHobbesian banner.81 Their unanimity was a measure of their vulnerability. Summoning memories of both episcopal loyalism and of Hobbesian and Independent treachery was clever. The polemics of the late 1660s responded, as well, to Hobbes’s reviving assertiveness. Tenison explicitly worried that the recent publication of the Latin Leviathan would serve to spread the Hobbesian ‘malady throughout the world’. Barlow was provoked by his new writings on heresy.82 Eachard attributed Hobbes’s Restoration influence to unspecified historical writings, probably the works on heresy.83 John Dowell answered not just Hobbes’s Historical Narration of Heresie, but even the brief ‘Apology for his Leviathan’ that Hobbes had appended to his earlier Problemata Physica.84 Hobbes’s new assertiveness was enabled by the fall of Clarendon, rising anti-episcopal opinion, and perhaps, as Richard Tuck has argued, the emergence of new court protectors such as the Earl of Arlington.85 Around this time Hobbes referenced the earl’s influence and possible ‘mediation’ of court favour on his behalf.86 The extent of Hobbes’s connection with Arlington has been debated, but it was significant.87 To Arlington, Hobbes dedicated Behemoth, which (we shall see) was dangerously critical of the bishops.88 There is also evidence, which we will consider below, that some close to Hobbes felt that Shaftesbury himself might act as a court patron. In short, by 1667 the weather at court was clearing for Hobbes.89 Elite anticlericalism and a renewed push for 79 80 81 82 83 85

86 87 88

Lambeth MS 674, f. 10. Axtell, ‘Mechanics of Opposition: Restoration Cambridge v. Daniel Scargill’, 102–111. An earthquake in Northamptonshire providentially chastised Hobbism. N.N., A Brief Account and Seasonable Improvement of the Late Earthquake in Northampton-shire, 1–4. Tenison, Creed, epistle; Barlow, ‘Animadversions on a MS Tract Concerning Heresy’, Oxford, Queen’s College MS 204. Eachard, Some Observations, 195. 84 Dowell, Leviathan Heretical, 143. Hobbes’s opinion may have lurked behind the low estimation of the Chancellor published by Hobbes’s devotee Samuel Sorbière in his Relation d’un voyage. Sorbière to Hobbes, 13/23 August 1664, CH, 630–1. Hobbes to Joseph Williamson, 19 June 1667, CH, 692. Hobbes, De Principiis et Ratiocinatione Geometrarum, epistle. Malcolm speculates that this concerned payment of Hobbes’s pension. Philip Milton, ‘Hobbes, Heresy, and Lord Arlington’, 525–9. Beh., introduction, 2, 6, 13–4. 89 Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Locke on Toleration’, 153–70.

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Indulgence created conditions similar to those of the Interregnum, which had originally inspired Leviathan. Naturally Hobbes would not reprise his endorsement of the Congregational way. When confronted with reminders of it, he was uncharacteristically silent. But his project for the reform of church and dogma, and for some measure of individual religious freedom, did not expire. Hobbes merely recalibrated it. Hobbes’s various writings from the 1660s, far from disjointed productions, were each a part of this effort. Faced with a publishing environment defined in equal measure by promise and peril, Hobbes adopted two strategies. The first was retreat to the cloistered groves of Latin publication and to the more permissive print culture of the Dutch Republic. Hobbes’s Opera Philosophica quae Latine scripsit Omnia appeared in Amsterdam in 1668. This sped the continental circulation of Hobbes’s oeuvre and also provided him occasion to recast portions of his philosophy. This was chiefly the case in the Latin translation of Leviathan, in fact a consequential revision rather than a mere ad litteram translation. Samuel Sorbière delivered Hobbes’s original Latin works to the prestigious printing house of Blaeu in the summer of 1663.90 By mid-1664, Pieter Blaeu had visited Hobbes in London, and Sorbière was urging a translation of Leviathan for inclusion in the Omnia Opera.91 Hobbes himself took on the task. (There is some indication that Hobbes had conceived of using a Latin translation as a vehicle for argumentative adjustment as early as the Interregnum.92) Hobbes now completed two thirds of the work by December of 1667.93 The revised Leviathan was by no means indifferent to its home audience. Hobbes did later claim that the translation, printed ‘beyond the Seas’, omitted ‘some passages as Strangers are not concerned in’.94 But many of Hobbes’s revisions responded to the English polemical context. The Blaeus promised sufficient copies for the London booksellers. Demand did not lack. The London bookshop of William Crooke on Fleet Street headquartered the scribal circulation of Hobbes’s new manuscripts.95 In 1670, the Stationers’ Company disrupted an unlicensed printing of Leviathan by the printer John Redmayne. Noel Malcolm has demonstrated that sheets salvaged from this episode, escaping the Bishop of London’s effort to ‘obliterate’ them, would make their way into the later 90 91 92 93 95

Sorbière to Hobbes, 11/21 September 1663, CH, 557. Malcolm, Introduction, Lev., 274; Sorbière to Hobbes, 21 June/1 July 1664, CH, 619. Malcolm, Introduction, Lev., 165–7. Pieter Blaeu to Hobbes, 29 November/9 December 1667, CH, 695. 94 AB, 45. Bulman, ‘Hobbes’s Publisher and the Political Business of Enlightenment’, 340–5.

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‘Bear’ edition of Leviathan.96 The eventual appearance (around 1678) of the Bear edition evidenced the market for Hobbes’s masterwork.97 In 1668, as Hobbes was completing the Latin Leviathan, Samuel Pepys reported that booksellers were charging an astounding thirty shillings for the English, ‘it being a book the Bishops will not let be printed again’. It was, nevertheless, a book ‘now mightily called for’.98

Hobbes’s Politics Recast Given this environment, what sort of polemical intervention did the Latin Leviathan represent? Hobbes was certainly interested in revising his own political past. He also sought to tailor his philosophical-political project to the conditions of the late 1660s. Virtually all of the significant editorial renovations of the work concerned its theology and ecclesiology. Some of Hobbes’s revisions fell into his established strategy of retrospectively obfuscating the original politics of Leviathan. The entire ‘Review and Conclusion’ of the English work was dropped. This had rehearsed Hobbes’s theory of political obligation and had also advertised Leviathan’s new religious doctrines as appropriate to the Interregnum moment of reform. The conclusion’s enthusiasm for the new ‘Publique Judge of Doctrine’ circa 1651 was the sort of detail that inflamed Hobbes’s critics.99 Hobbes buried all traces of these past political calculations. That those calculations were driven by his religious opinions and their contextual implications is further indicated in the Latin Leviathan. The sensitive Chapters 46 (‘Of Darkness from Vain Philosophy and Fabulous Traditions’) and 47 (‘Of the Benefit that proceedeth from such Darknesse’) were entirely rewritten. The reworked Chapter 46 removed passages of homage to the religious supremacy of sovereigns, which had a doubleedged quality: working to both denounce clerical ‘usurpation’ but also to recommend Hobbes himself as a theological reformer. Hobbes excised a passage describing his unorthodox account of heaven and ‘any other paradox of religion’ as doctrines awaiting adjudication after ‘the end of that dispute of the sword, concerning the Authority (not yet amongt my Countrey-men decided,) by which all sorts of doctrines are to bee approved, or rejected’. The victor would judge which ‘opinions’ would 96 97 98 99

Malcolm, ‘Printing of the “Bear”’, 345–70. This was presumably the edition noted by Anthony Wood in 1680, newly printed but bearing the ‘old date’. Life and Times of Wood, 2:475. Diary of Pepys, 2 September 1668, 9:298. Pepys paid 24 shillings for his ‘second hand’ copy. Lev., 1133–4, 1139–41.

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become law.100 This avowal, written while the Stuart cause was in disarray, was now distinctly embarrassing. A similar passage in Chapter 46, where Hobbes had asserted that ‘if the State give me leave to preach, or teach; that is, if it forbid me not, no man can forbid me’, was also expunged.101 The context for the original remark would have been remembered. Scholars who minimize the political significance of Leviathan’s Congregationalist ecclesiology must confront Hobbes’s sustained effort to obscure it in the Latin translation. Facing a resurrected episcopacy, Hobbes adjusted. He removed, for instance, a stringent condemnation of the phrase Divinâ providentiâ (used in episcopal ‘mandates’) for implying claims of clerical divine right and for ‘sliely’ slipping ‘off the Collar of their Civill Subjection’.102 Hobbes also omitted a passage condemning the English bishops for seeming to usurp an ‘Independency on the Civill Power’.103 Hobbes still held these views, but such raw rhetoric was safer in 1651. In a passage theorizing that revolutions in religion were caused by ‘unpleasing Priests’, Hobbes dropped the additional point that this was true ‘not onely amongst Catholiques, but even in that Church that hath presumed most of Reformation’.104 Most significantly, the long passage in Chapter 47 where Hobbes celebrated the abolition of presbyterianism and episcopacy, and endorsed the institution of an Independent church settlement, was wholly expunged from the Latin Leviathan. Other passages that had followed interpretations of the primitive church favoured by Independents were altered in the Latin, particularly in the heavily revised Chapter 42, ‘Of Power Ecclesiastical’. Here Hobbes repeatedly adopted the strategy of leaving the essence of his discussion intact, but excising references to the ‘particular’ churches or ‘particular church assemblies’ of specific ancient cities. For instance, the original Leviathan had attributed the paradigmatic ordination of the apostle Matthias to ‘the act of the Congregation’ (the ‘Members of the Assembly’) of the church in Jerusalem. In the Latin this is rendered merely the ‘church’. Hobbes did not fully reverse course and ascribe ordination to the apostles alone, but seemingly softened the Congregationalist overtones of his language.105 Similar was his revised history of the ancient selection of deacons, which replaced the agency of ‘a Congregation of [Christ’s] Disciples; that is, of Christian men of all sorts’ with simply ‘the Church’.106 Hobbes’s new discussion of the commissions of ancient pastors also replaced ‘in their several congregations’ with ‘the Churches’. Discussing 100 105

Ibid., 708. Ibid., 830–2.

101

Ibid., 1098. Ibid., 842.

106

102

Ibid., 854.

103

Ibid., 1106.

104

Ibid., 186.

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primitive excommunication, a power Leviathan surrendered to individual ecclesiae rather than the apostles, Hobbes eliminated the precise definition of the church as ‘the assembly of the Christians dwelling in the same city, as in Corinth, in the Assembly of the Christians of Corinth’.107 Hobbes remained hostile to the view that the primitive church concentrated authority in the Apostles alone (and thus in their supposed episcopal successors). But he does appear, where possible, to have reframed his discussion of the ‘church’ so that it no longer specifically referenced ‘particular congregations’. His original rhetorical nods to the dominant Independents of the Interregnum were no longer timely. Where he found it absolutely necessary, Hobbes reverted to support for an Erastian episcopacy. Without referencing his views of 1651, Hobbes now wrote, ambiguously, that ‘the best government in Religion is by Episcopacy, but in the King’s right, not in their own’.108 But beneath these diplomatic adjustments, Hobbes maintained the basic thesis of Leviathan that usurping clerics were the agents of sedition and civil war. If he now framed the point slightly more generically, his criticism still left the Laudians exposed. Towards the end of the original Leviathan, for instance, Hobbes had censured the ‘Errours of Aristotle’s Politiques’. In the Latin, this passage is reworked; the drones of Aristotelianism are now identified as the clergy, and the entire passage is recast as an explanation of ‘civil wars about religion in Germany, France, and England’. This, Hobbes writes, ‘was the beginning of our trouble’. For both the majority of preachers (who had an extremely high opinion of their own doctrine) and other people (from their reading of Greek and Latin politics) thought themselves great political experts; and because things were not going well for their ambition (in the Church, for some and in the state, for others), they ignited a civil war – a war in which many thousands of citizens were killed and the King was shamefully slaughtered.109

Elsewhere Hobbes cautioned against Protestant clergy claiming, in the Catholic manner, to rule the church by ‘divine right’.110 Few readers would have mistaken his implication here. The Latin Leviathan contained not just wholesale revisions, but an appendix of three entirely new chapters. These largely concerned theology and heresy, but in the last appendix, Hobbes recapitulated the history of Leviathan itself, a book in which ‘there are some things contrary to received opinion, both in philosophy and theology’. 107

Ibid., 796.

108

AB, 105.

109

Lev., 1095–7.

110

Ibid., 1125–9.

80

The Restoration Projects of Thomas Hobbes And there are so many things said against the power of the Roman pontiffs over other princes, that it may easily appear that the author considered that the cause of the civil war which was being waged at that time throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland, was nothing other than the quarrelling, first between the Roman Church and the Anglican, and then within the Anglican Church between the Episcopalian and Presbyterian pastors, about theological issues.

Here Hobbes loosed a full volley. The passage reads like a condensed version of his discussion, in the original text, of the unwinding of ‘praeterpolitical church government’, though this time with the Independents left out. The Latin Leviathan recalled Charles I’s ‘lulling’ of the Scottish revolt by abolishing Scottish episcopacy, the unpopularity of the English Court of High Commission (centrepiece of Archbishop Laud’s power), and the King’s effort to calm parliament by removing ‘the bishops from all extraordinary ecclesiastical government’. This vacuum of clerical authority, Hobbes wrote, removed the power to try heresies. Sects appeared and new ideas circulated: ‘The author of [Leviathan] was then living in Paris, making use of the ordinary right to write freely.’ In vindicating the sovereign’s authority in spiritual and temporal matters, he ‘fell into unheard-of doctrines, which have been charged with heresy and atheism by very many theologians’.111 This was the most politically charged passage of the entire Latin Leviathan. Its portrayal of the Laudian bishops was distinctly combative, particularly when read in light of Hobbes’s other Restoration writings. He blamed the civil war on clerical in-fighting and presented the fall of the bishops as a precondition for his own philosophical masterpiece. Hobbes’s recalibration of Leviathan required tricky footwork, implausibly imputing consistent royalist purposes to Leviathan, eagerly referencing the King’s Act of Pardon and Indemnity, and carefully distinguishing the ‘Church of England’ from the primary episcopal faction that now dominated it. The members of that dominant faction were treated to an unvarnished and damning historical account of their Laudian forebearers. The renovated politics of the Latin Leviathan anticipated the strategies of Hobbes’s most important Restoration text, Behemoth, his history of the civil war. Hobbes dated this work to his ‘eightieth year’ (sometime between 1667 and 1668).112 Its composition thus preceded or overlapped with the

111

Ibid., 1226.

112

Seaward, Introduction, Beh., 6.

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translation of Leviathan.113 Behemoth was not published until 1679, and then only in unauthorized form with an adulterated title.114 Hobbes’s publisher had taken a copy for scribal circulation, and Hobbes’s had deposited the original with his copyist, James Weldon. Authorized or not, Hobbes’s Behemoth entered into a bull market for his works. Around this time a hand-written copy of the manuscript of the Dialogue of the Common Laws cost a dear 50 shillings.115 There were fully three printings of Behemoth in 1679, after the temporary expiration of the Press Licensing Act in that year. When Hobbes’s own printer finally published it in 1682, he complained of the ‘spurious editions’ that were ‘commonly sold by all booksellers’.116 Hobbes’s failure to secure a license for Behemoth directs us to its political significance. In June of 1679, Hobbes told Crooke that he had wished to publish Behemoth ‘long ago’: And to that end I presented it to his Majesty; and some days after, when I thought he had read it, I humbly besought him to let me print it; but his Majesty (though he heard me gratiously, yet he) flatly refused to have it published.

Hobbes worried that the unauthorized printings would now offend the King.117 This was not unlikely. The first unauthorized edition was noticed by the Counsellor Sir Thomas Chicheley, who alerted the Privy Council.118 The Council (if not Chicheley himself) considered it one of ‘severall notorious bookes and Libells tending to the defamation and disturbance of the Government’. Roger L’Estrange, the surveyor of the press, was ordered to investigate. Confronted, Hobbes admitted authorship but denied authorizing the publication. He produced correspondence evidencing this.119 In 1679, the Council considered the purportedly royalist Behemoth ‘notorious’.120 By then Charles had lurched back into a strategic alliance with the bishops. The religious environment a decade earlier, when Hobbes wrote Behemoth, was

113 114 115 116 117 118 119

If a 1668 mention of Hobbes’s ‘Epitome of your Troubles’ references the work. Du Verdus to Hobbes, 13 April 1668, CH, 697; Schuhmann, ‘Thomas Hobbes, Oeuvres’, 155–6. The History of the Civil Wars of England (London, 1679). John Aubrey to [Locke], 11 February 1673, TNA PRO 30/24/7/493; Robert Hooke paid 9 shillings for Hobbes’s Thucydides around this time. Diary of Robert Hooke, 14. Hobbes, Behemoth, the History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England . . . printed from the author’s true copy (1682), ‘the bookseller to the reader’. Hobbes to William Crooke, 19 June 1679, CH, 771. Chicheley to Robert Legh, 3 September 1679 (Rylands Library, Manchester), quoted in Seaward, ‘Introduction’, Beh., 15. Chicheley himself was rather favourable to the book. TNA, PC 2/68/ pp. 203–4; Seward, Introduction to Beh., 15. 120 TNA, PC 2/68/ p. 569.

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quite different. In the earlier context, he clearly felt that his voice might again be heard. But even then, Charles had disappointed him. Any work by Hobbes promised to rile orthodox opinion. In 1669, for instance, Hobbes had composed a short defence of Daniel Scargill. This is now lost, but surely availed itself of the polemical opportunity afforded by the clergy’s spat with the Cabal counsellors. Undoubtedly lobbied hard by the bishops, the press licenser Sir John Berkenhead denied Hobbes’s Scargill tract a license.121 The suppression of Behemoth was detailed in a 1673 letter from John Aubrey to John Locke, no less. Aubrey wrote: ‘The King haz read and likes it extremely, but tells [Hobbes] there is so much truth in it he dares not license for feare of displeasing the Bishops.’122 Aubrey confirmed the bishop’s hostility in a separate letter to Anthony Wood.123 Wood himself reported that Behemoth had convinced the Bishop of Oxford, John Fell, that Hobbes was an ‘enemy to Universities’ and Christian ‘metaphysicks’.124 What Locke might have made of Aubrey’s reports is a question considered below. Relevant here is the episcopal response to Behemoth.125 The Press Licensing Act of 1662 designated the Secretary of State (Hobbes’s ally Arlington) as the licenser of ‘Books of History’ and ‘Affaires of State’.126 But Behemoth was no straightforward historical work. Given its digressions on topics such as heresy and free will, and Hobbes’s notoriety, it was perhaps considered prudent to consult the Bishop of London or Archbishop of Canterbury, the designated licensers for religious works. Such a consultation would have ended any thought of publication. As a chronicle of the civil war, Behemoth is cursory and was essentially cribbed from James Heath’s Brief Chronicle of the Late Intestine Warr (second edition, 1663) and Edward Husband’s Exact Collection of wartime documents (1643).127 Most of the original argumentation of Behemoth appears in its initial two dialogues, where Hobbes roamed back through the history of medieval and ancient Christianity, and into pagan religious practices. There he found the ‘seed’ of the civil war: ‘certaine opinions in Divinity and Politicks’. Hobbes’s longstanding theory of religious warfare 121 122

123 124 125 126

ABL, 1:360. Aubrey to [Locke], 11 February 1673, TNA, PRO 30/24/7/493. The letter, now in Shaftesbury’s papers, lacks an addressee, but that it was for Locke is strongly suggested by its content and by Locke’s endorsement. Aubrey to Wood, 3 February 1673, Bodl., Wood MS F 39, f. 196v. Life and Times of Wood, 2:472. Aubrey corresponded with Hobbes about Behemoth and pirated publications of it. Hobbes to Aubrey, 18 August 1679, CH, 772. Statutes of the Realm, 5:429. 127 Seaward, Introduction to Beh., 30–1, 43–6.

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blamed virtually all ‘civill warres, in all places of Christendome’ on the division of, and subsequent rivalries between, temporal and spiritual authority.128 This perspective had dominated Leviathan, where it served to associate Prebyterianism and episcopacy with the sins of popery. Behemoth offered a more extensive indictment.129 Leviathan’s sporadic and localized comments about medieval Church corruption were consolidated into a sustained narrative. The book pulled no punches as an anticlerical manifesto, flaying Catholics, Presbyterians, and the Church of England alike. Hobbes appealed to the fashionable malice engulfing the church in the late 1660s. The Laudian church, closely linked to the martyred Charles I, was subject to a remarkably critical scrutiny by Hobbes. Behemoth sideswiped common lawyers, city oligarchs, and parliamentary republicans, but the work was essentially a sustained account of a religious war. It did not absolve the Independents, still less the radical sects. Hobbes aimed a barb at those ‘who in the beginning of the troubles were not discovered, but shortly after declared themselves for a Liberty in Religion’.130 But even this remark insulated the Independents (and the sects) from the origins of the war and emphasized their late emergence. Behemoth did not follow Levaithan in asserting the priority of congregational church authority over episcopal authority, or the absence of hierarchical distinctions among primitive ecclesial officers. Independency was no longer a going concern in the corridors of power, and Hobbes jettisoned it. He did, however, go some way in Behemoth towards minimizing the Independents’ central role in the drama of the regicide. Further, echoing his Interregnum tracts, he offered measured praise for the Commonwealth’s rejection of Presbyterianism and its close surveillance of the universities. Hobbes trained his heavy fire at ‘the pretences both of the Pope, and of the Presbyterians, by which they claim a Right to governe us, as they doe’.131 The Pope’s role in England’s agonies concerned the war’s deep causes: the ‘mystery of iniquity’ slowly growing throughout the Middle Ages, weakening European monarchs, and empowering a fifth column of clergy. The central role of the Presbyterians in the crisis was straightforward enough. But Hobbes’s identification of the Church of England as an instrument of clerical sedition was explosive. 128 129

130

Hobbes to Devonshire, 23 July/2 August 1641, CH, 120–1; DC, preface to reader (1647 edition), 12–3, 81. Seaward’s view that ‘Leviathan had largely ignored’ the Church of England cannot be sustained (Introduction Beh., 69). See in particularly Robert Payne to Hobbes [1649?], in Collins, ‘Christian Ecclesiology’, 217–31. Beh., 109. 131 Ibid., 111.

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This was undoubtedly what enraged the Restoration clergy. We can chart this with some specificity, thanks to the accidental survival of one particular manuscript of Behemoth (of the seven known) in which eight consequential passages are struck out, either by Hobbes’s own hand or by the hand of James Weldon, his copyist. This manuscript was possibly a presentation copy made for Arlington. It is probably not Hobbes’s original, nor the copy owned by William Crooke from which the printed versions of Behemoth variously derive. Nevertheless, it enjoys pride of place among the existing manuscripts. The obscured material in the manuscript was surely not added for Arlington’s private benefit and then removed. Instead, it must have been found in Hobbes’s original text and obliterated, presumably to placate hostile censors. Later copies omitted the deletions, but Hobbes’s original copy must have included them. Reverse engineering of the still visible passages allows us to reconstruct the church’s hostility.132 Virtually all of the passages represent efforts to implicate the Church of England in Hobbes’s foundational critique of ‘popery’. Exposing the distinction of ‘Power Spirituall and Temporall’ as the root of civil war, Hobbes condemned not only the power of Popes but also ‘most bishops also in their severall Dioceses, Jure Divino, that is immediatly from Christ, without deriving it from the Pope’.133 This presentation of bishops as each a ‘divine right’ Pope in his diocese recalled similar arguments from Leviathan. Hobbes also suppressed a passage identifying Oxford as part of the medieval papal ‘designe’ of scholastic universities.134 Even more striking was a passage in which Hobbes explained the Long Parliament’s pronounced hostility to the bishops. Not only the MPs, Hobbes wrote, but ‘all the people of England were their enemies upon the account of their behaviour as being imperious’. Hobbes let this remark stand, but deleted a lengthy exposition: For indeed the most of them carryed themselves as if they owed their greatnesse not to the Kings favour and his Letters Patents, which give them their Authority, but to the merit of their own wisedom and learning, and handled men of quality that came under their jurisdiction much more rudely then they should have done, having in their conversation more of the passions of a scholler, then of the dignity of the office, being ever highly offended with those that dissented from their opinions, besides they were reputed a little too diligent in making the best of their revenue. 132

133

The manuscript is at St John’s College, Oxford. Ferdinand Tönnies first reconstructed the deleted passages. Their contextual significance is addressed in Collins, Allegiance (86–7) and Seward, Introduction to Beh. (92–6). Beh., 113. 134 Ibid., 159–60.

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Parliament had condemned ‘Ecclesiastical Tyranny’ because the bishops had ‘indiscreetly, and perhaps wickedly’ connived against the King’s ‘Supream Authority’.135 These remarkable criticisms recalled Hobbes’s approbative response, in 1641, to the Long Parliament’s campaign to abolish episcopacy ‘root and branch’.136 The suggestion that clerical arrogance endangered royal sovereignty again resonated in the political environment of the late 1660s. The anticlericalism of Behemoth reached a boiling vehemence at the start of the second dialogue. From Diodorus Siculus, Hobbes pulled details on the ancient Druids, the Persian magi, and the Egyptian priesthood, all part of ‘the conjuncture of philosophy and divinity’, whereby ‘power was acquired in civill matters’ by superstitious priests. Political stability and philosophy were alike thereby diminished. Recalling the slaying of priests at Abaton by the Nubian King Ergamenes, Hobbes concluded, dreadfully, of the ‘Presbyterian Ministers’ who started the civil war: ‘Had it not been much better that those seditious Ministers, which were not perhaps a thousand, had been all killed before they had preached. It had been (I confesse) a great Massacre, but the killing of a hundred thousand is greater.’137 This remarkably vicious comment targeted Presbyterians, but Hobbes roped in the episcopal-men. His interlocutor, in Behemoth, immediately responded to Hobbes’s enthusiasm for a purge by remarking: ‘I am glad the Bishops were out of this businesse. As ambitious as some say they are, it did not appear in that businesse, for they were enemies to them that were in it.’ But Hobbes batted down this backhanded defence: ‘Though they pretended a divine Right (not depending upon the King’s Leave) to the government of the Church, yet being but six and twenty in number, and not at all in favour with the people, how could they choose but be innocent.’138 Hobbes later expunged this text, which suggested that the bishops’ royalism was situational, and that their own principles undermined the Royal Supremacy as surely as those of the Presbyterians.139 Hobbes would pursue this indictment elsewhere in Behemoth. He condemned scholastic theology for breeding ‘disaffection, dissention, and finally sedition and civill Warre (as we have lately found by dear experience in the differences between the Presbyterians and Episcopalls)’. ‘Both parties’ had arrogated an ‘exemption from their obedience due to the Soveraigne power’.140 Hobbes stringently criticized Archbishop Laud, who was ‘generally 135 137

Ibid., 213, 224. 136 Hobbes to Devonshire, 23 July/2 August 1641, CH, 120–1. Beh., 231. 138 Ibid., 232. 139 Lev., 1116, 1106. 140 Beh., 232–3.

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hated’ for his ‘Papisticall doctrine’ of free will. Laud had generated outrage by forbidding ‘all Ministers to preach to the people of Predestination’ and for preferring Arminianism in the church.141 This flaying of the Arminians recalled Hobbes’s polemics with Bishop Bramhall on the question, polemics that he was reviving in print even as he completed Behemoth. Having lashed Presbyterians and episcopalians together as malefactors, Hobbes condemned ‘what harme may proceed from a liberty that men have upon every Sunday and oftner, to Harangue all the people of a nation at one time, whilst the State is ignorant of what they will say’. This was unheard of outside Christendom, as were ‘any Civill Warrs about Religion’.142 Hobbes rebuked Laud himself as a ‘very zealous promoter of the Church government by Bishops’ and for embroiling the State with ‘squablings’ about ‘Free Will’. Laud’s ‘standing upon puncilio’s concerning the Service booke and its Rubricks, [was] not in my opinion an argument for his sufficiency in affaries of State’.143 All of this provoked the Restoration clergy. These were not sentiments from Hobbes’s past now circulating in a new and awkward context. Hobbes purged them shortly after he devised them, and indeed the Restoration environment – as well as that of the civil war – was before his eyes when they were composed. In one suppressed passage, for instance, Hobbes scorned the bishops by regretting that they enjoyed ‘the authority of licensing the books’ produced by the Royal Society. The new wisdom of ‘naturall philosophy and Mathematicks’ should not be judged by ‘Divines who have little knowledge in Physicks, and none at all in Mathematicks’.144 One need not strain to read between the lines of this remark. The Restoration bishops continued to function, like the Magi and Druids of old, as purveyors of inane philosophy detrimental to the new scientific and political wisdom. That Hobbes himself chaffed beneath this intellectual policing would have been lost on few initiated readers. The topicality of Behemoth within the Restoration context was suggested by its attack on the sedition Hobbes found lurking in the popular The Whole Duty of Man (1657). This handbook of Anglican piety was almost certainly by the theologian Richard Allestree, chaplain to the King and provost of Eton. Prefaced by Henry Hammond, the work counselled neoStoic patience during times of trial and a sacramental form of piety. It advanced the Arminian theology so disdained by Hobbes. Nor could he have appreciated its exhortation that Christians privilege the fate of their 141

Ibid., 187–8.

142

Ibid., 189–90.

143

Ibid., 201–2.

144

Ibid., 233.

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souls over their ‘lump of flesh’ destined to ‘rott in the Earth’.145 This, to Hobbes, was a typical effort to undermine earthly sovereignty with reveries of eternity.146 Hobbes loosed a broadside against the Whole Duty. Do the Clergy in England pretend, as the Pope does, or as the Presbyterians doe, to have a right from God immediately to governe the King and his subjects in all points of Religion and Manners? If they doe you cannot doubt but that if they had number and strength, which they are never like to have, they would attempt to obtaine that power, as the others have done.147

Hobbes denigrated Allestree’s account of religious obligation, which rested it upon scriptural injunction without the interpretive mediation of sovereigns. He scorned the Whole Duty’s distinction between passive and active obedience, according to which unlawful commands were to be disobeyed but not resisted, and the wrath of sovereigns endured.148 Allestree wrote while Cromwell was in power, but this did not prevent Hobbes from characterizing his book as a ‘justification’ of the presbyterian rebellion. ‘It is this Doctrine that divides a Kingdome within it selfe’, Hobbes wrote, ‘whatsoever the men be Loyall or Rebells that write or preach it publickly. And thus you see, that if those Seditious Ministers be tryed by this Doctrine they will come off well enough.’149 In the late 1660s, with the king and bishops in deep discord, Hobbes lobbed a rhetorical grenade. This was probably a revenge attack, responding to a 1667 court sermon of Allestree, which attacked the politique Hobbism circulating at court.150 Allestree feared that court wits and atheists had now been armed with an imposing social and political philosophy.151 Only revealed religion and the sacrifice of material interest could secure a godly polity. Piety required ‘hard and cruel things to flesh and bloud’, earthly rewards of ‘fire and faggot’ in pursuit of ‘after-promises’.152 Explicitly targeting Leviathan, Allestree condemned those who understood interest as merely bodily and material, and who construed theism as mere prudence rather than natural law. Such worldliness promoted the lie ‘that Religion and a Deity were but dreams or artifices’. None of this, Allestree warned, would serve the ‘Interest of States of Princes’.153 He instead urged that Charles protect the confessional identity of the kingdom and treat his Supremacy as a sacred and dutiful custodianship. The ‘ecclesiastical state’ and the ‘secular’, Allestree had long warned the court, must both be settled on ‘just 145 148 150 151

[Allestree], Whole Duty of Man, preface. 146 Lev., 928. 147 Beh., 168. [Allestree], Whole Duty of Man, 278–281. 149 Beh., 171–4. Allestree, Sermon Preached before the King at Whitehall on Sunday Nov. 17 1667. Ibid., 10–11. 152 Ibid., 5, 28. 153 Ibid., 6–7; Parkin, ‘Baiting the Bear’, 440.

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foundations: Religion and Loyalty both running in their ancient current’. Otherwise, he feared, sectarians and atheists might, in league, cajole the King to indulge a ‘riot of faiths’.154 This case against Hobbesian statecraft was by now an established mode of attack. Hobbes’s old enemy Seth Ward had used the tactic in a court sermon of 1662, where he had urged Charles to protect the church and to spurn those ‘Writers of Politicks, Machiavel abroad and others nearer home’, who teach that religion ‘is prejudicial to Policy: and that to be a thorow-paced, a sincere and zealous Christian is to be dangerous to the state’.155 Ward had associated this MachiavellianHobbism with the ‘teaching soldiers’ of the rebellion.156 A certain nervous hope had abounded among the churchmen in 1661–2. By 1667, however, these clerical critiques of court Hobbism were laced with misgiving. They played a role in shaping the political purposes of Behemoth. These polemical dynamics further explain the otherwise untimely appearance of Hobbes’s final blast against his most famous clerical interlocutor, Bishop Bramhall. Bramhall, an ally of Clarendon’s, had died in 1663 as primate of Ireland.157 His exchanges with Hobbes dated back to the 1640s, and his final, most expansive critique appeared in 1658: Castigations of Mr. Hobbes . . . with an appendix concerning the Catching of Leviathan, or the Great Whale. Hobbes, in his eventual response, claimed to have learned of this book only years after it appeared. That the umbrageous Hobbes remained for so long unaware of such a powerful critic is difficult to credit.158 More likely his belated decision to publish a rejoinder reflected waxing intellectual confidence within an increasingly receptive context for his work in the late 1660s. In July of 1668, Hobbes bundled his Answer with his Historical Narration concerning Heresie and sent the whole to Joseph Williamson for a publishing license.159 This was apparently denied. It is nevertheless remarkable that Hobbes felt sufficiently emboldened to submit the work, which deprecated a church primate for behaviour becoming ‘neither a Bishop nor a Christian’, for being ‘fierce and unseemly’, and for blowing ‘Venome’ with his very breath.160 Hobbes’s decision to wheel once again against Bramhall’s free will theology was consistent with Behemoth’s claim that Laud’s Arminianism had fuelled the 154 155 156 157 158 159 160

Allestree, Sermon Preached at Hampton Court on the 29th of May 1662, 3, 31–2. Ward, Against Resistance of Lawful Powers, A Sermon Preached at White-Hall, November 5, 1661, 3. Ibid., epistle, 20, 35. ODNB; Jackson, Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity, 250–1. AB, to the reader. Hobbes to Williamson, 30 June 1668, CH, 699. Discussing this book, Hobbes referenced the recent or concurrent publication of his Latin Leviathan. AB, 45. AB, 13, 119, 129.

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civil war. The Answer to Bramhall also eagerly publicized the Bishop’s hostility to Hobbes’s Erastianism. Writing under Cromwell, Bramhall had condemned the notions that princes judge prophecy and revelation or might command subjects to deny Christ. Hobbes defended his own expansive view of the spiritual powers of sovereigns. This feature of Leviathan now redounded to the benefit of the restored monarchy, and Bramhall was no longer alive to remind readers of its original context.161 Hobbes’s Erastianism was thus given a royalist gilding, and Bramhall’s original, anti-Cromwellian text condemned for ‘heaving at the King’s Supremacy’.162 Bramhall had blasted Leviathan for surrendering doctrines to the ‘sharpest and most successful sword’ to fix them ‘not according to their truth or falsehood, but according to that influence which they have upon political affairs’. A decade later, Hobbes evasively replied that ‘being at Paris when there was no Bishop nor Church in England, and every man writ what he pleased, I resolved (when it should please God to restore the Authority Ecclesiastical) to submit to that Authority in whatsoever it should determine’.163 This faint suggestion that Leviathan expected or welcomed an episcopal restoration was risible. Bramhall had condemned Hobbes for ignoring divinity in his natural laws and for grounding political stability on mere interest and self-preservation. Hobbes did not retreat, but expressly blamed the civil war on religious zeal and credited hard-nosed interest for achieving the Restoration.164 And lest this be read as a blast only at sectarian fanatics, Hobbes suggested the culpability of the Caroline bishops as well: ‘I do not say there were Doctrine of other Men, not called Phanaticks, as pernicious to Peace, as theirs were, and in great part a cause of those troubles.’165 If the allusion here was obscure, Hobbes clarified. Defending the doctrinal authority of sovereigns, he wrote: ‘No man can deny it that has seen the Rebellion that followed the Controversies here between Gomar and Arminius.’166 The Arminianism of men such as Laud and Bramhall, as well as their devotion to divine right episcopacy, again stood condemned. The Answer to Bramhall is peppered with sarcasm about the ‘wisdom’ of bishops and condemnations of their seditious inclinations. In one particularly audacious passage, Hobbes even referenced with favour the Long Parliament’s condemnation of Joseph Hall’s Episcopacie by Divine Right Asserted.167 The rhetorical strategies adopted by Hobbes in his final exchange with the ghost of Bramhall clarify why the Restoration church feared the threat 161 163 164

162 Ibid., 62, 70–2, 74. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 108–9; on the importance of this legal hiatus, see Day, ‘Hobbes’s Changing Ecclesiology’, entire. Ibid., 4–6. 165 Ibid., 59. 166 Ibid., 61. 167 Ibid., 82.

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he posed. The Interregnum had exposed Hobbes as an enemy to King and church alike. The period of the Cabal now opened the possibility that monarchical and episcopal opinion might be divided, and indeed that the latter might be presented as a threat to the former. The Supremacy itself might be understood not as the bulwark of a sacrosanct church constitution, but as an indifferent aspect of a godless sovereignty. The political recalibration found in Behemoth, the Latin Leviathan, and Hobbes’s Answer to Bramhall responded to distinct contingencies of the late 1660s: the marginalization of the Independents; the restoration of a Laudian model of episcopacy; and the growth of a politique religious inclination at court. If Hobbes was forced to abandon Independency and accept some form of episcopal establishment, the growing estrangement of Charles II and his bishops opened a new space for assertive Erastian politics. The bishops, more hostile to Hobbes than ever, loomed as enemies both powerful and paradoxically vulnerable. The new political conditions also reshaped another aspect of Hobbes’s religio-political project. While he did not abandon his politique tolerationism, he was forced to jettison any his quasi-Independent ecclesiological project and to distance himself from the language of ‘free conscience’. His tolerationism was instead channelled into extended explorations of the history of orthodoxy and heresy. Designed to deconstruct these categories (and the clerical power they entailed), Hobbes’s histories of heresy advanced a kind of religious freedom. But Hobbes adapted his account to suit an age of renewed royal authority. Rather than individual conscience and voluntary religious practice, he now promoted a philosophical freedom in religious doctrine. Lurking behind this, furthermore, lay a positive project of rationalized religion, advanced by a potentially coercive politics of creative destruction and reform.

Hobbes, Conscience, and the Freedom of Philosophy Concluding his Answer to Bramhall, Hobbes observed that the colleagues of the late bishop had ‘not doubted to say publickly, that there be many Heresies in my Leviathan; I will add hereunto for a general answer an Historical relation concerning the word Heresie from the first use of it amongst the Grecians, till this present time’.168 His Historical Narration concerning Heresie and the Punishment thereof followed. It was one among many Hobbesian texts from this period dedicated to the linguistic, statutory, 168

AB, 131–2.

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and intellectual history of Christian heresy and orthodoxy. Hobbes justified these writings with reference to clerical and parliamentary manoeuvres against Leviathan.169 He sought to demonstrate that England’s medieval statutes punishing heresy had been repealed and that common-law heresy prosecutions were illegitimate. His heresy writings, like Behemoth and the Latin Leviathan, were self-apologias with a defensive purpose, but they were also acts of theological and philosophical assertion. Framed as philosophical histories, they refined both Hobbes’s theological project and his account of religious freedom. They sought to vindicate the reforming powers of the sovereign on matters of doctrine, to impair the intellectual authority of the clergy, and to establish philosophical freedom in the realm of religion. They attacked the commonplace notion of heresy while advancing specific heresies, and they advocated a minimal, rationalized version of Christianity as a dogma suitable for a more ‘civil’ religious establishment. Modern historians of toleration often operate with clumsy, social-scientific definitions of ‘religion’, which lump together all manner of religious opinion and practice under categories such as ideology. This anachronistic habit blurs distinctions that early moderns carefully maintained, distinctions demarcating the different categories (for instance) of atheism, blasphemy, and heresy. Equally undifferentiated for many moderns are the different early modern discourses characterizing individual religious freedom. Our vague category of ‘toleration’ tends to be casually applied to phenomena such as ‘free conscience’, which was distinctly different from tolerantia.170 To elide these distinctions is to risk falsely schematizing a history of enormous complexity. Thomas Hobbes deployed different rhetorics of religious freedom, for different ends, at various moments during his long career. In the Interregnum context, Leviathan tentatively deployed a discourse of ‘free conscience’ that Hobbes had previously denounced wholesale. Surprisingly, the work favoured the language of conscience over the idiom of prudential tolerantia, which is a term scarcely present in Leviathan. The original Leviathan had also advanced individual religious autonomy in the sphere of ecclesiology. It commended Independency, in part, for minimally burdening consciences, and thus envisioned individual free exercise as an 169

170

Accounts include Milton, ‘Hobbes, Heresy, and Lord Arlington’; Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Locke on Toleration’; Axtell, ‘Mechanics of Opposition: Restoration Cambridge v. Daniel Scargill’; Parkin, ‘Hobbism in the later 1660s’; Justin Champion, ‘An Historical Narration Concerning Heresie: Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Barlow, and the Restoration Debate over ‘heresy’; Thompson, ‘Hobbes on Heresy’. Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, 199–233; Walsham, Charitable Hatreds: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, chapter five.

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implication of a conscience freedom that was primarily internal. This preference for Congregationalist ecclesiology was untenable after 1660, and Hobbes suppressed it in his later writings. Indeed, he entirely abandoned positive theorizing about the church constitution, contenting himself with the negative case against clerical usurpation. The revisions to the Latin Leviathan also expunged the most expansive of Hobbes’s claims for free conscience. Bramhall had accused Hobbes of subordinating Christian conscience to power and of obliterating the distinction between an ‘erroneous Conscience’ and a ‘Conscience rightly informed’. Hobbes responded by berating the clergy for warping consciences. He insisted that ‘the true decision on Cases of Consciences ought to be grounded only on Scripture, or natural Equity’.171 In this context, he wrote that his ‘sence of Scripture and mine own conscience’ would not permit him to assert the eternity of an immaterial soul.172 But this exchange over conscience was a vestige of an Interregnum debate now advanced against a dead interlocutor. In general, Hobbes did not find such rhetoric timely during the Restoration. Even in the Answer to Bramhall, he retreated to the simple assertion that sovereignty could legitimately ‘bind the conscience’.173 In Behemoth as well, Hobbes reverted to a characterization of conscience as dangerous, empowering ‘Spiritual Doctors’ to be ‘judges in the inner court’.174 Hobbes’s Restoration commentary on conscience was more reminiscent of De Cive than Leviathan, sceptical of clerical control over conscience formation, and fearful of the political threat posed by ‘extraordinarily tender’ consciences. Hobbes’s Restoration texts broadly presented conscience as ‘a cloak of stubbornness’.175 Perhaps more surprisingly, they also continued to largely eschew an explicit discourse of prudential tolerantia. Hobbes’s obsessive interest in religious governance nevertheless endured, as did his concern to secure some measure of individual religious freedom. He now pursued these priorities in a new genre: sacred history, of both the church and Christian doctrine. These topics permitted a strategic redirection of Hobbes’s account of religious freedom. The topic of heresy was not new to Hobbes.176 As always, his Interregnum and Restoration projects shared important affinities. Leviathan introduced

171 174 175 176

AB, 100–1. 172 Ibid., 94. 173 Ibid., 117–20, 124. Beh., 113, 116, 140. Behemoth did recall the Rump voting ‘Liberty of Conscience to the Sectaries’ and abandoning the ‘severe imposing of odd opinions upon the People’ (338). Ibid., 171. Collins, ‘Hobbes, Heresy, and the Theological Project of Leviathan’, 6–33. The follow passages are more fully developed in this article.

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the topic of heresy in its eleventh chapter, discussing ‘ignorance of the signification of words’. From such ignorance it proceedeth, that men give different names, to one and the same thing, from the difference of their own passions: As they that approve a private opinion, call it Opinion; but they that mislike it, Haeresie: and yet haeresie signifies no more than private opinion; but has onely a greater tincture of choler.177

This analysis recalled aspects of Hobbes’s early ‘Elements of Law’, which had associated opinion with ‘conscience’, and in turn with both the ‘indocibility’ and ‘prejudice’ manipulated by dogmatists.178 Consequentially, Leviathan went further and associated private opinion with heresy specifically. This followed the established etymology of the word.179 The Jesuits Nicholas Serarius and Denis Pétau, for instance, both promoted the neutral definition of heresy as a mere ‘philosophical opinion’ or ‘school’.180 Sebastian Castellio exploited the etymology, claimed that he could ‘discover no more than this, that we regard those as heretics with whom we disagree’.181 Leviathan had appeared in a context of religious radicalization, when orthodox parties were raising piercing alarums in heresiological compendiums such as Ephriam Pagitt’s Heresiography (1645) and Thomas Edward’s wild-eyed Gangraena (1646). Ordinances designed to suppress heresy and protect orthodox ‘fundamentals’ appeared during the 1640s and 1650s.182 Hobbes’s characterization of heresy as a ‘choleric’ pejorative disdained this theological panic. His reaction echoed the Table Talk of John Selden: In Primitive times there were many Opinions, nothing scarce but some or other held: One of these Opinions being embraced by some Prince, and receiv’d into his Kingdom, the rest were condemn’d as Heresies, and his Religion, which was but one of several Opinions, first is said to be Orthodox, and so have continu’d ever since the Apostles.183

That the Greek word for heresy denoted ‘choice’ or opinion was well known to the fathers. For Tertullian heresy betrayed a ‘malicious will’ precisely because it represented a free choice to espouse ‘private fancies’.184 177 179 180

181 182 183 184

Lev., 158. 178 Hobbes, Elements of Law (Tönnies edition with corrections), 42, 62, 75, 140. Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 449–50. Pétau in his edition of Epiphanius’s Against Eight Heresies (1622), and Serarius in his Trihaeresium, seu Celeberrimis Tribus, apud Iudaeos, Pharisaeorum, Sadducaeorum, et Essenorum sectis (1604). Schmidt, ‘Hasidaeans and the Ancient Jewish Sects: Seventeenth Century Controversy’, 187–90. Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 18. Coffey, ‘A Ticklish Business: Defining Heresy and Orthodoxy in the Puritan Revolution’, 108–136. Table-Talk, being the Discourses of John Selden, 115. Loewenstein, Treacherous Faith: The Spectre of Heresy in Early Modern English Literature, 3.

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But humanists and radical reformers used the Greek connotations of the term to undermine theological foundationalism. This was particularly true during the civil war years. ‘Those tenets’, pronounced the Leveller William Walwyn, ‘which are now accounted heresies, may be countenanced truthes of the next age, as what formerly was accounted errour, is now esteemed truth.’185 Wrote the radical Independent John Goodwin, they ‘make the word Orthodox to signfie a man of their judgement, whether rotten, or sound; the word Heteredox or erroneous, a person differing in judgement from them, though in the truth’.186 To John Milton ‘heresie’ was ‘no word of evil note; meaning only the choice or following of any opinion good or bad in religion or any other learning, and thus not only in heathen authors, but in the New Testament itself without censure or blame’. Heresy and heretic, wrote Milton, were ‘Greek apparations’ and were ‘rail’d at to the people as in a tongue unknown’. Leviathan’s participation in this project of deconstructing heresy indicated Hobbes’s willingness to ally himself with the more radical religious forces of the 1650s. Leviathan considered heresy predominantly as a political problem. It rebuked those who ‘allow for a Law of Nature the keeping of Faith’, but who ‘nevertheless make exception of certain persons; as Heretiques, and such as use not to performe their Covenant to others’.187 Hobbes repeatedly decried Innocent III for promulgating the canonical rule that a king could be excommunicated for failing to ‘purge his Kingdome of Haeretiques’.188 He denounced Bellarmine for affirming that ‘it is not lawfull for Christians to tolerate an Infidel or Haereticall King’.189 Hobbes allowed that sovereigns enjoyed the right to condemn heresies. There was no ‘Judge of Haeresie amongst Subjects but their owne Civill Soveraign: For Haeresie is nothing else but a private opinion, obstinately maintained, contrary to the opinion which the Publique Person (that is to say, the Representant of the Common-wealth) hath commanded to bee taught.’ Thus, publicly authorized opinions could not, by definition, be heretical and sovereigns could never be heretics.190 But Leviathan counselled against heavy-handed enforcement of orthodoxy. Heresy hunting was the pastime of subversive medieval clerics. Hobbes recommended the pacific approach of the primitive church, where heresy – ‘private opinion which the Church has forbidden’ – did not even merit excommunication. The apostles, he argued, understood that the mania for theological complexity threatened both conscience and ecclesial union.191 185 188

Ibid., 10. 186 Goodwin, Fresh Discovery of the High Presbyterian Spirit, 14. 191 Ibid., 910–12, 962. 189 Ibid., 920. 190 Idem. Lev., 800, 802.

187

Lev. 226.

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Leviathan was paradoxical as regarded the public establishment of orthodoxy. Commentators have disputed the relative weighting of Hobbes’s gestures towards free conscience against his insistence that sovereigns patronize a doctrine of true obedience. Attention to Hobbes’s precise language provides some clarity. Leviathan was most liberal with conscience where it implicated theological orthodoxy and heresy properly understood. Seditious doctrines, atheism, blasphemy, and gross scientific error were not as generously treated. By framing his deference to conscience as, primarily, a matter of permitting heresy, Hobbes effectively freed private opinions only as regarded religious ‘mysteries’. Enforcing uniformity on arcana divina, if a sovereign prerogative, usually only augmented the soft power of the clergy. This particular framing chiefly liberated elite theological interpretation within universities, private studies, and printing houses. The Restoration Hobbes largely abandoned the discourse of free conscience and the notion of voluntary church membership and foregrounded the project of liberating heresy. This can plausibly be construed as a narrowing of his case for free religious exercise. In the 1660s Hobbesian religious freedom began to approximate a strictly philosophical freedom. Ecclesiastical history became a newly favoured genre for Hobbes. He situated the topic of heresy within the setting of the primitive church, the period of the major church councils, and then during the Middle Ages when orthodoxy hardened into militancy. This history was informed by a philosophical context: Hobbes’s own theology and its heretical reputation. In the Latin Leviathan, he recalled the collapse of episcopal authority, which removed ‘any power in England to try heresies’. Sects and individuals could write and publish freely. In Leviathan, Hobbes had made ‘use of the ordinary right to write freely’. In doing so ‘he fell into unheard-of doctrines, which have been charged with heresy and atheism by very many theologians’.192 In the Answer to Bramhall, Hobbes likewise wrote that the Interregnum afforded the freedom to ‘publish anything which the Scriptures suggested’.193 Hobbes’s historical deconstruction of heresy was partly intended to shield his own doctrines. His historical and philosophical heresy projects were thus braided together. Hobbes devised theology from sola scriptura, with a hermeneutic presumption that revelation could not contradict his own scientific principles. The theology of Leviathan was replete with affronts to conventional opinion, but three particular doctrines drew the most incessant hostility: Hobbes’s denial of spiritual beings; his mortalist account of eternal life and 192

Lev., appendix chapter 3, 1226.

193

HN, 17; Vita, 9; AB, 94.

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judgement; and his unique theory of the Trinity. All of these doctrines derived from Hobbes’s strictly materialist ontology, the non-negotiable foundation of both his natural and his civil science. Hobbes’s denial of all incorporeal beings was exceedingly difficult to sustain within Christian parameters. By not admitting a non-material soul that survived the death of the human body, Hobbes was driven towards the radical doctrine of mortalism, whereby the soul dies with the body and would resurrect only with the body.194 Luther had deployed this ‘sleeping’ soul notion as a weapon against Purgatory, but Calvin condemned it as a heresy. It circulated on the radical fringes.195 Mortalism could exist within a Christian context, as it did not deny eternal judgement.196 But Leviathan paired mortalism with an unusual theory of eternal punishment, which presented hell as an eternal earthly existence for a ‘succession of sinners’, each of whom would eventually die a final death.197 Hobbes’s mortalism was explicitly designed to thwart traditional understanding of ‘Life Eternall, and Torment Eternall’, which weakened crucial psychological impulses privileging the protection of life. Mortalism provided a soteriology consistent with reductive materialism but escaping an outright denial of human immortality.198 But many Christians suspected mortalism as a marker of atheism. Still more contentious was Hobbes’s notion of a material God. The radical otherness of God had been fundamental to Christian theology until the nominalists Scotus and Occam developed a ‘univocal’ metaphysics. This strained traditional patristic and scholastic thought, according to which God was understood not as one being above other beings, but as the very foundation of all being. Epicureanism and the new science drove univocal metaphysics towards materialism.199 Hobbes’s insistence that God must be material made a metaphysical claim out of the methodology of the new science. The result was an account of divinity (material, and yet omnipotent, omnipresent, and so forth) that most contemporaries found implausible. A material God, as one being among other beings, also distorted traditional arguments for God’s existence. God was no longer understood as the constant, abiding, ‘final’ cause of all things, but became ‘the initial temporal causal agency in a continuous 194 196 198 199

Lev., 706, 986–94. 195 Most famously in Richard Overton’s Mans Mortaltie. Burns, Christian Moralism from Tyndale to Milton. 197 Lev., 710–8, 994. Lev., 698; Johnston, ‘Hobbes’s Mortalism’, 647–63; McDowell, ‘Dead Souls and Modern Minds? Moralism and the Early Modern Imagination from Marlowe to Milton’, 559–92. Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 36–9; Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century.

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temporal series of discrete causes’. This at most suggested a ‘demiurge’, a particular kind of ‘divine world maker or cosmic craftsman’.200 Such a notion of God would enjoy some appeal among deists and purveyors of ‘natural design’ apologetics, but was alien to traditional patristic or scholastic theology. In Hobbes, causality was understood within a closed system of mechanistic physicality. God was presented as the ‘first’ among discrete material beings. If, finally, we presume with Hobbes that belief in God was generated by the need to explain ‘gaps’ in scientific knowledge, we see the profound vulnerability of this theology.201 Philosophically informed belief in God would collapse whenever natural science dispensed with the need for a higher being to explain material events. ‘Metaphysical demonstration’ was thus reduced to a series of ‘scientific hypotheses’.202 Classic theists did not present God as the first falling domino, but rather asserted that the world ‘wouldn’t exist here and now, or undergo change or exhibit final causes here and now, unless God were here and now, and at every moment sustaining it in being, change, and goal-directedness’.203 Hobbes rejected such notions of simultaneous and hierarchical causality in favour of a simplified notion of physical, chronological (efficient) causality. In Leviathan he wrote, ‘Curiosity, or love of the knowledge of causes, draws a man from consideration of the effect, to seek the cause; and again, the cause of that cause, till of necessity he must come to this thought at last, that there is some cause, whereof there is no former cause, but is eternall; which is it men call God.’204 This idea of God was ‘unnatural’, and so God was presumed to be ‘supernatural’ and nonmaterial. Hobbes inserted a material God into a closed system of natural causality, but at obvious risk to the plausibility of theism itself.205 Hobbes’s materialism also necessitated a third, notoriously unorthodox, doctrine: his account of the Trinity, first proposed in Leviathan: Our Savior therefore, both in Teaching, and Reigning, representeth (as Moses did) the Person of God; which God from that time forward, but not before, is called the Father; and being still one and the same substance, is one Person as represented by Moses, and another Person as represented by his Sonne the Christ. For Person being a relative to a Representer, it is consequent to plurality of Representers, that there bee a plurality of Persons, though of one and the same Substance.206 200 201 202 206

Hart, Experience of God, 22, 30–1. Feser, Last Superstition, 79–81; Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism. Feser, Last Superstition, 83. 203 Ibid., 86, 102–19. 204 Lev., 160. 205 Ibid., 674. Ibid., 772.

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Leviathan later defined the third person of the Trinity as ‘the Holy Ghost, that is to say, the Apostles and their successors, in the Office of Preaching, and Teaching, that had received the Holy Spirit, [and] have Represented him ever since’.207 Hobbes’s Trinitarianism placed Moses and Christ on an equal footing, thus perhaps undermining Christ’s divinity. Hobbes also undercut the eternity of the Triune God, in that the second and third persons of the Trinity only came into being in historical time. Hobbes seemingly offered a ‘juridical invention without any ontological reality’.208 ‘Personating’ was an idea crucial to Hobbes’s account of authority and its representation.209 Personating empowered ‘Feigned or Artificiall persons’ to represent the words and actions of natural persons.210 Traditional accounts of the Trinity construed God as existing ‘in Three Persons and one substance’, a single God but differentiated into separate ‘essences’.211 Hobbes deployed his concept of personating in order to present some credible account of the Trinity compatible with materialism.212 A ‘natural person’, in Hobbes’s ontology, could only be a physical being. A single physical God might be conceived, but not one existing in three separate beings. Moses, Christ, and the Apostles were thus defined as three ‘artificial persons’ representing (‘personating’) the single substance of God. Three ‘persons’ and one substance were thus maintained, but at the cost of implicitly undermining the divinity of Christ, the existence of the Holy Spirit, and the eternity of the Trinity. Hobbes rejected the Cappadocian Fathers, who introduced the Greek term ‘hypostasis’ (substance) to mean an ‘individual reality’ that might variously present a single being (or ‘ousia’). This was mere ‘canting’ to Hobbes.213 Not all of the new science drove towards reductive materialism. Descartes espoused a mechanistic ontology and also rejected formal and final causes, but he preserved a vestigial spiritual realm for God and the human soul. A dimensionless soul and God were granted some causal 207 209 210 211 212 213

Ibid., 776. 208 Matheron, ‘Hobbes, la Trinité, et les Caprices de la Representation’, 389. Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State’, 177–208; Vieira, Elements of Representation in Hobbes, 209–33. Lev., 244–52. For perceptive comment on this, see Nye, The Exceptions of Mr Edwards in his Causes of Atheism against the Reasonableness of Christianity, 8. Abizadeh, ‘Hobbes’s Conventionalist Theology, the Trinity, and God as an Artificial Person by Fiction’, entire. Lev., 72. Hobbes perhaps encountered this question in the scholarship of Petau, and criticism of the patristic account of personhood in Valla. Paganini, ‘Hobbes, Valla, and the Trinity’. However, see Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 479n.

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function in a universe otherwise governed by blind laws of matter and were construed as the miraculous intercessors accurately linking our senses to the exterior world. Cartesian dualism produced at best a ‘stop-gap’ account of divinity.214 ‘First I must describe the body on its own’, wrote Descartes, ‘then the soul, again on its own; and finally I must show how these two natures would have to be joined together and united in order to constitute men who resemble us.’215 Stricter materialists, confronting this paradox of spiritual entities somehow capable of causing material change, abandoned Cartesian dualism in favour of a spare, material account of the mind, the soul, and even God. This approach, however, contained a paradox: blind matter that could somehow achieve higher reason. Thus emerged the atheism of the modern, doctrinaire materialist.216 Hobbes’s culture, enticed by the new science but still versed in the nuances of classic Christian theology, recoiled from his efforts. Hobbes was rumoured an atheist as far back as the mid-1640s.217 In 1651, Hobbes, it was publically reported, was banished from the exiled court for ‘Atheism and grosse Impiety’.218 In the revised De Cive, Hobbes had fended off charges that his failure to include theism among the natural laws made him an atheist.219 Others would evidence his atheism by pointing to his scepticism of miracles, or his psychologized ‘projection’ theory of religion itself. But by far the most common evidence of Hobbesian atheism was his materialism. Hobbes may first have developed his theory of a corporeal God and soul in direct correspondence with Descartes in 1640–1.220 When he openly dismissed ‘incorporeal substance’ as ‘insignificant speech’, critics descended. To deny the incorporeal realm, John Wallis charged, was to deny souls, angels, and the ‘great and good God himself’.221 Bramhall wrote, ‘God himself must be gone for company, as being an incorporeal substance, except men will vouchsafe by God to understand nature.’222 The Cambridge Platonists Henry More and Ralph Cudworth rallied 214 215 216 217 218 219

220 221

Dear, Intelligibility of Nature, 28–38. Springborg, ‘Hobbes’s Challenge to Descartes, Bramhall, and Boyle: A Corporeal God’, 906. Buckley, Modern Atheism, chapter two. Baillie to Alexander Henderson, 13 August 1646, in Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, 2:388; Nicholas to Edward Hyde, 8/18 January 1652, BL Add. MS 4180, f. 54. Mercurius Politicus, 84 (8–15 January 1652), 1344. DC, 163–4. One contemporary reported that Hobbes ‘tooke no exception in being estimd a Atheist unless it were with malice’. William Joyner to Wood, 23 November 1694, Bodl. Wood MS F. 43, f. 209, quoted in Pritchard, ‘Last Days’, 186. Mori, ‘Hobbes, Descartes, and Ideas: A Secret Debate’, entire. Jesseph, Squaring the Circle, 311–5. 222 Bramhall, Catching Leviathan, preface, 471–2.

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against Hobbesian materialism, as did Robert Boyle. The Boyle lecturer Richard Bentley said of Hobbes’s critics: ‘They understand that Caballa well enough: that all is but juggle; and that a corporeal infinite God is downright nonsense.’223 The original Leviathan juxtaposed an unorthodox theology with a skeletal, deconstructive history of heresy. It had appealed to the Interregnum’s intellectual permissiveness, but had drawn hostile attention even then. Presbyterian booksellers petitioned against Leviathan as a ‘blasphemous’ book in 1652, and Richard Baxter demanded that the Protectoral parliament burn it.224 The leading Independents also worried about rampant heresy, but their hope to establish a public slate of ‘theological fundamentals’ was never achieved.225 Responding to this environment, Leviathan had advanced a minimal set of essential doctrines. The ‘Onely Article of Faith, which the Scripture maketh simply Necessary to Salvation, is this, that JESUS IS THE CHRIST.’226 Hobbes nevertheless offered a fuller reading of Christian theology, ‘new doctrines’ that he attempted to shield from the heresy-hunters. It was a time for new ‘Truth’, and so Hobbes offered his teachings for the ‘consideration’ of new authority, as the basis for a new set of public fundamentals.227 In 1657, he goaded John Wallis with the prospect that he might be deputized by the Protectorate to preach his doctrines as orthodoxy.228 By the mid-1660s, Hobbes’s chance to commandeer the pulpits had passed. However, in the space opened up by the fall of Clarendon, Hobbes’s heresy writings revived the theological project of Leviathan. His first strategy was to establish that the statutory heresy laws had lapsed. He repeatedly recounted the repeal of the relevant medieval statutes, and the abolition of the Court of High Commission in 1641. This, according to Hobbes’s brief, unpublished manuscript on heresy, left ‘noe Statute in force, nor any Law in England whereby to punish any man for any matter of Doctrine in Religion’.229 It was a point he repeated many times, though its relevance relied on the Hobbesian rejection of common law, because heresy was also understood to be a common law offense.230 This legal analysis was clearly self-defensive, but it also suggested that Charles II, like Cromwell, had space for authorizing ‘new truths’. By the late 1660s, 223 224 225 228 229 230

Parkin, Taming, 323–4, 392. Baxter, Humble Advice, 2–7; Collins, ‘Silencing Thomas Hobbes: the Presbyterians and Leviathan’, 478–88. Coffey, ‘Defining Heresy and Orthodoxy’, 108–36. 226 Lev., 938. 227 Ibid., 1139. Hobbes, Markes of the Absurd Geometry, 16–8. Mintz, ‘Hobbes on Heresy’, 414; HN, 156–7; DCL, 92. Milton, ‘Hobbes, Heresy, and Lord Arlington’, 522; Cromartie, Introduction to DCL, lv-lxii.

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Hobbes was presenting the Restoration, as he had the Interregnum, as a context in which ‘there no longer remained any power in England to try heresies’, and thus ‘writing and publishing whatever theology anyone wanted’ was possible. The abolition of High Commission, confirmed at the Restoration, had opened up space for philosophical liberty. Tellingly, when Hobbes sought a license for his Historical Narration concerning Heresy, it was a pejorative reference to the methods of Archbishop Laud’s High Commission that motivated Joseph Williamson to deny it.231 Behemoth and the Dialogue of the Common Law also criticized the ‘excesse of severity of the High Commission Court’.232 In the reign of Charles II, heresy designated no more than ‘private opinion’. There again existed an opportunity to remodel the public doctrine. Hobbes did recast elements of his system. The revised Leviathan, facing onslaught by figures such as Cosin, Bramhall, and William Lucy,233 abandoned Hobbes’s original theory of the Trinity. Quoting his own words about Moses ‘bearing the person of God’, Hobbes now wrote: It seems that in this passage the author wanted to explain the doctrine of the Trinity, although he does not name the Trinity. His purpose was pious, but the explanation is mistaken. For he seems to make Moses a person in the Trinity, on the grounds that he too did in some way bear the person of God (as doe all Christian kings). This was gross carelessness. If he had said that God created the world in his own person, redeemed mankind in the person of the Son, and sanctified the Church, in the person of the Holy Spirit, he would not have said anything other than what is in the catechism published by the Church.234

The surrender, framed as an act of deference to public doctrine, carried a whiff of expediency.235 If Hobbes abandoned his reinterpreted Trinity, he did not abandon the materialist ontology that necessitated it. Trinitarianism was a faith-based mystery, but materialism was the foundation of Hobbes’s philosophy and could not be compromised.236 The Latin Leviathan continued to insist that ghosts (spirits) are ‘thin aëreall bodies’, and Hobbes added new text tracing specious notions of ‘incorporeal substance’ to the Greeks.237 Nor did 231 233 236

237

Hobbes to Williamson, 30 June 1668, CH, 699. 232 Beh., 217; DCL, 99–103. Parkin, Taming, 236. 234 Lev., 1232; see also 248 note 26, and 776–8. 235 AB, 43–5. Contra Jonathan Sheehan, who sees Hobbes’s theology as radically contingent and ‘variable’. Hobbes did view most orthodox, Trinitarian theology in this way, but he did not adopt a radically relativistic account of natural philosophy. His own theology was coded natural philosophy. Sheehan, ‘Thomas Hobbes, D.D.: Theology, Orthodoxy, and History’, 270–1. Lev., 166, 620, 1184.

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Hobbes abandon, but rather reaffirmed, the mortalist teaching that the soul could exist only with the body.238 And in his last exchange with Bramhall, Hobbes finally – for the first time – expressly asserted what had been merely implicit in Leviathan: that God himself was ‘a substance that has Magnitude’, an ‘infinitely subtil Substance’.239 Furthermore, if conventional Trinitarianism could not survive philosophical materialism, Hobbes was determined to demonstrate this by means other than direct theological argument. This became the primary purpose of his philosophical histories of heresy. Hobbes was not naturally drawn to the erudite, humanist histories of philosophy that were a major enterprise of his era.240 He did not view history as a true science, and often presented it as a parade of deceptions.241 Sacred history was particularly prone to mendacity. Hobbes lived through the explosion in church history produced by the polemical pressures of the Reformation. Armed with new critical techniques and sceptical of medieval narratives of the ‘imperial’ church, Protestants such as Johannes Sleidanus and Matthias Flacius retold the ecclesiastical history of Christianity as a narrative of corruption and redemption. Counter-Reformation Catholicism rallied with its own scholarship, most notably Cardinal Cesare Baronius’s Annales Ecclesiastici. Beyond church apologetics, the seventeenth-century English universities produced a train of high-level, critical histories of ancient philosophy. Hobbes was undoubtedly versed in this critically sharpened (but deeply polemical) scholarship.242 Hobbes’s early writings generally contained only ‘divine history’ extracted from the scriptures, rather than ecclesiastical history deriving from the new critical scholarship.243 This divine history buttressed his political theory, demonstrating, for instance, the singular nature of the Jewish covenant with God or the political passivity of the primitive Christians. Leviathan offered only a smattering of historical exempla drawn from the ecclesiastical history of mature Christianity: Thomas Becket’s sedition, Pope Alexander III’s humiliation of Frederick Barbarossa, and so forth. Much of this illustrated Hobbes’s claim that the rivalry of spiritual and temporal power had made civil war endemic to Christendom. Leviathan also dipped into doctrinal history, reprehending the church’s adoption of the ‘demonology of the heathen poets’ and its circulation of ‘false or uncertain traditions, feigned or uncertain history’.244 238 242 243 244

Ibid., 706. 239 AB, 40. 240 Levitin, Ancient Wisdom. 241 Lev., 88, 958, 588. Collins, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Ecclesiastical History’, 520–44. Hobbes referred repeatedly to the Old Testament as ‘sacred’ or ‘holy history’. DC, 188, 194. Collins, ‘Hobbes Ecclesiastical History’, 527–32.

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Only in the 1660s did Hobbes compose sustained historical narratives of the church and its doctrine. History, for Hobbes, was literary rather than scientific, and his composition of it encouraged him to indulge in rhetorical flourishes reminiscent of the second half of Leviathan. Some have viewed this as a watershed in Hobbes’s assessment of the service that rhetoric might provide to philosophy, but Timothy Raylor has more convincingly argued that Hobbes’s newly rhetorical style merely marked the second half of Leviathan as a piece of polemic rather than philosophy.245 This is true as well of Hobbes’s heresy writings, which at best tried to reconcile Hobbes’s philosophy with scripture and chiefly worked to ridicule his theological and political opponents. Any resignation to the requirements of polemical fireworks, and occasional rhetorical disingenuity, would only have been heightened by the conditions of censorship that Hobbes now faced. History, if more rhetorical than philosophical, would suit the requirements of this new context well enough. It is also true that the qualities of Restoration churchmanship had made ecclesiastical history a newly prominent genre. The Church of England had for generations maintained the importance of church history. As the high church strengthened during the Laudian era, so did the authority of the consensus Patrum. During the Interregnum and Restoration – responding to sectarian hostility – patristic authority became central to the apologetics of the church. Hobbes did not have the erudition or scholarly patience to counter the learned scholarship emitting from men such as Herbert Thorndike and Henry Dodwell. He shared, in certain respects, the anti-patristic disposition of the Interregnum Independents (and of figures such as Chillingworth).246 Nevertheless, the pronounced historicism of Restoration clerical culture helps contextualize Hobbes’s own turn to ecclesiastical history.247 The genre became Hobbes’s primary rhetorical refuge: a seemingly neutral, scholarly genre that allowed for coded polemic. The pattern was set in the Latin Leviathan, which offered extensive passages on the history of the Church councils and the formation of early orthodoxy. This material would be elaborated in Behemoth, in the Dialogue on the Common Law, in Hobbes’s Historical Narration concerning Heresy, and in his Historia Ecclesiastica. Across these works Hobbes’s historical narration was designed to demonstrate the seditious purposes behind 245 246 247

Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, chapter nine; David Johnston, Rhetoric of Leviathan, chapter three; Raylor, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes, 245–71. ABL, 1:370. Quantin, Christian Antiquity, 191–210, 254–67; Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 467–76.

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clerical enforcement of orthodoxy. But Hobbes also cast doubt on the patristic formation of Christological and Trinitarian orthodoxy itself. He adopted Protestant church primitivism and applied it to doctrines that most Protestants considered foundational.248 Most of these late Hobbesian works were denied a license, but they circulated scribally. In the summer of 1676, for instance, the mildly tolerationist Earl of Anglesey secured a copy of the Narration from Crooke’s bookshop and passed it on to Thomas Barlow, bishop of Lincoln, for a response.249 Barlow produced a scathing reply, which did not shy from suggesting that Hobbes might be guilty of the capital offense of blasphemy.250 Aubrey acquired a scribal copy of the Historia Ecclesiastica.251 The lapsing of the licensing act and Hobbes’s death allowed Crooke to publish his star author’s heresy works. ‘Severall things of Hobbs are come out of late’, wrote one contemporary in the summer of 1679, ‘some of which were printed before and others not.’252 But Hobbes’s late heresy writings had been composed some years earlier, during the nadir of the Restoration church’s power. The earlier context is central to their politics. In these histories Hobbes, as ever, revealed little of the seam work of his writing. He was generally silent on his sources. He did mention the ubiquitous Eusebius once, and seems to have known his Byzantine successor Socrates Scholasticus.253 He was surely familiar with the major Protestant historiographers, though he did not generally follow them in celebrating the Reformation. (Leviathan associated both Presbyterians and episcopalians with the sins of popery, and Hobbes’s ecclesiastical histories generally petered out before the Reformation.) Hobbes probably borrowed widely from Petau, Valla, Sarpi, Grotius, Selden, and Vossius, who researched ancient pagan, Jewish, and Christian practices.254 Hobbes directly consulted Diodorus Siculus of Agyrium, particularly for details on the archetypal priestly religion of Egypt.255 Aubrey reported that Hobbes’s Historia Ecclesiastica was heavily influenced by Johann Clüver’s 1645 Historia Totius Mundi Epitome.256 Introducing the 1688 edition of 248 250 251 252 253 254 255

Quantin, Christian Antiquity, 41–4. 249 Bulman, ‘Hobbes’s Publisher’, 353. Barlow, ‘Animadversions on a MS Tract Concerning Heresy’, Oxford, Queen’s College MS 204, ff. 131–82. ABL, 1:364. Rev. Thomas Dixon to Daniel Fleming, 20 August 1679, Flemings in Oxford, 1:299. Lev., 1214–8; Martinich, Two Gods of Leviathan, 281; Hobbes perhaps knew Selden’s partial translation of the annals of the Alexandrian Patriarch Eutychius. Toomer, Selden, 600–13. Hobbes commended Selden’s Titles of Honor and seemingly borrowed from it his sceptical account of the phrase Dei gratia; Lev., 148, 378. He perhaps knew Selden’s De Dis Syris (1617). Beh., 226–31 et passim. 256 Springborg, ‘Hobbes and Cluverius’, 1075–78.

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Historia Ecclesiastica, Rymer suggested that Sir John Marsham’s Diatriba Chronologica (1649) was a source.257 How much confidence Hobbes had in any of these authorities is open to doubt. In the Latin Leviathan, perhaps following the sceptical Jean Daillé, he remarked of the Council of Nicaea that ‘there are those who say that those records do not exist, having been corrupted by the Arians, and for that reason suppressed by the Catholics’.258 Even as he wrote more of it, history remained for Hobbes a fundamentally rhetorical art. From this eclectic reading, Hobbes produced luridly coloured narrative. Dmitri Levitin judges Hobbes’s history an ‘idiosyncratic account that stood to the side of developments in contemporary scholarship’. Among Levitin’s érudits it may have had ‘no direct influence at all’, but this judgement underestimates the broader effect among intellectual elites exerted by Hobbes’s historical writings.259 Figures such as Charles Blount, John Aubrey, Peter Pett, and Arthur Annesley read them with varying degrees of appreciation. Clergymen from John Barlow to John Tillotson read them with alarm.260 For Protestant readers, the less controversial aspects of Hobbes’s history condemned the power plays of the medieval church. Behemoth, for instance, presented such innovations as confession, clerical celibacy, and transubstantiation as clerical tricks to master men and minds. The universities circulated these carefully crafted absurdities of scholasticism. The mendicant orders acted as travelling shock troops hostile to the sovereign power of monarchies. None of this can be taken seriously as history. Crude polemic, it would nonetheless have appealed to Protestants, who might only have been scandalized by Hobbes’s association of Presbyterians and the Church of England with these popish outrages.261 Far more dangerous was Hobbes’s doctrinal history. To expose the inquisitorial impulses of the medieval church was one thing. To deconstruct the theology of the early Councils was another matter entirely. This new line appeared first in the Latin Leviathan. Hobbes heavily revised the polemic against ‘vain philosophy’ and ‘fabulous tradition’ of Chapter 46. He narrowly defined philosophy as ‘knowledge acquired by reasoning, from the manner of the generation of anything, to the properties; or from the properties, to some possible way of Generation of the same’. Excluded were both ‘supernatural Revelation’ and ‘reasoning from the 257 258 259 260 261

Rymer, ‘to the reader’, in HE, 593; on this text and Marsham, see Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 157. Lev., 1216; Daillé’s influence is Malcolm’s speculation; Quantin, Christian Antiquity, 264. Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 479. Tillotson to John Worthington, 22 April 1669, quoted in Parkin, Taming, 284. Beh., 108–11, 112–24.

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Authority of Books’. Theology was left teetering. The original Leviathan had offered an uncharitable history of the origins of philosophy in ancient Indian, Persian, and Egyptian cities, then among the Greeks. The ‘naturall philosophy of those Schools was rather a Dream than Science, and set forth in senseless and insignificant Language’.262 The revised Leviathan added new material on early Christians who esteemed Aristotelian philosophy. ‘Half-baked’ Christian philosophers of antiquity retained the ‘dogmas of their own masters’. ‘This was the origins of sects (in Greek “heresies”) in the Church of Christ – that is, they arose from disagreements among those newly converted pastors over the nature of Christ.’263 Hobbes catalogued these opinions: the Gnostic Valentinus’s allegorical reading of Christ’s generation; the Gnostic Apelles’s argument that Christ was a ‘phantasm without a body’; Anthropomorphites who gave to God the Father an ‘organic’, human body; and Subordinationists who viewed Christ as only partially divine. Of the early synods, Hobbes wrote, the opinions ‘they condemned, they called “heresies”, and the ones they confirmed, they called the Catholic faith’. Arianism was the most widespread of these heresies, necessitating the Council of Nicaea. Of Nicaea the Latin Leviathan was initially diplomatic, suggesting that its members ‘took no account of Greek philosophy’ in holding that Christ was begotten of the ‘same substance with God’. ‘But in expositions of the Nicene Creed . . . not so much tenderness was shown for the meaning of the Scriptures.’ Hobbes specifically condemned the inherently dualist claim of the Athanasian Creed that Christ was human and divine ‘in the same way that the rational soul and flesh are one man’. He also rejected, as polytheistic, the claim that the Trinity constituted ‘three substances’ or ‘hypostases’. Such efforts to ‘explain the mystery’ encouraged Christians to posit immaterial substances. ‘These things, and suchlike doctrines, are the opinions of individual people, not decrees of the Church; and therefore, even if they are not impious, they should nevertheless not bind consciences.’ Generations later, Aristotelianism took hold. Urged by Rome, monarchs established universities to purvey scholastic dogma, and then found themselves snared in the clergy’s coils. Hobbes intemperately unburdened himself against the scholastic apparatus of form, essence, ‘separated essences’, accident, and final cause. New in the Latin Leviathan was Hobbes’s effort to locate the history of Christian orthodoxy and heresy within this tale of ignorance and corruption.264 The book condemned the 262

Lev., 1052–60.

263

DCL, 92–4.

264

Lev., 1063–76.

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theological tradition of Trinitarianism – from the Athanasian Creed through scholasticism – as a philosophical barbarity.265 This new material, associating ancient Christian orthodoxy with the ‘vain speculation’ of the Greeks, was not off-handed. The first of the new appendices of the Latin Leviathan concerned the Nicene Creed, and the second, in suggestive juxtaposition, concerned heresy. Hobbes’s exposition of the Creed purported to vindicate it but did so by laboriously and tendentiously reconciling it with Hobbesian science. The untrained church fathers themselves ‘were not right in wanting to explain that mystery. For what is it to explain a mystery, if not to destroy it, or make a mystery not a mystery?’266 Of the creedal affirmation that Christ was of one substance with the Father, Hobbes wrote that it had brought ‘disturbances, banishments, and murders into the ancient Church’. He implicitly criticized both the Nicene and Athanasian creeds for claiming the resurrection of a non-corporeal soul.267 He rebuked the Aristotelian conceptions of essence, substance, and incorporeal spirits as foolish efforts to pin down the ‘inexpressible’.268 Hobbes’s discussion of the Creed crippled its philosophical authority and suggested that theological creeds could never be scientific. Nor would Hobbes accept that ‘men’s salvation turns on such small verbal quibbles’. He who believes in Jesus Christ and repents of his sins, even if he is not a theologian, must nevertheless be saved . . . Those things that are said by the Fathers, going beyond the Holy Scripture in their particular explanations of the Faith, do not oblige Christians, each one of whom must search out his own salvation in the Holy Scriptures at his own greatest peril – not at the peril of anyone else.269

The Creeds threatened the minimalist doctrine favoured by Hobbes’s own theology and trammelled the individual search for salvific knowledge. But private opinions sometimes achieved the status of orthodoxy. Behind that process lay much clerical mischief. Hobbes again defined heresy as ‘the doctrine of any sect whatsoever’, and traced the term to Greek philosophical debate. ‘Heresy’ carried no ‘reproach’ and did not necessarily imply error. Only Christians (‘so far as I have been able to find out from histories’) made the term ‘heretic’ a grave condemnation, largely to enforce tendentious accounts of the Trinity.270 The pivot point of Hobbes’s narrative was Constantine’s effort, with the Council of Nicaea, to end the ‘sedition and slaughter’ in Alexandria over 265 266

Malcolm speculates that Hobbes was familiar with Vossius’s attack on the Athanasian creed. See Lev., note ac, p. 1067. Lev., 1150. 267 Ibid., 1158, 1162. 268 Ibid., 1182, 1184. 269 Ibid., 1188. 270 Ibid., 1194.

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Arianism. Later councils at Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon condemned more heresies. In coming centuries, the process ramified. The medieval papacy increased in riches and power, convened general councils by his own authority, having paid no heed to the authority of the emperors or the petty kings of Italy and even dared to excommunicate some of those kings and emperors as heretics. So, with the passage of time, they condemned as heresies all doctrines that seemed either to impede the rise, or take away from the achievement, of ecclesiastical power. And thence arose those numerous heresies, on account of which (after the publication of Luther’s writings) so many Christians were burned in this Kingdom of England and in other countries – until, when the princes of those countries finally awoke, they were liberated from such heavy persecution and Roman slavery.271

Hobbes signalled sympathetic regard for heretics in this passage, writing that Lutherans, Anabaptists, and even Arians – if perhaps erring – nevertheless held ‘Christ to be the true Messiah, and Jesus Christ to be the Son of God’.272 The Dialogue of the Common Law noted that the chief victims of English heresy persecutions were Lollards, who were burned ‘for such Doctrines, as by the Church of England, ever since the first year of Queen Elizabeth have been approved for Godly Doctrines, and no doubt were Godly then’.273 Christianity itself had once been a mere heresy, existing in the ‘same relation to the established religion in the Roman Empire as heresy has to the Catholic Church today’.274 These remarkable passages were followed by a concession that doctrine required some policing in commonwealths, ‘lest seditions and civil wars spring up’. For Hobbes, this had been achieved with mixed results in England. Mary had been an unmitigated disaster. Elizabeth, deploying her reclaimed spiritual Supremacy, forbade the church from pronouncing ‘any doctrine heretical that had not been declared heretical’ in the first four general councils. ‘The Anglican Church was’ at this point similar to the Roman Church under Constantine the Great; and so it remained until the seventeenth year of King Charles I, who, more or less compelled by the requests of his subjects (who found the power of the bishops unbearably great), revoked that ordinance of Elizabeth, leaving the bishops with only their ordinary power, namely, the power to make canons, which could become ecclesiastical law with the king’s consent.275 271 272 273

Ibid., 1196–8. This went well beyond where most Protestants were willing to go. Loewenstein, Treacherous Faith, 133, 152–3. DCL, 98. 274 Lev., 1200. 275 Ibid., 1202.

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Thus did Hobbes again flay the Caroline church, and argue that Charles II’s monarchy – like the Interregnum regimes – enjoyed a state of affairs where ‘to err, to be deceived, or to have a wrong opinion is not a crime in itself; nor can an error become a crime so long as it is confined to a person’s heart’. The punishment of heresy had also experienced a history of inflation. Coercive punishments became possible under Constantine, but only the clergy were punished and only with expulsion from their churches. Arius, indeed, recanted and was reinstated. Athanasius, the great Trinitarian, resisted the authority of the Emperor, Hobbes rather pointedly observed and was exiled. ‘Nor should that be surprising’, he wrote, given the habit of grand theologians to flaunt ‘the rights of princes’.276 Elsewhere Hobbes swiped at Athanasius as ‘the most fierce of the Catholicks’, rightly ‘banished’ by Constantine.277 Constantine defined orthodoxy in order to ‘prevent the Christians, and especially the soldiers, from dividing into factions and killing one another’. But he did not order executions, nor did his successors. Pope Alexander III, trampling the ‘laws of all princes’, supposedly innovated by executing heretics.278 Hobbes subtly associated the heresy hunting impulses of Catholicism with episcopal churchmanship (the ‘Rump of the Roman Tyranny’279). Sovereign religious authority – under Constantine or under the English Royal Supremacy – should remain wary of heresy hunting as a threat to its own prerogative. Wrote Hobbes, ‘there have been more Christians burnt and killed in the Christian Church by Ecclesiastical Authority, than by the Heathen Emperors Laws for Religion only without Sedition’.280 The Latin Leviathan set the terms of Hobbes’s ecclesiastical history, but he would rework and accentuate aspects of it. He amplified his criticism of the early church fathers. The Historical Narration concerning Heresy slighted those rhetoricians and philosophers converted by the Apostles, some ‘feignedly, for factious ends, or for need’. Loyal to their old teachers, each drew ‘the Scriptures everyone to his own Heresie’, interpreted them with ‘bias’, and created scandalous ‘Dissention’. The fathers of Nicaea thus prepared the ground for Aristotelian ‘School-men’.281 Hobbes became more critical of Constantine himself. In the Dialogue of the Common Laws he recalled Constantine promising to uphold the doctrinal improvisations of the bishops: ‘The Emperor (I think), was here 276 278 281

277 Lev., 1210 HN, 154; Lim, Mystery Unveiled: the Crisis of the Trinity, 219–21. Lev., 1212. 279 AB, 126. 280 Ibid., 75. HN, 137–8, 153; Levitin’s judgement that Hobbes’s narrative was ‘incredibly polite about the anteNicenes and the Nicenes’ (reserving blame for later fathers) is an overstatement. Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 478. DCL, 94–5.

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a little too indifferent.’282 The Historical Narration concerning Heresy similarly concluded of Constantine’s deference: ‘This may perhaps seem a greater indifferency than would in these dayes be approved of.’283 The creedal distinction of substance and essence was not scriptural, Hobbes wrote, and not by Constantine ‘sufficiently understood’. In this again appeared the ‘indifferency of the Emperor, and that he had for his end, in the calling of this Synod, not so much the Truth as the Uniformity of the Doctrine.’284 Trinitarianism resulted, in short, from a poorly designed civil religion. Hobbes’s account of popish heresy formation dominated Behemoth’s deep history of the causes of religious war. Theoretically, the early church councils enjoyed no obligatory force other than the Emperor’s, but the church usurped doctrinal power by claiming that conversion to Christianity – for a King as for a subject – required submission to the ‘Bishop that converted him’. So empowered, clergy alleged royal heresy (or laxity against heresy) to absolve subjects of their allegiance.285 It was in the interest of churches, and not sovereignty, that heresy be ‘cruelly prosecut[ed]’. ‘Consequently Haeresy may be said to bear the same relation to the Power Spirituall that Rebellion doth to the Power Temporall, and is suitably to be persecuted by him that will preserve a Power Spirituall, and Dominion of men’s consciences.’286 Hobbes thus accepted, but evaluated very differently, Thomas More’s understanding of heresy as ‘treason’ against the Church.287 As the Restoration church targeted him, Hobbes reminded the King that the apparatus of heresy prosecution did not serve the interests of sovereignty. If the bishops, Hobbes wrote to Bramhall, ‘think that every opinion they hold, though obscure and unnecessary to Salvation, ought presently to be Law, then there will be clashings innumerable, not only of Laws, but also of Swords, as we have found it too true by late experience’.288 Hobbes’s turn to philosophical history culminated with his extensive, idiosyncratic poem, Historia Ecclesiastica. This work was completed by the fall of 1671.289 Aubrey reported that it was partially written during the Interregnum. Its marked anticlericalism and theological scepticism would certainly have suited the tenor of that decade.290 But those themes also 282 284 285 288 290

DCL, 96. 283 HN, 141. Ibid, 143; this backhanding of Constantine could generate real outrage. See Dowell, Leviathan Heretical, 34. Beh., 115, 119–20. 286 Ibid., 116. 287 Loeweinstein, Treacherous Faith, 24. AB, 106, 122. 289 When James Weldon made a copy. Springborg, Introduction to HE, 86. ABL, 1:338; even vaguer are reports of 1664 that Hobbes was putting his ‘entire philosophical system into Latin verse’. Du Verdus to Hobbes, 24 July/3 August 1664, CH, 625.

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resounded in Hobbes’s late writings. Some reports suggested that Hobbes had burned the poem when the bishops began to scrutinize him.291 Whether this happened to the original draft of the Historia Ecclesiastica is impossible to say. But that Hobbes, after 1667, may have revived a composition begun during the more radical days of the Interregnum would be telling. It had little hope of receiving a license, but circulated as a scribal publication. The Historia Ecclesiastica ranged broadly over the causes of religious war, the natural origins of religion among fearful and ignorant humans, and the avarice of the medieval papacy.292 Hobbes traced theological corruption to its earliest point, the Pauline age. Christianity’s very rise coincided with ‘the greatest abundance of false philosophers;/ the tide of wickedness was at the full’. The Church welcomed these holy charlatans, whose rhetorical trickery could lure converts. ‘The Faith’, Hobbes wrote with remarkable irreverence, ‘grew as a parasite.’293 The fathers were dupes ‘thunderstruck’ into a ‘stupefied silence’ by Hellenizing philosophers.294 Hobbes again criticized Constantine himself, for ‘heedlessly’ conceding ‘the Fathers rights to which they were not entitled’. The ‘Nicene Church played the Sphinx’ in order to ‘take sovereign power away from Kings’.295 Amidst doctrinal warring, the ‘names of heretic and Catholic were born’. The zeal of Christian soldiers ‘made Constantine victorious, and he bathed the earth in the blood of those who did not believe them’, wrote Hobbes, ambiguously. But this dogma eventually redounded to the benefit of the church.296 As for the Council of Nicaea itself, its proceedings were an ignoble parade of accusations, infighting, and dishonour.297 ‘Do you think this was the path to peace’, demanded Hobbes. ‘What is Arius to us, what is Athanasius to us?’ he wrote, provocatively unwilling to distinguish the orthodox patristic from his heretical foe. ‘Full salvation is found in the sacred texts alone.’298 The Historia Ecclesiastic proceeded through the Nicene Creed line by line, echoing the Latin Leviathan. Trinitarianism emerged as a farrago of philosophical nonsense incompatible with Hobbes’s scientific doctrines. Hobbes observed, in a typical jab, that ‘what might be in dispute between “the not-begotten” and the “begotten not in time”, not all men understand./ Nor (does everyone 291 292 293 296 297

Weldon to Aubrey, 4 December 1674, quoted in Milton, ‘Hobbes, Heresy, and Lord Arlington’, 511. The modern translation by Springborg, Stabelin and Wilson confuses this somewhat by consistently translating ‘haeresis’ as ‘sect’ (a defensible but partial translation). Hobbes, HE, 355. 294 Ibid, 323. 295 Ibid., 357–9, 368–71, 395, 449, 503. Ibid., 405; a possible source was Richard Crackenthorpe, The Defense of Constantine (1621), which was found in the Cavendish library. HE, 369, 71. 298 Ibid., 419.

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understand) in whose language the Word can be a “substance”, or how it can be understood in the mind.’299 The Nicaean Creed was a doomed effort to shape religion ‘into some impossible system’.300 The central tenets of Christianity were mere inanities in the mouths of the usurping fools of Nicaea. ‘It was not right’, wrote Hobbes, ‘that the Fathers tried to put into words mysteries which their own minds could not comprehend.’301 This ‘dense darkness’ was the ‘first step toward supremacy for the clergy’.302 Hobbes’s narration again worked in both ancient and modern times. Historia Ecclesiastica scarcely commended the Reformation as an effective check on clerical power. Aubrey, indeed, reported that the poem’s original title was the History of the Encroachment of the Clergie (both Roman and Reformed) on the Civil Power.303 Luther received a few vaguely favourable mentions,304 but the Reformation hardly figures in the poem and in general the ‘new lights of this age’ stood in the dock with the medieval papists. Hobbes again side-swiped the Restoration churchmen as enemies to the spiritual authority of the monarchy. ‘Our king is for us both a Moses and an Aaron;/ I do not know what sort of Kingdom the Doctors want.’305 In a reference to the civil war, and the ‘sects’ who ‘sated savage Mars with much blood’, Hobbes included episcopal-men alongside Presbyterians, Independents, and the radical sects.306 When Rome was ‘shipwrecked’ in England and lost its power, ‘the prelates nevertheless escaped and carried off a few fragments of their ancient rights intact’. Opposed by the Presbyterians, ‘these men’ went to ‘war over their religion’. This reprise of the thesis of Behemoth clarified the immediate relevance of Hobbes’s ecclesiastical history.307 The clerks and theologians were a threat ‘now too’. ‘I am astonished’, Hobbes wrote, ‘at the foul invective in the books of the theologians, and I / am angry and read them with shame./ For whoever dissents from theologians immediately hears from all sides,/ “blasphemer”, “atheist” and “heretic”.’308 Hobbes blamed ‘the abominable teaching which came out of Oxford and Cambridge’ for the civil war and regicide.309 In this manner he linked his own philosophical project to the fortunes of kings, and arrayed both against the ‘clergy, whose wisdom is scorned and whose intelligence is considered paltry’. This last remark could have been written either in the 1650s or in the late 1660s.310 Hobbes’s critical histories of heresy had both an institutional and an intellectual dimension. In the former respect, they attacked the concept 299 303 306

Ibid., 391. 300 Ibid., 305–7. 301 Ibid., 383. 302 Ibid., 395. Milton, ‘Hobbes, Heresy, and Lord Arlington’, 510. 304 HE, 507, 573, 577. 305 Ibid., 309. Ibid., 499. 307 Ibid., 501–3. 308 Ibid., 353. 309 Ibid., 445. 310 Ibid., 353.

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as an instrument of popery; in the latter, they offered an implicit apology for specific Christian heresies by deconstructing orthodoxy, scraping away accretions that had made Christian theology incompatible with Hobbesian materialism. A sovereign fully commanding his due spiritual authority, armed against ‘fabulous’ philosophy, might set Christian doctrine on its true foundations. This required the positive assertion of a minimal fundamental theology, but also the purging of entrenched orthodoxy. What emerged was not a neutral case for religious freedom, per se, but a philosophical freedom to interrogate orthodoxy and promote a more scientifically defensible theology. As we have seen, Hobbes explicitly linked his discussions of heresy to his own philosophical achievements and their notoriety. At the end of his Historical Narration, he wrote that the ‘putting down of the High Commission’ and the episcopacy had opened space for the appearance of ‘a Book called Leviathan . . . written in defence of the King’s Power, Temporal and Spiritual’. At the Restoration, the King ‘restored the Bishops, and pardoned the Presbyterians’, and both had rounded on Leviathan with specious accusations of heresy. To Hobbes the ‘fierceness’ of the divines proceeded ‘down from before the Council of Nice to this present time’.311 Likewise, the Historia Ecclesiastica narrated how lordly clergy ‘cut the throats of many honest heretics (such as we are said to be today)’.312 Hobbes’s account of heresy worked in dual time. Charles was advised to act as a new Constantine, seeking stability and peace, but with a heightened wariness of clerical meddlers. Hobbes was remarkably deferential to the doctrinal authority of sovereigns. (‘No Fraud can be pious in any man’, he rebuked Bramhall, ‘but him that hath a lawful Right to govern him whom he beguileth.’313) But sovereigns should not be dupes, defending whatever ‘obscure doctrines’ the clergy threw up. ‘The King should enforce peace according to the laws and do away with controversy . . . In other matters let the pen be free and let there be free speech, so long as it does not teach bad morals.’314 This was a very personal priority. ‘Do you forbid me’, wrote Hobbes, anticipating a Lockean line of reasoning, ‘from employing my own reasoning, when what is most important to me has to be pursued at my own peril?’315 The Restoration thus occasioned shifts in Hobbes’s thought on the problem of religious liberty. By and large he abandoned the language of free conscience. Though he championed the Royal Supremacy, he said little explicit about indulgence for nonconformists. He purged his writings 311

HN, 160, 100.

312

HE, 493.

313

AB, 20.

314

HE, 447.

315

Ibid., 445.

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of any sympathy with the Independents. Hobbes did not prove to have a durable interest in a tolerationist settlement of multiple church forms, or in the liberty of individuals to conscientious free worship. In new circumstances, Hobbes redirected his tolerationism towards the debate over the legal and historical status of heresy. He sidelined the individual worshipper and foregrounded the philosophical manipulation of clerical conspirers.316 The question was no longer the nature of ancient ecclesiology, but antiquity’s festering theological legacy. The age of Athanasius and Constantine held lessons for the age of Sheldon and Charles II. Hobbes’s church histories urged Charles to recognize the political peril of the church’s doctrinal power. To strip away theological complexity was to destroy a nest of sedition and to maximize the sovereign’s freedom. But as a foundation for individual religious liberty, Hobbes’s sacred history was narrow. It justified individual speculation, perhaps an individual license to write freely, but not necessarily a plurality of congregations and creeds. Hobbes’s paradigm of the worthy heretic was Hobbes himself, exercising a freedom of philosophy, rather than a freedom of religious worship. This liberty was fundamentally private and individual, the realization of Hobbes’s doctrine – one highly resonant within the liberal imaginary – that fear and ignorance made ‘in every man his own Religion: which hath place in the nature of man before Civill Society’.317 As Bishop Bramhall, with insight, wrote, ‘It seemeth T[homas] H[obbes] thinketh there is no divine worship, but internal.’318 The recast tolerationism of Hobbes’s last writings perhaps reveals more than the tentative defence of conscience and church voluntarism found in Leviathan itself. What he finally sought was not a freedom of worship, but a freedom of belief and speculation, gifted by sovereignty and justified by the sovereign’s interest. In weaving together a critique of clerical power and a deconstruction of Trinitarian orthodoxy, Hobbes anticipated by decades intellectual patterns of the 1690s that are often interpreted as a prelude to the Enlightenment. Locke, as we shall see, would certainly become embroiled in those later controversies, but he was also exposed to Hobbes’s initial and influential anticipations of them. For his part, Hobbes would find revising his own legacy an elusive project. His efforts at adapting his political and religious thought, and repositioning their politics, could only achieve so much. The English 316

317

Justin Champion distances Hobbes from tolerance and associates him with an ‘ideological laïcité’, or an ‘Enlightenment fundamentalism’. Champion, ‘Godless Politics: Hobbes and Public Religion’, 46–7. Lev., 216, also 170. 318 AB, 103.

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Leviathan remained by far his more influential work. That book, with its more overt appeal to sectarians, its rhetoric of tolerated individual conscience, and, above all, its deference to the spiritual prerogative of sovereigns, would enjoy its own Restoration career. If Hobbes kept his distance from the complex politics of Indulgence, ‘Hobbism’ would nevertheless be implicated in them.

chapter 3

Locke and the Restoration Politique

During the early Restoration, at Christ Church, John Locke taught rhetoric and was briefly censor of moral philosophy. His family’s political past did not hinder him, though it misleads to call him ‘a man of the right’.1 In 1663, the dean of Christ Church, John Fell, co-signed a testimonial to Locke’s orthodoxy and upright character.2 This coincided with a renewed purge of university non-conformists and was perhaps written to protect Locke. Despite their different perspectives, and though he would eventually abandon Locke, Fell had regard for him.3 In 1663, Locke’s friend John Strachey successfully dissuaded him from the ‘tedious’ occupation of a clergyman.4 According to the conditions of his studentship, he would soon be required to enter holy orders. In November of 1666, however, the King would dispense with the requirement in his case.5 With no small irony, Locke thus benefitted from one of the most contested prerogative powers of the Restoration and was able to keep his studentship through an exercise of royal indulgence. Medical studies dominated Locke’s attention during these years.6 Anthony Wood placed him within a scientific club established by the chemist Peter Stahl and described him as a ‘turbulent spirit, clamorous, and never contented’.7 This is not an impression confirmed by other evidence. Locke’s Oxford teaching career did produce a significant engagement with theories of natural law, in a series of manuscript essays or lectures written around 1663–4. These were probably teaching papers, composed after exchanges with Gabriel Towerson.8 The long-term significance of 1 3 4 5 6 8

Cranston, Locke, 67. 2 ODNB. Damaris Masham recalled Fell’s early esteem. Wootton, ‘Lady Masham’s Account of Locke’, 174. John Strachey to Locke, 18 November 1663, CL, 1:215. MS Locke c. 25, f. 11; Charles II to Dean and Chapter of Christ Church, Cambridge, 14 November 1666, TNA, SP 44/14/f. 103. Milton, ‘Locke at Oxford’, entire. 7 Life and Times of Wood, 1:472. Gabriel Towerson to Locke, [3 November 1660?], CL, 1:158–9; von Leyden, Introduction to ELN, 8–14.

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natural law to Locke’s mature thought has been contested. Throughout his life, Locke affirmed belief in natural law, but his published writings failed to offer a rounded account. This has spawned a discordant historiography on the question, bedevilled by the untenable Straussian thesis that Locke, beneath strategic dissimulation, adopted a Hobbesian version of the ‘new natural law’, which reduced it to a psychologized law of natural behaviour. Ian Harris and Timothy Stanton have asserted the enduring significance of Locke’s early essays on natural law. These, they argue, established groundwork presuppositions for Locke’s philosophy: namely, that ‘God is the superior of the human race’ and rightfully obliges it through natural law; and ‘that God has fitted people to apprehend the content and obligation of that law by providing them with the data of sense and a mental apparatus to work on them, especially reason’.9 Though Locke rejected traditional innate natural law, he avowed a rationally accessible slate of universal moral duties beyond Hobbes’s minimal and self-regarding ‘laws of nature’.10 Locke also construed belief in (and obedience to) God as natural law whereas Hobbes had controversially characterized atheism as mere imprudence rather than injustice. Locke’s attachment to a theistic natural law would undoubtedly colour his philosophy, lending it a teleological quality, constraining natural right, and limiting self-interest as the foundation of morality.11 Whether Locke managed to keep a recognizable natural law at the centre of his later philosophy remains disputed, largely because he was haphazard in his explications. This frustrated allies, we shall see, who feared that this negligence made Locke vulnerable to charges of Hobbism.12 Problematically, Locke’s fullest exegesis on natural law remained in unpublished manuscripts of his youth. Specific natural law doctrines appear only sporadically in his published work. In the Two Treatises he expressly excused himself from elucidating a full natural law code.13 Locke’s natural law thinking could not be systematically accessed by readers of his fragmented and often anonymous texts. For this reason, this book will resist the presumption that Locke – particularly the public Locke – can only be read as a ‘Hobbesian’ if it can be established that his ‘conception of natural law’ was ‘indistinguishable’ from that of Hobbes. 9 10

11 12

Harris, Mind of Locke, 78–9. Timothy Stanton, ‘Hobbes and Locke on Natural Law and Jesus Christ’, 65–88. For Locke’s natural law theory within a voluntarist, nominalist tradition, see Oakley, ‘Locke, Natural Law, and God – Again’, entire. Foster, Locke’s Politics of Moral Consensus, 12–18, 35–7. See for instance James Tyrrell to Locke, 30 June 1690, CL, 4:100–1. 13 TTG, II:12.

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That approach concedes too much to Straussian interpretations.14 Locke’s encounter with Hobbism cannot be subordinated to his views on natural law. Nevertheless, Harris and Stanton have demonstrated the durable importance of one particular natural law arrived at early on by Locke: a natural duty to recognize, obey, and worship God.15 This appears in Locke’s fourth essay, where the experience of sense sifted by reason confirmed a purposeful God dispensing law to his rational creations.16 These truths produced obligations intended by God solely for his glory: namely worship by those ‘disposed and ready to contemplate God’s works and that wisdom and power of His which they display, and thereupon to assign and render praise, honour, and glory most worthy of so great and so beneficent a creator’.17 In rejecting tradition and innate sense as sources of natural law, Locke approached Hobbes’s voluntarist understanding of law. But as Harris demonstrates, Locke’s natural law conclusions did not sit easily with Hobbesian interest-oriented doctrine.18 Hobbes, though unmentioned in Locke’s Essays on the Law of Nature, may have been an implicit foil. It is nevertheless notable that the particular natural law of present concern – the natural duty to worship God – did survive in a traditional form, perhaps as an inadvertency, in Hobbes’s generally unconventional account. Though theism itself was not a Hobbesian natural law, Leviathan did suggest that appropriate modes of worship were suggested ‘by natural reason’ and were more foundational than the conventions of ‘particular commonwealths’. Naturally correct worship included ‘Gifts, Petitions, Thanks, Submission of body, Considerate address, sober Behaviour, Premediated words, Swearing (that is, assuring one another of their promises) by invoking [God]’.19 One might wonder whether Hobbes had fully considered the implications of asserting forms of ‘worship which naturally men conceived fit to be used towards their Gods, namely, Oblations, Prayers, Thanks, and the rest formerly named’.20 It is nevertheless true, perhaps unexpectedly, that Locke’s natural duty to worship God did not require a dramatic divergence from the letter of Leviathan. However, the natural duty to engage in public and communal worship would prove much more consequential in Locke’s mature philosophy than in Hobbes’s. Its full significance only emerged decades later, but was 14 15 17 20

Stanton, ‘Hobbes and Locke on Natural Law’, 65–6. Harris, ‘John Locke and Nature Law: Free Worship and Toleration’, 62–5. 16 ELN, 152, 154. Ibid., 156–7. 18 Harris, Mind of Locke, 84–95. 19 Lev., 170. Ibid., 174. Hobbes’s discussion of idolatry also implies a universal, natural prohibition. Lev. 1032–7.

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suggested early on. In his ‘English Tract’, for instance, Locke did intimate that certain religious ‘actions’, as mandates of natural law, could not be surrendered to the magistrate.21 This was not a particularly pronounced theme of the ‘English Tract’. The later ‘Latin Tract’, responding to the Anglican tradition represented by Sanderson and more coloured by Locke’s natural law studies, went further. Dutiful worship could not be ‘furtive’, but required public acts of preaching, prayer, and sacraments. These basic requirements – the ‘substance of religion’ – were inviolable, not indifferent. Nevertheless, with thoroughness Locke affirmed that God ‘relinquished these rites to the discretion of the magistrate . . . to be amended, abolished, renewed, or in whatever way soever enjoined as he should judge best in the light of the times and the customs of the people and as the needs of the church should demand’.22 Christian truth was still largely an interior phenomenon, ‘embraced by the soul and faith alone’. Outward worship, while a natural duty, was customary and rendered ‘orderly’ and ‘decent’ by the sovereign.23 Hobbes would have disagreed with none of this, and church conformists agreed with little of it. Only much later would Locke reconcile the natural duty to outward worship with an individual freedom of conscience that, in his earliest writings, functioned primarily to liberate a purely interior realm of opinion. The initial stirring of another shift in Locke’s religious opinions appeared during his first trip abroad, to Cleves in the fall of 1665. For three months, perhaps considering a career as a courtier, he served as secretary to Sir Walter Vane on a diplomatic mission to the Elector of Brandenburg.24 This appointment may have been arranged by Locke’s friend William Godolphin, secretary to Arlington. If true, this placed Locke on the fringes of the court faction that opposed Clarendon and perhaps favoured Hobbes. In the duchy of Cleves, Locke encountered one of the most pluralistic religious environments of the Empire. Strategically situated, Jülich-Cleves was partitioned in 1614 between Calvinist Brandenburg and the Catholic Duke of Pfalz-Neuberg.25 Treaties had established a rare degree of religious liberty for Lutherans, Calvinists, Catholics, and even (informally) Mennonites. The Elector Frederick Wilhelm pronounced in 1645 that: ‘We are, thank God, of that understanding that we arrogate no authority 21 23 24 25

MS Locke e. 7, ff. 4–5; TT, 128–9. 22 MS Locke c. 28, ff. 3–4; TT, 215–6. MS Locke c. 28, f. 5; TT, 218. William Swann to Williamson, 5/15 December 1665, TNA, SP/82/10 f. 272. Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy from 1453 to the Present, 13–4, 30–1, 53; Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 206.

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over the consciences of our subjects, but commit it to God alone.’ Toleration served, additionally, to augment his own sovereignty. In political and university appointments, he rejected ‘zealots’ and restrained ecclesiastical discipline. His edicts forbade public religious disputes and prioritized order.26 In a letter to Robert Boyle, Locke commended this regulated tolerantia. The subjects of Cleves were not marked by uniformity in their religion, three professions being publickly allowed: the Calvinists are more than the Lutherans, and the Catholicks more than both (but no papist bears any office) besides some few Anabaptists, who are not publickly tolerated. But yet this distance in their churches gets not into their houses. They quietly permit one another to choose their way to heaven; for I cannot observe any quarrels or animosities amongst them upon the account of religion. This good correspondence is owing partly to the power of the magistrate, and partly to the prudence and good nature of the people, who (as I find by enquiry) entertain different opinions, without any secret hatred or rancour.27

Locke’s equanimity as regarded civil religious disagreement is notable. So too is his emphasis on magisterial power and prudence; Locke continued to view sovereigns as the arbiters of toleration in their respective states. Locke’s reportage did not consistently evince the stability of pluralism. He informed Godolphin, for instance, that French troops allied with the Dutch had fled to the Bishop of Münster, being ‘unwilling to fight against their owne religion’.28 The Elector’s own reluctance to fight the Dutch reflected distrust of his Imperial Catholic allies. This apparent territorial struggle was understood in Germany as a ‘Warre of Religion’. Locke professed surprise that religious allegiance could trump geopolitical interest among Imperial actors.29 In this respect his evaluation of Cleves’s stable religious pluralism was significantly qualified.30 Nor was his own religious ‘civility’ consistently displayed, particularly towards Catholics. He provided Strachey with a cutting account of dinner at a Franciscan monastery. The monks ‘live upon others charity’, he wrote, ‘or more truly, live Idly upon others labours’. He ridiculed their sung prayers, their habits of silence, and their spare diet. He sketched the lordly manner of the well-fed prior with amused disdain. These observations 26 27 28 29 30

Richardson, ‘Religious Toleration under the Great Elector’, 93–110. Locke to Robert Boyle, 12/22 December 1665, CL, 1:228–9. Locke to William Godolphin, 12/22 December 1665, CL, 1:232. Locke to William Godolphin, 19/29 December 1665, CL, 1:239–40. But see Simonutti, ‘Political Society and Religious Liberty: Locke at Cleves and in Holland’, 413–36; Woolhouse, Locke, 62–3; Marshall, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 46–7.

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reflected the standard prejudices of Locke’s upbringing, as did his sarcastic description of Catholic Christmas celebrations as an idolatrous ‘shew’. Such ‘mummerys in religion’, he concluded, demanded the ‘severity of the magistrate’. Despite this, Locke wrote, the Catholick religion is a different thing from what we beleive it in England and I have other thoughts of it, then when I was in a place that is fild with prejudices, and things are known only by heare say. I have not met with any soe good naturd people or soe civill as the Catholick preists, and I have received many courtesies from them which I shall always gratefully acknowledg.

Indeed, Locke preferred them to the duchy’s disputatious Calvinists, so similar to ‘our English Presbyterians’.31 To Lutherans he was more charitable, though their habit of singing hymns ‘merrily’ with their hats on reminded him of a theatre. Of the small Quaker community, Locke observed: ‘They agree with ours in other things as well as name, and take noe notice of the Electors prohibiting their meetings.’32 Cleves introduced a certain empathy and urbanity into Locke’s worldview, but the trip was perhaps not the watershed into which it is often made.33 Locke retained prejudices against formalism, ceremonialism, and sacramentalism. The placidity of Cleves’s domestic pluralism impressed him, but so too did the disruptions wreaked by confessional allegiances on geo-political calculation. When measuring confessional regimes, he valued the pre-eminence and stability of sovereignty. Prudence and prerogative determined the limits of tolerantia. With the exception of a (temporarily) moderated view of Catholicism, Locke’s reports from Cleves accorded with his Interregnum opinions.

Locke, Shaftesburian Politics, and the Return to Hobbes In February of 1666, having returned home, Locke decided against joining a diplomatic mission to Spain. England’s annus horribilis was upon the kingdom, setting in train the military and political upheavals that would upend Clarendon. In the summer are recorded Locke’s first contacts with the household of Anthony Ashley Cooper (who in 1661 had become Baron Ashley of Wimborne St. Giles). Locke met Ashley while arranging the 31 32 33

Locke to John Strachey, 5 January 1666 and early January 1666, CL, 1:244–7, 252–5. Locke to Strachey, 14/24 December 1665, CL, 1:235–7. DeBeer, ‘Locke and English liberalism: The Second Treatise of Government in its Contemporary Setting’, 36.

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delivery of medicinal spring waters. The two men, each diverted by the conversation and manners of the other, began the most consequential friendship of Locke’s life.34 Now ‘fixt again in England’, Locke sorted through the ‘variety of News’.35 In July, his friend Dr. David Thomas (part of Ashley’s clientele) sent him reports of intrigues at court.36 Williamson proposed Locke for a mission into Sweden, without success.37 In November, Strachey captured the mood: ‘Fears, Jealousys, Longe knives, Masses, present and future pressures, forrein and Domestick enemies, litle money and less witt doe soe afflict and distract the Country, that I am sometimes afraid, that as the warme weather comes on wee shall break forth into flame and fury . . .’38 Locke positioned himself in the circle of Lord Ashley, who would soon find himself among the rising men. The pivotal year of 1666–7 thus reoriented the career of Locke as surely as it had that of Hobbes. In October of 1666, at the invitation of Ashley, Locke visited the smouldering ruins of London, consumed the previous month by the Great Fire. Locke kept his studentship at Oxford, but sublet his rooms. Ashley’s Exeter House became his primary residence. Ashley was nine years Locke’s senior. His political trajectory had taken him from a moderate parliamentarianism to a conservative Cromwellianism and then a politique royalism. He had enjoyed high place in the Interregnum regimes. His return to royalism was latebreaking, and his Restoration offices more a concession to his prominence than a reward for service. Clarendon considered him unreliable. Nevertheless, Ashley was appointed to the Privy Council and in 1661 became the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Ashley’s religious views defy ready classification. When he abandoned Charles I in 1644, he later explained, he had suspected the king of planning to betray Protestantism.39 He avowed the Solemn League and Covenant in 1644, but had friends among the Congregationalist clergy (and would eventually employ the Independent Robert Ferguson as chaplain).40 He seemingly supported the Independents around Cromwell. Ludlow recalled his support for these ‘political state parsons’. Ashley Cooper helped devise Cromwell’s Erastian church establishment and was named to one of the local ‘Ejecting’ committees appointed to purge the clergy.41 34 36 37 38 39

Woolhouse, Locke, 70–2. 35 Locke to John Strachey, 6 March 1666, CL, 1:265. David Thomas to Locke, 19 July 1666, CL, 1:286. Charles Perrott to Locke, 21 August 1666, CL, 1:289–90. John Strachey to Locke, 27 November 1666, CL, 1:299. Christie, Life of Shaftesbury, 1:appendix 2, xxix. 40 ODNB. 41 Haley, Shaftesbury, 83–6.

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Ashley’s ecclesial politics may be characterized as Hobbesian.42 A lifelong anti-cleric, his efforts on behalf of individual religious liberty largely aimed to strengthen temporal sovereignty. Of his political past, he would later write to Charles II: ‘I observed the leaders of the great parties of religion, both laity and clergy, ready and forward to deliver up the rights and liberties of the people, and to introduce an absolute dominion; so that tyranny might be established in the hands of those that favoured their way.’43 This was telling rhetoric. Ashley shared Charles II’s preference for a politique toleration. Aubrey characterized him, on religious affairs, as ‘much for the [King’s] Prerogative’.44 The bishops viewed him as a major adversary.45 His hostility to Clarendon developed amidst Charles II’s first effort to secure a prerogative Indulgence. After the failure of this effort, according to the French ambassador, Ashley was ‘perfectly in the King’s graces’ as part of the ‘clique’ hostile to Clarendon.46 Religious politics during the Restoration oriented themselves around the great question of indulgence. Ashley did not share the King’s sympathy for loyalist Catholics. (His grandson recalled ‘hatred’ of popery as his ‘Master-Passion’.47) He initially tried to exempt Catholics from the Act of Oblivion. He backed down, but pronounced himself ‘no friend to Papists’.48 However, sympathy for both dissent and the King’s governing strategies made him a strong backer of the first Declaration of Indulgence.49 In this he happily defied the bishops, ‘whom he hates to the death, and publicly rails against’.50 The policy of Indulgence, conjoining a politique toleration with a concern to augment sovereign authority, appealed to court Hobbism and disregarded the traditional constitution of the English church. When Locke’s proclivities towards toleration were given voice, they ran in these channels. In Ashley, he found a like-minded patron. The 1662 Indulgence failed, but there was no reason to regard that as a permanent defeat. Throughout the decade, reports reached the Privy Council that dissenters (‘abusing’ the Indulgence while it was in force or afterward) ‘pretended’ royal approval of their gathered churches.51 Some 42 43 44 45 47 48 49 51

Spurr, ‘Shaftesbury and the Politics of Religion’, 127–51. Christie, Life of Shaftesbury, 2:252; LHW, 374–5. Aubrey to Wood, 3 February 1673, Bodl. Wood MS F. 39, f. 196. The significant context for this remark is considered below. Burnet, History, 1:172–3, and elsewhere. 46 ODNB. Third Earl of Shaftesbury to Le Clerc, 8/18 February 1705, Le Clerc, Epistolario, 2:524. Charton to R. Leveson 3 June 1660, in Haley, Shaftesbury, 145–6. Haley, Shaftesbury, 162–4. 50 Diary of Pepys, 15 May 1663, 4:173. Petition of John de Saumarez, Dean of Guernsey, 24 July 1665, TNA, SP 29/449, f. 117.

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intelligencers pitched reports assuring the government that, even in the face of plague and discontent, the dissenters remained peaceable and that the King would find them worthy ‘of the prudent indulgence he declares for’.52 Nonconformists, petitioners claimed, sought indulgence for ‘conscience, not faction’.53 Those of the opposite inclination warned that the ‘unseasonable indulgence’ had emboldened sedition.54 A 1666 intelligence report from Scotland observed that Presbyterians might prove unreliable after ‘their disappointment of that indulgence to their consciences which they promised themselves from his Majesty’s publique declarations’.55 Expectations for renewed Indulgence spiked after the fall of Clarendon and the expiry of the first Conventicle Act.56 In early 1668, an informer from Northamptonshire reported: ‘We have frequent meetings here without much control, and our sectaries talk exceedingly high of Indulgence.’57 From Falmouth came word that the Indulgence granted to the ‘fanatick party’ had discouraged the ‘loyal party; and the insolence of the former has grown so high that they build houses for their meetings’.58 On Jersey, with its distinct jurisdiction, ‘the King’s Indulgence’ seems to have persisted into the late 1660s, with ‘happy’ effects on the loyalties of the inhabitants.59 The politics of indulgence, in short, did not erupt only around the declarations of 1662 and 1672, but were a persistent feature of Restoration factional struggle.60 Ashley was a pillar of the policy, enemy to the bishops, and tireless advocate of sovereign spiritual supremacy. These positions, we have seen, were broadly construed as evidence of court Hobbism. That Ashley knew Hobbes’s writing is very likely and is suggested by his later desire to acquire Clarendon’s published attack on Leviathan.61 Ashley likely needed no introduction to Leviathan from Locke. There is evidence, however, that his new (and more politically engaged) circumstances encouraged Locke to reacquaint himself with Hobbes. To an extent generally overlooked, concentrated evidence suggests Locke’s engagement with Hobbes specifically during the late 1660s and early 1670s. We can establish his reading of several different works by Hobbes 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Report to Arlington, 22 July 1665, TNA, SP 29/127, ff. 84–5. William Boteler to Arlington, 13 June 1666, TNA, SP 29/158, f. 164. Guy Carleton, dean of Carlisle, to William Blakeston, 19 December 1663, TNA, SP 29/86, f. 23. Capt. Thomas Blackman to Arlington, 2 July 1666, TNA, SP 29/161, f. 29. Hutton, Restoration, 263. R. Hope to Williamson, 29 February 1668, TNA, SP 29/235, f. 147. F. Bellott to Williamson, 1 June 1668, TNA, SP 29/241, f. 3. R. Manley to Robert Francis, 25 March 1668, TNA, SP 29/237, f. 71. Harris, Mind of Locke, 161–3. 61 Haley, Shaftesbury, 219.

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precisely during the Cabal years, when his political engagement was accelerating. There can be no question that Locke was familiar with Hobbes’s oeuvre beyond his apparent Interregnum study of Leviathan. As we shall see below, he made repeated references to Hobbes in manuscripts and journals from the 1670s and 1680s, and copied at least one extract from Leviathan. The 1685 draft of the Essay concerning Human Understanding contains a well-informed characterization of Hobbesian theory that is all the more significant for being off-handed and off-topic.62 Locke avoided explicit mention of Hobbes in his Two Treatises, but, as Parkin observes, there are passages where Locke obviously ‘crosses swords’ with Hobbes (to distinguish his own account of the state of nature and the social contract from Hobbes’s version).63 There is also a pregnant allusion to ‘Leviathan’ in the Second Treatise, which allies itself with Hobbes’s scepticism of democracy as a form of ‘administration’ (though not of sovereignty).64 Locke owned a 1651 folio edition of Leviathan. It appeared in his final library catalogue and he seemingly acquired it during the Interregnum. In those years, he reportedly studied it closely, but he was also apparently reading it in the late 1660s (see below).65 Laslett and others have been impressed by the fact that Locke apparently did not have possession of his Leviathan between 1674 and his return from exile after the Revolution. He had left the book with Tyrrell.66 But for most of this time, Locke was abroad in either France or the Dutch Republic and separated from many of his books. In any case, he would have had access to Hobbes in the Dutch Republic. Hobbes’s Latin Omnia Opera was available, and Benjamin Furly’s library was at Locke’s disposal. There he might have read Leviathan and Hobbes’s free will controversy with Bramhall.67 Various animadversions against Leviathan were also on Furly’s shelves.68 It has been little observed that Hobbes appears on a list of used volumes purchased by Locke around the year 1669. Locke paid a full pound for an unidentified volume of Hobbes, perhaps for his friend John Strachey.69 This corresponds to the high price recorded by Pepys for a copy of Leviathan at this time. The volume could have been any work by 62 63 64 65 67 69

An account of Hobbes on keeping covenants. Locke, EcHU I:3 and 5. Parkin, Taming, 365–6; TTG, I:19 and 21 particularly. TTG, I:98, see also 97 for more apparent allusions to Hobbes; on democratic administration, see Tuck, Sleeping Sovereign. LL, 1465; Waldmann, ‘Locke as Reader of Leviathan’. 66 Laslett, Introduction to TTG, 71. Bibliotheca Furliana, 241, 251, 324. 68 Such as George Lawson’s. Ibid., 228. BL Add. MS 46470, p. 19.

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Hobbes, of course, but a pound was twice what Robert Hooke paid for Hobbes’s Thucydides, and half of what a copy of a Hobbesian scribal publication might have cost.70 Also recorded in Locke’s notebook from around this time was a notation reading ‘Hobs Works, Latin’. No price is indicated.71 Locke perhaps noted the availability of this expensive and recent publication in order to gauge Shaftesbury’s interest. We can guess that he did not purchase it for himself, or it would likely (although not certainly) have appeared in his later library catalogue.72 The timing of his interest is nevertheless significant. A catalogue of Locke’s Oxford library, in his own hand and dating from the summer of 1681, lists two unnamed works by Hobbes that cannot be the English Leviathan.73 The first is a quarto volume and the second an octavo.74 The date of the catalogue probably rules out the Dialogue of the Common Law, which was only published in 1681.75 The volume sizes offer clues.76 Neither work is likely to have been De Cive, the first edition of which (a quarto) was very rare. (Later editions were duodecimo, as were other Hobbes titles, including his Homer and Virgil translations.) Hobbes’s Thucydides and his Historical Narration concerning Heresie are also ruled out, as they were folios. The quarto listed here may have been De mirabilibus Pecci, which Locke purchased for 10 pence in June of 1679 (though Laslett, oddly, does not so identify it).77 This would require that Locke’s 1681 list of volumes include a short and inconsequential pamphlet 70

71 73 74

75 76 77

Aubrey paid 50 shillings for a copy of the Dialogue of the Common Law. Aubrey to [Locke], 11 February 1673, CL, 1:375; ‘Hobbs’s Leviathan, Lat.’ was advertised for as little as 5 shillings. The English enjoyed a more vigorous market; ‘Books to be sold by Richard Chiswel’ in William Cave, Primitive Christianity, back pages. 72 BL Add. MS 46470, p. 50v. Williamson, ‘John Locke’s Pocketbook’, 140–1. Discussed by Laslett in LL, 14. 14 July 1681, MS Locke f. 5, pp. 96–7; for unclear reasons Harrison and Laslett have suggested that these are two copies of the same work, despite the differing formats. One of them (the octavo) is thus not included in his catalogue, and may be among the fourteen titles from the 1681 book list that he was unable to identify (although this is also not clear). If these were in fact not duplicates, at least one of Hobbes’s titles may be missing from Harrison and Laslett’s reconstruction of Locke’s library catalogue. As for the quarto, Harrison and Laslett confusingly identify it as Hobbes’s Problemata Physica of 1662 (based on the interleaved edition of Thomas Hyde’s Catalogus impressorum liborum Bibliothecae Bodlejanae in Academia Oxoniensi of 1674, where Locke recorded his library as it stood as of the purchase of this volume in 1685/6 and thereafter). This, however, was an octavo volume. Locke certainly owned it (it appears in his Hyde), and it may have been the octavo listed in the 1681 booklist, but Laslett and Harrison are too confident on this score, and so it cannot be ruled out that not one but two Hobbes titles are missing from the Library of Locke (see pages 155 and 272). Cromartie, Introduction, to DCL, lxvi–lxix. MacDonald and Hargreaves, Hobbes: Bibliography; for a list of Hobbes editions available as of 1675 see A Catalogue of the Works of Mr Hobbes. LL, p. 272. On the purchase date and price see Locke MS c.1, p. 101 (my thanks to John Milton for calling this to my attention).

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publication. Otherwise the quarto was conceivably a copy of the Latin translation of Leviathan, or one of Hobbes’s scientific tracts (all quartos).78 As for the octavo, few of Hobbes’s works appeared in this size.79 Laslett is probably right to identify this as the Problemata Physica of 1662 that later appeared in Locke’s full library catalogue. If it was another title, it did not make its way into the later catalogue. (Certainly, some books did not.) The first pirated edition of Behemoth, it is worth noting (dated 1679 and titled The History of the Civil Wars of England), was one of Hobbes’s rare octavos, and so may have been the text of that size in Locke’s inventory.80 Tempting as that possibility is, the Problemata Physica is more likely. But it is worth recalling that none of Hobbes’s Restoration writings, including the scientific ones, were innocent of his religious politics. If he owned Hobbes’s Problemata Physica, Locke encountered not just mathematics, but one of Hobbes’s periodic efforts to embarrass the Restoration episcopate and to reassert the argument of Leviathan that ‘Ecclesiae Authoritatem dependere faciam a Potestate Regia’.81 Locke also purchased, either for Shaftesbury or for himself, Hobbes’s translation of Homer.82 This was likewise not a mere belle-lettristic effort detached from Hobbes’s religious politics. Hobbes’s translation, indeed, manipulated Homer in order to ‘peel off mystical accretions and inject some needed discretion into the greatest of epic poems’.83 Hobbes was particularly concerned to cast Homer as a kind of prudent counsellor, rather than a divine prophet. One contemporary wrote that his translation ‘prevaricates with honest Homer’s text to make the opinions of immaterial substances, immortality of the soul, and punishments after this life ridiculous’.84 Nor should we presume that Locke was familiar only with those works of Hobbes found in his final library. We know that he read, for instance, Hobbes’s The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, quotations from which are found in his interleaved Bible. Kim Ian Parker dates these quotations from before Locke’s departure for France in 1675, based on the format of the scriptural citations.85 Thus likely dating from the late 78 79 80 82 83 84 85

Malcolm, Introduction to Lev., 326–31. Other Hobbesian octavos include De Corpore, Dialogus Physicus, and Mr Hobbes Considered. Seaward, Introduction to Beh., 83–92. 81 Hobbes, Problemata Physica, preface. In July of 1680. The journal entry was originally marked ‘for my Ld’, but this was scored through, so perhaps Locke kept the volume. Either way, he had access to it. 3 July 1680, MS Locke f. 4, p. 141. Nelson, Introduction to Hobbes, Translations of Homer, lv–lxxiv. Simpson to Smith, 3 September 1674, Bodl. MS Smith 53, f. 265. The comments are pegged to Isa. iv. 4, Jer. xix. 5, and 1 Tim. ii. 4. Kim Parker, Biblical Politics of John Locke, 161; PNP, 1:16n.

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1660s or early 1670s (when Hobbes was again answering Bramhall’s animadversions), these passages recorded Hobbes’s views on the involuntary, internal motions of the will and the conscience. The full significance of this will be considered in the next chapter, as will the significance of three further comments on Hobbes found in Locke’s journals and reading notes. These have been widely overlooked by scholars. The first dates from 1677, the second from 1684, and the third from 1693. Each characterized Hobbes’s account of the spiritual authority due sovereigns.86 The possibility that Hobbes influenced Locke’s thinking in the late 1660s and early 1670s has been broadly ignored. Laslett pioneered this scepticism, which is puzzling given that he uncovered evidence countervailing it. In a flyleaf of an unrelated volume in Locke’s library, there appears a transcription from Leviathan. It reads: In wrong or noe definitions, lyes and first abuse of speech, from which proceeds all false and uselesse Tenets; which make those men who take their instruction from the authority of books, not from their owne meditation to be as much below the condition of ignorant men, as men indued with true science are above it. For between true science and erroneous doctrines Ignorance is in the middle.87

This is written into Locke’s copy of Sylloge Curationum et Observationum Medicinalium by Georgius Hieronymus Velschius, which was first published in Ulm in 1667. Locke’s copy was published in 1668. This establishes a terminus post quem at the very least, but suggests that Locke was indeed reading Leviathan during the early years of his association with Shaftesbury. Laslett is oddly dismissive of Locke’s direct transcription from Leviathan, probably because it does not seem pertinent to the Two Treatises, his primary interest. If we accept the fundamental importance of conscience and religious governance to Locke’s understanding of Hobbism, however, the passage takes on more relevance. It closely renders the summation of Leviathan’s fourth chapter, ‘Of Speech’, and advances the nominalist proposition that only names, not actual types or beings, could be universal. Names, strictly deployed for ‘registering’ thoughts, served as useful mental shorthand for the application of proper scientific ‘reckoning’. Hobbes chastised those who borrowed definitions (and specious ‘universals’) from ‘former authors’. This targeted the authority of scholastic ‘doctors’ and Hellenized church orthodoxy, very much in the 86 87

16/26 March 1677, MS Locke f. 2, p. 120; MS Locke, c. 33, f. 35v; and MS Locke d. 3, p. 103. Laslett, Introduction to TTG, 74n.

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manner of Hobbes’s late heresy writings.88 The distinctions between scientific ‘knowledge’, ‘opinion’, and ‘belief’ in authority critically informed Hobbes’s characterization of orthodoxy as an instrument of nefarious conscience domination. Exactly this disdain for power-seeking through orthodoxy and ‘heresy’ enforcement would animate Locke’s revision to the ‘Essay concerning Toleration’, as we shall see below. The most intriguing evidence of Locke’s situation within the milieu of late Hobbism is John Aubrey’s letter to him of 11 February 1673. Richard Tuck has noted the significance of this letter as evidence that Hobbes and Locke likely shared a perspective on the political battles of the Cabal years.89 Aubrey recommended that Locke ‘peruse’ two Hobbesian manuscripts: the Dialogue on the Common Law and Behemoth. This was not an idle or off-handed remark by Aubrey. He seems to have been quite intent on getting these works into the hands of Locke and Shaftesbury. Indeed, a week earlier, in a letter to Anthony Wood dated February 3, Aubrey had provided additional details of his effort to lobby Locke on Hobbes’s behalf: I have lately desired Dr. Lock to get a transcript of [the Dialogue of the Common Law], and I doubt not but the present Lord Chancellor (being much for the King’s Prerogative) will have it printed, and have also ordered to have some copies of his History of the Late Times from 1640 to 1660, which the Bishops will not license, since fires happen, and tis fit there should be more copies than one.90

This letter to Wood has received little scholarly notice, but it is highly significant in contextual terms.91 It has been conventionally presumed that Hobbes’s hopes for a court patron who might promote his Restoration writings and protect them from the bishops were trained on the Earl of Arlington. Aubrey – who knew Hobbes exceedingly well during this period (down to his morning habits) and who had played a role in encouraging some of Hobbes’s late writings92 – instead aired hopes that Shaftesbury might fill this role, and that the sympathetic Locke might influence him to do so.93 Aubrey’s reasoning is no less telling; Hobbes and Shaftesbury alike were understood to be staunch defenders of the ‘King’s Prerogative’, in legal matters but also in religious matters and in opposition to the 88 89 90 91 92 93

Lev., chapter four; Dawson, Locke, Language, and Early-Modern Philosophy, chapter six, 202. Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Locke on Toleration’, entire. Aubrey to Wood, 3 February 1673, Bodl. Wood MS F 39, f. 196v. Though see Philip Milton, ‘Hobbes, Heresy, and Lord Arlington’, 518. Aubrey to Wood, 3 February 1673, Bodl. Wood MS F 39, ff. 196v-97. The licensing act of 1662 designated the Lord Chancellor as one of the licensors of ‘all Books concening the Common Lawes of this Realm’. Statutes of the Realm, 5:429.

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churchmen who had stalked Hobbes for years. This point of view marked all of Hobbes’s works (including Behemoth and the Dialogue of the Common Law) and marked as well this period in the careers of Shaftesbury and Locke. In his letter to Locke himself, amidst intense court anger at the bishops for impeding indulgence, Aubrey praised Shaftesbury as ‘our illustrious Lord Chancellor, who seriously deserved a statue for the good he has already begun’. Again, this was not an improvised comment, but part of a sustained effort on Aubrey’s part to tempt Shaftesbury into patronizing Hobbes.94 We do not know if Locke visited Crooke’s bookshop to read Hobbes’s manuscripts or if he visited Hobbes, as Aubrey suggested (Hobbes ‘would take kindly’ to a call). There is no direct evidence that Locke and Shaftesbury took it upon themselves to circulate Hobbes’s late works or print them. But Aubrey, who knew Hobbes and Locke well, strongly implied that they were on personal terms. He presumed good feeling, an alignment of political opinion, and Locke’s interest in Hobbesian scribal publications suppressed by the bishops. These estimations were likely correct. As we shall see, Locke’s own writing from around this time paralleled Hobbes’s late works in quite specific ways.95 In sum, Locke’s study of Hobbes, begun during the Interregnum, appears to have revived in the later 1660s and early 1670s. There is considerable if scattered archival evidence that Locke and Ashley shared an interest in a wide array of Hobbes’s works during the years when they were most favourably situated at court.96 Moreover, with a few exceptions there is a thematic consistency to Locke’s interest: Hobbes’s understanding of conscience and the spiritual power of sovereigns seems to have commanded his attention. What we can say of Locke’s estimation of Hobbes on these topics will be considered below, but first we must further detail the political environment that confronted Locke during these years. Locke’s most documented period of engagement with Hobbes’s writing coincided 94

95 96

In a biographical fragment on Shaftesbury written sometime around 1673, Locke himself recalled the ‘titles and honours’ bestowed on the earl by ‘our sacred Soveraigne anno 1672’. LHW, 360. This unexpectedly effusive language (see Milton, Introduction to LHW, 141–2) may indicate that the politics of Locke and Shaftesbury were favourable to royal supremacy and ‘prerogative’ in the early 1670s. Aubrey to [Locke], 11 February 1673, TNA, PRO 30/24/7/493. Their knowledge of Hobbism would have been indirectly augmented by interest in Spinoza. A list of purchased books from 1672 found in Shaftesbury’s papers, and autographed by Locke, includes disbursements for the Tractatus Theologico-politicus. Further payments in 1674 secured ‘Spinoza’s works’. Locke also possessed works of Spinoza’s, including the distinctly Hobbesian Tractatus. TNA, PRO 30/24/47/30, f. 16v; 14 July 1681, MS Locke f. 5, p. 95; LL, 2743; Nuovo, Christian Virtuoso, 90–2.

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with the crisis of Charles II’s relations with the bishops and the zenith of Hobbism at the Restoration court. The King abandoned Clarendon in the summer of 1667 to placate parliament after the disastrous second Dutch war. Misjudging the church’s parliamentary strength, Charles promoted comprehension for moderate Presbyterians by proposing to relax some features of the prayer book, and permitting ministers to dispense with surplices.97 There was another failed effort at comprehension in early 1668.98 Comprehension aimed at mollifying Presbyterians and threatened to diminish the appeal of a broader toleration. The travails of comprehension thus redounded to the benefit of Indulgence. The context for this was increasingly geo-political, as the King and Arlington pursed the secret negotiations that would eventually produce the Treaty of Dover. Toleration was now a bargaining chit in the court’s negotiations with France, a development that would complicate its political fortunes. The run-up to the King’s second Indulgence, which would be issued in 1672, witnessed erratic religious policy. Scalded by the failure of comprehension, the Council briefly swung back towards coercion. In 1670, in both England and Scotland, new conventicle acts were passed, and the policing of sectaries redoubled. This was driven by parliamentary opinion, but the council acquiesced. Charles’s religious policies increasingly reduced to naked efforts at securing his own authority over the church. This was perhaps most clear in Scotland, where the Earl of Lauderdale dangled the carrots and wielded the sticks. Indulgence, indeed, first reappeared here in 1669. The Scottish Indulgence of that year was in truth more of a comprehension effort, allowing deprived Presbyterians back into their livings provided they accepted episcopal collation (appointment). (A second Scottish Indulgence would be promulgated in 1672.) The Indulgence alarmed the Scottish episcopate. Archbishop Sharpe vigorously protested it as a violation of the Restoration settlement.99 The court responded by evicting the particularly recalcitrant Archbishop of Glasgow, Alexander Burnet, and by passing the Scottish ‘Act of Supremacy’ in October. This act forcefully asserted the King’s ecclesiastical authority in Scotland and repealed all laws inconsistent with it. It confirmed the Erastian quality of the Indulgence and alienated many Presbyterians along with the 97 98 99

Hutton, Restoration, 278–9. Notes on possible prayer book revisions are found in papers of the third Earl of Bridgewater. Huntington, Ellesmere MS 9901. Spurr, ‘Church of England and Comprehension’, 933–4. Yould, ‘Lauderdale’s Religious Policy in Scotland’, 248–67.

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bishops.100 All of this was balanced by a savage Scottish Conventicle Act, which made open-air preaching a capital offense.101 Westminster instructed the Scottish Privy Council to suppress any ‘seditious discourse’ from the pulpits.102 ‘Never’, wrote Lauderdale to the King, ‘was a King so absolute as you are in poor old Scotland’, or freed from the meddling of ‘ecclesiastical person[s]’.103 To the keen observer George Mackenzie, Charles II’s measure of spiritual authority exceeded that of Henry VIII. Critics (presbyterian and episcopalian) condemned Lauderdale’s policies as rankly Hobbist.104 Scottish bishops channelled these fears south to Canterbury.105 Indulgence was pursued later, and differently, in Ireland. In February of 1672, the King issued a declaration allowing Catholics to live and trade in incorporated towns, which threatened to enable Catholic participation in town government. In 1661, the Clarendonians had beaten back a similar effort, but Arlington now revived it. The Indulgence illustrated with unique clarity the provisional quality of the King’s toleration. When the Privy Council debated waiving the Oath of Supremacy for Catholics seeking local office, the Earl of Essex suggested a telling approach. Rather than issue a blanket waiver, the King was advised to empower his representative to ‘allow such as shall please him from time to time to dispense with from the taking this Oath, and admit them by his special favour to enjoy this Priviledge’. Individual dispensations, rather than a broader suspension, would maximally preserve the King’s discretion.106 On August 31, the King deputized Essex to exercise this dispensing power.107 Essex prepared to do just this, but as opposition to the English Indulgence intensified, the Privy Council suspended the scheme, much to his irritation.108 Locke surely followed the council debates on all aspects of indulgence, including those in Ireland and Scotland. Among Shaftesbury’s papers is a long document rebutting objections to the Irish Indulgence, probably 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108

Jackson, Restoration Scotland, 116–117; Lee, Cabal, 60–3; for an anti-Indulgence complaint from Scotland, see BL Add MS 32094, f. 396. Harris, Restoration, 120–1. Charles to the Scottish Privy Council, Huntington, Ellesmere MS 8544. Lauderdale to Charles II, 22 October 1669, quoted in Yould, ‘Lauderdale’s Religious Policy in Scotland’, 251. Jackson, Restoration Scotland, 117, 177–8. Yould, ‘Lauderdale’s Religion Policy in Scotland’, 254. Essex to Arlington, 24 August 1672, Essex Papers, 1:17–18. Charles II to Essex, 31 August 1672, Essex Papers, 1:23. Essex to Arlington, 14 December 1672 and Essex to Arlington, 18 January 1673, Essex Papers, 1:43–4, 49.

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written for the Council. Critics complained that waiving the Oath of Supremacy was ‘partiall or arbitrary’, and ‘contrary to the nature of general and publique Laws’. It was feared that the policy was a scheme for ‘increasing the King’s power and prerogative in the corporations’. This criticism, the memo made clear, was understood as a threat to royal authority.109 Locke himself displayed an interest in Scottish church affairs.110 A memo in his hand, dated 1668, scrutinized the convoluted, hybrid settlement of the Scottish Kirk. At issue were the relative powers, in both disciplinary and synodical matters, of bishops, deans, deacons, presbyters, and lay elders.111 The memo charted the contours of Scottish clerical authority mere months before Lauderdale launched his dual strategy of Erastian Indulgence and persecution. Most of Locke’s queries concerned the power of the Scottish bishops. In Scotland and Ireland, an admixture of indulgence, persecution, and the assertion of Royal Supremacy revealed the priorities of the King. Ashley, from the Lords, lent support. He not only acceded to the Conventicle Act, but also (with Arlington and Clifford) urged another English Indulgence. Clifford viewed indulgence as part of a long-term effort to advance English Catholicism.112 Ashley was motivated by anticlericalism and a desire to uphold sovereign religious prerogative. These ends increasingly defined his politics. Typical was his management of the parliamentary divorce case of John Manners, Lord Roos, which occasioned a controversy over secular intrusion into the business of the church courts.113 With Charles II married to a childless Catholic, the debate carried Henrician overtones. (‘Henry VIII had a surer way of divorce than by Parliament’, declared one MP, ‘which was by death.’114) Ashley assailed the ‘Counter-reformation’ notion of insulating marriage from civil jurisdiction by treating it as a sacrament.115 The extent of the King’s Supremacy (whether understood in strictly monarchical or in parliamentary terms) seeped into many debates during these years. Ashley may also have been responsible for the failed effort to attach a proviso, modelled on the Scottish Supremacy Act, to the new Conventicle Bill of 1670. This 109 110 111 112 113 114 115

TNA, PRO 30/24/50, ff. 222–9. Harris, ‘England’s ‘Little Sisters without Breasts’, 183–98. TNA, PRO 30/24/47/30, f. 45; EcT, 319–21. See the undated ‘scheme’ in Clifford’s papers; BL Add MS 65138, f. 75v. LJ, 24 March 1670, vol. 12, 322–4; The King adjudicated the separation. Calendar of the Cecil Papers, 22:441–6. Speech of Sir William Coventry, Grey’s Debates, vol. 1, 30 March 1670. Haley, Shaftesbury, 278.

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would have asserted a sweeping prerogative power over ecclesiastical affairs.116 Ashley’s instincts on religious governance can be teased from the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, drafted in 1669. Locke, as secretary to the Carolina proprietors, had some hand in the design of this document.117 The Constitutions allowed an unusual degree of religious pluralism, permitting any ‘seven or more persons agreeing in any religion’ to ‘constitute a church or profession to which they shall give some name to distinguish it from others’.118 (Catholics were not expressly forbidden, though in the published version of the Constitutions an allusion to ‘papist churches’ disappeared.119) The document vaguely aspired to promote the ‘true faith’, but primarily it promoted a logic of civil religion. Deferential to royal sovereignty, contemptuous of ‘numerous democracy’, it casts the management of religious difference as an important component of ‘Civil Peace’. The goal was to encourage migration and to defang religious rivalry through a regulated pluralism. Church membership would be registered with the civil authorities, and hostile speech against rival religions prohibited. Also banned was sermonizing about ‘State-Matters’.120 Churches violating these regulations were deemed ‘Riots’. The published version of the Constitutions affirmed an Anglican establishment.121 This concession, Locke would supposedly later claim, was inserted by certain Proprietors ‘against his Judgement’.122 In any case, the toleration of the Constitutions belonged to the politique tradition: it sought to pacify subjects, augment magisterial authority, and secure fundamentally political ends.123 In 1672, Ashley was elevated to the earldom of Shaftesbury and appointed Lord Chancellor, an office enjoying considerable influence over clerical appointments and revenues. This development cannot have struck the bishops as auspicious. Sheldon had recently warned Cathedral deans of the ‘evill eye’ with which ‘some men looke upon the possessions of the Church’.124 The Chancellor exercised the royal right of patronage attached to a large number of church livings. Locke served (informally) 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124

Seaward, ‘Shaftesbury and the Supremacy’, 59–62. Armitage, ‘Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government’, 608. TNA, PRO 30/24/47/3 (unpaginated). Compare TNA, PRO 30/24/47/3, article 90; Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 22. TNA, PRO 30/24/47/3, articles 91–9; Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 21–3. Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 20. Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, 42n; Armitage, ‘Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government’, note 37. Marshall, Locke, Toleration, 595, 599–600, 696. Sheldon to ‘several deans’ of the province of Canterbury, 29 July 1670, BL Harley 7377, f. 16.

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as Shaftesbury’s secretary as he sought to secure these rights, which had eroded through years of neglect.125 Shaftesbury required bishops to account for all livings in their dioceses, their incumbents, their value, and the King’s claim over particular livings.126 Locke, as ‘Secretary for the clergy’, was employed in this process of royal assertion.127 Locke further assisted Shaftesbury in managing legislative business related to the royal governance of the church.128 The period surrounding the Indulgence of 1672 and Shaftesbury’s chancellorship marked the apex of both his royal service and his ideological support for the Supremacy. Embedded in this milieu, Locke almost certainly shared the earl’s general disposition. Certain suggestive documents in the Shaftesbury archive likely trace to this period, including an undated, anonymous memo on indulgence. This urged the King – in the face of parliamentary opposition – to reaffirm his spiritual powers but through ‘condescension to have this branch of his Prerogative legaly examined and tryed in the house of Peers’.129 Indulgence politics also animated an anonymous memo ‘Concerning his Majesties Supreme Power Ecclesiastical . . . in their full force and Vigor’. This remarkable document, virtually Hobbesian in tenor, invoked Reformation statutes to defend the latter-day Supremacy. Deploying historical and legal precedent, it confirmed the subordination of the clergy on matters of revenue, court jurisdiction, synodical legislation, church discipline, and even doctrine.130 The memo’s concern to establish state control over the definition and punishment of heresy recalled Hobbes’s late writing, and surely responded to the same political dynamics.131 It also insisted on the King’s prerogative to ‘relax’ ecclesiastical discipline, thus trumping both clerical jurisdiction and parliamentary statute.132 The memo probably dates from the early 1670s. Its historical sources range from Thomas Fuller’s church history of 1656, to the collection of English canon law published by R. Norton in 1661, to Peter Heylin’s Ecclesia Restaurata (1661, reprinted in 1670).133 The memo flattered 125 126 127

128 129 131 133

On Locke’s service, see Pierre Coste to James Harris, 27 December 1738, in J.R. Milton, ‘Pierre Coste, John Locke, and the Shaftesbury Family’, 168. TNA, PRO 30/24/42/59, ff. 34, 45. Locke to Nathaniel Lye, 1 July 1673, TNA, PRO 30/24/42/59, f. 26; the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Damaris Masham remembered this as his title. ‘Lady Masham’s Account of Locke’, 178; third Earl of Shaftesbury to Le Clerc, 8/18 February 1705, Epistolario, 2:522. For instance, a draft bill for uniting parishes in Exeter, dated 1673. TNA, PRO 30/24/47/30, ff. 24–6. 130 TNA, PRO 30/24/6b/431 (unpaginated). TNA, PRO 30/24/6b/427 (unpaginated). Idem. 132 Idem. Fuller, The Church History of Britain from the birth of Jesus Christ; A Collection of Articles, Canons, Orders, Ordinances, and Constitutions Ecclesiastical; Peter Heylin, Ecclesia Restaurata, or, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England (1661).

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Charles II as a second Henry VIII, but it also affirmed the court of chancery’s traditional role in the exercise of the Supremacy. According to Henrician statutes, when the Archbishop refused to grant licenses or dispensations, the court of chancery would adjudicate the matter and direct the Archbishop on behalf of the king.134 The context here may have been the licenses for nonconformist worship devised by the Indulgence of 1672. The sovereign’s power to fix orthodoxy was also exercised through chancery judgements.135 This attention to the role of the Chancellor in executing the Royal Supremacy suggests that the memo dates to Shaftesbury’s chancellorship. This possibility is intriguing in light of the memo’s account of past monarchs appointing laymen to act as their spiritual vicegerents. The author took the Vicar Generalship of Thomas Cromwell as a model and recommended the utility of a vicegerency for bridling a recalcitrant clerical hierarchy. The notion of a new Cromwellian age may seem implausible, but we must remember the intense estrangement of the King from his bishops. On 6 March 1672, Charles asked his counsellors for opinions on ‘liberty in matters ecclesiastical’. Promoting such a liberty, Shaftesbury joined Clifford in urging the King to appoint a Vicar General ‘above the Archbishop of Canterbury’, who might settle and ‘dispense with’ ecclesiastical law. The King, Clifford suggested, enjoyed more spiritual authority ‘than was generally supposed’. Charles instructed Clifford, Shaftesbury, and Lauderdale to investigate the legal precedents.136 This remarkable episode explains another memo contained in the Shaftesbury archive, explicitly urging the King to restrain the ‘machinations of some in parliament’ by establishing a Vicar General to ‘exercise, use, occupy, and execute under his Majesty all manner of Jurisdiction’ in the church.137 Locke at least read and initialled this memo. Again invoking Tudor statute and Thomas Cromwell, the proposal aimed at outmanoeuvring the ‘Episcopall Hierarchy’, which was tainted by ‘slothe, covetousness, partiallity, and intestine divisions’. An advance on the bishops would buttress the King’s credibility with dissenters and parliament. Potential benefits were cast in civil religious terms; Charles could seize the levers of preferment, enrich the treasury, and cultivate clerical ‘gratitude and generosity’. The memo’s emphasis on preferment and revenues again suggests that it was written for the chancellor. A Vicar 134 137

TNA, PRO 30/24/6b/427 (unpaginated). TNA, PRO 30/24/6b/429 (unpaginated).

135

Idem.

136

TNA, SP 104/177, ff. 12–12v.

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General would permit the King to ‘chastise in a legall and plausible way that clergy which hath so much opposed his conduct of late’. The memo specifically condemned parliamentary efforts to deny the royal suspending power.138 In January of 1675, it would be rumoured that the King dangled the office of Vicar General before Shaftesbury.139 The Venetian ambassador reported that, attempting to lure the by then estranged earl back into service, the King proposed to him the office of ‘vicegerent, a post instituted by Henry VIII when he suppressed the monasteries, which takes precedence of the archbishops and ranks immediately after the King in ecclesiastical matters’. The bishops, he further reported, implacably opposed this scheme. The King wished to keep the court factions balanced, perhaps in part by reviving an old proposal of 1672.140 Throughout these years, the possible appointment of a Vicar General was consistently associated with Shaftesbury. One final memo in the Shaftesbury papers concerns ‘Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction’. This document asserted the full plenitude of royal prerogative against popery of both the Catholic and Protestant varieties. Recent battles merely re-ignited Reformation wars, and the memo embraced the Tudor Supremacy, as well as Cromwell’s Vicar Generalship. It offered a distinctly Hobbesian note of argumentation by condemning contemporaries who defined ecclesia as either a church building or the clerical estate. In primitive times, ecclesia instead denoted a ‘body of men, of what rank or condition soever, gathered together in the profession of saving truths’. This paralleled Hobbes’s own deflationary definition of ecclesia in Leviathan and subsequent texts. It would also be a point emphasized in the Shaftesburian Letter from a Person of Quality (discussed below). Conflating the church with the clerical estate amounted to ‘cutting one body into two’.141 The anonymous quality of these memos and uncertainty over their context has minimized awareness of their significance.142 Older Locke scholars tended to credit him with involvement in their composition,143 but the rigorous J.R. and Philip Milton have doubted this.144 They were 138 140

141 142 143 144

Idem. 139 Haley, Shaftesbury, 369. Girolamo Alberti to Venetian Senate, 22 January/1 February 1675, CSPV, 38:348–9; see also Prideaux to Ellis, 24 January 1675, BL Add. MS 28929, f. 11r; John and Philip Milton, Introduction to EcT, 151 note 2–3. TNA, PRO 30/24/6b/430. Ashcraft makes passing reference to them. Revolutionary Politics, 111n; Marshall distances Locke. Marshall, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 83. Less sceptical is Harris, Mind of Locke, 164. Cranston, Locke, 143–4; Haley, Shaftesbury, 296–8. John and Philip Milton, Introduction to EcT, 148–50; J.R. Milton, ‘Locke’s Political Apocrypha’, 252–7.

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certainly correct not to include the ‘Vicar General’ memos in their superb edition of Locke’s writings from this period, but their scepticism as to his possible connection to them may be overdrawn. That the memos date to the time of the second Declaration of Indulgence seems overwhelmingly likely. The Miltons suggest that the evidence for this is weak, but this ignores several apparent references to the parliamentary fight over indulgence and to a Vicegerency. They reference the council notes of 6 March 1672 only to observe Locke’s absence from the minutes, but Shaftesbury’s involvement (on that day) in urging a Vicar Generalship is surely the larger point. The Miltons note Locke’s lack of legal expertise, but at the same time rightly characterize the memos as having an informal, ‘unofficial’ air. The memos indeed offered little more than light reference to the most famed statutes of the Reformation era. Locke’s involvement in the Vicar General memos is uncertain, but his knowledge of them overwhelmingly likely. They significantly illuminate his intellectual milieu in the early 1670s, evidencing the remarkably Erastian inclinations of Shaftesbury during this period, and his comfortable situation within a court intensely hostile to the bishops. This period of Cabal rule and clerical unease had elicited Hobbes’s final burst of theorizing about the governance of religion. The private counsels of Shaftesbury, where Locke was firmly situated, were similarly coloured by a Hobbesian disposition. According to Le Clerc, Shaftesbury instructed Locke in the 1660s to apply himself to the study of those Matters, that belong’d to the Church and State, and which might have some relation to the business of a Minister of State. And Mr. Locke succeeded so well in these Studies that his Lordship began to consult him on all occasions of that Nature. He not only took him into his Library and Closet, but brought him into the company of the Duke of Buckingham, my Lord Halifax, and other Nobles, who were Men of Wit and Learning, and were pleas’d as much with his Conversation as my Lord Ashley.145

This echoed an account possessed by the third Earl of Shaftesbury, which recalled his grandfather tasking Locke with the ‘Study of the Religiouse and Civil affairs of the Nation, with whatsoever related to the Business of a Minister of State’. The first earl supposedly consulted with Locke ‘on all occasions of the kind’.146 145 146

Le Clerc, Life of Locke, 6. TNA, PRO 30/24/47/28, f. 3, quoted in Laslett, Introduction to TTG, 27; third Earl of Shaftesbury to Le Clerc, 8/18 February 1705, Le Clerc, Epistolario, 2:521–2.

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As we shall see, the Indulgence of 1672 occasioned a political struggle more intense than that spawned by its predecessor in 1662. Indulgence deployed the Supremacy not to protect the Church of England, but to permit subjects to abandon it. This vision of the Supremacy construed it not as a feature of the traditional ecclesial constitution, but as a mere note of sovereignty. Thus Clifford’s advisor, the Benedictine monk, Hugh Cressy, justified the 1672 Indulgence as an exercise of absolute prerogative by arguing that Charles should eschew the title of ‘Head of the Church’. In a pluralistic religious setting, the traditional Royal Supremacy was nonsensical. ‘Will he become a Head in Spiritualls as well as Temporalls to more than twenty Bodies opposite to one another, of any of which he is not so much as a Member?’ The English bishops would have interpreted this point as a blow against the historic church and in favour of a capacious power over all ‘religion’. Church constitutionalism thus gave way to the logic of sovereignty.147 By 1672, indulgence could only be interpreted as an act of statecraft justified according to a logic of civil religion. The King loomed as a janusfaced spiritual governor in all of his kingdoms: either zealously enforcing the privileges of the established church or indulging compliant nonconformists as occasion required. He and his servants consistently treated the maintenance of royal control as their primary project. This was the political context in which John Locke returned to the subject of religious toleration.

Locke’s Tolerationism in Transition: The ‘Essay’ of 1667 Locke’s manuscript ‘Essay concerning Toleration’ was initially composed in 1667, around the time when Clarendon fell, and was revised throughout the Cabal’s ascendancy. Locke also left evidence of his evolving views on toleration in notes on Samuel Parker’s anti-tolerationist Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1669) and potentially in the Letter from a Person of Quality (1675). Locke’s mature tolerationism would only emerge some years later, but the late 1660s and early 1670s represent an important transitional phase in his views. It is significant that these were also years in which Locke engaged with the writings of Hobbes, and particularly with Hobbes’s views on spiritual governance, views which themselves responded to contemporary political dynamics. In light of these factors, how might Locke’s ‘Essay concerning Toleration’ be measured against the Hobbesian, 147

BL Add MS 65139, f. 20v. Dated 11 April 1671.

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prerogative-oriented account of toleration that, it has been argued, marked Locke’s earlier ‘English Tract’? The ‘Essay’, seen in this light, not only broke from a core element of the Hobbesian politique, but also maintained important affinities with it. The remainder of this chapter and the next two will argue that Locke, throughout the later 1660s and 1670s, came to recognize the limitations of the prerogative tolerationism associated by contemporaries with court Hobbism. Driving this process were several factors: Locke’s exposure to Hobbes’s writings; his proximity to the religious policies of indulgence; and his familiarity with a broad critique of ‘civil religion’ and the court politique, a critique that cross-cut religious parties but was dominated by church conformists hostile to both court Hobbism and toleration. These factors would eventually produce Locke’s fully developed account of religious freedom of the 1680s. But the relevant dynamics were in play earlier, during the Cabal years, when they produced the transitional position of the ‘Essay’. This work not only introduced some critical argumentative departures, but also preserved elements of Locke’s earlier statist, civil religious perspective. As to why Locke wrote the ‘Essay’ in 1667, few details are decisively known. Involvement in Shaftesbury’s political projects surely played some role.148 He may have written the document to clarify his own thinking or to share with colleagues. That it was a memo for the King has been convincingly doubted by J.R. and Philip Milton based on its informal tone.149 That it was written to advise Shaftesbury, however, is much more plausible, and through this channel Locke may have aspired to influence royal deliberations.150 We can follow the evolution of the ‘Essay’ closely. Several drafts and revisions survive. The first sketch of the ‘Essay’ strongly prioritized the question of toleration for Catholics. (Most of its conclusions concerned this matter.)151 The later, expanded ‘Essay’ would have a wider ambit, but the initial draft suggests that the Catholic question occasioned Locke’s return to the subject of toleration. This suspicion, indeed, has recently received confirmation by the discovery of a short manuscript by Locke, entitled (misleadingly) ‘Reasons for tolerateing Papists equally with 148 149 150 151

The best discussions are J.R. and Philip Milton, Introduction to EcT, 4–51; Marshall, Locke, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 49–70; Harris, Mind of Locke, chapter four. J.R. and Philip Milton, Introduction to EcT, 50–1, countering Marshall, Locke, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 49–50. Shaftesbury’s papers include a clean copy. TNA, PRO 30/24/47/1, ff. 1–34. Huntington, MS HM 584, draft outline.

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others’.152 Felix Waldmann and J. C. Walmsley have made a strong textual case that the ‘Reasons for tolerating Papists’ predated and informed Locke’s earliest draft of the ‘Essay’. The debates of 1667 were roiled by fears that toleration would shelter ‘papists’.153 Shaftesbury, always wary of this possibility, may have sought Locke’s advice about it. Whatever induced him, Locke’s consideration of the question took the form of dialogic notes on the first edition of the anonymous Liberty of Conscience the Magistrate’s Interest, now known to have been written by the old Cromwellian, Sir Charles Wolseley.154 This is itself significant. As we have seen, Wolseley’s tract was notable for its politique manner of argumentation. He sought to raise the prince above all religious parties, reducing his subjects to an equal dependence and freeing himself from any clerical interest. Persecution generated, rather than suppressed, faction. Indulgence was recommended by ‘marvellous prudence’, and by concern for the state’s ‘Safety and Welfare’.155 Wolseley’s maxims of ‘interest’ and ‘policy’ would readily have appealed to Shaftesbury. (He and Ashley had served the Commonwealth together and were acquainted.) The tract’s other major feature was an antipathy to Catholicism. Wolseley feared the ‘absolute Power of the Church’ and viewed the conformist cause of uniformity as a mere variation on popery.156 For this reason, and because English Catholics could not be loyal subjects, Wolseley precluded their indulgence.157 Despite the title of his notes on Wolseley’s tract, Locke did not disagree. His initial comments, it is true, did isolate contradictions in Wolseley’s argument in a way that potentially benefited English Catholics. If, as Wolseley argued, indulgence dissipated the threat of popery, united Protestants, converted individual Catholics, and rendered sectarians loyal, then logically ‘Papists may be safely tolerated’ as well. Further, if suffering produced martyrs and thus promoted the credit of dissenting opinions, persecution might benefit Catholicism.158 Wolseley’s arguments 152

153 154 155

156 158

I am grateful to Felix Waldmann and J. C. Walmsley for sharing this discovery with me prior to its publication. It confirmed a case that I had made on more speculative grounds. Waldmann and Walmsley, ‘John Locke and the Toleration of Catholics: A New Manuscript’, forthcoming. J. R. and Philip Milton, Introduction to EcT, 21. The Miltons keenly noted textual parallels between Locke and Wolseley; Introduction to EcT, 25. Liberty of Conscience the Magistrate’s Interest, 3–5, 7. Quite different was Wolseley’s effort to ground toleration on the ‘light and law of nature’ in Liberty of Conscience upon its True and Proper Grounds Asserted and Vindicated. Liberty of Conscience the Magistrate’s Interest, 11–12. 157 Ibid., 13. Greenfield Library, St John’s College, BR1610.L8232, f. 1r. I thank Dr. Waldmann for providing me with images of this document.

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against Catholics were apparently self-defeating. But rather than leaving the matter there, Locke proceeded to strengthen Wolseley’s case, treating his own tentative conclusions in favour of Catholics as devil’s arguments. His notes proceeded to shoot them down. Anticipating arguments that would work their way into his ‘Essay’, Locke argued that Catholic belief in papal infallibility made them irredeemably ‘factious’, even when ‘sincerely consciencious’. Their ‘unstable mindes’ and tendencies to both docility (within their church) and militancy (outside it) made them hated and rendered their martyrdoms inglorious. Locke concurred that the Indulgence of Catholics would not benefit Protestant princes. Catholics were inherently loyal to a foreign power. Their acquiescence in ‘ignorance’ threatened the advance of knowledge otherwise encouraged by a ‘variety of opinions in religion’.159 Politique considerations in favour of Catholics weighed little with Locke. They controlled little trade, and whatever credit abroad an English king might accrue by tolerating them would only diminish his domestic standing.160 That Locke’s return to the question of toleration prioritized the Catholic problem is significant, as we shall see. But as Locke revised his work, he expanded it, and his ‘Essay concerning Toleration’ soon outstripped this initial purpose. To read Locke’s ‘Essay’ against Hobbes entails a certain measure of speculation, but any contextual reading of the manuscript must be similarly speculative. As J.R. and Philip Milton note, the ‘Essay’ responded to the general toleration debate of 1667–8, but it made no reference to any contemporaneous printed work (not even Wolseley’s).161 There is more evidence of Locke reading Hobbes during this period than there is of his reading John Humfrey, John Owen, John Corbet, or other direct participants in the controversy.162 As Marshall observes, the ‘Essay’ is not ‘sufficiently explained by any specific ecclesiastical allegiance’. Given Locke’s reading, the Hobbesian overtones of the earlier ‘English Tract’, and continued Hobbesian textual parallels in the ‘Essay’ (some noted by the Miltons163), reading the text against Hobbes is justified. This is particularly true because, as we shall see, Locke was immersed in a broader polemical literature that construed the tolerationism of the Cabal as ‘Hobbist’, and he 159 160 161 162 163

Greenfield Library, St John’s College, BR1610.L8232, f. 2r–2v. Greenfield Library, St John’s College, BR1610.L8232, f., 2v, 3r. J.R. and Philip Milton, Introduction to EcT, 26. Marshall, Locke, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 60–1; J.R. and Philip Milton also note the sui generis nature of much of Locke’s thinking. Introduction, EcT, 22–5. J.R. and Philip Milton, Introduction to EcT, 31–2, 315n.

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left manuscripts responding to that uncomfortable construal. Furthermore, the nonconformist authors often invoked to contextualize the ‘Essay’ – including Owen, Corbet, and particularly Humfrey – were significantly involved in the polemical wars over ‘Hobbesian’ toleration. Reading Locke’s writings within a Hobbesian milieu and reading them against the broader tolerationist debates are not alternative – but linked – interpretations. In this regard, that the initial seeds of Locke’s ‘Essay’ engaged favourably with Charles Wolseley is itself significant. Though he later wrote against Hobbes, Wolseley’s Liberty of Conscience the Magistrate’s Interest was exactly the kind of politique case for indulgence that contemporaries widely characterized as Hobbesian.164 As had Locke’s earlier ‘Two Tracts’, the ‘Essay’ presents itself as an exploration of new contractual and rights-oriented doctrines of sovereignty. Locke’s revised conclusions about toleration again positioned themselves within this language and logic. The ‘power and authority the magistrate hath is derivd from the grant and consent of the people’, and ‘it cannot be supposd the people should give any one or more of their fellow men an authority over them for any other purpose then their owne preservation, or extend the limits of their jurisdiction beyond the limits of this life’.165 Locke’s emphasis on the bare preservation of life as the motive for the social contract was significantly Hobbesian. He again sidelined divine right models of monarchy, thus removing one potential source of magisterial spiritual power. More surprisingly, but consistent with Locke’s earlier writing, the ‘Essay’ did not consider any parliamentary basis for sovereign religious authority based on the English church constitution. The work explores the nature and limits of a purely temporal sovereignty. Locke’s opinion had swung back in favour of toleration. If his logic remained fundamentally deferential towards sovereignty, and wedded to the natural rights paradigm, it was nevertheless not a purely politique argument. Locke now identified limitations – beyond mere prudence – to the spiritual power of magistrates. Arguably the most essential argument of the ‘Essay’, however, can be found in Leviathan. With Hobbes, Locke held: Noe man can give an other man power, (and it would be to noe purpose if god should) over that over which he has noe power himself, now that a man 164 165

A point made by Parkin, Taming, 243, 259. There were scattered Hobbesian touches in Wolseley’s writing, such as the account of the natural state in Wolseley, Unreasonableness of Atheism, 151–2. Huntington, MS HM 584, f. iii; EcT, 270. (I have followed the numbering of J. R. and Philip Milton, who have supplied folio numbers i–ix for the initial leaves of the manuscript.)

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The hint as to the subjectivity of perception and the deterministic overtones of Locke’s account of ‘opinion’ are both significant. The prudence of power must bow to the dictates of nature. Hobbes had similarly construed internal conscience as a realm of opinion that could not be liberated from the will. Also Hobbesian was Locke’s emphasis on the mysterious, non-scientific nature of tolerable beliefs. These were ‘puerly speculative opinions’, a phrase recalling Leviathan’s discussion of orthodoxy, heresy, and conscience.167 As in Hobbes, the power of sovereignty to command assent was weakest where a scientific demonstration of causality could not be sustained. Of coercion, asked Locke, ‘who takes this course to convince any one of the certain truths of mathematiques?’ Only speculative opinions could be enforced for ‘interest and dominion’.168 Locke also wrote of a ‘private interest’ in individual salvation that could not be alienated rationally.169 This would become a core Lockean argument, but it was found – surprisingly – in Hobbes’s later writings as well. In the Latin Leviathan, Hobbes had written that each individual ‘must search out his own salvation in the Holy Scriptures at his own greatest peril – not at the peril of anyone else’.170 In the Historia Ecclesiastica, he challenged the clergy whether they would ‘forbid me from employing my own reasoning, when what is more important to me has to be pursued at my own peril’.171 Locke wrote that only ‘speculative opinions and Divine worship’ required an ‘absolute and universall right to toleration’.172 As a matter of simple natural necessity, opinions could not lose their liberty, and this freedom of personal opinion was the primary concern of the ‘Essay’. This dimension of the work would have given Hobbes no pause whatsoever. Locke’s right to ‘divine worship’, however, was a significant departure from a purely Hobbesian logic. Leviathan had certainly urged prudent sovereigns towards latitude on what Locke called the ‘place, time, & 166 167

168 170

Huntington, MS HM 584, ff. iv–v; EcT, 272. Huntington, MS HM 584, f. iv; EcT, 271. The context for this is religious belief. Locke lists as ‘speculative opinions’ the ‘belief of a trinity, fall, antipodes, atoms’. In the first draft, ‘Christs personall reigne on earth’ is included. Huntington, MS HM 584, f. 23v; EcT, 296. 169 Huntington, MS HM 584, f. vi; EcT, 273. Lev., 1188. 171 HE, 445. 172 Huntington, MS HM 584, f. iv; EcT, 271.

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manner of worshiping my god’. But for Hobbes this was a matter of shrewd governance, and in his Restoration writings he largely dropped the subject of worship or exercise. Locke presented free worship as a right, and envisioned it extending to Muslims, Jews, and even the ‘pompous ceremonies of the papists’. The logic of contracted sovereignty, trading protection for obedience, could not empower sovereigns to control belief or worship. ‘He can right me against my neighbour but cannot defend me against my god’, wrote Locke. The sovereign ‘can make me noe reparation in the other world’.173 This significant argument does seem to ground a spiritual right on something other than natural necessity. A closely connected departure in the ‘Essay’ is Locke’s revised position on adiaphora. He continued to deploy the concept, but now counselled a wide latitude on matters indifferent (largely because they would not ‘disturb the community’).174 Locke’s mature position on adiaphora had not yet fully emerged, but his position had shifted significantly. As Marshall notes, the public good (and not just arbitrary power) now adjudicated matters indifferent.175 The right to religious worship was significant, providing a stronger claim on liberties urged by Leviathan on prudential grounds. Nevertheless, in the ‘Essay’, Locke’s general presentation of religious liberty is substantially individualized and seems modelled more on the case of speculative opinion than that of collective worship. Locke wrote of ‘my private interest in another world’, of salvation as ‘a higher concernment to me’, and of individual ‘inquirers’ following inner conscience. He contrasted ‘outward violence of the magistrate on mens bodys’ (in temporal affairs) with the ‘voluntary and secret choise of the minde’ (in spiritual ones). He construed religious worship as a ‘commerce passeing only between god and myself’, a homage that ‘hath in its owne nature noe reference at all to my governor or to my neighbour’.176 This characterization of free belief and even free worship as fundamentally ‘private’, individual, and ‘secret’ limits the ‘Essay’ as a brief for free exercise.177 Indeed, notwithstanding his concession of a right to worship, Locke remained preoccupied with the threat of collective, corporate 173 174 175 176 177

Huntington, MS HM 584, f. v; EcT, 27. Huntington, MS HM 584, ff. 2, 18–9; EcT, 274–5, 289. Marshall, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 52. Huntington, MS HM 584, f. vi, 1–2, EcT, 273–4; the pronounced individualism of the ‘Essay’ is noted by J.R. and Philip Milton, Introduction to EcT, 32. This complicates the chronology offered by Harris and Stanton, whereby the natural law duty to public worship devised by Locke in 1662–4 was the watershed in his thought. This interpretation convincingly rebukes the tendency to treat Lockean religious freedom as purely individual (rather

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religious liberty, and devised an expansive logic of limitation. These limitations explain why the ‘Essay’ is usually read as an ambiguous defence of conscience rights, displaying both liberal and authoritarian features.178 As Marshall observes, in the ‘Essay’ Locke ‘seemed to take back with one hand what he had just written with the other’.179 Locke warned: Since men usually take up their religion in grosse, and assume to themselves the opinions of their party all at once in a bundle, it often happens that they mix with their religious worship, and speculative opinion, other doctrines absolutely destructive to the society wherein they live, as is evident in the Roman Catholicks that are subjects of any prince but the Pope. These therefor blending such opinions with their religion, reverencing them as fundamental truths, and submitting them as articles of their faith, ought not to be tolerated by the magistrate. . .

This fear of ‘religion in grosse’ and of religious ‘party’ is marked. ‘Factions of men’ could use speculative opinions and modes of worship to advance destabilizing doctrines, and the sovereign must ‘use all ways either of polisie or power that shall be convenient, to lessen, break, and suppresse the party and soe prevent the mischeife’.180 Locke remained concerned with weaponized conscience. A ‘perfect and uncontrould liberty’ of speculation and worship must reward only those who believe and act ‘sincerely & out of conscience to god’ without ‘ambition, pride, revenge, faction, or any such aloy’. Ceremonies and practice were freed by Locke in theory, but he demonstrated considerable concern about both corporate, ecclesial authority and communal, sectarian identity. This could implicate seemingly neutral, indifferent practices. Any ‘forme of worship’, even if it did not directly cause turbulence, might occasion the ‘strict correspondence and freindship’ of malcontents and afford them opportunity ‘to number their forces, know their strength, be confident of one another, and readily unite upon any occasion’.181 Thus, even communal practices that were manifestly

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than communal and ecclesial), but it does not effectively characterize the ‘Essay concerning Toleration’. Stanton, ‘Natural Law and Toleration’, 50. Kraynak, ‘Locke: from Absolutism to Toleration’, 60–2; Wootton, Introduction to Locke, Political Writings, 41; Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, 94–5; Kelly, ‘Authority, Conscience and Religious Toleration’, 124–47; Foster, Moral Consensus, 47–8. Marshall, Locke, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 58. Huntington, MS HM 584, ff. 13–4; EcT, 284–5. Huntington, MS HM 584, f. 16; EcT, 286. It is a measure of the Hobbesian qualities of the original Essay that Locke would later excise much of this argument in a revision. The suggestion that the Quakers might be such a faction with overly close ‘correspondence and friendship’ was dropped. MS Locke c. 28, ff. 26–7.

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‘every particular man’s duty’ might be prohibited by law. The ‘good of the common wealth is the standard of all human laws, when it seemes to limit and alter the obligation even of some of the laws of god and change the nature of vice and virtue’.182 With this comment prioritizing state interest, Locke neared the notorious Hobbesian subordination of good and evil to mere positive law. The sovereign alone must decide when indifferent religious practices might unify his enemies. Speculative opinions enjoyed an absolute right, but worship practices only a conditional one. The fine print on this point was significant, as was indicated by Locke’s identification of the Quakers as one group legitimately ‘suppresse[d] & weaken[ed]’ by the state. This example justified a significant proportion of all sectarians jailed by the Restoration regime.183 Locke also justified censorship of speculative opinions, if they were deemed disruptive to civil order.184 He further carved out a second category of opinion: not ‘speculative opinions’, but ‘practicall principles, or opinions which men thinke themselves obleigd to regulate their actions, with one another’. These practical opinions, because indifferent, had some title to toleration, ‘but yet only soe far, as they do not tend to the disturbance of the state, or doe not cause greater inconveniences, than advantages to the community’. This utilitarian logic opened a wide gate to coercion.185 Among vulnerable ‘practicall principles’ Locke included beliefs about child rearing, ‘that men may work or rest when they thinke fit, that polygamy and divorce are lawful or unlawful’.186 Practical opinions thus included social practices implicated in religion and potentially sacramental in character. Locke’s chief goals were to prevent punishment for ‘publishing or venting any opinion’, forcing individuals to ‘renounce or abjure any opinion’ or ‘to declare an assent to the contrary opinion’. This conflation of conscience and opinion recalled Hobbes. Opinion was free as a matter of natural necessity because ‘compulsion cannot produce any reall effect’ on it, but actions ‘flowing from any of these opinions’ could be coerced to serve the ‘necessity of the state’.187 Worship practices fell under this more 182 183 185

186 187

Huntington, MS HM 584, ff. 11–12; EcT, 282–3. Emphasis added. Huntington, MS HM 584, f. 16; EcT, 286. 184 Huntington, MS HM 584, f. 6; EcT, 278. In later revisions, Locke excised parts of this argument, specifically the claim that ‘the good of the commonwealth is the standard of all human laws’. The original phrasing is strongly Hobbesian. MS Locke c. 28, f. 26. Huntington, MS HM 584, ff. 2v, 3; EcT, 275–6. Huntington, MS HM 584, ff. 6–7; EcT, 278.

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vulnerable category. Locke’s ‘Essay’ conformed quite closely to the primary justifications of Restoration confessional law, which usually eschewed any desire to force belief and instead foregrounded the threat of sectarian disorder. The ‘Essay’ thus only partly denied the claim that on religious questions, ‘the right of imposeing is the great prerogative of the magistrate’. Most of Locke’s arguments remained confined within a Hobbesian logic of prudent statecraft. What he negated, if only by complete negligence, was any claim that the established church might enjoy authority to govern the religion of subjects or that the sovereign was constitutionally bound to enforce its spiritual judgements. Consistent with the Erastian logic of the new natural rights thinking, ‘rightful’ liberty from clerical authority was unqualified in the ‘Essay’. Indeed, cautioning magistrates against unjustified coercion, Locke warned of agents who might ‘mislead’ the sovereign in this direction out of ‘faire praetenses’ or ‘specious semblances and appearances of right’.188 This was the language of Hobbes’s heresy writings. In sum, the ‘Essay’ defended free conscience (opinion) with a Hobbesian affirmation of the natural limitations of coercion. Locke privatized and individualized religious freedom, and cast it as a question of speculative opinion in a manner reminiscent of Hobbes’s heresy writings. His most noteworthy innovation – a right to worship – was qualified by treating all communal practices as latently political and all religious practices as potential rallying points for faction. Locke undoubtedly wished to counsel the sovereign to tolerate pluralistic religious practices, but so had Hobbes. And in this later respect, Locke’s ‘Essay’ persisted in offering politique arguments.189 Locke concluded the work by leaving aside the ‘duty’ of magistrates and considering what they ‘ought to doe in prudence’. A series of standard civil religious arguments followed. Toleration would secure stability, enrich the state, pacify ‘malcontents’, promote migration and industry, and prevent the propagandistic use of martyrdom to spread error. Toleration would force dissenters to ‘crumble into different partys amongst themselves’, as distant ‘one from another as from you [i.e. the King]’. It would ‘cement’ their allegiance to the state.190 These arguments echoed the indulgence memos circulating in Shaftesbury’s circle during these very years. Locke’s ‘Essay’ even included a prescient discussion of 188 189 190

Huntington, MS HM 584, ff. 7v, 8; EcT, 280. A point observed by Marshall, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 53–4, 63, 68, and Jolley, Toleration and Understanding, 21. Huntington, MS HM 584, ff. 19, 26; EcT, 289–90, 293–8, 301.

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magistrates as God’s ‘vice-gerents’, anticipating later schemes for a Cromwellian-style Vicar General.191 The ‘Essay’ echoed the Hobbesian theory of religious war, asking ‘how it comes to passe that Christian religion hath made more factions wars & disturbances in civil societys then any other, & whether toleration & Latitudinisme would prevent those evills’.192 Like Hobbes, Locke indicted Catholics, episcopalians, and sectarians alike for this violence, specifically referencing the foolish severity of the Laudian church ‘before the war’. He argued, as Hobbes had, that religious persecution was caused by unjustified deference to clergy. ‘For let Divines preach duty as long as they will’, wrote Locke, ‘twas never knowne that men lay downe quietly under the oppression and submitted their back to the blows of others when they thought they had strength enough to defend themselves.’193 Locke’s ‘Essay concerning Toleration’ remained an equivocal, transitional text. Without doubt it advanced beyond a purely Hobbesian tolerantia. It limited sovereign control of adiaphora, and it asserted that not only speculative opinion but also exterior worship practices could not reasonably be alienated by individuals subjecting themselves to political power. Locke’s mature tolerationism would draw on these argumentative threads. But when measured against Locke’s later writings, the ‘Essay’ appears modest. Its central defence of conscience as speculative, interior ‘opinion’ was broadly Hobbesian. Though it deployed the language of ‘rights’, it did not justify active resistance in protections of those rights. Subjects resisting the loss of their religious freedom were required ‘quietly to submit to the penaltys that law inflicts on such disobedience’. God alone would judge the wayward sovereign who imposed on conscience.194 Moreover, Locke’s ‘Essay’ continued to operate within the confines of civil religious discourse, explicitly or implicitly. Even where Locke conceded conscience rights, or rights of free worship, he limited such rights with unvarying reference to the safety or mere ‘convenience’ of the 191 192

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Huntington, MS HM 584, f. 10; EcT, 281. An early use of the term ‘latitude’ in an ecclesial context. Simon Patrick’s Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude Men was published in 1662. The term became more common in the 1670s. Rivers, Reason, Grace, 27–9; for the language of ‘latitude’ as problematic, see John Spurr, ‘’Latitudinarianism and the Restoration Church’, 61–82. Huntington, MS HM 584, ff. 24, 26, 30; EcT, 295, 299, 301. Like Hobbes, Locke favoured an atomization strategy. Sects ‘are apt to devide and subdivide into so many little bodys and always with the greatest enmity to those last parted from or stand nearest to’. MS Locke c. 28, f. 28v. Huntington, MS HM 584, f. 8; EcT, 279. The significance of this limitation is perhaps indicated by Locke’s later decision to remove it from a revision. MS Locke c. 28, f. 26.

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commonwealth.195 As we shall see, Locke’s Epistola de Tolerantia would cast conscience freedom as a Christian good and would speak with reverence of the communal and ethical purposes of religion unsullied by statecraft. The ‘Essay’ offered none of this. Prophetic Christianity is missing entirely from the text.196 The work limited the spiritual supremacy of sovereigns, but preserved some coercive control over religion as a prerogative power, provided that control was exercised for purely civil ends. The residual Hobbism of Locke’s ‘Essay’ was, if anything, accentuated in later revisions. In the years following its original composition, perhaps in the early 1670s, Locke added and deleted significant passages.197 Some of these additions – such as the prohibition on the toleration of atheism – anticipated Locke’s Epistola. Locke also fortified his critique of regulating adiaphora by noting that any small gesture or ceremony might be of ultimate importance to an individual convinced of its divine warrant. He distinguished the governance of adiaphora in a church wherein the sovereign is a member from such governance in an alien church. This point potentially augmented monarchical authority over the Church of England, while increasing latitude outside it.198 As an argument from Shaftesbury’s ‘clerical secretary’, it would have dismayed the bishops. They would have been still more incensed at passages added to the version of the ‘Essay’ found in Locke’s Adversaria and almost certainly dating from the early 1670s. Here Locke urged conformist clergy not to ‘impudently raile at theire dissenting bretheren’. Their obsession with ‘jurisdiction’ made ‘some men suspect that tis not the feeding of the sheep but the benefit of the fleece’ that made them ‘endeavour by such methods to enlarge theire fold’.199 The Adversaria ‘Essay’ contained intensely anticlerical passages reminiscent of Hobbes’s late historical writings. Once Christianity had ‘growne up in the world and was become a national religion’, it has ‘been the cause of more disorders tumults and bloudshed then all other causes put togeather’. Primitive Christianity had been politically passive, but a priesthood proclaiming divine right and apostolic 195 196 197

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Huntington, MS HM 584, f. 3, 7, 9–10, 12; EcT, 276, 278, 281, 282–3; Marshall, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 50. Harris, Mind of Locke, 114, 120–4. Some of these changes are found in the copy of the Essay in Locke’s papers (MS Locke c. 28, f. 21–42). Others are found in Locke’s Adversaria 1661. The latter text dates from the early-to-mid-1670s. The former is impossible to date. J.R. and Philip Milton, Introduction to EcT, 172–7. MS Locke c. 28, f. 22. ‘Additions to the essay’ from ‘Adversaria 1661’, printed in EcT, 310–11.

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succession ‘by the imposition of hands’ freed itself ‘from the civil power’. This empowered priests to doe severall things which are not lawfull to be donne by other men, the chief whereof are: 1. to teach opinions concerning god, a future state and ways of worship. 2. to doe and performe themselves certain rights exclusive of others. 3. to punish dissenters from their doctrines of rules. Whereas it is evident from Scripture that all preisthood terminated in the Great high preist Jesus Christ who was the last preist. 2. That there are noe foot steps in the Scripture of any soe set apart with such powers as they pretend to after the Apostles time nor that had an indelible character. 3. That there is to be made out that there is noe thing which a preist can doe which an other man without any such ordination . . . may not lawfully performe and doe, and the church and worship of god be preserved, as the peace of the State may by Justices of peace and other officers, who had no ordination or laying on of hands to fit them to be Justices, and by taking away their commissions may cease to be soe. Soe Ministers as well as Justices are necessary one for the administration of religious publique worship, the other of civil justice, but an indelible character, peculiar sanctity of the function, or a power, immediately derived from heaven is not necessary or as much as convenient for either.

Hobbes had repeatedly insisted that lay servants of a sovereign might be empowered to administer religion. Under Christian sovereigns, Locke continued, clergy pretended to limit their authority to spiritual matters, but ‘pressed’ the magistrate to enforce orthodoxy at their command. ‘Serviceable’ monarchs, willing to be so importuned, were rewarded with ideological support (‘for commonwealths have hitherto been lesse favorable’ to church power). But not-withstanding the jus divinum of Monarchy, when any prince hath dared to dissent from their doctrines of formes, or been lesse apt to execute the decrees of the hirarchy they have been the first and forwardest in giving chek to his authority and disturbance to his government. And princes on the otherside being apt to hearken to such as seeme to advance their authority, and bring in religion to the assistance of their absolute power, have been generally very ready to worry those sheepe who have ever soe litle stragled out of those shepheards folds . . . and hence have come most of those calamitys which have soe long distubd and wasted Christendom.

Sovereigns foolishly willing to ‘punish those the clergy please to call hereticks scismaticks or fanatick’ would only drive dissenters into confederacies. The ‘desire for religious liberty’, when denied, would cause ‘open war’.

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J.R. and Philip Milton have dated this passage to 1674–5. It is generally unknown and casts new light on the themes of the original ‘Essay’. Locke’s warning that jure divino clergy, their protestations aside, would hamper rather than augment the authority of princes and would occasion civil wars was a Hobbesian point much in favour at court during the Cabal years. We have established that Locke, during his Shaftesburian period, was reading Leviathan, reacquainting himself with the Hobbes–Bramhall dispute, purchasing other works by Hobbes, and being advised (at least) to read Behemoth and the Dialogue of the Common Law. It is certainly true that in the original ‘Essay concerning Toleration’ and elsewhere (as we shall see) not all of Hobbes’s views on ecclesiastical power found favour with Locke. But others did, and his revised ‘Essay’ attacked divine right clergy and heresy hunting in a manner very reminiscent of Hobbes’s writings from the same period. These passages, indeed, were the most Hobbesian commentary on religion that Locke had composed since the ‘Two Tracts’.201 To some extent this continued to be true even when Locke defended a right of worship broader than that justified by Hobbes. Locke continued to qualify this right by surrendering an extensive power ‘to forbid such things as may tend to the disturbance of the peace of the commonwealth’. He inclined, like Hobbes, towards a highly individual understanding of conscientious practice, defining worship as each man’s homage to God according to forms ‘he himself is perswaded are acceptable and pleaseing to that god he worships . . . depending on his opinion of his god’. He reaffirmed that coercion could not alter conscience, as conscience was mere inner ‘opinion’.202 200 201

‘Additions to the essay’ from ‘Adversaria 1661’, printed in EcT, 311–5. This builds on observations of Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Locke’, 168–9. 202 EcT, 311–12.

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Even more strikingly Hobbesian passages explored the relationship between the coercion of conscience and clerical usurpation. These echoed the ecclesiastical history that Hobbes had recently composed as coded political comment, and that Aubrey had directly recommended to Locke and Shaftesbury. Particularly notable were Locke’s condemnation of a priesthood empowered by succession and imposition of hands (‘independent of civil power’), and his denunciation of the clerical aspiration to control ‘opinion’ and to punish heresy. Locke’s thesis that the ‘calamitys which have soe long disturbed & wasted Christendom’ were caused by sovereigns targeting so-called ‘schismatics’ and ‘heretics’ at the behest of the clergy was the key argument of all of Hobbes’s heresy writings and was ubiquitous in texts that Locke may well have known.203 Clergy goaded magistrates to punish and persecute. However outwardly deferential to the Royal Supremacy, priests deployed orthodoxy as a nefarious means of control. Hobbes had made identical points in Leviathan.204 Locke echoed another Hobbesian argument in asserting that Christian ‘clergy’ adopted this status in imitation of the Jewish priesthood. Hobbes had argued this at length, tracing the title ‘clergy’ to the Hebrew term for ‘lot’ or inheritance.205 Locke claimed that ‘in ordine ad spiritualia absolute temporall power comes in’ (as evidenced by the empires of Popery and Presbyterianism). This passage also mirrored Hobbesian rhetoric. In Behemoth, Hobbes wrote of the ‘Sacerdotall’ power: [A.] By Spirituall Power they meane the Power to determine points of Faith, and to be Judges, in the inner Court of Conscience, of morall duties . . . But for the Power Temporall, which consists in Judging and Punishing those actions that are done against the Civill Laws, they say they doe not pretend to it directly, but onely indirectly, that is to say so far forth as such actions tend to the hindrance or advancement of Religion and good manners, which they meane when they say in ordine ad Spiritualia. B. What Power then is left to Kings and other Civill Soveraignes, which the Pope may not pretend to be in his in ordine ad Spiritualia.206

A later passage of Behemoth and one in the Dialogue of the Common Law would repeat this deconstruction of the phrase in ordine ad Spiritualia.207 The phrase appeared in Locke’s writings after, but not before, the 1670s, by 203 204 206 207

Beh., 116–9; Hobbes here used, as Locke did, the metaphor of sheep to describe those subject to clerical authority. DCL, 92–103. Lev., 1106, 865. 205 Ibid., 844. Beh., 113; J.R. and Philip Milton observe some of these parallels. EcT, 313n and 315n. Beh., 161; DCL, 104.

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which time Locke had likely encountered Hobbes’s repeated and politically charged analysis of it. These parallels may be coincidental, or spring from common sources, but a direct influence is plausible, perhaps likely. In any case, the parallels evidence persistent Hobbesian traits in Locke’s ‘Essay’, particularly as revised in the 1670s. Understanding these features of the work requires two revisions to the standard view. On the one hand, we must recognize the limitations of the ‘Essay’s’ tolerationism when measured against his Epistola. On the other, we must resist construing Restoration Hobbism as an uncomplicated system of temporal and spiritual absolutism. Certainly, that reading of Hobbes circulated. But more commonly, and more accurately reflecting his actual politics, Hobbes was associated with prerogative indulgence and philosophical liberty for speculative opinion. In this sense, to document Hobbesian arguments in Locke’s ‘Essay’ is not to deny the work’s tolerationist credentials at all, but merely to note that it remained strongly marked by deference to sovereign prerogative and temporal political priorities. That said, the ‘Essay’ did offer an important innovation: an effort, not unmitigated but still significant, to limit the ‘right’ of sovereignty to command full spiritual sovereignty for spiritual purposes. When pursuing civil ends, sovereigns continued to enjoy considerable latitude to limit the free religious exercise of subjects. But they could not do so either arbitrarily or in the service of spiritual ends, as they lacked spiritual competence. Further, it was irrational for subjects to deposit the fate of their eternal souls into a sovereign’s custody. If this important new logic was only partially unfolded in the ‘Essay’, it anticipated aspects of Locke’s final position on religious freedom.

Polemics and the Construction of Hobbism: The Notes on Parker To the extent that Locke’s mature tolerationism would eventually break with the Hobbesian cause of prerogative indulgence, some evidence of the circumstances encouraging that break emerged a few years after the original ‘Essay concerning Toleration’ was composed. Locke’s Shaftesburian period produced one particularly important point of contact with debates over Hobbism. Locke took substantial notes on Samuel Parker’s famous defence of confessional intolerance, the Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie of 1669, and in these notes, Locke associated Parker’s intolerance with Hobbes, as others did. The notes have been interpreted as an important

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watershed in Locke’s thought, directing him towards a ‘right of conscience’ that has often been casually arrayed against Hobbes’s presumed intolerance.208 This standard interpretation is not entirely incorrect, but it trades on stereotypes about Hobbes and misreads the contemporary resonance of Parker’s polemic. Engaging with Parker did not pit a tolerationist Locke against Hobbes’s spiritual absolutism. Rather, Parker forced Locke to confront the limitations of the Hobbesian case on behalf of toleration. Samuel Parker’s proximity to Hobbes on the question of confessional coercion has often been overstated. His Discourse was in fact a broadside aimed at the politique tolerationism that Hobbism was feeding at the Restoration court. Associated with the cause of indulgence, Locke was motivated to ward off these charges.209 Parker, like his colleagues, kept a wary eye on Hobbes’s influence during these years. Like Locke, he may first have encountered Leviathan at Interregnum Oxford. A student at Wadham and then Trinity, Parker inclined towards Presbyterianism during the 1650s.210 After the Restoration, he conformed. Significant theological writings earned Parker the favour of Archbishop Sheldon, to whom he became a chaplain.211 Parker was also one of the gifted critical historians of the era, versed in antiquarian researches.212 Parker’s Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie exemplified the church’s apprehension over the direction of royal religious policy.213 The book became infamous for the unseemly enthusiasm with which it flogged ‘Brain-sick’ dissenters. Parker deftly mobilized contemporary stereotypes, presenting dissenters as factionalized ‘bigots’ possessed of a ‘holy Inhumanity’. He revived memories of the civil war, when sectarians had betrayed their own intolerance.214 Nevertheless, Parker’s blast against nonconformity was hardly sycophantic court propaganda. It was, rather, an alarm to ‘awaken Authority’ to ‘dangerous Enemies’. Like much conformist writing of these 208 209

210 212 213

214

Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, 105–9; Marshall, Locke and Toleration, 117, 440–3, 451, 453, 462; Marshall, Locke, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 74–7; Harris, Mind of Locke, 70. 183. The best discussion of Parker and Hobbism is found in Parkin, Taming, 252–8, which accords in many respects with the reading here. Parkin’s presentation of Parker as an Erastian ‘latitudinarian’ is overstated, however, and he says little about the context of court politics and Indulgence. AO, 4:226. 211 ODNB; Sutch, Sheldon, 108–9. Even in this context Hobbes functioned as a foil for Parker. Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 143–6, 349–54, 496. Rose, ‘Ecclesiastical Polity of Samuel Parker’, 350–75; Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 497; Rose revises the overly Hobbesian readings of Parker offered by Schochet and Parkin. Gordon Schochet, ‘Between Lambeth and Leviathan: Samuel Parker on the Church of England and Public Order’, entire; Parkin, ‘Hobbism in the later 1660s’, 85–108. Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, iii, vii, x.

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years, it regarded the court with suspicion. Parker urged: ‘That whatsoever Freedom they may think good to Indulge to Religion, they would not suffer Irreligion to share in the Favour, nor permit Atheism to appear openly (as it begins to do) under the Protection of Liberty of Conscience.’215 The Discourse advanced on two fronts, against presumptuous nonconformists full of spiritual arrogance and against the atheistic ‘wits’ of town and court nurturing ‘prophaneness and ribaldry’. In this latter respect, Parker’s manifesto targeted court Hobbism and traded on the association of the court’s politique impulses with the cause of toleration. Atheistic scoffers in high places, reared on the ‘Principles of the Malmsbury Philosophy’, maligned the church as a pack of ‘Ambitious Priests’ duping the kingdom. Parker itemized Hobbes’s heresies: the denial of immaterial substance; the subordination of reason to sense; the reduction of will to corporeal motion; the elevation of might to right; an egoistic account of natural law; and the claim that true ‘religion is the Belief of tales publickly allowed’. Promoted ‘upon the bare Authority and proofless Assertions of one proud and haughty Philosophy’, these new dogmas imperilled religion, piety, and the clergy.216 ‘They can scarce meet with a Clergy-man’, wrote Parker, ‘but they must be pelting him with Oaths, or Ribaldry, or Atheistic Drollery . . . The Infection spreads and grows Fashionable, and creeps out of the Cities into Villages.’217 Parker presented nonconformists and Hobbists as coconspirators. Crucially, his Discourse centrally targeted ‘the consequences that some men draw from Mr. Hobs’s Principles in behalf of Liberty of Conscience’.218 This purpose has been obscured by readings foregrounding the marginal Hobbesian notes of Parker’s own arguments.219 He certainly did flatter the spiritual authority of sovereigns. Concerned that individual conscience could topple hierarchy, Parker granted princes ‘absolute’ and ‘uncontrollable’ power over spiritual and temporal affairs.220 He was a dogged propagandist on behalf of the Royal Supremacy, and even his episcopal colleagues viewed his Erastianism warily.221 But Parker’s supposed ‘Hobbism’ is easy to overstate. Parker grounded spiritual and temporal power on natural, paternal authority, rather than contract and 215 216 217 219 220 221

Ibid., xix. Ibid., xxxv–xxxvi; see also Parker, Defence and Continuation of the Ecclesiastical Politie, 466. Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, xxxii–xxxiii. 218 Ibid., 135. Parker insisted that his supposed Hobbesianism was based on tendentious and partial quotations. Parker, Defence and Continuation of the Ecclesiastical Politie, 278–9. Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, 26–8. Morrice, Entring Book, 18 September 1686, 3:254.

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interest.222 He rejected such conceits as the state of nature and Hobbes’s account of the natural law. He did not present spiritual authority as a universal note of sovereignty, in the manner of Leviathan. Christian kings, rather, had been ‘annexed’, empowered to ‘abet the Spiritual Power of the Clergy with their Secular Authority’. Christian states merely enhanced the miraculous, charismatic power of the apostles.223 Parker posited a primitive episcopal church endowed with supernatural authority. This diverged fundamentally from Hobbes’s primitive, teaching church of gathered congregations. Parker’s belief in the apostolic authority of episcopacy distanced him from ecclesial Hobbism.224 In his The Case of the Church of England of 1681 – written after the further shock of the royal Indulgence of 1672 – Parker would make this altogether clear. Defending episcopal divine right, he attributed the church’s unpopularity to ‘Mr. Hobbs and his Followers, that own the Church of England only because it is Establisht by the Law of England, and allow no Authority either to that or any other Religion than as it is injoined by the Sovereign Power’.225 Parker associated this hyperErastianism with Hobbes’s Cromwellianism, Independent anticlericalism, and Restoration-era ‘wits’.226 Against these parties he decried a doctrine often incorrectly attributed to him: the ‘one Fundamental Principle, that the Sovereign Power in every Common-wealth is the sole Founder of all revealed Religion’.227 Hobbes’s great error – beguiling Cromwellian Independents and Restoration courtiers alike – was to deny the church’s ‘Right of Society from God’ as a ‘spiritual Corporation distinct from the Common-wealth’.228 Eager to punish dissent, Parker did reject separate spheres of spiritual and temporal authority, but on grounds inimical to Hobbism. Ironically, he agreed with Hobbes and Locke that conscience was inward, and that religious coercion could only operate on outward actions. ‘Mankind therefore’, Parker continued, ‘have the same Natural Right to Liberty of Conscience in matters of Religious Worship as in Affairs of Justice and Honesty, ie a Liberty of Judgment but not of Practice.’ Real religious freedom ‘dwells in our Hearts and our Thoughts’, but ‘public religion’, 222 224 225

226 228

Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, 28–31. 223 Ibid., 48–9. See Parker Account of the Government of the Christian Church of 1683. Parker, Case of the Church of England, 3. Rose, ‘Polity of Parker’, 353. The work targeted Stillingfleet’s Irenicum, but, as Parker seems to have privately realized, this was not entirely fair. Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment, 162–3. Parker, Case of the Church of England, 7–8, 24–5. 227 Ibid., 15–20. Ibid., 36–7; also his Defence and Continuation of the Discourse of Ecclesiastical Polite, ‘to the reader’.

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implicating civil peace, was necessarily regulated by sovereignty.229 But Parker’s notion of confessional unity privileged the sacred, episcopal church, merely aided and protected by princely power.230 He shared the view of his colleagues that cynical Hobbists and nonconformists were allied in a joint assault on the church. Hobbism was ‘the most powerful Patron of the Fanatick Interest’, and ‘Belief in the indifferency, or rather Imposture, of all Religion, is now made the most Effectual (not to say most fashionable) Argument for the Liberty of Conscience.’231 Nonconformity, Hobbism, and the misperceived interests of the monarchy had dangerously converged. The King’s foolish ‘policy’ was to ‘endear [dissenters] all to himself, by indulging them their Liberty in different Follies; and so he may with more ease secure his Government by abusing all, and yet disobliging none’.232 In his Continuation of the Discourse, Parker would elaborate on this theme, condemning Hobbes’s ‘indifference, or rather Imposture of all Religion’ as the ‘most effectual and most fashionable Argument for Liberty of Conscience’. The beneficiaries of indulgence were the ‘young Cubs of the Leviathan’.233 Indulgence amounted to a Hobbesian act of statecraft. Parker answered his enemies on their own terrain: the supposed utility of religious pluralism. He adopted the rhetoric of civil religion to reject this claim and to urge the political benefits of religious uniformity, but he insisted that the Hobbesian case for indulgence must also confront the ‘Truth and Divine Authority of religion’ itself. Thus did Parker advertise the distinction of civil from prophetic religion, and expose the ‘pernicious consequences’ of reducing religion to ‘Imposture’. Even for ‘modern politicians’ enamoured of Hobbes, it was ‘an odde piece of Policy openly to owne and proclaim it’. A church that was ‘advantageous to Government’ required public respect, and authority above all rivals.234 The prince could not cynically balance sects, lest he ‘forfeit his Interest in them all, and whilst he seems concern’d for no Party, no Party will be really concen’d for him’. The ‘Indulged’ would soon scramble to establish their own ‘Supremacy’. ‘Tis Reformation men would have, and not Indulgence.’235 229 230 231 233 234 235

Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, 92, 95, 98. For a slightly different view, see Goldie’s classic ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, 333–4. Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, 137. 232 Ibid., 139. Parker, Defence and Continuation of the Discourse, 568–9. Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, 139, 142, 144, 158, 160–6. See also Parker, Religion and Loyalty, or, a Demonstration of the Power of the Christian Church within itself, epistle.

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The occasional absolutist notes in Parker’s Discourse paled next to his attack on Hobbes, which was driven by the fear that court actors were advancing indulgence with politique logic. This polemical strategy also informed Parker’s 1673 Discourse in Vindication of Bishop Bramhall. Here, defending Hobbes’s most vociferous clerical foe, Parker also attacked John Owen. Owen’s ‘Pamphlets and Preachments for Indulgence’, Parker claimed, were actually efforts to secure, as during the 1650s, the dominion of the ‘Lords Anointed Ones’. Again, Parker’s affirmation of the spiritual supremacy of sovereigns was hardly Hobbesian in flavour. Princes required the ‘Assistance of Ecclesiastics’. Political peace ‘does and must own its quiet and continuance to the Churches Patronage’.236 Sovereigns required not only authority, but also conscience restraints ‘tied on by the Hand of the Priest’, and had an obligation to the ‘Ecclesiastick State’.237 Parker’s most resolute defence of clerical autonomy, it is true, appeared in works postdating the Indulgence of 1672, indicating the profound shock that the second Stuart Declaration delivered to the Restoration church. But anxiety over indulgence and court Hobbism stalked the church earlier, throughout the years of the Cabal. Parker’s Discourse reflected those apprehensions. Indulgence, Parker wrote, validated ‘Coffee-house discourses’ that insinuated the King’s contempt for the church. Indulgence encouraged nonconformists to posture as ‘the Darlings and Favorites of the State’. These comments did not exude confidence in the Church’s nursing father. The ‘fanatics’ advanced indulgence ‘by the assistance of Atheisme and Irreligion’. Court Hobbists had collaborated with the ‘distempered and fiery sort of Fanaticks, and they will piece Interest with any party to pluck down any Church-Faction’.238 Their goal was the despoliation of the church, pursued everywhere except ‘places where Church-men have scrued up themselves to a Superiority or Equality of Interest with the Secular Power, and are by that means able to hold their own’.239 Sentiments of this kind had provided Hobbes with polemical foils for decades. Parker was the most prominent publicist of the view that court Hobbists and nonconformists had allied against the Church. His critic, Andrew Marvell, understood this: I do not see but your Behemoth exceeds his Leviathan some foot long, in whatsoever he saith of the Power of the Magistrate in Matters of Religion and Civils; save that you have levyed the Invisible Powers to your assistance 236 238

Parker, Discourse in Vindication of Bishop Bramhall, 2, 18, 25, 35. Ibid., 64–6. 239 Ibid., 60–2, 76.

237

Ibid., 50.

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Marvell certainly hurled the charge of Hobbism at Parker, quipping that his writings should have earned him the ‘Rectorship’ of ‘Malmsbury’.241 But he knew that Parker’s clericalism fundamentally diverged from the politics of Leviathan by invoking the ‘invisible powers’ that were Hobbes’s main target. In the Rehearsal Transpros’d, Marvell accused Parker of holding that ‘princes cannot pluck a pin out of the Church, but the State immediately shakes and totters’. A more un-Hobbesian sentiment can hardly be imagined, which is why Marvell conceded that Parker ‘confine[d] upon the Territories of Malmsbury’ and ‘surpasses by far the presumption either of Gondibert or Leviathan’.242 Marvell’s polemic against Parker’s supposedly Hobbesian intolerance shrewdly distinguished the temporal absolutism of the latter from the clerical absolutism of the former. Parker, responding, suggested that Marvell’s own case for ‘Indulgence and Liberty of Conscience’ depended on royal prerogative in spiritual matters. As for himself, he repudiated the subordination of religion to the ‘will and Pleasure’ of the Prince. This was the ‘very Divinity of the Leviathan, that I have labour’d to oppose with greater Zeal and Vehemence than I have modern Orthodoxy and Fanaticism itself’.243 Marvell’s critics indeed often characterized Marvell himself as Hobbesian. One linked his account of individual ‘conscience’ to the anarchic ‘Hobbian state of nature’. Marvell supposedly defended the liberty of ‘Conscientious Savages’ by repressing the church and empowering the ‘Politick Cabal-men’. This, as we shall see, misread Marvell, but nevertheless suggests how indulgence was understood by its clerical opponents.244 Edmund Hickeringill similarly implicated Marvell in the politics of the Cabal, which he traced, in turn, to the ‘Oliveral Orthodoxy’. Marvell numbered among the ‘new Politicians’ of the coffeehouses, promoting both the ‘good old cause’ and latter-day Indulgences.245 Hickeringill defended the church against court cynics 240 241 243

244 245

Marvell, Rehearsall transpros’d, second part: 214; Parkin, Taming, 300. Marvell, Rehearsall transpros’d, 5. 242 Ibid., 60. Emphasis added. Parker, Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed, 35–7. Locke owned this work. LL, 2199. He also owned Parker’s A Demonstration of the Divine Authority of the Law of Nature and of the Christian Religion in Two Parts, where Parker assailed Hobbes’s state of nature and account of natural law (xii–xxiii, 33, 38, 210–12). Leigh, Transproser Rehears’d, 36, 76, 112; Parkin, Taming, 300. Hickeringill, Gregory, Father-Greybeard, with His Vizard off, or, News from the Cabal, 6, 15–7.

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who ‘cry up Indulgence and Liberty, Breda, Breda, Reformation, Reformation’.246 The year 1672 was 1642 redux, with sectarianism, atheism, and Cromwellian statecraft again on the move.247 Like Hugh Peter, John Owen, and Cromwell himself, the Cabal ministers were ‘new Politicians play[ing] their pranks, with their new experiments of Licentiousness’.248 Gently rebuking the King, Hickeringill marshalled constitutional and clerical critiques of the Indulgence.249 The new politicians, necessarily including Shaftesbury, had swapped ‘Aristotle for Hobs, Ecclesiastical Policy for Contempt of the Clergy’.250 This presentation of Marvell was an unfair but telling polemical strategy. As a tolerationist, Marvell was attacked along lines developed by Parker, as a promoter of cynical statecraft, absolutism, and Hobbesian licence.251 Locke owned Hickeringill’s book and read it closely.252 Rival interpretations of Hobbism thus marked the years of the Cabal’s ascendancy.253 This was further illustrated by Locke’s old associate Henry Stubbe. Now producing propaganda on behalf of Arlington and the Indulgence, Stubbe attacked both Marvell and Parker, the latter for ‘incoherent’ principles of intolerance. Stubbe presented Parker as a ‘young Leviathan’ for making ecclesiastical and civil power inseparable, thus empowering the King sacramentally.254 This was a gross misreading of Parker. Furthermore, Stubbe was himself a Hobbesian, tempted to ground toleration on sovereign prerogative, as indeed he did when rebutting Marvell’s constitutional objections to indulgence. Stubbe defended ‘prerogative and arbitrary power’, particularly in the hands of a ‘popular, cautelous, and mild’ prince. Stubbe’s enlightened absolutism and prudential tolerantia accorded with Hobbes’s Restoration political priorities and affronted Parker’s. Parker feared the union of ‘fanaticks’ and ‘atheists’ with ‘crafty and Sacrilegious States-men’. Parker surely had the Cabal ministers in mind with this remark. The promotion of politique Indulgence would set the King ‘at liberty from all Restraints of Religion, and prepossess his

246 250 251 252 253 254

249 Ibid., 24, 121–2. 247 Ibid., 44, 53, 58. 248 Ibid., 120. Ibid., 182–3. Ibid., 30, 140. See as well the attack on Indulgence, under the ‘Patronage of Leviathan’ in A Common-place Book out of the Rehearsal Transpros’d, 11–12. LL, 1447. Locke’s copy is marked in the margins, unusually. Bodl. Locke 7.262, pp. 80, 99, 104–7, 114. Ashcraft neglects the ecclesial dimensions of Parker’s critique of Leviathan. Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, 44, 48–52. ODNB; [Henry Stubbe], Rosemary & Bayes: Or Animadversions upon a Treatise, called the Rehearsall Trans-prosed, 2, 5, 8, 18.

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Mind against all Counsels of Priests’, allowing ‘Convenience’ to become the sole ‘Rule of Policy’.255 John Locke’s dissent from Parker’s Discourse is often read as a rebuke to the latter’s presumed Hobbesian case for conformism and uniformity.256 In fact, Locke likely read Parker’s Discourse as an assault on his own political circle. If the indulgence politics of the court stood condemned for an atheistic, politique Hobbism, Shaftesbury was in the dock. Locke did not react favourably to the indictment. Some of Locke’s notes on the Discourse were either neutral or suggested agreement. He presumably accepted Parker’s claim that society required ‘One Supreme’, because ‘coordinate distinct powers may command ye same person contrary obedience which he cannot be obliged to’.257 Likewise, that ‘the Civil magistrate must have under his power all that may concern the end of government: i.e. peace’ was affirmed in Locke’s ‘Essay concerning Toleration’.258 As for Locke’s disagreements with Parker, not all of these were theoretically significant. Locke mischievously equated Parker’s ‘Fanatick spirit’ with that of his nonconformist foes. He suggested that Parker was fishing for preferment.259 At other points, Locke’s dissent from Parker would have commanded Hobbes’s agreement. He rejected Parker’s paternalist account of indefeasible, hereditary monarchy, and instead grounded sovereignty on popular consent. On this foundational question Locke, rather than Parker, remained the Hobbesian.260 Locke’s most significant challenges were ones of application. He wondered why the ‘subdivision of opinions into small sects be of such danger to the government’. He demanded whether – given the predominance of Catholic monarchs – Parker was wise to rely on the religious discernment of sovereigns. Locke conceded the sovereign’s interest in securing peace. He questioned, however, ‘whether Uniformity established by a law’ was required for this end: ‘Whether it be at all dangerous to the magistrate that he believing free will, some of his subjects should believe predestination. Or whether it be more necessary for his government to make laws for wearing surplices, than it is for wearing vests?’261 These were challenges based on consequences, rather than first principles. It was in the context of

255 256 257 259 261

Parker, Discourse in Vindication of Bishop Bramhall, 72–3. Goldie, ‘Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, 368. MS Locke c. 39, f. 5; EcT, 322–6. 258 MS Locke c. 39, f. 5; EcT, 323. MS Locke c. 39, f. 9; EcT, 326. 260 MS Locke c. 39, f. 7–7v; EcT, 325. MS Locke c. 39, f. 7; EcT, 325.

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this criticism, nevertheless, that Locke associated Parker with Hobbism. He asked: . . . whether hence it will follow that ye magistrate ought to force men by severity of laws and penaltys to force men to be of the same minde with him in their speculative opinions in religion or worship god with the same ceremonys? That the magistrate should restrain seditious doctrines who denys but because he may how has he power over all other doctrines to forbid or impose, if he hath not the argument is short, if he hath how far is this short of Mr. Hobbs’s doctrine?262

In truth, neither Parker nor Hobbes empowered sovereigns to force men to ‘the same minde’ in ‘speculative opinions’. But both did empower sovereigns to impose ceremonial uniformity and public doctrine. Hobbes, however, in Leviathan and his later writings, doubted the prudence of such coercion. Locke, in fact, took a Hobbesian line when he disputed Parker’s claim that rigorous doctrinal uniformity was required for public peace. It was nevertheless reasonable to suggest, as Locke did, that both Hobbes and Parker believed religious doctrine ‘incline[d] men to obedience or disturbance’, that ‘opinions in religion influence more forcibly than any’, and that it was thus in the ‘magistrates interest to take care what particular doctrines of religion are taught, and above all things to look to ye doctrines and articles of mens beliefs’.263 Locke’s notes dispute only the number of religious doctrines that might be construed as destabilizing. The requirements of political stability still empowered the magistrate, when necessary, to control doctrine and worship practices, as indeed they had in Locke’s ‘Essay’ of 1667. Locke’s sideswipe at Parker for Hobbism did not carefully reflect the nuances of Leviathan or Hobbes’s Restoration writing, nor the decidedly clericalist dimensions of Parker’s understanding of church establishment. But Locke was certainly not the first to casually deploy Hobbes’s name as a pejorative byword. In this case, Locke’s motive for accentuating Hobbes’s potential intolerance, and thus tarring Parker with a species of ‘Hobbism’, is apparent. He was attempting to parry a countervailing charge of Hobbism, levelled by Parker against the Cabal and its misguided, politique Indulgence. Locke countered by associating Hobbism with the enforcement of religious uniformity at the behest of the bishops. As a reading of the cultural and political moment, Parker’s account was the more credible, and one wonders if Locke’s effort to turn the charge around reflected some 262

MS Locke c. 39, f. 9; EcT, 326.

263

Idem.

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awareness of this reality. Certainly, he could not have read Parker’s Discourse and missed its anti-Hobbesian thesis or its application to his patron.264 Locke’s strategy paralleled that of the nonconformist John Humfrey. Aware that Parker had framed Indulgence as a Hobbesian tactic, Humfrey defended it as an act of Christian charity. In truth, he wrote, Parker and Hobbes encouraged atheism by putting ‘conscience under human Authority’. He thus typed Hobbism as an instrument of ‘Episcopal Bigots’. A similar case against Parker was made by A Sober Inquiry into the Nature, Measure, and Principle of Moral Virtue. If this was composed by Robert Ferguson, as is often asserted, Locke may have known it.265 Ferguson, like Locke, moved from the clientage of Owen into that of Shaftesbury. The Sober Inquiry reproved Parker for proximity to Hobbes and quoted the Latin Leviathan to expose their reduction of morality to the positive commands of sovereignty.266 Ferguson presented Hobbism as an instrument of conscience bondage. Humfrey’s reading was subtler, nuanced by his own decidedly Erastian politics. Defending indulgence, he invoked the dictum that ‘the Supream Law must over-rule all under it; and in all human Laws salus Reipublicae is suprema lex’. Legal technicalities aside, Charles’s Indulgence was approved by God and the ‘consent of the people’.267 In recent years, Humfrey wrote, the ‘Anti-Episcopal party of the Nation, are really turning to be the Royalists, who are for Prorogative, and Supremacy in Ecclesiaticals, when the Bishops party who made it hitherto a proverb that without them no King, are the men bandy about it.’ Parker had presented such deference as godless, Hobbesian statecraft. Far from denying the Supremacy, Humfrey wrote, nonconformists ‘may perhaps be rather accused shortly for acknowledging it too much (as hath been intimated) seeing they do accept of his Declaration, nor doe they scruple his Title of Supreame Head’.268 Humfrey’s understanding of sovereignty, furthermore, was probably extracted from Hobbes. He denied that sovereignty was formed by a contract between governors and the governed. This traditional, quasi-feudal contractualism was the ‘leven of Civil Wars’. Sovereignty instead emerged from ‘the mutual agreement of the people 264 265 266 267

J.R. and Philip Milton present Parker as (at times) ‘distinctly Hobbesian’, as is the convention. Introduction to EcT, 68–9. The work is so identified in the Short Title Catalogue, and the identification is followed by some historians. See for instance, Ashcraft, ‘Latitudinarianism and Toleration’, 173n. R.F., Sober Enquiry into the Nature, Measure, and Principle of Moral Virtue, 53–5, 65, 73–6. Humfrey, Authority of Magistrate about Religion Discussed, 9, 11–12, 17–8, 23. 268 Ibid. 30, 37.

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themselves . . . as they judge best for their general advantage, this, supposing it agreed at first to be absolute, secures it forever being set up, and answers the end of the institution’.269 Humfrey wished – like Locke – to reflect the charge of Hobbism back onto Parker. But construing Parker’s Hobbism as Erastianism would not suit his larger purpose of justifying indulgence. Parker’s Hobbism was therefore represented as a broad ‘Authority over Conscience in any matters whatsoever’. This was, in fact, a misfire. Neither Parker nor Hobbes held that magistrates could coerce the ‘inward acts of man’s soul’. Tendentiously ignoring this, Humfrey then expanded his critique: ‘If the Magistrate hath power over the conscience . . . Then might he impose on us a new Faith, or new Articles in our Creed: Then must we have no Religion but his Will, and no God but Leviathan only.’ This charged Parker, certainly, with too much.270 It was an exaggerated account, indeed, even of Hobbes. And remarkably, Humfrey acknowledged that Leviathan was subject to an alternate interpretation. Having quoted Hobbes’s subordination of all morality to sovereignty, he wrote: Now let us compare this ingenuously as we ought (seeing else it is so bad) with other places in his Book [Leviathan]. That Subjects owe to Soveraigns simple obedience in all things, wherein their obedience is not repugnant to the Laws of God I have proved – C[hapter] 31. Again, It is manifest enough that when a man receiveth two contrary commands, and knows that one of them is Gods, he ought to obey that, and not the other, though it be the command of his lawful Soveraign, of his Father. C 43.

Humfrey thus identified Hobbesian passages respectful of inner conscience and conceded that Parker, similarly, ‘dare not take off all obligations of good and evil from mens consciences antecedent to humane Laws, as Hobs in that one place (though otherwhere, as it seems, he intended not so far) hath done’. Later, Humfrey condemned Hobbes for allowing Christians to deny Christ as a mere external act (as with Naaman). But then again, he observed of Leviathan: ‘There are no passages but this . . . that in my reading over that Book, I observed to be so extream bad, as folks ordinarily talk.’ Hobbes’s account of conscience, he effectively argued, was subtle and often misrepresented in contemporary polemic.271 Humfrey thus seriously compromised his case against Parker’s Hobbism, and perhaps strengthened suspicions that his own deference to 269

Ibid., 75.

270

Ibid., 34, 38–9, 42–3, 44–5, 48–51.

271

Ibid., 68–9, 70.

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sovereignty might be reconciled with a tolerationist reading of Leviathan. As a polemicist he did not have Parker’s relentless mendacity. His honest appraisal of Hobbes’s paradoxical theory of conscience demonstrated why allegations of Hobbism played such contradictory roles in the debate over indulgence. Locke’s accusation of Hobbism against Parker, likewise, was an effort to navigate these contradictions. They were contradictions still present in his ‘Essay concerning Toleration’ and only fully resolved more than a decade later.

Danby’s Rise and the Return to Politique Confessionalism The failure of the King’s second Indulgence numbered the days of the Cabal. Sheldon rallied the bishops for the parliamentary session of 1673: ‘I have great reason to believe that there is a necessity of raysing all the force wee can make.’272 In a profane and atheistic age, wrote Bishop Barlow, when ‘our enemies are many, and perniciously industrious’, only the ‘zeale’ of parliament could be relied on.273 The withdrawal of the Declaration was met with celebratory bonfires and church bells.274 A revolution at court was stirring. In the summer of 1673, the Duke of York and Thomas Clifford both publicly revealed their Catholicism. Clifford retired as Lord Treasurer, as required by the Test Act, and Thomas Osborne (made Earl of Danby in 1674) was appointed to replace him. He was thus positioned as the Cabal tottered. By now Shaftesbury was slipping from favour. York’s Catholicism (and his betrothal to Mary of Modena) provoked the public, and when parliament met in the fall of 1673 there was little hope of a smooth session.275 Rowdy MPs demanded the annulment of York’s marriage, protested the standing army, and fulminated against court Catholicism. Charles prorogued the session in early November.276 Soon thereafter, Shaftesbury was dismissed. Arlington was impeached in January of 1674, partly for his role in the Declaration of Indulgence. He contritely atoned; while he ‘did at that time beleeve the king had an Inherent right in him in such matters’, he now acknowledged ‘the contrary and that [Indulgence] was not consistant with Law’.277 ‘God’, wrote the nonconformist Timothy Taylor, ‘is calling the Cabal to account.’278 272 273 274 275 276 278

Sheldon to Bp. of Bangor, 28 December 1672, BL Harley MS 7377, f. 39. Thomas Barlow to Harley, 26 February 1672, BL Add. MS 70012, f. 22. Mary Hastings to her brother, 8 March 1673, Huntington, Hastings Correspondence, box 35, 7907. William Temple to Essex, 25 October 1673, Essex Papers, 1:130. Hutton, Charles II, 304–10. 277 BL Add MS 32094, f. 306. Beinecke, Osborn MS fb161, p. 54.

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In the following session, Shaftesbury joined what would become the Whig opposition. Danby was ascendant, but the King’s renewed alliance with the church remained fragile.279 In December of 1673, Danby advised the King that revenues would be needed from the sitting parliament, or from a new one. The present parliament ‘must be gratified by executing the laws both against popery and nonconformity’. A new one, Osborne suggested, would demand comprehension or toleration, and would likely raise funds by liquidating episcopal lands and thus ‘destroy the Church’.280 (This revived rumours about the sale of episcopal lands that had circulated in 1669.281) Charles opted for the devil he knew. The prosecution of nonconformity intensified, and licenses for nonconformist meeting houses were revoked in numbers.282 A few years later, perhaps reflecting on these events, Locke would ruefully record Paolo Sarpi’s opinion that ‘mischief’ would beset England when the ‘English Hierarchie’ secured ‘a prince tractable to prelacy’.283 Charles II had decided to at least strategically mimic the loyal episcopalianism of his father. Danby’s nightmare of a neo-Henrician descent on church wealth would undoubtedly have gratified Shaftesbury. His anticlerical inclinations found full throat. Danby rallied anti-Catholicism to benefit the established church, now cast as the bulwark of Protestantism. For Shaftesbury this political strategy was built on a contradiction. High episcopalianism, in his view, was mere English popery. Danby’s policies offered a more coercive version of Clarendonism. In 1675, the Earl of Lindsey wrote of Danby that he aimed ‘to settle Church and State; to defend the one against schismatics, and papists, and the other against Commonwealthsmen and rebels’. Among his obstacles, Lindsey warned Danby, was the ‘restless’ Shaftesbury: ‘you must bleed him, purge him, fright him’.284 The politics of popery would shadow the remainder of Charles II’s reign and force him into the arms of the English bishops. Their role in screening the court from parliamentary pressure became Shaftesbury’s obsession.285 The great set-piece battle of the period erupted over Danby’s ‘Test’. This bill (not to be confused with the Test Acts) proposed to bind the political class to Danby’s ruling vision. The Test was devised in the autumn of 1674 279 280 281 282 284 285

Goldie, ‘Danby, the Bishops, and the Whigs’, 78–80. Memo of December 1673, in Browning, Danby, 2:63–4. Daniel Fleming to Williamson, 10 May 1669, TNA, SP 29/260/f. 28. Beinecke, Osborn MS fb 161, 206, 211, 215. 283 5 May 1681, MS Locke f. 5, p. 49. Lindsey to Danby, 25 August 1675, Manuscripts of the Earl of Buckinghamshire, Earl of Lindsey, 376–7. See his speech of February 1674. Beinecke, Osborn MS fb161, p. 107.

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by a cohort of bishops deputized by Danby.286 Though still, according to Marvell, ‘upon their guard and very jealous of being treapannd’,287 the bishops cooperated. They advised the King that church and state faced threats from all directions: from ‘Atheism and Profaneness’, Catholicism, and the sects. They pressed for enforcement of the penal laws.288 The suppression of popery would expose the ‘disguises’ of the parliamentary opposition, who had exploited that cause as a ‘pretense to their other designes’.289 The King duly issued a proclamation in February redoubling efforts to enforce the penal laws.290 At the parliamentary session beginning in April, Danby trumpeted the King’s reborn concern for the Church and introduced his Test into the Lords. It required office holders and members of parliament to foreswear both rebellion and ‘the Alteration of the Government either in Church or State’. Binding the members in any manner was controversial, but the hedging of the church raised the greatest alarm. ‘The King’, Danby wrote, ‘could rest with safety on noe party but that of the Church.’291 Shaftesbury rallied opposition in the Lords, defending not only the liberty of the aristocracy but also the possibility that prudent governance might require alternation of the church constitution.292 The early months of 1675 proved a political watershed. Before the introduction of the Test, there remained some chance that Danby’s confessional strategies might be overthrown in favour of renewed efforts to secure a politique toleration. Danby lacked the full support of the Council, and Shaftesbury continued to dangle his possible goodwill before Charles.293 There were confused reports that the King was preparing another Declaration of Indulgence.294 Rumours circulated that Shaftesbury might at last be appointed Vicar General, in part to keep the court interest divided.295 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295

Robert Southwell to Ormond, 24 October, 1674, quoted in the Introduction to EcT, 76. Marvell to Henry Thompson, [January 1675], Poems and Letters of Marvell, 2:338; William Harbord to Earl of Essex, 30 January 1675, Essex Papers, 1:293. TNA, SP 29/367 ff. 193–7. Eight bishops signed this letter, dated January 1675. Danby to Essex, 28 January 1675, Browning, Danby, 2:55. Henry Thynne to Essex, 30 January 1675, Essex Papers, 1:293–4. Introduction to EcT, 82–3. LJ, 21 April 1675, vol. 12, 664–5; Huntington, Ellesmere MS 8412 for a drafted protestation dated 26 April 1675. Shaftesbury to Carlisle, 3 February 1675, TNA, PRO 30/24/5/284. Humphrey Prideaux to John Ellis, 24 and 31 January 1675, BL Add. MS 28929, ff. 11–12. Alberti to the Venetian Senate, 1 February 1675, CSPV, 38:348–9. J.R. and Philip Milton dismiss this report because of its timing, but may overlook the fluidity of the political situation in 1674–5. Introduction to EcT, 151.

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But the King supported Danby’s Test, and Shaftesbury crossed the Rubicon.296 In widely reported speeches of the autumn, he blamed the bishops for expanding crown powers and undermining parliament. The church, he warned the peers, had ‘unanimously gone against us in matters that many of us have thought essential and undoubted rights’. Danby’s Test rested on a logic of jus divinum. This ‘fatal principle’ was beneath even the Jesuits and traced to Archbishop Laud, the Canons of 1640, and current bishops.297 In this embittered remembrance of Laudianism was heard the voice of Ashley Cooper, the Erastian Cromwellian, now raised against the heirs of Laud.298 As then, the churchmen stood accused – paradoxically – of both exalting and undermining royal authority. It was, Shaftesbury avowed, ‘against the King’s crowne and dignitie that his subjects should be sworne to maintaine the Government of the Church equall as to himself’. He charged the bishops with seeking ‘power separate and independent of the King’, of setting ‘Myter’ against the Crown.299 Andrew Marvell delighted in this declamation against the emerging ‘Episcopal Cavalier Party’.300 The reputation of the bishops with the aristocracy, Baxter felt, was waning.301 Shaftesbury’s campaign was credited with ‘exposing’ and ‘abusing’ the bishops.302 The spring of 1675 thus fractured the religious strategies of the Restoration court. The politique confessionalism of Danby confronted the politique tolerationism of the Cabal ministers. The restored royal – episcopal alliance would largely prevail for the remainder of the reign. It resulted in some amazingly cynical developments, not least the brief use (during the Exclusion Crisis) of excommunication to remove dissenters from the franchise and from parliament.303 John Locke orbited Shaftesbury’s political projects during these years, and there is no reason to doubt his concord with his patron. His correspondents spoke of ‘the great love and Esteem the people in Generall have for the Earle of Shaftesbury’, and his ‘courage, industry, and care’ for the ‘good of the nation’.304 Locke followed Shaftesbury’s parliamentary 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304

On Shaftesbury’s ‘aversion to Popery, Tyranny, and arbitrary Power’, see Le Clerc, Life of Locke, 9. Speech of November 1675, BL Add. MS 32094, ff. 392, 392v. For another of Shaftesbury’s speeches against the ‘Laudean doctrine’, see Huntington, Ellesmere MS 8416. Beinecke, Osborne MS fb161, pg. 238–45; BL Add MS 32094, ff. 391–3. Marvell to William Popple, 24 July 1675, Poems and Letters of Marvell, 2:341. Introduction to EcT, 88. Marvell to Popple, 24 July 1675, Poems and Letters of Marvell, 2:343. Gibson, ‘Limits of the Confessional State: Electoral Religion in the Reign of Charles II’, 27–47. Peter Colleton to Locke, 22 July 1674, CL, 1:404.

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manoeuvring closely.305 He may have done more and contributed to one of the most consequential political tracts of the period, the anonymous Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country. This tract appeared in the autumn of 1675 and was, in early November, burned by order of the Lords. The Stationers were directed to find its author and printer. The hunt would last for several years.306 The Letter certainly emitted from Shaftesbury’s circle, and its authorship has sometimes been attributed to Locke. The attribution dates to 1720, to the Huguenot editor Pierre Des Maizeaux, though it may trace from him to better connected figures such as Thomas Stringer. There is little direct evidence on the matter, but the third Earl of Shaftesbury would recall Locke acting as his grandfather’s ‘assistant pen’ in state affairs, and particularly against the ‘prevailing Popish party’.307 It is likely that Locke at least helped to prepare the publication, itself a dangerous activity. The Letter, in any case, captured the dominant ideological proclivities of Locke’s milieu. It railed against Danby’s fashioning ‘a distinct Party’ of the ‘High Episcopal Man’. His plan to entrench the church constitution was a dangerous Laudian relapse.308 The Letter echoed Shaftesbury’s speeches, accusing the bishops of trading divine right monarchy for a surrender of the Royal Supremacy. Thus ‘our statesmen and bishops’ conspired ‘as in Old Laud’s time’.309 Danby’s Test was a quasi-popish brief for episcopal ‘infallibility’. The Letter’s concerns over absolutism, in fact, were considerably mitigated by its clamouring on behalf of the Royal Supremacy. There was a distinctly Hobbesian flavour to the Letter. It railed against ‘two distinct Supream Powers inconsistent with each other’, setting the ‘mitre above the crown’. Religion, it insisted, could ‘only justify itself to the Government’ if it was either . . . the State Religion, that ownes an entire dependency on, and is but a branch of it; or the independent Congregations; whilest they claim no other power, but the exclusion of their own members from their particular Communion, and endeavor not to set up a Kingdom of Christ to their own use in this World, whilest our Savior hath told us, that His Kingdom is not of it; for otherwise there would be Imperium in imperio, and two distinct 305 306 307

308

Thomas Stringer to Locke, 25 November 1675, CL, 1:434–5. LJ, 8 November 1675, vol. 13, 12–4. The evidence is surveyed by J.R. and Philip Milton, Introduction to EcT, 101–18. Their suggestion, however, that the third earl was incorrect because Danby did not seek to aid the ‘Popish party’ is not decisive. Danby’s episcopal allies (having ‘wholly laid aside’ their previous, instrumental ‘zeal against popery’) were now charged with jure divino aspirations borrowed from ‘the prelate of Rome’. The ‘prevailing party’ in 1675 stood charged with a Laudian form of ‘popery’. LPQ, 1, 8. 309 LPQ, 1. Ibid. 7.

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Supream Powers inconsistent with each other, in the same place, and over the same persons.310

The bishops would have recognized this as a distinctly Hobbesian line of argument, serving – as Leviathan had – both Erastian and Independent purposes. This nod to Congregationalism, indeed, occurs once again in the Letter, when ecclesia is understood as a ‘congregation of men’, precisely ‘as the Independents do’.311 These invocations of Erastian Independency had also appeared in one of the memos dating from Shaftesbury’s Chancellorship. They evoked the final pages of Leviathan. Also markedly Hobbesian is the Letter’s repeated complaint that heresy charges were being used to augment clerical power. This had also been a theme of Locke’s ‘Essay concerning Toleration’.312 Embedded in the Letter was a telling defence of Shaftesbury’s involvement in the 1672 Declaration of Indulgence. The Indulgence was needed to secure the Protestant interest and was permissible as an exercise of ‘supreme executive power’ in the interval between parliaments. To this rather dubious historical claim was added the more plausible one that the bishops had, in killing the Indulgence, made but a show of constitutionalism as a disingenuous tactic.313 The governing theme of the Letter was an incandescent hostility to autonomous church power. Between the two strategies of civil religious governance – Danby’s confessionalism and Shaftesbury’s tolerationism – only the latter had the virtue of freeing sovereignty from clerical sway. The Letter characterized this clash of ‘Indulgence’ against ‘Rigid Conformity’ as a ‘dispute of the Politiques, Mistery, and secrets of Government both in Church and State’.314 Politique tactics of indulgence, however, would find no royal support for the remainder of Charles II’s reign. This circumstance, in turn, would recast the political possibilities that confronted Locke when he again returned to the subject of toleration. 310 311 312 314

Ibid., 24. Ibid., 21. Parker denounced this reduction of the idea of ecclesia to its ‘vulgar meaning’ (an assembly). Parker, Case of the Church of England, 80. 313 LPQ, 4, 18. Ibid., 4–6. Ibid., 33 (mispaginated as 29 in the first edition); Paul Seaward, ‘Shaftesbury and the Royal Supremacy’, 51–2.

chapter 4

Non-domination Liberty in Spiritual Context

Thomas Hobbes spent his final years primarily at the country estates of the Cavendishes. Infirmity, and perhaps the increasingly inhospitable political climate, curtailed his writing. His original Letter about Liberty and Necessity was allowed a reprinting in 1676, but only paired with a scorching refutation by Benjamin Laney, Bishop of Ely.1 Pirated editions of Behemoth appeared in 1679.2 Hobbes retreated to translation of the ancients. Around the time of Danby’s rise, Hobbes engaged in his final feud with the bishops, with a man known to Locke, Bishop John Fell, the former vice chancellor of Oxford. Fell had patronized the antiquarian Anthony Wood’s Historia et Antiquitates Universitatis Oxoniensis of 1674, which included a short notice on Hobbes. (‘Such dead flyes’, complained Henry Wilkinson, former principal of Magdalen Hall, ‘may marr a whole Box of Precious Oyntment.’3) Wood’s text had been prejudicially edited by Fell.4 Indignant, Hobbes printed an epistolary response, with the design of tipping it into the published book. This does not seem to have occurred, though the letter circulated independently.5 Fell’s edits described Hobbes as ‘bitter’ and reviled his ‘monstrous’ works. Fell also deleted Wood’s mention of Hobbes’s favours at the royal court, perhaps betraying the church’s unease about his influence there.6 Our only evidence of Hobbes’s engagement with the politics of the latter 1670s is found in a brief manuscript on hereditary monarchy, probably composed in 1679 for the Earl of Devonshire.7 This responded to the Exclusion Crisis, Shaftesbury’s great cause. Hobbes conceded, reluctantly, 1 2 3 4 5 6

A Letter about Liberty and Necessity . . . together with Observations upon it, by a Learned Prelate of the Church of England lately deceased, 103. Bulman, ‘Hobbes’s Publisher’, 352. Introduction, Beh., 82–92. Hobbes to William Crooke, 19 June 1679 and Hobbes to Aubrey, 18 August 1679, CH, 771, 772. Henry Wilkinson to Wood, 19 December 1671, quoted in Pritchard, ‘Last Days’, 180. Malcolm, ‘Anthony Wood’, CH, 918–9. Prideaux to John Ellis, 28 July 1674, BL Add MS 28929, f. 1. Hobbes to Wood, 20 April 1674, CH, 746–8. 7 Chatsworth MS Hobbes D 5.

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that sovereigns were not bound by any rule of succession. This conclusion would have pleased Devonshire. However tantalizing, we should not make too much of this burst of Whiggery. Hobbes steered well away.8 Neither the Whig’s Exclusionist cause nor Danby’s resurgent confessionalism provided Hobbes with fertile political ground in his final years. In the mid-1670s, the library of New Inn Hall Oxford refused a gift of Leviathan as a book unfit for ‘young students to study in’.9 In the aftermath of the Cabal, the churchmen avidly followed the production of antiHobbesian polemics.10 In February of 1679, Thomas Pierce, Dean of Salisbury, ‘inveied against the pernicious doctrines of Mr Hobbs’ in a court sermon.11 The Church was beset by dissenting enthusiasts on one flank and by those ‘so Atheisticall’ as to spurn all religion on the other. Yoking together sectarians and ‘the Disciples of the Books which is call’d Leviathan’, Pierce warned that the church was not ruled by the ‘warranty and allowance of sovereign powers’ alone.12 Eight months later, Hobbes suffered a stroke and fell into a ‘silent stupefaction’. He died on December 4, finally finding ‘a hole to creep out of the world at’. On his deathbed he dictated a tombstone inscription: ‘This is the true Philosopher’s Stone.’13 Polemics – and rumours as to whether he had died ‘in all the forms’ of a Christian – followed him to the grave.14 Anthony Wood reported his death with acidity (‘an ill-natur’d man they say, proud, scornfull’) but could not deny his influence: ‘Leviathan hath corrupted the gentry of the nation, hath infused ill principles into them, atheisme.’15 Recorded Narcissus Luttrell in his diary: ‘Mr. Hobbes of Malmsbury died in the middle of this month . . . he was a very learned man, but broacht severall pernicious principles destructive to religion and government.’16 Kinder publicity appeared in two broadsheets of 1680, collecting Hobbes’s ‘memorable’ or ‘dying’ sayings. One of these (perhaps both) may have been compiled by the deist Charles Blount.17 Neither bolstered Hobbes’s reputation 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 17

Skinner, introduction, WCL, 159–76. Wood to Aubrey, 15 September 1694, BL Egerton MS 2231, f. 149v. Prideaux to Ellis, 13 December 1674 and [June/July?] 1677, BL Add MS 28929, ff. 10v and 26. Evelyn, Diary, 2:133. Pierce, Seasonable Caveat Against the Dangers of Credulity, in Pierce, A Decad of Caveats, 1–3, 8–9, 10–11. Kennet, Memoirs of the Cavendish Family, 17. Robert Southwell to Ormond, 13 December 1679, HMC: Ormond (new series), 4–5:567; Justinian Morse to Wood, 9 January 1679/80, in Pritchard, ‘Last Days’, 184. Life and Times of Wood, 2:472. 16 Luttrell, Historical Relation, 1:30. Martinich, Hobbes, 352–3; Parkin, Taming, 348–9.

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with the orthodox. They collected his most inflammatory passages denouncing priestcraft, psychologizing religion, and doubting revelation.18 They thus solidified his reputation as an atheist and scourge of the clergy. Blount, a dedicated Whig and Exclusionist, admired Hobbes’s late heresy writings.19 Perhaps Aubrey’s vague notes of a ‘club’ behind the publication of the Memorable Sayings refer to the Whig’s Green Ribbon Club, of which Blount was a member.20 If so, Hobbes would have thus made another ghostly pass through the radical Whig circles surrounding Shaftesbury and Locke. Hobbes’s autobiographical Vitae also appeared. In February of 1680, Wood informed Bishop Fell that ‘Hobs’ life written by himself was in the press and those matters related to [Fell] were put in’.21 This was presumably the Latin prose life composed by Hobbes around 1677 (though this ignored Fell). Aubrey lent this to Richard Blackburne after Hobbes’s death, and from there it made it into print.22 The prose life had been preceded by a Latin Vita in verse.23 Hobbes apparently wrote this in the early 1670s, during his final burst of productivity.24 It circulated in scribal form. (Robert Hooke read it in November of 1673 at Garraway’s coffee house.)25 It was published in Latin in December of 1679 and then in English a few weeks later. John Aubrey’s loose notes on Hobbes’s life were also reworked into a Latin biography by the physician Richard Blackburne (himself a ‘phil[osophical] Hobbist’).26 This was finished in late 1680 and was published with Hobbes’s two Latin Vitae.27 The collection went through several editions. Aubrey feared – with reason – that it would provoke clerical ‘fury’.28 Blackburne’s text was circumspect on religion but contained an injudicious account of the Scargill affair. More provocative still were the posthumous vindications of Leviathan in Hobbes’s own Vitae. These echoed his Mr Hobbes Considered of 1662, which Crooke indeed reprinted in 1680.29 The verse Vita laboured to establish the royalist credentials of Leviathan. It scorned the ‘Blood-thirsty leeches’ of the 18 19 20 22 23 24

25 27 29

The Last Sayings, or the Dying Legacy of Mr. Thomas Hobbs of Malmesbury (1680); Memorable Sayings of Mr. Hobbes in his Books and at the Table (1680). Charles Blount to Hobbes, 1678, CH, 759–63. ABL, 1:356; Malcolm, ‘Charles Blount’, CH, 793. 21 Life and Times of Wood, 2:480. ABL, 1:395. Weldon to Aubrey, 16 January 1680, in ‘The Autobiographies of Thomas Hobbes’, 403–5. Thomae Hobbesii Malmesburiensis Vita. Authore seipso. Although in a recently discovered letter of 1657, written while Hobbes was ill, Henry Stubbe urged Hobbes to preserve ‘your effigies with verses’. Perhaps the verse Vita had Interregnum origins, at least in conception. Stubbe to Hobbes, 24 May 1657, European Magazine 35 (1799), 232–3. My thanks to Professor John Milton for this reference. Diary of Robert Hooke, 68. 26 Bodl. MS Ballard 14, f. 125 quoted in ODNB; ABL, 1:395. Thomae Hobbes Angli Malmesburiensis Philosophi Vita (1681). 28 Parkin, Taming, 356. Retitled Considerations upon the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners, and Religion of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury Written by himself by way of a Letter to a Learned Person (1680).

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Commonwealth. Contemporaries had reason to doubt this political recasting. But Hobbes was not inclined to similarly retreat from his ecclesiological principles. He celebrated the throwing down of the episcopal ‘Mitres’ and Presbyterianism. The Interregnum regimes had thwarted the clergy, who duly arrived – ‘Indigent’ and ‘Burthensome’ – to plague the exiled court.30 These exiled clergy became Hobbes’s ‘Grand Enemy’. Back in England, Cromwell ruled alone, without ‘Prelate’ or ‘Presbyter’. Hobbes recalled the intellectual liberty of the period with remarkable candour. ‘All Men did scribble what they wou’d, Content/ And yielding to the present Government.’ Hobbes exploited this ‘liberty’ to publish, though he was at ‘constant war’ with the clergy: ‘against my Leviathan/ They rail, which made it read by many a man’. Clerical jealousy, indeed, had served only to justify Leviathan’s ‘severe reproof’ of priestly ambition and to prove the book’s worth as the ‘King’s Defence and Guard’.31 The poem lashed out at Wallis and Bramhall, free-will theology, and the Restoration clergy. ‘These were my Wars; what more have I to say?’32 The verse Vita was a remarkably brazen attack on the church and a frank commendation of the intellectual liberty of the Interregnum. Importantly, the verse Vita was written and circulated in the early 1670s. It thus belonged to the context which produced Hobbes’s heresy writings and his appeal to the politique culture of the Restoration court. Hobbes’s prose Vita, written during Danby’s ascendency, was slightly more accommodating. There Hobbes recalled taking Communion according to the prayer book rite when mortally ill in 1647. He spun this, and his refusal to convert to Catholicism when pressured by Mersenne, into evidence that he had ‘always preferred ecclesiastical government by bishops’. But the prose life was no full retreat. Leviathan, Hobbes argued, asserted the ‘right of kings in both spiritual and temporal terms’ as a precondition of ‘peace in the Christian world’. This lesson targeted ‘those who had defended episcopacy’.33 Leviathan had also dealt freely with theology because the administrative structure and powers of the Church were in abeyance, and of no importance. (This was the power to declare that certain doctrines were heretical. It subverted the power of the King, for when it was exercised, the King’s own power was lessened proportionally.)34 30 33 34

VV, 10. 31 Ibid., 12–13. 32 Ibid., 16. PV, 248. This is significantly mistranslated as ‘rejected episcopacy’, an error followed by several historians relying on this translation. PV, 248.

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The theologians had responded by securing Hobbes’s banishment. In England his doctrines provoked the clergy but pleased ‘learned’ laymen. ‘Poised as it were in equilibrium between friends and enemies, his doctrines were neither whole-heartedly accepted, nor yet oppressed.’ The prose Vita recorded that Hobbes was often beset by those disputing ‘the rights of supreme civil or ecclesiastical power’. He had responded, in his final years, with a long Latin poem ‘on the inordinate rise and growth of the power of the priesthood, but the nature of the times was such that they could not be published’.35 Hobbes’s Vitae reprised his late heresy writings. They constituted miniatures of his Restoration case for a philosophical freedom established by way of sovereign prerogative. But they could only achieve so much against a tide of opprobrium. Hobbes’s name had become a byword for atheism, anticlericalism, and intellectual license.

Locke in France: The Failure of Bourbon Indulgence What Locke made of Hobbes’s death we do not know. The mid-1670s were a caesura in his career. The failure of the second Indulgence surely augmented the doubts about Erastian religious authority emerging in his ‘Essay’ of 1667 and in his notes on Parker. Indeed, in a 1674 document on excommunication, Locke posited a pronounced dualism of church and state. The end of ‘civill society’ was ‘prosperity’ and ‘preservation’; that of ‘religious society’ was salvation. Both properly formulated law and required obedience, but only the former exercised coercive authority.36 Locke still sought to limit the civil effects of ecclesial discipline, and thus the political authority of priests. Regarding parallel limitations on the spiritual power of magistrates, he ambiguously concluded that a sovereign should not punish excommunicates unless ‘he finds it convenient for the preservation of the civil peace & prosperity of the commonwealth’.37 This, like the ‘Essay’, preserved considerable space for magisterial coercion of religion. But the brief essay on excommunication did go further than Locke had before in emphasizing an anti-Hobbesian, dualist model of spiritual and temporal society. It potentially indicated an accelerating discontent with the sovereignty-oriented patterns of his own previous thinking on toleration. Shaftesbury’s disfavour cost Locke his government posts. On 14 November 1675, days after the Letter from a Person of Quality was 35 36 37

Ibid., 252. MS Locke c. 27, f. 29a. The first part of the document is not in Locke’s hand; EcT, 327–34 at 327. MS Locke c. 27, f. 29b verso; EcT, 333.

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burned, Locke departed for France. There were signs of haste in this decision, though not panic.38 That the trip abroad lasted for more than three years, however, surely reflected the increasingly inhospitable political climate. Portions of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding were drafted in France. No major writings on religion emerged from this period. But Locke’s journals touched on matters relevant to the present book, particularly the difficult position of French Huguenots within a rapidly reconfessionalizing France. He recorded features of confessional coexistence, noting, for instance, the even split of Protestants and Catholics required among public officials in Orange.39 But long before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Louis XIV began to claw back Protestant privileges, bribe converts, and close churches.40 At Nîmes, Locke recorded the shuttering of a Protestant church and the surrender of a Protestant hospital. At Uzes, he reported the King’s forbidding of further Protestant consuls and the destruction of their church on the ‘pretence’ that their singing disturbed nearby Catholic services.41 Locke noted the prohibition on intermarriage, which ‘often causes the change of religion’.42 He recorded reductions in taxes paid to support Protestant clergy.43 He recorded the banishment of Protestants from La Rochelle, their political disabilities in various towns, and the billeting of troops in their homes.44 The plight of the Huguenots carried political lessons. Observing, for instance, that nine of thirteen Protestant churches in Provence had been pulled down within six years, Locke wrote that the Protestants ‘complain that those who are garantie of the Edict of Nantes interpose noe thing in their behalf’.45 Huguenot dependence on the fickle favour of the court was a constant feature of Locke’s account.46 His journals contain historical notes on the legal details of the ‘guaranty of the Edict of Nantes’, guarantees becoming increasingly fragile in the years of his visit.47 In April of 1679, he recorded that ‘the Protestants within these 20 years have had above 300 churches demolished and within these 2 months, 15 more condemned’.48 38 39 40 42 44 46 47

Fell authorized the journey due to Locke’s supposed ill health. John Fell to Locke, 8 November 1675, CL, 1:430. 20/30 December 1675, MS Locke f. 1, pp. 23–4. Lough’s edition of Locke’s Travels in France is useful but omits key passages. Marshall, Locke, Toleration, 19–20. 41 21/31 January 1676, MS Locke f. 1, p. 53. 13/23 February 1676, MS Locke f. 1, p. 117. 43 8/18 March 1676, MS Locke f. 1, p. 155. 1/11 September 1676, MS Locke, f. 3, p. 279. 45 9/19 April 1676, MS Locke, f. 1, p. 217. As when he described their ‘agents’ soliciting the court for the ‘due freedom’ of the provincial synod of Languedoc. 21 April/1 May 1676, MS Locke, f. 1, pp. 243–4. 24 May/3 June 1676, MS Locke, f. 1, p. 269. 48 25 April 1679, BL Add. MS 15642, f. 75

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Locke described the Jewish quarter of Avignon (then a papal territory), its poverty, and the yellow hats required for the ‘distinction’ of the Jews.49 He also observed impingements on philosophical freedom, particularly the banning of Cartesianism.50 But his chief concern was the fate of Protestants sheltering under the Edict of Nantes. France occupied an unusual position in Locke’s taxonomy of European confessionalism. His 1674 memo on excommunication categorized places where ‘Civil and Religious Societys are coextended’ (Muscovy), places where the established religion was not universally accepted by the people (England, Brandenburg), and places where ‘the Commonwealth because all of one religion is but a part of the church’ (Spain and the Italian states).51 Gallican France was omitted from the roster of fully Catholic kingdoms. Its anomalously robust national Catholic church, administered by the monarchy, was no mere province of the imperial church. The Bourbon kingdom remained, in the early 1670s, broadly known for a territorialized religious pluralism and a high degree of prerogative spiritual authority. Toleration and the policing of orthodoxy were royal powers. ‘If any one holds tenets contrary to their articles of faith, the King punishes him, soe that you must be either of the Romish’ or Huguenot churches.52 For decades France had rivalled the Dutch as an exemplary pluralist polity and was often invoked in English dissenting tracts. The erosion of the Edict of Nantes would have been significant to Locke, particularly as it occurred precisely while Danby’s rehabilitated confessionalism triumphed over indulgence and as the Duke of York’s Catholicism was publicly confirmed.53 Together these developments surely diminished Locke’s confidence in tolerationist versions of the Hobbesian politique. English nonconformists had begun to publicize the disintegration of the Edict of Nantes and the ‘severities’ suffered by those it once protected.54 Some English and Huguenot writers, encouraging Charles’s Indulgence, presented persecution in France as a clerical encroachment on royal authority. But such apologies for the Bourbons looked increasingly frail. Locke certainly knew better and cannot have taken seriously calls for Charles II to establish ‘another Edict of Nantes here in England’.55 For Locke, the Revocation of Nantes did not simply 49 50 52 53 54 55

22 December 1675/1 January 1676, MS Locke f. 1, p. 25; also 9/19 April 1678, MS Locke f. 3, pp. 107–8. 12/22 March 1676, MS Locke f. 1, p. 159. 51 MS Locke c. 27, f. 29b. Locke recounted the history of an Arian ‘permitted to scape out of prison’ at the King’s connivance. 2/12 February 1676, MS Locke f. 1, p. 101. James ceased attending Anglican services in 1676, as reported to Locke. Thomas Stringer to Locke, 6 April 1676, CL, 1:445. An Abstract of the Present State of the Protestants in France, 1–2. Everard, The Great Pressures and Grievances of the Protestants in France, epistle.

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exemplify religious intolerance but the vulnerability of prerogative indulgence. It is often claimed that Locke would eventually write the Epistola de Tolerantia in response to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.56 It is more accurate to say – as we shall see – that it was the Stuarts’ ongoing efforts to emulate the Edict itself that occasioned Locke’s intervention. Locke’s theorizing about religious governance and religious freedom had operated within a tradition of natural rights thinking about sovereignty. This tradition, dominated by Hobbes, gravitated towards a logic of civil religion. It understood inner conscience as free because, as a matter of material necessity, it could not be forced. Any religious freedom beyond this was arbitrated by the needs of prudent governance and was often motivated by anticlericalism. Hobbes justified magisterial control of religion not as an aspect of the ecclesial constitution but as a note of sovereignty. He promoted indulgence during periods – the Interregnum, the early 1670s – when politique thinking was ascendant. Lurking beneath the ecclesial politics of Hobbes, finally, were non-neutral philosophical projects with heretical implications. His pleas for the toleration of heresy, in particular, often appeared as bids for philosophical freedom on behalf of these projects and the ‘scientific’ public doctrine that they might inform. Significant aspects of this program had appealed to Locke in his early ‘Two Tracts’. Doubts about Hobbism as a model of spiritual authority and prerogative indulgence had begun to creep in around 1670, as the notes on Parker suggest. But Locke’s ‘Essay concerning Toleration’ – particularly in its later revisions – and the Letter to a Person of Quality continued to demonstrate the potential of Hobbesian rhetoric to inform a Shaftesburian project of indulgence. This perspective lingered somewhat during Locke’s years in France. In a brief essay of February 1676 on the ‘Obligation of penal laws’, he deployed the concept of adiaphora to limit the capacity of human laws to oblige the conscience. But even on matters indifferent, Locke disallowed resistance. He played a trump card: a ‘law of god which forbids disturbance or dissolution of governments’ and which obliged all to an expansive ‘rule of civil obedience’. This obligation to ‘preserve the government’ was markedly Hobbesian. It ‘clear[ed] a man from the infinite number of sins that otherwise he must unavoidably be guilty of if all the penal laws oblige the conscience’. This recalled Hobbes’s assurance that, like Naaman, Christian subjects could not sin performing acts of outward obedience. 56

Jolley, Toleration and Understanding, 2; Introduction to John Locke, A Letter concerning Toleration in Focus, 3–6.

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Such a perspective left only one source of relief: prerogative. Individual freedom from the law, wrote Locke, could be achieved only when the penalty for disobedience ‘is not pressed’ by authority.57 The late 1670s, however, emerge as a transitional moment in Locke’s thinking. His tolerationist writings of the 1680s would definitively break with the presumptions of politique toleration and civil religion, both by expanding the logic of the 1667 ‘Essay’ and by developing entirely new lines of argument. This was in part a reaction to the resurgence of confessionalism – and failure of monarchical indulgence – in both England and France. That reaction, this chapter will argue, reflected the broader dynamics of toleration debates in Restoration England, where political developments generated suspicion of prerogative spiritual authority among conformists and dissenters alike. This suspicion triggered a broad reaction against the Restoration politique and the Stuarts’ vacillation between the alternatives of confessional uniformity and pluralistic toleration. Locke’s own tolerationism matured amidst these broader political and ideological developments. As Jon Parkin has observed, it was really at the end of the 1670s, rather than in 1667, that ‘the anti-Hobbesian thrust of Locke’s arguments in ecclesiology and politics’ could be discerned.58 The origins of Locke’s full theory of toleration have been explored from various angles. John Marshall has largely located the question within the political and intellectual contexts of the 1680s, and particularly the confessional politics of France and the Dutch republic. Richard Ashcraft and others have emphasized the epistemological project of the Essay concerning Human Understanding.59 Ian Harris has concurred, seeing in Locke’s hostility to innate ideas a requirement that autonomous individuals exercise their reason and throw off intellectual deference.60 Harris has also, with Tim Stanton, understood Locke’s tolerationism as an implication of his natural law theory. There are any number of philosophical or political contexts in which to place Lockean toleration. Many rely on methods of textual juxtaposition combined with a presumption that Locke’s writings form an interlocking system. And many of these readings are in turn incompatible. Locke the tolerationist sceptic is not entirely easy to reconcile with Locke the natural lawyer.

57 58 59 60

15/25 February 1676, MS Locke f. 1, pp. 123–26. Parkin, ‘Hobbes’, Continuum Companion to Locke, 63. Ashcraft, ‘Locke and the Problem of Toleration’; see also Jolley, Toleration and Understanding, 2–8, and entire; Black, ‘Locke and the Skeptical Argument for Toleration’. Harris, Mind of Locke, 177–8.

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Lockean toleration might be logically explained as a function of epistemological scepticism. But that does not seem a sufficient foundation for his fully developed theory of religious freedom. Scepticism, ethical relativism, and philosophical nominalism are all Hobbesian potentialities of Lockean epistemology consistent with a politique toleration of prudent statecraft. Locke’s eventual account of free conscience and freedom of worship as inalienable rights and salvific necessities would seem to require more: human free will; natural law;61 an opposition to reductive materialism;62 and a theory of equality understanding humanity in imago dei rather than a raw Hobbesian equality of bestial strength.63 Locke’s full theory of religious freedom would eventually transcend a purely political logic aimed at the prudent control of appetites and wills, in part because he rejected the materialism and determinism that informed these dimensions of Hobbes’s project. (Though, as we shall see, Locke’s rejection of materialism and determinism would not always be obvious to contemporaries, who would accuse Locke of Hobbism throughout his later life.) These philosophical departures marked Locke’s adherence to traditional elements of Christian doctrine, and these in turn encouraged him to supplant the logic of civil religion with a prophetic account of Christian religious freedom. Locke’s explicit mentions of Hobbes, and his engagement with the Hobbes of public polemic, largely appertained to questions of ecclesial governance. Rather than a speculative philosophical juxtaposition of Locke and Hobbes, this book offers a more direct account of that political, polemical context. Rather than an encyclopaedic conjecture of every possible implication of Locke’s view of Hobbes, it offers a sustained narrative of the issue that dominated his explicit engagement with Hobbes. The result is a particular viewpoint on Locke’s most pressing political concern – religious toleration – as it emerged in political context. The remainder of this chapter will examine one vital feature of this context: the evolving debate over the Stuarts’ persistent pursuit of a politique Indulgence.

The Stuart Indulgences: Liberty and Domination As observed above, the political theories of modernity have spun off historical interpretations locating the early modern jus naturalists within purported histories of liberalism. A relevant case in point is the neo-republicanism 61 62 63

Stanton, ‘Hobbes and Locke on Natural Law’, 65–88. Anstey, John Locke and Natural Philosophy, entire. Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, entire.

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of Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner. Their theoretical position disallows constitutional definitions of republicanism and liberalism and instead construes them around competing definitions of civil liberty. They critique what they take to be the core understanding of liberty within the liberal tradition: liberty as ‘non-interference’. Pettit and Skinner position their own account – ‘liberty as non-domination’ – between the poles of positive and negative liberty defined by Isaiah Berlin. According to Berlin’s model, liberty can be understood as a freedom from interference: a right to self-sovereignty and individual end-setting hedged only by the rights of others. Or it can be understood as a freedom to flourish in some normatively dependent way, to possess liberties ‘rightly ordered’ according to a hierarchy of goods defined by shared moral beliefs. The neo-republican position seeks to escape what it takes to be the antisocial implications of negative liberty, without slipping into the divisive moral foundationalism required by positive liberty. Non-domination liberty requires not just the absence of interference but ‘guarantees which help to ensure against interference’.64 In particular, liberty cannot depend upon the arbitrary will of a superior. The conditions of liberty are as important as its presence or absence. The mere existence of ‘a power of interference on an arbitrary basis’ subverts some forms of apparent liberty. Pettit’s account considers unfree any ‘dominated’ individuals, even if they enjoy considerable de facto liberty from interference. Conversely, he considers as free individuals subjected to interference, if that interference is legally executed non-arbitrarily and if the goal of interference is to minimize domination. Pettit characterizes non-interference as a ‘quantitative’ understanding of liberty and non-domination as a ‘qualitative’ understanding. The former, he feels, inevitably regards the state negatively, while the latter views the state as a crucial guarantor of ‘high-quality’ liberty. Non-interference liberalism, Pettit argues, has been ‘tolerant of relationships in the home, in the workplace, in the electorate, and elsewhere, that the republican must denounce as paradigms of domination and unfreedom’.65 Neo-republicans thus often construe domination as a social problem, rather than a problem of statism. A historical schematic informs this theoretical position. Pettit and Skinner have plausibly located the origins of non-interference liberty in Hobbesian thought. Consistent with his determinism, Hobbes defined freedom as the mere absence of physical constraint. The will was ‘free’ like 64

Pettit, Republicanism, 167.

65

Ibid., 9.

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flowing water – free to travel where the determined impulses of appetite and aversion took it and where obstacles did not hinder it. In civil terms, only physical constraint constituted a limitation on liberty. Fear did not, and this allowed Hobbes to construe a social contract as ‘free’ even if coerced. Freedom and necessity, according to Hobbes, are compatible. Absent chains, laws never violate liberty. One retained the right to violate law, and mere fear of consequences (as calculated by the determined will) did not constitute a restraint on liberty.66 Conceptually, non-domination liberty has real theoretical purchase. Some, however, have pressured the historical account of its origins offered by Pettit and Skinner. What alternative definitions of liberty did Hobbes seek to defeat? Where, in history, do we find the opposition of noninterference and non-domination liberty schematically structuring political debate? Pettit and Skinner locate non-domination accounts of liberty among early modern, Anglophone republicans. Henry Parker, John Goodwin, John Milton, and others extracted this ‘third way’ of liberty from the ancient Roman texts. Contingencies gradually attached this definition to a republican constitutional position. Pettit and Skinner thus posit a tradition of non-domination liberty that is, nevertheless, rooted in sovereignist thinking and a positive valuation of the state. Republicanism nurtured this tradition through the Enlightenment, but it was gradually supplanted by the contractual, interest-oriented Hobbesian tradition represented by Locke, Paley, Constant, Bentham, Smith, and others. Non-interference liberty functioned as an insidious anti-state ideology serving new private sources of social and economic domination. This account has met various challenges. That Hobbes devised his own account of liberty in response to republicanism, rather than in the context of philosophical and theological dispute, has been doubted.67 It is not clear that early modern republicans ever escaped foundational, ‘positive’ understandings of freedom,68 nor that non-domination accurately captures the ancient Roman understanding of liberty.69 The republican narrative may work to cast Benthamite utilitarian liberalism as Hobbesian. It fails, however, to properly characterize such central ‘proto-liberal’ thinkers as Locke 66 67 68 69

Douglass, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Changing Account of Liberty and Challenge to Republicanism’, 281–309. Collins, ‘Quentin Skinner’s Hobbes and the Neo-Republican Project’, 343–67. Pocock, ‘Foundations and Moments’, 46–7. Kennedy, ‘Cicero, Roman Republicanism, and the Contested Meaning of Libertas’, entire; Kapust, ‘Skinner, Pettit, and Livy: The Conflict of the Orders and the Ambiguity of Republican Liberty’, entire.

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and Constant, who manifested a constant concern with the conditions of liberty.70 This chapter will argue that the failure of Pettit and Skinner to properly locate their notion of non-domination liberty within early modern debate is a historiographical failure with normative implications. A compelling history of the idea must locate debates in which ‘non-domination’ conditions for a given, contested liberty are central – indeed determinative. Such a history must find debates in which political actors spurned a given liberty, or at least militated in that direction, explicitly because the conditions of that liberty were deemed insufficient. Freedom from law would be sacrificed because it failed to provide a freedom through law. There is, in fact, one major seventeenthcentury political debate that did proceed in this way: the Restoration debate over the status of religious toleration. This provides the best example of a major public controversy in which a non-domination account of liberty was articulated in detail and indeed proved decisive. Non-domination accounts of liberty found voice in the struggle over the Stuarts’ Indulgence policies. This context throws light on John Locke’s own evolving tolerationism. The Stuart Indulgences were inspired by politique considerations and were justified through the monarchy’s prerogative authority to suspend the operation of laws. At Breda, however, the King promised to confirm a religious indulgence with legislation.71 The Declaration of 1662 (which merely announced royal intentions) not only promised to protect the ‘Freedom of Parliament’ but also insisted that the dispensing power was ‘inherent in us’. Protestant and Catholic dissenters alike, ‘who (living peaceable) do not conform . . . through scruple and tenderness of misguided conscience, but modestly and without scandal perform their devotions in their own way’, would be relieved. The King regretted ‘Bloodshed for religion only’. He promised to favour the church establishment and to prevent its disparagement. The first Stuart Declaration appealed strongly to civil consideration: political peace, but also the commercial ‘plenty’ that would accrue if subjects found their ‘minds happily composed by our Clemency and Indulgence’.72 The Indulgence of 15 March 1672 went beyond a mere declaration of intent and suspended the penal laws immediately. The established church would remain the standard of public worship, but twelve years of coercion had failed. Protestant dissenters would enjoy public places of worship, once those places (and their ministers) had received royal approval. Catholics 70 71

Larmore, ‘A Critique of Philip Pettit’s Republicanism’, entire. His Majesty’s Declaration to all his Loving Subjects, December 26 1662, 7.

72

Ibid., 8–9, 12–4.

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could worship privately. Free conscience and pluralism were not presented as desirable outcomes per se. The dissenters were ‘erring’ and religious differences ‘unhappy’. The King’s ends remained purely civil in nature: stability, skilled immigration, commerce. Unlike its predecessor, the Indulgence of 1672 did not seek statutory confirmation. It was satisfied to rest upon the King’s ‘will and pleasure’, that spiritual supremacy ‘inherent in us’.73 The most consequential of the Stuart Indulgences would be issued by James II in April 1687 (and reissued, with more expansive verbiage, in the spring of 168874). Somewhat more inclined to present free conscience as a positive principle, James affirmed, as Charles had not, that ‘Conscience ought not to be constrained, nor People forced in matters of meer Religion’. Nevertheless, the ‘Interest of Government’ (trade, immigration, and population) continued to figure largely. James promised to protect the church establishment, but all penal laws in ‘matters indifferent’ were suspended through his ‘will and pleasure’. Public worship services were now permitted to Protestant dissenters and Catholics alike, provided they were open, registered with Justices of the Peace, and broadcast no political disaffection. The Declaration specifically suspended the Test Act, freeing recusants from civil as well as religious disabilities. It offered a general pardon for existing offenses against the penal laws. The Declaration, announced James, would be confirmed by parliament ‘when we shall think it convenient’. But it was, in any case, a binding expression of ‘our Royal Prerogative’.75 James did speak of the inviolability of religious conscience. But, as contemporaries understood, indulgence was largely driven by the ‘maxims of our statesmen’ and derived from the ‘inherent’, inalienable power of monarchy.76 James sought parliamentary confirmation of his Indulgence not out of ‘any doubt we had of our power in the putting a stop to the unreasonable severities of the Acts of Parliament’ but only ‘to give our Loyall subjects a new opportunity of showing their duty to us’.77 James was still more high-handed in his Scottish Indulgence, issued in February 1687. The ‘Royal Tolleration’ there was established ‘by Our Soveraign Authority, Prerogative Royal, and absolute power’.78 73 74 75 76 77 78

His Majesty’s Declaration to all his Loving Subjects, March 15 1672, 4–9. Boyer, English Declarations, 106. His Majesties Gracious Declaration to all his Loving Subjects for Liberty of Conscience, 4 April 1687, 2–3. Parliamentum Pacificum (1688), quoted in Knights, ‘Meer Religion’, 50; Morrice, Entring Book, 24 July 1686, 3:186. Speech of James, 21 August 1686. Huntington, MS STT, folder 17. By the King a Proclamation (Edinburgh, 12 February 1687).

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Each of the Stuart Indulgences operated in an individual context, but there is value in viewing the dynasty’s efforts from a distance. The Indulgences not only suspended specific laws but also provided individual licenses (to license meeting houses and preachers).79 They thus effectively married two separate prerogatives: the power to suspend whole laws and the power to dispense with laws in individual cases. Prior to the Indulgence fights, the dispensing power had been more contentious than the suspending power (or ‘general dispensing power’).80 The latter was often accepted as an emergency measure, while the former (as in the case of monopolies) was suspect as a perquisite for powerful elites. The Stuart Indulgences, however, involved the suspension of dozens of penal statutes at once, in pursuit of a generally unpopular policy.81 Royal appeals for a statutory toleration were inconsistent, and the legal logic of indulgence rested on the prerogative. James II, it is true, sought a compliant parliament to repeal the penal laws by canvassing the political elite on this point. But this canvassing itself, and parallel threats to pack the Lords, were condemned as efforts to subordinate parliament. As John Reresby put it, any effort to ensure a compliant, ‘pre-engaged’ Commons struck ‘at the very foundation of parliament’.82 Furthermore, James asked officeholders to confirm support for a Declaration of Indulgence already issued as a monarchical edict.83 His decision to reissue the Declaration in 1688 reflected James’s pessimism that a pliable parliament could be ensured and his resolve to maintain toleration by way of prerogative.84 If it is true that James developed a sincere belief in conscience as an ‘indefeasible natural right’ that might bind his sovereignty, this was a late development. His orations (following the rhetoric of Penn) seeking a new spiritual ‘Magna Carta’ were generally suspected.85 In the very month in which he issued his Declaration, James had personally assured the Bishops of Rochester and Peterborough that he ‘would never by any counsel be tempted to suffer’ a ‘toleration’.86 Neither his word nor his intentions were trusted. In 1672, Charles II had relied on his prerogative with even less prevarication. And though a parliamentary indulgence statute was vainly sought 79 80

81 82 84 85 86

Boyer, English Declarations, 20. It was not agreed whether laws for the ‘benefit and security of the King’s subjects’ or for the ‘advantage of religion’ could be dispensed with. For an undated legal opinion that they could not be, see BL Lansdowne MS 253, ff. 398–9. Edie, ‘Tactics’, 224. Godden v. Hales vindicated the dispensing power, not the suspending power. Reresby, Memoirs, 478–9. 83 Walker, James II and the Three Questions, 13–14, 67–73, 91. Gibson, James II and the Trial of the Seven Bishops, 78. Sowerby, Making Toleration, 24–8, 40–2. Gibson, James II and the Trial of the Seven Bishops, 64.

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in 1662–3, the proposed law would not have repealed the penal laws but would have instead confirmed the King’s prerogative power to suspend them. Royal rhetoric seeking statutory confirmation of the Indulgences, in other words, was ambiguous at best. The contexts for the Stuart Indulgences were dynamic. First, the significance of Catholicism to the monarchy and thus its opponents grew with time. A subordinate feature of the 1662 Indulgence, it was a major feature (for diplomatic reasons) in the Indulgence of 1672, and an overriding one in 1687. Second, the opposition of the established church to indulgence was continual, but their influence over the monarchy declined in stages. Third, the repeated failure of the Indulgence policies established an increasingly unpromising environment for successive efforts. The vacillations of the Stuarts on the issue only hardened their reputation for unreliability and Machiavellian calculation. The Stuart Indulgences were prerogative exertions designed to augment royal power and political stability. They deployed a form of civil religious reasoning. One anonymous memo, for instance, probably dating to the 1670s, advised the King that toleration must prioritize ‘due submission, of all partyes as well ecclesiasticall as civill, to ye temporall prince, as supreame governor in all causes’. Dissenters, the author tellingly argued, should ‘have all ye same loving connivances and indulgences they have at present, but noe legall libetye; for legal allowance will make them impudent and endeavor to encrase, wereas otherwise they will be humble and cautious’.87 Dependence and servility were features of the policy. ‘Princely favors’, suggested another memo, should not be tied to particular ‘modes and circumstances of Religion’ but should reward subjects for ‘affection to the Crown’.88 Church and parliament remained consistently opposed to indulgence – the former concerned to protect its spiritual autonomy, the latter to protect a ‘king-in-parliament’ understanding of the Supremacy itself. Indulgence had a unique capacity to alienate the Stuarts from their natural supporters. Danby spoke in opposition to the dispensing power.89 Roger North, Tory advisor to Archbishop Sancroft, wrote blunt memos for James II surveying the history of indulgence. The effort of 1672 in particular had triggered an ‘unhappy dispute between the King and his Parliament’, which would have been ‘much better avoided’. The 1672 Indulgence and the ‘Impertinence of the Papists (to give it no worse name)’ had failed and thus occasioned the 87 88 89

‘The Grounds of Unity in Religion, or an Expedient for a General Conformity and Pacification’, BL Stowe MS 182, ff. 6, 6v, 7. ‘An Expedient for a limitted Toleration’, BL Add MS 32095, f. 216. Speech draft, 23 November 1685, Browning, Danby, 2:132–3.

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need for James’s renewed effort, itself probably doomed.90 This rhetoric did not, one may presume, gratify James II. In response to the second Indulgence, parliament marshalled constitutional objections, moving in February of 1673 that ‘penal statutes in Matters Ecclesiastical cannot be suspended but by Act of Parliament’ and that ‘the laws must have their free course’.91 This was a bolder response than that of 1663, when the House had merely offered ‘humble advice’ and had largely warned against the schismatic consequences of indulgence.92 In 1663, MPs had urged the King not to feel obliged by the Declaration of Breda, which did not generate any kinds of ‘rights’ that might be ‘pressed’. The First Declaration of Indulgence was opposed chiefly on consequentialist grounds and (paradoxically) by appealing to the King’s prerogative right to reverse his own promises of liberty.93 Constitutional objections loomed larger a decade later. Dominant opinion in the Commons held that ‘a general suspension of penal Statutes is against the Law’.94 Charles II rebuked such ‘questioning of his powers in Ecclesiasticks’, unprecedented ‘in the reigns of any of his ancestors’. This oblique reference to the Royal Supremacy, however, was a side note. Primarily he asserted a general prerogative to suspend laws, though not, significantly, when ‘the Properties, Rights, or Liberties of any of his Subjects are concerned; nor to alter anything in the Established Doctrine or Discipline of the Church of England’. The latter proviso in fact suggested a rather limited view of the statutory Royal Supremacy (his ancestors had not hesitated to alter doctrine and discipline). Charles’s 1673 response to parliament, furthermore, did not treat religious freedom as a natural or constitutional right but as a gift of prerogative seeking the ‘quiet of the Kingdom’ and the ‘ease’ of subjects.95 The alignment of interests within the Cavalier parliament did not produce a clearly articulated ‘non-domination’ account of religious liberty there. Indulgence was a gift aimed at preserving peace and trade, and its supporters tended to deny that it entailed ‘rights and liberties’.96 Indulgence was transactional and conditional, and thus usefully flexible. Attorney General Finch warned against a statutory indulgence. ‘Some would have a Bill for it’, 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

‘Matter of Fact Concerning the Dispensing Power’, BL Add. MS 32523, ff. 47-48v. CJ, 10 February 1673, vol. 9, 251; 15 February 1673, vol. 9, 252–3. CJ, 25 February 1663, vol. 8: 440. History and Proceedings of the House of Commons, 1:60–72. Speech of Sir Thomas Meres, Grey’s Debates, vol. 2, 10 February 1673. Speech of Charles II, CJ, 24 February 1673, 9:256; History and Proceedings of the House of Commons, 1:60–72. Speech of Waller, Grey’s Debates, vol. 2, 10 February 1673.

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he warned, ‘that is hard. Will you tie the King to indulge those consciences where he will, or no? Now tender, hereafter may not be so.’97 ‘Great promissory words’, another supporter of the King suggested, ‘may amount to more than you or the King means.’ These remarks betray a revealing concern that a toleration statute might bind royal prerogative as surely as the penal laws had. A flexible indulgence was thus preferred.98 Indulgence was often defended outside the terms of the Royal Supremacy itself. So insistent was the King on eschewing all ‘innovation’ in the established church that the Supremacy was often paradoxically diminished by defenders of indulgence. Indulgence would cast out the church’s ‘secret enemies’, but the church would not lose ‘her power’. The Declaration of 1672 ‘expressly confirm[ed] the Discipline and Government, as well as Doctrine of the Church of England. Her rights are all resev’d, all Preferments are appropriated to her, and whatever Church-Power belongd to her before remains intire.’99 These assurances that indulgence did not threaten the libertas ecclesiae suggest the central role churchmen had played in opposing it on the grounds that it would. ‘The Church is part of the state’, one supporter suggestively declared, ‘but the state no part of the Church.’100 ‘The Church of England is not concerned in this declaration’, declared Sir Robert Howard.101 By implication the Indulgence was not dependent on royal ecclesiastical supremacy as such, which concerned the internal administration of the duly constituted church. The suspending power was understood by most as an ‘inherent right’ more than a consequence of the statutory Supremacy.102 The Attorney General avowed that the King’s power to suspend law was equal in the spiritual and temporal spheres and thus flowed from the natural prerogative power.103 The capacity to suspend religious law was often equated with a similar authority in matters such as treason law. Indulgence was often construed as an expansion of the general prerogative to pardon.104 It transcended the reformation statutes empowering the monarchy in spiritual causes.105 This permitted critique by 97

Speech of Finch, Grey’s Debates, vol. 2, 10 February 1673. Speech of Coventry, Grey’s Debates, vol. 2, 14 February 1673. 99 His Majesty’s Declaration to all his Loving Subjects, March 15 1672, 9, 15. 100 Speech of Waller, Grey’s Debates, vol. 2, 10 February 1673. 101 Speech of Howard, Grey’s Debates, vol. 2, 10 February 1673. 102 Speech of Osborne, Grey’s Debates, 10 February 1673. 103 Speech of Finch, Grey’s Debate, vol. 2, 10 February 1673. 104 Rose, Godly Kingship, 99–100. Rose provides evidence on this point, but tends to shepherd all discussion of the suspending power under the umbrella of the Supremacy proper. 105 Edie, ‘Tactics’, 197–234, though Reformation statutes did transfer to the King the papacy’s rights of dispensation in ecclesial matters. Churchill, ‘Dispensing Power of the Crown in Ecclesiastical Affairs’, 297–33. 98

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a church theoretically loyal to the Supremacy but deeply suspicious of the Stuart dynasty. The parliamentary debates of 1673 – dominated by anti-Catholicism and the constitutional case for coercion – were inhospitable to any nondomination account of individual religious liberty. Things were different in the debate out of doors. Here, a gradual rhetorical transition of considerable importance occurred. The Indulgence of 1662 was generally welcomed by dissenters, reflecting the enthusiastic monarchism then predominant. By 1672, dissenter suspicion had significantly heightened. Their reluctance peaked with the failure of James II’s effort to forge a Catholic– dissenter alliance in favour of his own Declaration. Across the period then, resistance to the arbitrary nature of royal indulgence intensified among those for whom free conscience was an essential end. Early Restoration toleration tracts were usually marked by a deference to royal prerogative. Prominent dissenters had petitioned the court for relief after the passage of the Uniformity Act.106 One example of this was Edward Bagshaw’s appeal to Charles II, but there were many others. Pamphleteers appealed to the promises of Breda and spoke in high tones of the King’s providential authority to ‘exercise justice’ and act as a ‘terrour to all transgressors’.107 John Corbet styled the King a ‘Common Father’ and ‘Great Moderator’, whose ‘gracious disposition’ would soothe religious differences. Restraining the excesses of clerical zeal required a bold prince, guiding his own interests with ‘diligence’ through ‘new occasions’.108 Wrote Corbet: His Majesty hath gained his peoples hearts, and is glorious in their eyes, and by his continued clemency he will not fail to hold them fast to himself . . . There is a yielding that is no way abject, but generous and advantageous, a Princely condescention, whereby a King becomes more absolute, and may have what he will from his loving subjects.109

Such presentations of indulgence as an instrument for augmenting royal power were not unusual. Indulgence was understood as a ‘pure act of grace’ and ‘clemency’.110 Defenders appealed to exemplary monarchs such as France’s Henry IV, who earned loyalty by suffering religious minorities.111 106

Lord Wharton patronized memos defending the ‘royal dispensing power’ as an aspect of ‘the King’s supreme power and authority in ecclesiastical affairs’. Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics, 49–50. 107 Burrough, Case of Free Liberty of Conscience in the Exercise of Faith and Religion, 5–6. 108 Corbet, Interest of England in the Matter of Religion the first and second parts, 24–5, 136. 109 Ibid., 250. 110 L’Estrange, Interest Mistaken, 37. 111 C.H., An Extract out of Thuanus His Preface to His History . . . concerning Toleration of Differences in Religion, to the reader.

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‘Condescension’ was a common characterization of the King’s ‘willingness to indulge’. His was a ‘Charitable Connivance’.112 As one observer would later satirize in verse: ‘Our freedom is inlarg’d,/ and that’s a thing,/ will make me love/, the once loath’d name of King.’113 The limits of prerogative, by contrast, were usually invoked by opponents of indulgence, both inside and outside of parliament.114 Paradoxically, constitutionalism was a weapon in the arsenal of the church. In 1663, Archbishop Sheldon warned the King that indulgence required a law, ‘unless your Majesty will let your Subjects see, that you will take unto yourself a liberty to throw down the Laws of the Land at your pleasure’.115 He would reiterate this point in the March 1673 conferences at Lambeth Palace where the bishops plotted resistance to Charles’s second Indulgence.116 Arbitrary power thus became a rhetorical foil or anti-tolerationists. The anonymous author of the 1663 tract One Word More and We Have Done provides a case in point. Cast as a dialogue between ‘orthodox’ and ‘nonconformist’, the tract discredited indulgence as an ersatz liberty obtained by unconstitutional means. ‘Nonconformist’ is portrayed as a grovelling sycophant, ‘working upon the Kings necessities, inclinations, and goodness’, falsely assuring the court that ‘Indulgence would make for the King’s honour and comfort’.117 ‘Orthodox’ blasts such ‘subtle’ flatterers as ‘traitors to the constitution’. ‘You quarreled with the late King of blessed memory, because you said he did not govern with the advice of his Parliament . . . you cannot live under this King, because he doth rule with the advice of his Parliament.’118 Extra-legal favours would only invite the ‘importunities’ of those ‘who pretend to that favour, or their envy and hatred that are excluded from it’.119 The context for this argument against a prerogative toleration was suggested by the inclusion of ‘T. Hobbes’ among the heretical sectarians seeking ‘the native freedom of our thoughts’.120 Scottish critics also attacked indulgence for infringing church liberty. Critics of the Scottish Indulgence of 1669, and its attending Act asserting the Royal Supremacy, denounced the ‘slavery’ of Gospel ministers imposed by a ‘corrupted and apostacized state’. From exile in Rotterdam, the deprived John Brown blasted the ‘wretched Indulgence’ as a ‘Church-ruining’ scheme 112 114 115

116 117 118

J.V.C.O., Amsterdam: Toleration, or No Toleration, 4. 113 Flagellum poeticum, 13. L’Estrange, Toleration Discuss’d, 3–5. Sheldon’s admonition, significantly, was reprinted by Richard Baxter. Baxter, Fair Warning: or XXV Reasons Against Toleration and Indulgence of Popery; with the Arch-Bishop of Canterbury’s Letter to the King, epistle. Lambeth Palace MS 2940, 7, quoted in Simon, Restoration Episcopate, 181. One Word More, and We have Done: or the Plain English of Indulgence, 18, 20. Ibid., 6–7, 14–5, 22. 119 Ibid., 22, 24–5. 120 Ibid., 32.

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by ‘backsliding Rulers’.121 Brown denounced those compliant with the Indulgence as ‘court favorers’ required to ‘gape’ for ‘morsels’ of ‘Princely benevolence’. Brown also defended the rights of individual worshippers to reject indulged ministers. Libertas ecclesiae could thus bleed into a more general case for conscience freedom. Brown claimed to protect not just church law but all law. Indulgence (and Supremacy) worked to ‘weaken and invalidate the publick standing Lawes of the Kingdom’.122 Scottish rhetoric in 1687–8 was still hotter. James II’s Scottish Indulgence encouraged idolatry and apostasy. It rendered all law ‘ineffectual and contemptible’. Any who accepted its terms was a ‘cunning Achitophell in the Court’, or ‘a Judas in the Church which betrayed his master with a kiss for a little money of preferment’.123 Such goading of dissenters for dependence on sovereignty was partly strategic. The argument, nevertheless, would appear with increasing regularity. Through the cunning of history, defenders of the libertas ecclesiae would voice, and thus inadvertently nurture, a non-domination case for individual religious freedom. After the fall of Clarendon, tracts promoting or assailing toleration began to ‘multiply’ and ‘swarm’.124 Seeking a fundamental liberty through prerogative power presented a challenge to tolerationists, now accused of dependence on royal ‘condescension’.125 The tensions in such a compromised position were reflected in A Peace Offering in an Apology and Humble Plea for Indulgence and Liberty of Conscience of 1667. Locke may well have known this work: it was penned by his old patron John Owen. Owen invoked the law of nature, which not only required all to seek protection for their lives but also ‘forced’ individuals ‘to differ from others’ in sacred beliefs. Owen anticipated mature Lockean argument when he wrote that the law of nature ‘disposed’ men unto ‘civil society’ for their ‘particular advantages’. But ‘men’s apprehensions of things spiritual and supernatural . . . are not absolutely under their own power’ and could not be freely surrendered. To coerce differences on matters of revelation would destroy society. Owen, versed in the logic of contracted sovereignty, marshalled it in favour of ‘a liberty in religion, as founded in the Law of Nature’.126 But monarchy still dominated the political environment, 121 123 124 125 126

[John Brown], History of the Indulgence, epistle, 7, 9; ODNB. 122 Ibid., 15, 26. ‘Reasons against dispensing with Penal Statutes against Papists’. Huntington, Hastings MS, Religious Papers, box 1, folder 11. Indulgence and Toleration Considered in a Letter to a Person of Honor, 3. Ibid., 8–9, 11–12, 23–4. [John Owen], A Peace Offering: in an Apology and Humble Plea for Indulgence and Liberty of Conscience, 3, 16–17, 24.

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and Owen accommodated this reality. Parliament, seeking ‘the prohibition of that way of worship which we desire to walk in, and the establishment of another LAW to whose authority we own subjection’, was his enemy. Owen celebrated the royal ‘Power Ecclesiastical, or Authority to dispose of those Affairs of the church with coercive Jurisdiction’. Law was ‘derived’ from the King, and ‘binding formally on that sole reason, and no otherwise’. Dissenters could only seek ‘Princely favour toward persons of tender consciences, which his Majesty hath often declared his Inclinations for’.127 (Owen’s confidence had been further encouraged by a supposed conversation with the Duke of York in 1669, during which York disavowed ‘persecution for conscience sake’.128) In Owen’s writing, conscience emerged as a natural right transcending politics, but the hegemony of monarchical rule prevented its secure establishment on a non-domination basis. Other dissenters were even less hesitant. A steady cycle of works defending such a tactic appeared, often in multiple contexts. The old Cromwellian Bulstrode Whitelocke drafted a defence of indulgence in 1663. This was specifically commissioned by the King, who had heard that Whitelocke’s ‘judement was high for his Majesty’s power in Matters Ecclesiastical’.129 Whitelocke kept John Owen as a chaplain and was known to discuss toleration with him.130 His defence of the King’s spiritual power was revised in 1672, and would finally be published in 1687, as The King’s Right of Indulgence in Spiritual Matters. The presbyterian John Humfrey’s Authority of the Magistrate About Religion appeared in 1672. In that year as well, the Independent minister Philip Nye composed his own defence of indulgence. (This was also posthumously published in 1687 as The King’s Authority in Dispensing with Ecclesiastical Laws.) In 1673, Henry Stubbe offered an important defence of indulgence in his Further Justification of the Present War.131 Mark Goldie and Jacqueline Rose have done a great deal to document this strain of dissenting Erastianism, defensibly treating these works as legal defences of the Royal Supremacy. But these apologetics could also be informed by scripture and a general understanding of the prerogatives of sovereignty. Nye, for instance, certainly did invoke Reformation statutes, but he also appealed to the necessities of power in ‘all Polities and Forms of Government’ and the need for an authority ‘annexed to the Sovereign 127 128 129 131

Ibid., 8, 13, 15. Macpherson, Original Papers: Containing the Secret History of Great Britain, 1:51. Whitelocke, Diary, 663–4. 130 Ibid., 750. Goldie, ‘Toleration and the Godly Prince in Restoration England’, 45–66.

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Majesty of every State’.132 The Oath of Supremacy only confirmed this feature of sovereignty, which was a consequence of natural law.133 Nye flattered the designs of Charles II, describing the King as the ‘Common Father’ of all, a ‘kind of Corporation in himself’.134 Nye was certainly concerned (as one ally put it) to demonstrate that ‘the Principles of Dissenters are not inconsistent with the King’s Supremacy in Ecclesiastical Affairs’, but he freely availed himself of far-flung historical examples, scriptural principles, and natural law.135 ‘Policy or Government in itself’, from the ‘Light of Nature and common reason’, was his primary guide.136 Independency, for Nye, was scriptural, but it also permitted the maximum deference to secular spiritual authority. He quoted the estimation of unnamed ‘States-men, that there is no form of Church Government left by Christ, or his Apostles, but to be moulded by the wisdom and discretion of Christian Magistrates, as may best sute and joynt in with the Civil Government’.137 This may have been a cautious allusion to Hobbes. The politics of indulgence could draw its defenders towards the allures of the Hobbesian politique.138 As Mark Goldie has observed, Hobbes was often unmentioned but ever-present in this context.139 In a 1667 parliamentary debate over the penal laws, Edward Seymour condemned inquisitorial clergy as ‘one of the greatest causes of the decay’ of monarchy, as ‘Mr. Hobbes says’.140 The writings of the idiosyncratic Sir Peter Pett made the point more systematically. As Goldie has shown, Pett’s defence of James II’s Indulgence (1687) exhibited a notable Hobbism. Pett celebrated Hobbes as ‘a great philosopher’. His Happy, Future State of England eagerly broadcast Hobbes’s ecclesiological principles, which exposed ‘church supremacy’ for ‘making duo summa principia in states and kingdoms’. But Pett embraced Hobbesian principles not only as a theorist of sovereignty 132 133

134 135 136 138

139 140

Nye, King’s Authority in Dispensing with Ecclesiastical Laws, Asserted and Vindicated by the late Reverend Philip Nye, 3–4. Ibid., 6; Rose, Godly Kingship, 167–9. Rose’s reading of Nye’s book as a description of the ‘nature and history of the royal supremacy’ is perhaps too limited; de Krey, ‘Rethinking the Restoration: Dissenting Cases for Conscience, 1667–1672’, 57–9. Ibid., 52–6, 29. Nye, Lawfulness of the Oath of Supremacy and the Power of the King in Ecclesiastical Affairs, epistle, 4–5, 11, 32–4, 42–5. Ibid., 35. 137 Ibid., 46. They sought ‘an Enlightened monarch to institute reforms and bring about constitutional changes’. Sowerby, Making Toleration, 58, 68–70. But Sowerby downplays the politique dimensions of James II’s program. Goldie, ‘Toleration and the Godly Prince in Restoration England’, 60–1. Speech of Seymour, 4 March 1667, Grey’s Debates: volume 1. Quoted in Parkin, Taming, 243.

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but also as a tolerationist. Behemoth demonstrated that most Christian controversies did not concern theology but the power of priests.141 Pett absorbed, as well, Hobbes’s sceptical deconstruction of heresy as a priestly tool.142 In 1687, Pett would publish an explicit defence of the suspending power, based partly on the traditional supremacy, but also on Hobbes’s more abstract and theoretical sovereignism. Pett accounted it ‘a beneficial Providence of the Age’ that Behemoth had appeared as a timely exposé of clerical demagoguery. Despite ‘all the prejudice against the Author’, Behemoth flew ‘like light lightning round the Kingdom’, an ‘effectual Antidote’ against such poisons to loyalty.143 Behemoth had blamed the spiritual imperialism of the bishops for sapping the prerogative of Charles I and rendering him a martyr to their ecclesial project. Pett would commend the book as a useful justification of sovereign prerogative power within the context of indulgence. An equally clear case was provided by Henry Stubbe, Locke’s friend and Hobbes’s old Oxford promoter. His defence of indulgence recoded that original version of Hobbesian toleration. The King’s toleration of the sects protected his sovereignty from ambitious churchmen. Indulgence was, in the ‘Soveraign judgment of our most discerning Prince’, necessary to his crown and dignity. In a strikingly Hobbesian phrase Stubbe declared that Charles II acted ‘like a Bishop’ over those outside the official church, in the manner of Constantine.144 As he had earlier, Stubbe traced prerogative toleration back to the ancient Roman and Byzantine emperors. Recalling the strategies of Hobbes’s heresy writings, he commended the emperors for indulging peaceable ‘heretics’.145 Indulgence, in Stubbe’s account, was defended not as an aspect of the statutory supremacy but as a ‘Necessity of State’.146 Stubbe’s Further Justification recalled his Essay in Defense of the Good Old Cause, which Locke had commended. Stubbe left Hobbes unmentioned, but he was surely among those unnamed masters of ‘Stateaffaires’ who, with Bodin, informed Stubbe’s version of what Jacqueline Rose has called dissenting ‘supremacism’. Stubbe’s version of this tradition may have been particularly influential. As a client of the Earl of Arlington, he composed memoranda defending a strongly monarchical interpretation of the Royal Supremacy.147 141 142 143 144 145

Goldie, ‘Sir Peter Pett, Sceptical Toryism and the Science of Toleration in the 1680s’, 258–60. Ibid., 265. Pett, Obligation Resulting from the Oath of Supremacy to Assist and Defend the Pre-eminence or Prerogative of the Dispensing Power belonging to the King, 4, 37 [mispaginated]. See also 22, 31. Stubbe, Further Justification of the Present War against the United Netherlands, 30–2. Ibid., 59. 146 Ibid., 71. 147 Rose, Godly Kingship, 175–7.

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Louis du Moulin provided yet another example of dissenting Hobbism and support for prerogative tolerantia. His Interregnum writings, commended by Hobbes himself, had used natural rights Erastianism to defend Congregationalism. In the Restoration context, du Moulin linked the Declaration of Breda and the cause of indulgence to his old antiLaudianism.148 Only the ‘Fervour of the prevailing Corrupt ChurchParty’ had prevented the use of prerogative to compose the Kingdom. Independents remained the best ‘preservers of the King’s Person, Life, Honours, Dignities, and Prerogatives’. Du Moulin had been making this case for decades. If reticent in public, he privately conceded Hobbes’s influence over his thinking.149 Wrangling with Richard Baxter over the merits of Independency’s Erastianism, he regretted that God ‘hath permitted men as ill principled as Grotius and Selden, yea Hobbes, as bad as can be, should come nearer the truth then many good men’.150 Du Moulin’s reluctant Hobbism, once used to champion the Congregational Way, now rallied to the Indulgence policies of Charles II. A final case of a Hobbesian tolerationist gravitating from Cromwellianism to monarchism and the cause of Indulgence was William Petty, the early political economist. Petty, who served the Interregnum regimes, befriended Hobbes after they met in Paris in 1645.151 Hobbesian political and religious thought made its mark on him.152 On religion, Petty was every inch the Hobbesian politique, and this perspective drove him to favour strategic toleration. He borrowed Hobbes’s projection theory of religion and his psychologized understanding of religious dissent. He warned Kings, as Hobbes had, that priests might ‘give their people greater benefits and impose greater feares upon them than any Civill power can do’.153 For reasons of state he advocated a regime of free conscience and considered the legal coercion of heresy a prop of clerical power.154 ‘Natural to man’ and ‘necessary to states’, religion could serve as ‘an Instrument of Civil peace and plenty’ if properly bridled.155 In 148 149

150 151 152 153 154 155

Lewis du Moulin, An Appeal of all the Non-conformists in England, 5–6. Ibid., 11–12. Du Moulin did associate the ‘Religion of Thomas Hobbes’ with Cromwell’s party (21), and elsewhere condemned his theology (28). But on ecclesial principles his own dependence on Hobbes was obvious and conceded. His accusation of Hobbism against high churchmen such as Bramhall, Heylin, and Thorndike was rejected as absurd. Letter to Dr. du Moulin Containing a Charitable Reproof, 3. Collins, Allegiance, 230–1. McCormick, Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic, 36–7. Ibid., 38. He did dissent from Hobbes’s monarchism. Frank Amati and Tony Aspromourgos, ‘Petty contra Hobbes: a previously untranslated manuscript’, 127–32. BL Add. MS 72888, f. 21v. McCormick, Petty and the Ambition of Political Arithmetic, 115–6, 181–2, 242. BL Petty MS 72888, f. 30.

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passages reminiscent of Leviathan, Petty condemned metaphoric theology, the salvific powers of the clergy, and the mingling of spiritual authority with temporal.156 Originally a defender of the Indulgence of Charles II, Petty – despite his contempt for Catholicism – eventually produced manuscripts defending James II’s toleration. To a politique Hobbesian, indulgence held a natural appeal. Critics attributed the Stuart policy of prerogative indulgence to godless ‘statesmen’ such as ‘Hobs’, who had surrendered all religion and morality to the sovereign will. Clemency thus became a ‘blasphemous and pestilential Doctrine’, serving ‘the hopes of the Jesuits on the one side’ and those of the sects on the other.157 Indulgence was tainted with the ‘absolute and arbitrary Power of the King’ and with the ‘Atheistical Spirit’ of the ‘Freaks of Hobs’.158 Such indictments were overdrawn but not entirely fanciful. Hobbes was indeed a theoretical influence over many of those inclined to justify prerogative indulgence. The reverse was also true. Episcopal defences of the Royal Supremacy could be rather dramatically qualified in deference to the constitutional church. Perhaps the clearest instance of this was provided by William Falkner’s Christian Loyalty of 1678. Falkner, a well-connected conformist, made his mark with his 1674 Libertas Ecclesiastica, a voluminous defence of liturgical uniformity and an attack on indulgence. Falkner condemned conscientious objections to liturgical traditions as ‘destructive’, tending to ‘promote a Universal toleration’.159 This was not a view well-pitched to appeal at court in 1674. Falkner’s Christian Loyalty appeared in the more congenial climate of Danby’s administration. It not only defended the ecclesial authority of Kings but also reflected persistent clerical anxieties about the reliability of the Stuarts. Falkner enthusiastically attacked notions of popular sovereignty and resistance theory.160 Trickier, however, was the King’s authority over the church.161 Falkner conceded a fair measure of spiritual power, according to scripture and the ‘nature of sovereignty itself’, and yet he limited such power by preserving the autonomy of ancient, apostolic church officers. The clergy 156 157

158 160 161

BL Petty MS 72888, ff. 5, 6v, et passim. A Full Answer to all the Popular Objections that have yet Appear’d, for Not Taking the Oath of Allegiance, 3, 5. Significantly, this tract is sometimes attributed to Thomas Long, the critic of Locke, and is consistent with his known views. If Long wrote the Full Answer he also wrote the Historian Unmask’d (on which see below). Ibid., 6–7, 38. 159 Falkner, Libertas Ecclesiastica, 433–4. Falkner, Christian Loyalty, or, A Discourse wherein is Asserted that Just Royal Authority and Eminency, which in this Church and Realm of England is Yielded to the King. Ibid., 364–5.

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were custodians of an ‘unalterable’ inheritance (the ‘constitutions of the church’) and sovereigns properly deferred to their judgement.162 Charles II had never cared for such instruction, nor much regarded the ‘Honor and freedom’ of the church for its own sake. He cannot have appreciated Falkner’s vigorous case that ‘liberty of conscience and toleration’ undermined the ‘authority of civil power in matters of Religion’.163 Privileging the rights of the church over the security of the throne, Falkner used the rhetoric of churchly anti-Hobbism. The church, Falkner, warned, was not a ‘worldly contrivance’ but an institution of laws that could not be ‘repealed or altered to the prejudice of English Subjects, by the pleasure of any Prince alone’.164 ‘New modellers’ such as ‘Mr. Hobbs’ (and Spinoza) were ‘dangerous to the government’. Their apparent deference to sovereignty rested on a ‘rotton foundation’ of interest. Leviathan degraded the ‘divine original of Soveraignty’. Neither just monarchical power nor the sacred authority of the church could be founded on an ‘imaginary state of liberty’.165 Orthodox religion alone would restrain alike the arbitrary will of sovereign power and the wilful consciences of subjects. Willingness to secure a natural liberty by appealing to arbitrary power opened dissenters up to withering critique. Answering Corbet and Owen, the royalist divine Richard Perrinchief not only denied the natural right to free conscience166 but also pressed the dissenters on their contempt for the law and compliance with tyranny. They had stooped to ‘flattery’ and ‘servitude’. Unexecuted laws cast government into contempt. Such Indulgence was unsafe and imprudent, ‘the Prostitution of the Authority of the King and the Parliament, to the forwardness of men that will not be satisfied’.167 For dissenters, ‘the cruel Tyrant is now their Idol, anon their abomination’.168 The polemics of 1672 tapped into diverse argumentative strategies, variously ‘civil’ or ‘prophetic’ in tone. Some defended the Indulgence on consequentialist grounds, and even as a boon to the church. The enemies of the church would ‘divide and subdivide’ when ‘the Itch of Novelty’ was ‘a little allay’d’.169 Opponents of indulgence had become more inclined to deploy anti-Catholic rhetoric, reflecting increased suspicion of the court. They cried out ‘Antichrist, Babylon’, one dissenter complained, in order to ‘smiteth the 162 165 166 167 169

163 Ibid., 3, 8, 15–6, 27–8, 34–5, 42. Ibid., 274–86. 164 Ibid., to the reader, 542. Ibid., 407–11. Perrinchief, Indulgence not Justified, being a continuation of the Discourse of Toleration, 8. Perrinchief, Discourse of Toleration in Answer to a Late Book, 1, 15, 31–2, 46. 168 Ibid., 24. T.N., Judgment of a Good Subject upon his Majesty’s Late Declaration for Indulgence of Tender Consciences, 4–6.

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innocent Flock’.170 Attacks alleged that ‘liberty of conscience’ for the godly might instead become a licentious toleration of heresy, error, Judaism, Islam, and popery. Indulgence cultivated a dangerous religious individualism (‘an inward principle of self’). As one critic versified: ‘Well! Since Royal Clemency has given/ each man his leave to choose his own way to Heaven,/ Clean and Unclean Beasts into one ark driven:/ Since pressing i’th’ Church-Militant disappears,/ and all men now are Gospel Volunteers.’171 Charles’s Indulgence was compared with papal Indulgences,172 appropriate to a plot favouring Catholicism.173 News of the deathbed conversion of Charles II only cast a harsher light on his Indulgences. Bishop Fell acidly commented that the dying King – after a lifetime of hypocrisy – required an ‘Indulgence’ from his new church of the kind he had so ‘liberal[ly]’ supplied to dissenters. James eagerly publicized his brother’s conversion, but this evidence of the Stuarts’ ‘trifling with religion’ likely had counterproductive effects.174 Roger Coke sarcastically recounted Charles II’s professed devotion to the official church. How much more dangerous was prerogative indulgence under an openly Catholic King, seeking eternal rather than earthly glory, content to be a ‘terror to his own people’ rather than a ‘terror to his neibors’.175 But even defenders of indulgence increasingly worried that it was a constitutionally suspect use of prerogative, and thus an unstable foundation for an important right.176 This was, again, a position paradoxically pushed upon them by the conformist clergy. Burnet would wryly recall that the episcopal party, ‘that were wont to put all authority in the king, as long as he was for them, began to talk of law’.177 Churchmen characterized indulgence as a ‘warrant’ for disobedience and a dangerous ‘ground for Governors upon every such pretension to change and innovate the said Law’. The stringent conformist Thomas Long – who would write against both Hobbes and Locke – beseeched nonconformists to consider ‘into what danger they bring the Church (you have a toleration for the present) and when it shall be noted, how refractory you are in many things, will not your rigidness beget in those good and pious Senators, who have granted you this Indulgence, a certain disdain and 170 171 172 173 174

175

Vindiciae Libertatis Evangelii: or; a Justification of our Present Indulgences, 3. An Answer to the Author of Humble Thanks for his Majesties Gracious Declaration for Liberty of Conscience. Wild’s Letter to his Friend, answered this (8). Vindiciae Libertatis Evangelii, 3, 12; Wild, Letter to his Friend, 34–5. Fell to Lord Hatton, August 2 168[5?], BL, Add. MS 29583, f. 299; Charles II did indeed seek preemptive papal indulgences for whatever concessions might be required as part of his effort to reconvert England. BL, Add. MS 65138, ff. 132–3. 176 BL Add. 69955, f. 1v. Rose, Godly Kingship, 174. 177 Burnet, History, 1:509.

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alienation of affection?’178 Arguments of this kind were often voiced by those who already scorned toleration on other grounds, but they began to influence those for whom conscience rights were sacrosanct.179 Some dissenters turned the allegation of ‘arbitrary’ government against the unpopular and often ignored Clarendon Code itself. ‘Nothing can be more pernicious to a Commonwealth, then that people should be enured to disobey the Laws, and slight them with impunity.’ The Indulgence merely removed a power where political will was already lacking. ‘Dormant Laws’, wrote one dissenter, ‘are a kind of Trap.’ In this way the penal laws themselves were cast as arbitrary and capricious impositions. The King’s Indulgence, by contrast, circumvented parliament but conformed to the revealed preferences of the people.180 For their part, royal propagandists badgered dissenters not to refuse the Indulgence ‘like peevish Children’.181 Nonconformists should accept ‘a favour from their prince’ (‘I should humbly beg it upon my knees’). Presbyterians and episcopal men alike, they were reminded, had ‘accepted of the Liberty then offered and indulged to them in the late times of the Usurpation: and why [nonconformists] should not do it now, in the Reign, and from the Hands of their most Rightful Sovereign, I see not’.182 But scruples were not so easily brushed aside. The Declaration, as a mere ‘permission’ of the King, contrasted unfavourably with just, stable law. A toleration reliant on the King’s ‘grace and clemency and reasons of state’ seemed insufficient to many nonconformists.183 In the words of one pamphleteer, the second Declaration left ‘many of the Nonconformists in doubt as to what to do’, whether ‘in Conscience or in Prudence, to take advantage from his Majesties late Declaration’.184 On both sides of the debate the insufficiency of mere clemency to ground a freedom denied by law became a common argument. Many still attended primarily to the political concerns of stability and prosperity. But voices increasingly argued from what we might call ‘prophetic’ considerations: that a prerogative indulgence could not create a right where none existed in the eyes of the church; or that indulgence could not 178 179 180 181 182 184

Long, Calvinus redivivus: or Conformity to the Church of England . . . perswaded by Mr Calvin, 92. Indulgence to Dissenters in Religion by Suspending Penal Laws in matters Ecclesiastical is Destructive both to Church and State, 2–3. The Judgment of a Good Subject upon His Majesties Late Declaration for Indulgence of Tender Consciences, 9–10. Tertullus Christianus: or Thanks for the King’s Indulgence, with a Rebuke of Ingratitude (1672). Indulgence not to be Refused, 10, 24. 183 Ibid., 2. Fullwood, Toleration not to be Abused. Or a Serious Question soberly debated and resolved upon Presbyterian Principles, 1.

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presume to ensure a God-given freedom. Sir Charles Wolseley, in a work read closely by Locke, had pitched his earliest case for toleration with the logic of politique statecraft. Later, perhaps reflecting the broader concerns of dissenting allies, he was more inclined to condemn the temptation to ‘bottom all Religion upon humane authority’. The notion that religion bore the ‘stamp of mens artifice’ and was best understood as a ‘politick’ tool, he wrote, was a Hobbesian teaching destructive of right conscience. ‘Tis but of late the world hath been told’, Wolseley wrote in 1672, that the notion of a Spirit implies a contradiction; that the Bible is nowhere in force as a Law Divine, but where by Laws civil and municipal ’tis made to be so; that Religion is nothing else but a fear of invisible powers feign’d in the mind, and fancyed from tales publickly allowed.

These principles were ‘the spawn of the Leviathan’.185 Some critics of the Indulgence, including the author of the scribally published ‘Queries upon the Declaration’, presented the royal licensing of preachers as a usurpation undermining the ‘libertatis evangelii’.186 Many dissenters considered licenses an ‘undue exercise of power’ which infringed their ‘right to worship freely’.187 ‘By taking our Licenses, we confess that the King hath a Legal Right to suspend old Laws and make new.’ Pamphleteers thus allowed two allegations to converge: that the Indulgence encroached on the ‘great Statute-Law of Christ’ and that it also undermined the constitutional order. ‘By accepting a License, we give the King an arbitrary power’, wrote the author of the ‘Queries’. ‘For by the same rule that he makes a New Law for my pretended good and advantage, he may make another for my real hurt.’ By this ‘our Liberties Civil, as Christian’ would be ‘given up and betrayed’. Defenders of the Indulgence could find this a difficult criticism to answer. ‘Niceness about Laws belongs not to me’, wrote one, ‘nor private Christians, where a Salvo of God’s Authority is preserved.’ But to critics the Indulgence ‘betrays and destroyes rather than inlargeth our Christian or Civil Liberty’. It was disgraceful to ‘run greedily to them for a supposed favour, which is quite the contrary’. To ‘bless and bow the knee’ would ‘debase’ religious right and undermine civil law.188 Andrew Marvell condemned the Indulgence of 1672 as a conspiracy against temporal and religious order, reflecting ‘Arbitrary principles that 185 186 187 188

Wolseley, Unreasonableness of Atheism, 15–7, 72; Wolseley, Reasonableness of Scripture Belief, preface. The manuscript is lost but can be reconstructed from the response in Vindiciae Libertatis Evangelii, 5–7. Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics, 66–70. Vindicae Libertatis Evangelii, 7, 11, 14, 19, 24–5.

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will bow the knee to Baal’. Marvell favoured free conscience, but considered it a ‘Master-piece’ of ‘boldnesse and contrivance in these Conspiratours’ to issue this Declaration, and it is hard to say wherein they took the greater felicity, whither in suspending hereby all the Statutes against Popery, that it might thence forward passe like current money over the Nation, and no man dare to refuse it, or whether gaining by this a President to suspend as well all other Laws that respect the Subjects Propriety, and by the same power to abrogate and at last inact what they pleased, till there should be no further use for the Consent of the People in Parliament.189

Roger L’Estrange, in exasperated reply, observed how ‘ungratefully’ Marvell attacked indulgence, which was ‘a manifest Concession only to gratifie the restless Importunities of his own Gang’.190 Marvell in fact conceded the King’s clement instincts but warned that successors might use the same discretion to promote fanaticism or popery.191 Marvell’s Rehearsal Transprosed thus made the case against Parker’s episcopal conformism but not the case for prerogative indulgence. Indeed, it was satirically identified on its title page as being printed ‘at the sign of King’s Indulgence’. Locke owned all of Marvell’s major works and was surely influenced by them.192 The factors nurturing the development of a non-domination account of conscience rights within the Indulgence debate peaked under James II. Royal Catholicism cast a deep shadow.193 From the earliest days of the reign, the mere rumour of a new toleration generated apprehension.194 Those ‘liberal in their indulgances to our dissenters’ appeared to be ‘trifling with religion’ out of self-interest.195 By now repeated failures had made the Stuarts’ tolerationist policy appear unreliable. King James accompanied his Indulgence with an effort to pack parliament in its favour, which rendered his constitutional assurances suspect. His abandonment of the established church reignited the episcopal opposition that had bedevilled his brother. Catholicism was now perceived as an existential threat, which threw nonconformists on the defensive. The ‘dissenters must well consider of it’, wrote Roger Morrice, ‘if they would accept [Indulgence] togeather with the Papists’.196 The Royal Supremacy now appeared as an absurdity. The 189 190 191 194 195 196

Marvell, Growth of Popery, 34–5. L’Estrange, The Parallel, or, An Account of the Growth of Knavery, 8–9. Marvell, Growth of Popery, 44. 192 LL, 1931–6. 193 Miller, ‘James II and Toleration’, 8–19. Clarendon to Rochester, 28 December 1685, Correspondence of Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, 1:197. Fell to Lord Hatton, 2 August 16[85?], BL Add MS 29583, f. 299. Morrice, Entring Book, 28 August 1686, 2:239.

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gradual remodelling of sovereign spiritual power – from an aspect of ecclesial constitutionalism to an abstract note of sovereignty – had reached its culmination.197 As in 1672, the ‘non-domination’ critique of indulgence was often paradoxically voiced by establishment conformists. Prerogative powers over religion, once a mixed blessing, now appeared in the blackest terms. This was particularly true after the establishment, in the summer of 1686, of the King’s ‘Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes’, a body threatening to dominate church governance in the manner of Henry VIII.198 The French Ambassador captured the irony. ‘All the laws which have been passed for the establishment of the Protestant and to destroy the Catholic religion’ now gave the new King ‘the right to exercise a power still greater than Catholic Kings, in other countries, exercise over ecclesiastical affairs’.199 Archbishop Sancroft refused to serve on the Commission, previewing the oppositional constitutionalism that would culminate in the trial of the seven bishops. The Indulgence, wrote one critic, had advanced Popery and atheism, exposed ‘all Religion as a Cheat’, and had ‘taught Men to conclude, that there is nothing Sacred or Divine but Trade and Empire, and nothing of such eternal Moment as Secular Interest’.200 Anti-Hobbesian tropes thus made their way into conformist broadsheets and challenged dissenters for having subordinated their sacred consciences to carnal interest. Not all conformists resisted. With considerable irony, Samuel Parker, Bishop of Oxford, became perhaps the most prominent clerical ally of James. For those convinced of his fundamental Hobbism, this did not surprise. But Parker was an odd tolerationist, essentially defending the political rights of the Catholic aristocracy, not the rights of dissent generally. He insisted that the Test Act itself had in fact violated the ‘ecclesiastical Authority’ of the church, because it had been passed by parliament (rather than Convocation). Far from offering an Erastian defence of indulgence, Parker attacked the Test as an encroachment on episcopal authority.201 He marshalled both church and parliamentary constitutionalism against the law. Parker expressly linked 197 198 199 200 201

Rose, Godly Kingship, 3. Kenyon, ‘The Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes, 1686–8’, 727–36; see also, Tapsell, ‘Charles II’s Commission for Ecclesiastical Promotions, 1681–84: A Reconsideration’, entire. Quoted in Boyer, English Declarations, 56. To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, the Humble Address of the Atheists, or the Sect of Epicureans (1688). Samuel Parker, Reasons for Abrogating the Test Imposed upon all Members of Parliament, 4–8. Lloyd attacked Parker’s view of the ‘legislative’ power of the church, in terms far more Hobbesian than Parker’s own. Lloyd, Answer to the Bishop of Oxford’s Reasons, 9–13.

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the Test to the revolutionary cause – ‘partly of Independency, partly of Erastianism’ – that had ‘undermined the Old Church, as it stood upon Divine Right and Catholick Principles’. With Leviathan surely in mind, he assailed this unholy alliance for augmenting the spiritual authority of the magistrate and for allowing each ‘private Christian’ the ‘arbitrary Choice of his own communion’.202 Parker’s Reasons for Abrogating the Test is often read as an unalloyed defence of James II’s prerogative Indulgence. It was, in fact, a text utterly consistent with Parker’s sacramentalist and clericalist antiHobbism. Parker was certainly a big catch for James. His tract was printed in both Scotland and Ireland in 1688. But the best the King could extract from the conformist ranks was a work of crypto-Catholic theology that was utterly silent on indulgence and implicitly hostile to state control of the English church. Parker’s less careerist colleagues were more inclined towards outright opposition, and they found themselves enjoying the constitutional high ground. If dissenting pleas for conscience ‘put Anglican authorities on the defensive’,203 conformist critiques of indulgence did the same to the dissenters. Many were forced to reposition themselves. In 1662, scarcely any notable dissenter rejected Indulgence based on concerns about its arbitrary nature. The ‘quantity of liberty’ had decisively trumped doubts about its quality. In 1672, dissenting concerns on this score were growing, and efforts to justify ‘dependence’ on royal favour becoming more strained.204 By 1687, a considerable body of dissenting opinion rejected toleration because, as a mere royal grant, it depended on arbitrary power and created conditions of unacceptable dependence.205 The previous balancing act of men such as John Owen, presenting conscience as a natural right but accepting it as a royal favour, could not be maintained. As Mark Knights has observed, dissenters were paralyzed by the ‘political significance’ of indulgence and increasingly inclined to resist royal blandishments. This reluctance, however, did not represent (as Steve Pincus has suggested) a ‘prioritiz[ing of] civil over religious liberty’.206 Reluctance, rather, reflected a judgement about the conditions necessary 202 203 204 205

206

Reasons for Abrogating the Test Imposed upon all Members of Parliament, 62–5. De Krey, London and the Restoration, 100. Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics, 66–8. This is not to deny the significant level of support that James enjoyed among dissenters. See, Goldie, ‘James II and the Dissenters’ Revenge’, entire; Sowerby (Making Toleration, entire) tends to downplay all evidence that the support of dissenters for James II was coerced or stage-managed. As suggested by Pincus, 1688, 122. Pincus does observe the parallels between Indulgence and the Gallican logic of the ‘liberty of conscience by royal fiat’ (134).

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for a secure religious liberty. By the end of 1687, wrote one advisor to James II, nonconformists were cooling on indulgence. The ‘Church of England Clergy’ had convinced them that the Indulgence was either a Catholic plot or that it was a mere temporary measure lasting only for the current reign.207 The memory of dissenters ‘fondly hugging the Indulgence’ was blamed for burnishing the reputation of the bishops.208 After the Revolution, Roger Coke would recall that many sober ‘Dissenters did both dread and detest’ the Declaration, which represented the absurdity of ‘a Jesuited Prince pleading for Liberty of Conscience, to the breaking down the laws, which before he had so often professed to maintain’.209 Even dissenters who accepted Indulgence ‘dreaded a snake in the grass’.210 The ambiguities of the indulgence wars, and not just the experience of persecution, forced dissenters to argue more clearly for free conscience as an inviolable right.211 Even as they attacked the popish absolutism of the bishops, dissenters felt pressure to distance their own cause from a rival accusation of Hobbesian absolutism and politique tolerationism.212 These dynamics were exemplified by the Marquis of Halifax’s enormously influential Letter to a Dissenter. Halifax was, by inclination, a potential supporter of prudent toleration, but not from the hand of a Catholic king. York’s Catholicism destroyed his confidence in the dynasty.213 He railed against popery, opposed Danby’s Test, and was removed from the Privy Council in 1676. Both Charles and James learned to loathe him. In his anonymous Character of a Trimmer (published in 1688 but circulating in manuscript earlier), Halifax asserted the importance of a ‘Constitution of Laws’.214 Stable rule, he argued, avoided partisan extremes. The ‘trimmer’ promoted a balance between ‘devouring Prerogative and a Licentious ungovernable freedom’.215 Halifax proposed a moderate establishment, with a set of confessional laws softened in their rigour. The Trimmer ‘hath too much deference to the constitution of our Government to wish any more Prerogative Declarations in favour of Scrupulous men . . . We must no more break a law to give a man ease then we Robb a House with a devout intention of giving plunder to the poor.’216 The Character of a Trimmer was distributed in 1684, and so its constitutional objections to indulgence referenced the effort of 1672. Halifax 207

Undated letter to James II, BL Add. MS 32095, f. 247. Daillé, Lively Picture of Lewis du Moulin, 20. 209 Coke, Detection of the Court and State of England during the four last Reigns, 641–2. LL, 804. 210 Thoresby, Diary, 1:186. 211 De Krey, ‘Reformation in the Restoration Crisis, 1679–1682’, 233. 212 Ibid., 234–5. 213 ODNB. 214 Savile, Character of a Trimmer, 1–2. 215 Ibid., 14. 216 Ibid., 20–1. 208

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returned to the subject three years later. His Letter to a Dissenter, designed to prevent James from consolidating nonconformist support, offered a classic exposition of what we would today call a ‘non-domination’ account of liberty. Halifax conceded the ‘ill circumstances’ of the dissenters. The politics of the moment recommended a tone of generous sympathy. But ‘men who are Sore’, he wrote, ‘run to the nearest Remedy with too much hast, to consider all the consequences’. Halifax countered with two arguments: that Dissenters could not trust their ‘new friends’; and that there was a ‘Duty incumbent upon you, in Christianity and Prudence, not to hazard the publick Safety, neither by desire of Ease, nor of Revenge’.217 The Letter unabashedly traded on anti-Catholicism. Liberty and popish ‘infallibility’, Halifax argued, were flatly incompatible, and Catholicism was the primary beneficiary of the toleration. But Halifax’s chief strategy was to condemn not ends but means: the dependence on arbitrary power implicit in the Indulgence. The Indulgence lulled nonconformists into a foolish compliance and would weaken their resolve when the King’s catholicizing projects were finally exposed. ‘The other day you were Sons of Belial, Now, you are angels of Light.’ And ‘you are therefore to be hugged now, onely that you may be the better squeezed at another time’.218 In accepting liberty as a favour from a lawless, absolute prince, dissenters devalued the very rights they so earnestly desired. Halifax was not dismissive of free conscience. Indeed, he insisted (dubiously) that the threat of Catholicism had broken the ‘rigid Prelates’, who had wrongly made confessional uniformity itself a ‘matter of Conscience’. But ‘the Constitution of England’, Halifax wrote, ‘is too valuable a thing to be ventured upon a Complement. Now that you have for some time enjoyed the benefit of the End, it is time for you to look into the Danger of the Means.’219 The Letter to a Dissenter offered the most sustained account of a ‘nondomination’ definition of liberty to be found in the seventeenth century. ‘Consider’, Halifax wrote, that the implyd Conditions of your new Treaty are no less, then that you are to do everything you are desired, without examining, and that for this pretended Liberty of Conscience, your real Freedom is to be Sacrificed: Your former Faults hang like Chains still about you, you are let loose only upon Bayl; the first Act of Non-compliance, sendeth you to Jayl again.220 217 218

Savile, Letter to a Dissenter, Upon Occasion of His Majesties Late Gracious Declaration of Indulgence, 1–2. Ibid., 3. 219 Ibid., 11. 220 Ibid., 14.

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Non-interference established on such conditions was not a worthwhile liberty and indeed threatened the conditions required for all freedom. ‘To rescue your selves from the Severity of one Law, you give a Blow to all the Laws, by which your Religion and Liberty are to be protected.’ Rather than act as ‘counsel retained by Prerogative’, nonconformists should have awaited relief from parliament.221 By leaping at the King’s favour, they had reduced themselves to supplicants, bribed by the King and ‘bid to’ be grateful. Their reward was a temporary and vulnerable favour. ‘For whatever may be told you, at this very hour, in the heat and glare of your present Sun-shine, the Church of England can in a Moment bring Clouds again; and turn the Royal Thunder upon your Heads, blow you off the stage with a Breath, if [the Church] would give but a Smile or a Kind word.’222 For those who had lived through the uncertainties of the previous Stuarts Indulgences, this point carried weight. Halifax, though a master rhetorician, was not a particularly principled constitutionalist. He read Leviathan, and his private manuscripts indicate a fundamentally Machiavellian or Hobbesian understanding of power. His constitutionalism was largely posture. On the constitution, for instance, he wrote privately: ‘There is then no other Fundamental, but that every Supream power must be Arbitrary. Fundamental is a Word used by the Laity, as the Word Sacred is by the Clergy, to fix everything to themselves they have a mind to keep; that nobody else may touch it.’223 Halifax’s account of religion was cynical and functional. ‘The use of Religion’, he wrote, ‘as to this World is to keep it quiet, but it is sometimes made the greatest Instrument of Disquiet’.224 Halifax cannot have objected to indulgence from deep-seated hostility to the Hobbesian politique. He opposed Catholicism and wielded constitutionalism as a weapon ready to hand. But however cynical, his case resonated. The Letter to a Dissenter became a sensation. Not all were convinced. Some derided his promise that the established Church would ease the dissenters in time. Responding to this ‘officious friendship’, Henry Payne argued that the Church’s own loyalty to the King had been itself exposed as a matter of self-interest.225 It ‘must not be forgotten’, wrote another, ‘how much the Church of England hath exalted the Prerogative when they were in hopes of having it employ’d 221 223 224 225

Ibid., 9. 222 Ibid., 5, 7–9, 12. Works of Savile, 2: 223–5. For Halifax’s reading of Hobbes and Machiavelli see Works of Savile, 2:34 and 224n. Ibid., 2: 149, 166, 230, 258. Payne, Answer to a Scandalous Pamphlet, entituled A Letter to a Dissenter, 2–3.

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against the Dissenter’. Critics called Halifax’s bluff.226 ‘It is not therefore the Prerogative that our Church-men are angry with’, wrote one, ‘but the exercise of it to the relief of others.’227 As Roger Morrice considered the effects of the Indulgence of 1687, he recorded in his entering book historical details of 1672. In that year dissenters ‘did generally concur with the Hierarchists to null that Declaration, because they thought it assumed a power of Dispensing with Lawes’. The episcopal churchmen had promised a liberty by statute, but had betrayed this promise, and so some nonconformists had complied with the King’s licence scheme. The bishops then accused them of trying to ‘advance the Prerogative above Law’. Morrice’s historical account was mangled, but reflected the deeply divided mind of many dissenters. A tolerationist, absolute monarch opposed by an exclusivist church establishment espousing constitutionalism confounded their natural political expectations.228 Halifax could manoeuvre critics into robust defences of the King’s ‘undoubted Prerogatives’, both as ‘Supreme Head of the Church’ and through ‘His Sovereignty’. Wrote one: ‘His Clemency should be as extensive as His Empire.’ The Indulgence was openly characterized as ‘Grace and Favour’, a ‘Royal Bounty’ requiring obedient gratitude.229 But defending the dispensing power and deriding its critics as rebels ‘like those of 41’ was not natural nonconformist rhetoric.230 Henry Payne presented the dispensing power as a right of sovereignty, denied to James only by the seditious Exclusionists. The dissenters could ‘rely on the word of this Glorious Prince’.231 The rejoinders to Halifax consistently reiterated trust in the monarchy, and outrage at ‘insinuations’ that James had secret designs.232 But this went only so far in redeeming their position of dependence. The Whiggish churchman Gilbert Burnet, from exile, answered Payne by echoing Halifax: ‘The Dissenters, for a little present ease, to be enjoyed at Mercy, must concur to break down all our hedges, and lay us open to that Devouring Power, before which nothing can stand that will not worship it.’233

226 227 228 229 231 232 233

Answer to the Letter to a Dissenter, Detecting the many Unjust Insinuations, 5, 7. Ibid., 7; see also L’Estrange, Answer to a Letter to a Dissenter, upon occasion of his Majesties late Gracious Declaration of Indulgence, 3–4. Morrice, Entring Book, 25 June 1687, 4:105. An Answer from the Country, to a Late Letter to a Dissenter, 4, 19–21, 36, 42. 230 Ibid., 22–3. Payne, Answer to a Scandalous Pamphlet, entituled A Letter to a Dissenter, 4–5, 7. Answer to the Letter to the Dissenter, Detecting the Many Unjust Insinuations, 3. Burnet, An Answer to Mr. Henry Payne’s Letter, 2; see also his Letter Concerning Some Reflections on His Majesty’s Declaration for Liberty of Conscience (1687).

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The controversy over indulgence often oriented itself around the messages of thanks sent by some congregations. Were these markers of gratitude, or of servitude? ‘Our Religion and our government’, wrote Burnet, ‘are matters that are not to be parted with to shew our good breeding.’234 Defenders of the Indulgence vehemently denied that ‘the dissenters Thanks are extorted’, but presented them as evidence of the very loyalty that fitted them for toleration.235 Roger Morrice recorded dissenting messages of thanks to the court, and reported – wishfully – than only a few congregations produced them. Morrice’s journal constitutes an unfolding record of the indecision that gripped nonconformists in 1687. On the one hand, he eagerly predicted that the Indulgence would mortally wound the ‘Torey Hierachicall party’, sending thousands into dissenting congregations. On the other, he believed that the court intended to ‘advance Popery’ under this ‘colour and satisfaction’.236 Increasingly, indecision gave way to dissenter resistance. As one critic, answering William Penn, put it: ‘The name of Liberty signifies nothing without the Substance and Continuance, Certainty and Security of it. Let us endeavor to secure our Substantial Liberties . . . rather than to get the Names of New ones which may fatally bring us into greater bondage in the end.’237 Historical memory often celebrates dissenters and Whigs as the champions of liberty. To contemporaries however, they often appeared intent on securing rights through sovereignty. In the wake of the Glorious Revolution, the trimming Tory Richard Temple composed a polemical history of ‘Whigs in power’ that illustrated the typical connections. Whigs and nonconformists were willing to ‘gain their point even to ye subversion of government, nay of religion and liberty itself’, which they ‘readily and frankly sacrificed to any government that wou’d bottom itself upon their party and expose their interest’.238 Such men undermined the king and church during the Interregnum, but after 1660 they ‘became the most thorough-paced courtiers to all designs of advancing prerogatives, arbitrary power and popery under the notion of indulgence’. The cause of liberty thus secured the King a ‘power of dispensing with laws concerning 234 235 236 237 238

Burnet, An Answer to My Henry Payne’s Letter, 2; on the addresses of thanks see Pincus, 1688, 199–200. Answer to the Letter to the Dissenter, Detecting the Many Unjust Insinuations, 6. Morrice, Entring Book, 9 April 1687, 4:6–10, 17. Comber, Three Considerations Proposed to Mr William Pen (1687?), 4. Temple, ‘The False Patriot Unmasked: or a Short History of the Whigs’, Huntington, MS STT Folder 9, pp. 1–2.

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religion’.239 In what was essentially a post-revolutionary election manifesto for Toryism, Temple made his case against the Whigs among those ‘who have any value for the government, church of England, or their libertys’.240 The Indulgence battle was the primary cultural memory working to render this rhetoric plausible. The neo-republican project has asked when it was that Western political thought began to develop an understanding of rights that was at once negative and constitutional. When did rights become individual zones of self-sovereignty (rather than ‘rightly ordered’ actions), which were also secured on a non-arbitrary, constitutional basis? The dominant early modern jus naturalists – Grotius, Hobbes, Spinoza – provide only the first of these conditions: a modern notion of rights, but one unconcerned with their constitutional status, and indeed exceedingly deferential to sovereignty. Pettit and Skinner have done an enormous theoretical service in excavating an alternate understanding of liberty. But the non-domination liberty they attribute to the republican tradition in fact emerged most explicitly during the tolerationist debates of the Restoration. Hobbism indeed generated a mere non-interference form of liberty compromised by dependence on arbitrary will. That account of liberty (and its alternative), however, did not centrally concern republicanism. Non-domination liberty was primarily nurtured by defenders of conscience rights. Tolerationists agitated for perhaps the first widely demanded right to a negative liberty. Gradually refining their case for this right in response to political developments, tolerationists insisted that it be established under non-arbitrary conditions. Repeatedly tempted by a license offered as favour, they eventually demanded a freedom through constitutional, natural, and divine law. Philip Pettit would likely brush aside this revision. He has written that history provides his theory with mere ‘colour’. But his own historical presumptions may do more normative work than he allows. Pettit casts modern, capitalist political economy as the theoretical alternative that eclipsed liberty as non-domination. Mere non-interference liberty supposedly appealed to an emerging society of private acquisition. The metaphors of non-interference – of markets, rational choice, individual taste, and privacy – offend him for this reason. The language of classical, liberal political economy, he suggests, has lulled us into accepting an abbreviated account of our potential liberties. The present book is not fully consistent with this chronology or this account of causality. 239

Ibid., 5.

240

Ibid., 17.

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More significantly, Pettit would likely be uncomfortable with the claim that non-domination liberty was most vigorously espoused by religious tolerationists who were deeply committed Christians. Pettit seeks to eradicate domination not primarily in the state, but in society, in families, and in civic associational life. The sovereign state must act against domination in all social arenas. Provided that law performs this function, its intrusions cannot be cast as ‘unfree’. A robust statism informs this perspective: an assumption that sovereignty, properly designed, can empower individuals with real freedom. Pettit’s republicanism might, on these terms, justify intrusive regulation of the family, of civic and religious associations, and of other sources of social domination.241 Tellingly, Pettit begins Republicanism with a rather dark invocation of his experiences as a Catholic seminarian, where ‘formation had tried to cultivate unfreedom’ and made a ‘virtue’ out of subordination. For him this experience was the prototype of ‘being subject to arbitrary sway’, the ‘capricious will or the potentially idiosyncratic judgement of another’.242 Given Thomas Hobbes’s role as the neo-republican anti-hero, it is paradoxical but suggestive that Pettit shares Hobbes’s visceral hostility to the moral authority of non-state associations. It would be historically inconvenient for the neo-republicans to concede that dissenters and tolerationists were the primary defenders of a non-domination account of liberty in the seventeenth century. It would be still more awkward if that defence of religious freedom was understood as a reworked, individualized version of the libertas ecclesiae espoused by the corporate church of Christian tradition. Dissenters, initially deferential to state domination and favour, came to fear it. Their ethic otherwise cultivated within them a willingness to accept dependence on the will of others. The details of Christian theology – original sin, divine omnipotence, grace – generate a profound sense of dependence for most Christians within their churches and families. For these dissenters, and for Christians of a higher ecclesial inclination, the dangers of arbitrary will were eventually embodied by the emerging modern state, armed with Hobbes’s new logic of sovereignty. That a non-domination account of liberty might have worked primarily to critique this new sovereignty in the service of ecclesiastical society is not a historical finding that will be easily integrated into current neorepublican mythology. 241

242

Pettit has responded in On the People’s Term’s: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy. His defense of democracy does something to dissipate the whiff of statism that sometimes lingers over his project, but less to enhance his account of associational freedom. Pettit, Republicanism, viii, 5–6.

chapter 5

Locke, Conscience, and the Libertas Ecclesiae

Recent contextualizations of Locke’s tolerationism have foregrounded the continental setting for the Epistola de Tolerantia. This is certainly defensible. The work was composed in Latin in the Dutch Republic and coincided with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. This focus on the continent, however, may obscure the critical importance of the English context in advancing Locke’s tolerationism. The Restoration offered a unique constellation of religious circumstances: a highly fissured pluralism; a mobile, modernizing society with a scattered aristocracy (hindering the territorialized religious pluralism favoured in France and the Empire); a confessional establishment reliant on broad social support more than royal favour; a dynasty espousing a minority religion; and monarchs determined to pursue toleration, in contrast to Louis XIV, but by deploying absolute prerogative power in his image. With the exception of the Epistola, Lockean texts were composed in English and responded to these English developments. This was true of his early letter to Stubbe, his ‘Two Tracts’, his ‘Essay concerning Toleration’, his notes on Parker, and his Letters concerning Toleration. It was true, as well, of his longest tolerationist work, the unpublished ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’, which remains the least studied of Locke’s major writings.1 The present chapter will consider its significance within the context of the Indulgence debate and will read it as an anticipation of Locke’s more famed Epistola. Early in the Restoration, this book has argued, Locke’s thinking on religious governance was rooted in a Hobbesian, politique logic. Informed by a version of the new jus naturalism highly deferential to sovereignty, he understood toleration and confessional establishment alike as alternate modes of civil religious 1

This title is my own, preferred to the more common but less accurate ‘notes’ on Stillingfleet. Stanton opts, defensibly, to preserve the title ‘Defence of Nonconformity’ used by King in his Life of John Locke (1829). Stanton, ‘The Name and Nature of Locke’s “Defence of Nonconformity”’.

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policy. The prevailing question was which policy ‘conduced’ to the ‘advantage of the state’. Indulgence was not a right but a sufferance of dissenters ‘on the terms offered to them’.2 This deference to prerogative was typical of much Restoration dissent. However, historical contingencies such as court Catholicism and the repeated failure of the royal Indulgences eventually strained efforts to pursue conscience rights with absolutist mechanisms. The case for conscience freed from sovereign domination, and justified by more than utility, developed in stages among nonconformists. So it was, as well, with Locke. Initial breaks appeared in the 1667 ‘Essay concerning Toleration’. But it was only in the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ and then in the Epistola that Locke broke entirely free of civil religious logic and politique toleration on the Hobbesian model. Locke travelled this road with English dissenters. But he also engaged closely with episcopal defenders of establishment, who resisted both toleration and court Hobbism. Defenders of the libertas ecclesiae powerfully challenged the logic of indulgence. Enabled in part by the Stuarts’ Catholicism, they harried dissenters for their dependency, for compromising the constitution, and for subordinating spiritual life to statecraft. This argumentative posture was not entirely tactical. It also reflected a ‘pious anti-politics’ that the Restoration church had cultivated, by necessity, during the Interregnum and much of the Restoration.3 Facing such polemical pressure, many dissenters translated the freedom of the hierarchical, corporate church into the freedom of individual conscience within plural, voluntarist churches. As the Stuart Indulgences failed, Locke embraced an inalienable right to free conscience, one potentially justifying resistance to sovereignty. Uniquely among the canonical jus naturalists, Locke defended religious freedom with what we now style a ‘non-domination’ logic. But to understand this development, we cannot complacently array dissenting tolerationists against ‘throne and altar’ conformists. The debate was not merely over the end of toleration but also the conditions of its attainment. The Indulgence controversy exposed the limitations of civil religion as a logic of both confessionalism and toleration. The church, furthermore, though hostile to toleration as an end, played a vital role in undermining the credit 2 3

Locke to Philippus van Limborch, 12 March 1689, CL, 3:585. The phrase is Brent Sirota’s, in his superb The Christian Monitors, 19, 65. Sirota’s focus is on the revolutionary transformation of 1688, rather than the Church’s experience from 1651 through the 1670s, where the patterns of 1687–9 were set.

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of the Hobbesian politique as a means. Conformist churchmen thus acted as midwives to a more robust account of religious freedom. Locke’s notes on Samuel Parker illustrated this dynamic. Parker, as a vigorous if idiosyncratic advocate for ecclesial liberty, critiqued the Stuart Indulgences as raw political acts. Locke could only have read this as a personal challenge (to Shaftesbury and thus to himself), and he responded by swinging the charge of Hobbism back at Parker, highlighting those awkwardly Erastian features of Parker’s eclectic ecclesiology. The disagreement, however, necessarily pressured the remaining sovereignist features of Locke’s own thinking. If prerogative could not justify confessional coercion, could it reliably ensure freedom of conscience? During the 1670s, tensions over this question were felt inside circles familiar to Locke. They can be observed, for instance, in the writings of Martin Clifford. A client of Buckingham and Shaftesbury, eventually Master of the Charterhouse, Clifford was a court favourite.4 Religiously unorthodox, an advocate of the new science, he was precisely the sort of figure associated with court Hobbism, particularly after the 1674 publication of his Treatise of Humane Reason. This work defended Clifford’s own right (and that of ‘every private person’) to ‘make a search into the nature and quality of my Religion; and according to my interest in Humane Society, to communicate the effects of that search to others if I shall believe it profitable for them’.5 Clifford advocated theological rationalism against the mystified orthodoxy of the priests.6 Intellectual coercion, he argued, bred conflict. Allowing each ‘quietly to enjoy his own Opinion’ cultivated stability.7 Deconstructing heresy (not sparing the Council of Nicaea), and construing religious freedom as a liberty of private, philosophical opinion, Clifford strongly recalled Hobbes’s late writings. The church hit back. Bishop Laney opined of Clifford’s Treatise that ‘twas no matter if all the copies were burnt and the author with them’.8 In 1675, Clifford featured in a court sermon by Miles Barne, warning against unbridled toleration and casting both Clifford and Hobbes as enemies of church authority.9 ‘Neither the Leviathan’, pronounced Barne, ‘nor any of his Disciples, hath yet been able to shew how or when the Church forfeited 4 7 9

Lee, Cabal, 163. 5 Clifford, Treatise of Humane Reason (1674), 1–2. 6 Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 10–12. 8 AO, 3:999. Barne, Authority of Church-Guides Asserted, 7, 12. This sermon was first published in 1675. Barne felt 1685 a fitting year to reprint its warnings against ‘the envenom’d Writings and Erastian Principles of some modern Contovertists’. He invoked other anti-Hobbesians such as Lowth and Bramhall (epistle).

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Her antecedent Right’, or her ‘Power distinct, yet in no ways opposite to the Civil’.10 Clifford was understood as a conduit of Hobbism into the Restoration court.11 He and Hobbes made religion ‘truckle under Civil Sovereigns’, so that piety was ‘unable to fly higher than the Thrones and Scepters on Earth’.12 But it is suggestive of growing doubts about the efficacy of prerogative toleration that Clifford rejected these associations. He explicitly disputed Leviathan’s conclusion that ‘every City’ must be ‘supream Judge in matters that belong to Gods worship’. Clifford sympathized with Hobbes’s anticlericalism and heterodoxy, but he rejected the legitimacy of kings fixing doctrine.13 ‘What pity it is’, wrote one critic, ‘that two such extraordinary Friends should fall out’ on this point.14 Clifford’s doubts about the spiritual supremacy of Hobbesian sovereigns did not go unchallenged in Shaftesbury’s circles. One defence of Clifford, by the common lawyer Albertus Warren, was dedicated to the earl. Warren’s prior tracts had advocated obedience to the Commonwealth and attacked Laudian ‘black Coates’.15 He had defended the Interregnum regimes with an odd amalgam of common law and a Hobbesian account of the ‘arbitrary power’ necessary for the salus populi.16 Now, Warren presented Clifford’s Treatise as a service to the King, clipping the wings of clerical ‘bigots’ and promoting ‘Gracious Condescention’ towards religious dissenters.17 But Warren, going further than Clifford, drafted Hobbes directly into a brief for indulgence: Because Peace is the end of Government, men’s opinions, when publickly vented and found inconsistent with Peace, must be regulated by the Magistrate, which is not to make men see double by being dazl’d betwixt Ecclesiastical and Temporal powers, for all Power is Temporal, as Power. Nevertheless, as T.H. saith, Paul, or Cephas, or Apollo may be followed, perhaps as the best way, according to mans liking, so it be done without Contention, and without measuring the Doctrine of Christ by our Affection to the person of the Minister; (the Fault which Paul reprehended in the Corinthians,), his Reasons follow, See the Leviathan ch. 47 pag. 385, and they are such as no man has ever hitherto presum’d to refute; though his sworn Enemies have assaulted him otherwise by Shoals.18 10 11 12 14 15 16 17 18

Ibid., 17–18. W.H., Spirit of Prophecy . . . Asserted against Mr. Hobbs, and the Treatise of Humane Reason, epistle. Ibid., to the reader, 209–14. 13 Clifford, Treatise, 46–8. Plain-dealing, or, A Full and Particular Examination of a Late Treatise, entituled, Humane Reason, 72–3, 83. Warren, Royalist Reform’d, or Considerations of Advice to Gentlemen, Divines, Lawyers, 2–5, 8–9, 22–3. Warren, Eight Reasons Categorical: Where is Examined and Proved, that its Probable, the LawCommon Will Stand, 5. Warren, An Apology for the Discourse of Humane Reason, written by Ma. Clifford, 60, 70. Ibid., 80–1, 93.

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Warren thus brought Hobbes’s Erastian-Independency into the debate over Restoration Indulgence, correcting Clifford for discounting the tolerationist potential of Leviathan. ‘The Church depends upon the State, not the State upon the Church, for the King is Head of both, and both are consolidate in him’, Warren wrote in defence of Hobbes. ‘No man ever condemned [Hobbes] who read him without prejudice.’19 The polemical dispute over Clifford’s Treatise reflected the Janus-faced position Hobbes occupied in tolerationist debate. Locke was certainly familiar with the affair and owned the relevant works by Clifford and his critics.20 He was, as we shall see, sometimes suspected of having authored the Treatise of Humane Reason, which suggests the work’s relevance as an artefact of Locke’s milieu. The association of Shaftesbury with the Hobbesian politique certainly persisted. The idiosyncratic Visions of Government, by the Tory Edward Pettit, condemned a ‘grand confederacy’ against Christendom that involved Jesuits, Ottomans, republicans, sectarians, atheists, Machiavelli, and Hobbes.21 Shaftesbury and Hobbes were Pettit’s primary marks, as members of that tribe of ‘politicians’ hostile to divine order in church and state. Such ‘Politik illuminati’, Pettit warned the court, disguised power-seeking stratagems as efforts to secure free conscience.22 In a remarkable scene, Pettit portrayed Hobbes (inspirer of the ‘Policy of Shaftesbury’) paying homage to a ghostly, tormented Oliver Cromwell as the ‘unlimited and absolute Soveraign, that mighty Leviathan I have endeavoured in this book, to recommend to all mankind’.23 Pettit associated Charles II’s Indulgence with Cromwellian toleration as species of ‘Fanatical and Hypocritical Policy’. As Lancelot Addison would put it in a 1677 tract targeting fashionable Hobbism, it was an ‘atheistical supposal’ of the age ‘that Religion is but a meer Engine of Government, or a politic invention devised to awe the people into subjection and obedience’.24 Shaftesbury and the politics of indulgence were implicated in this critique. As one broadside had it, Leviathan was presumed to be ‘much studied by the late E of S in his Retirements’. Hobbes taught him democracy, atheism, and the ‘reasonableness of Seperation’.25 19 20 21 24 25

Ibid., 82–3, 116–7. LL, 787, 1844. Plain Dealing is here attributed to Marvell. Warren’s Apology for Clifford was found in Furly’s library (mistakenly attributed to Clifford). Bibliotheca Furliana, 145. Pettit, Visions of Government, 2–4. 22 Ibid., 14–24, 27, 36. 23 Ibid., 22, 91–5, 125. Addison, A Modest Plea for the Clergy (1677), quoted in Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment, 143–4. At Amsterdamnable Coffee-house, quoted in Parkin, Taming, 362; for another linking of Shaftesbury to Indulgence, atheism, and Independency, see The Vanity of all Pretences for Tolleration, 4–5, 62–3, 66.

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Locke’s Mature Tolerationism: The ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ Restoration polemics over the tolerationist implications of the Hobbesian politique swirled around Locke’s consequential engagement with Edward Stillingfleet. Perhaps the leading church apologist of the Restoration, Stillingfleet participated in virtually every debate over toleration (which he opposed) or comprehension (which he generally favoured). For a time a chaplain at the Temple and Sergeant’s Inn, he was well connected among lawyers and versed in both common law and church law. Stillingfleet is often cast as an Erastian Latitudinarian, but (as with Parker) the label misleads.26 His earliest work, the Irenicum of 1661, did deny the jus divinum of episcopacy and took a soft line on liturgical adiaphora. This made the young Stillingfleet vulnerable to charges of Hobbism. Partly in reaction to this, his ecclesiology drifted higher.27 He became a favourite of Archbishop Sheldon, perhaps for his court sermons berating the King’s faltering morality. In his mature years, he championed the apostolic authority of episcopacy and the church’s privileges.28 Stillingfleet was more sympathetic to the culture of Restoration high churchmanship than his earliest writing might suggest. As one critic wrote, he had ‘repented’ of Irenicum in favour of ‘English Prelacy’ with all its ‘wonted luster and grandure’.29 This made him an increasingly determined anti-Hobbesian and an interlocutor helping to calibrate Locke’s own evolving ecclesial politics. Irenicum might have appealed to the young Locke. Its efforts to reunify the church under sovereign auspices by denying any fundamental church constitution and by subjecting religious adiaphora to prudent regulation were reminiscent of Locke’s early conformism.30 But the restored church advanced on a higher road, and Stillingfleet followed. As early as his revised Irenicum of 1662, he rebuked Leviathan for having ‘melted down all Spiritual Power into the civil State, and dissolved the Church into the Common-wealth’. The church, he wrote, was a ‘Society’ (‘distinct from a civil Society’) that subsisted ‘by virtue of a Divine positive Law’.31 Stillingfleet’s efforts against Hobbes followed the deeply worn tracks of Restoration polemic. In 1662 appeared his Origines Sacrae, a work of natural 26

27 29 30 31

Marshall, ‘Ecclesiology of the Latitude-men, 1660–1689’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985), 407–27; largely followed by Parkin, Taming, 359–61; see however Spurr, ‘’Latitudinarianism’, 74–5; Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 83–4, 144. 28 Quantin, Christian Antiquity, 285–8. Ibid., 290. An Antidote against Dr. E. Stillingfleet’s Unreasonableness of Separation (1681), epistle. For Stillingfleet as a latitudinarian, see Marshall, Locke, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 16, 40. For a more complex account, see Rose, Godly Kingship, 141–48. Stillingfleet, Irenicum: or a Weapon-Salve for the Churches Wounds, 418, 426–8.

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theology and historical apologetics and an attack on fashionable atheism.32 The work went into five editions before 1680.33 Hobbes lurked behind its condemnation of Epicureanism and mechanistic natural philosophy.34 Hobbes’s grounding of religion on ‘ignorant superstitious’ fear, Stillingfleet wrote, subverted the rationality of Christianity. Hobbes left only the state’s ‘public allowance’ to distinguish religion from superstition. Rhetorical ‘concealment’ marked all of Hobbes’s religious writing, particularly atheistic paradoxes such as his ‘material God’. (In these respects, Spinoza was ‘a true Disciple of the Leviathan’.35) Reduced to irrational fear, religion became ‘only a Trick made use of by cunning Legislators’.36 This critique was refined in the 1690s, but Stillingfleet had formulated it earlier. Concerns about a Hobbist/Spinozist atheism, empowered by an overbearing state, informed his 1677 Letter to a Deist. Here he combatted the fashionable scorn heaped on sacred things. Did Christianity rest on sacred revelation and the church, or on the chicanery of ‘politicians’?37 In 1683, Stillingfleet unburdened himself in a sermon before the King. Charles’s late lurch towards conformity had not entirely alleviated the distrust of the churchmen. ‘I hope Religion’, Stillingfleet announced, ‘may be fairly acquitted from being thought as a meer contrivance of Politicians.’ Religion was not mere ‘interest and design, first started by some great Politicians to tame and govern mankind, and ever since kept up by a company of Priests who lived upon the Cheat’. The sermon targeted Leviathan as the handbook for ‘framing’ religion ‘to serve the ends of Government’.38 These perspectives marked Stillingfleet’s landmark intervention in the toleration debate – first in the published sermon of 1680, the Mischief of Separation, then in a long treatise responding to critics, The Unreasonableness of Separation of 1681. Locke was merely one of many interlocutors, and his own extensive reply was not published. Within the development of Locke’s tolerationism, however, the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ was of singular importance. Stillingfleet’s broadsides against ecclesial separation spoke ‘for the 32 33 34 35 37

38

Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 84–5, 140–3, 346–9. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, 413–4. Stillingfleet, Origines Sacrae: or a Rational Account of the Grounds of the Christian Faith (1662), 465–9; Stillingfleet, Origines Sacrae . . . seventh edition (1702), 65–8, 70. Stillingfleet, Origines Sacrae . . . seventh edition, 68–9. 36 Ibid., 71–3. Stillingfleet, Letter to a Deist, in Answer to Several Objections (1677), preface, 12–13, 32. For Hobbes and Spinoza paired, see Richard Baxter, Church History of the Government of Bishops and their Councils Abridged (1680), preface. ‘A Sermon preached before the King February 15, 1683’, Fifty Sermons . . . by the Right Reverend Father in God Edward Stillingfleet, 348–52.

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common front of the London clergy in the 1680s’.39 He favoured conformism, gestured modestly towards comprehension, and assailed toleration as schismatic. Often overlooked is Stillingfleet’s specific argument against prerogative indulgence. The Unreasonableness of Separation targeted the politique inclinations of the court. It tainted Indulgence with Hobbesian associations, thus rebuking the temptation to pursue conscience rights through constitutional capitulation. The argument coordinated several moving parts. Its foundation was the familiar claim that separation over non-essential practices constituted schism. Stillingfleet effectively pursued this point by quoting Tudor Reformation figures who sought to reform the English Church but nevertheless remained communicants within it. The current disregard for ecclesial union – an echo of Donatist or Brownist perfectionism – entailed an idolatry of will and construed private conscience as subjective opinion. It was folly to allow unfit communicants to ‘depart from the church as they please’.40 Separatism had advanced further these ‘last ten years’ than in the previous century.41 ‘Since the Congregational way’, Stillingfleet wrote, ‘hath prevailed in England, the present dissenters are generally fallen into the practice of it’, on the specious grounds that the primitive church gathered into independent congregations, with elected ministers.42 The Unreasonableness of Separation confuted John Owen’s reading of the early church in favour of the view that the primitive ecclesia in various cities constituted a single society encompassing all local congregations, governed by a hierarchy of differentiated church officers. Church officers with power ‘independent’ of the people followed the example of the apostles.43 Independency, Stillingfleet warned, would allow ‘as many Religions as Churches’, as evidenced by the civil war.44 Atheism, in turn, would thrive amidst such ecclesial disorder. ‘Toleration’ was the ‘nurse of Atheism, the inlet of Popery, the common Sink of all Errors and Heresies.’45 Stillingfleet invoked the witness of Charles I, who had ‘understood the Constitution of our Church as well as any Bishop in it’.46 Like Laud, Stillingfleet revered the Church as its own ‘society’, governed by venerable creeds, canons, and liturgical practices.47 These ancient rules, predating Christian states, could be confirmed in statute law, but only by ‘common 39 40 41 43 44 46

Rupp, Religion in England, 34–6. Stillingfleet, Unreasonableness, 115, 118, 127; Stillingfleet, Mischief, 12. Stillingfleet, Unreasonableness, 367. 42 Ibid., 220. Stillingfleet, Mischief, 17–21, 26–7; Stillingfleet, Unreasonableness, 286–8, 308–9. Stillingfleet, Unreasonableness, 292–3. 45 Stillingfleet, Mischief, 47. Stillingfleet, Unreasonableness, 270–1. 47 Ibid., 287.

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consent of the whole Nation in parliament’. Separatism threatened the constitutional integrity of the ‘Church of England representative’, which Stillingfleet grounded on parliamentary sovereignty rather than royal will.48 This traditional understanding of the Royal Supremacy made a foil of Hobbism. Dissenters, to Stillingfleet’s anger, accused him of subordinating the church to princes. Richard Baxter attacked him for obscuring whether the King or the clergy headed the church. Baxter portrayed the established church as a hotbed of ‘Hobbists’ and Spinozists.49 ‘Hobbes and such others’, wrote Baxter, ‘as oppose Fundamentals, deride Christianity, or the Immortality of the Soul, some by Writing, some by common Talk, do die in the Church of England.’50 It was not indulgence but authoritarian prelacy that constituted the spawn of Leviathan.51 Stillingfleet answered: Would Mr. B[axter] seek a Cause to express his anger against me? As if I had allowed Princes to set up what Religions they please. Surely, he thought himself writing against Hobbs and Spinoza then. No: but thus he artificially draws me into this snare.52

Baxter had falsely accused him of making ‘all worship’ the instrument of sovereignty. I wonder he did not give me 30 tremendous aggravations on Atheism and Hobbism. For he doth in effect charge me with them; For it follows, It’s strange that he can be sure, God’s will is true, and yet be so sure, that Men’s Laws are above it, and may suspend it.53

Stillingfleet was anxious to disassociate church conformity from Hobbism. And in truth he was too deferential to primitive church practice for such a charge to stick. Stillingfleet, in fact, had prominently advanced the church’s counterargument: that toleration and separation were encouraged by court politiques and the royal policy of Indulgence. Hobbism, tolerating and indeed promoting heresy and error, imperilled the church constitution. Along these lines, Stillingfleet subtly critiqued the royal policy of Indulgence. As Baxter challenged him: ‘What if the Magistrate grant a Toleration of divers modes of Worship?’ If so, it could not be disobedience that made schism.54 Stillingfleet accepted this point but reversed its implications. 48 49 50 51 53

Ibid., 299, 312–3, 115. Baxter, Answer to Edward Stillingfleet’s Charge of Separation, 31, 34, 40–1, 58; Baxter, Church History, 338; Baxter Answer, 58; Baxter, Defense of the Nonconformists Plea for Peace, 139, 144, 175. Baxter, Third Defence of the Cause of Peace, 133. Baxter, Answer to Mr. Dodwell and Dr. Sherlocke, 1. 52 Stillingfleet, Unreasonableness, 308. Ibid., 131–2. 54 Baxter, Answer, 57.

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The Unreasonableness of Separation indeed began with an extended discussion of the Indulgence of 1672.55 Stillingfleet audaciously condemned it as a ‘stratagem to introduce Popery and Arbitrary Government’. Some dissenters had wisely ‘refused the bait’ when ‘they saw the Hook that lay under it’. But most remained insufficiently wary.56 Tolerationists thus undermined law in favour of their own narrow interests, secured by arbitrary prerogative. ‘Suppose’, he wrote, ‘the Indulgence be at present strictly limited to Dissenting Protestants; are we sure it shall always so continue?’ The dissenters who accepted indulgence would become prisoners of another’s will. They had shown themselves willing in various contexts (including the Cromwellian era) to scrape before the ‘Magistrate’s Power in matters of religion’.57 Nor, Stillingfleet warned the King, could he count on dissenters’ abiding gratitude. The sects would grow insolent and ‘bid defiance to the settled Constitution; as we have seen already by the yet visible effects of the former Indulgence’. That Declaration had not made dissenters ‘more modest and obedient, but peevish and quarrelsome’.58 Dissenters sought to ground ‘unalterable’ conscience ‘rights of the People’ on a suspension of constitutional law. This promised to destroy parliament and the constitution.59 Dissenters, and not Stillingfleet himself, he insisted, subordinated true religion to mere prudence. ‘No man’s Conscience’, he wrote, ‘alters the nature of Good and Evil in things.’60 Defenders of indulgence risked the ‘hazard of all for a shew of greater Liberty to themselves’. Unshackled popery would be their reward. For under this pretence our Adversaries endeavour to make them their Instruments to bring upon our Necks a Yoke which neither we nor our Fathers were able to bear. An Universal Toleration is that Trojan Horse, which bring in our enemies without being seen.61

Hobbes’s name appeared only twice in the Unreasonableness of Separation, but he is a primary target of the text, the patron of atheists and separatists sheltering under prerogative indulgence. Stillingfleet’s deconstruction of Owen’s argument for primitive Congregationalism worked to answer Hobbes’s similar case in Leviathan. Stillingfleet demonstrated the subservience of the Independents to prerogative by invoking Owen’s associate, Lewis du Moulin, the Congregationalist quasi-Hobbist once appreciatively read by Hobbes himself.62 And Stillingfleet favourably 55 57 58 60

Previewed in Stillingfleet, Mischief, preface, 40. 56 Stillingfleet, Unreasonableness, xxii–xxiii. Stillingfleet, Unreasonableness, lxxix; Stillingfleet, Mischief, 46. 59 Stillingfleet, Unreasonableness, liii, lxxiv, lxxx. Ibid., 122, 135. 61 62 Stillingfleet, Mischief, 43. Ibid., 57–8. Stillingfleet, Unreasonableness, 297; see above.

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referenced the 1663 conformist tract Evangelium Armatum, where the Indulgence was associated with seditious papists, dissenters, and Hobbes alike. All had worked together during the dark years of the Interregnum to undermine King and church.63 One anonymous response to Stillingfleet, grasping this feature of his polemic, conceded that the ‘religion of Thomas Hobbes’ had played its role among the Cromwellians but worked to distance Cromwell from true Independency.64 In prominent defences of Stillingfleet, the high churchman William Sherlock redoubled these arguments. His Discourse about Church Unity condemned Baxter, Owen, and Humfrey for seeking a sovereign indulgence destructive of the church constitution.65 The ‘Baxterian Catholick is nothing else but a Protean Religionist, who transforms himself into all shapes, and differs from the Hobbist only in this, that the Hobbist is for being alwayes of his Prince’s Religion, but he is alwayes for being against it.’66 Only the sacred church could navigate between these rival versions of religion subordinated to profane, political will. Catholic communion, Sherlock argued elsewhere, required a universal church ‘antecedent to any humane laws, and of a distinct Consideration from a Church incorporated into the state’. Where men such as Humfrey conceded a national church, Sherlock wrote, it was purely a ‘Political Church’ under the sovereign.67 So attacking Erastian-Congregationalist ecclesiology and indulgence, Sherlock found Leviathan a ready weapon. Did Humfrey ‘think with Mr. Hobbs, that Christianity itself can be a Law to us, only considered as the Law of the Land . . .?’ No communion or sacraments existed absent ecclesia. And no Hobbesian ‘Civil Authority’ could ‘make that to be one National Church which is not one National Communion’.68 The anonymous author of Kedarminster-stuff (1681), defending Stillingfleet, charged that tolerationists did not seek liberty but the establishment of Independency and dismantling of episcopacy.69 ‘Is it not sad 63 64 65 66 67

68

Ibid., 145–6; Evangelium Armatum, preface. Antidote against Stillingfleet, 21. The comment originated with or was borrowed from Louis du Moulin himself, who may have authored this tract. Sherlock, Discourse about Church-Unity being a defense of Dr. Stillingfleet’s Unreasonabless of Separation, viii–x. Ibid., 234; Humfrey took umbrage. Reply to the Defense of Dr Stillingfleet, 40; see also Long, Unreasonableness of Separation, the Second Part, 34–5, 46, 144. [Sherlock], Continuation and Vindication of the Defence of Dr. Stillingfleet’s Unreasonableness of Separation, 191–8. This has often been attributed to Thomas Long but is clearly by Sherlock and responds to criticisms of his original Discourse about Church Unity. Ibid., 199. 69 J.B., Kedarminster-stuff, 22, 37, 11–12, 18, 20–2, 37.

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then that such an old carping Minister as Mr. Baxter, should so abet that rampant sin of the times, which the Leviathan-sinners so sport in?’70 Casting Baxter as a Hobbist was not an easy rhetorical trick, but Stillingfleet’s defence of episcopacy and attack on politique indulgence could produce such revealing effects. Another blow in the barrage was struck by the popular work of the Reverend Timothy Puller, The Moderation of the Church of England (1679). Puller rejected prerogative toleration as a threat to the temporal and spiritual constitution.71 The court’s politique disposition pinched the church between statecraft and the dissenting interest. Puller balanced a moderate Royal Supremacy with a priestly ‘Spiritual Power’ distinct from temporal authority. He thus broadcast loyalism while staving off an immoderate statism.72 Dissenters could only assert the Supremacy of the Pope or the supremacy of the ‘people’ commanding their own consciences in voluntary congregations.73 The Church of England checked the excesses of Rome, without joining those ‘who resolve the exercise of all the inward power of the Church into the sole will and arbitrary power of the Civil Magistrates, according to Erastus and the Leviathan-Author’. ‘Romanists’, Puller wrote, ‘make the Pope such a Monarch in the Church, as Mr Hobs doth his Prince in the State.’74 Rome was the very ‘model of Mr Hobs his City’. Hobbes and the dissenters had merely ‘chang’d the Idol’ into a monstrous agglomeration of consciences under a profane state.75 Locke may have encountered similar arguments in the writings of the future non-juror Francis Turner. In 1676, Turner responded to the tolerationist Naked Truth by the idiosyncratic Herbert Croft, Bishop of Hereford. Croft provoked churchmen who construed indulgence as a spiritual usurpation by Hobbesian princes. In his Animadversions, Turner charged Croft with denying the church its sacramental authority and liturgical integrity. Croft had also attacked the Council of Nicaea and Constantine’s deference to the council, attacks that rose from ‘the very dregs of Mr. Hobbs’s Divinity’.76 Croft, like Hobbes, subordinated the Church to selfconcerned sovereigns willing, through indulgence, to ‘wound the whole Body of the Church’.77 Croft’s ‘Universal Toleration’ would indiscriminately liberate nonconformists and ‘the Leviathan himself: whom this 70 71 72 76 77

Ibid., 13. ODNB; Puller, Moderation of the Church of England, 12, 30, 365, 470, 505, 516. Ibid., 23, 93, 336. 73 Ibid., 339, 480–1. 74 Ibid., 335, 96. 75 Ibid., 149. Turner, Animadversions upon a Late Pamphlet Entituled The Naked Truth, 3, 8–10, 12–3. Ibid., 12–14, 22.

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Author follows a great way in his Notions of Sufficient or Insufficient Means for People’s Conviction’.78 Turner cast ‘indulged’ Independents and sectarians as implicit Hobbesians, sacrificing the church and securing individual license of opinion from an unprincipled state. A final case emerges from a source that Locke would encounter again, years later. In 1684, the revered James Lowde, rector at Easington, published a visitation sermon in defence of conformity. Hobbes was Lowde’s anti-hero, revealing again how Leviathan might be turned against both separatists and overlordly sovereigns inclined towards toleration. Leviathan conjoined these threats, teaching ‘that in Obedience to our own Dear Sovereign Self-Preservation, it is lawful in Words to deny even Christ himself before men’. Politicians now ‘tell us, that whatever a Subject is forced to do, so that he do not the thing on his own accord, that is not his Action, nor to be imputed to him; but it is the Action of the Sovereign, and to be imputed to the laws of the Country’. But conscience, Lowde wrote, could not be abandoned to the representative person of an absolute prince.79 The ‘Hobbists of the age’ made ‘Interest and Self-Preservation the great and fundamental Principle of Reason and Religion’. Dissenters, with Hobbes, valorized self-interest and subordinated religion to appetite and prideful opinion.80 Lowde thus targeted two species of the Hobbesian conscience: the riot of individual opinion and the tyranny of a single, princely person ‘representing’ that chaos. Conformist clergy of the era were at times derided as a ‘new fry of churchmen prepar’d by Hobbs’, himself the ‘nurse of modern Politiques’.81 But the assertion that ‘Restoration Anglican discourse tended in a distinctively Hobbesian direction’ is fundamentally misleading.82 Both Hobbes and his priestly antagonists would have scoffed at the claim, conflating as it does two fundamentally different understandings of monarchical spiritual authority. Responding to it, churchmen such as Parker, Stillingfleet, Puller, Lowde, Sherlock, and Turner associated Hobbism with a boundless Caesaro-papism pursuing a politique tolerationism.83 And this construal far more accurately captured Hobbes’s religio-political disposition. Dissenting responses well understood these polemical patterns. John Owen, for instance, bridled at the 78 79 81 83

Ibid., 46. Marvell rejected this case for Croft’s Hobbism. Mr. Smirke; or, the Divine in Mode, 16, 37. LL, 186. Lowde, Reasonableness of the Christian Religion in a Sermon, 46–7. 80 Ibid., 42–4, 46–7. The Observator in Dialogue, 27 July 1681, 2. 82 Parkin, ‘Hobbes,’ Continuum Companion, 63. Edward Fowler, who was known to Locke, vented a similar opinion about the ‘Leviathan Doctrine’ of ‘absolute subjection’. Libertas evangelica, or a Discourse of Christian Liberty, 170. LL, 1162. Locke to John Mapletoft, 29 October/8 November 1678, CL, 1:626.

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charge that Congregationalists kowtowed to state power.84 He chided Stillingfleet for begrudging ‘our Thankful acceptance of the Indulgence granted by his Majesty by a public declaration some years ago’. But Owen disavowed any role in devising the Indulgence, refused to opine on its legality, and presented it as a temporary ‘expedient’.85 The clerical critics of prerogative indulgence had clearly thrown him on his heels. Their reading of Hobbes’s own political priorities and the situated implications of his ecclesiology were in most respects correct. John Locke’s final library catalogue contained at least seventeen of Stillingfleet’s titles, including works – such as Origines Sacrae and A Letter to a Deist – wherein Hobbes was a primary target.86 Indeed, Locke was well steeped in the anti-Hobbesian literature produced by the Restoration church. In addition to Stillingfleet and Parker, Locke owned John Templer’s Idea Theologiae Leviathanis (1673), Thomas Tenison’s The Creed of Mr. Hobbes Examined (1670), and Clarendon’s Survey of Hobbes’s Leviathan (1676).87 Around this time, he read Lawson’s Politica Sacra et Civilis and acquired his Examination of the Political Part of Mr Hobbs his Leviathan.88 It has been suggested that Lawson might have influenced Locke’s constitutional views. But Lawson’s attack on Hobbes was also ecclesiological, and on this score Locke’s reaction must have been mixed.89 He cannot have appreciated Lawson flaying the Independents for schism, nor his accusation that ‘statists’ had made the ‘congregational party subservient to their civil interests’. His own prior positions were implicated in Lawson’s vigorous case against Hobbesian Erastianism, which had conflated the ‘two distinct Commonwealths’ of church and state to empower the latter. Lawson’s Examination had keenly anticipated the Restoration church’s critique of the Hobbesian politique.90 All of these works assailed Hobbes’s ecclesiology and theory of conscience. Several rehearsed his past endorsement of Cromwellian Independency. 84 86

87

88 89 90

Owen, Brief Vindication, 14–5. 85 Owen, Enquiry concerning the Original, preface. LL, 2774; Locke owned the third edition of Origines Sacrae, printed in 1666. Bodl. Locke 8.41. Locke’s copy was bound with a random page (456) from either the 1666 or 1671 edition of Raleigh’s History of the World. LL, 730, 2849, 2850. Tantalizingly, Locke’s copy of Tenison has clearly been dog-eared on the page where the clergyman lampoons Hobbes’s doctrine of the Trinity, and again when he condemns Hobbes’s denial of incorporeal substance. Locke would later be associated with both of these features of Hobbism. The folds, may, of course, have been made by someone else, but they are rare in Locke’s books. Bodl. Locke 7.37, pp. 41–2, 53–4, 55–6. Marshall, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 94; LL, 1095–6. Condren, George Lawson’s Politica and the English Revolution, 136–8; Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty, chapter 3; Collins, Allegiance, 212–5. Lawson, Examination, 156, 140; Lawson, Politica, 131–5, 50, 199–216, 259–60.

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Around this time, we have seen, the same topics were debated by Martin Clifford, his critics and defenders, in works also owned by Locke. Locke had read attacks on Leviathan in the 1650s, and (we shall see) his library would experience another infusion of anti-Hobbesian polemic in the 1690s, when his own reputation would be implicated. But Locke was also exposed to a sustained anti-Hobbesian polemical literature in the 1670s. He was thus well versed in the church’s intense campaign against the court politiques and their project of indulgence. Locke acquired Stillingfleet’s Unreasonableness of Separation on 4 April 1681.91 His ‘Answer’ was composed while he convalesced after an illness at the home of James Tyrrell.92 Unpublished, it has been long neglected and was once commonly thought to have been co-written by Tyrrell, whose handwriting appears in much of the manuscript. However, though Tyrrell was surely no mere copyist, recent scholars have attributed the work to Locke’s single authorship.93 In 1686–7, Tyrrell repeatedly described the manuscript to Locke as either ‘your intended discourse concerneing Toleration and Persecution’ or ‘your discourse about Liberty of Conscience’.94 Locke himself characterized it as ‘my owne, though for the most part marked by another’s hand, who was my operator when I kept my bed’.95 Internal textual evidence supports the attribution. The manuscript, for instance, dismisses the idiosyncratic argument that the apostolic church – before the conversion of Rome – enjoyed a supernatural power to inflict physical punishment on dissenters. This odd claim was made by Parker, and the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ echoed the ridicule of it found in Locke’s notes on Parker’s Discourse.96 At another point the manuscript commended the religious settlement of Cleves, perhaps recalling Locke’s own formative journey there.97 Locke’s ‘Answer’ bent Stillingfleet’s most effective rhetoric back against him. He agreed that popery ‘approaches towards us’ but argued that coercion – not liberty – weakened Protestant resistance. Responding directly to Stillingfleet’s reproof of the Indulgence of 1672 for succouring both dissent and Catholicism, Locke asserted that Catholic conspirators were in fact at work ‘amongst the conformists to stir them on to 91 93 94 95 97

4 April 1681, MS Locke f. 5, p. 39. 92 Marshall, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 96–7. Milton, ‘Locke’, ODNB. James Tyrrell to Locke, 26 December 1686, CL, 3:92, and 6 May 1687, CL, 3:191. See also David Thomas to Locke, 6 September 1688, CL, 3:499. Locke to Edward Clarke, 26 March/5 April 1685, CL, 2:709. 96 MS Locke c. 34, p. 42. MS Locke c. 34, p. 20.

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persecution and severity’.98 The obstinate enforcement of indifferent things (rather than differences over them) generated factions. The narrow terms of communion established at the ‘King’s happy restoration’ had been a mistake. Following the Independents, Locke defined schism as a failure of charity, rather than a rent in ecclesiastical jurisdiction.99 Locke advanced on Stillingfleet’s historical erudition with several manoeuvres. The first denied the binding authority of either primitive or Reformation practice. ‘The business is not what men’s opinions were then or now’, he wrote, ‘but what is the weight of their Reasons.’100 Nevertheless, Locke tentatively sided with Owen’s Congregationalist reading of the ancient Church. While he conceded some possibility of distinct church officers in the early church, he denied them autonomous power.101 He broadly agreed with Owen (and Hobbes) that early church government was ‘in the people’ and that ecclesia denoted ‘one Assembly’. (On this point his library contained one particularly pertinent riposte to Stillingfleet. David Clarkson’s No Evidence for Diocesan Churches marshalled patristic and scriptural evidence that ancient ‘particular congregations’ had elected church officers.102) ‘Distinct separate independent Churches’, Locke wrote, ‘are not a breach’ of ecclesial ‘peace and unity.’ These passages recalled both Locke’s Interregnum milieu and his observations about the ecclesial practices of the French Huguenots.103 Stillingfleet’s contrary case for ensuring peace and order with episcopal hierarchy was ‘a very good argument to prove the universal supremacy of a Pope’.104 Stillingfleet, Locke complained, viewed anti-episcopacy more seriously than ‘Idolatry, Tyranny, and perverting the Gospel’.105 But by Shaftesbury’s standards, or those of Hobbes, Locke’s rhetoric was rather mild on this point. It is misleading to suggest that the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ was ‘relentlessly’ anticlerical.106 Far more thematically central was Locke’s frontal attack on the spiritual authority of sovereigns. In this Locke differed, for instance, from John Owen, whose response to Stillingfleet impugned episcopacy relentlessly.107 98 101 102 103 104 105 106 107

99 MS Locke c. 34, p. 9. MS Locke c. 34, pp. 9, 17, 37. 100 MS Locke c. 34, p. 34. MS Locke c. 34, p. 90. Clarkson, No Evidence for Diocesan Churches, or, any Bishops Without the Choice and Consent of the People, epistle, 3–7, 44–55; LL, 338. Locke commended the authority enjoyed by ‘every particular’ Huguenot church. 10/12 February and 16/17 February 1676, MS Locke f. 1, p. 100, 106–7. MS Locke c. 34, 70–4; for a different reading, see Marshall, Locke, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 98–110. MS Locke c. 34, 158. Ashcraft, ‘Anticlericalism and Authority in Lockean Political Thought’, 81–4. Owen, Enquiry into the Original, Nature, 4–5.

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Locke concerned himself, rather, with state power. How was religion established? ‘If by civil magistrate I would fain known how he comes to constitute churches, and more than [that] to make Religions.’ The ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ fully developed a thesis previewed in the ‘Essay’ of 1667: a denial that magistrates could act as legitimate governors of the church.108 Hobbes had cast religious persecution as a clerical ploy, suborning magisterial authority into reckless policy. This perspective had partially informed Locke’s ‘Essay’ of 1667, but he now took a different tack and cast religious coercion as an injustice of overlordly sovereignty. The argumentative crack of 1667 was now dramatically widened. A shadow boxing match over Hobbism played out in Locke’s text. He sought to trap Stillingfleet – rather tendentiously – into a narrowly Erastian, Hobbesian logic, whereby ecclesial establishment was grounded on state power and deployed for state purposes. ‘I can have’, he wrote, no other governor to prescribe to me what Church I shall be of but an infallible one, the Civill Magistrate, or my own Conscience, and I desire the Dr. or anyone else to shew me, how anyone can talk coherently concerning Church Communion and separation without terminating/bottoming in Popish, Hobbist, or Phanatick Principles, for so being guided by a man’s owne conscience is called. And since I believe neither the Dr. nor any of the Church of England allow of Hobs’s principles I desire him to consider notwithstanding all the advantages he thinks the liberty of men’s using their reason in the choice of [church?] they will be of will give to the growth of popery, whether the Protestant religion will better stand upon its owne or popish foundations.109

Locke clearly knew and here acknowledged how vigorously the Church hierarchy condemned court Hobbism. Stillingfleet in fact grounded the corporate church on ancient tradition, Christian truth, and episcopal governance. Hobbes would have rebuked him for unmitigated popery. Locke nevertheless condemned Stillingfleet not primarily for clericalism but for Erastianism, for allowing the ‘ecclesiastical government’ to become dependent ‘upon the secular Arme’.110 With a question-begging narrowness, he challenged Stillingfleet to ground his ‘settled church’ on either ‘the civil magistrate’ or the voluntary consent of believers. Stillingfleet was ‘perfectly unintelligible’ in justifying the church with both civil law and canon law: ‘he appoints me at the same time two different Judges, the Civill, and Ecclesiastical Governours’.111 Locke knew that neither 108 111

MS Locke c. 34, p. 15, 28, 31. 109 MS Locke c. 34, p. 40. 110 MS Locke c. 34, p. 102. MS Locke c. 34, pp. 48, 53. Others also criticized Stillingfleet’s confusion over whether ‘the church may be called a civil or ecclesiastical constitution’. Alsop, Mischief of Impositions, 30.

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voluntarism nor a purely clerical church (‘popery’) would serve Stillingfleet’s requirements, so he cast him on the shoals of Hobbism. This device allowed Locke to frame his own repudiation of Erastian logic. It was no sin, he wrote, ‘not to obey the law of the land commanding to joyn in communion with the Church of England till it be proved that the civil magistrate hath power to command and determine me what church I shall be of’. Stillingfleet’s church ‘signifie nothing till it be evident the civill magistrate hath this power’.112 If the sovereign be allowed to have power to establish religions, force men to such ways of worship they shall think fit to enact, I desire any one by a survey of the present potentates of the Earth to tell me how it is like to fare with truth and religion.113

Hyperbolically suggesting that Stillingfleet empowered magistrates to found whole religions evoked the spectre of Leviathan. Such noble lying and instrumentalized religion were by now virtual Hobbesian brands. Locke had lobbed the charge of Hobbism at Parker, but the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ was a more fully drafted indictment. This was a crucial moment in the development of Lockean toleration. His effort to tar Stillingfleet and Parker with Hobbism constituted a turning of the rhetorical tables within a dialectic context. The strategy implicitly paid tribute to the efficacy of their own condemnation of politique tolerationism and ‘state religion’. (In this respect it is misleading to pit Locke against a ‘Hobbesian feature of the Anglican project’.114) If Hobbesian prerogative could not secure conscience rights and free exercise, neither could it preserve a holy, universal church. The Locke–Stillingfleet dialogue thus operated in a broader polemical context – particular to the contingencies of the English political setting – in which the churchly enemies of toleration drove dissenters towards a non-domination account of individual religious liberty. The controversy over Stillingfleet’s writings provided a major outlet for the debate over the alternate implications of Hobbism. Locke’s participation in this controversy marked a critical moment of transition. Tellingly, the model of Hobbism deployed in Locke’s ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’, in which the sovereign claimed a secularized infallibility replacing the Pope’s, differed from that found in his French journal of 1677. There, in a to-date unnoticed passage, Locke anticipated his later contrast between Roman Catholic and Hobbesian principles. He condemned each 112 114

MS Locke c. 34, p. 74. 113 MS Locke c. 34, p. 87. Parkin, ‘Hobbes,’ Continuum Companion, 63.

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for dogmatic rigidity, and – as he would against Stillingfleet – Locke identified ‘infallible’ clerical authority as the ‘principle doctrine’ of Rome. But in 1677, Locke presented Hobbism differently than he would in the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’. Rome consistently deified papal authority. ‘On the other side’, he wrote, make the light within our guide and see also what will become of reason and scripture. An Hobist with his principle of self preservation whereof him self is to be judg, will not easily admit a great many plain dutys of morality. The same must necessarily be found in all men who have taken up principles without examining the truth of them.115

Here Hobbes functioned as a foil of popery but not (as he would against Stillingfleet) as an apologist for the absolute authority of states. Rather, in 1677 Locke had emphasized Hobbes’s radical egoism and his liberation of individual judgement from natural law. Leviathan had empowered individuals to arbitrate their own moral obligations according to a calculus of interest. The passage, indeed, echoed those conformist clerics who viewed Hobbes as an ally of the Interregnum sectarians, idolizing a Leviathan created from agglomerated, individual wills. It suggests Locke’s familiarity with the subtleties of Hobbes’s account of conscience and its potential to inform a radical individual autonomy.116 It was thus a rhetorical strategy against Parker and Stillingfleet, and not a misunderstanding, to downplay Hobbes’s potential as a politique tolerationist and cast him as an unalloyed, absolutist Erastian. As indicated above, in the 1670s Locke seems to have been reading and acquiring a number of works by Hobbes and by his clerical critics. There are indications from the period that Locke was re-evaluating Hobbes’s theology of obedience. Sometime before his departure for France, in an interleaved Bible, Locke made several excerpts out of Hobbes’s The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (1656). Pegged to scriptural passages interpreted by Hobbes, these discussed the distinction between God’s revealed, spoken will and his unknowable, inner will. According to Hobbes, God did not in fact ‘will’ temporally, responding to events, but only spoke in such a way in order to be understood by humankind. Interpreting Isaiah 5:4 (‘What could have been done more to 115 116

The comment appears in a long passage (not found in Lough’s edition of the French journals) on the subject of ‘study’. 16/26 March 1677, MS Locke, f. 2, p. 120. Emphasis added. The passage also struck a Hobbesian note on words, which were of ‘noe value or use but as they are the signes of things’ with a ‘clear and distinct significantion’. (16/26 March 1677, MS Locke, f. 2, pp. 87–8). Locke had elsewhere transcribed a passage from Hobbes’s chapter ‘on speech’. (See above.)

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My Vineyard that I have not done in it? Why, when I looked for it to bring forth good grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?’), Hobbes denied that God was inviting humans to freely scrutinize his purposes. Rather, God was commanding obedience and revealing that necessity which would seal the fate of each. Humans would, as determined individuals, obey God’s purpose ‘whether we will or not’.117 Locke quoted Hobbes at length, including his claim that the will was ‘an internall act of the soule, and commands are but words and signes externall of that internall act soe that the will and the word are divers things and differ as the thing signified and the signe’.118 Hobbes similarly interpreted 1 Timothy 2.4 (describing ‘God our Saviour’ as the one ‘who will have all men to be saved, and come to the knowledge of truth’) and Jeremiah 19:5 (‘They have built also the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings unto Baal, which I commanded not, nor spake it, neither came it into my mind.’) These passages variously implied some human capacity to scrutinize the purposes of God, to mentally agree with God, or to defy God’s will. Locke recorded in detail Hobbes’s effort to finesse them. ‘God doth not will and command us to enquire what his will and purpose is and accordingly to doe it’, wrote Hobbes, as copied by Locke, ‘for we shall doe that whether we will or noe; but to looke into his commandments.’ Alongside reiterations of this point, Locke recorded Hobbes’s interpretive principle – anticipating Spinoza – that ‘when god speaks to men concerning his will and other attributes, he speaks to them as if they [i.e. his will and attributes] were like to those of men to the end he may be understood’. Revelation was thus framed to the feeble understanding of humanity. On the free-will question, Locke was likely recording Hobbes’s opinion with some scepticism. Hobbes, of course, theorized the compatibility of freedom and necessity and consequently required outward conformity to the commands of sovereignty. He justified religious obedience by arguing that outward conformity did not corrupt inner, conscientious dissent. The distinction between God’s inner intention and his outer commands paralleled the distinction, in an individual believer, between outward conformity and inward conscience. Locke apparently demurred. Hobbes’s voluntarist theology informed his ‘mortal God’ of sovereignty. Locke recorded passages which recognized this and which underscored the requirement that subjects conform to religious law as commandments. 117 118

Hobbes, Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, 10–11. The passages are copied next to the relevant Bible verses. Bodleian Locke 16.25, pp. 500, 548, 829; one excerpt is transcribed by Higgins-Biddle, Introduction to Locke, Reasonabless, lxxvii, note 1.

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Tellingly, however, Locke truncated Hobbes’s elaboration that God’s will was embodied, ‘as to the Jewes, [in] the Law of Moses; and as to other People, [in] the Lawes of their Country’.119 Locke did not accept the strict doctrine of necessity that undergirded Hobbes’s theology of obedience. This was further indicated in later notes, dating from 1693, on the writings of John Norris, the high-church Oxonian and devotee of Malebranche. Norris would reject Locke’s theory of merely sensory knowledge, his denial of universals and innate ideas, his supposedly implicit scepticism of non-corporeal spirits, and his alleged moral conventionalism. As we shall see, during the 1690s such attacks on Locke would often work to associate him with Hobbes.120 As was often his strategy, in his notes on Norris (posthumously published) Locke tried to turn the accusation of Hobbism around. Norris defined ‘human understanding’ and universal ideas as the ‘presentialness of the Divine or Ideal world to our souls, wherein we see and perceive all things’.121 Locke rejected the suggestion that God might in this manner author all thoughts – including ‘infidelity, murmuring or Blasphemy’ – in men whose minds were only ‘mirrors’. He would condemn this as the ‘Religion of Hobbs and Spinoza’ for ‘resolveing all, even the thoughts and will of men into an irresistible, fatal necessity’.122 This was a position that Locke first suggested in the 1670s, when he critiqued various features of Hobbes’s system relevant to conscience and toleration: first, Hobbes’s subordination of moral obligation to individual interest and natural determinism, which reduced the duty of religious observance into a mere outward conformity; and, second, Hobbes’s presentation of conscience as mere wilful opinion. The evidence is fragmented, but there is reason to believe that Locke was re-evaluating Hobbes’s broad account of religion, morality, and obedience in a manner that would fully alienate him from the cause of prerogative tolerantia. The ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ largely abandoned the civil religious discourse that had earlier attracted Locke. Though the ‘Two Tracts’ and the ‘Essay concerning Toleration’ had differed in important respects, both had conceded much to the prudent interests of states, likely on the presumption 119 120 121 122

Parker, Biblical Politics of Locke, 161n45. For Norris’s rebuttals of Hobbes, Norris, Christian Blessedness, 177; Norris, Collection of Miscellanies, 73, 235, 408. Norris, Christian Blessedness, 20–1. MS Locke d. 3, p. 103; Pritchard, Religion in Public: Locke’s Political Theology, 73–4; Locke, Remarks upon some of Mr. Norris’s Books printed in A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke Never Before Printed, 170.

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that toleration would emerge only from an act of prerogative. These works had displayed no interest in the purpose and end of the church. Locke’s ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ would invert these priorities. There he consistently limited sovereign law to ‘civil concernment’ and omitted the provisos that seriously qualified this limitation in the ‘Essay’ of 1667. Locke argued that any act of religious worship – even a minor one of ceremonial conformism – lost ‘its indifferency and without [that] the reach of [state] jurisdiction’.123 Christ had kept ‘within the strict limits of religion’ and had ‘nothing to do with secular affairs’, but this divide hedged the state as well. ‘Religious societys in contradistinction to the Civill are called Churches as the other are called States.’124 This concern with church ‘society’ was substantially new. Thus did Locke preserve Hobbes’s passive reading of the primitive church, but decisively reject his blending of church and state authority in mature Christian societies.125 In defending this newly sharpened dualism, Locke echoed an antipolitique rhetoric most commonly voiced by episcopal churchmen.126 This was perhaps the most insistent theme of the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’: that religion was far more consequential than the ‘short and triviall concernments’ of states. The ‘courts of Princes or Senate houses’ knew not the ‘ways to heaven’, and their laws were not ‘the standards of truth and religion’. Kings lacked the knowledge necessary to guide individual conscience. They were, furthermore, not sincerely concerned with this priority but rather used religion for their own secret purposes.127 Sovereigns made ‘use’ of religious authority ‘to serve the secular ends of their ambition and greatnesse’.128 They were abetted in this by bishops, who were ‘far more Politicians than Divines’. Religion had, lamentably, ‘become a businesse of state’.129 In the ‘Essay’ of 1667, Locke had construed the social contract so as to deny sovereign religious authority. But, in addition to significantly qualifying this concession in deference to political stability, the ‘Essay’ had displayed no interest in the purpose or end of churches. Nor had the ‘Essay’ denigrated the priorities of statesmen, but had regarded them solicitously. The ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ was very different in quality. The Restoration church had expansively condemned politique religious government for justifying a prudential toleration. Locke deployed a very similar language to denounce the church establishment, reliant as it was on 123 125 126 127 129

MS Locke c. 34, p. 74. 124 MS Locke c. 34, pp. 78, 21. Anticipated in his 1674 memo on Excommunication. MS Locke c. 27, ff. 28–9. Stanton, ‘Name and Nature of Locke’s “Defence of Nonconformity”’, 161. MS Locke c. 34, pp. 86–7. 128 MS Locke c. 34, pp. 107–8, 110. MS Locke c. 34, p. 43, 101–2; pace Waldron’s claim that Lockean toleration did not limit the state; Waldron, ‘Locke, Toleration, and the Rationality of Persecution’, 99–100.

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the ‘connivance of a Magistrate’. Locke’s clerical interlocutors ‘intimated’ that any church was defined by the ‘bounds and extents of Civil governments’. Stillingfleet supposedly made ‘the only end of a Church to be Government and order, which is as much as to say that the business of the Army is only that it should be commanded’. But believers did not worship ‘meerly to be governed’. The ‘great business of religion is to glorify God’ – not the prince – by ‘informing the understanding’, ‘subdueing of the will’, and propagating the Gospel.130 Locke had broken with civil religious discourse and embraced a prophetic understanding of religious worship. This rejection of the politique undermined a particular, limited view of what the church establishment represented. Locke accused episcopacy – tendentiously – of accepting a dependence on ‘arbitrary power’, on ‘one absolute and uncontrollable supremacy’.131 Locke’s own earlier deference to the discourse of sovereignty thus dissipated. Rejecting politique logic, however, also forced Locke to decisively abandon sovereigns as sufficient patrons of conscience. This new stance implicitly rebuffed the strategy of Indulgence. ‘Toleration’, Locke wrote, here implying something like mere toleration, ‘is an act of the State not of the Church.’132 With a few minor exceptions, the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ ignored merely prudential tolerantia. Instead, Locke defended conscience and freedom of worship as inalienable individual rights and posited a right to resist sovereignty when it violated these rights. Attaining these advanced positions required Locke to spurn aspects of the jus naturalist contractual tradition as formulated by Hobbes and Spinoza, particularly where it touched on the crucial question of representation. Refining the logic of contracted sovereignty – which he had long accepted – Locke denied that religious interests could be surrendered to a representative, as temporal interests might be. ‘For representative (as I understand the word), is one that has a power to doe something in other men’s names, which by delegation he hath received from them.’ Asked Locke: ‘Can anyone empower another to make religion for him, as he does civill laws?’133 In part this was designed as another argument on behalf of Independency, in that a ‘representative church’ must possess the consent of its members. But Locke was seeking, more broadly, to divorce religious conscience entirely from political power. Permanent consent in ultimate matters of conscience was impossible, and the costs of false obedience unbearable. 130 132

MS Locke c. 34, pp. 19–23, 116. 131 MS Locke c. 34, pp. 107–8, 145. MS Locke c. 34, p. 27. 133 MS Locke c. 34, pp. 113, 118.

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‘No representative or secular power can oblige a man to joyne with any church or to believe in transubstantiation’, nor could it be claimed that ‘a man’s representative in Civil matters can make articles of religion for him.’ This was a problem not just of monarchy but of sovereignty in general. Locke admitted no ‘republican church’ on the Harringtonian model. Neither King-in-Parliament nor King-in-Convocation could channel national consensus in religious matters, as they did in civil ones.134 Locke dismissed Stillingfleet’s effort to ground confessional law on parliamentary consent and rejected the conformist argument that the ecclesial ‘constitution is established by the law of the land’. There could be no ‘religion of the majority’, and conscience could not ‘be disposed of’ by a Commons vote.135 Thus did Locke disdain the Restoration church’s strategic alliance with parliament. Locke’s right to conscience was no longer, as with Hobbes, only a natural limitation on effective coercion.136 He did aver that bare belief could not be forced, but this did not go far enough. The ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ asserted a freedom of worship, of practice, and of church membership. Churches (plural) could only be representative as ‘voluntary societyes’, with a free liberty to join and depart by one’s ‘own consent’. This served to vindicate Independency. It also widened religious freedom, which entailed not just inner belief but ‘articles of faith and forms of worship’.137 It is true that Locke’s early ‘Latin Tract’ and essays on natural law had theoretically defined the public worship of God as a natural and inalienable duty. But, paralleling strategies of Leviathan, Locke had delimited the implications of this point by locating essentially all outward, religious rites within the realm of custom and positive law. The ‘Essay’ of 1667 had gone somewhat further, asserting a theoretical right to free religious exercise, but one seriously qualified with provisos deferential to order. Only with the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ did Locke conjoin two principles and allow them to amplify one another: first, a naturally and necessarily inviolable realm of inner conscience freedom; and second, a natural duty to rightly ordered public worship according to private conscience. Not only the religious psychology (as in Leviathan) but churches and communal religious practices had pre-political origins. By the ‘light of 134 136

137

MS Locke c. 34, p. 122. 135 MS Locke c. 34, pp. 22, 87, 118. As recently as his French journals Locke had written that the freedom of conscience was tantamount to the inability of ‘man to alter his nature’. This is closer to the Hobbesian understanding. 15/ 25 February 1676, MS Locke f. 1, p. 123. Locke c. 34, pg. 78, 122.

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nature’ men saw the truth of a ‘supreme being’, and ‘it was for this that men entered into societies for religion with those who were of the same belief and way of worship with them’.138 Against Hobbes, who defined atheism as mere imprudence, Locke understood atheism as a violation of natural law. Where Hobbes rendered the religious psychology natural but subordinated worship practice to political society, Locke granted communal religious practice an autonomous right that predated and thus trumped the claims of sovereignty.139 The churches thus needed to free themselves from civil ‘usurpation’.140 Locke’s ‘Essay’ of 1667 had previewed some of this by limiting the social contract to civil purposes. But the ‘Essay’ had argued the point negatively, with little concern for the natural interest and duty of individuals to worship communally. Free worship had played a role in the logic of that work, but its primary concern remained the freedom of private, speculative opinion. Further, the ‘Essay’ had fretted over the potential turmoil of individuals taking their religion ‘in gross’, turmoil that justified considerable religious coercion. The ‘Essay’, moreover, expressly prohibited individuals from resisting sovereigns who usurped their conscience freedom. The ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’, by contrast, asserted the importance of public, communal religion. It also made free religious practice a defensible right. Hobbes had repudiated all religious resistance even as he had advocated some freedom of conscience. He attributed war to clerical sedition, the pitting of spiritual jurisdiction against temporal. Locke, once sympathetic, inverted this theory of civil war. War ‘followed’, he now wrote, ‘from a complication of the civill and ecclesiasticall power’, or their ‘mixture’.141 When religion was manipulated to suit ‘the designes and interests of secular domination’, it caused violent disorder. There were now popular Commotions, bloud and confusion whilst men in defence of their natural and Evangelical right of takeing care of their owne salvation and not owneing the belief of which they did, or could not beleive, often resisted that force, which would unreasonably and contrary to the Methods of the Gospell, compell them to a profession of that Religion and those doctrines, which they did not beleive or could not assent to, or to joyne in that way of worship which they thought displeaseing and provokeing to that God they served. 138 140 141

Recalling Owen, Enquiry into the Original, 8–9. 139 MS Locke c. 34, pp. 75–8. MS Locke c. 34, p. 126. MS Locke c. 34, 103; Failure to keep religion and government ‘distinct’ had been a ‘great cause of distraction’; ELN, 275.

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The corruption of Christianity with coercive practices had opened up the question ‘whether the People may use force against the magistrate to alter either the doctrine or discipline of the church, which he by force has established or maintained’. The resulting disorder, Locke argued, was the fault of the agents of spiritual tyranny, not those who resisted them. And though he warned dissenters not to fall into the same trap by seeking to win the ‘Secular Arm’ for their own sect, it was ‘unavoidable’ that subjects living under a spiritual tyranny would ‘by force withdraw themselves’.142 As recently as his French notebooks, Locke had invoked the concept of passive obedience to rule out religious resistance on the theory that God ‘forbids disturbance or dissolution of governments’.143 The ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ explicitly asserted a natural right to religious freedom, violation of which would justify resistance.144 This was a dangerous position, though another who approached it was Vincent Alsop in a work Locke may have read. Stillingfleet, Alsop argued, sought an ‘arbitrary power’ encroaching upon ‘the freehold of conscience and sovereignty of Christ, and will justify any Christian to assert that liberty against it, where Christ has installed him’. Asked Alsop: ‘If God himself has given the Indulgence, what man has power to take off the seal?’145 Dissenters translated the libertas ecclesiae into a freedom of conscience and voluntary worship, but they preserved the structure of a critique first formulated by episcopal apologists. The essence of this anti-politics was smuggled in, a process often disguised by specious efforts to portray the conformist party – in its turn – as rank Hobbists reliant on magisterial favour.146 Locke had been pervasively exposed to the Restoration debate over indulgence, prerogative, and conscience. That debate, in part, forced the maturation of his tolerationism. Parker’s Discourse had predicted the path forward for Locke. Rebuking the schemes of the politiques, he warned the King that indulgence might for a time be taken as a ‘kindness’ by its beneficiaries, but these affections quickly vanish, and then what before was Favour, is now become Justice; and their Prince did but restore them to their just and lawful 142 143 144 145 146

MS Locke c. 34, p. 102, emphasis added; Baumgold, ‘Hobbes’s and Locke’s contract theories’, 3–26. 25 February 1676, MS Locke f. 1, pp. 124, 126. In notes on toleration from 1679, Locke considered it ‘unreasonable’ for men to surrender power over their conscience. But he did not justify resistance. MS Locke d. 1, p. 125; EcT, 388–90. Alsop, Mischief of Impositions, epistle. This argument differs from Goldie’s in his important ‘John Locke and Anglican Royalism’. Goldie is aware of the tensions over royal religious authority found in the absolutist writers he surveys as Locke’s interlocutors. He posits, however, an adamantine hostility between Locke and the church conformists that worked to augment Locke’s appreciation of prerogative religious authority. Goldie, ‘John Locke and Anglican Royalism’, 75–83.

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Where Parker saw the church’s ruination, Locke found the true freedom of a Christian. He had moved beyond the Shaftesburian politics of indulgence, tentatively in the 1670s, fully by 1683. What ‘before was favour’ had ‘become justice’.

The Epistola de Tolerantia in Political Context Locke decamped to the Dutch Republic in 1683. Shaftesbury had himself fled to Amsterdam as the so-called Tory reaction gathered steam in the final years of Charles II’s reign. The earl died there in January of 1683. Locke attended his burial in England and remained loyal to his memory. Still, Shaftesbury’s death freed him from direct political entanglement. By this time, Locke had certainly composed the first of his Two Treatises of government. Whether he had composed the second has been a matter of inconclusive debate. The most extreme thesis, that Locke participated in the Rye House Plot of June 1683, is exceedingly unlikely.148 But this plan to assassinate Charles II and the Duke of York as they attended the races was grist for the Tories. Locke certainly felt exposed. During the hot summer he arranged his affairs. News from ‘Old Bailey’, where the Rye house plotters were tried, added urgency to his planning.149 The Exclusion Crisis and its reactionary aftermath put an end to Bishop Fell’s protection. In July of 1683, Fell wrote: ‘Very few daies will bring those that have not securd themselvs by flight to their trial.’150 Fell followed the arrest of conspirators throughout the summer.151 Shaftesbury’s ‘confidants’ were of particular interest, and Locke had already fallen from favour as one of the ‘men of Shaftesbury’. The placeman John Ellis collected intelligence from Oxford: ‘John Lock lives a very Cunning unintelligible life here being 2 days in Town and 3 out and noe one knows where he goes or when he goes or 147 148 149 150 151

Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, 166–7; see also Brown, Heraclitus Ridens Redivivus, or, A Dialogue between Harry and Roger Concerning the Times, 2. Ashcraft’s case for this receives excruciating deconstruction in Philip Milton, ‘Locke the Plotter? Ashcraft’s Revolutionary Politics Reconsidered’. Locke to Edward Clarke, 26 August 1683, CL, 2:602. Fell to Lord Hatton, 5 July 1683, BL Add MS 29582, f. 17v. Fell to Lord Hatton 12 July, 27 July, 4 August, and 29 August 1683, BL Add MS 29582, ff. 23, 35, 39, 49.

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when he returns. Certainly there is some whig intreaque amanageing.’152 Locke was in Rotterdam by September, and then in Amsterdam. With the exposure of the Rye House Plot, one suspicious Oxford observer wrote, he had ‘cunningly stole away’.153 Oxford had become the ideological headquarters of the Tory reaction, the apogee of which was reached in July of 1683, when the university convocation condemned a series of ‘pernicious books and damnable doctrines’. A syllabus of these doctrines was published in both Latin and English.154 The entire affair was stage managed by the arch-conservative Regius Professor of Divinity, William Jane. It climaxed with a book burning.155 Anthony Wood reported the ugly scene. The Convocation in its robes and Bishop Fell himself presided as condemned books ‘[were] committed to the flames by Gigur, the Universitie bedell of beggars. The scholars of all degrees and qualities in the meane time surrounding the fier, gave severall hums whilst they were burning.’156 In the name of monarchy and church, Oxford targeted the contractual political tradition. Locke’s old patron John Owen was condemned, as were seditious writings of Shaftesbury’s (specifically the ‘Shaftesburian association’, an oath to use force to resist a Catholic successor).157 But Oxford’s primary target was certainly Hobbes. Both Leviathan and De Cive were burned, and their doctrines anathematized in print. The condemnation primarily asserted the sanctity of monarchy, but toleration was sideswiped with a blast at the proposition that ‘it is not lawful for Superiors to impose any thing in the worship of God that is not antecedently necessary’. With Charles II now back in the church’s bridle, there was no need to air differences with him over the sanctity of episcopacy (differences which Jane had advertised in the 1670s).158 But the court was duly reminded of the threat that Hobbism posed to sacred monarchy, and Hobbes was integrated into the ideology of Shaftesburian Whiggery. In November of 1684, Anthony Wood recorded that Locke had been expelled from his college post. The ‘academic whigs’ were being ‘run down’. The reason in Locke’s case was alleged association (which he denied) with suspect English exiles and rumours that he had composed 152 153 154 155 157 158

Humphrey Prideaux to John Ellis, 14 March 1681, BL Add MS 28929, f. 95. Humphrey Prideaux to John Ellis, 12 November 1684, BL Add MS 28929, f. 110. Judgement and Decree of the University of Oxford past in their Convocation July 21 1683, against Certain Pernicious Books and Damnable Doctrines. Bennett, ‘Loyalist Oxford and the Revolution’, 11. 156 Life and Times of Wood, 3:60–3. The text is in Morrice, Entring Book, 1:522. I thank Mark Goldie for this reference. See also Jane, Letter to a Friend Containing Some Quaeries about the New Commission for Making Alternations in the Liturgy.

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seditious libels.159 This had provoked the Privy Council. The Earl of Sunderland informed Fell, on unclear evidence, that Locke was factious and disloyal. Fell demurred, hesitantly suggesting that Locke had been discreet at Oxford, where he had been under close surveillance.160 Locke was nevertheless expelled ‘by the King’s special command’.161 He had long held his place by virtue of a royal waiver of its ordination requirement, but Locke would no longer be ‘indulged’.162 The perils of indulgence were thus impressed upon him in a highly personal manner. In a letter to Thomas Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, Locke indignantly demanded whether his behaviour at Oxford had demonstrated any ‘turbulency, faction, or sedition’. He disingenuously minimized his association with the now disgraced Shaftesbury and denied that he had composed libels for print publication.163 Locke could deny printing seditious works but not composing one. The Two Treatises were in at least partial draft by late 1684. Locke’s effort to recast his recent political past, in any case, failed in its purpose. Friends urged Locke to seek ‘his Majesties great clemency’, but Locke hesitated ‘til a fiter season’.164 The death of Charles II ended his hopes that his university post might be salvaged.165 It is often observed, and considered puzzling, that Locke did not discuss religious freedom as a major theme in the Two Treatises of Government.166 The concerns of the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ seemingly made little impact on the work. Furthermore, there is no indication that Locke had yet conceived of writing the Epistola de Tolerantia, and so the Epistola and the Two Treatises cannot be read as intentionally complementary texts.167 To some extent this lacuna in the Two Treatises illustrates the point that Locke no longer subordinated questions of religious freedom to his theory of politics, as 159 160

161 162 163 164

165 166 167

Philip Milton, ‘Locke’s Expulsion from Christ Church’, 43. Sunderland to Fell, 6 November 1684, and Fell to Sunderland, [1684], MS Locke c. 39, ff. 1–2; Le Clerc, following Damaris Masham, reported Fell’s attempt to avoid Locke’s dismissal. Le Clerc, Life of Locke, 11–12; ‘Lady Masham’s Account of Locke’, 180–2. In 1682 Humphrey Prideaux had also reported that Locke lived ‘quietly’ at Oxford, without a word ‘from his mouth that discourses anything of his heart within’. Prideaux to Ellis, 24 October 1682, BL Add MS 28929, f. 100. November 15, 1684, Wood, Diary, 3:117; MS Locke c. 39, f. 1v; Prideaux to Ellis, 12 November 1684, BL Add. MS 28929, f. 110. Chudleigh to Middleton, 11 November 1684, quoted in Philip Milton, ‘Locke’s Expulsion from Christ Church’, 44. Locke to Thomas Herbert, 28 November/8 December 1684, CL, 2:662–4; on the rumored libels, see Le Clerc, Life of Locke, 11. Locke to Edward Clarke, 1 January 1685, CL, 2:673; Wood inaccurately reported that Locke returned to England before the invasion of William, after an ‘indulgence’ was granted by James. AO, 4:639. Philip Milton, ‘John Locke, William Penn, and the Question of Locke’s Pardon’, 134–5. Laslett, Introduction to TTG, 86; Jolley, Toleration and Understanding, 123. As is done in Jolley, Toleration and Understanding, chapter seven.

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Hobbes did. For Locke the inviolability of conscience, the duty to honest religious worship, and the spiritual limitations of sovereignty sprang from a pre-political, enduring natural law. They implicated questions of ecclesiology – a theory of churches understood as autonomous societies – rather than politics. Locke’s ecclesiology and his politics were not, of course, incommensurable. In both spheres he would operate with kindred notions of individual autonomy and consent. The early Locke, in both the ‘Two Tracts’ and the ‘Essay concerning Toleration’, did embed his discussions of conscience within an account of the state. That the Two Treatises and the Epistola cordoned off these topics suggests the rupture that divided Locke’s early from his late thinking on religious freedom. Certain features of his political theory – for instance, the claim that ‘the beginning of Politick Society depends upon the consent of the Individuals, to joyn into and make one Society’ – carried both ecclesiological and civil implications and would figure in both the Two Treatises and the Epistola.168 In his mature thinking, however, Locke decisively distinguished his account of the church from that of the state, based upon the distinct telos of each as a particular society. The state’s end was preserving ‘Lives, Liberties, and Estates’;169 the church’s was dutiful public worship and care for individual salvation. By the time he composed his ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’, Locke was more concerned to prevent each of these distinct societies from corrupting the purposes of the other than he was to present their purposes as mutually reinforcing. This is not to say that the Two Treatises displayed no effects of Locke’s engagement with the issue of toleration. What we find there, however, is not Locke’s full case for conscience rights but rather a suggestive disenchantment with prerogative forms of indulgence. Locke’s disillusionment with the Bourbons’ politique tolerationism, for instance, seemingly made a small mark on the book. In its discussion of tyranny, Locke condemned prerogative ‘employed contrary to the end, for which it was given’ (namely ‘to do good, not harm, to the People’). Such ‘Experiments’ could include covertly favouring ‘that Religion underhand . . . (though publickly proclaimed against) which is readiest to introduce’ and support arbitrary power.170 This passage concluded with an analogy of a ship’s captain (the sovereign) fighting all elements to constantly bear his ship and its inhabitants towards the slave markets of Algiers, a likely reference to the sale of captive Huguenots there.171 Locke thus concluded his discussion of abused prerogative by alluding to the spectacular failure of France’s politique religious toleration. 168 171

TTG, II:106. 169 TTG, II:123. 170 TTG, II:210. Savonius, ‘Locke in French: the Du Gouvernment Civil of 1691 and its Readers’, 76–7.

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It is often assumed that Locke would have chiefly feared the possible imposition of Catholicism, in the manner of Louis XIV, on England. It was, however, not the confessionalism of the Stuarts so much as the methods of their toleration that raised Locke’s alarm. The reference in the Two Treatises to Louis’s inconstant purposes suggests this. So too do passages which seemed to rebuke the Stuarts for failing to implement the penal laws. These passages are typically interpreted as a straightforward reflection of Locke’s anti-Catholicism.172 But Locke’s concern in these passages, more consequentially, reflected considered doubts as to the viability or justice of indulgence. It was not only prerogative confessionalism that the Two Treatises dreaded but prerogative toleration. It is suggestive that the only discussion of the violated ‘consciences’ and ‘religion’ of the people (as an aspect of tyranny) found in the Two Treatises construes it as an abuse of prerogative on behalf of religious dissent. In the coming years, Locke would spend time in Amsterdam, Leiden, Utrecht, and Cleves. He laboured on the Essay concerning Human Understanding, which was substantially complete by 1686. His other major work of the period was the Epistola de Tolerantia. Locke composed this in late 1685. Le Clerc later reported that Locke wrote it at the home of Egburtus Veen, where he had hidden himself for a few months while the government of James II hunted Whig exiles.173 The Epistola was likely addressed to the remonstrant theologian Philippus van Limborch, who kept the manuscript until it was published anonymously in Gouda in April of 1689, after Locke had returned to England following the fall of James II. The English translation universally read today, the Letter concerning Toleration, was not Locke’s work. Its translator, William Popple, was Locke’s close friend and Locke seems to have approved of the project, at least tacitly.174 Locke adopted the wording of the translation in later controversies over the Letter.175 172

173 174 175

Waldron, ‘Locke, Toleration and the Rationality of Persecution’, 109; Jolley, Toleration and Understanding, 123. Waldron offers the simple anti-Catholic reading of these passages. Jolley disagrees, claiming that the Stuarts did not fit the description Locke offers of a tyrant favouring that ‘religion underhand’ that was ‘publicly proclaimed against’. He also claims that the suspending of the penal laws was open, not ‘underhanded’. But Charles II did indeed proclaim against Catholicism even while attempting to ‘indulge’ it. That strategy, in fact, explains why Indulgence was indeed often condemned as underhanded. Le Clerc, Life of Locke, 13. See Locke’s will, CL, 8:426; Locke to Philippus van Limborch, 6 June 1689, CL, 3:633–4. Popple collected errata from the Third Letter for Locke, suggesting some collaboration. William Popple to Locke, 12 November 1692, CL: 4:582.

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The pre-eminence of the Epistola in studies of Locke’s tolerationism is in certain respects unjustifiable as a matter of intellectual biography, given the formative importance of the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’. And if that is so, then the importance of the Dutch exile on Locke’s thinking about religious freedom is itself easy to exaggerate. Many of the theoretical foundations of the Epistola were already in place before 1683. His stay in Cleves immediately before composing it can only have refreshed lessons first learned there in the 1660s. Even Louis XIV’s Edict of Fontainebleau of 22 October 1685, revoking the Edict of Nantes, should not be understood as the essential trigger. There is evidence that Locke had at least drafted the Epistola before this, by late September.176 The revocation, in any case, only underscored the collapse of French religious toleration that Locke had experienced more directly during the 1670s, experiences which surely undermined the value of politique toleration in his mind. Finally, emphasis on Locke’s Dutch exile serves to minimize the other, and most consequential, context for Locke’s disillusionment with the Hobbesian politique: the failure of the Stuart Indulgences and the English polemics that successfully discredited them.177 In exile, Locke kept his eye on English affairs, with the issue of toleration always paramount. As Mark Goldie has observed, Locke’s political evaluations were rooted in his last English experiences: the Tory reaction of the early 1680s. Some of his English correspondents, present when James II strategically embraced the dissenters in 1687, viewed their political and confessional prospects more optimistically. These hopes perhaps motivated efforts to secure Locke a pardon. That William Penn may have been at the centre of some of these efforts may further indicate that Locke was viewed as a tolerationist who might produce court propaganda for James II’s Declaration of Indulgence. Though Locke was not a published author, he was widely thought to have written Whiggish tracts.178 Rumours of authorship that damaged his reputation under Charles II may have boosted him at the court of his brother. Goldie argues that the possibility of Locke as a propagandist for James was conceivable and would have been in keeping with Locke’s presumed support for the Indulgence of 1672.179 176

177 178 179

Van Limborch seemingly referenced a draft. Philippus van Limborch to Locke, 21 September/ 1 October 1685, CL, 2:743–4. This evidence is sounder than van Limborch’s memory 20 years later that Locke wrote (revised?) it in the winter. Van Limborch to Lady Masham, 24 March 1705. Quoted in Raymond Klibansky, ‘Preface’ to Epistola, ix. For accounts emphasizing the exile, see Marshall, but also Klibansky, ‘Preface’ to Epistola, x–xvii; Jolley, Toleration and Understanding, 24–9. Humphrey Prideaux to John Ellis, 25 October 1681, and 22 November 1684, BL Add MS 28929, ff. 77, 112. Goldie, ‘Locke’s Circle and James II’.

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Locke’s break with the methods of prerogative toleration, however, date to the late 1670s and early 1680s. James II’s succession certainly raised prospects for a revival of indulgence. Around the time Locke composed the Epistola, for instance, Limborch interviewed the chaplain to Lord Preston, ambassador to France, on the question of toleration.180 Locke seems to have followed the English polemics on the ‘controversye’ of toleration, but in 1685–6 that was fixated on the matter of Catholic toleration, with which he never demonstrated any sympathy whatsoever.181 It is true that in December of 1686 Tyrrell urged Locke: I could wish you would send for your papers in the red trunk which wee writ together; and out of them perfect your intended discourse concerneing Toleration, and Persecution, which I’le assure you will be no ungrate subject to any party but one at this time; for I know none but the P[riests? Papists?] of all partyes that can be offended at it: and of them most confesse the thing in Theory, tho’ they deny it in practice.182

This referenced the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ and certainly reflected Tyrrell’s rising optimism at the prospects for some kind of toleration in England.183 But Locke apparently did not share this enthusiasm, even after he learned of the King’s Declarations in 1687.184 The ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ was not suited as an indulgence tract. Much of it attacked prerogative power over religion, and it asserted conscience freedom as a natural right. Locke rejected efforts to secure him a pardon from the court of James II. He had no interest in becoming a court penman. Indeed, notwithstanding his optimism, Tyrrell offered an implicit explanation of Locke’s reluctance. In May of 1687, he again urged Locke to publish his ‘discourse about Liberty of Conscience’. Locke might help ‘dispose peoples minds to passe [the Indulgence] into a Law whenever the Parliament sits’. Tyrrell continued: ‘the thing gives so generall a satisfaction that more are displeased at the manner of doeing it then at the thing itself, so that I find few but the high Church of England men highly displeased’.185 Tyrrell thus impressed on Locke the nature of the discontent with James’s prerogative edict and also the role of episcopal men 180 181 182 183 184 185

This was William Wake. Philippus van Limborch to Locke, 28 September/8 October 1685, CL, 2:752–3. James Tyrrell to Locke, 20/30 January 1686, CL, 2:768. James Tyrrell to Locke, 26/December/5 January 1686, CL, 3:92. See also David Thomas to Locke, 6 September 1688, CL, 3:498–9. John Freke to Locke 1/11 March 1687, CL, 3:149. Speaking of the Scottish Indulgence, ‘worth your reading’. James Tyrrell to Locke, 6/16 May [1687], CL, 3:190–3.

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in advancing this critique. But these were familiar patterns to Locke by this point. Overgrown royal power also tainted the King’s efforts to secure a compliant parliament and to install Catholics in royal office and at the universities.186 Prerogative mechanisms, Tyrrell informed Locke, had secured the promotion of ‘our old Friend Dr. Parker’, Bishop of Oxford to the Presidency of Magdalen College, Oxford.187 John Freke, as well as Tyrrell, informed him of the machinations of that ultimate instrument of magisterial spiritual power, the Ecclesiastical Commission.188 James’s policies continued the prerogative-oriented politique of his brother’s reign. Tyrrell knew this, but allowed ends to justify means. Locke was not similarly inclined. He was apparently rather biting when William Penn’s influence at court was raised as a possible avenue for his own advancement.189 He was pointedly unimpressed by the religious freedom supposedly ensured by Penn’s ‘Frame of Government’ for Pennsylvania, which preserved the ‘arbitrary power’ of magistracy more fully than Locke thought acceptable. Locke apparently had no wish to put himself in debt to the great Quaker champion of indulgence.190 If Locke needed reminding of how cooperation with politique toleration could cultivate servility and hypocrisy, one of his few high-church friends, Anna Grigg, obliged. Despairing (after James’s Indulgence) at her ‘new modeled Country’, she wrote of the compliant nonconformists: ‘. . . such as cald the Bishops papist are drudging slaves to father Peters [Edward Petre, the King’s confessor]’. Grigg celebrated the ‘righteousness’ of churchmen such as her beloved friend Francis Turner, the Bishop of Ely.191 Ely was among those bishops tried for resisting the Indulgence. For Grigg, these bishops revealed how defending the rights of the church might instruct nonconformists on the perils of sovereign favour. The trial of the Bishops, James II’s most disastrous misstep, had afforded the Church the moral luck to position itself as the defender of constitutional liberties.192 The written justification of the bishops directly assailed the 186 187 188 189

190 191 192

Idem. Also James Tyrrell to Locke, 14/24 December 1687, CL, 3:311. James Tyrrell to Locke, 29/August/8 September 1687, CL, 3:257; Tyrrell to Locke, 2/ 12 November 1687, CL, 3:287. John Freke to Locke 10/20 May and 3/13 June 1687, CL, 3:200, 210. James Tyrrell to Locke, 29 August/8 September 1687, CL, 3:257; David Thomas to Locke, 29 November/8 December 1687, CL, 3:307; Locke to Edward Clarke, 6/16 May 1688, CL, 3:449–50; Philip Milton, ‘John Locke, William Penn, and the Question of Locke’s Pardon’, 154–66. November 8, 1686, MS Locke f. 9, pp. 33–41; Le Clerc, Life of Locke, 12. Anna Grigg to Locke, 22 June 1688, CL, 3:484. Sowerby, Making Toleration, 156–61, 182–91.

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legitimacy of the suspending power (‘often declared illegal in Parliament, and particularly in the years 1662 and 1672’).193 To James, this public attack on the dispensing power was the ‘standard of rebellion’.194 But that was a fight he was destined to lose. The established clergy across the kingdom were forced to confront the limits of the King’s authority, not just in temporals, but in spirituals. ‘My resolucon is not to read [the Declaration]’, wrote one, ‘because it does not come from ye Bps according to ye order of council . . .’195 The triumph of the acquitted bishops, celebrated across the kingdom, had been decades in the making, produced by the alliance of parliamentary and church constitutionalism. Grigg urged this point to Locke: What next is to be don with us I know not, hitherto those arts which have bin us’d to root out the Church and with her the Laws of England have by the goodness of God don much good, having served to demonstrat who are the men that keep innocence and fence us from Popery and Slavery, you need not be told how much business the present contests cut out for ingenious men, nor how all our thoughts are employ’d, dayly new papers come abroade and those of greatest spirit and use are said to be yours, you are in a glorious spot of the world Keep you in it a while longer, I have faith enough to cheer my heart and to fancy strongly that popery is spending itself and will soon expire by its extreme violence . . .196

Grigg’s remark about ‘new papers’ is cryptic. Was Locke now thought to be writing against the Indulgence? Either way, Locke probably found Grigg’s opinions more congenial than the monarchist enthusiasm of James’s Whigs. He was presumably less concerned than her about protecting the episcopal church, but that prerogative indulgence might prove yet again fragile and instrumental – serving the cause of ‘Popery and Slavery’ – was a point he seems to have taken to heart. An episcopal anti-politics had again challenged the defenders of free conscience. This lesson impressed itself upon Locke’s closest associates. Edward Clarke, for instance, wrote of the bishops ‘behaving themselves with great courage, and spoke such Bold Truths concerning the Dispenceing Power as have not of latter yeares been mentioned in Westmr Hall, or anywhere else out of Parliament’.197 Richard Temple would later echo Grigg. The ‘church party’ had secured the overthrow of James’s ‘arbitrary’ and popish reign. By contrast, 193 195 196 197

Boyer, English Declarations, 116. 194 Ibid., 117–19. Joshua Stanley to John Strype, no date, Cambridge Add. MS 1, Letter 123. Anna Grigg to Locke, 8/18 July 1688, CL, 3:485. Edward Clarke to Thomas Stringer, 30 June 1688, in Clarke, ’Thomas Stringer, John Locke, Shaftesbury, and Edward Clarke: New Archival Discoveries’, 187.

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he wrote, ‘with what readiness and alacrity upon the first overture of an indulgence the whole party of the Whiggs ran into all the masures of that Prince not only accepting of an indulgence and justifying it under an unlimited Prerogative of dispencing with all Laws . . .’198 The defence of the church undertaken by the episcopal resisters to the Indulgence could itself be cast as an act of conscience. Wrote William Wake before the bishops’ trial, ‘nothing has given more strength and reputation to us with all sorts of men both at home and abroad than this brave stand’. Church resistance had exposed the falsity of the King’s ‘principle’ against the forcing of conscience.199 Locke cannot have been comfortable reading defenders of indulgence goading the established church for trying to ‘restrain that Power by Law, which She herself hath acknowledged to be Imperial, Unlimited, Absolute, Free, Unconditional, and Independent’.200 He was no longer eager to repurpose the prerogative, even in the service of toleration. The trial of the seven bishops was emblematic of the dynamics with which this book has been concerned. The ‘conscience’ of the corporate church rallied to the defence of its own authority against a politique sovereign.201 Bridget Croft, sister of the Bishop of Hereford, chastened him for authorizing the reading of the Declaration. He had failed, while his brethren ‘passively suffer when they cannot with a cleare conscience actually obey’, and refused ‘anything for feare or favour that might be a scandall to our religion, for St Paul saies wee must alloy all appearance of eviel therefore no bowing to Rimmon’.202 Conformists celebrated this balancing act as a triumph of brave churchmanship, weighing ecclesial constitutionalism against due loyalty. The Church, wrote one apologist, had not ‘Preached up an Arbitrary and Absolute Power in their Prince, to dispence with the Laws established’, nor ‘Addressed their Thanks for a Toleration and Indulgence of Papists and Sectaries’.203 This well-pitched resistance to politique toleration was specifically cast as a blow against ‘Hobbs his Creed’: namely, that 198 199 200 201

202 203

Temple, ‘The False Patriot Unmasked or a short history of the whigs’, Huntington, MS STT Folder 9, p. 10. Gibson, James II and the Trial of the Seven Bishops, 119. Vox cleri pro rege (1688), preface. LL, 975. Resigning from James’s Ecclesiastical commission, the Bishop of Rochester praise, the ‘conscience’ of the episcopal resisters. Thomas Sprat to the Commission, Huntington, Stowe Temple Correspondence, box 30, STT 843. Bridget Croft to Earl of Huntingdon, 21 August 1688, Huntington, Hastings Correspondence, box 45, HA 1785. The Historian Unmask’d, or Some Reflections on the Late History of Passive Obedience, 5. Perhaps by Thomas Long, the critic of Locke’s toleration.

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sovereigns defined all ‘good and evil, just and unjust’ even ‘to the destruction of the established Religion’. Hobbes’s effort to ‘extend the power of the Prince above the Law’ had been dangerously exemplified by James II’s Indulgence. Church apologists trumpeted their resistance, and revelled in their new public esteem.204 Their position, within the political realities of 1688, would produce a reluctant willingness among some bishops to accept some toleration of dissent. The same political dynamics informed the positioning of William and Mary, who responded to indulgence and the church’s resistance by promising relief for dissenting Protestants, but also by justifying the overthrow of James in order to defend the rights of the ‘Church of England as established by law’.205 The Church’s pulpits, sites of resistance to James, were now deployed by men such as Bishop Compton to ‘lay before the people the great blessings we enjoy by this wonderful Revolution, which has procur’d to use so full a deliverance from Popery and Arbitrary Power’.206 Tory support for the Prince was secured by circulating intelligence about his friendly dealings with the English bishops, his receiving the sacrament from their hand, and his politic judgement to Gilbert Burnet that ‘the church of England was nearest to the true Christian pattern of any in the world’.207 William announced to parliament that ‘monarchy would not stand firme or flourishe but where ye Governmt of ye Church was Episcopall’.208 This stance was balanced by reports of his friendliness to Presbyterians, promises of comprehension, and his estimation that ‘no one shall suffer on account of his religion’.209 The King adopted the rhetoric of the bishops who had defeated James II. For instance, a statement drafted by the anti-Hobbesian theorist Roger Coke (for use by the bishops) refused public readings of the Declaration of Indulgence because the ‘parliament in 1662 and 1672’ had determined that the dispensing power violated ‘laws Ecclesiasticall and Civill’. But the statement also advertised ‘due tenderness for dissenters’ and promised parliamentary relief.210 For a brief but 204 205

206 207 208 209 210

Ibid., 30–1, 54. Declaration of his Highness William Henry, by grace of God Prince of Orange . . . of the reasons inducing him to appear in armes in the Kingdom of England. The illegality of the dispensing power is a primary theme. On the declaration’s unpredictable effects, see Claydon, ‘Williams III’s Declaration of Reasons and the Glorious Revolution’, 87–108. Locke referenced it in a political memo of 1690. Farr and Roberts, ‘Locke on the Glorious Revolution’, 396. Compton to John Strype, January 1689, Cambridge Add. MS 5, letter 190. Harmon to Lady Clopton, 22 and 25 December 1688, 1 January 1689, Beinecke, Osborn MS, fb210. January 30, 1690, Newsletter from London, Huntington, HA 30659. Harmon to Lady Clopton, 3 January 1689, Beinecke, Osborne MS fb. 210. BL Add. 69955, f. 10.

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revealing moment, the causes of conscience freedom and the libertas ecclesiae conjoined.211 William Popple, translator of Locke’s Letter, was likely more impressed by the bishops’ ‘narrowness of spirit’.212 Nevertheless, he understood that Locke’s case for toleration had also undermined the logic of the Indulgence. Much had been said on toleration in England, he wrote in his preface to the Letter, but ‘there is no People that stand in more need of having something further said and done amongst them, in this point, than We do’. Those who had thus far sought to secure ‘their own Rights and Liberties, have for the most part done it upon narrow Principles, suited only to the Interests of their own Sects’. The Letter would offer a more universal case. Popple then shrewdly characterized Locke’s maturation on the topic of toleration: ‘It is neither Declarations of Indulgence, nor Acts of Comprehension, such as have yet been practised or projected amongst us, that can do the work. The first will but palliate, the second increase our Evil.’213 Popple was a fitting conduit for Locke’s Letter to enter into English debate.214 A wealthy wine merchant, he lived in Bordeaux throughout the 1670s and possibly met Locke there.215 They were lifelong friends thereafter, with many common associates.216 Popple was involved in the socalled Dry Club debating society, where topics such as toleration and rational theology would be discussed by Locke’s circle in the 1690s.217 Unorthodox in his views, not least on the Trinity, Popple was responsible for a French translation of Clifford’s controversial A Treatise of Human Reason, which appeared in 1682.218 He expanded his preface to this translation into a small work of natural religion entitled A Rational Cathechism (1687). In 1688, he returned to London and participated in the pamphlet 211 212 213 214 215 216

217 218

Sirota’s case that the church lacked a consistent ‘political theology’ capable of critiquing the dispensing power is somewhat overdrawn. Sirota, Christian Monitors, 52–9, 23–4. Richard Baron revealed Popple’s role in translating that work in Thomas Hollis’s edition of Locke’s Letters (1765). Popple, ‘To the reader’, A Letter concerning Toleration: Humbly Submitted, etc. (London, 1689). Popple also circulated the Proast-Locke exchange. Benjamin Furly to Locke 16/26 October 1690, CL, 4:145. Robbins, ‘Absolute Liberty: the Life and Thought of William Popple’, 190–223. Locke to Benjamin Furly, 17 December 1690?, CL, 4:175; a commonplace book of Locke’s records medical recipes received from ‘Mrs. Popple’ in the 1690s. J.R. Milton, ‘A Locke Commonplace book in Glasgow University Library’, 148. Locke’s ananuensis, Sylvester Brounower, left his service and entered Popple’s in 1696; J.R. Milton, ‘Sylvester Brounower’, 80. Benjamin Furly to Locke, 7/17 November 1692, CL, 4:572; ‘Rules of the Dry Club for the Amicable Improvement of Mix’d Conversation’, MS Locke c. 25, ff. 56–7; LHW, 315–7. See editorial notes CL, 3:623; Robbins, ‘Absolute Liberty: the Life and Thought of William Popple’, 191.

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wars over indulgence. His position revealed all of the tensions that bedevilled the dissenters during these years. Popple’s primary effort, entitled Three Letters, agitated for the repeal of the penal laws and ‘the establishment of a new law for universal liberty of conscience’.219 However, Popple feared that the granting of this Liberty should serve onely to put a Power into their Hands that now demand it, whereby they may be able hereafter to take it away from others, truly in that case I am apt to hesitate upon the Point; or to say better, I confess that I hesitate not at al. For I would by no means that a specious hope of Christian Liberty should betray the Nation into a New Unchristian Slavery.220

This was an economical account of the fault-lines dividing the tolerationists. ‘We would have Liberty with Security of its continuance: not otherwise’, Popple wrote, in a perfect distillation of non-domination liberty. The Three Letters were surely read by some as support for James’s toleration, but Popple did not support indulgence. He asked parliament to repeal the penal statutes and called for ‘the Sanction of a New Great Charter for Liberty of Conscience’. It was not the King’s intention, Popple reassured, to ‘raise his own Prerogative upon the ruine of the People Libertys’.221 Many would have raised eyebrows at this generous assessment, but it was no defence of indulgence. Indeed, Popple used the insecurity of prerogative as a foil. The penal laws should be removed by statute, precisely because laws such as the Test Act were already defunct. Catholics remained forbidden from office, ‘But, pray, who is it that should punish them for that Offence? They know very well that in this Reign they are in no danger. That Law is now dispensed with.’ The only Bridle therefore that restrains them from transgressing it, is evidently the fear of its being Revived in the Reign of the next Successor; because it is a Law whose Penalty they will be always liable unto, whensoever the Government shall think fit to exact it. Now if this be the onely Ground of their Exclusion from Public Offices, and consequently of our pretended Security; I say if it be onely the Force of a Law that works that effect; pray let us consider if another Law might not be contrived, to secure us much more 219

220 221

The work is identified by Robbins. Robbins, ‘Absolute Liberty: the life and Thought of William Popple’, 190n. Gough remained unaware of it. Gough, ‘William Popple’s Translation’, in Locke, Epistola, 43–51. Three Letters Tending to Demonstrate how the Security of the Nation … lys in the Abolition of the Penal Laws, 1, 5. Ibid., 10–11.

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effectually against Persecution, than this Exclusion of them either dos or can do.222

Popple proposed more than a statute and certainly more than a temporary suspension of law: namely, a ‘Magna Charta of Religion, with all the ingaging Circumstances that the Wit of Man can invent to make it inviolable. Let that Liberty be declared the Natural Right of all Men’, and a ‘Fundamental Constitution’. Parliament would be bound by it, and the King required to ‘suffer in it a Clause, by which, reserving all other Rights of Prerogative inviolated, he may solemnly renounce the onely Right of Dispensing with this Law, or of Pardoning any Transgressor of it in any case whatsoever’.223 This rhetoric of a new Magna Carta was borrowed from Penn, but here was deployed with unusual force to critique the strategy of indulgence. Popple thus turned the rhetoric of court Whiggery against itself. Locke was familiar with the obverse of this argument. He owned tracts defending the Indulgence of James II, even urging him to ‘stretch his Prerogative to a higher Peg than yet he has done’ and deprive all clergy who opposed him.224 In Locke’s library was an anonymous tract of 1687, and so not an influence over the Letter but relevant to it: The Judgement and Doctrine of the Clergy of England Concerning . . . the Dispencing with the Penal Laws. The Judgement, as a blast against persecution, grounded conscience rights on the Gospel and natural law.225 But the tract also quoted diverse divines defending the dispensing power as ‘inherent in and inseparably annexed to [the] Crown’. Laws ‘were made to ease [the King] of his Labour, not to deprive him of his Power’. Relief from the law sprang from the superabundant authority of sovereignty.226 Locke thus owned a concise summary of the prerogative defence of indulgence. We can presume that he read it with disapproval, and by 1687 agreed with its caustic critics. Wrote one, the Judgement and Doctrine ‘made the Prince absolute, and set him above all Laws, which were Laws no longer than he pleased to have them so; and thus our Lives and Properties, and Liberties and Religion, were at the Will of the Prince’. Such a sovereign power was corrupt at the core. ‘If the exercise of such a Liberty be inglorious; that Power, which is founded on it, cannot be glorious.’227

222 224 225 226 227

Ibid., 15. 223 Ibid., 15–17. Care, Legality of the Court Held by His Majesties Ecclesiastical Commissioners, 24. LL, 101. Judgement and Doctrine of the Clergy of the Church of England, 40–1, 43. Ibid., 3, 9, 20, 23, 34. LL, 163. Answer to a Late Pamphlet Intiuled, the Judgement and Doctrine of the Clergy of the Church of England, 2–5, 15.

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Popple demonstrates that, even among Whiggish writers facially supportive of toleration during James’s reign, doubts about Indulgence had become deep-seated. From the King’s perspective, a tract such as Popple’s must have appeared highly ambivalent. It did not harmonize Penn’s call for a ‘spiritual Magna Carta’ with the King’s own view of his ecclesial authority, but instead pit the former against the latter. The insufficiencies of prerogative tolerantia thus became the lever for upholding conscience rights. Popple pitted ‘religion, truth, and equity’ against ‘the precarious, partial, and unjust principle’ of spiritual authority. He arrayed ‘indispensable right’ against laws ‘every day dispensed with’. ‘Dispensation dissipates’ the anti-popish ‘Bulwark’ of Protestantism ‘into Dust and Air’.228 Popple’s Three Letters eviscerated the logic of Indulgence. It is relevant, in this context, that Popple also translated Martin Clifford’s Treatise of Reason. As we have seen, this was read by the church as another Hobbesian, anticlerical work from Shaftesbury’s circle. But despite its Hobbesian qualities, it refused to ground free conscience on mere sovereign prerogative.229 Albertus Warren had chided Clifford for missing the tolerationist potential of Leviathan. But Popple, in the early 1680s, shared Clifford’s perspective. He would perhaps suggest the limitations of Hobbism in a later letter to Locke, where he denounced those ‘wits’ such as deny all Immaterial Beings, though that dos not hinder them from talking of a God upon all occasions, but undoubtedly more for the sake of the Name than the Thing. Consequently to that, they make all Events necessary, and laugh not onely at Revealed but even Natural Religion. I say Religion: For they talk big of Virtue and Morality. But when they lay all the grounds of both Virtue and Morality onely in the good-nature of particular persons, or in the fear of the Magistrate’s Rod, I fear their Superstructure will be very tottering. And what makes me fear this, is because I see plainly the Youth of this Age build all upon that Foundation. We are running from one Extream to another. Atheism, or, (if that word be too harsh), even Irreligion is a sad Sanctuary from the Mischiefs of Superstition.230

Atheism, materialism, and necessity – Hobbesian brands – destroyed conscientious, rational religion. Virtues (such as tolerance) could not be founded on prerogative, or the mere ‘good-nature of particular persons’.

228 229 230

Popple, Three Letters Tending to Demonstrate how the Security of the Nation … lys in the Abolition of the Penal Laws, 20. See above; Locke himself was suspected of having authored Popple’s separately published preface to the work. James Tyrrell to Locke, 18 March 1690, CL, 4:36. William Popple to Locke, 16 January 1696, CL, 5:520.

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Popple was Andrew Marvell’s nephew. It was to Popple that Marvell mordantly described the Conventicle Act as ‘the Quintessence of arbitrary malice’. But Marvell had opposed as tyrannical any toleration grounded on ‘ecclesiastical Prerogatives’, and warned his nephew about the Stuarts’ efforts to outflank the clergy by achieving an ‘absolute power to dispose of all Things in religious matters’.231 Popple’s Three Letters echoed Marvell’s case against the Indulgence of 1672.232 Locke owned Popple’s Three Letters and surely appreciated it.233 The tract evoked his own mature position on the question of conscience and emerged from the same context.234 Popple linked the anti-Indulgence politics of Marvell with the rights-oriented tolerationism of Locke.235 By way of his translation of Clifford, furthermore, he connected Locke’s Letter with older debates, from within Shaftesbury’s circle, over the tolerationist potential of Hobbism. Popple’s reading of the political moment was shrewd. As the Quaker Furly wrote to Locke in March of 1689, there were hopes that William would institute a statutory toleration to relieve nonconformists now again exposed to the penal laws. ‘For if we cannot be relieved by a Law, theres no hopes of being relieved by dispensation or connivance.’236 A decade later, Locke circulated a text, Catholicism without Popery, that suggested the enduring importance of the indulgence debate to his own understanding of toleration.237 Written by the Whiggish, Irish judge John Hooke, it advocated comprehension. Hostile to Roman Catholicism and English prelacy, Hooke celebrated the Toleration Act and borrowed ecclesiological argumentation from the dissenters.238 He began with a vivid account of the context that had nursed Locke’s own tolerationism. The civil war and Restoration, wrote Hooke, had been divided by vicious controversies over ‘the Prerogative of the King and the Liberty of the Subject’ and also between ‘a strict Uniformity in matters of Religion and a Lawless Liberty of Conscience’. Exploiting these divisions, Catholics had tempted the sons of Charles I with an immense prerogative power and ‘caress’d’ nonconformists with ‘an Illegal Toleration’.239 The Revolution of 1688 evaded these 231 232 233 234

235 236 237 238

Marvell to Popple, 21 March 1670, and 14 April 1670, Poems and Letters of Marvell, 2: 313–4, 317. See Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, which Marvell and Popple discussed. Marvell to Popple, 10 June 1678, Poems and Letters of Marvell, 2: 357. The work is commonly misattributed to Penn. Laslett so lists it, likely following the error of the English Short Title Catalogue. LL, 2247. Locke’s Letter exerted influence over Popple’s tolerationism in A Discourse of Humane Reason with Relation to Matters of Religion, see 94–6 in particular. This work expanded his preface to Clifford. Robbins, ‘Popple,’ 219n. Locke owned it. LL, 787. For a different reading of Popple, see Marshall, Locke, Toleration, 74, 192, 484, 554, 632, 683. Benjamin Furly to Locke, 19 February/1 March 1689, CL, 3:572. Samuel Bold to Locke, 2 October 1699, CL, 6:709–10. 239 Hooke, Catholicism without Popery, 6–8, 39, 44; LL, 1487b. Ibid., to the reader.

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perils and ensured that ‘a Liberty to Dissenters has received the Sanction of a Law’. Locke’s appreciative promotion of Hooke’s narrative is suggestive, though like its author he was perhaps more eager than was justified to write the bishops out of the story.

Lockean Ecclesiology From its opening phrases, Locke’s Epistola de Tolerantia signalled his emancipation from the Restoration idiom of civil religion and politique tolerationism.240 ‘Mutual toleration among Christians’ would be defended as ‘the chief distinguishing mark of a true church.’241 In a highly consequential – indeed historic – act of redescription, Locke thus swept aside the dominant understanding of tolerantia as a prudent accommodation of evil. Locke would not defend toleration with a mere political logic, taking prosperity, power, or stability as primary ends. Rather, he stigmatized the ‘striving for power and empire’ as the base motives driving conformists to uphold rituals and narrow orthodoxy. Locke understood ‘ecclesiastical dominion’ in material, political terms. The creatures of establishment aimed not at truth or salvation but power, ‘passion’ and ‘ambition’, ‘faults which perhaps cannot be eradicated from human affairs’.242 Toleration could not be adequately defended with a similar political logic but only as an individual duty motivated by caritas and fides per amorem.243 The beginning of Locke’s Epistola, and many subsequent passages of it, offered what this book has called ‘prophetic’ rhetoric. Toleration was a scriptural duty following the ‘perfect example of the Prince of Peace’. It is commonly observed, however, that the Epistola argued in two registers: the spiritual and the temporal, defending toleration as a Christian duty, but also as a political limitation on sovereignty. ‘Tolerantia’, Locke wrote, was harmonious with both ‘Evangelium et ratio’. However, though the latter argumentative line was secular, it did not constitute a politique argument dependent on civil religious logic. If we define civil religion as religion organized primarily to achieve political ends, Locke’s Epistola avoided such rationales entirely. His secular arguments for toleration were not grounded on prudential considerations but on an account of justice and a positive theory of the church. They were, furthermore, expressly marshalled against the supposed civil religious posturing of conformists, their tendency to ‘mask their 240 241

Schochet, ‘From Persecution to ‘Toleration’”, 125–6; also Schochet, ‘John Locke and Religious Toleration’, 147–64. A duty of ‘all mankind’. Epistola, 58–9. 242 Ibid., 64–5. 243 Ibid., 58–9.

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persecution and unchristian cruelty with a pretence of care for the commonwealth and observance of the laws’.244 This remark reveals how Locke understood his argumentative burdens: first, to disprove the civil religious claim that confessional establishment served the good of the polity, without defending toleration with a similarly impoverished logic; and second, to expose as a ‘pretext’ the idea that confessional intolerance was required in order to preserve the ‘observation of the law’. The second of these challenges indicates how closely Locke had followed the constitutional debates over indulgence and how seriously these had challenged quasi-Hobbesian political conclusions that had appealed to him in earlier years. Read in Restoration context, the Epistola accepted the critique of prerogative toleration. But rather than merely achieving religious freedom with an imperfect statute, Locke cast it as both a natural right and a religious obligation. Locke thus rendered confessional penal statutes not just unwise but illegitimate, and – the Epistola would argue – an occasion for rightful political noncompliance, or even resistance. These arguments had been anticipated in the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’, which indicates that the English debates of the 1660s and 1670s, and perhaps Locke’s experiences in France, provided the primary contexts for the theoretical advances in his tolerationism. The Epistola is written at a high level of abstraction, with few allusions to contemporary circumstances. Locke did, on two occasions, reference ‘Remonstrants’, ‘anti-Remonstrants’, and ‘Socinians’ as rival sects in hypothetical examples. But this detail carried no substantive importance, and Popple’s translation smoothly replaced these with (English) ‘Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Arminians, Quakers’.245 As for Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, it left no explicit mark on the Epistola. The English letter includes one mention of ‘dragoons’, seemingly invoking Louis’s instruments of confessional intimidation, but this was Popple’s freighted translation of ‘cohors’.246 The specificity of the allusion is an artefact of the translation. It is also fair to say that the Stuart Indulgences are not explicitly referenced by Locke. Variants of ‘indulgere’ appear here and there, indicating the unacceptable ‘indulgence’ of wantonness and vice.247 If Locke meant this usage to cast aspersion on the Declarations of Indulgence, he was overly subtle. Popple, nevertheless, drew the connections with a keen intuition. The Epistola echoed manuscripts of Locke’s that directly addressed the 244 245 247

Ibid., 64–5; there is an undated listing of tolerationist scriptural passages in MS Locke c. 33, f. 24v. Epistola, 81, 144–5; Letter, 54. 246 Letter, 25; followed by Gough, Epistola, 64–5. See, for instance, Epistola, 138.

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indulgence debates. Like those manuscripts, the work disavowed magisterial prerogative as a foundation for either confessional coercion or for toleration. It also rejected counsels of prudence and expedience. It was, for instance, a shibboleth of English debate to invoke the commercial and demographic gains following from toleration. The Dutch Republic was the great exemplar of this bounty. And yet, writing from the Dutch Republic, Locke did not avail himself of this readiest of arguments. Indeed, as we shall see below, while debating Proast he explicitly disdained it. Locke resisted the allure of utility. His case for religious freedom now worked from the inside out. Conscience, or inner conviction, animated honest belief and the life of the spirit. Physical coercion could not bind conscience, but it was also true that the mere calculus of material profit was insufficient to justify the worship freedom of believers. A political rationale could never define the parameters of Christian liberty and ensure the ‘salvation of souls’.248 Like the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’, the Epistola not only rejected the spiritual authority of magistrates but derided the suggestion that politics might be reconciled with sincere religious purposes. ‘Princes are born superior in power’, Locke wrote, ‘but in nature equal to other mortals. Neither the right nor the art of ruling carries with it the certain knowledge of other things, and least of all of true religion.’249 Locke effectively paganized political power, levelling Christian sovereigns with ‘infidel’ overlords such as the ‘Turkish emperor’. Providence would not, for our convenience, distinguish godly from godless power. ‘The civil power is the same everywhere, nor can that power, in the hands of a Christian prince, confer any greater authority upon the church than it could in the hands of a heathen; that is to say, it can confer none at all.’250 A sovereign was ‘armed with force, namely, with all the strength of his subjects’ for the protection of their ‘rights’. In contrast to Hobbes, Locke’s slate of inalienable natural rights included not just ‘life, liberty, bodily health, and freedom from pain’, which were acknowledged by Leviathan. The Two Treatises of Government added property rights and the corresponding political rights required to defend them. Avoided in the Two Treatises, but explored in both the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ and the Epistola, was another category of inalienable right: conscientious religious exercise. An individual’s interest in salvation, and the ‘profession’ that would secure it according to conscience, could not be surrendered. Hobbes himself conceded that inner conscience could not be alienated. Locke’s advance 248

Ibid., 64.

249

Ibid., 94–5.

250

Ibid., 82–3.

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was to insist on the sacrosanct status of ‘profession’ and ‘doctrines or forms of worshipping God’.251 Locke’s right of conscience was justified by reason and scriptural revelation (the ‘spirit of religion’ and the ‘law of nature’, as Limborch put it252). The Gospels nowhere empowered states with religious authority. It was, furthermore, irrational to so elevate princes, as they were as prone as other humans to ‘varias principium de religione opiniones’.253 Locke did not share Hobbes’s hopes that a revised theology, formulated by philosophical counsellors, might be established as an enlightened civil religion. He did maintain Hobbes’s strong view that conscience was a strictly ‘inward judgement of things’, a ‘persuasion’ of the individual mind. Conscience could not, according to Hobbes, make itself ‘right’ by accommodating itself to natural law, ‘right reason’, or a common orthodoxy. It was mere opinion. Locke’s epistemology had, since the Interregnum, pulled him towards a similarly subjective understanding of conscience. But his adherence to foundational natural law (though erratically expressed) drew him in the opposite direction and encouraged a more traditional understanding of conscience as the illuminator of stable truth. These ambiguities in Locke’s treatment of natural law would encourage allegations of Hobbism against him throughout his later life, as we shall see. Timothy Stanton, in important articles, has resisted attributing a ‘right of conscience’ to Lockean theory and prefers to speak of a right of voluntary church membership and worship. He associates conscience with a traditional implanted light or sense revealing natural law and notes that Locke rejected this in favour of conscience as a mere faculty of judgement. Natural law was not implanted but emerged from reason operating on sensory data or interpreting scriptural revelation.254 Locke’s empirically minded account of natural law was certainly innovative, but the role of conscience in judging actions remained paramount. It seems defensible to speak of Locke’s right of free, voluntary worship as a species of conscience right. Locke insisted on the right of conscience to voice itself and inform worship, lest the sin of ‘hypocrisy’ in the eyes of God and ‘contempt of his Divine Majesty’ be forced on individuals.255 Locke based his tolerationism in part on a theory of sovereignty. Unlike Hobbes, however, he was not motivated to augment state authority or 251 253 254 255

Ibid., 67–9. 252 Philippus von Limborch to Locke, 26 April/6 May 1689, CL, 3:607–8. Epistola, 70. Stanton, ‘Freedom of Conscience, Political Liberty, and the Foundations of Liberalism’, 147–8. Epistola, 69.

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achieve political ends. Some indication of this is found in the Epistola’s greatly diminished deployment of the concept of adiaphora. Locke did regret that ‘trivial things’ sowed discord among Christians. But he remained aware, as he had been for some years, that the notion of adiaphora was better suited to a policy of comprehension than toleration, and that it could authorize sovereign will – rather than individual will – to regulate vast swathes of religious practice. Locke granted that ‘res indifferentes’ fell under the ‘legislative’ power if the ‘public good’ were at stake.256 But the Epistola argued, more clearly than had the ‘Essay concerning Toleration’, that indifferent matters capable of political arbitration could by their very nature never attain the ‘dignity and excellence’ required of ‘divine worship’.257 Things indifferent, imposed on religion, were ‘as abominable to God as the sacrifice of a dog’.258 Even where the ‘circumstance’ of worship did leave certain matters to ‘human discretion’, Locke surrendered this not to the state but to the ‘churches themselves’, the ‘prudence of each church’ exercising its ‘libertas Evangelica’.259 Locke’s use of the phrase ‘evangelical liberty’ (recalling rhetoric of Jeremy Taylor) indicates an important and often overlooked theme of the Epistola. The obverse of Locke’s desacralization of politics was a call for the purification of religion: a desire for prophetic churches capable of reproving the princes of earth. Locke’s spiritual case for toleration possessed an idiosyncratic ‘churchly’ quality. The Epistola was in part a work of ecclesiology, seeking to define the notes of a true ‘ecclesia’. Locke himself described it as a ‘treatise on toleration and Church peace’ (pace ecclesiastica).260 Locke has been commonly characterized as a ‘latitudinarian’ episcopalian in the manner of Tillotson. There is a certain theological plausibility in this, given Locke’s belief in free will and his rationalized theology. But Locke’s ecclesiological position was fundamentally Congregationalist. Echoing the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’,261 the Epistola defined ‘Ecclesia’ as a ‘societas libera hominum’, a ‘societatem liberam et voluntariam’.262 An individual was not born to church membership or tied to arbitrary parish boundaries: ‘he voluntarily joins the society in which he believes he has found true religion and the form of worship which is acceptable to God’. Membership was a conscientious decision. A member ‘must always have the same liberty to go out as he had to enter’.263 Locke dismissed as unscriptural the claim that 256 260 261 262

Ibid., 102–3. 257 Ibid., 105. 258 Ibid., 106–7. 259 Ibid., 108–9. Locke to Philippus von Limborch, 6 June 1689, CL, 3:633. Marshall highlights the brief passages which emphasize the potential intolerance of Independency, as in New England. Marshall, Locke, Toleration, 554. Epistola, 73. 263 Ibid., 72–3.

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a ‘true church’ must include bishops or presbyters, or that church governance descended through apostolic succession.264 Locke’s appreciation of voluntary Christian assemblies would inform his 1688 scheme for a society of ‘Pacifick Christians’. This was envisioned as an ecumenical lay gathering of charitable inquirers, marked by ‘forbearance’ and ‘diversity’. ‘Since in matters of Religion every one must know and believe, and give an account for himself’, the ‘assembly’ disallowed clerical ‘masters’. Nor could ‘magistrates’ wield authority in ‘matters of faith or worship’ within the society.265 This was not a theory of the church per se. It is nevertheless suggestive of the kinds of voluntary assemblies that Locke viewed as essential to the propagation of Christianity, assemblies that bear some resemblance to the lectures and prayer meetings (additional to parish worship services) long central to puritan piety.266 As is often noted, Locke did compare church associations with other civil associations. But this did not render churches of like stature with mere clubs and economic corporations.267 Locke defended the voluntary status of churches scripturally and defined churches by their unique end: the ‘public worship of God, and, by that means, the gaining of eternal life’.268 This purpose elevated churches above other associations. In 1682, in notes on Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Politie, Locke wrote that the church was ‘a supernatural but voluntary societie wherein a man associates himself to god, angels, and holy men’. It was a hybrid society, consensual but also supernatural or divine, a ‘sociable’ bond but a ‘supernatural’ one as well, defined by that ‘law revealed concerning what worship god would have donne unto him’. State power was purely ‘secular’, Locke concluded, because it lacked this dependence on revelation.269 A similar reverence would mark Locke’s discussion of the church in his late Paraphrases of the epistles of St. Paul, where the primitive church is marked by a ‘diversity of gifts’ often miraculous in nature.270 When compared with Hobbes’s rather spare account of the primitive church, Locke’s was elevated. Ecclesia was ‘one body’ with ‘one life, one spirit’, communicated through the sacraments of baptism and communion, and possessed of an often disruptive prophetic mission.271 264 266 267

268 270 271

Ibid., 74–5, 85. 265 MS Locke c. 27, ff. 80a and 80b; PE, 304–5. My thanks to Mark Goldie for this observation. This has been a central point in the interpretations of both Harris and Stanton. See Harris, ‘Locke and Natural Law’, 78–81; see also Beiner, Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy, 146–55. Epistola, 76–7. 269 1682, MS Locke d. 10, f. 43; EcT, 391–2. In his late Discourse on Miracles (1702), Locke was perhaps surprisingly convinced of their existence and the existence of angels. Posthumous Works, 217–31. Locke, Paraphrase, 1: 231–4, 2:584–5, 642-3n, 644n, 646–7.

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Hobbes feared the political implications of eternity and salvation. To augment the force of the primary political impulse (the drive for survival), he deployed theological innovations such as mortalism to render salvation a remote consideration. Locke engaged in no such evasions. The Epistola acknowledged salvation as an interest that could be neither minimized nor surrendered. The salvific ends served by churches, furthermore, surpassed the material ends (recreation, companionship, or profit) of civil associations. No inalienable right of association attached itself to property rights. Conscience rights, by contrast, required a right of association. Once conscience was freed from ‘dominion’ humans endowed with this liberty must therefore enter some religious society, in order to hold public services, not only for mutual edification, but to testify to the world that they are worshippers of God and offer to his Divine Majesty such service as they themselves are not ashamed of, and such as they think not unworthy of him, nor unacceptable to him; and finally, by purity of doctrine, holiness of life, and decent form of worship, to encourage others to love religion and truth, and perform such other religious acts as cannot be done by each private man apart. These religious societies I call churches.272

Ecclesiae could not be equated with mere civil voluntary associations. They were more powerfully protected as a matter of natural justice and more intrinsically implicated in the exercise of a particular inalienable individual right. Locke distinguished churches from philosophical, commercial, or recreational societies by describing these latter societies as having ‘trivial’ or ‘slight’ purposes.273 The liberty of churches did not emerge from the ‘standard of bare justice’ but from ‘benevolence and charity’, scriptural injunction, and the requirements of ‘natural fellowship’. As Stanton has put it, Locke’s public worship was not a Hobbesian political act but ‘witness in the presence of others by those who had combined sua sponte into churches to worship to the end of their salvation’.274 It is often presumed that Locke’s ‘separation’ of the spiritual and the temporal was designed to insulate the latter from the disruptive influence of the former. Locke sometimes wrote in such terms, particularly as regarded ‘priestly’ power. But in the Epistola Lockean dualism largely protected ‘true churches’ from the corruptions of material power and political logic. ‘Laws are not concerned with the truth of opinions’, Locke wrote, ‘but with the security and safety of the commonwealth and 272 274

273 Epistola, 100–1. Emphasis added. Ibid., 72–3. Stanton, ‘Freedom of Conscience, Political Liberty, and the Foundations of Liberalism’, 151.

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of each man’s goods.’ And if religious establishment could not be justified as a purely civil end, neither could religious freedom. Religious truth ‘has not received, and never will receive, much assistance from the power of great men, who do not always recognize or welcome her’.275 Locke’s Epistola exuded suspicion of politique logic and reason of state. A church true to spiritual purposes and sincere conscience could not entail authority held in ‘succession’ or hierarchy. Churches so organized violated Locke’s cardinal spiritual virtues: individual conviction and sincerity of outward witness. Locke’s normative partiality for inward religious belief over outward, sacramental practice, and voluntary churches over hierarchical, corporate ones constituted aspects of a prophetic Christian vision. They did not emerge from an equal application of his individualist contractualism to all associations. Further, as Ian Harris has observed, care for one’s own soul did not imply a privatized, self-sufficient religiosity. Religious inquiry and worship were public acts. Locke’s argument, Harris writes, concerned ‘societates, jurisdictions, and their relations. This follows from Locke’s natural duty to worship, for worship required a group.’276 To those espousing some version of a divine right church of succession, Locke wrote: I agree that you may have the ruler you appoint and believe to be necessarily determined by this long chair of succession, while I at the same time attach myself to the society in which I am persuaded that I shall find what is necessary for the salvation of my soul. In this way we both preserve ecclesiastical liberty, as you demand, and neither of us has a legislator over him other than the one he has chosen for himself.277

This nonchalant accommodation of jure divino church authority with voluntary membership begged some essential questions. Few of his opponents would have accepted this effort to empower them with free choice in a pluralistic ecclesial setting. What is perhaps more revealing is Locke’s desire to co-opt and redefine the ecclesiae libertas. A high churchman might justly demand church freedom from the Hobbesian ‘legislator’, but not from the free agency of individual believers. Libertas ecclesiae, properly construed, freed voluntary societies appealing to individual conscience. 275 276

277

Epistola, 122–3. Harris, ‘Locke and Natural Law,’ 88. Harris, with Stanton, may go too far dismissing the notion of Lockean conscience ‘rights’ (101). Locke’s understanding of the church was intensely voluntarist and relied on individual Christians pursuing their personal sense of true religion. In this a higher form of self-interest was indeed at work, and personal custodianship of this interest was among those ‘rights’ that individuals could not reasonably surrender to sovereigns. Epistola, 74–5.

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‘But to speak the truth, we must admit’, wrote Locke, ‘that the church (if a convention of clergy, making decrees must be so called) is for the most part more apt to defer to the court than the court to the church.’278 ‘Socalled’ churches reliant on sovereign authority were inevitably compromised by political ambitions and material purposes. Locke’s recast understanding of the libertas ecclesiae protected pure Christian witness and a capacity to rebuke political authorities with ‘evangelical freedom’.279 A ‘preacher of the gospel’ should understand ‘the business of his calling’. He was not to toady to power or flatter princely will but to ‘warn’, ‘teach’, and ‘exhort all men, whether private persons or office-holders in the commonwealth, if there be any such in his church, to charity, meekness, and toleration, and ally and temper all that heat and antipathy of mind’ antithetical to true Christianity.280 Prophetic churches should adopt the ‘true and only method of propagating the truth’. They must ‘willingly or fervently devote their energy to attacking errors which are favoured by the court or the magistrate’. These public corruptions, which used religion for carnal ends, were far more damaging than the ‘superstition and heresy’ of private parties. Clergy were not to meddle in politics if their witness was to be free and pure, but their moral witness did enjoy some public power.281 This reading of Locke’s ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ and Epistola broadly accords with the interpretations of Stanton and Harris, both of whom have emphasized the importance of the liberty of churches – as public and communal societies – in these texts. Both have rejected the domestication of Locke into Millian or Rawlsian liberal categories, whereby, in the manner of Hobbes, religious freedom is granted to the atomized individual and strictly private conscience. Stanton compellingly presents toleration as a duty of peaceful coexistence among ‘particular churches’ and suggests that the Epistola was not concerned to recommend toleration to sovereigns, but to argue ‘why toleration is none of the civil magistrate’s business’.282 Harris has likewise recast Lockean tolerantia as a positive feature of religious associations informed by Christian virtues of charity and love.283 Both Stanton and Harris present this Lockean concern with free churches as a consequence of his natural law theory, and particularly the natural duty to publicly and decently worship God.284 There is an elegance to this argument, but it must confront the absence of natural law language 278 281 283 284

Ibid., 96–9. 279 Harris, ‘Locke and Natural Law’, 90–1. 280 Epistola, 86–7. 282 Ibid., 84–5, 148–9. Stanton, ‘Natural Law, Nonconformity, and Toleration’, 55–6. Harris, ‘Locke and Natural Law’, 84–5. Stanton, ‘Natural Law, Nonconformity, and Toleration’, 50–1; Harris, ‘Locke and Natural Law’, 60–2.

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in the Epistola.285 Harris circumvents this by reading the Epistola in light of Locke’s other writings. ‘The explicit arguments in [the Epistola] depend upon positions supposed there but argued or used explicitly elsewhere in Locke’s writings, positions which, therefore a reading of Epistola alone cannot disclose.’286 But Locke, of course, cannot have intended this. His lectures on natural law, ‘Essay concerning Toleration’, and ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ remained unpublished. Furthermore, as the Epistola appeared anonymously, Locke necessarily composed it as a self-sufficient text. The natural law emphasis of Harris and Stanton tells us something significant about the private development of Locke’s views. But the focus of the present discussion has been on polemics, politics, and argumentative strategy. In those contexts, the Epistola would not have been read as a contribution to natural law theory. Rather, it would have appeared as a modification of social contract theory, wedded to a scriptural understanding of Christianity and a fairly traditional ecclesiology. Notable rhetorical features of Locke’s case would have been his inversion of Hobbesian categories, his rejection of prerogative indulgence, his use of the language of prophetic freedom, and his adaptation of libertas ecclesiae to serve a voluntarist, quasi-Independent understanding of the church. The Epistola explicitly rejected the notion that toleration depended on sovereign discretion. Toleration was among the ‘great duties’ of Christians (and all theists), whatever their status.287 Locke again forced conformist churchmen towards the untenable alternatives of relying on either popery or Hobbism. On this point the Epistola, if silent on Hobbes, nevertheless replicated the logic of Locke’s earlier disputes with Parker and Stillingfleet. ‘Perhaps’, wrote Locke, you will say that we do not attribute this infallible judgement, which all men are bound to follow, to the civil magistrate but to the church. What the church has determined, the civil magistrate orders all to observe; and he takes care by his authority that nobody shall either act or believe in sacred matters otherwise than as the church teaches. Thus the power of decision rests with the church: the magistrate himself yields obedience to it, and requires obedience from others. I answer: Who does not see how frequently the name of the church, which was venerable in the time of the Apostles, has been made use of in subsequent ages to throw dust in people’s eye? . . . Yet you bid me be of good courage, and tell me that all is now safe and secure, because what the magistrate now enjoins on the people, and confirms by civil sanctions, is the observance not of decrees in matters of religion, but the 285 286

Jolley, Toleration and Understanding, chapter nine. Harris, ‘Locke and Natural Law’, 59, 76. 287 Epistola, 90–1.

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In the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ Locke had expressly cast this as an alternative between popery and Hobbism. Locke now rebuked those ‘who cry out continually, The church! The church! with as much noise, and perhaps upon the same impulse, as the Ephesian silversmiths once did for their Diana’. He preserved the liberty of the church, but defined it in primitive, voluntary terms. More hierarchical or coercive theories of the church and its rights, whatever autonomy they might claim, relied on magisterial power. Of Princes Locke wrote: What difference does it make whether he leads me himself or hands me over to be led by others? In both ways I depend upon his will, and it is he who in either case decides my salvation. Would a Jew, who had worshipped Baal upon the command of his king, have been more secure, because he was told that the king ordered nothing in religion upon his own head, nor commanded anything to be done by his subjects in divine worship but what was approved by the council of priests and declared to be of divine right by the hierophants of their church?289

Hobbes had used God’s permission to Naaman to bow to the god of Rimmon as evidence of the purely inner nature of religious conscience. Using Baal, Locke effectively rebuked Hobbes for this, but drew lordly ecclesiastics into the critique. Whether they acknowledged their servility to Leviathan or not, their own coercive powers were mere grants of the sovereign who suffered them. A domination, a ‘dependence’ on human will, would result in either case. ‘The civil power can either change everything in religion according to the prince’s pleasure, or it can change nothing.’290 Locke’s Epistola at times read as a systematic inversion of Hobbesian categories. It denied the possibility of a ‘respublica Christiana’, thus repudiating the concept of a ‘Christian Commonwealth’ so central to Leviathan’s Erastianism.291 Hobbes had attributed civil wars to the machinations of independent spiritual authorities. Locke instead blamed them on the merger of spiritual and temporal power.292 Ambitious clergy in league with magistrates ‘were not so much ministers of the Gospel as ministers of the government, who have flattered the ambition of Princes and the dominion of the mighty, and devoted all their energies to the endeavour to promote in the commonwealth a tyranny which otherwise 288

Ibid., 95–7.

289

Ibid., 96–7.

290

Ibid., 112–3.

291

Ibid., 116–7.

292

Ibid., 146–7.

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they would have vainly sought to establish in the church’. For Locke, it was the ‘agreement between church and state’ that generated conflict, whereas ‘if each of them confined itself within its own bounds – the one attending only to the worldly welfare of the commonwealth, the other to the salvation of souls – there could not possibly be any disagreement between them’.293 Hobbes obsessed over the threat of religious war to political stability. Confessional establishment and politique toleration were two alternate strategies for achieving fundamentally political ends. Locke’s early writings shared this perspective. But the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ and the Epistola de Tolerantia attacked religious tyranny rather than religion disorder. It was not civil war – in the manner of the Thirty Years War or the French wars of religion – that haunted Locke, but the Inquisition as an instrument of repressive order. Locke’s indictment of religious violence, furthermore, was no longer primarily based on a denial of its effectiveness as a tool of control. Rather, conscience coercion was an abomination because it violated individual right and the requirements of religion. Indeed, Locke implicitly countenanced a form of religious warfare: rebellions of spiritual resistance. This radical implication was evaded in the ‘Essay concerning Toleration’, but affirmed in the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’. ‘Obedience is due first of all to God’, Locke now wrote in the Epistola, ‘and afterwards to the laws.’ In cases where the ‘magistrate’s decree should order something which seems unlawful to the conscience of a private person’, Locke offered arresting guidance. Where such unjust laws dealt with ‘political matters’ and the ‘public good’, resistance could only be passive and those abstaining from obedience must ‘undergo the punishment which it is not unlawful for him to bear’. These cases did not ‘deserve toleration’. However, if the law concerns things which lie outside the magistrate’s province, as for example that the people, or any part of it, should be compelled to embrace a strange religion and adopt new rites, those who disagree are not obliged by that law, because political society was instituted only to preserve for each private man his possession of the things of this life, and for no other purpose. The care of his soul and of spiritual matters, which does not belong to the state and could not be subjected to it, is reserved and retained for each individual.294

Between a tyrannical magistrate restraining private conscience and his subjects, ‘who shall be the judge between them? I answer: God alone; for there is no judge upon earth between the legislator and the people.’295 293

Ibid., 147–9.

294

Ibid., 126–9.

295

Ibid., 128–31.

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This important passage distinguished cases of political injustice permitting only passive resistance from cases of spiritual usurpation, which implicitly permitted something more. Locke was not entirely explicit about what greater resistance might have been entailed but in the subsequent two paragraphs, Locke characterized disagreement between a spiritual tyrant and his subjects as a ‘contest’ of power and will. In these contests the magistrate was not permitted to punish individuals or parties (i.e., to ‘take away worldly things’), which suggests the insufficiencies of passive resistance in such cases. And while Locke acknowledged the requirement to preserve public peace (which he had earlier construed as a natural law), in the Epistola he renders that concern secondary to the good of one’s own soul. In the case of an open ‘contest’ over religion, furthermore, he blamed the usurping sovereign for making a ‘desert’ in the name of ‘peace’. This last remark recalled the rhetoric of the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’, where Locke, in explicitly allowing subjects to use force against a religion maintained by force, blamed the resulting conflicts on the tyrannical sovereign rather than resisting subjects. The Epistola’s somewhat evasive ‘appeal to God’ to judge the rightfulness of religious resistance recalled Locke’s comment in the Two Treatises that an ‘appeal to Heaven’ would justify resistance triggered by temporal injustice.296 One of Hobbes’s great fears, resistance fired by ‘conscience’, was preferred by Locke to the grave-like peace of Inquisitorial states. To Hobbes, the suppression of heresy typically elevated clerical power as a rival to sovereign authority. To Locke, the suppression of heresy threatened individual conscience rights and the evangelical liberty of churches. He specifically denied that voluntary religious assemblies were particular cradles of sedition: ‘A congregation in church is not more vicious or turbulent than elsewhere.’ Where men ‘devise factious schemes, it is not by gathering for religion that they are impelled to do so, but because oppression makes them miserable’.297 Where ‘sedition’ was religiously inspired, it was in polities where, ‘for the sake of religion’, subjects were ‘maltreated and live wretchedly’.298 Disorder followed from misguided efforts to deploy religion as an instrument of order. And in such circumstances Locke was willing to re-describe sedition as rightful resistance. He expressly paralleled property rights with conscience rights: 296

297

TTG, I:20; Tim Stanton has made astute observations about Locke’s reservations on the question of resistance (‘Authority and Freedom’, 20–2). But the situation envisioned in this quote, presumably of a tyrant imposing Catholicism in the first instance, seems to justify a resistance that goes beyond merely confronting an already ‘dissolved’ political authority. Epistola, 136–7, 140–1. 298 Ibid., 138–9.

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Now since in practice men do not patiently allow themselves to be stripped of the goods which they have got by their honest industry, and contrary to all right, both human and divine, to be delivered up as prey to other men’s violence and rapine, especially when they are otherwise entirely blameless; and when the matter in question is one which does not concern the civil law at all, but the conscience of each individual and the salvation of his soul, for which he is accountable to God only; what else can be expected but that these men, growing weary of the evils under which they labour, should in the end persuade themselves that it is lawful to repel force with force, and to defend, with the arms at their disposal, the rights which God and nature have granted them, and which are forfeitable on account of crimes alone, not of religion?299

Stanton has intelligently emphasized that Locke viewed all power-holding through a natural law prism, arguing that government was limited in its purposes not by the consent of free individuals, but by divine duty.300 This perspective undergirds his view that Locke was generally not a theorist of ‘natural rights’ in the modern sense. He is surely correct that, particularly when compared with Hobbes, Locke did not view rights as zones of selfsovereignty, nor consent to government as a mere transactional calculation of interest. More than Hobbes and more than modern liberals, Locke preserved the notion of rights as ‘rightly ordered actions’. But jus in this more traditional sense could entail inalienable liberties as well as duties. The freedom to arbitrate one’s own worship and church membership was one of these, and Locke spoke of it as a ‘right’. And though consent was not a radically free, interest-oriented act for Locke, individuals did have a fiduciary duty to hold the magistrate to his proper purposes. Consent, or resistance, can be construed as natural law duties without denying individuals free agency. In both the Two Treatises and the Epistola, Locke developed this argument.301 It was perhaps this dimension of the Epistola, paralleling the resistance theory of the Two Treatises, that prevented Locke from acknowledging his authorship of the text until the end of his life.302 Locke reacted with alarm when an associate, Pieter Guenellon, wrote to him from Amsterdam that ‘vous este autheur du traité latin de la tolerance’ and told him that this was publicly known in England.303 Guenellon had this knowledge from 299 301 302

303

Ibid., 146–7. 300 Stanton, ‘Authority and Freedom’, 20. Jolley, Toleration and Understanding, chapter seven. This disagrees with P.J. Kelly, who reads Locke’s tolerationist writings as efforts to reconcile the ‘liberty of conscience with the authority of the sovereign legislator’. Kelly, ‘Authority, Conscience, and Religious Toleration’, 128. Pieter Guenellon to Locke, 8/18 April 1690, CL, 4:51–2.

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Limborch himself, who asked Locke whether it was perhaps ‘not a good thing’ that the secret was out, as it might lend ‘authority’ to his text.304 Locke disagreed and reproached Limborch’s indiscretion. Unfriendly parties had been spreading ‘irresponsible reports’ of his authorship of the translated Letter, and Locke suspected that Guenellon was inquiring on behalf of those parties. ‘You do not know’, Locke wrote, ‘what trouble you have gotten me into.’305 This panic probably elevated caution to a fault, but it is worth noting that while Popple’s translation was licensed, Locke’s original Latin text was not, and yet was imported into England.306 Tyrrell and Molyneux were later unable to pry from Locke confirmation of his authorship.307 He only formally conceded it in his will.308 Presumably Locke chiefly worried about the reaction of the church, but the approbation of the Williamite monarchy could not be fully presumed either. The Toleration Act did not secure the full conscience rights envisioned by the Epistola. Particularly in the early years after the Revolution, malicious readers might have presented it as a seditious libel. The strong tendency to associate the Epistola with the cool rationality of the Dutch Remonstrants – foils of the more militant Calvinist Huguenots309 – tends to distract us from the more radical aspects of the Letter as regarded the subject of resistance. The Dutch Remonstrants certainly appealed to Locke, but to prioritize their milieu foregrounds projects of concordia, latitude, and comprehension marginal to his project. Like Popple, Limborch understood that Locke was not arguing the case for comprehension.310 As one pamphleteer explained it: ‘Comprehension is for strengthening the churches interest; and Toleration (if our Rulers think fit to grant it) of such things as are tolerable, this is for the Kingdomes peace.’311 Locke himself would later write similarly: comprehension ‘signifies the extension of the boundaries of 304

Philippus von Limborch to Locke, 15/2 April 1690, CL, 4:57. Locke to Philippus von Limborch, 22 April 1690, CL, 4:62. 306 Copies of the Latin were sent to Locke. Klibansky, ‘Preface,’ to Epistola, xix; Philippus von Limborch to Locke, 7 October 1689, CL, 3:699. 307 James Tyrrell to Locke, 18 March 1690, and William Molyneux to Locke, 27 August 1692, CL 4:36–7, and 4:508–9. 308 Coste, ‘Character of Mr. Locke in a Letter to the Author of the Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres’, xxiii. 309 Some Dutch did attribute it to ‘the workshop of the Arminians’. Limborch to Locke, 5/ 15 June 1689, CL, 3:631. 310 Locke’s Latin Epistola, when shipped to England, was bound with Samuel Strimesius’s Dissertatio Theologica de Pace Ecclesiastica (1684), but Limborch (who arranged this) understood that the former argued for toleration and the latter for comprehension. Philippus von Limborch to Locke, 22 April 1689, CL, 3:607–8. 311 Indulgence not to be Refused. Comprehension Humbly Desired, 23. 305

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the church’, while indulgence ‘signifies toleration’ of those outside it.312 Comprehension and indulgence were at cross purposes.313 Locke largely dismissed parliamentary comprehension efforts after 1689. To Limborch he repudiated ‘any hope that ecclesiastical peace will be established in that way. Men will always differ on religious questions and rival parties will continue to quarrel and wage war on each other unless the establishment of equal liberty for all provides a bond of mutual charity by which all may be brought together into one body.’314 Locke echoed this thought in a memo of early 1690, responding to the precarious first year of the Williamite regime. Of the ‘divisions which throw a dred amongst us’, Locke wrote, I shall not propose union of opinions. Tis not to be hoped that all men’s consciences should be equally enlightened. Reason and experience shew them that they are out of the way who aime at it by compulsion, constraint is known to widen the breaches. All here to be wished is that mutual charity would supply consent of thought, till by true methods all men were brought to be of the same minde if that can ever be expected.315

One context for this comment was the on-going parliamentary debate over the oaths due to William and Mary.316 But also relevant were Locke’s doubts about the comprehension bill that some hoped would accompany the Toleration Act. Locke’s pessimism on this point would prove justified.317 Limborch regarded toleration as a way station on the road to church unity. For similar reasons, Le Clerc hoped for a more capacious, ‘moderate’ establishment.318 For Locke, however, toleration was its own end and likely to be compromised by comprehension efforts.319 He simply did not share Limborch’s ‘horror of schism’.320 He was more sanguine than many dissenters when in 1689 (partly due to the mismanagement of William III) the causes of comprehension and toleration split apart, ensuring the defeat of the former.321 Locke’s response more closely approximated that of the 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321

Locke to Phillipus van Limborch, 12 March 1689, CL, 3:585. Speech of Thomas Lee, Grey’s Debates, vol. 2, 14 February 1673. Locke to Philippus Limborch, 10/20 September 1689, CL, 3:689–90. MS Locke e. 18, p. 1; Farr and Roberts, ‘John Locke on the Glorious Revolution: A Rediscovered Document’, 395. Ibid., 398. Horwitz, Parliament, Policy, and Politics in the Reign of William III, 22–6, 36–7, 40, 44. Jean Le Clerc to Locke, 25 June/5 July 1689, CL, 3:642–3. To Timothy Taylor comprehension was poisoned with ‘dividing conditions’. Beinecke, Osborn MS, fb 161, pp. 105–6. Limborch to Locke, 20/30 September 1689, CL,3: 694–5; Limborch to Locke, 2/12 April 1689, CL, 3:587–8. Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution, 164–5.

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Independents than the Presbyterians.322 Conformist churchmen, ironically, also had reason to prefer indulgence to comprehension. The former could be cast as a political error, while the latter introduced ‘schism into the heart of the church’.323 (In 1675, Bishop Laney called comprehension a ‘dragnet that will fetch in all kinds of fish, good or bad, great or small, there will be room enough for Leviathan’.324) In general, the unity of Protestantism concerned Locke less than the conscience freedom of individual Christians and the evangelical liberty of churches. Fully disengaged from civil religious logic, the Epistola separated politics and religion, but also prioritized the purity of religion and evangelical Christian witness over the carnal achievements of stability and prosperity. In certain conditions, the latter might be sacrificed for the former. For Locke, as for other dissenters of the late seventeenth century, deference to Godly magistracy was an exhausted strategy. The logic of politics was increasingly understood to be antithetical to the truths of religion and moral virtue. In striking ways Locke’s anti-politique position invoked the rhetoric of the ‘liberty of the church’ and the freedom of prophesy. The present book has argued that this position was developed by Locke during his engagement with conformist Restoration clergy. Their assault on politique toleration, cast as a Hobbesian intrusion into the sphere of the church, pressured him to devise a more robust account of religious freedom. But where their free church had been communal, hierarchical, and sacramental, Locke’s was a church of sincere profession and voluntary membership, inherently Congregationalist in its ecclesial logic. Its liberty was not corporate but attached to individuals. An Independent understanding of the church that had allured Hobbes also attracted Locke, but where Hobbes deployed it to augment sovereignty, Locke now construed it as an implication of natural and supra-political religious duties. Locke coopted the churchly attack on the Hobbesian politique. The freedom of the church was thus recast, and the freedom of association born. 322

323 324

Spurr, ‘Church of England, Comprehension, and the Toleration Act of 1689’, 927–46; R. Thomas, ‘Comprehension and Indulgence,’ in From Uniformity to Unity, eds. G.F. Nuttall and Owen Chadwick (London, 1962). Ibid., 945–6; Ashcraft, ‘Latitudinarianism and Toleration’, 153–5. Quoted in Spurr, ‘The Church of England, Comprehension, and the Toleration Act of 1689’, 941.

chapter 6

Locke and Catholicism The ‘Roman Leviathan’

John Locke’s ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ and Epistola asserted inalienable natural rights to free conscience and public worship, and they affirmed that sovereign encroachment on these rights would legitimate resistance. These positions developed substantially within an English context, amidst escalating public discontent with indulgence, and in part responded to clerical critiques of the Restoration politique intended to defend the liberty of the church. Having repudiated the state-oriented account of religious governance that had often animated his earlier writing, Locke began more consistently to deploy ‘Hobbism’ as a byword for state domination of religion. His notes and commonplace books from around this time flag the new interpretive territory. In 1684, Locke transcribed a passage characterizing Hobbes found in Bayle’s Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres. There he had encountered a review, by Bayle or a collaborator, of De Jure Civitatis libri tres by the Dutch jurist Ulrich Huber.1 The review detailed Huber’s account of debates over the relations of sovereigns and subjects. Hobbes and ‘several others’, Locke recorded, were said to have empowered sovereigns ‘so strongly that they attribute to him a right over men similar to that which we exercise over animals’. Hotman, Althusius, and others, by contrast, restricted sovereigns so thoroughly that ‘they speak of them as servants, clerks, or agents of the people’.2 The brief note suggests Locke’s hardening sense of Hobbes as an authoritarian. But Bayle’s broader review contained a more detailed critique of Hobbes that resonated with Locke’s own views in 1684. Huber attacked Hobbes, Locke would have read, for subordinating natural law to politique considerations and for measuring natural rights by utility.3 Huber, who held a more traditional view of natural and divine law, asserted against Leviathan that some rights were tacitly or expressly 1 3

On whom, see Fukuoka, Sovereign and the Prophets, 315–43. 2 MS Locke c. 33, f. 35v. [Pierre Bayle?], Article VI, Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (September 1684), 150.

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reserved from sovereignty.4 Locke might have been most interested in Huber’s discussion of (as the review had it) ‘grand difficultez à bien établir les bornes de la puissance du Prince sur les affaires Ecclesiastiques’. Huber’s critique of Hobbes in this context closely paralleled Locke’s mature position. Huber granted churches an extensive autonomous jurisdiction: over ‘Confessions of Faith’, ‘les Assemblées des Fideles pour server Dieu’, and the disciplining of heretics. When sovereigns usurped these ecclesial powers, ‘l’Eglise n’est pas oblige de se conformer aux orders de la Puissance Civil’ (the Church is not obliged to comply with the orders of the Civil Power). Huber also empowered subjects to choose their own religion freely and to assemble for worship. Huber, wrote Bayle, refuted both Erastus and ‘Thomas Hobbes who attributes the determination of points of faith so much to Princes that subjects are forced to subscribe without being responsible for anything. It is up to these princes to answer to God for the falsity of dogmas, if there are any.’5 Two years later, Locke transcribed a second passage characterizing Hobbes, not dissimilar from Huber’s: Hobbes tried to put morality in a geometric order and to establish the hypothesis of Epicurus, who laid down for the principles of societies selfpreservation and utility. Indeed the principal purpose of Hobbes was to extend the power of kings over the temporal and over the spiritual against the seditious and the fanatical, which made him say things that would not accord with the peace of civil society nor with the Christian religion.6

This passage dates to 1686 and was transcribed from Le Clerc’s Bibliothèque Universelle et Historique, which in turn had excerpted it from Samuel Pufendorf’s Eris Scandica.7 (Locke omitted the detail that at court Hobbes had been treated as ‘Ours pour exercer les Dogues au combat’.8) Locke presumably found these characterizations apposite. During the very years when he composed the Epistola, on separate occasions, his notebooks memorialized continental critiques of Hobbes as a politique Erastian. A few years later, he would have encountered further continental discourse construing Hobbes in this manner in the Traité de la Liberté de Conscience, ou de L’Authorité des Souveraigns sur la Religion des Peuples oppose aux Maximes Impies de Hobbes et de Spinosa by the idiosyncratic 4 6 7 8

Ibid., 152–4. 5 Ibid., 156–7. MS Locke c. 33, f. 29v. Reading notes beginning in the 1670s but extending into the 1680s. Pufendorf, Eris Scandica, qua Adversus Libros de Jure Naturali et Gentium objecta diluunter (1686). This contained Pufendorf’s De Origine et Progressu Disciplinae Juris Naturalis (1677). Bibliothèque universelle et historique de l’année MCLXXXVI (1686), 3:493–4.

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French tolerationist Noël Aubert de Versé (whom Locke may have met during his Dutch exile).9 Here Hobbes and Spinoza were condemned for the ‘absurd’ belief that all ‘words and actions’ informed by conscience ‘reverted to’ the authority of sovereigns. They had seized from God the ‘L’empire de la conscience’.10 (In his copy of this work, Locke inscribed the single word ‘Toleration’, suggesting the verbal redescription that in his own writing had rendered tolerantia – once an act of mere prudence – newly synonymous with ‘liberty of conscience’.11) Hobbes, in these readings, was hostile to both conscientious religious exercise and autonomous ecclesial authority. Continental readers, working from Hobbes’s major texts alone (often just De Cive), were unfamiliar with Hobbes’s domestic context and his minor Restoration writings. They often knew nothing of his endorsement of Independency, which had been expunged from the Latin Leviathan. They tended to miss or minimize Hobbes’s case for prudential toleration as a governing strategy. As he consistently demonstrated, Locke was primarily interested in Hobbes as a theorist of spiritual sovereignty. And by the 1680s, he had fallen fully out of sympathy with the immoderate spiritual ‘power of kings’, whether deployed to enforce confessional uniformity or establish indulgence. Goaded by churchmen, as much as he was encouraged by dissent, Locke abandoned the Hobbesian politique in stages. The Epistola de Tolerantia emerged from this divergence. However, the Epistola contained an important limitation: a refusal to tolerate Catholicism. Anti-Catholicism was a constant feature of the polemical context that nurtured Locke’s mature tolerationism. His own anti-Catholicism arose from two springs: polemical Protestantism and the jus naturalist tradition, with its pronounced Erastian tendencies. Locke confronted the Catholic question in all of his toleration writings. His refusal to adapt his initial position remained an important limitation, one often minimized in later theoretical appropriations of his thought. The modern liberal tradition has generally adopted a common line on the question of Locke and Catholicism. This is found, for instance, in the writings of John Rawls. In his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy and in Political Liberalism, Rawls traced liberalism to the Reformation and the wars of religion, which brought on the ‘reluctant acceptance of the principle of toleration and liberty of conscience’.12 The Reformation (along with the modern state and science) overthrew the old order of Christendom, which 9 10 11 12

Marshall, Locke, Tolertation, 495. Aubert de Versé, Traité de la Liberté de Conscience, 55–6. Bodl. Locke 6.98, inside front cover. Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, 10–1; Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxiv.

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Rawls associated with ‘authoritarian’ Catholicism and an expansionist ‘religion of priests’.13 The Reformation and religious wars, by introducing moral disagreement, created the conditions for modern politics.14 This inadequate characterization of the Christian past ignores the medieval origins of core Rawlsian conceptions, such as individual equality, the rule of law, and secularism itself.15 It has been influential, however, and is not without interest when read in light of the themes of this book. Rawlsian liberalism is not a perfectionist project but instead seeks an impartial stability amid ‘reasonable pluralism’, an overlapping consensus upholding a purely political understanding of justice. On this point, Rawls favoured Locke as a historical exemplar. Locke’s tolerationism offered something more than a mere modus vivendi but less than a perfectionist ‘Enlightenment liberalism’. Rawlsianism forbids only those comprehensive doctrines considered ‘unreasonable and irrational, and even mad’.16 Rawls conceded that Locke’s ‘liberalism’ qualified as a comprehensive doctrine, a ‘religious doctrine’ that on its own terms secured toleration and individual liberty. It served, however, as the paradigm of the ‘reasonable’ comprehensive view – capable of joining the ‘overlapping consensus’ essential to political liberalism. Defending this proposition, Rawls observed that Locke’s Letter asserted human equality, individual interest in one’s own salvation, the futility of coerced belief, voluntary religious societies, and the claim that ‘only faith and inward sincerity gain our salvation and acceptance with God’.17 Locke’s rational Christianity thus served as Rawls’s exemplary ‘reasonable’ comprehensive doctrine. Catholicism served as its opposite, and Rawls essentially defended Locke’s intolerance of Catholicism. In a Theory of Justice, Rawls advocated free religious belief and worship, ‘although these may be regulated as always by the state’s interest in public order and security’. He disavowed ‘the omnicompetent laicist state’ but did empower states to ‘restrain liberty of conscience at the boundary’. Public order and the protection of basic rights could justify the coercion of voluntary religious societies. Toleration was certainly not a matter of mere ‘practical necessities or reasons of state’. Rawls held that Locke (and Rousseau) restricted Catholicism only to protect public order. ‘If Catholics and atheists were not to be tolerated it was because it seemed evident that such persons could not be relied upon to observe the bonds of civil society.’18 13 15 16 18

Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxii–xxxiii. 14 Ibid., xxiv–xxv, xviii. Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism; Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xvii, xviii, xxxviii. 17 Ibid., 145. Rawls, Theory of Justice, Revised edition, 189–90.

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Rawls thus echoed Locke’s own account of acceptable religious coercion. Deferring to Locke’s own self-apologias on the point is, indeed, a pervasive habit among modern commentators. James Tully, for instance, writes that Locke’s intolerance of Catholics reflected the ‘calculus of interest and duty, not prejudice’.19 Rainer Forst agrees that Locke offered ‘political rather than religious’ grounds for rejecting the toleration of Roman Catholics.20 One could multiply such examples endlessly.21 This line, indeed, is adopted even in the preeminent scholarship of J.R. and Philip Milton, where Locke’s non-toleration is presented as ‘essentially political’, having nothing ‘to do with the content of Catholic worship or theology’.22 Locke’s own account of reasonable and unreasonable modes of Christianity has become a commonplace in both history and theory. This chapter seeks to challenge this conventional wisdom. Contemporary polemics over toleration for Catholicism were yet another context in which Locke encountered contemporary constructions of Hobbism.

Locke and the Catholic Question If Locke’s general understanding of toleration evolved across his career, his views on the toleration due Roman Catholicism remained consistent. In 1659, responding to Henry Stubbe, he wrote: ‘The only scruple I have is how the liberty you grant the Papists can consist with the security of the Nation (the end of government) since I cannot see how they can at the same time obey two different authoritys carrying on contrary interest.’ Their church interest was ‘backd with an opinion of infalibility and holinesse’. It was not ‘limitted by any contract’ and thus ‘under pretence of spirituall jurisdiction’ could ‘hooke in all secular affairs’. Locke doubted, furthermore what security you can take of their fidelity and obedience from all their oaths and protestation, when that other soverainty they pay homage to is acknowledgd by them to be owner of a power that can acquitt them of all perfidy and perjury, and that will be ready to pardon and court them to it with dispensations and rewards.23

Stubbe had advocated toleration for English Catholics who ‘adhere to the doctrine of Widdrington, or Preston, and Blackwel, etc., denying the 19 20 21 22 23

Tully, Introduction to Locke, Letter, 8. Forst, ‘Pierre Bayle’s Reflexive Theory of Toleration’, 91, 103. Berkowitz, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 94–6; Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, 254; Stanton, ‘Locke and the Politics and Theology of Toleration’, 91–2. Milton’s, Introduction to EcT, 40; Jolley, Toleration and Understanding, 31. Locke to Henry Stubbe, September 1659, CL, 1:111.

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Pope’s power any way in Temporals, to depose Magistrates, to dispose of lands, or the civil obedience of subjects’. Stubbe quoted an Elizabethan declaration of Catholics eschewing papal conspiracy and avowing allegiance to the monarchy. A ‘like declaration’, he wrote, might relieve Catholics ‘according to the conveniency of the Republique’.24 The specifics of Stubbe’s case will prove significant, but Locke was unmoved. Locke’s initial foray into the subject had an Interregnum context (as we shall see), but it remained relevant after the Restoration. The Stuart Indulgences succoured Catholic dissent as well as Protestant, a fact which complicated their political fortunes. Locke’s ‘Essay concerning Toleration’ treated Catholic toleration as a central concern. Indeed, if the compelling reconstruction of Walmsley and Waldmann is correct, Locke’s manuscript ‘Reasons for tolerateing Papists equally with others’ was the original seed of the ‘Essay’.25 As we have seen, this manuscript considered – only to dismiss – the Indulgence of English Catholics. This conclusion would in turn inform the fuller ‘Essay’. Of the toleration due speculative opinions and manners of worship, Locke wrote in an early draft of the ‘Essay’, ‘to both these papists and all mankind seem to have a title’.26 This language suggests that the draft was an effort to gauge how far general principles of free conscience might apply to Catholics.27 Despite his initial concession, Locke’s first draft of the ‘Essay’ nevertheless disallowed toleration for Catholics. Individuals sacrificed their right to toleration when they sought to ‘compell others to their opinion’. Catholics, moreover, refused to keep faith with heretics and advanced religious opinions ‘destructive to any government but the popes’. Locke proposed expedients to reduce Catholic numbers. Whether ‘tolerated or persecuted’, they would endanger the state.28 The expanded ‘Essay’ was less singularly focused on Catholicism. Among tolerable speculative opinions, Locke included purgatory and transubstantiation, and among tolerable worship practices, the ‘pompous ceremonies of the papists’.29 But Locke vitiated these concessions. Individuals often ‘mix with their religious worship, & speculative opinions, other doctrine absolutely destructive to the society wherein they live, as is evident in the Roman 24 25 26

27 29

Stubbe, Essay in Defence, 132–40. Waldmann and Walmsley, ‘John Locke and the Toleration of Catholics: A New Manuscript’, forthcoming. Mentions of ‘papists’ are underscored in the manuscript. J.R. and Philip Milton treat these as deletions (recording the passages in the notes), but the underscoring may have been for emphasis. EcT, 303n, 306n. 28 Huntington MS 584, first draft. Idem. Huntington HM 584, ff. iv, 2; EcT, 271, 274.

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Catholicks that are subjects of any prince but the Pope’. Toleration was impossible in such cases unless the sovereign could be assured ‘that he can allow one part, without the spreading of the other, and that the propagation of these dangerous opinions may be separated from their religious worship, which I suppose is very hard to be donne’.30 The earlier ‘Reasons for Tolerateing Papists’ had anticipated this point.31 Papists, Locke wrote, also ‘thinke themselves bound to deny [toleration] to others’. Toleration was intended for the quiet of the people, and it was thus unreasonable to tolerate those who believed indulgence to be ‘unlawful’. Neither indulgence nor severity could make Papists whilst Papists freinds to your government being enemys to it both in their principles and interest, and therefor considering them as irreconcileable enemys of whose fidelity you can never be securd, whilst they owe a blind obedience to an infallible pope, who has the keys of their consciences tied to his girdle, and can upon occasion dispense with all their oaths promises and the oblligations they have to their prince espetially being an heritick & arme them to the disturbance of the government, I think they ought not to enjoy the benefit of toleration.

Locke conceded that persecution usually triggered compassion but felt that Catholics were ‘lesse apt to be pittyed’. The severities they suffered were widely thought ‘just punishments due to them as enemys to the state rather then persecutions of conscientious men for their religion, which indeed it is not’. Catholics were not persecuted for conscience but as ‘subjects of a foraigne & enemy Prince’.32 Catholic doctrines, he elaborated, were unattractive to free minds. Dissenters naturally preferred ‘liberty and enthusiasm, wherein they are still free and at their own disposal’, and thus they usually spurned the impositions that typified Catholicism. Tolerated Protestant dissenters would subdivide, but sheepish Catholics, preferring authority, would remain dangerously unified by the ‘art and industry of their clergy’. As an elite conspiracy, Catholicism was ‘the most likely of any religion to decay where the secular power handles them severely’.33 The frail Catholic psychology was easily plied.34 Even if the coercion of Catholics failed to lessen their numbers, it would strengthen the unity of Protestants. ‘For the 30 31 32 33 34

Huntington HM 584, f. 13; EcT, 284–5. Greenfield Library, St John’s College, BR1610.L8232, f. 3r. Huntington HM 584, ff. 19–20; EcT, 290–1. Huntington, HM 584, f. 21; EcT, 291–2; see also ‘Reasons for tolerateing Papists equally with others’. Greenfield Library, St John’s College, BR1610.L8232, f. 2r–2v. Locke’s papers contain several manuscripts exploring this topic as it related to Infallibility. TNA, PRO 30/24/47/33; MS Locke c. 27, ff. 32–3; PE, 204–8; EcT, 404–7.

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interest of the King of England as head of the Protestants will be much improved by the discountenancing of popery amongst us.’ Protestant unity would serve royal power. According to the ‘Essay’, civil religious considerations thus weighed in favour of coercing Catholics. Locke’s Epistola was less explicit on the question. ‘Popery’ prowled behind its condemnations of intolerance, religious coercion, and clericalism, but often implicitly. Locke did mention Catholicism alongside Socinianism and Lutheranism as religions that might be doubted or believed on equal terms. He again identified transubstantiation as a ‘speculative opinion’ (albeit ‘false and absurd’) meriting toleration. ‘If a Papist believes that what another man calls bread is really the body of Christ, he does no injury to his neighbour.’35 Nor did Locke believe that idolatry, a particularly Roman vice, justified religious coercion.36 However, Locke wrote: A more secret evil, but one even more dangerous to the commonwealth, is when men arrogate to themselves, and to those of their own sect, some peculiar prerogative, contrary to civil right, though concealed in specious words designed to throw dust in people’s eyes. You will scarcely anywhere find men who teach, baldly and openly, that faith need not be kept, that a prince may be turned off his throne by any sect, or that the dominion of all things belongs only to themselves. For these notions, thus nakedly and openly proposed, would immediately attract the magistrate’s attention, and awaken the eyes of the commonwealth to watchfulness to prevent this evil lurking in its bosom from spreading abroad. Nevertheless we find people saying the same thing in other words. For what else do they mean, who teach that faith need not be kept with heretics? . . . What is the effect of asserting that kings excommunicated forfeit their kingdoms, if not that they arrogate to themselves the power of deposing kings, since they claim the exclusive right of excommunication for their hierarchy? That dominion is founded in grace is an assertion ultimately implying that those who maintain it lay claim to the possession of all things, for they will not be so modest as to refuse to believe, or at least to profess, that they are themselves the truly pious and faithful. These therefore, and the like, who attribute to the faithful, religious, and orthodox, that is to themselves, any privilege or power above other mortals, in civil affairs; or who on the plea of religion claim any authority over men who do not belong to their ecclesiastical communion, or who are in any way separated from it – these have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate: as neither have those who refuse to teach that dissenters from their own religion should be tolerated.37

Furthermore, a church can ‘have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate which is so constituted that all who enter it ipso facto pass into the allegiance and service of another prince’. Locke elaborated: 35

Epistola, 97, 121.

36

Ibid., 115.

37

Ibid., 130–3.

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Nor does the useless and fallacious distinction between the court and the church [futilis illa et fallax inter aulam et ecclesiam distinctio] afford any remedy against this evil; since both are equally subject to the absolute authority of the same person, who can not only persuade the members of his church to accept whatever he pleases, either as something spiritual itself, or as something concerned with spiritual matters, but can also enjoin it on pain of eternal fire. It is absurd for anyone to call himself a Mahometan in religion only, and otherwise the faithful subject of a Christian magistrate, if he admits that he owes blind obedience to the Mufti of Constantinople, who himself is entirely subservient to the Ottoman Emperor, and frames the feigned oracles of his religion according to his pleasure. But this Turk among Christians would even more obviously repudiate Christian government if he acknowledged the same person to be the head of his church and also the supreme magistrate.38

This passage constituted a coded critique of Catholicism.39 We will consider the phrase ‘court and church’ below, but Locke’s use of the ‘Mufti’ allegory was also telling. The rhetorical figuring of the Pope as a Mufti was exceedingly common in contemporary polemic. Henry Hammond, for instance, characterized any claim on doctrinal infallibility by invoking ‘the Pope or the Mufti’. The ‘Turkes Mufti’, wrote Matthew Sutcliffe, against the Jesuit Robert Parsons, ‘is as good a Bishop as the Pope’. Gilbert Burnet used the device.40 In 1689, Peter Belon produced an entire novel using the main Muslim sects as allegories for Protestantism and Catholicism. James II’s Jesuit confessor, Father Edward Petre, was cast as the Mufti.41 In the midst of the Popish Plot, verses inveighed against the sleepless machinations of ‘Rome’s mighty Mufti’.42 The device was pervasive. Locke’s concessions to Catholicism were less than met the eye. To permit ‘speculative opinions’ such as transubstantiation was to concede no more than Hobbes had. Catholics were permitted to believe and perhaps voice their ‘absurd’ opinions, but this was a very spare freedom. The major fault-lines of confessional co-existence in early modern Europe were communal forms of public religious practice. Locke knew this very well; his letters from Cleves and his French journals regularly detail religious processions and other forms of public worship.43 The Epistola 38 39 40

41 43

Epistola, 132–5. Again, pace Waldron, God, Locke, Equality, 221; but see Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, 99. Works of the Reverend and Learned Henry Hammond, 4:481; Sutcliffe, Subversion of Robert Parsons, 56; Burnet, Discourse concerning Transubstantiation and Idolatry, 22; also Tryon, Way to Health, Long Life, and Happiness, 279; Barrow, Treatise of the Pope’s Supremacy, 274. Belon, The Court Secret: A Novel. 42 Babel and Bethel, or the Pope in his Colours. See, among many examples, his description of the procession of the host in 25 May/4 June 1676. MS Locke, f. 1, p. 275; on religion and public space, see Kaplan, Divided by Faith.

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skirted this problem. Would Locke have allowed a Catholic to teach transubstantiation at Oxford or Catholics to publicly process with the Eucharistic host through an English town? Would he have permitted Catholic churches to bear outward markings, or would he have required them to remain clandestine, in the Dutch manner? The Epistola is generally silent on such matters, but discussing the equal right to religious ‘assemblies, solemn meetings, celebrations of feast days, sermons, and public worship’, Locke did not include Catholics alongside ‘Remonstrants, Antiremonstrants, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Socinians’, Muslims, Jews, and even pagans. Catholics were a glaring absence from this list.44 Even more doubtful is the possibility that Locke would have allowed Catholics full access to civil office. In the ‘Essay’, he explicitly denied them a right to personal arms. But Locke’s chief argument for coercion was his claim that all Catholics were implicated in the menace of popery. He sustained this by depicting Catholicism as irrational, produced by a clerical conspiracy against the simple-minded. Effectively, Catholic believers were not reasonable political subjects capable of contract, and Catholic clergy were little more than seditious conspirators.45 By delineating Roman Catholicism with the rhetoric of conspiracy and deception, Locke sabotaged its claim to equal treatment. Locke confronted English Catholics with a liar’s paradox. He condemned them for holding that faith need not be kept with heretical subjects or sovereigns. This doctrine, however, rendered suspect any explicit repudiation of the same. Locke often presented this conclusion as a straightforward application of contract theory, but there are reasons to doubt the full cogency of that presentation.

Idolatry and Conspiracy: The Context of the 1670s and 1680s The circumstances of the later Restoration forced the ‘Catholic question’ to the political forefront. Exercised about the ‘growth of popery’ after the failed Indulgence of 1672, the Commons urged a crack-down.46 In March, the first Test Act passed. This required office holders to swear, in open court, the Jacobean Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy; to offer annual, third-party evidence of receiving the sacrament in the English church; and to publicly avow: ‘I, A.B., do declare that I do believe that there is not any 44 45 46

Epistola, 142–5. They lacked the agency ‘to be held responsible’ according to ‘shared moral understandings’. Kelly, Propriety of Liberty: Persons, Passions, and Judgement in Modern Political Thought, 11–13. Grey’s Debates, vol. 2, 3 March 1673.

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transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, or in the elements of bread and wine, at or after the consecration thereof by any person whatsoever.’47 Violating the Test Act deprived subjects of office, disabled them from lawsuits, disallowed them as guardians or executors, and incurred a heavy fine. Regarding the Eucharistic requirement, some bishops objected to making a civil test of the sacrament.48 Attorney General Finch argued that the Oaths of Allegiance would prove acceptable to some Catholics but that the sacramental test would ‘cut off many hands from your service’. A few MPs worried about ‘exposing holy things in this manner’, but the hard-line position prevailed.49 Even more remarkable was the declaration against transubstantiation. The Test certainly did not respect the distinctive status of Locke’s mere ‘speculative opinions’. The Test disabled Lord Clifford, the treasurer, and the Duke of York, who resigned as Lord Admiral. While Clifford lividly denounced the Test in the Lords, Shaftesbury, as Chancellor, ensured its passage.50 York’s betrothal to the Catholic princess Mary of Modena in the summer of 1673, which threatened to found a Catholic dynasty, inflamed matters further. The Commons petitioned the King to prevent the marriage’s consummation.51 Trying to break the fever, the Privy Council ordered stricter enforcement of the penal laws even after the parliamentary session of 1673 ended in disarray.52 Danby, once in office, was moved by both confessional and fiscal considerations to squeeze the Catholics. Charles mothballed indulgence and ended the Dutch war, but nothing fully allayed suspicions of the ‘darke and mysterious Contrivances of a small Popish Caball’.53 From the mid-1670s, the succession question dominated. Some favoured the King’s divorce and remarriage, or legitimating the Duke of Monmouth. Raved one observer: ‘Now is the critical time. Either we shall by God’s assistance subdue the Papacy or that will ruin us. They have hundreds of thousands of priests and Jesuits to assault us boldly from head to foot.’54 The dissenter Timothy Taylor predicted Jesuits making the ‘London streets run with Hugonots blood’.55 Shaftesbury, now out of favour, pounced. During a 1674 effort to 47 48 50 51 52 53 54

‘An Act for Preventing Dangers which may happen from Popish recusants’, Stuart Constitution, 461–2. Miller, Charles II, 202. 49 Speech of John Duncombe, Grey’s Debates, vol. 2, 3 March 1673. Miller, Charles II, 203; ODNB. N. Armorer to Williamson, 30 October 1673, TNA, SP 29/337, f. 224. Proclamation of 20 November 1673, SP 46/131 f. 28; Charles II to the Scottish Privy Council, 22 December 1673, TNA, SP, Scottish Warrant Book 2, 370. See the paranoid manuscript ‘Verbum Sapienti’ (1674), which blasted Arlington, Lauderdale, Buckingham, and York. SP 29/360, ff. 219–22. TNA, SP 29/370, f. 56. 55 Beinecke, Osborn MS, fb161, 287.

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oust York’s client, Samuel Pepys from the Commons, the earl peddled rumours that Pepys was a secret Catholic. Shaftesbury was alive to the political uses of fear.56 Locke departed this fevered atmosphere for France in 1675. There, amid the failures of the Bourbon’s politique toleration, his suspicions of popery received ample reinforcement. On a visit to Port de Cette, for instance, Locke complained of a sermon that ‘bid us to cheat the Hugenots’ with the dicta Nulla fides servanda cum Hereticis, nisi satis validi sunt ad se defendos.57 In the summer of 1676, he refreshed his memory of the Gunpowder Plot, by way of Father Bartoli’s 1667 history of the English Jesuits.58 He received regular letters about the escalating threat of Stuart Catholicism, which throughout his life he would associate with the ‘counsels and pattern of the French King’.59 A Carthusian monk in Avignon asked him whether, when the English ‘came to be papists’, monastic lands would be restored. Locke dryly conceded the point.60 The spiritual practices of Catholicism, and not just its political sins, captivated Locke. His diary recorded episodes of ‘superstition’ and ‘idolatry’ with such regularity that the impression is of potential notes for a never-composed tract. He recorded statuary of God the Father as an ‘old man sitting’, ‘with a globe in his hand’. (Graven images ‘forbidden by scripture’ and artistic taste alike.)61 He visited, and caustically documented, relics: at St. Baum, the supposed lodgings of Mary Magdalen; and at Toulouse, the bodies of six apostles and the head of a seventh. In April of 1676, Locke admired a ‘heretic’ who infuriated the local priest by refusing to kiss the arm of St. Martha. He recounted the bowing and crossing of visitors to relics, the pompous grandeur of their display, and the vainglory of their clerical custodians.62 Locke’s interest in the veneration of images and relics was vaguely obsessive. Such practices were partly the product of mere ‘speculative opinions’, but they potentially tipped into idolatry, a subject Locke explored through Edward Stillingfleet’s Defense of the Discourse concerning the Idolatry Practiced in the Church of Rome.63 (Stillingfleet’s Defense was 56 57 58 59 61 62 63

CJ, 13 February 1674, vol. 9, 308–9; Overbury to Williamson, 13 February 1674, TNA, 29/360/ f. 291. 15/25 January 1676, MS Locke, f. 1, p. 46. 29 May/8 June 1676, MS Locke f. 1, p. 277; notes on D. Bartoli, author of Dell’ Istoria della Compagnia di Giesu I’Inghilterra (Rome, 1667). MS Locke e. 18, pg. 2. 60 12/22 April 1676, MS Locke f. 1, p. 226. 27 March/6 April 1676, MS Locke f. 1, pp. 181–2; 8 March 1677, MS Locke f. 2, pp. 76–7. 6/16 April 1676, MS Locke f. 1, pp. 210–12; 20/30 March 1677, MS Locke f. 2, pp. 93–4; 13/ 23 April 1676, Locke f. 1, pp. 221–24; Locke’s Travels in France, 67–70, 138–9, 87–8. Locke requested that Stillingfleet’s book be sent in the spring of 1676. Thomas Stringer to Locke, 5 June 1676, CL, 1:447; 9 March 1681, MS Locke f. 5, p. 23.

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written to refute the prominent English Catholic controversialist Thomas Tylden, a.k.a Thomas Godden.64) Locke’s notes defined idolatry very broadly, as ‘performing outward worship, i.e., bowing, kneeling, prostrating, or praying, &c, before an image’ in a context where ‘divine worship’ would be presumed by third parties.65 That idolatry should be outlawed was a common contemporary argument against Catholics. Locke’s published writings do not adopt this line, but his notes from France seemingly did. He wrote that ‘if idolatry were nothing but terminating our worship, i.e. thought, on something that is not God, I do not see how there could be a law to punish idolaters, seeing their thought cannot be known’. However, the veneration of images was not an inward but a public act, susceptible to prohibition.66 In a note dated 1679, Locke wrote that ‘terminating the worship of the minde on an Idol’ could not be outlawed but ‘performeing outward acts of worship before an Idol’ could be.67 This fundamentally Hobbesian distinction between private belief and public worship limited the freedom Locke afforded Catholic ‘speculative opinions’ where they informed practice. Locke did not publicize this argument in print, but he accepted it as late as 1679. His journals, furthermore, consistently treated relics as occasions for clerical trickery and power. Locke commonly presented, in juxtaposition, wealthy and cynical clergy against poor, prostrated, and barefooted worshippers.68 He was fascinated by the tight monastic control of what he considered lucrative frauds. Idolatry was not simply produced by honestly misguided conscience but was an instrument to control the ignorant. Given the ‘grossness of men’s apprehensions, especially the ignorant part of mankind’, the vulgar were readily lured to the worship of ‘sensible objects’. Catholic catechisms thus adulterated the Ten Commandments, omitting the second commandment against graven images and dividing the tenth into two.69 In this way were Catholic ‘understandings’ corrupted. In private writings, Locke construed transubstantiation similarly, as a doctrine so inherently irrational that it relied on malicious indoctrination. In print he accepted transubstantiation as a tolerable, if absurd, speculative opinion. Privately, he took a different line. In a short essay on faith and reason, Locke denied that states could arbitrate doctrinal 64 65 66 68 69

Godden, Catholicks no Idolaters. Or a Full Refutation of Doctor Stillingfleets unjust Charge of Idolatry, epistle. 5/15 July and 10/20 July 1676, MS Locke f. 1, pp. 320–5, 354–5. Locke, ‘Idolatry’, in ELN, 261. 67 1679, MS Locke d. 1, p. 81; EcT, 387. 27 March/6 April 1676, MS Locke f. 1, pp. 181–2. Locke, ‘Idolatry’, in ELN, 262; Stillingfleet, Defence of the Discourse, 403–5, 429, 497.

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questions. But he offered a thought experiment in which dissenters were ‘out of their wits’ or in a ‘delirium’. Locke felt that ‘perfect innocents, only a little crazed’ could be left alone, since ‘though their brains are a little out of order, their hands work well enough’. But those whose madness ‘had a tendency to rage’ would require surveillance and counter-measures.70 Some ‘fancies and natural superstitions’ were ‘irrational’, believed only by those ‘more senseless than beasts themselves’. Locke pointed to the doctrine of transubstantiation, ‘guarded by the Church of Rome’. It was rational to interpret the words of the Last Supper in a ‘figurative sense’. A literal interpretation of hoc est corpus meum, however, left ‘no foundation of knowledge, certainty, or faith at all’. Thus, Locke concluded, transubstantiation was ‘not a matter of faith but of philosophy. It is a thing we exercise our senses and knowledge on and not our faith, and so clear that there is not room to doubt.’ The ‘simple idea’ of bread could not become the ‘substance of flesh’. Only ‘custom and the terrible name of heresy’ prevented men ‘from regarding their own ideas’ on the matter. Transubstantiation was a philosophical mistake – or, like relics, a fraud. ‘He that would have me assent to what is contrary to what I see desires what is altogether unreasonable and impossible.’71 The passage suggested that transubstantiation was one of those rare doctrines that could be definitively banned. Utterly irrational, it was not ‘innocent’ or consensual but was promoted with fear and force. Locke here echoed Andrew Marvell, who understood priestcraft as theological, not simply jurisdictional. And ‘above all their other devices’, wrote Marvell, was ‘that Transubstantiall solacisme, whereby that glorified Body, which at the same time they allow to be in Heaven, is sold again and crucifyed daily upon all the Altars of their Communion’.72 Likewise George Care, in a work that Locke owned, viewed transubstantiation as particularly intolerable because it was ‘grosly against the common Light of Reason and Sense itself’.73 The Test Act’s declaration against transubstantiation was admissible according to this logic. It did not target honest error but dangerous intellectual subservience. It coerced only madmen. That Locke eventually rejected this logic is undoubtedly significant. Perhaps, with time, he came to accept that Catholics ‘consented’ to belief in transubstantiation or that the belief (however absurd) was not destabilizing. But he never explained the reversal, and it may be that his softer line 70 71 73

13/23 August 1676, MS Locke f. 1, p. 412; ELN, 274–5. 18/28 August 1676, MS Locke f. 1, pp. 418–29; ELN, 277–80. Care, Liberty of Conscience Asserted and Vindicated, 2; LL, 2952.

72

Marvell, Growth of Popery, 7.

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in the Epistola was merely politic. In the Essay concerning Human Understanding, discussing ‘wrong assent or errour’, he likely had transubstantiation partly in mind when he regretted that ‘men will disbelieve their own Eyes, renounce the Evidence of their Senses, and give their own Experience the lye, rather than admit of anything disagreeing with these sacred Tenets’.74 There is a telling moment in Locke’s 1690 paper on the divisions opened up by the Revolution of 1688, when Locke begins to observe that James II had surrendered ‘three crowns for his conscience’. Having written this, Locke scored through the final word and replaced it with ‘his blinde obedience to those guides of his conscience’, the Jesuits.75 In the cases of transubstantiation and relics, Locke’s political critique of Catholicism implicated worship practices and speculative opinion. By presenting these as delusions propagated by force and fraud, Locke cast the Catholic clergy as seditious conspirators and Catholic believers as incapable of rational social behaviour.76 His private manuscripts reveal how readily, in his evaluation of Catholicism, the doctrinal could become the political. This certainly occurred in one of Locke’s most untenable compositions: an intentional textual adulteration embedded within his translation of three of Pierre Nicole’s Essais. The translations date from approximately 1676.77 In the second, on the ‘weakness of man’, Nicole had condemned Protestants for meddling with venerable theological mysteries. Locke’s manipulation of this passage precisely reversed its meaning. On the enforcement of doctrinal uniformity, Locke wrote: And yet the supports of an old usurpation perswade the world, that there is noething in all this, which exceeds their power, To which they have by force compeld soe many hundred milions to submit, & have severly handled multitudes . . . And the hierarchy of Rome having found the sweet of dominion over mens consciences, & considered it as an advantage too great to be parted with, hath always thunderd against those, that asserting their just right, have withdrawn from that slavery; and under the name of heriticks, hath treated them as rebels. This monstrous presumption (in those who are really perswaded of such a power amongst them) is the product of humane weakeness & arises only from that, that man is soe far removd from an acquaintance with truth, that he knows not the markes, & signes of it.78 74 75 76 77 78

EcHU IV:20:10. With Catholics it was always the ‘dull head of followers’ which were ‘bought and sold’. MS Locke e. 18, pp. 2–3. In Halifax’s Anatomy of an Equivalent (1688) Catholics are presented as ‘minors’ incapable of contract. Works of Savile, 1:273–5. John Locke as Translator: Three of the Essais of Pierre Nicole in French and English, 7. Ibid., 82–5.

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Here again, Locke presented theological ‘error’ as an intentional act of mental domination and – as Hobbes had – heresy hunting as a clerical power play. Locke confessed to changing the ‘scheme of the [Nicole’s] discourse’ in an effort to ‘do good to my country’ and ‘advance truth’.79 Locke’s journey to Cleves had produced fairly superficial commentary on Catholicism. His years in France proved more consequential. The behaviour of a Catholic majority favoured by sovereignty diminished his confidence in politique toleration. His fear of Catholicism as a seedbed of sedition was nourished. His understanding of Catholic religious practices as irreligious and conspiratorial hardened. Even as these opinions developed in his private writings, their potential relevance within England pressed upon him.80 On 28 September 1678, Titus Oates appeared before the Privy Council. A failed Cambridge student and former Catholic seminarian, Oates was prodigiously mendacious. With his fellow seminarian, William Bedloe, and an unhinged radical preacher named Israel Tongue, Oates unleashed a fantastical conspiracy. Oates had been expelled from the Jesuit seminary of St Omer in June. In revenge, he now asserted a Jesuit plot to murder the King and raise a rebellion of Catholics.81 Initially rebuffed by Danby, Oates appeared before the Westminster magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, and then the council.82 The King disbelieved him,83 but the council could not afford to disregard him. Danby was deputized to investigate. In October, Oates appeared before a House of Commons primed to receive his allegations in a righteous fury. Over York’s objections, the King allowed a parliamentary investigation.84 Because Oates implicated members of parliament, a second Test Act was rushed into law, applying the Test to both houses (excepting only York). Sacramental and doctrinal tests were thus incorporated into the constitutional structure itself, where they would remain for a century and a half.85 The Plot triggered tighter enforcement of the penal laws, banishment of Catholics from court, their disarmament, the recall of seminarians, and an unknown number of arrests. More than thirty Catholics were executed during the Plot. The Catholics, wrote one observer, ‘say that all is but 79 80 83 84 85

MS Locke c. 28, f. 42; Marshall charitably presents this as an ‘argument’ on Locke’s part. (Marshall, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 89–90). Marshall, Locke, Toleration, 28–54. 81 ODNB. 82 TNA, SP 29/409, ff. 3–9. Reresby, Memoirs, 160; ‘Journals of Sir Edmund Warcup’, 245. Danby, 2:89–90; CJ, 28 October 1678, vol. 9, 522–3. Morrice, Entring Book, 14 November 1678, 2:79; Earl of Orrery to Mallet, 26 October 1678, BL Add MS 32095, f. 127. A test against transubstantiation for new monarchs had been proposed in 1677 and was perhaps reconsidered in 1679. Morrice, Entring Book, 30 June 1679, 2:162.

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a contrivance to ruine them’, but they ‘must expect to suffer for this zealous, wicked humour of their priests’.86 Bedloe warned the Commons that ‘not a Papist of consideration’ was innocent of the Plot. Catholic militias reportedly drilled by night around the counties.87 Random murders were blamed on Catholics. Plot sceptics were ‘at best lookt upon as Popishly affected’.88 Fears, wrote one news intelligencer, ‘whether real or feigned, are grown so great, that they are become like a Torrent which none can withstand’.89 The Plot and subsequent Exclusion Crisis encouraged MPs to pursue legislative relief for Protestant nonconformists.90 But the crisis further discredited the politique strategy of pacifying recusants through indulgence. Danby would allege that the Duke of York’s ‘incessant agitation’ for the Indulgence of 1672 had been ‘designed only in behalfe of the papists, as my Lord Clifford confesst to mee’.91 This had been a general suspicion at the time. Indulgence was recalled as a ‘deep popish design’.92 The nonconformist Timothy Taylor characterized ‘liberty of conscience’ as a cause corruptly hijacked by court Catholics.93 Roger Coke would later cast the 1672 Declaration as part of a perceived Popish Plot.94 Witnesses accused the Jesuits of riling ‘disaffected Scotts’ to take ‘up the Sword for the Defence of Liberty of Conscience’.95 In Ireland too, Catholic plotters were supposedly motivated by the cause of ‘Religion and their Libertyes’.96 The very cause of the Plot was rumoured to be the ‘fatall revocacion of the Kings Declaration for liberty of Conscience’.97 Particularly in early depositions, indulgence and nonconformity were cast as (perhaps unwitting) agents of the Plot and the episcopal church as its target.98 This may have been a bid by Oates and the others to tempt Danby to make ideological use of the Plot. With the impeachment of Danby, Shaftesbury rose as the main stage manager of the Plot, and the prominence of indulgence diminished. Shaftesbury was not inclined to rake over the coals of 1672. Nevertheless, indulgence for Catholics was now thrown into a sinister light, a development which furthered suspicion of prerogative toleration as an absolutist instrument. ‘What they call Indulgence and 86 87 88 89 90 92 94 95 97

Francis Benson to Leoline Jenkins, 4 October 1678, Huntington MS 30315, unpaginated. Morrice, Entring Book, 18 November 1678, 2:80–1. Francis Benson to Leoline Jenkins, 15 November 1678, Huntington MS 30315, unpaginated. Francis Benson to Leoline Jenkins, 6 December 1678, Huntington MS 30315, unpaginated. Horwitz, ‘Protestant Reconciliation in the Exclusion Crisis’, 201–17. 91 Danby, 2:91. Diary of Alexander Brodie, 327; Lee, Cabal, 189. 93 Beinecke, Osborn MS, fb 161, 313, 380. BL Add. 69955, f. 4v; Diary and Papers of Dering, 125. Morrice, Entring Book, July–August 1678, 2:1, 8, 17–8. 96 Ibid., 1 February 1677, 2: 4–5. Ibid., 9 August 1678, 2:11. 98 Reresby, Memoirs, 154.

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Toleration’, wrote one observer, ‘is indeed Rule and Dominion.’99 When Edward Coleman, a client of the Duke and Duchess of York, was spectacularly exposed for secret correspondence with the French court, his motive was supposedly the breaking of parliament because it was ‘too firm to the Church of England’. Coleman conceded that he had hoped for a new ‘toleration by which the Roman Catholicks would have recovered themselves’.100 The consequential campaign against indulgence surveyed in Chapter 3 was ideologically central to the polemical patterns of the Popish Plot. Oates gained a specious credibility through two historical accidents: the exposure of Coleman’s correspondence with France101 and the mysterious murder of Edmund Berry Godfrey on 17th October. The country was gripped by rumours of firings, murders, providential darkening of the noonday sky, and the avenging ghost of Godfrey appearing to terrify a mass in the Queen’s chapel.102 Charles tried to let the conflagration burn itself out. Coleman was sacrificially hanged, drawn, and quartered in late November. Trials continued into the spring and summer of 1679. Approximately three dozen innocent men, Catholic priests and several aristocrats, would be judicially murdered before the credibility of the Plot crumbled.103 Though the first victims were convicted of treason, later victims were often executed simply as Catholic priests.104 It was Locke’s moral luck to have been abroad when this inferno ignited. In late October, his idiosyncratic clerical associate Denis Grenville sent news of the ‘dismall relation of another Jesuiticall plot to kill our King . . . If this generation of vipers will not bee quiet; we will raise up againe Monsr. Pascall to Confound them.’105 The two men continued to correspond into the spring over the ‘Combustions which the Jesuite hath put our Church and Kingdome’.106 Other sources sent Locke further bits of news from England.107

99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107

Hancock, Popish Principles, 156. Francis Benson to Leoline Jenkins, 8 November 1678, Huntington MS 30315, unpaginated. Before this many ‘made light’ of Oates. Francis Benson to Leoline Jenkins, 8 October 1678, Huntington MS 30315, unpaginated. February 1679, Luttrell, Historical Relation, 1:8. The best narrative remains Kenyon, The Popish Plot. Francis Benson to Leoline Jenkins, 17 December 1678, Huntington MS 30315, unpaginated. Denis Grenville to Locke, 14/24 October 1678, CL, 1:618–9; Denis Grenville to Locke, 18/ 28 October 1678, CL, 1:620. Denis Grenville to Locke, 10/20 February 1679 and 22 March/1 April 1679, CL, 1:682, 698. George Walls and Nathaniel Hodges to Locke, 22 March 1679, CL, 1:699; Samuel Thomas to Locke, 4 January 1679, CL, 1:666–7.

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Locke returned to London on the 30th of April, with the Plot roaring. He re-ensconced himself with Shaftesbury.108 In 1677, the earl had been confined for contempt of parliament. Now however, Danby was himself in the tower, impeached for secret correspondence with Louis. Shaftesbury temporarily returned to power as Lord President of the Council. He was reportedly quite eager to grip the plot with both hands, with the end of excluding York from the succession.109 The original efforts to tie the plotters to the causes of indulgence and nonconformity faded away, and its late-breaking details began to implicate Danby, other courtiers, churchmen, and potentially York himself. Shaftesbury’s reported maxim was creative chaos: ‘Things must bee worse before they will bee better.’110 Wrote another observer of the earl: ‘I wish from my heart the designes of men might be as sincere and wellmeant as they are plausible.’111 Shaftesbury was very widely suspected of suborning perjury in order to breathe new life into the Popish Plot.112 At court, the ‘villainy of Lord Shaftesbury’ became an obsession.113 In October of 1679, he was dismissed from the Council, where his late presence had been an odious necessity. Shaftesbury felt himself confronting a treasonous court, but even these high stakes could not excuse his acting as the plot’s ‘impresario’.114 When Gilbert Burnet raised eyebrows at several plot witnesses, Shaftesbury reportedly insisted ‘that all those who undermined the credit of the witnesses were to be looked on as public enemies’.115 Shaftesbury was not alone in this. Halifax avowed that the plot ‘must be handled as if it were true, whether it were so or no, in those points which were so generally believed by city and country, as well as both houses’.116 Shaftesbury patronized perjurious witnesses, dangling pardons in exchange for fresh ‘informations’.117 He was a mainstay on every investigative commission in the Lords.118 His only qualms about the simultaneous execution of five Jesuits was that the ‘hanging of so many on one occasion’ would pacify the ‘popular mind’ and that ‘it would be impossible to stir it up again without a great expenditure of careful effort over a long period of 108 109 110 111 112 113 115 116 117

Marshall, Locke, Toleration, 40–54. Haley, Shaftesbury, 461; Danby to Latimer, 11 April 1679, Danby, 2:79. Danby to Bath, 3 June 1679, Danby, 2:85. Francis Benson to Leoline Jenkins, 15 November 1678, Huntington MS 30315, unpaginated. Prideaux to Ellis, 5 July 1681, BL Add MS 28929, f. 53. Danby to the King, 21 May 1682, Danby, 2:82–3. 114 Haley, Shaftesbury, 435–8. Burnet, History, 2:171–2. Memoirs of the Life, Works, and Correspondence of Sir William Temple, 2:49. Haley, Shaftesbury, 498. 118 April 1679, Luttrell, Historical Relation, 1:9.

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time’.119 He did not appreciate those with less fervour. The credit of the plot suffered in December of 1679, when Justice William Scroggs presided over the acquittal of George Wakeman, the Queen’s physician. When the earl publicly dined with other lords and the chief justice, he drank ‘plentifully’ and scandalously upbraided Scroggs.120 Amidst the anti-Catholic circus Shaftesbury did not forget his traditional political foes, the English bishops.121 Their discomfort was considerable. Henry Prideaux wrote from Oxford: ‘I give all for lost and none will suffer more in the ruin then we churchmen who are sure to be grinded wither Papist or Presbyterians prevail, and I know not which adversary most to fear.’122 Shaftesbury terrified the churchmen, particularly as the earl publicized their own alleged proximity to Rome. Rumours circulated that arms for rebellion had been walled up in the home of the Bishop of Winchester.123 During the dispute as to whether the bishops could participate in the trial of the five ‘popish Lords’, Shaftesbury produced a dubious witness to incriminate them. John Sidway claimed that the Bishop of Ely had discouraged him from leaving the Roman Church. Oates also incriminated the bishop.124 Three other bishops were allegedly prepared to assist the conversion of the kingdom. Over the objections of Shaftesbury and Halifax, the Lords eventually committed the ‘frivolous’ Sidway to the Gatehouse.125 As it unfolded, the Popish Plot could be turned either against the cause of indulgence or against the conformist churchmen. Locke bore no responsibility for the Earl of Shaftesbury’s demagoguery, but he did nothing apparent to bridle it, and the earl’s correspondence with him assumed fellow feeling. By the time Locke arrived in England, many who originally believed in the plot had developed doubts.126 Locke either had none or swallowed them. He certainly followed the wild pamphlet wars.127 It is unlikely that he still had full confidence in the details of the conspiracy in January of 1680, when he signed a monster petition to the 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

127

Haley, Shaftesbury, 541. August and December 1679, Luttrell, Historical Relation, 1:18–20, 29; Morrice, Entring Book, 4 December 1679, 2:209. Goldie, ‘Danby, the Bishops, and the Whigs’, 90, 97. Prideaux to Ellis, 13 January 1680, BL Add MS 28929, f. 41. Francis Benson to Leoline Jenkins, 6 December 1678, Huntington MS 30315, unpaginated. Reresby, Memoirs, 208–9. LJ, 5 and 7 August 1679, 13: 498–9, 500–2; Haley, Shaftesbury, 511–12; Morrice, Entring Book, 7 April 1679, 2:126. The credulity of Leoline Jenkin’s intelligencer began to falter when Oates targeted the Queen. Francis Benson to Leoline Jenkins, 26 November and 3 December 1678, Huntington MS 30315, unpaginated. John Hoskins to Locke, 5 February 1680, CL, 2:155; Thomas to Locke, 30 December 1680, CL, 2:337.

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King demanding a new parliament to expose the ‘Damnable and Hellish Popish Plot’.128 And Locke probably knew that Shaftesbury was suborning perjury to keep the plot boiling. After his dismissal from the Council, attempting to force another Exclusion parliament, Shaftesbury organized pamphlets, petitions, and ugly Pope-burnings spectacles.129 He appeared dramatically before the Privy Council and sprang revelations about a second wave ‘Popish Plot’ involving an Irish revolt, French invasion, and Protestant massacre.130 The far-fetched details were ‘revealed’ by renegades like the ex-Franciscan John Fitzgerald, who later claimed that Shaftesbury had procured his lies. Other ‘witnesses’ were rustled up by the earl’s Irish agents.131 The King saw through the entire affair. It refreshed Shaftesbury’s popularity with the London crowds but cost Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, his life.132 Shaftesbury and his servants, including Locke’s friend Thomas Stringer, collected ‘proofs’ of the Irish Plot. Locke’s own role has been debated, but he was certainly on conversational terms with some of the witnesses.133 David Thomas charted their comings and goings through Locke, and when he received some incriminating gossip against the Catholic Lord Arundell, he sent it to Locke for vetting.134 Locke’s proximity to Shaftesbury’s management of the Plot is relevant. Locke defended the penal laws against English Catholics based on the political dangers of popery. This position was not deflected by dramatic evidence that those purported political dangers were often the subject of cynical exaggeration and manipulation – manipulation that could enable both the religious persecution and judicial tyranny that Locke otherwise deplored. The behaviour of Shaftesbury, Halifax, and others during the Popish Plot represented the inverse of their politique tolerationism: an equally instrumental use of religion for political purposes, but now mobilized coercively, to mark insiders and outsiders and to strike at enemies. Locke betrayed no meaningful recognition of this development. 128

129 130 131 132 133 134

Huntington, HM 68, sheet 40. Knights, ‘John Locke, Algernon Sidney, and London’s ‘Monster’ Petition of 1680’, 94–111; on this campaign, see Prideaux to Ellis, 13 January 1680, BL Add MS 28929, f. 41. Marshall, Locke, Toleration, 37–8. Ibid., 38–40; memo dated 28 February 1680, BL Add MS 32095, f. 196. Haley, Shaftesbury, 569–71; ‘Journals of Warcup’, 248–50. For depositions see TNA, PRO 30/24/ 43/63. Essex knew that Plunkett was a patsy. Burnet, History, 2:291–2; Jones, First Whigs, 124–5. Kelly, ‘Locke and Molyneux: The Anataomy of a Friendship’, 38–54; Marshall, Locke, Toleration, 49n. David Thomas to Locke, 14 December 1680 and 21 December 1680, CL, 2:322–3, 326.

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Hobbism, Toleration, and Catholic Loyalism We do not know what Thomas Hobbes made of the spectacular panic that dominated his final year. For all of his raging at the dark arts of Rome, he never demonstrated much anxiety about English Catholicism. The coolness of his own religion and his lifelong proximity to aristocracy likely inhibited Protestant xenophobia. In Behemoth he rejected as a ‘slander’ the original ‘popish plot’ allegation: that the Caroline court had schemed to reconvert the kingdom in the 1630s.135 Hobbes certainly lashed out at Catholicism theoretically and historically, but he saved his domestic paranoias for the clear and present dangers of Presbyterianism and English episcopacy, ‘popish’ in their own manner. In fact, to the extent that Hobbism operated in an English Catholic context, it did not work primarily to justify Protestant confessional uniformity. Rather, a considerable faction of Catholics read Leviathan as a manifesto of obedience and a possible brief for politique tolerationism. This book has charted John Locke’s encounters with the legacy of Hobbism in contemporary religious polemic and particularly within theoretically consequential debates over prerogative toleration. Closely related debates over the toleration of English Catholicism provided occasion for another such shadowboxing match. Restoration Catholicism is often treated by historians as a monolith. Locke’s characterization of ‘popery’ as a political fifth column – at once paradoxically seditious and tyrannical – was a contemporary commonplace and has become a modern one. But these presumptions distort a more complex political dynamic within English Catholicism that was well known to Locke and that casts his intolerance towards Catholicism in a different light. The factional structure of English Catholicism dated back to the late sixteenth century, when Counter-Reformation Rome began to view England not as a temporarily wayward kingdom but as a mission field. The arrival of the Jesuit order split the English Catholic chapter, a split often schematized (simplistically) as a divide between ‘seculars’ and ‘regulars’. Tudor and Stuart polemic distinguished secular priests and their diehard flocks from the aggressive missionary orders invading the towns. The latter, steeped in Tridentine orthodoxy, supported the universal jurisdiction of Rome. The former were supposedly mere religious traditionalists anxious to demonstrate their political loyalty.136 This distinction 135 136

Beh., 185–6. Bossy, English Catholic Community; Christopher Haigh viewed the distinction as a polemical construct, Haigh. ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’.

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of historic, native Catholicism and Counter-Reformation popery stigmatized Jesuits but could justify succouring traditional Catholic loyalists. The dynamic was a writ-small version of the split between CounterReformation and French Gallican Catholicism. Old English Catholics and their Counter-Reformation brethren differed as to whether their church’s ecclesial integrity had survived the Reformation sufficiently for the seculars of the chapter to elect their own bishop. Or did conditions of captivity require direct control by Rome? The chapter also divided over the legitimacy of oaths eschewing the political authority of the papacy. The Tudor oaths of Supremacy were generally rejected, but modified oaths were considered. The so-called appellant secular clergy, patronized by the Elizabethan regime, condemned Jesuitical political thought. In their Important Considerations of 1601, the ‘contentions betwixt the secular priests and the Jesuits’ was adjudicated in favour of the former, and the Jesuits were condemned for an ‘affectation of soveraigntie’. The Considerations justified English Catholic loyalism against the ‘Macivilean’ Counter-Reformation papacy.137 The appellants condemned the Jesuits for the appointment of George Blackwell as an ‘archpriest’, supplanting a bishop and wielding an irregular authority over the English chapter. The appellants proposed several oaths of obedience in the late sixteenth century.138 These foundered, but after the Gunpowder Plot, James I approved a statute requiring an Oath of Allegiance from Catholics. This abhorred ‘as impious and heretical this damnable doctrine and position that princes which be excommunicated and deprived by the Pope may be deposed or murdered by their subjects or any other whatsoever’. Condemned by Rome, the Oath of Allegiance occasioned a ‘cataclysm of dissension’ in the chapter. James sought to isolate the seditious from those who ‘retained in their hearts the print of their naturall duties to their Soveraigne’. The oath supposedly condemned only the political claims of the Papacy, but its description of these as ‘impious, heretical, and damnable’ confused the matter. So too did its opaqueness as to whether the Pope could excommunicate a King rather than depose him.139 The appellants kept their distance from new contractual theories of sovereignty, which were associated with resistance theory. The Jesuits, the appellants 137 138 139

Important Considerations, which Ought to Move all True and Sound Catholikes (1601), epistle, 3, et passim. Bossy, ‘Henry IV, the Appellants, and the Jesuits’. Questier, ‘Loyalty, Religion, and State Power in Early Modern England: English Romanism and the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’, 311–29.

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alleged, combined a ‘Romish supremacie’ with a ‘Genevian popularitie’.140 In 1594, the Jesuit Robert Persons argued that subjects had the right to select Elizabeth’s successor.141 The Jesuits represented not only the ‘imperial’ interests of Rome but a new seditious politics. By contrast, the appellants brandished a more traditional loyalism pitched at the monarchy. James I’s defence of the Oath of Allegiance dwelt on the ‘Authoritie and Priviledge of Kings’ and was dedicated to monarchs as a sacred brethren.142 It was the civil war and in part the writings of Hobbes that reconciled English Catholic loyalism with the new jus naturalism. The regicide opened space for theoretical innovation. Lacking a bishop or an archpriest between 1655 and 1685 and confronting virulent anti-popery, the Irish rebellion, and the collapse of the monarchy, the English Catholic chapter divided. George Leyburn, president of the influential seminary at Douai, upheld traditional royalism and defended the authority of Rome’s episcopal appointments.143 Different political calculations were made by their factional foes, led by the theologian Thomas White, alias ‘Blacklo’, also a product of Douai and a professor there before the war.144 The ‘Blackloist’ Catholics included priests such as Peter Fitton, Henry Holden, and John Sergeant, as well as prominent Catholic layman such as Kenelm Digby. Largely French-trained, they were influenced by Jansenism and Gallicanism, and at times by the new science. They rejected both the intellectual and the political authority of Rome. In the 1640s, White met Hobbes, who also knew Digby. White and Hobbes divided over metaphysics,145 but Hobbes’s civil science exerted a powerful sway within White’s circle.146 The Blackloists sought autonomy for the English chapter, the defeat of political papalism, and some measure of toleration within England in exchange for enforceable demonstrations of political obedience. Leviathan provided the theoretical scaffolding required for this program. Its unitary theory of sovereignty and rejection of ‘sacred’ political legitimacy disempowered the Roman hierarchy. Its theory of obedience favouring de facto powers allowed the Blackloists to negotiate their allegiance without embracing anti-monarchical constitutional views. All of this informed White’s own Grounds of Obedience and Government (1655), 140 141 142 144 145 146

Important Considerations, which Ought to Move all True and Sound Catholickes, epistle. Persons, A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England. James I, An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance, epistle. 143 Ellis, An Encyclical Epistle, 6–9. Southgate, ‘Covetous of Truth’: The Life and Works of Thomas White, 1593–1676; Bradley, ‘Blacklo and the Counter-reformation: An Inquiry into the Strange Death of Catholic England’, entire. Hobbes, Thomas White’s De Mundo Examined. Hobbes, White, and Digby were often grouped. Baxter, The Reduction of a Digressor, 66.

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a work heavily influenced by Hobbes. The Blackloists negotiated directly with the English Commonwealth, attempting to secure religious toleration by offering a new declaration of obedience and more.147 As one Cromwellian involved in the negotiations wrote: ‘it is undoubtedly an error to look at all papists through the same perspective’. The Blackloist ‘opinion of and dependance upon the Pope [was] little or nothing what we imagine it to be’. The priest Henry Holden drafted the Blackloists’ concessions: acknowledgement of the Commonwealth, acceptance of ‘Three Oaths’ against the Pope’s temporal power, disarmament, and even parliamentary approval of any future English bishop.148 In Ireland, the Commonwealth negotiated on similar terms with the abbot Patrick Crelly, advisor to the powerful Marquis of Antrim.149 Infiltrated by the royalists, the negotiations collapsed but were not forgotten. Charles, furious at this Catholic ‘zeal for Cromwell’, purged Blackloists from his exiled court.150 Digby caused further scandal when he turned up at Whitehall under Cromwell’s protection. White himself arrived in London in the early 1650s, around the time that Hobbes did.151 The Blackloists effectively overhauled the political theology of English Catholic loyalism. The new idiom of interest and contract provided a political logic convenient to accommodationism.152 Hobbism also furnished a politique defence of toleration for quiescent religious minorities (entailing, to critics, a fundamentally Protestant Erastianism). The Blackloists blew apart the calculations of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs and the appellants they sponsored. Schooled in Hobbism, White rejected the sacred authority of both sovereign and pope. He sought space for a Catholic minority within a political universe de-sanctified by the new scientific theories of sovereignty. Among early Catholic responses to Hobbes, his was the boldest appropriation. Pierre Gassendi, in his preface to the second edition of De Cive, had dismissed Hobbes’s ecclesiology. The English Franciscan Christopher Davenport (‘Sancta Clara’), in his 1650 Treatise of Schism in England, had comprehensively rejected Hobbes’s Erastianism as a violation of the libertas ecclesiae. Hobbes obliterated ‘the 147 148 150 151 152

Following efforts in 1647. Clancy, ‘The Jesuits and the Independents, 1647’, entire. ‘Holden’s Instructions’, in Blacklo’s Cabal, 32–4. 149 Collins, ‘Blackloist Conspiracy’, 319–21. Winstad to Nicholas, 27 February 1649, Bodl. Carte MS 24, f. 14; Gatford to Hyde, August 1649, Clarendon State Papers, 2:19. See the undated letter airing suspicions of Digby’s fidelity, Bodl. Clarendon MS 47, f. 281; Digby to White, 25 February 1652, in Blacklo’s Cabal, 91. Brown minimizes the Hobbesian influence over Blackloism. But his objections deploy a dated notion of Hobbes as an enemy of free conscience. Brown, ‘Anglo-Irish Gallicanism’, 80–90.

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authority which the Holy Ghost giveth to Praelates regere Ecclesiam Dei to govern the Church of God’.153 The Blackloists, by contrast, were widely understood as Hobbists. Indeed, a tract justifying the Blackloist negotiations of 1649 contained the earliest known invocation of Leviathan in print. Written by the priest John Austin, this condemned ‘coercency on religion’, celebrated the loyalist potential of Catholicism, and flattered Cromwell as the ‘great Instrument of our freedom’. Austin repeatedly invoked Leviathan: for limiting idolatry to image worship established by ‘private authority’ (rather than ‘sovereign pastors’), and for condemning any effort to ‘extend the power of Law (which is the Rule of actions only) to the bare thoughts and Consciences of men’.154 The Blackloist exploitation of Hobbes inflamed indignation.155 George Leyburn condemned White’s Grounds of Obedience as ‘horrid, unparalleled, unauthorised, and unchristian’, and ‘cut out of Mr. Hobbe’s Leviathan’.156 Richard Baxter also made the association, as did an agitated Edward Hyde, the future Earl of Clarendon. Hyde investigated the Blackloist priests at the exiled court in 1649, partly for promoting Hobbes’s theory of obedience.157 In 1656, he composed a remarkable piece of agitprop printed as an anonymous Letter from a True and Lawfull Member of Parliament. This indictment of the ‘tyrannical’ Protectorate also denounced Digby and White as servants of ‘Machiavel’s Prince’ and ‘Hob’s Leviathan’, reducing ‘all Obligations of Government into the Good Will and Pleasure of the Governour’.158 By the Restoration, neither the monarchism of loyalist Catholics nor the Jesuit’s monopoly over contract theory could be presumed. The Blackloists had adopted Hobbes’s variant of the contract tradition, stripped as it was of the theocratic elements of sixteenth-century resistance theory. Crucially, Hobbism also informed their willingness to accept a prerogative toleration.159 None of this redounded to the benefit of the Blackloists after 1660, when both Hobbist principles of political obligation and politique tolerationism were tainted with Cromwellian associations. Charles II tended 153 154

155 156 158 159

Davenport, Suspicious Moderate: the Life and Writings of Francis a Sancta Clara, chapter 14. [Austin], Christian Moderator: or Persecution for Religion Condemned, 12–13; also Christian Moderator, Third Part. Or the Oath of Abjuration Arraign’d, 21, 27; Brown, ‘Anglo Irish Gallicanism’, 42–3. Beacon set on fire: or the Humble Information of Certain Stationers, 3–4, 7–8, 13. Southgate, ‘Damned Book’, 245. 157 Bodl. Clarendon MS 37, ff. 218–19. [Hyde], Letter from a True and Lawfull Member of Parliament, 45, 65; Smith, Constitutional Royalism, 278. Collins, ‘Blackloist Conspiracy of 1649’, entire.

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nostalgically to portray English Catholics as latter-day Elizabethans, loyal to their rightful King (not least during his flight after the battle of Worcester). The King’s suspicious Protestant servants offered a more upto-date ideological mapping. Standard denunciations of popish Jesuits could now be supplemented with a critique of the perfidious Catholic Hobbesians, who had scraped before Cromwell. The Blackloist ‘conspiracy’ of 1649 and White’s Grounds of Obedience illustrated the varieties of Catholic political reprobation. This new turn of the screw pinched those Catholic loyalists long favoured by English monarchs. It embarrassed Restoration advocates of Catholic toleration. If the court itself could be presented as cynically instrumental on ecclesial questions, the Blackloists, as potential recipients of its favour, could as well. In the early Restoration, Digby and the Blackloist laymen John Winter lobbied Charles II for toleration.160 In Winter’s 1662 Observations upon the Oath of Supremacy, Hobbism was implicit. Winter defended the oath by arraying a contractual ‘loyal subject-hood’ against the ‘unlimited immoderate attributes given to popes by Cannonists’. He defended the sovereign’s ‘supreme coactive Jurisdiction’ over all subjects ‘Ecclesiasticall or Temporall’.161 According to Gilbert Burnet, toleration for Catholics willing to promise obedience and foreswear the pope was promoted by the priests ‘Blackloe, [John] Serjant, [Redmond] Carron, and [Peter] Walsh’, as well as laymen around Henry Bennet and George Digby, Earl of Bristol.162 White’s Grounds of Obedience and Austin’s Christian Moderator provided ideological sustenance to this faction.163 Peter Walsh, in particular, enjoyed court standing. An Irish priest long connected to the royalist Duke of Ormond, in 1662 he presented Charles II with a declaration of allegiance signed by dozens of Irish Catholics. This avowed that the signatories ‘were teaching our flocks perfect obedience to the King’. The so-called Remonstrant clergy confirmed the legal supremacy of the monarchy, ‘in spite of any authority existing in or given by the See of Rome’. The Remonstrance read: ‘We protest that all Princes and supreme Governors are God’s lieutenants, and that obedience is due them. We repudiate all doctrine contrary to this and we hold it impious, damnable and wicked to contend that a private person may murder the 160

161 163

Winter had been sent into Ireland by Cromwell. Hyde to Edgeman, 9/19 March 1649, Bodl. Clarendon MS 37, f. 40; intelligence letter to Ormond, 15/25 February 1651, Bodl. Carte MS 23, f. 489. [Winter], Observations Upon the Oath, 8–9, 14. 162 Burnet, History, 1:346–8. See The Jesuits Reasons Unreasonable, in A Collection of Several Treatises concerning the Reasons and Occasions of the Penal Laws.

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King.’164 The Remonstrance set the terms of Catholic loyalism for a generation. Walsh’s own More Ample Account agitated for toleration and complained that Irish Catholics were worse off than they had been ‘under the tyranny of Cromwell’.165 This quasi-Gallican tract traded heavily on the royalism of the Catholic clergy during the civil war. But Walsh was vulnerable in claiming that Catholics had ‘refused any conditions’ from Cromwell, and in his confidence – soon disabused – that Rome would accept the Remonstrance.166 Walsh’s Ample Account could echo Leviathan, particularly with its account of a ‘temporal commonwealth’ (‘Monarchical, Aristocratical, or Democratical’) established ‘either by election or acquisition’ but always by way of ‘covenant’. By this covenant every man transferred to the sovereign ‘all that natural and sovereign power which everyone had in himself before (or in the pure state of nature) of judging, determining, righting, punishing, offending, and defending’. This transfer must be ‘absolutely unlimited’ and ‘irrevocable’.167 Walsh’s fellow Franciscan, Redmond Caron, upheld the Remonstrance with similar logic. Spiritual authorities could not depose sovereigns, he argued, nor could subjects. Subjects could never revoke their original surrender of right to sovereignty, ‘otherwise all covenants, transactions, and contracts had been to no purpose’. The establishment of ‘absolute and independent’ sovereigns, Caron wrote, required subjects to renounce ‘all their power of judging, determining, defending or offending’.168 Hobbes hovered over the Blackloist milieu. The Reflexions upon the Oathes of Supremacy and Allegiance by a Catholick Gentleman (1661) was probably written by Hugh Cressy, the veteran of the Tew Circle and now a Benedictine monk. Cressy studied under Henry Holden in Paris during the late 1640s.169 His Reflexions rejected the spiritual powers of monarchy implied by the Oath of Supremacy but insisted that the Oath of Allegiance could be sworn by Roman Catholics. The ‘author of Leviathan’, Cressy wrote, was perhaps the only Briton who could swear every word of the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy without qualm. So embedded in a tribute to sovereignty, this remark was ambiguous at worst. Hobbes himself would have been delighted.170 In memos to Lord Clifford urging 164 165 168 169 170

3 February 1663, Remonstrance, Acknowledgment, Protestation, and Petition of the Roman Catholic Clergy of Ireland Addressed to the King. TNA, SP 63/ 310/ f. 19. Walsh, More Ample Account, 4. 166 Ibid., 42–3, 46–50. 167 Ibid., 69–72. Caron, Loyalty Asserted and the Late Remonstrance or Allegiance of the Irish Clergy Confirmed, 46–7. ODNB; he commended the Gallican model to Clifford. BL Add MS 65139, f. 13–4. Reflexions upon the Oathes of Supremacy and Allegiance by a Catholick Gentleman, 12.

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Indulgence, Cressy echoed Hobbesian characterizations of heresy hunting as a tool of clerical usurpation. Out of ‘ignorance and worldly Policy’, he wrote, the clergy ‘incited Secular Princes’ to war for orthodoxy. The ‘creulty of Princes against Hereticks’ was largely attributable to the religious orders.171 This rhetoric might have been lifted wholesale from Hobbes’s heresy writings. Cressy and Hobbes were likely associates from their days in Viscount Falkland’s Tew Circle,172 and Cressy imported Hobbesian argument directly into the internal deliberations over the Declaration of Indulgence. As regards ‘the execution or suspension of [penal] lawes, it belongs to the Civill Magistrate onely to judge and determine’. Cressy urged Charles II to ‘grant an entire Liberty of Conscience to all his Subjects, and to give them an absolute certainty that he will never infringe such liberty’, provided they demonstrated loyalty to his crown. Prerogative would thus circumvent the confessional laws.173 To hostile observers, Walsh, Redmond, and Cressy appeared as yet more renegade Catholics dangling the Hobbesian lure and perpetuating the Blackloist machinations of the Interregnum.174 The Church of England viewed Blackloism as a threat. Clarendon tried sowing discord among the Catholics with punitive proposals for the exile of Catholic regulars. The chapter’s papal faction, ironically, aided this campaign of division. George Leyburn urged the papacy to condemn White’s political doctrines: ‘His Majesty will be grateful when he happens to remember that Albio dared writing in favour of Cromwell.’175 Leyburn’s faction, to the apparent relief of Clarendon and Archbishop Sheldon, eventually marginalized the Remonstrants within the chapter.176 From Ireland, the Lord Lieutenant, the Duke of Ormond, viewed the Remonstrance as a ‘means to devide’ the Irish Catholics.177 Essex, his successor, was also inclined to ‘encourage these little animosities’ to ‘keep these men divided’.178 Protestant churchmen eagerly reminded Charles that the Blackloists’ Hobbesian principles had undercut his father. William Assheton’s influential Evangelium Armatum arrayed ‘the positions of the papists and the Hobbesians’ alongside those of the sects. With White as the lynchpin, he brought the ‘Papists and the Hobbians upon the same stage’, as 171 174 175 176 177 178

BL Add MS 65139, f. 17. 172 ODNB. 173 BL Add. MS 65139, ff. 17v–25. Tutino, White and the Blackloists, 127–8. Ibid., 123; the King’s displeasure with White riled the Chapter. A Manifest Publisht to their Brethren by the General Chapter of the Catholick English Clergy, 1–7. Archbishop Boyle of Dublin to Archbishop Sheldon, 7 June 1666, quoted in Burnet, History, 1:346n. Ormond to Essex, 9 December 1673, Essex Papers, 1:150–1. Essex to Ormond, 14 November 1673, Essex Papers, 1:137–8.

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underminers of both the civil and the ecclesiastical constitution.179 Roger Coke reviled White and Hobbes for enslaving law and religion to sovereignty.180 Pierre du Moulin recalled the Blackloist negotiations with the ‘Independent army’ and presented White’s Grounds of Obedience as an apology for ‘Oliver’s Tyranny’.181 The high churchman Richard Perrinchief, attacking indulgence in his 1664 Samaritanism, asserted the divine right of both monarchy and the church against the new logic of interest. He rebuked the Hobbesian notion that religion itself was a mere ‘trick of policy’.182 He recalled the ‘treacherous Piece of Mr. White’, wherein loyalty to the Usurper was justified according to Hobbes’s new civil science.183 White and Digby understood how damaging these associations with Hobbism and Cromwellianism would prove.184 After beating back indulgence, parliament punished Winter by stripping him of a lucrative patent for harvesting timber.185 Bristol and Kenelm Digby’s son John were indicted for recusancy,186 and Kenelm Digby was forbidden from court.187 After 1667, with the rise of the Cabal, reminders of Blackloist perfidy were even more central to episcopal polemic. Catholic hopes of indulgence had recovered. In 1667, the English Chapter assured the court of its ‘honest, loyall, and in every way unoffensive intentions and actions’. Catholic ‘Brethren thoughout England’ were urged not to ‘find fault with any Transactions of our Governours, but humbly to obey and to expect God’s and their pleasure’.188 In April of 1671, Hugh Cressy advised Clifford on how a new oath might be devised that would not ‘offend the Court of Rome’.189 Cressy’s oath affirmed the King’s claim to ‘the Supreme Civill Power over all persons and in all Causes, both Ecclesiasticall and Temporall: and that neither the Pope, nor any Prince, Power, state or persons collective or representative have, or ought to have any Jurisdiction 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189

Assheton, Evangelium Armatum, ‘To the reader’, 53. Coke, Survey of the Politicks of Thomas White, Thomas Hobbes, and Hugo Grotius, epistle. Pierre du Moulin, A Vindication of the Sincerity of the Protestant Religion in Obedience to Sovereigns, 36, 56–9, 60–63. Perrinchief, Samaritanism, or, A Treatise of Comprehending, Compounding, and Tolerating Several Religions, 1–2, 4–5, 27. Ibid., 57–8. White to Digby 29 April 166[3?], BL Add. MS 41846, ff. 84–6. White here defended his Obedience and Government against Assheton’s Evangelium Armatum. CJ, 29 November 1660 and 13 February 1662, vol. 8, 194–5, 362; ODNB. September 1663, Newsletter, TNA, SP 29/80/f. 14. Thomas Clifford to Williamson, 6 January 1664, TNA, SP 29/90/f. 49. BL Egerton 2260, ff. 122, 126v, 130v. Clark [Cressy] to Clifford, 11 April 1671, BL Add MS 65139, f. 5.

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or Superiority repugnant to the same’.190 By the early 1670s, courtiers were considering a revival of Walsh’s Remonstrance scheme. The King reportedly monitored English Catholic divisions closely, hoping to encourage ‘that obedience, which is desired by him’.191 The Church of England felt pressure to respond. John Corbet exploded the Catholics’ ‘high pretensions of Merit towards the King’. ‘King-killing Jesuits’ figured prominently in his effort, but so too did those – White particularly – who had ‘sought the favour of the Usurpers’. The Blackloists had ‘generally taken, and punctually kept [the Commonwealth’s] Engagement; and promised, That if they might enjoy their Religion, they would be the most quiet and useful Subjects’.192 Whatever the attractions of Leviathan at the Restoration court, a Hobbism serving republicanism was a sharp weapon in the pamphlet wars. Pierre du Moulin again entered the fray, claiming that his original work had been urged by the Archbishop of Canterbury and that, in 1668, he was forbidden to publish further on Catholicism by a court that was increasingly suspect.193 William Lloyd, future Bishop of Worcester, advocated loyalty oaths as a way of splitting the Catholics and scooping up converts.194 But this did not soften his estimation of Blackloism. Innocent of papalism, they had nevertheless abandoned the monarchy. After the regicide, he asked, ‘where were you? In all those weak efforts of gasping loyalty, what did you? You complied, and flattered, and gave sugared words to the Rebels then, as you do to the royalists now.’195 Lloyd rounded again on the Blackloists in his 1673 Seasonable Discourse.196 His prominent polemics fixed loyalist Catholicism within an exclusively monarchist context that had been rendered obsolete by Catholic Hobbesians: ‘A Cromwell would have served their turn (when time was) as well as a Stuart.’197 Thomas White’s Grounds of Obedience, Lloyd wrote, was a ‘treason against Princes’ and a ‘Catholick Leviathan’.198 The Oxford fellow Henry Foulis, in a compendious history of Catholic treachery, used Austin’s tracts to evidence the Blackloist negotiations with 190 192 193 194 195 196 197

BL Add MS 65139, f. 7. 191 Report to Venice, 8 July 1672, CSPV, vol. 37:240. Corbet, Discourse of the Religion of England, 15–6. Pierre du Moulin, A Replie to a Person of Honour, his Pretended Answer to the Vindication of the Protestant Religion, 2, 5–6. Lloyd, Considerations Touching the True Way to Suppress Popery in this Kingdom, 28–30, 78; ‘The Diary of Dr. Edward Lake’, 18. Lloyd, Late Apology in Behalf of the Papists Reprinted and Answered, 13–5, 44. Lloyd, Seasonable Discourse Shewing the Necessity of Maintaining the Established Religion in Opposition to Popery, 15–7. Ibid., 54–5. 198 Lloyd, Reasonable Defence of the Seasonable Discourse, 45.

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the ‘bloudy and murdering Rump’.199 Bishop John Fell later quoted this work to disparage Catholic ‘boasts’ about their loyalty to Charles I, which were intended to secure an Indulgence from his son.200 Thomas Tenison, in a wide-ranging attack on Hobbes, cast White as a ‘part-boyled Romanist’ who had ‘caressed Oliver’. The Grounds of Obedience and Government, he wrote, ought to be publicly burned.201 This campaign was apparently carefully organized. While in London in 1669, the venerable Bishop Cosin sent to his assistant in Durham for ‘H. Holden’s Epistle to his party, and the Roman Catholicks in England, perswading them to submit to Cromwell’s government as long as it lasted’.202 Where and when Cosin deployed this information is unknown, but the anti-Catholic campaigning of the 1670s liberally abused Holden’s faction. Histories of Catholic treachery were a cottage industry during these years, targeted with equal fervour both ‘Jesuitisme’ and the Erastian-Hobbism of the Blackloists.203 The Popish Plot blew open the factions of English Catholicism. Oates himself played on these divisions, specifically informing on the Jesuits for preaching that oaths of allegiance were ‘Devillish’.204 Thomas White and Redmond Caron had died, but White’s devotee John Sergeant acted as secretary to the Catholic chapter, and Walsh still enjoyed influence. Sergeant, desperate to demonstrate loyalty, gave testimony to the Privy Council that vaguely implicated certain Jesuits.205 In revenge for this scapegoating, anti-Blackloists published the intercepted Interregnum correspondence of Digby, Holden, White, and Sergeant. Their overtures to Cromwell were thus exposed. Appearing in 1680, Blacklo’s Cabal not only advertised Catholic factionalism but also damaged the possible appeal at court of Blacklo’s contractual theory of obedience. The reputation of all Catholics suffered. Henry Care’s acidic History of the Damnable Popish Plot, for instance, did not discriminate among the ‘hissing Popelings’. Austin, White, Winter, and Digby had ‘truckled servilely to the late Rebellious Powers’, bargaining with ‘Oliver’s Tyranny’ for toleration.206 Their ‘popery’ was less seditious than absolutist, a ‘Leviathan’ threatening 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206

Foulis, History of Romish Treasons and Usurpations, preface. Fell, Seasonable Advice to Protestants, 1, 16. Tenison, Creed, 150; also Womock, Religion of the Church of England, the Surest Establishment of the Royal Throne, 34–6. Doyle, ‘Gallican and Anglican: Henry Holden and John Cosin’, 67–70. Denton, The Burnt Child Dreads the Fire, or, An Examination of the Merits of the Papists, 35, 64. Morrice, Entring Book, 29 September 1677, 2:2. Informations of John Sergeant and David Maurice (1681). Care, The History of the Damnable Popish Plot, epistle, 76–7.

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a ‘double, Intertwisted Tyranny’.207 Attacking the memoirs of the executed Catholic Lord Stafford, Robert Hancock recalled how the Blackloists had ‘flatter’d the most Infamous Rump’. Thomas White, a ‘moderate Catholique (as he is esteemed)’, had undermined loyalty to the exiled Charles II during the depths of the Interregnum.208 This polemical line resounded for years. Assheton’s attack on Hobbes and White reappeared in 1681. The anonymous Ursa Major and Minor of that year accused Hobbes and White of seeking pensions from Cromwell.209 William Wake, in a history of popish treason, attacked White’s clique for ‘treating’ with the Protector. Polemicists thus confounded any Blackloist appeal to the politique tolerationism of the era. The courtiers and King received regular reminders of its seditious potential. Loyalist Catholics despaired at the effectiveness of this attack. A defensive Roger Palmer, Earl of Castlemaine, incoherently asserted Catholic loyalty by advertising the Papal condemnation of Thomas White. Thus had Cromwellianism discredited a major theory of Catholic loyalism.210 The nature of Catholic sedition was endlessly malleable. Reflected Redmond Caron: ‘Whosoever become Masters, the Catholicks must still be Traytors.’211 In desperate notes taken during his trial, the Catholic Lord Arundell wrote: ‘Wicked principles are alleged to make good a plot, which being denied, the Plot is introduced to make good the principles.’212

Locke’s Rejection of Catholic Loyalism Read against the themes of this book, Blackloism embodied the chief features of the Hobbesian politique. Leviathan provided an interestoriented account of sovereignty freed of ‘sacred’ trappings. It upheld absolute power and distanced the Blackloists from resistance theory. Hobbes’s case for a prudent Indulgence, furthermore, advanced their primary political project, without requiring them to adopt heretical understandings of free conscience. As we have seen, dissenting support for indulgence often magnified the prerogative powers of sovereignty and 207

Ibid., 84. Hancock, Loyalty of Popish Principles, 8–9, 12–13, 114–5; Long, Compendious History of all the Popish & Fanatical Plots and Conspiracies, 91–4. 209 Ursa Major and Ursa Minor; Wake, Brief History of the Several Plots Contrives and Rebellions Raised by the Papists, 88–9. 210 Palmer, Catholique Apology, 76–81. 211 Caron, Vindication of the Roman Catholicks of the English Nation, 16. 212 ODNB. 208

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could skim the shores of Hobbism. The Blackloists provided a Catholic analogue of the model. This complex history was known to Locke. His own estimation of toleration for Catholics cannot be read against a monolithic ‘popery’. In his early letter to Stubbe, for instance, Locke had objected specifically to Stubbe’s commendation of Catholics who ‘adhere to the doctrine of Widdrington, or Preston, and Blackwel, etc., denying the Pope’s power any way in Temporals’.213 Stubbe had specifically countenanced the ‘Widdringtonian Catholicks now in England’. Widdrington was the assumed name of Roland Preston, a Jacobean Catholic loyalist, but the contemporary reference was certainly to the Blackloists. Locke responded by reasserting precisely the condemnation of Catholics ‘in general’ that Stubbe deplored. Papists ‘obey two different authoritys’, one boasting ‘infalibility and holinesse’. Oaths of allegiance could never bind them, as the papacy claimed the power to indulge ‘perfidy and perjury’.214 To the young Locke, popery was an inescapable feature of Catholicism, whatever the obfuscating of Blackloists. The question remains: did he ever transcend this perspective and credit devices to confirm Catholic political loyalty such as those Stubbe promoted? It is often suggested that he did. One piece of evidence assumed to indicate Locke’s willingness to further strategies akin to Walsh’s Remonstrance is a manuscript entitled the ‘Particular Test for Priests’ found in his archive. This reads: ‘I A.B. do from my heart utterly renounce and adjure all these following Positions or Doctrines.’ Itemized propositions follow: the doctrinal infallibility of the Pope; the universal jurisdiction of conciliar decrees; the papal deposing power; papal authority to dispense with the allegiance of subjects; the authority of papal bulls; equivocation during oath taking; the injunction ‘not to keepe Faith with Heretical Princes or Subjects’; use of the ‘Seal of Confession’ to hide conspiracies; and clerical exemption from ‘subjection and obedience to civil Authority’. This Test was explicitly designed for Catholic clergy who were not Jesuits.215 The Summary Catalogue of Locke’s papers indicates that this Test is in the hand of Sylvester Brounower, Locke’s amanuensis, and it has thus been widely assumed that Locke was its author.216 The ‘Particular Test’ is printed in the Cambridge edition of Locke’s ‘political essays’, an 213 215 216

Stubbe, Essay in Defence, 136–40. 214 Locke to Henry Stubbe, 1659, CL, 1:111. MS Locke c. 27, f. 30a. Summary Catalogue, 27; G.A.J. Rogers, ‘Locke and Religious Toleration’, 132.

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attribution followed by the leading historian of Locke’s tolerationism, John Marshall. Marshall construes it as a response by Locke to the 1674 edition of Peter Walsh’s Some Few Questions concerning the Oath of Allegiance. Locke, he surmises, thought it ‘important to identify loyal Catholics who were willing to take an oath to the English Crown and thus capable of being tolerated’.217 But as Anthony Brown has demonstrated, the ‘Particular Test’ was not Locke’s composition but was written by Walsh himself.218 This is indicated, indeed, by Locke’s note ‘F. Walsh/Welch’ on the back of the manuscript.219 Marshall interprets this as identifying Locke’s interlocutor, but it more straightforwardly indicates the author of the ‘Test’. Brown has established that the manuscript is not in Brounower’s hand but in Walsh’s.220 Nor does the ‘Particular Test’ pertain to the 1674 edition of Walsh’s Some Few Questions (first published in 1661). More likely, Walsh devised the Test during or after the second Declaration of Indulgence. Indeed, he circulated such a proposed oath among politicians in England and Ireland in 1675, hoping to secure a hearing in the Common’s Committee of Religion.221 Cressy had offered his own version of an allegiance oath to Clifford in the spring of 1671. Viscount Stafford would also claim to have devised a Catholic loyalty oath and offered it to Shaftesbury.222 There are indications in the Shaftesbury archive that Walsh’s ‘Test for Priests’ was presented to the earl at some point in the 1670s, when Walsh was apparently lobbying the Earl of Essex and Charles II.223 A copy was among papers seized during Shaftesbury’s arrest in 1681.224 The ‘Particular Test for Priests’ only demonstrates Locke’s familiarity with the intricacies of Remonstrant/Blackloist thinking. This is hardly surprising. Indeed, he owned loyalist Catholic works by Walsh and Caron.225 But the ‘Test’ was not his scheme, nor is it evidence that he had revised the dismissal of Catholic loyalism he had first penned in 1659. 217 218 219 220 221 222 224 225

PE, 222.; Marshall, Locke, Toleration, 688–9; LL, 2213. J.R. and Philip Milton conclude similarly. Introduction to EcT, 147–8. MS Locke c. 27, f. 30v. Marshall reads this as ‘T’ but it is an ‘F’, for ‘Father’. Brown ‘Anglo-Irish Gallicanism’, 266–7; J.R. Milton, ‘Sylvester Brounower’, 82. Peter Walsh to ?, 4 June 1675, BL Add MS 32094, ff. 375, 375v. 223 Stafford’s Memoires, 155–6. Copy of Walsh to Essex, n.d., BL Add MS 32094, ff. 377–81. TNA, PRO 30/24/6a/pt 1/ 348–49. LL, 2113, 2191. The Vindication of Catholicks of England not identified by Laslett was probably Caron’s work, first published in 1660 and perhaps reprinted in 1673. Alternatively, the title may refer to Walsh’s Vindication of the Remonstrance, which was published in 1673. J.R. and Philip Milton note that Locke loaned Tyrrell ‘Walsh’s Epistle’ in March of 1674. EcT, 147 n3.

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In Locke’s own writing, we find little give in his position. The ‘Essay’ on toleration disallows the toleration of papists, because their ‘dangerous opinions’ were ‘absolutely destructive to all governments but the popes’. Locke did reject coercion of Catholic consciences, but he effectively rendered it impossible to isolate their conscientious religious beliefs from their political allegiances. Echoing his letter to Stubbe, he wrote that Catholics were ‘irreconcileable enemys of whose fidelity you can never be securd’ as long as they acknowledged an authority that ‘can upon occasion dispense with’ their oaths and promises to the prince.226 These passages rejected the various schemes of the Remonstrants, which had been promoted at court since 1662. The ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ was no more compromising. Catholics, Locke warned readers, ‘are making their approaches towards us and are ready openly to attack’.227 They were conspiring among both nonconformists (urging toleration) and conformists (urging ‘persecution and severity’). This charge echoed the widespread claims of the Popish Plot era that Catholics had conspired to advance the 1672 Declaration of Indulgence. Intriguingly, Locke also invoked the ‘late times’ of the civil war when Papists were ‘contending for toleration’ among the ‘Independents, Anabaptists and Quakers’ and against the ‘Presbyterians’. Such charges, we have seen, were staple features of the anti-tolerationist polemics produced by church conformists. These Interregnum Catholic agitators presumably included White, Digby, Winter, Austin, and Holden, all disparaged by Locke as conspirators against the English constitution and church.228 The ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’, therefore, in common with much contemporary polemic, caught Catholics in a pincer. Jesuitical plotting was condemned, but so too were long-running Catholic efforts to secure toleration for their ‘sect’. The ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ explicitly defended the Test Act, which comprehensively erased the distinction between the political and theological sins of Catholicism. Theoretically, Locke conceded that penal laws could not justly target pure belief. ‘If the Papists are punished for anything but for being subjects of a Prince that hath declared enmity and war to us, I think they have a hard usage,’ he wrote. Left there, this passage casts Locke as open to compromise with loyalist Catholics, in the manner suggested by the ‘Particular Test for Priests’.229 But Locke immediately torpedoed this possibility with reference to the Test Act: 226 228 229

Huntington, HM 584, f. 21; EcT, 291–2. 227 MS Locke c. 34, p. 8. MS Locke c. 34, 10–11. Marshall indeed uses the passage in this way but truncates it, omitting the words in the following quotation printed in italics (Locke, Toleration, 688).

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. . . and though the proofs upon them be concerning Religion, yet their being of that Religion is but a proof of their being of the enemyes party, and can be looked upon as nothing but either enemyes in our bowells or spies amongst us, whilst their general commanders whom they blindly obey declare warr and an unalterable designe to destroy us. Were there no more Papists in the world then those amongst us I should wish they were to be treated onely as the other dissenters onely with an allowance of greater pity as being possessed with more extravagant and senseless opinions.230

With Catholics it was defensible to use purely ‘religious proofs’ to identify and isolate a dangerous sect. Locke thus endorsed the theological provisions of the Test Act. The Test Act was a frontal assault on English Catholic loyalists. Their distinction between theological Catholicism and political popery could accommodate allegiance oaths but not sacramental or doctrinal Tests. To Locke, one could not believe Catholic absurdities but only be ‘possessed’ by them. Individuals in such a state surrendered the right of ‘taking care of their own salvation and not owneing the belief of which they could not believe’.231 Locke obsessed over ‘blind submission’ and taking ‘religion on trust’. No power, Locke wrote, ‘can oblige a man to joyne with any Church or to believe in transubstantiation’. This was no random example. In general, belief could not be forced, but here Locke suggested that honest belief in Catholic theology was impossible.232 The ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ was written amidst the fury of the Popish Plot, which had fractured the English Catholic chapter. The beleaguered Jesuits and episcopal conformists both found it convenient to rehearse the Hobbesian perfidy of the Blackloists. The Plot was used to discredit politique toleration as a possible reward for Catholic political loyalism, in spite of John Sergeant’s pathetically eager collaboration with the Whigs. King Charles reportedly suspected Shaftesbury of having rewarded Sergeant for his convenient testimony.233 Locke was well acquainted with these Catholic factional struggles, particularly the efforts of Father Walsh, but presumably also those of Sergeant and (earlier) Thomas White.234 Shaftesbury’s seized archive contained numerous papers concerning Ireland, most endorsed by Locke. Included was a printed copy of the 230 232 233 234

MS Locke c. 34, p. 26. 231 MS Locke c. 34, p. 102. Ibid., 120, 130. Catholics were subject to an ‘arbitrary power’ without any ‘liberty of doubting or inquiring’ (145). Morrice, Entring Book, October 1679, 2:194. For the impact of Sergeant’s testimony, see Morrice, Entring Book, 2 October 1679, 2:172–3; Luttrell, Historical Relation, 21, 28–9.

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Irish Remonstrance.235 But a letter from one of Shaftesbury’s Irish intelligencers urged, as part of a general effort to suppress Catholicism, ‘the banishment of all Jesuits and all priests both secular and regular’, thus obliterating a distinction crucial to the Remonstrant party.236 Another memo on Irish affairs detailed objections by the Irish Catholics to their treatment, and their assertions of loyalism during the civil war. The memo answered these objections point by point. It repeated anti-Blackloist themes from the broader polemical wars, specifically condemning the Irish for their compliance after the regicide. They had ‘accepted from the Usurper all they could get from him’.237 Locke was thus versed in the rhetorical strategies used to denigrate the loyalty of Blackloists and Remonstrants. All of this explains the most significant anti-Catholic gesture of the Epistola de Tolerantia: Locke’s explicit rejection of the ‘empty and deceptive distinction between church and court’. This phrase, largely overlooked by commentators, is precisely the point targeted when Locke referenced the Ottoman ‘Mufti’ as an analogue for the Pope. Locke’s denigration of the ‘church and court’ distinction directly rejected one of the primary argumentative strategies of the Remonstrant Catholics. Throughout the Restoration, striving to secure toleration, English Catholics cast themselves as members of the Church of Rome, but not loyal followers of its court. The phrase was intended to embody precisely that distinction of religious and political identity that Locke supposedly demanded of Catholics, and that the Blackloists and Remonstrants were eager to embrace. The most conspicuous invocations of the distinction were those of George Digby, Earl of Bristol, in speeches in the House of Lords. Kinsman of the Blackloist philosopher Kenelm Digby, Bristol was a royalist military officer and counsellor during the civil war. His conversion to Rome in 1659 encumbered his career but positioned him to agitate on behalf of loyalist Catholicism after 1660. He enjoyed some early influence, lost it after an ill-advised effort to secure Clarendon’s impeachment in 1663,238 and then partially recovered it after Clarendon’s exile. Bristol tenaciously publicized the political passivity of English Catholicism. His articles of impeachment against Clarendon, remarkably, accused him of besmirching the King as a Catholic.239 235 237 239

TNA, PRO 30/24/50, f. 73. 236 Undated and unsigned. TNA, PRO 30/24/50, f. 156–7. TNA, PRO 30/24/50/ f. 207. 238 CSPV, 4 September 1663, v. 33: 261–5. LJ, 10 July 1663, vol. 11, 554–7.

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This attempt against Clarendon failed abjectly. Bristol defended himself before the Commons on 1 July 1663, eager to deny that he was himself a ‘dangerous driver on of papistical interests’. He announced himself ‘a Catholick of the Church of Rome, not of the Court of Rome . . . A true Roman Catholick as to the other world, but a true English-man as to this.’ Bristol defended, as a pillar of order, the Protestant ‘state ecclesiastical’. Should the Pope deny the King his rights as protector of the established Church, he would ‘as readily draw my sword against him as against the late usurper’.240 Bristol returned to this theme nearly a decade later. On 15 March 1673, amidst the rubble of the King’s second Indulgence, he spoke in the Lords regarding the Commons’ proposed Test: Give me leave to remind you what kind of Catholick I told you the other day I am; that is a Catholick of the Church of Rome, not a Catholick of the Court of Rome, A distinction (if I am not much deceived) worthy of your memory and reflection, whenever any severe proceeding against those whom you call Papists shall come in question, since Catholicks of the Court of Rome do only deserve that name.241

Bristol aimed to please. Though sceptical of the national panic, he approved of moderate efforts to ‘obviate’ so ‘general a disturbance of mens minds’. Amazingly, he commended the Test Act for merely debarring Catholics from ‘office and places’, rather than the ‘private and modest exercise of their religion’. Bristol concluded: ‘However the sentiments of a Catholick of the Church of Rome (I still say, not of the Court of Rome) may obliege me (upon scruple of Conscience) in some perticulars of this Bill, to give my negative to it when it comes to the passing, yet as a Member of a Protestant Parliament my advice prudentially cannot but go along with the main scope of it.’ Bristol did, however, affirm the prerogative right of the King to suspend the penal laws.242 The speech marked the outer limit of Catholic loyalism. The concept and phrase ‘church and court of Rome’ were not entirely original,243 but Bristol’s speeches made them catchphrases of Restoration debate. Locke did not happen upon these words by accident. We find them in a court sermon by the high flyer Thomas Pierce, who instructed the King that ‘it was not so much the Church as the Court of Rome, which proudly trod upon Crowns and Scepters’.244 Father Cressy, responding, conceded that jurisdictional ‘quarrels’ between Kings and the ‘court of 240 242 244

Two Speeches of George Earl of Bristol, with some Observations upon Them, 11. 241 Ibid., 2. Ibid., 5–6. 243 It appears in Carleton, Jurisdiction Regall, Episcopall, Papall, 259. Pierce, The Primitive Rule of Reformation. Delivered in a Sermon before his Majesty at Whitehall, 1 February 1662, 35–6.

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Rome’ had nothing to do with ‘religion’.245 The Earl of Danby, informed that Buckingham had converted to Catholicism, responded mordantly that Buckingham might reconcile ‘to the Court of Rome (according to my Lord Bristolls distinction), but I did beleeve he would scarce be reconciled truly to any Church’.246 The church and court distinction could divide the Catholic community along familiar lines. Bristol’s more uncompromising co-religionists ‘did their best to have it understood, that the persecution which seem’d to threaten Catholicks, had whetted that Earl’s wit to find out specious and plausible distinctions betwixt Catholick and Catholick, whereby to exempt himself from the inconveniencies likely to fall upon the generality of that profession’.247 This rhetoric spilled into parliamentary debate. When in January of 1674 Bernard Howard petitioned the Commons for relief from the penal laws, offering in exchange an oath of loyalty, a debate over his homebrewed ‘remonstrance’ erupted. A supporter commended it for proving that ‘allegiance’ is not ‘vitiated’ by religion.248 Another argued that a similar oath might divide the Catholic enemy and favour the milder portion.249 But the members were unmoved by this effort to distinguish Catholic from Catholic in the manner of ‘Lord Bristol’s proviso’.250 The phrase ‘court of Rome’ was common; what rankled some was the claim that a Roman church might exist, as an apolitical spiritual communion, detached from the political supremacy of this court. In rejecting this possibility, Locke was very likely inspired by contemporaries. In 1674, in a work that Locke owned, Bishop Lloyd assailed Bristol’s concept. The ‘vogue’ among English Catholics for denying the authority of the ‘Court of Rome’ left him cold.251 He dismissed moderate men of the Roman Communion, who disown the Exorbitances of the Pope, though they remain addicted to that Church. Writers of this kind, who not onely joyn with, but seemingly out-go us, in a just abhorrence of some of the odious parts of Popery, thereby gain an advantage to recommend both themselves and the other less scandalous, though equally pernicious, Doctrines of the Roman Church; and also to bring in that Whole Religion at the Postern-Door, which would never be admitted at the Gate.252 245 246 248 249 250 251 252

Cressy, Roman-Catholick Doctrines no Novelties, 282, 304. Memorandum, September 1679, Danby, 2:93. 247 Two Speeches of Bristol, ‘to the reader’. Speech of Robert Howard, Grey’s Debates, vol. 2, 28 January 1674. Speech of Coventry, Grey’s Debates, vol. 2, 28 January 1674. Speech of Thomas Higgins, Grey’s Debates, v. 2, 28 January 1674. [Lloyd], Conference between two Protestants and a Papist, Occasion’d by the Late Seasonable Discourse, 5, 25, 30. Lloyd, Difference between the Church and Court of Rome Considered, 1–2.

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Such ‘pretences of moderation’ were mere ‘stratagems’ to ‘pretend a disagreement with the Court of Rome, and sufferings by it’. All species of popery threatened the kingdom, including ‘Gallican’ Catholicism.253 Andrew Marvell likewise flatly rejected the ‘distinction betwixt the Church and Court of Rome’ in favour of a Popery ‘wholly supressed’.254 Stillingfleet himself, in a sermon of 1673, argued that the Catholics disproved ‘Machiavel’s quarrels against Christianity’, in that popery demonstrated none of the apolitical docility that he despised.255 Rome had erected a ‘Universal Monarchy’, justified with an exaggerated version of the ‘doctrine of Ecclesiastical liberty’. Stillingfleet batted away the self-apologias of Remonstrants and Blackloists, which tried to ‘vainly distinguish’ the ‘Court and Church of Rome’.256 John Gother’s Papist Mis-represented and Represented flatteringly juxtaposed loyal English Catholics with ‘black’ papists constantly threatening the kingdom with ‘Fires and Massacres’.257 But Gother’s case was answered by an anonymous Protestant in terms reminiscent of Locke: ‘The distinction of the Court and Church of Rome is wholly impertinent in this Case. For, we here consider not the meer Temporal Power which makes the Court, but the Spiritual Capacity of Teaching the Church: and if Popes and Councils may err in Teaching this Doctrine, why not in any other?’258 Among Protestants eager to discredit loyalist Catholicism, it became a shibboleth to assert (often against Walsh) that ‘the Church and Court of Rome are so incorporated together, that if Communion with the Church be admitted or tolerated, here it must necessarily be introductory of that Court’s Usurpation’. The distinction (promoted by Walsh, White, and Serjeant) was ‘a mere trap for the weak’, a device for the ‘seducing of Proselytes’.259 There was no space between supposedly ‘true Catholicks and State Catholicks’.260 Perhaps most telling was Robert Hancock’s 1682 book-length ‘charge of Disloyalty and Creulty against the Court and church of Rome’. The Loyalty of Popish Principles Examin’d targeted ‘the more plausible Arguments of Romish Loyalty’, particularly Walsh’s Remonstrance and White’s Grounds 253 255 256 258

259

260

254 Ibid., 5–6, 12, 28. LL, 2187. See above; Marvell, Growth of Popery, 67. Stillingfleet, Sermon Preached November V. 1673 at St. Margaret’s Westminster, 2–3. Ibid., 31–2, 33–4. 257 Gother, Papist Mis-represented and Represented, introduction. ODNB. A Papist Mis-represented and Represented, or, A Twofold Character of Popery . . . To which is added a Book entituled, The Doctrines and Practices of the Church of Rome, Truly Represented. In an answer to the aforesaid by a Protestant of the Church of England (Dublin, 1686), 17. This riposte to Gother is often confused with an edition of his work. Creamer, A Journey into the Country: being a Dialogue between an English Protestant Physitian and an English Papist, epistle, 7–8; Pettus, England’s Independency upon the Papal Power historically and judicially stated, epistle; Dodwell, Two Short Discourses against the Romanists, preface. Denton, Jus Caesaris et Ecclesiae Vere Dictae, 243.

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of Obedience.261 Hancock trained fire on the Hobbism of the Blackloists: ‘If ever the English Papists had any reason to boast of their Obedience to the Government, it was under the late Usurped Powers’, when they had ‘renounce[d] the Interest of the Stuarts’.262 But in any case: ‘Where hath the Church of Rome warranted any such distinction (as [Walsh] makes) between matters of Faith and Practise; or confined the whole power of General Councls to matters of Faith only? . . . Why must Transubstantiation be a matter of Faith; and the deposing of Princes be none, when both came out of the same Forge?’ Hancock directly assailed Bristol’s famed rhetorical device. ‘Let al Wise and Impartial men judge’, wrote Hancock, ‘whether the Distinction between the Church and Court of Rome be not utterly insignificant, as to those purposes for which it is commonly produced.’263 Significantly, Hancock placed indulgence in a long line of perfidious efforts at Catholic toleration, a history which included the Blackloist negotiations with Cromwell. Hancock presented indulgence as an instrument of unconstitutional tyranny. As part of this case, he quoted passages from the Letter from a Person of Quality.264 Hancock associated the distinction of the church and court of Rome with Catholic sedition, Blackloist Hobbism, and the dangers of politique Indulgence. He was not alone. White Kennett, for instance, defended monarchy and church by assailing both Hobbes (a ‘patriot of Rebellion and Confusion’) and Catholics. Kennett made his case in part by refusing ‘to swallow the distinction of the Church and Court of Rome’.265 But the linkages were also found among Whigs. In a published sermon, Gilbert Burnet identified two Restoration threats. The first was that ‘Agent of Hell’, the ‘Author of Leviathan’, who had planted ‘all those impious and immoral Maxims which have since overrun the Land’.266 In this environment, a second threat prospered: Catholics, seeking to deflect their own sin of ‘king killing’ onto Protestants. Rebellion, Burnet avowed, sprang from principles of popular sovereignty and resistance that were Catholic and Hobbesian alike. The two ideological menaces came together in the ideology of the Blackloist Catholics. How ‘vain a thing’ it was, Burnet wrote, to ‘distinguish between the Court and Church of Rome’.267 Escaping the sway of popery would only throw loyalist Catholics into the arms of Hobbes.268 Timothy Puller discredited indulgence for Catholics by recalling the perfidy of White and the ‘favour the Papists 261 263 265 266 268

Hancock, Loyalty of Popish Principles, preface, 9. 262 Ibid., 11–13, 64–5, 94–5. Ibid., 121, also 130–2, 137–9. 264 Ibid., 145–6, 151–7. Kennett, Letter from a Student at Oxford to a Friend in the Country, 12, 14. Burnet, Sermon Preached before the Aldermen of the City of London, 9–10. 267 Ibid., 12. See also Burnet, Vindication of the Ordinations of the Church of England, preface.

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had under Oliver Cromwell’. This Catholic-Hobbesian synthesis afforded the ‘Roman Leviathan’ a ‘fine time to play his Game, and to sport among the People’.269 A Whiggish tract of 1694 accused Charles II of tolerating Catholicism in keeping with the principles of ‘his Tutor Hobbs’, namely that ‘all Religion is but a Trick of State to keep People in obedience’.270 The Indulgence had been a mere stratagem of Hobbesian statecraft, to divide Protestants.271 In a mock confession, the tract made the late King confess that his penmen had been ‘incourag’d to write smoothly on that Subject, and insinuate a Difference betwixt the Court and Church of Rome’. When Locke’s Epistola dismissed the distinction of the church and court of Rome, it was not an inconsequential or casual remark. It echoed an established polemical strategy honed by influential writers very familiar to him. This rhetoric associated the distinction with conspiracy, falseness, and prerogative indulgence designed to favour Catholicism.272 Both the Blackloist milieu and Walsh’s Remonstrance campaign were implicated in polemical attacks that were also shot through with allusions to Hobbes’s malignant influence. In this way did Locke’s Epistola de Tolerantia implicitly address another variant of Hobbesian religion: namely, the Catholic effort to invoke Leviathan as a way of reconciling their spiritual and their political allegiances. Such an effort, it is often suggested, appealed to Locke. Perhaps it should have, but in fact it did not. Locke was willing to countenance the barest form of toleration for Catholic beliefs. But Catholic projects for a more robust toleration of religious practice, based upon contractualism and oaths of allegiance, were crippled in his mind by the inherently disloyal, irrational nature of Catholicism. Both the political and the theological principles of Rome betrayed a conspiracy to captivate sheepish minds in the interests of clerical power. Locke refused to allow any space to open between these dangers or between the ‘church’ and ‘court’ of Rome. The broad association of anti-papal, loyalist Catholicism with the principles of Hobbes, furthermore, cannot have appealed to Locke. By the 1680s, he had come to reject prerogative routes to toleration. In his late 269 270 271 272

Puller, Moderation of the Church of England, 482–3, 496. Eikon basilike deutera, the pourtraicture of His Sacred Majesty King Charles II with his Reasons for turning Roman Catholick, 3; owned by Locke, LL, 1032. Ibid., 156–7. Brown’s reading of the phrase as neutral and potentially unrelated to the Anglo-Irish Gallican tradition references none of this polemical context and is fundamentally unconvincing. Brown, ‘Anglo-Irish Gallicanism’, 268–71.

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writings, religious governance was permitted only three possible foundations: the Erastian power of the Hobbist state, the clerical dominion of popery, or the authority of individual conscience. ‘Loyalist’ Catholicism in the manner of White, Caron, and Walsh – even if their oaths and professions could be credited – had only traded their allegiance to Rome for a slavish subjection to absolute sovereignty. In Locke’s mind there simply was no possibility of reconciling allegiance to a corporate, hierarchical church with the liberty of individual conscience. Locke’s variant of the sovereignist logic of the age inevitably produced this ramification. He therefore foreclosed any substantial religious liberty for English Catholics and played no small role in grafting this bias into a liberal tradition that has habitually commended his teachings on this point.

chapter 7

Locke and a ‘More Liberal’ Hobbism

On 12 February 1689, after six years in exile, John Locke returned to England. On the 13th, Ash Wednesday, William and Mary accepted the English throne at Whitehall, in the Banqueting House before which their grandfather had been executed when Locke was sixteen. Their coronation occurred in April. On June 3, the King approved the Toleration Act. These events marked a watershed in Locke’s life much as the Restoration had in the life of Hobbes. But if the historical waters had become rougher for Hobbes in 1660, they smoothed for Locke in 1689. Shaftesbury was dead, and the Revolution took the radical edge off of the Whig cause. If it is correct to see Locke’s Epistola as a rejection of prerogative toleration, responding to the turbulent politics of indulgence, then the revolutionary settlement represented a partial attainment of its vision. It secured rights of religious practice – though not full civil rights – for Trinitarian Protestants. The Toleration Act was less generous than the Stuart Indulgences, but what liberty it afforded enjoyed a more secure status. Liberty of conscience was increasingly spoken of as a ‘natural right’. In neo-republican terms, the quality of a liberty was preferred over its quantity. The new coronation oath required the monarchy to maintain ‘the Protestant Reformed Religion established by Law’. Whigs were disappointed at the conservative tone of this clause, but at least it restrained sweeping interpretations of the Supremacy.1 The Bill of Rights condemned both the dispensing and the suspending power, as well as the Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes.2 It also curbed the Supremacy by requiring monarchs to publicly abjure Roman Catholicism. Capturing the paradoxes of the Revolution, the Bill of Rights absolved subjects of their allegiance to future Catholic claimants. The papacy’s oft-decried power to dethrone heretical monarchs was thus granted to all Protestants. William’s prerogative spiritual power was further restrained when parliament denied 1 2

Rose, Godly Kingship, 105–6. The Lords failed to preserve a reduced dispensing power. Edie, ‘Tactics’, 231–3.

315

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him flexibility to tender the new Supremacy oaths to the clergy at a time of his choosing. A hard deadline was established over his objections. Parliament also limited his capacity to relieve non-jurors ‘of tender conscience’.3 Both toleration and its limits were thus established by statute and insulated from the prerogative. Hopes for a comprehension bill, where they persisted, came to nothing. The religious pluralism enabled by the new toleration was therefore more extensive than most desired; by 1710 more than 2,500 nonconformist meeting houses had been licensed.4 Though church attendance remained a legal requirement, it became impossible to enforce amid the new pluralism. In the mid-1690s, the expiration of press licensing sheltered an avant-garde culture of anti-Trinitarian heresy, a development that would – consequentially for Locke – generate an atmosphere of alarm among the orthodox. The established church proved unable to maintain the unity that had typified the conformist cause for decades. The ‘high church’ and ‘low church’ (or ‘latitudinarian’) parties remembered by history are often cast back into the Restoration, but they were in fact largely produced by the post-revolutionary era of episcopal schism. The watershed was the deprivation of the non-juring clergy, who would not compromise their sworn allegiance nor accede to the new monarchy’s control of the church. Typical of this perspective was the non-juror Jeremy Collier, who blasted the Williamite episcopal bench as a ‘court-invention, and a politique design’ from ‘Selden or Erastus, or else from Hobbs’s Leviathan’. Christianity itself lay ‘at the mercy of the state, and may be exitinquish’d at pleasure’.5 To more ecclesially minded Christians, the Revolution had insulated toleration from prerogative but only further exposed the church itself to state domination. The sharpest exponents of this view were ejected from the church establishment. Non-juring sacramentalism and clericalism became a counter-culture, swamped by nonconformity, radical heretical thought, and a hostile clerical hierarchy.6 Churchmen of this disposition were forced, to their horror, into ‘Jacobit conventicles’.7 The famous ‘Trinitarian crisis’ of the 1690s, indeed, was shadowed by anxiety over the ‘inadequacy of post-revolutionary political and ecclesiastical institutions’ to protect orthodoxy.8 Faced with both brazen heresy and 3 4 5 6 7 8

Ibid., 108–9; Horwitz, Parliament, Policy, and Politics, 13, 23–6, 36–7. Bennett, Tory Crisis in Church and State, 13. Collier, Reply to the Absolution of a Penitent, 11; quoted in Sirota, Christian Monitors, 163. Sirota, Christian Monitors, 150–8. For one disrupted, see the newsletter of 7 April 1696, Huntington, MS HA 30659. Sirota, ‘Trinitarian Crisis in Church and State: Religious Controversy and the Making of the Posterevolutionary Church of England’, 28.

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a discontented priesthood interested in reviving Convocation, the Williamite bishops increasingly preferred to lean on state power. Thus developed a ‘polarity between clerical and Erastian disciplinary programs’ that had largely been avoided (within the church at least) before 1688 but would define ecclesiological (and political) faction well into the next century.9 The public face of the new order was John Tillotson, who ascended to Canterbury in 1691.10 The compromised nature of Latitudinarian churchmanship is easily exaggerated, but it certainly marginalized the priestly, sacramental piety treasured by the Restoration church. The new religious environment was well pitched to appeal to Locke. Rational theology, the ‘commonsense’ rule of faith favouring practical ethics, the moderated toleration of dissent, the banishment of the high church: this constellation of factors conformed to the spiritual preferences reflected in his Reasonableness of Christianity.11 An episcopal order that loomed as a neoLaudian fifth column in the days of Shaftesbury now appeared as a more benign set of Whiggish worthies. Locke enjoyed friendly relations with Tillotson and other clergy of ‘latitude’.12 While he certainly wished that the Toleration Act had gone further, he did little to agitate for this. Around 1690, he drafted a proposal to legislatively waive the ordination requirement for university fellows who did not boast the clerical ‘disposition’ (as Charles II had waived it for him).13 His privilege would have become a stable, common rule. The proposal went nowhere. Radical Whigs would later recall Locke, rather in the manner of Hobbes, urging King William to ‘regulate’ the universities with an aim of reducing clerical sway. But Locke’s participation in a project of that kind seems unlikely.14 Locke was generally a complacent servant of the new regime.15 The resistance theorist had been quieted, and by 1690, Locke was urging those ‘who have any regard to their country, their religion, their consciences and their estates’ to ‘support our present government’.16 However, the more divisive religious environment of the 1690s – the cold war between ‘high’ and ‘low’ church, and rising alarm over perceived disciplinary laxity in the face of heresy – would not leave Locke in peace. 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Ibid., 29; Sirota, ‘“The Leviathan is Not Safely to be Angered”: The Convocation, Controversy, Country Ideology, and Anglican High Churchmanship, 1689–1702’, entire. Spellman, Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 5–6; Tyacke, ‘From Laudians to Latitudinarians’, 55–60; Rupp, Religion in England, 1688–1791, 36–7. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in 18th Century England, 1. Spellman, Latitudinarianism in the Church of England, 9; Goldie, ‘John Locke, Jonas Proast’, 144. MS Locke c. 25. f. 45; LHW 309. J.R. Milton, ‘Locke, William III, and the Reform of the Universities’, 123–37. Israel, ‘William III and Toleration’, 155–60. 16 MS Locke e. 18, p. 3.

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Having failed to secure the return of his studentship,17 Locke lived chiefly in London for two years. The Two Treatises of Government were licensed in August of 1689. Published anonymously, the work assumed the cooler, less radical hue that would colour it for centuries. The translated Letter concerning Toleration appeared in the autumn and the Essay concerning Human Understanding in December. Locke’s purchase on posterity was secured by the rush of publications in 1689–1690, but of these he only acknowledged authorship of the Essay. His responsibility for the Two Treatises and the Letter would become an increasingly open secret, but only gradually. These habits of anonymity hampered interlocutors. The Locke of history had not yet fully emerged, and so his public reputation hung on the Essay, and to a lesser extent on Some Thoughts concerning Education (the third edition of which appeared in his name in 1695). Locke had confessed to Boyle in 1666 that ‘this very Caution of being in Print, where there is no Danger of it, has too much of Vanity in it’.18 His public controversies, nevertheless, were conducted anonymously. In early 1691, Locke decamped to north Essex. He lived for the remainder of his life at Oates, the manor house of Sir Francis Masham and his wife Damaris. London still demanded much of his time. The Whigs tapped his expertise on the currency, print licensing, and the colonies. He served on the reformed Board of Trade launched in 1696. However overworked and plagued by the bad London air, Locke’s written prolixity was astounding. He maintained a massive correspondence and wrote numerous manuscripts published posthumously (including A Discourse of Miracles and the Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of Saint Paul). In the summer of 1693, he published Some Thoughts concerning Education and in the next year a revised edition of the Essay concerning Human Understanding. In 1695, Locke’s apologetical work, The Reasonableness of Christianity, was printed anonymously. Throughout, Locke warred with critics. Running disputes with Stillingfleet, John Edwards, and Jonas Proast elicited fully seven further volumes from Locke. Had he died in 1687, Locke would have been a footnote in Restoration histories as part of the Shaftesbury clientage. As with Hobbes, longevity permitted his philosophical aspirations to find voice. Therefore, only late in life was Locke explicitly paired with the deceased Thomas Hobbes. Even then, Locke’s careful cropping of his public authorial profile influenced (and limited) the range of these associations. This 17 18

MS Locke c. 25, ff. 41–2. Boyle, General History of the Air, 140; Locke to Robert Boyle, 5 May 1666, CL, 1:275–6.

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book has argued that Locke read Hobbes primarily as the representative of a particular outcome of the new contractualism as it grappled with the problem of religious freedom. Locke’s explicit comments on Hobbes point to this conclusion, as do the implicit Hobbesian themes of his early writings. Consistent with the polemical dynamics of the Restoration, Locke understood Hobbes as a politique theorist of sovereignty. This position appealed to Locke as he moved (like Hobbes) from an antitolerationist to a tolerationist politics. As, however, the project of a Stuart politique toleration collapsed, he began to deploy Hobbes polemically as an emblem of coercion. This shift coloured aspects of the Epistola de Tolerantia, but it largely played out in manuscripts. Hobbes’s intellectual foils, such as Parker and Stillingfleet, could not readily attach their critiques of Hobbes to Locke’s name. And even when they were at last positioned to do this, Locke’s reticence hindered their response. Only as the author of the Essay concerning Human Understanding could Locke be tarred directly with the Hobbesian brush. It was thus often on ontological and epistemological questions that Locke emerged from the shadows as a supposed ‘Hobbist’. The political aspects of Locke’s thought and their potential relationship to Hobbism intrigue moderns. But it was precisely here that Locke most insulated his own reputation. Nevertheless, read carefully, the controversies of the 1690s disclose thematic features relevant to the present book. As John Yolton once wrote, the Essay ‘created such an active interest in Locke’s contemporaries’ because ‘its philosophical doctrines were almost always directly related to the moral and religious disputes of the day’.19 Contemporaries lashed Locke to Hobbes’s materialist atheism, to a ‘godless’ account of sovereignty, and to a politique statecraft. Locke could be read as one of the late ‘spawn of Atheists, Deists, Fanaticks, and Jesuits under the prolifick influence of an abus’d Toleration, crawling forth like Locusts, first to darken, and then to devour the Land’.20 Locke’s eagerness to disassociate himself from Hobbes must be read in this light. The tolerationist controversy with Proast, though it made no explicit reference to Hobbes, was strongly coloured by Locke’s disenchantment with the Hobbesian politique. Finally, it must be remembered that Locke’s authorship of the Two Treatises, the Reasonableness of Christianity, and the Letters concerning 19 20

Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas, viii. Anon., Essay Upon Government. Wherein Republican Schemes Reviv’d by Mr. Lock, Dr. Blackal, etc. are Fairly Consider’d and Refuted, 1.

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Toleration was in many quarters privately understood.21 His critics often knew more than they felt able to say. The implications of his contractualism for the problems of conscience and toleration thus appear in antiLockean polemic more regularly than might be anticipated. This chapter will chart Locke’s reputation as a Hobbist through the 1690s, when it finally took shape. Charges of Hobbism could be remarkably various, when levelled against Locke as against others. But the politics of conscience, sovereignty, and toleration were a consistent thematic vein running through critiques of Locke. Mining this particular vein will not comprehensively account for every accusation of Hobbism made against him, but it burrows through a surprisingly large swatch of the intellectual terrain of the period. As Brent Sirota has established, religious polemics from the 1690s fixated on both the status of Trinitarian orthodoxy and disputes over the autonomy of clerical authority to police orthodoxy.22 As this book has demonstrated, Hobbes’s Restoration writings had anticipated this intersection of the theological and ecclesiological. Hobbes was the prototype of the heretical Erastian, promoting prerogative toleration as a vehicle for theological license. His status as a foil for the orthodox persisted into an era of fractured churchmanship. In 1695, the non-juror George Hickes would make the point. Infuriated by both lax Erastian churchmen and impudent heresy, he demanded a campaign to defend orthodoxy ‘from Leviathan to the present day’.23

Locke’s Post-revolutionary Encounters with Hobbism The complexities of Hobbes’s legacy as they would have presented themselves to Locke in post-revolutionary polemic are suggested in the writings of Sir Robert Howard. Remembered as a Restoration playwright and something of a roué, Howard was also a prominent member of the Cavalier Parliament and was probably known to Locke.24 Howard’s ardent anti-Catholicism implicated his view of the Stuart Indulgences and made him a firm Williamite. He was also an appreciative reader of Hobbes. This emerged in writings that Locke owned, most notably Howard’s 1694 The History of Religion. Clerical censures of that work were answered in 1696 by

21 22 23 24

Le Clerc believed that Locke’s authorship of the Letters was common knowledge. Le Clerc, Life of Locke, 16. Sirota, ‘Trintiarian Crisis’, entire. George Hickes to Arthur Charlett, 8 December 1695, quoted in Sirota, ‘Trinitarian Crisis’, 50. ODNB; Allsopp, ‘Sir Robert Howard, Thomas Hobbes, and the Fall of Clarendon’, 75–93.

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Howard’s Twofold Vindication of the late Arch-bishop of Canterbury and the author of The History of Religion. Howard’s History was a natural history of religion, a Hobbesian genre fashionable among heterodox writers of the 1690s.25 It viewed organized religion as quasi-heathen priestcraft designed to manipulate the vulgar. Barbaric superstition engrafted into primitive Christianity empowered priests, who deployed ‘mystery and persecution’.26 Howard’s sceptical account of the Council of Nicaea and his defence of heresy as ‘free opinion’ might have been lifted wholesale from Hobbes’s heresy writings.27 Howard promoted rational theology and attacked the ‘Business of submitting our Understandings to Humane Authority’.28 He also defended Tillotson from the charge that he had reduced religion to a civil instrument based on the ‘politicks’ of Leviathan.29 The non-juror Charles Leslie had accused Hobbes and Tillotson of subordinating religion to the mere ‘Peace and Quietness of this world’.30 The Act of Toleration had ‘render’d our Church a perfect Cypher’, a mere adjunct of the state.31 Implicitly Hobbesian, toleration favoured atomized opinion over the rightly ordered conscience of the church.32 Howard, and presumably Locke, rejected this account and instead found in Tillotson’s sermons a defence of ‘private Liberty and Exercise’, an individual ‘right to publish and propagate the true Religion’. Locke presumably appreciated Howard’s own theological minimalism and emphasis on Gospel charity. But in Howard’s Two-fold Vindication, Locke would also have encountered a guarded defence of Hobbes, which presented him as a tolerationist foe of clerical persecution. Rallying to free conscience, the Two-fold Vindication would have appealed to Locke by defending the Toleration Act as superior to the Stuart Indulgences.33 The latter were mere ‘favors’ and ‘liberalities’ doled out by a ‘popish and arbitrary interest’.34 This attack on indulgence, reminiscent of Marvell, was not Hobbesian, but Howard’s 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 33 34

See also Goldie, ‘John Locke, the Early Lockeans, and Priestcraft’, 138–9; Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions, chapter one. Howard, History of Religion, iv–v. Reflections upon a Late Libel Printed, entituled, the Charge of Socinianism against Dr. Tillotson Consider’d, 53–60, 75–81, 85–91. Howard, History of Religion, viii. Leslie, Charge of Socinianism against Dr. Tillotson, 13–4; LL, 1718. Leslie, Charge of Socinianism against Dr. Tillotson, 14; see also Remarks upon the Present Confederacy, 19–21. 32 Leslie, Querela Temporum, 24–5; LL, 1718. See also Lowth, Of the Subject of Church Power. Howard, Twofold Vindication of the Late Arch-bishop of Canterbury, and the Author of the History of Religion, 5–7. Ibid., 14–5, 51, 177.

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deconstruction of clerical authority certainly was. Confronting Leslie’s manifesto against ‘super-Hobbism’,35 Howard dismissed the term as a lazy, illinformed epithet.36 Hobbism, he wrote (echoing polemics of the 1670s), was a slander against the Williamite regime designed to flatter the corporate authority of the (now Jacobite) church.37 Hobbes was thus brought onside as an ally against priestcraft. Still more boldly, Howard tackled Francis Atterbury’s sermon attacking his own History of Religion as a Hobbesian production.38 Hobbesians, Atterbury had warned, understood religion as a ‘Convenient trick and pretence only; invented by Cunning men to keep silly people in awe, to make Princes Reign safely, and the Priesthood live easily’.39 Years before he published his landmark Letter to a Convocation Man, Atterbury thus sounded for the court of Queen Mary a familiar alarm over the dangerous allures of a Machiavellian or Hobbesian politique. Howard responded subtly. He pit Atterbury against Hobbes as to whether individuals were capable of ‘search[ing] successfully after Truth, especially Divine Truth’. On this question Atterbury had wrongly heaped ‘Abuse upon old Hobbes’. Howard diplomatically conceded that Leviathan was an ‘ill Book’ but characterized it as ‘ingenious and honest’ on the matter of theological ‘searching’. Hobbes had conceded in Leviathan that ‘I am a man that love my own opinions, and think all true that I say.’ To Atterbury this remark betrayed the wilful pride of the heretical conscience. Howard answered: . . . if loving a Man’s own Opinions must be an Instance of Pride, let the Reader consider, whether most loves his own Opinions: Sir R[obert] H[oward], who can indulge a peaceable good Subject to differ from him, and enjoy the present Parliamentary Liberty of Conscience, without envying or censuring him; or Mr. Att[erbury] who in bold defiance of the Laws of his Country, reproaches all Men that do not believe as he does.40

Hobbes and Howard were thus cast as advocates of ‘a sober Liberty of philosophizing and prophesying’, and Atterbury as a rebellious inquisitor. Defending the Toleration Act, Howard invoked Hobbes’s defence of heresy as mere ‘private opinion’. Howard perhaps allusively drafted Locke into this argument, contrasting ‘mysterious’ theological cant with 35 36 38 39 40

Leslie, Charge of Socinianism against Dr. Tillotson, 5; LL, 1718. Howard, Twofold Vindication, 37, 44–5. 37 Ibid., 37. Atterbury, ‘A Scorner Incapable of True Wisdom: a Sermon Preached before the Queen at Whitehall, Oct 28 1694’, in Fourteen Sermons Preached on Several Occasions, 147–8, 160, 164. Ibid., 147–8. Howard, Twofold Vindication of the Late Arch-bishop of Canterbury, and the Author of the History of Religion, 67–8.

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the ‘plain and easy’ teachings of the ‘Reasonableness of the Christian Religion’. Howard’s tolerationist reading of Leviathan acknowledged Hobbes’s contradictions. Atterbury might fairly have ‘censured old Hobbs for teaching that Right is founded in Power’, he wrote, ‘or that the Command of the Civil Magistrate makes the Scripture a Law to us’. But it was ‘shamefully false’ to depict Hobbes’s theological beliefs as mere prideful scoffing. ‘I have taken pains’, he wrote, to vindicate Hobbs (who has Faults enough to answer for, without being unjustly charg’d) from these particular unjust Charges, that the Reader may understand how convenient it is, to imitate the noble Beraeans, and examine carefully, whether all those things are true which are sometimes told them è Cathedrâ.41

Howard thus disparaged Atterbury as an apologist for ecclesiastical infallibility and defended Hobbes as a sincere seeker freely preaching as Paul of Tarsus and Silas had at Berea. Readers should approach the theological opinions of Leviathan as the Bereans had those ancient sermons, with all ‘readiness of mind’.42 After the Revolution, the tensions of Hobbes’s position on conscience were substantially eased for readers such as Howard. With indulgence and the suspending power abolished, and toleration enacted by statute, the conditions of free conscience were clarified. The clerical high-flyers had lost their sway at court and been replaced by modest Tillotsonians. Hobbes’s anticlericalism and deconstruction of heresy could now be invoked, and the contradictions of his theory of conscience finessed away. Locke surely heard a familiar echo in the controversy over Howard’s ‘Hobbesian’ History of Religion. In the tumultuous theological context of the 1690s, he and Howard shared enemies. His own writing would itself stand accused of a theological Hobbism enabled by a licentious and politique toleration. Locke’s positioning vis-à-vis Hobbism evidenced itself soon after the Revolution during the controversy over the oath of allegiance. The controversy, which Locke followed closely, showed yet again that conformist clergy, as scourges of Hobbism, could force Locke to clarify his own understanding of church authority and the state. Locke followed the parliamentary debate on whether to enforce the oaths of allegiance on the higher clergy.43 He surely shared the indignation of his friend John Somers that non-juring clergy spread false principles which worked to 41

Ibid., 73–8.

42

Acts, 17:11.

43

Locke to Edward Clarke, 13 April 1689, CL, 3:603–4.

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‘infect the people’.44 Their notions of divine, hereditary right affronted any rights-oriented contract theory. Equally obnoxious was their ecclesiology, which emphasized the divine rights of the corporate church and its bishops. Locke, however, did not reflexively applaud all manner of oath-taking clergy. This emerged in his sceptical notes on the influential Case of Allegiance due to Sovereign Powers (1690) by William Sherlock. Sherlock, a dedicated conformist and scourge of dissent, spent a short period as a non-juror but eventually defended the oaths. Sherlock’s ‘conversion’ caused a stir in Locke’s circle,45 and the Case of Allegiance provided Locke another point of contact with contemporary debates over Hobbism. Allegiance to ‘usurpers’, in 1690 as in 1651, was construed by critics as a Hobbesian violation of natural law and an abuse of conscience. A critical Examination of Sherlock by Theophilus Downes, which Locke owned, captured these dynamics: Mr Hobbs hath taught his Followers, that Subjects when commanded by their Sovereign to deny Christ, may lawfully obey him; they have the Licence, says he, that Naaman had, and need not put themselves into danger for it: A Principle, no doubt, for our Worldly ease and safety; and upon the same account he advanced another Principle, the same, for ought that I can see, which is maintained by [Sherlock], That the Obligation of the Subject to the Sovereign does last no longer than the Power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them. In short, the Temptation (for it is nothing else) with which the Doctor would corrupt his Reader, may equally serve as a persuasive to the denial of Christ, the Existence of Spirits, Hell Torments, and to divers other Articles of the Hobbian belief.46

The argument over allegiance thus intersected with debates over conscience freedom, the autonomy of the church, and politique reasoning.47 The non-juror Henry Dodwell likewise accused Sherlock of betraying the church for wordly considerations and ‘poor-spirited Politicians’.48 Vulnerable, Sherlock laboured to distance himself. Unable to deny that both he and Hobbes counselled obedience to de facto powers, Sherlock obscurely dissented from Hobbes’s supposed argument that ‘God himself is the Natural Lord and Governour of the World, not because he made it, 44 45 46 47 48

John Somers to Locke, 25 September 1689, CL, 3:698–90. Benjamin Furly to Locke, 16/26 October 1690, CL, 4:145. LL, 991. Downes, Examination of the Arguments drawn from Scripture and Reason, in Dr. Sherlock’s Case of Allegiance, 3, 14–5. Collier, Dr. Sherlock’s Case of Allegiance Considered, 73–82, 91–3; Seller, History of Passive Obedience since the Reformation, 104, 186. Dodwell to Sherlock, n.d., BL Add MS 32095, f. 360.

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but because he is Omnipotent.’ It was rather the case that ‘Government is founded in Right, and that God is the Natural Lord of the World because he made it.’ Might alone did not justify authority but merely signalled ‘where God had placed and settled the Power’ to rule.49 Locke reacted to this with mystification.50 He rejected Sherlock’s veiling of his theory of obedience to de facto powers with providentialism. He presumably disliked Sherlock’s naïve faith in the historical operations of the divine will and his disregard for popular consent.51 Furthermore, Locke necessarily rejected Sherlock’s use of church constitutionalism to check the absolute authority of de facto sovereigns.52 Scrambling to preserve his credit with the non-jurors, Sherlock wished to deflect the charge of schism and preserve the ‘communion of the Church’. He had no desire to ‘blacken the Clergy’ with the radical Whigs and raw Hobbesians.53 Sherlock thus distinguished ‘rightful’ new sovereigns from mere bandits. William and Mary exemplified the former and the Interregnum regimes, the latter. Contrasting these two contexts in which a Hobbesian theory of political obligation had been invoked, Sherlock drew distinctions. Some of these might have appealed to Locke, such as the question-begging claim that the Williamite regime was ‘settled’ and accepted, while the Interregnum regimes had not been.54 Locke may have appreciated Sherlock’s constitutional case against the Commonwealth. The regicides had not merely accepted the providential departure of an unjust king but had abolished the monarchy and the law itself. But Locke could only reject the decisive role that Sherlock allowed the episcopal church in arbitrating the limits of rightful power. The church constitution, Sherlock argued, guarded the ‘safety of the nation’ and adjudicated the ‘rightfulness’ of new powers. He relied heavily on Bishop John Overall’s Jacobean Convocation Book, a commentary on English canon law 49 50

51 52

53 54

Sherlock, Case of Allegiance, 15. MS Locke c. 28, f. 91v; PE, 313–17. Sherlock was acquitted of Hobbism in Their Present Majesties Government Proved to be Thoroughly Settled, and that we may Submit to it, Without Asserting the Principles of Mr. Hobbs. Locke’s notes on Sherlock are terse, but he recorded pagination from Sherlock’s book next to his own notes, and this permits a more detailed reconstruction of their apparent sources of disagreement. Sherlock, Case of Allegiance, 24–5; MS Locke c. 28, f. 92v. Not explored in Parkin, Taming, 382–7; Locke owned many responses to Sherlock (LL, 63–70). Some rejected his providentialism and church constitutionalism. See Modest Remarks on Dr. Sherlock’s New Book. For one accusation of Hobbism, see Kettlewell, The Duty of Allegiance Settled upon its True Ground, 53. An argument he tried on Sancroft. Sherlock to Sancroft, 20 August 1690, BL Add MS 32095, f. 347; for Sherlock’s Hobbesian as ‘Oliverian’, see Wilson, God, the King, and the Country United in the Justification of this Present Revolution, 12, 22, 29.

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only published in 1690. Providence, he wrote (implicitly invoking the Trial of the Seven Bishops), often cast down evil princes to secure the ‘preservation of the Church and the deliverance of the Good’.55 Lawful new powers were distinguished from usurpers by the discernment of the English bishops. The old episcopal men loyal to Charles I had defended the constitutional monarchy and the rightful church against the Cromwellians. William and Mary now likewise protected England’s sacred church from a popish prince.56 ‘Whoever loves the Church’, Sherlock wrote, ‘will not chuse to submit (when they are not obliged in Conscience) to such Usurpations on the State as overthrows the Church.’57 Hobbesian de factoism, by contrast, impermissibly surrendered spiritual authority to sovereign conquerors. All of this recalled earlier argumentative strategies of Sherlock in his defences of Stillingfleet.58 Locke could assent to the secular, but not the eccesial, dimensions of this argument. He dismissed as ‘jargon’ Sherlock’s claim that obedience to new authority emerged from a ‘conscience’ informed by right ‘Religion’.59 Episcopal authority could not distinguish the real rights of power from ‘pretended ones’.60 Locke noted, with implicit dissent, Sherlock’s appeal to churchly ‘acts and canons’.61 The Church could not act as proxy for the consent of the people. Considering Sherlock’s use of the ‘Preservation of the Church’ to test whether a new prince was ‘providential’, Locke sceptically noted this as one of his supposed ‘markes of a true’ authority (rather than one of ‘human invention’).62 Locke recorded, surely with displeasure, Sherlock’s example (borrowed for Overall) of Alexander the Great, whose rule of the Jews was supposedly legitimated not by long settlement or popular consent but by ‘Jaddus the high priest’.63 Locke likely squirmed at Sherlock’s invocation of the ‘sacred assurances’ of William and Mary to protect the established church, with only a ‘bare Indemnity’ for dissenters. The church, for Sherlock, distinguished his moderated de factoism from the godless variety offered by ‘the Atheists, the Hobbists, the Commonwealthmen’. The real Hobbesians, he charged, were those very Whigs and Exclusionists who brought schism by persecuting non-jurors.64 Locke’s 55 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Sherlock, Case of Allegiance, 44–52. 56 Ibid., 47–50. Sherlock, Vindication of the Case of Allegiance, 70. See Chapter 6. Locke owned Three Letters to Dr. Sherlock concerning Church Communion, which defended Independency. LL, 113. MS Locke c. 28, f. 91–91v; Sherlock, Case of Allegiance, 39, 43. MS Locke c. 28, f. 91; Sherlock, Case of Allegiance, 19. MS Locke c. 28, f. 91; Sherlock, Case of Allegiance, 4–5, 7. MS Locke c. 28, f. 93v; Sherlock, Case of Allegiance, 44. MS Locke c. 28, f. 95v; Sherlock, Case of Allegiance, 48. Sherlock, Letter to the Authors of the Answers to the Case of Allegiance Due to Sovereign Princes, 2, 5.

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notes implicitly rejected this valorization of the society of orders. But he was not willing to play the pure Hobbist and rejected both a bare conquest theory and Sherlock’s churchly providentialism in favour of a sovereignty limited by consent and rights. Locke thus once again translated an antiHobbesianism of priestly, ecclesial conscience into one grounded on the conscience rights of individuals. Nevertheless, it was paradoxically the case that as Locke’s actual political and theoretical proximity to Hobbes diminished, he became exposed to public charges of Hobbism for the first time. Locke had by this time abandoned the Hobbesian prerogative tolerantia that had once appealed to him. But his Essay and the Reasonableness were subject to interpretations that drew him near Hobbes’s theological sins: materialism, antiTrinitarianism, moral conventionalism, and creedal minimalism. The fine points of his theory of conscience were all too easily washed away in the polemical swirl that surrounded these heresies of the age. Early signs of trouble emerged in Locke’s correspondence with James Tyrrell. The historian and political theorist Tyrrell was Locke’s long-time friend and custodian of his manuscripts during his exile. In the 1690s, he produced histories of English constitutionalism and defended a Grotian account of natural law.65 His great foil was the ‘Epicurean’ atheist Hobbes. This was the context for his letters to Locke from Oxford, which reported the vexatious reception given the Essay concerning Human Understanding. The exchanges were tense. Locke upbraided Tyrrell for speculating publicly about his authorship of the Two Treatises.66 Tyrrell scorned the orthodox churchmen, ‘scandalized that so sweet and easy a part of their sermons as that of the Law written in the heart’ had been exploded by Locke’s Essay.67 But his own unease betrayed itself. To conservative Oxonians, Locke had ‘resolved all vertue and vice, and the Law by which it is establisht’ into mere convention. This approached ‘what is so much cryed out upon in Mr. Hobs; when he asserts that in the state of nature and out of a commonwealth, there is no moral good or evil’.68 Locke crossly responded that he did believe in a rational natural law, divine in quality, distinct from revelation, but not implanted in the mind.69 Tyrrell remained unsatisfied with the Essay’s obscurity on the relationship of 65 66 67 68 69

Goldie, ‘Tyrrell’, ODNB. James Tyrrell to Locke, 19 December 1689, and 30 August 1690, CL, 3:761–2, 4:116–7. James Tyrrell to Locke, 18 February 1690, CL, 4:11. James Tyrrell to Locke, 30 June 1690 CL, 4:100–1. His topic was men’s ‘ideas’ of moral law, not the moral law itself. Locke to James Tyrrell, 4 August 1690, CL, 4:111–14.

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natural and divine law and anxious to distinguish Locke from Hobbes’s ethical conventionalism.70 Ian Harris and Timothy Stanton have argued for the importance of natural law within Locke’s thinking, and particularly within his account of conscience. They may, however, underestimate Locke’s failure to publically convey the internal coherence of his system. Locke was, with Hobbes, often accused of reducing natural law to a psychology of appetite and aversion, and thus to mere political convention. This was not Locke’s intention. In his only explicit allusion to Hobbes in An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke opposed two views of the moral requirement that one must keep compacts. The Christian did so ‘because God, who has the Power of eternal Life and Death, requires it of us’, while the ‘Hobbist’ did so ‘Because the Publick requires it, and the Leviathan will punish you, if you do not’.71 Locke undoubtedly favoured the sovereignty of God in this case, but in point of fact he presented the contrast merely to illustrate that there existed a ‘great variety of Opinions, concerning moral rules’, a pluralism which told against any supposed ‘innate’ moral principles. For decades, Locke had denied any innate sense of natural law. Natural law – while universal – could only be accessed by reason interacting with sensory data. In An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke neglected natural law, subdividing law into divine law, civil law, and the ‘law of Opinion or Reputation’.72 Pressured, he later added text avowing a universal natural law that was not innate but was instead ‘attained’ by ‘application of our natural Faculties’.73 This, however, could appear as a rearguard action. The Two Treatises (which, in any case, contemporaries would have read as a stand-alone text) occasionally referred to the natural law as ‘implanted’ or ‘writ’ in the ‘hearts of mankind’, but this was probably a casual inadvertency.74 The Two Treatises exploded Filmer’s traditional account of the natural law (upholding natural hierarchy),75 and asserted an individual right to execute the natural law in the state of nature. But as to the content of the natural law, it was not Locke’s ‘present purpose to enter here into the particulars’.76 Here and there Locke went further, writing of a natural duty to preserve, nourish, and educate children, or a natural duty to preserve oneself. However, his emphasis on survival, and on an individual right to execute natural law in the natural state, struck many readers as fundamentally 70 73 74 76

James Tyrrell to Locke, 27 June 1690, CL, 4:107–9. 71 EcHU I:3:5–6. 72 EcHU II:28:7. EcHU I:3:13; Aarsleff, ‘State of Nature and the Nature of Man in Locke’, 127–33. TTG, I:56; II:11. 75 Locke, TTG, II:1, and throughout the First Treatise. TTG, II:6–7 and 12. Truer was Locke’s statement that the natural law was ‘plain and intelligible to all rational creatures’ who ‘study of it’. TTG, II:124, 136.

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Hobbesian.77 And though a natural duty to public worship may well have informed Locke’s fully developed tolerationism, natural law makes no explicit appearance in the Epistola. By the time he composed The Reasonableness of Christianity, Locke was openly pessimistic about the capacity of unassisted reason to produce ‘an entire body of the law of nature’.78 Revelation, rationally interpreted, was required to fill the gap.79 During the intellectual tumult of the 1690s, Locke’s failure to lay out a developed account of natural law was commonly interpreted as a lurking Hobbesianism. Locke was fully aware of this possibility. In a notebook dating to 1687–8, referencing book four of his manuscript of the Essay concerning Human Understanding, he had attributed to Hobbes and unnamed ‘philosophical sects’ the teaching that ‘Right and Wrong, Honest and Dishonest, are defined only by Laws and not by Nature’.80 Increasingly, this was a shoal around which Locke would need to navigate. After the brief, contentious meeting of Convocation (the first since 1664) was dissolved in January of 1690, Oxford served as the institutional headquarters of orthodoxy. The Trinitarian crisis loomed over all. But the Restoration context also echoed in Tyrrell’s reports, particularly in suggestive Oxford rumours that Locke had written Clifford’s Treatise on Reason, a Hobbesian production originally emerging from Shaftesbury’s old circle.81 Locke’s resistance theory and tolerationism seem to have been open secrets among his Oxford critics. They associated Locke with a Hobbesian subordination of morality and religion to sovereignty. This had been a core concern of the church for a generation. Locke’s response was a somewhat maladroit effort at deflection. He responded with similar reticence when accused of Hobbism by Isaac Newton. Newton had characterized Locke’s denial of innate ideas as an axe chop at the ‘root of all morality’ and confessed to Locke, ‘I took you for a Hobbist.’82 Locke responded generously, asking Newton to identify the textual grounds of his concerns so that ‘I may avoid being mistaken by others, or unawares doeing the least prejudice to truth or virtue.’ He did not explicitly mention Hobbes, a typical gesture of hesitation.83 At Oxford, long the capital of clerical anti-Hobbism, divine right royalism, and high episcopalianism, Locke would remain in the dock 77 79 80 81 82 83

TTG, II:56 and 135. 78 Locke, Reasonableness of Christianity, 149–50. Jolley explores the role of natural law in Locke’s later Letters on toleration. Jolley, Toleration and Understanding, 154–61. MS Locke f. 28, p. 167. James Tyrrell to Locke, 20 August 1690, and 18 March 1690, CL, 4:110–14, and 4:36. Isaac Newton to Locke, 16 September 1693, CL, 4:727. Locke to Issac Newton, 5 October 1693, CL, 4:731; Isaac Newton to Locke, 15 October 1693, CL, 4:733.

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with Leviathan for decades.84 Both Tyrrell and John Toland were present for the January 30th sermon of 1695 at St. Mary’s Church, commemorating King Charles the martyr. They were, reported one gossip, ‘very attentive’ as ‘Mr. Hobbes and Mr. Locke’ were flayed from the pulpit as enemies to the ‘old principles of government’. ‘The eyes of the congregation’ were ‘fixed’ upon them, and it was suspected that one of them, or both, reported the scene to Locke.85 Locke certainly kept a wary gaze on academic antagonists. The universities continued to produce condemnations of the Hobbesian politique. Old wounds had not healed. When Anthony Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses appeared in 1692, it was burned by Oxford for impolitic remarks about the Earl of Clarendon. Wood’s narrative of Hobbes’s late polemics with Bishop Fell also ‘set all Oxford in a flame’.86 Nor did Cambridge provide Locke reliable shelter. In 1694, James Lowde, fellow of Clare Hall, published A Discourse concerning the Nature of Man … with an Examination of Mr Hobbs's Opinions. Lowde entangled Locke in his critique of Hobbes, and Locke responded briefly in the revised edition of the Essay concerning Human Understanding. Lowde struck back in his Moral Essays of 1699. The minor controversy demonstrated Locke’s vulnerability to charges of religious or ecclesial Hobbism.87 Lowde swept Locke into his case against the godless, quasi-Epicurean new philosophy. Hobbes’s account of humanity, he argued, extinguished divine reason and innate knowledge of natural law. Leviathan reduced conscience to mere appetite and opinion and made ethics dependent on arbitrary will. Lowde scored Locke for denying, with Hobbes and Spinoza, the innate principles of conscience. Against him, he cited Taylor’s more traditional view that God had implanted knowledge of the natural law and had written ‘all the Laws of Christianity in the Tables of your Consciences’.88 So numbered among the ‘atheists of the present age’, Locke was saddled with the Hobbesian (and Machiavellian) doctrine that theism itself was an ‘opinion’ promoted by ‘Kings and Princes, and those of the Ecclesiastical Order, the one to keep the people in awe, the other to maintain and bear up the reputation of their Function’. The very ‘Thunderings and Lightning of Mount Sinai were only the well-order’d Plots of somewhat like Drums and 84 85 86 87 88

Yolton, Way of Ideas, 4–5. Thomas Hinton to Arthur Charlett, 31 January 1695, quoted in Goldie, ‘Earliest Attack on Locke’s Two Treatises of Government’, 73–84. James Harrises to Wood, 21 July 1692, quoted in Pritchard, ‘Last Days’, 185. Lowde, Discourse concerning the Nature of Man both in his Natural and Political capacity . . . with an Examination of Mr. Hobbs’s Opinions, 134. Ibid., 77–82.

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Gun-powder behind the stage’, and ‘the Miracles of our Saviour were only the deluding and the cheating of the outward Senses of some’.89 The church was thus debased, Lowde insisted, to a ‘politick Device’ or ‘contrivance’ of princes. ‘Fatal principles’ and arbitrary divinity ultimately served ‘the pleasure of the Civil Magistrate’.90 Thus had Hobbes, as a quasi-Calvinist determinist, made a ‘God of his Leviathan’, undermined the church, and reduced conscience to willful opinions bridled by power. And where Machiavelli had offered his cynical system ‘only to a Prince’, Hobbes’s ‘bad principles are of a more universal influence, and reach not only to the Prince, but People too’.91 Gilbert Burnet offered similar criticism. Hobbes ‘thought religion had no other foundation than the laws of the land; and he put all the law in the will of the Prince, or of the people’.92 Lowde’s attack on Hobbes for democratizing the Machiavellian politique strongly echoed the old episcopal attacks on indulgence. Lowde had indeed participated in that campaign, casting usurping sovereigns and nonconformists as Hobbesian fellow-travellers. Locke cannot have been comfortable in this company. Having broken with the Hobbesian theory of conscience (and with Hobbes’s ‘religion of fatality’), he did not wish to be associated with the logic of merely civil religion. He responded in the revised Essay concerning Human Understanding. Where Lowde had charged him with making ‘Vertue Vice and Vice Vertue’, Locke insisted that he had merely used convention and positive law to explain ‘moral Ideas’, not ‘moral Rules’. A rule, he insisted, ‘alters not the nature of things, though Men generally do judge of, and denominate their actions according to the esteem and fashion of the Place or Sect they are of’.93 This was not a particularly robust denial of ethical conventionalism. Locke, furthermore, necessarily reiterated his denial of all innate notions.94 In his Moral Essays, Lowde more stridently accused Locke of reducing the dictates of conscience to mere opinion. Conscience thus became arbitrary, varying according to the laws of ‘respective Clubs’ and religious sects. Without reference to Locke’s tolerationist writings – which may have remained unknown to him – Lowde acutely critiqued a society of atomized, voluntary clubs and congregations, enabled by a politique toleration and the ‘will and power of the Law-maker’.95

89 93 94 95

Ibid., 121–2. 90 Ibid., 181–3. 91 Ibid., 163, 168. 92 Burnet, History, 1:333. Locke, An Essay concerning Humane Understanding . . . the second edition, ‘to the reader’. Idem. Lowde, Moral Essays wherein some of Mr. Lockes and Monsir. Malbranch’s Opinions are briefly examin’d, 9–10, 40–2. Anthony Collins and Locke later corresponded about Lowde. Anthony Collins to Locke, 15 March 1704 and Locke to Collins, 21/24 March 1704, CL, 8:243, 250–6.

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Locke thereafter held his tongue. But the revised Essay betrayed his anxiety over Hobbesian characterizations of his philosophy. Epistemological and ontological critiques of Locke carried profound political overtones. Locke – as a Hobbist, an Epicurean, or a Spinozist – was suspect as an anticlerical thinker and a politique. Such critiques, usually made without reference to Locke’s tolerationist writing, would have recalled for him the polemical patterns of the Restoration. The reverberations of past polemics must have struck Locke still more forcefully when Edward Stillingfleet published against him. Locke knew what Stillingfleet did not: that his own understanding of Hobbism had been partially shaped by critical engagement with the bishop’s earlier writings. As Stillingfleet now cycled back to familiar themes, Locke was drawn in publicly.96 In his Discourse in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity (1696), the churchman reprised his case against the fashionable atheism of Hobbes and Spinoza. Stillingfleet condemned methodological materialism.97 He defended the Trinity, specifically the proposition that one divine essence might exist in different ‘substances’ and thus in multiple persons.98 Deism, he warned, represented a revived Hobbism among those claiming ‘more Wit than to be cheated by the Priests and imposed upon by the common Forms of Religion’. They maliciously represented ‘Churchmen as Persons of Interest and Design, who maintain Religion only because it supports them’. Their war on priestcraft was advanced partly by a theory of natural religion that reduced all creeds to indifferency. The final component in this sceptical project was to clamour for a ‘universal liberty as to opinions’.99 Anti-Trinitarianism had inspired a renewed campaign against the clergy and in favour of a reckless philosophical license. This complaint echoed concerns about Hobbes’s own tolerationism of the 1660s, which had also targeted orthodox Trinitarianism. But Locke was now dragged into the thicket. Stillingfleet’s scholastic understanding of ‘substance’ equated it with the ‘essence’ of a thing, comprehensible rationally but not directly demonstrable to sense. He criticized Locke for a hazy account of how his ‘substratum’ (posited as the thing in which the sensible qualities of substances inhered) could be clearly perceived. Locke was also exposed by the rather pro forma, equivocal tone of his concession that ‘spiritual substances’ 96 97 98

Stewart, ‘Stillingfleet and the Way of Ideas’, 245–80. William Molyneux had urged Locke to disprove the eternity of the world, as ‘Hobbs himself’ relied on the argument. Molyneux to Locke, 18 April 1693, CL, 4:668–9. 99 Stillingfleet, Discourse in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity, xxvii. Ibid., 1, lxix.

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might exist.100 On this point, to Locke’s alarm, John Toland had used his doctrine of ideas in Toland’s own Christianity not Mysterious.101 There Locke’s epistemology was applied to the ‘essence’ and ‘persons’ of the Trinity, with predictable effects.102 His book had been publicly burned in Ireland.103 Answering Stillingfleet, Locke noted that he had not discussed the Trinity and denied that he was ‘one of the Gentlemen of this new way of reasoning’. Harder to dispute was an anti-Trinitarianism by consequence. Locke insisted that a ‘substratum’ was necessary to support the modes and accidents accessible to our senses. Though individual substances could not be known, the ‘general idea’ of substance could be. This logic, however, violated empirical method. As for ‘spiritual substance’ (or ‘thinking substance’), Locke hesitantly described it as merely probable. The ghost of Leviathan hovered over this jittery effort to affirm (contra Hobbes) immaterial substance.104 Indeed, Locke conceded it possible that ‘thinking substance’ was material, and – as Hobbes had – he cited ancient authorities describing the soul as a ‘subtil matter’.105 As for his general theory of ideas, Locke suggested that ‘clear and distinct apprehensions’ might usefully expose absurd doctrine such as transubstantiation or the ‘pope’s supremacy’. Not for the first time did Locke lob the grenade of popery at Stillingfleet.106 The bishop’s answer more explicitly associated Locke with Hobbes. Locke’s ‘new methods of Certainty’ aided such philosophical infidels.107 Pouncing on Locke’s reference to the soul as ‘subtile matter’, Stillingfleet lashed this to Leviathan. Hobbes’s ‘spirit’ was ‘a subtile fluid, invisible Body, or a Ghost, or other Idol or Phantasm of the Imagination’. This premise informed his heretical mortalism, as a soul that was other than a ‘separated substance’ must die with the body. It was ‘not enough’, 100 101 102 103 104

105 106 107

Ibid., 231–9, 240, 245; Ayers, ‘Foundation of Knowledge and the Logic of Substance: the Structure of Locke’s General Philosophy’, 60–71. Duncan, ‘Toland, Leibniz, and Active Matter’, 249–78. Wiglesworth, Deism in Enlightenment England, 23–30. Theo Harrison to John Strype, 10. October 1697, Cambridge Add. MS 5, letter 248. Richard Burthogge took Locke as an ally against Hobbesian materialism. Burthogge, Essay Upon Reason and the Nature of Spirits, 171–3. Richard Burthogge to Locke, 15 May 1694, CL, 5:51. LL, 538. Locke, somewhat unusually, took the time to correct errata in Burthogge’s book. Bodl. Locke 8.162a/2, pp. 6, 11, 33, 52, 57, etc. On Locke and Hobbesian materialism, see Jolley, Locke’s Touchy Subjects: Materialism and Immortality, introduction. Locke, A Letter to Edward Ld. Bishop of Worcester, 4–10, 22, 28, 65–8; Peter Brown, A Letter in answer to . . . Christianity not Mysterious, 130. Locke, Letter to Edward Ld. Bishop of Worcester, 150–2, 225. Stillingfleet, The Bishops of Worcester’s Answer to Mr. Locke’s Letter, 38.

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Stillingfleet charged Locke, ‘for you to disown the Consequence, but to shew that it doth not follow from you Principles of Certainty’.108 Locke responded with a somewhat lifeless repetition of his insistence that his theory of ideas did not concern ‘matters of religion’. When defensive, Locke often resorted to professions of conformity with revealed truth.109 As in his letter to Tyrrell, his first Reply to Stillingfleet refused to speak Hobbes’s name. He only rose reluctantly to the bait in his next Reply, after Stillingfleet – with increasingly stridency – assailed Locke’s fideism. Faith without reason, the Bishop wrote, reduced revelation to ‘nothing but the Effects of an Exalted Fancy, or the Heats of a disordered Imagination, as Spinoza affirmed’.110 This finally smoked Locke out. He defended his claim that God might have miraculously endowed matter with ‘a faculty of thinking’, thus rendering the soul material. He rebuffed Stillingfleet’s ‘candid and kind insinuations’ that this argument was adopted from Hobbes or Spinoza. Neither man had offered such a theory, Locke asserted, implicitly conceding familiarity with their theologies. They had no ‘other business here, but their names skillfully to give that Character to my Book with which you would recommend it to the World’.111 Locke responded as he had repeatedly in the 1670s and 1680s, by turning the accusation of Hobbism around on his interlocutor. He insisted that only fideism could justify the doctrine of the Trinity. ‘I am not’, he continued, so well read in Hobbes or Spinosa as to be able to say, what were their Opinions in this Matter. But possibly there will be those who will think your Lordship’s Authority of more use to them in the Case, than those justly decried names. And be glad to find your Lordship a Patron of the Oracles of Reason, so little to the Advantage of the Oracles of Divine Revelation.112

Stillingfleet’s decrepit scholasticism invited Hobbists and Spinozists to destroy Christianity by kicking away such rotted supports. Stillingfleet wanted to use Leviathan as a weapon, but Locke tried to make him feel the hurt of the recoil. Too much has been made of Locke’s claim in this exchange that he was not a dedicated reader of Hobbes or Spinoza.113 That claim had a narrow 108 109 110 111 112 113

Ibid., 55–6, 83. Mr. Locke’s Reply to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his Letter, 2, 23, 31, 95–6. Stillingfleet, The Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to Mr. Locke’s Second Letter, 29–30. Mr. Locke’s Reply to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his Second Letter, 414. Ibid., 422–3. This is Parkin’s view. Parkin, Taming, 401. Parkin’s brief but insightful discussion of Locke and Hobbism foregrounds critiques of his account of natural law, but also notes the question of Hobbes’s ‘single doctrine’ orthodoxy (397–402).

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context, and Locke’s disavowal was too convenient to be fully trustworthy. (It was, furthermore, specific enough to imply a broader familiarity.) But Hobbes loomed silently over the entire controversy, as Molyneux would later intimate to Locke when dismissing Stillingfleet: ‘I begin to be almost of Old Hobbs opinion, that were it Mens Interest they would Question the truth of Euclid’s Elements, as now they Contest almost as full Evidences.’114 The Essay channelled critiques of Locke’s purported Hobbism into a natural philosophical channel, but these disputes implicated the political concerns that had roiled the church for decades.115 The relevant linkages emerged again in the three anonymous Remarks upon an Essay concerning Human Understanding. Long attributed to the idiosyncratic philosopher Thomas Burnet, the Remarks were very likely by the clergyman Richard Willis, later Bishop of Gloucester, Salisbury, and Winchester.116 Rallying to Stillingfleet in a series of works (all owned by Locke),117 Willis agreed that sensory knowledge was an insufficient foundation for religion. Unlike ‘Polititians’, the Christian philosopher would ‘make a more immutable and intrinsick Distinction’ between the true and the useful. There existed a moral order transcending the mere will of sovereigns.118 Hobbes lurked behind this passage, the master theorist of civil religion and moral conventionalism. Willis strongly intimated this in a follow-up response to Locke119: ‘You know what Philosophers (Ancient or Modern) your Principles are said to imitate; but I do not desire to make use of Names, one way or the other.’120 In his third attack, Willis explicitly associated Locke with Hobbes, whose materialism subordinated ethics to ‘Temporal Felicity’, the ‘principle of Private Self-Preservation’ or of the ‘Preservation of Society’.121 Though he would become an ecclesial Whig sympathetic to comprehension, Willis at this point echoed the orthodox episcopal-men who had impeded toleration and fought the rage of the Restoration politique. His responses to Locke invoked past political battles over the disposition of the Restoration court to the church. In 1696, answering An Account of the 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

William Molyneux to Locke, 15 March 1698, CL, 6:349. Goldie, Introduction, Reception of Locke, 1:xl. Walmsley and Burrows, ‘The Authorship of the Remarks upon an Essay concerning Humane Understanding’, 205–43. LL, 535. Willis, Remarks upon an Essay concerning Human Understanding, 3–6; LL, 1794 (incorrectly attributed to Burnet). In his reply to Stillingfleet, Locke had swiped at the Remarks. Locke, Mr. Locke’s Reply to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his Letter, appendix 3. Willis, Second Remarks upon an Essay, 12–13, 21. 121 Willis, Third Remarks upon an Essay, 26.

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Growth of Deism by Locke’s admirer William Stephens (on whom, see below), Willis parried Stephens’ effort to blame deism on ‘priest-craft’. He defended apostolic episcopacy, ceremonial uniformity, and even Archbishop Laud and instead blamed rising irreligion on the corrupt culture of the Restoration court. Prominent in this culture of license, encouraging a ‘sceptical Humour’, had been ‘Mr. Hobbs’s Philosophy’.122 In this context Willis rebuked the fashionable notion that Christian Religion was a ‘Politick Invention, or Trick of State’.123 Willis’s critique of Hobbes informed his companion case against Locke. The denial of innate morality nursed a politics of private appetite and ‘Interest of State’.124 The Third Remarks attacked Locke’s understanding of conscience as ‘nothing else but our own Opinion of our Actions’, judged as either ‘profitable or unprofitable’, convenient or inconvenient. Conscience so understood, and the extent of its freedom, was measured according to utilitarian standards, rather than the judgement of the church. The Hobbesian qualities of Locke’s definition of conscience were imputed by Willis when he linked it to the notion that Christian orthodoxy contained but ‘one Fundamental (as a certain late Author supposes)’.125 Locke took this censure seriously and perhaps considered a published response. This is suggested by the copious marginal notes left in his copy of the Third Remarks. (Locke generally did not write in his books.) He laboured to escape the charge of ethical conventionalism but was forced to reaffirm that ‘conscience is not the law of nature, but judging by that which is taken to be the law’. Locke’s notes challenged the author of the Remarks: ‘prove the distinguishing sense of virtue and vice to be natural to mankinde before they have learnt the measures of virtue and vice from something besides the sense and you will have proved something’.126 This was not a line of argument that Locke pursued in his published writing. Locke’s marginalia were particularly thick on the page in which Willis suggested Locke’s intellectual proximity to Hobbes’s doctrine of the one theological fundamental. Though he pushed back, demanding that his critic ‘list’ a more extensive number of fundamentals if such existed, Locke 122

123 124 125 126

Willis, Reflexions upon a Pamphlet, intiuled, An Account of the Growth of Deism in England, 6–7, 15, 31–3. On authorship, see Walmsley and Burrows, ‘The Authorship of the Remarks upon an Essay concerning Humane Understanding’, 221. Willis, Reflexions upon a Pamphlet, intiuled, An Account of the Growth of Deism in England, 58–9. Willis, Third Remarks upon an Essay, 16, 26–7. Ibid., 4–5, 8, 15–6; objection to conscience as ‘opinion’ was also voiced in Milner, Mr Locke’s Religion, 111–7. Locke owned this work. LL, 1802. Porter, ‘Marginalia Lockeana’, 33–50.

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refrained from explicitly defending Hobbes. But he surely understood the connection being drawn.127 Stillingfleet and Willis demonstrate how charges of Hobbism could work to suggest Locke’s proximity to cynical statecraft, ethical conventionalism, a reduction of conscience to arbitrary opinion, and politique tolerationism. By the turn of the century, orthodox critics regularly ranked Locke alongside Hobbes and Spinoza as scoffing atheists who hated all clergy, idolized temporal authority, and advanced a dangerous ‘philosophick libertie’.128 Metaphysical materialism and atheism worked (as ‘an opiate’) to ‘compose the disorder’ of guilty minds and cultivate an ‘insensibility in sinning’. This in turn rendered religion ‘nothing but a meer human and political institution, the invention of a crafty and designing order of men’. Conscience was thereby lost in a world of dangerous philosophical licence.129 This was not a critique emitting solely from orthodox clergymen. It could also be heard from the commanding heights of the Boyle lectures, an honoured forum for Locke, who lionized Boyle. Locke owned, for instance, the eight lectures that Richard Bentley (who served as Stillingfleet’s chaplain) offered in 1692, which assailed the Hobbesian politique. Atheists had dangerously theorized that religion was ‘first contrived and introduced by Politicians, to bring the wild and straggling Herds of Mankind under Subjection and Laws’. But noble lies could not serve as the ‘cement of Society’. ‘For an atheist to compose a System of Politicks is as absurd and ridiculous’, Bentley announced (referencing De Cive and Leviathan), as Epicurus’s Sermons were about Sanctity and Religious Worship. But there was hope, that the Doctrine of absolute uncontroulable Power and the formidable name of Leviathan might flatter and bribe the Government into a toleration of Infidelity.130

Bentley thus broadcast the thesis that philosophical atheists were promoting a Machiavellian or Hobbesian civil religion, partly to advance a perilous philosophical freedom. These themes ran throughout the attacks on Locke published by the Tory churchman and philosopher Thomas Beconsall, which Locke 127 128 129

130

Locke’s copy of the Third Remarks is held at Yale University. The Bodleian Library has a photographical copy (microfilm 15). This particular marginalia is on page 15. Mungo, Satyr against Atheistical Deism, 12, 13–4. Jenkin, Reasonableness and Certainty of the Christian Religion, preface; Harris defended Locke in Atheistic Objections, 5, 19, 22; Lowde, Discourse concerning the Nature of Man, 81–3, 87, 134; Sault, Second Spira, 10; John Turner, Phisico-Theological Discourse upon the Divine Being, 7, 107. Bentley, Folly and Unreasonabless of Atheism in Eight Sermons, 30–31, see also 67, 157.

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owned.131 Beconsall, a fellow of Brasenose, may have been among the Oxford antagonists mentioned by Tyrrell.132 He was a rare early critic who explicitly identified Locke as the author of the Two Treatises (perhaps based on Tyrrell’s indiscretion).133 Beconsall’s The Grounds and Foundations of Natural Religion (1697) warned that rationalized theories of natural religion reduced religion itself to psychology and politics, a ‘Profitable Invention’ of a ‘designing Leader’.134 Hobbes and Locke, kindred materialists and political contractualists, had both advanced this cause. Beconsall’s critique was not only theological, but it also entailed a sustained case against politique toleration. By reducing religion to ‘a Contrivance of some Designing men, an Artificial System of certain Creedmakers’, the new philosophers crippled the church.135 Instrumentalized religion became a tool of cynical politicians, such as those who justified ‘unheard of Indulgence’, ‘Liberty of the Press’, and an ‘undisturbed Toleration’.136 Beconsall’s case against the purely naturalistic anthropology of the new materialism fired in several directions: against Hobbes’s state of nature, minimalist natural law, and materialist account of the soul. Locke, with a ‘Latitudianarian’ impiety, also supposedly denied universal moral laws in favour of a relativistic conventionalism.137 He had reduced right reason to the ‘private Perswasions of a Party’ and misconstrued conscience as mere ‘Opinion’ that could be liberated as deemed convenient.138 This implicated ‘Mr. Hobbs’s Notion’ that authority equalled mere power. The ordinances of God demonstrated the Absurdity of the Hobbists Notion, that matters of Religion receive their Obligation from the State or civil Power, and consequently induce an absolute Obedience: This puts an eternal Silence to the Dispute, Whether we are to yield an Obedience to the Laws of the State before the Laws of God, or whether the Laws of the State are to be obeyed against the Laws of God? . . . The civil Power, that derives all Authority from God, can only exert a Power in matters of Religion, where God has not interposed, or placed it in other hands.139

Thus did Beconsall move into a critique of Erastianism and an implied defence of jure divino episcopacy. Statism in religion, moreover, manifested 131 132 133 134 136 138

LL, 251. On Easter Monday, 1697 he preached against Locke at Oxford. Beconsall, Doctrine of a General Resurrection, preface, 16–17. ODNB; Goldie, ‘John Locke, Thomas Beconsall, and Filial Rebellion’, 127–42. 135 Beconsall, Grounds and Foundations of Natural Religion, xi. Ibid., introduction. 137 Ibid., iv, introduction. Ibid., 45–6; see also Cross, Caleb’s Spirit, 16. Beconsall, Grounds and Foundations of Natural Religion, 46, 52. 139 Ibid., 92, 95–6.

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itself not as tyranny but as indulgence. So lashed to Leviathan,140 Locke’s own tolerationism was reduced to a mere consequence of prudent politics, ‘the Will and Power of the Law-Maker’ licensing the ‘fashionable Immoralities of a degenerate Age’.141 ‘I cannot but reflect a little’, wrote Beconsall, ‘on Mr. Lock’s Account of Conscience, when he tell us, That it is nothing else but our own Opinion of our own Actions, and this Opinion founded in a Perswasion, however got, as from Education, Company, or the Customs of a Country.’ Such an account, in Hobbesian fashion, freed conscience from God’s rule and made it ‘nothing else but certain Superstitious Fears, contracted and rivetted by the Power of Education’, a ‘mere Chimora, or State, or Church-Engine, to reduce the multitude to a servile Obedience’.142 This in turn justified the project freeing individual ‘opinion’. Beconsall thus presented Locke as a representative of the church’s longstanding enemy: the Hobbesian egoist, driven by appetite and opinion, placated by politique indulgence. Polemics of the period regularly responded to Locke’s philosophical and theological work within the context of debates over toleration and priestcraft. In this regard we should not forget the likelihood that Locke’s authorship of the Letter concerning Toleration was an open secret, implicitly colouring debate about his broader philosophy. One friendly example was the anonymous An Account of the Growth of Deism in England of 1696, which Locke acquired.143 This tract was composed by the Whiggish rector William Stephens, a literary collaborator with the third Earl of Shaftesbury.144 Stephens produced a slippery work, which defended revelation but also sympathetically portrayed rational religion and anticlericalism. This balancing act was achieved by dividing deists into two camps: one a ‘loose and sensual’ party of scoffers, atheists, and devotees of ‘Spinosa and Hobbes’; the others, men of probity with a due regard for scripture. Worthy deists, Stephens argued, rejected only the worst priestcraft: popish frauds, the ‘grasping’ Presbyterians, and the ‘Protestant High-Priests’ who ‘rival the Sovereign power’. Neo-Laudians came in for particular criticism. Their ‘piques and malice’ kept more worthy Protestants from office and obstructed the recent toleration.145 Locke ranked among those capable of distinguishing religion from 140 141 143 144 145

Ibid., 142–3, 171. Beconsall quoted, unusually, the Two Treatises on Government. Ibid., 188, 200, 205–11. 142 Ibid., 217, 222, 226–7. LL, 937; ODNB; For Locke’s queries about works by Stephens, see Awnsham Churchill to Locke, 24 April 1700 and 17 November 1703, CL, 7:69 and 8:122. Goldie, ‘John Locke, the Early Lockeans’, and 10–13. Stephen, Account of the Growth of Deism, 5–10.

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priestcraft and defending both conscience rights and sovereignty against the priests.146 In The Reasonableness of Christianity was found the spirit of charity, due respect for the ‘Worship of other Congregations’, and a tonic against clergy who ‘would always distinguish between Church and State, and give the Precedency to themselves’.147 Locke presumably appreciated this effort to distinguish his own brand of conscience rights, rational religion, and anticlericalism from a more vicious and carnally minded version of Hobbes and Spinoza. John Edwards was not inclined to make such charitable distinctions. Edwards attended Cambridge during the Interregnum but later trimmed his vigorous Calvinism sufficiently to manoeuvre through a Restoration clerical career. During the 1690s, ill health forced him from the pulpit. He contented himself with theological controversy, assailing atheism, Socinianism, materialism, and anticlericalism. Locke rarely left his sights, and Edwards was determined to keep him in the frame with Hobbes and Spinoza.148 His 1695 Some Thoughts concerning the Several Causes and Occasions of Atheism attributed atheism to urbane men prone to heedless scientific speculation. Edwards attacked Hobbes and Spinoza for their notions of a corporeal God and their constructions of ‘priestcraft’.149 Fastening upon the Reasonableness of Christianity, Edwards enlisted Locke into the ‘Cabals and Assemblies’ of atheism. He reported, incredibly, unnamed Londoners who acknowledged to him a secret society. ‘Mr Hobbes is their Great Master and Law-giver’, their sole object of ‘reverence’. ‘His Leviathan is the Best Book in the world next to the Bible: He himself was a Man of great Piety, and is spoke against by none but the priests.’150 This was not company with whom Locke wished to be associated, particularly as Edwards presented politique tolerationism as a feature of Hobbism. Hobbists cast religion as ‘a mere Invention of Politick Heads to awe the Multitude, and to keep the world in good order’. The indulgence of the sects only empowered their own atheistic projects.151 Edwards thus reprised the orthodox discourse of the 1670s and 1680s, when Hobbist atheism, cynical statecraft, and the heretical sects were cast as a triple-headed menace. Locke was now swept into the general indictment. 146 147 148 149 150 151

Ibid., 24–6; see also Prideaux Letter to the Deists, 148–9, 15; Locke owned this title, LL, 938. Stephen, Account of the Growth of Deism, 25–6, 29–30. Edwards peddled salacious rumours about Locke at the ‘Seraglio at Oats’. Anon. to John Churchill, 3 July 1697, CL, 6:150. Edwards, Some Thoughts concerning the Several Causes and Occasions of Atheism, 2, 8–14, 25. Ibid., 100, 128–30; for ‘Hobbians’ among the ‘sects’, see Edwards, Sermons on Special Occasions, 16. Edwards, Some Thoughts concerning the Several Causes and Occasions of Atheism, 134, 42.

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Locke’s presumed Socinianism was a major target of his critics, resonating as it did with the general panic over anti-Triniarianism.152 For Edwards, Socinianism linked Locke to Hobbes’s theological program.153 Locke knew this, as did his friends. The anti-Trinitarian Stephen Nye, for instance, defended the theological minimalism of Hobbes and Locke, which in each case only required assent to the proposition that ‘Jesus is the Messiah’.154 It became common to attribute Locke’s spare definition of the one essential Christian doctrine to Hobbes’s precisely similar claim.155 Both men were thus accused of anti-Trinitarianism and a denial of the innate moral law.156 This was perilous. In 1692, William Popple warned Locke that surging heresy was scandalizing London and that the King had reportedly said ‘he would not suffer any Socinians in his Dominions, but would have the Laws put in execution against them’. The ‘whole orthodox Herd’ was again on the move.157 It was well known, wrote John Milner in 1700, ‘how much Mr. Lock complains that he was join’d with the Unitarians’.158 Such theological critiques bled readily into political ones. In his Brief Vindication of the Fundamental Articles of the Christian Faith (fastening now on the Thoughts concerning Education), Edwards invoked Hobbes as an enemy of religion and the universities. ‘Mr. Lock’ had ‘taken courage to tread in his Old Friend’s steps’ by attacking the ‘University-men’159 and had gutted Christian fundamentals in favour of the theological minimalism of Leviathan.160 This encouraged ‘bitter reflections on the ministers of the Gospel and their office’.161 Edwards flung the shaft at Locke with vigour: Nor is he pleas’d with our Old Christianity, but hath offer’d a New Scheme to the World, the same . . . with what Mr. Hobbes propounded as the 152 153 154 155 156

157 158 159

160 161

Walker, Reason and Religion in late Seventeenth Century England, 147–94; Young, Religion and Enlightenment in 18th Century England, 24–8. Edwards, Socinianism Unmask’d, epistle, 38. Nye, Exceptions of Mr Edwards in his Causes of Atheism against the Reasonableness of Christianity, 8, 17. F.B., Free and Modest Censure of the Late Controversial Writings and debates of the Lord Bishop of Worcester and Mr Locke, 8–9. Buerdsell, Discourses and Essays, 81, 125, 194–5, 212; F.B., Free and Modest Censure of the Late Controversial Writings and Debates of the Lord Bishop of Worcester and Mr Locke, 4–5, 8; Yolton, Way of Ideas, 3–4. William Popple to Locke, 12 November 1692, CL, 4:582; Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, 107–11. Milner, Mr. Lock’s Religion, 34. Edwards Brief Vindication of the Fundamental Articles of the Christian Faith, epistle; Edwards, Animadversions on a late book entituled The Reasonableness of Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures, preface, 65–6; Edwards, Socinian Creed, 120–30; LL, 1025–8. Edwards, Brief Vindication of the Fundamental Articles of the Christian Faith, 28; Jolley, Toleration and Understanding, 129–30. Edwards, Brief Vindication of the Fundamental Articles of the Christian Faith, 22–3.

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This spiteful presentation of Locke was implausible. Nevertheless, to be drawn into a critique of Hobbesian irreligion was no laughing matter to a former servant of Shaftesbury.163 Edwards further portrayed Locke and Hobbes as fellow advocates of a purely instrumental policy of toleration. ‘Though nobody can be a Creed-maker’, he wrote, yet every-one may be a Fundamental-Maker. Mr. Hobbs was pleased to give his power to the King only, but this Gentleman is more liberal, and grants it to every Subject: He may make what Catalogue of Fundamentals he pleases, and put this into it, among the rest, that the Pope is Infallible, and that the Religion of the Church of Rome is to be prefer’d to that of the Reformed.164

The use of Catholicism here was bizarrely inapposite, but the passage was otherwise an arresting interpretation of Locke’s ‘more liberal’ Hobbism. Motivated by heretical beliefs, Hobbes and Locke had marshalled a politics of opinion against the church. Where Hobbes had empowered the sovereign to treat religion as an instrument of his will, Locke empowered sovereign individuals to do the same. The theological proximity of Locke and Hobbes became a commonplace of late seventeenth-century polemics. A precis of this case was offered in the Free and Modest Censure of 1698, where the various ways in which Locke ‘jumps with Mr. Hobbs’ were surveyed: materialism; an insufficient ‘onearticle’ orthodoxy; and contempt of clergy and of ‘sacred things’.165 Locke owned this work, though he probably needed no refresher on its 162 163

164 165

Ibid., epistle. Locke raged at John Covel, master of Christ’s College, Cambridge, for providing an imprimatur to Edwards’ Brief Vindication. Locke to John Covel, 29 September 1697 and 26 July 1698 CL, 6:210–11, 452–3. Locke’s copy of the Brief Vindication may have an ink mark on the second page of the ‘epistle dedicatory’, a page on which Locke is accused of ‘tread[ing] in his Old Friend’s [Hobbes’s’] steps’. Bodl. Locke 8.68 a/1. Edwards, Brief Vindication of the Fundamental Articles of the Christian Faith, 67–8. F. B., Free and Modest Censure of the Late Controversial Writings and debates of the Lord Bishops of Worcester and Mr Locke, 5, 10, 12. Bold attributed it to Edwards. Samuel Bold to Locke, 17 November 1698, CL, 6:507.

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content.166 As for Edwards, Locke answered him minutely. His first and second Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity (1695 and 1697) recoiled from the ‘Capital Crime of atheism’. Less compelling was Locke’s insistence that the Reasonableness contained ‘not one word of Socinanism’.167 Locke tried to keep his dispute with Edwards on scriptural ground. They tangled over how many essential doctrines the New Testament prescribed. Locke insisted that positing a single fundamental doctrine – that Jesus was the Messiah – was not inherently antiTrinitarian. He was not, pace Edwards, attempting to ‘make a Religion’ in the manner of Hobbes.168 But Locke could not completely ignore Leviathan. In the final pages of the second Vindication he responded, not in answer to Edwards but answering Richard Willis. The first number of Willis’s orthodox Occasional Papers had also claimed that Locke had borrowed his ‘single fundamental’ Christianity from Hobbes, where it had nefariously served as a pliable, minimalist theology for the politique sovereign.169 Locke challenged Willis: Whether he knows, that the Doctrine proposed in the Reasonableness of Christianity, &c. was borrowed, as he says, from Hobbs’s Leviathan? For I tell him, I borrowed it only from the Writers of the Four Gospels, and the Acts; and did not know that those words he quoted out of the Leviathan, were there, or any thing like them. Nor do I know yet any farther, than as I believe them to be there, from his Quotation.170

The charge of Hobbism was ‘perfectly false’ and meant to diminish Locke’s credit ‘in the Opinion of the World’. His own single theological fundamental had been extracted from scripture, not from the ‘words of the Leviathan’. What Hobbes had written, ‘I know not.’171 Locke’s repudiation of Hobbism in the second Vindication repeated the strategy of his controversy with Stillingfleet: to cast the accusation as a badfaith ad hominem attack and profess ignorance of the detail of Leviathan in question. The tactic mostly testifies to Hobbes’s disreputable status. Locke had an established tendency to disavow awkward influences. In the Vindications themselves, he showily repudiates Socinian texts that he seems to have sympathetically read.172 That as late as 1697 Locke was unaware that his single doctrine Christian theology had been anticipated by Hobbes is difficult to believe. It is worth remembering, in this context, 166 170 172

167 LL, 159a. Locke, first Vindication in VRC, 7–9, 13–14. Locke, Second Vindication in VRC, 229. 171 Ibid., 230–1. Locke, Vindication, in VRC, 18n.

168

Ibid., 22.

169

LL, 2118.

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Tyrrell’s later allegation that Locke had merely ‘affected to deny’ reading Leviathan in order to preserve his own originality.173 But undoubtedly Locke was sincerely concerned to minimize the broader implications of his proximity to Hobbes on this point. If Hobbes’s theological minimalism was designed to empower the politique and indulgent sovereign, Locke’s own tolerationism was now quite different in quality. Locke’s Vindications thus repeated the rhetorical strategy of his ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’. They repudiated the discourse of civil religion in favour of prophetic, scriptural religion. Locke redirected the charge of political religion (implicitly ‘Hobbist’) back at Edwards and his cohort. It was Edwards who wrote with the unholy ‘Zeal’ of a ‘Creed-maker’, seeking power rather than truth.174 Edwards and his friends claimed the ‘Infallibility’ of a ‘Dictator’, seeking not to save souls and serve ‘Christ’s Kingdom’ but to ‘overrule and prescribe’. Like other ‘Professors’, Edwards was constantly found ‘bawling for his fashionable and profitable Orthodoxy’. The result was ‘fierce contests’, ‘cruel Havock’, ‘Fire and Faggot’.175 Locke’s theory of religious violence, his deconstruction of heresy, and his minimalist theology did echo Hobbism, as critics observed. These resemblances could not be entirely effaced. What had changed, however, was the character of Locke’s tolerationism. ‘No Man, I think’, Locke wrote, ‘has a right to prescribe to my Faith, or Magisterially to impose his Interpretations or Opinions on me.’176 No power, clerical or secular, enjoyed authority to define religious fundamentals. Locke no longer defended toleration by inventorying its civil advantages or by grounding it on the sovereign’s inherent spiritual powers. His tolerationism was now rights-oriented, his own religious perspective apolitical, scriptural, and prophetic. This encouraged him to cast a foil such as Edwards as either a popish clergyman or a ‘politick’ servant of secular power.

Samuel Bold: Locke’s Anti-Hobbesian Apologist Defense of Locke from aspersions of Hobbism was taken up by his admirer and correspondent, Samuel Bold. From several Dorset pulpits in the 1680s, Bold had advocated toleration and scourged church ‘popery’. Under James his position resembled that of Popple’s; he desired a toleration but suspected the court’s Catholicizing agenda.177 As for the royal Indulgences, 173 175 177

BL Add MS 4222, f. 245. 174 Locke, first Vindication, in VRC, 16. Locke, Second Vindication, in VRC, 62, 72–4, 77, 125–7, 192. 176 Ibid., 179, 122. Bold, Brief Account of the First Rise of the Name Protestant, epistle.

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Bold implored nonconformists to spurn ‘unadvised compliances’. ‘For Protestantism doth not take away an undue, boundless Power and Authority from the Pope, and confer if on another person.’178 Religious truth could not rely on ‘mere human authority’.179 Bold borrowed Lockean strands of argument: theological minimalism based on the sufficiency of scripture; free conscience as a matter of right; hostility to popery and prelacy; and a suspicion of politique indulgence. When Edwards rounded on the Reasonableness of Christianity, Bold rallied to its author. A grateful Locke appended a letter to Bold (‘true Minister of the Gospel’) to his Second Vindication of the Reasonableness. Bold, Locke wrote, had ‘entered into the true sence of my Treatise’, and his judgements ‘perfectly agree with mine’.180 Intellectual concord eventually produced an appreciative correspondence. Bold understood Locke as a champion of rational Christianity and tolerance against the ‘Raging, Furious Spirit’ of conformism.181 He published several more defences of Locke, all of which Locke owned. Bold answered men such as Stillingfleet and the non-juror Robert Jenkin,182 who had presented Locke as a Hobbesian materialist.183 But he was more tenacious still against Edwards’s claim that Locke had borrowed from Hobbes the argument that the single salvific Christian doctrine was the ‘proposition that Jesus is the Christ’.184 This doctrine alone informed true Christianity, affirmed Bold, however much ‘curious and contentious people’ might extend orthodoxy beyond this.185 Bold’s 1698 Observations accused Edwards of misrepresentation and clerical ambition.186 The persecutorial impulse – popish or magisterial – depended on intricate orthodoxy. To Edwards’s allegation that both Bold and Locke had extracted their single-doctrine theology from Hobbes, Bold claimed that his own tutor, ‘the Learned Mr. Lawson’, had encouraged in him an ‘Aversion’ to ‘Mr. Hobs’s Writings’. He denied close knowledge of Hobbes but affirmed, more ambiguously: 178 181 182 183

184 185 186

Ibid., 12. 179 Ibid., 31–1. 180 Locke, Second Vindication, in VRC, 33–7. Samuel Bold to Locke, 26 March 1697, CL, 6:67. Bold, Some Considerations, 29–60; Jenkin, Reasonableness and Certainty of the Christian Religion, 1: xxix–xxx, xxxvi–xviii. LL, 347–6. Samuel Bold to Awnsham Churchill, 26 March 1697, and Bold to Locke 17 September 1697, CL, 6:69, 193–5. Bold complained of Stillingfleet as well. Bold to Churchill, 15 December 1697, CL, 6:270–1; Bold, Some Considerations, 20–7. Bold, Short Discourse of the True Knowledge of Christ Jesus, 6–8. Ibid., 24–5. See also, A Reply to Mr. Edward’s brief reflections on a Short Discourse. Bold, Observations on the Animadversions (lately printed at Oxford) on a Later Book, entitled The Reasonableness of Christianity, 6–7.

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Locke’s theology could not be ‘invalidated by the bare mentioning of Mr. Hob’s Name’. Locke may not have been wholly pleased with this ambiguous formulation. Perhaps aware of this, Bold offered further critique of Hobbes in his Observations, claiming to have stumbled upon Hobbs’s Tripos only recently.188 Based on his reading of De Corpore Politico, Bold more fully distinguished Hobbes from Locke. Hobbes’s ‘single article’ of Christian belief, he argued, was presented as self-sufficient. Locke supposedly viewed it as a foundation, on which further articles of faith might stand. Bold further contrasted Hobbes with Locke on this point: Whether a Christian subject may without hazard of his Salvation, do Actions in Obedience to his Sovereign, which imply a Denial of them, notwithstanding he knows they are revealed in the Scripture? Mr. Hobs declares for the affirmative.189

Hobbes’s single doctrine, Bold suggested, was designed to make believers maximally pliable, to reduce ‘controversies of religion’ by exercising state authority. Locke, by contrast, freed individuals for honest inquiry and controversy. ‘Controversy may occasion and engage Christians to enquire more accurately’ into Christ’s teachings. Bold then offered a shrewd characterization of Locke’s break from the Hobbesian account of conscience: I find Mr. Hobs was for a Publick Conscience, and for Peoples transferring their Right of Judging in matters of Religion, to another. Which Notion agrees well enough with that of a great many Persons in the World. He differed from them in this, That he is for having the Right transferred to the Civil Magistrate. Perhaps he was then, or had a mind to be in Favour with the Civil Magistrate. Those who are willing to part with their Consciences, and put them forth to Trust, no doubt, are desirous to place them where they think it will be most for their own Advantage. But I think there cannot

187 188 189

Ibid., 19–20. The Tripos appeared in 1684 and collected Hobbes’s discourses ‘On Human Nature, De Corpore Politico, and Of Liberty and Necessity’. Bold, Observations on the Animadversions (lately printed at Oxford) on a Late Book, entitled The Reasonableness of Christianity, 90–2.

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be a Notion more contrary to what the Author of the Reasonableness &c. delivers, than this is.190

Bold was in close correspondence with Locke during the months when he wrote these passages. Their response to Edwards seems to have been coordinated, partly through the auspices of Locke’s printers.191 We have evidence that Locke advised Bold and corrected his manuscripts. An extensive ‘line read’ of Bold’s 1699 Some Considerations on the Principal Objections and Arguments which have been Publish’d against Mr. Lock’s Essay of Humane Understanding survives in Locke’s papers.192 Here Locke lavished most attention on Bold’s insistence that Locke had not flatly asserted that the ‘Soul is Material’.193 This, we have seen, was a claim used by Stillingfleet and others to lash Locke to Hobbes, and Locke showed himself particularly eager to refine Bold’s apology for his work on this point, though he could go no further than he had against Stillingfleet and affirm as merely probable conventional belief in the immateriality of the faculty of thinking. He continued to entertain the possibility of ‘thinking substance’.194 Further, Bold’s Observations – where he critiqued Hobbism most closely – was apparently sent to Locke for his approval.195 ‘Every thing must be welcome to me’, Locke would later write Bold, ‘that comes from your Pen.’196 Edwards lambasted Bold as a ‘blind Worshiper of the Idol that Mr. Hobbs and Mr. Lock have set up’.197 He composed a mock oration for Bold: ‘I will rather stick to Worthy Mr. Hobbs and Mr. Lock then part with my Opinion at the sollicitation of Thousands of Divines and other Christians whom they call Orthodox.’198 The Brief Vindication was Edwards’s most sustained effort to portray both Bold and Locke as Hobbists. It is thus of considerable interest that among Locke’s papers survives a manuscript answer to that tract, apparently composed by Bold and sent to Locke. If this effort was ever printed all copies have been lost. Entitled ‘Some Remarkes on Mr. Edwards’s late Papers Entituled A Brief Vindication of the Fundamental Articles of the Christian Faith’, it defended Locke’s Thoughts concerning Education and his Second 190 191 192 194 195 196 197 198

Ibid., 93. Referencing part two, chapter six of De Corpore Politico. Bold to Awnsham and John Churchill, 5 May 1697, CL, 6:113. MS Locke c. 27, ff. 147–49. 193 Bold, Some Considerations, 18–25. MS Locke c. 27, ff. 147v, 149v. Samuel Bold to Awnsham Churchill, 25 June 1697, CL, 6:146–7; Samuel Bold to Locke 10 September 1698, CL, 6:469–70. Locke to Samuel Bold, 16 May 1699, CL, 6:626–7. Edwards, Brief Vindication of the Fundamental Articles of the Christian Faith, 105–6. Ibid., 95. The passages of Bold’s cited by Edwards correspond to none of his known published tracts.

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Vindication of the Reasonableness.199 Bold reiterated some of the rather fine distinctions he had elsewhere drawn between Hobbes and Locke and defended his own work from Edwards’s jeremiad.200 He denied that Locke wrote as an ‘enemy to the office of the ministry’ or was hostile to its ‘sacred function’. Locke had only condemned ‘pride, Arrogance, Intemperate passion, uncharitableness, cruelty’ and ‘wordly humor’ wherever clergy manifested such traits. Such vices degraded the ministry’s ‘sacred office’, and any minister who ‘do indulge to these things’ deserved to be ‘abhorred’.201 Locke’s direct influence over Bold must remain a matter of conjecture, but Bold offered a lucid exposition of the crucial commonalities and divergences between Locke and Hobbes. Each sought to protect conscience from orthodoxy and its clerical enforcers. But where Hobbes had put this tolerationist project in the service of sovereigns, Locke – consistent with the Gospel – defended inviolable individual conscience from the blandishments of carnal power and respected the mission of a purified ministry.202

The Controversy with Proast Thomas Hobbes makes no open appearance in Locke’s famous polemical set piece with Jonas Proast. Yet their exchange appears in clearer light when read as the denouement of Locke’s liberation from the strictures of the Hobbesian politique. Proast was not positioned to name Locke as the author of the Letter (whatever his private knowledge). Locke’s habits of anonymity again protected him from a cohesive critique. But Proast nevertheless portrayed the Letter within an implicitly Hobbesian tradition. This strategy was previewed in the earliest known response to the Letter, Thomas Long’s 1689 The Letter for Toleration Decipher’d. Long was primed to hear in Lockean tolerationism echoes of Hobbes. A high-church Oxford man sequestered during the Interregnum, he encouraged his friend John Walker to compile his famous Sufferings of the loyalist clergy.203 Rewarded at the Restoration with the prebendary of Exeter Cathedral, Long polemicized tirelessly. The Presbyterians, and Richard Baxter, were his favoured 199 201 202

203

200 MS Locke c. 27, ff. 151, 152v. MS Locke c. 27, ff. 151, 151v, 153, 155, 156. MS Locke c. 27, f. 154v. Bold’s defences of Locke were gathered in A Collection of Tracts, published in vindication of Mr. Lock’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1706). Le Clerc mentioned Bold’s efforts in his biography of Locke. Le Clerc, Life of Locke, 20. Walker Revised, being a revision of John Walker’s Sufferings of the Clergy, v:118.

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quarry. (Wood commended him for undergoing the ‘drudgery of reading many or most of Mr. Richard Baxter’s Books’.204) Long condemned the sects as cynical allies of atheists and papists willing to hazard the church in exchange for indulgence.205 Long’s attack on the Letter scattered its shot widely, against emboldened nonconformity more broadly. He catalogued quotations from past Independent and Presbyterian writings, which had – in headier days – assailed toleration as a threat.206 When the Cromwellian boot had been on the episcopal neck, dissenters had been less than vigorous defenders of conscience. Long commended the Cavalier Parliament’s resistance to the Declaration of Breda and the Stuart Indulgences. ‘Merciful rulers’, he wrote, should not allow a ‘Trade for Butchering Souls’ to be established in the streets.207 Thus did Long associate Locke’s Letter with Interregnum Erastianism and the Restoration Indulgences. The just order of regnum and sacerdotium had been caught in a pincer movement between ‘an All-Dispensing Power’ and ‘Absolute Liberty’. When Locke’s Letter, and the wider dissenting cause, had found their ‘design of an Absolute Power’ defeated, they ‘invented this Stratagem of an Absolute Liberty to put a new life into their dying Cause’.208 Hobbes was unnamed here, but his presence is palpable. Long had previously characterized the Janus-faced conspiracy against the church – alternately coercive and licentious – as fundamentally Hobbesian. During the 1680s, he had grouped ‘sectaries and phanaticks’ with blaspheming Shaftesburian wits, who ‘Leviathan-like, sport themselves in the waters of the Sanctuary, scoffing at all things that are sacred’.209 Invoking Stillingfleet and the resistance of the seven bishops, Long characterized indulgence as the ‘spawn of the Great Leviathan’, bringing ‘slavery’ to the church.210 Nonconformists, Long had written, presumed a quasiIndependent primitive church arising from the mere ‘composition and agreement of Men among themselves, as Mr. Hobs’ had affirmed. This was a striking association of Independency with Hobbesian contract theory.211 204

AO, 4:485. The ODNB does not resolve Long’s possible composition of anti-Hobbesian tracts of 1689 and 1690 (see above). 206 Long, Letter for Toleration Decipher’d, 5–7, 17–8. 207 Ibid., 28–9, 9–10, 17. 208 Ibid., epistle dedicatory, 1. Long was also versed in the history of Blackloism. Long, A Compendious History of all the Popish and Fanatical Plots and Conspiracies, 15, 20–3, 92–4, 131. 209 Long, The Original of War or the Causes of Rebellion in a Sermon, 3–4. Long targeted ‘Achitophel’ in King David’s Danger and Deliverance, a sermon of 1683. 210 Long, Case of Persecution, Charg’d on the Church of England, Consider’d and Discharg’d, ‘occasion of printing’ and preface. See also his Answer to a Socinian Treatise, call’d The Naked Gospel, 160. 211 Long, Mr. Hale’s Treatise of Schism Examined and Censured, 16–19, 64. 205

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Read in isolation, Long’s attack on Locke’s Letter can appear disjointed and digressive. Read alongside his other polemics, the Letter Decipher’d appears as a late effort to associate Locke’s tolerationism with prerogative indulgence in the manner of Hobbes. Similar colorations would tint Proast’s more famous attacks on the Letter. His initial Argument of the Letter concerning Toleration, briefly considered and answered was printed in the spring of 1690. It appeared as the high-church party was being badly weakened by the purge of the non-jurors.212 Locke’s controversy with Proast possessed a somewhat idiosyncratic quality. The later Letters concerning Toleration assailed Proast’s position rigorously but are increasingly forced to treat it as retrograde. The initial Letter, written from exile and during the ascendancy of a priestly, sacramentalist church, was an act of resistance. The later Letters were qualified defences of the new order against a clerical revanchist.213 Proast was an ideal foil. A high-church Oxonian like Long, Proast had been ejected from his chaplaincy at All Souls in 1688 by its warden, Leopold Finch. Finch had been foisted on the college by James II through a writ of mandamus. In opposing Finch’s ‘pretended’ status, Proast and Archbishop Sancroft (the latter acting as visitor of the college) paralleled the more famous resistance strategies of Magdalen. ‘His grace says the college is his’, one observer had written to Finch, ‘and he will not have you there but by his own right.’214 Proast was, in effect, a martyr on behalf of the church’s resistance to the dispensing power. There survives a memo by Proast to Sancroft militating against reading James II’s Declaration of Indulgence. The Declaration represented an ‘unlawful liberty’, and the clergy should not ratify the usurpation entailed in it.215 But hostility to tolerationist Erastianism proved a less valuable bona fide in the era of Tillotson. By 1690, Proast was isolated, ecclesial power having ‘slipped from the grasp of his friends’.216 Nevertheless, his debate with Locke attained a certain notice. It was advertised abroad in the Bibliotheque universelle among ‘quelques livres Anglois de le Tolerance’.217 Encouraged by Tory patrons, his work licensed by none other than John Edwards, Proast engaged Locke on behalf of the ‘Oxonian High Church citadel’.218 212 213 214 215 216 218

Tate, Liberty, Toleration, and Equality, 144–6. Goldie, ‘Locke, Proast, and Religious Toleration’, 144–5. Vernon, Career of Toleration: John Locke, Jonas Proast, 11–12. Gutch, Collectanea Curiosa, 1:329, quoted in Vernon, Career of Toleration: John Locke, Jonas Proast, 13. Ibid., 13. 217 Le Clerc to Locke, 1 November 1690, CL 4:151. Goldie, ‘Locke, Proast, and Religious Toleration’, 154.

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Proast’s opening rhetorical gambit proved consequential in shaping the debate.219 Locke’s Letter largely abandoned civil religious argumentation and adopted a ‘prophetic’ language justifying toleration as a spiritual necessity. Proast tried to circumvent this feature of the Letter and to force Locke back into the politique corner. His opening line derided Locke’s claim to be defending the ‘mutual Toleration of Christians’ and noted his consideration of pagans, ‘Muhametans’, and Jews. By only excluding atheists and those threatening to ‘civil society’, Locke’s toleration could not advance the cause of Christianity. For how much soever it may tend to the Advancement of Trade and Commerce (which some seem to place above all other Considerations;) I see no reason, from any Experiment that has been made, to expect that True Religion would be any way a gainer by it; that it would be either the better preserved, or the more widely propagated, or rendered any whit the more fruitful in the Lives of its Professours by it. I am sure the Fruits of a Toleration not quite so large as our Author’s (some of which still remain with us) give no encouragement to hope for any such Advantage from it.220

Thus Proast maligned Locke’s spiritual motives, portraying him as yet another tolerationist privileging reasons of state. This was a tendentiously narrow reading of the Letter, and Proast thus proceeded to reject Locke’s argument that coercion was of ‘no use for the promoting True Religion, and the Salvation of Souls’. But his initial instinct, to cast Locke’s tolerationism as purely civil and politic, was revealing and typified much of his rhetoric. Proast expended almost no effort answering Locke’s scriptural arguments or his interpretation of primitive Christianity. These were not arguments where the author of the Letter had ‘place[d] any part of his Strength’.221 The pious aspects of the Letter, Proast suggested, merely camouflaged its more imperative political arguments. This criticism would have resonated with those who ranked Locke among the tribe of ‘politicians’ for whom religion was a mere instrument. Proast agreed with Locke that power cannot force belief, but he presented this argument as a straw man. Moderate coercion would instead ‘bring men to consider those Reasons and Arguments’ foundational to piety but neglected by an apathetic culture.222 Sheer habit forced many from the truth. Mild correction could bring habitual dissenters ‘to act like 219 220 221

Anonymous on Locke’s part, a pretense preserved even in private correspondence. See Benjamin Furly to Locke, 26 October 1690, CL, 4:145. Proast, Argument of the Letter concerning Toleration, Briefly Considered and Answered, 1, 2–3. Ibid., 27. 222 Ibid., 4–5.

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Men, in an affair of such consequence’ and to make a ‘wiser and more rational choice’.223 Locke and Proast tangled over which of their positions was most tainted by political motives. Each wished to trap the other on the politique ground. This pattern recalled Locke’s private dialogues with Parker and Stillingfleet, where he had been eager to liberate toleration from association with Hobbes and turn the charge of Hobbism back onto defenders of establishment. The debate between Locke and Proast assumed a similar pattern. Thus Proast accused Locke of prioritizing political stability and trade and dissenters of seeking mere ‘worldly respect’. This echoed conformist rhetoric of the Restoration, when court tolerationists stood accused of teaching ‘that there is nothing Sacred or Divine but Trade and Empire, and nothing of such moment as Secular Interest’.224 Proast denounced Locke for affirming ‘that the Commonwealth is constituted onely for the procuring, preserving, and advancing of the Civil Interests of the Members of it’.225 The atomizing force of the new contractualism threatened the communal purposes of religion. Proast thus resisted the purely political logic spawned by that language of sovereignty. Anticipating Locke’s riposte, he further rejected a purely statist, Erastian (and implicitly Hobbesian) version of corporate religious authority.226 The sovereign was not empowered to enforce ‘belief’ according to his own judgement but merely to support the proper Ministers of Religion, who by special designation are appointed, not onely to exhort, admonish, reprove, and correct by Spiritual Censures those, who having embraced the Truth, do find themselves obliged by it to submit to their Spiritual Authority; but likewise to seek that which was lost, and to endeavour by wholsom Instruction and due Information, to bring to the right Way those who never knew it, and to reduce such as have gone astray from it . . .

Magistrates were duty-bound to patronize this ‘Pastoral care, which is purely Spiritual, and operates immediately upon the Consciences of men’. Sensing where Locke might take their dispute, Proast defended an autonomous corporate church and rejected Locke’s characterization of the church establishment as a mere ‘Religion of the Court’.227 Locke’s Second Letter concerning Toleration laboured to demonstrate the cynical instrumentality of Proast’s position. Coercion to encourage 223 225 226 227

Ibid., 11, 7 224 Quoted in Sowerby, Making Toleration, 64. Proast, Argument of the Letter concerning Toleration, Briefly Considered and Answered, 18. Tate, Liberty, Toleration, Equality, 170–3; Vernon, Career of Toleration, 14. Proast, Argument of the Letter concerning Toleration, Briefly Considered and Answered, 20–1, 24.

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The Controversy with Proast

conscientious consideration was, Locke alleged, a ‘new Trick’, devised ‘when the old Pretences were too much exploded to serve any longer’.228 He observed that most confessional enforcement concerned outward conformity, not inward belief. Nor did Proast seem particularly exercised about complacent conformists. ‘Did you ever punish any Man, that he might not blindly leave it to the choice of his Parish-Priest, or Bishop, or the Convocation, what Faith or Worship he should imbrace?’229 An often overlooked rhetorical feature of Locke’s Second Letter was its effort to occupy the spiritual high ground and force Proast to defend a ‘civil religious’ logic of establishment. Even while he conceded the intellectual inabilities of many vulgar individuals, Locke celebrated the inevitable victory of true religion, when free, based upon its inherent beauty and force. Primitive Christianity was his evangelical model. The Second Letter disavowed all utilitarian arguments for or against religious coercion. Even if force might occasionally draw men to true religion ‘by indirect effects’, it was inherently unjust. Christianity could never vindicate coercion, nor could a contracting subject ever reasonably surrender his rights of conscience. Lawful and godly actions could not be measured by ‘usefulness’.230 Locke refused to offer a utilitarian case for free conscience. He rejected as ‘uncharitable’ the ‘insinuation’ that he had ‘place[d] the advancement of trade above Religion’.231 Rhetorically, Locke made Proast own the political considerations of the question. ‘They are not Politick Discourses’, he wrote, ‘which are the means of right Information in the Foundations of Religion.’ Blasting both republicans and monarchists for preaching politics, Locke concluded that too often ‘Reasons and Arguments proper and sufficient to convince Men of the Truth in the controverted Points of Religion, and to direct them in the right way to Salvation, were scarce any where to be heard.’ He repeatedly accused Proast of championing a ‘court religion’. The allures of worldly interest inevitably tainted conformity. ‘For in matters of Religion’, he wrote, ‘none are so easy to be driven, as those who have nothing of Religion at all; and next to them, the Vicious, the Ignorant, the Worldling, and the Hypocrite; Who care for no more of Religion but the Name; nor no more of any Church, but its Prosperity and Power.’232 As he had Parker and Stillingfleet before him, Locke offered Proast only two options: to justify the coercive powers of an infallible clergy, thus drifting near the shoal of popery; or to grant spiritual power to sovereigns in the manner of Machiavelli and Hobbes. The latter course would 228

SLT, 57.

229

Ibid., 11–12, 35.

230

Ibid., 7–8, 17.

231

Ibid., 2.

232

Ibid., 23, 49.

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empower not only English monarchs, or Protestant ones, but every variety of spiritual prince. The Royal Supremacy – as a cornerstone of the English ecclesial constitution – meant nothing to Locke. Secular power over religion could only be justified as an aspect of sovereignty, abstractly considered, and such logic was available to all princes. Proast resisted this turn to sovereignty. He considered the historic Church of England providentially inspired and veritable.233 Monarchs should protect and serve this church, guided by its apostolic clergy. The debate between Proast and Locke thus pitted two alternate approaches to the new monopolistic sovereignty: Proast’s traditional corporatism, which rejected it, and Locke’s secularization of politics, which accepted but limited it. Proast, Locke charged, could not distinguish ‘Civil Society’, or the sovereign commonwealth, from ‘distinct sorts of Societies, instituted for different Ends’, such as families and companies. ‘By which account there will be no difference between Church and State.’234 Proast found himself adrift in the new sovereign age. Locke pressured the tender spots of his position, occasionally by casting him as a usurping cleric,235 but more often as a defender of the state’s absolute spiritual competence. However he wished to defend the power of Godly, Anglican monarchs, Proast was forced to answer for the state religions of Machiavellian or Hobbesian princes. In one of his few explicit allusions to the confessional laws that survived 1688, Locke echoed complaints about the Test Act that had been widely voiced, even by nervous bishops in the Restoration Lords. These were complaints that Locke had ignored in his earlier defences of the Test. But he now presented the Test as a profanation established to achieve ‘secular advantage’. The sacrament had become a mere means for individuals to ‘keep their Places, or to obtain licenses to sell Ale (for so low have these holy Things been prostituted)’. Not one magistrate in a hundred favoured piety over politics.236 Proast’s argument for moderate coercion, therefore, was nothing more than a counsel of servility in the face of carnal power. ‘Doubtless’, sniffed Locke, Churches are instituted for the attaining of all the Benefits which Ecclesiastical Government can yield: And therefore, if the Temporal and Secular Interests of men may any way be procured or advanced by Ecclesiastical Polity, the procuring and advancing these Interests, must in 233 234 235 236

For a similar critique, see Slade, Gallionism Truly Stated: or, the Duty of the Magistrate with Respect to Religion, 7. SLT, 51. Proast was not clear as to how the ‘proper ministers of religion’ were to be identified. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 11, 14–5.

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all reason be reckon’d amongst the Ends of Religious Societies, and so consequently fall within the compass of Churchmens Jurisdiction. The Church of Rome has openly made its advantage of Secular Interests to be procured or advanced, indirectly and at a distance, and in ordine ad spiritualia . . . And if the Commonwealth once invades the spiritual Ends of the Church, by medling with the Salvation of Souls, (which she has always been so tender of) who can deny, that the Church should have the liberty to make herself some amends by Reprisals.237

In his second rejoinder, Proast adopted new strategies to deflect the charge that he was a toady to power. He resisted Locke’s premise that spiritual authority, if enjoyed by one magistrate, must be enjoyed by all. He theorized that rightful magisterial authority, advancing true doctrine rather than a mere state religion, had providentially replaced the miracles of the primitive age as the ‘assistance’ required by the Church.238 By considering sovereignty abstractly, Locke was forced into a sceptical position that ‘all Religions are true’ or ‘none is’. Such relativism recalled the Interregnum and the ‘Writers of those times’, who tolerated all ‘sects and heresies’ other than the true Church.239 Sovereigns must ‘submit themselves’ to the ‘King of Kings’ in order to advance his ‘spiritual kingdom’. Proast insisted that ‘eternal interests may be promoted by Political Government’ without reducing true religion to the ‘Magistrate’s religion’. This required deference to the ancient, corporate society spurned by the new jus naturalists. ‘There may still be as great a difference as you please, between Church and State, a Commonwealth and an Army; or between a Family and the East India Company. Which several Societies, as they are instituted for different ends, so are they likewise furnish’d with different Powers, proportionate to their respective Ends.’240 The proper calibration of coercion in religion required a balanced society of orders: Is there no difference between Temporal Power and Politie, and Ecclesiastical Politie or Government, consisting in the exercise of Spiritual Power onely? Between Temporal Power, paramount to all the Power of the Kings of the Earth, and Ecclesiastical Politie, subject to be many ways limited and regulated by the Civil Power?241

Proast answered what he took to be Locke’s quasi-Hobbesian theory of sovereignty with an older understanding of corporations, societies, and 237 238 239

Ibid., 53–4. Proast, Third Letter concerning Toleration, 7–8. Proast’s second effort is confusingly titled the ‘third letter’ (after Locke’s ‘second’ entry into the dispute). Proast, Third Letter concerning Toleration, 12–3. 240 Ibid., 32, 62, 66, 58. 241 Ibid., 60.

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‘coactive’ powers. In this context he tellingly invoked that arch, clericalist critic of Hobbes, Herbert Thorndike.242 Proast did not construe Locke’s account of sovereignty, or the politique toleration that it might entail, in explicitly Hobbesian terms. But his rhetoric powerfully suggested the association. Proast demanded of Locke: Whether Sects and Heresies (even the wildest and most absurd) and even Epicurism and Atheism have not continually thereupon spread themselves . . . Not to speak of . . . the Books and Pamphlets which now fly so thick about this Kingdom, manifestly tending to the multiplying of Sects and Divisions, and even to the promoting of Scepticism in Religion among us. In which number I shall not much need your pardon, if I reckon the First and Second Letters Concerning Toleration.243

The relaxation of moderate penal laws had advantaged sectarian schism and philosophical atheism alike. For his entire life, Locke would have associated such a complaint (particularly directed against Epicureanism) with the charge of Hobbism. In the 1690s, he himself had been explicitly targeted by such associations.244 But Locke’s tolerationism had by this time disentangled itself from politique logic. In his Third Letter, Locke continued to present his toleration as a scriptural mandate. In political terms, the ‘Law of Nature’ and the social contract ‘must be to all Magistrates equally’, ‘without any new Power of Commission from our Saviour’. Proast could not escape this hard truth with his neo-Laudian corporatism. Locke’s Third Letter offered one of his clearest efforts to distinguish his own account of sovereignty from that of Hobbes on the question of religious freedom. He wrote: The end of a Commonwealth constituted can be supposed no other, than what Men in the Constitution of, and entring into it proposed; and that could be nothing by Protection from such Injuries from other Men, which they desiring to avoid, nothing but Force could prevent or remedy: all things but this being as well attainable by Men living in Neighbourhood without the Bonds of a Commonwealth, they could propose to themselves no other thing but this in quitting their Natural Liberty, and putting themselves under the Umpirage of a Civil Soveraign, who therefore had the Force of all the Members of the Commonwealth put into his Hands, to make his Decrees to this end be obeyed. Now since no Man, or Society of Men can 242 243 244

Proast, Second Letter to the Author of the Three Letters for Toleration, 14. Proast, Third Letter concerning Toleration, 34. For disagreement over scepticism as a foundation for Locke’s toleration, see Tate, Liberty, Toleration, and Equality, 232–40; Nicholson, ‘John Locke’s Later Letters on Toleration’; Venon, Career of Toleration, chapter three.

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by their Opinions in Religion, or Ways of Worship, do any Man who differed from them any Injury, which he could not avoid or redress, if he desired it, without the help of Force; the punishing any Opinion in Religion, or Ways of Worship by the Force given the Magistrate, could not be intended by those who constituted, or entred into the Commonwealth, and so could be no End of it, but quite the contrary. For Force from a stronger Hand to bring a Man to a Religion, which another thinks the true, being an Injury which in the State of Nature everyone would avoid, Protection from such Injury is one of the Ends of a Commonwealth, and so every Man has a right to Toleration.

Free conscience was an inalienable right of nature, even in political society. If Proast wished to contest this, Locke would force him onto the terrain of the new contractualism, where he would need to adopt a fundamentally Hobbesian position. ‘If you will say that Commonwealths are not voluntary Societies constituted by Men, and by Men freely entred into, I shall desire you to prove it.’245 But Locke knew that Proast did not wish to adopt the Filmerian line. His entire case for moderate coercion, indeed, was partly based on a methodological individualism. It was not mere outer conformity that the Godly Kings sought, nor was it enough to banish unbelievers for the common good. Proast’s magistrates were to encourage individuals to singly consider their own eternal fate. This position met the interest-oriented individualists of the new civil science at least halfway. Proast was generally willing to concede the contractual basis of sovereignty, at least for argument’s sake.246 His desire to preserve corporate church power alongside the new political dispensation sat uneasily with this concession.247 And where Proast associated Locke’s tolerationism with riotous sectarianism and Epicurean atheism, Locke hit back by rehearsing the Church’s recent disappointments with ‘court religions’: Which of the Magistrates of your time did you know to have so well studied the Controversies about Ordination and Church Government, to be so well versed in Church-History and Succession, that you can undertake that he certainly knew which was the Ministry which our Lord had appointed, either that of Rome, or that of Sweden, whether the Episcopacy in one part of this Island, or the Presbytery in another, were the Ministry which our Lord had appointed . . . And King Lewis of good right comes in with his 245 246

247

TLT, 60–1 See, for instance, Proast, Third Letter, 59. ‘I can easily admit that nothing can in reason be reckon’d among the Ends of any society, but what may in reason be supposed to be designed by those who enter into it.’; Tate, Liberty, Toleration, and Equality, 182–3. Jolley, Toleration and Understanding, 117–22.

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Dragoons; for ’tis not much doubted that he as strongly believed his Popish Priests and Jesuits to be the Ministry which our Lord appointed, as either King Charles or King James the 2d believed that of the Church of England to be so.248

Proast had cast Locke’s toleration as a kind of Hobbesian indulgence of schism and philosophical atheism. Locke returned the favour by awakening old anxieties about the unreliability of the Stuarts and their Hobbesian courtiers. Locke’s Third Letter offered a few new arguments. It advanced more forcefully Locke’s fundamental fideism as regarded theological mysteries. If true religion could not be ‘knowledge’ but only belief and opinion, sovereigns were no better equipped than other individuals to advance it. Locke also reiterated his minimalist theology, which had caused him to be broadly associated with Hobbes.249 Locke folded in further critique of politique confessionalism. Who was better positioned to map the route to salvation, individual seekers in free communion, or ‘the Prince with his Politicks’?250 ‘The Princes of the World are, suppose, as well infected with the depraved Nature of Man, as the rest of their Brethren.’ They were not ‘of another race, than the rest of corrupt Men, and free from that general Taint’. Proast had blamed licentious indulgence for heresy and idolatry. Locke countered that idolatry resulted from ‘the Ambition, Vanity, or Superstition of Princes’, eager to ‘introduce their Predecessors into the Divine Worship of the People, to secure themselves the greater Veneration’ and ‘seduce’ the People into obedience.251 In this context Locke explicitly rejected politique indulgence. Too often toleration itself – like confessionalism – served civil rather than spiritual purposes: Can you or anyone know, or suppose, that Penalites which are laid by the Law on Nonconformity, are intended to make all Men consider [their salvation]; where ‘tis known that a great Number, under the Magistrates Power, are dispensed with, and privileged from those Penalties? How many, omitting the Jews, are there, for example, in the King of England’s Dominions, under his Care and Power, of the Walloon, and French Church; to whom Force is never apply’d, and they live in Security from it? How many Pagans are there in the Plantations, many whereof born in His Dominions, of whom there was never any care taken, that they should so much as come to Church, or be in the least instructed in the Christian Religion? And yet must we believe, or can you pretend, that the Magistrates 248

TLT, 8–9.

249

Ibid., 3–4, 245, 296.

250

Ibid., 44–5.

251

Ibid., 281, 288–9.

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use of Force, against Nonconformists, is to make all his Subjects consider, so as to be convinc’d of, and imbrace the Truth that must save them? If you say, in your way you mean no such Indulgence: I answer, the Question is not yours but the Magistrate’s Intention.252

Locke here denounced prerogative indulgence as the obverse of prerogative confessionalism: each was equally corrupted by dependence on the ‘Magistrate’s Intention’. ‘For whatever the charitable wishes Magistrates may sometimes have in their Thoughts’, their laws served material rather than salvific ends. The merely prudential tightening or ‘relaxation’ of penal laws would only ‘draw in all the loose and careless in Matters of Religion’. Dependence secured neither religion nor freedom but the mere ‘compliance’ of ‘those who more mind their Secular interest than the Truth of Religion’.253 Locke at times suggested that Proast and his allies defended the confessional laws to advantage themselves, as ‘infallible guides’ and spiritual ‘men of art’.254 But, revealingly, he did not foreground this condemnation of jure divino churchmanship. He was more concerned to entrap Proast within the logic of sovereignty, forcing him to defend the spiritual power of princes abstractly considered. In this way Hobbesian statecraft could once again be turned into the burden of his adversary. 252

Ibid., 214–5.

253

Ibid., 209, 215, 220, 235.

254

Ibid., 185, 246.

Conclusion Conscience and Liberalism’s Two Paths

John Locke spent his final years at Oates, with a lucid mind but faltering health. He had resigned his office at the Board of Trade in 1700. Weak lungs hampered his travel. He read, received visitors, and wrote letters. His wrote his Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of Saint Paul, which would appear posthumously. So too would his unfinished Fourth Letter concerning Toleration, written in his final months. In September 1704, Locke drafted a codicil to his will finally acknowledging authorship of his anonymous works. On October 26, he was found in his rooms on his hands and knees. The next day his breathing was laboured and he requested the prayers of the household. After a sleepless night, he died peacefully on the 28th as Psalms were read to him.1 Locke’s death did not occasion the polemical fireworks of Hobbes’s. To be sure, he had enemies. In 1704, months before his death, the heads of the Oxford colleges debated banning the teaching of Locke’s Essay.2 The effort, which narrowly failed, was blamed on the ‘odium’ raised by Stillingfleet against Locke, and ‘suspicion of his orthodoxy’.3 The provost of Queen’s, on elevation to the vice-chancellorship in 1706, attacked Locke in his convocation address. Locke stood accused of trying to ‘ruin’ the church and university, and was blamed for ‘Dr. Tyndale’s Book of the rights of the Church’.4 Well into the eighteenth century, strict conformists associated Locke with atheism and license.5 But where Hobbes’s only friends were heretical philosophes and anticlerical wits, Locke had Christian defenders to celebrate the piety of his final days. At the end, Pierre Coste wrote, he spoke of the ‘goodness of God’, and ‘exalted the Love which God shewed to Man, in justifying him by 1 2 3 5

Coste, ‘Character of Locke’, xxi–xxii; Le Clerc, Life of Locke, 1:23–7. James Tyrrell to Locke, April 1704, CL, 8:269–70. Table Talk and Papers of Bishop Hough, 399. 4 Hearne, Remarks and Collections, 1:293–4. Wood, Essay on the Fundamental or Most Important Doctrines of Natural & Revealed Religion, 93–101.

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Faith in Jesus Christ’.6 Le Clerc remembered his ‘lively and sincere piety’ and his scriptural study. At his final reception of the sacrament, Locke reportedly informed the priest that ‘he was in perfect Charity with all men, and in sincere Communion with the Church of Christ, by what Names soever it might be distinguished’.7 Locke’s exemplary death inspired the Congregationalist hymnist Isaac Watts to verse: ‘Reason at last submits to wear/ The wings of faith; and lo they rear/ Her Chariot high, and nobly bear/ Her Prophet to the skies.’8 Locke was no orthodox Trinitarian, but his writings and correspondence revealed a devotion lacking in Hobbes. Partly for this reason, and because of the different quality of their theories of toleration, polemical efforts to associate Locke with Hobbesian theology and ecclesiology would fade in the eighteenth century. But this did not happen immediately. A composite ‘HobbesianLockean’ position on sovereignty and religion persisted, for instance, in Matthew Tindal’s The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted (1706). Tindal corresponded with Locke, and was influenced by the argument of the Letter that the spiritual power of magistrates was a violation of natural law and social contract.9 His dominant concern, however, was with the ‘Church of Ecclesiastical Power’, which frequently ‘clashed’ with sovereignty.10 In the Rights of the Church, his Lockean toleration showed some Hobbesian teeth. He was obsessed with the instability of ‘Two Independent Governments, one belonging to the clergy by Divine, the others to the King and Parliament by Human Right’. Only the strict vigilance of states could prevent the ‘Empire with an Empire’ aspired to by Catholics and Laudians alike. Also distinctly Hobbesian was Tindal’s presentation of Trinitarian orthodoxy as a weapon of clerical tyranny.11 Tindal’s ‘blend of Erastianism and Lockean tolerationism’ was perhaps not as ‘surprising’ as one recent historian suggests.12 It certainly did not surprise his clerical critics, who had a rhetorical arsenal ready at hand for a countercampaign. George Hickes (Tindal’s now-scandalized former teacher) blusterously demanded whether Tindal ‘could baffle, or discompose an Order 6

Coste, ‘Character of Locke’, xxi–xxii. Coste’s good opinion would not last. James Dybikowski, ‘“Asper’d and Blacken’d”: Pierre Coste’s Critique of Locke’s Moral Theory’, entire. 8 Le Clerc, Life, 1:24. Works of the Reverend Isaac Watts, 9:262. 9 Matthew Tindal to Locke, 10 January 1697, CL, 5:749–50; Tindal, Second Defence of the Rights of the Christian Church, 39, 57, 76; Hudson, Enlightenment and Modernity: the English Deists and Reform, 4–5, 35, 129. 10 Tindal, Essay Concerning the Power of the Magistrate, 2. 11 Tindal, Rights of the Christian Church Asserted, v, xliii, xlix–liii. 12 Levitin, ‘Matthew Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church (1706)’, 717–40, 718. 7

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of Men, who has so lately conquered LEVIATHAN’.13 Jonathan Swift berated Tindal for rendering Christianity ‘a perfect contrivance of civil power’ in the Hobbesian manner, but he also observed that Tindal ‘limpeth as fast as he is able’ after ‘Mr. Locke’.14 William Carroll had no doubt that both Tindal’s licentious tolerationism and his tyrannical Erastianism were ‘borrowed from Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke’.15 There thus endured a polemical context in which Lockean tolerationism might be condemned as a by-product of the Hobbesian politique tradition.16 The house of Ashley, ironically, helped to perpetuate these associations. In one of his first writings, the third Earl of Shaftesbury defended ‘eminent divines’ and learned pulpit Christianity, unsullied by political interest. Those who subordinated religion to ‘the policies of the world’ and ‘affairs of government’ threatened pure Christianity. The malevolent genius of this ‘Political Christianity’ was Thomas Hobbes, whose ‘ill service in the Moral World’ had been opposed by ‘worthy Divines of the Church of England’.17 Shaftesbury, whose relations with Locke were fraught, tendentiously associated him with neo-Epicureans and ethical nominalists such as Hobbes.18 Drawing on critiques by (among others) Edwards, Shaftesbury accused Locke of measuring morality as Hobbes had, by ‘law and will’, mere custom, and the whims of earthly power.19 While he praised English divines for moderation and charity, he condemned ‘our Modern Assertors of a Toleration’, who had destroyed the ministry, and who cared ‘not who defends Religion, or how it is defended’.20 True freedom could not emerge from cold contract, but only from the ‘love of mankind’ and of God. Shaftesbury held Locke apart from the noble cause of Christian liberty and arrayed him with the theorists of will and appetite, for whom freedom merely ‘indulged’ 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

Hickes, ‘A Preliminary Discourse’, printed in Carroll, Spinoza Reviv’d; see also Whitfield, The Kingdom of Jesus Christ: In Answer to Some Points Treated of in the Rights of the Christian Church, 4, 14. Posthumous Works of Dr Jonathan Swift, 1:44–6, 55, 59, 73. Proast was a common foe to Locke and Tindal; Anthony Collins to Locke, 7 August 1704, CL, 8:370. Carroll, Spinoza Reviv’d, 22–4, 35, 41; Carroll, Remarks upon Mr. Clarke’s Sermons, Preached at St Paul’s against Hobbes, Spinoza, and Other Atheists, 9–16, 48, 54, 69, 72–81. Locke was a pervasive influence over Tindal. See his Second Defence of the Rights of the Christian Church, 39, 57, 76. Though Tindal, like Locke, did present Hobbism as a form of religious coercion. Tindal, Defense of the Rights of the Christian Church, against a Late Visitation Sermon, 10. Select Sermons of Dr. Whichcot, in two parts (1698), preface. Locke owned this work. LL, 3139. Lord Ashley to Locke, 29 September 1694, CL, 5:152–4. Shaftesbury to Michael Ainsworth, 3 June 1709, quoted in Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, 64–5, 138. Shaftesbury, Several Letters Written by a Noble Lord to a Young Man at the University, 36–7. The letters themselves date from 1707; Milton, ‘Pierre Coste, John Locke, and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’.

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passions and sought ‘temporal ends’.21 He ranked his old tutor with Toland, Tindal, and Collins, with ‘Hobbists, Witts, Libertines, HalfBelievers . . . Sectarians’.22 Tindal and Shaftesbury – the first embracing Locke and the latter repudiating him – demonstrated the endurance of a Hobbesian reading of Lockean toleration into the early eighteenth century. But these retrograde interpretations did not capture either Locke’s mature, rightsoriented defence of religious freedom, or its understanding of ecclesial mission. Furthermore, the Revolution and the statutory establishment of toleration had transformed the confessional environment. The cogency of associating Hobbism with toleration of any kind was fading. To be sure, in the more absolutist polities of Europe, Hobbes’s ecclesiology continued to enjoy influence. His marriage of sovereignism and prudent toleration influenced Christian Thomasius. Thomasius avoided a Lockean right to conscience freedom precisely because he feared powerful, independent churches. A desire to subordinate church authority to sovereignty motivated his enthusiasm for Hobbes. But Thomasius also adopted the tolerationist implications of Hobbes’s minimalist theology. The evangelist John, wrote Thomasius, ‘said, those who believe that Jesus came into this world should be tolerated . . . Hobbes thought this, too, and affirmed that he believed it. He therefore could be no heretic.’ This reading of Hobbes also inspired Pufendorf.23 The brothers de la Court had earlier espoused something like Hobbesian tolerantia as a policy of state. Spinoza seemingly read Hobbes similarly. But more common was the view of Hobbes promulgated by Pierre Bayle, who associated Hobbes with the thesis that sovereigns must minutely control ‘the external aspects of religion’ or invite civil war.24 Hobbes’s exposure of clerical power was well remembered. Largely forgotten was his case for the prudent toleration of religious difference.25 If the positive case for toleration based on Hobbesian principles continued to have a constituency in England, it was among radical republicans and deists in the mode of Tindal. But the disappointments of the Indulgence era soured Protestant nonconformists on toleration through prerogative. Nonconformists became the natural inheritors of Locke’s mature, rights-oriented, and anti-politique theory of religious freedom. 21 22 23 24 25

Shaftesbury, Several Letters Written by a Noble Lord to a Young Man at the University, 7, 9–11. Klein, Shaftesbury, 157. Schröder, ‘Thomas Hobbes, Christian Thomasius, and the Seventeenth-Century Debate on the Church and State’, 66. Bayle, Political Writings, 84. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the European Republic of Letters’, 476–82, 511, 515, 534.

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Locke’s ecclesial legacy thus began to break apart in the early decades of the century. To the extent that his contractarian theory contained a residual capacity to subordinate church authority to secular power, this was exploited by Whiggish churchmen fending off both non-jurors and sectarians.26 William Warburton’s Alliance of Church and State defended establishment by borrowing Locke’s ‘separation’ model of temporal and religious purposes, and his contractarian understanding of associational authority.27 However, as religion supported the temporal mission of sovereignty, it was appropriate for the state to maintain a duly subordinated church establishment. Warburton did distinguish Locke from the ‘Hobbeist’, who measured all religion by ‘Reason of State’. More dubiously, he also distinguished Locke from separatist nonconformists.28 Where Hobbes had rendered churches mere ‘creatures of the civil magistrate’, Locke preserved the integrity of the church as an autonomous association of Christians. But Warburton would not allow Locke to be construed as a separatist, and instead used him to justify a soft alliance of church and state.29 Lockean principles had also informed Benjamin Hoadly’s The Nature of the Kingdom of the Church of Christ (1717), where they inspired a certain latitudinarianism but also an uncompromising Erastianism. For subordinating the church to sovereign and individual will alike, Hoadly the Lockean was not implausibly cast by his critics as a treacherous episcopal Hobbesian.30 It was partly to counter this unsatisfactory version of Whiggish churchmanship that Warburton produced his version of Locke. Creative misreadings of this kind appeared in diverse contexts. In colonial Boston, for instance, the high church episcopalian John Checkley – defending himself at a libel trial – attacked both Whiggish notions of political authority and Congregationalist ecclesiology by quoting Locke on the impossibility of any natural, direct democracy. One doubts this bit of irony amused the colony’s Congregationalist patriarchs. London conformists were presumably more favourable.31 ‘Hanoverian clergy’, writes Mark Goldie, ‘became adept at construing Lockean principles as supportive of the established church.’32 The painful contortions 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

For context, see Ingram, Religion, Reform, and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century, chapter six. Ingram, Reformation without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England, 289–99. Warburton, Alliance between Church and State, 20; Warburton, Divine Legation of Moses, 2:288. Warburton, Alliance of Church and State, 55, 64. Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate: Benjamin Hoadly, is the fullest study. The speech of Mr. John Checkley, upon his tryal, at Boston in New-England, for Publishing The Short and Easy Method with the Deists, 15. Referencing Locke, TTG, II:86. Goldie, Introduction, RLP, 1:xliii.

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required by this manoeuvre emerged in the anonymous Of Civil Polity (1753), a slender distillation of the Two Treatises in which a bowdlerized Locke defended ecclesial establishment in the manner of Warburton.33 This minor work of Lockean vulgate supposedly affirmed, but in fact contravened, the doctrines of ‘Lock, On Toleration’. Subjects were to content themselves with religious freedom ‘within the bounds of such Toleration as the Legislature shall appoint for Dissenters’. Toleration – to achieve ‘peace and welfare’ – must be under the ‘Cognisance and Controul of the Civil Power’.34 The author of Of Civil Polity apparently left Locke’s Epistola in the drawer. Lockean defences of a subordinated ecclesial establishment would prove an ephemeral feature of the church’s Whiggish captivity. Locke’s more natural devotees were nonconformists who abandoned comprehension, suspected monarchical prerogative, and embraced a rights-oriented theory of religious freedom. To this audience, Locke’s Letter became a textbook on conscience, the voluntary church, and the limits of politics.35 Nonconformists accentuated the ‘prophetic’ and rights-oriented features of Locke’s writing. His friend, for instance, the nonconformist John Shute Barrington, believed that Locke had revealed the ‘duty of the Government to Nonconformists’, and settled religious freedom on natural law.36 Liberty of conscience did not hang on ‘prerogative’, but on the right of subjects.37 ‘You alone’, Barrington wrote Locke directly, ‘have vindicated the Rights and Dignitys of human nature, and have restor’d Liberty to Mens Consciences from the Tyranny of human Laws and their own Passions.’38 Nonconformists reproved use of Lockean contractualism to support an Erastian church establishment. In his Defence of Moderate Nonconformity, Edward Calamy rebutted not just divine right conformists, but also their Hobbesian or Lockean-Whiggish confederates. ‘In religion’, Calamy wrote, ‘every Man is under a Superior Order, and Acting according to his Conscience has none to Controul him . . . It concerns not the Commonwealth (as such) what Ceremonies be us’d or omitted in Publick Worship Assemblies.’ Conscience freedom and free exercise were both natural rights and scriptural mandates, rather than a mere willingness of sovereigns to ‘waive their authority’. Calamy certainly rejected overweening 33 35 36 37 38

Of Civil Polity, i. 34 Ibid., iv, 31–2. Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity in Eighteenth Century England, 26–31. Barrington, An Essay upon the Interest of England; in Respect to Protestants Dissenting from the Establish’d Church, 3. Ibid., 21–4, 32; Barrington, An Essay on the Several Dispensations of God to Mankind, 47. John Shute Barrington to Locke, November 30 1703, CL, 8:133.

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clerical power.39 But his chief concern was to defeat magisterial coercion and Erastianism in the manner of Warburton. In this he was guided by Locke’s Letter.40 Certainly among nonconformists – and in fact more broadly – it was Calamy’s Locke, rather than Warburton’s, that would prevail. Locke’s Letter condemned ‘vest[ing] the magistrate with the power of religion’, and demonstrated that people ‘cannot traffick with their consciences, as they might with their money and estates’. Locke proved that ‘wordly motives’ and ‘usefulness’ could not measure the spirit.41 Even where Hobbes was remembered as a politique tolerationist (rather than a conformist), Locke was disassociated, and commended for arguing that the ‘Power to govern conscience is the sole Prerogative of the Deity’.42 Those seeking a more thorough dismantling of confessionalism publicized Locke’s letter to Limborch, in which he had rued the imperfections of the Toleration Act. For the Unitarian Thomas Belsham, this letter evidenced Locke’s ‘liberal’ sentiments.43 Locke was drafted into the campaigns against the tithe and the Test and Corporation Acts.44 Joseph Priestley, Samuel Wilton, and other enemies of the Test brought Locke’s authority to bear.45 Charles James Fox appealed to Locke’s Letter in parliamentary speeches against the Test.46 Particularly during the 1770s and 1780s, disestablishment polemics consistently quoted one particularly memorable passage from Locke’s Second Letter: his withering characterization of the Test as a profanation of the sacrament for ‘secular advantage’ (as when used to attain a ‘license to sell ale’).47 This defence of the sanctity of the sacraments and chastisement of civil religious logic became one of Locke’s most successful pieces of rhetoric. 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47

Quoting the Letter from a Person of Quality. Calamy, A Defence of Moderate Non-Conformity, 2:29–33, 36. Stebbing, An Essay concerning Civil Government, Consider’d as it Stands Related to Religion, 63–4, 27. Christianity and Free-thinking: in Three Discourses, 103, 105, 151, 77, 178. Furneaux, Letters to the Honourable Mr. Justice Blackstone, concerning his Exposition of the Act of Toleration, ix–x; Sell, Locke and the Eighteenth Century Divines, 167. The Reasonableness of Applying for the Repeal or Explanation of the Corporation and Test Acts, Impartially Consider’d, 10–11, 34–6; Pearson, Great Case of Tithes Truly Stated, 101. Priestley, Essay on the First Principles of Government, 128–9; Wilton, Apology for the Renewal of an Application to Parliament by the Protestant Dissenting Ministers, 25; Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth Century Divines, 162–84. Goldie, Introduction to RLP, I: xxxvi. The Right of Protestant Dissenters to a Compleat Toleration Asserted, 78–9; The Case of the Protestant Dissenters, in Relation to the Laws by which the Sacramental Test is Imposed, 3; Extracts from Books, and Other Small Pieces; in Favour of Religious Liberty, and the Rights of Dissenters, 10.

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By mid-century, Locke had emerged as a ‘Patron of Liberty’ advancing (as well) the principles of the ‘true Christian and Church of Christ’.48 He was remembered for ‘piety and learning’ worthy of the ‘Primitive Christians’.49 He had established that ecclesia was not ‘interwoven with the State’, but was ‘absolutely separate and distinct from the Commonwealth’. Of ‘liberal mind’, he offered a theory of ‘the church itself’ as ‘separate and distinct from the commonwealth’.50 Locke’s felicitous phrase that ‘every church’ was ‘orthodox to itself’ was quoted as an implicit defence of ecclesial voluntarism and pluralism.51 In the lectures of the prominent nonconformist Henry Grove (tutor at Taunton Academy), a Lockean ‘Absolute Toleration and a general Liberty of Conscience’ was asserted as ‘the unalienable right of all’. Mere prosperity and utility were insufficient foundations for true conscience liberty.52 Though Hobbes’s own case for toleration faded from memory as a Restoration artefact, echoes occasionally sounded decades later. But prerogative indulgence was now clearly distinguished from Lockean toleration. When the broad-minded Benjamin Ibbot sermonized for toleration before the London aldermen in 1720, he used Locke’s Letter to restrict the spiritual authority of magistrates. Piety might tend to ‘our present Happiness’, but political benefits were ‘no Part of its Main and Principal Design’. The duty to conscientiously worship God predated civil societies, and this ‘natural Freedom’ (or ‘inalienable Property’) survived the social contract. Locke had demonstrated that states were duty-bound to ensure an ‘absolute Liberty in Matters of Religion and Conscience’, and could not make religion serve ‘Affairs of States’.53 Ibbot’s deference to Locke was presented as an attack on the church by disconcerted auditors.54 Tellingly, one quasi-Hobbesian critic avowed against Ibbot that ‘Toleration is no man’s Right, but a Favour only, or Indulgence in the civil magistrate, which he may grant, or withhold, as he thinks fit.’55 But Ibbot, following Locke, could not allow this. 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Richardson, Christian Liberty and Love Represented, 16; Observations on the Conduct of the Tories, the Whigs, and the Dissenters; With Advice to the Latter, 16–7. Dunton, New Practice of Piety, epistle. Prisoners’ Defence Supported: or an Answer to the Charges and Allegations of George Markham, Vicar of Carlton, 75–6. Colebrook, Letter to a Nobleman, Containing Considerations on the Laws Relative to Dissenters, 51, 142. Grove and Amory, A System of Moral Philosophy, in RLP, 5:350–1. Ibbot, The Nature and Extent of the Office of the Civil Magistrate (1720) in RLP, 5: 163, 165–7, 169, 172–4. An Answer to Dr. Ibbot’s Sermon Preach’d before the Lord-Mayor; Slade, Gallionism Truly Stated, 7. Slade, Gallionism Truly Stated, 9.

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Locke enjoyed particular standing among Independents, who welcomed his definition of the church as a ‘free and voluntary society’, ‘absolutely separate and distinct from the Commonwealth’.56 The influential Congregationalist Philip Doddridge recommended Locke’s Letter to students as a guidebook on conscientious separatism.57 His sermons associated Locke’s tolerationism with that of John Owen.58 Indeed, Locke and Owen were often drafted into a canon of Congregationalist thought now purged of the more Erastian elements that had often marked it in the seventeenth century.59 Issac Watts, the Congregationalist poet and theologian, commended Calamy’s defence of the gathered congregation by reporting that Locke himself had done so. Locke had avowed that while the Protestant dissenters kept close to [Calamy’s] principles, they would sufficiently maintain their ground, and justify their separation from any established national church, if that church should assume an authority to impose things which ought to be left indifferent.60

This reported letter from Locke does not survive, but we need not doubt Calamy’s characterization of it.61 It served to evidence Locke’s essential accord with the Congregationalist understanding of ecclesia. This agreement in spirit, rather than any actual denominational allegiance, explains why Locke would often be speciously remembered as a nonconformist. In the fourth volume of his Commentaries (1769), William Blackstone refused to regard religious toleration as a natural right of any kind. In Hobbesian fashion, he construed it as an act of prudent forbearance, and dissenters as ‘tolerated criminals’. This evoked indignation from both Priestley and the prominent Independent minister Philip Furneaux. Furneaux’s Letters to the Honourable Mr. Justice Blackstone (1770) summoned Locke’s ‘celebrated Letters concerning Toleration’. Echoing the indulgence debates of the 1670s, Furneaux wrote: ‘Let me only ask any friend of civil liberty, what would be his reflections, if he had no security for the possession of his rights and privileges in the laws and constitution of his country, but held them only through the moderation of his superiors, 56 57 58 59 60 61

Phipps, Animadversions on the Practice of Tithing under the Gospel, 60–1, 53. Orton, Memoirs . . . of Philip Doddridge, 121; Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: a Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, v.1: Whichcote to Wesley, 166 Sell, Locke and the Eighteenth Century Divines, 162. Hutchison, Compendious View of the Religious System, Maintained by the Synod of Relief, 19–20. ‘A New Essay on Civil Power in Sacred Things,’ in Watts, Works, 4:50. Calamy, Historical Account of My Own Life, 2:30–1. ‘I had also a message from the ingenious Mr. Locke, letting me know that he had read this Introduction, and thought it such a defence of Nonconformity as could not be answered; and that standing to the principles there laid down, I had no occasion to be afraid of any antagonist.’

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or the spirit of the times?’62 Such cringing before men of ‘rank and station’ infringed ‘the rights of human nature (and religious liberty in its full extent is one of these)’.63 Furneaux associated Blackstone’s cramped interpretation of the Toleration Act with Hobbesian absolutism.64 He rebuked those who rendered the church a mere political institution, incorporated with ‘civil constitutions’ and ‘temporal emoluments’.65 One of Doddridge’s students, Andrew Kippis, demonstrated a particularly subtle understanding of Locke’s place in the evolution of nonconformist tolerationism. Kippis, a liberal Presbyterian who also pastored an Independent Congregation in the 1750s, campaigned against the Test and Corporation Acts.66 His Vindication of the Protestant Dissenting Ministers of 1773 celebrated Locke, again associating him with John Owen and Independency. With the half measure of the Toleration Act, Kippis regretted, the kingdom had circumvented true religious freedom. The more ‘liberal views’ of Owen and Locke took generations to prevail, but recently a ‘revolution hath taken place in the sentiments of the Protestant dissenters’. They were at last inclined to ground their church separation on a pure right of conscience, and a renunciation of the spiritual power of magistrates. Nonconformists now understood establishment ‘as a violation of our essential liberty to judge and act for ourselves’.67 Locke’s Letters had inspired this ‘revolution’, breaking nonconformity from its strategic docility in the face of monarchical power. It was of no small consequence that this reading of Locke’s legacy flourished, above all, in colonial America.68 The Congregationalist pastor Elisha Williams for instance invoked ‘the celebrated Lock’ to combat Connecticut laws prohibiting itinerant ministers from evangelizing beyond parish boundaries. Some liberty must be surrendered to government for the ‘benefit of society and mutual Defence’, but the ‘sacred’ religious ‘Liberty wherewith Christ has made [men] free’ was inalienable. It was not merely a right but a Christian duty to freely search the scriptures, 62 63 67 68

Furneaux, Letters to the Honourable Mr. Justice Blackstone, Concerning His Exposition of the Act of Toleration, 2:vi. 64 65 Ibid., ix. Ibid., 52, 113. Ibid., 40, 93, 102. 66 ODNB. Kippis, Vindication of the Protestant Dissenting Ministers, with Regard to their Late Application to Parliament, 23–6, 36, 40, 43. The debate over Locke’s American influence deals chiefly with the Two Treatises and with Locke’s understanding of property and colonialism. Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism; Huyler, Locke in America: the Moral Philosophy of the Founding Era; Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: the Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke. An exception is Dworetz, The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism, and the American Revolution, where Locke’s tolerationism is interpreted as part of a general ‘theistic liberalism’. See chapter five, 93–4, 120–2.

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gather for worship, and preach Gospel truth. Those who threatened this freedom rebelled against Christ, the ‘Lord of the Conscience’. So too, however, did those who submitted ‘their Consciences to any such unjust usurp’d Authority’. Civil rulers had no more power in this regard than clergymen.69 The unjust usurpations of Henry VIII and James II were no better than that of the ‘tyrannical Prelate Laud’.70 William’s Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants concluded by asserting the insufficiencies of prerogative toleration: The Rights of Magna Charta depend not on the Will of the Prince, or the Will of the Legislature; but they are the inherent natural Rights of Englishmen: secured and confirmed they may be by the Legislature, but nor derived from, nor dependent on their Will. And if there be any Rights, and Privileges, that we may call natural and unalienable, this is one, viz. the Right of private Judgment, and Liberty of worshipping God according to our Consciences, without controul from human Laws. A Priviledge more valuable than the civil Rights of Magna Charta. This we hold, not from Man, but from GOD: which therefore no Man can touch and be innocent.71

Thus did Williams reveal the capacity of Lockean toleration theory to rebuke its Hobbesian forerunner. In 1742, the Letter concerning Toleration became the first Lockean text to appear in an American edition.72 Its influence was pervasive. In the run-up to the Revolution, colonial presses reprinted the writings of Priestley and Furneaux, where Locke had been invoked as an inspired exponent of conscience amidst the court culture of absolutism.73 Issac Foster’s Defense of Religious Liberty of 1780 offered the apologia of a Connecticut pastor ejected by a local ‘consociation’ for doctrinal heresies. Foster rallied the emerging nation of ‘Americans’ against the ‘creed-making’ authority of clerical assemblies. Christ was the ‘only Lord of conscience’.74 Invoking Locke’s Letter, Foster defended the right of individual theological judgement (for pastors and congregants alike), but also the purely voluntary nature of ecclesia.75 He construed ‘Christian communion’ as the willing fellowship of believers in the ‘sum total of their individual rights’, and cited Locke’s hostility to imposed creeds. Foster expressly arrayed Lockean toleration 69 70 73

74

Williams, Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants, in RLP 5: 288–95. 71 Ibid., 302, 308, 320–8, 331, 339. Ibid., 340. 72 Dworetz, Unvarished Doctrine, 142. An Interesting appendix to Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the laws of England. Containing, I. Priestley’s Remarks . . . Furneaux’s Letters to the Hon. Mr. Justice Blackstone; The Palladium of Conscience; or, The Foundation of Religious Liberty Displayed. Foster, Defence of Religious Liberty, 31–2, 36. 75 Ibid., 43.

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against ‘Hobbism’, construing this as the opposition of an ‘equal and impartial’ liberty of conscience against a coerced uniformity of opinion.76 The most consequential promoter of Locke’s tolerationism in colonial America was Isaac Backus, the Baptist minister of Connecticut. Most prominently in his Seasonable Plea of 1770, he defended free conscience as the ‘dearest of all rights’. It informed the right of individual judgement, but also the right of like-minded seekers to gather into congregations. The Plea quoted Locke’s Letter at length, to condemn persecuting pastors as ‘more ministers of the government than ministers of the gospel’, and to avow that ‘truth’ could not be served by the ‘power of great men’.77 Backus’s campaign against the compulsory (if largely theoretical) payment of tithes to support a Congregationalist establishment eventually flowered into a full blown theory of ‘church and state separation’, surpassing a theory of ‘mere toleration’.78 In appeals to the first Continental Congress, and then within the constitutional convention, he agitated for this cause. His fusion of Lockean and sectarian theoretical priorities strongly suggests how Locke’s Letter was read during the era of the founding of the American republic. John Locke’s earliest exposure to Hobbes is often misread as an influence drawing him away from religious toleration. It is better understood as an influence pulling him towards a science of sovereignty that might have tolerationist or anti-tolerationist implications. A high view of prerogative, deference to civil religious ends, and a general indifference to ecclesiology marked Locke’s writing during the Interregnum and early Restoration. His association with Shaftesbury and the cause of indulgence accorded well with these proclivities, as did the religious politics of Hobbes within the same context. Locke made a partial break with prerogative style toleration in the late 1660s. Perhaps partly motivated by disenchantment with Hobbes’s version of natural law, and concerned with the natural duty to rightly worship God, Locke began to formulate a right of free religious exercise (rather than one limited to inner belief). But during his Shaftesburian period he retained a deference to sovereignty. He disallowed conscientious resistance, composed markedly anticlerical prose, and continued to show little interest in a positive theory of ecclesia. His further evolution on these points coincided with a renewed exposure to Hobbesian and anti-Hobbesian texts during the late 1660s and 1670s. His position, like that of the broader 76 77 78

Ibid., 160–5, 174–5, 122. Backus, Seasonable Plea for Liberty of Conscience, against some Late Oppressive Proceedings, preface, 11–14; Backus, Letter to a Gentleman in the Massachusetts General Assembly, 20. McLoughlin, ‘Isaac Backus and the Separation of Church and State in America’, entire.

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dissenting cause, was seriously pressured by episcopal conformists. These conformists assailed a prerogative style of religious governance that was commonly typed as Hobbesian and that threatened, in their minds, the libertas ecclesiae. Unfolding during the Indulgence battles and the collapse of toleration in France, this dialectic forced Locke to bolster his understanding of free conscience and free religious exercise. What was once a gift became a right, one that might justify resistance. In the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ and the Letters concerning Toleration, Locke also formulated a positive understanding of the church as an autonomous society with distinctive ends and liberties. He discarded the logic of civil religion. His abandonment of Hobbesian toleration evidenced itself not least in his persistent theoretical refusal of toleration to a loyalist Catholic tradition that had substantially absorbed Hobbes’s approach to religious governance. High church critics persistently lashed Locke to Hobbes throughout his life. To a surprising extent, given the anonymity of the Letters, contested understandings of conscience and religious freedom threaded their way through critiques of his work. But these responses, trapped in a Restoration context, failed to capture the essence of Locke’s mature tolerationism. The surer reading of Locke was offered by nonconformists across the Atlantic world. They adopted Locke not only for his defence of individual free conscience, but for his understanding of churches as voluntary, sacred, and autonomous societies. This more prophetic, ecclesial understanding of religious freedom was not infrequently contrasted with mere prerogative forms of toleration as favour. But with the passage of time, the memory of Hobbes as a politique tolerationist faded, and the complex history of the tolerationist cause as it had evolved in the later seventeenth century was smoothed out. Locke’s proximity to Hobbism, where acknowledged, became detached from the question of religious freedom. His dialectic with episcopal conformists was forgotten, as was the formative role played by them – and their cause of church freedom – in his intellectual maturation. All of this served a liberal tradition invested in a secular Locke dedicated to a strictly individual understanding of rights, and a purely internal understanding of conscience. Charting the serpentine path of Hobbes and Locke from their own context into modern liberal mythology would require another book. The introduction to the present one told a small part of that story as it played out in the twentieth century, among interwar anti-liberals. A few other pieces of the story were offered in digressions on non-domination liberty (Chapter 4) and the Rawlsian interpretation of Locke (Chapter 6). A great

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deal more could be said, but not in the present setting. As a direct theoretical influence over the developing liberal tradition, Hobbes surpassed Locke during the long nineteenth century heyday of utilitarianism. The hostility of the utilitarians, and the preoccupations of the ‘new liberals’ of the early twentieth century, diminished the theoretical resonance of Locke’s theory of religious freedom. But the Rawlsian liberalism of latter generations might be read, in part, as a recovery of that inheritance. Harvard has produced one last son of the Revolution, a theologically liberal Christian (in training) convinced that Locke’s theory of conscience was the seedbed of our freedom.79 Thus has Locke’s Letter concerning Toleration found a privileged place in the currently dominant historical mythology of liberalism. Nor is this reading of Locke unavailable to modern Christians of more ecclesial inclinations. One of the twentieth century’s preeminent exponents of human rights, the neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain, favourably contrasted the early American understanding of ‘inviolable freedom of conscience’ (marked ‘by the influence of Locke’) with France’s secularist Rights of Man. The Lockean Americans adhered ‘more closely to the originally Christian character of human rights’.80 Though it combats a counter-narrative of the secularized, hyper-individualist Locke, Locke’s theory of church freedom continues to find advocates within Christian liberalism. Nor can this reading of Locke’s contribution to the liberal tradition be easily dismissed as an ideological projection. Recent intellectual historians have tended to reject any effort to find historic ‘liberalism’ earlier than the nineteenth century as an anachronistic imposition.81 However, as has been demonstrated repeatedly in this book, Locke’s theory of toleration was regularly characterized as ‘liberal’ by nonconformists of the eighteenth century, and that characterization played a role in defining the language of ‘liberal politics’ as it emerged in the 1770s and 1780s.82 But Hobbes’s rival place in liberal history has not lacked enthusiasts. A positivist, statist, and egoistic Hobbes appealed to utilitarian liberals little concerned with the rights of conscience. Hobbes’s theory of 79

80

81 82

Spurred by the publication of Rawls’s senior thesis as A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: With ‘On My Religion’; Rawls and Religion, ed. Bailey and Gentile; Eric Gregory, ‘Before the Original Position: The Neo-Orthodox Theology of the Young Rawls’. Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law, 45; Moyn, Christian Human Rights; Elshtain, Sovereignty: God, Self, and State (New York, 2008), 121–30; more hesitantly, Wolfe, Natural Law Liberalism, 41, 134–8, 163. Bell, ‘What is Liberalism?’, 682–715; Fawcett, Liberalism: the Life of an Idea, xii; Rosenblatt, Lost History of Liberalism, 3. See above, and Collins, ‘Lost Historiographies of Liberalism’, forthcoming in Review of Politics.

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conscience, as we have seen, also proved central to the first prominent ‘liberalized’ historical treatment of Hobbes, generated by the interwar, German scholarship represented by the malicious Carl Schmitt. Leo Strauss’s more acceptable reading of the liberal Hobbes shared kinship with this interpretation. The ‘tolerationist’ Hobbes produced by more recent historians sometimes emits from a Straussian milieu, or suggests the influence of Schmitt (often by way of Koselleck). More typically, recent historians reject anti-liberalism altogether, and celebrate the theoretical innovations that Schmitt despised. Either way, the liberal Hobbes is predominantly constructed around the core question of conscience. And it is not necessarily problematic to Hobbes’s latter-day admirers that the religious freedom of Leviathan is but a relaxation of sovereignty, and a concession to the inevitable unruliness of determined wills. In those considerable swaths of our public culture enraptured by materialism and the dicta of sociobiology, the prudently tolerationist Hobbes serves to reconcile – at least superficially – a disillusioned, deterministic metaphysics with a sufficiently liberal politics. Thus does the intellectual historian Mark Lilla make a liberal hero of Hobbes for separating religion and politics, justifying the modern state as the resolver of primal religious violence, and exposing Christianity as a dangerous illusion. (Locke fits far less comfortably into his interpretation.)83 Equally enthusiastic is the sociobiologist Steven Pinker, in a popular book acclaiming the modern state for inaugurating an age of prosperity and peace. Grounded on materialism and a deterministic theory of human nature, Pinker’s book psychologizes belief systems that he disdains. Civilization depends on the ‘Leviathan’ – a coercive power relaxed only after it has re-schooled the beasts within its subjects, thus channelling their appetites more productively. Hobbes functions as the heroic prophet of this ‘disinterested’ sovereignty. Locke and his theory of conscience are essentially unmentioned.84 The most sustained case for favouring a Hobbesian-Spinozist model of conscience and power over a Lockean one has been offered in Jonathan Israel’s controversial histories of the Enlightenment. Israel denigrates Locke for his piety, his belief in free will and the non-material realm. He dismisses Lockean toleration as ‘grudging’ and limited ‘precisely because it 83

84

Lilla, Stillborn God, 75–98; see 96–7 for a reading of the Letter as a meditation on the ‘political psychology of toleration’. The Letter, compared to Leviathan, offered an ‘indirect therapy to the theological-political illnesses that Hobbes had so ably diagnosed’. Lilla reads the work in the civil religious tradition, arguing that ‘religious toleration would increase attachment to the social compact rather than challenge it’ (98). Pinker, Better Angels of our Nature, 35–56, 487, 612, 641–2, 144.

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is a theological conception’. True freedom emerges exclusively from atheistic, ‘one-matter philosophy’ and a recognition – with Hobbes and Spinoza – that human conscience is trapped by material necessity. This perspective subordinated ‘freedom of worship’ to the state, and forces subjects to be free beyond the ‘sway of an organized Church’.85 Locke, Israel tendentiously argues, became a hero of ‘anti-philosophes’ for ‘resisting the scope of reason, providing only a rather limited toleration, and for his defense of spirits, miracles, faith, and divine Revelation, as well as for separating civil and spiritual status’.86 A somewhat more measured version of this account is found in Anthony Pagden’s history of the Enlightenment, where a notably Hobbesian reading of Locke manages to preserve him more credit than Israel affords.87 Extraordinarily, however, Pagden’s account of Enlightenment toleration omits any discussion of Locke’s Letter, or Christian theories of conscience, in favour of a heroic narrative of scepticism, materialism, and prudent statecraft.88 Justin Champion has likewise commended a specifically Hobbesian anticlericalism as a ‘transgression of customary structures of subordination and hierarchy’.89 Hobbes is far from supplanting Locke as a theorist of religious toleration in the cultural memory of western, liberal polities. And yet secularization, fashionable socio-biology, and rising liberal suspicions of foreign and domestic ‘theocracies’ are in some prominent quarters augmenting the reputation of Hobbes and Spinoza as theorists of prudential statecraft. Locke’s more robust, rights-oriented account of religious freedom is by consequence diminished. The liberalization of Hobbes (and Spinoza) was once primarily a habit of anti-liberals, but it increasingly tempts liberals themselves. There is every reason to suspect that the tensions between a utilitarian, prudential, sovereignist model of (internal) ‘conscience’ freedom and a pre-political, rights-oriented model of free religious exercise will persist, and perhaps come into sharper conflict. It might behove current enthusiasts for Hobbesian or Spinozist liberalism to consider the fundamentally Schmittian historical roots of their perspective. 85

86 87 88 89

Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 265–70. Israel tries to keep Hobbes at arm’s length from Spinoza’s account of ‘philosophical freedom’, but is unconvincing in the effort. Israel is exactly incorrect to characterize Locke’s mature ‘tolerance’ as a mere ‘privilege’ or ‘immunity’. He is right, however, that Locke was more willing than Spinoza to protect the ‘rights’ of churches (266–7). Israel, Revolution of the Mind, 240; Israel, Democratic Enlightenment, 142–3. Pagden, The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters, 77–85. Ibid., chapter 3. Remarkably, Locke appears here only once, to be misidentified as a ‘stauch Calvinist’ (97). Champion, ‘Anticlericalism, Politics, and Power’, 45–8.

376

Conclusion

Our common memories of religious war, the secular state, conscience and toleration, and the tyranny of throne and altar, all too often trade in commonplaces and mythologies. We regularly forget that both toleration and confessionalism could be justified, alternatively, by religious or secular logics. We tend to operate with a secular notion of progress, whereby the Enlightenment secured our prosperity and freedom by marginalizing religion and prioritizing civil concerns. Scepticism and materialism are presumed to have advanced human freedom, and religion to have hampered it. Churches are construed as inevitable instruments of tyranny and political hierarchy. A contextual study of Hobbes reminds us that the turn to sovereignty could play a crucial role in advancing tolerationist argument. The religious freedom of individuals was often understood as a useful mechanism for augmenting state power. Hobbesian toleration conceded a great deal to the subjectivity and ungovernability of human conscience as determined will. It conceded very little to the high truths of human conscience, and permitted broader religious freedom only as a matter of prudent indulgence. Locke’s toleration theory, often derided as defective because of its significant exceptions, in fact offered a far more radical and robust challenge to the supremacy of sovereignty. Paradoxically, it was the more traditional features of Lockean thought that permitted this more elevated account of conscience as a foundational human freedom. These included belief in human free will, the spiritual soul, and human equality in the image of God. But also critical was Locke’s respect for the prophetic voice of religion, its integrity as the repository of a moral logic that might check and correct purely political power. For all of our cultural memory of ‘priestcraft’ – of early modern churches as the tools of monarchical tyranny – autonomous churches long served as crucial institutions capable of restraining the remorseless operation of a purely political logic. Dissenting advocates of free conscience, in this regard, could not merely denounce clerical absolutism. They were required, as fellow Christians, to refigure the prophetic role and moral authority that long attached to the libertas ecclesiae. This was John Locke’s great achievement. No doubt this refiguration advanced what Brent Sirota has called the ‘loss of the ecclesial’, the ‘disappearance of the Church of England as a “distinct society”, that is, a form of human sociability reducible to neither the political state nor the multiplicity of associations subsisting in civil society’.90 For this reason conformist churchmen tried hard to discredit 90

Sirota, Christian Monitors, 151, 169–70.

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Locke by keeping him in Hobbes’s company. But their critique of him was often as unwarranted and instrumental as was his of them. Locke’s account of religious freedom had decisively broken from Hobbesian sovereignism, and he did not understand churches as particular civil associations amongst others. They were not mere creations of contract and the transaction of private interests; their moral duties transcended such terms. Nor was the religious conscience that informed the doctrine and practice of free churches merely one interest among others. Religious conscience – of belief and practice – marked a hard limit to state power, and was fundamental to Locke’s theory of popular resistance. Only in stages did Locke’s account of conscience and the church liberate itself from Hobbes’s version of the same. When it did so, the implications of his reconfigured position proved radical, and would substantially influence the shape of constitutional government during the age of revolutions. The future of that Lockean legacy, as the beliefs that lent it authority recede in the Western world, remains to be seen.

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Index

Aaron, 112 Addison, Lancelot, 216 adiaphora, 41, 47, 49 views of Hobbes, 50 views of Locke, 44, 50, 53, 145, 149, 150, 179, 258 Alexander III, Pope, 102 Allegiance, Oath of, 293, 298 Allestree, Richard, 86–8 Anglesey, Earl of. See Annesley, Arthur Annesley, Arthur, Earl of Anglesey, 104, 105 Arianism, 105, 106, 108 Arius, 109, 111 Arlington, Earl of. See Bennet, Henry Arminianism, 86, 88, 89 Arundell, Henry, Baron Arundell of Wardour, 291, 303 Ashley-Cooper, Anthony. See Shaftesbury, first Earl of Assheton, William, 299 Athanasius, 109, 111, 114 Atterbury, Francis, 322 Aubert de Versé, Noel, 273 Aubrey, John, 63, 104, 105, 153, 174 as source for Richard Blackburne, 174 fears clerical displeasure at Hobbes’s Vitae, 174 letter to Locke concerning Hobbes, 82, 129 letter to Wood concerning Hobbes and Locke, 129–30 on Historia Ecclesiastica, 110, 112 on the suppression of Behemoth, 82 Austin, John, 296, 306 Backus, Isaac, 371 Bagshaw, Edward, 30, 47, 51, 52, 61, 190 career of, 32 The Great Question concerning Things Indifferent in Religious Worship, 41–3 views on Hobbes, 32–3 Barlow, Thomas, Bishop, 27, 73, 75, 104, 105, 166 Barne, Miles, 214 Baronius, Cesare, 102

Barrington, John Shute, 365 Baxter, Richard, 24, 25, 40, 60, 100, 196, 296, 348 assails Stillingfleet, 220 Bayle, Pierre, 271, 363 Becket, Thomas, 102 Beconsall, Thomas, 337–9 Bedloe, William, 286, 287 Bellarmine, Robert, Cardinal, 94 Belon, Peter, 279 Belsham, Thomas, 366 Bennet, Henry, Earl of Arlington, 68, 74, 75, 82, 84, 119, 129, 131, 195 Bentham, Jeremy, 183 Bentley, Richard, 100, 337 Berkenhead, John, 82 Berkley, Sir William, 71 Berlin, Isaiah, 182 bishops. See also Church of England after 1688, 317 alliance with Danby ministry, 167–8 ambiguity over the Royal Supremacy, 139 attacks on Hobbes, 173 crisis in relations with Charles II, 69–71, 136, 137, 139, 218 opposition to Indulgence, 39, 187–8, 191, 204–5, 245–8 resistance to James II, 245–8 Restored in Scotland, 38 role in Restoration of church, 38 Blackburn, Robert, 174 Blacklo, See White, Thomas Blackstone, William, 368 Blaeu, Pieter, 76 Blount, Charles, 105, 173 Blount, Thomas, 67 Bodin, Jean, 19, 46, 195 Bold, Samuel, 344–8 Boyle, Robert, 64, 100, 120, 318 Bramhall, John, Bishop, 32, 74, 86, 88–90, 99, 102, 110, 113, 114, 175

421

422

Index

Breda, Declaration of, 34, 37, 38, 42, 184, 188, 196, 349 Bristol, Earl of. See Digby, George Buckingham, Duke of. See Villiers, George Burnet, Alexander, Archbishop, 131 Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop, 71, 199, 248, 279, 289, 297, 312, 331 Burnet, Thomas, 335 Butler, James, Duke of Ormond, 297, 299 Cabal ministry, 68–9, 131 fall of, 166–7 Calamy, Edward, 365 Calvin, Jean, 96 ‘Cambridge School’ contextualism, 3, 7 Cambridge University, 73, 74, 112, 286, 330, 340 Canons of 1640, 169 Capell, Arthur, Earl of Essex, 132, 299 Care, Henry, 302 Caron, Redmond, 298, 302 Carroll, William, 362 Castellio, Sebastian, 93 Castlemaine, Earl of. See Palmer, Roger Catholicism anti-Catholic atmosphere during the later Restoration, 280–2 Blackloist faction, 296 accused of Hobbism by the Church, 299–302 associated with Hobbes, 311–13 condemned for Hobbism, 296 influence of Hobbes over, 294, 296, 298–9 lobby Charles II for toleration, 298 negotations with Commonwealth, 295 support for politique indulgence, 303–4 English ‘appellant’ clergy, 293 factions within English Chapter, 292–4 Remonstrance of the Irish Clergy, 297, 301, 308 use of the church-court distinction, 308–14 Cavalier Parliament, 36, 37, 39, 67, 69, 131, 133, 166, 168, 187, 188, 300, 310 Cavendish, William, Earl of Newcastle, 64 Cavendish, William, third Earl of Devonshire, 63, 64, 172 Charles I, King of England, 33, 80, 219 Charles II, King of England, 33, 307 abandons Clarendon, 131 advised by Hobbes, 113, 114 celebrated as a tolerant prince, 190 childless marriage of, 133 critiqued by churchmen, 198 deathbed conversion, 199 defence of Indulgence, 39 elevated Danby, 167

Hobbes’s appeals to, 100 Indulgence declarations of, 184–5 on Catholic loyalism, 296 politique impulses of, 34, 41, 219 politique religious governance of attacked by bishops, 87–8 reconciled with Church, 167 urged to exercise the Royal Supremacy, 136 warned by bishops, 59 Checkley, John, 364 Chicheley, Thomas, 81 Church of England, 150, 157, 189, 207, 223, 229, 244, 362, See also bishops accused of Hobbism, 220 and the Royal Supremacy, 139 attacks on Catholicism, 299–302 characterized by Locke as either popish or Hobbesian, 228 defined by Proast, 354 loss of corporate authority, 376 on Catholic loyalism, 299, 301 patristic and historical scholarship of, 103 praised by William III, 248 restoration of, 36–9 transformed by 1688, 315–17 civil religion definition of, 56–8 toleration and, 58–61 Clarke, Edward, 246 Clarkson, David, 227 Cleves, duchy of, 119–21 Clifford, Martin, 214–16, 226, 249, 252 associated with Hobbism, 214–15 critiques Hobbes, 215 Clifford, Thomas, 68, 133, 136, 139, 166, 281, 287, 298, 300 Clüver, Johann, 104 Coke, Roger, 199, 205, 248, 287, 300 Cole, Thomas, 16 Coleman, Edward, 288 Collier, Jeremy, 316 Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes, 203, 245 comprehension, 131, 167, 217, 219, 248, 253, 268, 316, 335, 365 Locke’s view of, 249, 258, 268, 269 Compton, Henry, Bishop, 248 Constant, Benjamin, 183 Constantine, Emperor, 51, 109, 113, 114, 223 Conventicle Act, 124, 133 Conventicle Act, Scottish, 132 Convention Parliament, 37 Corbet, John, 143, 190, 301 Cosin, John, Bishop, 101, 302 Coste, Pierre, 360 Court of High Commission, 80, 100, 101, 113

Index Crelly, Patrick, 295 Cressy, Hugh, 139, 298–9, 300, 305, 309 Croft, Bridget, 247 Croft, Herbert, Bishop, 223 Cromwell, Oliver, 17, 24, 60, 87, 89, 100, 122, 161, 175, 216, 222, 295, 313 Cromwell, Thomas, 136, 137 Crooke, William, 76, 81, 84, 104, 130 Cudworth, Ralph, 99 Daillé, Jean, 105 Danby, Earl of. See Osborne, Thomas Davenport, Christopher, 295 Davies, John, 25 deism, 332, 336 Des Maizeaux, Pierre, 28, 30, 170 Descartes, Rene, 98, 99 Devonshire, Earl of. See Cavendish, William Digby, George, Earl of Bristol, 69, 297, 300 on church and court of Rome, 308–9 Digby, Kenelm, 294, 295, 297, 300, 306 Diodorus Siculus, 104 dispensing power, 186 dissenters, 72, 123, 136, 148, 151, 169, 178, 184, 190, 204, 253, See also Independents and non-domination liberty, 211 attacked by Parker, 155 characterized by Stillingfleet, 219 goaded by Church as servile, 192, 198 growing opposition to Indulgence, 204 Locke’s view of, 150 support for prerogative, 192–7 targeted by Halifax, 207 urged to accept Indulgence, 200 Doddridge, Philip, 368 Dodwell, Henry, 103, 324 Dover, Treaty of, 69, 131 Dowell, John, 75 Downes, Theophilius, 324 du Moulin, Louis, 31, 196, 221 du Moulin, Pierre, 300, 301 Dunn, John, 2, 4 Eachard, John, 73, 75 Edward, Thomas, 93 Edwards, John, 318, 340–2, 345, 350 associated Locke with Hobbism, 341–2 attacked by Locke, 344 critique of Hobbism, 340 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 108 Ellis, John, 238 Eusebius, 104 Evelyn, John, 33, 67

423

Falkner, William, 197–8 Fell, John, Bishop, 43, 116, 199, 238, 239, 240, 302 controversy with Hobbes, 172 Ferguson, Robert, 122, 164 Filmer, Robert, 27, 29, 45, 55 Finch, Heneage, 188, 281 Finch, Leopold, 350 Fisher, Payne, 17 Fitton, Peter, 294 Fitzgerald, John, 291 Flacius, Matthias, 102 Fontainebleau, Edict of, 243 Foster, Issac, 370 Foulis, Henry, 301 Fox, Charles James, 366 Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor, 102 Frederick Wilhelm, Elector, 119 Freke, John, 245 Fuller, Thomas, 135 Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 134 Furly, Benjamin, 125, 253 Furneaux, Philip, 368 Gassendi, Pierre, 295 Gee, Edward, 28, 47 Godfrey, Edmund Berry, 286, 288 Godolphin, William, 119 Goodwin, John, 94, 183 Gother, John, 311 Graham, Richard, viscount Preston, 244 Grenville, Denis, 288 Grigg, Anna, 245, 246 Grotius, Hugo, 46, 104, 196 Grove, Henry, 367 Guenellon, Pieter, 267 Hale, Matthew, 59 Halifax, Marquis of. See Savile, George Hall, Joseph, 89 Hammond, Henry, 23, 24, 53, 86, 279 Hancock, Robert, 303, 311 Harrington, James, 23, 25, 32 Heath, James, 82 Henrietta Maria, Queen of England, 68 Henry IV, King of France, 190 Henry VIII, King of England, 203, 370 Herbert, Thomas, Earl of Pembroke, 240 heresy defined as private opinion, 93–4 Interregnum debate over, 94 Hickeringill, Edmund, 160 Hickes, George, 320, 361 Hill, Thomas, 16 Hoadly, Benjamin, Bishop, 364

424

Index

Hobbes, Thomas account of English heresy law, 108 An Answer to a Book Published by Dr. Bramhall . . . Called the Catching of Leviathan, 66, 89, 92 An Historical Narration concerning Heresie, 66, 75 associated with church and court distinction, 311–13 associated with ecclesial Whiggery, 316 associated with free conscience, 323 associated with Indulgence, 191 Behemoth, 66, 75, 105, 292 account of religious war, 110 attack on Whole Duty of Man, 86–8 attacks on bishops, 82–8, 89 censorship of, 76–7 episcopal hostility towards, 82–8 on heresy, 103 on High Commission, 101 passages expunged from, 86 pirated editions, 127, 172 theory of religious war, 82–3 case for the liberty of philosophy, 95 censorship of his work, 101 context for later writings, 75–6, 90 critique of Constantine, 110, 111 De Cive, 22, 47, 63, 92, 99, 126, 273, 295, 337 burned by Oxford, 239 De mirabilibus Pecci, 126 death of, 174 defends materialism, 101–2 demand for his works, 77, 81 Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student, of the Common Laws of England, 67, 81, 101, 103, 108, 109, 126 eighteenth-century continental reading of, 363 ‘Elements of Law’, 93 heresy writings, 103 broad purposes of, 91 contemporary relevance, 112 general character, 103–4 Historia Ecclesiastica, 67, 103, 104, 111–13, 144 history of, 111 sources for, 104 Historical Narration concerning Heresie, 88, 90, 101, 103, 104, 109, 110, 113, 126 Interregnum career, 24–5 justification of Leviathan, 79–80, 85–6, 95, 174 Latin Leviathan, 75, 76, 127, 144 consequential revisions, 77–80 critique of Christian doctrine, 105–8 limited discussion of conscience, 92 on episcopacy, 79, 80 on religious war, 79

passages on Independency expunged from, 78–9 printing of, 66 Letter about Liberty and Necessity, 172 Leviathan, 22–4, 42, 143, 337 associated with dissent, 223, 224 associated with Independency, 73–4, 215–16 burned at Oxford, 239 Interregnum context of, 100 language of civil religion, 57 languages of religious freedom in, 91–2 on heresy, 92–5 on the Trinity, 97–8 linked to sectarianism, 173 lost defense of Daniel Scargill, 82 Memorable Sayings of, 174 memory of the Interregnum, 95, 175 mortalism of, 95–6 Mr Hobbes Considered in his Loyalty, Religion, Reputation, and Manners, 65–6, 174 on Bishops, 22, 85–6, 175, 176 on Catholicism, 292 on causality, 97 on conscience, 12–13, 92 on Constantine, 109 on heaven and hell, 96 on history, 102 on Independency, 22–4, 31 on powers in ordine spiritualia, 153–4 on Presbyterians, 80, 85, 87, 175 on the freedom of philosophy, 114 on the materiality of God, 96–7 on the Trinity, 97–8, 110, 111 paper on the Exclusion crisis, 172 place in liberal tradition, 372–5 polemics with Wallis and Ward, 25–6, 31 price for his works, 125–6 Problemata Physica, 75 profile at the Restoration, 63–4 prose Vita, 175–6 Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance read by Locke, 127 renewed dispute with Bramhall, 88–90 reputation as an atheist, 99–100 Restoration self-apologias, 64–6 Restoration writings, 66–7 sacred history anti-Catholicism of, 105 readership of, 105 sources for, 104–5 theological dimensions, 105–8 Seven Philosophical Problems, 64 targeted for heresy, 67–8 theory of attributed action, 12–13

Index theory of personation, 98 translations of Homer and Virgil, 126, 127 understanding of Jesus Christ, 97 unorthodox theological views, 95–9 Verse Vita, 174–5 Vitae, 174, See also Verse Vita and Prose Vita vulnerable at Restoration, 35 writes response to Fell, 172 Hobbism associated with Erastianism and toleration, 320 associated with Indulgence and dissent, 194–8, 221–5, 247 conventional interpretations of, 4 Locke’s evolving understanding of, 271–3 Restoration era constructions of, 74 Restoration features of, 35 Holden, Henry, 294, 295, 298, 302, 306 Hooke, John, 253 Hooke, Robert, 64, 174 Hooker, Richard, 259 Howard, Bernard, 310 Howard, Robert, 189 controversy over Hobbism, 320–3 Howard, William, viscount Stafford, 303, 305 Huber, Ulrich, 271–2 Humfrey, John, 143, 193, 222 ambiguous writings on Hobbes, 164–6 Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 34, 35, 37, 38, 63, 68, 296, 299, 308 Brief View and Survey of Leviathan, 124, 225 Ibbot, Benjamin, 367 Independents, 21 associated with Hobbism, 72–3 ecclesiology of, 33 Erastianism of, 22, 72 hostile to patristics, 103 marginalized, 90 support for Indulgence of 1662, 39 Indulgence 1675 rumours of a new Declaration, 168 ambiguous link to the Supremacy, 188, 189 and royal prerogative, 186–7 associated with Catholicism, 198, 202, 206 associated with Hobbism, 194–8 civil religious reasoning behind, 187 constitutional objections to, 187–8, 191, 246–9 dependence on prerogative, 189–91 dynamic context for, 187 growing constitutional objections among dissenters, 199–210 in Ireland, 132 memo concerning in the Shaftesbury papers, 135 not construed as a right, 188–9

425

political pressure for and against, 123–4 Scottish opposition to, 191–2 supported by dissenters, 192–7 Indulgence, Declaration of 1662, 39, 184, 188, 190 Indulgence, Declaration of 1672, 69, 184–5, 187, 190, 208, 226, 287, 305, 306 Indulgence, Declaration of 1687, 185 Indulgence, Scottish of 1669, 131 of 1672, 131 James I, King of England, 293 James II, King of England, 166, 193, 281, 285, 370 hired penmen of, 244 Indulgences of, 185 perceived duplicity of, 186 Jane, William, 73, 239 Jenkin, Robert, 345 Juvenal, 52 Kennett, White, 312 Koselleck, Reinhart, 11 L’Estrange, Roger, 81, 202 Laney, Benjamin, Bishop, 214, 270 Laslett, Peter, 2, 4 Laud, William, Archbishop of Canterbury,80, 86, 89, 169, 170, 219, 370 Lauderdale, Duke of. See Maitland, John Laudianism, 149, 170 Lawson, George, 225 Le Clerc, Jean, 138, 242, 269, 272, 361 Leslie, Charles, 321, 322 Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country,, 170–1, 179, 312 and Independency, 171 burned, 176 Hobbesian features of, 170–1 Locke’s possible involvement with, 170 Leyburn, George, 294, 296, 299 liberalism, 7 adoption of Locke’s view on Catholicism, 273–5 and the legacy of Hobbes and Locke, 372–5 historiography of, 7–12, 13 libertas ecclesiae, 59, 192, 201, 213, 237, 261, 295 liberty as non-domination, theory of, 181–4 position of Hobbes within, 182 Limborch, Philippus van, 242, 268, 269 Lindsey, William, Earl of Lindsey, 167 Lloyd, William, Bishop, 301, 310 Locke, John A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, 259

426

Index

Locke, John (cont.) accuses Parker of Hobbism, 162–4 and natural law, debate over, 116–19 ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’, 226–38, 255, 256, 266, 271, 372 abandons politique Hobbism, 232–8 accuses Stillingfleet of Hobbism, 228–9 defense of the Test Act, 306 justifies resistance, 236–7 limitations as defense of Indulgence, 244 offers new ecclesiology, 232–8 on Catholicism, 306 as Shaftesbury’s ‘Secretary for the clergy’, 135 associated with Independency, 365–9 associates Hobbes with individualism, 229–30 authorship of the ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’, 226 career after 1688, 315–18 career during early Restoration, 116 celebration of by nonconformists, 365–9 collaboration with Samuel Bold, 347–8 controversy with Proast, 350–9 co-opted by Whiggish churchmen, 364–5 death of, 360–1 denies accusations of Hobbism, 334, 341–2 differences with Remonstrants, 268–70 Discourse of Miracles, 318 dismisses the Church-court distinction, 308–14 dispensed from requirement to enter holy orders, 116 early political and religious views, 15–16 early reading of Hobbes, 27–8, 29–30 early views on conscience, 48 early views on Cromwell, 17, 20 English Tract, 39–40, 55, 119, 140 context for, 43–4 Hobbesian features of, 44–51 Locke’s reluctance to publish, 52 enters the circles of Lord Ashley, 121–2 Epistola de Tolerantia, 271, 329 and natural law, 257 composition of, 242 conscience as natural right in, 256–7 context of, 243 distinguishes churches from civic associations, 259–60 ecclesiology of, 259 hostility to politique, 256 implicit Congregationalism, 258–9 implicit anti-Hobbesian themes, 264–5 in English context, 256 limitations as a natural law text, 262–3 on Catholicism, 278–9, 308–13 rejects civil religious logic, 255 rejects reason of state thinking, 261

resistance theory of, 265–7 Essay concerning Human Understanding, 2, 125, 177, 242, 285, 318, 327, 328, 330 revised edition of, 318, 331 ‘Essay concerning Toleration’, 171, 179, 228, 232, 241 anti-clerical themes in, 150–2 as a transitional text, 149–50 context of, 142–3 evolution of, 140–2 Hobbesian qualities of, 143–5, 150–4 limitations of case for free conscience, 145–8 on Catholic loyalism, 306 on Catholics, 276–8 on religious war, 149 origins of, 140 politique qualities of, 148–9 revisions to, 150–4 Essays on the Law of Nature, 118 evolving understanding of Hobbism, 271–3 expelled from his studentship, 239–40 familiarity with Hobbes’s writings, 124–30 favours prudential tolerantia, 121 final years, 360 flight to the Dutch Republic, 238 Fourth Letter concerning Toleration, 360 France, years in, 177–80, 282–3 general shape of his interest in Hobbes, 130–1 habits of authorial anonymity, 267–8, 319–20 influence in America, 369–71 involvement in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 134 language of sovereignty, use of, 55–6 Latin Tract, 36, 53, 119 limitations of his theory of natural law, 328–9 notes on Hobbes, 128 notes on Hobbes’s Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, 230–2 notes on John Norris, 232 notes on Parker, 162–4, 214 conventional interpretation, 154–5 notes on Scottish Kirk, 133 Oath of Allegiance controversy, 323–7 on Catholic loyalism, 306–8 on Catholic toleration, 279 logic of limitation, 279–80 on idolatry, 283 on Independency, 227 on Jews, 178 on powers in ordine spiritualia, 153–4 on relics, 282 on religious war, 49 on spiritual substances, 332 on superstition, 50 on the banning of Cartesianism in France, 178

Index on the failures of the Edict of Nantes, 177, 178–9 opinion of Henry Stubbe, 20–1 opinion of William Penn, 245 ownership of anti-Hobbesian works, 225–6 paper on excommunication, 1674, 176, 178 paper on the ‘Obligation of the Penal Law’, 180 paper on the post-1688 settlement, 269 Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of Saint Paul, 318, 360 place in liberal tradition, 372–5 publications after 1688, 318 reading of Filmer on Hobbes, 27, 45–6 reading of Hobbes, 152 reading Ulrich Huber on Hobbes, 271–2 ‘Reasons for Tolerateing Papists’, 140–2, 277 responds to Charles Wolseley, 141–2 redefines tolerantia, 254 responds to Richard Willis, 336 right to ‘divine worship’, 145 Second Letter concerning Toleration, 352–5, 366 service to Shaftesbury during Cabal administration, 134–9 signs Popish Plot petition, 290 society for ‘Pacifick Christians’, 259 Some Thoughts concerning Education, 318 taxonomy of European confessional states, 178 The Reasonableness of Christianity, 317, 318, 329 Third Letter concerning Toleration, 356–9 tolerationism context for, 212 development of, 139–40, 212–14 general accounts of, 180 limits of scepticism as explanation for, 181 transcribed passages from Leviathan, 128–9 translations of Nicole, 285–6 Two Tracts on Government, 21–2, 232, 241, See also Locke, Latin Tract and Locke, English Tract context for, 36–40 lack of ecclesiology, 43–4 limits to Anglican context for, 54 Two Treatises of Government, 2, 117, 125, 256, 266, 318, 327, 328 account of sovereignty, 55 composition of, 238 limited discussion of conscience, 240–1 situated against Epistola de Tolerantia, 241 upbringing, 16 verses of, 17, 35 view of Restoration, 35 view on transubstantiation, 283–5

427

views on Catholics, 120–1, 140–2 Locke, John, senior, 16, 35, 43 Lollards, 108 Long, Thomas, 199, 348–50 Lord Roos, divorce case, 133 Louis XIV, King of France, 69, 212, 242, 243 moves against Protestants, 177 Lowde, James, 224, 330 Lucy, William, 101 Luther, Martin, 96, 112 Luttrell, Narcissus, 173 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 60, 88, 216, 311, 331 Mackenzie, George, 132 Magalotti, Lorenzo, 71 Maitland, John, Duke of Lauderdale, 68, 136 religious policies in Scotland, 131–2 Marsham, John, 105 Marvell, Andrew, 61, 168, 311 accused of Hobbism, 160–1 correspondence with William Popple, 253 on the Indulgence of 1672, 201 on transubstantiation, 284 response to Parker, 159–60 Mary II, Queen of England, 248, 315, 326 Mary of Modena, 166, 281 Masham, Damaris, 318 Masham, Francis, 318 Mersenne, Marin, 175 Milner, John, 341 Milton, John, 94, 183 Molyneux, William, 268, 335 Monconys, Balthasar de, 63 Monmouth, Duke of. See Scott, James More, Henry, 99 Morley, George, Bishop, 34 Morrice, Roger, 208, 209 Moses, 112 Nantes, Edict of, 212, 243, 255 natural law, 192 natural rights, 19 Nedham, Marchamont, 25 Newcastle, Duke of. See Cavendish, William Newton, Isaac, 329 Nicaea, Council of, 105, 109, 111, 113, 214, 223, 321 nonconformists. See dissenters Non-jurors attacks on Hobbes, 322, 324 Norris, John, 232 North, Roger, 187 Nye, Philip, 193–4 Nye, Stephen, 341

428

Index

Oates, Titus, 286, 288, 302 Oblivion, Act of, 123 Ormond, Duke of. See Bulter, James Osborne, Francis, 25 Osborne, Thomas, Earl of Danby, 166, 187, 281, 310 impeachment of, 287 rise to power, 166–7 role during Popish Plot, 286 Test Act of, 167–9, 170, 205 Overall, John, Bishop, 325 Owen, John, 16–17, 22, 26, 40, 143, 161, 222, 224, 368, 369 attacked by Parker, 159 celebrates royal prerogative, 193 condemned by Oxford, 239 critiqued by Stillingfleet, 219 Humble Plea for Indulgence, 192 Oxford University, 112, 155 book burning of 1683, 239 Christ Church, 16, 18, 26, 41 criticism of Locke, 330 debates banning Locke’s Essay, 360 Magdalen College, 245 visitation of, 36 Pagitt, Ephriam, 93 Paley, William, 183 Palmer, Roger, Earl of Castlemaine, 303 Parker, Henry, 183 Parker, Samuel, 214, 226, 245 attacks on Indulgence, 158 case against Hobbes, 155–9 Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie associated Hobbes with free conscience, 156–7 context for, 155–6 ecclesiology of, 157–8 early career, 155 Reasons for Abrogating the Test, 203–4 responds to Marvell, 160 Vindication of Bishop Bramhall, 159 ‘Particular Test for Priests’. See Walsh, Peter Pascal, Blaise, 288 Payne, Henry, 207, 208 Payne, Robert, 22 Penn, William, 60, 186, 209, 243, 245, 251 Pepys, Samuel, 70, 77, 125, 282 Perrinchief, Richard, 198, 300 Persons, Robert, 294 Pétau, Denis, 93, 104 Peter, Hugh, 161 Petre, Edward, 245 Pett, Peter, 58, 105, 194–5 Pettit, Edward, 216

Pettit, Philip, 181–4, 210–11 Petty, William, 25, 196–7 Pierce, Thomas, 173, 309 Plunkett, Oliver, Archbishop, 291 Popish Plot, 286–91 discredits Indulgence, 287–8 divides English Catholics, 302–3 executions, 288 Locke’s proximity to and view of, 288–91 Shaftesbury’s manipulation of, 289–90 turned against the established Church, 290 Popple, William, 242, 252, 341 as translator of Locke’s Epistola, 249–51, 255 background, 249 implied opposition to Hobbism, 252 opposed to Indulgence, 250 Prideaux, Henry, 290 Priestley, Joseph, 366, 368 Proast, Jonas, 318, 350–9 Pufendorf, Samuel, 272 Puller, Timothy, 223, 312 Quakers, 15, 37, 121 Rawls, John, 8, 273–5 Redmayne, John, 76 religious freedom varied discourses of, 91 Reresby, John, 186 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 57 Royal Society, 86 Royal Supremacy, 55, 71, 72, 89, 108, 139, 170, 185, 193, 223 defended in papers of Shaftesbury, 135 Rye House Plot, 238 Rymer, Thomas, 105 sacred history, 102, 103 Sancroft, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, 187, 203, 350 Sancta Clara. See Davenport, Christopher Sanderson, Robert, 53, 119 Sarpi, Paolo, 104, 167 Savile, George, Marquis of Halifax, 138, 289, 290 Character of a Trimmer, 205 Letter to a Dissenter, 205–7 controversy over, 207–8 reading of Leviathan, 207 Savile, George, Marquis of Halifax his case for liberty as non-domination, 206–7 Savoy Conference, 38 Scargill, Daniel, 74–5, 174 Schmitt, Carl, 8–12 Scott, James, Duke of Monmouth, 281 Scroggs, William, 290

Index Selden, John, 46, 93, 104, 196, 316 Serarius, Nicholas, 93 Sergeant, John, 294, 302, 307 Seymour, Edward, 194 Shaftesbury, first Earl of, 68, 69, 75, 136, 166, 214, 281 and the ‘Particular Test for Priests’, 305 anticlericalism of, 169 as possible Vicar Generalship, 137 associated with Hobbism, 161, 216, 239 associated with sectarianism, 216 behaviour during Popish Plot, 289–90 career as Chancellor, 130, 133–8 Clarendon’s estimation of, 122 condemned by Oxford, 239 death of, 238 defended in a Letter from a Person of Quality, 171 enters the opposition party, 167–9 Erastian politics of, 124, 133–8 hatred of Catholicism, 123 hostility to church, 123 last period in office, 289 memo on ‘ecclesiastical jurisdiction’ in his papers, 137 moves against Catholics, 281 political and religious views, 122–3 urged by Aubrey to patronize Hobbes, 129–30 Shaftesbury, third Earl of, 138, 170, 339, 362–3 Sharpe, James, Archbishop, 131 Sheldon, Gilbert, Archbishop of Canterbury, 37, 38, 39, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 114, 191, 217, 299 hostility to Shaftesbury, 134 patronizes Samuel Parker, 155 rallies opposition to King, 166 Sherlock, William, 222 on the Oath of Allegiance, 323–7 Sidway, John, 290 Skinner, Quentin, 2, 12, 182 Smith, Adam, 183 Socinianism Locke accused of, 341 Socrates Scholasticus, 104 Solemn League and Covenant, 122 Somers, John, 323 Sorbière, Samuel, 76 Spencer, Robert, Earl of Sunderland, 240 Spinoza, Benedict, 29, 198, 218, 232, 273, 330, 332, 334, 339, 362, 375 Stationers’ Company, 170 Stephens, William, 336, 339 Stillingfleet, Edward, Bishop, 29, 217, 225, 282, 311, 318 associates Locke with Hobbes, 333 defenses of, 222–3

429

hostility to Hobbes, 217–18 Irenicum, 217 on Indulgence, 221 published controversy with Locke, 332–5 Unreasonableness of Separation, 218–22 Strachey, John, 17, 116, 125 Strauss, Leo, 8, 10, 117 Stringer, Thomas, 170, 291 Stubbe, Henry, 18, 24, 27, 30, 43, 47 attacks Parker, 161–2 church history of, 19 defends Indulgence, 161–2, 195 difference with Locke over Catholicism, 275, 304 Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause, 18–20, 31 promotion of Hobbes at Oxford, 25–6 views on Catholics, 20 Sturgion, John, 60 Supremacy, Scottish Act of, 131, 133 suspending power, 186, 189, 246 Sutcliffe, Matthew, 279 Swift, Jonathan, 362 Taylor, Jeremy, 53, 59–60 Taylor, Timothy, 281, 287 Temple, Richard, 209, 246 Templer, John, 225 Tenison, Thomas, Bishop, 72, 75, 225, 302 Test Act of 1673, 166, 280, 284 Test Act of 1678, 286 Tew Circle, 299 Thomas, David, 122 Thomasius, Christian, 363 Thorndike, Herbert, 33, 72, 103, 356 Thucydides Hobbes’s translation of, 126 Tillotson, John, Archbishop, 105, 317 Tilly, Samuel, 17, 52 Tindal, Matthew, 360, 362 Toland, John, 333 Toleration, Act of, 253, 268, 315, 321, 369 Tory Reaction, 238–40 Towerson, Gabriel, 36, 40, 41, 43, 47, 52, 116 transubstantiation, 105, 235, 279–80, 281, 283, 284, 312 declaration against in Test Act, 281 Trial of the Seven Bishops, 245–8 Trinitarian Crisis, 316 Trinitarianism, 101, 107, 327, 332 defended by Stillingfleet, 332 Locke’s commentary on, 333 Turner, Francis, 223–4, 245 Tylden, Thomas, 283

430 Tyrrell, James, 16, 28, 125, 226, 245, 268, 330 account of Locke’s early career, 28–30 and Locke’s supposed Hobbism, 28–30 falling out with Locke, 29–30 urges Locke to publish his ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’, 244 Uniformity, Act of, 38, 39, 70 Valla, Lorenzo, 104 Vane, Henry, 18 Vane, Walter, 119 Veen, Egburtus, 242 Vicar Generalship, 149, 168 Restoration plans to revive the office, 136–7 Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham, 68, 138, 214 Vossius, Gerardus, 104 Wake, William, 247, 303 Wakeman, George, 290 Walker, John, 348 Wallis, John, 25, 31, 64, 99, 100, 175 Walsh, Peter, 297, 298, 307, 311 ‘Particular Test for Priests’, 305 Walwyn, William, 94 Warburton, William, 364

Index Ward, Seth, Bishop, 25, 27, 88 Warren, Albertus, 215–16, 252 Watts, Issac, 361, 368 Weldon, James, 81, 84 Westminster School, 16, 18, 26, 32 graduates at Oxford, 26 White, Thomas, 294, 296, 300, 302, 306, 311 Whitelocke, Bulstrode, 193 Widdrington, Roger, 304 William III, King of England, 248, 269, 315, 317, 326 Williams, Elisha, 369 Williams, Roger, 60 Williamson, Joseph, 88, 101 Willis, Richard, 343 Willis, Richard, Bishop, 29 accuses Locke of Hobbism, 335–7 Wilton, Samuel, 366 Winter, John, 297, 306 Wolseley, Charles, 58, 141–2, 143, 201 critique of Hobbes, 201 Wood, Anthony, 16, 82, 116, 129, 172, 239, 330 on Hobbes’s death, 173 on Hobbes’s prose Vita, 174 Worcester House Declaration, 37 Wren, Matthew, Bishop, 28, 70

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