A Political Biography of John Toland (Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies)

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A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN TOLAND

Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies Series Editor: J. A. Downie

Titles in this Series 1 Daniel Defoe P. N. Furbank & W. R. Owens 2 Jonathan Swift David Oakleaf 3 Delarivier Manley Rachel Carnell 4 Henry Fielding J. A. Downie 5 Richard Steele Charles Knight 6 Alexander Pope Pat Rogers 7 William King Christopher Fauske

Forthcoming Titles Eliza Haywood Kathryn King John Arbuthnot Angus Ross Samuel Johnson Nicholas Hudson Thomas Paine W. A. Speck Joseph Addison Charles Knight Frances Burney Lorna J. Clark Maria Edgeworth Susan Manly

A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN TOLAND

by Michael Brown

london PICKERING & CHATTO 2012

Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH 2252 Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont 05036-9704, USA www.pickeringchatto.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher. © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2012 © Michael Brown 2012 To the best of the Publisher’s knowledge every effort has been made to contact relevant copyright holders and to clear any relevant copyright issues. Any omissions that come to their attention will be remedied in future editions. british library cataloguing in publication data Brown, Michael. A political biography of John Toland. – (Eighteenth-century political biographies) 1. Toland, John, 1670–1722 – Political and social views. 2. Philosophers – Ireland –Biography. I. Title II. Series 192-dc22 ISBN-13: 9781851969142 e: 9781851966837

∞

This publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction: The Conspiratorial World of John Toland 1 Ireland, 1670–97 2 London, 1697–1700 3 Hanover, 1701–7 4 The Hague, 1708–10 5 Epsom, 1711–16 6 Putney, 1717–22

1 21 41 63 89 105 127

Notes Works Cited Index

149 177 189

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All books begin with an idea, and I am grateful to Colin Kidd for helping me find the idea that lies behind this one. It was in a paper he delivered at the University of Aberdeen that I first heard mention of Richard Hofstadter’s essay on ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’. This helped me add shape to this biography and organize thoughts that I presented at the Conference on Rediscovering Radicalism in Britain and Ireland c. 1550–c. 1700, held at Goldsmith’s College, University of London and organized by Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan; the Jacobites and Anti-Jacobites, Culture and Diaspora conference held under the auspices of the Jacobite Studies Trust at the University of Strathclyde, and organized by Allan Macinnes and Murray Pittock; at the 2011 American Conference of Irish Studies Conference in Madison, Wisconsin at a panel on the Irish Enlightenment organized by Scott Breuninger; and finally at a conference on Conspiracies Real or Imagined organized by Adam Morton at the University of York. To all the audiences I am grateful for their feedback and insightful questioning. An early version of Chapter 5, which aired some of the basic ideas in this study appeared as ‘Creating Conspiracies: John Toland’s Art of Restoring and Hanoverian Paranoia’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 25 (2010), pp. 48–61. I would like to thank Eoin Magennis for encouraging the submission and steering it through peer review and the editorial process. I would also like to thank the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society for permission to use passages again here. I am also grateful that James McGuire asked me to provide the entry on Toland for the Dictionary of Irish Biography, allowing me to first think through the totality of Toland’s life. I would also like to extend my thanks to colleagues in the University of Aberdeen, particularly Jackson Armstrong, Andrew Dilley and Caroline Erskine who engaged in an extended discussion of Hofstadter and the pertinence of examining conspiracy theory and what the conspiratorial mind reveals about a period. Other institutional debts include everyone involved in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen where much of this book was written, and the staff at the libraries at which I worked, namely Aber-

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A Political Biography of John Toland

deen University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the British Library and John Rylands Library in Manchester. Particular thanks should be given to Alan Downie for commissioning the book and to Mark Pollard for his patience in waiting for its delivery. But it could not have been written without the encouragement and support of my wife Sandra Hynes and our son Daniel Brown, both of whom put up with prolonged absences and a distracted presence. I am fortunate to have such coconspirators.

For Sandra and Daniel

‘Why Mrs Mulverhill, you’re a conspiracy theorist!’ ‘Yes’, she agreed, ‘But not by nature. I’ve been forced into it by the conspiracy I’m investigating’ Iain Banks, Transition (2009; London, 2010), p. 277.

INTRODUCTION: THE CONSPIRATORIAL WORLD OF JOHN TOLAND

John Toland was dying. Bankrupt following a foolish financial foray in South Sea Stock, he was suffering from ‘my old pains in my thighs, reins, and stomach [which] seized me violently two days ago; with a total loss of appetite, hourly retchings and a very high coloured water’.1 As the illness progressed, and ‘I grew much worse than I was … [and I] relapsed again into all my former symptoms, more frequent and malignant than ever’, he gave himself up to the ‘hands of a Physician, who I believe to be an honest man [who] prepares his own medicine and explains everything he does to me’.2 Despite the care, he did not prevail, and succumbed in backroom of a carpenter’s shop in Putney. The year was 1722; he was fifty-two. Yet, even as he was losing his battle with a series of chronic conditions, from rheumatism, the stone and ‘black jaundice’, his endemic temperamental suspicion was abrasively on show. He railed vigorously against the treatment he was receiving. ‘An Historical Account of the Life of Mr John Toland’ takes notice of how ‘There was found upon his table when he died a small Latin tract, intitled, Diatriba contra Medicos, chiefly levelled against the use of Oils and Emeticks, so much late in vogue’.3 This was of a piece with a deep-felt antagonism towards doctors, expressed in a letter-cum-pamphlet, addressed to his friend Barnham Goode. Written while he was ‘recovering, indeed though very slowly’ from an episode of his illness, and composed ‘by fits and starts in my intervals of up-sitting’, he attacked the medical profession as consisting of ‘men who, the greatest part of them, ruin nature by art; and who by endeavouring to be always very cunning for others, by making everything a mystery, are frequently too cunning for themselves’.4 He declared that as a consequence of the misdiagnosis and mistreatment of his condition, he had finally sworn off future care by the profession, one he caustically observed ‘whose art is founded in darkness and improved by murder’.5 This places this pamphlet in relation to the Deist subversion of established authority, attacking the pretensions of those who proposed unmerited claims of a knowledge that was inaccessible to ordinary citizens. As he continued:

–1–

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A Political Biography of John Toland They reduce all diseases with their cures right or wrong to certain precarious systems, or hypotheses, according to which he that expresses himself the most volubly or plausibly sets himself up immediately for an able physician and is by others so deemed, tho’ he knows nothing of anatomy, botany, or any such requisite qualifications; and would sooner kill a man according to the doctrine he has espoused than cure him by following any other method.6

Yet the pamphlet also points in another direction, suggesting that Toland could perceive in the medical profession a conspiracy of control akin to that he found in the churches: both medics and clerics were guilty of priestcraft. Toland made explicit the shared conceit of an attack on a clerisy which situates this pamphlet into a wider paradigm of freethinking scepticism when he averred ‘The doctors have almost as many jarring sects and incompatible factions among ’em as the priests, and come little short of hating each other as heartily, that is like devils’.7 Hence the purchase of the title, Physic without Physicians, for Toland was convinced that auto-didacticism was the only antidote to the bitter poison of priestcraft. In enabling this second reading, the pamphlet allows a wider interpretation of John Toland’s life, thoughts and actions, which runs against the grain of recent studies of the Irish freethinker. Since the revival of interest in Toland began with essays in the late 1960s, much of the criticism has focused on the labile, fluid, allusive quality of his prose. Of this, Robert E. Sullivan has rightly warned of how Requirements of daily survival combined with imperatives of temperament to lead Toland into compromises – in choosing topics, method of presentation and, on occasion, viewpoint. There is nevertheless a risk that concentration on such compromises will foster neglect of the subjective and objective realities which both enabled him to aspire to – and sometimes clutch – cosmopolitanism and ensured his historical survival.8

Yet, the generality of the recent discussion has, arguably, fallen foul of this temptation and has read Toland’s work as an early brand of postmodernism, concerned with how apparently authoritative texts might, by dint of literary scholarship and antagonistic reading, be destabilized, deconstructed and decoded. As his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, written by Stephen H. Daniel, recognizes, ‘Because of Toland’s interest in challenging the bounds of propriety, he has been the object of work in hermeneutics, deconstruction, and post-structuralism’.9 Daniel himself offers up just such a treatment in his essay on ‘The Subversive Philosophy of John Toland’. As he writes: My remarks … indicate that I find certain themes in contemporary philosophic research helpful in understanding Toland’s philosophic outlook. Though I do not

Introduction: The Conspiratorial World of John Toland

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intend to present my comments as a post-structuralist or post-modern reading of Toland, I have suggested that such strategies can retrieve Toland from simple classification as yet another eighteenth-century deist.10

In this rendition Toland is less concerned with the discourse of power and more perplexed by the power of discourse. As ‘among the foremost eighteenth-century theorists of discretion’ Toland conducted a subversive campaign to highlight how discourse tends towards absolutist uniformity and disregards the idiosyncratic experience of the individual.11 As Daniel explains: For Toland, when a belief is commonly shared and intelligible to all, it makes the individual holding the belief superfluous, since nuances of individual beliefs introduce only superficial (and bothersome) distinctions for common discourse. But these bothersome idiosyncrasies of meaning by which individuals – assert their presence provide Toland with exactly what he needs to acknowledge how guerrilla attacks occur within reasoned argument. According to Toland, reason benefits from the subversive influence of controversy, because dispute draws our attention back to the discursive nature of reason.12

Toland is thus interested, Daniel notes, in toleration of ethnic minorities, in the condition of exile – such as he sees Toland’s own ‘Irish heritage, [which] makes him a suspect in English debates’ and in polemics that disrupt received, communal, wisdom.13 Toland is here presented as ‘the exiled or subversive “other”’.14 Perhaps the most significant recent reader of Toland’s oeuvre, Justin Champion, has written in this postmodern vein of Toland’s ‘mercurial ubiquity’, his ‘ambiguity’, while promoting him as ‘a maverick, a man on the radical margins, involved in clandestine counter-cultural sodalities, disseminating an esoteric materialism’.15 All true, as far as it goes, but the term ‘counter cultural’ does reveal some of Champion’s underlying preconceptions. In Republican Learning Champion depicts a Toland dedicated to the promulgation of a form of positive liberty, which rejected religious superstition and favoured the deliberation of independent gentlemen.16 It was Toland’s ambition, Champion contends, ‘to replace the rule of tyranny with liberty’. It was a libertine if not a libertarian vision, one which Toland fought for by acts of intellectual resistance: ‘In order to achieve that objective he intended to alter the culture in which he lived by changing the way people thought and behaved’. He asked them, in other words, to tune into his message, and turn on to his vision,17 dropping out of one social arrangement and entering another, namely a vision of Britain as a classical republic. In Champion’s rendition, Toland’s strategy for cultural subversion was a subtle and sophisticated matter … Exploiting the growing cultural authority of the way of print and especially the ambiguity of reader reception and response, Toland consistently presented himself as a man of learning and theological erudition. Rather than trash the claims of scripture,

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A Political Biography of John Toland the Church Fathers and ecclesiastic tradition, Toland became expert in the knowledge of these discourses. By learning the trade he was able to engage more effectively in deconstructive ambitions, teasing readers and audiences with a variety of ruses and ambiguities … By effective capture of the languages of orthodox discourses (in politics and theology) he developed a repertoire of discursive ruses that deconstructed commonplaces, exposed contradictions and appropriated the affective power of key vocabularies to his own purposes.18

‘Discursive ruses’ and ‘deconstructive ambitions’: Toland is here being portrayed as a 1960s French intellectual, playful, ironic, erudite and elusive. Nor is Champion alone in rendering Toland as a postmodern avant la lettre; Daniel C. Fouke sees Toland as the author of ‘a philosophical comedy with serious purposes’ – referring to his late and privately published Pantheisticon – suggesting that the real subversion that Toland practised was in his style of writing.19 The literary complexity, the overweening scholarship, the layering of notes and commentary, the circular, sometimes self-contradictory quality Fouke identifies in Toland’s writing is all the consequence of this central purpose. Toland is consistently puffing up religious forms only to burst them on the pin of his acuity and wit. It is, as the title to Fouke’s study expresses it, Philosophy in a Burlesque Mode. This reading of Deist style as parodic and subversive also informs the study of James A. Herrick. He identifies a ‘radical rhetoric’ that plays with notions of ‘subterfuge’ that covers the ‘discourse of scepticism’ he associates with the English Deists in general.20 This style was ‘characterised by strategic lying, linguistic camouflage, scandalous allegation, and scathing ridicule’.21 To Herrick the most important component of this style was the resort to ridicule, for ‘Ridicule expressed the freedom to inquire into religious questions unrestrained; it was reason flaunting authority and as such appealed to a reader’s sense of adventure, and, perhaps, latent sense of rebelliousness’.22 It also effectively ‘undermined the revelation-based clerical hierarchy’ mocking its pretensions to learning and the priest’s access to universal truth. Perhaps most importantly however, ridicule was entertaining, and hence provided a strong antidote to what was considered to be ‘the distracting and soporific effects of religious language’, which was also ‘difficult to answer by traditional argument’.23 Crucially, ridicule ‘does not appear in discourse as argument; its premises and conclusions are obscure’.24 This obscurity of intention also shaped what David Berman termed the ‘art of theological lying’, which he sees as indicative of atheistic thought in the period and of which he views Toland as a master. What is involved in this trope is not a subversion of a norm, but its false appropriation. This is, for instance, how Berman reads Toland taking on the persona of a Christian in his writings.25 Strategically, this provides a cover for heterodox ideas; by disclaiming any intention in this direction it protects the author from accusations of heresy. It also, in its


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use of the formula, communicates to knowing readers that what is involved is in fact a deceit: those who are truly Christian do not need to proclaim it. The very identification highlights that the question is in doubt, and hence the need to read the text with an awareness of heterodox undercurrents. Finally, the assertion that the work comes from the pen of an orthodox mind insinuates heterodox notions into those who actually wish to advocate orthodoxy, misdirecting naive readers and subtly shifting the understanding of Christian norms.26 Reading Toland as subversive, parodic and duplicitous – A. B. Worden describes him as ‘one of the great posturers of Anglo-Irish literature’ – places him into the context of a ‘Radical Enlightenment’.27 This is a tradition of thought identified, or arguably constructed, by historians like Paul Hazard (whose Crisis of the European Mind was first published in French in 1935, but translated into English in 1953), Margaret Jacob (for whom Toland’s Pantheisticon is a key text in the spread of Speculative Freemasonry across Europe), and most recently Jonathan Israel. To Hazard, Toland was ‘a queer personage’ who ‘had got drunk on ‘reason’; it had gone to his head’.28 Indeed for Hazard, Toland was at once filled with ‘iconoclastic energy’ and a purveyor of a synthetic tradition of radical ideas.29 While ‘he was a born mischief maker and scandal-monger, puffed up with vanity, fond of creating an uproar’, he was not an original mind.30 ‘Time and again’ Hazard proposed, ‘as we read him we catch echoes of Fontenelle and Bayle, of Bekker and Van Dale, of Hobbes and Spinoza … His head was crammed with things he had read, and the ideas of his predecessors keep cropping up in little shreds and patches in everything he wrote’.31 Proof in his being of the existence of a radical Enlightenment, Toland – for Hazard – was a product of an engagement with continental scepticism. In contrast, for Margaret Jacob, the influence pointed in the other direction, for Toland was, in her view, the central purveyor of English heterodox ideas onto the continent. This ‘unofficial envoy’ of Freemasonry was ‘one of the most heretical thinkers of his age’.32 For Jacob, Toland is primarily a student of the Hermetic tradition of thought, with particular inspiration being drawn from Giordano Bruno. In his hands, she contends, both Bruno and the Hermetic tradition underwent a necessary transformation. The subtleties and profundities of Bruno’s thought were lost or ignored, as was the religious, Gnostic goal of the Hermetic view of nature. What evolved was a pantheistic and materialist worldview. In the period under discussion this new world-view became the theology and metaphysics of the natural religion formulated by its proponents. They often formed groups whose organisation and ritual were Masonic; but Freemasonry also had been transformed into a convenient social and intellectual association, within which the members probably found the secrecy and international contacts needed for the promotion of their views.33

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And in the development of this new brand of Speculative Freemasonry, Toland was also complicit, exporting it from London to Holland, prompting ‘those who railed against Toland and his associates [to see] them as an organised, if not conspiratorial, group whose aim was to destroy religion and to undermine the structure of the state’.34 While Jacob thus makes Toland a proponent of an old form of esoteric philosophy, Jonathan Israel appropriates Toland as a proponent of a form of a self-consciously modern Spinozism, albeit one that implied not that ‘Spinoza invented the patterns of thought to which Toland adhered but rather that Spinoza was the chief representative and main exponent of a tendency which had allegedly existed since the remotest beginnings of philosophy, and of which too Toland was a major representative’.35 In Israel’s assessment, Toland’s contribution to the radical Enlightenment was in fact rather substantial. Yet, if due to personal shortcomings, he could never shake off an unenviable reputation for superficiality, unreliability and charlatanism, which dogged him until the end of his days, what his most cogent texts demonstrate is that he was a creative ‘Spinozist’ in the sense generally understood in the Early Enlightenment.36

If Jacob’s insistence on Toland’s complex debt to Giordano Bruno pushes him in the direction of Israel’s depiction of him as a pupil of Spinoza, then the reading of Robert Rees Evans has the merit of retaining a sense of Toland’s heterodoxy while insisting on his originality of mind. Evans claims attention for Toland on the ground that ‘he invented and entertained a vision of a new human being dwelling in a new society’.37 While, in Evans’s view this ‘utopian vision’ was fashioned in resistance to both Spinoza and Newton – both of whom ‘had missed or passed over the quasi-biological basis of cosmos’ and whose own theories ‘played into the hands of the priestly bureaucracy from want of an adequate biology’ – it was deeply radical in character.38 For Evans, Toland’s ‘cosmos was conceived as a metamorphic, hylozoistic [the conjecture that all matter contains some element of life] round. The state, ideally, reflected this as a new incarnation of the classical cosmopolis’.39 And crucially, Toland contended ‘there is no overriding purpose for God, church nor priest in a circulating biological universe. Matter in general, moves itself ’.40 This edifice of scholarship is all in agreement in seeing Toland as a subversive figure, an able illuminator of the inherent instability of text, and as a jester, prankster and polemicist, close to personifying what W. H. Auden determines the characteristic traits of the practical joker: the practical joker must not only deceive, but also when he has succeeded, unmask and reveal the truth to his victims. The satisfaction of the practical joker is the look of astonishment on the faces of others when they learn that all the time they were convinced that they were thinking and acting on their own initiative, they were actually


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the puppets of another’s will. Thus, though his jokes may be harmless in themselves and extremely funny, there is something slightly sinister about every practical joker, for they betray him as someone who likes to play God behind the scenes.41

This was indeed an accusation levelled at Toland, for his ambition was supposed by opponents to be to head up a religion by the age of thirty.42 The problem with this evocative reading is, however, that Toland is not a postmodern figure. Toland was not even a sceptic, as are many postmodern thinkers. He does not fit the tradition of early modern sceptical thought documented ably by Richard H. Popkin.43 He did not live in a world in which words were slippery and identity unstable. Rather, as the paradigmatic philosopher of the period, John Locke, had it, while ‘their signification [is] perfectly arbitrary [and] not the consequence of a natural connection’ there is a reasonable presumption that ‘Words are sensible signs, necessary for communication of ideas’.44 It can be further inferred that speakers ‘suppose their words to be marks of the ideas in the minds also of other men, with whom they communicate: for else they should talk in vain, and could not be understood’.45 Moreover, and critically, words also can be presumed to relate to the reality of things’. This presumption is ‘because men would not be thought to talk barely of their own imagination, but of things as really they are; therefore ‘they often suppose the words to stand also for the reality of things’.46 It is certainly the case that in making this inference a necessary simplification occurs wherein the appearance of an object, made up of its secondary qualities, becomes a shorthand for a still unknowable essential, or primary quality. Nonetheless, as Locke recognised, there was a working premise of referential accuracy and a presumption that communication could be meaningful. In this light, while habit and prejudice often worked to misshape meaning, there was thought to be a stable reference which knowledge would reveal. It was this process of corrosion that Toland set out to expose, while simultaneously endeavouring to re-establish the stable, reasonable meaning of words. This context is understood by Terry Eagelton, whose own postmodern inclinations lead him to disown Toland as ‘epistemologically naive’ in hermeneutics and argue ‘there is of course no such form of [universally stable] knowledge’.47 Yet Eagleton rightly understands the radical nature of Toland’s stance, realizing that ‘as a good rationalist, but also one scornful of élites, Toland is allergic to darkness and uncertitude’.48 Indeed, Given his own experience of calumny and abuse, Toland understands how discourse can maim and incarcerate, how words can starve a man by depriving him of employment, or rhetoric fashion a new religious object for sectarian wangling. In his Enlightenment faith that ‘truth is always and everywhere the same’, Toland strikes a radical blow against those who would seek to manipulate texts for their own oppressive political ends. It is a case which our own postmodernists, for whom such re-readings are generally assumed to by subversive, might do well to ponder.49

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In Eagleton’s reading Toland comes close to an Orwellian conceit that to take hold of the ‘plain sense’ of language, with ‘plain speaking’ pronounced in a ‘plain style’ is to reveal the truth value of the object under discussion.50 Certainly Toland presumed that the problem with language was not that it is inherently nominal, but rather than its referential capacity is corroded by misuse and prejudice; and by the fallacious understandings promulgated by vested interests and powerful agents of control. In Toland’s view language has a stable, coherent and consistent form; a form which can be revealed by a process of purification and reduction. When Toland claimed, for instance, that Christianity is not mysterious, he meant what he said. Scripture could be understood if the words were stripped of the accretions of false meaning developed through traditions of clerical scholastic obfuscation. It is not a sop to social niceties to suggest that Christianity is inherently a rational theology: it is a truth claim that Toland intended for readers to take seriously. The predicate of this study is, therefore, that instead of thinking of him as a jester, there is something to be gained by taking Toland seriously, treating him not as a jester but as a journalist, not as a prankster but as a polemicist, not as a postmodern critic but a political conspirator. In this I follow his clear injunction ‘if you were to know more of him, search his writings’.51 The immediate consequence of this decision is unavoidably unsettling. As Physic without Physicians makes amply clear, if one commits oneself to reading Toland flat one finds oneself hearing a very different tone from the ironic academic detachment modern commentators are prone to hear when listening to him. Instead what is articulated is the vigorous terrified voice of a political actor who understands and fears the machinations of power. The reader is being pestered by a believer, not an unbeliever, and being accosted by a writer who believes in the capacity of institutional power, not one who assumes he is dealing with a mirage. In Isaiah Berlin’s terms Toland was not a fox; he was a hedgehog. Berlin discriminated between two temperaments when writing on Tolstoy, by using a saying of the Greek poet Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things; but the hedgehog knows one big thing’.52 Whereas the fox is adept at deploying a breath of knowledge and appears to have a scale of learning that intimidates, his knowledge is in fact superficial and scattered, with there being no schema, no overarching principles and nothing bringing the learning together into a workable system. As Berlin puts it, foxes ‘pursue many ends, often unrelated, and even contradictory, connected, if at all, in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle’.53 In contrast to the fox’s intellectual fireworks, the hedgehog seems obsessive and pedestrian, with a solid and deep understanding of one thing, in which there is ‘a single,


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universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance’.54 Although in first light Toland appears to be a fox, and this is how many of his critics read him, what this book contends is that he was in fact a hedgehog. All of his diverse writings, from historical theology to political pamphleteering, from esoteric schemes for Masonic organizations to public assaults on establishment figures were ultimately devoted to revealing the essential, singular and unitary truth of the historical condition. In other words, Toland did not have an eclectic mind; in fact he was something of a monomaniac, and what follows is, for that reason, a study in idealism. It is however an idealism of a peculiar bent, for in his concern for seeing a teleological pattern in the historical record Toland was prone to uncovering real meaning behind the veil of actuality. It was his persistent belief, from Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) to the A Specimen of the Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning which was amongst his papers upon his death in 1722, that history was to be understood as a narrative of original purity and eventual corruption, against which process Toland railed. Throughout his writings he sought to identify the protagonists who were guilty of driving historical development down the wrong course; those whose interests and power hunger led them to dismiss the claims of the public good in favour of factional benefit and personal aggrandizement. There is no sense in Toland’s work of impersonal social forces of the kind later centralized in the historical writings of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers as varied as Adam Ferguson, William Robertson and John Millar. In twinning his sense of history as regressive with an understanding of agency as personal, Toland conceptualized the world in terms of parties and networks, not social groups and economic transformation. These parties often hid their agendas and operations from public view; knowledge elites emerged consisting of those in the know, whose interests lay in the perpetuating of an infrastructure of power and keeping the public in the dark about the actual causes of the events that shaped their lives. Extending this interpretation across society, from the church to the state, Toland became a conspiracy theorist. This may seem rather excessive, although as Robert E. Sullivan insightfully recognized, ‘Like other eighteenth-century writers of every persuasion, Toland detected sinister conspiracies at work beneath the surface of great public events’.55 This, Sullivan suggests, is a consequence of the psychological failure to distinguish the man from the argument, for ‘as a group, Augustan pamphleteers seem to have been unable to separate themselves – or anyone else – from their ideas … If he [Toland] spoke with the voice of reason, then his opponents had to be moved by the base motives he imputed to them’.56 Indeed, what must be recalled is the conspiratorial quality of late seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury political life – a game of ins and outs in which factions, parties and

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cabals scrambled into and fell out of office, all within the shadow of a wide Jacobite conspiracy to overturn the state and return a Catholic monarch to the throne. Toland was hardly unrealistic in thinking of politics in conspiratorial terms when the state was the bounty to be won in a competition composed of palace coups, invasion scares, assassinations, arrests and abdications. This has the ring of a historiographical truism about the period from at least 1678 and the beginnings of the Popish Plot.57 By 1683, when the Rye House Plotters planned to assassinate Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, later James II, the idea of politics being conducted through conspiracy had bled across to how the Protestants understood their own actions and not the projected and feared Catholic other.58 Yet despite these events being much commented on, the structural consequence of their occurrence on how contemporaries conceptualized politics in the period which follows has been less developed. Although Paul Hopkins has written of how the salient fact about the 1690s is that the whole period lay in the shadow of the Popish Plot, in fact little attention has been devoted to the consequences of this structuring of high politics.59 The Williamite Revolution of 1688–91, for instance, was itself the consequence of a conspiracy, or of interlocking conspiracies, but this is little remarked on, even in the two most formidable recent re-evaluations of the episode; those of Tim Harris and Steve Pincus.60 More helpful is an important essay by Mark Knights on ‘The Conspiracies of Party Politics under the Late Stuarts’. Therein Knights contends that Between 1689 and 1714 oppositional politics could not simply be fought on the grounds of a struggle between liberty and power because power kept shifting hands, to the Tories in the 1690s, early 1700s and 1710–1714 and to the Whigs in the mid 1690s, mid 1700s and after 1714. These shifts, and corresponding shifts in public opinion, were explained in terms of a conspiracy, not just of self-interested men but also of men who used manipulative rhetorical techniques to manipulate public discourse. The language of party thus articulated and shaped conspiratorial fears.61

This observation can be extended even further to include the shaping fact of the late Stuart regime. After 1688 Jacobite plots absorbed and appalled the body politics for decades. The actual certain existence of a counter-revolutionary movement, with active international support from the arch-enemy France, and with a distinctive Catholic religious profile, provided the grist for numerous invasion scares, for scandalous innuendo, for guilt by association and, shockingly and sickeningly, secret conspiracies and open rebellions. Yet, again, this is not a theme which has been picked up on extensively by historians of the Jacobite movement. One honourable exception to this reticence is Paul Hopkins whose essay ‘Sham Plots and Real Plots in the 1690s’ ‘attempts to set some of the unsifted allegations, false witnesses and legends in context’.62 He asserts that


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‘A large number of the political nation – including probably several of William’s ministers – interpreted contemporary politics in the light of what they imagined [the Popish Plot] revealed’.63 Although he accepts that ‘there were genuine reasons for alarm’ he concludes that ‘the ministers looked for assassination plots, and saw sinister patterns in what was merely repetition by perjurers’ and that across the period ‘the government’s belief in so many false tales had, if anything, made detection of the real Assassination Plot [of 1696] more difficult’.64 While Hopkins may be correct to suggest that only ‘with Anne’s accession and the obvious quiescence of English Jacobitism did the number of allegations significantly decrease’, the political fears were transposed onto external threats made manifest in 1715 and again less cogently in 1719.65 With the Atterbury Plot of 1720–2, domestic Jacobitism came to the attention of Hanoverian authorities, and renewed the sense of a regime living with the perpetual possibility of subversion from within by secretive cabals of counter-revolutionaries.66 If conspiracies had shaped politics throughout the fifty-two years of Toland’s life, it is unsurprising that he accorded them significance in his thinking about the nature of power. Yet, what is distinct about Toland’s work is his commitment to this mode of thought, and not any inoculation from its power. As will be contended throughout this study, Toland’s work evokes all the central characteristics of the conspiratorial mind. By this term is meant a commitment to thinking about power relations precisely as structured by conspiratorial activity, by cabals, and secret societies and covert motives. As Brian L. Keely relates, ‘A conspiracy theory is a proposed explanation of some historical event (or events) in terms of the significant casual agency of a relatively small group of persons – the conspirators – acting in secrecy.’ In this definition some useful clarifications apply, namely, that ‘it proposes reasons why the event occurred,’ that is, it ascribes power to human agency in affecting historical change; secondly this potency is, paradoxically, limited for ‘it is because the conspirators are not omnipotent that they must act in secret. Thirdly, they must constitute an identifiable group for ‘a conspiracy of one is no conspiracy at all, but rather the actions of a lone agent’.67 This final observation accords with the legal understanding of conspiracy as ‘a completed crime; it is complete when two or more persons agree to do an illegal act by illegal means. Conspiracy is what exists before and without any scheme being carried out’.68 This is critical for it places the crime into the discursive practice of the conspirators: it is not that they have acted but that they have discussed their intentions which produces a conspiracy. Three tendencies, Keely proposes, make someone particularly likely to understand the world as shaped by conspiracies, namely a concern for totalized explanations. Conspiracy theorists get distressed by outliers – facts that do not sit comfortably within the given narrative of events. Secondly, there is a desire

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to rationalize the world: ‘rejecting conspiratorial thinking entails accepting the meaninglessness nature of the human world’.69 Finally, they accord with a pessimistic view of human nature, one in which there exists ‘an almost nihilistic degree of scepticism about the behaviour and motivations of other people and the social institutions they constitute’.70 In all three aspects, Toland seems a plausible case for succumbing to this mode of thought. So too, when the issue is considered sociologically, Toland seems to fit snugly into the paradigm. For surprisingly perhaps, belief in conspiracy theory correlates well against higher levels of education. Indeed as Anita Waters observes pithily, ‘believers were by and large better educated than sceptics’.71 Conspiracy theories may attract those with pride in their learning, giving them a sense of being in the know and having access to arcana of which others are deprived. Moreover, ‘although believers distrust government institutions, they are not political dropouts’.72 In Toland’s case he was a persistent petitioner for reform of state systems. In this he was, paradoxically, assuming that the state made a difference to people’s lives. He was, as is the case with conspiracy theorists in general, politicized in the sense that they think that answers to social, spiritual and personal problems can be found within the domain of political debate. Finally, it should be noted that Ted Goertzel has observed how there is a tendency to accumulate conspiratorial explanations once one event seems to accord with this kind of causation. In this they are ‘monological belief systems’ in that each of the beliefs serves as evidence for each of the other beliefs.’ The more conspiracies a monological thinker believes in, the more likely he or she is to believe in any new conspiracy theory that may be proposed’.73 This is akin to what Richard Hofstadter has termed the paranoid style, the ‘distinguishing’ element of which was not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a ‘vast’ or ‘gigantic’ conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-andtake, but an all-out crusade.74

Inspired in large part by McCarthyism and written in the shadow of Barry Goldwater’s run for the US presidency, Hofstadter perceived a recurring shape to the prose style of a strand of American political life. While he adopted the language of psychiatry to describe this strain of understanding, Hofstadter was at pains to mark out the difference between personal insanity and the political condition he was trying to capture, arguing that Whereas both tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose and apocalyptic in expression, the clinical paranoiac sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him;


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whereas the spokesman of the paranoiac style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others.75

He traced the style back to origins in the European response to the French revolution, identifying as founding fathers of a kind the exponents of the thesis that 1789 was the consequence of a Masonic plot: the Edinburgh Professor John Robison and the Jesuit Abbé Barruel.76 Yet the style as outlined seems just as apt as a description of the Hanoverian anxiety, or may we call it paranoia, about the Catholic triumvirate (the Pretender, France, and the papacy). Just such a conviction that what was stake was a semi-apocalyptic battle between good and evil convinced the anti-Catholic writers of the British polity. The fate of their community was thus intimately locked into a wider European struggle and a metaphysical conflict in which the souls of millions would be fought over. Indeed, Hofstadter, citing the work of Norman Cohn, recognized that the style he was identifying had a heritage in millenarian perceptions, and actively tied his story to a form of anti-Catholicism that festered through American public life in the nineteenth century – he memorably remarks on how ‘Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan.’77 Underpinning this concern for a multi-headed and existential threat to the life of the community is a conception of Catholicism as at once subversive, conspiratorial and necessarily secretive in its actions, and as ‘constituting a separate system of loyalty, a separate imperium within the framework of … governments, inconsistent with loyalty to them’.78 While this description in fact draws from Hofstadter’s analysis of the structure of the supposed Masonic plot, Williamite Protestants were concerned with – not to say obsessed by – the question of whether Catholics could keep faith with heretics and with the supposed deposing power of the pope. Finally, as Hofstadter recognizes, the exercise of power did not inoculate the sufferer from the potency of the paranoid style: it was often a ‘defensive act’ in which the authors ‘felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country – that they were fending off threats to a still wellestablished way of life in which they played an important part’.79 That captures a key conceit in Toland’s work – that without vigilance and an active citizenry, the forces of darkness will destroy the republic of liberty Britain represents. None of this is to argue that Toland was an active conspirator, although on certain occasions and in certain ways he was, but rather that he saw the political world as operating on the principle of the inner circle, the cabal, the party. Indeed in 1701 he went so far as to explain his precise fear of the influence of closed factions, penning The Art of Governing by Parties, particularly in Religion, in Politics, in Parliament on the Bench and in the Ministry. Written under the influence of Robert Harley and a plea for a patriotic ministry that would set

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aside familial, local and regional ties the book argued that the Stuarts had been guilty of a ‘secret fraud’.80 In his history of the decay of the English constitution across the seventeenth century, the creation of factions, or parties, was a crucial corrosive development, being wilfully ‘created for our destruction’.81 In the religious realm Charles II promulgated a policy of harsh orthodoxy, which, paradoxically, would ensure that dissenters could never conform to the establishment: He perfectly know their main Scruples against Conformity, and having a Parlament of the same temper with his Clergy, he got such Oaths, Tests and Declarations fram’d, as he was sure they could never swallow, which would neccesitat them (as in effect it did) to form themselves into a separat Party, and notwithstanding their privat Dissentions, to unite together for their Common Liberty against the Court and the Church.82

The purpose of this counterintuitive insertion of division amongst his subjects was to ensure that, ‘above all, the Protestant Interest was daily weaken’d by such as most pretended (and most of them no doubt, design’d) to support it’. The Stuart ecclesiastic policy was thus to disrupt Protestant equanimity and forward the interest of the Roman Catholics. However, Toland reported in relieved tones: At length the continual Encroachments made on the civil Constitution, under pretence of suppressing Phanaticks, and the barefac’d Countenance given at the same time to avow’d Papists (being receiv’d into the chiefest Trust and Confidence) open’d all Men’s Eyes and discover’d the black designs of the Court.83

The ‘monarch’s own plot’ extended into formal secular political considerations also, as the religious ambition ‘enters into all other Divisions, and is not only the chiefest, but also the most successful Machine of the Conspirators against our Government’.84 According to this vision of politics as the consequence of plots and covert schemes, Charles drove forward a policy of emphasizing the royal prerogative to such an extent that At last the patience of Good Men being quite worn out, they begun to complain loudly of their grievances, and the Creatures of Prerogative as loudly opposs’d them, which made them mortally hate one another of course; while the King laughed in his sleeves at the sport, and took special care to keep their animosities alive. The charge of Rebellion was urg’d as much by one side, as denied by the other; and both made the highest pretences to Loyalty tho’ each of them wou’d wholly Ingross that virtue to themselves. The branded one another with opprobrious Names. In Parliament they were call’d Patriots and Loyalists, or the Court and Country Parties: but in all other Places they were distinguish’d into Whigs and Tories.85

Not only did the Tories then enact measures to expel Presbyterians from the body politic, they further ‘ridicul’d the horrid Plots of the Papists against their


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own Religion, and laboured to fasten them onto their Protestant Brethren’.86 The Tories were, to Toland’s Whiggish cast of mind, ‘mercenary Drudges of the Court and the Brib’d Tools of Popery’.87 Thankfully, in his view, ‘Tho’ the Conspirators and Desertors made a mighty noise, yet their number was contemptible’.88 In the face of this covert assault on the Protestant composition of the free constitution, Toland averred: ‘That Party who espous’d the defence of Liberty and Property maintain’d themselves against the craft and power of Lewd and Arbitrary Kings, against a flattering Clergy, and prostitute Ministry, a corrupt set of Judges, a mercenary Army and Justices purposely chosen to oppress them’.89 Thankfully the arrival of William saved the nation and the ‘present King’ was considered by Toland to be ‘in no way ingag’d in the treacherous designs of his Precessors’.90 Yet, all was still not well, for ‘there’s but too much of these ill humours stirring among us still’.91 Toland was imagining a politics of patriotic monarch, who was impartial in his concern for all his subjects. Toland warned that: ‘a King can never lessen himself more than by heading of a Party; for therby he becoms only the King of a Faction, and ceases to be the Common Father of his People’.92 Yet, Toland averred, William III, ‘resolv’d on first coming here to abolish our infamous distinctions both in Church and State, and intended to receive the good Men of all Parties into equal Favour, Protection and Trust’, even extending his liberality to accommodating Tories where he thought ‘that, according to their own declar’d resolutions, they had quitted such wicked Principles as had lately endanger’d their Ruin, he elevated several of them to the most eminent Posts in the Kingdom’.93 Sadly, Toland observed that this trust was largely misplaced, for ‘the Tories quickly returned to their Vomit’.94 Their incorrigible nature promoted a final shift in policy which Toland favourably related: The frequent discovery of their [the Tories] Plots, Correspondence and Treacheries, with a universal series of design’d mismanagements in every Part of the Government, open’d the Eyes of all who were unalterable friends to their Country, and they made the K[ing] so sensible of his own and the Nation’s most dangerous Condition, that he betook himself to the only proper remedy of saving both, which was by placing the Administration in the Hands of Persons that had opposed the late Usurpations, help’d to advance himself to the Throne, and were all their lives the profess’d Enemies of Popery and France.95

Thus the history of conspiracy, of plots and of treason continued beyond the Williamite War and Toland understood his actions as part of a cosmic drama in which the forces of liberty fought the enticements and machinations of despotism. In availing of the concept of conspiracy in relating the history of the previous decades, Toland inaugurated a trope in eighteenth-century Irish political thought.96 As Scott Breuninger has documented, Christianity Not Mysterious was met in Ireland with a repeated use of the idea of a conspiracy of Deists,

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intent on destroying the established Anglican Church of Ireland.97 As late as 1749, Philip Skelton availed of the idea in his omnibus of denunciation, Ophiomaches, or Deism Revealed. Therein the Deists in general, and Toland is a named example, were accused of having precisely the temperamental disorder of which Toland complained, namely a penchant for covert scheming: The Deists, and indeed the Libertines of all degrees and denominations, are accused as men of dark and deep designs, who artfully attack the principles of other men, and still more artfully conceal their own, seldom declaring themselves by their writings in favour of any particular system of opinions, and when they do, seemingly frequently to contradict one another. I have read over, with all the attention I was master of, the celebrated performances of my Lord Shaftesbury, Mr Collins, Mr Toland, Dr Tindal, and some others of less note; and to my great concern, altho’ I can perceive what it is they would overturn, yet I cannot so easily discern what they intend to establish, any further than that they labour to recommend the religion and law of nature, instead of revelation; and that their readers may gather, in some few instances, what they maintain by what they deny. This obscurity, proceed it from whence it will, is turned against them by their adversaries, and ascribed by some to the crudity or evil tendency of their tenets, by others to artifice and chicane.98

For Swift, Toland was at once a covert Catholic priest and ‘the great Oracle of the anti-Christians’; yet Swift shared with the freethinker a propensity to see the political world as operating within a conspiratorial framework.99 Indeed, in Gulliver’s Travels the King of Brobdignag dismisses British history in the seventeenth century as ‘only a heap of conspiracies’.100 In the Academy of Lagado, Gulliver opines on how at home, ‘the bulk of the people consisted wholly of Discoverers, Witnesses, Informers, Accusers, Prosecutors, Evidences, Swearers; together with their several subservient and subaltern instruments’.101 Commenting on this passage, Jeanne Clegg highlights how ‘the Products of the espionage business are “Plots” designed to raise the reputations and revenues of their discoverers, reinvigorate governments, to stifle discontents, and manipulate public credit to the private advantage of ministers’.102 In this, Swift suggests that politics is made up of competing plots, and the task is ‘to suspect suspicion and look for conspiracy behind conspiracy’.103 This tradition culminates in Edmund Burke’s understanding of the ‘double cabinet’ expounded in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770).104 According to Burke, two systems of administration were to be formed; one which should be in the real secret and confidence; the other merely ostensible, to perform the official and executor duties of government. The latter were alone to be responsible; whilst the real advisors, who enjoyed all the power, were effectually removed from all the danger.105


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The result of this conspiracy would be to degrade the institutions of power through which the people traditionally checked the legislators and to infect the constitution with the sentiments and manners belonging to despotism: The capital objects, and by much the most flattering characteristics of arbitrary power would be obtained. Everything would be drawn from its holdings in the country to the personal favour and inclination of the prince. This favour would be the sole introduction to power, and the only tenure by which it was to be held: so that no person, looking towards another, and all looking towards the court, it was impossible but that the motive which solely influenced every man’s hopes must come in time to govern every man’s conduct; till at last the servility became universal in spite of the dead letter of any laws or institutions whatsoever.106

F. P. Lock makes this trope of the double cabinet the centrepiece of his twovolume biography of Burke, while any consideration of the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) must acknowledge the power of the conspiratorial structure on Burke’s thinking about the collapse of the ancien régime.107 Toland appears in Burke’s masterpiece in one of his heavily quoted apercu: ‘Who, born within the last forty years, has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb and Morgan and that whole race who called themselves Freethinkers? Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through?’108 Perhaps one might remark that Burke clearly had, although he pronounced that they were and are wholly unconnected individuals. With us they kept the common nature of their kind, and were not gregarious. They never acted in corps, nor were known as a faction in the state, nor presumed to influence in that name or character, or for the purposes of such a faction, on any of our public concerns.

One recent assessment, that of S. J. Barnett, concurs in seeing the notion of a faction of Deists as a scare story become historical construct.109 But this is not how most historians have construed the ‘English Deists’. Justin Champion has written of how infidelity posed a realistic threat to the Established Church of England, and historians with such varied sympathies as J. C. D. Clark, Wayne Hudson, John Redwood, and Jeffrey Wigelsworth concur.110 In all of these works Toland is a central figure. His work retains the power to surprise and, on occasion, annoy. As recently as 1985 his legacy was contested on confessional grounds by an Irish bishop, Jeremiah Newman of Limerick, on the grounds that his heretical ideas must by definition belong to an English, and not an Irish, line of philosophy. The bishop had taken umbrage at Toland’s inclusion in a collection edited by Richard Kearney and entitled The Irish Mind.111 In one sense the bishop was right: Toland was not a welcome voice in Ireland in the 1690s; however in a more fundamental sense he was certainly wrong, for if home is where you know who your enemies are, Toland was at home in Ireland. He was equally at home, in this sense, in Scotland and England, for in confront-

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ing clerisy he was to identify enemies in each of the confessional systems that were established across the British Isles. And in that fight against what was then termed ‘priestcraft’ – or the assertion of spiritual authority grounded on discrete knowledge which was inaccessible to a congregant, Toland was to find an ideological sheet-anchor. Toland’s story is not one of fluid postmodern play. Rather it is to recount a life lived within the politics of certainty. Each chapter below reconstructs a phase of his life and locates it within a particular geographic location. But it also highlights an aspect of Toland’s politics of certainty, and his tendency to thus think in terms of conspiracy theory. The first chapter thus both recounts his period in Ireland and identifies the plot that dominated his thinking and which was first articulated in his signature text, Christianity Not Mysterious (1696). The second chapter explores Toland’s life in London in the late 1690s and early 1700s, showing how he relied on a series of patrons to patch together a livelihood within the nascent public sphere. In doing so it emphasizes Toland’s reliance on individual agency in his thinking about historical development: if conspiracies are to make sense, after all, someone, not something, must be working behind the scenes. This concern with agency informed his portrait gallery of Commonwealth thinkers, such as James Harrington and John Milton. The third chapter brings Toland to Hanover, and explores his fluctuating relations with his patrons through to 1707. These connections gave Toland a fleeting view of how politics was run, and introduced him to the politics of the closet, highlighting to him the potency of insider knowledge. This fascination continued through Toland’s sojourn in Amsterdam, related in Chapter 4, which saw him engaged with the esoteric writings of figures like Giordano Bruno and his participation in protoMasonic societies. Toland’s concern for secrecy is here explored, shifting as he did away from a desire to publicize plots, and towards the notion of a conspiracy of the virtuous. In an extended engagement with the Sacheverell affair, Toland found a focus for his ire and a personification of the Tory enemy he despised and which he understood to be the exact counterpoint – a conspiracy of the clerics. In Chapter 5, Toland’s retreat to Epsom beyond the capital’s bounds, is read in the light of his collapsing relationship with Harley. In rejecting Harley, Toland found a cause for paranoia about the actions of individuals and the possibility of deceit. Harley became, for Toland, an icon of insincerity and deceit. The sixth chapter locates Toland in Putney, initially close to a patriotic ministry willing to enact the kind of legislation he thought necessary to support the public weal. This period of his life enables an account of his fundamental comprehension of power both secular and spiritual and underlines his commitment to an idealistic mode of politics from which he found compromise difficult. This idealism set in relief his persistent concern with the motives and machinations of his enemies as he remained concerned about the question of what the powerful were not, tell-


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ing their subject audience. He recovered a lost Gospel that, he claimed had been set to one side as discomforting to the powerful and contradicting doctrinal orthodoxy. By using such outlier information to posit a conspiracy, he further recounted the history of the clerisy’s plot against the laity, and imagined a conspiracy of the virtuous that would effect a revolution in the governance of men. Toland’s life was thereby shaped by a commitment to overthrow the clerical conspiracy he identified at play within the church, and thus to complete the political revolution he associated with the Williamite War by extending it to spiritual affairs. In this, Toland was committed to a broad-based republican heritage that he did much to recover and rehabilitate. He also contributed to an anti-clerical Enlightenment that challenged the hegemony of the Church of England as much as it did Roman Catholic authority elsewhere in Europe. Finally, Toland did much to promulgate the idea that politics is structured by power, self-interest and deceit. His body of work constitutes a conspiracy theory concerning the corruption of liberty by the malevolent forces of arbitrary government and spiritual orthodoxy. Yet, as we shall see, the trouble with this, is that there were enemies who wished to silence him. He was censured, threatened and beaten up for speaking out. His work thus tells us something discomforting about the period in which he lived: a period of fear, jealousy and paranoia, in which conspiracy theories flourished and sometimes turned out to be true; a period much like our own.

1 IRELAND, 1670–97

Inishowen is isolated. A promontory on the northern reaches of the Donegal coast, located on the north-western corner of Ireland it is a remote peninsula which seems removed from the concerns of wider Irish, let alone British politics. Yet this image is deceptive, for in fact Inishowen is near the very heart of the British Isles. The map of the archipelago, when turned on its side, makes this apparent, for the province of Ulster juts out into the Irish Sea and is nestled between the Argyllshire region of Scotland, the north Welsh region where the island of Anglesey gestures towards County Down, and the Cumbrian coastline of England. This position at the heart of the British Isles has had the unfortunate consequence of making the province the archipelago’s charnel house: when the political structures of governance and representation have become unstable or illegitimate, Ulster has been the central arena of contestation, from the Nine Years War of 1594–1603 when the Gaelic chieftains Hugh O’Neill and Hugh O’Donnell resisted the expansion of English rule, to the Troubles which flared in the 1960s in which a physical-force republicanism associated with Irish separatist ambition endeavoured to undermine a state system dominated by a Unionist constituency. In the wars of 1688–91, when the Williamite Revolution was rippling through the three Stuart Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland, Ulster was a critical testing ground for the military capacity of the contending forces. In the city of Londonderry, just east of Inishowen, the conflict tipped decisively against James II. For 105 days, between April and July 1689, the city of 30,000 souls was surrounded by the Catholic army. Despite the pessimistic assessment of the City Governor, Robert Lundy, that the city must fall, the citizens were able to hold out long enough for the Williamite navy to break the boon that had blocked the Foyle river’s access to the sea. The siege of Londonderry eventually became an iconic event in Williamite political culture, although in the decades immediately following the siege Anglicans and Presbyterians contested the garlands of war.1 Yet the strategic centrality of Ulster to the political concerns of the British Isles did not always result in such hatred and internecine violence. Ulster was

– 21 –

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also a province filled with incongruous connections, local settlements and negotiated loyalties. Inishowen, for instance, was the site of a Protestant plantation under the stewardship of Arthur Chichester in the early seventeenth century. It saw the intrusion of Presbyterianism in the 1670s. Yet the Anglican rector in Clonmany parish from 1672 to 1711, Daniel McLaughlin was the brother of the Catholic priest, Peter, who had responsibility for the overlapping parish.2 The very fact that the province represented the narrow ground of the British political fault lines ensured that those who lived with the threat of earthquake oftentimes resolved to negotiate the fractured landscape with agility and guile.

I. At first glance, John Toland fits with this profile of accomodatory aptitudes. By his own account he was born in Inishowen in 1669 or 1670.3 The preface to his edition of the works of James Harrington acknowledges that he was ‘but this present day beginning the thirtieth year of my age, Canon, near Banstead, Novemb 30 1699’; his friend Pierre Des Maizeaux gave 1670 as the year.4 His original name was in all likelihood Sean Eoin, or Joannes Eugenius in Latin, which he bowdlerized into Janus Junius at a later date.5 If this was the actual baptismal name it accounts for Des Maizeaux’s assertion that when at school, and with ‘the other boys making a jest of it, the Master himself order’d him to be call’d John for the future’.6 He was born into the Catholic faith, with a noxious rumour suggesting he was the illegitimate son of a priest.7 He certainly made it a matter of personal pride that despite ‘being educated, from my cradle, in the grossest superstition and idolatry, God was pleas’d to make my own Reason, and such as made use of theirs, the happy Instruments of my Conversion’.8 His education was undertaken in Redcastle School in Londonderry, before he removed to the University of Glasgow in 1687.9 It would appear that he was intended to use his native ability to speak the Irish language to minister to the population, and hence would have been a prize asset to the Church of Ireland, which struggled with the linguistic divide between predominately English-speaking clerics and a Gaelic-language populace – the suggestion is made that he was forwarded by the Anglican bishop of Derry, Dr Ezekiel Hopkins.10 However, he was soon altering his theological coloration again, for an argument with the archbishop of Glasgow pushed him towards the Presbyterian faith – in 1697 he averred how ‘the real Simplicity of the Dissenters Worship, and the seeming Equity of their Discipline (into which being so young he could not distinctly penetrate) did gain extraordinarily upon his Affections’ – it was presumably stimulated in part by the need to avail of the greater educational opportunities the faith supplied.11 He stayed there in 1690 when he transferred to the University of Edinburgh,

Ireland, 1670–97

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from which he was awarded a MA in 1690, on ‘the day before the memorable Battel of the BOINE’.12 However, Toland’s story is not one of negotiation, labile flexibility in ideological matters and liminal shadow play. It is indicative of a very different texture to Toland’s mind that his removal to Edinburgh was a common path taken by those in Glasgow who were not willing to sign up to the oath of allegiance.13 Indeed, it was reported that while Toland was in Glasgow ‘He got a rabble together, and at the Head of them in the Market place burn’t the Pope; upon which occasion he made a formal Speech against the then Magistrates o’ the Town for being Episcopal … He fail’d not to cast in his mite when the Episcopal clergy was rabbled’.14 This act of physical confessional cleansing chimes with the intellectual purification that lies at the heart of his first major venture into print, Christianity Not Mysterious – a missive of hate which first appeared between December 1695 and June 1696, when Toland was still twenty-five.15 Christianity Not Mysterious constitutes an all out assault on ‘priestcraft’ – a central term of art on the radical fringes of the Williamite coterie, which had origins in the fight against the Stuart project of Absolutist monarchy, as the Whigs conceived of the Restoration period’s travails.16 In Toland’s view, the threat of priestcraft was not limited to the Roman Catholic Church, with its emphasis on institutional authority and traditional accretions to scriptural interpretation. Rather, Christianity not Mysterious was expressive of a wider distrust in clerical establishments, for it was directed against taking any doctrinal interpretation on trust. Priestcraft denoted these accretions of human invention into theological dogma, through the imposition of creedal formulations and the exercise of secular power by spiritual leaders. Toland’s treatise revolved around an extended consideration of the notion of ‘mystery’. In a reading which accords with Mark Knights’s assessment that conspiracies can be embedded in the wilful misuse of language, Toland railed against the nonsense or ‘Blictri’ offered by priests in defence of their social power.17 The assertion that Christianity was a mysterious faith, that was above reason and which required a clerisy to mediate between God and his people was the central fallacy that corroded the Christian Church. In his view the mysteries of faith referred to in scripture were not such in essence, but rather because they came to be known solely through special revelation. As he expressed the distinction: ‘Such Revelations then of God in the New Testament are call’d Mysteries, not from any present Inconceivableness or Obscurity, but with respect to what they were before this Revelation, as that is call’d our Task which we long since perform’d’.18 Indeed, it was implausible to his mind that God would require belief in a notion that could not be conceptualized by human reason. Indeed whereas the clerics wished to assert the authority of revelation over and above reason, Toland insisted in a crucial passage that

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A Political Biography of John Toland Revelation was not a necessitating Motive of Assent, but a Mean of Information. We should not confound the Way whereby we come to the Knowledg of a thing, with the Grounds we have to believe it. A Man may inform me of a thousand Matters I never heard of before, and of which I should not as much think if I were not told; yet I believe nothing purely upon his word without Evidence in the things themselves. Not the bare Authority of him that speaks, but the clear Conception I form of what he says, is the Ground of my Persuasion.19

This went for God’s message as much as for gossip in the neighbourhood: Toland was insisting that God’s revelation had to accord with our understanding for it to be accepted. It had to be plain and rational, not obscure and mysterious. As he underlined the matter, ‘Whoever reveals anything, that is whoever tells us something we did not know before, his Words must be intelligible, and the Matter possible. That rule holds good let God or Man be the Revealer’.20 In contrast, ‘As for unintelligible Relations, we can no more believe them from the Revelation of God than from that of Man; for the conceiv’d Ideas of things are the only Subjects of Believing, Denying, Approving and every other Act of the Understanding’.21 In this, Toland was making an epistemological claim about an aesthetic matter: truth is expressible in the plain style and ornate learning is likely to be deceptive. Yet despite this rather single-minded focus, the book has been read rather differently, by both its supporters and critics, taking it as rejecting revelation altogether, and not merely attacking the tendency towards religious obscurantism. Certainly both types of reader considered it as a canonical text in the radical tradition of subversion and heterodoxy. Voltaire, for instance, when drafting Letters … containing Comments on the Most Eminent Authors, wrote of how ‘Toland has aimed … violent blows against Christianity … Persecution exasperated him, and he wrote against Christianity, at once out of hatred and of revenge’.22 While this was a matter of praise for the anticlerical Frenchman, for the Irish Anglican John Leland, writing in the same period, this was the cause of distress. Leland’s A View of the Principal Deistical Writers of 1755 asserted that while Toland ‘called himself a Christian, [he] made it very much the business of his life to serve the cause of infidelity’.23 The notoriety of this tract rests not on its critique of language, but on the positive construction of a rationalist faith. Christianity Not Mysterious was read by contemporaries as a contribution to a debate about the reasonableness of Christianity, to avail of the title of a work by John Locke, and which took in Deists, Latitudinarians and the High Church men against whom Toland railed.24 Toland’s stance was an avowedly extreme position, one which left Locke himself wary of fraternizing with the Irishman. The treatise was taken as promulgating a Deistic religion without revelation; Toland’s persistent disavowals of this intention have done much to inscribe the

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view of him as a duplicitous and ironic writer. In An Apology for Mr Toland for instance he insisted, ‘When the Christian Religion is attack’d by Atheists and others, they constantly charge it with Contradiction or Obscurity; Mr Toland’s design in the Publication of his Book was to defend Christianity from such unjust imputations’.25 Yet in cleansing the Bible of the accretions of tradition and the confusions of interpretation, Toland offered arguments for reading scripture as a historical document in which ‘mysteries’ were explained by gospel. The book thus contended that human reason was sufficient to comprehend the faith demanded by God, and that any claim to the obscurity of doctrine made by the clergy was motivated by a cynical desire for secular power. In confronting scripture, Toland averred, people ought to rely on their own understanding and not the pronouncements of the authorities. In forwarding this thesis, Toland was, however, doing more than undermining Catholic claims to interpretive power, or indeed subverting the position of clerics of any theological colouring. He was, critics asserted, destroying the central tenet of the Trinity; the central mystery of the Christian faith.26 In other words, he was guilty of the heresy of Socinianism – the belief that Christ was not divine. It was the heterodox consequence inherent in Toland’s treatment of scripture which prompted the book’s most angered rebuttals. A Letter to J. C. Esq upon Mr Toland’s Book, published in Dublin in 1697, complained He says in his Preface that he is a Christian … it is plain he believes not Christ to have been the Author of what we call the Christian Religion … I think he cannot be supposed at least to say the Lord’s Prayer, for our Saviour has told us that All Men should Honour the Son even as they Honour the Father, can he then say, Hallowed be thy Name, who makes a Coffee-house jest of the Trinity.27

While this Letter irritated Toland – he deemed it a ‘strange Denunciation’ intended to ‘terrify anybody from appearing publickly for Mr Toland’ – the real threat was emanating from the private office of the Archbishop of Dublin.28 Narcissus Marsh was appalled by the premise of Christianity Not Mysterious. He marked up his copy with angry annotations, declaring, for instance, of the book’s reliance upon reason, ‘You speak like a man that both knows and useth Reason indeed such as it is, that is very weak, as the whole Book declares, being very weakly written’. He thought the book ultimately ‘prov’d nothing, unless saying a thing is so, be proving it to be so’.29 It was Marsh who proposed to Peter Browne, then a senior fellow at Trinity College Dublin, that he pen a refutation, which defended mystery as inherent to the faith. In relation to the Trinity a spirited defence was offered, highlighting the variety of terms used to talk of the divine force of God, Christ and the Holy Spirit. This led Browne to the conclusion that they are not three distinct different Spirits; for then there must be three Gods, contrary to Reason and Scripture. From all of which I infer there is in the Godhead

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A Political Biography of John Toland something more than a meer nominal Distinction, and something less than that of three different Spirits … Now at the same time I make this profession of my Faith, I allow I have not the least knowledge how strict this Union is, nor how great is the Distinction. It is as much beyond my Reason, as the Glory of God is beyond my Sight; and any Man who strives to conceive it himself, or takes pains to explain it to others, is guilty of such a folly that I can’t think of any action in nature extravagant enough to match it. 30

Deeming the refutation a success, and pleased with Browne’s positive argument defending fideism, Marsh supported Browne’s successful pursuit of the provostship of that institution in 1699, and by 1710, of the bishopric of Cork and Ross.31 Toland, who repeatedly took notice of his antagonists, ironically praised himself for making Browne a prelate. It was Browne who brought Christianity Not Mysterious to the attention of public magistrate in Ireland. He was not alone however in thinking the book required official sanction. Robert E. Sullivan suggests that even Toland himself waited until the Licensing Act lapsed in 1695 before venturing its publication.32 By May 1697 the Middlesex Grand Jury moved to condemn Christianity Not Mysterious; followed in swift succession by the Irish parliament sitting in Dublin. In September 1697, the Irish public hangman, following a resolution of the assembly that the book constituted a public utterance of heretical ideas, twice burnt the book in College Green at the centre of the Irish capital. It was, in other words a success de scandale, and a set piece in the fight between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the early Enlightenment. However, this is to read the text through the prism of its reception (or through the lens of reader reception theory to be more theoretical about it), to recall the hostility of the establishment to its appearance and to thereby concede to its opponents the primacy of interpretation which they asserted as their right. They get to determine the manner of its memory, and to propose its correct reading. Yet something of the peculiarity of Christianity not Mysterious may be lost by ceding such ground to its clerical detractors. If nothing else, it occludes the purpose and context of its composition; which can be recovered by refocusing the story around Toland.

II. Consider Toland’s situation in 1695–6. Despite having a Catholic origin, Toland was the subject of a vital Presbyterian education in Glasgow University, from 1687 to 1690, until his removal to Edinburgh University. In other words, Christianity Not Mysterious is the product of a Presbyterian pen. As S. J. Barnett writes: ‘Traditionally, John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious has been understood as a Deist work. Yet it can more convincingly be demonstrated that his

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aim was to show how true Christianity could only be found within the confines of the apostolic – Presbyterian – model of the church’.33 Surprising as this might seem, Toland had returned to Glasgow after his receipt of the Edinburgh MA to gain a certificate of orthodoxy; he was very fond of collecting such testimonials to intellectual fidelity. This read: We the magistrates of Glasgow under-subscribing, do hereby testify and declare to all whom these presents may concern that the bearer, John Toland, Master of Arts, did reside here for some years at the University in this city, during which time he behaved himself as a true Protestant and loyal subject, as witness our hands the penult day of June one thousand six hundred and ninety years … John Lecke I. S. George Nisbitt.34

Presbyterianism was, at this juncture, an important marker, giving him access to places and people he wished to associate with. In this light it is surely pertinent that Christianity Not Mysterious shares in the stringent rationalism of much Presbyterian scholastic theology, and a scripturalism that is inherent in much Calvinist dogmatics: the exegesis of the use of mystery is, after all, the purpose of the book. Toland even credited Presbyterianism for shaping his mind, in the preface to Christianity Not Mysterious: ‘For being educated, from my cradle, in the grossest Superstition and Idolatry, God was pleased to make my own reason, and such as made use of theirs, the happy instruments of my conversion’. Yet he continues: ‘Thus I have been very early accustomed to examination and enquiry, and taught not to captivate my understanding no more than my senses to any man or society whatsoever’.35 In this, Christianity Not Mysterious goes further, decrying any clerisy for their presumption in intruding false doctrine between the special relationship of the believer and the revealed truth of scripture. Certainly the book’s reputation rests on its deistic content, its rationalization of religious sentiment, and its anti-clerical tenor and tone. And indeed, there is much here of this to be found, notably is the vitriolic scorn he heaped upon ‘priestcraft’.36 While much of this might be read as an attack upon the Catholicism of his youth, the Presbyterians did not take to this either, for as Justin Champion has revealed, the Presbyterian Justice on the Court of Common Pleas, Sir Thomas Rokeby was a central figure in the prosecution by the Middlesex Grand Jury.37 Rokeby was caught up in the spasm of moral seriousness that manifested itself in the Society for the Reformation of Manners, and was unable to disregard such apparent licentiousness. So too in Dublin, Toland’s friend William Molyneux remarked to Locke of how he deemed ‘dissenters here were the chief promoters of the matter’.38 It seems they did not wish Toland to escape un-chastised for his mockery of their confession. Caution may be exercised here, though, for we also have the view taken by one Dublin Presbyterian, the influential minister of the prominent Wood

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Street congregation, Joseph Boyse. Writing to the dissenting antiquarian, Ralph Thoresby of Leeds, on 29 May 1697, Boyse remarked: Mr Toland, of which book the Grand Jury of Middlesex take notice, is here and our clergy are so alarmed upon his coming that they are rousing the Pope Eustace against him: But I think him not so formidable an enemy as to deserve all the artillery spent both from pulpit and press. For though he want not ready wit and eloquence, nor reading, for his short time here (for he began not his university studies till about the Boyne fight), yet he seems to have some solidity and weight to support his [words illegible] and make him the head of a party. For he disclaims his being either a Socinian or Arian, so that if he has any hypothesis about the Trinity it must be a new one.39

Boyse was himself to enter into controversy over Arian heresies, condemning the ideas of his fellow minister at Wood Street, Thomas Emlyn in 1704; he certainly recognized free thought when he saw it, and was not loath to distance himself publicly from its appearance.40 Yet, to his mind Toland was not worthy of the energy expended, perhaps because he was not of that stripe, instead he wryly dismissed the maelstrom as merely a squall of little note. What was the purpose then of writing Christianity Not Mysterious? Although sceptical of Toland’s merits, Boyse might give us a clue. As he reminds us, Toland was at university during the Williamite Revolution of 1688–91, the move to Edinburgh possibly being the result of troubles at Glasgow caused by the upheaval.41 So too, he received a testimony from the Glasgow Presbyterian leaders of the city, which stated his devotion to the cause: We the magistrates of Glasgow under-subscribing do hereby testify and declare to all whom these presents may concern, that the bearer John Toland, Master of Arts did reside here for some years as a student at the University in this city, during which time he behaved himself as a true Protestant and loyal subject.42

This aided his entry in the dissenting circles surrounding Daniel Williams in London, considered to be the Presbyterian Pope.43 Williams had been a minister, alongside Boyse, at the Wood Street congregation in Dublin in the Restoration period but had decided to settle in the English capital in 1688.44 Indeed, Toland’s first foray into print would seem to have been a review and defence of Williams’s Gospel Truth Stated and Vindicated of 1692, which was itself a sustained criticism of congregationalism.45 Williams, ‘along with some others of the brotherhood, made a Collection of a good round sum to maintain him for two years in Holland’, taken up in the autumn of 1692, ‘but ’twas too long for him so at the end of one year he very fairly return’d’, in the summer of 1693.46 Having finally set aside any attempt to enter a ministry of faith, Toland retreated to Oxford by Christmas 1693.47 It was while there he began to develop

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his scholarly bent, taking on a number of publication plans that, characteristically, had little chance of coming to fruition. Throughout his career, Toland was more of a projector than he was a publisher. However prolific his output, Toland always had more ideas sketched than he could every plausibly complete. Thus, he presented himself to the University’s scholarly community as the compiler of an Irish–English Dictionary. Another such scheme was ‘The Fabulous Death of Atilius Regulus’ which remained in his papers until his death; it revised the biography of the consul to see him dying peacefully in contradiction to standard accounts.48 Despite such pretensions to scholarship, Toland’s penchant for radical posturing in the coffeehouses and taverns of the town eventually resulted in his expulsion by the vice-chancellor.49 This was not before he had been ‘arraigned and convicted’ by drinking companions for ‘burning the Book of Common Prayer’ in a mock trial in a tavern, and spent time ‘talking against the Scriptures, commending Commonwealths, justifying the murder of K[ing] C[harles] 1st, railing against Priests in general, with a Thousand other Extravagancys’.50 This loose talk was leading him into trouble, gaining him a reputation as ‘a man of fine parts, great learning and little religion’.51 He was warned in an anonymous letter, sent to him through Nan’s Coffee House, that ‘Popular esteem, the applauses of a Coffeehouse, or of a Club of profane Wits, are mean, unworthy ends; and which a man of understanding is asham’d to stoop for’.52 By September 1695 he was back in the capital, publishing his first substantive work, Two Essays Sent in a Letter from Oxford to a Nobleman in London.53 This availed on recent disputes about combining geological observations with the scriptural account of the Great Deluge to argue for a hyper-materialist account of creation. Characteristically, he scathingly dismissed the account of the Flood as implausible: What design could there be in destroying all the innocent dumb Creatures, in the Uninhabited Parts (which were above a Hundred to one, in respect of those Plated by the Anti-diluvian People) for the sake only of a few Wanton and Luxurious Asiaticks, who might have been drown’d by a Topical Flood, or by a particular Deluge.54

Despite this sneering tone, in the ‘Apology for Writing the Following Essays’ Toland commented, rather optimistically, on how ‘The universal disposition of this Age is bent upon a Rational Religion; the fierceness of Bigotry is in good measure calm’d and allay’d; therefore I venture out upon this Pacifik Sea, hoping to reach my Port without any storm or hardship’.55 While this echoes Mark Goldie’s assessment that the 1690s had seen an end to the Tory project of erecting a powerful and persecutory state church, Toland’s flexing of intellectual muscles was intentionally provocative, even as he declared himself to be ‘well affected to the Church of England’.56 Laying out a defence of his thesis as

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according with nature, and not scripture, he openly stated his view that ‘The Philosophical History of the Bible is not always to be embraced’.57 To his mind, ‘Things are denominated Heresie and Atheism, not by any certain Rules of Truth or Falshood, but according to the Caprice, or Interests of Sects and Parties’.58 Moreover, as he argued in the second letter, on the use of fables as an educational method, ‘The Sacred Authors themselves complied with this Humour of Parables and Fictions, the Holy Scripture being altogether Mysterious, Allegorical, and Enigmatical; and our Saviour himself gave his precepts under this veil’.59 This was then developed by priests to alternate ends, for ‘from these Fountains, the Christian Monks drunk in the art of Lying’.60 Offering instead a reliance on the Baconian method, Toland was preparing the ground for the publication of his reduction of Christianity to rational certainty, what he termed in the Two Essays, ‘ordinary providence’, and the controversial rejection of priestcraft as a conspiracy of sectional self-interest.61 Yet how might these peregrinations provide an interpretive context for understanding Christianity Not Mysterious beyond indicating a revisionist streak in Toland’s approach to received authority and a desire to perform the part of a public polemicist? Might Toland’s encounter with, and subsequent disillusionment about, Presbyterianism have shaped the text? Was he in fact criticizing the establishment of Presbyterianism as a state religion in this, his most controversial treatise? In as much as Christianity Not Mysterious can be read as a satire of Presbyterian scholasticism, a reductio ad absurdum that showed how, if taken to its logical conclusion, Presbyterian ideas concerning the relationship between scripture and reason excluded the role of the clergy and hence negated the need for a church structure, it offers a critique of the outcome of 1688–91. Although the revolution removed the threat of political despotism, Toland was unhappy with the way it persisted in buttressing church tyranny. In reading the text in this way, in reading it as promulgating the identity of political and religious freedom, there is at least the merit that it chimes with the rest of Toland’s subsequent polemical activism. In Boyse’s response we find an awareness that the Anglicans had little to fear, as they were not the real target. The context here is less the spasm of anxiety about heterodoxy in England, or fears about a threat within the Church of Ireland that might weaken the Protestant cause in its confrontation with the Catholic community, but the execution of Edinburgh student Thomas Aikenhead in January 1697, a few months before the presentment of Toland’s text to the Grand Jury in Middlesex and his descent upon Dublin.62 Was the clerisy being subjected to Toland’s ire the Presbyterian ministers, not the Anglican prelates? Might his audience, then, have been an Anglican one: an attempt not to promulgate the Presbyterianism of his training, but rather to satirize it? Might Christianity Not

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Mysterious be something of a student prank, a squib directed at his old teachers, and an appeal to a new constituency? If so, it misfired badly.

III. The reality was that Toland’s critique of Presbyterian scholasticism served to undermine Anglican pretensions to intellectual power just as well. One anonymous well-wisher in Oxford, hearing rumour of the treatise, fretted that it will not prove half so advantageous to yourself or others … I confess I do not foresee what good influence it would derive upon our practice, if all the deep and hidden things of God lay open to the meanest capacities (and there is no better argument with me, that the knowledge of them would be of no great use unto us, than that they lye so very deep) but that ever they should be thus laid open to men in these bodies, I freely own, I think next to impossible … the great mischief of ingenious persons applying the choicest abilities to such sort of purposes is [to be] pathetically lamented.63

Yet, it is significant that the book was being composed during this stay in Oxford. Christianity Not Mysterious emerged just at the moment Toland was trying to break away from the Presbyterian communities that had facilitated his education, and move into Anglican scholarly communities in England. By 1704, and the publication of the Principle of the Protestant Reformation Explained, he was insisting on his fidelity to the Church of England.64 Might he have arrived in Oxford anxious to disown his dissenting past and assert his Anglican credentials? And might Christianity Not Mysterious, with its satirical jibing at the Calvinist credo and parodic mimicry of its scholastic methods, be a central element in that endeavour? While he was to convert from Presbyterianism to Anglicanism, the Anglicans with whom Toland now fraternized were rather idiosyncratic. Indeed, he seems to have fallen in with Whigs of an anticlerical hue. This may emerge from the Dutch sojourn, where he associated with the freethinker Jean Le Clerc, and with the Quaker and political radical, Benjamin Furly. Through Furly, Toland met John Locke (to whom he was asked to deliver some letters by Furly upon returning to England). And by the time he reached Dublin he was involved with the arch anti-cleric, Robert Molesworth, who was himself, as a Commoner sitting for Dublin, to be censured in the Irish House of Lords for sarcastic remarks about the bishops in 1713.65 Toland had come to Ireland under the protection of John Methuen, himself reputed to have dubious religious views and moral practices – too much of a libertine eye for women being a central charge. Swift neatly dispatched him as ‘a profligate rogue without religion or morals; but cunning enough; yet without abilities of any kind’.66 Archbishop William King of Derry certainly sensed that the scandal surrounding Christianity Not Mysterious

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had as much to do with local antagonisms towards Methuen as it did to do with a fear that Toland was promulgating heresy. Writing to the Archbishop of Canterbury, King wryly observed that the ‘design was against some greater persons, that supported him’.67 Toland, it seems, may have been caught up a local fire-fight in which he was a reluctant and unsuccessful pawn. In other words there is a circle of connections all of whom are actively asserting the connection between political and religious liberty: this implies that the desired audience Christianity Not Mysterious was a low Whig, anti-clerical tolerationist community. This connects the book with its distant cousin Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), as well as with Molesworth’s Account of Denmark (1694). This connects also to a political context in which the Licensing Act had just lapsed and the clerics feared a wave of irreligious and licentious texts might come streaming from the presses: Toland’s text was not alone in being highlighted by Middlesex Grand Jury: Locke’s text and A Lady’s Religion were also named in the charge. Intriguingly, this later text was associated with the pen of Toland, by none other than Toland himself. In A Defence of Mr Toland he remarked of how, if it be yours, it is certain that there are some priest that have the honour of your acquaintance, and for whom you have a particular regard and esteem. ‘Tis true indeed you are distinguishing in your respect to men of that order, and you are very much in the right of it. But if you meet with a man of an unprejudiced emancipated understanding, who is likewise a person of strict integrity and purity of behaviour, and of chaste, severe morals, you make him your friend and companion though a priest.68

If Toland’s appropriation of A Lady’s Religion is accurate, and this seems likely given that the letter of introduction was signed Adeisidaemon, a name Toland would later use for one of his esoteric texts, then Christianity Not Mysterious was part of a sustained campaign to simplify the relationship between scripture and faith, offering instead a version that was intentionally ‘plain short and intelligible’.69 A Lady’s Religion, addressed to Lady Howard, comprised a letter by Monsieur Le Clerc, to which Toland had added a preface.70 In introducing the main body of the work, Toland expressly stated his view that ‘Religion is the concern of all’, for ‘the knowledge of it depends not on the help of Spurious Learning’.71 ‘True Learning consists’, he observed ‘ in the Knowledge of things as they are in themselves, and the expressing of this Knowledge in proper words whereby it is convey’d into the minds of others’.72 Regrettably, this apparently plain virtue was in short supply, for men’s interests often led them to frustrate … its native and useful effects [by making] Learning consist in strange and difficult words, in the meer Grammatical Knowledge of Languages, without any regard to the sense, if sometimes they have any; in frivolous, precarious, and imper-

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tinent distinctions; in Etymologies, a World of old stories, and the Lord knows what Gibberish and Nonsense. This the truly Learned call Pedantry.73

An early conflation of the religious, learned and political themes that were to occupy Toland’s life, he then claimed ‘there’s nothing more obvious than that thus artful Learning destroys all Liberty of course’.74 As if to prove the point, The Lady’s Religion, and by implication Christianity Not Mysterious, got caught in an internal party politics within the Whig party. Indeed, Toland may have been mistaken in deeming the topic safe, in so much as he found sanction from within Whig party circles for his ideas: this accounts for the quotation taken from Archbishop Tillotson, which adorns the cover. This pronounces that: ‘We need not desire a better evidence that any man is in the wrong, than to hear him declare against reason, and thereby to acknowledge that reason is against him’.75 Tillotson, the Williamite archbishop of Canterbury until his death in 1694, was a hero to the Latitudinarian faction within the church.76 He was here recruited so as to give sanction to Toland’s polemic; even if the Anglican clergy were soon to turn on Toland as their bugbear and nightmare. As suggested earlier, if this was in part his intention: to forward the policies of one faction within the Whig party, it can only be described as a mitigated failure: mitigated in so much as Toland’s allies did not desert him: he noted how even in the Irish House of Commons, some unnamed members stood up for his right to intellectual freedom: something he made much of in his subsequent published defence, writing of how ‘Several persons eminent for their birth, good qualities or fortunes, opposed the whole proceeding, being of opinion it was neither proper nor convenient for them to meddle with a thing of that nature’.77

IV. There is, however, another cluster of problematic issues surrounding the book’s appearance, and this adorns the cover; hidden in plain view so to speak. First there is the visual gag Toland plays. The text of the title ‘Christianity Not Mysterious’ is smaller than much else on the page: in particular, four words within the subtitle commandeer the space, in order reading ‘treatise’ ‘gospel’ ‘reason’ and ‘mystery’: the title page announces the relationship between the gospel and reason is and will remain a mystery; the opposite of Toland’s apparent intentions. Or perhaps he was setting the gospel and reason into a mysterious opposition. Or was he implying simply that the gospel was not reasonable, and was instead mysterious? That was how his detractors read him. That Toland took notice of his title page can be shown by his remarks in the subsequent Defence of Mr Toland in a Letter to Himself that ‘the chief complaint I have met with is against the Title and Design of the book [his emphasis]. ’Tis an impudent thing, I am

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told, for a man to publish to the world in huge capital letters, that Christianity is not Mysterious, when all sects and parties of Christians, have agreed to speak of the Mysteries of the Christian Religion’.78 Yet that is not how the title page actually looks: Toland is once again mocking his opponents, who have not, he implies, so much as seen the book, at the same time as he is drawing attention to his visual gag. Indeed it is only the four key words identified above that appear in capital letters, the actual title is in standard layout, albeit in italics. Might this suggest that Christianity not Mysterious is little more than an intellectual parlour game in which he conducts a thought experiment and sees who takes it seriously? If so he was making fun precisely of the Anglican clerics’ sententiousness. This captures something of Toland’s nature as a trickster.79 Might the entire text be a kind of practical joke, in which the joke is firmly on those clerics ignorant enough, and prideful enough to take the prank seriously? What may then have occurred is that, in seeing Christianity Not Mysterious as a heterodox text, Anglican clerics were guilty of just the kind of literalist reading of which Toland was making mock. Toland seems to have been aware of this tendency, and saw behind it not only a foolish small mindedness on the part of his antagonists, but a vexatious self-interestedness; Christianity Not Mysterious enabled certain clerics to make their name. This was the thrust of Toland’s remarks on one such opponent in particular, Peter Browne, who authored A Letter in Answer to a Book intitled Christianity Not Mysterious: If you credit Mr Browne, he [Toland] designs to be as famous an impostor as Mahomet. To confirm this character [Toland continued], which was well enough invented to amuse the people with vain terrors, there was a ridiculous story handed about, whether true or false God knows; for Mr Toland remembers nothing of the matter. ’Tis said in short, that about the fourteenth year of his age he gravely declared he would be the head of a sect e’er he was thirty; and before he was forty he should make as great a stir in the commonwealth as Cromwell ever did.80

This overwrought response contrasts with Boyse’s dismissal of the furore (although echoing Boyse’s assertion that Toland intended to become the ‘head of a party’) and explains Toland’s subsequent irritation at the treatment meted out to him. Indeed, the venom of the Anglican clergy’s response may only have resulted in Toland’s increasing radicalization, forcing him to adopt increasingly radical postures to defend his credibility as a writer. The joke, if that is what it was, seems to have backfired and the victim was not the bloated pomposity of the clerics, but the snide self-regard of Toland himself.

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V. If the motive for writing Christianity Not Mysterious was nothing so furtive as youthful boisterousness, akin to that which got Thomas Aikenhead into trouble in Edinburgh in the same period, it is probably worth recalling that Toland was only twenty-five; he was not a teenager but was still young enough to take perverse pleasure in riling his elders. And as William Molyneux wryly observed of his houseguest in a letter to John Locke in 1697, by the time Toland arrived in Dublin, he was already unmanageable: I have known a gentleman in this town that was a most strict Socinian and thought as much out of the common road as any man, and was also known so to do; but then his behaviour and discourse was attended with so much modesty, goodness and prudence that I never heard him publicly censured or clamoured against, neither was any man in danger of censure by receiving his visits or keeping him company. I am very loath to tell you how far ’tis otherwise with Mr T in this place.81

Moreover, this reading would chime with another aspect of the title page: its original anonymity and subsequent reissue with the author’s name proudly emblazed upon it, alongside that of the publisher, Samuel Buckley, who was later to produce the Daily Courant and the Whig periodical, the Spectator. Usually anonymity would be maintained to avoid trouble, and when it was the kind of trouble Toland was brewing up, it seems strange that he would act so quickly to bring attention upon himself. Indeed it was as early as June 1696 that Toland was advertising his authorship of the book in the pages of the Post Man, before issuing the second, and ‘greatly enlarged’ edition with his name on the cover before the year was out.82 Perhaps youthful enthusiasm got the better of him. Having irked his elders he could not help but gain credit for it; the cheeky boy who took pride in his misdemeanour. The other possibility is that this revelation of authorship was intended from the start, and was part of the jape in which Toland’s book was complicit. It was after all a revelation of the truth – a solving of the mystery of authorship in just the fashion that Toland had contended scripture treated of mysteries of faith. In Christianity Not Mysterious Toland argued that mystery was used solely to indicate something that was once hidden, a truth obscured until revelation illuminated it: this stood in opposition to the assertion by those guilty of priestcraft that a revealed truth might itself be mysterious, incomprehensible to the intellect of a fallen man, and hence necessitating an act of unthinking faith (the most obvious and controversial case of this being the doctrine of the Trinity). For Toland faith could only be founded on knowledge, and mysteries, once uncovered and resolved, were no longer such. Revelation countermanded mystery and was not its handmaid. In revealing his authorship in this dramatic fashion, Toland was echoing the revelation of gospel truth, for once the truth

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of his authorship had been asserted, the obscurity cleared, any pretence that a mystery remained was left to look foolish. The act of concealing and then revealing authorship thereby echoed and paralleled the internal argument within the book concerning how truth came to light.

VI. Can the two readings be brought together? Was Toland’s pursuit of an Anglican patronage under Methuen and Molesworth compatible with his attack on the sententiousness of the clergy? Was it that his primary target was Presbyterianism, and the Anglican reaction unexpected? Or was Anglican High Church scholasticism very much in Toland’s mind as he scripted the polemic? It is here I think that conspiracy finally comes into play. Much has been made of the opening sections of Christianity Not Mysterious with their exposition of the relationship between reason and faith, but less well commented on is the final section of the treatise – section 3, ‘That there is Nothing Mysterious, or Above Reason, in the Gospel’. This neglect is partly a consequence of a general wariness concerning biblical learning among Enlightenment scholars (although Justin Champion is one notable exception here), as this is the part of the thesis in which Toland can display his learned credentials. The section is broken down into five parts, which include such scholarly expositions as ‘the history and significance of mystery in the writings of the gentiles’ and ‘objections brought from particular texts of scripture’; the first allows Toland to display his erudition in a canon of ancient, often pre-Christian thought; the second to parade his learning within the confines of the Bible. In both Toland is prone to overload, a freighting of the text with scholastic references that at once revelled in the particular detail and bludgeoned the reader into submission by the sheer volume of data. A standard conceit of the conspiracy theorist is, after all, the lawyerly device of pushing masses of material forward in the hope that such a display will convince the audience of the thesis by dint of evidential comprehensiveness. However, it is in the final part, entitled ‘When, Why and By Whom Were Mysteries brought into Christianity?’ that Toland finally reveals his polemical purpose.83 Therein he proposed a history of corruption and decay, a common thematic for conspiracy theorists who wanted to locate a moment in time in which history twisted out of shape and the evil conspiracy took hold of the fate of nations. Thus, while Toland was content to admit that Christ ‘fully and clearly preached the purest morals, he taught that reasonable worship and those just conceptions of heaven and heavenly things’, and while ‘his disciples and followers kept to this simplicity for some considerable time’, it was ‘the converted Jews who continued mighty fond of their Levitical rites and feasts’ who first brought in the falsehoods that ‘became afterwards part of Christianity itself under the

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pretence of apostolic prescription or tradition’.84 While this ran somewhat counter to Toland’s later full-throated philosemitism, he proceeded by proposing that ‘This was nothing compared to the injury done to religion by the gentiles, who as they proselytised in greater numbers than the Jews, so the abuses they introduced were of more dangerous and universal influence’.85 In this process of accommodation to the demands of the Gentiles, ‘Christianity was put upon an equal level to the mysteries of Ceres, or the orgies of Bacchus. Foolish and mistaken care! As if the most impious superstitions could be sanctified by the name of Christ’.86 As with the physicians, and their conceit of building speculative systems to sustain their cultural hegemony, so too, Toland identified a tendency among philosophers whereby while they pretended to imploy their philosophy in defence of Christianity, they so confounded them together what before was plain to everyone did now become intelligible only to the learned, who made it still less evident by their litigious disputes and vain subtleties. We must not forget [he enjoined the reader] that the Philosophers were for making no meaner a figure among the Christians than they formerly did among the heathens; but this was that they could not possibly effect, without rendering everything abstruse by terms or otherwise, and so making themselves sole masters of interpretation.87

Christianity thus was corrupted by those who sought cultural power, and who were willing to confuse, obfuscate and obscure the true faith in their pursuit of worldly pre-eminence. This history of conspiracy and corruption culminated in the intervention of secular power into spiritual matters, for ‘multitudes then professed themselves of the emperors persuasion only to make their court and mend their fortunes by it, or to preserve those places and preferments whereof they were possessed’.88 And in this transition, all their [the heathen priests] endowments with the benefits of the priests, flamens, augurs and the whole sacred tribe, were appropriated to the Christian clergy, Nay their very habits, as white linen stoles, mitres and the like were retained to bring those, as was pretended, to an imperceptible change, who could not be reconciled to the Christian simplicity and poverty. But indeed the design at bottom was to introduce the riches, pomp and dignities of the clergy which immediately succeeded.89

In drawing out the connection between the newly elevated Christian priests and the heathen religious leaders they emulated, Toland noted how ‘they both made use of the words, initiating and perfecting … kept their mysteries as secret as the heathens did theirs’ and ‘were extremely cautious not to speak intelligibly of their mysteries before unbelievers or the Catechumens, whence you frequently meet in their writings with these of the like expressions: the initiated know, the initiated understand what I say’.90

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Finally, they both indicated a reliance on the ceremonial, which was entirely intended to misdirect the observer from the essential characteristics of the faith and befuddle the believer. For Toland, ceremonies ‘never fail to take off the mind from the substance of religion, and lead men into dangerous mistakes for ceremonies being easily observed, everyone thinks himself religious enough that exactly performs them … it is visible then that ceremonies perplex instead of explaining’.91 As he concluded, ‘in short, there’s no degree of enthusiasm higher than placing religion in such fooleries; nor anything so base as by these fraudulent arts to make the gospel of no effect, unless as far as it serves a party’.92 ‘Serves a party’: here Toland completes his course, and Christianity Not Mysterious is revealed to be a tract concerning a great historical conspiracy involving the corruption of Christianity, the denial of the true faith to the believers for party ends, with all the bile that the late seventeenth century could impart into that most derided of words. Party for contemporaries spoke of the civil wars, of faction and of fraudulent self-interest draped as the patriotic pursuit of the common weal. To be motivated by a party was to be desiccated, immoral, and intolerable. If this is to make Christianity Not Mysterious into a late seventeenthcentury version of the Da Vinci Code, so be it. It does however give us an answer to the initial question concerning Toland’s commitment to a conspiratorial political worldview. Toland shared with many of his contemporaries a compulsion to see conspiracy behind every form of power, and in so doing found shelter in the circle of latitudinarian Anglicans who wished to strip away the ceremonials of the High Church and return the faith to its original purity. So too, it required the separation of Christianity from the political certainties of the Presbyterian settlement in Scotland and the doctrinaire clerics who had overreacted in their punishment Thomas Aitkenhead’s youthful posturing. Enthusiasm and superstition were equally corrupting of the central message of Christianity, and the elevation of ministers or priests above the message of the gospel was a historical disaster Christianity Not Mysterious hubristically sought to correct. That Toland brought forth a thunderstorm of denunciation, and drew condemnation from both the spiritual and secular authorities only showed, to his mind, how right he was in his analysis. The reaction also ensured that he evaded what David Aaronovitch diagnoses as the central fear that prompts conspiratorial thought, namely the fear of being ignored. According to Aaronovitch, ‘paranoia may often be a defence against indifference, against the far more terrible thought that no one cares about you’.93 In that regard it may have been an attractive mode of thought for a young man anxious to make a mark, a man from the outskirts of the archipelago, a man with a vexed religious history and an insecure place in the community of power brokers. The claim that he had uncovered a key to understanding the political universe, and indeed, that ‘there is an explanation, that human agencies are pow-

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erful and that there is order rather than chaos’, all fed into his sense that there was a meaning to the world, that Christianity was not mysterious and that even a lowly figure like himself could exercise interpretive power over the gospels, and over the record of human history. To that extent, Christianity Not Mysterious was an astonishing success, making Toland a notorious figure and pushing him deep inside the political machinery of the early Williamite regime in England. Indeed he was to become, as the next chapter will document, an ally of one of the power brokers of the period, raising an ideological edifice in defence of Robert Harley that gave purpose and poise to his machinations and manoeuvres.

2 LONDON, 1697–1700

The capital was a haven for Toland. The city was large enough to disappear into, with a steadily growing population of around 550,000 in 1700, and diverse enough that he could find like-minded souls to support his cause and person. Thomas Firman for instance was the subject of a paean by Toland for speaking with more ‘disinterestedness and impartiality of our various sects in religion’ and ‘whose charity was as much extended to men of different opinions was it as to the poor of all sorts in good works.’1 He also made the acquaintance of John Darby, a printer with whom he contracted an agreement to provide translations of Classical texts in January 1697.2 Upon returning to London from his ill-starred visit to Dublin, in September 1697, he took up the task of producing editorial work for the printer. In the character of these compilations, Toland accorded with the political views of a freethinking commonwealth circle, known to themselves as the College, and which gathered around the Grecian Coffeehouse in Devereux Court. Frequenting the establishment was a set of republican thinkers whose public utterances and actions were drawing the attention and suspicion of political enemies as to their secret ambitions and private values. According to Charles Davenant’s mean-minded rumour-mongering Toland was inducted into a club ‘that used to meet thrice a week on purpose to invent lies that were to support our friends and blacken our enemies’. Toland himself was a central figure in this cabal, for True there were not above five or six men in the nation that agreed with him in all his principles … in some of his tenets, he had a great many followers, especially among the Modern Whigs … as contemptible a figure as he seemed to make, he was not to be neglected, as being the apostle of the libertines, Socinians and atheists, who every day grow more and more considerable.3

Although there is some degree of distance postulated by Jonathan Harris between Toland and the Grecian – he notes how the letters that survive the period mention Nan’s Coffeehouse and not the Grecian – the involvement of Toland in the political campaign that germinated there is clear.4 Moreover, con-

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temporary enemies were quick to link Toland to the coterie, as in a particularly nasty piece of political slander penned by Edward Ward, A Secret History of the Calves Head Club. This vitriolic assault picked up on the idea of a republican association to propose Toland’s involvement in a club devoted to celebrating the anniversary of the execution of Charles I on 30 January each year from 1693. ‘The Royal Martyr’, Ward complained, ‘has been Treated, if ’tis possible, with more Inhumanity after his Desolation, than he was exposed to when under the Power of his Rebellious Subjects.’5 As Ward rendered the meetings of this club, which he claimed dated back to Milton, and had traditionally met in secret but now ‘meet almost in a Publick Manner’, the antics were offensive and heavily politically charged. Meeting in a tavern, there was An Ax hung up in the Clubb Room, and was reverenced, as a Principal Symbol in this Diabolical Sacrament. Their Bill of Fare was a large Dish of Calves Heads dressed in several ways; a large Pike with a small one in his Mouth, as an Emblem of Tyranny; a large Cods-head, but which they pretended to represent the Person of the King singly, as by the Calves head before they had done with him, together with all them that had suffer’d in his Cause’; a Boars-head with an Apple in its Mouth, to represent the King by this as Bestial, as by the others they had done Foolish and Tyrannical. After the Repast was over, one of their Elders presented an Eikon Basilike [a defence of Charles supposed to have been penned by the monarch himself ] which was with great solemnity Burn’d upon the Table, whilst the Anthems were Singing.6

The ceremony was concluded with oath-taking to bind together the fraternity and a toast, taken in a Calf ’s Skull, ‘to those worthy Patriots that had Kill’d the Tyrant’. The meeting ended with a collection for ‘the Mercenary Scribbler’, which was by in all probability a reference to Toland, whose life of Milton which contained an attack on the Eikon Basilike, had already been footnoted.7 In this light, Ward’s description of the average member of this noxious association takes on additional resonance as an enemy’s portrayal of Toland: He is the spawn of a Regicide, Hammer’d out of a Rank Anabaptist Hipocrite … He is harden’d in his Hatred to Kings and Bishops, beyond the influence of Grace, or Check of Conscience; and thinks nothing can be a more Meritorious Act than to Sacrifice either to the Fury of a Mad Rabble, who when they have but Liberty and Property in their Mouths, always let loose the Devil in their Hearts, and believe the very Name of the Protestant Religion gives a Sanction to their Villainies. He is a Republican Monster, so full of passion and prejudice that he is Blind to all Truth, and Deaf to all Reason.8

While the existence of this club is contested, and in all probability unlikely, the existence of this attack does suggest the informal coterie of Commonwealthmen gathered at the Grecian was understood to be operating in combination.9 Toland’s involvement also indicates how far this period in London entangled him into the political arguments that spawned in the ferment of the Williamite

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era. In the wake of the Revolution, the constellation of government was decidedly unclear, with numerous congregations of Whig Members of Parliament gathering around influential families and political patriarchs. While the Junto administered the Kingdom from around 1693 until 1698, from that point it was regularly unable to cohere a parliamentary majority. It was opposed by a circle of ‘Old’ or ‘True’ Whigs, which included Toland, whose debt to classical republican ideals lent force to their argument that the revolution settlement was too narrow, as it did not preclude the growth of modern innovations, notably the standing army and the national debt. The Junto was also opposed by resilient Tories, who found it hard to stomach the recent change in Church politics, even if the state’s commitment to Protestantism kept them within the fold. Outside the legitimate realm of political discourse, lay the Jacobite loyalists, whose continuing commitment to the Catholic James II placed them in opposition to the Revolution in its entirety. From within this kaleidoscope of competing loyalties emerged Robert Harley, who from 1695 led an opposition to the Junto grounded on self-consciously Country Principles – a blend of Tory and True Whig positions, allowing him to pincer the Junto and effectively restrain their influence. Availing of the disintegration of the Junto and commandeering arguments about the standing army in 1697 to drive home his advantage, Harley was to become the Speaker of the House of Commons in 1701, and was effectively the leader of a new, Country administration. Aware of the power of rhetoric in the shaping of his solution to endemically weak administrations, and conducive to aspects of the republican programme that Toland promoted, Harley was to become a central figure in Toland’s politicization; a process that was underway even as he returned from the Irish to the English capital in September 1697.

I. Although in flight from the Irish tempest, Toland used the London print houses to defend Christianity Not Mysterious in a series of apologia. The titles of this sequence indicate Toland’s growing self-confidence in the dispute, beginning as he did with An Apology for Mr Toland (1697) and then issuing A Defence of Mr Toland (1697), before returning to the topic of the controversy five years later in a vindication – Vindicius Liberius. While the first of these tried to divorce Toland from the controversy, protesting that he would not ‘enter into the Merits of the Cause on either side’ the last of the pamphlets emerging out of the turmoil the book had caused him was engaged in ‘pleading my Justification where I think I am injur’d, and ingeniously owning my Mistakes where I am convin’d there’s Reason for so doing’.10 The central theme of these pamphlets was the integrity and personal decency of the author. Thus in the Apology, he complained that ‘the Errors commonly

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laid to Mr Toland’s charge, they are so various and inconsistent with one another, than no Man of ordinary sense could possibly hold them all at a time.’11 In the Defence he extended this defence when he acknowledged that his public reputation was that of being a liar, an atheist and a libertine. Yet, he proffered an extended rebuttal to these charges, arguing When I am pressed hard with such accounts as these, my Answer is, That ’tis very difficult for me to conceive how any Man, that owns the least tittle of Natural Religion, can publickly and solemnly profess to the World that he is firmly perswaded of the Truth of the Christian Religion, and the Scriptures, when at the same time he does not really and sincerely believe anything of them; and therefore since you have made such a profession as this, I think myself obliged to believe you so far, and upon that account, I should chuse rather to suppose that your intimate conversation with Deists and Libertines, and your seeming compliance with some of their opinions was by a mistaken policy carried on, and continued with a design of winning them over to the Christian faith.12

If this sounds somewhat half-hearted, he was clearer and more concise in Vindicus Liberius, where he asserted: ‘I must not, neither ought or can I, accuse myself of Opinions I never believ’d nor maintain’d, such as Arianism, Socinianism or the like.’13 Thereby, Toland integrated an account of his travails at the hands of Irish, and later English, authorities, with a wider concern for the politics of personality. Underpinning the Apology, the Defence and the vindication was an unstated assumption that the character of the man spoke for the virtue or vice of his positions. The man was an essential part of the argument. Toland was able then to divide the world into a Manichean world of friends and enemies, and he was quick to assert how even at the height of the controversy in priest-ridden Ireland, He met there and had the Honour to be acquainted with a great many worthy Gentlemen, who by their extraordinary parts, Education, and Vertues, merit to be distinguish’d in any Country of the World. He knows several Men and Women (and doubtless there are or should be more) who don’t confine all Salvation to the narrow Limits of a Sect, nor mistake the affected Phrases of any Party for the only true Christianity … Person who can live easily with all Men, as being of one Race, and fellow Citizens of the same World.14

This concern with the nexus of personality and politics was to mark his encounter with London also, concerned as he was with the identification of suitable patrons and the development of a reading of the past as shaped by human agency. Identifying enemies was easier. Indeed, the cause of Toland’s return to the issue in 1702 was the targeting of Christianity not Mysterious by the High Church-dominated Lower House in the Convocation of the Church of England. A Committee established there and mandated to expunge the publication

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of heterodoxy had redacted five heterodox ideas from within the first of these works and resolved that ‘the said Book is of Pernicious Principles, of dangerous Consequence to the Christian Religion, written on a design (as they Conceive) and tending to subvert the Fundamental Articles of the Christian Faith’.15 As Toland then related the matter moved to the Upper House, where, while they concurred as to the heterodox character of the book, they also in Answer to that Part of the Representation which concern’d a Censure, their Lordships declar’d ‘That on their consulting with Council learned in the Law concerning heretical, impious or immoral Books, and particularly concerning this Book sent up to them from the Lower House, they do not find how, without a License from the KING, (which they had not yet receiv’d) they cou’d have sufficient authority to censure judicially any such Books: but on the contrary’.16

This endeavour by the High Church party was prompted by the passage of a Blasphemy Act passed by Tories in 1698, testing the capacity of the Act to effect censorship, and hence it was also as Robert Rees Evans observes ‘less a Tory attack upon blasphemy than an oblique foray against the uncensored press’.17 Certainly Toland was a choice victim, as the subject of an earlier contretemps in Dublin, and the Whig author of a defence of the nascent public sphere. In a Letter to a Member of Parliament, which Toland published anonymously in 1698, he contended that ‘A Restraint on the Press is inconsistent with the Protestant Religion and dangerous to the Liberties of the Nation.’18 A highly polemical intervention in the context of the Blasphemy Act, he argued that it was the duty of every person to inform faith, and by employing ‘Reason to the best of his Ability to find out Religious Truth, in order to Practice it, does all that God desires.’19 In turn, Toland then concluded: ’tis clear that the Press ought not to be restrained because it tended to make Men blindly submit to the Religion they chance to be educated in’ – an allusion to his own conversion history – and that ‘it deprives Men of the most proper and best means to discover Truth’.20 This attack on the politics of the High Church as actively detrimental to religious life was then embittered by his contention that ‘suppressing the Evidence in a Cause where Men’s eternal Happiness is (I take it) much more criminal than in a Cause of temporal Interest.’21 His stated view was that the clergy could not trusted with control of the press as they ‘will suffer nothing to be printed but their own side’.22 In contrast, in arguing that it was incumbent on the press to inform readers and help that process of reflection, Toland offered a vision of the press as integral to both secular and spiritual flourishing: One Reason why God hath so formed Mankind, that each alone without the help of others cannot subsist, is to oblige them to mutual love and kindness, and to contribute to one another’s happiness. And they want each other’s assistance for things of the Mind as well as of the Body. For a Man would be in a miserable state of Dark-

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A Political Biography of John Toland ness and Ignorance, were it not for the Light that others afford him: and therefore they are obliged to increase as much as they can each other’s knowledge, especially in Religion, which they can no otherwise do than by communicating to one another what they think is the Truth, and the Reason by which they endeavour to prove it. To oblige Men to do this, God has not only implanted in them a strong desire to find out Religious Truth, but as great an inclination to teach others what they apprehend to be so; and there is no Man who believes a Doctrine to be true, but would be very glad to get it owned by others, Whosoever therefore endeavours to hinder Men from communicating their Thoughts (as they notoriously do that are for restraining the Press) invade the natural Rights of Mankind and destroy the common Ties of Humanity.23

In this Toland was expressing a trust in the public, and in the power of reason. He had predicated his argument for the freedom of the press on the assumption that ‘that which makes a Man differ from a Brute wholly uncapable of forming any Notion of Religion, is his Reason; which is the only Light God hath given him’.24 This perception was reiterated in early 1705 when he averred, ‘whoever does not make use of his Reason, is not only ungrateful to neglect so excellent a gift of God, but actually prefers the state of brutes to humanity’.25 This statement of ontological confidence occurred within the confines of a proposal Toland penned for producing a periodical. Writing to a patron, he observed ’tis very surprising that something of this nature has not been thought of in our country before’.26 He then described how the respondent might Once a week expect to receive a letter from me, containing a Sheet of paper, upon some subject of general use, and which you are permitted for that reason to publish to the world. This is the whole design in two words … The day of publication shall be Wednesday, because most people are then in Town and that those who come from their Country-houses may receive this lecture fresh before them for their instruction and entertainment.27

The subject matter Toland envisioned covering under the topic of ‘general use’ to the public included ‘the moral Virtues, remarkable passages in History, philosophical Disquisitions, and the detection of popular Errors’.28 Far from competing in the space taken up by newspapers – with their accounts of court politics and trade winds, Toland undertook to ‘make up at least one third part of this Journal’ with ‘an Account of Books newly publish’d’.29 He equally promised to set aside ‘meddl[ing] with any Factions or parties at home, with civil or religious professions’, endeavouring thereby to create a neutral venue for learned and polite correspondence and advice.30 He thereby hoped to avoid incurring the ‘displeasure of the Government’, although he did insist on discriminating between an honest broker and ‘being the pensionary of a secret Cabal, nor the trumpet of a designing Minister, nor the tool of an ambitious Prince’.31

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Mimicking such learned journals as Bayle’s Bibliothèque Universelle et historique, to which Toland had contributed in 1692, and foreshadowing polite vehicles such as Addison’s Spectator in its competency and assertion of political neutrality, Toland promised to avail of ‘the whole World’ as the Storehouse of the Materials I shall use; anteint and modern, foreign and domestic Books, the Letters and Conversation of other persons; the face of Nature and my own particular Thoughts. So that ’tis impossible I should ever be at a loss for a subject, but rather in suspense which to prefer, and how with the exactest judgement to chuse properly among so many. But one indispensible law I propose to myself is that the subject be something which may be generally entertaining, for which reason I shall always treat of it in a stile and method intelligible to everybody … Let no man therefore imagine that this will be a work above his sphere and capacity: for ’tis in the moral part of it equally intended for the good of all, and the learn’d part of it is particularly design’d for those who have not the leisure, nor ever had the opportunity to turn over many Books. And ’tis especially hop’d that the Ladies, who neither do not, [or] ought to, undergo such drudgery will in these Letters find something that may please them.32

This passage gives an insight into Toland’s view of the public he wrote for, and the role of the hack writer in educating opinion. It was a broad-bottomed public, democratic in its inclusivity, but with a strong moral and didactic approach to the audience. It was the task of the writer to instruct as much as it was to inform, to educate as well as entertain. As Justin Champion nicely concludes in his rendition of the argument of the Letter to a Member of Parliament, for Toland, ‘the press was to be a rational engine for the manufacture of public opinion’.33 Thus, while the approach to a female readership was also in line with Toland’s expressed views on the mental capacity of women, it also smartly positioned the project as a discreet shaper of taste, rather than an active political polemicist. The journal could create a culture of opinion conducive to Whig ideals, without having to hector, harass and herd the public into agreement. In this, it was in line with Addison and Steele’s sublimation of Whig politics into a cultural agenda in the pages of the Spectator.34 The project however, appears to have been stillborn, and the era of the polite literary journal was to wait for the next decade to arrive.

II. A target for Tories and a High Church Men, Toland was not considered to be neutral. Indeed his assault on the High Church Party in the Letter to a Member of Parliament only confirmed his notoriety as personifying the stance of the Commonwealthmen or True Whigs with whom he associated. Yet he was not without his allies, as the Grecian circle suggests. During this period in London he was able to rely on psychological, and on occasion financial, support from a number of peers and wealthy commoners, who protected him from the extremi-

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ties of his position as a political pariah. Some indication of these relationships can be evinced from his publication record, as a number of works were explicitly dedicated to figures of note in the political firmament. The extremely wealthy Sir Robert Clayton and the politically influential Duke of Newcastle were both subject to such public acclamations.35 It was also in this milieu that Toland forged a relationship with Robert Molesworth, author of the True Whig Account of Denmark (1696) and later Viscount of Swords. Toland may have initially encountered him during his sojourn in Dublin – he may be among the ‘great many worthy Gentlemen’ he praised in his Apology – however Molesworth was certainly the inspiration behind the Grecian coterie. His Account derived from a trip to Denmark undertaken as envoy to the court of Christian V in complex negotiations with William’s government and resulted in a narrative that emphasized the weakness of constitutional government when confronted with the absolutist ambitions of monarchs.36 He was one of the few patrons that Toland was to keep, however the friendship waxed and waned through the years. However, the most significant connection Toland made with immediate effect was possibly one mediated by Molesworth. In 1699 Toland cemented the bond with another patron publishing a version of the third Earl of Shaftesbury’s Inquiry concerning Virtue (1699), which the family later claimed was a piracy on the basis of Toland’s extensive editorial intervention.37 Close intellectual companions from at least 1698 to 1702, the two men shared a political agenda and literary ambition.38 The editorial issuing of Shaftesbury’s essay was also was a key gesture in Toland’s creation of a patronage network, for while Molesworth led the Old Whig grouping within the Commons, Shaftesbury – who lauded Molesworth with the encomium that he was his ‘oracle’ – tried (albeit rather ineffectively) to inspire action in the House of Lords.39 Unlike Molesworth, who was an active and able parliamentarian, Shaftesbury found public speaking difficult and preferred to wield his influence through correspondence and essay writing. He also prompted the work of others. One such utterance was Toland’s The Danger of Mercenary Parliaments which was ‘wrote in King William’s Time by Lord Shaftesbury’s Direction, and printed and dispersed privately at his Expense’.40 The theme was one to affect the emotions of the grandson of a Whig rebel against Stuart authority: the corruption of legitimate power that resulted from a conspiracy of forces initially prompted by the vaunting ambition of an ill-intentioned monarch, namely Charles II: The Project of corrupting Parliaments being but of a late date, a Practice first set on foot within the compass of our own Memories, as the last and most dangerous Stratagem that ever was invented by an incroaching King, to possess himself of the Rights of a free-born People; I mean King Charles II.41

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Explicitly denounced as a ‘treacherous King’ Charles was the source of a general degeneration in the manners and virtue of the parliament, availing of the crude mechanism of bribing parliamentarians with the promise of enriching offices.42 Although the reign had concluded the tendency towards corruption remained within the body politic, and Toland now fretted over the influence wielded by the Men who have endeavour’d to render our Condition hopeless, even beyond the Power of the King to relieve us: For tho’ his Majesty be deservedly lov’d and honour’d by his People for his readiness to do them Justice, and ease their Oppressions, yet we cannot expect it from him whilst he is thus beset and surrounded, and his Palaces invested by these Conspirators against his own Honour and the Welfare of his Kingdoms.43

Availing of the trope of a conspiracy, Toland was quick to locate the crisis of corruption in the personalities of those who sought power for self-interested gain, and set aside the needs of the country they purported to serve. As with the conspiracy that lay behind clerical power uncovered in Christianity Not Mysterious, the clue to the existence of a plot was to be found in the duplicity of language employed by the conspirators, for All impartial Men must either think they notoriously dissemble with us, or that they have indeed lost their Senses when they speak of publick Service; the Word is so unbecoming in their Mouths, and so awkwardly pronounc’d that they seem not to breathe in their own Elements when they Usurp the Name.44

In contrast to the self-seeking political office holders, Toland placed his trust in the general patriotism of the populace, who, under Charles, had resisted the process and again with proper ‘Directions and Informations’ could be relied on to avail of the electoral process to choose independent representatives who would be ‘in a condition to speak and act freely’.45 In this light it was a figure like Shaftesbury, who resisted the blandishments of the administration in order to articulate patriotic concerns, who Toland could admire and lionize without disturbing his tender conscience. This was the claim that was embedded within Shaftesbury’s Inquiry concerning Virtue with its conceit that virtue and beauty were intimately connected and that the life of the connoisseur, a learned man of leisure and taste, was constitutive of the good life. Shaftesbury was effecting a none-too-subtle self portrait, a justification of the life of detachment from the court, rural independence and patriotic oversight. The Inquiry concerning Virtue also positioned Toland within a heritage of republican endeavour by associating him with the legacy of the first earl, who has been invested in the conspiratorial resistance to Charles II in the 1660s conducted by the original Whigs. The eventual success of the plots to remove the Stuarts in 1688 underlined the value, in Toland’s mind, of individual acts of pat-

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riotism and the potency of the sole individual in the shaping of political events. Again, the Inquiry concerning Virtue underlined this lesson by emphasizing the significance of individual virtue in a corrupt and ugly world. But he widened this lesson to encompass not only the Restoration generation of Whigs, but also the Commonwealth Republicans in the preceding generation. In the late 1690s Toland ploughed an enormous amount of labour into the compilation, editing and publication of a sequence of Commonwealth writings.46 He was, in effect, developing a thesis concerning the past fifty years in which republican virtue was confronted with the power of arbitrary government and clerical ambition, the heroes of the struggle for liberty and tolerance included, in his canon, Denzil Holles, and Edmund Ludlow, both of whom were active in the cause of the Commonwealth in the 1650s and Algernon Sidney from amongst the first Whigs. As a capstone to this project of historical recovery, Toland produced an edition of the works of the republican theorist James Harrington, which appeared in 1700. In treating of this body of publication, modern commentators have emphasized the party political nature of this work of compilation, with Caroline Robbins highlighting how far it gave a sheen of intellectual coherence to the Grecian coterie of Old Whigs, and J. G. A. Pocock pointing up how far Toland’s rendition of these writings was shaped by a commonwealth paradigm of political thought.47 In contrast Blair Worden has explored Toland’s editorial practice in his interventions into these texts, and while the modern editor of Sidney’s Discourses concludes that the ‘1698 edition is fairly close to what Sidney actually wrote’, Worden has, in contrast, dismissed Toland’s edition of A Voyce from the Watch Tower as ‘radically unfaithful’.48 As he has shown, Toland exercised considerable editorial licence, turning Ludlow’s Puritan and anti-monarchical tract into a paean for an enlightened tolerant monarch and a critique of clerical power. Indeed throughout this massive editorial project, Toland was concerned with secularizing his heroes, helping to forward his own anti-clerical understanding of the current condition and the need to battle for liberty and tolerance. In the case of Ludlow, Toland systematically removed the millenarian aspect of the manuscript, central though it was to the actions of that avid Puritan, replacing it with commonwealth concerns. Through the process of editorial rewrites and absences, he justified such central tenets of his own politics as support for a militia and condemnation of courtly corruption. He even changed the central thread of the text, making it read that the 1653 coup by Cromwell was the moment in which courtly ambition overtook republican ambition; this was in contrast to Ludlow’s own thesis in which millennial hopes were dashed by the collapse of the Barebones Parliament. The treatment of Sidney was, if anything even more brazen. Alongside the Discourses concerning Government Toland wrote a text while purporting it to be by his hero, thereby offering up Sidney as a by-word for tolerance and incorruptibility. In ‘The Honourable Algernon

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Sidney’s ‘Letter Against Bribery and Arbitrary Government’, which appeared in 1697, an anachronistic assault on ‘venality’ was attributed to a heroic progenitor.49 Indeed in Worden’s assessment ‘the document is inauthentic in both style and content. Its prose has a histrionic element … The document is not dated, but its allusions to contemporary events place it in the early 1660s when Sidney had yet to form some of the sentiments it voices.’50 Rather the concern for corruption ‘had become conspicuous only in the 1670s’ and Sidney’s concern with ‘constitutional disorder’ expressed elsewhere is here replaced with a threat to the constitution from faction, which only makes sense after a ‘well designed one … had been secured in 1688.’51 In a characteristic passage Toland, if it is he, bewails how: That country of mine, which us’d to be estemmed a Paradise, is now like to be made a Stage of Injury, the Liberty which we hoped to establish oppress’d, all manner of Prophaneneess, Looseness, Luxury and Lewdness set up in its height; instead of Piety, Virtue, Sobriety, and Modesty, which we hoped GOD, by our Hands, would have introduced; the Best of our Nation, made a Prey to the Worst; the Parliament, Court and Army Corrupted, the People enslav’d, all things Vendible, and no Man safe, but by such evil and infamous means as Flattery and Bribery; What Joy can I have in my own Country in this Condition?52

He here makes Sidney voice the concerns of the Grecian coterie about the moral impact of the Junto, and hint at their programme of a Place Act to inoculate against ‘mercenary parliaments’, the establishment of a militia to replace a standing army and a rejection of the commercial innovations of the Bank of England, founded in 1694, and the national debt now termed the financial revolution. Yet Toland’s motives were deeper than offering a tendentious, secular, republican reading of the civil wars, Interregnum and Restoration. Rather, he was engaged in an argument concerning historical methodology. As Gordon Wood has helpfully observed Just as devout Puritans believed that nothing occurred without God’s providence, so the liberal-minded believed that nothing occurred without some person willing it. Earlier, men had sought to decipher the concealed or partially revealed will of God; now they sought to understand the concealed or partially exposed wills of human beings. That in a nutshell was what being enlightened was all about.53

Toland’s project of editorializing and canonizing was in that sense enlightened, for it was premised on the idea that human beings and their motivations moved history. Paradoxically, it is the treatment of Harrington – whose theories of the relationship between political structure and the means of production in fact undercut Toland’s assertion of personal agency – that Toland’s presumptions are enunciated.54

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Perhaps partially instilled with a desire to repay the kindness extended by Harrington’s half-sister, Dorothy, who by the 1690s was the wife of James Bellingham of Levens Hall in Westmoreland, who gave Toland access to Harrington’s papers, Toland was at pains to emphasize Harrington’s upstanding personal character.55 He wrote of how he had ensured his brothers had made a living, and undertook the education of his sisters, before taking in his motherin-law and treating her children as kin. He then extolled Harrington for being of a very liberal and compassionate nature. Nor could he indure to see a Friend want anything he might spare; and when the Relief that was necessary exceeded the extent of his Estate, he persuaded his sisters not only to contribute themselves, but likewise to go about to the rest of the relations to complete what was wanted.56

Crucially, in contradistinction to place seekers and men of fortune, Harrington was marked out by a ‘natural inclination to study [which] kept him from seeking after any publick Imployments’.57 Eventually convinced by the monarch to enter his employ, it was to Harrington’s credit that even the king found him to be a pleasant companion, and ‘much convers’d with him about Books and Foren Countrys … He afterward found means to see the King at St James’ and accompany’d him on the Scaffold, where, or a little before, he receiv’d a token of his Majesty’s Affection.’58 In the retreat which followed friends worried for him, but he emerged from his library with Oceana – the product of his deep learning and personal experience; a text Toland asserted was ‘a study of civil government’ motivated by his concern for ‘the Peace and Felicity of Mankind’.59 This hinge between the personal and political informed Toland’s wider project of biography and editorial compilation. As a set the editions of Holles, Ludlow, Sidney and Harrington comprise a portrait gallery of political heroes in the battle against priestcraft and the corruption of power. They comprise a martyrology – a secular sainthood and a gallery of luminaries to inspire and inform. Yet, there is one other aspect of this project that is worth emphasizing, namely the relationship between this notion of agency in history and the conspiracy of priests and monarchs Toland was determined to uncover. As Gordon Wood has also observed in relation to the structure of conspiratorial thought in this period: There even developed a politics of sincerity, with which republicanism became associated … The conspiratorial interpretations of the age were a generalized application to the world of politics of the pervasive duplicity assumed to exist in all human affairs. Only by positing secret plots and hidden machinations by governments was it possible, it seemed, to close the bewildering gaps between what rulers professed and what they brought forth.60

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Certainly Toland was engaged here in generating a reputation for republican virtue and sincerity: these were all men who suffered for articulating their thoughts honestly and without view to advantage and favour. The counterpart of this celebration of a ‘politics of sincerity’ was a politics of deceit, which Toland projected onto his enemies – the High Church men who sought to silence him through the power of Convocation. In that, Toland participated in ‘the Whig tradition of political jealousy and suspicion’ Wood identified, arguing it ran beyond the secular affairs of state and inflected the spiritual realm of ecclesiology and orthodoxy.61 In this he mimicked his real hero, and the other subject of his editorial endeavours, John Milton.62

III. John Milton was the central political martyr identified in this sequence of works, whose persona, Toland averred, was one of probity, humanity and patriotism. Despite the personal hardship of raging headaches from youth, and eventual blindness, Milton was an exemplary figure in his private and his public dealings. Toland noted such episodes as the reconciliation with his estranged first wife and his taking in of her Royalist relatives as examples of his hero’s manly virtue.63 Toland was to draw distinct parallels between himself and the poet. From the way the rumour of Milton’s expulsion for Cambridge as a student echoed Toland’s Oxford escapades, through the image of a writer serving an administration with his pen, and on to Milton’s engagement in foreign affairs (how early Toland was being thought of as a secret agent for Harley for missions on the Continent is unclear), it is apparent that Milton was being used as a model for Toland’s own progress through the political and public worlds of his day. Nor was the coincidence between the poet and his biographer merely occupational: Toland was at pains to draw comparisons between Milton’s political perceptions and those he had already placed into print. Thus, Toland dwelt at length on Milton’s attack on Presbyterians for favouring toleration when out of power, and persecution when established. ‘On this occasion I must remark,’ he protested, drawing on his own experience, that by reason of the Presbyterians warmly joining with others the last parliament to promote penal laws against the Socinians, I find few people will believe that those in England differ from their brethren in Scotland about persecution, not that their own sufferings of late have made ’em more tender to the consciences of others. This naturally leads men to think that they have not repented of their rigour in the civil wars; and that should the dissenters once more get the secular sword into their hands, they would press uniformity of sentiments in religion as far as any other protestants or papists ever yet have don: witness their inhuman treatment of Daniel Williams (a

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A Political Biography of John Toland Sober man and a judicious divine) for no cause that I can discern, but that he made Christianity plainer than som of his colleagues in the ministry, and that, it may be, he takes a greater latitude than such as thro their ignorance cannot or will not form design.64

A similar foreshadowing of Toland’s politics was to be found in the treatment of Milton’s views on the freedom of the press – Areopagitica is extracted extensively – while his anticlericalism was also explicitly praised.65 Toland summarized Milton’s stance as identifying two sources of corruption within churches, namely ‘force on the one side restraining the professors and hire on the other side corrupting the teachers of it’, a position close to his own account as related in Christianity Not Mysterious.66 And as with the political works that had followed, Toland depicted Milton similarly fretting over the threat to liberty personified by clerics and kings. Thus, in the recreation of Milton’s political thought Toland drew attention to Milton’s extensive controversy surrounding the Defence of the People, over and against the claim of central authority. As with Toland himself, Milton trusted the people, and hence favoured a republican form of government, offering to Cromwell ‘the model of a Commonwealth: not such as he thought the best, but what might be readiest settled at that time to prevent the restitution of kingship and domestic disorders, till a more favourable season, or better dispositions for erecting a perfect democracy’.67 The heart of this critique of monarchical power rested in the treatment Toland offered of the Eikon Basilike, in which Charles I ‘vindicates himself in so many distinct chapters from the chief heads of those tyrannies charg’d upon him by the people, either as occasions of the civil war, or as inhumanities committed during the same.’68 In exploring how Milton had responded to this account of Charles I’s actions in the civil war, Toland availed of the opportunity to unveil a persistent royalist conspiracy that had hidden the true origins of the treatise. Rather than being written by the king himself, the book was the product of a Dr Gauden. As Toland recounted, ‘One of Milton’s sagacity could not but perceive by the composition, stile and timing of this book that it was rather the production of som idle clergyman, than the work of a distrest prince, either in perpetual hurry at the head of a flying army, or remov’d from one prison to another.’69 Documenting the existence of an extensive conspiracy to perpetuate the fraudulent attribution, motivated by ‘mere interest and imposture’, he then provided a history of the reveal, with the truth emerging as a consequence of ‘nice and unforeseen accidents’.70 As with many of the conspiracies Toland actively uncovered, the supposition was that the truth would eventually come forward, and those who knew where to look would be able to uncover the deceit of malicious, if often rather inept, plotters. In this case the detective work had provided a pay off, allowing the hagiography of Milton to also serve as a deconstruction of the competing martyrology that had developed around the person of Charles I.

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Predictably, this deconstruction did not go uncontested. Of particular offence was a passage in which Toland extended his criticism of the credulity of readers of the Eikon Basilike to the Biblical accounts of Christ. ‘When I seriously consider how all this happen’d among ourselves within the compass of forty years, in a time of great learning and politeness, when both parties so narrowly watch’d over one another’s actions’ he could not help but reflect and cease to wonder any longer how so many suppositious pieces under the name of CHRIST, his apostles and other great persons, should be publish’d and approv’d in those primitive times, when it was of so much importance to have them believ’d, when the cheats were too many on all sides to reproach one another.71

This enraged the ‘Chaplin in Ordinary to the King and afterwards Bishop of Exeter’, the Church of England minister, Ofspring Blackhall, who responded with a direct attack on Toland in a sermon preached before the House of Commons on 30 January 1699; the anniversary of the regicide. Therein he defended the reputation of Charles I against the accusations of Milton and Toland, reasserting that Eikon Basilike was composed by himself, in the time of his Distresses … notwithstanding the Endeavours that have been formerly used by some to prove it spurious; and the Confidence of a late Author asserting it to be so, without producing any new Evidence for the Proof of his Assertion or offering one Word in Answer to those just and rational Exceptions that had been made before to those only Testimonies which he insists upon to prove it a Forgery, or making any Exceptions to those later Evidences that have been produced to prove it Authentick.72

Blackhall then expanded the remit of his assault, taking to task Toland’s treatment of the Bible. He described Toland as an ‘infidel’ for daring to ‘doubt’ the authenticity of the gospel writings. Addressing his august audience, he warned that Toland’s impunity was the first step in the creation of a lewd and debauched kingdom of heresy: ‘tis much to be feared that these your pious Designs and Endeavours to Suppress Vice and Immorality … will not give altogether so good an effect as might be wished; so long as the Foundation of all Revealed Religion is so openly struck at, and the publick Records and Evidences of our Christianity are, without Controul or Censure, suffered to be called in Question. For if any of the Pices (as he calls them) under the Name of Christ and his Apostles, which are received by the whole Christian Church as Portions of divine Revelation are spurious and supposititious, who can tell but that those which forbid Swearing and Drunkenness, and Fornication and Adultery, and other abominable Lusts not fit to be named, are so, as well as those (which I suppose this Author chiefly aims at) which deliver to us the Doctrine of the Trinity, and other Articles of our Christian Faith.73

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Toland responded to this loaded accusation of Socinian belief in Amyntor (1699), a text which brought Toland first to the attention of the Convocation of the Church of England and which began the campaign to have him censured.74 Yet it was not the views of that body of men which caused Toland consternation, rather he protested that when I am openly accus’d before the greatest assembly in the world, the representative body of the people of England, let the charge be never so frivolous in itself, or to be slighted on any other occasion, yet such a respect is due to the dignity of those to whom it was exhibited, that I hold myself oblig’d to convince ’em of my innocence, to remove all suspicion far from me, of what in its own nature is acknowledg’d to be criminal, or by them might be reputed indecent.75

Of the particular nature of the charge, Toland rejected the idea that his comments were intended to cast aspersions on the Gospels, contending instead that they reflected the proliferation of apocrypha which were ascribed to the authorship of Christ himself. To buttress this contention Toland then provided an extensive ‘catalogue of books anciently ascribed to JESUS CHRIST, his apostles, their acquaintance, companions and contemporaries’.76 As Justin Champion notices in considering this listing, ‘the dense thicket of references to orthodox erudition is testimony to his wide reading and skill at mimicking the routines of scholarly criticism’.77 In particular, he was consciously flirting with the boundary between the accepted Gospels and those works that were rejected as apocryphal, implying that the legitimacy of the first might not be sufficient given the existence of the other. That he relied on precisely the same body of literature as orthodox minds availed of to elaborate the doctrine of the church infuriated his opponents. As Champion further observes: ‘His forensic use and examination of the critical and cultural procedures for establishing authentic attribution was bent to the purpose of attacking the clerical monopoly of interpretive authority.’78 In other words, at the heart of Toland’s project of evidence accumulation was an attack on the claim to clerical authority and interpretive hegemony. It was precisely by listing out the other potential sources for an understanding of Christianity, along with citations of where the Church Fathers had rested their argument on such discarded texts, that he was able to forward the thesis that what had occurred was a conspiracy of selection. What Toland was offering was a body of evidence that went against the received theory of Christian doctrine. This was the material the church government would rather was neglected and lost, the data that perplexed and confounded their claim to discursive supremacy. As a corpus it amounted to a condemnation of the account of early Christianity that the clerics now provided, and opened up the possibility that a counter history might be created in which their power was diminished or dismissed.

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Toland also returned to the issue of Eikon Basilike in the final section of Amyntor, arguing that ‘the reason why I produc’d no new evidence to prove the spuriousness of Icon Basilke was because I thought the old one’s sufficient’.79 With his hand now forced, he supplied supporting documentation in abundance, with the avowed intention being to ‘clear myself from a public charge, and to discover a pious fraud, which deserves not to be excused from censure for being the contrivance of a modern bishop, no more than those of the ancient fathers of the church’.80 Again the tactic was a superabundance of supporting documentation, which acted to overwhelm the official thesis concerning Charles I’s authorship of the treatise, and put into play an alternative reading. And as with the listing of the apocrypha, the facts of the case were of less polemical importance to Toland than to elucidate the ‘immorality of this forgery’ in a particular case that alluded to the wider motivations of those in positions of ecclesiastical power.81 As he generalized out from the specific case of the actual author of the treatise: That Gauden hop’d to make a fortune by this book, as well as to promote the cause of the church, ought by no means to be counted strange; for who is it, pray that serves the king any more than God, for nought? Have not most of the bishops and other clergymen of those times, that either liv’d depriv’d here in England or that accompany’d Charles the second in his exile, pleaded their loyalty and magnify’d their services at the Restoration, as many others would questionless do, of King James should ever return again?82

This slight of the clergy and the implication that many remained loyal to the Jacobite Pretender only aggravated the offence caused by Toland’s assault on biblical canonicity. The combined assault on scripture and the High Church was such that Amyntor, immediately the subject of a number of orthodox rebuttals, was also the made the basis for the aborted attempts to censure Toland by the Convocation of the Church of England in 1699 and again in 1701.83 Yet these moves on the part of the High Church party within the Lower House of Convocation did not deter Toland availing of this method of critique, for at least two further revisions of the list were developed, one which was sent to Eugene of Savoy and one that circulated privately in the period from 1718 to 1720 and which was published by Pierre Des Maizeaux in the posthumously collated works.84

IV. While Toland was happy at this stage of his political thought to place his trust in the people in general, his real desideratum was a figure that could rise above the party conflicts that were blighting the political nation in the post-Revolution years. While the Grecian coterie had provided him with a language of patriotism, a diagnosis of the condition of the state, and a reformist agenda, it was still

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on the outskirts of power, with no real chance of exercising anything other than moral influence. If he was to drive the conspirators who threatened the English Constitution out of court, he needed to find a figure who could replace them, and act in the general interest of the country. He was soon to identify a candidate for this good old cause. Indeed it was while in the Grecian circle that Toland seems to have first met with the man whose political fortunes would dictate Toland’s own for the next fifteen years, Robert Harley. This connection emanated from a series of pamphlets which issued forth from the group concerned with the continuing existence of a standing army. The specific issue was the persistence of the Williamite regime, heading by the Junto, in supporting a permanent force after the close of the Nine Years War against the French, which concluded in 1697. While King William III was anxious to retain the force, the House of Commons repeatedly voted to reduce the scale of the establishment, to 10,000 men in 1697, then 7,000 English born men in 1698 and in 1700, to make the point clear, to reject explicitly the maintenance of William’s Dutch Guard. As Lois G. Schwoerer enunciates, however, this was a foil for a deeper discussion for ‘what was at stake, just ten years after the Glorious Revolution, was the relative power of King and Parliament. For the first time, Article VI of the Bill of Rights, that is that parliament must consent to an army in peacetime, was applied and tested’, making the matter a test of the breadth of the Revolution Settlement.85 The Grecian coterie was heavily invested in this intense political argument, on the side of the Commons. Indeed, the pamphlet war that coincided with the parliamentary debates had been prompted by the issuing by John Trenchard of An Argument Showing that a Standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government in 1697. While it has been suggested that Toland was involved in co-authoring this work, alongside John Trenchard and Walter Moyle, it seems likely this was in fact a Trenchard–Moyle production. So too, the assertion of Toland co-authoring with Trenchard of A Short History of Standing Armies in England, which appeared in 1698, is insecure, with Schwoerer asserting it to be solely Trenchard’s pen at work.86 It is thus only uncontested that he penned The Militia Reform’d which appeared in 1698. The rhetoric employed in this tract was that of a steady mean, in which the constitution, for instance, could be praised for allowing ‘the Dignity of the Magistracy’ and ‘the Liberty of the People’ to flourish, or the militia established in such a fashion as to ‘effectually defend us hereafter against all Foreign Force, and constantly preserve our Freedom and Peace at home’.87 This enabled him to eschew all party labels and position himself as a general Patriot, or one who ‘can be of no Faction, nor consequently for excluding any from sharing the Blessings of that LIBERTY they are willing to support’.88 In this placatory mode he further accepted the force of the security argument proffered by the advocates of

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a standing army, ‘and that in Honour we ought not discharge Men who suffer’d so much for our sakes’.89 In the light of his patriotic persona, however, he settled the question as one concerning ‘what’s most for the Advantage of the Nation’.90 As he explained, ‘this was the Motive of raising them, and shou’d be that of establishing them or laying them aside’.91 Accepting the parliament’s decision to leave a standing army of 10,000, at the time of writing, he took this to be a stop-gap measure to ensure national security ‘til the New Militia is regulated’.92 It was towards the execution of this outcome that the pamphlet offered specific instructions for the creation of a force of independent citizens, assuming as he did so that ‘the Honour and Safety of the Nation is the commendable Design of all sides’.93 As he formulated the matter, ‘the only Question is, Whether it be safest to trust Arms continually in the hands of ignorant, idle, and needy Persons; or only when there’s occasion for it, in the hands of sober, industrious and understanding Freemen’.94 In this moment, Toland revealed his own hand, relinquishing the patriotic ecumenical figure he had adopted, and suggesting his partisanship in the debate. By freemen, Toland explained carefully that he meant ‘Men of Property, or Persons that are able to live of themselves; and those who cannot subsist in this Independence I Call SERVANTS’.95 In this he followed the classical distinction of independent and dependent citizens, excluding the latter from active service in the state on the grounds that their influence could be purchased by patronage and corruption. As he pithily concluded, ‘Citizens will always appear for Liberty, and Servants fight for Bread’.96 Despite this distinction he proposed ‘that one Afternoon every week there will be a Parochial Exercise of all Males, as well Servants as Freemen from 16 to 40 Years of Age’ led by the disbanded sergeants of the standing army.97 His threefold justification for training servants, even if they were not part of the militia proper, was to ensure that those who became freemen in time were militarily able, that they might be used for imperial ventures, and that they might serve as auxiliaries in times of foreign invasion.98 He then suggested, in line with the argument forwarded by his Grecian confrere, the Scottish pamphleteer Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, that the parochial militias be grouped into three regional structures, and that ‘the Standing Militia of the Whole … annually encamp for the space of three Weeks in some one of the Classes’.99 While in camp, Toland envisioned the Militia learning the highest Perfection of Discipline, and [being] taught to make regular Sieges and Attacks in all Forms, to Storm Castles, to fight Battles, to gain advantageous Posts, to make honourable Retreats, to intrench themselves, to forage, decamp, and in one word, to perform all the other Duties necessary of an Army.100

This he thought would redeem the reputation of ability in arms, which had been debauched by the behaviour of ‘Mercenary Soldiers Abroad, who excepting some

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Officers and a few Volunteers, being most of ’em the Scum of Mankind, consisting of ignorant, brutish, mean, beggarly and idle Fellows’ with the ‘arbitrary Princes’ who hired them ‘countenancing and conniving at these Disorders’.101 In this light it became significant that the offices within the militia rotated, for it allowed men to ‘learn alternately to Command and to Obey’.102 Far from taking away from the authority of the King, this proposal would also remove him from any insinuation that he was favouring the Whig or the Tory element in the political nation through the establishment of a military force.103 Again donning the mantle of a patriot he then wished that ‘as in War the KING has equally protected all his Subjects, so I hope he’ll abolish their infamous Distinctions, and render England the Glory and Terror of the World’.104 The fluctuation Toland effected between Commonwealth Whig proposals and patriotic rhetorical gestures has caused some consternation in the reading of this pamphlet. Caroline Robbins for instance, viewing it as the product of the Grecian coterie – she states bluntly that ‘he supported the campaign of Trenchard and Moyle against a standing army’ – and Lois Schwoerer largely concurs, listing him alongside Trenchard, Moyle, and Fletcher as advocates of a militia.105 Robert Rees Evans, drawing on the second tendency, sees in the tract an early example of the Country party effusions that were to come. However Evans rightly accepts that ‘whether or not Toland wrote The Militia Reform’d on a commission from Harley remains a matter for conjecture’.106 While he is right to emphasise that ‘Harley was pleased to see his compromise legislation defended in so ingenious a manner is proven when we consider the latter’s patronage of the young Irishman from that moment forward.’107 Yet it perhaps still right to see the pamphlet as reaching out from the Grecian coterie to the Country party, and not as a notice of submission from them to it. However, Toland had found political saviour, or so he initially thought. Certainly, Robert Harley was already a man of merit. Elected Speaker of the House of Commons following the election of 1701, he headed up the Country party interest in the chamber, setting an agenda that decidedly and self-consciously triangulated against the Court Whig interest in its rejection of place holding and the Tory interest in openly accepting the consequences of the Williamite revolution. In this, he developed a third way to approach the complex problems of the revolutionary settlement; one that upheld Tory virtues of independence and Whig commitment to a balanced constitution. In establishing this space in the discourse, Harley had to reject both Whig and Tory stances as self-interested and as injurious to the right running of the constitution. In other words he had to formulate a critique of both the Whig and Tory party as iniquitous. In this, Harley’s Country Party viewed both as part of a political establishment that was conspiring to hold power over and against the populace of honest, virtuous citizens. As Jeffrey Ostler has analysed, the trait of a third party in a period of

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‘Machiavellian crisis’ when the constitution is being debated, as it was during the years when the succession was indeterminate, is to have recourse to ‘conspiratorial rhetoric’ to explain the failures of prior administrations to act in a patriotic fashion.108 Both the court Whigs and the Tories are thus rejected as representing ‘no longer the legitimate vehicle for resisting all forms of slavery and for promoting human freedom’.109 In doing so they also ‘invoked ideas of liberty and independence to denounce monopoly, speculation, inequality of wealth and deferential politics.’110 While Ostler is speaking of nineteenth-century American Populism, it is indicative of a broader structure of thought that so much of Toland’s political embrace of the British constitution and his rejection of priestcraft can be inscribed into this understanding. Pertinent also is Ostler’s suggestion that there is a link to this kind of political position, conspiratorial thought and populism, for ‘although conspiracy theorising was not the mainspring of politicization, this does not mean it was merely campaign rhetoric or that it was in any way superficial’.111 Rather, by effecting a rejection of both wings of the established political debate as corrupt ‘conspiratorial arguments legitimized extraordinary action in a moment of crisis’; not least an appeal to the public.112 As J. A. Downie has shown, Robert Harley was the first politician to take seriously the political ramifications of the emergent public sphere, availing of the administration’s resources to finance the publication of pro-ministry pamphlets by, amongst others Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and John Toland.113 As the Letter to a Member of Parliament indicates, Toland concurred with Harley’s assessment of the importance of the press. Moreover Toland shared with Harley an acute understanding of the importance of language and rhetoric in political debate. Toland’s 1700 production, Clito, versified this insight. But when the Crowd I’m chosen to persuade By long Orations for the purpose made; Or by what reaches more with more success The labor’d Compositions of the Press: Then shall my fertile Brain new Terms produce, Or old Expressions bring again in use Make all Ideas with their Signs agree.114

Nor was it was not just in comprehending the potency of discourse and argument that Toland and Harley shared common ground. Crucially, for Toland, patriotism properly defined involved a government for all, and equated to the latitude that he favoured in religious matters. This ambition was, he assumed, shared by the Country party, for All gos well when Whigs and Torys join; I’ll sing the Triumphs of the good Old Cause,

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A Political Biography of John Toland Establish Justice, reinthrone the Laws, Restore the Nation to its perfect health The Pow’r usurpt destroy, and form a Commonwealth.115

This could all be accomplished by a ‘matchless hero’, a figure here assumed to be Clito, a representation of Harley, praised by Adeisidaemon, ‘which signifies Unsuperstitious’, (and is Toland, as the preface indicated) – who would repair Britain’s imperial fortunes and confront the papacy: No longer thus the World shall be misled By him that’s falsly call’d th’ unerring Head His Triple Crown I scornfully will spurn, And his proud Seat to heaps of Rubbish turn.116

This threat was in turn characteristically extended to ‘all Holy Cheats / Of all Religions’ for, returning to the theme of the power of language, To gull the People, while their Spoils they share As much as we revere those worthy men Who teach what’s peaceful, necessary, plain; So much we shou’d such Hypocrits impeach As only Jargon, Strife and Impire Preach RELIGION’S safe, with PRIESTCRAFT is the War All Friends to Priestcraft, Foes of Mankind are … Their foolish Books (as Leaves From Trees in Autumn fall) I’ll scatter wide, And show those Fables which they fain wou’d hide117

Coming to a close, he reiterated his belief that ‘pow’rful Eloquence shall teach the Wise / Vile and absurd Inventions to despise’ once ‘my Words like Thunderbolts be hurl’d’.118 And Toland was to take the lesson to heart, identifying Harley as the most likely source of the republican, patriotic virtue he had committed himself to in the Grecian coterie. In attaching himself to Harley in such an overt fashion, Toland was also committing himself to Harley’s solution to the crisis of state that was paralysing the Junto and perplexing the True Whigs and Tories, namely the issue of the monarchical succession. Harley’s version of the Country party was to be built out a compromise that reserved the line of descent to Protestants (satisfying the churchmen), limited the power of the crown (placating the True Whigs) and drawing fire down onto the Junto with a Place Act and other stays on their commercial power. In this programme of government, Toland found a cause to campaign for, and in doing so, became intensely politicized. It also brought him to Hanover.

3 HANOVER, 1701–7

Visiting Hanover in 1701, for ‘five or six weeks’, Toland had, as he proudly confessed, ‘all imaginable Opportunitys to make Observations on the Court, and to understand the Character of Persons’.1 Situated ‘upon the River Leine, which is navigable only by small Boats’ Hanover was, to Toland’s eye, ‘regularly fortify’d, and divid’d into new and old Towns which is always a sign of a thriving place’.2 Of the palace, he thought ‘The apartments … very fine and richly furnish’d’ with a theatre and opera house located within to entertain courtiers and visitors.3 Of the court itself, he deemed it a model for others in its liberality and manners. Astonished, he praised it for being Extremely polite, and even in Germany it is accounted the best, both for Civility and Decorum … Strangers of Figure and Quality are commonly invited to the Table, where they are amaz’d to find such easy Conversation, and to be allow’d a Liberty that nobody who deserves it will abuse. At Court hours all People of Fashion meet there without any manner of constraint; and provided they know what difference to make between Men and Things (which everybody that coms there is suppos’d to do) they may freely talk of any Subject even with the Elector himself.4

Dominating the court were the diverse personalities of the royal family. The Elector was diligent, being ‘a perfect Man of Business, exactly regular in the Oeconomy of his Revenues, reads all the Dispatches himself at first hand, writes most of his own Letters, and spends a very considerable part of his Time about such Occupations in his Closet, and with his Ministers’.5 The Electress, in contrast, was distinguished by learned accomplishments. Toland gushed about how: She has bin long admir’d by all the Learned World, as a Woman of Incomparable Knowledge in Divinity, Philosophy, History, and the Subjects of all sorts of Books, of which she has read a prodigious quantity. She speaks five Languages so well that by her Accent it might be a Dispute which of ‘em was her first.6

Yet he claimed that the Electress for England, stating she ‘is so intirely English in her Person, her Behaviour, in her Humour, and all her Inclinations, that naturally she cou’d not miss of any things which peculiarly belongs to our Island’.7 Similarly, the Electoral Prince, the future George I, was in thrall to the English – 63 –

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circumstance, having both ‘a real esteem for Englishmen, [and he] … entertains a high Notion of the Wisdom, Goodness and Power of the English Government’.8 The only aspect of English manners that perplexed the Hanoverian court was the heat of party contestation. In Hanover, Toland asserted, ‘No Distinction is ever made in her Court concerning the Partys into which Englishmen are divided, and whereof they carry the Effects and Impressions wherever they go … There it is enough that you be an Englishman, nor can you ever discover by your Treatment which are better lik’d, the Whigs or the Torys’.9 Indeed, far from being similarly afflicted, Toland suggested that ‘Both Princes and People [in Hanover] cannot forbear admiring how we in England can keep up our Divisions about matters of much less importance’ than the divide that existed in the electorate between Calvinists and Lutherans. Far from being the source of political argument, he observed that ‘the clergy seldom appear at the court … and it wou’d be no less scandalous for their Characters to be seen soliciting there for Preferments than … if in England they frequented the Theatre or other Houses of worse fame’. 10 The royal family itself managed to combine the two faiths, having servants of both denominations and even ‘to show good Example, and their unfeign’d Character in these lesser Differences, do often go to Church together’.11 Toland was actively depicting the court of Hanover as a model for England – in its careful management of monies, its learned atmosphere, its admiration of the balanced constitution, its separation of spiritual and secular concerns and its religious latitude. This was not a neutral set of observations by the visitor however, for Toland was providing propaganda for a future reign. He was also setting out an agenda for the monarch which was in line with his Country Party vision of a patriot king and republican government. Toland was part of the retinue that had come to Hanover to offer the terms of succession to Queen Anne.

I. In his commitment to the rhetoric of national unity, patriotic monarchy, republican governance and the succession of the Hanoverian dynasty, Toland was falling into line with the political programme set by his political patron of these years, Robert Harley. This can be evinced in the political analysis within Toland’s Art of Governing by Partys which was issued before the election and blamed the Court Whigs for the rupture in the broader movement caused by their ambition for place and rejection of the national interest.12 However, the real merit of Harley’s project, in Toland’s eyes, was his commitment to the specific policy of encouraging a determination of the pillar of monarchical succession. This measure was the central pillar in a programme of national renewal as it would

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decisively end all Jacobite hopes of a second restoration, and open the way for a patriotic government favouring the common weal. The merit of these interlocking propositions was the subject of Toland’s second contribution to the pamphlet war of 1701, namely Limitations on the Next Foreign Successor.13 Published just prior to the first vote being taken by the Commons on the Act of Succession it took the form of a conversation between a young man perplexed by the idea of the measure, and an older head who thought ‘wise men will consider the uncertainty of all human Affairs, and by a cautious foresight provide against many maybes as well as against things which are unavoidable’.14 This show of virtu was to prevent against the possible death of both William III and his heir, Anne, without issue, leaving the monarchical line indeterminate. As a preventative measure the Act of Succession intended to indicate that the Hanoverian Electress Sophia would be next in line, followed by her young son George. Yet despite the necessity of such an action, the older head also thought it would be sensible to set a series of limitations on the power of the crown at this juncture, partly inspired by a recognition that the younger Hanoverians were Lutheran in their confession – a faith he worried was ‘rather for diminishing Ceremonies in Worship’.15 Moreover, if ‘a politick and ambitious Lutheran Price succeeds to our Throne and … he has a mind to make himself as Arbitrary in England as most of the Princes are in Germany, you cannot but know that he may readily fall upon a method to effect it. He has no more to do but to fall in with our bigoted Ceremonialists’.16 This anxiety prompted this Commonwealthman to prescribe a series of limits he wished to see enacted before the crown was offered to the Hanoverian line; a wish list that included the meeting of an annual parliament, a Place Act to exclude dependents of the court and foreigners from parliament, and parliamentary limitations on the power of peace and war.17 In making this plea, the Commonwealthman was happy to rely ‘entirely upon the Good will of the People’ for the matter under consideration was such that ‘the concern was … fit only for the thoughts of the United Wisdom of the Nation’.18 This recourse to the sense of the people prompted Toland here into the most extravagant aspect of this political programme – a re-imagining of the nature of the nation itself. The speculation began by articulating the basic approach to the understanding of politics he adopted, namely a statement of natural law theory concerning how ‘the Liberty of the People were the Gift of God and Nature [and] could not be forfeited by Prescription, nor justly given away’.19 From this predicate he could deduce that ‘the Laws of God and Nature never endowed any Government of what Species soever, with an absolute and unlimited Power; it must all be directed to the Good of the Society’.20 With an empirical turn Toland then observed of recent history that there had been an extended conflict of political cultures between the English, the Irish and the Scots, each of whom

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had grievances about the behaviour of the others. The answer to this festering sore within archipelagic politics was, in a characteristic manoeuvre, to recognize the interweave of these communities fully, to see all their fates as interlinked, to see the British Isles as a holistic whole, and to project a political unification. Rather than having the English parliament impose a monarchical settlement on the three kingdoms – as eventually happened – Toland suggested that the present Parliament of Scotland might be call’d, or rather a new one chosen, that his Majesty may have the more immediate sense of that Nation as well as of ours, to go along with us, step by step, both as to the Terms and the Person; and then we need not doubt of a happy issue. To that End ’twere necessary a stricter and more indissolvable Union should, if possible, be form’d betwixt the two Nations.21

Nor did Toland leave the idea free-floating, for he then considered something of the shape such a settlement might take, envisioning how ‘The Parliaments of both Kingdoms, like the Provincial States of Holland, might continue as they are for the security of their respective Liberties; and a proportional number of both might, under the direction of the King, regulate all matters concerning the Union, as the States General do’.22 This political unification was to be the precursor of a wider cultural unity that Toland projected. With a conspirator’s sense of the interconnectedness of apparently unrelated events and persons, he asserted that ‘it were requisite that the Names of English, Scots and Irish should be disus’d, and that the distinction should be South, North and West Britains; that as we are all of one Original, and under one Government, we should carry one denomination’.23 One of the central characteristics of the conspiratorial mindset is the belief that apparently disparate events and people are actually connected, if only the link can be revealed and comprehended. Toland is, in one sense, attempting such a political recognition here, in which English, Scots and Irish, despite different – often conflicting – historical experiences are revealed as being ‘all of one Original’ and hence unified. While here the revelation is beneficial the structure is the same when the connections uncovered actually highlight how the people have been duped – the resting of virtue in the body of the people is another trope of the conspiracy theorist who projects their activity to be on the side of truth and freedom and against the forces of deceit and despotism. As such, Harley’s political programme of uniting a nation divided by parties and matters of faith and his reliance on the appeal to the people was appealing to a figure like Toland who was already given to structuring his thought around contrasts of virtue and vice, truth and lies, publicity and secrecy, the public and the clerisy. And while not an immediately obvious stimulus, the Act of Succession pushed Toland into print on the matter precisely because it offered the possibility of a fresh start, a new kingdom in which the people could unite and expel the forces of division.

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Thus, the Limitations for the Next Foreign Successor was not Toland’s sole contribution to the pamphlet debate that surrounded the Act’s progress. Once the matter had been resolved and the Act was safely steered through parliament, Toland recounted events with an eye to garnering public support for the measure – a characteristically Harleian tactic. Within Anglia Libera Toland offered a rendition of the history of the state as a product of the parliamentary will. This was in turn grounded, as expressed before, in an understanding of that body as representative of the public and as holding within it the right to resist absolutist forces and the capacity to exercise a deposing power when the monarch overstretched his ambition to the detriment of the common good. According to Toland’s rendition of natural rights theory: Nor is it only when a People first agree on the Government that they have a Power of putting it into what Form they please; but if afterwards the chief Magistrate or any other Members of the Society shou’d manifest a deliberat and settl’d design of inslaving the rest, they may justly defend themselves and disarm or punish those who wou’d otherwise ruin Them, for such Persons (let ‘em be what they will) are to be treated after no other manner than Wolves or Tygers, which will be sure to destroy us if we are beforehand with them.24

In his reading of the recent past James II was guilty of both an initial arrogant drive towards absolutist power, in part inspired by his determination to impose the clerisy of Roman Catholicism on the people, and then a neglectful abdication of his post when the parliament exercised its power of resistance. This was legitimate for the people may honestly recover their liberty whenever they are able, since nobody can have a Right to govern others to their Hurt or Damage, all Men entring into Society for the better Preservation of their Liberty and Possessions, for none can be suppos’d to put themselves under any Government to make ’em in a worse condition than they were before.25

In facing this existential threat to their liberties, the people of England had unified, and were now understood to be once again coming together to ensure the preservation of the Revolution settlement through the measure of the Act of Succession. Toland extolled how, on the occasion of the parliamentary vote, and despite the party divisions that had racked the body politic since the revolution, ‘the Bill past both Houses with an Unanimity never before known on the like Occasion … which shews above all other Arguments how heartily the main Bulk of the Nation is ingage’d for Liberty’.26 He celebrated how this sudden unanimity was a watershed in the political discourse of the country, for The pernicious Contentions about Prerogative and Privilege are quite at an End forever. All orders of Men have their several Stations, Dutys, Rights, and Pre-eminences,

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A Political Biography of John Toland clearly stated and determin’d by express Laws; and the Nobility and Commons in this present Parliament will be famous to all Generations for applying the proper Remedy, and discovering the only Expedient capable of reconciling and extinguishing our Differences … The two great Partys, which have so long divided this Kingdom, were equally pleas’d, being suddenly united in promoting the true Interest of their Country and their opposite Denominations will probably henceforth be bury’d in Oblivion.27

This was to understand the Act of Succession as a marvellous compromise in which both sides of the debate could take a degree of satisfaction from the result. As Toland recognised: The Royalists have still a King, under which Magistrate they thought Liberty the most secure, and the Republicans enjoy Liberty under a King, tho’ they once thought them Things dissociable and scarce to be reconcil’d; so that neither Party was forc’d to submit or condescend to the Other, but their common Interest happen’d to meet in a third Point which, during their long Misunderstandings, neither of ’em probably foresaw.28

Yet this benevolent measure had done more than reintegrate the political nation, newly able to speak with one voice. It also resuscitated the natural form of the English state, which he deemed to be a commonwealth. Recuperating a term of art that had been tarnished by its association with the Cromwellian regimes of the 1650s, Toland stopped to explain how ‘I mean by the word Commonwealth, not a pure Democracy, nor any particular Form of Government; but an independent Community, where the Common Weal or Good of all indifferently is design’d and pursu’d, let the Form be what it will’.29 Heading up this Commonwealth was the Patriot King William III, whose wisdom and foresight in ensuring the passage of this Act he extolled. Yet Toland also eulogized the actions of Robert Harley. He recounted how the Proposition was receiv’d in the honourable House of Commons with all the Unanimity and Chearfulness that cou’d be expected; and everybody began to ominat well to this matter, when a Person of such acknowledg’d Learning and unparalleled Ability in Parliamentary Affairs as Mr Harley, the present Speaker, was observ’d occasionally to drop his Sentiments about it from Days before it came to be the Proper Business of the House … the Speaker said that He hop’d in a little Time our infamous Distinctions and Partys, but particularly Jacobitism, shou’d be wholly abolisht and extirpated.30

England was here born anew in Toland’s effusive rhetoric: party division was set aside, the country was ruled over by a Patriot King; the people were represented by an astute and visionary politician whose laudatory ambition it was to reintegrate the nation into a unitary body. The multiplicity of confessional divisions, the monarchical contest and the political arguments were subsumed

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into a vision of an English Commonwealth. Fracture had given way to unity; the many had become one. Anglia Libera both narrated the events in parliament and explicitly defended the decision, addressing not just a domestic audience but an international one also. As Toland boasted to Shaftesbury, it was being translated ‘as fast as may be’ into French and Dutch, with Toland claiming to be little less than ‘a sort of ambassador from the people’.31 The counterpart to this commitment to the Hanoverian cause was the outright and vocal rejection of the Jacobite claim on the throne, and through it the French throne that supported the court in exile. Toland dealt with the international context in an extended passage in Anglia Libera but the specific quality of the Jacobite threat was made the topic of his 1702 intervention, Reasons for Attainting and Abjuring the Pretended Prince of Wales. Therein he diagnosed the content of the Jacobite party as a mix of ‘fools or … knaves’, with motivations varying from the self-interested to the self-deluded: Some of ’em temted by the Prospect of getting large Shares of the Prey … or because they despair to advance themselves in a Free Government … others of ‘em are misled by the Force of Superstitious Principles to think an implicit Obedience in civil and religious Affairs to be the Duty of Subjects to their Superiors, and that the greatest Happiness of any Country consists in being under a despotic Government.32

Unlike the transparent appeal to public opinion that characterized the conduct of the Williamite administration in England, the Stuarts had a long history of acting through secrecy since at least the ‘conspiracies against the Life of Queen Elizabeth’ and which culminated when ‘In King James II’s reign the Mask was quite laid aside, Popery and Slavery display’d their Banners, and made a formidable Attack’. Toland reserved particular ire for the Protestants who had been taken in by ‘their execrable Machinations’, hoping that now with ‘the Protestant Conspirators so fairly markt … they shou’d never again by the Virtue of any disguise, be mistaken for Friends of the Government or Religion they so basely betray’d’.33 The pamphlet was supportive of the measure of an Act of Abjuration precisely because it would bring to light those Protestants who were inclined towards supporting the Jacobite cause. As Toland rendered the issue, while The profest Papists are well enough distinguished, and under an Incapacity in many Respects of acting against us, by Reason of their Exclusion from Parliament, as well as from all civil, military and ecclesiastic Preferments. But what they cannot do of themselves they bring about by these of the Confederates and Accomplices, who are so much the more dangerous, as professing the same Religion with us, they are not so easily discern’d.34

The Act of Abjuration would thus identify the ‘disaffected party’ allowing the state to remove those who were conspiring against it, and allowing the creation

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of a genuinely unitary national body politic committed to the revolutionary settlement and the Act of Succession. The Act was passed on 7 March 1702. The theme of unification of the national will also informed the other pamphlet Toland penned for Harley at this juncture, namely his Propositions for Uniting the Two East-India Companies. In the election of 1701, the condition of the East India Company was the subject of a heated debate, for on the one side an Old Company existed which had strong links to the Tory party, while there had been recently created a Whig-sponsored New Company that aimed to buy out the original company. The election saw both sides in the debate field candidates in an attempt to generate a parliamentary interest.35 While the outcome was a decisive victory for the Old Company, with Harley’s Country interest ensuring the rejection of a number of Whig claims to contested seats, the rhetoric of his public voice, Toland, was typically driven by the conceit of unifying the two sides in the national interest. This conciliatory approach may also have been promoted by personal considerations, for caught up in this row on the Whig side was Toland’s old connection from his Oxford days, the powerful London merchant Sir Robert Clayton, who won a parliamentary seat in the city in part through the backing of the New Company interest.36 Driven to provide a settlement, Toland’s tract provided four key components of a projected deal to satisfy both sides, allowing ‘both the Companys to [be] United and become one Company; in a general Joint Stock’.37 By subsuming the competing companies into a third, Toland was convinced that ‘the Act will not be look’d on as made in Favour of the new or the old, but as regulating the Trade of India in general, as the legal Authority of the sole Company of England’ – note here how he avails of a rhetorical deployment of England as whole.38 Speaking for the nation was, however, a difficult pose for a controversialist like Toland to maintain; his predilection to see internal treachery and conspiracy at work around him made him unlikely to be able to sustain this hegemonic voice. Yet the idea of national unity was to have an unlikely echo in his thought, for Toland was soon to articulate a philosophy that was integrated, holistic and whole. In line with his conspiratorial mindset which saw all political action as intricately connected, Toland was to envision the natural world as unitary and perpetually in motion. It was a belief system he was to term Pantheist.

II. Toland’s political halcyon days were decidedly brief. In the spring of 1701, Harley ensured Toland, via William III, was appointed as a secretary at the embassy in Hanover. He travelled over with Lord Macclesfield, although the peer and the pamphleteer did not like each other. Yet, this station led Toland to Hanover as part of the retinue of which presented the Act of Succession to the Electress

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Sophia, and the Order of the Garter to the future George I. In his own account, Toland was to become a figure of some note in this mission, prompting Macclesfield to ‘present me to kiss his Majesty’s hand … My Lord himself went with a Prejudice against me to Hanover, where he was thoroughly undecided, and became my hearty Patron’.39 Toland also presented Sophia with a copy of Anglia Libera, leading one cynical commentator – J. A. Downie suspects it might even have been Somers – to ask Whether Mr H[arle]y has not made choice of a very proper Envoy, in sending Toland to notify the good old P[rinc]ess that she owes the Crown to the Sp[eake]r? And whether, hereafter, if she finds herself oblig’d to make the one her Treasurer for his Honesty, she must not make the other Archb[isho]p for his Religion?40

While at the court Toland was to meet Leibniz, presenting him with a copy of Christianity Not Mysterious, which in turn prompted the German thinker to pen and present Annotatiunculae subitaneae which he dated 8 August 1701. Toland’s recollection of the encounter led him to pen an encomium to Leibniz in the Account of the Court of Hanover: That they want not Men of Letters, I need but name Monsieur Leibnitz, for an Example, who is here a Privy Counsellor and an Assistant in the Court of Chancery, but better known in the Commonwealth of Learning by his discoveries in Mathematics, and by his Codex Diplomaticus which shows that he’s equal to the Task he has undertaken, I mean of writing the History of the most Serene House of Brunswick and Lunenburg. I cannot agree with his metaphysical Notions, but possibly my own Apprehension may be in fault.41

In many ways this visit constituted the apogee of Toland’s political fortune, for the return to England in late 1701 allowed Macclesfield to present him to William III.42 This audience made the fall all the more abrupt and painful, for William III died on 8 March 1702; the consequence of a fall from a horse. So too, Toland’s connection with Harley was abrasively suspended. He had foolishly issued in January 1702 a pamphlet he had composed in Holland, on his way back from the Macclesfield legation to Hanover, and entitled Reasons for Addressing his Majesty, William III.43 Therein he proposed inviting the dowager Electress Sophia and her grandson, George, to stay in England, thereby securing the throne. The merit of this case would be to secure the Act of Succession by allowing the prescribed heirs to the English throne to make affective connections to the people they would govern. In particular the prince would benefit ‘by Reason that being but yet eighteen Years of Age, he may receive the most early Impressions of Love and Kindness for the British Soil itself, as well as to make the Customs of the Country habitual to him like those of his native Place; and in a Word to have him educated in the Language, Laws and the establist Religion of the Nation he

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is to govern’.44 In making this petition Toland claimed to be speaking for ‘what I take to be the Sense of the Nation’ and reflecting arguments that ‘are in everybody’s Mouth’.45 While he realized that the cost of maintaining a second court would be a burden on the public purse, he deemed the benefit of committing to the Act of Succession in such a public fashion to outweigh the material cost, as it would dampen the hopes of the Jacobite sympathizers who he dismissed as playing ‘a new French game’.46 The unity he envisioned were William III to extend the invitation he hoped for would, he optimistically believed, also extend to the attitude of the next in line to the throne, Anne, for he thought it is the Princess’ visible Interest to have such a support and assistance in maintaining her right to the Crown … And as a great many other Circumstances (besides being of the same line) contribute to make the Interests of both these Ladys to be the same so there can be no Doubt of their living in a very good Understanding and strict Friendship together.47

In spite of this confidence, Toland had misjudged the political moment. The pamphlet, while supporting the Act of Attainder and Abjuration that was signed into law in March 1702, that same month saw the death of William III in a riding accident. With the accession of Queen Anne there was a distinct and immediate shift towards the High Church party to the detriment of Harley’s triangulation of interests. Toland was to fall foul of this alteration, as Anne viewed his proposal as placing her in little more than the position of a royal caretaker. That the pamphlet was published simultaneously in London and Hanover only ensured he discomfited both ‘Ladys’ whose interest he thought he was supporting.48 On 16 May 1702, the English House of Lords condemned the work as containing ‘Assertions and Insinuations, scandalous and dangerous, tending to alienate the Affections of the Subjects of this Kingdom from Her Majesty’, an adjudication which placed Toland outside the bounds of acceptable political society for a time.49 This misfortune brought on another German journey, with Toland hoping rather naively that he would be given the post of tutor to the future George II at Hanover. Sophia was less enthusiastic about the idea and, worried over the ramifications of Toland’s presence at the court, sought to deter his arrival; while she still considered him to have ‘plenty of wit but not much judgement’.50 Toland was therefore intercepted by Friedrich Spanheim in Holland, who, anxious that Toland not be seen to be forwarding the idea that Sophia reside in England, diverted him to Berlin, where he arrived on 24 July 1702. There, according to his Account, dated 18 August 1702, Toland found a state exemplifying the connection he wished to draw between learning, toleration and commercial wealth. Encountering a king who was decidedly anti-French and pro-Protestant, and who had granted Toland audiences despite his having ‘no public station’, Toland

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was clearly smitten.51 The capital was aesthetically pleasing, and filled with public buildings that underwrote Frederick I’s commitment to the development of his realm, such that ‘in a few years Berlin will be one of the finest Citys that can be seen’.52 Underpinning this development was a willingness of the crown to accommodate ‘that great number of French refugees, and other persecuted Protestants, who have found here a most assur’d Protection and Sanctuary’.53 While this was economically beneficial to Prussia, for as Toland described the dynamic in mercantilist terms, ‘the more People, the more Consumption and Commerce, and therefore the more Riches, Revenues and Soldiers’, what was striking about Prussian attitudes to faith was that toleration was not limited to strangers and exiles.54 Rather, Toland painted a portrait of a haven of civility, where there existed an intire Liberty of Conscience … The Lutherans and the Calvinists live amicably together … Their Churches, I told you, were without any Marks of Distinction; and they are themselves indifferently prefer’d to Civil and Military Offices, according to their Merit or Recommendation, without any Brands of Infamy or Distrust on either side.55

This policy of latitude had a significant benefit at both the personal and the social level, reducing immorality and discord, for, Toland assumed ’tis very probable that they have fewer Hyorcites than where it is beneficial or detrimental to be of a certain Sect: and there is Demonstration that, supposing the Ministers of any Side shou’d grow uneasy, they cou’d never draw the Laity into their Quarrel who have already a full Liberty of worshipping God according to the Dictates of their Conscience.56

The capstone of this system – which was at least partially a projection of what Toland wished to see created in England was a Patriot King, one who evinced a profound concern for the public weal, which found expression in a well-maintained militia – again a long-time ambition of Toland for England; and in a determination to staff the court with virtuous men. As Toland explained, in contrast to his fears about the running of England, the King of Prussia employs the ablest Persons he can find, but by the fundamental Maxim of regulating his Affairs: for ‘tis his pleasure that every Man shou’d not only faithfully acquit himself of his Commissions, but that he confine and addict himself wholly to that, without forming any Cabals and privat Intrigues, or at all intermeddling in other People’s Business.57

The learned world of Prussia found its institutional hub in the library of the crown, and in the Prussian Academy, the Statutes of which Toland translated and published in 1705 for an English audience.58 However, the intellectual heart of the kingdom was to be found in the court and person of the Queen,

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Sophie Charlotte. A devotee of Leibniz, she had gathered about her ‘all that’s gay and polite’ and, Toland effused, while there ‘you may see a complete Harmony between what most of the World believe to be contrary if not extremes, I mean Learning and Mirth’. The queen was to favour Toland with audiences and learned conversation. According to his lengthy prose praise poem she was the most beautiful Princess of her Time, and who is second to no Person in the Justness of her Thoughts, the Delicacy of Expressions, or the Graces of Conversation. Her reading is infinit, and she is conversant in all manner of Subjects; nor is She more admir’d for her inimitable Wit, than for her exact Knowledg of the most abstruse parts of Philosophy: and (without flattering her high Dignity in the least) I must freely own that I never heard Objections more pertinently made, the Sophistry of an Argument quicker detected, not either the difficulty or weakness of any Opinion more easily penetrated by any other in my whole Life … She loves to see Strangers, and to inform herself of all that’s worthy or remarkable in their several Countrys and she has so just an Idea of Government, that in all Germany they call her the Republican Queen.59

Her untimely death from pneumonia in February 1705 left Toland to footnote that ‘those who had the Opportunity to know her true worth will forever mourn her life’.60 However brief, Toland’s encounter with Sophie Charlotte had made an impression, for in the debates he here described lay the origins of his Letters on Serena (1704), three of which were explicitly addressed to the queen of Prussia. Alongside espousing Toland’s long-held views concerning female equality of intellect and ability, which would have met with approval from the Queen, the letters also provide a glimpse into how heterodox the discussions that the freethinker conducted with the monarch had become. The three letters treated of religious prejudice, pagan attitudes to immortality and the origins of idolatry in turn. Two further letters addressed the philosophy of Spinoza, with Toland arguing, against him, that motion was essential to matter. This idea was deeply heterodox, for as Daniel C. Fouke recognizes ‘Matter made essentially active threatened to establish the autonomy of the natural order, and to make God superfluous’.61 However, for Toland the premise was critical, not only to the development of his ontology of the natural world, but also to his perception that all events and forms are interconnected and exist as part of a holistic system. The fourth letter in the sequence, addressed this time to a Gentleman in Holland, took the genre of a philosophical refutation, implying that in his critique of Spinoza Toland would effect a defence of orthodoxy. Associating Spinoza with Epicurus in the opening salvos buttressed this impression, as the Greek philosopher’s ideas were thought to underpin the materialist heterodoxies of both Spinoza and his forerunner Thomas Hobbes. Yet, Toland actually pushed the argument in a different direction, suggesting that in his thinking the Dutch-

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man had not been ambitious enough in thinking through the consequence of Epicurean thinking. In a surprising reversal, Toland adopts a criticism that had been levelled at his younger self, to suggest that the fault of his forerunner was his ‘immoderate Passion to become the Head of a Sect, to have Disciples and a new System of Philosophy honor’d with his Name’.62 Levelling this accusation in effect connects the two men, as well as providing a pretext for a rehearsal of the essential elements of Spinoza’s philosophy, drawing out the elements with which Toland was in broad argument. Thus he could observe how: He acknowledges but one Substance in the Universe, or that the Matter of all the things in the Universe is but one continu’d Being, everywhere of the same nature, however differently modify’d and endu’d with unchangeable, essential, and inseparable Attributes. Of these Attributes (which he supposes eternal as well as the Substance to which they belong) he reckons Extension and Cogitation to be the most principal; tho’ he supposes innumerable others which he has not bin at the pains to name. He has nowhere so much as insinuated that Motion was one of them.63

On the issue of movement in the natural world, Toland drew a distinction between ‘local motion’, which was no more than ‘a change in situation’, and ‘the Moving Force or Action’.64 The first was not troubling and merely the concern of mathematicians, the second quality, which was the concern of philosophers, concerned ‘the first Causes of the Origin of the World, its present Mechanism, or the Affections of Matter’.65 While accepting that the standard narrative was that ‘Matter being of itself inactive, a dull and heavy Lump, the Divinity (which was acknowleg’d distinct from this Matter) communicated Motion to it, tho’ after a manner exceeding Human Comprehension’, Toland suggested that this myth of the origin of motion was fallacious and tended towards superstition.66 Moreover, in a tendentious passage he concluded that if God is the cause of motion he is also ‘the Author of all the Wickedness in Nature, tho’ Motion were still but a Mode. ’Tis he, for example, that actually moves the Tongue of a lying Witness, the Hand and Dagger of a Murderer’.67 While Spinoza had at least accepted that there was ‘no Being separate or different from the Substance of the Universe, no Being to give it Motion, to continue or preserve it’ yet he did not travel to the logical conclusion of that insight and suggest that motion as inherent in objects.68 Instead he merely ‘builds on all the common Notions about local Motion, without ever showing any Cause of it’.69 As such Spinoza was merely a mathematician, whereas Toland’s ambition was to be a metaphysician, as he made plain when he opined, in a central passage in his thought, Motion is essential to Matter, that is to say, as inseparable from its Nature as Impenetrability or Extension, and that it ought to be made part of its Definition. But as in Matter we distinguish the Quantity of particular Bodys and the Extension of the

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A Political Biography of John Toland Whole, of which these Quantitys are but several Determinations or Modes, existing and perishing by their several Causes: so the better to be understood, I would have this Motion of the Whole be call’d the Action, and all local Motions, as direct or circular, fast or slow, simple or compounded, still be call’d Motion, being only the several changeable Determinations of the Action, which is always in the Whole, and in every Part of the same, and without which it cou’d not receive any Modifications. I deny that Matter is or ever was an inactive dead Lump in absolute Repose, a lazy and unwieldy thing.70

Crucially this quality of Action resided, Toland insisted, in all manifestations of nature, without exception. He asserted plainly that all the Matter in Nature, every Part and Parcel of it, has bin ever in motion, and can never be otherwise; that the Particles which lie in the midst of the most solid and bulky Rocks, in the heart of Iron Bars or Gold Ingots, are as well in constant Action as those of Fire or Air, or Water, tho’ not according to the same Determinations, nor in the same Degrees, no more than these last mention’d, compar’d among themselves: for this Action is equally natural and internal to them all, and to all other Classes of Matter in the Universe, tho’ their specific Motions be so various and different, which proceeds from their several ways of affecting one another.71

As well as being in motion, all matter is also interconnected, for as Toland then informs his correspondent when challenged on the matter. Although he accepts that matter does subdivide into diverse forms from planetary bodies through to ‘Men, Birds, Beasts, Trees, Plants, Fishes, Worms, Insects, Stones, Metals, and a thousand other differences’ he also contended As all these depend in a Link one on another, so their Matter (to speak in the usual Language) is mutually resolv’d into each other: for Earth and Water and Air and Fire are not only closely blended and united, but likewise interchangeably transform’d in a perpetual Revolution, Earth becoming Water, Water, Air, Air Aether, and so back again in Mixtures without End or Number. The Animals we destroy contribute to preserve us, till we are destroy’d to preserve other things, and become Grass, or Plants, or Water, or Air, or something else that helps to make other Animals, and they one another, or other Men: and these again turn into Stone, or Wood, or Metals, or Minerals or Animals again, or become Parts of all these and of a great many other Things, Animals and Vegetables daily consuming and devouring each other; so true is it that everything lives by the Destruction of another.72

This passage supplies a remarkable vision of an integrated, self-sustaining, selfreplicating natural environment in which cyclical development occurs with matter metamorphosing from one form to another through a process of creative destruction. It echoes Lucretius and as Margaret Jacob pithily remarks, it imagines a world in which ‘all beings are somehow united and have existed eternally; their union is not static but dynamic, and all things become one’.73 The theme of the text is thus ontological unity.

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In political terms, the crucial aspect to this pantheistic line of reasoning was that it produced a self-sustaining, integrated holistic system in which all elements were related to each other. There was no requirement for an external agency and no deity was needed to animate the world, who could reshape the rules according to whim or wisdom. Unlike a despotism, in which the will of the monarch was acceded to, Toland was here providing a universe that accorded with his republican Commonwealth ideals, in which every citizen played a part, and the mixed constitution of king, Lords and Commons was a self-regulating, self-correcting system that promulgated liberty of opinion and action, and not slavery to the will of magistrates, clerics and kings. This holistic system also provided an ontological basis for Toland conspiratorial tendencies, for it proposed that the universe was indeed constituted of intricate, often unseen connections which might be discerned by the learned and the curious. In its schema there was simply no recourse to the miraculous, the deus ex machina, or the special providence of God’s will. To explain an occurrence, the world itself sufficed. The task was to reveal the hidden connections that underpinned action, to identify the cabal, to reveal the plot and expose the conspiracy that had driven events in a particular direction. So too the mechanism for change was understood to be destruction; politics can thus be envisioned as an existential conflict between world systems. The plotters are endeavouring to destroy your world and enliven their own. The battle is thus one for survival. In these ways, the Letters to Serena expressed Toland’s conspiratorial ontology.

III. The fallout from the Reasons for Addressing his Majesty was personal as well as political. Certainly the continental sojourns had staved off a recognition of the damage Toland’s intervention had made to his English reputation. He returned to England by July 1704: a report submitted to Harley notes how ‘They say John Toland is in England, and hard at work with his pen’.74 Yet despite Harley’s appointment as Secretary of State on 18 May 1704, as part of a Triumvirate that included Marlborough and Godolphin, the centrality of his patron magnified the sense of isolation from the locus of power, as Toland’s indiscretion towards the new Queen stopped up a lucrative source of monies on which he had relied. Despite a cooling of the relationship following Toland’s adoption of Harley, he did not baulk at petitioning the Earl of Shaftesbury for help, with the Earl’s patience wearing thin. Although in the letter to the Quaker leader William Penn requesting Harley’s favour, he stated that ‘to say it fair, my support has been owing to the generosity and esteem of the Earl of Shaftesbury’, in fact Shaftesbury eventually rejected Toland’s advances, complaining to a correspondent of

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how his ‘prophane and loose ways overbalance all the good (I think) that either he has done or can do, unless he reforms much more’.75 Editorial jobs kept Toland afloat through his period of political oblivion. He issued a version of The Fables of Aesop (1704), with Toland inserting a letter highlighting his relationship with the freethinker Anthony Collins, by whom he had been asked to perform the translation from French of a revisionist life of Aesop. That life recuperated Aesop’s reputation from the damage done by a Christian account of the heathen writer, arguing in a passage that resonates with the power of a refracted self-portrait: Aesop, from an obscure Birth and servile Condition, has acquir’d an everlasting Fame, raising himself by his own Merits, to the Dignity of a Philosopher and Statesman. But he further clearly proves, that he was so far from being dull and slow of Conception, harsh and stammering in Speech, distorted, maim’d or monstrous in his Person, and a bugbear or a laughingstock for Children, that he was a very handsome and comely Man, of an admirable and quick Genius, a great lover and skilful performer of Musick, and an adroit polite Courtier, having been both a Minister and a Favourite of a mighty Monarch.76

This was followed by the 1705 edition of Créquinière’s, The Agreement of the Customs of the East Indians with those of the Jews and Other Ancient People. A book of comparative ethnography which questioned the authority of the ancients, as Pierre Lurbe concludes: ‘there is no doubt the book contains much material that John Toland might have found congenial to his own purposes and interests’.77 In particular it began an extensive engagement with Judaic history, even as it diminished its authority – and hence that of Christianity – by placing it in a wider context of transnational faith.78 The sequence also included an edition of the Statutes of the Prussian Royal Academy (1705) and concluded with the issue in Latin and in English of Matthew Schinner’s A Phillipick Oration to Incite the English against the French in 1707, which drew Toland back to formal politics.79 Dedicated to Queen Anne, the intention of the book, as Toland expressed it, was to provide ‘unanswerable reasons against making Peace overhastily with the French; but likewise [he published it] as being a magnificent Encomium of the English Nation and Government’.80 The ambition was clearly to provide hawkish propaganda during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). In 1707 and 1708, the inability of the French to sustain the losses they had incurred left them briefly suing for peace, and Toland was not minded to compromise with the Catholic power. The period from late 1704 to 1707 also saw Toland attempt to recommence his relationship with Harley. Indeed Pierre Des Maizeaux suggests that it was Harley who ‘accidently found among some other Manuscripts a Piece call’d Oratio ad excitandos contra Galliam Britanos, [and] he communicated it to Mr Toland, who published it in the beginning of 1707’.81 As he readily admitted

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in 1705 when petitioning the eminent Quaker William Penn to be sent to the Holy Roman Empire as a spy for the administration. ‘I protest to you’ he averred, by all that’s awful, that I have not spoke one word to Mr Harley, nor received one letter or message from him, nor sent any to him since King William died [8 March 1702]. And in this particular, I frankly confess, that from prudential considerations I acted by constraint against my own judgment; I mean in breaking off conversation and correspondence with a person of signal abilities and excellent learning, by whom a man in my circumstances could mightily improve, as before I freely acknowledge to have done. But this affected strangeness was merely to prevent the vile aspersions of others either against him or myself, which yet I was not able to accomplish.82

In this same letter, Toland also disclaimed any relationship with Lord Somers and Lord Halifax, while taking the chance to reiterate what he thought of as his essential political position. ‘I ever was and will be for a free Government’, he proclaimed, and against what is arbitrary and despotic; which is to say, I prefer standing and indifferent Laws to the uncertain and byast will of any Prince. But concerning the several forms of free Government (which are all good in their kinds, tho’ not all equally so) I justly think our own mixt Constitution to be the best that is now extant anywhere.83

In contrast he expressed his continued concern about the fracturing of the political nation that had resulted from the party divisions between Whig and Tory, and reserving particular scorn for those court Whigs who had abandoned what he still understood as the True Whig position over parliamentary elections and the standing army enunciated by Grecian Whigs. Indeed when the Junto was defeated by Harley’s Country party adoption of True Whig measures, ‘so enrag’d were these undertakers at their surprising disappointment that they never forgave those Whigs who had the honesty and firmness to adhere to their old principals’.84 This anger was in part a rationale for the discrediting of Toland’s personal reputation, which he recognized now ensured that Harley had to keep him at a measured distance. Still, Toland expressed a desire to both be rewarded for past service and to take up a useful post again. He pleaded with Penn to intervene with Harley on his behalf to allow Toland to take up any post ‘that he shall think me fit to serve the Queen or himself; for I am certain beforehand that it will be on such a foot as is agreeable to my principles, and for the particular benefit of the Succession’.85 He even went so far as to suggest the role of private German correspondent, for This I fancy wou’d be of some advantage both for the Queen’s service and theirs, and the secret will be kept inviolable, so long as it shall be thought necessary to do so; for I have pretences enough to go into that Country on my own account, as to make an ampler Description of it, or for any other plausible interest. For my Appointment, I

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A Political Biography of John Toland shall be well content that it be paid me quarterly and it be continued no longer than I shall be judg’d to deserve the same or better.86

Central to this process of recuperation in the eyes of Harley was The Memorial of the State of England, which emerged in October 1705. Toland had chosen to dedicate the work to Godolphin, whose recent administration the tract defended, but he also took the chance openly to praise Harley, a gesture informed by the electoral contest then underway for the Speakership of the House of Commons.87 Toland later claimed that Harley had promised to recompense him for all his effort by making him keeper of the paper office, a sinecure worth £400 per annum. If made, the promise was certainly not kept, but occasional payments from Harley’s political war chest did occur, and may have halted the slide into poverty. As Toland admitted to Harley, ‘You have supplied me now for two whole years out of your own pocket, in diet, clothes, lodging and all other expenses; for whatever some might imagine, I had no other resource in the world but your protection and friendship’.88 The Memorial was a plea for Protestant unity based on the triangulation policy that Harley had adopted in secular matters. In extending this tactic to spiritual concerns, Toland set up a polarity that saw the Presbyterians and the Catholics as extremes poles outside the Church of England which were expressed by Puritan and High Church factions within that establishment.89 Constructively, this was to favour a latitudinarian approach to religious politics in which the capstone was a policy of toleration. The key to this was an understanding at once that while dissenters were not part of the established church – and never had been, saving them from the slur of being schismatic – their social power was so low and their shared reformed heritage implied that Christian decency demanded that the Church extend its protective wing over them so long as they did not disrupt the political settlement. The same munificence could not be awarded to Roman Catholics, whose desire to reassert hegemony and wider social and political power across Europe ensured that they remained a threat; as Toland expressed it, all Protestants are convinced that the Papists have been carrying on a Conspiracy against the Reformation in England and consequently against the State, ever since we abolish’d Papacy … They have endeavour’d to execute this Plot in many ways: But God has always defeated their mischievous designs, and sometimes wonderfully deliver’d us when our recovery was thought impossible.90

A further component of the complex edifice of spiritual and secular observation was that within the Church of England, neither extreme wing of the movement, be it High Church or Puritan, properly articulated the Anglican tradition. Indeed, in the case of the High Churchmen, Toland was impertinent enough to deny them a place within the Anglican fold at all, declaring, ‘the High Church is not the Church of England, but a certain number of Clergymen and Laymen

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who are either favourers of Popery or who are adverse to our mixt Government and her Majesty’s Right’.91 Instead it was the Erastian tradition that properly represented the Church of England’s broad religious purview. Indeed, from its very origins as a national church, the tendency was to encompass ‘all the Protestants of England without distinction, tho’ from the very first they were divided in their Opinions’.92 In other words, it was the latitudinarian tendency – ‘men of wide swallow’ as they had once been contemptuously designated – that were the essence of the Anglican settlement: more specifically this was to praise the bishops of the Upper House of Convocation to the detriment of the priests that composed the Lower House who had tried to have Toland eviscerated in 1702. Politically, the Memorial offered a similar triangulation to effect a defence of Harley’s compromise. Whereas the High Church tendency was enamoured with monarchical power, and the Puritans were mesmerized by democratic agency that threatened anarchy, the Country party Whigs Toland spoke for favoured a moderate settlement. ‘The Whigs’, he insisted, ‘maintain That all good Governments are (under God) originally from the Choice of the People’. The insertion is vital here in generating a sense of balance for at its extremes power emanated from the highest monarch and the lowest citizen. Yet, in brokering a viable position between the two, he continued: No Government is good which does not consist of Laws, by which the Magistrates are restrain’d and regulated no less than the Subjects for their common Happiness. This End of all Society they think may be compass’d by several Methods, Means and Forms, since the Sovereign Authority is safely and commodiously lodg’d in a few or many Hands; and, among the rest, they like none so well as our own mix’d Form of King, Lords and Commons, the latter being purely Elective, the Second absolutely Hereditary, and the First partaking of both.93

The tract was a success as Toland gleefully reported to Harley on 14 December 1705, even garnering the attention of the very highest portion of the state. ‘It is no small satisfaction to me’ he declared, ‘that the judgement of the Queen, the Parliament and the Ministry do so unanimously concur with the Book which (under your protection) I have publish’d for their Service and which has met with all the success and reputation that any Author cou’d wish.’94 Explicitly written against a Tory pamphlet Toland’s Memorial was itself attacked in turn; while Toland wrote he did not publish a rejoinder.95 Yet it was another blown assignment that may have ensured that Toland’s recuperation with Harley was not achieved at this juncture, for as he was to whinge in a letter to the politician as late as 16 May 1707: I own myself disappointed; for this time two years I made sure of some preferment before now, not only because my Lord Treasurer was pleased to promise I should be taken care of when he received so favourably my letter to Mr Penn, and by reason of

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A Political Biography of John Toland the particular service I was generally acknowledged to have done him in writing The Memorial of the State, with the further pains I was at in making My Lord Marlborough’s Defence, it being none of my fault that it was not published, though without receiving as much as copy money for either; but likewise because I think myself as much more deserving on many other accounts not fit to be named at present, and a great deal more capable in all respects, than several in the long list of such as have been employed in that space of time.96

This circumstance was aggravated by his reliance on occasional payment from the politician and the perception that ‘truly all the world are persuaded you are my patron, and look on me as your creature’.97

IV. This period of political isolation also saw Toland make public his conversion to Anglicanism. As early as the publication of Anglia Libera he had associated himself with the Church of England. He there declared, rather uncharacteristically, that after the most deliberate Consideration, my real Opinion is what I have already deliver’d in this Section; and that for very good Reasons it is my fixt Intention never hereafter to ingage in religious Controversies, unless for any Thing already past I receive such Provocations as may justify my Conduct. But I also declare that my approving the National Church, and owning myself a member of the same, I do not think it a Doctrine of this Church to persecute or disturb those of another Religion which does not teach or practice anything that’s cruel, immoral or profane.98

If this sounded rather half-hearted and limited, he was soon to expand on his stance. First of all, in the wake of the renewed controversy surrounding Christianity not Mysterious and the response of the Lower House of Convocation, Toland wrote two letters to that body’s Prolocutor, the dean of Canterbury, the High churchman George Hooper, later bishop of Bath and Wells.99 Reproduced in Vindicius Liberius these epistles protested Toland’s orthodoxy and announced ‘I own myself a Member’ of the established church, ‘as finding it, after due Consideration, to be the best in the World, tho’ in many Respects coming short of Perfection’.100 He then declared that It will not be long before I have the Opportunity to acquaint the Public with my Reasons for this Profession, both to undeceive those who are pleased to question my Religion in general and because I adher’d to no peculiar Society before, but only occasionally join’d with all Protestants indifferently, against the Superstition, Idolatry and Tyranny of Popery.101

Toland made good of this promise in The Principle of the Protestant Reformation Explained, published in 1704. Although anonymous, it can be attributed to

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Toland on the grounds that, as was common practice for him, it puffed another of his works, in this case he wrote of how his correspondent ‘told me that you very much liked a certain Book which you had lately Read, call’d Christianity not Mysterious. And I must own to your Ladyship as touching that Book, it shews its Writer to be a Man of Letters and of Great Vivacity of Wit’.102 Although it then disclaimed his reduction of faith, admitting himself to be ‘very ignorant of very common things, and this was the Case of Mr Toland when he was drawn into the Delusion of writing that book’, this may be merely self-effacing.103 Addressing a ‘Noble Lady’, The Principle formally asked as to the necessity of communion taking; a politically charged issue given the passage of a Test clause in Ireland in that year which demanded the public receipt of Communion to qualify for offices in the Corporations. Pushing scripture to its logical boundaries, Toland, if it is his work, pithily observed that ‘Judas had as much Communion with the holy Jesus as the others [the Apostles] had, and was present at the last Supper with the Rest. Altho’ in that same Night he betray’d his Master’.104 From this tendentious reading of the issue he brusquely concluded: ‘You may see that Communion with our Saviour Christ himself in Person is not any certain Mark of a good Christian’.105 Rather what was required was not an external show of uniformity, but a concord within with the tenets of the faith; he then claimed that ‘upon the same Account, you or I may deserve the same Name’.106 In prioritizing individual conviction over social recognition Toland drew a sharp distinction between a Christian and a ‘Churchman, as it may likewise so fall out, that a good Churchman may be no Christian, unless it be in name only’.107 Drawing on a favoured theme in his critique of priestcraft, he then complained of how ‘tis apparent that nothing is more contrary to the Christian Principle than Persecution for matter of Religion, and yet all sorts of Churchmen have, in their turn, favoured Persecution’.108 While on these grounds he dismissed Roman Catholicism as intrinsically ‘Anti-Christian, and so shut out of this Question’ he still rejected the significance of ceremonies as ‘in themselves indifferent’.109 Indeed, he proposed instead that ‘In short, a Man may love God and his Neighbour, tho’ there were no Bishop, Priest or Deacon, no Form of Prayer, Ceremony, or Church Assembly in the World’.110 Communion was, to his mind, no more than an act of ‘affectionate remembrance of our Lord and Saviour, by the Signs of our Bread and Wine’.111 Sadly, this ‘plain institution (by the power of Priestcraft) grew up into such a Mystery as is not only above, but contrary to all Sense and Reason’.112 In contrast to the innovative system in which clerics could determine who might participate in the Sacrament, Toland insisted that primitive Christianity understood communion to be ‘a religious Conversation of Christians one amongst others [which] … may be kept up among Christians without Priest or Altar, or any set Form of Prayer or Praise’.113

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All of this then granted, Toland did provide one justification for taking communion in the national church – namely social expediency. In realizing that the norms of the society often made it easier to participate in the religious ceremonials that the state supported, he argued from bitter experience of religious controversy, if a Man intends to pass his Life easily in any Christian Country, ’twill be necessary for him to own the Communion of that Church, which is in Fashion in that Couyntry where he lives; for neither the Priesthood nor People will suffer him to live well with them upon any other Terms; and therefore since your dwelling is in England, ’twill be highly expedient for you to joyn yourself in publick Communion to the Church by Law Established.114

Once again the demands of national unity were foregrounded in Toland’s thinking, making the public profession of faith a necessary component of good citizenship, even while reserving private judgement on the necessity of the practice – he made another distinction between matters of ‘conscience’ which were integral to Christianity, and those that were matters of ‘persuasion’ or inessential to faith.115 After all, if ceremonies were in fact inessential, then the taking of them was more a political gesture than a spiritual one, and could be performed in good conscience. As he wryly reflected ‘perhaps no wise Man was ever very Zealous either for, or against, indifferent things’.116 As he opined in his treatment of the issue, the Church of England at least had the practical advantage of being ‘most agreeable to the Laws of the Land, and to the Genius of the People’ and avoided the temptation of pride that he thought indicated ‘peevish and Schismatical temper of Mind’.117 Thus, despite his pronounced reservations, by 1707 Toland had certainly taken communion in the Anglican creed. He wrote to an unidentified clergyman of his concern that while I’m so much accustom’d to the hard and undeserv’d usage of some men, that now it moves me not in the least; yet I was strangely surpriz’d to hear you censur’d by some of your brethren up the country, as if you had reciev’d a bribe to give me the Sacrament, which shews at once their ignorance and their malice: their ignorance in imagining you cou’d deny it me, and their malice in belying you after so base a manner.118

He then expanded on his motive for taking the Sacrament, recalling how, in a thoughtful passage of self-reflection, he had presumed there needed no other qualification (I hope) than being dispos’d as the Rubric directs; and the bare act of receiving it ought to convince all charitable persons of my veneration for it: since I look upon it to be the public sign whereby we commemorate the death of Jesus Christ, the founder of our Religion, engage ourselves to obey his Laws, and declare our hopes to enter the benefits of same. I differ from you and others who think the Sacrament to be a means of conveying grace, which if it be an error, has been profest to the world by many eminent Divines of our Church, and was never thought a sufficient bar to Communion.119

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Toland protested on 6 March 1707 to no less a figure than Thomas Tension, the Archbishop of Canterbury (who had been the Low Church leader of the Upper House of Convocation during the debates surrounding Toland’s heterodoxy in 1701) that his character was now ‘very different from what it has now formerly been, as is still represented to be by those who do not know me, or are not willing I shou’d make a better use of my reason and experience’.120 Yet paradoxically, it was the same period that saw Toland issue a translation of a book review penned by Jean Le Clerc under the title Socinianism Truly Stated.121 Its subtitle gave some relation of the purpose for it was intended to support ‘fair Dealing in all Theological Controversys’. The prefatory letter marked a breakthrough in Toland’s thinking about the problem of religious orthodoxy, as it was here he first availed of the term ‘Pantheist’ to describe those who followed his creed of belief in ecclesiological toleration and scriptural scepticism.122 The preface itself, which claimed to be written by a Pantheist to an Orthodox Friend, bemoaned the tendency of people involved in controversy to deem winning the row more important than uncovering the truth, for, as he bitterly remarked: ‘I scarce ever knew a Persecutor that believ’d a tittle of any Religion; so far are their Officiousness, Vexations and Crueltys, from being only the mischievous effects of a mistaken Persuasion, which is a good-natur’d Excuse that is commonly made for those Men-devouring Monsters, who themselves have no Humanity, to make allowances for the Education or the Capacity, for the Simplicity or Sincerity of others’.123 The letter also offered subtle paradox based on the competing desires and temperaments of the two correspondents. ‘You’ Toland observed, who so carefully avoided all Disputes cou’d never enjoy any Tranquillity, occasion’d by your concern for the differences in others; and that I, who industriously engag’d myself in the Consideration of all their Quarrels, was nevertheless extremely easy and unconcern’d. The reason of these contrary Dispositions in two who agree in most other things, I take to be that you, who no less expect than wish to see the different Partys reconcil’d, must needs have a Detestation for everything that widens their Breaches or retards their Union; and that I, who despair of any Uniformity in Men’s Opinions or Practices (which I hold to be Impossible) must needs be pleas’d with examining the Grounds of those Notions, and the Springs of those Actions, which tho I cannot help or prevent, yet give me a further Knowledge of Human Nature.124

This passage offers in succinct terms Toland’s diagnosis of the underlying assumptions lying behind religious orthodoxy and the demand for uniformity. It is indicative of his character that he concluded the assessment with the view that ‘I think our whole Difference to be that you represent Mankind to yourself, such as they ought to be, and that I consider ’em but just as they are’ a phrasing that pointedly echoed the approach of the bête noire of the Anglican church, Thomas Hobbes, and which he then reiterated by raising the question of whether ‘a universal Peace be possible or a Perpetual War be unavoidable.’125 Indeed, despite his

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proclaimed acceptance of the Church of England, Toland was still determined to push the boundaries of theological acceptability. It was a tendency that was to become even more pronounced as he left England once again.

V. Another visit to the continent was undertaken in the summer and autumn of 1707, initially in the company of freethinker Anthony Collins. Prior to the journey Toland protested to Harley in May 1707 that As to my going for about six weeks out of the kingdom, I do assure you sir, by all the professions I have already made, that I am not going nor shall go either to Berlin or Hanover, nor upon any account or errand whatsoever relating to these courts, as some foolish people might insinuate to you after my departure … But I am really going over on the pressing invitation of some particular friends in the seven provinces, that love my person and favour my studies, There are arcana literaria among us which I hope may divert your leisure hours.126

This however was not the itinerary he actually kept, as he was to leave the United Provinces and venture as far as Vienna and Prague, in all probability seeking out manuscripts and rare books for a number of learned patrons. While in Prague, in January 1708, he approached the Irish Franciscan friary at Prague in search of an official statement of his heritage. The Latin document declared that We whose names are below testify in writing that Mr John Toland originates from a good, noble and ancient family, who have lived for many hundreds of years as history and the continuing memory of the kingdom shows, in the peninsula of Inishowen, near Londonderry in Ulster. To affirm this stronger, we who come from the same country, have written this in our own hands at Prague in Bohemia, on this day 2 January 1708.

It was signed by, ‘John O’Neill, Superior of the Irish College, Francis O’Devlin, Professor of Theology, [and] Rudolph O’Neill, Lecturer in Theology’.127 Although Toland was prone to gathering statements of orthodoxy of this kind, the specific matter at hand may have been less to do with his theological colour than aspersions cast on his parentage by the French bishop Pierre Daniel Huet.128 Certainly Toland reciprocated the kindness offered by the Franciscans by recommending Francis O’Devlin to either Prince Eugene of Savoy or his aide de camp, Baron von Hofendorf, not doubting by my own experience, but that during his stay in Vienna, you’ll not only favour him with your protection (he being a good imperialist, without which I wou’d not espouse him) and be ready to forward or countenance him in all lawful occasions. But I am confident his own merit will prevail farther than anything I can say in his behalf.129

Hanover, 1701–7

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Having arrived in Berlin, against the intentions stated to Harley, Pierre Des Maizeaux relates that he was involved in ‘an incident too ludicrous to be mentioned in these memoirs’ and removed rapidly to Hanover, where again he had promised Harley not to go, and doubled his offence by claiming while there that he was sent on an errand by the politician. Toland, as one correspondent told Harley on 11 October 1707, ‘has given out that he was employed by you’ following on from a report from the court at Hanover.130 Another account provided: an account of Toland’s arrival there and that the Electress receives him three or four hours every afternoon in private, and that this scandalous fellow pretends to come from several people of quality in England. He was gone to Wolfenbüttel when the last letters came away but was to return in a few days to Hanover.131

Nor could Toland manage to enjoy the favour of the Hanoverian court for very long. A debate over orthodoxy with the court chaplain resulted in a general admonition being issued by the Grand Chamberlain and his eventual separation from the Electress. From Hanover, he progressed to Dusseldorf, to meet with the Elector Palatine, who awarded him with ‘a Golden China and Medal, and a purse of a hundred Ducats’ for writing The Declaration Lately Publish’d in Favour of his Protestant Subjects by the Elector Palatine.132 The opening passage opined that the Elector had been the cause of significant misinformation, asserting, in a fashion which once again evidenced Toland’s fascination with unlikely connections and unity of purpose: It seems to me to be a very natural Enquiry, and highly becoming such as observe publick Transactions, to examine how far those Potentates, with whom we are under any Tie of Friendship or Alliance are Encouragers of the same generous Sentiments … for a considerable space no Prince did more take up the Thoughts or Discourses of the latter, than his Highness the Elector Palatine, whose Subjects are divided in their Religion, there being Calvinist, Lutheran and Popish Churches in his Dominions, and he himself being not only of the Persuasion of the Last but represented as the Persecutor of the first, in most of our Newspapers, and in many other Publick Writings. But the Result of my Diligent and impartial Enquiry has in short been this, That the Elector neither is, nor ever was a Persecutor, tho’ the Protestants , whose grievances he has lately redress’d have suffer’d by other hands more than either Law or Gospel cou’d warrant.133

Key to this remarkable and singularly positive defence of a Catholic in Toland’s oeuvre was his conviction that the Elector displayed ‘extraordinary Zeal and Common Cause against the exorbitant Power of the French King, to whose Fury and Resentments he’s so immediately expos’d’.134 In the War of the Spanish Succession, the enemy of Toland’s enemy was to be recruited as a friend, however

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implausibly. Here – at least – his hawkish foreign policy tipped him over into inconsistency.135 After his sojourn in Vienna and Prague, Toland was intending to return to England. However, his peregrination took on a new character when Harley fell from power in February 1708, having failed to construct a bipartisan administration.136 Suddenly the fear of fracture and disconnection had been realised and Toland was effectively in not actually in exile. He chose to stay in the Netherlands until Harley regained his position, which did not occur until August 1710.

4 THE HAGUE, 1708–10

Holland was a European seedbed for conspiracies. It was not only the Williamite intrusion of 1688 that was devised in part in Dutch circles, for the exile community of Whigs had dreamt of a revolution since at least the early 1680s. In particular the circle of activists surrounding the first Earl of Shaftesbury (and containing John Locke) was complicit in the Rye House plot in 1683; they retreated to Holland on discovery of the plan. The subsequent Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 underlined this group’s commitment to the transformation of England’s political character and Holland’s status as a refuge for the revolutionary republican movement.1 Holland was also a European hotbed of conspiracy theory. The Rye House plotters were committed to a theory of politics that was infused with a vocabulary of plots, invasions, assassinations and combinations. Indeed they committed themselves to what Ashcraft terms a code language. Certain key words and phrases were used by them, and only by them, since the use of these words revealed very clearly the ideological commitment of radicalism. This terminology spoke of ‘an invasion of rights’, ‘usurpation’, ‘tyranny’, the king’s ‘betrayal of trust, his use of ‘violence and force against us’, the fact that he had ‘degenerated into a beast’ and so forth. It is, and was meant to be a violent language. It was intended to convey to others that a state of war already existed, launched by the king, who was therefore the true ‘rebel’, ‘thief ’ or ‘traitor’.2

Nor were the English alone in situating their conspiratorial politics in Holland. In the wake of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 Amsterdam and The Hague became the rendezvous of a large Huguenot community, which railed against the conspiracy of absolutist power personified by Louis XIV and which was challenged by a Dutch Republic which the French King repeatedly confronted in armed conflict. In their scholarly endeavours the Huguenot exiles expanded the boundaries of accepted theological discursive practice, availing of historical methodology to interrogate the scriptures and to question the orthodoxies of Catholicism and, on occasion, Calvinism and even sectarian identities such as Quakerism. They found a wellspring and their extreme manifestation in the writings of Toland’s inspiration Benedict Spinoza, whose Tractatus Theolog– 89 –

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ico-Politicus (1670) and Ethics (1677) scandalized and invigorated the Republic of Letters across the continent.3 So too this exiled Republic of Letters community cohered around norms of sociability and trust, in which learning served to accentuate and underpin claims to authority.4 In this the Republic of Letters took form in clubs and associations; learned institutions and informal gatherings. This wave of émigrés was supplemented by politically disaffected English and German activists; indeed Pierre Des Maizeaux was a central conduit of ideas between the French and English, living at times in London and contributing to Dutch-based French-language periodicals.5 In both ways, Holland provided convivial soil for Toland’s ideas, a place where they could germinate, grow and flower. He found the republican politics to which the community was committed appealing and the rationalist interrogation of scripture conducted there highly stimulating. He clearly loved staying there. In Anglia Libera he swooned over the landscape and the urban conurbations he found there, proclaiming No other Place can proportionably equal the Number and Beauty of their Cities, the various Improvements of their Country, their flourishing Colonies abroad, their immense Trade and Riches, their Armies by Land, their Fleets at Sea and the eminent Rank which they bear among other Princes and States in all the known Regions of the Earth.6

This material wealth was twinned with a moral richness, for Toland was equally quick to extol the history of the country as a haven for the persecuted and a beacon of liberty in the dark landscape of Absolutist Europe. ‘Since its first Foundation it has bin the principal Seat of Liberty and Truth’, he maintained, praising how it has bin the Refuge of the miserable and persecuted of every Country; afforded a sure Protection to those of all Persuasions, who fled from the Tyranny of their native Princes; and ever promoted the Common Good, the Freedom, and Quiet of Europe. No People in History have more gloriously asserted and maintain’d their Liberty, with greater Resolution, or equal Courage.7

In thinking about this heritage, he was aware that he was reflecting on his own intellectual inheritance, for as he admitted, There’s Scarce a Family in England that formerly appear’d on the Behalf of Liberty, but owes its Preservation, or that of the principal Persons in it, to the secure Retreat afforded them by that generous Republic and their Hospitality and Assistance to those Gentlemen in Distress, are still gratefully remembered by themselves or their Relations, which makes ’em now to be doubly concern’d about the Safety of their Protectors.8

The Hague, 1708–10

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And, in 1708, when Harley had been removed and Toland was persona non grata at the English and German courts; politically isolated and exposed, he settled in The Hague. He spent the next two years thinking, writing, talking and waiting for his fortunes to change.

I. This was not Toland’s first recourse to the Dutch Republic. Indeed his engagement with the ideas fermenting there dated back to his days as a student, when he finished his formal studies with a brief visit to the country in 1692 and 1693 under the patronage of Daniel Williams and the Presbyterians of London. He matriculated as a student of theology at Leiden University on 1 November 1692 and again on 26 March 1693 and 9 March 1694, this last at a time when he was apparently already back in London.9 While his stay was foreshortened, Toland still took the opportunity to circulate among the learned circles made available to him. He clearly met with the Socinian theologians Jean Le Clerc and Philip Van Limborch.10 On return to England he carried a book of the first for inspection by the Lord Privy Seal and works of the second for Locke.11 In his encounters with Socinian thinkers, Toland was inducted into the grammar, vocabulary and method of critical biblical scholarship. Framed by the writings of Richard Simon and Pierre Bayle, there was an extensive and intensive debate being conducted over the application of historical method to the Bible. In this, Le Clerc and Van Limborch were both advocates of the approach, with the consequence that as well as secularising scripture it was possible to secularise the figure of Christ. In Jonathan Israel’s brisk assessment, Le Clerc was ‘Europe’s most tenacious protagonist of rationalist Christian theology’, while Le Clerc, Limborch and Locke saw their quest to reduce Christian belief to a wholly rational core of fundamenta, which they considered empirically grounded and essentially ‘reasonable’, fencing off a sphere of the miraculous centring around Christ’s miracles and the Resurrection, the best defence against philosophical incredulity.12

While they never pushed the logic of this argument into a treatment of Christ and the accusation of Socinianism was largely misplaced, Toland was to be less heedful of the sensitivities of orthodoxy, while drawing inspiration from their rationalist approach to scripture. At the centre of this network sat the Quaker merchant Benjamin Furly, whose acquaintance included Jean Le Clerc, Phillip Limborch, John Locke, Anthony Collins, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Charles Levier and Jean Aymon; all of whom had connections of different qualities with Toland in turn.13 A first generation Quaker, who had published works in the 1650s (one of which

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was with George Fox, the leading Quaker) and in the 1660s in defence of the movement, he had settled in Amsterdam and then, from 1659, in Rotterdam.14 His individualistic streak emerged in the ‘Hat controversy’ in which he sided with the Quaker renegades in deeming hat honour to be an inessential matter, although he eventually recognized the authority of the Society of Friends over the issue. By 1691 however, he was estranged from the movement as Furly found their social practices inherently restrictive, and deemed it necessary to follow the light of the individual conscience. Furly’s house, which was initially used for Quaker meetings, was opened to visitors from 1663, and Furly quickly became a mainstay of the exiled Whig community in Holland. He was close to Algernon Sidney – whose Court Maxims may have been composed under his roof – and John Locke – who lived with Furly from 1687 to 1689 – composed both the Two Treatises of Government and the Essay concerning Human Understanding in his home. Furly’s library, which contained 4,200 books as detailed in an auction catalogue, was a site of intellectual exchange, and through correspondence, he was able to insert it into a network of private collections. As Champion has observed of the interlocking relationship that existed between Furly, Locke and Anthony Collins, All three men owned large and extensive collections of books: each man had a different set of contacts into the world of print. Furly was best connected in the Low Countries being intimate with libraires like Renier Leers, Wettstein and Johnson. Locke conducted most of his business through Awnsham Churchill, while Collins, through the agency of Pierre Des Maizeaux, had efficient relations with French booksellers in London like [Paul] Vaillant and [Pierre] Du Noyer.15

Through Furly, Toland had been able to access these collections, becoming a close friend of Anthony Collins – he travelled with him to Hanover in 1707, failed to return books he had borrowed, and Collins held a body of Toland manuscripts as the catalogue of his library dating 1720 documents.16 If the relationship to Locke was rather more frosty – with Locke distrusting Toland’s tendency to selfpromotion in social settings – these connections were vital to Toland’s claim to scholarly authority and to his capacity to hunt out manuscripts and rare books.17 Certainly Furly shared some of Locke’s doubts about Toland. On 19 August 1693, Furly provided Locke with a brief character sketch of the young Irishman: I find him to be a free spirited ingenious man; that quitted the Papacy in James’ time when all men of no principles were looking towards it; and having once cast off the yoak of spiritual authority, that great bugbear, and bane of ingenuity, he could never be persuaded to bow his neck to that yoak again, by whomseoever claymed; this has rendered it somewhat difficult for him to find a way of subsistence in the world, and made him ask my counsel in the case: I told him I knew no way for him but to find out some free ingenious English gentleman that might have an occasion for a Tutor in his family.18


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This reputation was clearly confirmed by subsequent events in Ireland, and in 1699, when Toland revisited Holland, he found the atmosphere rather altered. On his art he had clearly sustained his interest in developments there, as in 1697 he had translated Le Clerc’s irenic Treatise on the Causes of Incredulity; but by 1699 and in the wake of the scandal surrounding Christianity Not Mysterious, both Le Clerc and Limborch were anxious to create a sense of distance between them and the Irish provocateur.19 It was possibly on this visit that Toland made himself known to Charles de la Motte, who reported to Des Maizeaux in 1707 that his dealings had been less than satisfactory. Warning Des Maizeaux against any relationship with Toland, he pronounced I am angered that you have given money to Toland; I fear greatly for your two works. I have formerly known the man here, but he has so misbehaved that I have refused to see him on the travels he has made since. He owes money to several people of my acquaintance which he has never thought to repay. I hope however that now he is richer that he will be more honest with you. You know very well too that he lies like a dentist.20

In all these exchanges, Toland was at once a noisy, demanding presence and a man capable of aiding and abetting the scholarship of his confreres. In particular, as will be documented, his ability with the Irish language was a boon in interrogating sources of medieval Christianity, and his polemical wit and passionate style made him a vibrant vehicle for unorthodox ideas. But for him, Holland provided a vital induction into the Republic of Letters. While Oxford had eventually turned on him for his heterodox performances in taverns and coffee houses, he was to find a convivial and sympathetic environment in which to pursue his thoughts in the networks that existed around Furly. It was in Holland that Toland felt most able to articulate the workings of his world view, and where he found the intellectual companionship for his voyage into critical scriptural scholarship and the esoteric Hermetic tradition.

II. During his self-imposed exile of 1708–10, Toland fell back on his secondary occupation to earn a living, namely book collecting. He had long evinced his skill in locating, identifying and interpreting ancient books and manuscripts. Amyntor had presented a list of apocrypha to polemical effect; the True Whig canon had been a massive act of compilation and collation, and the previous period of political isolation, from 1704 to 1707, had been traversed by utilizing his skills as a translator and editor of foreign texts. In Holland Toland was again to foreground this secondary skill. As demand on his prowess as a polemical pamphleteer waned to almost nothing, he revived

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contacts with the learned world in Utrecht and Amsterdam to position himself as a book collector for wealthy patrons. It was this occupational turn that led to his encounter with the Gospels of Mael Brigte, which formed the basis for parts of his 1718 publication Nazarenus. As he explained there: In the beginning of the same year 1709, I discover’d at the Hague a manuscript of the four Gospels (then lately brought from France) all written in Irish characters, which were mistaken for Anglosaxon, but yet the whole text is in the Latin tongue. Some little thing in Irish is here and there mixt among the Notes, which are every numerous, and other passages in the Irish language occur also elsewhere.21

This passage downplays the rather insalubrious recent history of the manuscript, for it would appear to have been removed from Ireland by political exiles from the Williamite War when the Jacobite movement settled in St Germain-en-Laye, before certainly being stolen from the Royal Library in Paris by Jean Aymon, a renegade priest and adventurer. Aymon had inveigled his way into the institution having promised the librarian that he would supply information that would be politically useful in Louis’s fight against the Huguenots. Instead, he made off with valuable and controversial manuscripts, including one that suggested the ancient Christian Church did not believe in transubstantiation.22 Toland, who availed of Aymon as a middleman in his dealings with the Scottish-born Hague-based publisher Thomas Johnson, was to participate in the attempt to negotiate a price for the item with Robert Harley’s main bibliophile, Humphrey Wanley.23 He also drew up a wider catalogue of the materials taken from the Parisian library.24 The Gospels of Mael Brigte may also have been paraded before Eugene of Savoy, whose bibliomania was well known to Toland. Although no sale ever materialized, Toland’s connection with Aymon was one element in an intricate sequence of associations Toland established while in The Hague, and which found focus in his relationship to Prince Eugene of Savoy. As Pierre Des Maizeaux observed ‘While in Holland, he had the good fortune to get acquainted with Prince Eugene of Savoy, who gave him several marks of his generosity’.25 Eugene of Savoy was a central military commander in the complex series of conflicts known as the War of the Spanish Succession. To the English, he became a hero when commanding the Hapsburg forces alongside the Duke of Marlborough at the Battle of Blenheim on 13 August 1704.26 Alongside his military prowess he gained a reputation as a collector and patron of the arts. He had an extensive collection of paintings, with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art being particularly favoured.27 He was also a gardener of note, collecting rare plants and engaging in the propagation of new species. Further to this he was the central figure in an extensive network of thinkers and writers, and counted Leibniz and the young Montesquieu among his correspondents. He was a particular patron


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of Jean-Baptise Rousseau, a freethinker who wrote highly offensive odes and satirical verse.28 He also held a close affinity to figures central in the emergence of Jansenism.29 His library of 15,000 books and 237 manuscripts was deeply erudite in content, with a particular interest evinced for illustrated natural history and geography. He took care to have them bound with his seal, with the colour of the binding indicating the field of interest: blue for theology and jurisprudence; red for historical works and works of fiction; and yellow for natural philosophy.30 The collection also displayed a distinct libertine bent.31 As Margaret Jacob has observed, it ‘amply represented the pagan naturalists of the late Renaissance, and in particular the nearly compete writings of [Giordano] Bruno’.32 Yet as Derek McKay rightly warns, while ‘there were works by Toland in Eugene’s library, but with these as with the Scienza Nuova of the Italian philosopher of history, Vico, which was also there, we have no way of knowing whether they had been read or understood’.33 What mattered for Toland, however, was that Eugene of Savoy was willing to collect such works and might be thought of as open to heterodox ideas. Indeed, Toland actively pursued his patronage, producing a prospectus for a complete collection of the works of Cicero for him in 1712.34 Eugene clearly represented an ideal-type for the freethinker; his mixture of military prowess and learned patronage established him as philosopher-legislator in Toland’s mind. Toland dubbed Eugene ‘Meglator’ when dedicating Nazarenus to him in 1718, if Alan Harrison’s speculation is correct.35

III. Toland’s work as a book collector and distributor placed him at the heart of a continent-wide network of thinkers interested in clandestine manuscript material and heterodox ideas.36 It also inducted him into more formal manifestations of the tendency. While in London he had befriended Robert Clayton, a wealthy merchant who headed up a lodge that prefigured the formal creation of the speculative freemasons in 1717. While in Holland, Toland encountered a community devoted to ritualistic sociability. Called the Knights of Jubilation, they met in The Hague from about 1710 to 1716. It seems Toland was an active member, for among the papers left at his death was an account of one of the society’s meetings, which is dated 24 November 1710. The account recalled how the members of the sodality had enjoyed a convivial evening, announcing: Let it be made known then, that at the request of Chevalier Böhm, cupbearer of that Order, we were gathered happily in general convocation around a table, laden with a huge sirloin together with fricassés and salads; … having eaten with the utmost discernment, and drunk quite uncommonly well.37

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The formal business of the occasion was to inflict a punishment on a fellow member for a flagrant breach of the rules of homosociability. He had fallen for a woman and was threatening marriage, despite the fact that the aforesaid Knight Jean Fredrick Gleditsch, [was] … sworn under solemn oath to observe in perpetuity the statutes and rules of our order, which consist in the requirement to be always merry, high-spirited, happy, ready to eat and drink, to sing and to dance, to gamble and to joke and to frolic and play pranks, and moreover to abstain from all love, whether clandestine or matrimonial, since love is the complete opposite of all joy and marriage the grave of all laughter and fun … nevertheless he, in spite of his vows, and to the great scandal of our Order, has violated his word and his promises, and committed the crime of lèse-jubilation, which is most horrid, detestable and utterly deplorable apostasy, namely to allow the drear poison of love to enter his heart: which is a heresy ipso facto punishable, and to be punished by excommunication.38

Yet, in the face of a stiff defence from his younger brother, and fellow Knight of Jubilation, the society had determined that leniency was to be exercised: We in the fullness of our power, certain knowledge and ‘jubilational’ authority have at the present time declared and ordained, one and all, that the said J. Frederick Gleditsch will be exempt from excommunication by him [the Grand Master], on the one condition that he remits and reimburses into the safekeeping of our Treasurer G. Gleditsch, the sum of 200, a modest sum whose modesty has been urged upon us by our charming Grand Master, whose moderation is always so striking.39

A homosocial society which revolves around drinking and eating; officer holders with the power to fine and expel; a mock court, a declaration of fraternal loyalty and forgiveness for the sin of lust: all aspects of the Knights of Jubilation at once mimicked the church structure at the same time as it drew on guild systems and elaborated rituals that point towards speculative freemasonry.40 While much of the ritual and badinage can be related to the wider emergence of associational life in this period, there is some supporting circumstantial evidence that identify the Knights of Jubilation as a conduit for heterodox ideas.41 In particular, the secretary of the Order was identified in the document as Prosper Marchand, a bibliographer and bookseller, who Margaret Jacob has described as ‘one of the leading savants of the Radical Enlightenment.42 To Jonathan Israel he was ‘one of the most eminent journalists of the early eighteenth century’, a Roman Catholic in exile who had ‘perceived the errors of the Roman Church and inwardly renounced its teachings’.43 Other members included the bookseller, Charles Levier, who published the notoriously heretical Traité des trois imposteurs as a Life of Spinoza in 1719, having copied it from manuscript in Furly’s library in 1711.44 Toland’s loose connection to this work was through Jean Aymon, who helped revise the text prior to publication.45


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While Toland’s connection to the Traité was somewhat cursory his connection to another esoteric text was more extensive. Indeed he tried to pass off as a copy of the Traité another esoteric the Spaccio de la Bestia trionfante by Giordano Bruno. While this ruse was not entirely successful, Toland was to become a proselytizer for the ideas of the Italian Hermetic thinker. Toland was to help arrange the publication of an edition of Bruno’s Spaccio in 1713, and amongst the papers published after Toland’s death was a translation of ‘An Account of Jordan Bruno’s Book of the Infinite Universe and Innumerable Worlds’ – which A. B. Worden suggests was stolen from the collection of Anthony Collins.46 In the case of the Spaccio the content certainly accorded with many of Toland’s thematic concerns. First published in 1584 it imagines a cosmic debate between the Gods as they endeavour to remove the vices of man and restore a magical ordering of the virtues. Toland took from this allegorical work a concern for the Egyptian world that Bruno speculated had been utopian before the coming of the law, and, perhaps equally importantly, an Epicurean strand that associated the natural world with the divine: as Frances Yates observes, ‘The marvellous magical religion of the Egyptians will return, their moral laws will replace the chaos of the present age, the prophesy of the Lament will be fulfilled, and the sign in heaven proclaiming the return of the Egyptian light to dispel the present darkness was the Copernican sun’.47 The ‘Book on the Infinite Universe’ provided the ontology behind this sociology of power, giving a brisk point by point rendition of Bruno’s view that ‘The Worlds are in number infinite, how each of them is mov’d and form’d’ and how, equally, ‘motion is infinite and what moveable it is that has an infinite tendency, and to innumerable compositions’.48 However Toland’s adoption of Bruno was limited and polemical. While as Margaret Jacob recognizes, in some respects ‘Toland and Bruno were kindred spirits separated by a century of history, yet strangely allied in their quest for new, and inevitably more secular, forms of religiosity’ yet it was also true that ‘Toland read him as a freethinker, ignored his magical beliefs and imbibed his naturalism with its mystical overtones’.49 Perhaps the central component that Toland drew from the Hermetic tradition was its concern for secrecy. Toland was to make a sharp distinction between the initiated and the uninitiated, the learned and the vulgar, the knowing and those who are left to the mercy of clerisies of various motivations. In Tetradymus for instance, which Toland published in 1720, he included an essay entitled ‘Clidophorus’ where the learned and vulgar becomes the difference between esoteric and exoteric knowledge. Drawing a distinction between interest and truth, he attacked the priestcraft of those HEATHEN IMPOSTURES; who perceiving that what was built upon fraud, cou’d only be supported by force, they made it capital to question their dictates, and highly disreputable so much as to examine, let alone to doubt of them. The priests,

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A Political Biography of John Toland for their own interest were not wanting anywhere to promote such penal laws; and the Magistrates (partly thro Superstition proceeding from their own ignorance; and partly thro Policy, to grasp at more power than the laws allow’d, by the assistance of the Priests) have been commonly very ready to inforce those laws, by what they call’d wholsom severities. Hence no room was left for the propagating of TRUTH, except at the expense of a man’s life, or at least of his honour and imployments, whereof numerous examples may be alleg’d. The Philosophers therefore, and other well-wishers to mankind in most nations, were constrain’d by this holy tyranny to make use of a two-fold doctrine; the one Popular, accommodated to the Prejudices of the Vulgar, and to the receive’d CUSTOMS or RELIGIONS; the other Philosophical, conformable to the nature of things, and consequently to TRUTH, which with doors fast shut and under all other precautions, they communicated only to friends of known probity, prudence, and capacity. These they generally call’d the Exoteric and Esoteric, or the External and Internal Doctrines.50

Herein, Toland outlined his notion of a conspiracy of the virtuous to contradict the clerisy.

IV. In his formal writings in Holland, Toland concentrated in biblical criticism, releasing in 1709 Adeisidaemon and Origines Judicae bound together as ‘Two Dissertations’. Dedicated to Eugene of Savoy these essays were provocative assaults on the priestcraft inherent in a faith-filled reading of the Bible. He began with an apparently unrelated defence of the authority of Titus Livy, as the Adeisidaemon, or literally ‘person without superstition’.51 However, the polemical purpose of this issue lay in Livy’s treatment of religion as a secular and not a spiritual concern. It was who exposed ‘the ancient Roman priesthood of systematic deceit, manipulation and fraud in misleading the common people’.52 Toland followed Livy in proposing that Ancient legislators cunningly supported their political aims by disguising natural events as miracles. For example, both Scipio and Alexander, when leading invasions, called it miraculous when seas were made suddenly passable by the wind and ebb of the tide.53

In contrast, Livy was a member of the learned few who perceived the social necessity of superstition without actually taking it seriously. He was, thus, a member of the initiate, actively revealing the conspiracy of the priests. Origines Judicae was part of an intended wider study of the Respublica Mosaica, which Toland projected but did not complete, although he claimed ‘my materials are in such a state of readiness that one half year, free from all other business, wou’d be sufficient for me to form and finish the whole work’.54 Also drawing from this scheme were two French-language texts that Toland even-


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tually released in English translation – one that appeared as an Appendix to Nazarenus in 1718 and Hodegus that was published in 1720.55 The cornerstone of this study was again, Toland’s contention that religion was a mere invention ingine of the state policy … that a belief in the immortal Gods was an invention contrived by wise and profound legislators for the general benefit of the commonwealth, in order that those whom reason could not influence, might be trained to their duty by a sense of religion.56

This assumption forced Toland to account for the development of religion in a natural vein however; and no more so than the rise of Christianity. Underpinning this were the origins of Judaism, which was where Toland felt on sufficiently secure ground to make his polemical intervention. In effect, the purpose of the Origines Judicae was to read Moses as a secular legislator; the founder of a mode of government more than of a faith. As a first step, Toland accepted Jean Le Clerc’s contention that Moses was not the author of the Pentateuch, thus removing its claim to any revealed authority, as allowing the scriptures to be historicized and secularized.57 The next element involved Toland constructing a new image of Moses. He effected this portrayal by resting heavily on the depiction of the Patriarch found in Strabo, a Classical Greek geographer, whose study ’Of the Land of the Jews’ held that Moses was little more than a political figure, using his status as a spiritual authority to convince his followers of the moral value of his direction. As Toland held, the value of Strabo’s account was in how he compares Moses with Minos, Lycurgus, Zamolxis and many others of the same description, without any distinction, and what is more, that he has given an account of the Jewish religion, the origin of the nation, and of Moses himself, totally different from that which we find in the Pentateuch.58

There was, beyond this political secularization of Moses, a second tier to Toland’s thesis. It was a central plank of Toland’s concern for the history of Moses that he be transformed from the founder of a revealed religion into a promulgator of a natural faith. In Toland’s account therefore, Moses maintained that ‘no divinity exists separate from the universal frame of nature, and that the universe is the supreme and only God, whose parts you may call creatures, and himself the great creator of all’.59 In this way he stood as an intellectual precursor to Spinoza, who enunciated as similar view in the late seventeenth century, and with whom Toland drew an explicit parallel: Moses was a pantheist, or to, to speak more currently, a Spinozist, for he taught that there is no Numen aside from matter and the structure of this world, and that nature itself, or the Universe, and the supreme God are one. You may say, if you wish, that creatures are the individual parts and the whole is the Creator.60

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If this is so, and the divine and the natural are indeed one, it then became necessary for Toland in his treatment of the Old Testament to account for the miracles that are recounted therein. Again concentrating on the Mosaic history, Toland’s Hodegus endeavoured to do just this. Toland supplied a reductive reading of the Pillar of Cloud and Fire that appears in Exodus, 13:21–2. ‘By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so that they could travel by day or night. Neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night left its place in front of the people’. In Toland’s reductionist reading this phenomena, read typically as a manifestation of the divine favour exerted for the Israelite people, was little more than a ‘portable fire’ or ‘a Pillar of Smoke, and not a real Cloud, that guided the Israelites in the wilderness; and that there were not two (as by most believ’d) but one and the same Pillar, directing their march with the Cloud of its Smoke by day, and with the Light of its Fire by Night’.61 He then dwelt at provocative length on the detail of how this operated, slowly deflating any claim to special providence that the account imparted. ‘The reason of such a portable Fire is this’, he asserted: In countries well inhabited, the route of Armies, tho extending ever so large in front for the convenience of forage or ways, is mark’d by military stones or posts, by rivers, hills, cities, villages, castles and other remarkable places so that they know by their orders how farr they may stretch, and where again to come closer together to form one camp or body. But in vast and unpractis’d desarts, without any edifices at all, without noted hills, frequent rivers, or even the ruins of ancient buildings there is a necessity of a visible Guide preceding the main body, whereby the wings may order their march and keep within a commodious distance, so as not to straggle, or any of ’em be lost, and to know in an instant when the Army halts or incamps.62

The listing and repetition here allowed Toland to labour his point: the miraculous was made mundane, and the remarkable turned by slow corrosion into the banal. He then extended his argument further to interrogate one of the central terms of scripture, revealing his wider rhetorical target: After having demonstrated that the Pillar of Cloud and Fire was not miraculous, this fancy of the sacred fire cou’d not take up much of my time: and therefore I think it now fit to discharge the promise I made above, of showing that the Angel of the Lord, which carry’d the Pillar behind the Israelites, or between them and the Egyptians, was a mere mortal man, the overseer and director of the portable fire, and the guide of the Israelites in the Wilderness.63

He then turned to etymology to contend that while the account may suggest the miraculous, in fact, all the actions of the angel might be done by natural and ordinary means … It cannot simply and peremptorily be concluded from the word Angel that the director of the guiding Pillar was other


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than a man, for the Hebrew is not less general than the Greec word, from which we have form’d Angel. It signifies any Messenger whatsoever, mortal or immortal; so that circumstances alone can determine what kind of messenger is meant.64

As he admitted happily, ‘This will probably occasion certain people to make a noise: but so long as I am persuaded Truth’s on my side I shall be as much pleas’d as they are sure to be angry.65 While this interpretation of scripture as an allegorical rendering of the everyday and ordinary had the subversive consequence of rendering the clerics who promulgated the superstitious, miraculous reading foolish if not stupid or mendacious, the consequence Toland wished to draw out was wider still. In providing a reading of biblical history in secular terms he had inoculated history itself from a providentialist reading. History was being actively secularized in Toland’s work; the expelling of special providence from the Jewish Exodus suggested that history itself was not a story of miraculous particular salvation. Instead what Toland was promulgating was a version of history that was imbued with ordinary providence; the ordinary workings of the laws of nature, which were open to all those with the insight, knowledge and capacity to recognize it. This then allowed the Mosaic republic he celebrated to at once become a reachable objective – no longer requiring the particular favour of a distant and unknowable God – and, paradoxically, capable of being sustained eternally: as the work of human beings alone, it could be maintained by their active virtue and political commitment. This then raised the wider question of historical mutability which he addressed in the brief account of ‘Two Problems Concerning the Jewish Nation and Religion’. There he asked why it was that the Jews, when in charge of their own affairs, were prone to the worship of idols, and yet, when in exile, they stuck fast to their confessional identity despite the pressures to conform they encountered. In this way Toland raised a central methodological issue for any historian of religion or secular society: how to account for change. As he realized, behind these ‘Two Problems’, There is yet a third … which wou’d be needless to produce, till an answer be given to these; wherof it is a most natural consequence on the one hand (I mean the solution happens to be given) but quite the contrary on the other: for no wise man will admit of CHANCE for a real mean between REASON and REVELATION, consider’d as two extremes. I observe this the rather because tho there be nothing more evident than that Chance signifies with men of sense, an effect whereof the causes are unknown or unforeseen; yet a world of people mean by Chance an effect that has no Cause at all: and so they gravely pronounce concerning some of the most remarkable Phenomena in nature that they happen (forsooth) by Chance; as if in reality any effect cou’d be without another cause as regularly producing it, or finally that there were no causes where we don’t immediately and directly perceive them.66

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This passage captures many of the intellectual developments Toland drew from his engagement with Holland. It expressed his distinction between learned and vulgar understandings, and highlighted how the former were recognizably through their freedom from the superstitious belief systems that enraptured the populace. Secondly it articulated his view that everything that occurs has a discernable cause. Whereas the vulgar may take refuge in a faith which rejects reason, the learned cannot. Their self-appointed task is to reveal the causes that operate in the world, even when they are obscure and consciously hidden by an active conspiracy of the powerful. Moreover, Toland here set up a polarity between revelation and reason, and much of the Mosaic Republic project was dedicated to the debunking of the first and rendering the biblical narrative in a mode that was consistent with the second. What Toland took from Holland, in other words, was a conviction that reason could explain the world, and that recourse to revelation or chance was incompatible with philosophy. In this, Toland’s work on the Mosaic Republic conforms in its underlying epistemological presumptions with what Gordon Wood has observed about the Enlightenment’s view of agency. Wood has posited a narrative of ideas about causation in which a seventeenth century still devoted to ideas of providence eventually gives way to a world in which large, impersonal, social and physical forces generate historical change.67 If the first view understands agency as emanating from the divine, the second view is committed to a notion of probability that religious thinkers found unsettling. However, between these two periods there was a brief interlude, in which divine agency had been rejected, but probability not yet accepted. In that phase, recourse was taken to human agency. As Wood expresses it, while ‘God may have remained the primary cause of things … in the minds of the enlightened he had left men to work out the causes and effects of their lives free from special interventions. All that happened in society was to be reduced to the strictly human level of men’s motivations and goals’.68 This shift was integral to what Wood recognized as the conspiratorial frame of mind, for if God was not causing events, and random chance, as Toland asserted here, was not an acceptable argument, than someone must be responsible for events that shape society; as Wood expresses it: ‘never before or since in Western history has man been held so directly and mortally responsible for the events of his world’.69 This imputation of human intention in social occurrences generated problems in accounting for violence and social deprivation, for Having only the alternative of ‘providence’ as an impersonal abstraction to describe systematic linkages of human actions, the most enlightened of the age could only conclude that regular patterns of behaviour were the consequences of concerted human intentions – that is, the result of a number of people coming together to promote a collective design or conspiracy.70


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That was the burden of Toland’s account of the church – it was a social conspiracy to promote priestcraft and to reject philosophical understandings of the world as an integrated, holistic, comprehensible and self-regulating system. Philosophical freedom and religious superstition were thus in a conflict Toland configured as being between a conspiracy of the virtuous and a conspiracy of the mendacious; between those committed to republican freedom of inquiry and those devoted to an absolutist control over information. Le Clerc and Furly had initiated Toland into the circles of the learned; book collecting and distribution revealed truth and denounced priestcraft; the Knights of Jubilation constituted a conspiracy of the virtuous and, in Toland’s Mosaic Republic, he projected a vision of history as the conflict of conspiracies. And the pantheist world Moses and Spinoza articulated held God to be inherent in this world of plots and schemes, embedded and revealed by human history, and not an external actor to it. As Amos Hofman has rightly remarked, in hands such as those of Toland, ‘the concept of conspiracy emerges as a secularised form of the idea of heresy’ in which God is himself the prime mover, the arch conspirator.71

5 EPSOM, 1711–16

Returning to England in early 1711, Toland decided to settle in Epsom, ‘where I continue the whole summer and whither I withdraw frequently in winter’.1 The house he occupied, which was a gift from political patrons at some indeterminate date, provided him with a place to escape the din of city life, while still permitting him ‘In two or three hours time [to] … be at London, whenever I will, at my ease; and if I have no business in town, I can receive all the publick news as well, and almost as soon, at EPSOM’.2 He clearly fell in love with the location, for he decided shortly after to write a merry description of the town ‘in a manner different from his ordinary style’ and one which set aside ‘a secret meaning (as is usual in political letters)’.3 Indeed, he was explicit in suggesting that the town was a place where, ‘A Tory does not stare and leer when a Whig comes in, nor a Whig look sour and whisper at the sight of a Tory. These distinctions are laid by with the winter suit in London’.4 What the town represented to Toland was the possibility of retreat and revival. He imagined how he might ‘resign (from that minute) my share of all titles and preferments to such as are in love with hurry, pay court to envy, or divert themselves with care, to such as are content to square their lives by the smiles or frowns of others, and who are resolv’d to live poor that they may die rich’.5 He revelled in how the countryside around the town provided him with the source of therapeutic excursions. ‘No where’ he told his female correspondent Eudoxa, ‘has Nature indulg’d herself in grateful variety, more than in this Canton’.6 He imagined himself as a rustic for whom no pleasure was greater than ‘the lowing of oxen, the bleating of sheep, the piping of shepherds and the whistling of hinds, [having] charms, for which the men of noise and business, with the men of pleasure falsely so call’d, have neither taste nor ear’.7 His pastoral idyll was, however, designed to renew his vigour and bring him back to public society in good health and heart, for although ‘in such places … you’ll imagine to see me wandring as void of care as of ambition, and always a book in my hand or in my head: yet still [he admitted to having] … a design of returning more entertaining to private conversation, or more serviceable to publick Society’.8

– 105 –

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Indeed Toland’s peroration of this Surrey town celebrated how it combined both the virtues of the countryside with proximity to the ‘imperial city’ of London: As England is the plentifullest country on earth, so no part of it is supply’d with more diversity of the best provisions, both from within itself and from the adjacent villages, than EPSOM. The nearness of London does in like manner afford it all the exotick preparatives and allurements to luxury, whenever any is dispos’d to make a sumptuous banquet, or to give a genteel collation. You wou’d think yourself in some enchanted Camp, to see the peasants ride to every house with the choicest fruits, herbs, roots and flowers, with all sorts of tame and wild fowl, with the rarest fish and venison and with every kind of butcher’s meat.9

This confluence of rural charm with urban amenity ensured that Epsom was, in Toland’s projection, a society predicated on moderation, balance and tolerance, a place of civility and politeness, encapsulated in the promenades conducted on The two bowling greens … on which all the company by turns, after diverting themselves in the morning according to their different fancies, make a gallant appearance every evening (especially on Mondays), music playing most of the day, and dancing sometimes crowning the night … Here the British beauties, like so many animated stars, shine in their brightest lustre; not half so much by their precious jewels and costly apparel, as by the more pointed glory of their eyes.10

This idealization extended to the tavern and coffeehouse of the town where a fully operational public sphere was thought to be in evidence: ‘By the conversation of those who walk there, you would fancy yourself to be this minute on the Exchange, and the next minute at St James’; one while in an East India factory or a West India plantation, and another while with the army in Flanders or on board the fleet in the ocean.’11 As this utopian portrait suggests, however, and despite the publisher’s protestations, Toland could not resist making a political point, even as he suggested Epsom was his ‘hermitage’ in which politics could be safely set aside.12 His acknowledgement that the city’s vice of greed had spilled over into Epsom society in the form of gambling prompted him to admit ‘we are not quite in Heaven here, but we may justly be said to be in paradise: a place cohabited by innocence and guilt, by folly and fraud, right from the beginning’.13 This reflection then resulted in an extended attack on ‘those priests and politicians … who so industriously propagate discords and inhumanity in Britain’.14 Toland at once scorned ‘degenerate Whigs’ and asked that ‘those Tories be forever abhorred who, like hungry dogs, return to their vomit again, by madly offering up both laws and liberty to the arbitrary will of any mortal’.15

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To fulfil his vision of a unified British public sphere, and to resist the threat the politicians posed, he appealed to the ‘wise and well-meaning, the able and honest of all these denominations’ asking them to heartily join together to carry on the publick cause, and mutually bear with one another’s incurable differences or infirmities, becoming in this last respect perfect INTERPENDENTS. Let free-born Brittons be the common designation for the future; and no distinction be known among us, but only as such as are for civil Liberty, Toleration, and the Protestant succession, and of such others as are for absolute Slavery, Persecution and the Popish pretender.16

In this confrontation Toland relied on the worthiness of a governor – a microcosm of the patriot leader – who that for good humour, good breeding, and good living, is esteem’d by all those who posses or understand these qualities. He’s a profest enemy to all party-disputes, he’s the arbiter of all differences; and in promoting the interest of this town which he has frequented for many years, ’tis plain he looks upon virtue as his own reward.17

This was, arguably, a coded portrait of his long-term political patron and hero, Robert Harley – man who had endeavoured to triangulate between Whigs and Tories and to speak for the political nation as a whole. Yet this Description of Epsom was penned in early 1711, and Toland’s political fortunes were quick to alter. The relationship with Harley, upon which Toland had pinned very high hopes, cooled dramatically when rumours spread that Toland was a correspondent of the attempted assailant on Harley, who had struck in March 1711. The relationship had, however, already been failing, as Harley had led Sacheverell’s supporters into power and abandoned his bi-partisan ambitions. Also forcing them apart was Harley’s policy of parleying with the French, a position that led Queen Anne to sanction his creation of an administration. Toland saw war with France as a desirable anti-Catholic crusade, and central to propping up the Hanoverian settlement. Toland started to act as an informer for the Whig opposition while still asking Harley for financial aid. The tension had to break.

I. Epsom, and the distancing from the centre of politics it represented in Toland’s Description, had been chosen for a reason. He had become increasingly disillusioned with the trajectory of English politics in the period of his exile in Holland. When he had resurfaced in the country, as in 1709, the brief visit had underlined in physical terms the causes of Toland’s intellectual anxiety. As was reported in 1726 by William Stratford in commenting on the life offered by Pierre Des Maizeaux in the Collection of Several Pieces of Mr Toland, the pam-

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phleteer had been the subject of a vicious beating, possibly by men in the pay of the Duke of Marlborough.18 Yet despite the evident risks, Toland began to re-engage in English politics. He was driven to do so by the wider fear that the High Church that he had fought since his entry onto the national scene in the early 1700s was now on the brink of a remarkable coup. To Toland, the rise in High Church power constituted a substantial crisis to the Whig constitution of balanced powers and the revolutionary settlement and despite the continuation of disfavour shown towards his Patriotic patron, Robert Harley, Toland repeatedly intervened in the debate which emanated from a controversial sermon preached by the High Church mouthpiece, Henry Sacheverell. The touch paper had been lit by Sacheverell preaching a Gunpowder anniversary sermon, entitled The Perils of False Brethren, in Church and State on 5 November 1709. Instead of following the rhetorical orthodoxy of these occasions and comparing the delivery from the Gunpowder conspiracy with William’s intervention in 1688, he instead chose to compare William’s treatment of James II with the less savoury analogy of the regicide of 1649. This established a historical narrative in which the threat to the constitution emanated, not from the crown, but from parliament, and questioned explicitly the legitimacy of the post-revolution regime. Moreover, Sacheverell tied the fate of the constitution to the fate of the Church of England, and raised the cry of the Church in Danger by picturing it as threatened with internal subversion from dissenters and free thinkers, whom he polemically connected to the Whig oligarchy.19 The sermon became a lodestone for the party conflict that followed, with the Whigs determining on a course of legal sanction to make an example of the impertinent High churchman. While Sacheverell was found guilty in the trial which followed, the punishment – a three-year suspension from office – was thought so lenient as to constitute a technical victory for the Tory party who supported him. Worse still, the Whigs came across as doctrinaire and unable to cope with the realities of freedom of expression and religious toleration; principles that they claimed to defend. The general election which followed in late 1710 underlined the public’s disenchantment as the Tory party swept into power, headed by their new saviour, Robert Harley, who had tacked ably away from the centre of the political spectrum as the mood of antagonism to the Whigs became apparent. For Toland, these events bespoke a political crisis of faith. The Whigs had revealed themselves to be foolish in the exercise of power; the High Church were taking control of the public agenda and the commanding offices of the state; and the figure in whom Toland had invested his political hopes was being revealed as a political tacker, prompted by necessity and not by virtue. This set of interconnected reasons promoted Toland to enter the fray and to do so in a manner that

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exposed the stress he felt at the dark turn he thought events had taken. The tone of his contribution to the Sacheverell debate was shrill, anxious and aggressive. He was not prepared to let any rhetorical weapon lie unused in what he thought of as an existential battle with the High Church, one in which his own personal livelihood and safety were at stake. As a consequence, Toland dug deep into his repertoire in conducting this campaign. One attack was extensive: the lengthy High Church Displayed, which recounted the Sacheverell trial from a Whig perspective.20 Another was brisk – the eight-page production of documents which reproduced a ‘testimony against the absurdity of these opinions’ of passive obedience and non-resistance, ‘which may be of more weight with them … that is the Royal Authority of King James the First’.21 And the attack was pronounced and personal. In The Jacobitism, Perjury and Popery of High Church Priests, which Toland issued in 1710, he tried to destroy the position of his opponents systematically – challenging their politics, their integrity and their purpose in turn. Proclaiming them to be no more than ‘a pack of Ridiculous, Senseless, Selfish, Pragmatical, Proud, Insolent, Perjur’d Wretches’, he attempted to connect the High Church sentiment to the Jacobites by asserting how: The only Reason that the professed Jacobites do or can give for their not taking the Oaths [of Abjuration and Allegiance] is that their Principles of Passive Obedience and Non-Resistance do inviolably attach them to the Interest of the St Germans Family, in opposition to the present Government and the Protestant Succession. And since the High Church maintain the same Doctrine, ought they not, if they would not be thought to mean the same thing, to endeavour to convince the World, that Jacobite is not the necessary Consequence of their Common Principles? But they are so far from offering at any such thing, that they plainly and openly show what they wou’d be at, when they join with the Jacobites in all publick Matters, and appear to be influenced in all their Actions by the same Spirit and to carry on the same Interest, and the same Designs.22

Not that their word could be trusted. While the parliament had enacted the oaths with a view that people would act in good faith by taking them, These things went down with them as glibly as a Bumper of Claret to the health of their Popish King, whom rather than lose the least triffle, they will abjure ten times a day. Nay, High-Church Priests, the more they swear, the more they think it their Duty to be Forsworn. And those Oaths which they can’t break without renouncing the Faith of a Christian, have no other Effect on them, than to make them the more industrious in Preaching up, with an uncommon Zeal, all those Doctrines which are inconsistent with the late and present Government and the Protestant Succession.23

Toland was developing this damning analysis as early as 3 January 1710, while still in Amsterdam, when he signed his Reflections on Dr Sacheverell’s Sermon. Using the conceit of writing to a Dutch friend, Toland was able to simplify

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and polarize the debate, characterizing the party division of Whigs and Tories as being between ‘The First [who] are Zealous Sticklers for Civil Liberty, and sworn Enemies to Ecclesiastical Tyranny’ and ‘the latter [who] do not willingly admit of any Toleration in Matters of Religion, or of any Check on the Will of the Sovereign’.24 Further dividing the two camps into the conformists and nonconformists among the Whigs, and the High flyers and outright Jacobites among the Tories, Toland configured the ambitions of the latter to consist of undermining the Hanoverian succession and reinstating the Stuart claimant. Not finding it sufficient to assail the reputation of Tories in general, Toland denounced Sacheverell personally as a ‘mad curr’, ‘no less impudent than ignorant, two qualities generally inseparable’, who had preached a sermon ‘full of scandalous Invectives and false Insinuations against the Person and Administration of Her Majesty the Queen … with Design to create Jealousies and make Divisions between the Subjects of the United Kingdom.25 Accusing Sacheverell of subversion, for he ‘grossly overturns the nature of Things, since Faction naturally goes before Sedition, as Sedition makes Rebellion’, Toland defended the trial as ‘something very solemn and used in only very extraordinary cases’.26 Brusquely declaring that ‘his Crime should Deserve Death’, Toland managed to praise the ‘leniency’ of the government which ensured ‘his life is in no danger’.27 The vicious nature of this imagined violence on Toland’s part and the general ad hominem nature of the epistle was justified in his mind by the sense that Sacheverell was a cipher for a much wider plot conducted by a cabal in England [who] in Conjunction with their True Brethren in Scotland, have form’d the ridiculous Design … to Preach up the Obsolete and Ridiculous Doctrine of PASSIVE OBEDIENCE and, in as much as in them lyes, to revive it, which will complete the rendering of them odious and contemptible to the Nation.28

In confronting a cabal whose ‘System is built upon a Principle of Violence’ Toland was mobilizing all the venom his able pen could expel.29 And in accusing the High Church of hatching a conspiracy in favour of the Jacobites, he was well aware of the fact that he was tarnishing their position through slander and invective. As Mark Knights has observed, ‘Conspiracy was a real fear but it was also a way of talking, a way of de-legitimising an alternative viewpoint’.30 Knights further observes that ‘the obvious question lying behind much of the 1710 debate about misleading identities’ of the kind Toland identified when he revealed the High Church men to be deceitful but determined Jacobites, ‘was, if the parties were not true to their original character, why was it that the people could not see this and act accordingly? … Cunning, self interested leaders misled the nation through tricks and artifice’.31 The challenge thus became ‘to depict a kind of conspiracy against the nation by a pack of self-seeking men who pursued their own, rather than the nation’s interest’.32 This was a challenge

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Toland was to rise to in 1713, in his pointedly titled Appeal to Honest People against Wicked Priests. This tract availed of Toland’s mastery of ancient Church history to provide the widest possible context for the High flyers ambition to place the demands of the Church above the concerns of the state. Toland argued that in fact ancient Christianity had been purely spiritual in its concern until it had been corrupted by the secular ambition of priests. ‘This’ he complained ‘has been the bane of Christianity from the beginning’.33 While he insisted that the doctrines of Christianity were ‘neither dangerous nor destructive to any Government’ it was the Emulation and Ambition of Christian Priests that made the Christian Religion seem incompatible with all good Policy, in the eyes of those who judg’d it only by the Priests that taught it and by the people who profess’d it. Power and Dominion were the Objects of the first, Luxury and Licentiousness the Practice of the last: for while the Priests, degenerating from their first Institution, were for ruling instead of instructing, for fleecing instead of feeding their Flocks, the People cou’d not of course but grow ignorant, and from ignorant become naturally vicious.34

This power urge on the part of the clerics could, on occasion, turned inward within the Church itself, when, as frequently occurred, ‘Party, the hour of the Party, sway’d all their Affections. Victory and Superiority were the only things contended for, and the losing side did generally for all that adhere to their Man, which presently begot a Schism, as that begot a Heresie’. Indeed, underlining his reduction of Church history to the play of human ambition and agency, Toland adjudged that ‘this Emulation … of the Clergy is the real source of those Heresies which make so bulky and black a Catalogue in Ecclesiastical History’.35 In this, Toland was reading the Christian past through the lens of conspiracy theory – rendering it as a narrative of power, plots and persecution – which he asserted was ‘the Art of Governing by Priests as well as by Parties’.36 The final result was that The whole Face of Religion was deform’d with a Multitude of Ceremonies, most of ’em borrow’d from the impure Mysteries of the Heathens; and the Worship of God was neglected, if not exchang’d for the abject and unmanly Veneration of dead Men’s bones, Hair or Sweat, with other Excrements and Ordures, under the name of holy Reliques.37

This reductive rendition of Church history into a grotesque blend of moral failings and bodily fluids would be, Toland admitted, ‘no better than an old Story little meriting your Attention, were you not convinc’d by it that the wicked Priests of our Time do perfectly resemble the wicked Priests of Antiquity’.38 This argument by analogy was then given particular power by his open identification of the parallel he was drawing, when he personified the modern wicked Priest as none other than Henry Sacheverell, drawing attention to ‘the Time that a Cer-

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tain Doctor did by preaching and rioting endeavour the utter Subversion of both [the Reformation and the Constitution]’.39 The tract was thus a scathing assault on the High Church party and the assertion of the superiority of the church over the legitimacy of the state. Toland similarly brought the question of ancient Christianity right up to date in his most unusual contribution to his campaign against the High Church. In Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland he documented the history of anti-Semitic savagery and bigotry that scarred the record of the Church in England. This tendency he explicitly ascribed to the influence of priests, who, he claimed, were ‘their most inveterate Enemies … who devoutly offer’d up those human Sacrifices, not only to share their Goods with the rapacious Prince but also to acquire the reputation of zeal and sanctity among the credulous vulgar’.40 It was they who promulgated the hate-filled myths that stimulated pogroms, such as that that Jews were involved in the ‘stealing of a Child to crucify him against Easter’.41 That this incredible assertion was taken seriously was, to Toland, evidence of how ‘dangerous and destructive a monster is SUPERSTITION, when rid by the Mob, and driven by the Priests’.42 Noticing that it was Oliver Cromwell who first allowed Jews to re-enter the country, following their expulsion in 1290, Toland pressed the case of tolerance on economic and humane grounds.43 As well as noting how they would ‘encrease the number of hands for labour and defence, of bellies and backs for consumption of food and raiment, and of brains for invention and contrivance’ he argued that as it was quite simply ‘the duty of every Man to contribute as much as he can, whether by his advice or by his industry, to the welfare of his whole species’ it was incumbent on him to argue their case.44 He was convinced indeed, that far from being a burden on the country, Let ’em once be put upon an equal footing with others, not only for buying and selling, for security and protection to their Goods and Persons; but likewise for Arts and Handycraft trades, for purchasing and inheriting of estates in Lands and Houses (with which they may as well be trusted as with Shares in the Publick Funds) and then I doubt not, but they’ll insensibly betake themselves to Building, Farming, and all sorts of Improvement like other people.45

As well as pressing the case of a wide toleration in this fashion, Toland was in this way able to reflect on the nature of social prejudice. He rejected that any association the Jews may have garnered with usury was inherent, and contended it was a repercussion of the penal system under which they had operated. Yet he admitted that he was ‘not ignorant how much the world is govern’d by prejudices, and how farr some, who wou’d not be counted of the vulgar, are yet sway’d by vulgar errors. One of the most ‘general’ he accepted is the prevailing notion of a certain genius or bent of mind reigning in a certain family or Nation’.46 This

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error he rejected outright, along with any notion of geographic determinism for ‘Government and Education ever get the better of it’.47 Instead of any inherent characteristics Toland asserted his conviction that ‘the Jews therefore are both in their origine and progress, not otherwise to be regarded than under the common circumstances of human nature’.48 Accounting for the prevalence of ‘a world of such extravagant fancies’ brought Toland back to his polemical purpose; namely an attack on the High Church.49 He argued that the cause of the prejudice the Jews encountered was the aversion which diversity of manners in general begats among men, and especially contrary rites or doctrines of Religion, that, farr from mutual love and good offices, as creatures of the same species, they foolishly despise and hate one another for their civil customs, but cruelly persecute and murder one another on the score of their religious ones.50

This moved Toland to utter an attack on priestcraft as the real underlying cause of the intolerance he was contesting. Picking up again on the rhetorical deployment of history in his thesis he pronounced: All histories are full of such execrable examples. Defamation, Exile, Imprisonment and Death were sometimes not esteem’d punishments severe enough, for the neglect of ceremonies in their own nature indifferent, and very often insignificant; or from the disbelief of doctrines understood by neither party; and when understood, that contributed not a jot to make mankind the wiser or the better. On such accounts, the tombs of the dead have been often violated, their ashes thrown into the air, and their very names branded with infamy: the People being artificially wrought up to these excesses when Priests and Politicians were to be gainers.51

The party political aspect of this tract was made clear when Toland included the naturalization scheme into his definition of the Whig political platform in his 1714 Memorial Presented to a Minister of State.52 Beginning with the premise that ‘too many of the Clergy of England have no regard for anything but profit and power’, he therein supplied a programme for reform that included the apt instruction of the clergy by the king, the reformation of the universities, the strict delineation of the role of the ministry, the removal of pluralities, the cutting off of the source of many clergymen through the demolition of the charity school system.53 This religious reform was to be coupled by a set of political reforms to resuscitate the fortunes of the country, which included such traditional True Whig demands as the reform of the army, the strict rule of law, the ‘frugal management’ of the state’s revenue, and the lowering of the national debt.54 While, he presumed, this platform could be erected given the provision of ‘gentlemen of virtue, understanding and industry made Magistrates; men who know their business and who will be sure to Execute the Laws; men that will be zealous to retrieve the morals and manners of the people, who are dissolute and

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vicious to the highest degree’, there was a major barrier to this ambitious scheme for national renewal: the apostasy of Robert Harley.55

II. Toland had welcomed the return of Harley to power. While still in Leiden, he wrote directly to the politician in late summer 1710, sending ‘Congratulations on Harley’s happy return to the management of affairs and the disgrace of his enemies, confidently predicted and wished for by the writer’.56 Yet, despite the change in his patron’s fortune, the effect was not apparent in Toland’s condition. Indeed, his circumstances in 1711 were grim. He wrote to Harley on 6 June complaining of how ‘It were strange if a person of my liberal education and experience in foreign Courts (to mention no other qualifications) should not be found useful in some things to so learned as well as so politic a Minister, to whom, I have been gaining all the credit abroad that was possible’.57 In a Memorial he drafted for Harley, Toland reiterated the complaint, saying, ‘I have so seldom of late the honour of admittance to your Lordship, and when I obtain it, that no opportunity is given me to speak of anything to any purpose’.58 Despite this clear sign of Harley’s desire to distance himself from his pamphleteer, Toland requested that he be dispatched ‘privately to Hanover this minute, where you’ll find me as secret as I hope to be successful’.59 On 17 December 1711, he again sailed forth with unsolicited advice to Harley, again using the device of a Memorial, so successful in 1705, as a means to attract attention and, potentially, a commission. Again upset about the ‘unusual difficulty of access I find of late to your Lordship’, and his ‘bad usage’, he detected a change in Harley’s political attitudes from an alteration in the character of those he met ‘going up your stairs, or coming down, who, not very long since, wou’d have been afraid to be found in the same house with you; men (as I then thought) the most opposite to you in principles and men who were the most bitter against you in their sarcasms’.60 Recognizing that his reputation precluded ‘that I should appear in any publick post’ he still thought it appropriate to provide private advice given how, my general acquaintance, the several languages I speak, the experience I have acquir’d in foreign affairs, and being engag’d in no interest at home, besides that of the publick, shou’d (one would think) qualify me in some measure for this province … All wise Ministers have ever had such private monitors.61

He even offered to act as a spy, claiming that Harley would find him at once ‘exact as well as secret’.62 Dismissing the cost of the venture as a barrier, he assumed the only stumbling block could be a shift in general policy, which Toland iterated as having been to date

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civil Liberty, religious Toleration and the Protestant Succession. These are my conditions sine qua non: and he that will not agree with me on this foot must never employ me nor ever trust me. I take this to be plain dealing, as I take honesty to be the best policy. Sooner than recreantly espouse Prerogative, Persecution or the Pretender, let me be utterly discarded, be exposed to all hazards, difficulties and inconveniences.63

This then prompted Toland to provide an extended declaration of political principle, marking out how he and Harley had collaborated in forwarding a shared vision of the polity. ‘I mean no more by Liberty’, Toland averred, than a government of Laws, and not of will, particularly our own excellent constitution of King, Lords and Commons; yet without the Juredivinoship of the Prince, or the Passive obedience of the Subject, the Laws being to both an equal rule. As the Whigs mean no other Commonwealth, contrary to the calumny of the furious and ill-affected part of the Tories, so I am persuaded many of the Tories are far from aiming at setting up irresistible Power or indefeasible Succession, contrary to the suggestions of some weal but well-meaning Whigs. The Papists and Jacobites are common enemies to both, and against these they must both join at last, or be ruin’d. Such a Common-wealth’s-man I only approve, as your Lordship formerly was, when you encourag’d me to reprint Harrington’s Oceana, tho neither us imagin’d the model itself to be practicable.64

This was followed with an determination to uphold the Act of Toleration, then under threat by an Act against Occasional Conformity, and an overt declaration by Toland that ‘I neither am, nor affect to be a Bigot, and that I abominate Licentiousness as much as I venerate Liberty’.65 Associating himself explicitly with ‘we freethinkers (whom some of narrow views ignorantly confound with thoughtless Libertines)’ he denounced Popery, which he then defined in broad terms as ‘in reality nothing else but the Clergy’s assuming a Right to think for the Laity’.66 This political testimonial, capped by the Act of Succession, was the test against which Harley’s actions were to be measured, and Toland worried that if while ‘you appeared for this cause [the Hanoverian claim] early … if to the same you are not still as firm as any, what a wretched politician am I? How greatly misled myself ? And how great a mis-leader of others, especially of that illustrious family?’67 Here was the seed of real doubt, the concern that Harley was not who he claimed to be; an agent for the republic of virtue Toland sought, but rather a duplicitous rogue whose political actions disguised self-aggrandizement and power hunger. Although Toland tried again to approach Harley in 1712, reporting on the political gossip and opinion of London before reminding him ‘there are a thousand ways, to which I am no stranger, whereby you may provide for me, and make me not a little useful to your Lordship, as well as easy to myself ’, the damage had been done. Doubt turned to disillusionment with the conclusion of the War of

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Spanish succession. The Treaty of Utrecht, signed in March and April 1713, recognized the French candidate, Louis XIV’s grandson Philip of Anjou, as King of Spain on the provision that he renounce his claim to the French throne. While the Treaty represented a setback to French imperial ambitions and sustained the balance of powers in Europe until the Seven Years War of 1756–63, Toland’s hawkish anti-French attitude deemed the outcome a defeat for British foreign policy.68 The immediate cause of Toland’s disaffection was the 1711 preliminaries to the Treaty, which had been secretly negotiated between France and England. Toland had recoiled at the idea of a British government having dealings with Louis XIV and the absolutist regime across the Channel. As early as 1711 Toland fretted that the peace settlement that was envisioned was detrimental to the interests of the House of Hanover, and warned Harley of how ‘a clandestine negociation with France sounds very ill to English ears, even in times of the profoundest peace’.69 Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Harley was in fact invoked in a subtle diplomatic play, he urged his one-time mentor to renege on the deal and construct ‘a happy coalition between the true friends of their Country, which are the moderate Whigs and the moderate Tories’.70 When it came out in 1713 that the rumours were accurate and the deal was in place, Toland was dismayed, despite how– as Angus McInnes has proposed – the deal set out in detail the advantages to be enjoyed by England when a general European peace was eventually signed. These included the Asiento contract – the monopoly of supplying slaves to Spanish America; the restoration of the Hudson Bay Company’s forts and territories; the acquisition of St Kitts, Acadia and Newfoundland, of Gibraltar and Minorca; the granting the most favoured nation treatment to English trade with the Spanish peninsula; and the dismantling of the fortifications of Dunkirk, the great nest of French privateering vessels that had for so long preyed upon English commerce.71

Far from being untrue, and ‘although the [terms] were in large measure negotiated by the Secretary of State St John, their real author was Oxford’.72 Toland believed himself to be politically betrayed, with Harley having reneged on the Commonwealth principles and on the Protestant Constitution he was supposed, in Toland’s light, to uphold. He expressed his antipathy to Harley’s machinations with the French administration in the scathing Dunkirk or Dover.73 Therein Toland took the article concerning the demolition of the fort at Dunkirk as at once critical to, and emblematic of, the Treaty as a whole. The success of the implementation of that clause would be the hinge around which any assessment of the deliberations would turn. As he viewed the matter: If the 9th Article of the Treaty of Utrecht (which is unreasonably, I will not say unfairly, delay’d) be not speedily executed, these consequences will undoubtedly fol-

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low: the Queen’s honour will be sully’d, which will add no credit to the Nation; the Nation itself will be in danger, which can be no safety to the Queen; the Liberties of Europe will be at an end, in which case we cannot hope to be free; and the Peace of the world will be disturb’d, which nearly concerns our plenty and power, as well as our safety and freedom.74

This hyperbolic view was born of anxiety, and the sense that Toland had of having been deceived by a political master he had trusted and on whose behalf he had worked for at least a decade. He was quick to focus attention on what he thought to be the bad faith of the administration: When the people observe any Ministry to do what is evidently to the diminution or detriment of their own country, and that not so much as a plausible reason appears for thus increasing the wealth or power of a foreign Potentate, at first sight they are too apt to think such Ministers very good-natur’d or very silly: but when they know them to have abundance of cunning and not a dram of good nature, then they very fairly conclude them to be ignominiously brib’d; to be gain’d by ready mony, honours, preferments, or any other hire of iniquity either in present or expectation.75

The failure of the French King to enact his promises was predictable. Yet what marked out the occasion as particularly significant was, as Toland rehearsed the episode, that when Louis had finally been brought to the negotiating table and was ‘on the point of signing Peace, that very probably for many years would have secur’d the tranquillity of Europe’ it was the enemy within that destroyed that prospect, for he could rely on ‘his good friends were working elsewhere underground’ committing ‘deeds of darkness’ on his behalf.76 The conspiracy against the Commonwealth was, it seemed, more deeply set and dangerous than Toland had thought. His anxiety was about to turn to paranoia.

III. The year 1714 should have marked the apotheosis of Toland’s political career; instead it was a year characterized by a crisis of faith. On 8 June Sophia died at the age of eighty-three; Queen Anne did not long outlive her presumptive heiress, herself passing on 1 August. The twin fatalities invested Prince George with the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland, arriving in England in September and being crowned on 20 October. With the death of the monarch a dissolution of parliament occurred and in the general election which followed in early 1715, the Whigs were victorious, rolling back the Tory gains of 1710 and destroying the post-Sacheverell political landscape. Harley’s era of domination of the political nation was at an end. The Tory position was equally undermined, for the accession was followed in 1715 by a Jacobite rising which briefly threatened the nascent Hanoverian regime. Led by the Earl of Mar the rebellion was a combination of a foreign

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invasion and an internal conspiracy.77 Its defeat, however, destroyed any hopes the Tories held of co-opting themselves into the favour of the King: he became a devotee of a range of Whig ministries, pushing the Tory party into the political wilderness for over a generation.78 The tension surrounding the succession was marked by Toland in two edited publications, the first highlighting the legitimacy of George; the second registering the passing of Sophia. In Her Majesty’s Reasons for Creating the Electoral Prince of Hanover a Peer of this Realm, Toland reproduced the preamble to the patent that elevated George to the title of Duke of Cambridge, in preparation for his eventual monarchical role. In the remarks appended to this text, Toland stated the legitimacy of the transfer of power to the Hanoverians, highlighting how ‘the Queen … does not say they are to succeed to the British sceptres by hereditary right … but by virtue of the Laws ratified by her authority, or by parliamentary right’.79 He was equally anxious to dismiss the rumours being circulated that ‘the Queen and her Ministers have any manifest designs or secret reserves in favour of the Pretender’ claiming that ‘the Succession is so far from being in Danger from the Queen or her Ministers, that I cou’d as soon believe ’em in a conspiracy against themselves as to be directly engag’d against the House of Hanover’.80 Instead he asserted plainly ‘this new title is to be to the Electoral Prince, the first fruits or earnest of the Royal Dignity’.81 In 1714 he then supplied a translation of the Funeral Elogy and Character of Her Royal Highness, the Late Princess Sophia which had been delivered by Johann Friedrich Cramer, which again served to emphasise the validity, virtue and prudence of the parliament’s decision to pass the Act of Succession.82 This was coupled with a survey of the Characters of the Court of Hannover, which emphasized the moral character of the Hanoverian line against the turpitude of the Stuart claimant. As he configured the dilemma, it was a choice Between a Protestant Prince, and indisputed Heir, and a Popish Pretender, disputed by all Law and Justice; between one who appear’d by many wonderful Acts of Providence, persevered to fill his Father’s throne, and another who seems destined by Heaven for a mock King, to dream of Crowns only, and please himself with an empty Title, unless marked out by Vengeance, at the Instigation of Villains, Traytors and Parricides, for the future Scourge of these Kingdoms, in Proportion to the cursed Sin of those who contrive the Ruin of their Country in assisting to bring him hither.83

The fervid atmosphere of 1714 was captured by Toland in The Grand Mystery Laid Open, where he surveyed the open shows of discontent and rumours of disturbance that rumbled through the British Isles. Within Ireland, he claimed, the Roman Catholics were increasingly impertinent: ‘they exercise their abominable Idolatry as publickly as others do the worship of the Establish’d Church’.84 In Scotland, the Pretender was overtly enlisting soldiers for his cause, while ‘the

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like traitorous practice has not wanted success in England’.85 This was expected to be a preliminary to an invasion there, backed by the French court, although here duplicity, not publicity was required, for The King of France and his Pupil are enough convinc’d of the aversion the British Nations have to SLAVERY, and that even many of the PRETENDER’s adherents wou’d not have him restor’d by a French power. For this reason, high if not extravagant encouragement is given to all English, Irish or Scots, that will enlist themselves in the service of either, or of the Duke of Lorain; that a body of Troops sufficient for the Expedition may be form’d out of these, whereby they design to kill two birds with one stone … For let People fancy what they please, tho the Chevalier’s interest is pretended, the thing intended is Conquest, French conquest.86

The heart of the Stuart threat however lay, in Toland’s estimation, in the internal threat posed by those within the state system whose actions bespoke a loyalty to the Pretender. Thus, he accosted those who supported the Schism Act (which insisted that teachers at schools had to partake of Anglican Communion, thereby threatening dissenting academies with closure) for acting to divide and destroy the Protestant interest on which the Hanoverian succession depended. As he diagnosed the matter All the Emissaries of Rome, and the Tools of France, of the Pretender (chuse what you will) are hard at work to widen our Breaches, and to render any Coalition impracticable, tho but in the means of providing for our Common Security, This is the true Reason why the Jacobites were the most eager of all others for pressing the Schism Bill, as foreseeing it wou’d sooner alienate and exasperate, than reclaim or reconcile the Dissenters.87

Here Toland laid out the central elements he perceived as acting in concert as ‘conspirators’ for a Stuart restoration. However, the darkest and most deceitful element of all were the ministers of state he thought were complicit with the scheme. He fretted about how Corrupt Ministers may go a greater way than any of these towards our destruction, and especially if there be a Single Minister: for such a one, having the purse and prerogative at his disposal, may barefac’d and without the Tricking which is inseparable from such Men, pull down in less than three years what has been a building above twenty: he may clandestinely strike up a personal instead of a national peace, a peace for three people, instead of three kingdoms.88

A Single or Prime Minister, with control of the purse through his position as Chancellor of the Exchequer, making a personal peace – through secret negotiations and not a public engagement – and favouring three people (the Pope, the King of France and the Pretender). The coding was not subtle: the greatest danger to the constitution Toland perceived emanated from the person of his one-time patron Robert Harley.

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IV. By 1714 Toland’s doubts about Harley and the course of events had become tortured realization. As a consequence, Toland produced an allegory born of anxiety, The Art of Restoring.89 The rhetorical device was the same as that which underpinned his attacks on Sacheverell and the High Church party – namely the drawing of a meaningful and critical historical analogy. Just as with the comparison of the High Church to ancient Christian persecutors – of heretics or Jews – Toland here supplied a sustained analogy between the machinations of General Monck during the period of the restoration and those of Sir Roger – a rather thin guise under which lay the figure of Robert Harley.90 The attraction of analogy as a mode of argument for Toland was twofold. As a political pamphleteer it provided him a degree of deniability, however slight. By merely recounting past events in a manner which alluded to current affairs the responsibility for making the parallel and drawing out the implied moral lesson was moved away from the innocent author, who was merely supplying a historical account – and rested it with the reader. But to the conspiratorial mind, the method had two further attractions. First of all it made the reader complicit with the suggestion that a parallel existed. It that it re-enacted the creation of a conspiracy, from the temptation of half-suggested ideas and the slow uncovering of a plot to the making the reader part of the initiated few who had the key to reading the underlying rationale for the events which unfold. Secondly, analogy as a form of argument depends on and asserts the inherent connectivity of things. One thing is shown to be like another, connected by some feature or characteristic, a cause or an effect. The conspiratorial mind, which is seeking out hidden connections, is drawn to a mode of argument that uncovers such similitude and proclaims its importance. Toland could thus connect the ancient and the contemporary church in a historical conspiracy of clerics. So too could he implicate Harley as a turncoat, by drawing an analogy with the Commonwealthman who had betrayed the cause and restored an exiled King. The implication was that Harley was a Jacobite and a traitor to the revolutionary settlement. Published in early February, Toland made clear the anxiety that was driving him to print, laying out the various strands of an intricate conspiracy which involved the Pope (described as the ‘good allie’ to the Jacobites), the French King, Louis, described as ‘no less a papist [than the Emperor] and something that’s worse’.91 It centred initially on James III, who was, to Toland’s eye, ‘Partial to the French nation, governed by French councils … under private engagements to the French king … educated from his cradle in French principles … under such vast obligations to the French king as to be properly his retainer and creature’.92 Toland was overt in depicting this as an international plot to place James III on the throne of Britain and Ireland. ‘The Jacobites’, he wrote, ‘and their secret or

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open abettors (who are in a sworn conspiracy against the [Hanoverian] succession and whom therefore in the sequel of my letter I shall call the conspirators) have in their numerous libels … plainly insinuated a design to alter the succession as by law established’.93 This involved Britain and France therefore in an existential fight for survival taking in the British allies of the Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch States, polities which as they’ll never for their own sakes, suffer the French king quietly to place his viceroy on the throne of Great Britain and the conspirators are therefore fully determined to break their power, and have as I have said done all that depended upon them as well by private treachery as by open violence to bring about their ruin.94

He identified this policy of totalized warfare – my enemy’s friend is my enemy – in typically conspiratorial fashion as ‘the key by which to decipher their [the conspirators] actions’.95 It would, once accepted, reveal the pattern of past history allowing those who knew to ‘perceive their drift as clear as the sun … those several measures which they formerly thought to be hasty, inconsistent and even chimerical, were maturely weighed, all of a piece, and perfectly well adapted to the end the conspirators designed’.96 But the real weak link in the chain according to The Art of Restoring was not conspiracy abroad but treachery at home. This, Toland asserted was the guilt to be ascribed to Harley, who was, he claimed, in the pay of the French, for Some of his old friends begun to be undeceived, when in the year 1708 it appeared by certain transactions, to which you are no longer stranger, that he had all along a private understanding with the court of France; and the rest who loath to think the worst of any man without irresistible conviction, had all their doubts dispelled, and their eyes sufficiently opened by the measures he was pursuing without any disguise since the year 1710 to this moment in time.97

Even the actions Harley had taken to resist James and to set back his cause were in this light to be understood merely as wise dissimulation. In a dexterous act of counter-intuitive thought, Toland argued that ‘exactly such has been the conduct of every traitor from the beginning of the world: for without complying with the firms established, they could never get into credit, nor consequently obtain the power of doing the mischief they intended’.98 Foreign forces at work, domestic duplicity and subversion in play. The Art of Restoring is a worried utterance, anxious to avoid a repetition of the collapse of liberty into despotism that Toland associated with the collapse of the Protectorate and the return of the Stuart lineage. In this lay the significance of his choice of analogy – General Monck had overthrown the republic Toland still supported and the values of which Toland was actively engaged in reconstituting under the auspices of a limited monarchy.99

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In this historical concern, as with the other characteristics of the text, Toland’s pamphlet seems to a work written in the paranoid style, a political style in much the same sense that ‘a historian of art might talk of the baroque or mannerist style. It is above all a way of seeing the world and of expressing yourself ’.100 Toland’s style was dependent here, as elsewhere, on a kind of hyperbolic scholastic fireworks, an accretion of citations and cross referencing that speaks to the pedantic mode of much writing in the paranoid style; indeed, ‘one of the impressive things about paranoid literature is precisely the elaborate concern with demonstration it almost invariably shows’.101 Thus alongside the primary pamphlet, Toland compiled a further compilation of Monck’s correspondence, at once asserting his authority over the material and repeating the central conceit of a parallel between the two men.102 As Justin Champion recognizes, this was intrinsic to Toland’s ‘strategy for making this comparative narrative’ in The Art of Restoring, as ‘the redeployment of discourses of liberty against tyranny and arbitrary power from the 1650s … could be usefully read as commentaries on the contemporary state of politics, as much as simple historical citation’. The difficulty with this habit of synthesis is that it irons out the irregularities and the inconsistencies of actual history. In its concern to find a pattern of meaning within the chaos of evidential material, it falls into the trap of imposing order where there may be none. ‘It is nothing but coherent – in fact the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures and ambiguities’.103 ‘But, what distinguishes the paranoid style is not, then, the absence of verifiable facts … but rather the curious leap in imagination that is always made at some critical point in the recital of events’.104 Here too Toland’s text is typical, seeing in the complexity of European power politics a Catholic plot – a consistency of shared ambition amongst British enemies that allowed him to make the improbable leap towards an existential spiritual war. It echoes and finds reverberation from the anti-Catholic trope that had proliferated in seventeenth-century England and the anti-French sentiment that had emanated from the Anglo–French Wars of the 1690s and 1700s. What is distinctive about Toland’s Art of Restoring, however, is the status of Robert Harley. Toland’s identification of an immediate villain to the piece removes the text from a vague, ill-defined sense of conspiratorial stress. His text is diagnostic; specific; personal. That Toland had known and worked for Harley accounts for his capacity to isolate him as the nodal point in a network of treason.105 This access, and the connected misreading of Harley’s deceitful character, now revealed, was admitted to when he wrote in the preface of The Art of Restoring of how ‘I cultivated a familiarity for some years, and of whom I once had a better opinion’.106 In this, it fits with Rachel Weil’s insightful remark that

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in debates about plots, the identity and motivation of the source were all important. How else but by knowing the source could one distinguish true information about a plot from a plot to pretend that there was a plot, and that in turn from a plot to pretend there was a plot to pretend there was a plot? Plot talk thus tended to affix information to particular bodies, not let it float freely. It was about persons and their credibility, not disembodied facts.107

Toland’s assertion of a forlorn relationship to Harley gave his assessment of the politician’s personality credibility, just as his accumulation of facts announced his authoritative scholarship.108 As well as writing political advice to him, he also pamphleteered on his behalf, although Harley retained a desire to keep Toland at a distance, allowing a degree of deniability and latitude in performance to characterise their dealings. Indeed, despite Toland’s claim to proximity in 1714, the place he pursued was largely denied to him. Justin Champion concludes: ‘Toland’s relationships with powerful men were built upon principle rather than private interest; that principle was shaped by his self-identification as a commonwealthman’.109 Given this, however, ‘Toland was a man intimate with the mechanics and personnel of elite politics … [and while] the historian needs to be wary of Toland’s claims to influence and connection, there was clear substance to his assertion of intimacy with princes, nobles and men of political power’.110 It was this intimacy that allowed Toland to supply a reading that is close to what Richard Hofstadter sees as characteristic of more modern forms of the paranoid style, where, as he observes ‘the effects of the mass media’ ensure The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public … For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, we may now substitute eminent public figures.111

In Toland’s case Harley was the eminent public figure whose deceptive character had to be revealed. In a startling passage of character assassination, Toland rounded on the one-time ally, and declared that it must be a sign you know not your friend so well as you imagine when you mention honour and him in the same breath; a man that never spoke as syllable of direct truth in this life, that never made a promise without a double meaning. Though his head is naturally muddy, yet the confusion and ambiguity of his expressions proceeds as much from design as from nature, that he may be bound by nothing; and so, as it may suit his convenience, be able to slip his neck out of the collar as to all obligations. As for his promises, therefore, and his protestations, they are as sure to be deceived who are weak enough to trust to them.112

Just as in the modern ‘paranoid imagination treason in high places can be found at almost every turning’ so in The Art of Restoring Harley is fingered as the enemy within the gates: the traitor who will give the citadel up to the enemy.113

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The attack on Harley also relates to Toland’s conspiratorial sense of history itself, a sensibility that viewed history as created by acts of will. This again chimes with the paranoid style whereby unlike the rest of us the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He is a free active demonic agent. He wills, indeed he manufactures the mechanism of history himself, or deflects the course of normal history itself in an evil way … The paranoid’s interpretation of history is in this sense distinctly personal; decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will.114

Within this paradigm of individual, if secret, agency Toland could understand and fear that the monarch could be chosen and imposed on the populace by ‘the dextrous management of a skilful politician’ to co-opt Bernard Mandeville’s apt contemporary phrase.115 He also had direct personal experience of just how dextrous politicians worked in such circumstances and feared the agility of a figure as capable of caprice as Harley. Hence denunciation became necessary when Toland feared that his exclusion from Harley’s circle might be permanent. In the polarized worldview Toland was adopting, his rejection must imply wider disloyalty to the cause, and hence treasonous intentions. He was merely a paltry, if symbolic victim of Harley’s wider betrayal. Toland was also pandering to a Whig bias, for an impeachment process against Harley was initiated on 9 July 1715, in the wake of his resignation from the Exchequer a year before. This resulted in Harley’s imprisonment in the Tower of London until June 1717, when the charges against him were quietly dropped. The two central thrusts of the assault were, as Toland laid down, the dealings over the Treaty of Utrecht, and the proposition that he was a supporter of the Jacobite claim.116 This, as his supporter Daniel Defoe was quick to point out, was true of his erstwhile ally Lord Bolingbroke, who Harley had endeavoured to restrain. Yet the plot to place James on the throne, had, in the conspiracy theory Defoe subsequently promulgated, been stymied by the death of the Queen, itself ultimately brought on by her distress at dismissing the moderate Hanoverian, Harley.117 Another plot; another conspiracy; another victim of scurrilous rumour, innuendo and political intrigue. In this, The Art of Restoring grappled with Toland’s self awareness; his consciousness that he was complicit in a plot to chose a monarch for a kingdom. He was startlingly close to the politicians who were designing and delivering the Act of Succession. In other words he was all too cognizant of the artificiality of any constitutional settlement, and the possibility of replacing one king with another. He understood that if the Elector of Hanover, with a connection as convoluted as it was, could inherit the crown of Queen Anne, so might someone else; or more specifically, so might the Pretender. After all, the Revolutionary settlement

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was the consequence of an earlier constitutional contrivance dreamt up by party men. Indeed Toland was all too aware that the British constitutional settlement had been in flux for something approaching seventy-five years – since the Bishops’ Wars in Scotland in the late 1630s and the Irish rebellion of 1641 which still crept into the thoughts of Irish Protestants at all too regular intervals. The regicide of 1649 had inaugurated the republic Toland venerated, but it was in turn removed by a constitutional novelty – a Restoration. While Toland viewed the events of 1688 as a partial restitution of republican sentiment, this could only be safeguarded and, potentially, extended by stretching the parameters of hereditary succession close to breaking point in defence of a kind of spiritual salve (George I was neither Anglican nor Calvinist but added a Lutheran strain to the recipe of Britain’s religious stew). In other words 1714 was itself a plot to overturn the constitution, and one that Toland supported. This is to understand 1714 as a year of conspiracies. As Hofstadter observes ‘catastrophe or the fear of catastrophe is most likely to elicit the syndrome of paranoid rhetoric’ and 1714 was one such ‘episodic wave’ of anxiety ‘mobilized into action … by social conflicts that involve ultimate schemes of values and that bring fundamental fears and hatreds, rather than negotiable interests into action’.118 The death of Queen Anne was one such conjunction in which, momentarily, it seemed the spiritual as well as the political fate of these islands hung in the balance. Two conspiracies emerged then. On the Hanoverian side there was a conspiracy of continuity, and, given the way in which 1714 underwrote 1688, a continuity of conspiracies. On the other, the Jacobite threat had not gone away. While the specific accusations Toland levelled at Harley may have been wide of the mark – and his vexed relations with the Jacobite remains the subject of conjecture and controversy – The Art of Restoring was accurate in its depiction of a disaffected cadre determined to effect change. The Pretender, France and the Pope did indeed plot to reinstate James.

6 PUTNEY, 1717–22

In amongst Toland’s papers upon his death at Putney in 1722 was A Secret History of the South Sea Scheme, which Pierre Des Maizeaux admitted was heavily annotated in Toland’s hand.1 This offered an initiate’s rendition of the trauma, arguing against the common understanding that it was a concatenation of the directors’ mismanagement and the foolishness of the crowd that had brought down the company.2 Rather, as it synopsized its own contents, the thesis it laid out was that: The authors of it were Appius, the Treasurer and the Negromancer. The disposing of the fictitious stock, which raised so much clamour, was the work of the Cabinet Council: the rest of the Directors were intirely ignorant of it. The giving Premiums for the Midsummer dividend, was deemed a wicked contrivance. Appius and the Negromancer were the only persons concern’d in that base design.3

This treatment of the South Sea Scheme as the design of three wicked figures was sustained right through the crash and the loss by one director of £200,000.4 A secret history such as this at once appealed to Toland’s desire to seek out hidden motivations and to be part of an initiated few who understood the true actions of the powerful. As Michael McKeon has observed ‘The aim of allegorical secret history is both to conceal and reveal the actual particularity of public personages’.5 Yet, it also fed into Toland’s self-defence, for while he had lost money in the frenzy, he had only invested on the advice of Sir Theodore Janssen – a wealthy Tory who had been a founding figure in the Bank of England and was also a director of the South Sea Company – and a man whose reputation the pamphlet was at pains to sustain. Toland had a vested interest in this matter for he had lost what little monies he had earned over his career in the South Sea Bubble, along with, to his embarrassment, credit he had been extended by his patron, Robert Molesworth.6 The negotiations around this investment were detailed in a sequence of letters between Toland and Molesworth, with the peer informing his agent that ‘I have good credit, having never yet, I thank my stars, forfeited it in any one instance, and shall be beholding to your good friend Sir T*** (for so he has signally shewn

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himself to my very great pleasure and satisfaction) if he can put me into a like method’.7 Toland responded positively informing him that Sir Theodore had facilitated a joint investment in South Sea Stock, although he admitted Your very name (ever auspicious to Liberty) has been made use of to secure this Subscription to me: for the very day before the Directors, by reason of the multitude that offer’d to subscribe, made a private order that no one person shou’d be in two Lists, and that none expect a Parliament-Man shou’d subscribe for a thousand pounds. Upon this, Sir T*** put in your name for mine, as being sure you wou’d not take it ill, since there was no time for asking your leave.8

Toland was clearly caught up in the financial fervour, for he breathlessly told Molesworth about how I was offer’d a thousand pounds advantage three hours after the thing was done, and thirteen hundred this very day: but my benefactor assures me that at the opening of the Books it will be worth a great deal more. You may easily guess I will be govern’d by him on this point. Another such job will make me as easy and independent as I desire, without ever stockjobbing more.9

It was not to be: Toland’s rare excursion into accepting expert advice did not go well. As an undated letter to Sir Theodore makes clear, Toland’s mentor in the mercantile world was himself caught up in the crisis that followed the bursting of the Bubble.10 ‘I cou’d not be unconcern’d’, Toland admitted, ‘to see you involv’d of late in the same difficulties with the rest of the South-Sea Directors, whom I cannot persuade myself to be all equally guilty’.11 He proceeded to advise his friend ‘to clear yourself with the soonest, as believing you rather imprudent than criminal’ and reminded him of how ‘I have solicited you to be speedy and frank in confessing all you knew … as the most certain way to shew a man’s innocence’.12 He averred that it was his tendency ‘never [to] think ill of any one, of whom I once thought well, till matters of fact make it impossible for me to think otherwise’, showing his own tendency towards idealizing his friendships as much as he did his political attitudes.13 This was a tendency he continued to show when he told Sir Theodore to wait on Molesworth, although when Toland had raised the possibility, Molesworth, by then investigating the Company for fraud, ‘did not think it advisable to see you without some more of the Committee were present’.14 Although this had occurred, Sir Theodore’s reputation was besmirched by the affair: he was charged with criminality and expelled from parliament on 23 January 1721.15 Although Toland had unwittingly led Molesworth astray, the peer did not desert his friend. At a personal level Molesworth was there until the end, writing to Toland about his anxiety at the writer’s illness. On 5 January 1722, he fretted over how ‘Your Landlady may be a very good woman, and have a great respect for you, but her poverty may prevent her from providing such sort of victuals and

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drinks as are proper for a sick man reduced to so weak a condition as I find you are’.16 He sent across Madeira and engaged in a final exchange of letters before Toland succumbed to a kidney-stones disorder in March 1722. Politically the year following the financial debacle of the South Sea Crash saw the publication of Toland’s edited series of letters between Molesworth and the third Earl of Shaftesbury: a clear indication of their continuing friendship and a political statement of Molesworth’s inheritance of Shaftesbury’s mantle as the leader of the True Whigs.17 This was underlined by Toland’s introductory essay in which he eulogized the earl as the figure who, more than any other ‘modern … turn’d the ancients more into sap and blood … Their doctrines he understood as well as themselves, and their virtues he practis’d better’.18 He then asserted the connection to Molesworth in similarly laudatory terms: ’Tis no wonder therefore to find him in the following Letters express the highest value for Mr Molesworth (now the Lord Viscount of that name) so often and in such a tender and passionate manner, seeing he did not only concur with him in opinion and practice, about all publick affairs during King William’s government, and afterwards; and had ever unalterably appear’d for the liberty of his Country, and indeed of Mankind, as well by writing as by word and action: but that he likewise had the same love and application to letters with himself, had the same relish and admiration for the celebrated Writers and Patriots of Antiquity; and above all, that he profess’d the same Philosophy too, which they, who know anything of it, will own to have begot a more sincere and lasting Union of hearts and hands, than any tyes of kindred, affinity or Interest. In short, he chose Mr M. for his Oracle in Publick affairs, and his thoro’ confident in private concerns to use his own Expression.19

With the connection to Molesworth being reasserted, Irish issues were finding renewed focus in Toland’s mind. While he had always understood that the polity he was working within was an amalgamation of three kingdoms and subsequently a German Palatinate, his attention had largely remained on matters pertaining to London and England in the period since his hasty removal from Ireland in 1697. Both Ireland and Scotland had made regular appearances in his writings, but it was not until the fall of Harley and the re-emergence of Molesworth in Toland’s political pantheon that he attended in detail to matters there. While much of the product of this rejuvenated concern dealt with antiquity, and its polemical value, Toland chose to make one direct intervention in Irish political developments. In 1720 he issued a pamphlet which contested the decision of the British House of Lords to seek the passage of a Declaratory Act which would instate the supremacy of that House in judicial matters over the jurisdiction of the Irish House of Lords, effectively making the British chamber the final court of appeal in Irish legal disputes. This initiative had been the result of a legal wrangle between the Londonderry Company and the bishop of the city, the Patriot poli-

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tician William King, and a subsidiary legal case entitled Annesley vs Sherlock.20 Yet the net result was to create a legal condition of dependency between Ireland and England. In line with the Patriotic thinking of Molesworth Toland enunciated a protest at the bill. In supplying some Reasons Most Humbly Offer’d to the Honourable House of Commons why the Bill sent down to them from the Most Honourable House of Lords Entitled An Act for the better Securing the Dependency of the Kingdom of Ireland upon the Crown of Great Britain Shou’d not Pass into a Law, Toland adopted a strictly Patriotic register. Citing the concept of the two Houses as a balance on each other, and placing himself as a citizen of the ‘British Empire’ he asserted the loyalty of ‘the Protestants of Ireland … [who] count it as their chief happiness to be inseparably united and annex’d to the Crown of England, now of Great Britain’.21 Parsing the bill’s clauses and laying down the practical difficulties that would be incurred by drawing jurisdictional power to London, Toland built towards the conclusion that the measure would unintentionally alienate the most loyal of the Irish subjects. The heart of his argument, however, was less practical than theoretical, for he believed the bill went against the basic structure of the relationship that existed between Britain and Ireland. As he contended: Upon the whole you’ll make no difficulty of acknowledging that there is a vast difference between Ireland’s being annext to the Crown of Great Britain and being subject to the Lords of Great Britain. These possess already as much power as they can reasonably desire, without any need of grasping at more, to the entire undoing of their innocent neighbours. Nothing should be attempted that might bring about the possibility of a Union of civil interests between the Protestants and Papists of Ireland, whose antipathies and animosities all sound Politicians will ever labour to keep alive.22

Extending this to a theoretical point he observed on the condition of imperial holdings that ‘History cannot afford one example where any Out-Province or remote Colony ever rebell’d against the mother Country, or chief seat of Government, but thro insupportable rigour and oppression’.23 Despite Toland’s labour on this tract, the bill passed into law; an indicative microcosm of his ineffectiveness during the last phase of his political career. Indeed, from the moment the South Sea Bubble burst in September 1720, Toland’s circumstances were desolate. His political hopes imploded with the fall of the Whig administration of Sunderland and Stanhope, which was finally dismissed in 1721. Yet, while in power, they had provided Toland with cause for one final flurry of pamphleteering, in which he had provided a succinct analytical account of the political and spiritual ideals he was pursuing.

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I. If 1714 represented the final collapse of the dream of a Patriotic regime headed by Harley, Toland was anxious to find a new beacon bearer. Having returned from a brief sojourn in Germany and Holland in 1714 Toland was politically isolated, with the Whigs distrusting his previous association with Harley. Yet by 1717 the context had dramatically changed, with the Hanoverian succession secure and the Jacobite rising in Scotland defeated, Toland was to issue The State Anatomy of Great Britain, which was a manifesto for the Commonwealthmen who surrounded his old ally Robert, Viscount Molesworth of Swords, in whose circle he was once again circulating. The Anatomy proposed a raft of legislation including the removal of the Test and Corporation Acts which hindered dissenters, the suppression of the Convocation of the Church of England, a Peerage Bill and reform of the Universities, a programme of action that would have de-confessionalized and republicanized the state structure in accordance with Toland’s long-term ambitions. The administration, led by the third Earl of Sunderland and the first Earl of Stanhope, did try to effect this agenda, suggesting Molesworth’s influence behind the scenes and Toland’s sudden renewed proximity to power. As Justin Champion had observed of Molesworth’s position, After 1714 he achieved some reward in appointment to the Irish Privy Council and as commissioner for trade and plantations, but not as much as he expected. After 1716 he did however exercise political influence without access to patronage, in particular over the controversial issues of toleration and the peerage. It was a public sign of his continuing status that he was created Baron Molesworth of Philipstown and Viscount Molesworth of Swords in July 1719.24

Indeed, Champion insists, this status was a consequence of his being ‘a focus for radical commonwealth projects’ and as leader of a grouping with sway in the administration led by the earls Stanhope and Sunderland.25 As Champion suggests, the central planks of the True Whig programme at this stage were the repeal of the Schism Act that prohibited dissenting teachers from practising their profession, the repeal of the Test Act which demanded nominal participation in the Anglican Communion from officeholders in the state system, and the passage of a Peerage Bill, which would preclude the packing of the upper chamber – an action Harley had taken when the Schism Act was under consideration with the creation of twelve new, politically compliant, peers.26 As Caroline Robbins has remarked, Toland’s State Anatomy of 1717 ‘may be regarded as a manifesto for the Molesworth connection’.27 Yet it also provided an insight into the polity Toland was trying to build. While he was anxious to defend the position of the dissenting academies, Toland was just as determined to see state intervention into the Universities,

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which he deemed to be haunts of High Church orthodoxy and a production line for clerical priestcraft. He pointedly observed: The University that thinks … an Act of Parliament may not quite change the frame of Universities, augment or lessen the number of their Colleges, regulate their revenues and methods of instruction, must not only think all men as ignorant as they find or make their Scholars; but be likewise shamefully ignorant themselves of what has past on such occasions in all parts of the world, and particularly at Oxford and Cambridge. Pray how comes it but by such Reformations that there are not Masses said now at Cambridge; and that the lands or money destin’d to such purposes are since apply’d to much better? Why may not Oxford, for example, be reform’d or purg’d by a ROYAL VISITATION tomorrow, as Aberdeen was the other day, or as Oxford itself was at the Reformation?28

His attack on the High Church did not stop there, however, in the institutions he thought to be their seedbed. Rather Toland thought it necessary for the state to expressly tolerate the variety of religious belief that existed within the kingdom, within the limits of social order and political loyalty. While he accepted that ‘no country professing any Religion can possibly be without a National Religion’ he was adamant that ‘Ever man ought at the same time to have the choice of his own Religion, since nothing is more consistent than a Publick Establishment and Liberty of Conscience’.29 This he then defined by arguing We do not mean Licentiousness of morals (which has not plea from Conscience) nor Indifference as to all Religions: but a free Toleration both of such actions as are in their own nature allow’d to be indifferent, or in their circumstances unsinful: and of such doctrines or opinions as are not destructive of humane Society and all Religion, but consisting in bare Speculation and solely regarding the conscience of man.30

‘The equity of this Liberty’ he asserted, ‘is grounded upon the use of Reason which is equally the right of all men, upon the nature of things, and upon the difference of education as well as of Capacities’.31 This position then enabled Toland to once again take an intellectual swipe at the High Church faction that had long been his central target, and announce that ’Tis not Toleration (the source of Science) but Persecution (the root of Ignorance) that produces sedition and troubles. The Dissenters are as faithful to King GEORGE, as zealous for the Government and the Reform’d Interest, as the Church establist by Law can possibly pretend to be. Their purses are as open to support them, and their hands (if they were permitted) as ready to defend them. Our Protestants of all sorts drive their traffic and commerce, set up their stocks and companies, and keep their feats and clubs promiscuously, without exception to one another’s opinions And who sees not that the heats which yet remain among us are by no means owing to the Church of England, or to the different Persuasions from it; but to that Party, which under pretence of being the flower of this Church, repines at Liberty of Conscience, and rebels against Civil Liberty?32

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Extending this polemic analysis across to secular politics, Toland contended that the central distinction between the Whigs and the Tories was that The Whigs declare for settled laws, against Arbitrary Will, maintain’d by the Tories, and the limited, conditional, legally-hereditary Monarchy … against a Monarchy indefeasibly-hereditary, unlimited and absolute, claim’d by the same Tories. Or to be shorter, the Whigs are assertors of Liberty, and the Tories abettors of Tyranny.33

At the pinnacle of Toland’s ideal system then, was a limited monarchy. He disclaimed the idea that there was any ‘strong party of Republicans, or Commonwealthmen’ in as much as no one was merely in favour of ‘An Aristocracy or a Democracy; or if you’ll have it worded otherwise, for the sovereignty of a Parliament and Privy-Council, exclusive of all Regal Government’.34 Yet he was again insistent that what could be found was a populace committed to a balance of powers, in which Our Kings, in effect, have all the power of doing good that can be desir’d, being only restrain’d in certain things from hurting themselves or their subjects’ while the people are able to exercise an envy’d Liberty … [which consists] not [of ] Anarchy not Licentiousness, but a Government of Laws enacted for the common good of all the people, by their own consent and approbation, as they are represented in parliament.35

This led to Toland’s political ur-statement, a statement of his credo, that ‘nothing is more consistent than Law and Liberty; nay there cannot be any political Liberty without Law … our Liberty consists in Laws of our own making, and … our monarchy is the best form of Commonwealth’.36 For a time between 1717 and 1719 it seemed as though Toland was about to see his hopes realized in an administration that was minded to enact legislation to temper the High Church faction, and forward a republican agenda in relation to the governance of the state. What pulled the project down was the factionalism that was rife in the Whig party, and against which Toland had long railed. In one sense the project was over even as it was finally being established. When on 9 and 10 April 1717 the Whigs finally spilt with Lord Townshend and Robert Walpole leaving the ministry, it seemed as though the Stanhope–Sunderland faction that Molesworth and Toland favoured had finally shed their constraint and were in full control of the administrative apparatus. However, Walpole in particular was to become an effective manager of the opposition, and was to reap his reward when the South Sea Bubble burst. Setting up a ‘Screen’ that protected the monarch from the ramifications of the scandal, he rose to power in 1720. The damaging struggle for power had destroyed Toland’s vision of a civil republic in Britain.

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II. If the State Anatomy was envisioning an ideal form of political structure, with a checklist of reforms that Britain would have to undergo to make this ideal manifest, then the parallel text in the spiritual dimension was Toland’s study of the original uncorrupted Christianity of ancient Britain, offered in An Account of an Irish Manuscript of the Four Gospels, published in 1718 as part of his wider corpus of Biblical criticism, Nazarenus. Therein he developed a broad portrayal of the Culdees, the community of Celtic Christians that existed before the coming of the Roman Church’s authority to the archipelago. As with the State Anatomy the account of the Culdees was something of a lengthy checklist. It supplied a series of characteristics for the Christianity Toland wished to see instituted, and thought had been in place before the corruptions of papal authority had deformed the faith. It also offered a model for the Reformed faith to pursue, an endpoint to the programme of Reformation being a reinstatement of the independent British variant of Christian church practice. In projecting this early Christianity, Toland appears to have drawn on the significance of a number of Presbyterian practices, such as the rejection of vestments, the reduction of ritual and the removal of statues.37 He also drew on wider Protestant practice to insist that the early Christians had partaken of Communion in both kinds and used scripture in the vernacular.38 He presumed that marriage was a civil, rather than a religious, ceremony and, crucially, there had been no archbishops until the eleventh century. In a central passage he proclaimed of the Culdees that the Church was esteemed to be, not a political empire, or an organiz’d society with a proper subordination of officers and subjects; but the congregation of the faithful thro-out the world, whether visible or invisible, and however differing anywhere in their discipline and their modes of worship … This is a true and generous account, for the Communion of Saints consists in faith and holiness but not in modes and forms … They did not in the least acknowledge the headship of the Roman Church.39

This was consciously counterpointed to Toland’s depiction of Roman Catholicism, which as a faith was guilty of introducing priestcraft and altering the nature of doctrine to fit with secular ambition. Thus, he contended, in relation to the introduction of the sacrament of auricular confession: Once a man abandons the use of his understanding so farr as to make a particular enumeration of his thoughts, words, and actions to another; and to believe that this other will not only keep his secret (tho’ sworn to the interest of a political community call’d the CHURCH,) but that he’s likewise able to absolve him from the guilt of all his sins, there is nothing to which such a man cannot be brought: and therefore, those Clergymen, who have form’d designs against Liberty civil or religious, are indefatigable to inculcate the necessity of sacerdotal Absolution and particular Confession.40

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This contrast between a ‘congregation of the faithful’ and a ‘political community call’d the CHURCH’ organized Toland’s thoughts, for in treating with the Culdees, he persistently drew comparison between the liberty they afforded congregants against the discipline inflicted by the Roman Church. Thus, he could imagine a religious society in which there was no uniformity demanded in relation to the liturgy, with Toland averring ‘late it was, before they quite gave up their liberty and independency’.41 When describing the practice of full immersion baptism, he announced that the Culdees were not guilty of promulgating any ‘superstitious ceremonies’; and he condemned auricular confession as ‘a sanctified trap for their [the laity’s] private and public liberty’.42 While the Culdees honoured their dead they were not in awe of any saints, and they rejected the doctrinal conceit of purgatory.43 While he admitted ‘they did indeed entertain the notion of a middle state of bliss or insensibility a good while before they transform’d it into a place of temporary torment; both alike groundless and unscriptural’.44 The hinge around which the religious history of the British Isles turned, Toland proposed, was the Council of Cashel, held in 1172 under the auspices of Henry II shortly after his descent into Ireland. This was symbolically important, given the prominence the debate surrounding Henry’s intrusion had for the constitutional status of the country. Had Henry invaded, Ireland would have been effectively a dependency of England; however, Irish Patriots such as William Molyneux (whose Case of Ireland … Stated of 1698 was the definitive statement of the argument that the king was there by invitation and that the crown of Ireland had been freely offered to him), Jonathan Swift and Robert Molesworth all conceived of the matter differently suggesting that the crown of Ireland was largely elective and Henry had recognized its independence from the succession of England.45 Whether that was the case, Toland was clear that it was under Henry’s direction that Rome had commandeered the Culdees and gained supremacy. Henry was a usable figure as his incursion into Ireland had been partly legitimized by a papal bull, and the Council was intended to bring Irish church practices into line with the wider Catholic community. In Toland’s treatment, this was not a process of necessary standardization, being instead a conspiracy to corrupt the ancient Christianity of the country. The Council of Cashel introduced the service of the dead, on which he commented ‘nothing does more contribute to harden the more ignorant sort in a vicious course of life, than this mummery’; it also introduced spiritual ceremonies for matrimony.46 It also, crucially, insisted on the payment of tithes, which buttressed the secular power of the clergy: That they paid no Tythes till the Council of Cashel was, to be sure, reckon’d an unpardonable crime by the Roman partisans, who ridiculously deriv’d the divine right of Tythes under the Gospel from the Law of Moses: as others of ’m from some Laws of Heathen governments asserted the natural right of Tythes, tho’ unhappily for their

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A Political Biography of John Toland pretences, this rather sets up the right of the Laity than of the Clergy. But voluntary Contributions contended those honest Irish Priests of old, who as yet did not aim at a spiritual empire, and so to make the people tributaries, instead of benefactors. Nor can I sufficiently admire the wisdom of our ancestors for their not establishing at the beginning Landed Clergy, which seldom fails to corrupt Religion, and to imbroil the State.47

The conspiracy to corrupt the Celtic church for secular purposes was only one component part of a wider agenda that Toland had taken up in composing Nazarenus, however. As Jonathan Israel has remarked, the wider polemical purpose of the collection was ‘to de-Christianise Christianity and remodel it as a republican civic religion’.48 To do that, Toland had to propose that the Roman Church was guilty of a wider conspiracy again; namely a cover-up of the very nature of Christianity itself. To that end he turned his attention to the construction of the Bible.

III. To press the charge that the Roman Church was guilty of a cover-up of the intrinsic nature of the Christian faith, Toland treated of the apocryphal Gospel of Barnabas, which was based on a sixteenth-century manuscript in Italian, which was in the library of Eugene of Savoy. The rhetorical power of this approach highlighted how far the scriptural canon was the result of a history of selection and exclusion; the outcome of debate, compromise and self-interested haggling. The apocryphal gospel was in effect an outlier: a rogue fact the existence of which was not explained by the official account of history as determined and promulgated by the authorities. By highlighting the anomaly that the Gospel’s existence represented – an account of Christ that did not accord with the official view – Toland was subtly raising the question as to whether other material had suffered a similar fate or neglect or wilful suppression. The Gospel of Barnabas begged the question as to whether there was more that the authorities were unwilling to share with the laity. Moreover, as Toland claimed, the manuscript he was presenting offered an ‘Original Plan of Christianity’ that was combustible in its contents and simultaneously helped explain the introduction of corruption and ‘mystery’ into the Church.49 Crucially in the case of the material presented in the manuscript, ‘the story of Jesus is very differently told in many things from the receiv’d Gospels, but more fully and particularly, this Gospel being, if my eye has not deceiv’d me, being near as long again as any of ours’.50 In the first instance, in this rendition of the story, Barnabas was one of Christ’s apostles, and the Muslim community, from which the gospel derived, were in fact a sect of Christians. The assertion that the Gospel used by the Muslims has been well preserved, because of their

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belief that the purity of the text preserves its inspirational quality, set up Toland’s next controversial statement, namely that the biblical texts used by Christians were corrupted: Nor is there anything more evident to those who have taken pains in this matter, than that the Mahometans openly profess to believe the Gospel: tho they charge our copies with so much corruption and alteration, that our Gospel is not only no longer certain or genuine; but according to them, the farthest of all the books in the world from being divine.51

The key element in the Nazarenus thesis however, was less to do with what the Gospel of Barnabas told readers about the quality of the Christian scripture, than what it positively asserted about the nature of the faith, for as Toland highlighted, the treatment of Christ by the Nazarenes made it plain they deemed Jesus to be human, not divine, or as he pertly put it, ‘a mere man’.52 This, Toland averred, was backed up in the gospel where it was noted that MAHOMET is nam’d again or foretold in some other places of this book of BARNABAS, as the design’d accomplisher of God’s economy towards man. ’Tis in short, the ancient Ebionite or Nazaren System, as to the making of Jesus a mere man (tho not with them the Son of JOSEPH, but divinely conceiv’d by the VIRGIN Mary).53

This revelation, for such it was intended to be, implied that the Socinian heresy was in fact grounded in a proper understanding of the faith. Indeed he directly ascribed the term to the Nazarenes stating EUSEBIUS says that some few of ’em in his time (that is, in the fourth century) believ’d like the Gentile Christians, the mother of CHRIST to have been a Virgin; and that he was conceiv’d by virtue of the Spirit of God, tho still but a mere man (which is just the Socninianism of our times) but that they enjoin’d the observation of the Legal ceremonies as strictly as the others.54

Moreover, the Gospel of Barnabas offered a challenge to the central predicate of the Christian faith – that Christ had died for humanity’s sins and had been raised from the dead. In an alternate ending, he observed how the manuscript agrees in everything almost with the scheme of our modern Unitarians; expecting the history of his death and resurrection, about which a very different account is given from that in our Gospels: but perfectly conformable to the traditions of the Mahometans, who maintain that another was crucify’d in his stead; and that JESUS, slipping thro’ the hands of the Jews, preach’d afterwards to his disciples and then was taken up into Heaven55

Toland then ascribed the origins of this cover-up to St Paul, raising the notion of a division between Barnabas, for ‘’Tis plain the writer of this Book [the Gospel] has known of the dissension between BARNABAS and PAUL recorded

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in the Acts of the Apostles; and it will be said, perhaps that this quarrel set BARNABAS a writing’.56 Toland accosted Paul for what he thought of as the perversion of not teaching to Gentiles, and attacked him for promulgating the priestcraft Toland had spent his career fighting against. In this he was of a piece with the Nazarenes, who were themselves ‘MORAL ENEMIES TO PAUL’ and he averred that ‘To set this matter in the clearest light, it is to be noted, that the Ebionites call’d PAUL an Apostate from the Laws; and rejected all his Epistles, as those of an Enemy and an Impostor … The Like charge against PAUL is acknowleg’d of the Nazarens’.57 It was thus Paul, not figures like Toland, who was ‘ambitious to be the head of a party’.58 The Nazarenes, in other words, offered an alternative vision of Christianity to that of Paul and, by default, the Catholic Church. As Toland contended: From the history of the Nazarens we shall take occasion (and a very natural occasion it is) to set THE ORIGINAL PLAN OF CHRISTIANITY in its proper light; the want of which made it a Mystery to both Jew and Gentile, before the declaration of it by Jesus; but since that declaration it ceases to be longer a MYSTERY to any but such as love darkness better than the light; or that take upon them to teach others what they profess not to understand themselves. Whereas, after the manifestation of it by the Gospel, nothing is more intelligible or conceivable, as nothing is more amiable or interesting than the true and genuine Christianity: so plain and perspicuous indeed, that it was preach’d at the very beginning to men of the most ordinary capacities; who were not puzzl’d but enlighten’d, not banter’d but thoroly instuct’d.59

Twenty-two years after the publication of Christianity Not Mysterious, Toland was still arguing that the faith was conformable to, not above, common reason, and was open to everyone to comprehend, once the accretions of tradition and the corruptions of priestcraft had been removed. The difficulty was to determine, however, how such a descent into superstition had occurred and how the clerical fraud had been permitted. What was the nature of priestcraft ? Was it inherent in Christianity, or was there something broader, in the nature of man that permitted its development. To explore that possibility, Toland had to turn away from Christianity altogether, and develop a project in the mode of comparative religious studies. While Nazarenus had dwelt on the data provided by the Muslim tradition, Toland realized his linguistic expertise was not able to interrogate that faith with adequate discipline, despite a persistent interest in the subject area.60 He was, however, a competent student of the Irish language, as his days at the University of Oxford trying to impress the learned community there had revealed.61 He thus turned his eye to the evidence available to him concerning pre-Christian Ireland.

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IV. In the papers left upon Toland’s death, and subsequently published by Pierre Des Maizeaux, was his major life project. Projected as early as his time in Oxford in the early 1690s, A Specimen of the Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning – known colloquially as ‘The History of the Druids’ – marked the culmination of his lasting concern with the pre-history of the British Isles and with the history of political ecclesiology.62 Characteristically, it postulated a history of religious conspiracy wherein priests set themselves up as authoritative auditors of divine knowledge. Sent around the circle of like-minded men that centred on Molesworth, Toland’s text was more than a secretive reveal of the inner mechanics of the church – it accorded with a broader understanding of history and politics as factional and founded in plots and counterplots. Indeed, as Harold Love has shown, the failure of the letters to be transferred onto moveable type, did not in fact preclude their private circulation.63 And as Justin Champion has suggested, this process of selective access created a discernible coterie.64 Moreover, as Michael McKeon has posited, it also ensured that the audience for the text would remain visible and known to the author.65 In this it is constitutive of a community instead of an anonymous society generated as a consequence of mechanical publication and mass distribution. It was also the means of initiating his companions into the secret history that Toland had uncovered of corruption in the Christian church. This process is underwritten by Toland’s use of the letter format, addressing his texts directly to his patron, and praising his learning and generosity; while underlining the durability of their friendship. The Specimen consisted of a sequence of three letters addressed to his long-time patron, Robert Molesworth; they were dated 25 June 1718; 1 July 1718 and 18 April 1719. Taken as a series, they slowly relate the drama of historical deceit that Toland wished his patron to understand; taken together they provide a narrative of conspiracy and fraud, cover-up and corruption. Moreover, Molesworth was an apt recipient for this material, not only because of his shared political perspective, but also due to a profound interest in the Celtic past which the two men had in common. Indeed, they had spent time annotating a single copy of Martin Martin’s travelogue A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, with Toland’s comments being drawn out by Molesworth, before being again worked over.66 The Specimen was fundamentally concerned with rejecting the uncomplimentary image of Ireland that had germinated in the British understanding of the past, largely drawn from Roman sources that thought of the Celts as barbarous and ungovernable. Instead Toland was determined to depict Ireland as the bastion of Celtic civilization that had extended through the British Isles and

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which could stand up to the close judgemental examination of its gainsayers. Far from being barbaric, it was a couth, cultured world that had benefited from a religious faith that rejected mystery and instead celebrated the power of nature. Toland drew on archaeological evidence to propose, for instance that in the Isle of Lewis could be found [a] Temple [which] stands astronomically, denoting the 12 signs of the Zodiac and the four principal winds, subdivided each into four others; by which, and the 19 stones on each side of the avenue betokening the cycle of 19 years, I can prove it to have been dedicated principally to the Sun; but subordinately to the Seasons and the Elements, particularly to the Sea and the Winds, as appears by the rudder in the middle.67

This pantheistic faith was headed up by the caste of druids, which Toland described in terms that echoed his own ontological commitments in the Letters to Serena in that the Druids asserted ‘two grand doctrines of the Eternity and Incorruptibility of the Universe, and the incessant Revolution of all beings and forms, [which] are very specially, tho’ sometimes very figuratively express’d. Hence their Allanimation and Transmigration’.68 Toland was here proclaiming a heritage for his own heretical stance concerning the eternity of matter and the existence of movement in all forms. Alongside this idealized version of the Druidic faith, Toland offered a vision of their political arrangements that chimed with his own republican commitments. Thus, he described an elective monarchy on the Hebrides, in which ‘better provision was made against the changing of an elective into a hereditary monarchy, and against all the exorbitances of the Prince, than ever I read in any other author, antient or modern’.69 He also managed to project into his research a utopia once existing on the Isle of Harris, in which the inhabitants were strangers to many of the Distempers, as they are to most of the Vices of other nations, for some of which they have not so much as a name: and it may no less truly be observ’d of these as the ancient Scythians, that the ignorance of vices has had a better effect upon them than the knowledge of Philosophy upon politer nations. They owe everything to Nature. They cure all disorders of the body by simples of their own growth, and by proper diet and labour.70

They also evinced many of the virtues that Toland deemed intrinsic to a sociable, civilized culture: They are hospitable beyond expression, intertaining all strangers of what condition soever gratis; the use of money being still in some of these islands unknown, and till a few ages past in all of them. They have no Lawyers or Attorneys; which no more than several other particulars here specify’d I do not understand of the Highlanders on the continent; tho’ speaking the same language, and wearing the same dress with them. The men and women plead their own causes, and a very speedy decision is made by

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the Proprietor, who’s Perpetual president in their courts … In a word, they are equally void of the two chief plagues of mankind, LUXURY and AMBITION.71

However, the portrayal of the Druids was not entirely unalloyed, for Toland recognized that alongside being keepers of the doctrine they also acted as guardians of morals, and it was in this, their secular guise, that Toland perceived the moral failings of the Celtic system to have become apparent. They were set up, in other words, both as creators and beneficiaries of priestcraft.72 Indeed, Toland assured Molesworth, ‘no Heathen priesthood ever came up to the perfection of the Druidical, which was far more exquisite than any other such system; as having been much better calculated to beget Ignorance and an Impolite disposition in the people, no less than to procure power and profit to the Priests’.73 The dilemma in the Druidic cult was the same as in that of the Christians: by placing secular trust in the spiritual elite, the risk taken was that the first task would disable the potential for an adequate completion of the second; and not, as hoped that the spiritual vocation would ensure the virtuous performance of the secular task. Although, as with Christianity, the laws the Druids upheld with vigour were apparently beneficial to society, this was merely a surface ruse, a depiction, for without some regard in fact, and a vast deal more in profession, to moral virtue, cou’d any Set of Impostors in any country possibly support their false doctrines and superstitious observances; which receive credit from hence, as the teachers of ’em do all their power and authority, in proportion to the austerities they practice, or the appearances they have of devotion. I say appearances, because this in most, join’d to real self-denial in a few (who by the rest are deem’d silly tho’ useful creatures), will long uphold an institution both erroneous and tyrannical.74

Thus Toland transformed the apparently virtuous druids – and by analogy the Christian clerics – into hoaxers and defrauders of their laity. Toland evidenced such shoddy and cynical practices by referring to the deceit of a concealed rope to move stones in a parody of supernatural interventionist justice. By this pretended miracle they condemn’d of perjury, or acquitted, as their interest or their affection led them: and often brought criminals to confess, what could no other way be extorted from them. So prevalent is the horror of Superstition in some cases, which led many people to fancy … that it might be a useful cheat to society, not considering that in other cases (incomparably more numerous and important) it is most detrimental, pernicious and destructive, being solely useful to the Priests that have the management of it; while it not only disturbs or distresses society, but very often confounds and finally overturns it, of which History abounds with examples.75

This passage transformed the Druids into mere magic-sharpers; deceiving the laity with tricks of perception and hidden mechanical devices: the type of charlatan that paraded their wares in the public gardens of London.

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In Toland’s treatment of the Druids, and in his reduction of the natural, virtuous faith into a vehicle for cheats and deceivers, he deployed once again the concept of superstition. This was the weakness in all humanity that opened them up to the subterfuge of the ill-minded clerics. It was an endemic problem for, as Toland admitted, There’s no part of our education so difficult to be eradicated as SUPERSTITION; which is industriously instill’d into men from their cradles by their nurses, by their parents, by the very servants, by all that converse with them, by their tutors and school-masters, by the poets, orators and historians which they read: but more particularly by the Priests, who in most parts of the world are hir’d to keep the people in error, being commonly back’d by the example and authority of the magistrate.76

In contrast, Toland belaboured how both the original Celtic faith and early Christianity had expressed natural religion which was inherently morally righteous, ‘For true Religion does not consist in cunningly devis’d fables, in authority, dominion or pomp; but in spirit and truth, in simplicity and social virtue, in a filial love and reverence, not in a servile dread and terror of the Divinity’.77 That Christianity had suffered a similar process of corruption by the priests was implied throughout and, on occasion, openly stated, as when Toland revised a common misperception about the Druidic faith, saying of the Hill of Tara: that all the Druids of Ireland assembl’d there on the first of November, as several authors injudiciously write; is not only a thing improbable, but also false in fact: nor were they otherwise there at that time, nor all at any time together in one place, but as now all the Clergy of England are said to be present in their Convocations; that is by their representative and delegates.78

Similarly he drew another parallel when he pronounced on how the Druids had dextrously led the people blindfold, by committing no part of their Theology or Philosophy to writing, tho’ great writers in other respects; but their dictates were only hereditarily convey’d from masters to disciples by traditionary Poems, interpretable (consequently) and alterable as they shou’d see convenient: which is a much more effectual way than locking up a book from the Laity, that one way or other, is sure to come first or last to their knowledge, and easy perhaps to be turn’d against the Priests.79

This allusion to the Latinate Bible as a means of keeping truth from the people was coupled with an account of how between 180 and 300 volumes had been burnt by Christian clerics in St Patrick’s time.80 This act of cultural destruction Toland lamented in an embittered passage of anticlerical criticism: What an irreparable destruction of History, what a deplorable extinction of arts and inventions, what an unspeakable detriment to Learning, what a dishonor to human understanding, has the cowardly proceeding of the ignorant, or rather of the

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interested, against unarm’d monuments at all times occasion’d! And yet this Bookburning and Letter-murdring humor, tho’ far from being commanded by CHRIST, has prevail’d in Christianity from the beginning.81

Similarly, Christians were guilty of the iconoclastic defacement of pagan sites of worship, ransacking them of the valuable metals and desecrating sacred ground.82 The explicit connection between the sociology of druidic power and that exercised by the priests was made when Toland observed how Christians had converted pagan places of worship for their own use, and co-opted the objects of faith for their own purposes: The erect stones in the midst of stone-circles … are not of this funeral sort; nor does it follow, that all those have been erected in Christian times, which have Christian Inscriptions or Crosses on them: for we read of many such Obeliscs thus sanctify’d, as they speak, in Wales and Scotland. And in our Irish Histories, we find the practice as early as PATRIC himself; who having built the Church of Donach-PATRIC on the brink of Loch-HACKET in the county of Clare, did there on three Colosses, erected in the times of Paganism, inscribe the proper name of CHRIST in three languages: namely JEUS in Hebrew on the first, SOTER in Greec on the second, and SALVATOR in Latin on the third.83

Even the rituals that the Druids had inaugurated had been incorporated into the Christian system. At the level of popular faith, this was particularly effective for it allowed people to continue to practise their traditional observations under a new guise. Thus, As to this Fire-worship, which (by the way) prevail’d over all the world, the Celtic nations kindl’d other fires on midsummer eve, which are still continu’d by the Roman Catholics of Ireland; making them in all their grounds, and carrying flaming brands about their Corn-fields. This they do likewise all over France, and in some of the Scottish Isles.84

In effectively drawing parallels between the story of the Druids’ corruption and the practices of the priests of the Christian faith, Toland turned the Specimen into a double narrative of betrayal: one in which the incursion of priestcraft and superstition into a natural religion corrupts and corrodes the virtues embedded therein. The tension between the secular and the spiritual is one, Toland here suggested, that was intrinsic to human history and was prone to becoming a history of deceit and failure. It was also a history of plots and revelations, having a strong didactic lesson: ‘For many reasons their History is most interesting and entertaining: I mean as on the one hand we consider them seducing their followers, and as on the other hand we learn not to be so deceiv’d’.85 The Specimen also allowed Toland to again reflect on the troubling tension between the vulgar and the learned parts of society, and the moral failure of the later in being tempted to misdirect the former. Instead of providing the kind of

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moral, patriotic, disinterested leadership Toland yearned for, the Druids and the priests ultimately only used their learning to confuse and deceive their flocks, for Thus at all times have the multitude (that common prey of Priests and Princes) been easily guil’d; swallowing secrets of natural philosophy for divine Miracles, and ready to do the greatest good or hurt, not under the notions of vice or virtue: but barely as directed by men, who find it their Interest to deceive them.86

At the heart of this tension was priestcraft, whereby allegories and superstitions were protected by priests who feared their power weakening if doctrine was made available to all the laity: On this occasion I cannot but reflect on the opposite conduct, which the Learned and Unlearned formerly observ’d, with respect to the Gods and divine matters. If, thro the ignorance or superstition of the people, any fable, tho ever so gross, was generally receiv’d in a Religion; the Learned being asham’d of such an absurdity, yet not daring openly to explode anything wherein the Priests found their account, explain’d it away by emblems and allegories importing a reasonable meaning, of which the first authors never thought: and if the Learned on the other hand, either to procure the greater veneration for their dictates, or the better to conceal their sentiments from the profane Vulgar, did poetically discourse of the Elements and qualities of Matter, of the Constellations or the Planets, and the like effects of Nature, veiling them as persons, the common sort immediately took them for so many persons in good earnest, and render’d ’em divine worship under such forms, as the Priests judg’d fittest to represent them.87

This provided Toland with a naturalistic account of the origin of a polytheistic religion, one in which objects of divine worship have been coin’d out of the rhetorical flights of Orators, or the flattering addresses of Panegyrists; even metaphors and epithets have been transform’d into Gods, which procur’d money for the Priests as well as the best and this by so much the more as such objects were multipy’d. This is the unavoidable consequence of deviating ever so little from the plain TRUTH, which is never so heartily and highly reverenc’d, as when appearing in her native simplicity; for as soon as her genuine beauties are indeavour’d to be heightn’d by borrow’d ornaments, and that she’s put under a disguise in gorgeous apparel: she quickly becomes, like others affecting such a dress, a mercenary prostitute, wholly acting by vanity, artifice or interest, and never speaking but in ambiguous or unintelligible terms; while the admiration of her Lovers is first turn’d into amazement, as it commonly ends in contemt and hatred.88

The Specimen captured both the idealistic vision of a pantheist, republican society for which Toland fought through his life, and dissected the origins of the corruption he fought against as a conspiracy of priests against the diminution of their secular power. This was Toland’s programme from the start: from Christianity not Mysterious through his battles with the High Church faction of

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the Church of England and into his support for a patriotic ministry, headed by either Harley or, after his perfidy had been revealed, by Stanhope and Sunderland. In Molesworth Toland found a steady friend, a reasonably reliable patron and a principled republican who shared his contempt of priestcraft and his interest in Celtic civility. For that reason, Molesworth was the correct correspondent for Toland to impart his double tale of secular power and spiritual declension. The Specimen was to all intents and purposes Toland’s vision of the world: it was one in which spiritual purity lost out to secular ambition, and conspirators corrupted and deceived; where republican monarchies lost out to absolutist tyranny. It was a world in which the virtuous, to compete, had also to conspire.

V. In the brief moment of wealth Toland enjoyed as the stocks of the South Sea Company rose he arranged for the private printing of a composition in Latin, the Pantheisticon. It depicted a learned society brought together by a series of religious rituals that celebrated the power of nature and the politics of liberty. The ceremonies he documented, laid out as a series of calls by the president of the society and responses from the members included a passage that announced All things in the World are one, And one is All in all things, Resp[onse]: What’s All in all Things is God Eternal and Immense Neither begotten, nor ever to perish. Pres: In him we live, we move, and exist Resp: Everything is sprung from him. And shall be reunited to him He himself being the Beginning, and End of all things. Pre: Let’s sing a Hymn upon the Nature of Universe.89

This pantheistic proclamation was coupled with an avowal of the society’s republican credentials, when, in another ceremony, the following exchange was transcribed: Pres. Right Reason is the only true Law, a Law befitting Nature, extended to all, consistent with itself, and everlasting. A Law that invites Men to their Duty by commanding, and Deters from Fraud by forbidding. A Law that commands or forbids not in vain the Honest, and, on the contrary, by commanding or forbidding moves not the Dishonest.

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A Political Biography of John Toland ‘Tis not Lawful to obrogate this Law, nor derogate anything from it, nor wholly abrogate it. Neither can we, by the Senate of the People, be exempted from this Law. We are not to seek for any other Explainer, or Interpreter of this Law but itself; it is not a different Law at Rome from what it is at Athens, not different not from what it shall be hereafter: But one and the same Law, eternal and immortal, has and shall contain all Times and Nations. There shall be one, as it were, common Master, and Ruler of All, that GOD, the Inventor, Umpire and Giver of this Law: He who obeys not this Law is his own Enemy, he scorns the Nature of Man, and therefore shall undergo the greatest Punishments, though he escapes all other supposed ones. Resp: We are willing to be brought up, and governed by this Law, Not by the Lying And superstitious Fictions of Man.90

Controversy has surrounded Toland’s intentions in printing and distributing this book. Margaret Jacob has cited it in evidence of his preoccupation with Masonic ritual and his engagement in secret societies.91 Others have argued instead that it ought to be read as a scathing satire on the protocols and performances of the Christian Church. Daniel C. Fouke for instance has written that Pantheisticon was neither a candid expression of his personal religion, nor a simple joke. It constructed a travesty of institutional religion through a subversive interplay of philosophy, rhetoric and fiction. It was a philosophical comedy with serious purposes.92

Certainly both cases have some merit. While Toland’s work has little to do with the formal content of Masonic practices, and the notion of ‘proto-masonic literature’ that Jacob offers is too teleological in its approach, it is the case that Toland had come in contact with secret societies in the Netherlands and the Pantheisticon can be read in the context of the rising culture of associationalism in Britain in the period.93 So too, the presentation of the text, with its use of red and black inks to mimic the church liturgy, speaks for its parodic quality. Instead of this polarity of purpose a third reading might be appropriate, namely one that sees the text less as reflecting the doings of an extant society, nor as just a skilled satire of religious orthodoxy. For Toland projects a society of heretics who co-opt the religious practices of the Christians just as Christians had once combined pagan forms with their own. And in its proclaimed secrecy, Toland was here proposing not a combination of the vitious (the clerics), but a conspiracy of the virtuous (the virtuosi). He was also generating an image of an ideal-type: a ‘Socratic Society’ of pantheists devoted to the natural world and who practised a religion that was

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simple, clear, easy, without Blemish, and freely bestowed, not painted over, not intricate, embarrassed, incomprehensible or mercenary; not luring Minds with silly Fables, and ensnaring them by the Filth, Inhumanity or Ridicule of Superstition; not subservient, I say, to the private Advantage of any Family, or Faction, against the Publick Good; not scandalising or railing at, much less disturbing Person or Persons, so that they be honest and Peaceable men.94

In this Toland was promulgating his vision of an ideal man also: one he described in the essay appended to the ceremonials. There he ascribed to the Pantheists a caution in articulating their ideals as they did not wish to risk their life. However, neither shall he be altogether Silent, when a proper Occasion presents itself; yet he shall never run the risque of his Life save in defence of his Country and Friends … All the Truths that the Pantheist can disclose, as Politics, Astronomy, Mechanicks, Oeconomics and such like, he shall not only envy them to others, but even voluntarily communicate them, still never without a due caution, because the Commonality weighs most things in the Scales of Opinion and but very few in those of Truth. Finally, he shall exactly Estimate, and in the Silence of his Heart, mediate upon the more sacred Dogmas, regarding either the Nature of God, or of the Soul; and he shall not make the Wicked, nor the Ignorant, nor any except the Brethren alone, or other ingenious, upright and Learned Men, partakers of Esotericks.95

This passage can be read as a flattering self-portrait, an avowal of Toland’s principles and a description of his attempts to evade and provoke controversy in equal measure. From the challenge to the Church of Ireland posed by Christianity not Mysterious, through to his pursuit of political influence in England and Hanover, from beatings to destitution, Toland thought of himself as pursuing an ideal. Articulated here in this final major work, it constituted a blend of pantheistic cosmology and republican politics. His rationalism, his constitutionalism, his toleration of other faiths and his rejection of Roman Catholicism, his opposition to the Stuarts and his celebration of George I, his courting of Shaftesbury, Harley and Molesworth were all consistent outcomes of his determination to fight for a natural religion and a government of laws. That implicated him in a fight against superstition and tyranny, the twin threats he confronted throughout his life. Yet the idealism expressed here also speaks to the inherent weakness in Toland’s approach. His was a polarized world in which the virtuous fought against the vicious. There was no space in Toland’s mind for the muddy compromises of the reality of political cut and thrust. Harley, for instance was either a hero or a villain in Toland’s mind, not the tacking, responsive, nimble political agent that could thrive in the shadowy, chaotic and dangerous world of postrevolution Britain. Moreover, in Toland’s clarity of vision, and in the perception that the world failed to match his ideal expectations, he was prompted to find a cause for the discrepancy, and given his desire to place humankind at the cen-

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tre of his thought, human agency was the obvious culprit. As Gordon Wood has noticed more generally, ‘Only by positing secret plots and hidden machinations by governments was it possible, it seemed, to close the bewildering gaps between what rulers professed and what they brought forth’.96 This study has argued that Toland’s work was filled with conspiracies, real and imagined. Far from being a peculiarity, coming from a personal quirk, however, this characteristic of his thought was a product of the time in which he lived, one in which institutional life was in flux, new modes of governance were being established and novel constellations of alliances were being forged. As Ed Whyte argues in relation to post-revolutionary America, these newly minted ‘practical ensembles must be carefully charted, and conspiracy theory provides those crude (though sometimes detailed) initial charts’.97 Whyte then proposes that what is revealed by a study of conspiracy theory is indeed, [a] better understanding of the production and praxis of culture, for so many of the institutional innovations of the period emerge not from some functionalist mechanism but from the vernacular tracing of the social field. Conspiracies offer perhaps the best illustration of this cultural praxis, for in many instances they were organisational innovations made in response to an unconsolidated institutional field. Conspiracy theories … offer a model of structural analysis from within that assesses and creatively directs innovations within developing ensembles, always attuned to the ways in which early citizens and noncitizens sensed the shakiness or restrictiveness, or potentialities of emergent social structures.98

This is the presupposition on which this study of John Toland rests. Nor is Toland’s commitment to the esoteric knowledge that conspiracy theory invokes at odds with his status within the Enlightenment pantheon; rather it is integral to his adoption of Enlightenment methods. The reliance on human reason to register truth pushed Toland away from established faiths that articulated the mystery at the heart of all human affairs, it provided for him with a narrative of recent history as a conflict between a True Whig politics devoted to liberty and a High Church politics committed to intellectual tyranny. It gave him a political agenda in fighting for the Hanoverian settlement against the Jacobite alternative, and introduced him to the esoteric ideas of Giordano Bruno and Dutch freethinkers. It also drove him to reject those he thought of as insufficiently virtuous or too prone to compromise, depicting them as treacherous. In this, a tendency towards conspiracy theories is integral to Toland’s personal odyssey and is revealing about the fears and anxieties that racked the early Enlightenment, an Enlightenment grounded in fear and loathing.

NOTES

Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

To the Right Honourable Robert Molesworth, Putney, Friday, Noon. in ‘Letters’, p. 491. Mr Toland’s Answer [to Robert Molesworth], Putney, 2 March 1721–2 in ibid., p. 494. [E. Curll], An Historical Account of the Life and Writings of the Late Eminently Famous Mr John Toland (London, 1722), p. 102 J. Toland, Physic without Physicians in P. Des Maizeaux (ed.), A Collection of Various Pieces of Mr John Toland, 2 vols (London, 1726), vol. 2, pp. 275–6, 289. Ibid., p. 276. Ibid., pp. 280–1. Ibid., p. 280. R. E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 42–3. S. H. Daniel, ‘John Toland’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 3 July 2011]. S. H. Daniel, ‘The Subversive Philosophy of John Toland’, in P. Hyland and N. Sammells (eds), Irish Writing: Exile and Subversion (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1991), p. 9. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., pp. 5–6. Ibid., p. 2. J. Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 4, 9. For a fuller response see M. Brown, ‘Review of Justin Champion, Republican Learning’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 18 (2003), pp. 160–2. J. Champion, Republican Learning, p. 6. Ibid., p. 14. D. C. Fouke, Philosophy and Theology in a Burlesque Mode: John Toland and the ‘Way of Paradox’ (Ameherst, MA: Humanity Books, 2007), p. 297. J. A. Herrick, The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Scepticism, 1680–1750 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 1997), p. 51. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid.

– 149 –

150

Notes to pages 4–9

25. D. Berman, ‘Disclaimers and Offence Mechanisms in Charles Blount and John Toland’, in M. Hunter and D. Wooton (eds), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 255–72. 26. D. Berman, ‘Deism, Immorality and the Art of Theological Lying’, in J. A. Leo Lemay, Deism, Masonry and the Enlightenment (Newark: University of Deleware Press, 1987), pp. 61–78. 27. A. B. Worden (ed.), Edmund Ludlow: ‘A Voyce from the Watch Tower’ (London: The Royal Historical Society, 1978), p. 24. 28. P. Hazard, The European Mind, 1680–1715 (London: Penguin, 1973), pp. 176–7. He also writes of Toland as ‘a queer-looking gentleman’, ibid., p. 179. 29. Ibid., p. 177. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., pp. 177–8. 32. M. C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 91. 33. M. C. Jacob, ‘John Toland and the Newtonian Ideology’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 32 (1969), p. 326. 34. Ibid., p. 328. 35. J. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 610. 36. Ibid., p. 614. 37. R. R. Evans, Pantheisticon: The Career of John Toland (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), p. 224. 38. Ibid., pp. 224, 222. 39. Ibid., p. 224. 40. Ibid., p. 222. 41. W. H. Auden, ‘The Joker in the Pack’, in idem, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (1962; New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 255–6. 42. [ J. Toland], An Apology for Mr Toland (London: 1697), pp. 114–15. 43. R. H. Popkin, A History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979). 44. J. Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (1690; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), III.iv.17, p. 428. 45. Ibid., III.ii,4, p. 406. 46. Ibid., III.ii.4, p. 406. 47. T. Eagleton, ‘Crazy John and the Bishop’, in idem, Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays in Irish Culture (Cork: Field Day / Cork University Press, 1998), pp. 53, 51. 48. Ibid., p. 51. 49. Ibid., p. 50. 50. Ibid., pp. 55, 57, 61. 51. Epitaph in British Museum Add MSS, 4295, f.76, translated in F. H. Heinemann, ‘John Toland and the Age of Enlightenment’, Review of English Studies, 20 (1944), p. 131. 52. I. Berlin, Russian Thinkers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 22. 53. Ibid., p. 22. 54. Ibid. 55. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, p. 49. 56. Ibid., p. 48.


151

57. J. P. Kenyon, The Popish Plot (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). See also P. Hinds, ‘The Horrid Popish Plot’: Roger L’Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late Seventeenth-Century London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 58. R. Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 59. P. Hopkins, ‘Sham Plots and Real Plots in the 1690s’, in E. Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759 (Edinburgh: John Donald Press, 1982), p. 89. 60. T. Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London: Penguin, 2006); S. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 61. M. Knights, ‘Faults on Both Sides: The Conspiracies of Party Politics under the Late Stuarts’, in B. Coward and J. Swann (eds), Conspiracy and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2004), p. 168. 62. Hopkins, ‘Sham Plots and Real Plots in the 1690s’, p. 89. 63. Ibid., p. 89. 64. Ibid., p. 101. 65. Ibid., p. 102. 66. E. Cruickshanks and H. Erskine-Hill, The Atterbury Plot (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 67. B. L. Keely, ‘Of Conspiracy Theories’, Journal of Philosophy, 96 (1999), p. 116. 68. T. J. Davis, ‘Conspiracy and Credibility: Look Who’s Talking about What: Law Talk and Loose Talk’, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 59 (2002), p. 169. 69. Keely, ‘Of Conspiracy Theories’, p. 126. 70. Ibid., p. 126. 71. A. M. Water, ‘Conspiracy Theories as Ethnosociologies: Explanations and Intention in African American Political Culture’, Journal of Black Studies 28 (1997), p. 117. 72. Ibid., p. 119. 73. T. Goertzel, ‘Belief in Conspiracy Theories’, Political Psychology, 15 (1994), p. 740. 74. R. Hofstadter, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, in idem, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p. 29. 75. Ibid., p. 4. 76. Ibid., pp. 11–12. See also A. Hofman, ‘The Origins of the Theory of the Philosophe Conspiracy’ French History 2 (1988), pp. 152–72; idem, ‘Opinion, Illusion and the Illusion of Opinion: Barruel’s Theory of Conspiracy’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 27 (1993), pp. 27–60. 77. Hofstadter, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, p. 21. 78. Ibid., p. 16. 79. Ibid., pp. 38, 23. 80. J. Toland, The Art of Governing by Partys (London: 1701), p. 9. 81. Ibid., p. 10. 82. Ibid., pp. 13–14. 83. Ibid., p. 15. 84. Ibid., p. 28. 85. Ibid., p. 35. 86. Ibid., p. 38. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid.

152 89. 90. 91. 92.


Ibid., p. 40 Ibid., p. 41. Ibid. Ibid., p. 41. In this Toland presages the celebration of a virtuous monarch in Bolingbroke, The Idea of a Patriot King (1738) in D. Armitage (ed.), Bolingbroke: Political Writings (Cambridge: 1997), pp. 217–95. 93. Toland, The Art of Governing by Partys, pp. 44, 44–5. 94. Ibid., p. 45. 95. Ibid., p. 46. 96. In this sense Toland’s work has a rather peculiar Irish dimension, although it is perhaps true to say that Toland tells us more about Ireland than his Irish origins reveal about Toland. For a reading of what else Toland tells us about eighteenth-century Irish political possibilities see M. Brown, ‘John Toland and the Problem of the Irish Enlightenment’, in E. Longley, E. Hughes and D. O’Rawe (eds), Ireland (Ulster) Scotland: Concepts, Contexts, Comparisons, Belfast Studies in Language, Culture and Politics, 7 (Belfast: Queen’s University Belfast Press, 2003), pp. 195–200. 97. S. Breuninger, ‘Unleashing a “Torrent of Impeity”: Blasters, Deists, and the Defense of the Irish Church, 1737–52’, unpublished paper presented at the American Conference of Irish Studies, Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2 May 2011. 98. P. Skelton, Ophiomaches, or Deism Revealed, 2 vols (London: 1749), vol. 1, p. 41. 99. J. Swift, An Argument to Prove that the Abolishing of Christianity in England, May as Things now Stand, be attended with some Inconveniences, and perhaps not Produce those many Good Effects Proposed Thereby, in Prose Works of Jonathan Swift: Volume Two: Bickerstaff Papers and Pamphlets on the Church, ed. H. Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940). 100. J. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. R. DeMaria Jr (1726; London: 2001), 122; cited in Knights, ‘Faults on Both Sides’, p. 153. 101. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, p. 178. 102. J. Clegg, ‘Swift on False Witness’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 44 (2004), p. 475. 103. Ibid., p. 476. 104. A thoughtful consideration of the pamphlet is that of J. Brewer, ‘Party and the Double Cabinet: Two Facets of Burke’s Thoughts’, Historical Journal, 14 (1971), pp. 479–501. 105. E. Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, in I. Harris (ed.), Pre-Revolutionary Writings of Edmund Burke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 125–6. 106. Ibid., p. 127. 107. F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, Volume I: 1730–1784 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); idem, Edmund Burke, Volume II: 1784–1797 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); see also my review which picks out this organizing idea: M. Brown, ‘A Good Hater’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 22 (2007), pp. 215–22. 108. E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. C. Cruise O’Brien (1790; London: 1968), p. 186. 109. S .J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 11–44. 110. J. Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1992). J. C. D. Clark, English Society: 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-


153

versity Press, 2000); W. Hudson, The English Deists: Studies in Early Enlightenment (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008); idem, Enlightenment and Modernity: The English Deists and Reform (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009); J. Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660–1750 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996); J. Wigelsworth, Deism in Enlightenment England: Theology, Politics and Newtonian Public Science (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 111. R. Kearney (ed.), The Irish Mind Exploring Intellectual Traditions (Dublin: 1985). The essay in question was D. Berman, ‘The Irish Counter-Enlightenment’, in ibid., pp. 119– 40. The incident is discussed in R. Kearney, ‘John Toland: An Irish Philosopher?’, in P. McGuinness, A. Harrison and R. Kearney (eds), John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious: Text, Associated Works and Critical Essays (Dublin: 1996), pp. 211–14.

1 Ireland, 1670–97 1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

I. McBride, The Siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant Mythology (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), pp. 1–32. D. Dickson, ‘Derry’s Backyard: The Barony of Inishowen, 1650–1800’, in W. Nolan, L. Ronayne and M. Dunlevy (eds), Donegal, History and Society: Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1995), p. 413. Dickson contends that while ‘Active [religious] persecution peaked … in the generation after the siege … the main pressure for implementing anti-Catholic policy [was] coming from outside’. Ibid., p. 415. There is a tradition which has Toland born in France, which dates back to contemporaneous comment. See for instance E. Gibson, Fellow of Queen’s College Oxford, to Rev Dr Charlett, Master of University College, 21 June 1694: ‘When I told you he was all Irish, I was mistaken. He was born in France, of an Irish father and French mother: brought up a Papist till ten or 12 years of age: came to his friends in Ireland to see what could be had there, but finding nothing that answer’d expectation, came to Glasgow’. Quoted in F. H. Heinemann, ‘John Toland, France, Holland and Dr Williams’, Review of English Studies, 25 (1949), pp. 346–7. This fact, if such it is, in Heinemann’s view ‘would ‘account for his intellectual make up, his critical faculty, his love of fame, and his extremism’. Ibid., p. 347. It is however Toland’s claim that he is Irish and this seems the most plausible narrative, with the French origin story likely to be an attempt to associate him more fully with Catholicism and Britain’s major international rival, as a means of discrediting him. J. Toland, ‘Preface’, The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington (London, 1700), p. x; P. Des Maizeaux, ‘Some Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr John Toland’, in P. Des Maizeaux (ed.) Collection of Several Pieces of Mr John Toland, 2 vols (London: 1726), vol. 1, p. iii. The attribution to Des Maizeaux can be found in HMC Portland Ms, VII, p. 441. R. E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 2. Des Maizeaux, ‘Some Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr John Toland’, p. v. Ibid., p. v. J. Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious in P. McGuinness, A. Harrison and R. Kearney (eds), John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious: Text, Associated Works and Critical Essays (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1996), p. 7.

154 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

Notes to pages 22–6 S. H. Daniel, ‘John Toland’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 27 July 2011]. This is problematic, however, as the modern editors of The Apology of Mr Toland note that ‘Redcastle is in Donegal’ and that therefore Toland is referring to a town, not a school. McGuinness, Harrison and Kearney (eds), John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious, p. 134 n19. J. G. Simms, ‘John Toland (1670–1722), a Donegal Heretic’, Irish Historical Studies, 16 (1968), p. 305. On the wider context see T. C. Barnard, ‘Protestants and the Irish Language, c. 1675–1725’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44 (1993), pp. 243–72. J. Toland, An Apology for Mr Toland in McGuinness, Harrison and Kearney (eds), John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious, p. 117. Ibid., p. 117. Simms, ‘John Toland (1670–1722), a Donegal Heretic’, p. 305. Bodleian Rawlinson MSS. D. 923, f.317. Quoted in F. H. Heinemann, ‘John Toland and the Age of Enlightenment’, Review of English Studies, 20 (1944), p. 128. J. Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 70. M. Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 209–31. Toland used the term descriptively to denote what had been rejected at the Reformation in Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious, p. 100. M. Knights, ‘How Rational was the Later Stuart Public Sphere?’, in P. Lake and S. Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 60; Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious, p. 81. Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious, p. 65. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid. Voltaire, Letters Addressed to his Highness the Prince of *****, containing Comments on the Writings of the Most Eminent Authors, who have been Accused of Attacking the Christian Religion (London: 1768), p. 31. The Prince in question was Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick Luneburg. J. Leland, A View of the Principal Deistical Writers, 2 vols (London, 1754–5), vol. 1, p. 62. See J. A. I. Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Toland, An Apology for Mr Toland, p. 122. For a useful synopsis which emphasises the epistemological basis of Toland’s polemic see Champion, Republican Learning, pp. 78–86. See also Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, passim. Anonymous, A Letter to J. C. Esq upon Mr Toland’s Book (Dublin, 1697), p. 3. Toland, An Apology for Mr Toland, p. 121. This annotations are documented in M. McCarthy., ‘Introduction’, in M. McCarthy and A. Simmons (eds), The Making of Marsh’s Library: Learning, Politics and Religion in Ireland, 1650–1750 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), p. 23. P. Browne, A Letter in Answer to a Book entitled Christianity Not Mysterious (Dublin: 1697), pp. 72–3. T. C. Barnard, ‘Peter Browne’, in ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 27 July 2011]. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, p. 7.


155

33. S. J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 53. 34. Des Maizeaux, ‘Some Memoirs of the Life and Writings of John Toland’, p. ix. 35. Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious, p. 7. 36. Ibid., p. 100. 37. Champion, Republican Learning, p. 71. Rokeby had practiced as a barrister in Yorkshire until his appointment to the bench by William III in 1689. See Lemmings, D., ‘The Independence of the Judiciary in Eighteenth-Century England’, in P. Birks (ed.), The Life of the Law (London: Hambledon, 1993), p. 131. 38. W. Molyneux to J. Locke, quoted in [Des Maizeaux], ‘Some Memoirs of the Life and Writings of John Toland’, p. xxii. For a fuller treatment of the Locke-Molyneux exchanges over Toland’s stay in Dublin, which does not mention this assertion see Champion, Republican Learning, pp. 73–6. 39. J. Boyse, to R. Thoresby, Dublin, 29 May 1697, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Y2 Ms7. I would like to thank the Yorkshire Archaeological Society for permission to quote this extract from the Thoresby correspondence held there. 40. See J. Boyse, The Difference between Mr E[mlyn] and the Protestant Dissenting Ministers of Dublin Truly Represented (Dublin, [1703]). 41. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, p. 2. 42. [Des Maizeaux], ‘Some Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr John Toland’, pp. viii–ix. 43. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, p. 3. 44. D. L. Wykes, ‘Daniel Williams’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 27 July 2011]. 45. The review appeared in the Bibliotheque universalle et historique, 23 (1692), pp. 505–9. There is the possibility that Toland was also responsible for a series of four pamphlets related to the Puritan Edmund Ludlow, namely the three items collected in F. Maseres, (ed.), Three Tracts Published in Amsterdam in the years 1691 and 1692 (London: 1812) and Truth brought to Light (London, 1692). For this attribution which relates it to the circle around Williams, see A. B. Worden (ed.), Edmund Ludlow: ‘A Voyce from the Watch Tower’ (London: The Royal Historical Society, 1978), pp. 34–8. If so, they were ‘a contribution to the London parish warfare between Anglicans and Presbyterians’. Ibid., p. 37. 46. Bodleian Rawlinson MSS. D. 923, f.317. Quoted in Heinemann ‘John Toland and the Age of Enlightenment’, p. 128. On this episode see chapter three below. The stipend was worth £8. See Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, p. 4. 47. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, pp. 4–5. On the date of his departure from Holland see Heinemann, ‘John Toland, France, Holland and Dr Williams’, pp. 347–8. 48. J. Toland, ‘The Fabulous Death of Atilius Regulus’, in Des Maizeaux (ed.), A Collection of Several Pieces, ii, pp. 28–47. A third project was the account of Job described in ‘To the Reverend Mr ***, London, 12 September 1695’, in ‘Letters’, pp. 315–17. 49. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, p. 5. 50. Ibid., p. 5. 51. For Mr Toland, Oxford, 4 May 1694 in ‘Letters’, p. 295. 52. Ibid., p. 296. 53. See however the evidence adduced against this attribution in R. Rappaport, ‘Questions of Evidence: An Anonymous Tract Attributed to John Toland’, Journal of the History of ideas, 58 (1997), pp. 339–48. 54. [ J. Toland], Two Essays Sent in a Letter from Oxford to a Nobleman in London (London: 1695), p. 14.

156 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77.

78. 79.

Notes to pages 29–34 Ibid., p. i. Ibid., p. iv. Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the Origins of Whiggism’. [ J. Toland], Two Essays Sent in a Letter from Oxford, p. ii. Ibid., p. iii. Ibid., p. 31. This sentence is cited by David Berman as an example of Toland’s adoption of ‘theological lying’ commenting on how he is ‘contradicting the thesis and title of Christianity Not Mysterious’. To Berman this offers ‘strong evidence that he was an atheist’. D. Berman, ‘Disclaimers and Offence Mechanisms in Charles Blount and John Toland’, in M. Hunter and D. Wooton, Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 271. [ J. Toland] Two Essays Sent in a Letter from Oxford, p. 31. Ibid., p. 4. On the moral spasm see D. W. Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957). On Aitkenhead see M. Hunter, ‘“Aitkenhead the Atheist”: The Context and Consequences of Articulate Irreligion in the Late Seventeenth Century’, in M. Hunter and D. Wooton (ed.), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 221–54. For Mr Toland, Oxford, 30 May 1694,’ in ‘Letters’, pp. 312–13. [ J. Toland], Principle of the Protestant Religion Explained (London: 1704). See Journal of the Irish House of Lords, ii, pp. 441–2. He remarked of them ‘publicly, and in the hearing of a great many persons … “they that have turned the world upside down are come hither also’’.’ He was removed from the Privy Council on 25 January 1713/14. In its complaint to the Commons the Lords associated Molesworth with Toland, asking for a similar zeal to be shown against the latest miscreant to invoke their ire. G. F. R. Barker, rev. Thomas Doyle, ‘John Methuen’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 26 September 2008]. Cited in Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, p. 9. [ J. Toland], A Defence of Mr Toland, p. 147. [ J. Toland], Preface in A Lady’ Religion (London: 1697), p. ii. Le Clerc’s identity is proposed in a Letter from the Publisher to the Reader in the 1704 edition, published in London. [ J. Toland] ‘Preface’, in A Lady’ Religion, pp. xii, ii. Ibid., p. v. Ibid., p. vii. Ibid., p. xi. [ J. Toland], Christianity Not Mysterious, cover page. The source is the sermon ‘The Excellency of Abraham’s Faith and Obedience’, in J. Tillotson, Of Sincerity and Constancy in the Faith and Profession of the True Religion in Several Sermons (London: 1695), p. 69. This point is made in I. Rivers, ‘John Tillotson’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 26 September 2008]. [ J. Toland], An Apology for Mr Toland, p. 120. He also remarks on how ‘an honourable member went to the bar, and offered a letter to be read which he had received that morning from Mr Toland, containing what satisfaction he intended to give the committee, had they thought fit to speak for himself. But this was likewise refused’. Ibid., p. 120. J. Toland, Defence of Mr Toland in a Letter to Himself in McGuinness, Harrison and Kearney (eds), John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious, p. 139. This is hinted at in D. C. Fouke, D. C., Philosophy and Theology in a Burlesque Mode: John Toland and ‘the Way of Paradox’ (New York: Amherst, 2007), passim.


157

80. J. Toland, An Apology for Mr Toland, pp. 114–15. 81. W. Molyneux, to J. Locke, 27 May 1697 in E. S. de Beer (ed.), The Correspondence of John Locke, 8 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976–89), vol. 6, pp. 113–14. 82. Champion, Republican Learning, p. 70. The Post Man was edited by Jean Lespinasse de Fonvive, a Huguenot, seems to have been part of the circle surrounding Toland and Molesworth. See I. Raban, ‘The Newspaper The Post Man and its Editor, Jean Lespinasse de Fonvive’, in R. Vigne and C. Littleton (eds.), From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland and Colonial America, 1550–1750 (Sussex: Sussex Academic, 2001), pp. 393–403. 83. Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious, p. 92. 84. Ibid., p. 92. 85. Ibid. See also J. Toland, Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews (London: 1714). 86. J. Toland Christianity Not Mysterious, p. 93. 87. Ibid., p. 93. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid., pp. 95–6. 91. Ibid., pp. 97–8. 92. Ibid., p. 98. 93. D. Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory has Shaped Modern History (London: Vintage, 2009), p. 341.

2 London, 1697–1700 1. 2.

J. Toland, Life of Milton… With Amyntor (London: 1761), p. 161. R. E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 16. 3. C. Davenant, Tom Double Return’d Out of the Country, or the True Portrait of a Modern Whig in idem, The Political and Commercial Works of Charles D’Avenant, 5 vols (London: 1771), iv, pp. 147, 241. Quoted in R. D. Lund, ‘The Atheist Cabal and the Rise of the Public Sphere in Augustan England’, Albion, 34 (2002), p. 398. 4. J. Harris, ‘The Grecian Coffee House and Political Debate in London, 1688–1714’, London Journal, 25 (2000), p. 10 n. 19. 5. N. Ward, The Secret History of the Calves-Head Club Complt, or the Republican Unmask’d (London: 1705), p. 12. 6. Ibid., p. 18. 7. Ibid., pp. 19, 13. 8. Ibid., p. 22. 9. R. E. Sullivan asks how far it may be possible to configure ‘a coherent group of patrician “Roman Whigs”, including Shaftesbury, Molesworth, Trenchard and Moyle meeting at the Grecian, who, though dismayed at abuses, accepted the 1689 settlement, from an often intermingling but nevertheless coherent group of “Calves-Head Whigs”, including Toland, Stephens and Tindal, who rejected it? Or was the Calves-Head Club merely a fantasy of the unbalanced Ward?’ Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, p. 15. 10. [ J. Toland], An Apology for Mr Toland (London, 1697) in P. McGuinness, A. Harrison and R. Kearney (eds), John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious: Text, Associated Works

158

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Notes to pages 43–8 and Critical Essays (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1996), p. 111; J. Toland, Vindicius Liberius (London, 1702), in ibid., p. 158. [ J. Toland] An Apology for Mr Toland, p. 123. [ J. Toland], A Defence of Mr Toland, in a Letter to Himself (London: 1697), in P. McGuinness, A. Harrison and R. Kearney (eds), John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious: Text, Associated Works and Critical Essays (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1996), p. 150. [ J. Toland], Vindicius Liberius, in ibid., p. 176. [ J. Toland] An Apology for Mr Toland, pp. 131–2. J. Toland, Vindicius Liberius, p. 166. Ibid., p. 167. R. R Evans, Pantheisticon: The Career of John Toland (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), p. 40. Seeing this action as part of ‘reactionary subterfuge to curtail the press’ and the product of a ‘feral aggressiveness’ on the part of the High Church, Evans further notes the paradox that it was the failure of this campaign that drove the High Church into the fray of public debate. Ibid., p. 40. Indeed the campaign of public denunciation of Toland’s works that followed can be thought of as one by-product of a change of tactic by those concerned to uphold orthodoxy. This work is also often attributed to Matthew Tindal, as in S. Lalor, Matthew Tindal, Freethinker: An Eighteenth-Century Assault on Religion (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 11. For details of the attribution to Toland, see Evans, Pantheisticon, p. 68 n 16. It is also taken to be by Toland in Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, p. 337, and in J. Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 244–5. [ J. Toland], A Letter to a Member of Parliament Shewing that a Restraint on the Press in Inconsistent with the Protestant Religion (London: 1698), p. 3. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 6–7. Ibid., p. 3. J. Toland, ‘A Project of a Journal, intended to be Publish’d weekly’ [1704–5], in P. Des Maizeaux (ed.), A Collection of Various Pieces of Mr John Toland, 2 vols (London, 1726), vol. 2, p. 203. Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., pp. 203–4. Ibid., p. 205. Ibid., p. 209. Ibid. Ibid., p. 210. Ibid., p. 206. Champion, Republican Learning, p. 245. B. Cowan, ‘Mr Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 (2004), pp. 345–66. Newcastle was the dedicatee for Anglia Libera while Toland’s edition of Harrington was dedicated to Clayton. Evans, Pantheisticon, pp. 67–8. On Molesworth see H. Mayo, ‘Robert Molesworth’s Account of Denmark: Its Roots and Impact’ (PhD: University of Odense, 2000). I would like to thank Hugh Mayo for providing me with a copy of his thesis.


159

37. A. B. Worden (ed.), Edmund Ludlow: ‘A Voyce from the Watch Tower’ London: The Royal Historical Society, 1978), p. 28. 38. For a synopsis of their relations, see ibid., pp. 43–5. Letters between the two exist in this period, for instance BL Add ms 4295 f 57; BL Add ms 7121 f 61. 39. [ J. Toland (ed.)], Letters from the Right Honourable, the Late Earl of Shaftesbury to Robert Molesworth (London: 1721), p. ix. 40. [ J. Toland,] The Danger of Mercenary Parliaments (1698; London: 1722), p. xi. It is posited by Daniel C. Fouke that this tract was written in conjunction with the Earl of Shaftesbury, but the editorial statement quoted here suggests it was with his inspiration and imprimatur, and not his actual collaboration. See D. C. Fouke, Philosophy and Theology in a Burlesque Mode: John Toland and the ‘Way of Paradox’ (Ameherst, MA: Humanity Books, 2007), p. 334. 41. [ J. Toland], The Danger of Mercenary Parliaments, p. 5. 42. Ibid., p. 6. 43. Ibid., pp. 14–15. 44. Ibid., p. 14. 45. Ibid., p. 17. 46. For two very different readings of this project to that offered here see S. H. Daniel, John Toland: His Methods, Manners and Mind (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984), pp. 60–93; Champion, Republican Learning, pp. 93–115. 47. C. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (New York: Atheneum, 1968), pp. 84–130, J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 401–62. 48. A. Sidney, Discourses concerning Government, ed. T. G. West (Indianapolis, IN: 1996), xlii. 49. B. Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 149. 50. Ibid., p. 147. 51. Ibid., p. 149. 52. [ J. Toland], ‘The Honourable Algernon Sidney’s Letter Against Bribery and Arbitrary Government’, in Familiar Letters Written by the Right Honourable John Late Earl of Rochester and Several Other Persons of Honour and Quality (London: 1697), p. 61. 53. G. Wood, ‘Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century’, The William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 39 (1982), p. 420. 54. For two contesting readings of Harrington’s work see Pocock The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 383–400; A. Cromartie, ‘Harringtonian Virtue: Harrington, Machiavelli and the Method the Moment’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998), pp. 987–1009. 55. For an assessment of the accuracy of Toland’s biographical account, and details of the connection that sourced the manuscripts, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘James Harrington and the Good Old Cause: A Study of the Ideological Context of his Writings’, Journal of British Studies, 10 (1970), pp. 30–48. 56. J. Toland, ‘The Life of James Harrington’, in J. Toland (ed.), The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington (London: 1700), p. xvi. 57. Ibid., p. xvi. 58. Ibid., pp. xvi–xvii. 59. Ibid., p. xvii. 60. Wood, ‘Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style’, pp. 426, 427.

160 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

Notes to pages 53–9 Ibid., p. 420. Worden (ed.), Edmund Ludlow: ‘A Voyce from the Watch Tower’ . J. Toland, The Life of John Milton …With Amyntor (London: 1761), p. 58. Ibid., pp. 64–5. Ibid., pp. 51–6. Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., pp. 70–1. Ibid., pp. 78, 76. Ibid., p. 77. O. Blackhall, A Sermon Preach’d before the Honourable House of Commons, at St. Margaret’s Westminster, January the 30th. 1698/9 (London: 1708), p. 11. Ibid., p. 12. Fouke, Philosophy and Theology in a Burlesque Mode, p. 41. J. Toland, The Life of John Milton … With Amyntor, p. 160. Ibid., p. 164. J. Champion, ‘Erudition and Polemic in Eighteenth-Century Clerical Culture’, in M. McCarthy and A. Simmons (eds), The Making of Marsh’s Library: Learning, Politics and Religion in Ireland, 1650–1750 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), p. 137. Ibid., p. 145. J. Toland, The Life of John Milton … With Amyntor, p. 201. Ibid., p. 202. Ibid., p. 209. Ibid., p. 210. Champion, ‘Erudition and Polemic’, pp. 138–40; Fouke, Philosophy and Theology in a Burlesque Mode, p. 41. Ibid., p. 136. See J. Toland, ‘A Catalogue of Books mention’d by the Fathers and other ancient Writers, as Truly or falsly ascrib’d to Jesus Christ, his Apostles and other eminent Persons’, in Des Maizeaux (ed.), Collection of Several Pieces, i, pp. 350–404. L. G. Schwoerer, ‘The Role of King William III of England in the Standing Army Controversy, 1697–1699’, Journal of British Studies, 5 (1966), p. 74. L. G. Schwoerer, ‘The Literature of the Standing Army Controversy, 1697–99’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 28 (1965), p. 190. The attribution of A Militia Reformed is given on ibid., p. 192. The claim for Toland of the earlier tracts is to be found in Fouke, Philosophy and Theology in a Burlesque Mode, p. 134. [ J. Toland] The Militia Reform’d Or an Easy Scheme of Furnishing England with a Constant Land Force (1697; London: 1699), p. 6. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., pp. 18–19. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 26.


161

98. Ibid., pp. 30–1. 99. Ibid., p. 31. See also A. Fletcher, ‘A Discourse of Government with relation to Militia’ and idem, ‘An Account of a Conversation concerning a Right Regulation of Governments for the Common Good of Mankind’, in John Robertson, Andrew Fletcher: Political Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 1–32, 175–215. 100. [ J. Toland], The Militia Reform’d, p. 40. 101. Ibid., p. 45. 102. Ibid., p. 48. 103. Ibid., pp. 52–4. 104. Ibid., p. 55. 105. Robbins, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, p. 126; Schwoerer, ‘The Literature of the Standing Army Controversy’, p. 188. 106. Evans, Pantheisticon, p. 47. 107. Ibid., p. 47. 108. J. Ostler, ‘The Rhetoric of Conspiracy and the Formation of Kansas Populism’, Agricultural History, 69 (1995), p. 4. 109. Ibid., p. 10. 110. Ibid., p. 22. 111. Ibid., p. 20. 112. Ibid. 113. J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 114. [ J. Toland], Clito: A Poem on the Force of Eloquence (London: 1700), p. 6. A. B. Worden suggests that this text ‘may have been doctored by his enemies before publication but [it] was clearly based on a text of Toland’. Worden (ed.), Edmund Ludlow: ‘A Voyce from the Watch Tower’, p. 25, n110. 115. [ J. Toland], Clito, p. 11. 116. Ibid., pp. 11, 14. Clito is described as ‘a certain eminent man’ and Toland identified by name. Ibid., p. iv, 117. Ibid., pp. 15–16. 118. Ibid., pp. 19, 20.

3 Hanover, 1701–7 1.

J. Toland, An Account of the Courts of Prussia and Hanover Sent to a Minister of State in Holland (London, 1705), p. 50. 2. Ibid., p. 52. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., pp. 53–4. 5. Ibid., p. 70. 6. Ibid., p. 67. 7. Ibid.. 8. Ibid., p. 73. 9. Ibid., p. 68. 10. Ibid., p. 58. 11. Ibid., p. 56.

162


12. See introduction; J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 42–4 provides a thoughtful contextual reading of the pamphlet. 13. For a reading of this text as ‘revealing the conversations and thinking of the men at the Grecian just prior to the Act of Settlement becoming law in 1701’, and not related directly to the Harley connection as is suggested here, see R. R. Evans, Pantheisticon: The Career of John Toland (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), pp. 80–6; quote is on ibid., p. 80. 14. [ J. Toland], Limitations for the Next Foreign Successor or New Saxon race (London: 1701), p. 17. 15. Ibid., p. 5. 16. Ibid., p. 4. 17. The list of fifteen items is on ibid., pp. 7–8. 18. Ibid., p. 3. 19. Ibid., p. 12. 20. Ibid., p. 13. 21. Ibid., p. 17. 22. Ibid., p. 18. 23. Ibid. 24. J. Toland, Anglia Libera (London: 1701), pp. 178–9. 25. Ibid., pp. 179–80. 26. Ibid., p. 67. 27. Ibid., pp. 81–3. 28. Ibid., pp. 83–4. 29. Ibid., p. 92. 30. Ibid., pp. 49–50. 31. J. T. to Shaftesbury, 19 July 1701, quoted in Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, p. 45. 32. [ J. Toland], Reasons for Addressing His Majesty … [and] for Attainting and Adjuring the Pretended Prince of Wales (London: 1702), p. 9. 33. Ibid., p. 10. 34. Ibid., p. 13. 35. On this matter see R. Walcott, ‘The East India Interest in the General Election of 1700– 1701’, English Historical Review, 71 (1956), pp. 223–39. 36. Ibid., p. 232. 37. [ J. Toland], Propositions for uniting the two East-India Companies (London: 1701), p. 4. 38. Ibid., p. 6. 39. Toland, Account of the Courts, pp. 64–5. 40. Some Queries which may deserve Consideration (London: 1701), p. 2. Cited in Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, p. 45. The supposition concerning authorship is on ibid., p. 44. 41. Toland, Account of the Courts, p. 55. 42. R. E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 16. 43. F. H. Heinemann, ‘Toland and Leibniz’, The Philosophical Review, 54 (1945), p. 440. 44. [ J. Toland], Reasons for Addressing His Majesty, p. 1. 45. Ibid., pp. 5, 1. 46. Ibid., p. 3. 47. Ibid., p. 6. 48. Evans, Pantheisticon, p. 90.


163

49. Quoted in Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, p. 18. 50. ‘Il a beaucoup d’esprit, mais pas beaucoup de jugement quand il n’a point de directeur’. Quoted in Heinemann, ‘Toland and Leibniz’, p. 446. 51. J. Toland, Account of the Courts, p. 43. 52. Ibid., p. 21. 53. Ibid., p. 22. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., p. 23. 56. Ibid., p. 24. 57. Ibid., p. 37. 58. Statutes of the Prussian Royal Academy (London: 1705). 59. Ibid., pp. 32–3. 60. Ibid., p. 35. 61. D. C. Fouke, Philosophy and Theology in a Burlesque Mode: John Toland and the ‘Way of Paradox’ (Ameherst, MA: Humanity Books, 2007), p. 274. 62. J. Toland, Letters to Serena (London: 1704), p. 136. 63. Ibid., pp. 138–9. 64. Ibid., p. 140. 65. Ibid., p. 141. 66. Ibid., p. 142. 67. Ibid., p. 157. 68. Ibid., p. 143. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., p. 159. 71. Ibid., p. 167. 72. Ibid., pp. 187–8. 73. M. C. Jacob, ‘John Toland and the Newtonian Ideology’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 32 (1969), p. 319. 74. HMC, Portland, IV, p. 98. 75. To Mr ***, London, 26 June 1705, in ‘Letters’, p. 348; Earl of Shaftesbury quoted in Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, pp. 89–90. For a presentation of the cooling of relations between Toland and Shaftesbury see F. H. Heinemann, ‘John Toland and the Age of Enlightenment’, Review of English Studies, 20 (1944), pp. 132–7. 76. [ J. Toland], The Fables of Aesop (London: 1704), pp. 2–3. 77. P. Lurbe, Review of Créquinière, The Agreement of the Customs of the East Indians (New York: 1999) in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 14 (1999), p. 133. 78. See C. Ginzberg, ‘Provincializing the World: Europeans, Indians, Jews (1704)’, Postcolonial Studies, 14 (2011), pp. 135–50. 79. The Latin version is Oratio Philippica (London: 1707). 80. J. Toland (ed.), M. Schinner, A Phillipick Oration to Incite the English against the French (London: 1707), p. ii. 81. Des Maizeaux, ‘Some Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr John Toland’, p. lxi. 82. To Mr ***, London, 26 June 1705, in ‘Letters’, pp. 345–6. The recipient is revealed in HMC Portland, IV, p. 408. 83. To Mr ***, London, 26 June 1705, p. 338. 84. Ibid., p. 342. 85. Ibid., p. 350. 86. Ibid., p. 352.

164 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.


Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, pp. 90, 89. HMC Portland, IV, p. 409. [ J. Toland], The Memorial of the State of England (London: 1705), pp. 6–9. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 76. To Mr ***, 14 December 1705 in ‘Letters’, p. 354. The identification of the recipient is in Evans, Pantheisticon, p. 103. 95. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, p. 92; P. Des Maizeaux, ‘Some Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr John Toland’, in P. Des Maizeaux (ed.), Collection of Several Pieces of Mr John Toland, 2 vols (London, 1726), vol. 1, pp. lx. 96. HMC Portland, IV, p. 408. 97. Ibid., p. 409. 98. Toland, Anglia Libera, pp. 99–100. 99. W. Marshall, ‘George Hooper’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 10 August 2011]. 100. J. Toland, Vindicius Liberius (London, 1702) in P. McGuinness, A. Harrison and R. Kearney (eds), John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious: Text, Associated Works and Critical Essays (Dublin: Lilliput, 1996), p. 161. 101. Ibid., p. 161. 102. [ J. Toland], The Principle of the Protestant Reformation Explained in a Letter of Resolution concerning Church Communion (London: 1704), pp. 19–20. 103. Ibid., p. 20. It is accredited to Toland by Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, p. 25. 104. [ J. Toland], The Principle of the Protestant Reformation, p. 3. 105. Ibid., p. 3. 106. Ibid., p. 4. 107. Ibid., p. 6. 108. Ibid. 109. Ibid., pp. 6, 7. 110. Ibid., p. 8. 111. Ibid., p. 9. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid., p. 10. 114. Ibid., p. 12. 115. Ibid., p. 14. 116. Ibid., p. 12. 117. Ibid., pp. 14, 18. 118. J. Toland, to the Reverend Mr *** in ‘Letters’, p. 374. 119. Ibid., p. 375. 120. J. Toland, to his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, 6 March 1707, in ‘Letters’, p. 372. See also Marshall, W., ‘Thomas Tenison’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 10 August 2011]. 121. [ J. Toland (ed.)], Socinianism truly Stated (London: 1705). 122. M. C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 249, n96. 123. [ J. Toland (ed.)], Socinianism truly Stated, p. 7. 124. Ibid., p. 5.


165

125. Ibid., pp. 5, 6. 126. HMC Portland, IV, p. 410. 127. A. Harrison, ‘John Toland’s Celtic Background’, in P. McGuinness, A. Harrison and R. Kearney (eds), John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious: Text, Associated Works and Critical Essays (Dublin: Lilliput, 1997), pp. 250–1. 128. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, 31. 129. To *** Prague January 1708, in ‘Letters’, 382. The possible respondents are suggested in Harrison, ‘John Toland’s Celtic Background’, p. 251. 130. HMC Portland, IV, p. 456. 131. Ibid., p. 456. 132. Des Maizeaux, ‘Some Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr John Toland’, p. lxii. 133. [ J. Toland], The Declaration Lately Publish’d in Favour of his Protestant Subjects by the Elector Palatine (London: 1707), pp. 3–4. 134. Ibid., p. 5. 135. Sullivan is a harsher judge, writing ‘the immediate profitability of this enterprise must be weighed against the lasting damage it did to Toland’s reputation. Throughout his past reversals, evasions and outrages, he could have credibly maintained that he had been loyal to the Protestant ideal of religious liberty with its dual emphasis on the inviolability of conscience and the duty of obedience to government. Now, in less than fifty pages, he had provided men who required little evidence with proof that he was a simple mercenary’. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, 29. 136. G. Davis, ‘The Fall of Harley’, English Historical Review, 66 (1951), pp. 246–54; G. S. Holmes and W. A. Speck, ‘The Fall of Harley in 1708 Reconsidered’, English Historical Review, 80 (1965), pp. 673–98.

4 The Hague, 1708–10 1.

This material is controversially surveyed in R. Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), particularly pp. 338–467. For one extensive critique see G. J. Schochet, ‘Radical Politics and Ashcraft’s Treatise on Locke’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 50 (1989), pp. 491–510, particularly pp. 497–9 on Locke’s Dutch exile. 2. Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, p. 394. 3. This is the central contention of J. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 4. This is the thesis of A. Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1995). 5. R. H. Vermij, ‘English Deists and the Traité’, in S. Berti, F. Charles-Daubert and R. H. Popkin (eds), Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought in Early-Eighteenth-Century Europe (Dordrecht: Klewer, 1996), p. 243. 6. J. Toland, Anglia Libera (London, 1701), p. 152. 7. Ibid., p. 151. 8. Ibid., p. 161. 9. For these details see Vermij, ‘English Deists and the Traité’, p. 247. 10. On these two figures, see Israel, Radical Enlightenment, pp. 464–71.

166


11. L. Gimonutti, ‘English Guests at “De Lantaarn”: Sidney, Penn, Locke, Toland, Shaftesbury’, in S. Hutton (ed.), Benjamin Furly (1646–1714): A Quaker Merchant and his Milieu (Firense: L. S. Olschki, 2007), p. 56. 12. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, pp. 464, 468. 13. This list draws on J. Champion, ‘‘The fodder of our understanding’: Benjamin Furly’s Library and Intellectual Conversation c. 1680–1714’, in S. Hutton (ed.), Benjamin Furly, 1646–1714: A Quaker Merchant and His Milieu (Brill: 2005), p. 143. 14. Details of his life are drawn from R. L. Greaves, ‘Benjamin Furly’, ONB, www.oxforddnd. com [accessed 15 August 2011]. 15. J. Champion, ‘‘The fodder of our understanding’’, p. 138. 16. Ibid., p. 139. 17. On the intellectual relationship between Locke and Toland see J. C. Biddle, ‘Locke’s Critique of Innate Principles and Toland’s Deism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 37 (1976), 411–22. 18. B. Furly, to J. Locke, 19 August 1693, quoted in Gimonutti, ‘English Guests at “De Lantaarn”, p. 57. 19. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, pp. 11–12. 20. 2 August 1707, quoted in Vermij, ‘English Deists and the Traité’, p. 249. 21. J. Toland, Nazarenus (London: 1718), p. x. 22. Goldgar, Impolite Learning, pp. 174–6. 23. For a brief discussion of this episode see A. Harrison, ‘John Toland and the Discovery of an Irish Manuscript in Holland’, Irish University Review, 22 (1992), pp. 33–9. 24. J. Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1670–1722 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 171. 25. P. Des Maizeaux, ‘Some Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr John Toland’, in P. Des Maizeaux (ed.) Collection of Several Pieces of Mr John Toland, 2 vols (London: 1726), vol. 1, p. lxv. 26. The standard English-language biography is D. McKay, Prince Eugene of Savoy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977). 27. Ibid., p. 196. 28. Ibid., p. 200. 29. Ibid., p. 202. 30. Ibid., p. 197. 31. Champion, ‘The Fodder of our Understanding’ , p. 147 32. M. C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), p. 147. 33. Ibid., p. 202. 34. J. Toland, ‘Cicero Illustratus’, in P. Des Maizeaux, A Collection of Several Pieces by Mr Toland, 2 vols (London: 1726), vol. 1, pp. 229–96. 35. A. Harrison, ‘John Toland’s Celtic Background’, in P. McGuinness, A. Harrison and R. Kearney (eds), John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious: Text, Associated Works and Critical Essays (Dublin: Lilliput, 1997), pp. 252–3. 36. On this theme see J. Champion. ‘‘Manuscripts of mine abroad’: John Toland and the Circulation of Ideas, 1700–1722’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 14 (1999), pp. 9–36. 37. BL Add 4295, ff18–19 translated in Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, p. 268. 38. Ibid., p. 268. 39. Ibid., p. 269.


167

40. There has been a debate about the character of the Knights of Jubilation conducted by Margaret Jacob – who favours a proto-masonic reading of the society – and Christiane Berkvens-Stevelinck who emphasises the Rabelasian quality of the event. For a summary see M. C. Jacob, ‘The Knights of Jubilation – Masonic and Libertine’, Quærendo, 14 (1984), pp. 63–75. 41. On this see P. Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 42. Jacob, Radical Enlightenment, p. 158. 43. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, p. 575. 44. Vermij, ‘English Deists and the Traité’, p. 246. 45. Champion, Republican Learning, p. 171. 46. A. B. Worden (ed.), Edmund Ludlow: ‘A Voyce from the Watch Tower’ (London: The Royal Historical Society, 1978), p. 24. 47. F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 215. This description draws on the summary provided in ibid., pp. 211–29. For a modern translation see Giordano Bruno, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1992). 48. J. Toland, ‘An Account of Jordano Bruno’s Innumerable Worlds’, in Des Maizeaux, A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr J, Toland, vol. 1, pp. 337, 339. 49. Jacob, Radical Enlightenment, p. 153. 50. J. Toland, Cliodophurus in idem, Tetradymus (London: 1720), pp. 65–6. 51. D. C. Fouke, Philosophy and Theology in a Burlesque Mode: John Toland and the ‘Way of Paradox’ (Ameherst, MA: Humanity Books, 2007), p. 231. 52. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, p. 611. 53. Fouke, Philosophy and Theology in a Burlesque Mode, p. 231. 54. J. Toland, ‘Two Problems Concerning the Jewish Nation and Religion’, in Nazarenus (London: 1718), p. 2. 55. Champion, Republican Learning, p. 174. 56. Quoted Champion, Republican Learning, p. 175 57. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, p. 134. 58. Quoted Champion, Republican Learning, p. 175. 59. Ibid., p. 175. 60. J. Toland, Origines Judaicae, p. 117. Quoted in D. C. Fouke, Philosophy and Theology in a Burlesque Mode: John Toland and the ‘Way of Paradox’ (Ameherst, MA: Humanity Books, 2007), p. 275. 61. J. Toland, Hodegus in idem, Tetradymus (London: 1720), p. 6. 62. Ibid., p. 7. 63. Ibid., p. 46. 64. Ibid., pp. 46–7. 65. Ibid., p. 46. 66. J. Toland, ‘Two Problems Concerning the Jewish Nation and Religion’, p. 3. 67. G. Wood, ‘Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century’, The William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 39 (1982), pp. 401–41. See also J. C. D. Clark, ‘Providence, Predestination and Progress: Or, Did the Enlightenment Fail’? in D. Donald and F. O’Gorman, Ordering the World in the Eighteenth Century (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 27–62. 68. Wood, ‘Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style’, p. 414. 69. Ibid., p. 417.

168


70. Ibid., p. 419. 71. A. Hofman, ‘The Origins of the Theory of the Philosophe Conspiracy’, French History, 2 (1988), pp. 154.

5 Epsom, 1711–16 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

[ J. Toland], The Description of Epsom, with the Humours and Politicks of the Place (London: 1711), p. 30. Ibid., p. 31. The suggestion the house was a perquisite is in R. E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 32. ‘The Publisher to the Reader’, in [Toland], The Description of Epsom, pp. i, ii. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., pp. 23–4. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 8. A similar reading, which highlights how the pamphlet revolves around ideas of ‘variety’ and ‘artifice’, arguing that both have political resonance, is P. Lurbe, ‘Epsom as Emblem: John Toland’s Description of Epsom’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 9 (1994), particularly pp. 131, 134. Lurbe concludes that ‘Epsom’s artificiality therefore reveals the essence of social life which is artificial in so far as it has to be built on a set of rules like all wellordered games’. Ibid., p. 135. [ J. Toland], The Description of Epsom, p. 14. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., pp. 19, 20. Ibid., pp. 21–2. Ibid., pp. 22–3. ‘It is plain it is Des Maizeaux who has written his Life, but though he has printed what Molyneux wrote to Locke in Toland’s favour, he has not printed what Locke wrote in answer to Toland’s; nor has he told of Toland’s being cudgelled most severely by some of Marlborough’s ruffians’. W. Stratford to E. Harley, 14 July 1726 in Portland Ms, VII, p. 441. H. Sacheverell, The Perils of False Brethren, in Church and State (London: 1709). Justin Champion offers the following assessment of this text: ‘Toland’s book was a very close re-working of the “official” account of the trial published by Jacob Tonson in 1710. Toland added commentary and ancillary contemporary documents to Tonson’s transcription of the trial. Toland edited the material to accent the extremism of Sachaverell’s hostility towards “revolution principles”, and to point to the dangerous social consequences of his inflammation of opinion in the city of London and the provinces. Toland pruned much of Sachaverell’s defence and indeed censored some of the defence material which cast aspersions on the religious integrity of his own work. The message was clear if embedded in a very long-winded account: the High Church was dangerous to the political, religious and social constitution of Britain. Since history was philoso-


21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

169

phy taught by examples, so the historical account of the trial indicted the corruption of the priesthood’. J. Champion, ‘To Govern is to Make Subjects Believe’: Anticlericalism, Politics and Power, c1680–1717’, in N. Aston and M. Cragoe (eds), Anticlericalism in Britain, 1500–1914 (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), pp. 58–9. I would also like to thank Brian Cowan for discussion of this book. [ J. Toland], The Judgement of K James the First and Charles the First against Non-Resistance (London: 1710), pp. 3–4. The attribution to Toland is in R. R. Evans, Pantheisticon: The Career of John Toland (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), p. 125. [ J. Toland], The Jacobitism, Perjury and Popery of High-Church Priests (London: 1710), pp. 16, 9–10. Ibid., 6. [ J. Toland], Mr Toland’s Reflections on Dr Sacheverell’s Sermon (London: 1710), pp. 2–3. Ibid., pp. 5, 6. Ibid., pp. 6–7, 11. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., pp. 13–14. Ibid., pp. 15–16. M. Knights, ‘Faults on Both Sides: The Conspiracies of Party Politics under the Later Stuarts’, in B. Coward and J. Swann (eds), Conspiracy and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2004), p. 158. Ibid., pp. 161, 162. Ibid., pp. 162. [ J. Toland], Appeal to Honest People against Wicked Priests (London: [1713]), p. 3. Ibid., pp. 3–4. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 32. J. Toland, Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland (London: 1714), p. 25. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 26. It is this aspect of this pamphlet that leads Pierre Lurbe to reflect on how ‘Toland’s approach to Jewish history is entirely secular, and the novelty of this needs stressing’. P. Lurbe, ‘John Toland and the Naturalization of the Jews’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 14 (1999), p. 42. Toland, Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews, pp. 6, 3. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid. J. Toland, A Memorial Presented to a Minister of State in P. Des Maizeaux (ed.), A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr Toland, 2 vols (London: 1726), vol. 2, p. 244. Ibid., p. 239.

170 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82.

Notes to pages 113–18 Ibid., p. 253. Ibid., p. 255. J. Toland, to R. Harley, 2 September 1710, in HMC Portland, ii, p. 572. J. Toland, to the Earl of Oxford, 6 June 1711, in HMC Portland, iii, p. 4. J. Toland, A Memorial for the Earl of *** [Oxford] containing a Scheme of Coalition in P. Des Maizeaux (ed.), A Collection of Several Pieces, 2 vols (London: 1726), vol. 2, p. 215. See also J. Toland, to [the Earl of Oxford], 7 December 1711, iii, pp. 126–7. Toland, A Memorial for the Earl of ***, p. 219. J. Toland, Another Memorial for the Most Honourable Earl of *** [Oxford] in P. Des Maizeaux (ed.), A Collection of Several Pieces, 2 vols (London: 1726), vol. 2, p. 221. Ibid., p. 223. Ibid., p. 224. Ibid., p. 227. Ibid. Ibid., p. 230. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 230–1. This is the assessment of J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion Volume One: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 113; idem, Barbarism and Religion Volume Two: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 163–76 J. Toland, A Memorial for the Earl of *** [Oxford] containing a Scheme of Coalition, p. 216. Ibid., pp. 216–17. A. McInnes, Robert Harley, Puritan Politician (London: Victor Gollancz, 1970), pp. 132–3. Ibid., p. 133. See also B. W. Hill, Robert Harley: Speaker, Secretary of State and Premier Minister (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 159–74. For the wider pamphlet debate on the issue see J. R. Moore, ‘Defoe, Steele and the Demolition of Dunkirk’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 13 (1950), pp. 279–302. J. Toland, Dunkirk or Dover (London: 1713), pp. 11–12. Ibid., pp. 7–8. Ibid., p. 15. A point amply made in D. Szechi, 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 77–101. In preparation for this election Toland prepared and issued a translation of Cicero, intended to promote the ‘choice of a good parliament, when King George shall think it for his Service … to summon one’. Toland asserted that ‘the politics here laid down ... [were] infinitely more adroit than refin’d Macchiavel pretended to teach, or bungling Oxford attempted to practice’. Rejecting the advice to ‘wheddle in their turn with each of the two parties, the Artistocratical and the Democractical’ he protested that it was his ultimate purpose to ‘let the Electors into the secret of the Candidates’. [ J. Toland (ed.)], The Art of Canvassing at Elections (London: 1714), pp. viii, vii, vii. [ J. Toland], Her Majesty’s Reasons for Creating the Electoral Prince of Hanover a Peer of this Realm (London: 1712), p. 6. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 7. J. Toland, Funeral Elogy and Character of Her Royal Highness, the Late Princess Sophia (London: 1714). It also included a reprint of Toland’s portrait of George, drawn from J.


171

Toland. Account of the Courts of Prussia and Hanover Sent to a Minister of State in Holland (London: 1705). 83. [ J. Toland,], Characters of the Court of Hannover (London: 1714), pp. 4–5. 84. [ J. Toland,], The Grand Mystery Laid Open (London: 1714), p. 5. 85. Ibid., p. 8. 86. Ibid., pp. 10–11. 87. Ibid., pp. 16–17. 88. Ibid., p. 15. 89. Toland certainly thought this to be an effective conceit, for in J. Toland, Acts of Parliaments No Infallible Security to Bad Peace-makers (London: 1714) he drew another parallel. As Justin Champion recounts, he ‘used the example of the attainder and execution of William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk in the mid-fifteenth century, for making an “ignominious peace with France” at the Treaty of Tours, as a warning to Harley of the punishment he might expect to receive for the disgraceful terms of the Treaty of Utrecht’. J. Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 135. 90. For this identification see J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 168 (‘Toland, like the hardened turncoat he was, repaid his former benefactor’s kindness with the malicious Art of Restoring in 1714 which drew unkind parallels between Oxford [Harley] and Monck’) and Champion, Republican Learning, pp. 134– 5: ‘In the pamphlet Toland skilfully established a complex series of parallels between Monck and Harley, describing the gap between the public commitment to the commonwealth/Hanoverian succession in speeches, letters and private negotiations and the pursuit of restoration’. 91. [ J. Toland], The Art of Restoring or the Piety and Probity of General Monk in Bringing About the Late Restoration (London: 1714), pp. 6, 2. 92. Ibid., p. 4. 93. Ibid., p. 2. 94. Ibid., p. 7. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid. 99. Champion, Republican Learning, pp. 141–63 and passim. 100. R. Hofstadter, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, in idem, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p. 4. 101. Ibid., p. 35. 102. [ J. Toland], A Collection of Letters written by His Excellency General George Monk, Afterwards Duke of Albermarle, Relating to the Restoration of the Royal Family (London:1714). 103. Hofstadter, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, p. 36. 104. Ibid., p. 37. 105. Toland was far from alone in being commissioned to write by Harley. On this see Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, passim. 106. Toland, Art of Restoring, p. iii. 107. R. Weil, ‘Matthew Smith versus the ‘Great Men’: Plot Talk, the Public Sphere and the Problem of Credibility in the 1690s’, in P. Lake and S. Pincus (eds), The Politics of the

172


Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 234. 108. For a synoptic assessment of the relationship between the politician and the pamphleteer, see Champion, Republican Learning, pp. 55–6. 109. Champion, Republican Learning, p. 64. 110. Ibid., p. 65. 111. Hofstadter, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, p. 24. 112. Toland, Art of Restoring, p. 11. 113. Hofstadter, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, p. 25. 114. Ibid., p. 32. 115. B. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1998), vol. 1, p. 369. 116. See W. A. Speck, ‘Robert Harley’, in ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 17 August 2010]; Hill, Robert Harley, pp. 221, 227–8. 117. D. Defoe, The Secret History of the White-Staff (London: 1714). See also, P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe (London: Pickering & Chatto Press, 2006), pp. 140–6 and B. Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689–1746 (1980; Aberdeen: Scottish Cultural Press, 1995), pp. 109–15. 118. Hofstadter, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, p. 39.

6 Putney, 1717–22 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Anonymous, ‘The Secret History of the South Sea Scheme’, in P. Des Maizeaux (ed.), A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr John Toland, 2 vols (London: 1726), vol. 1, p. 404n. For a modern rendering of the crisis see J. Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (1960; Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2001). Anonymous, ‘The Secret History of the South Sea Scheme’, p. 444. Ibid., p. 447. M. McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 2005), p. 622. As Isaac Disraeli remarked of Toland’s finances: ‘In examining the original papers of Toland, which are preserved, I found some agreements with booksellers. For his description of Epsom he was to receive only four guineas in case 1000 were sold. He then received ten guineas for his pamphlet on Naturalising the Jews, and ten guineas more in case Bernard Lintott sold 2000 … What a sublime person is an author! What a misery is authorship! The great philosopher who creates systems that are to alter the face of his country, must stand at the counter to count out 200 unsold copies!’ I. Disraeli, Calamites and Quarrels of Authors (London: Fredrick Warne and Co, 1867), p. 161 n. R. Molesworth, to J. Toland, Breckdenston, 25 June 1720, in ‘Letters’, p. 463. J. Toland, to R. Molesworth, London, 25 June 1720, in ‘Letters’, pp. 464–5. Sir T*** is identified in R. E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 37. Toland to Molesworth, 25 June 1720, in ‘Letters’, p. 465. Internal evidence suggests a date of December 1720 or early January 1721. J. Toland, to Sir T*** J***, in ‘Letters’, p. 466. Ibid., p. 467. Ibid. Ibid., p. 468.


173

15. See E. Veale, ‘Sir Theodore Jannsen’, ODNB, www.odnb.com [accessed 22 August 2011]. 16. R. Molesworth, to J. Toalnd, Albemarle Street, 5 January 1722, in ‘Letters’, p. 484. 17. [ J Toland (ed.)], Letters from the Right Honorable, the Late Earl of Shaftesbury to Robert Molesworth (London: 1721). The project is discussed in Molesworth to Toland, 25 June 1720, p. 461. 18. [ J. Toland (ed.)], Letters from ... Shaftesbury to ... Molesworth, p. vii. 19. Ibid., p. ix. 20. See I. Victory, ‘The Making of the Declaratory Act of 1720’, in G. O’Brien (ed.), Parliament, Politics and People: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Irish History (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989), pp. 9–30. 21. [ J. Toland], Reasons Most Humbly Offer’d to the Honourable House of Commons why the Bill sent down to them from the Most Honourable House of Lords Entitled An Act for the better Securing the Dependency of the Kingdom of Ireland upon the Crown of Great Britain Shou’d not Pass into a Law (London: 1720), pp. 8–9. 22. Ibid., p. 23. 23. Ibid., p. 24. 24. Champion, Republican Learning, p. 145. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., pp. 145, 156. 27. C. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (New York: Atheneum, 1968), p. 127. 28. J. Toland, The State Anatomy of Great Britain (London: 1717), p. 71. 29. Ibid., p. 27. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., pp. 28–9. 33. Ibid., p. 14. 34. Ibid., pp. 8, 9. 35. Ibid., p. 12. 36. Ibid., pp. 12, 13. 37. J. Toland, An Account of an Irish Manuscript of the Four Gospels in idem., Nazarenus (London: 1718), pp. 19–20. 38. Ibid., p. 23. 39. Ibid., pp. 34–5. 40. Ibid., p. 25. 41. Ibid., p. 21. 42. Ibid., pp. 22, 24. 43. Ibid., p. 26. 44. Ibid., p. 27. 45. W. Molyneux, Case of Ireland being Bound by Act of Parliament in England, ed. J. G. Simms (Dublin: Garrett Doyle, 1977). A useful survey of this strand in Irish political thought is S. J. Connolly, ‘Precedent and Principle: The Patriots and their Critics’, in idem (ed.), Political Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), pp. 130–58. See also J. Hill, ‘The Language and Symbolism of Conquest in Ireland, c.1790-1850’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 18 (2008), pp. 165–86. 46. J. Toland, An Account of an Irish Manuscript, pp. 26–7. 47. Ibid., p. 29.

174


48. J. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 613. 49. J. Toland, Nazarenus (London: 1718), p. 33. 50. Ibid., p. 16. 51. Ibid., p. 13. 52. Ibid., p. 27. 53. Ibid., pp. 16–17. 54. Ibid., p. 28. 55. Ibid., p. 17. 56. Ibid., p. 23. 57. Ibid., p. 29, 25. 58. Ibid., p. 31. 59. Ibid., p. 33. 60. For an early expression of his interest, see J. Toland, A Letter from an Arabian Physician to a Famous Professor in the University of Hall in Saxony (np, 1706?). See also J. Champion, ‘‘I remember a Mahometan story of Ahmed Ben Edris’: Freethinking Uses of Islam from Stubbe to Toland’, Al-Quantara, 31 (2010), pp. 443–80. 61. Claire O’Halloran has adjudged: ‘While he got the title of the Book of Ballymote wrong (referring to it as ‘Ballimore’) the rendition of all the Gaelic names is usually correct, indicating that Toland’s Irish was of a high standard’. C. O’Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c.1750–1800 (Cork: Cork University Press /Field Day), 2004), p. 76. 62. Toland wrote of how it was ‘a design which I form’d several years ago at Oxford, and which I have ever kept in view; collecting as occasion presented, whatever might any way tend to the advantage or perfection of it’. J. Toland, A Specimen of the Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning in P. Des Maizeaux (ed.), Collection of Several Pieces of Mr Toland, 2 vols (London: 1726), vol. 1, p. 4. 63. H. Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 35–90. 64. J. Champion, ‘‘Manuscripts of mine abroad’: John Toland and the Circulation of Ideas, 1700–1722’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 14 (1999), pp. 9–36. 65. McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, pp. 55–6. 66. M. Martin, A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland (London: 1703). The copy is now held in the British Library (shelfmark 579.e.12). See also J. Champion, ‘Enlightened Erudition and the Politics of Reading in John Toland’s Circle’, English Historical Review, 121 (2006), pp. 111–41. 67. J. Toland, A Specimen, pp. 89–90. See also how on Orkney ‘there are likewise two Temples, where the natives believe by Tradition, that the Sun and Moon were worshipt: which belief of theirs is very right, since the lesser Temple is semicircular’. Ibid., p. 91. 68. Ibid., p. 46. 69. Ibid., p. 152. 70. Ibid., pp. 175–6. 71. Ibid., p. 176. 72. As J. M. S. Tompkins writes: ‘Toland was a Deist who regarded the Druids as the archexamples of the arch-evil, priestcraft, and he cannot touch on their rites or mysteries without a contemptuous Deistic snort. But he was also an Irish-speaking Celt from Inishowen, deeply concerned to plead for the study of Celtic antiquities, in whose eyes the order of Druids in Gaul and Britain was a great achievement of the Celtic genius, and


73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

175

first and last his racial enthusiasm overpowers his Deistic spleen’. J. M. S. Tompkins, ‘In Yonder Grave a Druid Lies’, Review of English Studies, 22 (1946), pp. 5–6. J. Toland, A Specimen, p. 8. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., pp. 106–7. Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., pp. 84–5. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., pp. 40–1. [ J. Toland], Pantheisticon (London: 1756), pp. 70–1. Ibid., pp. 85–6. M. C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 66. D. C. Fouke, Philosophy and Theology in a Burlesque Mode: John Toland and the ‘Way of Paradox’ (Ameherst, MA: Humanity Books, 2007), p. 297. See P. Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Toland, Pantheisticon, pp. 94–5. Ibid., pp. 107–8. G. Wood, ‘Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century’, The William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 39 (1982), p. 427. E. Whyte, ‘The Value of Conspiracy Theory’, American Literary History, 14 (2002), p. 26. Ibid., p. 26.

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INDEX

Aaronovitch, David, 38 Acts [in chronological order] Corporation Act, 1661 (13 Charles II, 2 c.1), 131 Licensing of the Press Act, 1662 (14 Charles II c., 33), 26 Test Act, 1673 (13 Charles II c., 2), 131 Toleration Act, 1689 (1 William and Mary c., 18), 115 Blasphemy Act, 1698 (9 William, 3 c., 35), 45 Act of Succession, 1701 (12 and, 13 William III c., 2), 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 115, 118, 124 Act of Abjuration, 1702 (13 and, 14 William III c.6), 69 Test clause (Ireland), 1704 (2 Anne c.6), 83 Act against Occasional Conformity, 1711(10 Ann c., 6), 115 Schism Act, 1714 (13 Anne c., 7), 119, 131 Declaratory Act, 1720 (6 George I c.5), 129 An Account of an Irish Manuscript of the Four Gospels (1718), 134 ‘An Account of Jordan Bruno’s Book of the Infinite Universe and Innumerable Worlds’ (1726), 97 An Account of the Courts of Prussia and Hanover Sent to a Minister of State in Holland (1705), 71, 72 Addison, Joseph, essayist and politician, 45 Adeisidaemon, pseudonym, 32, 62, 98 Adeisidaemon (1709), 98 Aikenhead, Thomas, 30, 35, 38

Amsterdam, Holland, 18, 89, 92, 94, 109 Amyntor (1699), 56, 57, 93 Ancien régime, 17 Anglia Libera (1701), 67, 69, 71, 82, 90 Anglicanism, 16, 17, 19, 21, 22, 29, 30, 31, 34, 36, 38, 44, 53, 56, 57, 72, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 118, 119, 120, 125, 131, 132, 133, 142, 144, 147, 148 Anne I, 11, 64, 65, 72, 78, 81, 107, 110, 117, 124, 125 Annesley vs Sherlock, 130 Anonymous A Lady’s Religion (1697), 32, 33 A Letter to J.C. Esq upon Mr Toland’s Book (1697), 25 Traité des trois imposteurs (Life of Spinoza) (1719), 97 An Apology for Mr Toland (London, 1697), 25, 43, 44, 48 Appeal to Honest People against Wicked Priests (1713), 111 Arianism, 28, 44 The Art of Governing by Parties, particularly in Religion, in Politics, in Parliament on the Bench and in the Ministry (1701), 13, 64 Art of Restoring (1714), 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125 Ashcraft, Richard, 89 Assassination Plot (1696), 11 Atheism, 4, 22, 30, 41, 44 Atterbury Plot (1720–2), 11 Auden, W. H., 6 Aymon, Jean, writer and convert, 91, 94, 96

– 189 –

190


Bacon, Francis, natural and political philosopher, 30 Bank of England, 51 Barebones Parliament (1653), 50 Barnett, S. J., 17, 26 Barruel, Abbé Augustin, Jesuit, 13 Bayle, Pierre, 5, 47, 91 Bibliothèque Universalle et historique (1695), 47 Bekker, Balthasar, philosopher, 5 Bellingham, James, 52 Berlin, Germany, 72, 73, 86 Berlin, Isaiah, philosopher, 8 Berman, David, 4 Bill of Rights (1689), 58 Bishops’ Wars (1639–40), 125 Blackhall, Ofspring, Anglican Bishop of Exeter, 55 Blenheim, Battle of (1704), 94 Böhm, Chevelier, cupbearer in Knights of Jubilation, 95 Bolingbroke, First Viscount, Henry St John, 17, 124 Book of Common Prayer, 29 Boyne, Battle of the (1690), 23 Boyse, Joseph, Presbyterian Minister, 28, 30, 34 Breuninger, Scott, 15 Browne, Peter, Anglican Bishop of Cork and Ross, 25, 26, 34 A Letter in Answer to a Book entitled Christianity not Mysterious (1697), 25, 26, 34 Bruno, Giordano, philosopher and mystic, 5, 6, 18, 95, 97, 148 Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante (1584), 97 Buckley, Samuel, publisher, 35 Burke, Edmund, MP and political writer, 16, 17 Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), 17 Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), 16 Calvinism, 64, 73, 87, 89, 125 Catholicism, 10, 13, 14, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 30, 67, 78, 80, 83, 87, 89, 96, 118, 122, 134, 135, 138, 143, 147

Celts, 139, 140, 142 Champion, Justin, 3, 4, 17, 27, 36, 47, 56, 92, 122, 123, 131, 139 Characters of the Court of Hannover (1714), 118 Charles I, 29, 42, 52, 54, 55, 57, 108, 125 Eikon Basilike (1649), 42, 54, 55, 57 Charles II, 10, 14, 48, 49 Chichester, Arthur, Lord Deputy of Ireland, 22 Christian V of Denmark, 48 Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), 8, 9, 15, 18, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 43, 44, 49, 54, 71, 82, 83, 93, 138, 144, 147 Chubb, Thomas, writer, 17 Cicero, 95 Clark, J. C. D., 17 Clayton, Robert, London merchant, 48, 70, 95 Clegg, Jeanne, 16 Clito (1700), 61, 62 Coffeehouses, 29, 41, 42 Cohn, Norman, 13 Collins, Anthony, philosopher, 16, 17, 78, 86, 91, 92, 97 Communion, 83, 84 Conspiracies, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 36, 37, 49, 52, 56, 66, 69, 77, 89, 98, 102, 103, 110, 117, 120, 121, 124, 125, 135, 144, 145, 147 Council of Cashel (1172), 135 Country Party, 14, 43, 60, 61, 62, 64, 70, 79, 81 Court Party, 14 Créquinière, The Agreement of the Customs of the East Indians with those of the Jews and Other Ancient People (1705), 78 Cromwell, Oliver, Lord Protector, 34, 50, 54, 68, 112 Culdees, 134, 135 Curll, Edward, writer, 1 An Historical Account of the Life and Writings of the Late Eminently Famous Mr John Toland (1722), 1

Index Daily Courant, 35 The Danger of Mercenary Parliaments (1698), 48 Daniel, Stephen H., 2, 3 Darby, John, Printer, 41 Davenant, Charles, 41 The Declaration Lately Publish’d in Favour of his Protestant Subjects by the Elector Palatine (1707), 87 Deconstructionism, 2 A Defence of Mr Toland in a Letter to Himself (1697), 33, 43, 44 Defoe, Daniel, writer, 61, 124 Deism, 3, 4, 15, 16, 17, 24, 26, 44 Des Maizeaux, Pierre, 22, 57, 78, 87, 90, 92, 93, 94, 107, 127, 139 Collection of Several Pieces of Mr Toland (1726), 107 A Description of Epsom (1711), 107 Dissenters, 22, 27, 28, 31, 80, 119, 131, 132 Downie, J. A., 61, 71 Drake, James, political writer, 81 Memorial of the Church of England, 81 Druids, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144 Dublin, 26, 27, 30, 31, 35, 41, 45 Dunkirk or Dover (1713), 116 Dusseldorf, Germany, 87 Eagleton, Terry, 7, 8 East India Company, 70 Edinburgh, Scotland, 30, 35 Emlyn, Thomas, Presbyterian Minister, 28 England, 17, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 73, 77, 88, 89, 116, 117, 119, 130 The Enlightenment, 5, 6, 7, 9, 19, 26, 36, 96, 102, 148 Enthusiasm, 38 Epicurus, 74, 75, 97 Epsom, Surrey, 18, 105, 106 Erastianism, 81 Ernest Augustus, Elector of Hanover, 63 Eudoxa, patron of Toland, 105 Eugene of Savoy, prince and military leader, 57, 86, 94, 95, 98, 135 Evans, Robert Rees, 6, 45, 60

191

Fables of Aesop (1704), 78 ‘The Fabulous Death of Atilius Regulus’ (1726), 29 Ferguson, Adam, philosopher, 9 Fideism, 26 Firman, Thomas, freethinker, 41 Fletcher, Andrew, freethinker, 59, 60 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de, 5 Fouke, Daniel C., 4, 74, 146 Fox, George, Quaker leader, 92 France, 13, 15, 107, 116, 121, 125 Frederick I of Prussia, 73 Freemasonry, 5, 6, 9, 13, 95, 96, 123, 146 Freethinkers, 2, 17, 41, 115, 148 French Revolution, 13 Funeral Elogy and Character of Her Royal Highness, the Late Princess Sophia (1714), 118 Furly, Benjamin Quaker radical, 31, 91, 92, 93, 103 Gauden, Dr John, Anglican Bishop of Worcester and possible author of Eikon Basilike, 54, 56, 57 George I, 63, 65, 71, 117, 118, 124, 125, 132, 147 George II, 72 Germany, 65, 131 Glasgow, Scotland, 28 Gleditsch, G., treasurer, Knights of Jubilation, 96 Gleditsch, Jean Fredrick, member of Knights of Jubilation, 96 Glorious Revolution (1688), 51, 58, 67, 89, 125 Godolphin, first Earl of, Sidney Godolphin, 77, 80 Goertzel, Ted, 12 Goldie, Mark, 29 Goode, Barnham, friend of Toland, 1 Gospel of Barnabas, 136, 137, 138 Gospels of Mael Brigte (1138), 94 Grand Mystery Laid Open (1714), 118 Grecian Coffeehouse, 42, 50, 51, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62 Gunpowder Plot (1605), 108

192


The Hague, Holland, 89, 91, 94, 95 Halifax, first Earl of, Charles Montagu, 79 Hanover, Germany, 18, 62, 63, 64, 70, 71, 72, 86, 87, 92, 114, 118, 124 Harley, Robert, 13, 18, 39, 43, 53, 58, 60, 61, 62, 64, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 86, 87, 88, 91, 94, 107, 108, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 129, 131, 145, 147 Harrington, Dorothy, patron of Toland, 52 Harrington, James, Republican thinker, 18, 50, 51, 52, 115 Oceana (1656), 52, 115 Harris, Jonathan, 41 Harris, Tim, 10 Harrison, Alan, 95 Hazard, Paul, 5 Henry II, 135 Her Majesty’s Reasons for Creating the Electoral Prince of Hanover a Peer of this Realm (1712), 118 Heresy, 4, 30, 55, 103, 111, 120, 140, 145 Hermeneutics, 2, 7 Hermetic tradition, 5, 93, 97 Herrick, James A., 4 Heterodoxy, 4, 5, 25, 26, 30, 34, 45, 74, 85, 93, 95, 96 High Church Displayed (1710), 109 Hill of Tara, 142 Hobbes, Thomas, philosopher and political writer, 5, 74, 85 Hodegus (1720), 99, 100 Hofman, Amos, 103 Hofstadter, Richard, 12, 13, 123, 125 Holland see United Provinces Holles, Denzil, Republican thinker, 50, 52 Holy Roman Empire, 121 Hooper, George, Anglican Dean of Canterbury, 82 Hopkins, Ezekiel, Anglican Bishop of Bath and Wells, 22 Hopkins, Paul, 10, 11 House of Commons (Britain), 58, 60, 67, 68, 77, 80, 81, 115 House of Commons (Ireland), 33 House of Lords (Britain), 48, 67, 72, 77, 81, 115, 129 House of Lords (Ireland), 129

Hudson, Wayne, 17 Huet, Pierre Daniel, French Bishop, 86 Huguenots, 89, 94 Inishowen, County Donegal, 21, 22, 86 Interregnum, 51 Ireland, 15, 17, 18, 21, 65, 66, 93, 117, 118, 120, 129, 130, 135 Irish language, 22, 93, 94, 138 Isle of Harris, Scotland, 140 Isle of Lewis, Scotland, 140 Israel, Jonathan, 5, 6, 91, 135 Jacob, Margaret C., 5, 6, 76, 95, 96, 97, 146 Jacobites, 10, 11, 43, 57, 64, 69, 72, 94, 109, 110, 115, 117, 119, 120, 124, 125, 131, 148 The Jacobitism, Perjury and Popery of High Church Priests (1710), 109 James II, 10, 21, 43, 49, 67, 69, 92, 108 James III, 107, 109, 110, 120, 121, 124, 125 Jansenism, 95 Janssen, Theodore, Director of the South Sea Company, 127, 128 Jesus Christ, 136 Judaism, 37, 78, 99, 100, 101, 103, 112, 113, 120, 138, 143 Johann Wilhelm, Elector of Palatine, 87 Johnson, Thomas, publisher, 94 Kearney, Richard, 17 Keely, Brian L., 11 King, William, Anglican Bishop of Derry and Archbishop of Dublin, 31, 32, 130 Knights, Mark, 10, 23, 110 Knights of Jubilation, 95, 96, 103 La Motte, Charles de, writer, 93 Latitudinarianism, 24, 33, 38, 80, 81 Le Clerc, Jean, freethinker, 31, 85, 91, 93, 99, 103 Treatise on the Causes of Incredulity (1697), 93 Leland, John, 24 A View of the Principal Deistical Writers (1755), 24 A Letter to a Member of Parliament Shewing that a Restraint on the Press in Inconsist-

Index ent with the Protestant Religion (1698), 45, 47, 61 Leibniz, Gottfried, philosopher and mathematician, 71, 74, 94 Annotatiunculae subitaneae (1701), 71 Leiden, Holland, 114 Letters to Serena (1704), 74, 77, 140 Levier, Charles, publisher and bookseller, 91, 96 Limitations on the Next Foreign Successor (1701), 65, 67 Livy, Titus, historian, 98 Lock, F. P., 17 Locke, John, Philosopher, 7, 24, 32, 35, 89, 91, 92 Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), 92 Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), 32 Two Treatise of Government (1689), 92 London, England, 6, 18, 41, 42, 43, 47, 72, 89, 91, 95, 105, 106, 115, 129, 130, 141 Londonderry, County Derry, 21, 86 Londonderry Company, 129 Louis XIV, 89, 116, 117, 120 Love, Harold, 139 Lucretius, 76 Ludlow, Edmund, Republican thinker, 50, 52 A Voyce from the Watch Tower (1698–99), 50 Lundy, Robert, City Governor of Londonderry, 21 Lurbe, Pierre, 78 Lutheranism, 64, 65, 73, 87, 125

193

McCarthyism, 12 McInnes, Angus, 116 McKay, Derek, 95 McKeon, Michael, 127, 139 McLaughlin, Daniel, Rector, 22 McLaughlin, Peter, Priest, 22 The Memorial of the State of England (1705), 80, 81, 82, 113 Metheun, John, lord lieutenant of Ireland, 31, 32, 36 Middlesex Grand Jury, 26, 27, 30, 32 The Militia Reform’d (1698), 58, 60 Militia, 59, 60, 73 Millar, John, historian and philosopher, 9 Millenarianism, 13, 50 Milton, John, poet and polemicist, 18, 42, 53, 54, 55 Areopagitica (1644), 54 Complete Collection of the Historical, Political and Miscellaneous Works (1698), 53 Defence of the People (1651), 54 Molesworth, first Viscount, Robert Molesworth, MP, 31, 32, 36, 48, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 135, 139, 141, 145, 147 Account of Denmark (1694), 32, 48 Molyneux, William, natural and political philosopher, 27, 35, 135 Case of Ireland Stated (1698), 135 Monck, General George, soldier and politician, 120, 121, 122 Monmouth Rebellion (1685), 89 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, 94 Morgan, Thomas, Presbyterian minister and Macclesfield, first Earl of, George Parker, writer, 17 70, 71 Moses, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103 Mandeville, Bernard, Dutch writer and Moyle, Walter, Republican thinker, 58, 60 social critic, 124 An Argument Showing that a Standing Mar, twenty-second Earl of, John Erskine, 117 Army is Inconsistent with a free GovMarchand, Prosper, secretary, Knights of ernment (1697), 58 Jubilation and bookseller, 96 Muslims, 136, 137, 138 Marlborough, first Duke of, John Churchill, Nazarenus (1718), 94, 95, 98, 134, 135, 137, 77, 82, 94, 108 138 Marsh, Narcissus, Anglican Archbishop of New Testament, 23 Dublin, 25, 26 Newman, Jeremiah, Roman Catholic Bishop Martin, Michael, Travelogue writer, 139 of Limerick, 17 A Description of the Western Isles of ScotNine Years’ War (1594–1603), 21, 58 land (1703), 139

194


The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington (1700), 22 O’Devlin, Francis, Professor of Theology, Prague, 86 O’Donnell, Hugh, Gaelic Chieftain, 21 Old Testament, 100 O’Neill, Hugh, Gaelic Chieftain, 21 O’Neill, John, Superior of Irish College, Prague, 86 O’Neill, Rudolph, Lecturer in Theology, Prague, 86 Oratio ad excitandos contra Galliam Britanos (1707), 78 Order of the Garter, 71 Orford, Earl of, see Walpole, Robert Origines Judicae (1709), 98, 99 Orthodoxy, 5, 26, 27, 56, 74, 82, 85, 89, 91 Orwell, George, Writer, 8 Ostler, Jeffrey, 60, 61 Oxford, England, 28, 31 Oxford, first Earl of, see Harley, Robert Pantheism, 5, 70, 77, 85, 99, 103, 140, 145, 147 Pantheisticon (1720), 4, 5, 145, 146 Penn, William, Quaker leader and writer, 77, 79 Philip of Anjou, later Philip V of Spain, 116 Physic without Physicians (1726), 1, 2, 8 Pincus, Steve, 10 Pocock, J. G. A., 50 Popish Plot (1678–81), 10, 11 Popkin, Richard H., 7 Postman, 35 Post-modernism, 3, 7, 18 Post-structuralism, 2, 3 Prague, Bohemia, 86, 88 Presbyterians, 14, 21, 22, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 36, 38, 53, 80, 91, 134 Priestcraft, 2, 18, 23, 27, 30, 52, 61, 62, 103, 113, 134, 138, 141, 143, 145 The Principle of the Protestant Reformation Explained in a Letter of Resolution concerning Church Communion (1704), 31, 82 Propositions for Uniting the Two East-India Companies (1701), 70 Prussia, 73, 74

Prussian Academy, 73 Putney, London, 1, 18, 127 Reason, 3, 5, 22, 23, 25, 46, 90, 145, 147 Reasons for Addressing his Majesty (1702), 71, 77 Reasons for Attainting and Abjuring the Pretended Prince of Wales (1702), 69, 72 Reasons most Humbly offer’d to the Honourable House of Commons why a Bill Sent Down to them ... Shou’d not Pass into Law (1720), 130 Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland (1714), 112 Rebellion of, 1641, 125 Redcastle School, Londonderry, 22 Redwood, John, 17 Reflections on Dr Sacheverell’s Sermon (1709), 109 Republic of Letters, 90, 93 Republican thinkers, 3, 41, 42, 50, 52, 65, 77, 90, 103, 115, 116, 117, 120, 121, 125, 131, 133, 145 Republicanism, 21 ‘Respublica Mosaica’, 98 Restoration, 51, 125 Revelation, 24, 35 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), 89 Robbins, Caroline, 50, 60, 131 Robertson, William, historian, 9 Robison, John, Professor at the University of Edinburgh, 13 Rokeby, Sir Thomas, Justice, 27 Rotterdam, Holland, 92 Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste, Freethinker, 95 Rye House Plot (1683), 10, 89 Sacheverell affair, 18, 107, 108, 109, 117 Sacheverell, Henry, Anglican clergyman, 108, 109, 110, 111, 120 The Perils of False Brethren, in Church and State (1709), 108 Scepticism, 2, 4, 12, 85 Schinner, Matthew, 78 A Phillipick Oration to Incite the English against the French (1707), 78 Scholasticism, 31, 36

Index Schwoerer, Lois G., 58, 60 Scotland, 17, 21, 53, 65, 66, 110, 117, 118, 129, 131 A Secret History of the South Sea Scheme (1722), 127 Seven Years’ War (1756–63), 116 Shaftesbury, first Earl of, Anthony Ashley Cooper, soldier and MP, 89 Shaftesbury, third Earl of, Anthony Ashley Cooper, politician and writer, 16, 48, 49, 69, 77, 91, 129, 147 Inquiry concerning Virtue (1699), 48, 49, 50 Sidney, Algernon, Whig politician, 50, 51, 52, 92 Court Maxims (1655–6), 92 Discourses concerning Government (1698), 50 ‘Letter Against Bribery and Arbitrary Government’ (1697), 51 Simon, Richard, French priest and writer, 91 Skelton, Philip, Anglican minister and writer, 16 Ophiomaches, or Deism Revealed (1749), 16 Society for the Reformation of Manners, 27 Society of Friends (Quakers), 31, 89, 91, 92 Socinianism, 25, 41, 44, 53, 56, 91 Socinianism Truly Stated (1705), 85 Somers, John, first Baron Somers, 79 Sophia, Electress of Hanover, 63, 65, 71, 74, 87, 117, 118 South Sea Bubble, 1, 127, 128, 129, 130, 133, 145 Spanheim, Friedrich, professor of theology, University of Leiden, 72 A Specimen of the Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning (1726), 9, 139, 143, 144, 145 The Spectator, 35, 47 Spinoza, Benedict, philosopher, 5, 6, 74, 75, 89, 99, 103 Ethics (1677), 90 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), 90 St Germain-en-Laye, France, 94 St Patrick, 142, 143 St Paul, 137, 138

195

Stanhope, first Earl of, James Stanhope, 130, 131, 133, 145 The State Anatomy of Great Britain (1717), 131, 133 Statutes of the Prussian Royal Academy (1705), 78 Steele, Richard, writer and politician, 47 Stratford, William, 107 Sullivan, Robert E., 2, 9, 26 Sunderland, third Earl of, Charles Spencer, 130, 131, 133, 145 Superstition, 3, 38, 82, 98, 101, 102, 103, 112, 142, 143, 144, 147 Swift, Jonathan, Anglican Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral Dublin, 16, 31, 61, 135 Gulliver’s Travels (1726), 16 Tension, Thomas, Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, 85 Tetradymus (1720), 97 Thoresby, Ralph, antiquarian, 28 Tillotson, John, Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, 33 Tindal, Matthew, philosopher, 16, 17 Toleration, 32, 50, 72, 80, 85, 107, 110, 113, 115, 131, 132 Tories, 10, 14, 15, 29, 43, 45, 47, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 70, 79, 81, 105, 106, 107, 108, 115, 116, 117, 118, 133 Townshend, second Viscount, Charles Townshend, 133 Treaty of Utrecht (1713), 116, 124 Trenchard, John, writer, 58, 60 An Argument Showing that a Standing Army is Inconsistent with a free Government (1697), 58 A Short History of Standing Armies In England (1698), 58 Trinity College Dublin, 25 Troubles, the, 21 Two Essays sent in a Letter from Oxford (1695), 29, 30 Unionism, 21 United Provinces, 6, 66, 71, 72, 74, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 98, 102, 107, 121, 131, 146 University of Aberdeen, 132

196


University of Cambridge, 53, 132 University of Edinburgh, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 30 University of Glasgow, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28 University of Leiden, 91 University of Oxford, 29, 53, 70, 93, 132, 138, 139 Utrecht, Holland, 94 Van Dale, Anton, Dutch minister, 5 Van Limborch, Philip, freethinker, 91, 93 Vico, Giambattista, 95 Scienza Nuova (1725), 95 Vienna, Habsburg Empire, 86, 88 Vindicius Liberius (1702), 43, 44, 82 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 24 Letters addressed to His Highness the Prince of ***** containing Comments on the writings of the Most Eminent Authors (1768), 24 Von Hofendorf, Baron, aide de camp to Prince Eugene of Savoy, 86 Walpole, Robert Statesman, 133 Wanley, Humphrey, librarian and palaeographer, 94 War of Spanish Succession (1701–14), 78, 87, 94, 115 War of the Two Kings (see Williamite Revolution)

Ward, Edward, 42 A Secret History of the Calves Head Club (1705), 42 Waters, Anita, 12 Weil, Rachel, 122 Worden, Blair, 5, 50, 51 Whigs, 10, 14, 15, 23, 31, 32, 33, 35, 41, 43, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 70, 79, 81, 89, 92, 93, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 124, 129, 130, 133, 148 Whyte, Ed, 148 Wiglesworth, Jeffrey, 17 William III, 11, 15, 58, 65, 68, 70, 71, 72, 78, 129 Williamite Revolution (1688–91), 10, 15, 19, 21, 28, 30, 43, 94 Williams, Daniel, Presbyterian Minister, 28, 53, 91 Gospel Truth Stated and Vindicated (1692), 28 Wolfenbüttel, Germany, 87 Women, 47, 74 Wood, Gordon, 51, 52, 53, 102, 148 Wood Street Congregation (Presbyterian), Dublin, 27, 28 Yates, Frances, 97

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