Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700 (Ideas in Context (No. 82))

TAMING THE LEVIATHAN Thomas Hobbes is widely acknowledged to be the most important political philosopher to have writt...

Author: Jon Parkin

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TAMING THE LEVIATHAN

Thomas Hobbes is widely acknowledged to be the most important political philosopher to have written in English. Taming the Leviathan is a wide-ranging study of the English reception of Hobbes’s political and religious ideas. In the first book-length treatment of the topic for over forty years, Jon Parkin follows the fate of Hobbes’s texts (particularly Leviathan) and the development of his controversial reputation during the seventeenth century, revealing the stakes in the critical discussion of the philosopher and his ideas. Revising the traditional view that Hobbes was simply rejected by his contemporaries, Parkin demonstrates that Hobbes’s work was too useful for them to ignore, but too radical to leave unchallenged. His texts therefore had to be controlled, their lessons absorbed and their author discredited. In other words the Leviathan had to be tamed. Taming the Leviathan significantly revises our understanding of the role of Hobbes and Hobbism in seventeenth-century England. is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of York. His previous publications include Science, Religion and Politics in Restoration England (Boydell & Brewer, 1999) and an edition of Richard Cumberland’s A Treatise of the Laws of Nature (Liberty Fund, 2005).

JON PARKIN

IDEAS IN CONTEXT

82

Taming the Leviathan

IDEAS IN CONTEXT

Edited by Quentin Skinner and James Tully

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

TAMING THE LEVIATHAN The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700

JON PARKIN University of York

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521877350 © Jon Parkin 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2007 Reprinted 2008 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Parkin, Jon (Jonathan Bruce), 1969– Taming the Leviathan: the reception of the political and religious ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England, 1640–1700/Jon Parkin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-521-87735-0 (hardback) ISBN-10: 0-521-87735-0 (hardback) 1. Hobbes, Thomas, 1588–1679. 2. Political science – Great Britain – History – 17th century. 3. Christianity and politics – Great Britian – History – 17th century. 4. Great Britian – Politics and government – 1603–1714. I. Title. JC153.H66P37 2007 320.1092 – dc22 2007013274 ISBN 978-0-521-87735-0 hardback Transferred to digital printing 2009 Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Information regarding prices, travel timetables and other factual information given in this work are correct at the time of first printing but Cambridge University Press does not guarantee the accuracy of such information thereafter.

For Fiona

Contents

Acknowledgements

page x 1

Introduction 1 Reading Hobbes before Leviathan (1640–1651)

18

2 Leviathan (1651–1654)

85

3 The storm (1654–1658)

136

4 Restoration (1658–1666)

200

5 Hobbes and Hobbism (1666–1675)

238

6 Hobbes and the Restoration crisis (1675–1685)

312

7 Hobbism in the Glorious Revolution (1685–1700)

378

Conclusion

410

Bibliography Index

417 436

ix

Acknowledgements

The initial research for this book was made possible by my appointment to a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship held at King’s College, London in 1998–9. Institutional leave from the Department of Politics at the University of York, together with a matching Research Leave Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council enabled me to complete the writing. At a time when taking such leave inevitably imposes additional work upon one’s colleagues I would particularly like to thank Alex Callinicos, David Edwards, Catriona McKinnon, Sue Mendus and Matt Matravers for shouldering additional burdens during my absence, as well providing a rigorously analytical audience for some of the seminar papers that resulted. I have accumulated many intellectual debts over several years. By far the most important is to Quentin Skinner, whose seminal work really inspired me to take up the question of Hobbes’s reception in the first place, and who has supported my work for many years with astonishing kindness and unfailing generosity. Ideas for the book have been tried out in conferences, seminars and workshops in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Leicester, Reading, York and Brisbane, and for their advice and comments on various aspects of the project I would like to thank Thomas Ahnert, John Coffey, Alan Cromartie, Paul Davis, Martin Dzelzainis, Mark Goldie, Knud Haakonssen, Ian Harris, Tim Hochstrasser, Kinch Hoekstra, Clare Jackson, John Morrill, Sarah Mortimer, John Robertson, Richard Serjeantson, David Smith, Peter Schro¨der and particularly Tim Stanton, who was kind enough to read and comment upon a very long early draft. I would also like to thank the readers for Cambridge University Press, whose fantastically knowledgeable responses to the initial version of the typescript were stimulating and helpful. The research for the book has taken place in many libraries and I have benefited from the help and expert advice of staff at the British Library, the Bodleian, Cambridge University Library, Dr Williams’ Library, Lambeth x

Acknowledgements

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Palace Library, the Public Record Office, the Wellcome Library, Durham’s Palace Green Library, the Brotherton Library at Leeds, the Library of King’s College, Cambridge, the John Rylands University Library, UCL Library and the Minster Library at York. At the Press, Richard Fisher and the series editors have loyally supported the project over a period of several years and I am extremely grateful for their patience and understanding, particularly over the last year and a half, when work on the book was interrupted by health problems. For their expertise and care in getting me through that episode and back to work on the typescript I would also like to thank the staff of the Cardiology Department at York District Hospital and the Cardiothoracic Centre at Castle Hill Hospital, Hull. Lastly, I owe most of all to my wife Fiona Wickens, who has had to live with the project for many years, and to whom this book is dedicated. As well as providing encouragement and support, she also found time to read through numerous drafts and helped me to reshape the work for publication. I certainly couldn’t have completed it without her or our daughter Alice, whose recent arrival has helped to put everything into perspective.

Introduction

In 1640 Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, the 52-year-old secretary to the Earl of Devonshire, had a minor reputation as a respected translator and pastoral poet. To a small number of his friends he was also known as a promising mathematician and natural philosopher, perhaps even England’s answer to Descartes. By 1700 all of this had changed. Hobbes had an international reputation, but not as an acclaimed scientist. Indeed, that reputation lay largely in ruins. He was widely known as the most notorious philosopher that England had ever produced. His name had become a byword for atheism, immorality and a whole range of unacceptable political views. To his English readers, he was the ‘Monster of Malmesbury’, the ‘Devil’s Secretary’, an ‘Agent of Hell’ and as one writer put it ‘Nature’s Pest’ and ‘unhappy England’s Shame’.1 By the end of the century Hobbes had managed to acquire an extraordinary and perhaps even unique place in the English imagination as the beˆte noire of his age. The remarkable transformation of Hobbes’s public image from 1640 to 1700 was the effect of over fifty years of hostile commentary on Hobbes and his works. The dominant attitudes to Hobbes were largely structured by his critics, who were numerous and sometimes organised. Their success in blackening Hobbes’s reputation was such that their view of the philosopher as a misanthropic atheist profoundly influenced subsequent readers and still informs popular understandings of Hobbes’s ideas today. If Hobbes is now infamous as a dour pessimist with a taste for totalitarian authority, this reading has its origins in seventeenth-century critiques. As well as shaping views of Hobbes that have proved hard to shake, Hobbes’s critics were also successful in convincing historians that the philosopher and his ideas were a bizarre aberration in seventeenth-century intellectual history. On this 1

T. Pierce, A decad of caveats (1679), p. 3; Joseph Cutlore, Two sermons (1682), p. 15; G. Burnet, A sermon preached before the Aldermen of the city of London (1681), p. 9; T. L., ‘A Satyr’ in J. Barker, Poetical recreations (1688), p. 74 [second pagination].

1

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account, Hobbes was an eccentric thinker who was intellectually isolated. His ideas were at odds with all of his contemporaries and his impact was entirely negative. Recent work on Hobbes has established that such a picture is far from the truth, and that the portrait of Hobbes provided by his critics may not be a reliable guide either to his beliefs or to his relationship with his contemporaries. Over the last forty years historians have been recovering a more complex story in which Hobbes has been shown to have closer intellectual links with the mainstream of seventeenth-century thought than his critics liked to suggest. Looked at in context, Hobbes’s views seem a lot less outlandish than his critics often claim. We can now identify examples of individuals who did share Hobbes’s views and followed his lead. Indeed some historians have pointed out that even the critics who assaulted Hobbes may well have had more in common with him than they cared to admit; in fact some of them may well have attacked Hobbes’s theology because his other views were sometimes too close for comfort. This research raises the thought that the reception of Hobbes was a much more complicated process than it might at first appear, and in the light of this new information it seems appropriate to reconsider the question of the reception of Hobbes in all of its complexity. That is the purpose of this book, which draws upon recent research and attempts to offer a chronological account of the reception of Hobbes’s political and religious ideas between 1640 and 1700. Examining how and why Hobbes’s reputation was transformed so completely during this period can tell us much about the difficult relationship between Hobbes and his contemporaries, but also about the important role that Hobbes’s ideas played in the political and religious discourse of the period. For as we shall see, discussion of Hobbes was not simply the idle pursuit of a discredited atheist, but often a direct contribution to political and religious debate. READING THE RECEPTION OF HOBBES

The study of Hobbes’s reception amongst his contemporaries is a comparatively recent concern. That this is the case can be put down to the relative success of Hobbes’s early critics in convincing subsequent Hobbes scholars that there was little of interest to study beyond the bare thought that Hobbes was rejected, and often for good reasons, by his readers. Although early biographers of Hobbes do give short and quite informative sketches of Hobbes’s leading critics, they spend little time considering

Introduction

3

whether such writers could tell us anything either about Hobbes, his work or his relationship with his contemporaries.2 However in 1940 the American scholar Sterling Lamprecht offered a thoughtful analysis of Hobbes that sought for the first time to distinguish between Hobbes’s theory proper and ‘Hobbism’, the caricatured misreading (in Lamprecht’s view) of Hobbes’s political ideas common to his contemporary critics.3 Lamprecht argued that for those critics collectively, Hobbes’s political theory was summed up in four points that constituted political Hobbism. The first was a misanthropic account of human nature in which man was naturally inclined to malice and fraud, violence and ruthlessness. The second was Hobbes’s apparent moral relativism in which moral distinctions were merely aribitrary conventions ultimately determined by the state. The last two elements referred to Hobbes’s absolutism, suggesting that de facto a ruler could not be unjust or immoral as his commands were the criteria of right and wrong and that any appeal to the law for the protection of rights was invalid.4 Lamprecht argued that Hobbes could be read this way if he was quoted out of context, but it was this account of Hobbism that had dominated subsequent accounts of Hobbes himself. Lamprecht was perhaps the first writer to consider the causes of Hobbes’s misrepresentation, and he put it down to three factors; firstly Hobbes’s ‘remarkable gift for trenchant utterance and a glee in exploiting this gift to the irritation of his opponents’.5 Hobbes’s critics, indignant at his attacks upon them, wrote out of anger and therefore put the worst possible interpetation upon his ideas. The second factor was that the bulk of the critical response to Hobbes was a reaction to his most notorious book Leviathan. In contrast to Hobbes’s earlier work, argued Lamprecht, Leviathan, a heated and provocative polemic ‘lacks reasoned integrity and scholarly poise’. It was therefore easy to get Hobbes wrong. Lamprecht’s third suggestion referred to the fact that Hobbes’s political theory was actually part of a broader philosophical system, but the failure of that project meant that Hobbes’s politics were taken out of context.6 Lamprecht’s work showed that a discussion of the contemporary response could have important implications for the modern interpretation of Hobbes’s thought. His distinction between Hobbes and Hobbism still informs our understanding of the reception of Hobbes today. His argument undoubtedly captures some of the reasons why Hobbes’s critics wrote 2 3 4

G. C. Robertson, Hobbes (1886); John Laird, Hobbes (1934), pp. 247–317. S. Lamprecht, ‘Hobbes and Hobbism’, American Political Science Review 34 (1940), pp. 31–53. Ibid., pp. 32–3. 5 Ibid., p. 34. 6 Ibid., pp. 34–5.

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as they did, and pointed to some of the difficulties with interpreting a selfconsciously rhetorical text like Leviathan. However Lamprecht’s primary interest in Hobbes’s own theory meant that he was only interested in his critics as a united chorus of misguided disapproval; a more detailed investigation of their motives and interests in reacting to Hobbes would have to wait until the first book-length study of Hobbes’s critics, John Bowle’s Hobbes and his Critics: A Study in Seventeenth Century Constitutionalism (1951). Bowle’s book is something of a hymn to what Bowle identified as an enduring commonsense tradition of constitutionalism and the rule of law in English political thought. For Bowle this was a tradition that could stand as a bulwark against the kind of abstract political theorising that recommended arbitrary rule in the seventeenth century, and which smoothed the way for totalitarianism in the twentieth. Placed in this context, the war between Hobbes and his critics offered an historical lesson with contemporary relevance. Bowle therefore offered sympathetic surveys of nine contemporary critics of Hobbes’s political theory.7 In contrast to Lamprecht, Bowle saw the critics’ account of Hobbes’s ‘original, farranging and politically wrong-headed’ theory as essentially the right reading. On this account, Hobbes had failed to see the weakness of his attempt to base society upon cold calculation unsupported by myth. The critics knew better and countered Hobbes with a vigorous reassertion of the mythical foundations of political authority, divine right and natural law. Against Hobbes’s medieval pessimism about human nature, the critics offered a more enlightened optimism and confidence in the human instinct for mutual aid. Above all, rightly rejecting Hobbes’s theoretical and impractical absolutism, Bowle’s critics united in the defence of constitutionalism and the rule of law, anticipating Locke’s political theory, and the essentially correct response to the seductive power of an excessive and dangerous rationalism in politics. Although Bowle’s critical instincts were blunted by his ambition to celebrate the constitutionalism of Hobbes’s critics and to condemn the modern consequences of Hobbesian-style theorising, his readings successfully isolate an important strain of the response to Hobbes’s work. As we shall see, constitutional Royalists in particular would respond to Hobbes’s theory through a vigorous restatement of their core beliefs, and indeed it is true to say that the controversy with Hobbes produced some of the classic 7

J. Bowle, Hobbes and his Critics: A Study in Seventeenth Century Constitutionalism (1951). Bowle discusses Filmer, Ross, Ward, Lucy, Lawson, Bramhall, Eachard, Clarendon and Whitehall.

Introduction

5

statements of the constitutional Royalist and Presbyterian positions.8 But that said, Bowle’s determination to place Hobbes and the constitutional writers in rigidly segregated camps conceals the considerable interpenetration between their arguments. Hobbes’s ideas would actually be silently adapted by some extremely successful constitutional Royalist writers, but as we shall see even those who explicitly opposed Hobbes’s views had more in common with them than one might at first suppose. Hobbes and his Critics demonstrates the dangers of taking the critics’ account of their relationship with Hobbes at face value, and also illustrates the continued influence of those writers upon twentieth-century interpretations of Hobbes’s work. Just over a decade after Hobbes and his Critics was published, Samuel Mintz produced what is still the standard work on the reception of Hobbes, The Hunting of Leviathan (1962).9 What really distinguished Mintz’s work was not only the fact that he took Hobbes’s critics seriously as thinkers, but also his sophisticated understanding of the complexity of the encounters between Hobbes and his readers. Mintz’s central thesis was that although Hobbes was relentlessly assaulted throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, he exerted a subtle effect upon those writers who engaged him. Mintz argued that Hobbes’s critics were obliged to employ his own method of rational argument, thus absorbing his method while they resisted his ideas.10 For Mintz, the classic example of this process could be seen in the reaction of the Cambridge Platonists; in responding to Hobbes they softened their neo-Platonism and ‘concentrated on logical arguments for the existence of God and spirit’.11 In doing so, they acquired a more secular and rationalist outlook, and as a consequence their arguments took on a Hobbist form while their conclusions were diametrically opposed to Hobbes’s ideas. On Mintz’s account, Hobbes may not have produced any disciples or founded a school, but in spite of this almost entirely negative direct impact, he did contribute to the growing secular rationalism of the Enlightenment.12 This striking thesis offers a subtle re-reading of Hobbes’s impact. Mintz pursues the argument through an investigation of the philosophical reaction to Hobbes’s materialism and his moral philosophy, foregrounding the work of opponents like Henry More, Ralph Cudworth and John Bramhall. 8

9 10

Particularly Lawson’s An examination of the political part of Mr. Hobbs his Leviathan (1657) and Clarendon’s A brief view and survey of the pernicious errors to church and state, in Mr Hobbes’s book, entitled Leviathan (Oxford, 1676). S. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge, 1962). Ibid., p. viii. 11 Ibid., p. 151. 12 Ibid., pp. 147–8.

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Mintz also included a striking chapter on Hobbes and libertinism, scotching the view that the libertinism so often associated with Hobbes’s name was anything more than a debased adaptation of Hobbes’s work. For what it set out to do, The Hunting of the Leviathan was, and remains, a remarkably successful book, but it still held fast to the dominant view that Hobbes was an unusual and isolated figure. In the 1960s this thought was challenged in a series of ground-breaking articles by Quentin Skinner, whose work brought about a revolution in Hobbes studies, and injected new life to the question of Hobbes’s reception.13 Skinner’s new contextualist approach to the study of Hobbes demanded a more thorough examination of Hobbes’s intellectual milieu as a means of establishing the character of his theoretical interventions. The more detailed understanding of the relationship between Hobbes and his contemporaries resulted in a dramatic revision of the character of his reception. Skinner demonstrated that Hobbes was far from being the isolated thinker portrayed by previous writers. He argued that Hobbes’s ideas were often closely related to concepts available in contemporary political debate, and that it simply was not the case, as Mintz and others had argued, that Hobbes’s positive ideas were simply rejected. The classic example studied by Skinner is Hobbes’s involvement in the engagement controversy of 1649–51, where Skinner demonstrated that Hobbes not only shared much of his de facto theory with other engagement theorists, but also that Hobbes was widely quoted as an authority on the matter by subsequent writers. Uncovering an impressive amount of previously ignored evidence, Skinner was able to suggest that Hobbes’s work was read and admired by many of his contemporaries, both in England and on the Continent. This work transformed the modern perception of Hobbes’s relationships with his contemporaries and cast new light upon the activities of his critics. Far from attacking a single source of heterodox opinion, close examination of their works revealed that ‘they took themselves to be attacking the ablest presentation of a political outlook that was gaining dangerously in acceptability.’14 Hobbism, in the form of the beliefs that political obligation was based upon self-interest, and that human nature was basically anti-social, 13

14

Q. Skinner, ‘History and Ideology in the English Revolution’, The Historical Journal 8 (1965), pp. 151–78; ‘Hobbes and his Disciples in France and England’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 8 (1966), pp. 153–67; ‘The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought’, The Historical Journal 9 (1966), pp. 286–317; ‘Conquest and Consent: Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy’, in G. E. Aylmer, ed., The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement (1972), pp. 79–98. Updated versions of these articles are also available in Skinner’s recent collection of essays, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 2002), III, pp. 238–323. Ibid., p. 267.

Introduction

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were not simply creative misreadings of Hobbes’s work, but accurate accounts that were in fact getting a foothold in English society.15 The recognition that Hobbes had a richer and more subtle relationship with his contemporaries would in time inform the best work discussing the reception of Hobbes’s over the next few decades. Richard Tuck’s exploration of Hobbes’s place within the European natural law tradition provided an illuminating context for understanding Hobbes’s complicated relationships with contemporary natural law theorists in general, and his friends from Great Tew in particular.16 Noel Malcolm’s unpublished dissertation highlighted the complexity of Hobbes’s relationship with his Latitudinarian opponents, suggesting that much of their opposition to Hobbes stemmed not from their intellectual distance from Hobbes, but rather because in many respects they were too close to the disreputable philosopher for comfort.17 This insight was explored in Malcolm’s work on Hobbes’s relationship with the Royal Society, where it was clear that the scientists’ concern about Hobbes was that his growing theological notoriety might compromise the rationalist and scientific projects that they had in common.18 The powerful thought here for understanding the reception of Hobbes’s ideas was that Hobbes might have more in common with his mainstream contemporaries than we might think, and that the fact of his public exclusion from such company may have had more to do with contingent circumstances than any deep intellectual incommensurability between his views and those of his opponents. A similar theme emerges from John Marshall’s treatment of Latitudinarian Hobbism and I pursued Malcolm’s argument in my own work on Richard Cumberland.19 Many of 15

16

17 18

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Part of the reason for stressing the veracity of these accounts of Hobbes’s work was to counter the socalled Warrender–Taylor thesis, which suggested that Hobbes was offering a deontological theory of moral obligation. The fact that none of Hobbes’s critics thought that this was the case, and castigated Hobbes for holding a theory founded purely upon self-interest, together with Hobbes’s failure to make the case in response, strongly suggested that Warrender, Taylor and Hood were all incorrect in their interpretation of Hobbes’s ideas. R. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, 1979) and more recently Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), ch. 7, but see also M. Dzelzainis, ‘Edward Hyde and Thomas Hobbes’s Elements of Law, Natural and Politic’, The Historical Journal 32: 2 (1989), pp. 303–17. N. Malcolm, ‘Thomas Hobbes and Voluntarist Theology’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 1982. N. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the Royal Society’, in G. A. J. Rogers and A. Ryan, eds., Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 1988), pp. 43–66, and also in N. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), pp. 317–35. Latitudinarian ‘Hobbism’ ‘The Ecclesiology of the Latitude-men 1660–1689: Stillingfleet, Tillotson and Hobbism’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36: 3 (1985), pp. 407–27; J. Parkin, Science, Religion and Politics in Restoration England: Richard Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae (Woodbridge, 1999).

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these developments were summed up in Mark Goldie’s magisterial survey of the reception of Hobbes in his contribution to The Cambridge History of Political Thought.20 Placing Hobbes’s political theory in the context of the wider philosophical conflict between voluntarist and anti-voluntarist arguments allowed Goldie to explore the sometimes surprising connections between Hobbes and other Protestant voluntarist thinkers. This theological lens also revealed that Hobbes’s sternest critics could be distinguished in terms of their anti-voluntarist views. Most recently, Noel Malcolm has applied this more contextually sensitive approach to the neglected story of Hobbes’s Continental reception. Here once again the traditional story of Hobbes’s philosophical marginalisation is shown to be only partly true. Malcolm’s stunning overview of Hobbes’s reception across the Continent uncovers a rich and complicated story of adaptation and appropriation. Malcolm stresses the extent to which Hobbes influenced not only radical thinkers, but also more mainstream political traditions.21 Here, in one of the most dramatic outcomes of the new approach to Hobbes studies, attention to Hobbes’s reception uncovers Hobbes’s central role in early Enlightenment discourse. RETHINKING RECEPTION

In the light of this considerably revised account of Hobbes’s fate it seems like an appropriate moment to reconsider the reception of Hobbes’s ideas in his own country. This book builds upon the recent work on Hobbes’s relationships with his contemporaries to offer an overview of the reception of Hobbes’s political and religious ideas in England between 1640 and 1700.22 It also attempts to do so in a slightly unusual way in that I have avoided a more traditional thematic presentation of the material in favour of a chronological approach. I have done so partly because of a 20 21 22

M. Goldie, ‘The Reception of Hobbes’, in J. Burns and M. Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 589–615. N. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the European Republic of Letters’, in Aspects of Hobbes, pp. 457–545. I have only included discussions of the reception of Hobbes’s scientific and mathematical work insofar as they have a bearing on or illuminate those aspects of Hobbes’s reception that I am concerned with. The reception of Hobbes’s mathematical work is dealt with admirably in Douglas Jesseph’s excellent Squaring the Circle: The War between Hobbes and Wallis (Chicago, 1999), and I partly rely upon Jesseph for my own account of the disputes between the two. Hobbes’s scientific work and its reception has become an area of lively controversy, particularly since the publication of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985). I draw upon this work and the literature that has developed on the subject, particularly Emilio Sergio’s Contro il Leviatano. Hobbes e le controversie scientifiche 1650–1665 (Rubbettino, 2001).

Introduction

9

dissatisfaction with some of the effects of treating reception thematically, but also in the hope that arranging the material in this way will shed light upon some of the processes of reception in this particular case. Clearly there are advantages to adopting a thematic approach to reception studies, not least that it provides a sensible way of structuring heterogeneous material and is undoubtedly convenient for the reader who wishes to know how Hobbes’s contemporaries reacted to particular themes in Hobbes’s work. The disadvantage is that thematic treatments foreground the work of the author being received rather than the concerns of his or her readers. Such accounts frequently conceal the historical reasons why particular readers engaged with the texts in the first place, and also the changing contexts for their commentaries upon a particular author. What we lose is a sense of exactly why a text like Leviathan should have come to occupy such an important place in the political, religious and social discourse of its time, and how it earned the reputation that it did. Recontextualising Hobbes’s readers and critics and putting the emphasis upon them, rather than upon Hobbes, thus becomes a way of approaching this issue afresh, and allows us to consider the uses to which Hobbes and his work were put in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Such an approach reveals the contingent but cumulative character of what I have been calling the reception process. By this I mean the complicated hermeneutic and social process by which a text comes to bear particular public meanings, meanings sometimes quite at odds with the author’s intentions. For reasons that will be explored below, Hobbes’s controversial but politically and theologically underdetermined texts were peculiarly amenable to creative or hostile interpretation. Works like Leviathan potentially bore a variety of political and religious meanings, some innocuous and others freighted with danger. Readers, and communities of readers, came to Hobbes’s unusual arguments with a variety of preconceptions, prejudices and agendas that they used to make sense of the unusual and paradoxical me´lange of elements that they found there. Hobbes’s texts would be ‘decided’ in readings that could make clear the uncertain dangers lurking within. Such decisions often had a political dimension. Hobbes’s work was often read against the background of specific political and religious debates, in which his work could, sometimes erroneously, become aligned with specific positions. As we shall see, Royalists in the 1640s read Hobbes’s political theory under the shadow of a debate over parliamentary claims to sovereignty; a decade later the Oxford scientists read Leviathan in the context of a political debate over the future of the universities. The contingent political circumstances in

10


which these readings took place conditioned the character of published responses to Hobbes’s work. This meant that although Hobbes usually attempted to avoid identification with particular political and religious causes, the often deliberate ambiguity of his texts meant that he was ultimately associated with a surprising range of positions, in ways that he could not control, and mostly to his detriment. Hobbes would be read as a champion of rebellion and as a proponent of arbitrary government, as a dangerous exponent of the new science and as someone who really hadn’t grasped what the new science was about. Arguably none of these responses captured the complexity of Hobbes’s own ideas, but they would come to inform the public discussion of his work. Such characterisations often played an important role in turning Hobbes’s ideas into what Lamprecht called ‘Hobbism’, deliberate reductions of Hobbes’s views, often linked to undesirable social and political signifiers such as atheism and immorality. A less obvious consequence was that the condemnation of Hobbism could deliberately conceal genuine similarities between Hobbes and the views of his critics. Here the cumulative effect of Hobbes’s notoriety becomes important. As Hobbes was increasingly condemned, writers who shared arguments and premises with the philosopher would seek to distance themselves from him, often through attacks which reconstructed Hobbes’s views in a way that emphasised their distance from orthodox ideas. The construction of Hobbes as an unacceptable follower of Epicurus, for example, would ultimately help natural philosophers and natural lawyers to put clear classical water between Hobbes’s ideas and their own. This reconstruction of Hobbes’s ambiguous ideas and identity into various forms of Hobbism are part of the process that converted discussion of Hobbes into a way of talking about politics more generally. Once Hobbes had been reviled as a proponent of absolutely unacceptable absolutism, or an advocate of libertinism, and the claim that he was had been accepted, then the charge of Hobbism and the discussion of the iniquity of Hobbes’s view could become part of a critical discourse about power and authority, or public morality. Certainly this seems to have been the role played by Hobbes in the discussions of writers like Harrington and Lawson in the 1650s, where a caricature of Hobbes’s political views could serve as a stalking horse for the ‘Hobbesian’ threat posed by the Protectorate. The same would be true of Hobbes’s contractarian ideas, which would in time become the favourite target of Royalist assaults upon consent theory; any theorist alluding to consent could be tarred as a Hobbist, and rejected with anti-Hobbesian arguments. This process explains the extraordinary

Introduction

11

longevity of the debate over Hobbes and Hobbism, which remained a perennial topic for nearly half a century. As I have suggested, this was not simply the idle pursuit of a discredited atheist but often a direct contribution to political debate. Understanding this feature of Hobbes’s reception also helps us to understand why some interpretations of Hobbes’s views were more successful than others. It is not the case that the typical image of Hobbes at the end of the century reflected the full range of Hobbes interpretation in the early days of his reception. Whereas it was perfectly possible to read Hobbes as a sincere if eccentric Protestant theist in the early 1650s, by the 1690s such a reading would be regarded as intellectually perverse. This is not to say that such readings did not exist, but one is hard pushed to find examples of them in print; the overwhelming majority of Hobbes commentary at that time identifies him as a slippery non-believer, and to have argued otherwise was to court official censure.23 Clearly by the end of the century certain interpretative traditions had become authoritative both intellectually and institutionally. Particular groups of Hobbes’s critics (particularly the Latitudinarian Anglican clergy) had been successful in institutionalising their view of Hobbes and his works. Again, an historical account of this process reveals that the success or failure of particular interpretations often hinged upon contingent political factors. For example the Royalist view of Hobbes as a theorist of sedition would receive little public attention in the later 1650s when concerns about Cromwell were being expressed in terms of critiques of Hobbesian absolutism. But the Royalist account would flourish after 1660 as the new regime sought to condemn the theory that it associated with rebellion. Other interpretative possibilities were at the same time marginalised; early readings of Hobbes as a legitimate Protestant theologian, commonly the preserve of religious Independents, would become harder to sustain after 1660 as hostile Anglican views became institutionally dominant. When anti-Hobbism became a part of the rhetoric of institutions like the established church, the public meaning of Hobbes’s texts could be established authoritatively, as it would be in 1669 and 1683. That said, although it is true that institutional definitions of Hobbes and Hobbism did prove to be profoundly influential, their very success could sometimes prompt readers to take Hobbism seriously as a set

23

John Toland, for example, suggested that Hobbes might have orthodox religious views in an anonymous pamphlet published only after the licensing act had expired in 1695. See L. P. [John Toland], Two essays sent in a letter from Oxford to a nobleman in London (1695), pp. ii-iii.

12


of beliefs. As we shall see, such readings gave rise to hybridised forms of Hobbism from the 1670s onwards. Looking at the reception of Hobbes chronologically and taking his readers and critics seriously thus offers the possibility of a more nuanced account of the development of Hobbes’s public reputation and the role of his ideas in the political and religious discourse of late seventeenth-century England. In emphasising the role of contingent factors in that process, it reminds us that it was not inevitable that Hobbes should have ended up with the reputation that he did. Indeed, had history taken a slightly different course, it is not difficult to imagine that Hobbes might have been the toast of English society rather than its philosophical bogeyman.24 That in spite of this fact Hobbes nevertheless managed to exercise a profound influence upon the minds of late seventeenth-century English men and women is testimony to the power of Hobbes’s intellectual achievement. READING AND RECEPTION

Inevitably a study of this sort poses methodological questions, not least when it comes to the question of reception itself. In general I have aimed to contextualise uses of Hobbes’s name and ideas, to try to establish what is being done when either are explicitly evoked by seventeenth-century readers and critics. Adopting this procedure carries with it the advantage of limiting the study to the clearest possible set of evidence, but it has the disadvantage of excluding a wider and more traditional investigation of what we might call Hobbes’s ‘influence’. By this I mean the consideration of ideas that appear to be very similar to Hobbes’s, but where there is no explicit acknowledgement of a debt or clear evidence that the ideas are in fact Hobbesian. The difficulties of such an understanding of influence are numerous, and explained effectively by Skinner.25 To attribute the presence of a doctrine in a thinker (B) to the influence of an earlier thinker (A), one would have to be able to demonstrate that B had studied A’s works, that B could not have found the doctrine anywhere else and that B could not have arrived at the same doctrine independently.26 Casual discussions of 24

25

Two examples spring to mind; if the first civil war had resulted in a Royalist victory, the alignment of Hobbes’s unusual theory of sovereignty with Royalism would have met fewer challenges and ensured Hobbes a more comfortable old age. The other possibility would have been the survival of the Protectorate, which provided perhaps the best match for Hobbes’s political and religious views. Skinner, Visions of Politics, I, pp. 74–6. 26 Ibid.

Introduction

13

Hobbes’s supposed influence are frequently dogged by an inattention to these necessary conditions. One long-term legacy of the belief that Hobbes was an isolated and unprecedented theorist is the thought that concepts prominent in his work are necessarily unique to him. The result is often that a Hobbesian influence can be attributed when the concept or idea is readily available elsewhere. Hence Marvell’s Horatian Ode is frequently associated with Hobbes’s work because of its allusions to a distinctively de facto theory, and yet set in the context of its time, Marvell’s allusions fit with the de facto theories of a number of writers who appear to have arrived at their theories independently of Hobbes. The Ode’s Hobbesian ‘feel’ may have more to do with our Hobbesian prejudices than a Hobbesian provenance.27 The difficulty can manifest itself in another way when we consider that genuinely Hobbesian formulae can find their way into authors’ works, but via intermediate writers who had adapted Hobbes’s ideas. For example during this period one frequently discovers apparently Hobbesian formulations that come not directly from Hobbes but in a modified form from theorists such as Dudley Digges, whose adaptations of Hobbesian rights theory enjoyed considerable popularity. Of course this is an influence of a sort, and one important to note, but we need to be careful before jumping to the conclusion that the writer using such ideas was aware that he was making use of a Hobbesian argument. An interesting variant of this problem of intermediate writers comes from Hobbes’s changing public reputation. Although Hobbes may not have been automatically associated with certain concepts and ideas at an early stage in his reception, the development of his public reputation meant that his name would become indissolubly linked to certain ideas; crude de factoism for example. In the 1680s such an allusion could often be a reference to Hobbes’s ideas, mediated by the hostile coverage of Hobbes’s critics. In this example a silent reference to Hobbes may well be intended, but the doctrine to which it refers is a particular interpretation of Hobbes’s work. Examples like these point to the importance of understanding the temporal shifts in the public perception of Hobbes and his work, as what constitutes an allusion to Hobbes and his work changed quite dramatically during his early reception. Charting such shifts in Hobbes’s public reputation is partly what this book is designed to do, and in order to avoid some of the problems 27

Marvell’s de factoism seems to be closer to that of Marchamont Nedham, whose work shows no signs of Hobbesian influence until the second edition of his Case of the Common-wealth of England stated (1650), composed some time after the Ode was written.

14


outlined above I have tried to avoid attributing a Hobbesian label where there is not a strong and explicit textual or contextual warrant for doing so. Inevitably this is a matter of judgement, and there are occasions where I have excluded texts and arguments which have traditionally been regarded as Hobbesian or aimed at Hobbes. Although the task of discriminating between such cases is not straightforward I hope at least that as a result of taking this approach scholars might exercise a more critical and sceptical attitude before deploying a label which may have more to do with a modern preoccupation with Hobbes’s ideas rather than any necessary contemporary ‘influence’. TAMING THE LEVIATHAN

The title of the book is an allusion to Mintz’s work, but one in which the change to the verb is designed to signify our transformed understanding of Hobbes’s relationship with his contemporaries. Hobbes’s ideas were certainly hunted by his critics, but they frequently did so not in order to reject his thought entirely, but rather to tame and control it. The forms of domestication that I have in mind can be understood here in two senses, both of which characterise the reception process that will be studied. In the first sense, Hobbes’s work needed to be tamed, or interpreted authoritatively, because its heterodoxy was far from explicit. Hobbes’s theories were curiously indeterminate, hinting at dramatically heterodox conclusions drawn from quite conventional premises. As I noted above, this might at first sound like an unusual way to characterise the work of perhaps the greatest seventeenth-century system-builder, but it becomes clearer when we consider exactly how Hobbes went about trying to implement that system. Hobbes deliberately formulated his theory in terms of a series of paradoxes, in which conventional premises were realigned to suggest startling or unexpected conclusions. For example Hobbes discussed natural laws at length in chapters 14 and 15 of Leviathan, only to hint at the very end that they did not carry any obligatory force by themselves. Hobbes’s temporary solution is to suggest that the force of their obligation comes from the word of God, but in Part II of Leviathan we learn that the word of God needs to be authorised in turn by the sovereign. The paradoxical conclusion, gestured at throughout Hobbes’s discussion, is that in fact natural laws only oblige by the authority of the magistrate. Hobbes’s texts are littered with such underdetermined puzzles, which frequently indicate a complete and paradoxical inversion

Introduction

15

of traditional structures of authority, as his critics were quick to point out.28 The experience of reading Hobbes was therefore a strange combination of recognition of the familiar coupled with occasional shock and surprise at the realisation that the argument delivered potentially heterodox results. Hobbes’s critics were particularly concerned about this stealthy approach, given that his orthodox premises could mislead readers into a positive evaluation of his ideas. The Earl of Clarendon noted that Hobbes’s heterodoxy was concealed beneath quotable and innocuous phrases. John Eachard commented that Hobbes’s message was insinuated with all ‘demureness, solemnity, quotation of Scripture, and appeals to conscience and church history’. Thomas Tenison noted that Hobbes’s references to God could deceive readers into a good opinion of his philosophy.29 Nothing that Hobbes said clearly indicated that he was an atheist, but when he argued that ‘every part of the universe is body, and that which is not body is no part of the universe’, orthodox Christians were left with the distinctly heretical thought that either God was material, or that he didn’t exist. When called to explain this paradox, Hobbes would eventually choose to defend the unusual view that God was material, but his early critics sensed that the indeterminacy of such statements concealed darker motives. The danger here was that unless Hobbes’s indeterminate formulae were exposed, Hobbes might gain a sympathetic readership (which he did), and this is what made Leviathan a peculiarly dangerous text. For that reason it would have to be exposed for what it was, and Hobbes’s critics went out of their way to make it clear to their readers what they thought that Hobbes was really about. In this sense the dangerously plausible quality of Hobbes’s texts was tamed through a process of providing a clear account of Hobbes’s ‘true’ identity as an atheist, a heretic, a rebel, an arbitrary absolutist. Often these accounts would be Hobbist ‘creeds’; lists of heterodox positions that could be extracted from Hobbes’s works, a recurring feature of a critical reception that needed to isolate and display 28

29

As Bishop Bramhall observed: ‘God help us! Into what times are we fallen! When the immutable laws of God and nature are made to depend upon the mutable laws of mortal men; just as if one should go about to control the sun by the authority of the clock.’ John Bramhall, The works of the most reverend father in God, John Bramhall, D. D. sometime Lord Archbishop of Armagh, Primate and Metropolitan of All Ireland, 5 vols., ed. J. H. Parker (Oxford, 1842–5), IV, p. 544. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, A brief view and survey of the dangerous and pernicious errors to church and state, in Mr. Hobbes’s book, entitled Leviathan (Oxford, 1676), Ep. ded; J. Eachard, Some opinions of Mr. Hobbs considered in a second dialogue between Philautus and Timothy (1673), Sig. A5r–v; T. Tenison, The creed of Mr. Hobbes examined in a feigned conference between him and a student in divinity (1670), p. 132.

16


the dangers in Hobbes’s texts.30 The success of such exercises ensured that Hobbes’s seductive ambiguity was effectively neutralised; from being a strange and troubling book of puzzles, Leviathan (for example) became familiar even to those that had not read it, as an evil book. The second sense in which Hobbes’s ideas were tamed was through their adaptation and absorption into mainstream political thinking, and this too could be part of the critical process described above. For example, although Hobbes offered an at times shocking account of the centrality of conflict to the political condition, and the power necessary to overcome it, his contemporaries were quick to see that many aspects of Hobbesian theory were desirable additions to their own conceptual repertoire. We can see this from the earliest adaptations of Hobbes’s work in a theorist like Dudley Digges, but also in later writers who billed themselves as opponents of Hobbes. For example when Anglican theorists addressed debates over toleration in the later 1660s they found it useful to appeal to an account of sovereign authority in political and religious matters that came very close to Hobbes’s own theory, as their critics were quick to point out. Here their motivation for attacking Hobbes was to distance themselves from the now notorious philosopher. But that said, their project was to provide a more acceptable natural law foundation for what was in effect a distinctly Hobbesian version of sovereignty. One of the most striking examples of this is Richard Cumberland’s De legibus naturae (1672). Cumberland sought to extricate Hobbes’s useful doctrines from those that were heretical. By placing Hobbes’s ideas in the context of an obligatory natural law, Cumberland was able to make extensive use Hobbes’s political insights about sovereignty, borrowing liberally from his opponent’s conceptual furniture. The result was a domesticated version of Hobbes’s political thought, and we can find such borrowing taking place again and again, even in the cases of writers who explicitly attack Hobbes. The simple fact was that, for all his potential heterodoxy, Hobbes was too useful to ignore, but too dangerous to leave unchallenged. In this respect the recurrent confontation with Hobbes required that the valuable lessons of Leviathan should be quietly assimilated. Hobbes’s texts had to be controlled, their lessons absorbed and their author discredited. In other words, the Leviathan had to be tamed. 30

There were six famous lists of Hobbist’s creeds, produced at different stages, but particularly during the period 1669–73: L. Fawne, A beacon set on fire (1652), D. Scargill, The recantation of Daniel Scargill (Cambridge, 1669), Charles Wolseley’s atheist’s ‘catechism’ in The unreasonableness of atheism (1669), Tenison’s Hobbists creed in The creed of Mr. Hobbes examined (1670), Templer’s Idea theologiae Leviathanis (Cambridge, 1673), Clarendon’s Brief view and survey (1676).

Introduction

17

These processes are studied across the first sixty years of Hobbes’s reception from the earliest known responses to Hobbes’s political ideas in the Elements of Law, to the debates that involved discussion of his work in the 1690s. As I have indicated, Hobbes’s reception was decisively influenced by the wider concerns of politics, and it is no accident that significant public discussion of Hobbes’s work in the second half the century is loosely clustered, often around moments of political stress (1649–51, 1654–57, 1659–60, 1669–73, 1679–83, 1689–91). It was during these periods that the ‘taming’ processes were most active, simultaneously generating hostile images of Hobbes and encouraging the appropriation of his ideas. The narrative is similarly structured around these clusters, in an attempt to capture some of the complicated relationships between political developments and the discussion of Hobbes that was associated with them. It is, of course, true that discussion of Hobbes did not end in 1700; indeed, Hobbes’s doctrines seem to have enjoyed something of a radical revival in the first decade of the eighteenth century, to be followed, for example, by discussion of Hoadly’s Hobbism during the Bangorian controversy. But Hobbes’s presence in the seventeenth-century debate was at its most productive during the aftershocks of the revolution that had led him to write his work in the first place. The twin processes of rejection and appropriation during these periods ensured that by the end of the century Hobbes had been recast as the villainous philosopher familiar today, but also that his lessons had been silently absorbed in various ways into the mainstream of English political and religious thought.

CHAPTER

1

Reading Hobbes before Leviathan (1640–1651)

THE ELEMENTS OF LAW

Before 1640, Hobbes, secretary to the Earls of Devonshire, was known to the literate public as humanist scholar, a poet and a translator.1 Hobbes had been responsible for the standard English version of Thucydides’ Eight bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre (1629),2 and he was also the author of De mirabilibus pecci (1627), an occasionally obscene country house poem that Hobbes ultimately despised, but which remained popular throughout the century.3 To a smaller circle of scientists associated with Hobbes’s Cavendish patrons, the Earls of Devonshire and Newcastle, Hobbes was a respected natural philosopher, a former amanuensis to Francis Bacon who, although he had come late to the study of mathematics and natural philosophy, nevertheless promised much. 1

2 3

Hobbes has also been credited with writing three of the essays in Edward Blount’s Horae Subsecivae (1620), which is mentioned very occasionally by contemporaries. See for example G. Langbaine (1691), An account of the English dramatick poets (1691), p. 328. For the attribution of the essays to Hobbes see Thomas Hobbes, Three Discourses (1995), ed. N. B. Reynolds and A. W. Saxonhouse. Hobbes’s translation of Thucydides was reissued in 1634 and 1648, and only reprinted in 1676. The reissues suggest that the edition didn’t sell particularly well. Ad nobilissimum dominum Guilielmum Comitem Devoniae, &c. De mirabilibus pecci, Carmen Thomae Hobbes, written in 1627, although Aubrey suggests that it was published in 1636 (Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1898, I, p. 360)). Wing records editions in 1666 (two editions), 1675, 1678 and 1683 (the last two editions including an English translation by Charles Cotton). As Quentin Skinner has noted, Hobbes’s critics would sometimes draw attention to the obscenity in the poem (a cave at one point is compared to a woman’s genitalia); see for example John Wallis, Due correction for Mr Hobbes. Or Schoole discipline, for not saying his lessons right (Oxford, 1656), p. 3; Seth Ward, In Thomae Hobbii philosophiam exercitatio epistolica (Oxford, 1656), p. 240. Thomas Tenison’s divine travels to the Peak after reading De Mirabilibus and meets Hobbes in St Anne’s Well, Creed of Mr. Hobbes examined (1670), p. 4. De Mirabilibus is cited and quoted by Thomas Fuller in his The history of the worthies of England (1662), pp. 230–1 as part of a guide to Derbyshire. Edward Phillips, Milton’s nephew, noted that the poem was well-received (Theatrum poetarum (1675), p. 177 [second pagination]). Skinner notes De Mirabilibus’s distinguished readership. Robert Burton owned a copy; it was one of three works by Hobbes that Locke possessed and was the only work by Hobbes that Newton ever purchased. Robert Hooke also borrowed the work in 1675. Q. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), p. 241 and notes 212–18.

18


19

Hobbes got his first taste of direct involvement in the politics of the 1640s as a politician rather than a political theorist, being proposed as prospective Member of Parliament for Derbyshire for the Short Parliament of 1640. The Derbymen were resolved, however, ‘to give no way to the election of Mr Hobs’, according to one contemporary, a rejection that invites the thought that the Derbyshire constituents were passing one of the earliest verdicts upon Hobbes’s political outlook.4 But as so often when looking at contemporary reactions to Hobbes, one has to be careful to look at the context before assuming that any personal notoriety was at issue. In standing as an MP, the politically inexperienced Hobbes was representing the interests of his employer, the third Earl of Devonshire, whom he had served as tutor, secretary and adviser. It is possible that the Derbymen’s rejection was related to their attitude towards Devonshire and his staunch support for increasingly unpopular royal policies;5 what the episode does show is that his employer thought enough of Hobbes’s political acumen to try to place him at the centre of the unfolding political drama. But if Hobbes did not end up as a principal actor, he would soon find another role which would involve him in a dramatic attempt to rewrite the entire political script. The 1630s had seen Hobbes busied with the development of his broader philosophical system, a project which had political dimensions from the start. Hobbes’s comprehensive scientific project aspired to treat of the nature of body, of man, and of the citizen. But at the command of William Cavendish, the Earl of Newcastle, Hobbes put this work aside to complete a short manuscript detailing the third part of his project, which he titled The Elements of Law.6 Newcastle, at this point politically engaged as a Privy Councillor and Governor to the Prince of Wales, had increasingly acted as patron to Hobbes’s intellectual activities; as Hobbes’s dedicatory epistle to The Elements make clear, he and Newcastle had discussed political theory ‘in private discourse’ and now Hobbes had drawn up his principles ‘into a method’.7 Hobbes’s ambitions were characteristically large; an original treatment of the foundations of justice and policy which would be of ‘incomparable benefit’ to the commonwealth if every 4

5 6 7

Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, p. 228; Hobbes, De Cive: The Latin Version, ed. H. Warrender (Oxford, 1983) [henceforth DCL], Introduction, p. 4; P. Zagorin, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Departure from England in 1640: An Unpublished Letter’, Historical Journal 21 (1978), pp. 157–60. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, p. 229. For the composition of the work, see D. Baumgold’s, ‘The Composition of Hobbes’s Elements of Law’, History of Political Thought 25: 1 (2004), pp. 16–43. T. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. F. To¨nnies, second edition (1969) [henceforth EL], Ep. ded, pp. xv–xvi.

20


man had the opinions expressed. But Hobbes aimed his discourse at a specific audience and invoked Newcastle’s authority to insinuate the book ‘with those whom the matter it containeth, most nearly concerneth.’8 Hobbes’s dedication bears the date 9 May 1640, which gives us a sense of who might be most nearly concerned. The Short Parliament had been dissolved for less than a week, and the Elements dealt with the issues that had dominated its sitting. Hobbes himself gave a memorable description of the context to the work when he comments that it was written during the Short Parliament ‘in which many points of the regal power, which were necessary for the kingdom, and the safety of his Majesty’s person, were disputed and denied’.9 The Elements, Hobbes wrote, were designed to ‘set forth and demonstrate, that the said power and rights were inseparably annexed to the sovereignty; which sovereignty they did not then deny to be in the King; but it seems understood not, or would not understand that inseparability.’10 Hobbes’s work offered a theoretical toolkit designed to bring clarity to the wrangling over issues such as Ship Money and the royal prerogative, one designed for the king, his advisers and recalcitrant MPs. This seems to be borne out by the relatively wide distribution of the text. We are used to thinking that manuscript circulation involves limited distribution to small circles of intimates, but in the case of the Elements the manuscript phase of dissemination may have reached a broader readership than the first printed version of Hobbes’s political theory, the 1642 edition of De Cive. Hobbes himself reported that ‘many gentlemen had copies’ of the Elements of Law which, Hobbes claims, ‘occasioned much talk of the author’.11 It is well known that a surprisingly large number of manuscript copies of the Elements survive, no fewer than five at the British Library and three at Chatsworth.12 The surviving manuscripts give us a sense of how they were distributed; as Martin Dzelzainis has shown, Hobbes appears to have produced a number of copies which were circulated through various networks of readers, copied in their turn and returned, sometimes to be corrected or altered by Hobbes himself, presumably with a view to further circulation or perhaps ultimately publication.13 Hobbes’s close friend Robert Payne, then canon of Christ Church, 8 9 10 12 13

Ibid. T. Hobbes, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. W. Molesworth (1839–45) [henceforth EW], IV, p. 414. Ibid. 11 Ibid. British Library Harleian MS 1325, 4235, 4236, 6858 and Egerton MS 2005. See DCL, Introduction, pp. 3–4 and notes. M. Dzelzainis, ‘Edward Hyde and Thomas Hobbes’s Elements of Law, Natural and Politic’, Historical Journal 32: 2 (1989), p. 310.


21

seems to have been instrumental in disseminating the text in Oxford, lending a copy to Gilbert Sheldon, the warden of All Souls; Thomas Lockey, Bodley’s librarian and a student of Christ Church also owned a copy. Although Hobbes’s text in some ways had been aimed at practising politicians, its philosophical originality made it an object of particular interest at Oxford. As we shall see, the first obvious theoretical use of the text would come from an associate of Sheldon at All Souls, and Oxford dons would later be responsible for unauthorised published versions of the text in the early 1650s. More representative of Hobbes’s intended audience was the lawyer Edward Hyde, later the Earl of Clarendon, but in 1640 MP for Wootton Bassett in the Short Parliament and an opponent of royal policy across the range of issues that Hobbes sought to address in the Elements. Hyde appears to have got to know Hobbes in London in the 1630s, probably through literary friends that they had in common. Hyde, in turn, may have been the link that brought Hobbes into contact with the Great Tew circle, Lord Falkland’s convivium theologicum that connected the London literary scene to Oxford theologians like Sheldon.14 Much has been made of Hobbes’s relationship to Great Tew thinkers, particularly in terms of the sceptical, credally minimalist religious positions espoused by William Chillingworth. The members of the group also shared with Hobbes interests in philosophy and the new science. While all of these themes might have made Hobbes a welcome fellow-traveller, the same cannot be said for Hobbes’s political theory. The Elements of Law sometimes reads in part as an attempt to correct what Hobbes seems to have felt were the deeply misguided political ideas of men like Hyde and Falkland. Hyde appears to have read The Elements of Law at some point in September or October of 1640, that is, just before the opening of the Long Parliament, and we can get some sense of his reaction to it from extracts and notes that he appears to have made from the text, now preserved in the Clarendon manuscripts.15 Unsurprisingly the passages noted sections of the text dealing with those issues that had come to dominate the political agenda of the Short Parliament, particularly sections dealing with the extent of sovereign power, the nature of the relationship between the sovereign and Parliament, and more specifically, those 14 15

J. C. Hayward, ‘The mores of Great Tew: Literary, Philosophical and Political Idealism in Falkland’s Circle’, Cambridge University PhD (1982). Bodleian Library, MS Clarendon 126. The extracts are discussed in M. Dzelzainis, ‘Edward Hyde and Thomas Hobbes’s Elements of Law, Natural and Politic’.

22


sections dealing with the sovereign’s ability to raise revenue. There is nothing in the extracts chosen to indicate that Hyde approved or disapproved of them, but placing the notes in the context of what we know of Hyde’s political position at the time and the opinions he would go on to hold publicly, there can be little doubt that many of the positions recorded were those of which he seriously disapproved.16 Hyde’s view of the English constitution appears to have been fully formed by the 1640s and is perhaps best reflected by the assertion in his memoirs that ‘he had a most zealous esteem and reverence for the constitution of the government; and believed it so equally poised, that if the least branch of the prerogative was torn off, or parted with, the subject suffered by it, and that his right was impaired.’ On the face of it, statements like this point to a position congruent to Hobbes’s emphasis on the unitary nature of sovereignty, and there seems to be little doubt from his subsequent writings that Hyde agreed with Hobbes on this point, along with a good number of his contemporaries. But the considerable differences in their positions can be seen in Hyde’s elaboration of exactly what damage to the royal prerogative might involve. Hyde wrote that ‘he was much troubled when the crown exceeded its just limits, and thought its prerogative hurt by it: and therefore not only never consented to any diminution of the King’s authority, but always wished that the King would not consent to it.’17 Hyde’s complicated understanding of what constituted just limits is the crucial feature distinguishing his position from Hobbes. Although Hyde believed in a unitary account of sovereignty, he also believed that the exercise of sovereignty had been moderated historically; the crown had become legally self-limiting through voluntary agreements to act within a system of institutions which it could not change by itself.18 This commitment to the rule of law gave Hyde a strong historical sense of the legal powers and language proper to the crown, enabling him to present himself as a defender of the just prerogative when the crown exceeded its powers but also when its opponents demanded excessive concessions. In the Short Parliament, Hyde publicly aligned himself with the crown’s opponents, leading the attack upon the Earl Marshal’s Court as an illegal innovation.19 In the early months of the Long Parliament, Hyde, together with Falkland, 16 17 18 19

M. Dzelzainis, ‘Edward Hyde and Thomas Hobbes’, p. 315. Clarendon, Selections from The History of the Great Rebellion, ed. G. Huehns (Oxford, 1955), p. 31. B. Wormald, Clarendon: Politics, History & Religion 1640–1660 (Cambridge, 1951), p. 224. R. Ollard, Clarendon and His Friends (London, 1987), p. 49.


23

took the lead in denouncing the crown view of the Ship Money issue. In both cases the problem lay not so much in the crown’s attempts to raise money, but rather with the novel form of political argument used to support it. Denouncing the decision of the judges in the Ship Money proceedings, Falkland argued that the problem lay in the way that the judges had told the king ‘that by policy he might do what he pleased’. Hyde developed the same analysis in his History, arguing that the fault with the decision was that it created a situation in which ‘apophthegms of state [were] urged as elements of law’. Martin Dzelzainis has suggested that this was more than a verbal coincidence on Clarendon’s part and if that is so Hyde may well have seen Hobbes’s abstract treatment of absolute sovereignty as the systematisation of this new and dangerous vocabulary of legalised reason of state.20 The passages copied or noted by Hyde show a particular concern with positions in the Elements which comment directly upon the kind constitutionalism motivating his opposition to the crown. For example, a large group of extracts are taken from Part 2, chapter 1, sections 13–19, which assault the notion that there can be such a thing as a limited or moderated sovereignty.21 Hobbes’s position is that conditional sovereignty is no sovereignty at all. Limitation of the sovereign’s right to tax, for example, inevitably undermines the ability to provide effective protection. Equally, distribution of power to assemblies undermines sovereignty, which on Hobbes’s account must be absolute and indivisible. Although Hyde could agree with Hobbes on the necessity of indivisible sovereignty, he would resolutely defend the idea that it could involve the possibility of legal self-limitation, an option that Hobbes simply rejected as an absurdity. Hyde’s concern about the drift of Hobbes’s position comes in a second cluster of extracts covering sections from Part 2, chapters 3 and 4. The treatment of the rights of slaves in chapter 3 made it clear that in servile relationships, servants could hold no property rights against their masters, and that masters can do what they like with servants and their goods. The political relevance of these sections becomes apparent in the immediately following extract from chapter 5, recorded on the same sheet, where Hobbes states bluntly that the ‘subjection of them who institute a commonwealth amongst themselves is no less absolute, than the subjection of servants’.22 It is hard to see that Hyde’s noting of these passages indicated his approval of any of them, given his political stance at the time. Indeed, if 20 22

Dzelzainis, ‘Edward Hyde and Thomas Hobbes’, p. 315. Hobbes, EL, 2.4.9, p. 134.

21

MS Clarendon, fo. 126r–131v.

24


one were to characterise them in any way at all, they almost represent a compendium of the Hobbesian arguments that Hyde might have to deal with in debate. But if we lack a clear indication that Hyde did feel this way about these extracts, he did record in his notes that he found some sections of Part 2, chapter 2 to be ‘not reasonable’.23 The evaluation lends the notes more interest, not least because they touch for the first time upon themes that recur in Hyde’s anxieties about Hobbes. Hyde lists sections 12–16 of chapter 2 as passages which might be causes of concern, passages dealing with the conditions under which subjects might be released from their obligation to the sovereign.24 In finding these arguments disturbing, Hyde revealed another fundamental difference between his view of political obligation and the ideas expressed in the Elements, a view that he would repeat in his response to De Cive and later to Leviathan. For Hyde, the thought that political obligations were conditional ran against the grain of his own belief in the binding force of promises and contracts. The danger that loomed, perhaps even for Hyde in 1640, was that a conditional account of subjection instantly opened a door to situations in which individuals might desert their sovereign with impunity, an argument that he would make explicitly when confronted with Hobbes’s later works. The important point to note is that Hyde recognised this danger in Hobbes’s work right from the beginning. It has been claimed that many of Hobbes’s contemporaries, particularly those connected with the Great Tew circle, did not find anything problematic with the argument presented in the Elements of Law, and that their open hostility to Hobbes came after the supposed changes to his position in Leviathan. Hyde’s response to the Elements shows that where he did clearly express reservations about Hobbes’s position, those reservations dealt with fundamental characteristics of Hobbes’s arguments, specifically the potentially subversive aspects of his account of the end of subjection. When this is combined with the attention paid to authoritarian arguments against which Hyde’s political actions seemed to be directed, the distance between the two men becomes clear. If Hobbes had hoped to convince Hyde, the latter’s actions over the following months indicate that he failed. Both Hyde and Falkland took the lead in opposing Ship Money, they investigated the judges responsible for the decision, and they both voted in favour of the attainder of the Earl of 23 24

MS Clarendon 126, f. 130v, see Dzelzainis, ‘Edward Hyde and Thomas Hobbes’, p. 315. Ibid. These include situations where a sovereign voluntarily relinquishes sovereignty, a subject’s exile, conquest and situations in which a successor’s identity is not known.


25

Strafford. To Hobbes’s alarm, writings in favour of the king’s prerogative began to be investigated by Parliament; early in November, William Beale, Master of St John’s College, Cambridge was cited in a speech by Pym for preaching in favour of absolute monarchy.25 On his own account, Hobbes knew that this could put him in danger: ‘I knew’, he wrote later, ‘some that had a good will to haue me troubled, and might for any thing I saw in their honestyes make both the wordes and the witnesses.’26 It isn’t clear who these individuals were, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they were hostile readers of the Elements, perhaps even old friends who were now resolutely opposed to the crown’s policies and the new language of absolutism. When Strafford, Newcastle’s patron, was arrested, this may have tipped the balance for Hobbes and encouraged him to leave the country, which he did in late November or early December 1640.27 This might have been the end of Hyde’s engagement with Hobbes but for the growing demands for root and branch reform of the church that came to dominate the proceedings of the Long Parliament. When it came to the question of the church, both Falkland and Hyde were critical of Laudian innovation and, in common with other Great Tew habitue´s, they rejected simple jure divino accounts of episcopacy. This was, of course, something that they had in common with Hobbes. Although he had only touched upon the issue of church government in the Elements very briefly, Hobbes had argued that any claim to do something by divine right was simply a confusion about the relationship between rights and laws, a passage extracted by Hyde.28 However, at this point the similarities ended. Although Hyde and Falkland both saw the Church of England in broadly Hookerian terms as a human construct, the same sense of history that shaped their constitutionalism also defined their attitude towards the church as it had been established by law. Just as the constitution had evolved to include a range of historical legal obligations, the church had similarly become established through consecrated arrangements that although they were not, strictly speaking, the direct expression of divine right, nevertheless represented obligations with a divine as well as a human dimension. Any violation of the church or its property by law established

25 26 27 28

T. Hobbes, The Correspondence, ed. N. Malcolm, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1994) [Henceforth CTH], I, p. 116 n5. Ibid., I, p. 115. P. Zagorin, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Departure from England in 1640: An Unpublished Letter’, Historical Journal 21 (1978), pp. 157–60. Hobbes, EL, 2.9.5; cf. Clarendon MS 126, fo. 134.

26


was in effect a form of sacrilege.29 It is emblematic of the differences between Hyde and Hobbes that the thought of removing bishops would always be a line in the sand for Hyde, whereas Hobbes in 1641, confronted with the possibility of their replacement by lay commissioners, in effect simply shrugged his shoulders; bishops or commissioners, what was more important was the proper relationship of the official to the state.30 The combination of Charles’s constitutional concessions and concerns about the future of the church conspired to push moderate MPs towards the king’s cause as the summer of 1641 wore on. Charles could be rebranded as a constitutional monarch and defender of the ecclesiastical status quo and Hyde, Falkland and their associates were just the men to do the ideological makeover, particularly after January 1642 when, together with Sir John Culpepper, they began to draft public statements on Charles’s behalf, clearly expressing a view of the sovereign as a self-limiting power, ruling according to the law.31 The enthusiasm of Falkland and Culpepper for buying into what had become an opposition language of constitutional restraint resulted in the king’s Answer to the XIX Propositions, of June 1642. Here Falkland and Culpepper, to Hyde’s fury, went so far as to suggest that the English government was a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy and that the king was merely one of three co-ordinated estates.32 Hobbes would later make derisive comments on their efforts in Behemoth, his history of the civil war. Although written in the 1660s, Hobbes’s argument was consistent with his long-held conviction that the theoretical position upheld by Hyde, Falkland and Culpepper had ultimately proved to be a disaster for the royal cause. Their obsession with what he christened ‘mixarchy’ prevented the king from taking the unequivocal stand that he should have taken in 1642 and had contributed to the disaster that followed.33 There is little reason to suppose that he thought any differently at the time. It is no surprise that in circumstances where all sides were often determined to give at least the appearance of moderation and constitutional

29 30 31 32

33

See particularly M. Dzelzainis, ‘‘‘Undoubted Realities’’: Clarendon on Sacrilege’, Historical Journal 33: 3 (1990), pp. 515–40. CTH, I, p. 120. D. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 89–90. Answer to the XIX Propositions, c2r–v, quoted in R. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 233. Hyde was clear that the king was not an estate but rather the head and sovereign; the bishops made up the third estate. M. Mendle, Dangerous Positions (Alabama, 1985), p. 7. T. Hobbes, Behemoth; or, The Long Parliament, ed. F. To¨nnies (Chicago, 1990), pp. 116–17, 125.


27

propriety, the arguments of the Elements would not thrive outside the private counsels of Royalist ultras around Newcastle.34 When a Royalist pamphleteer did start to use Hobbes’s text in 1642, it owed more to the appearance of a new natural jurisprudential strain of parliamentary argument than it did to the persuasiveness of Hobbes’s distinctive case. Henry Parker’s Observations upon some of His Majesties late answers and expresses, published anonymously at the beginning of July 1642, was designed to respond to the Answer to the XIX Propositions and Hyde’s pamphlets accusing Parliament of absolutist behaviour. Parker, nephew of Viscount Saye and Sele, and by this stage an experienced parliamentary pamphleteer, changed the shape of the debate over the constitution by largely accepting Hyde’s accusation of parliamentary absolutism and turning it back upon his Royalist opponents. Moving away from the traditional legal and constitutional framework, Parker deployed what was still an exotic natural law argument that the origins of power lay in the people, who could choose their form of government. From this position, Parker went on to assert two subordinate maxims concerning the powers of monarchy; the first that although the king ‘be singulis Major [greater than any individual], yet he is universis minor [less than them all]’.35 Parker reinforced the account of popular sovereignty by arguing that as the people were the efficient cause of power, so it was a rule in nature that ‘quicquid efficit tale, est magis tale [whatever produces something is greater than it]’. The people were the final cause of regal authority as well as the efficient cause; as a result salus populi was the paramount law of all politics. Not content with making the monarch subordinate to the people, Parker went on to make Parliament, and particularly the Commons, the body that most truly represented the people and therefore the body best placed to judge the public good. As Parker argued later in the Observations, Parliament was the state itself, a body endowed with the arbitrary supremacy necessary to secure the safety of the people.36 As Michael Mendle comments, ‘Parker’s drift from known law and constitution into equity, popular sovereignty, and the law of nature released what had been the constitutional stream of the official war of words into broader political, 34

35 36

The army plotters of 1641 included several individuals later associated with, or accused of, Hobbism, particularly Henry Percy and William Davenant. Henry Jermyn, who was later responsible for employing Hobbes as the Prince of Wales’s tutor, was also involved. The plotters all fled to France after the plot was exposed in May 1641. See C. Russell, ‘The First Army Plot of 1641’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 37 (1988), pp. 85–106. H. Parker, Observations upon some of His Majesties late answers and expresses (1642) p. 2. Mendle, Dangerous Positions, pp. 85–6.

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religious, and (in several senses) moral waters.’ The unusual argument attracted a large number of replies and the debate over Parker’s text extended into 1643, reverberating throughout the decade as writers got to grips with the new and dangerous vocabulary. Of the various strategies available to Royalist writers dealing with the Observations, perhaps the safest was to ridicule the logical implications of Parker’s assertion of popular sovereignty: if the people were the source of authority and such authority could be revoked in self-defence, then the same could apply to parliamentary authority, and indeed any form of authority. The dangers of novel natural law arguments could then be contrasted with a constitutionalism which stressed an abhorrence of arbitrary power and the benefits of limited monarchy, positions deployed, for example, by Henry Ferne and John Bramhall. A far riskier strategy was to accept Parker’s premises and to find a way to beat him on his own terms. This was the approach adopted by Dudley Digges, a Fellow of All Souls and occasional visitor to Great Tew, and to help him to do this, he appears to have turned to a copy of Hobbes’s Elements of Law, possibly one derived from Payne’s loan to Sheldon. In many ways the Elements was an obvious resource for this sort of exercise, sharing as it did some of the language of Parker’s tract. That said, there were other ways in which Hobbes’s defence of the necessity of absolute sovereignty really didn’t fit the bill, not least in the conditional character of the sovereignty proposed. Although Hobbes was useful, his work not only shared some of the same language, but also some of the same dangers as Parker’s Observations. Digges’s Hobbesian passages are identifiable through their verbal resemblance to Hobbes’s arguments in the Elements. The first examples appear in the anonymous Answer to a printed book (Parker’s), which appeared in November 1642, and which can plausibly be attributed to Digges’s hand.37 Here Digges used a contractual argument against Parker that appears to paraphrase several sections of the Elements dealing with the state of nature.38 Distinctive Hobbesian elements appear in an emphasis upon natural equality and the observation that there is no injustice prior to law. The fatal divisions of the state of nature prompt individuals in that state to restrain their own judgement and to part with their natural right. 37

38

[Anon.] An answer to a printed book intituled, Observations vpon some of His Majesties late answers and expresses (Oxford, 1642). Although attributed to Falkland, Chillingworth, Digges ‘& ye rest of ye University’ on Thomason’s copy, Mendle notes that in later work Digges referred back to ‘my Answer to the Observations’ which suggests that he may well have been the sole author. The two distinctively Hobbesian passages can be found on pp. 1–2, 13–14. Ibid., pp. 1–2: Cf. EL, 1.16.1; 1.19.1; 1.19.7; 2.1.4.


29

Digges’s main argument against Parker here, that individuals cannot resume their initial authority once they have given up their rights, follows Hobbes’s thought that contracting individuals retained no constitutional means of resuming their authority.39 Digges’s encounter with Parker thus led him to adapt Hobbes’s work for the Royalist cause, and it wouldn’t be the last time that he would do so. When Parliament presented formal peace terms at Oxford in February 1643 the king was in no mood to compromise over the concessions demanded, which included the demands that he should disband his armies and settle the issues of church government and the militia on the advice of both Houses.40 In the wake of the failed negotiations Digges composed his best-known work, The Unlawefulnesse of Subjects taking up Armes against their Soveraigne in which he developed a theoretical framework that was applied to the terms offered to Charles in the spring. Digges opened with an account of the state of nature that paraphrased the Elements closely, occasionally reproducing some of Hobbes’s distinctive phrases word for word.41 If we can establish with some certainty that Digges was deploying passages from the Elements, we also need to work out exactly what Digges was doing with them. The debate with Parker appears to structure Digges’s discussion. He answers the Parkerian argument that a people might ‘justly use their native liberty, and resume their original power’ if the civil constitution does not provide for the public good.42 Digges is prepared to grant that ‘Freedome was an unlimited power to use our abilities, according as will did prompt’,43 but that such an unlimited freedom brought with it the problems identified by Hobbes. Although Digges does not refer to a state of war, the various calamities that he describes amount to the same thing. In response individuals choose to remedy the problems of division by making themselves into one civil body under one head and making his will the will of them all. At this point Digges sidetracks into Hobbesian psychology to explain that because the will is involuntary, it cannot be the basis for obligation. Obligation is the product of an effective command, hence the necessity of giving up one’s natural power to the sovereign so that he can 39 41

42

EL 2.1.4. 40 Smith, Constitutional Royalism, p. 112. D. Digges, The Unlawefulnesse of Subjects taking up Armes against their Soveraigne (Oxford, 1644), p. 3. Compare with Hobbes, EL, 1.14.10. The dependence on Hobbes is clinched by a passage in the same section where Digges reproduces some of the distinctive features of Hobbes’s discussion of the will taken from EL 1.12.5. Intriguingly the juxtaposition of the borrowed passages mirrors Hobbes’s rearrangement of the material in De Cive. Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge, 1998), p. 73. Digges, Unlawefulnesse, p. 1. 43 Ibid., p. 2.

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force refractory wills into conformity. It is clear from Digges’s discussion of this point that he was interested in the mechanics of Hobbes’s arguments, particularly his understanding of the functioning of the will and what was required to achieve a workable account of obligation. But Digges is keen to stress that such transfers are one-way processes; once we have restrained ourselves from exercising our native right it is irrational to want to trade in the more certain security of the law for the uncertain dangers of the state of nature. There can therefore be no real grounds for resistance; of course God is to be obeyed before men, but in situations where God’s will is unclear or problematic then it is important to follow the will of the sovereign. Digges’s Hobbesian borrowings unsurprisingly focus upon the absolutist implications of the Elements in order to deny any possibility that natural rights could be used as the basis for any kind of resistance. Although there was plenty of material in the Elements which could be made to support that position, Digges didn’t merely copy the material that he had read, he also put some of Hobbes’s more interesting arguments to work in places where Hobbes had used them in other ways. One example is the distinction made in the Elements between right and law, a position which informs many of Hobbes’s arguments but which is only made explicitly towards the end of Part II: The names lex, and jus, that is to say, law and right, are often confounded; and yet scarce are there any two words of more contrary signification. For right is that liberty which the law leaveth us; and laws those restraints by which we agree mutually to abridge one another’s liberty. Law and right therefore are no less different than restraint and liberty, which are contrary.44

In the Elements, Hobbes makes this comment with reference to the concept of divine right. The thrust of Hobbes’s slightly complicated point in this section is that if laws bind and rights are residual liberties, civil laws can abridge divine rights. Hobbes’s target, as he makes clear in the tidier version of the passage in De Cive are those who ‘persist in doing what is permitted by divine right, though forbidden by the law of the commonwealth’, an oblique attack upon anyone making use of divine right claims against the authority of the state. The only exception, of course, is the sovereign, who being unbound by the civil law, does everything by divine right. The passage was one of those extracted by Hyde but Digges evidently found the distinction a useful tool for his own argument against Parker, applying the same reasoning to natural rather than divine rights: 44

Hobbes, EL, 2.10.5.


31

If we looke back to the law of Nature, we shall finde that the people would have a clearer and more distinct notion of it, if common use of calling it Law had not helped to confound their understanding, when it ought to have been named the Right of nature; for Right and Law differ as much as Liberty and Bonds: Jus, or right not laying any obligation, but signifying, we may equally choose to doe or not to doe without fault, whereas Lex or law determines us either to a particular performance by way of command, or a particular abstinence by way of prohibition; and therefore jus naturae, all the right of nature, which now we can innocently make use of, is that freedome, not which any law gives us, but which no law takes away, and laws are the severall restraints and limitations of native liberty.45

Natural rights were liberties which the law limited and therefore it was nonsense to protest that one could hold natural rights against the civil law. Digges’s striking redeployment of this form of the argument appears to have made an impression upon Hobbes himself; although he does not use the distinction in the natural law sections of the Elements or De Cive, in Leviathan the distinction is rewritten in what we might call a Diggesian fashion in several places, particularly in the crucial discussion of natural right and natural law at the beginning of chapter 14.46 So Digges was not simply paraphrasing Hobbes but was rather using Hobbes’s conceptual tools to underpin his own arguments against Parker. Perhaps inevitably this meant that Digges’s Hobbism would only go so far. Once natural right had been disarmed with Hobbesian distinctions, Digges could revert to more traditional positions, as several commentators have observed. In particular, although Digges builds his argument upon a consent theory in a manner similar to Hobbes’s,47 he is keen to point out that it is God who validates that consent and God alone who can impart to the magistrate the jus gladii, or the right to take away life. Digges is also happy to underwrite the arguments of constitutional royalism, subscribing to the rhetoric of the self-limiting monarch; English kings, he argued ‘did enlarge the Subjects Priviledges by divers Acts of Grace’, but Digges was clear that such could not be taken for either conditional contracts or divisions of sovereignty. He agreed with Hobbes that the concept of mixed monarchy considered in the abstract was indeed a contradiction but redefined what it meant: ‘By a mixt Monarchy’, he wrote, ‘. . . nothing 45 46

47

Digges, Unlawefulnesse, p. 14. This reappropriation strengthened the absolutism of Hobbes’s theory, but created a tension with Hobbes’s thought that individuals always retain a right to self-defence. Digges, by contrast, had no problem at all with the restriction of that right. Ibid., p. 120. Digges even justifies the Norman Conquest as an example where de facto power was converted into de jure power by consent, and his account of consent looks forwards to Hobbes’s own.

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but this can reasonably be understood . . . a government not arbitrary, but restrained by positive constitutions wherein a Prince hath limited himselfe by promise or oath, not to exercise full power.’48 In a later note to De Cive Hobbes would make clear his dissatisfaction with this language of selfrestraint, but here Digges sought to bring Hobbesian concepts into line with constitutional Royalist rhetoric. Digges is undoubtedly unusual in mixing Hobbes’s ideas with constitutional Royalism in this way, although it is a trick that he can only pull off by concentrating upon the suggestion that natural rights could be alienated irreversibly. Although there was support for this position in the Elements, Hobbes’s contract theory also contained less welcome thoughts about the conditional character of obligation. This might explain why Digges appears to have been on his own in adapting Hobbes’s arguments in Royalist Oxford, a lonely advocacy that ended with his death, of camp fever, in October 1643. It may well have been more natural for Royalists to see far too much of Parker in Hobbes to make him worth using; this would certainly be the reaction of some of the earliest readers of the first published version of his political theory. Indeed, it appears to be a significant feature of the English reception of Hobbes’s De Cive that some of his most important critics saw his work not as an antidote to Parker’s Observations, but as a deadly variety of the same poison. DE CIVE

What was planned as part three of Hobbes’s philosophical trilogy eventually appeared as the first published version of Hobbes’s political theory, dedicated not to Newcastle this time, but to his employer, the Earl of Devonshire. The title, Elementorum philosophiae sectio tertia, emphasised that it was part of larger project. As with the manuscript of the Elements of Law, Hobbes’s larger, perhaps utopian,49 ambitions are in evidence from the beginning, setting out an agenda for what a properly realised moral science (in other words, Hobbes’s own) could do for mankind: For if the patterns of human action were known with the same certainty as the relations of magnitude in figures, ambition and greed, whose power rests on the false opinions of the common people about right and wrong, would be disarmed, and the human race would enjoy such secure peace that (apart from conflicts over 48 49

Digges, Unlawefulnesse, p. 68. See R. Tuck, ‘The Utopianism of Leviathan’, in T. Sorell and L. Foisneau (eds.), Leviathan after 350 Years (Oxford, 2004), pp. 125–38.


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space as the population grew) it seems unlikely that it would ever have to fight again.50

Instead, as Hobbes was fond of pointing out, the moral philosophy of his day was a shambles, with no greater knowledge of natural law and natural right than was to be had in the past. Moral philosophers upheld contradictory opinions defended through the citation of authorities, contributing nothing to the knowledge of truth. The appeal of the subject ‘has not lain in enlightening the mind but in lending the influence of attractive and emotive language to hasty and superficial opinions’. Hobbes, of course, had hit upon the proper starting points for such an enquiry, starting points that would lead to an elucidation of the fundamental elements of moral virtue and civil duties. In contrast to The Elements of Law there is no overt address to political actors of his own country or any other for that matter; Hobbes’s unhappy experience as a political adviser may have convinced him of the dangers of such moves: ‘I have paid careful attention’, he writes, ‘. . . not to say anything of the civil laws of any nation, ie. not to approach shores which are sometimes dangerous because of rocks, sometimes because of current storms.’ For Hobbes De Cive contained the first true example of a civil science, and to that end it was overtly addressed to an international audience, eschewing any form of local reference. He was, and remained, extremely proud of the book, adding some notes in 1647 and including that edition unchanged alongside Leviathan in the 1668 edition of his works. The ‘scientific’ character of the work has led many historians to see De Cive as the most sober expression of Hobbes’s political ideas, uncluttered by the rhetorical extravagance and unusual theology that characterise Leviathan. This account of De Cive also gives rise to the thought that, in contrast to Leviathan, Hobbes’s earlier work was more acceptable to his readers. Going further, one even encounters the suggestion that the work was not only acceptable, but that it was positively approved. Hobbes made this claim himself, most eloquently in his verse autobiography.51 Following Hobbes’s own positive spin, Richard Tuck suggests that Anglican clergymen did read it with approval and Al Martinich goes so far as to suggest that the De Cive won admiration from many people, including officials of

50 51

Hobbes, On the Citizen, p. 5. Hobbes, The life of Mr. Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (1680), p. 8: Hobbes claims that De Cive ‘Gratifi’d Learned Men, which was the Cause/It was Translated, and with great Applause/By several Nations, and great Scholars read/So that my name was Famous, and far spread.’

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the Church of England.52 It is possible to take this line of argument a little too far. It is, of course, a view that is helpful if one wants to argue that Leviathan represents a significant departure from Hobbes’s earlier writings. But it is also a view that relies upon the relative silence of De Cive’s readers, compared with the more obvious outcry over Leviathan. In fact we do have quite a bit of evidence about the reception of De Cive, although most of it has been overlooked or ignored. The impression that it creates suggests that we need to be careful before assuming that Hobbes’s arguments, or his readers’ perception of them, changed all that much between the De Cive and Leviathan. Indeed, in many ways it was the hostile reception of the former that in many cases would shape the critical response to the latter. The publishing and initial distribution of the first edition of De Cive was an extremely cautious affair managed by Hobbes’s friend Marin Mersenne. Hobbes had completed a manuscript by November 1641 (the date of his dedication) and Mersenne arranged for the production of a small number of copies without the author’s name or that of the printer. The book appeared in late April or early May, 1642.53 It was not for sale. Mersenne sent the anonymous work to carefully chosen members of his European correspondence network, with a view to eliciting feedback. This was of course a procedure more commonly associated with manuscript circulation prior to publication, although it is not clear in this case whether Mersenne was gathering feedback for the issue of a further edition, or whether he was simply testing the water before the book was issued on a wider scale. The process showed that Mersenne had reasons to be worried about the contents of the book. The first recorded response came from Hugo Grotius on 7 May, who, given Hobbes’s deeply disparaging remarks about projects like his own, was unsurprisingly cool about Hobbes’s offering, describing his ideas as ‘bold’ but adding that some were of a sort ‘I would not wish to defend’. What Grotius meant by this becomes clear in a letter to his brother in April 1643: I like what he says in favour of kings, but I cannot approve the foundation on which he builds his opinions. He thinks that all men are naturally at war with one another, and has some other principles which differ from my own. For example, he thinks it is the duty of each private individual to follow the official religion of 52

53

Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p. 319; A. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography (Cambridge, 1999), p. 180. Even a sceptical Lodi Nauta refers to ‘the favourable reception of De Cive among Hobbes’s Anglican Royalist friends such as Henry Hammond, Robert Payne and Edward Hyde’. L. Nauta, ‘Hobbes on Religion and the Church between the Elements of Law and Leviathan: A Dramatic Change of Direction?’ Journal of the History of Ideas 63: 4 (2002), pp. 577–98. N. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), p. 472.


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his country – if not with internal assent, then at least with outward observance. There are some other things I cannot approve of. I do not think that the book is for sale, but I will inquire. I shall be glad if the King’s cause is defended as it should be.54

About the only thing that Grotius could recommend about the book was that it could be used to defend monarchy; just about everything else seems to have been problematic, not least the discussion of religion. The sections on religion were also a problem for another early reader, Gabriel Naude´, sometime physician to Louis XIII and now librarian to Cardinal Francesco Barberini. Writing to Barberini in June 1642, Naude´ reported that he had been passed a book, ‘full of new and audacious ideas’ which would prove testing for ordinary readers. Religion again was the central issue. Naude´ singled out Hobbes’s view that the only article of faith required by Christians was the belief that Jesus was the Christ, cutting through debates between Catholics and Protestants by referring all controversies to the civil power. ‘There are many ideas odder than this’, commented Naude´, ‘but they are presented so clearly and pleasantly, that if it was popularised, the book could cause great confusion.’55 At Mersenne’s end some his correspondents’ comments left him in no doubt that Hobbes’s work was as controversial as he feared. In September 1642 Baptiste MasoyerDeshommeaux wrote of De Cive that ‘It is a rhapsody of heresies. Its basic principles are pernicious and absurd, namely, that society is founded on mutual fear and on the avoidance of violent death . . . He wants to unite sovereign priesthood with princely power, with the result that there will be as many heads of religion as there are princes . . . The only sort of correction this book deserves is that made by fire.’56 The criticism was such that when Mersenne wrote to the Calvinist theologian Andre Rivet in October, he felt it necessary to add that he knew in advance that Rivet’s opinion would be ‘without doubt unfavourable, where many sections of the book are concerned’.57 Descartes commented to a Jesuit priest some time in 1643 that he found Hobbes better at moral philosophy than he was at physics or metaphysics, but he couldn’t approve of all of Hobbes’s principles and 54 55 56 57

Grotius, Epistolae (Amsterdam, 1687), pp. 951–2. It is hard to find in these words the ‘discernible sympathy’ identified by Tuck in Philosophy and Government, p. 200. A. L. Schino, ‘Tre lettere inedite di Gabriel Naude´’, Rivista di storia della filosofia 4 (1987), pp. 697–708. Quoted in Malcolm, Aspects, p. 473. Ibid. See also the responses of Thomas de Martel, who found the book to contain ‘many paradoxes about the state and Religion’ and Samuel Sorbie`re, who was allowed by Mersenne to read a manuscript of the work for fifteen minutes early in 1643, Hobbes, De Cive, ed. H. Warrender, p. 300.

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maxims, which he judged to be ‘very bad and very pernicious, in so far as he supposes that all men are wicked, or gives them reason to be so’.58 The early European reception thus suggests that De Cive ran into a hail of criticism as soon as it appeared. Mersenne’s correspondents recognised that the book offered strikingly new and deliberately provocative ideas with some exceedingly controversial statements about religion. Although Mersenne’s contacts came from all points of the religious spectrum, the response seems to have been fairly consistent, and even those who would end up supporting Hobbes knew full well that many of his arguments would be simply unacceptable to a wider audience. The thought that Hobbes’s English readers, by contrast, might have found De Cive unobjectionable, seems at best unlikely, and the available evidence that we have largely suggests that they did not. We know that the first edition of De Cive did circulate amongst the English community in Paris. The British Library copy, for example, was owned by Richard Browne, English ambassador to Paris, before he gave it to his son-in-law, John Evelyn. Others encountered De Cive when the fortunes of war drove them to seek refuge in France. After a spell in the Tower for plotting to seize London for the king, Edmund Waller (another Tevian) was exiled to France in November 1644 and in the following year, with Hobbes directing the studies of his son Robert, he appears to have conceived a plan to translate De Cive into English, perhaps the best evidence that we have for an approving English reader.59 Hobbes’s unenthusiastic response to this proposal reflects the philosopher’s awareness that the project was unlikely to receive a warm welcome; in a letter of August 1645 he warns that although all the honour would come to Waller’s English translation, ‘so will the enuy also. I will not presse you to it but I must thank you for hauing once entertayned the thought.’60 Hobbes had good reason to warn Waller off; his letter was written shortly after he had faced 58 59

60

Quoted in Malcolm, Aspects, p. 473. CTH, II, p. 914; Aubrey, Brief Lives, II, p. 277. As an associate of the Tew Circle Waller may well have known of Hobbes’s work in the Elements. His recent political experience probably confirmed for him the value of a political theory built around self-preservation (Waller had turned informer to save himself in London). Waller also strongly approved of Hobbes’s anti-clericalism. Aubrey, Brief Lives, I, p. 372; see discussion in CTH, II, p. 915. Ibid., I, p. 124. The translation was never produced. Aubrey would later claim that this was because Waller had seen Hobbes’s own sample translation, which he ‘would not meddle with, for that nobody els could doe it so well’. Aubrey, Brief Lives, II, p. 277. In the light of Hobbes’s warning this may be a face-saving account. Aubrey recorded that on another occasion Waller had thought about penning some verses in praise of Hobbes, but did not because he was ‘afrayd of the Churchmen’. Similar fears may have sapped his motivation in this case. Bodleian MS Aubrey 9, fo. 54, see also CTH, II, p. 915.


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the first major assault on his political and religious ideas from one of his fellow countrymen, an attack that would do much to shape the English response to his work. Bishop John Bramhall is perhaps best known today as Hobbes’s scholastic antagonist in their protracted and increasingly heated exchange of pamphlets on the subject of free will in the 1650s. This debate was the result of the unauthorised publication of Hobbes’s side of a private correspondence that had taken place a decade earlier in France. In 1645, the 51-year-old Bramhall was a very distinguished Royalist refugee. A Yorkshireman by birth, Bramhall took his degrees at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, eventually becoming personal chaplain to Wentworth in Ireland and shortly afterwards Bishop of Derry. Bramhall’s brusque administrative efficiency on behalf of the church eventually earned him a reputation as the Irish Laud, a mantle that became a liability when he was impeached and imprisoned. Returning to Yorkshire, Bramhall eventually became an adviser to Hobbes’s former patron Newcastle, who now commanded the Royalist forces in the north, based at York. Bramhall busied himself defending the royal cause, not least from Henry Parker. In 1643 he published The serpent-salve, a systematic attack upon Parker’s natural law argument and one that, as we shall see, would shape his reading of De Cive. In common with some of the Oxford assaults on Parker, Bramhall was prepared to engage the Observator on his own ground with the aim of exposing his version of natural law theory as nothing other than a ‘Rebell’s Catechism’.61 Bramhall’s problem with Parker (as it had been for Digges) was that he ‘doth so often presse the Charter of Nature, even to the dissolving of all Oaths and Ties of Allegiance and all mutuall Compacts and Agreements’.62 The idea that the people could appeal to natural right (here synonymous with natural law) at any time left no room for a workable account of political obligation.63 Bramhall’s response was to make the absolutist point that appeals to nature could not survive any contract.64 Although natural law could never be destroyed or contradicted, it could be limited by the positive laws of the land. The only lawful form of resistance was the usual selection of prayers, tears or voluntary exile. But just as Bramhall follows the other Royalists in doing his best to make the initial contract more binding, so he is also keen to dispel the authoritarian odour of voluntary slavery that comes with the process, and here his 61 64

Bramhall, The serpent-salve (York, 1643), p. 30. Ibid., p. 26.

62

Ibid., p. 46.

63

Ibid., p. 200.

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account echoes the other constitutional Royalist writers. The sovereignty may be absolute, but the king is bound in conscience both by his oath and his office to protect his people and to observe those historical privileges and rights conceded by acts of grace, an obligation to which the king is obliged by the law of God.65 This was Bramhall’s only defence against the thought that subjects were merely slaves, but it allowed him to distinguish between the self-restraint of the king’s limited monarchy and Parker’s parliamentary despotism. For Bramhall, Parker’s stark assertion of natural law arguments threatened to dissolve the historical fabric from which the English constitution had been woven and the very real danger with this mode of argument was the one that haunted his own use of it. If networks of ties and obligations were really as conditional as the new language suggested, power rather than right would be all that mattered. For Bramhall, as well as Hyde, this form of rationalism in politics was at best, deeply misconceived, and at worst, positively dangerous. As he comments in the Serpent-salve, ‘It is dangerous to leave old received rules, upon probable and specious pretences: Remove not thou the ancient bounds, which thy Fathers hath set.’66 Bramhall had encountered one example of this dangerous tendency with Parker; he would soon discover another in Hobbes. The military disaster that engulfed Newcastle’s forces at Marston Moor in July 1644 was the event that precipitated Bramhall’s flight to France. In the immediate aftermath of the battle, Bramhall, together with Newcastle and his brother Sir Charles Cavendish, boarded a ship at Scarborough which took them to Hamburg to begin an exile that would last, in Bramhall’s case, for nearly fourteen years. Bramhall made his way to Brussels, where he would stay with the British ambassador, Sir Henry de Vic for most of the next four years. Newcastle remained in Hamburg until April 1645 when he moved to Paris, and it was at Newcastle’s house in Paris that Bramhall would meet Hobbes for the first time, some time between April and July 1645.67 The occasion is represented in the two men’s writings as having something of the quality of a formal debate, staged at Newcastle’s request, an intellectual sparring match of sorts, but on a topic in which Newcastle and his brother were clearly interested. Newcastle’s interest in applying the new science to human psychology, and ultimately to politics, seems to date back to the mid-1630s.68 The Elements of Law, with its opening discussion of human psychology, clearly addresses the 65 67 68

Ibid., p. 33. 66 Ibid., p. 230, the quotation is from Proverbs 22:28. A range suggested by the arrival of Newcastle in Paris and Hobbes’s departure for Rouen in July. See Malcolm’s discussion in Aspects, pp. 134–9.


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same set of concerns. The Cavendish brothers had an abiding interest in the issue of free will and necessity, together with the resulting political and theological implications. These issues had clearly been a topic of conversation at York, and this was where Bramhall came in. He records that Sir Charles Cavendish asked him to look at a French treatise dealing with God’s prescience, and Bramhall wrote a ‘full discourse’ upon the work, denying that God’s foreknowledge was inconsistent with human liberty. The Paris meeting offered Newcastle and his brother the chance to bring together two men with very contrasting views on the same subject. The verbal exchange between the two men appears to have been polite but unsatisfactory, perhaps unsurprising given the very different perspectives from which they were approaching the material: Bramhall proceeding from a traditional scholastic analysis of the will that Hobbes had already left far behind. Bramhall remembered that Hobbes ‘declared himself in words, both for the absolute necessity of all events, and for the ground of this necessity, the flux or concatenation of the second causes’. The subsequent debate seems to have gone badly for the bishop; when he wrote up his position later it appears that he was glad of the opportunity to clarify his position.69 Newcastle appears to have asked Bramhall to provide a written account of his position, and Bramhall did so on condition that Hobbes did the same. Bramhall’s first discourse of liberty and necessity marks the beginning of a debate that would ultimately result in the very public feud between Hobbes and the bishop in the mid-1650s. It was also a debate in which the political and religious consequences of Hobbes’s necessitarianism featured prominently from the very beginning. Bramhall proposed to reject Hobbes’s account of necessity by presenting evidence from scripture and reason. The scriptural evidence drew attention to those passages in the Bible which seemed to presuppose the thought that God had created men with free will;70 it also drew attention to the dangerous consequences of denying man’s freedom. If Hobbes argued that all men were necessitated to what they do, then it followed that Adam was necessitated to commit those actions that brought about the Fall of man. The implication that Adam might not be responsible for his sin also brought into question the thought that men more generally could be judged for their sins.71 The same 69

70

Bramhall, Works, IV, p. 647. A flavour of this encounter might well be echoed in Hobbes’s letter to Waller in August, where Hobbes describes his various encounters with his antagonists during the period, CTH, I, p. 124. V. Chappell, Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity (Cambridge, 1999), p. 3. 71 Ibid., p. 4.

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considerations had the effect of overturning earthly justice. If individuals were not at liberty to choose whether or not they broke the law, the very idea of punishment was simply unjust.72 For Bramhall, personal responsibility and the ability of the individual to choose their actions lay at the heart of social order, and any necessitarian doctrine could only undermine society. He puts the choice to Hobbes starkly: ‘Either allow liberty or destroy all societies.’73 Bramhall’s scholastic alternative was to reiterate the distinction between desire and will that Hobbes had effectively collapsed. Bramhall argued that although our desires may well have material causes, the act of choosing through the faculty of the will is quite independent of them. But this treatment of the issue of liberty was not the only piece that Bramhall sent to Hobbes. In the preface to his reply to Bramhall, dated 20 August 1645, Hobbes mentions that in addition to the discussion of liberty Bramhall had also sent a critique of De Cive, which he would have preferred to answer first.74 It isn’t clear exactly when Bramhall initially formulated his objections or when he sent them to Hobbes, but Bramhall’s own memory of them suggests that they were sent to Hobbes in 1645. In the preface to his Defence of true liberty (1655), Bramhall recalls that: Whereas Mr Hobbes mentions my objections to his Book De Cive, it is true, that ten years since I gave him about sixty exceptions, the one half of them political, the other half theological, to that book, and every exception justified by a number of reasons; to which he never yet vouchsafed any answer.75

It is clear that this work was a substantial critique of the arguments in De Cive, and one about which Hobbes was clearly concerned. It seems that Hobbes’s initial thought was to answer Bramhall privately, but he would later state that his response was effectively built into the English version of his theory, Leviathan: I did indeed intend to have answered those exceptions as finding them neither political nor theological, nor that he alleged any reasons by which they were to be justified. But shortly after, intending to write in English, and publish my thoughts concerning Civil Doctrine in that book which I entitled Leviathan, I thought his objections would by the clearness of my method fall off without an answer.76 72 74

75

Ibid. 73 Ibid, p. 5. Ibid., p. 15: ‘I had once resolved to answer my Lord Bishop’s objections to my book De Cive in the first place, as that which concerns me most, and afterwards to examine his discourse of liberty and necessity.’ Bramhall, Works, IV, p. 20. 76 Hobbes, EW, V, p. 26.


41

As we shall see, Bramhall’s critique also played some part in the annotations that Hobbes added to the 1647 edition of De Cive, thus making Bramhall’s reaction one of the most important responses by an English reader. Although we do not have Bramhall’s objections as they were originally formulated, we do have a version of them that may well reflect their original content: Bramhall’s The catching of Leviathan, a work published in 1658.77 This book contains three chapters, dealing with Hobbes’s theology, his political theory and in the third chapter alleged inconsistencies between Hobbes’s ideas. Although the title suggests that the work is devoted to Leviathan, the basic arguments against Hobbes are in fact built upon a detailed discussion of De Cive. The arguments against Leviathan are added to the basic set of objections to Hobbes’s earlier work.78 Although we need to be careful to distinguish between Bramhall’s objections to Leviathan and to De Cive, it seems reasonable to suppose that Bramhall did not repeat his critical examination of the latter and used it as the basis for his later critique. Bramhall’s objections in 1645 were undoubtedly put much more tactfully than they were in the Catching of Leviathan; the bishop himself recalled that he wrote about De Cive ‘with more respect than either he [Hobbes] or it deserved’.79 Nevetheless, the critique was severe enough to add up to sixty objections and to worry Hobbes. A glance at the attack on De Cive in the Catching of Leviathan soon reveals why this might have been. Although it is a common assumption that Hobbes’s theological heterodoxy only became an issue in Leviathan, it is clear that Bramhall, in common with De Cive’s continental readers, had problems with Hobbes’s theological position in De Cive from the start. Although prepared to acknowledge Hobbes’s discussion of God and his attributes, Bramhall was clearly struck by the way that Hobbes’s natural jurisprudence appeared to leave God out of the equation, replacing the divine obligation to natural law with 77

78

79

J. W. Daly noted that there was a close correspondence between Bramhall’s work of the 1640s and his critique of Hobbes in the 1650s which he ascribed to Bramhall’s theoretical consistency. He did not consider the possibility that the critique of Hobbes was produced during the 1640s: ‘John Bramhall and the Theoretical Problems of Royalist Moderation’, The Journal of British Studies 11: 1 (1971), pp. 26–44. Two more features of the critique suggest that Bramhall was working from his earlier draft of objections; firstly Bramhall explicitly states that he is commenting upon the first edition of De Cive and secondly, if one adds up the number of political and theological passages discussed in the first two chapters, there are fifty-five. See Bramhall, Works, IV, p. 597. Bramhall, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes his last animadversions in the case concerning liberty and universal necessity (1657), p. 448.

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discussion of pacts, surrenders and translations of power.80 Even more disturbingly for Hobbes, Bramhall discussed a series of passages where Hobbes seems to be soft on atheism. At the beginning of chapter 16, Hobbes had argued that superstition arose from fear without reason, and atheism from ‘opinion of reason without fear’.81 To this suggestion that atheism was more reasonable than superstitition, Bramhall added a concern about Hobbes’s discussion of atheism in chapter 14, where Hobbes, in a move that worried many of his readers, defined atheism as merely a sin of imprudence or ignorance.82 Hobbes’s point here was that an atheist had never submitted to God’s laws in the first place and could not, therefore, be guilty of injustice. Bramhall rejects the idea that any man could be ignorant of God’s laws and points out that Hobbes’s position clashes with his own argument elsewhere. Bramhall’s insinuations seemed designed to raise suspicions that Hobbes was equivocating over his treatment of atheism, and it is a sign of Hobbes’s concern over this charge that he appends a note to the second edition of De Cive responding to them in almost exactly the same order that Bramhall puts them.83 If Bramhall was pointing out Hobbes’s equivocation over atheism, it seems likely that the thirty of his sixty objections dealing with theology included comments upon Hobbes’s unusual views, even in De Cive. The Catching naturally assaults Hobbes’s idiosyncratic account of the Trinity and the nature of God in Leviathan, but the theology of the De Cive is also subjected to independent scrutiny, particularly Hobbes’s account of Christ’s government. For Hobbes in De Cive Christ’s kingdom was wholly otherworldly and would remain so until the day of judgement, something Bramhall regarded as a deposition of Christ from his ‘true kingly office’.84 One consequence of this that appalled Bramhall was the rejection of the notion that there could be such a thing as a universal church. Hobbes was determined in De Cive to redefine the idea of the church in such a way that it could never claim any independent spiritual jurisdiction. It became, in effect, the same thing as the political community, subject to the sovereign in all things.85 Although the temporal subordination of church to state was an Anglican commonplace, Hobbes’s collapsing of church and state in De Cive involved consequences that few Anglicans would have accepted. Bramhall notes that in De Cive Hobbes makes the word of the interpreter 80 82 83 85

Bramhall, Works, IV, p. 520. 81 Ibid., p. 521. Cf. Hobbes, On the Citizen, p. 187. Bramhall, Works, IV, p. 522. Cf. Hobbes, On the Citizen, p. 164. Ibid. See below, p. 57. 84 Ibid., 17.5, 6; Bramhall, Works, IV, p. 527. Hobbes, On the Citizen, 17.21, 18.1.


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of scripture (the sovereign) the word of God.86 De Cive, of course, did allow a role for the clergy, but Bramhall notes this with some suspicion: ‘Sometimes he is for Holy Orders, and giveth to the pastors of the Church, the right of ordination and absolution, and infallibility, too much for a particular pastor or the pastors of one particular church.’ It was perhaps reasonable to have such concerns in the light of Leviathan (which openly stated that the sovereign was the chief pastor), but it seems that Bramhall may well have had this suspicion in 1645; he notes that in De Cive Hobbes makes excommunication a sanction that could only be authorised by the sovereign.87 Hobbes may have paid lip service to Anglican accounts of the clergy’s role, but the drift of his ecclesiology, as we shall see from other Anglican responses, left considerable doubts about his sincerity. When we move to the political dimensions of Bramhall’s theological objections to Hobbes, we can see some of the anxiety about the implications of Bramhall’s own absolutism, as it had been discussed in the Serpentsalve, coming to the fore. One of Bramhall’s major concerns about Hobbes’s theory was the extent to which it appeared to invert the usual relationship between civil law and divine or natural law. The paradoxes which particularly draw Bramhall’s attention are those suggesting that civil laws are the rules of good and evil,88 and that the concepts of just and unjust are simply products of command. Bramhall found himself in a difficult position here, because as the discussion of Serpent-salve demonstrated, he too was committed to the thought that divine or natural law should not serve as an excuse for political disobedience: ‘We acknowledge’, he writes in exactly the terms that he used in the Serpent-salve, ‘that though the laws or commands of a sovereign prince be erroneous, or unjust, or injurious, yet he is bound to acquiesce, and may not oppose or resist, otherwise than by prayers and tears, and at most by flight.’89 In doubtful cases it was true that the subject should presume that the sovereign and laws were in the right, but Hobbes’s version of thesis seemed to push this position into one more akin to Asiatic despotism.90 It was important to Bramhall to keep some idea of divine obligation which led him to restate the view, again developed in his answer to Parker, that ‘in plain and evident cases, which admit no doubt, it is always better to obey God than man.’91 The relentlessly secular absolutism of De Cive clearly worried Bramhall because of the proximity of its apparently godless theory of obligation to his own. As would so often be the case, Hobbes’s theory, with its uncompromisingly paradoxical 86 89

Bramhall, Works, IV, p. 532. Bramhall, Works, IV, p. 543.

87 90

Hobbes, On the Citizen, 17.21 88 Ibid., 12.1. Ibid., p. 542. 91 Ibid., pp. 543–4.

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statements, came under fire from those in danger of being associated with its heterodoxy. But if Hobbes seemed to be leaving Royalist theory without its traditional moorings in divine law, his radical natural law position also cut away the foundations which had anchored Royalist discussions of the rights of kings in a constitutional web of historical obligations. Looked at this way, Hobbes’s theory was much closer to the radical implications of Parker’s work. Both theorists’ preference for discussing issues connected with natural right replaced an historical understanding of the royal prerogative with an erosive and ultimately dangerously unstable account of power politics. It is natural, therefore, that when Bramhall presents his objections to the political theory of De Cive, he should present the arguments in terms almost identical to those used in the Serpent-salve, even down to his identification of Hobbes’s argument as a ‘Rebell’s Catechism’.92 Bramhall’s frequently repeated charge is that Hobbes introduces an abstract language into the most practical of spheres, with disastrous results; state policy, he argues, ‘which is wholly involved in matter, and circumstances of time, and place, and persons’, is not at all like ‘arithmetic and geometry’.93 Hobbes’s political inexperience and his theoretical approach are singularly inappropriate for the matter in hand, a scepticism about the possibility of scientia civilis that Bramhall appears to have shared with Hyde. Towards the end of the Catching, Bramhall scornfully tenders the same piece of Lycurgan advice suggested to Parker: ‘I wish he would have turned probationer a while, and made trial of his new form of government first in his own house, before he had gone to obtrude it upon the commonwealth.’94 The biggest danger that Bramhall identifies in Hobbes’s new scientia is the conditionality that made Henry Parker’s work so destructive of any form of political obligation. Bramhall is particularly scathing about Hobbes’s refusal to privilege oaths and promises, the glue binding the webs of authority. To say that oaths bind no more than naked covenants was for Bramhall to open the way to perpetual diffidence and distrust. In the context of international relations it ‘openeth a large gap to foreign war’.95 Possibly with Parker’s seditious absolutism in mind, Bramhall could also find subversive material in De Cive. Bramhall quotes 6.3 of De Cive in the Catching as his primary piece of evidence that Hobbes’s emphasis upon self-preservation could destroy sovereignty as well as sustain it. The worry about self-defence superseding all other duties, was, of 92

Ibid., p. 555.

93

Ibid., p. 550.

94

Ibid., p. 575.

95

Ibid., pp. 550–1.


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course, a major concern about Parker’s appeal to the charter of nature. Bramhall is clear about what this means: ‘What ugly consequences do flow from this paradox, and what a large window it openeth to sedition and rebellion, I leave to the reader’s judgement.’ This wasn’t the only place where Bramhall could find Parkerian arguments in De Cive. Citing 2.18 where Hobbes states that no man is bound by pacts not to resist those who threaten death or wounds, Bramhall finds the basis of the resistance theory that he goes on to identify in chapter 21 of Leviathan; the individual’s subjective assessment of their own self-preservation grants a right that no law can restrain. In the Catching, Bramhall has recourse to the tropes that he used to assault Parker’s insistence on self-preservation; to grant such a right would allow the scholar, if were able, to take the rod out of his master’s hand and whip him; how much better Bramhall explained to both Parker and Hobbes, to adopt the position of the Thebaean legion (the Roman formation massacred by Maximian in 286 for their refusal to compromise their faith), who were able to defend themselves but who preferred to ‘die innocent than live nocent’ in rebellion against their prince.96 The concerns of the mid-1640s are also evident when Bramhall examines the last sections of chapter 7 of De Cive examining the conditions under which sovereignty is effectively relinquished. We have already seen Hyde querying those sections of the Elements of Law dealing with the same issue, but in the summer of 1645, one can imagine that Hobbes’s discussion of what constitutes the end of sovereignty would have been a topic of some importance for defeated Royalists. Hobbes had argued that subjects were released from obedience in four ways; if the monarch abdicates; if the commonwealth has fallen into the power of enemies and resistance is impossible; if there is no successor to the sovereign; or if the sovereign has exiled the subject. Bramhall’s objections make clear his distrust of Hobbes’s broad conditions; for example, did Hobbes mean that one was at liberty after the loss of a battle or a final conquest? Did this mean loss of de jure or de facto sovereignty?97 These were, according to Bramhall, questions upon which Hobbes was suspiciously silent, when to Bramhall it was clear that it would take more than conquest alone to extinguish a sovereign’s legitimate right. Although Bramhall had made his mind up about Hobbes’s disloyalty by 1658, it seems likely that he suspected those passages in 1645, and we shall see that other readers of De Cive felt exactly 96 97

See Bramhall, Castigations (1657), pp. 514–15 (cf. p. 270). Cf. Serpent-salve, p. 39. Bramhall, Works, IV, pp. 557–8.

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the same way. In Bramhall’s view, Hobbes, like Parker, took his sovereign for better but not for worse, a position which for the bishop would ultimately be confirmed by Leviathan. There is another area in Bramhall’s attack where the preoccupations of the 1640s rather than the 1650s seem to be uppermost in the discussion of De Cive, and this is the question of mixed monarchy. Bramhall rejects Hobbes’s suggestion that the idea of mixed monarchy was an absurdity: Which is a mistaking of the question. For though it be sometimes styled a ‘mixed’ monarchy, because it doth partake of all the advantages of aristocracy and democracy without partaking of all their inconveniences, yet, to speak properly, it is more aptly called a temperated or moderated sovereignty, rather than ‘divided’ or ‘mixed’.

Bramhall goes on to give a summary of the constitutional theory from the Serpent-salve, in which he stresses that the sovereignty remains undivided even though the king has voluntarily restrained himself from exercising it in full.98 This objection was important enough to warrant a separate annotation to this passage in the second edition of De Cive, where Hobbes appears to engage with Bramhall’s concerns. Hobbes agreed with Bramhall that any formula which involved divided sovereignty was disastrous, but he remained wary of any account that allowed room for sovereigns to be constrained and limited by any body other than the holder of the sovereign power: ‘. . . as this cannot occur without the limiters having to have some share in power by which to limit them, it is a division of power, not a restraint.’99 Hobbes’s distrust of the historical language of self-binding limitation would remain one of the most important differences between his position and Royalists like Bramhall. Although they could agree that sovereignty should be absolute and undivided, Hobbes appears to have suspected that the obligations discussed by Bramhall really entailed the sort of confusion that could lead to division of sovereignty. Bramhall’s suspicions run in the other direction. In Hobbes’s reluctance to take historical obligations seriously, Bramhall saw at the same time an unsustainable arbitrary power and a conditional understanding of allegiance, a process which can only have been aided by the existence of Parker’s Observations, conclusive proof that this sort of theory could celebrate both outcomes simultaneously. It is appropriate that Bramhall closes chapter 2 of The catching of Leviathan with the very same quotation of Proverbs that he had used to 98

Ibid., p. 564.

99

Hobbes, On the Citizen, 7.4n, pp. 93–4.


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end his attack upon Parker: ‘Remove not the ancient landmarks which thy fathers have set.’100 Like Parker, Hobbes had taken a pride in using natural jurisprudence to remove the ancient landmarks ‘between prince and subject, father and child, husband and wife, master and servant, man and man’. Bramhall had found all of these ideas in De Cive, and it is highly likely that he objected to them in 1645 as much as he did over a decade later. Further evidence that this is the case comes from the text of the reply that Bramhall made to Hobbes’s discussion of liberty and necessity some months after their initial exchange of letters. As Bramhall explains in his Vindication of true liberty (1655), he did not read Hobbes’s defence of necessity until April 1646.101 Reluctant to let the dispute end there, Bramhall produced an extensive reply to Hobbes’s written comments in which he not only attacks Hobbes’s theory of necessitation, but also ties it together with assaults on the political theory of De Cive. Hobbes’s written reply to Bramhall’s first discourse had moved him to provide a detailed statement of his theological and political case. Hobbes had not disguised his contempt for the bishop’s scholastic jargon, and portrayed himself as the champion of a commonsense compatibilist alternative. Hobbes’s general claim was that everything that happens is the necessary effect of antecedent causes, and ultimately the first cause God, a consequence of his general materialism. Rejecting Bramhall’s scholastic distinction between the desires and the will, Hobbes simply argued that the will was necessitated by the most powerful desire. Hobbes knew that his account of necessitation would be controversial, not least for the reasons suggested by Bramhall and he requests that the bishop and Newcastle keep his view private.102 The reason soon becomes clear. Hobbes agrees that Adam was necessitated, but denies that this means that God is unjust. Such a statement would presuppose an equation between human and divine justice, which are, in fact, radically different things.103 For Hobbes, God’s power alone justified his actions, and that meant that God could commit no sin, even though he could necessarily cause sin in Adam. Adam is punished not for his choice, but for his violation of God’s law. The same argument applied to Bramhall’s political objections. Individuals might well be necessitated to their criminal acts, but this does 100 102

103

Bramhall, Works, IV, p. 575. 101 Ibid., pp. 23–4. Ibid., pp. 21, 24, 27. Hobbes’s awareness that such views might be dangerous if expressed openly lend weight to the thought that his public utterances do not necessarily represent his private views, a point that may be of some moment when considering the question of Hobbes’s atheism, for example. Ibid., p. 22.

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not make laws unjust in punishing them, because the laws proscribe behaviour contrary to men’s preservation. Individuals are not punished because they freely chose to act as they did, but rather because they act against the law. The punishment acts as a deterrent in framing men’s wills to lawful behaviour. Hobbes gave the same reductive answer to Bramhall’s concern about piety. Piety, properly speaking, involves honouring God’s power, and the acknowledgement that God necessitates all things is something that in fact ‘fortifies piety’.104 Predictably this answer had done little to appease Bramhall and indeed it had probably disclosed a more extreme theological position than either De Cive or his comments on liberty and necessity. Bramhall’s tone was thus less than conciliatory in hoping ‘that his meaning is not so bad as the words intimate, and as I apprehend’.105 Bramhall was particularly offended at the argument that God had been the cause of Adam’s sin.106 Better to be an atheist, or a Manichee, or a heathen, commented Bramhall, than to make God the author of sin. Hobbes effectively ‘transforms God (I write it with horror) into the devil, and makes tempting to be God’s own work, and the devil to be but His instrument.’107 Bramhall was fundamentally unable to come to terms with Hobbes’s theology, which demanded that God’s role as first cause could not be classified according to human categories of justice and injustice. Hobbes’s statement that God’s power made his actions just also raised the spectre of a divine tyrant unfettered by traditional understandings of good and evil. For a scholastic thinker like Bramhall, a crucial attribute of God was his essential justice. A recurrent problem within scholastic philosophy was the status of divine justice. If God were bound by laws, then this denied his omnipotence. If God’s power defined his justice, he was an arbitrary tyrant. Neither argument provided a satisfactory account of the character of God’s will or his perfections. Bramhall’s scholastic solution, adopted by many Anglican clergymen in response to the problem, combined an account of God’s omnipotence with a theory of self-obligation. God was an absolute and omnipotent monarch who chose freely to will what was just, thus subjecting himself to the rules of justice.108 This was, of course, the same solution adopted by Bramhall in his political theory of sovereignty, where the sovereign was theoretically all-powerful but voluntarily self-limiting. Bramhall in turn was not slow to pick up on the parallels to be found between his opponent’s theology and his politics: 104

Ibid., p. 27.

105

Ibid., p. 57.

106

Ibid., p. 63.

107

Ibid., p. 72.

108

Ibid., p. 77.


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The same privilege which T. H. appropriates here to ‘power absolutely irresistable’, a friend of his, in his book De Cive (cap. vi. p. 70), ascribes to power absolutely irresistible, or to sovereign magistrates; whose power he makes to be ‘as absolute as a man’s power is over himself, not to be limited by any thing but only by their strength.’109

Even the greatest supporters of sovereign power, Bramhall argued, acknowledge that the law has a directive power over princes, for all that they have an immunity from coercive power. Revealing the extremity of Hobbes’s absolutism, Bramhall suggests that Hobbes’s sovereigns ‘will have no limits but their strength’.110 In the end, Hobbes’s greatest mistake lies in his claim that power regulates justice, whereas in fact justice regulates power. This claim was important for the refutation of Hobbes’s politics and would be deployed time and time again in answer to Hobbes’s radical voluntarism; for Bramhall as a Thomist all law was patterned upon and participated in the immutable divine law that determined what was just and what was unjust. In making justice a consequence of power, Hobbes appeared to drain the divine connection of any substantial content in terms of what was essentially good and what was essentially evil. The arbitrary and disenchanted world of Hobbesian power politics and moral relativism seemed to be the result. Hobbes’s refusal to acknowledge the effective existence of divine justice also resulted in mistakes elsewhere in his politics, not least where his assumptions led him to conclude that law was not something that could be derived from divine justice, but from consent. For Bramhall this ignored the matrix of divine and human laws to which man was already obliged without his consent, not least those laws of God and nature which vested government in fathers of families.111 Hobbes’s ascending theory of authority simply constituted a series of mistakes. The juridical void that was Hobbes’s state of nature simply never existed: ‘. . . there never was any such time when mankind was without governors and laws and ‘‘societies’’.’112 Any anti-social lawlessness ‘was an abuse, and a degeneration from the nature of man, who is a political creature’.113 God’s prior law meant that it was never lawful for private men to kill one another, and the right of selfdefence is only a privilege granted by God for emergencies. The political implication of this last point is that the people could never grant the right of life and death to the sovereign, because they never had that general right to give away in the first place. Only God could grant such a power to sovereigns. 109

Ibid., p. 78.

110

Ibid.

111

Ibid., p. 90.

112

Ibid., p. 95.

113

Ibid.

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Bramhall’s discussion of Hobbes’s theology thus allowed him to open another avenue of attack upon Hobbes’s political theory. The response to the private tract also allowed Bramhall to draw attention to the inconsistencies between his public and private arguments. Rounding upon Hobbes’s attack on jargon-ridden scholastic divines, Bramhall refers back to chapter 17 of De Cive where Hobbes had argued that the sovereign ought to consult with ecclesiastical doctors in matters of faith. ‘These are the very men whom he traduceth here. There he ascribes ‘‘infallibility’’ to them; here he accuseth them of gross superstitious ignorance. There he attributes too much to them; here he attributes too little. Both here and there he ‘‘takes too much upon’’ him.’114 If Bramhall was suspicious of Hobbes’s hypocrisy here, he makes great play of Hobbes’s own dictum in chapter 15 of De Cive that we should obey the magistrate in matters of religion: ‘I demand then, why T. H. is of a different mind from his sovereign, and from the laws of the land, concerning the attributes of God and His decrees?’115 The answer, of course, was that Hobbes’s views had been private, and he wanted to keep them that way for precisely these reasons. He did not reply to Bramhall’s comments until 1656, and then only because the whole affair had found its way into print against his wishes. The debate with Bramhall, however politely it began, soon degenerated into abusive and hostile recrimination as the two men explored the political and theological roots of their differences. That said, other readers of De Cive, whatever their true feelings about Hobbes’s project, adopted a less confrontational approach. In the Clarendon manuscripts we are fortunate enough to have an extensive Latin commentary on passages extracted from the first edition of De Cive. The evidence strongly suggests that these notes were prepared by Edward Hyde, and addressed to Hobbes himself, although the fact that they remained unfinished suggests that they were never sent.116 By 1646 Hyde was in Jersey, reading and reflecting on the course of events that he would write about in his History. His studies included reflections upon political theorists such as Grotius, Machiavelli and Thucydides, and it would have been natural for Hyde to include the 114 116

Ibid., p. 130. 115 Ibid., p. 196. See J. C. Hayward’s comments on the manuscript in ‘The mores of Great Tew’, esp. pp. 195ff. and, more accessibly, in his article ‘New Directions in Studies of the Falkland Circle’, Seventeenth Century 2 (1987) pp. 36–8, 43. The problem of attribution comes from the fact that the notes are not in Clarendon’s hand, but it is entirely possible that they are the work of an amanuensis. Clarendon’s handwriting is extremely hard to read, and the notes look like a fair copy. The extracts chosen, together with the commentary, correspond very closely to the concerns raised by Hyde in 1640 and later discussed by him in his important book on Leviathan, A brief view and survey, published in 1676.


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latest version of Hobbes’s theory in this process. In January 1647 he wrote to his friend Dr John Earles asking him to ask Hobbes if he would ‘for old acquaintance sake . . . bestow one of his Bookes upon mee, wch I haue neuer read, since it was printed, and therefore know not how much it ye same, wch I had ye fauour to read in English.’ Hobbes apparently complied with the request, sending Clarendon a copy of the 1642 edition.117 In February, Hyde wrote to Earles asking him to thank Hobbes ‘for his Book, wch I will read as soon as I receiue it’. The manuscript extracts and notes, bound together with other material from the period, appear to be the fruit of Clarendon’s reading.118 Even though the tone is generally, as J. C. Hayward has noted, one of constructive criticism, the intellectual gulf between the two men is evident from the beginning. The early comments show that Hyde had difficulty getting to grips with Hobbes’s non-scholastic terminology.119 Hyde attempts to vindicate Aristotelian accounts of natural inequality and sociability from Hobbes’s assault upon them, mainly by restating Aristotelian distinctions that Hobbes had collapsed.120 Rather than tackling Hobbes head on, Hyde chips away at some of Hobbes’s faster moves in what seems to be an attempt to get Hobbes to rethink his basic categories. The skirmishing over the details of human nature, though, soon gives way to more substantial disagreement over political ideas, and it is clear from the notes that gentle correction gives way to outrage. Hyde’s chief anxiety is that Hobbes seems prepared to sacrifice even the obligation to observe natural law when it comes into conflict with self-preservation. If selfpreservation trumps natural law, Hyde observes, why shouldn’t it trump civil law as well: But if security is especially to be seen in natural law, then why should the same not apply in the case of civil law to the same extent as in nature? This is ordained for the same nature. Yet you are not, I hope, asserting that civil law is not binding in the external forum, when, owing to the violence of rebels and the power of wicked 117

118

119 120

The second edition had been printed in January, but Hobbes did not receive any copies of the run until 22 March. The only version of De Cive in Clarendon’s library is the 1642 edition. See Dzelzainis, ‘Edward Hyde and Thomas Hobbes’, p. 304 n.6, for a detailed discussion of the issue. Copies of the early edition were usually given out on condition that the reader return comments; the notes may well represent Hyde’s contribution. This may also give us the reason why the notes weren’t completed. The second edition of De Cive was already in existence in the spring of 1647 complete with annotations responding to criticism. MS Clarendon 126, f. 8r. For example, where Hobbes rejects Aristotle’s claim that natural inequalities entitled some to rule, Hyde argues that some men could be naturally more talented at ruling than others. Ibid., f. 10r. Clarendon would deal with exactly the same objection in his Brief view and survey (1676), pp. 31–2 with a similar answer.

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men, the obedience that is owed to it cannot be paid without imperilling our security.121

The question goes to the heart of what we might call the Parkerian dangers of Hobbes’s line of argument and again reveals the way that Hobbes’s apparently absolutist natural law theory could be seen to undermine sovereignty. This anxiety is a recurrent theme in Hyde’s notes. One of the central features of the commentary is a concern about the implications of Hobbes’s position for any account of promise-keeping or binding obligation, a central issue for Hyde with political and religious dimensions. Hyde extracts a series of passages where Hobbes seems to undermine traditional accounts of promises and oaths. Hyde is particularly exercised by Hobbes’s suggestion in chapter 2 of De Cive that no one can enter into agreements with God, or be bound by a vow to him, unless it is to his representative on earth (the sovereign). This issue was particularly important for Hyde because the sacred nature of such vows underpinned his attitude towards church and state. The church might well be a human institution, but it was dedicated to God through the binding promises of men. This in turn was the basis for his defence of the Church of England; to dismantle the product of promises made to God was sacrilege.122 The position was also central to the Royalist case for a self-restraining monarchy; without a serious account of sovereigns binding themselves through oaths and charters there would be no way to distinguish the constitutional Royalist position from arbitrary tyranny. In response to Hobbes, Hyde argued that ‘it is certain that we may be bound by a vow to the Divine Majesty, and that we are bound to him alone and not to his representatives . . . A votive agreement needs no mediator.’123 Considering the political dimension of the issue, Hyde comments that: Anyone may place himself under an obligation to himself, that is, may come to an agreement with himself, that unless he abides by these or those conditions, or unless he observes the civil laws, he will suffer some punishment or some fine, and although his subjects may not demand it, yet provided it occurs without any reduction of the supreme authority, he should demand it from himself with the same good faith as he does from others.124

Hobbes’s account of promises and oaths effectively dissolved the glue that was essential for any plausible account of constitutional royalism. Even 121 124

Ibid. 122 M. Dzelzainis ‘‘‘Undoubted Realities’’’. Ibid., fo. 10v.

123

MS Clarendon, 126, fo. 8v–9r.


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worse, his emphasis upon self-preservation and security threatened to undermine any idea of indefeasible obligation. We have already seen that this subversive aspect of Hobbes’s theory was an issue for Bramhall, and it was a pressing issue for Hyde in 1647, faced with increasing numbers of Royalists prepared to accept Parliament’s conditions for their return to England and the recovery of their estates. In a letter to Sir John Berkeley in November 1646, fulminating against compounders, Hyde associated their actions with the new natural jurisprudence, and in particular ‘ye new Maxime, yt proteccon and subjection are Relatiues and cease together, wch I presume was neither diuinity nor Law 7 yeares since.’125 Inevitably perhaps, Hyde seized upon the sections of De Cive where Hobbes seemed to be making this sort of argument. Like Bramhall he focused upon the end of chapter 7, where Hobbes talked about the conditions under which obedience could come to an end, rejecting each example in turn. Abdication, Hyde argued, could never return men to the state of nature because authority would automatically pass to the heir or a legally qualified magistrate.126 With regard to conquest, Hyde admits that when under the power of a conqueror subjects might be compelled to obey, but such obedience should be understood to be involuntary and certainly not a condition that extinguished the original de jure authority. Should it occur that ‘by some chance occurrence or indulgence by the conqueror the state reverts to them . . . they are obliged to show obedience to their original ruler.’ In other words Hyde stressed that the original obligation does not disappear and could be restored. For Hyde, Hobbes’s argument was dangerous because it could legitimate accommodation with Parliament. Hyde also comments on Hobbes’s religious ideas in Part 3 of De Cive, and although there are signs of some agreement between the two men on a few issues, serious differences are not far beneath the surface. A crucial difference is Hyde’s suspicion that Hobbes simply reduces religion to the observance demanded by the magistrate. In response to the Hobbesian suggestion that the commonwealth must be obeyed if it orders something with consequences insulting to God (for example, worshipping an image), Hyde counters that such an action is to be rejected immediately.127 Hobbes was clearly going too far in making faith subordinate to reason, and in turn making reason an alibi for state control. Hyde reiterated Augustine’s view that we believe in order to understand rather than understand in order to 125 126 127

Ollard, Clarendon and His Friends, pp. 115–16. Clarendon MS 126, fo. 11r–v: Cf. Clarendon, Brief view and survey, pp. 93–5. Hobbes, On the Citizen 15.18; Clarendon MS 126, fo. 16v.

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believe: ‘for what, pray, would reason reply to the Incarnation of Christ, the Virgin Birth, the Trinity of Persons etc’. Leviathan, of course, would give the full and shocking answers to those questions. Hyde extracts sections dealing with Hobbes’s ecclesiology but did not finish the commentary upon them. The appearance of the same passages in his later critique of Leviathan confirm the thought that he agreed with Bramhall about Hobbes’s demotion of Christ’s authority (condemned as Socinianism in the Brief view and survey) and was in general suspicious about Hobbes’s manipulation of scripture.128 It is clear that Hyde was anxious about Hobbes’s departure from traditional understandings of human nature, natural law, political obligation, scripture and ecclesiology. The notes are an appeal to Hobbes to rethink what evidently appeared to the writer to be a glib and rather quick rejection of established scholastic views on all of these matters. It seems that Hyde still thought that this was possible when he began the task. The initial optimism seems to have been somewhat na¨ıve, to say the least. Although Hobbes’s work functioned in recognisable idioms, the possibility that it could ever be compatible with the distinctions suggested by Hyde is extremely remote. If Hyde had chanced to read the second edition of De Cive, it would have been clear to him that Hobbes was not prepared to back down, and this may explain why the notes were not completed or sent. Hyde’s mood also seems to have shifted as a result of reading the book. Soon after reading Hobbes, Hyde went back over his notes on Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis, a version of natural law theory that he found more congenial to his generally Hookerian outlook on such matters, and his annotations suggest that he was looking for the possible components of an anti-Hobbesian argument.129 THE SECOND EDITION OF DE CIVE

Up to 1647, the reception of Hobbes’s theory had been a largely private affair, but it had been marked by a good deal of hostility and criticism. The accusation of atheism had already been raised, as had the suspicion that 128

129

Hyde extracts sections of De Cive dealing with Christ’s authority (11.6, p. 129; 17.4, p. 206; 17.6, pp. 208–9), probably to make the suggestion that he would later make in the Brief view and survey, that they were inconsistent. Other extracts (from 11.6. p. 130 and 16.14, p. 207, quoted at Clarendon MS 126, fo. 13v and 16v respectively) are used by Hobbes to demonstrate a scriptural warrant for the sovereign’s power over the church. Hyde provides a remark on the last of these arguments in Brief view and survey, p. 241, which makes it clear that he has no time for Hobbes’s problematic readings of scripture. Dzelzainis, ‘Edward Hyde and Thomas Hobbes’, pp. 317, 312 n.21.


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Hobbes’s version of contract theory was potentially both unacceptably absolutist and at the same time potentially subversive. This is not to say that Hobbes did not have admirers, simply that their admiration was usually highly qualified, and that even the most loyal of them would turn out to be extremely reluctant to stand up and openly endorse what Hobbes said in De Cive, particularly in the section on religion. De Cive was perceived by most of its readers as an extremely dangerous book of paradoxes; the theory was difficult and the implications unclear but many readers, as we have seen, suspected the worst. That Hobbes’s reputation was now at an extremely low ebb is indicated by the rumours of his atheism circulating as far afield as Scotland; in August, 1646, Robert Baillie, the Scottish Presbyterian, wrote to a correspondent of Hobbes’s appointment as the Prince of Wales’s tutor: ‘. . . the placeing of Hopes [Hobbes] (a professed Atheist, as they speak) about the Prince as his teacher, is ill taken.’130 If the initial response to the first edition of De Cive acted as a deterrent to the immediate production of a more popular version of the book, the spreading of rumours such as those voiced by Baillie may well have acted as an incentive for Hobbes to produce a second edition, which was mooted in 1646. In the new preface Hobbes observed that his book had been ‘very sharply criticized’: by churchmen because he had ‘immoderately enhanced the civil power’, by ‘Sectarians’ because he had ‘taken away liberty of conscience’ and by lawyers because he had ‘exempted Sovereigns from the civil laws’. Indignantly Hobbes comments that he was not moved by such criticism ‘to do more than tie those knots more tightly, as each one was simply defending his own position’. But for his less partisan critics Hobbes had decided to provide some explanatory annotations.131 The annotations offer a fascinating glimpse into the sort of criticism that the first edition encountered, or at least the criticism that Hobbes chose to take seriously. There are no quick or straightforwardly disingenuous fixes. There are some blunt and disturbing admissions: in response to the thought that his shocking emphasis on fear would discourage sociability rather than foster it, Hobbes replies that fear could drive men to negotiate or to war, but either way a commonwealth would result. In an 130

131

Robert Baillie, Letters and Journals, ed. D. Laing, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1841–2), II, p. 388; see also II, p. 395. Hobbes seems to have procured the post through the patronage of Henry Jermyn, a former associate of Newcastle and by the mid-1640s a dominant figure in the court of Henrietta Maria. See Sir Charles Cavendish’s comments to John Pell in John Pell (1611–1685) and his Correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish, ed. N. Malcolm and J. Stedall (2004), p. 495. Hobbes, On the Citizen, p. 15.

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annotation to chapter 2, Hobbes states that when he talks about right reason he does not mean the infallible faculty of right reasoning, but, less comfortably, an instrumental account detached from the traditional scholastic understanding. But at the same time, Hobbes does attempt to redescribe his theory in such a way as to make it more acceptable to his readers. Typically, Hobbes does not actually concede all that much; his concessions largely take the form of repackaging some of his more shocking formulae. We can see this in his response to his critics’ worries about his provocative rejection of natural sociability as a motive for the formation of civil society. Hobbes does not deny that men might naturally seek each other’s company in the state of nature, but he is careful to distinguish this from the desire and the ability to form a civil society, a move which softens the shocking impact of his original formula. A similarly concessive treatment can be seen in his treatment of natural law, but this time with more by way of conceptual innovation. Hobbes had clearly faced a barrage of objections about his apparent demotion of natural obligation, and in the annotations Hobbes attempts to reconstruct his account of natural law to give some substance to natural obligation. Critics had charged Hobbes with the thought that in his state of nature the individual could do anything that he liked without injustice. Hobbes’s response was now to say that although an individual has the right to do whatever is necessary for his self-preservation, he does not have a natural right to do anything he likes. If the individual does something that he does not genuinely believe will lead to his self-preservation, then he sins against natural law. In making this argument in chapter 1 and again in response to the worry about the binding force of natural law at the end of chapter 3, Hobbes restores the thought that some acts, for example gratuitous cruelty, might be forms of injustice. But although this move allowed Hobbes to recover the language of natural justice, the tension nevertheless remained with his highly subjective account of the range of acts which an individual might genuinely believe to be necessary to their self-preservation. Hobbes’s critics, as we shall see, would return to this point again and again in their assaults on his theory, using the evidence of the annotations to convict Hobbes of disingenuous backsliding. Hobbes’s treatment of absolutism is another area where there is a softening of the language, in this case apparently aimed at those constitutional Royalists anxious about the elimination of any constitutional self-restraint. In one of the annotations to chapter 6 Hobbes responds to several challenges which again attempt to re-emphasise the language of natural and


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divine obligation as well as a recognisable account of self-limitation. Hobbes argues that although the sovereign has a right to despoil his subjects at will, he will not do so without violating the laws of God and nature, ‘Hence, a Prince’s oath offers a certain security to his subjects.’132 Princes could, he argues, sometimes refrain from exercising a right and prudently make concessions de facto, while yielding nothing of their de jure rights of sovereignty. As with the natural law example, the concession mainly involves recasting the original doctrine in a slightly more palatable form. Hobbes admits that the sovereign could still do what he wanted to do anyway, but that was the price of peace. A similar effect is achieved in one annotation to chapter 7, where he suggests that it is ‘fair enough’ for people to want power to be restrained and kept within some limit: ‘I myself would wish that not only kings but also assemblies that have sovereign power would want to refrain from wrongdoing, remember their duties and stay within the limits of natural and divine laws.’133 But Hobbes is clear that if restraint means limitation and constraint by others, then this is really a division of power. In spite of the more conventional language here, Hobbes was clear that any limitations could only ever be prudential at best, leaving some distance between even this modified account and the bulk of the constitutional Royalist writers, a stance revealed most starkly in a rather bad tempered note explaining that any legal proceedings between citizens and sovereigns simply revolved around establishing the will of the sovereign, rather than the basis of the sovereign’s right.134 Hobbes treads carefully in the religious sections, but again his strategy appears to be to make concessions or frame explanations that work within the logic of his larger theory. Again there are some blunt admissions: Hobbes simply restates that God rules through his power (as opposed to his goodness). He also defends his position on atheism: ‘Many critics’, he writes ‘have taken me to task for classing atheism as imprudence not as injustice; in fact some have taken it prove that I have not shown myself a keen enough adversary of atheism.’135 Hobbes’s response to the criticism (which follows the charges as they are made by Bramhall) is to argue that atheists cannot, indeed, be charged with injustice; citing Psalm 14.1 that ‘the fool hath said in his heart: there is no God’ Hobbes argues that God himself has classed the atheist among the imprudent. As such the atheist is the enemy of God and thus liable to punishment by God and by sovereigns. 132

Ibid., p. 83.

133

Ibid., p. 94.

134

Ibid., 6.15.

135

Ibid., p. 164 (14.19).

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Hobbes is superficially more accommodating when he comes to reconsider his controversial statement that the only article of faith required for salvation is that Jesus is Christ. Hobbes admits that the novelty of this position ‘may displease a large number of theologians’.136 By way of clarification, Hobbes stresses that he is not suggesting that faith alone is enough; he also requires justice, or the obedience due to God’s laws; additional articles may be required by order of a church but as external requirements these are matters of obedience rather than faith. Hobbes makes it clear that by admitting only one article of faith he is effectively admitting the inclusion of the whole of the Apostle’s Creed (that Christ is the Son of God who will reign as a king). What the account is designed to exclude, although Hobbes does not make this clear, is the suggestion that anything else could be required as an act of faith independently of an act of obedience commanded by the commonwealth. Again, the concessive language goes together with a position that remains true to the original theory, in this case a position designed to clarify the status of those things required by faith for salvation. Although Hobbes’s reformulations here drew him a lot closer to positions that could be defended by Anglicans, we should be careful not to assume that the annotations were necessarily designed to make his theory unproblematically and conventionally Anglican. Some commentators have drawn attention to small textual changes which appeared to offer a more significant role for bishops.137 At the same time, however, other annotations made clear his continued suspicion of the case made by Anglican bishops about their spiritual authority. In the annotation to 6.11 Hobbes adds to his list of subversive doctrines the various sorts of religious ideas grounding claims to obedience to men other than the sovereign: I do not conceal that this applies to the authority in foreign countries which many attribute to the Head of the Roman Church, and also to the power which bishops elsewhere, outside the Roman Church, demand for themselves in their own commonwealth, and finally to the liberty which even the lowest citizens claim for themselves on the pretext of religion.138

Hobbes unmistakably had Anglican iure divino defences of bishops in his sights and the charge that their position was subversive would be duly noted by the Anglican defenders of episcopacy. Rather than tweaking his position to accommodate conventional Anglican arguments, it might be better to suggest that Hobbes’s amendments at best allowed a case for 136

Ibid., pp. 240–1.

137

Ibid., p. 224.

138

Ibid., 6.11n., p. 81.


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Anglicanism to be made. Instead of offering a distinctively Anglican account of Hobbism, Hobbes offered the resources for a distinctively Hobbesian account of Anglicanism. That Anglicans would remain suspicious about the resulting ecclesiology can be seen from the critical response that the theory received. Hobbes’s correspondence with Sorbie`re over the publication of the book reveals that he was aware that even with the annotations it would still be unacceptable to many European readers. In May 1646 he wrote to Sorbie`re in The Hague warning him to ‘proceed quietly’ for fear of those who might try to prevent publication. Top of Hobbes’s list are those ‘who hold sway in the universities’. For that reason, Sorbie`re was counselled to be cautious in obtaining references for the book. The printer shouldn’t be allowed to find his own. Sorbie`re was even warned to be wary about approaching people who approved of most of the book, but did not approve the rest; they might praise Hobbes in private but would ‘begrudge me public praise’. The last caution was that if Descartes got to hear of the project he would try to stop it; ‘Please believe me on this one thing,’ Hobbes wrote, ‘for I do know.’ Such concerns may seem unnecessarily paranoid, but they are borne out by those testimonials that Sorbie`re eventually did use to get the work printed by Elsevier. Gassendi and Mersenne wrote letters, but letters praising Hobbes rather more than they praised De Cive. Their comments on the book avoid detailed endorsement of the argument: for Gassendi the book was ‘truly uncommon, and worthy of being handled by all who are sensible of higher things’.139 No writer, he went on, examines an argument deeper than Hobbes, although he excludes from this judgement ‘those parts which pertain to religion, in which we are of different beliefs’. For Mersenne, De Cive is ‘that outstanding work’, ‘a great literary treasure’ and ‘that golden book’ although like Gassendi, he spends the rest of the very short letter looking forward to the publication of the rest of Hobbes’s scientific work. That Gassendi and Mersenne fell into the category of private flatterers might have disappointed Hobbes, but it was nevertheless true: at some point in 1646 Mersenne wrote again to Sorbie`re, enquiring after the edition: ‘I ask however that you should be careful that not the least word of the letter should be printed that I sent in favour of the book De Cive, since it could be of no help to the book, but can do me considerable damage.’140 Perhaps to reassure Hobbes that things were not quite as bad as he had feared, Sorbie`re wrote back to the philosopher that a sympathetic audience 139

Warrender, DCL, p. 297.

140

Ibid., p. 310, n.2.

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awaited the publication of De Cive, citing a list of ‘excellent men and sound philosophers’. This included Sir William Boswell, then ambassador to The Hague, Dr Samson Johnson, sometime fellow of Magdalen and chaplain to the Palatine court in The Hague, Henrick Born, Professor of Logic and Ethics at Breda, the noted physician Henrick de Roy (Regius) and Adrian Heereboord, Professor of Philosophy at Leiden.141 The list should have given Hobbes some encouragement given the eminence of Regius and Heereboord but it is unclear that they necessarily endorsed his political and religious positions. Given that Hobbes may only have been known to many of them through his non-political work, their enthusiasm probably reflected what they knew of his scientific project and its promise.142 That this enthusiasm would tend not to survive the controversy over Hobbes’s political and religious ideas would be typical of his reception more generally. It would take until March 1647 for Hobbes to see the first sheets of the finished book, rechristened simply De Cive (in accordance with his wishes), but what he saw there horrified him. Sorbie`re had added an inscription to Hobbes’s portrait labelling the philosopher ‘Tutor to his serene Highness the Prince of Wales’.143 Hobbes immediately wrote to Sorbie`re ordering him to take the portrait out of the copies remaining in stock. His stated reasons for doing this reveal the tensions surrounding his ideas and his reputation. Hobbes suggested first of all that the connection with the prince could be used by the authorities in England ‘to stir up popular ill feeling against the royal family’. When they saw the prince’s name associated with a theory ‘which offends the opinions of almost everyone’, his enemies would attack him, claiming that he is ‘now revealing what sort of sovereignty he expects, and intends to demand’. Hobbes clearly had few illusions about how his political theory was likely to be received, and how poorly his absolutism would fit into mainstream political debate, even if he 141 142

143

CTH, I, p. 130, nn.2–5. What links many of the Dutch thinkers listed here is their general interest in natural philosophy, but also more particularly a certain amount of disillusion with the Cartesian project. Hobbes, along with Gassendi, appeared to offer new and very different systematic theories, and this may partly explain their collective enthusiasm for the Englishman’s new work. Although we can reconstruct some of the Dutch writers’ reactions to Hobbes’s political theory, we can be less certain about Boswell and Johnson. The former died in 1649, but there is a tantalising clue that Johnson may well have been impressed with Hobbes’s theory. We know from Hobbes’s correspondence that Hobbes knew Johnson: he wrote to Sorbie`re that Johnson had promised to send him a work by Regius. CTH, I, p. 133. In August 1652, Hyde wrote to Sir Edward Nicholas that when he had last seen his ‘old friend Dr Johnson’ he had expressed ‘a great reverence for Mr Hobbs, and it seems is of his faith in all things’. Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, II, p. 142; CTH, I, pp. 129–30, n.2. Thom. Hobbes Nobilis Anglus Ser. Principi Walliae a Studiis praep.[ositus].


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was only trying to prompt Sorbie`re into taking immediate action. But Hobbes knew that his work would be offensive before he went into print; what he really feared were the personal consequences of the scenario he had outlined: the consequences, real or imagined by Hobbes’s enemies at court, would be blamed ‘on my carelessness and vanity, to my great dishonour’. But it was not just his enemies at the prince’s court that worried Hobbes. It is perhaps his last reason that seems to be the most convincing; the link with the prince would stop him going home: ‘and I do not see why I should not wish to return, if it is permitted, when England has somehow or other been pacified.’ This last comment perhaps helps to explain the calculated ambiguities of De Cive; defending sovereignty generally rather a royal cause specifically; offering a range of ecclesiological possibilities rather than tying himself to a specific account of Anglicanism. As Hyde had sensed, the argument in De Cive could be used to support a case for returning to England and this seems to have been in Hobbes’s mind, not least because of his increasingly uncomfortable relationship with his enemies at the court. In addition to asking Sorbie`re to tear out the offending pages of Elsevier’s remaining stocks, Hobbes wrote to the bookseller stocking the work in Paris and also to his publisher in London, Andrew Crooke, to alter the books before they could be sold. This feverish repackaging of the book appears to have resulted in another variant of the edition, possibly produced by Crooke, or the Parisian bookseller. The entire first sheet of four pages, including the title page, is removed and replaced with a one-page engraving crudely reproducing the magnificent 1642 title page. Given Hobbes’s interest in title-page engravings, it is possible that this was done at his request; Elsevier’s frontispiece produces rather unHobbesian personifications of libertas, religio and dominium. As some commentators have suggested, the characterisation of libertas appeals to republican iconography that Hobbes is unlikely to have felt comfortable with, and the representation of religio violates Hobbes’s usual title-page convention of separating religious and political subject matter. The unusual variant may well represent Hobbes’s preferred version of the text for an English or French audience, one whose iconography attempted to evade ready identification with a particular cause or ideology.144 Whatever state the work appeared in, the edition clearly flew off the shelves. By August 1647, Sorbie`re wrote to Hobbes that Elsevier had no 144

C. W. Schoneveld, ‘Some Features of the Seventeenth-Century Editions of Hobbes’s De Cive Printed in Holland and Elsewhere’, in Thomas Hobbes: His View of Man, ed. J. G. van der Bend (Amsterdam, 1982), pp. 125–42.

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more copies of the book left ‘although he is getting requests from everywhere for hundreds of them’.145 Elsevier had suggested a new edition and asked whether Hobbes wanted to add anything to it, ‘or take anything out’. Hobbes’s underground notoriety had clearly seeded demand, but now everyone wanted to read Hobbes’s scandalous book, and that included readers in England. Although it was published in Amsterdam, the book clearly made an impact.146 ANGLICAN RESPONSES TO THE SECOND EDITION OF DE CIVE

As we have seen, Hobbes’s amendments at best left room for an Anglican argument to be made, but on withering Hobbesian terms. Instead of offering a traditionally Anglican account of Hobbism, Hobbes merely offered the conceptual possibility of a distinctively Hobbesian account of Anglicanism. That this Hobbesian account was less than attractive is suggested by what we know of the second edition’s reception amongst Anglican clergymen. John Cosin is an interesting example of an early reader who perhaps had fewer reasons than most to suspect Hobbes of heterodoxy. Cosin ministered to the exile community in Paris, and to Hobbes, when he suffered his near-fatal illness in 1647. The story goes that Cosin offered to pray with, and administer communion to, the stricken philosopher. Hobbes apparently agreed, provided that the English prayer book were used. Hobbes himself later used the anecdote as a rejoinder to accusations of atheism, referring his accusers to Cosin.147 This connection makes Cosin’s annotations to his copy of the second edition, now in the Palace Green Library in Durham, particularly interesting.148 Cosin read through the new preface and Part 3, dealing with religion, marking points that he approved with a trefoil and those of which he disapproved with crosses. In general it is clear that Cosin approved of the Royalist sentiments that characterised Hobbes’s new preface, particularly his indictment of the false opinions that had led men to revolt against their sovereigns. But Cosin wasn’t happy with Hobbes’s occasional equivocations over the status 145 146

147 148

CTH, I, p. 161. One sign of this was that when Hobbes’s translation of Thucydides was reissued in London in 1648 the title page referred to the fact that the translator was ‘Thomas Hobbes the author of the booke De Cive’. Hobbes, EW, VII, pp. 4–6. Palace Green Library Shelfmark Cosin T.5.57. For discussion of Cosin’s library and his copy of De Cive see A. I. Doyle, ‘John Cosin (1595–1672) as a Library Maker’, Book Collector 40: 3 (1991), pp. 335–57.


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of monarchy. He puts a cross against Hobbes’s admission that although he has suggested that monarchy is the most advantageous form of government, this is a point that is not demonstrated, but is put ‘with probability only’.149 Cosin then appears to have turned straight to the section on religion, thereby missing Hobbes’s attack on jure divino episcopacy, and it does seem that initially he finds a lot of what Hobbes has to say congenial. Perhaps predictably the Laudian Cosin marks those passages where Hobbes argues that worship ought to be public, uniform and beautiful,150 but crosses also start to appear against some of Hobbes’s theological positions, particularly his claim that God’s dominion is founded in his power.151 Cosin is also disturbed by the powers of interpretation that Hobbes hands over to the magistrate, marking passages where the magistrate is made the interpreter of natural and divine law.152 He picks out the same passage that Hyde had noticed about being required to worship an image if the state so commands and clearly disapproves of the extent of power potentially handed over to the magistrate.153 These doubts appear to deepen towards the end of the book where Cosin focuses upon Hobbes’s progressive diminution of the independent role of the church in chapters 17 and 18. Hobbes’s idea that ministers are appointed by the authority of the commonwealth he finds particularly problematic,154 but he reserves his most critical scrutiny for a passage that had also worried Naude´, Bramhall and Hyde: Hobbes’s reduction of the articles of faith to one, that Jesus is Christ. Cosin’s reaction is complicated here, because although he repeatedly puts crosses against this idea, he approves of some of Hobbes’s mitigating pleas in the annotation, particularly the thought that that one article actually implies several others.155 Cosin is less convinced by Hobbes’s attempt to argue that any other articles that might be required by the church are simply matters of obedience, and that one didn’t actually have to believe them.156 Although Cosin might have been susceptible to Hobbes’s arguments about the beauty of holiness, he was well aware of the dangers of Hobbes’s position. A similar reaction can be found in the first published response to De Cive in English, a hitherto unnoticed section of Henry Hammond’s Of the

149 150 151 154

Hobbes, On the Citizen, Preface, p. 14. I have referred to the modern translation for ease of reference. Ibid., 15.15, especially p. 181 where the instruction for ‘public uniformity’ receives a double trefoil. Ibid., 15.5–6, pp. 174–5. 152 Ibid., 15.17, p. 183. 153 Ibid., 15.18, pp. 184–5. Ibid., 17.24, p. 223. 155 Ibid., 18.6, pp. 239–40. 156 Ibid. 18.11, p. 244.

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power of the keyes, published in September 1647.157 Hammond, who may have known Hobbes personally from his association with Great Tew, was at that point a Canon of Christ Church where he was friends with Hobbes’s scientific collaborator Robert Payne and Gilbert Sheldon. The power of the keyes was designed to promote a moderate episcopal religious settlement in a manner designed to appeal to Presbyterians, Independents and Erastians, but in the course of the argument, Hammond digresses to discuss the anonymous work of an unnamed author.158 The author is in fact Hobbes and the page references and quotations come from the newly published second edition of De Cive. Hammond of course realised that the Marsilian Hobbes had collapsed church and state into one entity, so that whenever Hobbes referred to the ‘church’ and its functions in De Cive he was, according to Hammond, referring to ‘the Church in that notion of his, ie. to the city or Common-wealth (which with him also signifies the civil magistrate, or as he saith, judicem summum, the supreme judge).’159 Hobbes’s redefinition of the church simply gave the power of excommunication, and every other function, to the sovereign. But having registered this and dismissed the scriptural exegesis that Hobbes had used to support his case, Hammond then, perhaps surprisingly, offers an olive branch ‘by way of compounding the Controversie with this Gentleman’.160 The olive branch consists of the acknowledgement that if the civil magistrate is a Christian, then he can be involved in the process of excommunication, specifically through the nomination of the ecclesiastical judge, the setting of procedural rules or laws and the right to bring cases. Hammond recognises that Hobbes seems to want more than this for the summum judex, but this is as far as he is prepared to go.161 The real obstacle, suggests Hammond, is that Hobbes has got the wrong end of the stick about the clergy’s powers of binding and loosing. Anglican bishops don’t pretend to a power of saving and damning men; in fact what they do is what Hobbes says that they should do, merely persuade the sinner of the error of his ways and ‘much less to invade any part of the civil judicature, or loosen the bounds thereof by these spiritual pretences’. At this point Hammond brings up the ‘Annotation affixt to his last edition’ where Hobbes appeared to extend the charge of subversion to Anglican episcopalians: ‘I must hope’, he wrote carefully, ‘that it was a mistake, or which I rather think 157 158 159 160

Henry Hammond, Of the power of the keyes: or, of binding and loosing (1647). I would like to thank Sarah Mortimer for drawing my attention to these references. Ibid., p. 80. Hammond, Keyes, p. 81. Cf. Hobbes, On the Citizen, 17.21, p. 221. Hammond, Keyes, p. 84. 161 Ibid.


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(being persuaded of the uprightnesse of his affections to our establisht Government) that his [alicubi] did not in any wise referre (as I was apt to feare it did) to the constitution of Episcopacy in this native kingdome of his and mine.’162 Hammond had pointed out that Hobbes’s arguments had gone too far, and effectively undermined what was distinctive about Anglicanism, but he raised the thought that they didn’t need to do either. This odd combination of criticism and conciliation probably reflects Hammond’s broader agenda to sell his version of moderate episcopacy to Erastians more generally than to Hobbes in particular, but it is striking that he was at this stage prepared to talk in such terms and without vilifying Hobbes openly. By leaving Hobbes’s name out of it and putting a charitable construction on Hobbes’s words, Hammond may have been giving Hobbes a chance to correct his ‘mistake’ and to subscribe to an Episcopalianism compatible with his Erastian outlook. If anyone had persuaded Hammond that Hobbes could be a loyal son of the church, it was their mutual friend Robert Payne, for whom this reconciliation had become something of a personal project. Payne had been instrumental in bringing Hobbes’s works to Oxford, and he appears to have acted as a crucial intermediary between the philosopher and his university audience. As we shall see, Payne would be tireless in his efforts in the later 1640s to try and persuade Hobbes to accommodate some form of Episcopalian Anglicanism within his ecclesiology. It isn’t clear whether Payne’s activities in this regard stemmed from a genuine belief that Hobbes’s arguments could be reconciled with Anglicanism, or whether he simply realised, as his letters to Sheldon sometimes prophetically suggest, that Hobbes as an enemy would be incalculably more dangerous to the church than Hobbes as an ally, however unorthodox he might be. If Hammond’s criticism was therefore muted, there were other Episcopalians who were less interested in bridge-building after De Cive. Herbert Thorndike was a respected Hebraic scholar and mathematician in his fifties, a senior Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge until he was ejected in the mid-1640s during the Earl of Manchester’s purge of the university. Thorndike was no Laudian and in the early 1640s had tried promote conciliatory schemes of moderate episcopacy. By the late 1640s, however, and sensing the triumph of a resolutely Erastian parliamentary settlement, Thorndike set about relaying the foundations for what he felt to be the proper relationship between church and state in his Discourse of 162

Ibid., p. 86.

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the right of the church in a Christian state, written some time after 1647 but only published at the beginning of July 1649. Thorndike would always be something of a wildcard in the Anglican pack.163 His position often owed less to Grotius and Hooker than it did to his Hebrew learning. Where his agenda did line up quite closely with Hammond at least was his determination to preserve the idea of the church as a spiritual community independent of the state. Although Hammond had chosen to hold his fire on De Cive’s conflation of church and state, Thorndike had no such qualms. It was self-evident that ‘the late sharp work De Cive’ offered a thoroughgoing form of unacceptable erastianism where ‘. . . it is determined that the interpretation of the Scriptures . . . the constitution of pastors, the power of binding and loosing, belongs to every Christian state, to be exercised by the ministry of pastors of the Church.’164 Thorndike perceived straight away that the drift of Hobbes’s ecclesiology was to reserve all the substantial power of the church, including scriptural interpretation, to the state. Like Hammond, Thorndike begins by applauding those passages where Hobbes appeared to correctly describe the church as a form of society, but swiftly moves to a denunciation of Hobbes’s argument that a Christian state and a Christian church are the same thing.165 Thorndike argued that Hobbes had simply committed a category error in basing his argument on the identity of church and state. Being a Christian quite clearly entailed obligations to a national community of the church quite separate to those of the commonwealth, the rights of the church paralleling those of the state in their own jurisdictions. To make this claim allowed Thorndike to celebrate the distinctions between jurisdictional power deployed by Hobbes but to a very different effect. One of Thorndike’s biggest worries, and one usually thought to loom large only in Leviathan, was the power Hobbes apparently reserved to the sovereign to interpret scripture and controversies of faith. Hobbes had provocatively suggested that the word of the interpreter (the sovereign) was effectively the word of God in such cases.166 Thorndike exploits Hobbes’s own statements elsewhere to suggest that, on the contrary, the word of God can only be what has been revealed in scripture, latterly through Christ and the Apostles, and therefore is not subject to such arbitration. That all such interpretation defaulted to the magistrate in Hobbes left Thorndike with 163 164 165

For a recent discussion of Thorndike’s critique of Hobbes see J. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005), pp. 245–55. H. Thorndike, The Theological Works, ed. J. H. Parker, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1844–56), I, Pt ii, p. 711; cf. Hobbes, De Cive, 17.27. Thorndike, Works, i. Pt ii, pp. 711–12. 166 Hobbes, De Cive, 17.17.


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the clear sense that Hobbes’s apparent willingness to consider it in other passages was at best disingenuous.167 At the heart of Thorndike’s concern is the danger of mixing two radically different forms of jurisdiction. States procure civil justice, but this is fundamentally different to what is required from a spiritual authority: if Christianity come to be limited by the determinations of civil powers, then must the truth of the Gospel, and the spiritual righteousness which it requireth, be measured by those reasons which the public peace and civil justice, which preserveth the same, may suggest.168

Although this was doubtless a statement that Hobbes would have applauded wholeheartedly, for Thorndike the clergyman is better suited to judge spiritual matters on spiritual terms. As Hammond also argued, such a position is no threat to temporal authority because it makes no temporal claim. Thorndike suggests that if individuals were to use religion to disturb the peace, then they deserved punishment. On the basis of the church’s spiritual independence, Thorndike carves out a separate jurisdiction for excommunication and also the ordination of ministers. The Apostles Paul and Barnabas were given their appointment by the Holy Ghost, and not, as Hobbes infers, from the authority of the church (and ultimately the state). The complicated passages of scripture from chapter 16 where Hobbes had tried to prove that the power of priests was in the kings of the Jews, Thorndike simply denied. Israel was not a priestly kingdom and Hobbes had mistaken Eleazer’s superiority in some matters over Joshua to infer that he held sovereign as well as spiritual power.169 Thorndike takes Hobbes’s claims seriously, but the effect of his argument is to suggest that Hobbes has tortured scripture to support his thesis. Thorndike concludes his attack on Hobbes’s Erastianism by arguing that his credal minimalism does not do the job that he thinks it does.170 In reducing those essentials of faith for salvation to belief in Christ, Hobbes had hoped to limit them to non-sacramental beliefs. Sacraments such as baptism could then be redescribed as secondary matters of obedience, 167

168

Thorndike, Works, I, Pt ii, pp. 717–18. Thorndike fastens on a passage (17.28) often cited to demonstrate that Hobbes did leave a doctrinal role for the clergy. Here Hobbes comments that Christ promised doctrinal infallibility to the Apostles and their successors. Thorndike suggests that all that Hobbes is doing here is to point out that Christ failed his church, countering with the argument that no such infallibility was promised anyway. In fact the infallibility was a product of the chief pastor, the sovereign, as Hobbes went on to explain in his 1656 Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, EW, V, p. 269. Thorndike, Works, I, Pt ii, p. 718. 169 Ibid., pp. 722–4. 170 Ibid., pp. 737–8.

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thereby denying the clergy any gatekeeping role when it came to salvation. Under fire for the first version of this, Hobbes had conceded in an annotation that belief that Jesus was Christ included most of the Apostles’ creed, but without restoring any substantive role for the sacraments. Thorndike responded that although a simple profession of faith might be enough in unusual or extreme cases, in fact salvation also required what was contained in the covenant of baptism. Like Hammond, Thorndike had argued that the church had a properly spiritual jurisdiction and therefore could never interfere with a temporal jurisdiction in the way that Hobbes seemed to be suggesting. Hobbes had produced an extreme solution to a non-problem, at least in the case of the Anglican church. Although Thorndike was clearly in no mood to compromise, his Oxford colleagues were prepared to engage in dialogue with Hobbes, as Hammond’s comments had made clear. Central to this process was Robert Payne and his correspondence with Hobbes and with Sheldon during this period gives a fascinating insight into what would be the final attempts to win Hobbes around to an acceptable ecclesiology. For Payne, standing between an ever more intransigent Hobbes and his own suspicious colleagues, this was a difficult and delicate task, and yet it was one that he clearly felt was very important. Payne never spells out why this was. One might have thought that the Anglicans had good reason to reject Hobbes in the later 1640s in the way that they would go on to do in the 1650s, but there were several reasons to try to keep Hobbes on board. The main motive appears to have been defensive: the thought of what might happen if the great English philosopher, by this time expected to be the English Descartes, should come out against the Church of England. Hobbes was better as an unorthodox ally than an openly heterodox opponent. In these terms, Hobbes also fitted into the broader Anglican survival strategy if his statements could be made consistent with, and at least not hostile to, episcopacy. This seems to have been Payne’s strategy in a letter that survives from what was evidently a lengthy correspondence with Hobbes about ecclesiology in the later 1640s.171 Writing to Hobbes towards the end of 1649, Payne returns to the status of the clergy, and particularly the bishops. It is clear that the main issue was Hobbes’s continued suspicion of bishops and the spiritual powers that they claimed, the same issues dealt with in the annotation to chapter 6 of De Cive. What Payne had going for him was that 171

For the most recent discussion of this correspondence see J. R. Collins, ‘Christian Ecclesiology and the Composition of Leviathan’, Historical Journal 43: 1 (2000), pp. 217–31.


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Hobbes was largely indifferent to the precise form of ecclesiastical government, provided that its officers did not make claims for illegitimate forms of power. His task was to convince Hobbes that Anglican episcopacy could be redescribed in such a way as to make it compatible with the sort of civil authority that Hobbes had in mind. Payne’s tone was conciliatory from the start; although Hobbes had clearly received provocation ‘from some one or tow’ of the bishops,172 Payne addressed him as someone ‘without any quarrel to that whole tribe’ and who ‘might allow them a fayrer interpretation’. Payne’s suggestion was that their consecration and ordination might be construed as analogous to the creation of an academic doctor in any academic faculty, like a physician or a lawyer. Appealing to God might be construed as religious gratitude ‘not unproper for men of that callinge’ and more to do with presentation than practical power; equally Payne presents the bishop’s role in consecrating monarchs as a tactic designed to ‘render their persons as sacred to the people, and therby the people more ready to obey’. So long as bishops make it clear that they are as much subject to the civil power as doctors and lawyers, then whatever they claim to be doing cannot hurt the civil power, and if it does then they are liable to punishment. Payne suggests that Hobbes contrast this with the Presbyterians, who ‘professeth a right, nay in some cases a necessity to execute the acts of that power even against the prohibition of a supreame civill magistrate’. Payne’s closing remarks were to suggest that where bishops had claimed some ‘power above’, this was done because in any state which wanted to enjoy the benefits of religion it was necessary to convince the people of such a power; if Anglican bishops had ever claimed such power, it was ‘but a piece of prudence necessary to their office and for the publicke good’. Payne’s rather daring rewriting of Anglicanism shows just how far he was prepared to go to try to keep Hobbes within the Episcopalian fold. It isn’t clear how such arguments went down with the other Anglicans, but the presence of the letter in Sheldon’s correspondence indicates that he certainly knew about them. Throughout the period Payne kept Sheldon informed of the progress of the discussion;173 by February 1649/50, he wrote to Sheldon that the only sticking point was whether ‘there should be a power in a state independent of the supreme with right to execute the

172 173

There are a number of candidates for Hobbes’s antagonists: Cosin and Bramhall are high up the list. Although it seems to have been Sheldon alone – Hammond didn’t know (‘Illustrations of the State of the Church during the Great Rebellion’ in The Theologian and Ecclesiastic, p. 92).

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acts thereof without leave from the Sovereign’.174 However, for all of Payne’s ingenious solutions Hobbes was clearly reluctant to allow any vestige of independent authority back into his ecclesiology and it wouldn’t just be a matter of tinkering with the account in an English version of De Cive. In May 1650, Hobbes had informed Payne that he was writing Leviathan and in August 1650, Payne wrote to Sheldon informing him of Hobbes’s final position on ecclesiology. Although Hobbes had apparently written that he no particular problem with the ‘tribe’ of Episcopalians per se, he told Payne that he would set down and confirm ‘that the Civil sovereign (whether one or more) is chief pastor, and may settle what kind of Church government he shall think fit for the people’s salvation.’175 The argument confirmed Hobbes’s essential indifference to the precise form of church government, but left no privileged space for episcopacy, as Payne had hoped. As he wrote to Sheldon, this position would ‘be enough to justify those who have cassierd Bishops already, and may tempt others who have not, to follow their example. The truth is, I fear, he is engaged too far already to retreat, and therefore I have small hopes to prevail.’ Payne reported that he had written with one last appeal to Hobbes, echoing Erasmus’s appeal to Luther in suggesting that ‘all truths are not fit to be told at all times’. Given the antiquity of episcopacy, he had suggested, there were good reasons for it to be defended on the same terms as Hobbes’s preference for monarchy. But Payne didn’t hold out much hope of success, and he concluded by commenting that ‘if our tribe have got so sharp an adversary you may guess whom we have to thank for it.’ Payne doesn’t name names here but in March 1649/50 he had informed Sheldon of Hobbes’s remark that ‘he had lost the reward of his labours with the Pr[ince] by the sinister suggestions of some of the clergy as to their purpose.’ However conciliatory Payne was prepared to be, the exiled clergy had already taken action against Hobbes by spreading rumours about the way that the king’s mathematics tutor might have been abusing his position. Likely candidates here are Clarendon’s friends John Earles (who had been monitoring Hobbes’s activities as a tutor) and John Cosin. After Charles I’s execution, the exiled Episcopalians were increasingly marginalised at court, and thus unable to do as much to control Hobbes’s influence; their resort to rumour in order to get Hobbes sacked may have marked 174

175

‘Illustrations’, p. 167. Payne summarises for Sheldon the thrust of his arguments, that bishops should be dependent on the civil power for the execution of all acts belonging to their independent power and that the ordination rite should include an acknowledgement of the sovereign’s authority. ‘Illustrations’, p. 173.


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increasing anxiety over his influence in the increasingly politique Louvre court, where the queen was showing little interest in upholding her husband’s Episcopalian interests. Payne would remain convinced that this affair played a vital role in alienating Hobbes from the Anglican cause, and was responsible for the occasionally anti-Episcopalian tone to Leviathan. But Payne may well have been overestimating the chances for coming to terms with Hobbes given that his argument was already quite a long way from traditional Anglicanism, as we have seen. A year later in 1650, another book rammed this message home for an English audience. Recusant Philip Scot’s Treatise of the schism subjected the religious claims of De Cive to biting criticism. For Scot, Hobbes ‘reduceth the Spiritual commonwealth or Church almost to a Platonical Inexistent Idea’.176 Hobbes’s suggestion that the church could require individuals to profess doctrines that they did not believe, and to worship idols at the command of the magistrate, he found absurd.177 According to Scot, Hobbes stirs up the old plea against Christianity that its ministers are after wordly power: ‘Mr Hobbs seems to desire, though with much violence, to draw even hearing confessions and interpreting scriptures to his new Eutopia as belonging to civil magistracy.’178 Scot’s critique gathered together a range of objections now common to Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian readers of Hobbes’s work, and in a way that reinforced the thought that Hobbes’s nominal Anglicanism was, as Sommerville has pointed out, only skin-deep. Much has been made of small changes to the ecclesiology of Leviathan as a significant departure from Hobbes’s earlier work, but as we have seen, for anyone encountering that work after having read De Cive and the critical responses to it, there was little that would come as a genuine surprise. HOBBES AND POLITICS

1648–1651

If the publication of De Cive had begun to drive a wedge between Hobbes and his Anglican Royalist friends on the basis of his religious views, the reception of his work between 1648 and the appearance of Leviathan in the spring of 1651, eventually served to confirm the worst fears of those, like Bramhall and Clarendon, who had seen in Hobbes’s contract theory the potential for a dangerously conditional account of allegiance. It is, 176 177

P. Scot, A treatise of the schism of England. Wherein particularly Mr. Hales and Mr. Hobbs are modestly accosted (Amsterdam [i.e. London] 1650), p. 51. Ibid., pp. 202–4. 178 Ibid., p. 213.

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however, important to stress that it was far from evident to other early readers of the second edition of De Cive that Hobbes’s theory was subversive. Indeed, the earliest political discussion of his work tended to revolve around what was perceived to be his excessive Royalism. Ironically, it would be this identification that would ultimately encourage republicans to trumpet the ambivalence of his political theory as they gleefully deployed the theory of a notorious Royalist to undermine Royalism itself. As historians have now come to recognise, one certainly didn’t need to have read Hobbes to talk about issues of allegiance in terms of natural jurisprudence. In July 1648, Anthony Ascham produced the first edition of his celebrated Discourse,179 the first major treatment of what has become known as ‘de factoism’, or the doctrine that obedience is owed to those with de facto authority, even if their rule is not de jure. Ascham’s suggestion that obedience is owed to those that can protect us, and correspondingly is not owed in situations where such protection is at an end, sounds superficially Hobbesian, but as several commentators have noted, the analytical framework within which Ascham makes these claims seems to be derived from Grotius, with unHobbesian concessions to accounts of right reason and God’s providence. There is no evidence that at this stage Ascham had either read De Cive or the Elements,180 or that he needed to have read him in order to come up with this sort of conclusion. Indeed, when De Cive did enter discussion, it was to be the object of criticism for its absolutism. The occasion for this debate was a pamphlet published by Hammond in mid-January 1649, which rehearsed the Royalist argument that once individuals had parted with their natural liberty they were indissolubly bound to obedience to a sovereign empowered by God with a right of life and death. In the wake of the regicide, Hammond’s claims were attacked by supporters of the new regime. In May a writer with the pseudonym Eutactus Philodemius181 published a pamphlet called The original and end of civil power, in which he rejected Hammond’s one-way account of rights transfer and defended the idea of popular sovereignty. Part of the discussion focused on property rights, considered by Eutactus to be natural 179 180 181

A. Ascham, A discourse, wherein is examined, what is particularly lawfull during the confusions and revolutions of government (1648). Skinner, Visions, III, p. 278. ‘Disciplined Friend of the People’. This is often supposed to be Ascham, and the Oxford theologian John Fell suggested that Hammond’s reply to Eutactus was a reply to Ascham, Hammond, Works, I, p. 9, but Richard Tuck points out that Eutactus appears to be far more republican in his sentiments than Ascham is in his published works. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p. 257.


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rights that should not be violated by arbitrary authorities. Hobbes was accused of committing ‘an intellectual rape upon nature’ for his suggestion that property rights are grounded in contracts rather than nature itself, a position that Eutactus seems to identify with the absolutists he opposed.182 The identification of Hobbes with Hammond’s style of absolutism can also be seen in another work of 1649, the second edition of Ascham’s Discourse, now retitled Of the confusions and revolutions of governments. Ascham had extended some of the arguments including those in Part II dealing with the natural state of man. It is clear that by this stage Ascham had read the second edition of De Cive and he was sufficiently taken with it to produce his own interpretation of Hobbes’s state of nature. In De Cive Hobbes had complicated his simple juridical model of the state of nature with an annotation to 1.10 suggesting that in fact men are always born under the authority of their fathers, thereby readmitting a vaguely patriarchal theory of authority. Ascham conflates the two models to produce a much more historicised account of a state of war between families.183 This version of the state of nature still requires an account of the development of political authority, and in line with his de facto theory, Ascham finds it useful to quote Hobbes’s theology in chapter 15. Just as Hobbes points out that God’s power is the basis of his dominion, so power in general is the basis of subjection: ‘So that Mr Hobbs his supposition (if there were two Omnipotents, neither would be obliged to obey the other) is very pertinent and conclusive to this subject.’184 Ascham also borrows from another section of De Cive, this time what seems to be the end of chapter 7, to confirm a technical distinction between the overrunning of a country and its proper conquest: the first, states Ascham, brings about no change in property or right whereas the second does change property and right ‘if (as Grotius and Mr Hobbes say) there be a dereliction of command in the person of whom we speak, or if the country be so subdu’d, that the Conquerours can no longer be resisted, and after the subjects have us’d all their endeavours to oppose such a new power.’185 Ascham here paraphrases two of Hobbes’s conditions for the end of obligation in 7.18, the very passages that caused Hyde and Bramhall so much concern. In citing 182 183 184

185

Eutactus Philodemius, The Original and End of Civil Power (1649), p. 15. Cf. Hobbes, On the Citizen, Dedicatory Epistle, pp. 5–6. Eutactus only appears to have read the dedicatory letter. Hobbes, On the Citizen, 1.10. Ascham, Of the confusions and revolutions of governments (1649), p. 108; cf. Hobbes On the Citizen, 15.7n, p. 175. Cf. 1.14 also. The section on pp. 107–8 follows On the Citizen, 15.5–7. See also A reply to a paper of Dr. Sandersons (1650), p. 12. Ascham, Of the confusions, p. 119; cf. Hobbes, On the Citizen, 7.18

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both Grotius and Hobbes on the conditional character of obedience, Ascham may well have been deliberately mischievous because he goes on to attack both authors for their willingness to ‘argue severall wayes for obliging people to one perpetuall and standing Allegiance’.186 Ascham’s earlier references to De Cive fit into a broader strategy to convict both Hobbes and Grotius of fundamental inconsistencies in their absolutist theories. As they had both admitted, de facto obligations are at an end when conquest has occurred or sovereignty has been abdicated. In addition, Ascham argued that ‘such a total resignation of all right and reason, as Mr Hobbes supposes, is one of our morall impossibilities.’ Hobbes’s position was contrary to the Jus Zelotarum of the Jews, which permitted extra-judicial punishment for acts contrary to natural law.187 Ascham pointed out that Suarez, Vasquez and even Grotius allow for similar rights of extra-judicial punishment, thus showing that ‘our Generall and Originall rights are not totally swallowed up’. Ascham’s broader point is that any theory claiming to override natural rights perpetually was inconsistent. Hammond had used Grotius to support the idea of irrevocable transfer; Hobbes’s De Cive appeared to fall into the same category. Ascham had shown that they could be refuted on their own premises and even used to support a de facto theory like his own. Just as Hyde had feared, the double-edged character of Hobbes’s theory was becoming apparent, and as we shall see, the defenders of the new republic would be quick to seize upon the ambiguity of Hobbes’s arguments, particularly after they became available in English. HUMANE NATURE AND DE CORPORE POLITICO

By the end of 1649, Hobbes’s De Cive had become embroiled in domestic discussion about ecclesiology and dragged into the debates over the new regime. It was perhaps inevitable that this should create an interest in the publication of his work in English. Although Hobbes had plans to do this in Leviathan, others saw opportunities to satisfy the growing demand for accessible versions of his ideas through the unauthorised publication of the only English version of his work, The Elements of Law. In November 1648, Thomas Pakeman entered the title De Cive – or the elements of law naturall & pollitique by Thomas Hobbs in the Stationers’ Register, but the work never appeared. It isn’t clear whether this was an unauthorised translation or, as seems more likely, an attempt to package The Elements as a 186

Ascham, Of the confusions, p. 120.

187

Ibid., p. 121.


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translation of De Cive.188 In December 1649, however, the Oxford publisher Francis Bowman entered a book on the Register with the title Humane Nature, a work which eventually appeared in early February 1650 under Hobbes’s name with the full title: Humane nature: or, The fundamental elements of policie. Being a discoverie of the faculties, acts, and passions of the soul of man, from their original causes, according to such philosophical principles as are not commonly known or asserted. In effect it was the first thirteen chapters of Part I of The Elements of Law, complete with the dedicatory epistle to Newcastle, a short epistle to the reader and a commendatory poem by Ralph Bathurst at the end. The back-story to this edition is provided by Payne. Writing to Sheldon towards the end of March 1650 Payne recommends that he might read ‘a little tract of human nature, printed lately by Fr. Bowman out of a MS copy of Mr Lockey’s, who persuaded Bowman to publish it as the second part of Mr Hobbes’ intended work.’189 Thomas Lockey, Bodley’s Librarian and a colleague of Payne’s at Christ Church, had apparently made a copy of the original manuscript that Payne had loaned to Sheldon in 1640. It isn’t clear exactly why Lockey chose this moment to publish the work, which seems to have been known in Oxford for the best part of a decade, but part of the reason may well have been Hobbes’s tardiness in publishing the rest of his promised system of philosophy. It is clear that however Hobbes’s scientific readership might have felt about De Cive, many were waiting with baited breath for the work of a philosopher who promised to be England’s answer to Descartes and Gassendi. This scientific context is suggested by the extended title which although it capitalises upon the growing notoriety of De Cive in matters of policy, nevertheless focuses upon the investigation of the ‘faculties, acts and passions of the soul of man’, a formula that echoes Descartes’s Les passions de l’ame (1649) and the subject matter of other works by de la Chambre and Senault, recently translated into English.190 The epistle to the reader draws attention to Hobbes’s new system of philosophy, which was based ‘upon such Principles and in such Order as are used by men conversant in Demonstration’, before going on to claim 188 190

H. Warrender, DCE, p. 14, n.3. 189 ‘Illustrations’, pp. 170–1. Senault’s De l’Usage des passions (1641) appeared as The use of the passions in 1649, and de la Chambre’s Les characteres des passions (1640) was published as The characters of the passions in March 1650, shortly before the translation of Descartes’s work in May. Humane Nature clearly fits into this trend and may well have done much to fuel the interest in this literature. The extent to which a more general interest in the psychology and political implications of the passions may have created a fertile proto-Hobbism amongst readers before they were exposed to a work like Leviathan is suggested by Kevin Sharpe’s study of William Drake’s reading. See Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (Yale, 2000), see particularly the discussion on p. 211.

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(incorrectly) that Humane Nature was in fact De Homine, or part two of Hobbes’s system. The book ends at chapter 13 because the material from chapter 14 onwards clearly makes up the opening chapters of De Cive. It would be reasonable to assume that Hobbes simply intended to translate what had gone before as De Homine. Whatever the case, Lockey hadn’t consulted Hobbes about this; the epistle to the reader suggesting that the author’s advice ‘could not suddenly be obtained’. Payne was quick to write to Hobbes to inform him, noting that Bowman ‘hath promised to do him right in a second edition’.191 Lockey had enlisted other members of Oxford’s scientific community in the production of the piece. Apart from Bowman’s name, the only other to appear in the text apart from Hobbes was that of Ralph Bathurst, who wrote the appended verses praising Hobbes and his work.192 A Fellow of Trinity College, Bathurst was particularly interested in medical science and chemistry, and had assisted the noted physician Thomas Willis during the 1640s. He attended the weekly scientific meetings in William Petty’s lodgings. Petty, of course, knew Hobbes well and provided a direct link to the philosopher in France.193 Another associate of Bathurst was Seth Ward, the Cambridge-educated mathematician recently intruded into the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at Oxford. Although the dedicatory epistle to the reader in Humane Nature is signed F. B. [Francis Bowman], Anthony Wood later suggested that Ward was the true author.194 That some of the leading lights of Oxford’s scientific community were involved in the production of Humane Nature tells us much about the esteem in which Hobbes was held as a scientific thinker. Their attitude towards Hobbes’s political and religious theory, however, is less clear. The dedicatory epistle to the work suggests that it should be considered alongside Hobbes’s political theory, and invites the reader ‘to consider the relations 191 192 193 194

‘Illustrations’, p. 171. John Glanvill produced a translation of Bathurst’s verses in his Poems: Consisting of originals and translations (1725), pp. 268–71. CTH, II, pp. 787–9. A. Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, ed. P. Bliss, 4 vols. (1813–20), III, col. 1209. Kinch Hoekstra suggests that Seth Ward was the author of the epistle to De Corpore Politico, following Hobbes’s claim that he had been told this ‘for certain’ (EW, VII, p. 336). See K. Hoekstra, ‘The de facto Turn in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy’, in T. Sorrell and L. Foisneau (eds), Leviathan after 350 Years (Oxford, 2004), p. 33, n.2. It could be argued that Ward’s silence on this point in his response to Hobbes in the appendix to his Exercitatio constitutes a tacit admission of his authorship, but given the tentative nature of Hobbes’s charge (‘But whether you did so or not, I am not certain. If it were not you, it was some body else whose Judgement has as much weight at least as yours’) I am not sure that this constitutes particularly strong evidence one way or the other. The epistle’s slightly windy rhetoric doesn’t remind one of Ward’s prose style, even at its most polemical.


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wherein it stands, especially to the Book De Cive’. But any more substantial comment on Hobbes’s political theory is omitted. The decision to publish the first thirteen chapters of The Elements certainly avoided any overlap with De Cive, but in doing so Lockey and his colleagues also avoided publishing the more questionable aspects of Hobbes’s political and religious views. It is hard to take this as conclusive evidence of any particular anxiety about Hobbes’s other ideas, but the neutral stance taken perhaps reflects an awareness, hard to avoid by 1650, that many of Hobbes’s views were controversial and dangerous. What the relationship between Human Nature and De Cive was, the reader was left to decide. If the Oxford scientists were coy about putting an English version of Hobbes’s political and religious ideas into print, others were not. About a month after Humane Nature appeared, a new work by Hobbes was entered in the Stationers’ Register under the title De Corpore Politico. The book appeared early in May with an extended title that flagged up its relevance to what has become known as the Engagement controversy: De Corpore Politico. Or The elements of lavv, moral & politick. With discourses upon several heads; as of the law of nature. Oathes and covenants. Severall kinds of government. With the changes and revolutions of them. The text presents those chapters of The Elements not printed in Humane Nature, together with an anonymous espistle to the reader. The project appears to have been independent of the Lockey–Bowman edition, with the publishing work carried out by John Martin and John Ridley, and the books offered for sale in Fleet Street. By contrast with Humane Nature, Payne knew nothing about De Corpore Politico until he saw it on sale in Oxford in May, and even then after a cursory inspection he mistook it for an unauthorised translation of the first two parts of De Cive. Payne told Sheldon that he would write to Hobbes immediately to urge the publication of his works entire ‘and not suffer himself to be thus mangled by strangers’.195 De Corpore Politico’s ‘Epistle to the Reader’ made clear that it was the practical political utility of Hobbes’s work rather than its scientific interest that made it worth publishing; if men’s minds were focused upon Hobbes’s teachings ‘they would not prove to be such weather cocks, to be turned about with the wind of every false doctrine and vain opinion. We should then be free from those disorders which threaten distraction to the soul and destruction to the commonwealth.’ The writer refers later to Hobbes’s ‘excellent notions’ acting as a grounding for the government of ‘Kingdoms and Common Wealths’, thus identifying the complexity of Hobbes’s 195

‘Illustrations’, p. 172.

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position and making his argument available to the defenders of the new regime. If De Cive could be read as a primarily Royalist work, De Corpore Politico’s leaner conceptual argument may have allowed readers to see exactly how flexible Hobbes’s theoretical defence of sovereignty could be. Republican writers were not slow to see the implications of Hobbes’s position as stated in the De Corpore Politico, not least the space that Hobbes appeared to leave for popular sovereignty.196 Just over a week after the book appeared, it was being used to undermine the Royalist cause, again as part of the ongoing pamphlet war surrounding Hammond’s Address. One pamphleteer made a note that Hobbes actually agreed with Eutactus that coercive power came from the people.197 Although the writer was clear that Hobbes’s political allegiance lay with the Royalists, he exploited the fact that the philosopher’s arguments could be used to support the new regime. The possibilities for using De Corpore Politico in this way so impressed the republican journalist Marchamont Nedham that in the second edition of The case of the Common-wealth of England stated, published in October 1650, he included an appendix listing extracts from the work. As he made clear in his preamble, his quotation of Hobbes alongside Salmasius came not because he felt that they were authoritative upon the matters stated, ‘but onely in regard of the great reputation allowed unto those Books by the two Parties, Presbyterian and Royall; And I suppose no man may triumph, or cry a victory, more honourably then my selfe, if I can foile our Adversaries with weapons of their own approbation.’198 It suited Nedham’s purpose to talk up the popularity of De Corpore Politico amongst the Royalists; but it seems unlikely that they were particularly pleased with Hobbes’s theory in this form, as the quotation from it suggested. The first passages Nedham chose predictably focused upon the central role of security in Hobbes’s theory.199 In both cases Nedham glossed the quotations emphasising that security was no otherwise to be had than from the current regime. In addition he quoted from sections that emphasised the 196

197

198 199

This included the unusual claim, later removed from De Cive and Leviathan, that democracy was the original form of all government (2.2). For discussion of the changes to this argument, see D. Baumgold, ‘The Composition of Hobbes’s Elements of Law’, History of Political Thought 25: 1 (2004), 16–43. Anon., An Answer to the Vindication of Doctor Hamond against the exceptions of Eutactus Philodemius (1650), p. 16n: ‘Mr Hobbs, one of this Doctor’s party, though a man of dangerous, and unsound principles in other respects, yet in this agrees with EP That power of Coertion, of the Sword, and consequently of Life, is transferred from the People to the Magistrate. Hobs de corp polit par 2 c.1.’ M. Nedham, The case of the Common-wealth of England stated (1650), p. 103. Ibid., pp. 108–11. Nedham first quotes from 1.19.11 and 2.20.5 where Hobbes makes clear that the reason for submission is protection.


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importance of unitary judicial authority for security.200 Inevitably, passages insisting that subjection could arise from conquest are quoted,201 together with sections emphasising that sovereigns are God’s vice-gerents and that to submit to the laws was neither a sin against conscience nor a potential cause of damnation.202 Hobbes was thus repackaged as an apologist for the new regime. Obviously pleased with Hobbes’s scalp, Nedham continued to use the extracts from De Corpore Politico in the editorials of the republican newspaper Mercurius Politicus. The four editorials of January 1650/51 printed the passages at the beginning of each sheet, although this time he didn’t mention their origin.203 During the same period, Mercurius Politicus’s war correspondent in Scotland, the 23-yearold John Hall of Durham, published The grounds and reasons of monarchy considered, where he drew attention to De Cive’s reservations about the demonstrable superiority of monarchy in order to reinforce doubts about the Royalist case.204 The damage being done to the Royalist cause by the appropriation of De Corpore Politico and the subversive readings of De Cive may well have encouraged supporters of the crown to try to promote a Royalist version of Hobbes’s theory. In early November 1650, the Stationer’s Company records show an entry by Richard Royston for a book titled The true citizen or the Elements of Philosophy. Royston was the leading Royalist publisher; he had published the Eikon Basilike in 1649 and all of Hammond’s polemical works in the later 1640s. The book finally appeared in March 1651 under the full title: Philosophicall rudiments concerning government and society. Or, A dissertation concerning man in his severall habitudes and respects, as the member of a society, first secular, and then sacred. This was the first English translation of the second edition of De Cive,205 and to allay any concerns about the character of the argument the publisher had gone to some lengths to identify it as a Royalist tract. This is most obvious is the inclusion of the engravings which precede the three sections of the work. The plates came from Wenceslaus Hollar’s 200 203

204 205

De Corpore Politico 2.20, 8, 9, 10. 201 Ibid., 2.22.2, 2.21.15. 202 Ibid., 2.25.11, 12. Mercurius Politicus 31 (2–9 January 1650/1): 503, prints the extracts from De Corpore Politico 1.19.11; Mercurius Politicus 32 (9–16 January 1650/1): 519, prints the extracts from 2.20.5; Mercurius Politicus 33 (16–23 January): 535–6, prints the extracts from 2.20.8; Mercurius Politicus 34 (23–30 January): 551–2, prints the extracts from 2.25.11, 12 and 2.22.2, 2.21.15. J. Hall, The grounds and reasons of monarchy considered (Edinburgh, 1650), pp. 49–50. Cf. Hobbes, On the Citizen, p. 14. The text clearly follows the 1647 edition of De Cive. The verses by Bruno and the portrait that appeared on the first version of the 1647 edition are missing. The title-page engraving also reproduces the 1647 iconography.

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Emblemata nova, a collection of allegorical emblems, in this case illustrating stoic moral themes.206 The first dealt with the theme of despising wealth, the second the dangers of high office and the third on the theme of innocence. In the Philosophicall Rudiments the engravings and their Latin inscriptions are recast to refer to the theme of kingship, with the central character as the holder of that office; the third engraving goes further and modifies its allegorical character (the virtuous man) into a portrait of Charles I. De Cive’s ambivalent defence of monarchy had been given a quasi-religious Royalist makeover.207 The translation itself had probably been around for a while. As Noel Malcolm has demonstrated, it had been made by the 20-year-old poet Charles Cotton, who came from a Derbyshire-based Royalist family.208 Cotton’s interest in Hobbes may have been stimulated by his tutor, an ejected Royalist don from Oxford named Ralph Rawson, who joined the Cotton family at Beresford Hall in 1648, possibly bringing with him a manuscript copy of The Elements of Law. Rawson was a friend of Sheldon, who was also staying with a gentry family nearby after his release from prison during the same period. It seems likely that Sheldon knew of Cotton’s activities and had told Payne about them, hence Payne’s mistaking the De Corpore Politico for the expected translation of De Cive. Cotton’s dedicatory letter to Lady Ann Fane gives a few clues as to his interest in Hobbes, and also to his awareness of the controversial nature of the text. Hobbes is a man ‘well practis’d in the Lawes of Nature’ and ‘eminent in their speculation’, who ‘hath transcended all that have gone before him’ although Cotton also notes the opposition Hobbes’s views had attracted. From the ‘contradictions’ that Hobbes himself has met, Cotton surmises that ‘he will the more easily guesse at the severall brunts and conflicts his weaker, yet constant Admirers have undergone from obstinate and selfopinion’d men.’209 It isn’t clear whether Cotton is referring to himself here, but the intention seems to be to flag up the daring of his translation of this bold new theory. Cotton comments that he found Hobbes’s doctrine on taxation difficult to understand,210 but the fact that this was the only difficulty he thought worth mentioning suggests that, unlike many contemporary readers, he had been convinced by Hobbes’s arguments. That said, Cotton’s enthusiasm has a touch of teenage hubris about it; Hobbes’s 206 207 210

See M. Goldsmith, ‘Hobbes’s Ambiguous Politics’, History of Political Thought 11 (1990), pp. 639–73; Malcolm, Aspects, pp. 236–7. Ibid. 208 Ibid., pp. 234–58. 209 Warrender DCE, Appendix A, p. 269. Ibid., p. 271, cf. De Cive, 13.11.


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controversial challenge to received knowledge may have been part of the attraction for a precocious young man. As a result, the text is translated more or less complete, without any alterations to the more controversial sections on politics and religion. It isn’t clear who organised the publication process when it eventually took place, but the timing and circumstances strongly suggest that it was designed to give a Royalist account of Hobbes’s ideas at a moment when the philosopher’s growing fame was being hijacked by the new regime. Royston was keen to present the piece to the public as a completely new work by Hobbes, removing from all but a few copies evidence that it was a translation.211 This undoubtedly made marketing sense for Royston but it also creates the impression that this version of Hobbes’s theory superseded all of the others, however they had been interpreted. If this was the intention behind the Royalist Rudiments, it was soon to be blown out of the water; at the end of April 1651, only a few weeks after the appearance of the translation, a genuinely new work by Hobbes would eventually change the public understanding of the philosopher’s ideas for ever: Leviathan. HOBBES’S REPUTATION IN

1651

By the spring of 1651, the broader reading public had been exposed to an extensive range of Hobbes’s ideas and discussion of them in a relatively short time. The more erudite Latin-reading audience had had a chance to read De Cive from 1647 onwards and to become familiar with Hobbes’s philosophical ambitions for a science of politics. If they did, they probably noticed his unusual religious views, and if they hadn’t, a variety of domestic critics were available to make it clear, particularly to Episcopalians and Presbyterians, that Mr Hobbes might well be a man of dangerous and unsound principles. Both Royalists and their critics could agree that De Cive was a book that favoured absolute sovereignty, but the character of Hobbes’s praise of its monarchic form left the Royalists privately less than impressed and republicans aware of its double-edged potential. De Corpore Politico’s appearance and exploitation as an engagement tract can only have deepened the suspicions on all sides. For the scientific cognoscenti, however, the oddity of Hobbes’s religious and political views may have been a less welcome distraction from his more interesting work in natural philosophy, and his potential here seemed to be amply demonstrated for an English 211

The variant copies, with a slightly different title page and Cotton’s dedicatory letter to Lady Fane, were apparently printed for Cotton’s use.

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reading audience by Humane Nature, a text that confirmed Hobbes as a thinker of the stature of Descartes and one who promised much more by way of a complete philosophical system. A few months after its appearance, the physician and scientist Walter Charleton was referring to Hobbes as ‘that Noble Enquirer into Truth’ and borrowing quotations from ‘his inestimable manual of Human Nature’.212 To top this off, as Mercurius Politicus advertised in December 1650 alongside a new edition of Humane Nature,213 the ubiquitous Mr Hobbes was also in print with his commentary upon William Davenant’s preface to his new epic poem Gondibert. Davenant’s colourful career in the 1640s had seen him serve with Newcastle’s army and engaged in gun-running for the Royalist cause. In the later 1640s he was based in the Louvre court, effectively working for Henry Jermyn. The context for Davenant’s experimental epic appears to have been the Newcastle circle’s ongoing interest in the psychological basis of social order. Davenant’s particular interest was in exploring the role of rhetoric and poetry as a means of social control. He argued in his preface to Gondibert that the traditional aids of government (religion, arms, policy and law) had been defectively applied. Attempts to impose authority upon bodies had failed; Davenant suggested that a better approach was use to powers of persuasion to shape men’s minds, and crucial to carrying this out were poets, ‘whose operations are as resistlesse, secret, easy, and subtle, as is the influence of Planetts’. Gondibert would be the prototype for this new civic drama, a heroic poem designed for the moral improvement of the aristocratic elite.214 Part of Davenant’s manifesto for the new project was an ostentatious rejection of classical tradition, eschewing the supernatural and the fantastic for a naturalistic and therefore more persuasive mode of moral instruction. Davenant himself acknowledged Hobbes’s involvement with the new poem in his preface: Hobbes had done him the honour of a ‘daylie examination as it was writing’. That said, although Davenant shared Hobbes’s naturalism, it is far from clear that Davenant was simply Hobbes’s disciple. Hobbes’s ‘Answer’ to Davenant’s ‘Preface’ reveals the complications of the relationship between the poet and the philosopher. Although Hobbes approves of Davenant’s engagement with nature, there is a tension about the role that Davenant seeks to create for poets. Whereas 212 213 214

W. Charleton, Deliramenta catarrhi (1650), Sig A1v. Mercurius Politicus 29, 19–26 December 1650, p. 486. Davenant would develop the more popular use of dramatic entertainments later in the 1650s, see J. R. Jacob and T. Raylor, ‘Opera and Obedience: Thomas Hobbes and ‘‘A proposition for Advancement of moralitie’’ by William Davenant’, Seventeenth-century Studies 61 (1991), pp. 205–50.


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Davenant’s concern is to identify a civic role for the poet, Hobbes stresses that any such engagement of the imagination or what Hobbes calls ‘Fancy’ must be guided by judgement and philosophy.215 Hobbes reminds Davenant that poetry requires philosophy to be effective, perhaps betraying his occasional anxiety about the parallels between poets and priests.216 That said Hobbes was also prepared to acknowledge that where true philosophy had been deficient, as it had been in the doctrine of moral virtue, there might well be a role for the ‘Fancy’ of the poet. It was a lesson that Hobbes was apparently putting to work. Towards the end of the ‘Answer’ he makes the tantalising comment that ‘I have used your Judgement no lesse in many thinges of mine, which coming to light will thereby appeare the better.’217 As we shall see, one of the distinctive features of Leviathan would be its deployment of rhetoric, and this may in turn owe something to Hobbes’s discussion with Davenant.218 Gondibert ultimately came in for a certain amount of ridicule from the literary wits, and Hobbes suffered a few glancing blows in the process,219 but this contribution to literary theory meant that Hobbes had an extremely high profile in an extraordinary number of fields. Sir Justinian Isham, a Northamptonshire-based Royalist lawyer with scientific interests, wrote to Bishop Brian Duppa in April 1651 that ‘Mr Hobbes now stands high and much look’d on, both in Latin and English. Somewhat (I know not what, but only heare) he hath lately put forth.’ Given that he was writing in early April, Isham was probably referring to Cotton’s translation of De Cive, but the observation prompted Isham to some remarks about Hobbes’s over-exposure: That de Cive and de Homine [Humane Nature] I think may serve men to chew upon a while. His aime to demonstrate the nature of man and of human actions as distinctly as the mathematicians have don that of quantity in geometricall figures is the highest reach of man’s witt. I find he digs very deepe (as he had need) to lay his foundation; however he fares among philosophers, the divines and civilians being sure to question his superstructure for their severall faculties.220 215 216 217 218

219 220

W. Davenant, Gondibert, ed. F. Gladish (Oxford, 1971), p. 50. For this concern see P. Davis, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Translations of Homer: Epic and Anticlericalism in Late Seventeenth-century England’, Seventeenth Century 12: 2 (1997), pp. 231–55. Davenant, Gondibert, p. 54. For this possibility see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 332–3, 430–1; T. H. Miller, ‘The Uniqueness of Leviathan’, in Sorrell and Foisneau (eds.), Leviathan after 350 Years, pp. 75–104, esp. pp. 81–9. J. Denham, Certain verses written by severall of the authors friends (1653), p. 9; R. Wild, The incomparable poem Gondibert vindicated from the wit-combats of four esquires (1655), pp. 6, 14, 24–5. The Correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa and Sir Justinian Isham 1650–1660, ed. G. Isham, Northamptonshire Record Society xvii (1951), p. 34.

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Isham’s reading of De Cive’s project brings out some of the complexities involved in the early reception of Hobbes’s work; a broad approval of the scientific claims made in Humane Nature and the preface to De Cive, but an awareness, even before Leviathan, that the theological and political consequences were much more problematic. In many ways Isham was Hobbes’s ideal reader; a Royalist who had compounded for his estates, and who had taken refuge in the study of stoicism and science. In his correspondence with Bishop Duppa, he had pondered the significance of the various Continental works on the passions that had come out in the later 1640s and had discussed the preface to Gondibert. Duppa, who acted informally as confessor and casuist to Isham, was more sceptical about the new scientific approaches, and particularly the seductive effect they could have upon his younger friend. Their correspondence is a sensitive register of the tensions between the new science and religion. Where Isham recommended the latest scientific work, Duppa found Descartes superficially enlightening and referred to Hobbes (whom he saw as first and foremost as a mathematician) in unflattering terms as ‘the great speculator’. However, by April 1651 even Isham could see that the combined effect of new philosophy and new political theory spelled trouble for the church, echoing Payne’s concern about the effects of Hobbes’s alienation from the Anglican cause. Reviewing Hobbes’s work alongside Selden’s De synedriis et prefecturis juridicis, Isham comments to Duppa: ‘What amongst these late philosophies and the Erastian and Socinian opinions too much in request, I doubt the church likely to be stript by learned hands which seemes sadder to mee than all her sufferings from the rabble.’221 221

Ibid., pp. 23, 35.

CHAPTER

2

Leviathan (1651–1654)

CONTEXT

In several accounts Hobbes gives the impression that he had been composing the English version of his political theory from the middle of 1646, but the bulk of the evidence suggests that he was actually working on De Corpore between 1646 and 1649.1 Hobbes appears to have started work on Leviathan in late 1649, putting aside the manuscript of De Corpore, which was nearly ready for publication. Hobbes’s reasons for doing this are not entirely clear, but circumstantial evidence suggests that the reason might have been both political and controversial. Quentin Skinner’s original thought that the new work was a contribution to the allegiance controversy fits chronologically with the debate over the engagement and theoretically with Hobbes’s sharpened emphasis in Leviathan upon the conditional quality of obedience (specifically its relationship to protection). The problem comes in characterising Hobbes’s relationship to this debate, particularly because the arguments speaking most directly to the question of allegiance are to be found in the short ‘Review and Conclusion’ that Hobbes added to the end of the work. Commentators have noted tensions between the argument in the body of the text and the political message contained in the ‘Review’, and this has generated considerable debate as to the extent to which Leviathan itself was genuinely a pie`ce d’occasion, and a contribution to the engagement controversy.2 It is a testimony to the open quality of Hobbes’s work that the textual evidence has been used to support almost diametrically opposed but nevertheless plausible interpretations. 1 2

K. Schuhmann and G. A. J. Rogers, Introduction to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (Bristol, 2003), pp. 10–11. For the most recent survey of the various positions, see K. Hoekstra, ‘The de facto Turn in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy’, in L. Foisneau and T. Sorell (eds.), Leviathan after 350 years (Oxford, 2004), pp. 33–74; but see also G. Burgess, ‘Contexts for the Writing and Publication of Hobbes’s Leviathan’, History of Political Thought 11: 4 (1990), pp. 675–702.

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For some modern readers the bulk of the text appears to be written in a distinctively monarchic and therefore Royalist mood, and the ‘Review’, with its case for submission to the de facto power, represents a last-minute repackaging of the work as an engagement tract. At the other extreme, historians and philosophers have also suggested that Hobbes’s case for submission is present in the body of the text (particularly chapter 21), and that in fact the ‘Review’ with its rejection of some engager arguments, actually seems to reel in some of the main text’s radicalism. The very fact that Leviathan seems to defy a straightforward reading is of some importance in approaching the problem: the interpretative static may well reflect Hobbes’s intentions. Hobbes was very concerned about the public appearance of his work, and particularly keen to avoid its automatic association with the cause of Royalism in particular rather than sovereignty in general. This had been a feature of De Cive, which deliberately eschewed local politics in favour of lofty science; Hobbes’s anxiety over Sorbie`re’s intervention in the title page made his concern about the appearance of his work as a Royalist tract explicit. Hobbes had feared for his life after his political intervention in 1640, and clearly wanted to avoid being labelled when such labels could be extremely dangerous. His cause was increasingly the cause of peace and not necessarily any particular political grouping, and this may be an important reason why we should perhaps give up trying to pigeonhole Hobbes as essentially a supporter of specific factions, be they hardline Louvre group Royalists or potential sovereigns like Cromwell.3 The fact that Hobbes’s philosophical contribution could speak to the political agendas of all parties, as it might have to, may well be significant. Hobbes had even more reason to ensure that this was the case in 1649, with the Royalist cause at a very low ebb and the elderly philosopher becoming increasingly isolated in Paris.4 Hobbes had often talked of returning home in his correspondence and it was clearly on his mind in 1647. In May 1648 he had written to the Earl of Devonshire suggesting that it was still too dangerous for him to do so.5 After the execution of Charles I the possibility looked more plausible and in September 1649 he wrote to Gassendi that he was looking after himself ‘for my return to England, should it happen by any chance’.6 Hobbes evidently felt that a return home might be on the cards, not only for him, but also for other exiles. This is surely one important reason why it might have seemed appropriate, in the 3 4 5

Although for a different view see J. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005). N. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), pp. 19–20. CTH, I, p. 170. 6 Ibid., p. 179.


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autumn of 1649, to start work on an English version of his political theory designed to contribute to the pacification of the country, and showing into the bargain how it might be legitimate for former loyal supporters of the Royalist cause to subject themselves to a new political authority. Such a position was not inconsistent with Hobbes’s ambiguous ‘Royalism’ to date and did not require any opportunistic theoretical deviation on Hobbes’s part. As De Cive 7.18 made clear, once ‘a commonwealth has fallen into the power of enemies and resistance is impossible, it is recognised that the previous holder of sovereign authority has already lost it’.7 The same section made it clear that individuals could also be released from their obligation to their former sovereign, either by permission or command. It had always been a part of his political theory; as Bramhall and Hyde had noted with distaste, De Cive was a compounder’s charter. So Hobbes had plenty of reasons to ensure that the body text of Leviathan was not univocally Royalist, but this leads us back to the puzzle offered by the ‘Review and Conclusion’, where Hobbes on some accounts rolls back his radicalism, and on others, offers a more striking legitimation of submission to the new regime. There can be no doubt that the ‘Review’ is intended as an intervention in the political debate over engagement. Hobbes himself refers to the fact that several books on the subject had crucially got their argument wrong, specifically over the point in time at which a subject becomes obliged to a conqueror. Although it is true that Hobbes offers an argument as to how individuals could submit to a new authority, his answer reiterated the fact that individuals only become obliged when they were no longer protected by the previous sovereign, as he had argued in chapter 21, and when they have, crucially, consented to be the subject of their conqueror. Hobbes’s more stringent criteria for legitimate submission, together with his additional law of nature, requiring men to ‘protect in Warre, the Authority, by which he himself is protected in time of Peace’, do seem to speak to a more cautious account of submission. The reason for these clarifications may have something to do with both the changing political circumstances that developed during the writing of Leviathan, and the way that Hobbes’s theory was being read in England during the period immediately before the book’s publication. What changed politically was the revival of Royalist hopes in the forging of a deal with the Presbyterian Scots. In June 1650 Charles II had left for

7

Hobbes, On the Citizen, p. 101. See also Johan Sommerville’s comments in ‘Lofty Science and Local Politics’, in T. Sorell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), at p. 263.

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Scotland to renew the military campaign against the republic.8 Hobbes was already a long way through Leviathan. In May Payne reported to Sheldon that he had completed thirty-seven chapters. With a Royalist army in the field, the political situation now included a scenario that Hobbes had not explicitly addressed. In addition Hobbes’s public image had suddenly become very complicated as a result of the polemical use of his work. As we saw, Hobbes initially figured in the political debate as a slightly inconsistent Royalist, associated with a Diggesian theory of rights. We know that Hobbes had been worried about being taken for a Royalist, and this fact may well have played a part in his decision to offer a much less overtly Royalist argument in Leviathan from the outset. However, as Ascham, but particularly Nedham realised, the de facto strain in Hobbes’s earlier work could be used to legitimate the new regime. With De Corpore Politico now put to service as an engagement tract and extracts from it adorning Mercurius Politicus, Hobbes found himself described not only as an apologist for the Commonwealth, but also associated with a crude form of ‘might-makes-right’ de factoism based purely upon conquest alone. The consequences of this were problematic for Hobbes on political and conceptual levels. Politically it was being argued that his theory necessarily legitimated the revolution and supported the claims of the Rump at a time when Charles II was actively seeking to restore his authority. The dangers of being associated with the views of the engagers were made abundantly clear when Ascham was murdered in Spain (probably on the orders of Hyde) in June 1650. Conceptually Hobbes’s work was being aligned with accounts that argued that the mere fact of conquest by itself created an obligation to obey (in Ascham’s case) and even legitimacy (Nedham). The problem here had been posed in Bramhall and Hyde’s responses to De Cive: at what point did conquest generate a new right, and what sort of right would it be? This is precisely the objection that Hobbes deals with in the ‘Review’, in which he distances himself from the various species of argument with which his work was now associated and clarified his position to speak to the new political circumstances. Hobbes points out that conquest alone cannot create a right, which could only come from consent. But individuals could only consent to a conqueror when their previous obligation was at an end (i.e. that the sovereign was no longer protecting them) and when, as chapter 21 had stressed, ‘the means of his life is in the Guards and Garrisons of the 8

Tuck, Philosophy and Government, pp. 322–3.


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Enemy’.9 Here the individual has no alternative but to consent, thus, on Hobbes’s admittedly unusual understanding of consent, generating legitimate authority and a full obligation requiring the subject to obey. But Hobbes was keen to point out that this did not mean that Royalist soldiers, still benefiting from the protection of Charles II, could legitimately desert their sovereign until all of Hobbes’s stipulations had been met: ‘. . . he hath no liberty to submit to a new Power, as long as the old one keeps the field, and giveth him means of subsistence, either in his Armies, or Garrisons.’10 The extra law of nature made it clear that individuals were not at liberty to desert their sovereign at will, a construction that both Bramhall and Hyde had put on Hobbes’s work. The only individuals who were free of their previous obligations were those who, in line with De Cive, had done all that they could to defend the sovereign, but who now found themselves at the enemy’s mercy. Hobbes made it clear that this was in no way to legitimate the actions of those who had rebelled in the first place. As he explained in the ‘Review’, any legitimacy produced by conquest had nothing at all to do with the justness of the cause of the conquest. Hobbes’s argument is a typically Janus-faced lesson for all parties involved in the debate; writers like Ascham and Nedham are mistaken to believe that they can build a legitimate and thus stable political community upon the fact of conquest alone; fact could only be converted to right by some account of consent. For the Royalists, Hobbes made it clear that his theory was a good deal stickier in terms of obligation than its current usage might suggest. It certainly did not warrant rebellion or desertion from the Royalist cause unless that cause was entirely defeated (as it had seemed to be in 1649).11 Just as he had distanced his theory from an automatic association with the claims of Royalists in the main body of the text, so in the ‘Review’ he made it clear that his theory did not provide a simple endorsement of the Rump. Ironically, Hobbes’s polemical intervention in the ‘Review’ may well have been designed to extricate himself and his theory from the mire of association with practical politics and the uses to which his work had been put. Restoring the political indeterminacy of the text would, of course, come at a price, and the puzzlement over Hobbes’s political identity that continues to this day was its immediate consequence. But at the same time it 9 11

Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 484. 10 Ibid., p. 485. Just to reinforce the conservative qualities of his own position, Hobbes devotes some space in the Review to rejecting Ascham’s radical thought (based upon a reading of the Jewish Jus zealatorum) that individuals were always able to exercise their natural rights. Hobbes argues that such an argument is based upon a misreading of scripture, which suggests that the use of this particular right was always circumscribed by law.

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was a strategy that would allow the core ideas of Hobbes’s theory to remain relevant to whichever group or faction eventually managed to consolidate its grip upon power.12 It is certain that Hobbes did not see his position as being incompatible with Royalism, as his presentation of a manuscript of Leviathan to Charles II would show. But, as we shall see, when Hobbes was denied the protection of his sovereign, he had no qualms about submitting to the new government in England. He had done what he could, and now his own obligation was at an end. THE ARGUMENTS OF LEVIATHAN

On first inspection, Leviathan appears to be a radically different beast to Hobbes’s previous political works, most notably in terms of presentation, but also in terms of the arguments developed, particularly the discussions of theology that characterise books three and four. Nevertheless, the differences conceal practical and conceptual continuities that should not be underestimated; Hobbes’s unusually systematic thought does seem to exhibit a surprising amount of structural continuity, and what at first appear to be decisive theoretical departures often turn out to be elaborations, extensions or clarifications of initial principles. The new English work decisively established its author’s scientific credentials by combining material from the Elements of Law and what would become De Corpore in the first twelve chapters, offering a miniature prefatory version of his broader philosophical programme. The political and ethical theory was largely taken from De Cive with a few alterations. For example, Hobbes left out the material that originally constituted chapter 4 of De Cive, which explained exactly how natural law could be identified in scripture. This was significant inasmuch as Hobbes, having raised a doubt about the obligatory quality of natural law at the end of chapter 3, had quelled it by suggesting that we can know that it is in fact obligatory because it is contained in scripture. A similar formulation is left at the end of chapter 15, but the chapter that demonstrated the point had now been removed. The most significant technical alteration to the argument came with the addition of chapter 16 of Leviathan, in which Hobbes introduced his theory of representation and personation for the first time, to explain how many could, paradoxically, be one. This argument paved the way for the latest recension of his contract theory, in which Hobbes eliminated the thought that the contract was a two-stage process in which individuals 12

See J. Sommerville’s argument in ‘Lofty Science and Local Politics’, p. 267.


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came together as a society and then established a sovereign authority. The new version of the theory offered a one-stage process whereby individuals accept the sovereign as their representative, thus eliminating the thought that there could be a form of political community prior to the establishment of sovereignty. This was the theory so dramatically illustrated in the frontispiece of Leviathan, i.e. that the only sense in which the people can be considered to be a community is when the sovereign represents that community.13 More controversially, Hobbes also saw the argument as a way of making sense of the doctrine of the Trinity, in that he argued that God could also be, and had been, represented three times, by Moses, by Christ and the Holy Spirit in the church. For many readers, making sense of the Trinity at the price of making Moses one of its persons would be one of the most astonishing and novel moves that Hobbes would make. The heterodoxy of chapter 16 set the tone for the most extraordinary features of the new text and that was its treatment of ecclesiology and theology in Parts 3 and 4. Much of these sections had their roots in what Hobbes had written in De Cive, but even here there are moments where Hobbes seems to go a lot further than the argument offered in the earlier work. In terms of ecclesiology, De Cive had at least appeared to leave some sort of role for the church in terms of questions such as the interpretation of scripture, ordination and the exercise of ecclesiastical duties. In Leviathan Hobbes simply didn’t bother with the superficial nods to traditional Anglicanism and stated starkly that the sovereign authorised the interpretation of scripture, the ordination of clerics and could exercise ecclesiastical functions as supreme pastor. As some commentators have pointed out, such views had been latent in Hobbes’s work ever since the Elements of Law, but it was only in Leviathan that Hobbes made explicit what had been hitherto implicit in his carefully framed arguments.14 Although Hobbes couched his critique of clerical power as an assault upon Roman Catholicism and the thought of Cardinal Bellarmine in particular (another new feature of Leviathan), it was hard to avoid the thought that he was aiming for domestic targets, particularly Presbyterians and iure divino Episcopalians. Hobbes would later argue that his position in Leviathan 13 14

For the relationship between Hobbes’s theory and the anamorphic image on the frontispiece, see N. Malcolm, ‘The Title Page of Leviathan’, in Aspects, pp. 222–8. See Johan Sommerville’s argument in Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (Basingstoke, 1992), and most recently L. Nauta, ‘Hobbes on Religion and the Church between the Elements of Law and Leviathan’, Journal of the History of Ideas 63: 4 (2002), pp. 577–98 and Karl Schuhmann’s ‘Leviathan and De Cive’, in T. Sorell and L. Foisneau (eds.), Leviathan after 350 years (2004), pp. 13–31.

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was still consistent with Episcopacy, and while this is technically correct (taking an extremely Erastian view of Episcopacy) Hobbes’s general assault upon clerical power and his apparent preference in chapter 47 for religious independency would make it virtually impossible for him to mend his relationship with his former Anglican friends. By the end of the 1640s Hobbes was clearly writing his ecclesiology for a political situation in which traditional forms of Anglicanism had no privileged place as a form of church government. But if Hobbes’s Anglican and Presbyterian readers had reason to be distressed at his ecclesiology, almost all of his readers would be shocked by the extraordinary theology elaborated in Parts 3 and 4 of Leviathan. Here Hobbes offered nothing less than a completely revised account of Christianity, based upon his sometimes shockingly novel interpretations of scripture. It is still far from clear exactly what Hobbes was up to in systematically rewriting Christianity in such a radical, and occasionally downright bizarre fashion. The desire to render Christianity compatible with secular authority as a civic religion offers a compelling explanation for much of Hobbes’s paradoxical reinterpretation. Hobbes’s relentless attempts to control or bracket alternative sources of temporal authority, whether they be revelation, prophecy or even the authority of Christ himself seem to follow this logic. The sovereign is the authoritative interpreter of God’s will, and Christ’s reign is firmly deferred until after the Resurrection. The unstable world of unknowable religious mystery and even the very texts of scripture are coralled, defined and authorised by the sovereign, inverting the normal authoritative relationships between the secular and the sacred, between reason and religion. A connected ambition was to render Christianty consistent with the thoroughgoing materialism that stood as the foundation of Hobbes’s general philosophical project. This was a political priority inasmuch as a Christianity purged of the mistaken classical dualism between spirit and matter offered a more stable and transparent basis for the coexistence of political and religious authority. But this agenda also drove Hobbes far beyond nominally political concerns with a provocative zeal. Hobbes is at his most systematic when applying his materialist logic to mysteries of theology, and this feature of Leviathan produced some of his most unusual claims as he laboured to demonstrate that scripture could only make sense in materialist terms. The elimination of incorporeal substance as a category required dramatic re-readings of soteriology and eschatology; Hobbes argued that the soul was not incorporeal, and died with the body, to be restored physically by God at the Resurrection. Heaven and Hell were located upon earth, and the


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damned would be punished but not eternally, suffering a second and final corporeal death. Although one can find some precedents for Hobbes’s religious positions in the views of the ancients and some early-modern radicals, what gives Leviathan’s arguments their characteristic Hobbesian quality is the modal priority given to materialism in offering a coherent account of scripture. Hobbes himself was prepared to acknowledge that the results were strange and unsettling, although crucially nothing that was inconsistent with sovereignty and the laws as they stood.15 These political and philosophical priorities help to explain why Hobbes engaged in the arguments that he did but there was another dimension to his work that would lead many of his contemporaries to view his exegetical labours with deep suspicion. As he goes about the reconstruction of Christianity, Hobbes deploys not the reverent tones of the scriptural scholar (affected in De Cive), but deals with the subject in a more obviously ludic manner.16 For example, Hobbes defines religion as a fear of invisible power, points to inconsistencies in scripture which mean that Moses cannot have written the Pentateuch, notes that ‘prophet’ can mean one who is distracted, and that the best prophets are the best ‘guessers’. The text is peppered with such comments and the satirical mood often raises the suspicion that Hobbes is not so much reorganising Christian theology as hinting at its ultimate absurdity. Wit and rhetorical sparkle had never been entirely absent from Hobbes’s work, but Professor Skinner is right to draw our attention to its systematic use in Leviathan, particularly the latter sections where the full armoury of Renaissance rhetorical technique is deployed to brilliant effect, and not only upon Hobbes’s opponents, but also upon Christian doctrine itself. The suspicion that Hobbes might actually be offering a burlesque or travesty of Christianity was one that would occur to many of Hobbes’s early readers; the tension between that thought and the apparently serious purpose of Hobbes’s theology was an issue that perplexed his readers then just as it does today. Hobbes’s deployment of rhetorical techniques ensures that the work is not only a great work of political theory, but also a Renaissance literary masterpiece. Hobbes’s critics would notice the change in tone from the comparatively sober quasi-scientific style in the Elements and De Cive, and some, like Eachard and Clarendon, would regard it as a triumph of style over content. 15

16

In a post-Restoration apology for himself he acknowledged that his unusual divinity might be an object of suspicion, and in the Latin Leviathan (1668) he comments that he had ‘slipped into unusual doctrines’ (Hobbes, Mr. Hobbes considered in his loyalty, religion, reputation, and manners, by way of a letter to Dr. Wallis (1662), p. 29; Leviathan, ed. Curley, 539). For discussion of this feature of Hobbes’s work see particularly Q. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 10.

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Skinner has offered a persuasive account of the reasons for this change, in particular Hobbes’s awareness that the forces of reason and science were unlikely to have an impact upon an audience in the grip of irrational religious and seditious political ideas. Under these circumstances, it was necessary to deploy the arts of eloquence to insinuate his political and religious message. As we have seen, the poet’s imaginative role in shaping political obedience had been a central theme in the dialogue between Hobbes and Davenant over Gondibert. The literary qualities of Leviathan may owe much to this crucial exchange. Again the magnificant frontispiece acts as an appropriate symbol of the new union between reason and rhetoric; the image of Leviathan made up of individual figures simultaneously offering a rationalist demystification of the idea of the state in a powerful metaphorical image.17 Arguably this would be the most successful part of Hobbes’s project. As we shall see, the haunting images and turns of phrase were often the most effective means by which Hobbes’s philosophy lodged itself into the subconsciousness of his readers. Even Hobbes’s critics could not resist reproducing his startling metaphors and formulae in their works, and Hobbes’s ability to capture and organise the collective fears and anxieties of seventeenth-century men and women meant that they spread like a virus, even amongst Hobbes’s opponents. Of course, it wasn’t always the case that the virus delivered its political payload, and Hobbes’s critics did their best to come up with suitable antidotes, but the extent to which the dangerously attractive language of Leviathan predisposed its users to accept his account of man’s natural state and the necessary solutions it required should not be underestimated. PUBLISHING LEVIATHAN

Hobbes’s work on the book proceeded very rapidly. In May 1650 Payne reported to Sheldon that Hobbes had completed thirty-seven out of a planned fifty chapters. By August he had completed two more. The work, presumably near completion, was placed on the Stationers’ Register on 20 January 1651 by Hobbes’s London publisher Andrew Crooke. There was a government licensing system in place and all of Hobbes’s works produced in England during the early 1650s were at some level officially sanctioned.18 The Stationers’ Register shows that Leviathan was licensed by the Stationer Philemon Stephens and John Downham, the Puritan minister who had 17 18

See particularly Malcolm, ‘The Title Page of Leviathan’, in Aspects, at pp. 227–8. J. Peacey, ‘Nibbling at Leviathan: Politics and Theory in England in the 1650s’, Huntington Library Quarterly 61: 2 (1998), at p. 252.


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served as the official licenser since 1643.19 In his 70s by 1651 (he would die the following year), Downham had also licensed De Corpore Politico, so the politics of Leviathan would not have come as a surprise to him.20 He was no stranger to controversy either, having got into some trouble for licensing Alexander Ross’s edition of the Koran in 1649.21 This might suggest that Downham was prepared to entertain unusual ideas, but it is impossible to be certain how carefully or even how much of Leviathan Downham read in order to authorise the work. The controversy over the Koran also indicates that the fact that Downham licensed Leviathan does not tell us much about the republic’s attitude to the new work. The dedication of the work to Sidney Godolphin was dated 15/25 April, and the final stages of the printing process took place that month, as Hyde discovered when Hobbes visited him in Paris.22 Hobbes told him that ‘his Book (which he would call Leviathan) was then Printing in England, and that he receiv’d every week a Sheet to correct, of which he shewed me one or two Sheets, and thought it would be finished within little more then a Moneth’.23 Hobbes read Hyde the dedicatory epistle to Godolphin, but commented to him ‘that he [Hobbes] knew when I read his Book I would not like it’.24 Hobbes mentioned some of its conclusions, and Hyde asked him why he would publish such doctrine. After ‘a discourse between jest and earnest upon the Subject’ Hobbes replied ‘The truth is, I have a mind to go home.’25 It was certainly the case that the argument of the book would allow him to do so. Hobbes’s famous comment that Leviathan had ‘framed the minds of a thousand gentleman’26 provides indirect evidence of the size of the print run and the intended audience for the book. A run of a thousand copies was not unusual for a book like Leviathan at the time.27 It was presented in folio 19 20 21 22

23 24 27

A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers from 1640–1708, ed. G. E. Eyre, C. R. Rivington and H. R. Plomer, 3 vols. (1913–14, 1950), I, p. 358 [p. 205 of the original register]. For the entry on De Corpore Politico, see A Transcript of the Stationers Register, I, p. 340 [p. 184 of the original register]. Calendar of State Papers, domestic series (hereafter CSPD), 1649–50, pp. 45–6. The printing process probably began soon after the book was registered. The first gathering, which included the epistle dedicatory and the preface, was usually printed last. I would like to thank the anonymous reader of the typescript for these comments. Clarendon, Brief view and survey (Oxford, 1676), p. 7. Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 8. 26 Hobbes, EW, VII, p. 336. Karl Schuhmann has argued recently that Crooke may have elected to split the print run between London and Amsterdam for fear of losing his investment if the authorities reacted badly to the book. He suggests that the corrected sheets referred to by Clarendon were sent on to an Amsterdam publisher where the corrections were embodied in the second edition, known as the ‘Bear’ (after its distinctive title-page ornanment), an edition bearing the same publication information as the ‘Head’ (with the exception of a misspelling of Crooke’s name), but which clearly derives from a Dutch printer. See Schuhmann, Introduction to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (2003), esp. III.2 and III.4. For

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(bound or unbound in quires), a large-sized volume with a very striking and handsomely engraved title page. One paid for the quality; at eight shillings and sixpence, Leviathan was an expensive purchase, in contrast to the smaller, cheaper editions of Hobbes’s works already available. Deluxe large paper copies were also available, presumably for more money. It was a book aimed at the well-heeled English gentleman. The new book was certainly a curiosity in more ways than one, but did it sell? We tend to assume that Leviathan would have flown off the shelves like De Cive, but in fact the evidence points to exactly the opposite conclusion. Ironically the relative glut of Hobbes products over the period immediately preceding Leviathan’s appearance may have undermined the market for what we now know to be Hobbes’s masterpiece. The Newcastle bookseller William London still appears to have been offering copies of Leviathan for sale in 1658.28 As far as we can tell at the moment, there was no attempt to produce a second edition until the late 1660s, and even after the Fire of London had destroyed many book stocks Samuel Pepys was being offered a new copy in 1668 (he chose the cheaper second-hand option). Assuming that the new copy that he was offered wasn’t one of the false imprints, the inescapable conclusion is that Leviathan did not sell out, at least not for a long time. Although this seems like a strange conclusion today it isn’t really all that surprising; Leviathan was an expensive book, and if someone already owned a copy of De Cive or De Corpore Politico, or particularly The Philosophical Rudiments they might think twice before laying out a considerable sum of money on a book containing more or less the same political and religious theory. There were also reasons why buyers might actually avoid Leviathan. Some readers argued that the version of the argument in De Cive was technically tighter and therefore better, a case with some truth to it.29 There seems to have been no sense amongst Hobbes’s existing readers that it was necessary to refer to the latest statement of Hobbes’s argument, which, aside from the odd theology, came as little surprise.30 Most of Hobbes’s

28 29

30

decisive arguments against this implausible thesis see Noel Malcolm’s comments in Times Literary Supplement 5305 (3 December 2004), pp. 3–4. A much better explanation of the genesis of the ‘Bear’ can be found in Malcolm’s Aspects, pp. 336–82, see below pp. 287–8. W. London, A catalogue of the most vendible books in England (1658). Walter Pope commented of De Cive that it was ‘a good Book in the main, and much better than his Leviathan; for in the first, there is Verbum Sapienti, enouf said, to let the intelligent Reader know what he would be at; but in his Leviathan he spreads his butter so thin, that the courseness of his Bread is plainly perceived under it.’ W. Pope, Life of Seth, Lord Bishop of Salisbury (1697), p. 125. See Thomas Hill to Richard Baxter, Trinity College, 13 February 1651/2, in N. H. Keeble and G. F. Nuttall (eds.), Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1991), I, pp. 74–5.


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critics and commentators who refer to De Cive, De Corpore Politico and Leviathan saw them as interchangeable versions of the same basic arguments. As a result of the unauthorised printings of Hobbes’s theory between 1649 and 1651, many readers had already a formed a sense of what Hobbes’s theory was about. Slow sales may also explain the slightly delayed public response to the book. As we shall see, there was no immediate public outcry. ‘. . . A

FARRAGO OF ALL THE MADDEST DIVINITY

THAT EVER WAS READ’. EARLY RESPONSES TO LEVIATHAN

1651–1653

On 6 May 1651, Robert Payne gave Gilbert Sheldon the first reports of Leviathan: I am advertised from Oxf[ord] that Mr Hobbes’ book is printed and come thither: he calls it Leviathan. Much of his De Cive is translated into it: he seems to favour the present Government, and commends his book to be read in the Universities, despises all censures that may pass upon it. It is in folio at 8s. 6d. price, but I have not yet seen it.31

The observations of the unnamed informant as filtered by Payne foreshadow much of the critical response to come. The odd title draws attention. The continuity with De Cive is noted, possibly with a view to affirming that Hobbes’s ideas had not altered. Hobbes’s political allegiance, rendered suspect by the ambivalence of his views in De Cive and the use made of De Corpore Politico, is tentatively identified: he ‘seems’ to favour the present government, probably a conclusion drawn from Hobbes’s exposition of the relationship between protection and obedience in the ‘Review and Conclusion’. Perhaps more ominously for his reception in Oxford and Cambridge, Payne’s correspondent picked up on Hobbes’s desire that Leviathan should be required reading in the universities, coupling the remark with Hobbes’s arrogant dismissal of all censure that may pass upon it. It would be Hobbes’s hostility towards traditional university learning that would eventually bring him into conflict with Oxford’s natural philosophers, and which in time would destroy his scientific reputation. In 1651, however, Hobbes believed that he had allies there and he sent two copies of Leviathan to Ralph Bathurst at Trinity College Oxford, probably one for Bathurst himself (for his verses in Humane 31

‘Illustrations’, p. 223.

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Nature) and the other for Seth Ward, who had written the preface. Bathurst replied in a letter towards the end of May, the surviving portion of which omits what was probably a complimentary discussion of Hobbes’s gift,32 and encourages the philosopher to publish more of his eagerly awaited natural philosophy.33 But for all of his enthusiasm, Bathurst may well have been concerned that Hobbes’s non-scientific notoriety was getting in the way of his reputation as a natural philosopher: And thus much I am rather bold to suggest to you, because if by your other workes already published, you have gained so high an esteem, even when almost a whole order of men thought it concern’d them to cry downe your opinions, how much more shall those be received with honour, in whose argument no man’s Diana will be brought into question.34

Bathurst is flatteringly generous with his praise and estimation of Hobbes’s reputation here, but this is tempered by the acknowledgement that Hobbes’s reputation isn’t as high as it could be, probably because of the controversial character of his religious opinions in De Cive.35 The Oxford don encourages Hobbes to seek the greater honour to be had in publishing those of his scientific arguments that did not call religious views into question. Although he was clearly very impressed with Hobbes as a scientist, Bathurst was also aware that their connection to Hobbes’s political and especially his religious ideas compromised the prospects for the new science; it is possible that his suggestion that Hobbes get on and publish his scientific work was perhaps a recognition that such a move might be necessary to rescue his reputation and his science from the damage being done by his political and religious ideas. Those religious ideas also attracted the attention of Brian Duppa, who wrote to Justinian Isham in July that ‘. . . there is another production of the press, that Affrick hath not seen a greater monster, and that is Mr Hobbes his Leviathan’.36 The gnomic title of the work was an object of curiosity for many of its readers, and Duppa was quick to get to work on its allusive critical possibilities: 32 33 34 35 36

The letter is printed in Warton’s Life of Bathurst, where Warton reports Bathurst’s acknowledgement of the two copies of Leviathan and then quotes a portion of the letter (see CTH I, pp. 180–1). CTH, I, p. 180: ‘I hope your learned booke of Optickes, and that other de corpore, if it be yet finished, may no longer lie concealed’. CTH i. 180, adapting the manuscript version noted at 180, n4. ‘. . . almost a whole order of men’ – the whole order is likely to be the clergy, with individuals like Bathurst and Payne being the exceptions. G. Isham (ed.), The Correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa and Sir Justinian Isham 1650–1660 (Northampton Record Society 17 (1951)), p. 41.


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a title that I wond’red at at first, but when I found out how like he was to the Leviathan that Job speakes of, who plai’d, and sported himself in the Deep, I liked his judgement better in the title then in the book, for certainly (Lucian excepted) none ever was more gamesome in religion then he is.

The identification of Hobbes as the Leviathan begins a trend which would eventually see the title become a nickname for Hobbes himself, part of the process of reducing Hobbes’s own identity to that of his monster. But whereas later attempts to connect the author and his title tend to connect Hobbes’s title with the tyrannical figure of the sovereign or the terrifying beast from the book of Job, Duppa focuses upon the ludic quality of the scriptural Leviathan from Psalm 104:26, a creature made by God to play in the oceans, revealing the book to be a satirical, burlesquing treatment of religion. But decoding the title in this form doesn’t allow Duppa to jump to easy conclusions about the force of the argument, which is strangely indeterminate: And yet as in the man, so there ar strange mixtures in the book; many things said so well that I could embrace him for it, and many things so wildly and unchristianly, that I can scarce have so much charity for him, as to think he was ever Christian.

Duppa doesn’t specify what is said well, but we have already seen that aspects of Hobbes’s politics and his understanding of religion could appeal to Laudian clergymen like Cosin and writers like Hammond, but whereas the dominant reaction to Hobbes’s earlier discussions of religion had been one of suspicion, the wild and unchristianly character of the new theology in Leviathan was hard to ignore and the interpretative dilemma over its orthodoxy unquestionably more acute. All of the traditional Christian pieces were on the board, but the rules and the game itself had been completely transformed. Unsure in turn of the character of Isham’s response, Duppa defers a conclusive judgement until he hears from his younger friend.37 A rather more positive response can be found from William Rand, an English republican Independent then living in Amsterdam. Rand wrote to Samuel Hartlib in July, discussing some rather radical ideas for educational reform. These involved the reduction of religious instruction to core principles of Christian morality and uncontroversial texts of scripture with a view to avoiding sectarianism and conflict. Rand’s anti-sectarian sola sciptura approach, and his critical attitude towards the scholastic 37

We never discover Isham’s views on the book, although it is likely that he was more sympathetic than Duppa to Hobbes’s position.

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educational curriculum predisposed him to Hobbes’s own reformist agenda in these areas. This led him to take a sympathetic view of the odd mixture of material in Leviathan. Rand found the book to contain ‘a world of fine cleare notions, though some things too paradoxicall & savouring of a man passionately addicted to the royall interest’. Nevertheless, Rand felt that Hobbes might make ‘an excellent Councellour in the matter of education’ both for his ingenuity and his critique of scholastic teaching.38 For all Hobbes’s apparent Royalism, Rand was also surprised ‘to find him so sound in many other points, that looke with a hostile aspect upon royalty’. Picking up on the implications of Leviathan’s political ambiguity Rand, like Payne’s correspondent, conceived that Hobbes ‘is comeing over to the parliament side & would be easily engaged upon honourable termes to be serviceable to the publik’.39 But it wasn’t just Hobbes’s views on education that Rand found interesting. In August he wrote to Benjamin Worsley, drawing his attention to Hobbes’s ‘smart interpretation of the trinity’ in chapter 42.40 Rand was clearly impressed with Hobbes’s unusual application of his theory of representation. Hobbes’s reinterpretation had the advantage that it did not require one to believe that God had appeared in three different forms (potentially a form of tritheism for antiTrinitarians), but only that God had been represented three times (by Moses, Christ and the Apostles and their successors). Although this would be anathema to many of Hobbes’s contemporaries, Rand was one reader who appeared to find the approach congenial, evidence that there might be some readers at least for whom Hobbes’s strange divinity might strike a chord without raising a suspicion of atheism. But if Rand could find Hobbes’s educational ideas and his theology agreeable, Hobbes’s political views nevertheless left a lot to be desired. Again, the title of the book offered the starting point for Rand’s anti-absolutist critique: by the way let it not seem impertinent to tell yow, that I conceive Mr Hobbs was very unhappy in giveing his booke a name, which he gave by some such destiny as Pilate entitled the Cross of our Lord. For that Empire the Whale holds in the Sea is a fit resemblance of the Monarchy he would establish, submitting all to the will of a man who many times measures right by this power, & by potency of Lusts, has little more reason then a Whale, & under whose government the Law of Liviathan is established vz: That it be right & fit that the great fishes eat up the little, as it is in France at this day & elsewhere.41

38 40

S. Hartlib, The Hartlib Papers (Sheffield, 2002), at 62/30/3b–4a. Ibid., 62/21/1a (11 August). 41 Ibid., 62/21/1a.

39

Ibid., 62/30/4a.


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Rand’s republican sympathies put him completely at odds with Hobbes’s absolutism and he could see little else in Leviathan’s portrait of sovereignty than the classical definition of a tyrant. Hobbes’s unusual combination of ideas presented in such a politically ambivalent manner could thus simultaneously delight and appal audiences on all sides of the political and religious spectrum. De Cive had raised doubts in the minds of its readers as to Hobbes’s Royalist or Anglican identity. For its early readers, Leviathan deepened the mystery opening up a range of possible political and religious identities that went far beyond the conventional understandings of Hobbes’s nominal affiliations. It is striking that just as Duppa found it difficult to write Hobbes off immediately as an unacceptable atheist, a reader like Rand found it possible to see beyond Hobbes’s political theory to find ideas serviceable to the Commonwealth. Instead of seeing Leviathan as a text that worked to fix Hobbes’s identity, it might be better to see it as a text that worked to confound a whole range of prejudices about the character of his project. A work whose very title seemed calculated to defy straightforward interpretation, that was absolutist but not Royalist, Christian but not sectarian, authoritarian in religious matters, and yet fiercely anti-clerical, Leviathan managed to escape easy categorisation and attribution to any particular interpretative tradition, even if it might be associated with several. The indeterminacy of Hobbes’s text made it perfect material for opportunistic adaptation, and the first attempt to deploy Leviathan’s arguments in print demonstrate its flexibility for what might seem to be very unpromising causes. John Austin was a Cambridge-educated lawyer who had converted to Catholicism in 1640 and who in the early 1650s was attempting to argue the case for the toleration for Catholics in England. Austin was a Blackloist, a faction within English Catholicism which sought to deny the pope’s deposing power, and a faction which was prepared to deal with the Commonwealth in order to secure toleration. In August 1651, Austin, masquerading as an English Independent, published The Christian Moderator with this end in view, seeking to demonstrate that Catholics were neither idolatrous nor seditious. To demonstrate the former, Austin quoted the ‘learned Mr Hobs in his Leviathan’ to the effect that worship of an image is not idolatry so long as the worship is merely an acknowledgement of the holy designation of the place or image, and not the worship of the place or image as if it were God, or if such places or images are established by private authority.42 Austin’s suggestion that Hobbes’s 42

W. Birchley, The Christian Moderator (1651), p. 12; cf. Leviathan, p. 450 [p. 360 O.P.].

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formula did ‘absolutely clear the Papist of idolatry’ creatively misconstrues the explicitly anti-Catholic thrust of the original discussion, which implies that only the civil magistrate could authorise such worship. Austin’s borrowing comes from paying close attention to a rabidly anti-Catholic position, and recovering from it an argument which could be used to support his own position. Where a recusant like Philip Scot had simply sought to condemn De Cive outright, Austin saw the potential to turn Hobbes’s ambiguous and provocative statements into resources for religious toleration; for Austin’s trick to work, the Protestant reader was to be persuaded that this was what Hobbes had actually said. Leviathan’s interpretative complexity may have persuaded him that this was worth doing.43 In September, Payne wrote his last surviving letter to Gilbert Sheldon: ‘By this time, I presume, you have read Leviathan, and can judge out of your own experience what effect it may work on the better wits.’44 Payne’s concern, as it had been all along, was that Hobbes’s fame as a natural philosopher would make him a powerful and influential voice against the church, a situation that he felt had arisen because Hobbes had been treated badly by the clergy. His comments about Sheldon’s own experience suggests that the latter had already encountered Hobbes’s influence amongst the ‘better wits’.45 Within a month Payne was dead, but his concern about the danger of Hobbes’s influence survived. In a letter from Hammond to Matthew Wren, the former Bishop of Ely, having described Leviathan to Wren as ‘a farrago of Christian Atheism’, Hammond gave an account of its genesis that he probably got from Payne and Sheldon: having in France been angered by some Divines, and having now a mind to return hither, [Hobbes] hath chosen to make his way by this book, which some tell me takes infinitely among the looser sons of the Church, and the king’s party, being indeed a farrago of all the maddest divinity that ever was read, and having destroyed Trinity, Heaven, Hell, may be allowed to compare ecclesiastical authority to the kingdom of fairies.46

The inside story of Hobbes’s treatment at the hands of the exiled clergy, combined with the knowledge that Hobbes wanted to come home, provided a narrative in which Hammond and his colleagues could see 43 44 45 46

Interestingly, Austin does not quote those passages of Leviathan normally associated with a tolerationist view, particularly from chapter 47. ‘Illustrations’, p. 224. For example, Sheldon knew Charles Cotton, who might be a plausible candidate for such a Hobbesian conversion. ‘Illustrations’, 9 (1850) pp. 294–5.


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Leviathan as nothing other than an assault upon the sort of ecclesiastical authority that the Anglican Episcopalians wished to claim and an attempt to undermine doctrines central to traditional accounts of the Christian religion. At a time when the fortunes of the Episcopalians were at an extremely low ebb, Sheldon’s account of Leviathan’s growing influence in court circles was a matter of great concern. In November Sheldon wrote to Hammond with advice about what was to be done. Unfortunately we only have Hammond’s reply where he comments that ‘Your advice concerning Mr Ho[bbes] being perfectly my own sense, I shall adhere to.’ We can only speculate about Sheldon’s advice, but it may well have been a caution not to go into print against Hobbes. Sheldon often had to bridle his friend’s fondness for public polemic, and in this case there were a number of reasons why it might be best to do nothing, not least to avoid drawing unnecessary attention to Hobbes’s work. In this case Hammond agreed, which may explain why he didn’t attack Leviathan until the autumn of 1652. Hammond’s letter to Sheldon also includes a brief passage where he describes Charles II’s reaction to Hobbes. Hammond had met Charles during his escape after the battle of Worcester, and had the chance to question him about his former tutor. Hammond comments to Sheldon that Charles thought ‘that he [Hobbes] was the oddest fellow he ever met with’.47 The questions may not have been idle ones; Sheldon may have wanted to know the king’s attitude because he was aware that there were other plans in hand to neutralise Hobbes’s influence at court. DISCOUNTENANCING MR HOBBES

Charles II returned to Paris after his disastrous military campaign at the end of October 1651, the Royalist strategy of dealing with the Presbyterian Scots in ruins. The defeat signalled a change in strategy, and a crucial change in personnel among his political advisers. On 8 November Edward Hyde learned in Antwerp that Charles had sent for him and Sir Edward Nicholas. Earles and Cosin were again ministering to the king. The revival in the fortunes of the Old Royalists and the Episcopalian clergymen would prove disastrous for Hobbes. Hyde’s response to Leviathan had been much as Hobbes had expected: after reading the book he told Sir Charles Cavendish that he ‘could not enough wonder’ that a man who ‘had so great a reverence for Civil 47

Ibid., 11, p. 92.

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Government, that he resolv’d all Wisdom and Religion it self into a simple obedience and submission to it, should publish a Book, for which, by the constitution of any Government now establish’d in Europe . . . the Author must be punish’d in the highest degree, and with the most severe penalties.’48 Hyde was convinced that Hobbes’s theory was ultimately subversive of all political obligation. He was certainly less worried about the Erastianism, and possibly not as worried about the strange theology, as he was about this basic political weakness, which undermined the whole basis of the Royalist cause. This was probably the reason that even before he had returned to Paris, Hyde and his clerical allies in Paris had set in motion a move to cleanse the Augean stables and have Hobbes excluded from the king’s presence. Some time after Charles’s return to Paris Hobbes had presented a manuscript copy of Leviathan to his former pupil, according to Clarendon ‘engrossed in Vellam in a marvellous fair hand’.49 Hobbes clearly felt that Leviathan’s view of sovereignty was sufficiently compatible with Royalism for such a move to be acceptable, although his awareness of its controversial content and his own desire to return home may have led him to present the book as a gift rather than as a dedicated patronage artefact.50 The gift may well have been his undoing, allowing those Anglicans in attendance (and a prime candidate is Hyde’s friend John Earles) to draw Charles’s attention to Hobbes’s heterodoxy and make the case for his banishment.51 When Hobbes attempted to attend the king at the Louvre at some point in December, James Butler, Marquess of Ormonde informed him that the king would not see him. As Hobbes would later recall in his prose autobiography, this put him in an extremely dangerous situation. Hobbes had not been reticent about his opposition to Catholicism in De Cive and large parts of Leviathan were devoted to the detailed criticism of the Roman church. Now stripped of the king’s protection, Hobbes was left exposed to possible legal action by the 48 49 50

51

Clarendon, Brief view and survey, p. 8. Hobbes had asked Cavendish to solicit Hyde’s opinion. Ibid. Sarasohn argues that presenting the work as a gift would clarify Hobbes’s status as a former employee rather than a royal servant, and thus avoid any problematic statement of allegiance should he have to return to England. L. T. Sarasohn, ‘Was Leviathan a Patronage Artifact?’ History of Political Thought 21: 4 (2000), pp. 606–31. The manuscript, now in the British Library (BL Egerton MS 1910), bears a number (143) of marginal annotations which Schuhmann (I.51–2) suggests may be the work of a court clergyman. They are mostly connected to matters of religion and occur in chapters 12–13 and 31–5. Given that it is impossible to know when these marks were made or who made them, it is difficult to draw any concrete conclusions about them. There are a few other marks, on pp. 247, 251, 255 and 273 which take the form of an ‘x’ or cross.


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French clergy.52 In addition, now that he had been disavowed as an acceptable writer, there was also the possibility that he might share the fate of that other de facto theorist Anthony Ascham, assassinated by Royalist agents in Spain.53 On Hyde’s account, it was an attempt by the French religious authorities to have him arrested that caused Hobbes to flee from Paris, a few days before Hyde himself arrived there on Christmas Day.54 Hobbes’s own account is perhaps the best testimony of a homecoming bitter in more ways than one: I returned to my homeland, not quite sure of my safety. But in no other place could I have been safer. It was cold; there was deep snow; I was an old man; and the wind was bitter. My bucking horse and the rough road gave me trouble.

Concerned that he might be taken for a spy, Hobbes headed for London to make his submission to the Council of State. The philosopher’s expulsion from court was soon being exploited by Mercurius Politicus, which published an account of the events in Paris in the second week of January: They write also from Paris, that M. Hobbs (he that wrote the Book of Commonwealth) sent one of his Books as a Present to the King of Scots, which he accepted, in regard he had formerly been his Tutor in the Mathematicks; but being afterward informed by some of his Priests, that the Book did not only contain many Principles of Atheism and grosse Impiety, (for so they call every thing that squares not with their corrupt Clergy-Interest) but also such as are prejudicial to the Church, and reflected dangerously upon the Majesty of Soveraign Princes, therefore when M. Hobbs came to make a tender of his service to him in person, he was rejected, and word brought to him by the Marquis of Ormond, that the King would not admit him, and withal told him the reason, by which means M. Hobbs declines in credit with his friends there of the Royal stamp, as men shall, that run not to the same height and excess of madnesse with themselves.55

Nedham had already appropriated Hobbes’s political ideas for the Commonwealth and here we find a careful attempt to co-opt the philosopher and his latest work. The editorial launders the reputation of Leviathan when it attributes the accusations of atheism and impiety to the priestcraft of the Episcopalians in Paris. Hobbes the great philosopher had inevitably parted company with the increasingly deranged Royalist 52 53 54 55

Hobbes, ‘Prose Life’, in Gaskin (ed.), Human Nature and De Corpore Politico (Oxford, 1994), p. 249; see also Hobbes, Considerations, p. 8. See Hobbes’s comments in his ‘Verse Life’, Gaskin, Human Nature, p. 260. Clarendon, Brief view and survey, pp. 8–9; R. Ollard, Clarendon and His Friends (London, 1987), p. 148. Mercurius Politicus 84 (8–15 January 1652).

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cause, thus setting the stage for the symbolic representation of his defection. The rebranding of Hobbes did not escape the attention of Hyde’s colleague Sir Edward Nicholas, who commented to Lord Hatton in February that ‘Mr Hobbes is at London much caressed, as one that hath by his writings justified the reasonableness and righteousness of their arms and actions.’56 On the Royalist side, however, the response to Hobbes’s expulsion was mixed. For Nicholas, the removal of ‘that father of Atheists’ was a triumph, ending a malign ideological influence that had corrupted the entourages of the queen and the Duke of York, and which was threatening the king’s court.57 But not everyone was pleased. Nicholas wrote to Hyde in January commenting that Lord Percy, an admirer of Hobbes and member of the Louvre faction that included Hobbes’s closest friends at court (Newcastle, Jermyn, Davenant, Waller and Cowley), was ‘much concerned’ that Hobbes had been forbidden to come to court.58 Nicholas had even heard reports that Ormonde had been slow to tell Hobbes that the king would not see him.59 There was also confusion as to who had been responsible for the deed. Percy apparently blamed Hyde and the Episcopalians, but Nicholas had heard a rumour that the queen’s Roman Catholic chaplain Walter Montague had been responsible. It is possible that both rumours could be true (Montague could have initiated an attempt to have Hobbes arrested), but Hyde was quick to take credit for Hobbes’s removal and to reassure Nicholas that Ormonde had behaved appropriately: I had indeed some hand in the discountenancing my old friend Mr. Hobbes, nor was my Lord Lieutenant [Ormonde] at all slow in signifying the King’s pleasure; what the Catholicks wished I know not, but sure they contributed nothing to that Justice.60

Hobbes’s former friends had taken their revenge, effectively determining the official Royalist response to Leviathan. Although they had had their doubts about Hobbes for some time, his association with the court, his philosophical eminence, and perhaps even the hope that he might be talked around, had led the old Royalists to make their criticism in private. 56 57 58 59

60

The Nicholas Papers: The Correspondence of Sir Edward Nicholas, Secretary of State, ed. G. F. Warner (1920), pp. 286–7 12/22 February 1651/2. Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, III, p. 45. Nicholas Papers p. 285, 8–18 January 1651/2 to Hyde. This may have some basis in fact, as Butler does not appear to have been particularly hostile towards Hobbes. As Noel Malcolm notes, in the inventory of his goods there is even a portrait of the philosopher. CTH, II, pp. 800–1. Clarendon State Papers, quoted in G. C. Robertson, Hobbes (London, 1886), pp. 72–3, n.1.


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Leviathan changed all this, and regardless of whether it might be read as a Royalist work, Hobbes’s forced defection allowed his readers to fix his ambiguous political identity decisively. It is thus no surprise that the first substantial critique of Hobbes’s political theory was published by Richard Royston in February 1652, and that it was by the Royalist writer Sir Robert Filmer, the first of a stream of Royalist anti-Hobbesian works that would establish the tone for one of the most influential interpretative traditions for Hobbes’s work. FILMER’S OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING THE ORIGINALL OF GOVERNMENT

A Kentish gentleman with a legal training, Sir Robert Filmer was an almost exact contemporary of Hobbes. He had come to pamphleteering late in life but in the later 1640s had gone into print to defend the Royalist cause, assaulting Philip Hunton’s Treatise on monarchy in his Anarchy of a limited or mixed monarchy (1648). In the same year Filmer published The necessity of the absolute power of all kings, both works revealing him to be a radical absolutist, although an absolutist poles apart from Hobbes. Filmer’s patriarchal approach to political authority had been forged as a response to the use of contract theory by the crown’s opponents in the 1620s. This was when he probably wrote the manuscript of his most famous work, Patriarcha (only published posthumously in 1680). Whereas Hobbes had taken the route of appropriating contract theory in order to rewrite it in the cause of absolute sovereignty, Filmer had rejected any theory built upon the idea of the natural liberty or equality of mankind as a ridiculous fiction. Filmer’s response was to point to the fact that mankind had always been born into familial subjection, identifying the authority of the father as the ‘only fountain of all regal authority, by the ordination of God himself ’.61 Filmer’s deep and abiding prejudice against contract theory motivated his anonymous Observations of 1652, which targeted in turn Hobbes, Milton and Grotius as theorists afflicted by theoretical misunderstandings of the source of political authority. Filmer had evidently read De Cive but had delayed his assault upon the same political theory in Leviathan until after Hobbes had returned home, strongly suggesting that, in grouping Hobbes in the company that he did, he was making a statement about Hobbes’s new position on the political map. Indeed, Filmer’s short preface seems to single out those aspects of Hobbes’s theory which had already 61

Filmer, Patriarcha and other writings, ed. J. P. Sommerville (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 3, 7.

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been pressed into service by republican propagandists, with the intention of showing that he was less of a friend than they might think. Filmer’s preface begins with praise of Hobbes’s absolutism immediately and crushingly qualified: With no small content I read Mr Hobbes’ book De Cive, and his Leviathan, about the rights of sovereignty, which no man, that I know, hath so amply and judiciously handled. I consent with him about the rights of exercising government, but I cannot agree to his means of acquiring it. It may seem strange I should praise his building and yet mislike his foundation, but so it is. His jus naturae and his regnum institutivum will not down with me, they appear full of contradiction and impossibilities.62

Filmer exploits Hobbes’s occasional comments upon the absolute authority of fathers before the establishment of states to offer the philosopher a better foundation for his sovereignty in the principles of regnum patrimoniale. That Hobbes’s theory might work better if its patriarchal dimension were taken seriously had been an implicit thought in Ascham’s adaptation of Hobbes, and would continue to fascinate writers for whom the state of nature was an abstraction too far, but here Filmer’s suggestion is mischievous: ‘If, according to the order of nature, he had handled paternal government before that by institution, there would have been little liberty left in the subjects of the family to consent to institution of government.’63 The rest of Filmer’s preface appears to have been designed to disable the thought that Leviathan could offer any coherent legitimation to either popular sovereignty or rights based upon conquest, both elements of Hobbes’s theory that had been directly exploited in Commonwealth propaganda. Filmer’s message is that Hobbes’s position is much less congenial than his new supporters might think, and in revealing this Filmer deconstructs those passages that seemed to lend most support to the idea of a republican Hobbes. In particular Filmer focuses upon Hobbes’s complicated theory of representation to argue that any Hobbesian account of democracy or even aristocracy was simply incoherent.64 The same goes for Filmer’s attack upon Hobbes’s theory of conquest, again apparently calibrated to deflate Hobbes’s possible use by republican writers. Filmer points out that a commonwealth by conquest involves the 62 64

Ibid., pp. 184–5. 63 Ibid., p. 185. A Hobbesian democracy, Filmer argues, simply creates a sovereign representative comprising all the people, effectively leaving them back in the state of nature. Similarly a sovereign aristocracy remained at liberty to kill each other and their subjects. What Filmer ignores is Hobbes’s point that in both cases the sovereignty created is unitary and only the sovereign represented plural; so only the people or an aristocracy as a body could act in this way, not as private individuals.


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vanquished covenanting for the life and liberty of his body, giving to the conqueror in return a right to the use of the same at his pleasure. Hobbes’s thought that this slavery amounted to a form of liberty violated the conventional republican account of the concept in which liberty and slavery were antonyms.65 Filmer also exploits the thought that in buying into Hobbes’s theory one is forced to acknowledge that the obedience of one’s subjects could be forfeited in turn, and he pushes home the extreme implications of Hobbes’s de factoism by questioning Hobbes’s suggestion that any right involving conquest comes from the people’s submission: Surely the conqueror simply possesses the right of sovereignty by virtue of his victory? Lastly, and with a calculated assault upon the legitimacy of the authority of the Commonwealth, Filmer asks whether conquerors who are still technically subjects can ever have a right of sovereignty?66 The question is nicely judged to reveal to the reader that Hobbes’s theory of conquest was not a good fit for those who had recently conquered the kingdom. If Commonwealth writers thought that Leviathan offered support for their position, they had made a mistake. The preface gives the appearance of having been composed with Hobbes’s defection in mind. The rest of Filmer’s observations make a series of points related to the general implausibility of Hobbes’s natural jurisprudence, especially when his own statements appear to lend support to a patriarchal case. Filmer is particularly scathing about the very existence of a right or state of nature and the existence of De Cive’s ‘mushroom men’ within it. God had granted original dominion to Adam and rights could therefore only derive from him. Filmer exploited Hobbes’s own admission in Leviathan that the state of nature never generally existed in that form,67 and the annotation in De Cive where he admitted that no son (i.e. an individual born into the authority of its parents) could be understood to be in the state of nature.68 Hobbes’s occasional discussions of the historical existence of mankind, as opposed to the hypothetical limit-case represented by his pure state of nature, opened a window for his critics to accuse him of inconsistency, and Filmer was more than happy to point out the tensions between history and theory. Nevertheless, Filmer doesn’t rely upon this critique, and takes the reader through Hobbes’s argument as stated, undermining it at each turn. Granting Hobbes’s hypothesis (‘which is yet most false’), Filmer argues that there is absolutely no need for a state of nature to be a state of war, 65 67

See also Filmer’s discussion on p. 191. Ibid., p. 187. 68 Ibid., p. 188.

66

Ibid., p. 186.

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given that God had provided enough sustenance and land for all men. Given that the right of nature is about self-preservation, war simply does not make sense and would not occur: ‘If every man tend the right of preserving life, which may be done in peace, there is no cause of war.’69 Even allowing a state of war, Filmer observes that because Hobbes defines the right of nature to be a liberty to do what preserves his life, this effectively rules out war as an effective means of self-preservation ‘and thus the right of nature and the law of nature will be all one. For I think Mr Hobbes will not say the right of nature is a liberty for a man to destroy his own life.’70 Filmer exploits Hobbes’s concessions to a more traditional natural law theory; the conventional Royalist account of rights as liberties (endorsed in the Elements of Law) made rights simply permissions to do as one willed. In De Cive Hobbes had amended his discussion to suggest that one only had a natural right to do what one genuinely believed would lead to self-preservation, a concession which Sir Charles Cavendish had also noted as moving Hobbes’s notion of right closer to the traditional account of law. Indeed Lambert van Velthuysen, a Dutch admirer of De Cive, had defended the work by using precisely the same point to argue that the state of nature would not be a state of war at all.71 For less sympathetic critics like Filmer, the point simply demonstrated the incoherence of Hobbes’s claim that subjective judgements about self-preservation necessarily lead to a state of war. As we shall see, the point recurs in many of the refutations of Hobbes’s theory. As part of his assault upon Hobbes’s contractual mechanism, Filmer also attacks his discussion of rights transfer with some success. Filmer’s observations range from issues of practicality (how can covenants actually take place between every man?) to questions of procedure (how can one establish a sovereign body with one will without appealing only to the majority will?). The seditious consequences of placing individual self-preservation at the heart of a political theory inevitably form a major part of Filmer’s critique; if men have the liberty to refuse any order which undermines their own security, ‘then a sovereign may be denied the benefit of war, and be rendered unable to defend his people – and so the end of government frustrated’.72 Such a move would leave the judgement of security in the hands of the people. 69 71

72

Ibid. 70 Ibid., p. 189. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p. 307; Velthuysen, Dissertatio (1651), for a translation see Anon., A dissertation wherein the fundamentals of natural and moral justice and decorum are laid down and clearly stated according to the principles of Mr Hobbs (1706). Filmer, Patriarcha and other political writings, p. 194.


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Filmer then fastens upon a passage in chapter 21 that would quickly become notorious. Here Hobbes, adapting an argument from chapter 8 in De Cive about escaped slaves, argued that if a group of men had committed an injustice punishable by death, any further collective efforts to defend their lives would in fact be just: ‘Their bearing of arms subsequent to it, though it be to maintain what they have done, is no new unjust act, and if it be only to defend their persons it is not unjust at all.’73 The example was problematic because it appeared to provide a form of legitimacy for the actions of rebels. For Filmer the idea was absurd and dangerous, ‘as if the beginning only of a rebellion were an unjust act, and the continuance of it none at all’. Filmer points to other passages where Hobbes makes it clear that individuals never lose their right of resistance when faced with death, wounds, chains or imprisonment,74 commenting that ultimately the apparent maintenance of such rights entirely removes the point of contracting in the first place: These last doctrines are destructive of all governments whatsoever, and even to the Leviathan itself. Hereby any rogue or villain may murder his sovereign, if the sovereign but offer by force to whip or lay him in the stocks, since whipping may be said to be a wounding and putting him in the stocks an imprisonment . . . Thus we are at least in as miserable a condition of war as Mr Hobbes at first by nature found us.75

Reading Hobbes via Parker, Bramhall and Hyde had found the same conceptual problem lurking beneath the surface in De Cive; in Leviathan the problem was much more visible, especially given Hobbes’s provocatively resonant examples. The passages on a natural right of resistance and the example of the rebels from chapter 21 would become essential ingredients for an account of Hobbes as a resistance theorist. Filmer’s short critique presented in a nutshell the core of Royalist political objections to Leviathan and De Cive, at the same time demonstrating to the parliamentary propagandists like Nedham that the book could offer little support for their cause. In several ways Filmer’s Observations represented an important turning point in the early reception of Leviathan; ranked with those apologists and theorists linked with the new regime, both of Hobbes’s political works had been publicly assaulted by a Royalist. Combined with what appeared to be Hobbes’s political

73 75

Ibid. 74 Ibid., p. 195. Filmer, Patriarcha and other political writings, p. 195. For a modern version of the same argument see J. Hampton’s Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge, 1986).

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apostasy, the Royalist faithful had been left in no doubt about the subversive character of Hobbes’s work. For republican propagandists, on the other hand, Hobbes presented a rather different problem. Although Mercurius Politicus had attempted to put a positive political spin upon Hobbes’s disgrace, Leviathan was not a text that could be easily put to work for the republican cause. Rand’s comments about Hobbes’s addiction to monarchy and Filmer’s expose´ of Hobbes’s superficially democratic and de facto claims show that it was difficult to exploit in a positive sense.76 Of course, it wasn’t only Hobbes’s politics that made Leviathan problematic. Hobbes’s religious views were about to open up a whole new front against his works as Presbyterian writers began to react to Hobbes’s reappearance in England. It is perhaps surprising that a substantial Presbyterian critique of De Cive’s Erastianism had not already appeared, but in the later 1640s Hobbes’s open-ended religious identity and his Royalism may well have meant that refuting his work was a low priority for leading Presbyterian divines. Leviathan, however, was a different proposition, not least because it explicitly undermined the kind of authority Presbyterians still sought to exercise in the face of what they saw as an increasingly lax religious environment.77 Taking the lead in stirring up opposition to Hobbes was the Presbyterian divine and minister of Kidderminster Richard Baxter, who would become a leading opponent of Hobbes’s work. In February 1652, soon after Hobbes’s reappearance in the country, Baxter had written to Thomas Hill, the intruded Master of Trinity College Cambridge, expressing his revulsion at Leviathan’s teachings. Hill replied that: Your deepe detestation of Hobbs his Leviathan hath awakened some of us to consider what is fitt to be done therein. I was satisfyed concerning his spirit in religion before I minded this late rapsodie by a passage in his booke De Cive, wherein the Holy Spirits infusion of grace is [made] seditious doctrine.78

Leviathan had come as no surprise to Hill after reading De Cive, but Baxter now wanted more direct action, possibly because of Hobbes’s high-profile return to England and the sympathetic official treatment that he had received. 76

77 78

This may be one explanation why another edition of the more republican-friendly De Corpore Politico was produced in 1652. Thomas Roycroft printed the book under two different imprints for former business partners John Martin and John Ridley who had published the first edition together. For explicit attacks upon Presbyterian doctrine, see Leviathan, pp. 427, 475. Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, ed. N. H. Keeble and G. F. Nuttall. Thomas Hill to Baxter Trinity College 13 February 1651/2, pp. 74–5.


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The context to Baxter’s concern about Leviathan lay in his revulsion at the antinomianism he had encountered amongst army Independents and later amongst the sectaries tolerated by the new regime. For Baxter, the crucial theological argument that had made such radicalism possible had been the idea that predestined election removed the necessity for much by way of faith or works, thus releasing those who believed themselves to be the elect from any rules or obligations. Baxter’s Aphorisms of justification (1649) attempted to argue that although God’s election was unconditional, there was a still a role for the Arminian notion that election was theoretically available to all through Christ’s sacrifice. The latter form of what Baxter termed sufficient grace, enabled the possibility of salvation even if it still took God’s efficient grace to ensure the salvation of the truly elect.79 This position allowed Baxter to stress the importance of the exercise of individual free will in choosing a path that would enable election, and retained a substantial role for the godly pastor in guiding individuals to that end. By contrast, Hobbes’s radical rewriting of Christianity attempted to neutralise the thought that salvation could be enabled by particular acts of faith over and above a simple profession of belief in Christ’s future rule. This was designed to disable the attempts of priests like Baxter to have any purchase upon the process of salvation by denying that Christ’s law has any authority independent of the magistrate. For Baxter, this attempt to downgrade the importance of Christ’s doctrinal injunctions linked Hobbes with the antinomian radicals. Writing to Thomas Hill in early March 1652, he explained: Had I time I cud show, that the denying of Redemption to the Non-Elect in Davenant sense hath a Multitude of Intollerable Inconveniences. I speake of the evill of Denying Christ’s Doctrine to be a Law, in that most of the Horrid consequences in Hobbs Booke arises from that Principle: viz. ergo Xt Doth but teach and Princes command . . . ergo Scripture is no further a Law (saith Hobbs) than sovereigns so make it: Nor Ministers have any power of Governing, or Commanding, Nor Christ any kingdome now on Earth; but only in preparing men by Doctrin for one hereafter, and 100 the like Hobbs abounds with.80

Hobbes’s diminution of Christ’s role in De Cive had already offended Anglicans like Bramhall and Hyde, and Baxter in turn found the argument 79 80

W. Lamont, Baxter and the Millenium: Protestant Imperialism and the English Revolution (1979), pp. 135–40. Dr Williams’ Library MS 59, Baxter Correspondence, 6 vols., III, ff. 272v–273. Partially cited in the Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, I, p. 76.

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as elaborated in chapter 41 of Leviathan nothing less than evil. Hobbes had argued that Christ’s earthly jurisdiction would only start at the Resurrection with the consequence that Christ’s authority was limited to teaching, thereby subordinating Christians to the civil sovereign and eliminating the mediating role of the clergy in achieving salvation. Leviathan thus represented a new strain of the antinomian disease that needed to be countered by official action. Baxter’s instinct when dealing with Hobbes’s heretical ideas would be to call for his book to be banned or burned,81 and this was an approach that he shared with other Presbyterians, who singled out Leviathan in the autumn of 1652 in an appeal to Parliament to tighten up the censorship laws.82 In September a group of Presbyterian booksellers led by Luke Fawn published A beacon set on fire, a pamphlet giving details of ‘Popish and Blasphemous Books’ in the hope that they might be suppressed.83 The booksellers’ main concern was popery, and the thought that the unsettled religious situation might allow Catholicism to re-establish itself, but after listing several Catholic works including Philip Scot’s anti-Hobbesian Treatise of the schism,84 the booksellers turned to the ‘Names and Blasphemies of some Books not Popish’. Top of this list was ‘HOBS his LEVIATHAN’ and the booksellers then presented nine examples of Hobbes’s most offensive blasphemies. The extracts are taken from chapters 33, 35, 36, 38 and 42 and reveal the same concerns that Baxter had shared with Hill about the way that Hobbes had rewritten core Christian beliefs to make them compatible with civil authority, inverting the traditional relationship between divine and human obligation.85 The first extract was taken from chapter 33 where Hobbes argued that the only authority that could oblige individuals to obey scripture was the sovereign, thus removing the idea that scripture carried with it any independent obligation, a position that would become one of the most controversial in the whole text for critics of all denominations. The booksellers also extracted a section from chapter 35 where Hobbes’s civic reinterpretion of the Lord’s Prayer meant that the line ‘Thy Kingdom come’ referred to the restoration of God’s earthly kingdom after the day of judgement, rather 81 82

83 84

He would call for this in 1655, see R. Baxter, Humble advice (1655), p. 7. It is not impossible that the booksellers’ action was one consequence of the correspondence between Baxter and Hill. One of the booksellers, Thomas Underhill, was responsible for publishing most of Baxter’s works during the period. See also J. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, pp. 209–10 and notes. Luke Fawne, A beacon set on fire (1652), A2r. Thomason received his copy on 21 September 1652. Ibid., p. 13. 85 Ibid., pp. 14–15.


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than the traditional spiritual interpretation. Hobbes’s promotion of the sovereign also attracted attention in an extract from chapter 36 where Hobbes suggested that the sovereign was a prophet by whose rules any doctrine was to be accepted or rejected. If the booksellers were unhappy about the central role Hobbes granted to civil sovereignty, they were also critical of Hobbes’s unusual soteriology and his account of the afterlife, both of which were designed to rewrite Christian beliefs in line with his rigorous materialism and mortalism. The booksellers’ concerns focus around Hobbes’s ruthlessly materialist elimination of a spiritual realm. They single out his argument in chapter 38 that the soul’s immortality does not begin until the Resurrection. This doctrine stemmed from Hobbes’s mortalist rejection of the idea that soul might have an independent incorporeal existence, for Hobbes a philosophically corrupt reading of scripture. The booksellers also found Hobbes’s highly unusual reinterpretation of Hell objectionable, citing Hobbes’s arguments in chapter 38 that the terms for the devil signified not persons but the office of earthly enemies of the church. Here Hobbes’s reinterpretation attempted to eliminate superstitious belief in evil spirits in favour of an understanding of Satan as the mortal enemies of God’s followers. Equally, Hobbes’s argument in the same chapter that the torments of the damned actually take place on earth, but only for a finite period, overturned traditional understandings of Hell and eternal punishment in favour of a mortalist and materialist reading of scripture. Hobbes himself acknowledged that his readings were unusual. His hostility to the very idea of a spiritual realm virtually guaranteed that doctrines such as these would face criticism from most Christians, but when Presbyterians like Baxter were concerned to make God’s eternal punishment an essential incentive to godly living, Hobbes’s odd mortalist alternative appeared at best to diminish its impact. The last set of objections focuses upon chapter 42, a chapter that would become the most controversial in Leviathan. The booksellers single out Hobbes’s statement that if the sovereign commands an individual to say that they do not believe in Christ, then ‘we must obey the Prince’. Hobbes’s provocative formulation of this argument would attract perhaps more odium than any other passage in the book. His position was that external profession of any doctrine simply involves following the law and doesn’t compromise one’s internal beliefs. The denial is not an individual act, but the act of the sovereign. A similar statement is picked out of Hobbes’s argument that ‘actions of men can never be unlawful or sinful, but when they are against the Law of the Commonwealth’. This section comes from Hobbes’s discussion of excommunication, and his

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transformation of it into a purely civil sanction. As part of Hobbes’s campaign to eliminate all forms of external authority other than the civil laws, he repeatedly stressed that no other source of authority, even scripture (as the booksellers note), could be allowed to define what constitutes illegality or sinfulness. To allow scripture authority independent of civil law would allow it to become an excuse for rebellion. For the booksellers such a move inverted the proper relationship between God and man. It also undermined the basis for the actions of Christian martyrs; the pamphlet paraphrases Hobbes’s comment that those that have allowed themselves to be martyred since the time of the Apostles have simply misunderstood the nature of the obligation to God with the uncomfortable consequence that ‘many have needlessly cast away their lives’. As a critique the booksellers’ list of propositions is simple and effective, isolating some of the most shocking moments from the text to uncover the heretodoxy of Hobbes’s position. When so much of the text contained principles and arguments that were attractive and apparently acceptable, this method of extracting and paraphrasing unacceptable statements would become a common feature of Hobbes criticism. If there was any uncertainty as to what Hobbes actually meant, leading paraphrase, such as the addition of the suggestion that Christian martyrs had ‘died needlessly’, allowed Hobbes’s intentions to be made clear and his text to be decided in favour of a particular reading. In this case, Hobbes’s representation allowed him to be paraded alongside other blasphemers and their books such as the Independent Joshua Sprigge and the Socinian John Bidle, thus casting him, as Baxter had, as a religious radical. Far from striking a universally popular chord, however, the booksellers were themselves assaulted in turn by pro-toleration army officers in early December, in a pamphlet titled The beacons quenched, which raised, but did not examine, the thought that Hobbes and Sprigge might have been quoted out of context.86 The dispute rumbled on but by this stage the books involved were a secondary feature of a debate about Presbyterian designs on political power. The Presbyterian campaign may not have got Leviathan banned, but it had revealed for the first time in print the radical character of Hobbes’s theological position. Public discussion of Leviathan’s religious heterodoxy may also have encouraged Henry Hammond to break his silence on Leviathan. In early November, Royston published Hammond’s A letter of resolution to six quaeres, where Hammond covered a variety of issues connected to the new church settlement including, inevitably, Episcopal 86

The beacons quenched (1652), p. 13.


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authority and the issue of ordination. At the end of his formal discussion Hammond inserts an assault on Leviathan, the theology of which he describes as ‘a Rapsody of as strange Divinity, as since the dayes of the Gnosticks, and their several Progenies, the Sun ever saw’.87 But instead of attacking Hobbes for this, Hammond’s critique settles into a rather technical discussion of Leviathan’s account of clerical ordination. The issue went to the heart of the Episcopalians’ problem with Hobbes: his ruthless exclusion of any form of independent spiritual authority. Hobbes had argued in chapter 42 of Leviathan that the process of appointing clerics in the early Christian church was a matter reserved to the church as a whole with no special role for clergymen exercising spiritual powers derived from the apostolic succession. The payoff for this argument was that in a Christian commonwealth the church and state are one body, and the election and ordination of clerics was a matter for the sovereign. In a painstaking scholarly exegesis of Hobbes’s scriptural claims, Hammond sought to defend the thought that election and ordination were separate processes and that the latter could only be performed by the Apostles and their successors.88 Hammond’s treatment of Hobbes is surprisingly restrained; even though it is evident that he thinks little of Hobbes’s unusual scriptural readings, the care taken in unpicking Leviathan’s claims perhaps betrays Episcopalian concerns that there were readers who might be persuaded by Hobbes’s apparently scholarly approach to scripture. The public discussion of Hobbes’s theological heterodoxy may also have encouraged others who had been silent about Leviathan to speak out, not least because silence might indicate continuing support for Hobbes’s more wayward ideas. This issue was particularly acute for those Oxford scientists who had been so enthusiastic about Hobbes’s scientific promise, and early works like Humane Nature. Hobbes’s reappearance in England had provided an opportunity for them to meet the philosopher in person, and Hobbes himself recalled that soon after he arrived back in the country ‘divers persons that professed to love philosophy and mathematics, came to see me; and some of them to let me see them, and hear and applaud what they applauded in themselves.’89 The meeting or meetings were probably held at the London residence of the Royalist physician Sir Charles 87 88 89

Henry Hammond, A letter of resolution to six quaeres (1653 [amended to 1652 on Thomason’s copy]) p. 384. Hammond singles out Hobbes’s reinterpretations of the Trinity, Heaven and Hell. Ibid., pp. 385, 397–8, 398–9. Hobbes, EW 7: 337–8. See also Probst’s account of the meeting, ‘Infinity and creation: the origin of the controversy between Thomas Hobbes and the Savilian professors Seth Ward and John Wallis’, in The British Journal of the History of Science 26: 90–3 (1993), p. 276.

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Scarborough90 and, as Hobbes’s gloss suggests, they don’t seem to have gone very well. It isn’t clear exactly what happened, and later accounts are coloured with prejudice, but Hobbes apparently defended the novelty of his claim that all sense is nothing but a perception of motion, in contrast to what he suggested was the dominant Aristotelian doctrine of the Schools, that sensation is performed by species. The university scientists, possibly already anxious about the implications of Leviathan and perhaps irritated by Hobbes’s suggestions that the universities were slavishly devoted to Aristotle, turned on him. John Wallis recorded later that Seth Ward, the author of the preface to Humane Nature, put it to Hobbes that that his scientific claims had already been made by Descartes, Gassendi and Kenelm Digby.91 The charge of course preserved the value of the science, but undermined Hobbes’s compromised authority. Hobbes was furious; he was always extremely proud of his scientific achievements and the accusation that his work was unoriginal made him very angry, especially when it came from individuals with an agenda.92 This first-hand experience of apparent unreasonableness and arrogance, however it was provoked, seems to have provided the original example of the magisterial behaviour that became such a major feature of later critiques of the philosopher. It was, of course, appropriate that Hobbes behaved like a Leviathan, and the anecdote helped to merge the philosopher’s image with that of his book. As Hobbes came under fire for his theological views in the autumn of 1652 Ward went further and publicly dissociated himself from the philosopher. He did this by issuing a A philosophicall essay towards an eviction of the being and attributes of God, published in Oxford shortly after the booksellers had named and shamed Hobbes’s theological views.93 The treatise itself dealt with the being and attributes of God, the soul’s immortality and the truth and authority of scripture, and Ward claimed that he had composed it several years previously. Towards the end of his prefatory remarks, Ward suddenly digresses into a topical attack upon Hobbes, drawing attention to the philosopher’s denial of the existence of 90 91 92

93

Pope’s Life of Seth (1961 Luttrell ed. J. B. Bamborough), pp. 124–5. Wallis, Elenchus geometriae Hobbianae (Oxford, 1655), p. 116; Hobbes gives his view of the matter in EW 7: 337–341. Walter Pope’s account in his Life of Seth [Ward] ([1961] Luttrell ed. J. B. Bamborough), p. 125, seems to recall the same (or a similar) occasion. Although Hobbes could enjoy the process of verbally baffling unprepared opponents like Bramhall, it was a different matter when he uncovered more organised opposition. When he sensed that he was being lectured at, or that the objections were coming from pre-prepared positions, the dialogue would tend to be abandoned. S. Ward, A philosophicall essay towards an eviction of the being and attributes of God (Oxford, 1652).


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incorporeal substances, a position at odds with Ward’s orthodox defence of the soul’s immortality.94 What follows is a carefully structured rejection of Hobbes’s authority. Ward comments that he ‘hath a very great respect and a very high esteem for that worthy Gentleman’, but he must acknowledge that a great proportion of it is founded upon a belief & expectation concerning him, a belief of much knowledge in him, and an expectation of those Philosophicall and Mathematicall works, which he hath undertaken; and not so much upon what he hath yet published to the world, and that he doth not see reason from thence to recede from anything upon his Authority, although he shall avouch his discourse to proceed Mathematically.

The praise gets fainter and gives way to condemnation, a verbal representation of Ward’s volte face in the face of Hobbes’s heterodoxy; focusing now upon Hobbes’s more recent works on religious matters, Ward suggests that Hobbes ‘hath much injured the name of Demonstration, by bestowing it upon some of his discourses, which are exceedingly short of that evidence and truth which is required to make a discourse able to bear that reputation’. At the heart of the dispute was Hobbes’s materialist rejection of the idea that there could be such a thing as an incorporeal substance. Hobbes had come close to saying as much in the Elements of Law, but it was only in Leviathan that this was spelled out.95 For Ward, Hobbes’s denial of incorporeal substance simply meant that Hobbes was unable to think beyond the idea of matter, not that incorporeal substances didn’t actually exist. Hobbes’s delusions in this respect betrayed his arrogance, ‘that he conceives himself in the highest and utmost bound of human apprehension, and that his reason is the measure of truth’. In an effective simile Ward likens Hobbes to a man who denies the existence of the moons of Jupiter because he looks at the planet with his naked eyes instead of with a telescope: ‘the reason why M. H denies those beings whilest other men apprehend them, is for that he lookes at them with his Fancy, they with their minde.’ Ward’s pamphlet, or at least the part dealing with the immortality of the soul, was thus turned into an anti-Hobbesian treatise. As Noel Malcolm 94 95

Ibid., Sig. A3r. In Elements, 1.11.5, Hobbes states that incorporeal bodies as such were simply an ‘absurdity of speech’, although as Douglas Jesseph, Squaring the Circle: The War between Hobbes and Wallis (Chicago, 1999), pp. 51–2, rightly states, he falls short of explicitly denying the existence of immaterial substances. Cf. Leviathan, ch. 34, pp. 269–70.

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has pointed out, one of the more unusual features of Hobbes’s reception was the way that those who had been prepared to associate themselves with Hobbes’s natural philosophy were to become some of his most vicious critics.96 The reason was that the scientists were in danger of guilt by association, and in the context of the philosopher’s increasingly compromised reputation, it was important for them to establish where they stood with respect to his ideas. Ironically it was their close intellectual proximity to Hobbes that required them to reject his authority and criticise his work. ALEXANDER ROSS

Almost all of the critical commentary attracted by Leviathan in the autumn of 1652 had concentrated upon the book’s radical theology rather than its political theory, and this trend would be continued into the spring of 1653, when another dedicated critique of Leviathan appeared, this time by the redoubtable Scottish schoolmaster Alexander Ross. Born in 1591 and educated at King’s College in Aberdeen, Ross imbibed early the conservative Aristotelian scholasticism that he would champion in later life against the new upstart philosophies. After completing his doctorate in Scotland, Ross had moved to England in 1616, accepting the Mastership of the Free School at Southampton. Some time in the early 1640s he moved to London, where he ran a private school in Covent Garden.97 Ross’s campaign against the new philosophy had begun in 1634 with his Commentum de terrae motu circulari (1634), which rejected the Copernican hypothesis that the earth rotated around the sun. His attack on heliocentricism continued in the 1640s when he targeted the Oxford scientist John Wilkins in his The new planet no planet: or The earth no wandering star; Except in the wandring heads of the Galileans (1646). Ross also attacked Sir Thomas Browne and Sir Kenelm Digby for their departure from orthodox Aristotelianism. Hobbes was therefore in good company when Ross turned his attention to Leviathan. On Ross’s own account, some of his friends asked him to look at Leviathan and to give his opinion of it in the first half of 1652. As a result he set aside his other studies over the summer of that year to investigate the book more thoroughly. The reason why Hobbes’s ‘chief Tenets’ needed 96 97

Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the Royal Society’, in Aspects, pp. 317–35. D. Allen, ‘‘‘An Ancient Sage Philosopher’’: Alexander Ross and the Defence of Philosophy’, The Seventeenth Century 16 (2001), pp. 69–94; but see also Malcolm, Aspects, pp. 281–2 especially note 108.


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investigating in this way was, according to Ross, Hobbes’s influence upon younger students. Hobbes’s ideas, ‘though erroneous and dangerous, are swallowed down by some young Sciolists without nauseating’.98 The danger in Leviathan lay in the way that it packaged heterodox ideas in a superficially convincing manner: I finde him [Hobbes] a man of excellent parts, and in this book much gold, and withal much dross; he hath mingled his wine with too much water, and imbittered his pottage with too much Coloquintida: there are some of his positions which may prove of dangerous consequence, to green heads, and immature judgments, who look no farther then the superficies, or outside of things, thinking all to be gold that glisters, and all wholesome food that is pleasing to the tast; under green grass lurch oftentimes snakes and serpents, such as Euridice perceive not, till they be stung to death.99

Ross’s verdict here echoes Duppa’s view that the book was an odd mixture of the good and the bad, but Ross takes upon himself the task of exposing exactly what the dangerous consequences of Hobbes’s theory were. For Ross, and it seems, many early readers, Leviathan was a difficult and paradoxical work whose implications were very hard to read. As with the Presbyterian reaction, it was perceived to be a matter of some importance to draw out from Leviathan exactly what it was that made the book so dangerous, but in contrast to the Presbyterian case, Ross followed Filmer and to a certain extent Ward in standing back from an accusation that Hobbes was being malicious. Indeed, there is a perhaps surprising sympathy for Hobbes, already revealed in Ross’s compliments about Hobbes’s abilities; on Ross’s account, Hobbes the talented philosopher has simply made dangerous mistakes that he should amend: In discovering of these errors, I quarrel not with Mr. Hobbs, but with his book; which not onely I, but many more, who are both learned, and judicious, men, look upon as a piece dangerous both to Government and Religion. All the hurt I wish him is, true illumination, a sanctified heart, and Christian sobriety; that he may retract what is amiss.100

Ross’s view of Leviathan was that it represented not so much a coherent system as a heterogeneous compilation of ancient heterodoxy. Faced with the challenging task of deciding exactly what Leviathan represented, Ross 98 99

100

A. Ross, Leviathan drawn out with a hook, or, Animadversions upon Mr. Hobbs his Leviathan (1653), Sig. A3r. Ibid., Preface. Coloquintida was the spongy pulp of the bitter cucumber, an Asiatic plant related to the watermelon. Eurydice was famously stung by a serpent concealed in a meadow which caused her death and descent to Hades. Ibid., To the Reader.

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played with an image of the biblical Leviathan, in this case swallowing not Jonah, but Cerinthus the heretic: Hobbes had carelessly strung together a whole series of heretical doctrines and ‘vomited up the condemned opinions of the old hereticks’, including (amongst others) the ‘the Anthropomorphits, Sabellians, Nestorians, Saduceans, Arabeans, Tacians or Eucratits, Manichies, Mahumetans and others’.101 One of the striking things about early readers of Leviathan like Ross, Duppa and Hammond, is the difficulty that they have in placing the book within recognisable traditions. Leviathan is a strange mixture or a ‘Farrago’, or a ‘Rapsodie’ rather than a programmatic statement with an identifiable provenance. When faced with the difficulty of identifying where Leviathan was coming from, Ross could only see it in terms of a ragbag of regurgitated heresy, a position that allowed him at once to identify the character of the dangers involved, but which also had the effect of denying an intellectual unity to Hobbes’s project. This analysis allowed Ross to retain the thought that Hobbes might adjust his views by jettisoning the mistakes, something that the uncovering of a sinister underlying project might not have allowed. As a result, Ross works through Hobbes’s chapters in order, albeit with a selective interest in his science and theology, rather than in his politics. His reaction to Hobbes’s science simply demonstrates the vast distance between Ross’s Aristotelian worldview and Hobbes’s new paradigm. The early sections of Leviathan propose a physics and physiology completely alien to Ross’s experience, eliciting little by way of commentary other than the slightly impatient correction of basic lapses from Aristotle’s judgement. But this soon gives way to more substantial objections. For example, commenting on chapter 5, Ross notes that Hobbes makes the idea of faith being inspired or infused an absurdity on the grounds that nothing can be poured or breathed into anything but body.102 Ross quickly notes that the consequence would be to argue that on these grounds the soul and the Holy Ghost must also be body. Ross also unpacks the problems latent in Hobbes’s controversial definition of religion in chapter 6 as ‘Feare of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publiquely allowed . . . ’103 Noting the subversive implication of Hobbes’s position he comments that: ‘We must mend the Creed, if Mr Hobbs his religion be true; and instead of saying I believe in God, we must say, I imagine, or feign in my minde an invisible power.’104

101 103

Ibid. 102 Ibid., p. 8; cf. Leviathan, ch. 5, pp. 34–5. Ibid., ch. 6, p. 42. 104 Ross, Leviathan drawn out, p. 15.


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Ross pays particular attention to Hobbes’s deployment of paradox, perhaps Hobbes’s trademark technique in De Cive and Leviathan. Ross realised that Hobbes’s unusual reversals of traditional conceptual relationships were the features of his argument that led readers towards highly controversial conclusions. Ross’s strategy for dealing with them was to draw out the dangerous consequences in order to exhibit their self-evident absurdity. In one example, Ross scrutinises the ‘strange Paradoxes’ in chapter 10 where Hobbes parades a series of apparently counter-intuitive and provocative formulations that what is honourable is ‘whatsoever possession, action or quality, is an argument and signe of Power’. One of the consequences is that an unjust action, if joined with power, is honourable because honour arises from the opinion of power.105 For Ross, the simple correlation of honour and power allows the possibility that Caligula and Domitian could be honourable men by virtue of their power alone, thus denying that virtue or goodness might be essential attributes of honourableness. Hobbes’s odd statement may sound superficially plausible, but its simplifications conceal a wide variety of intolerable consequences. Despite his stated interest in the political consequences of Hobbes’s work, Ross offers no commentary at all upon some of the most notorious passages of Hobbes’s political theory. Leviathan’s account of the state of nature and the laws of nature is passed by without comment, and there is no discussion of Hobbes’s contract theory or the seditious consequences of chapter 21 or the ‘Review and Conclusion’. Hobbes is portrayed straightforwardly as an occasionally inconsistent theorist of tyrannical absolutism. Ross does defend Aristotle’s political views against Hobbes’s sometimes direct assaults. Although he concedes that all men are equal ‘in regard of the essential perfection of the soul’, he echoes Hyde’s defence of Aristotle’s argument about natural inequalities and the resulting need for subjection.106 Ross reveals that his political preference is for a form of constitutional Royalism which puts him severely at odds with what he perceives to be Hobbes’s apology for tyranny.107 Commenting on chapter 18 of Leviathan where Hobbes argues that princes can do no injuries to their subjects, Ross comments that this is a doctrine that ‘will hardly down with free born people, who choose to themselves Princes, not to tyrannise over them, but . . . to rule them. The people were not mad to give their power so to Princes, as to be their slaves.’108 Although Ross was a Royalist, like 105 107 108

Leviathan, ch. 10, pp. 66–7. 106 Ross, Leviathan drawn out, pp. 18–20. Ibid., pp. 30–1. Ross defends a constitutional Royalist account of a self-binding monarch in his account of oaths, covenants and promises. Ibid., p. 21; cf. Leviathan, ch. 18, p. 124.

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Filmer he angled his attack on Hobbes’s theory of authorisation to reflect its difficulties for a republican account of popular sovereignty. Staying within a republican idiom, Ross also attacks Hobbes’s reductive suggestion that ‘whether the commonwealth be monarchical or popular, the freedom is still the same’. Ross rejects Hobbes’s conflation of the situations, distinguishing between conditions of absolute monarchy where ‘there is no liberty but meer slavery’, and other regimes (monarchical or democratic) where the amount of liberty varies according to ‘the condition of the times, and the people, and the disposition of the Governors’.109 Ross derides Hobbes’s attempt in chapter 20 to elide the distinction between tyrants and kings: This is to put no difference between the Father and Butcher of his Countrey, between the Shepherd and the woolf, between sharing and fleaing of the sheep. A King governs, and is governed by laws; a tyrant hath no law but his will; jus est in armis, opprimit leges timor.110

Ross’s distinction between just/lawful and arbitrary/tyrannical power is subsequently used to deny practical features of Hobbes’s absolutism, particularly his property theory. Here Ross’s formulation returns to those pre-civil war Royalist arguments that had caused Hobbes to reject these distinctions in the first place: ‘. . . the property then of the subject excludeth not the Princes right in cases of necessity, but onely his arbitrary power.’ The treatment of Hobbes’s religion is more detailed and interesting in Ross’s attempts to identify the source of Hobbes’s religious views. Ross is less interested in ecclesiology than he is in Hobbes’s theology. Ross came to Leviathan after publishing the first English edition of the Koran in 1649, and one of his most striking responses to Hobbes’s mortalist interpretations of the afterlife is to suggest that they are very close to an Islamic account of paradise. It would eventually become a commonplace for Hobbes’s political theory to be compared to Turkish despotism, a conventional archetype of tyrannical government, but the identification of his theological arguments with this source is more unusual. 109

110

Ross wants to preserve here the classical category of the arbitrary tyrant whose subjects are slaves ruled by force. He seems to see liberty as freedom from arbitrary interference, a quality which can be enjoyed in monarchies as well as in commonwealths. Hobbes’s redefinition of liberty as physical non-interference allowed him to remove these traditional distinctions betweens types of rule. Ibid., p. 22; the quote is from Seneca, Hercules furens CCLI: ‘. . . might makes right; fear silences the power of the law’, cf. Leviathan, ch. 20. Ross also criticises Hobbes’s shaky scriptural warrant for absolute power, a notorious passage from the book of Samuel (1 Samuel 8:11–12) detailing the servitude of the Jews; the passage in question, Ross argues, ‘describes unto us, not the qualities of Kings, but of tyrants’.


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Bypassing Hobbes’s comments about the sovereign authorising scripture, Ross was more concerned with Hobbes’s denial of Moses’ authorship of the Pentateuch, offering alternate explanations as to how Moses could have written of his own death.111 Regarding Hobbes’s other assaults on Old Testament writers as ‘of no moment or validity’, Ross moves on to chapter 34 and a passage that would become a central piece of evidence in the argument over Hobbes’s theism. In that chapter, Hobbes argues that ‘For the Universe, being the Aggregate of all Bodies, there is no reall part thereof that is not also Body; nor any thing properly a Body, that is not a part of (that Aggregate of all Bodies) the Universe.’112 Ross offers the first printed discussion of the point and identifies straight away the consequence that Hobbes was effectively saying that God, if he exists at all, is material.113 Ross identifies Tertullian as a source for Hobbes’s view, a Christian precedent to which Hobbes would himself allude in his own defence from 1662 onwards. Ross is nevertheless clear that the church had rejected Tertullian’s position and saw God as an incorporeal substance of the sort that Hobbes denied. Ross pursues the implications of Hobbes’s robust materialism into his treatment of Christ, Heaven and Hell. The idea that Christ should return to the earth as a mortal king Ross simply finds at odds with scriptural accounts that state that Christ returns to earth only to judge the quick and the dead. Ross’s strategy here, as elsewhere in his treatment of Hobbes’s religious doctrine, is to uncover possible heretical versions of Hobbes’s doctrine, in order to demonstrate that Hobbes’s approach is neither original nor orthodox. Where Hobbes explicitly proclaims the novelty of his idea that Christ’s kingdom is an earthly kingdom, Ross finds a precedent in the teachings of ‘Cerinthus the heretick’.114 Ross also denies the novelty of Hobbes’s teachings about the soul’s death until its resurrection at judgement day, arguing that it was the heresy maintained by the Arabian

111

112 113 114

Ross argues that Moses wrote in a scriptural mode that allowed him to anticipate his own death. For Hobbes’s arguments on this issue, see N. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Ezra and the Bible’, in Aspects, pp. 383–431. Leviathan ch. 34, pp. 269–70; Hobbes makes the same point in chapter 46, p. 463. Ross, Leviathan drawn out, pp. 35–6; see also p. 87 commenting on the passage from Leviathan, chapter 46, p. 463. Cerinthus was an early Christian Gnostic-Ebionite heretic referred to by Irenaeus, Adv. Haer., I, c. xxvi; III, c. iii, c. x, and Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., III, xxviii, 2. Cerinthus distinguished between Jesus and Christ. Jesus was mere man, though eminent in holiness. He suffered and died and was raised from the dead, or, as some say Cerinthus taught, He will be raised from the dead at the Last Day and all men will rise with Him.

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heretics and more recently by the soul-sleepers, or ‘Psychopanuychits’.115 Hobbes, in an opinion that ‘relisheth too much of the Alcoran’, simply mistakes allegorical accounts of Heaven in the scripture for descriptions of an earthly kingdom.116 The same goes for Hobbes’s earthly vision of Hell, ‘a doctrine well beseeming the school of Mahomet, not of Christ’.117 Hobbes’s ‘strange wheemsie concerning the blessed Trinity’ causes particular confusion for Ross and he refers to Hobbes’s adaptation of his theory of representation as ‘strange stuffe’. He had noticed it first in chapter 16, where Hobbes lays out his theory of representation to argue that God had been represented by Moses and Christ.118 For Ross this made no sense because only separate individuals could represent each other, but Christ and God were one and the same. In considering Hobbes’s treatment of the issue in chapter 42, Ross makes the orthodox objection that the term ‘person’ in the Trinity did not refer to an act of representation at all, but rather to a particular manifestation of God’s unitary essence. Hobbes’s use of representation had been designed to demystify a Christian doctrine that was close to tritheism. However, for Ross, Hobbes’s attempt to make sense of the idea of the Trinity with his unitary account of personation opened the way to absurdity; if representing God makes an individual a person of the Trinity, then three people hardly reflect all those priests and kings who have a claim to represent God on earth: ‘in this respect the Trinity may be called a Legion, or rather innumerable persons.’119 Ross’s doubts about the relevance of a more general theory of representation to the Trinity may already have been expressed to Hobbes, who reported that John Cosin had thought the passage insufficiently ‘applicable to the mystery of the Trinity’.120 As we shall see, the outraged response to this particularly heretical doctrine would lead Hobbes to make an uncharacteristic public retraction of the view in 1668.121 In terms of ecclesiology, Ross’s complaints centre around the augmented status of the sovereign. Of Hobbes’s claim in chapter 42 that sovereigns are to teach religion, Ross comments: ‘. . . to allow Princes power to teach what they will, is to make them absolute lords, not onely over our bodies and goods, but over our souls also, and to enslave our understandings to their wills.’122 If Hobbes defines heresy as a private opinion ‘obstinately 115

116 118 119 122

‘Soul-sleepers’ were followers of Richard Overton’s teachings in Mans mortallitie (1643), a work whose materialism is often close to Hobbes’s position. They allegedly believed that the soul falls asleep at death. Ross, Leviathan drawn out, p. 50. 117 Ibid., p. 73. Leviathan, chapter 16, p. 114 Cf. Ross, Leviathan drawn out, p. 20. Ross, Leviathan drawn out, pp. 54–5. 120 EW, IV, p. 317. 121 See below, p. 282. Ross, Leviathan drawn out, pp. 59–60; cf. Leviathan, 42.


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maintained, contrary to the opinion which the publick person hath commanded to be taught’, Ross was quick to point out that in non-Christian states this made Christians heretics: ‘these are your hereticks, Mr. Hobbs; by this your definition, you may call Christ and his Apostles hereticks, for they held doctrines contrary to the opinions of the Scribes and the Pharisees, who (as you say) sat in Moyses chair.’ Heresy, according to Ross, could only be those doctrines repugnant to God’s word and the Christian faith. Ross sees well enough that Hobbes’s strategy is ‘to overthrow Christs Kingdom in this world, as being an invention of the Romanists and Presbyterians to uphold their own greatness’.123 But at the same time Ross dismisses Hobbes’s noisy polemic about Roman Catholicism as old news. Indeed, Ross challenges Hobbes’s suggestion in chapter 47 that either the Roman Catholic or the Presbyterian churches had ever claimed to be Christ’s kingdom on earth.124 Identifying Hobbes’s generic threat to all clerical claims to authority, Ross attempts to present Hobbes’s kingdom of darkness as a community of straw men. The closing chapters of Leviathan include a crushing indictment of scholasticism, or in Hobbes’s terms ‘vain philosophy’. In response Ross offers a lengthy defence, citing Protestant supporters and admirers of Aristotle, vindicating his political and religious utility and uncovering Hobbes’s purpose in launching so desperate an assault. Ross argues that it all comes down to Hobbes’s ambition to replace Aristotle in the university curriculum, referring to Hobbes’s recommendation that Leviathan might be taught in the universities.125 This Hobbesian policy often attracted the attention of the book’s academic readers, and Ross was rightly sceptical about Hobbes’s chances of success. It would be this aspect of Hobbes’s work that would embroil him in disputes with Oxford a year later. Ross ended as he began, as a respectful, rational and open-minded critic, and he claimed that he would have Hobbes take note that ‘I have no quarrel against him, but against his tenets; I honor his worth and learning, but dislike his opinions; I know not his person, but I know and respect his parts.’126 Ross’s odd formulation draws attention to a distinction between Hobbes’s essence and his accidents, and in this polite treatment we can identify the persistence of the Royalist view that there was enough in 123 124 125

Ross, Leviathan drawn out, p. 94. Leviathan, ch. 47, pp. 474–5; cf. Ross, Leviathan drawn out, p. 94. Ibid., pp. 96–7. 126 Ibid., p. 102.

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Hobbes of value to try to persuade him of the error of his ways. At no point does Ross accuse Hobbes of outright atheism; in line with other printed responses to Leviathan, Hobbes is portrayed as a writer guilty of blasphemous and heretical heterodoxy, but not of anti-Christian atheism. This would come later. Leviathan drawn out with a hook was bound together with Ross’s Observations upon Sir Walter Raleigh’s history of the world and published by Richard Royston towards the end of January 1652/3.127 William Rand judged that Ross’s particular approach would pose no real threat to Hobbes; he wrote to Samuel Hartlib in February that ‘Mr Hobbs need not feare the pedantick way of writing used by Al: Ross, though a learned Man in his way & veine of Learning.’128 Part of the reason for this was Ross’s reputation as a knee-jerk opponent of the new science. In 1654 John Davies, who knew Hobbes, commenting on Ross’s critique noted that Ross was ‘one who may be said to have had so much Learning as to have been perpetually barking at the works of the most learned’.129 Rand’s and Davies’s response was probably representative of a scientific community that had long since parted company with Ross’s brand of scholasticism (at least, when it came to science), but this shouldn’t lead us to the conclusion that Ross’s judgement on Hobbes was not read or taken seriously by other readers. In 1655 Thomas Barlow recommended Ross’s work to undergraduates,130 and in 1656 Seth Ward drew upon Ross’s critique in his own attack upon Hobbes. It may also be significant that Ross’s title appeared in William London’s 1658 Catalogue of the most vendible books in England.131 However the book was received more generally, it proved to be the only dedicated critique of Leviathan to be published for several years. Indeed, the rest of 1653 proved to be rather quiet in terms of discussions of Hobbes’s work in print, possibly because that year was also the first that did not see the publication of any works by the philosopher. The examples that we have demonstrate the wide range of debates in which Hobbes’s work could either be used or criticised, often in contexts far removed from their usage in Hobbes’s texts. In June, Albertus Warren’s Eight reasons categorical defended the common law against reformers (a very unHobbesian cause) as a bulwark against 127 128 130 131

Thomason received his copy on 26 January. Ross’s Observations date from 1650 and had been printed separately. Hartlib Papers, 62/17/2 A. 129 Hobbes, Of libertie and necessitie a treatise (1654), Sig. A8r. CTH, II, p. 786; Cf. de Jordy and Fletcher, A Library for Younger Scholaers, p. 49. W. London, A catalogue of the most vendible books in England (1658), p. 12.


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Hobbesian anarchy, praising the army’s prudential defence of it in terms that recall Leviathan’s remarks about the relationship between sovereigns and their laws.132 In July, John Austin was again appropriating Hobbes’s anti-Catholic remarks for the cause of Catholic toleration, this time claiming that Leviathan offered a defence for Catholics unwilling to take the Oath of Abjuration. The sections quoted from chapter 46 argue against the legal proscription of the ‘bare thoughts and Consciences of men by examination and inquisition of what they hold’.133 This captures Hobbes’s original anti-Catholic thought (Hobbes’s pointedly capitalised and italicised Inquisition is suppressed in the quotation) that legislating over private thought is a violation of natural law, but Austin removes Hobbes’s important qualification that punishment is only unjust if those opinions have not been expressed or acted upon. Hobbes may well have been tolerant when it came to freedom of thought, but when it came to external profession, he was uncomfortably intolerant, as the Presbyterian reading had indicated.134 The difficulty for Austin was that Hobbes’s theory provided a much simpler solution to the Oath of Abjuration issue: Catholics should take it because external profession had no effect upon internal beliefs. But Austin wanted to redeploy Hobbes’s antiCatholicism as a full-blooded endorsement of liberty of conscience, with Hobbes made an unlikely part of a roll call of ‘the most eminent divines in the Reformed Churches (Osiander, Bucer, Buchanan, Foxe, Beza, Calvin, Polanus, Acontius, Perkins, Assembly of Divines, Hobbs, Chillingworth)’.135 Austin’s textual gymnastics show that Leviathan could be used to support the case for toleration, but the need to suppress key elements of Hobbes’s religious authoritarianism also demonstrates the difficulties involved in using him this way. Although modern commentators have made a lot of Hobbes’s supposed commitment to religious toleration, it is perhaps no surprise that Austin is one of only very few contemporary apologists for religious toleration to deploy Leviathan in this way. Hobbes’s anti-clericalism might make Leviathan agreeable to the 132

133 134

135

A. Warren, Eight reasons categorical (1653), p. 5. On Warren see also Skinner, Visions, III, pp. 276, 281, 299, 304; but see also S. State, Thomas Hobbes and the Debate Over Natural Law and Religion (New York, 1991), pp. 128–9. W. Birchley [Austin], The Christian moderator . . . Third part. (1653), p. 21, selectively quoting ch. 46, p. 378 of Leviathan [pp. 471–2 in Tuck]. See also p. 27 of The Christian moderator, where Austin selectively quotes from chapter 42 of Leviathan (p. 342 [p. 270 O.P.]) to the effect that priests have no power to punish belief. Austin omits Hobbes’s less tolerant thought that if the clergy have sovereign power, ‘then they may indeed lawfully Punish any Contradiction to their laws whatsoever’. W. Birchley [Austin], The Christian moderator, p. 27.

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enemies of priests, but at the same time his authoritarian commitment to a civil religion made him a lot less attractive to those interested in freedom of religious expression. The paradoxical quality of Leviathan thus made it a tricky work to apply to contemporary discussions in a straightforward fashion, and the problem of working out how to situate Hobbes’s ideas remained, particularly where Hobbes’s theology was concerned. In November 1653 a Catholic writer named Guy Holland (1587–1660), perhaps a pseudonym of John Serjeant, produced a defence of the immortality of the soul titled The grand prerogative of humane nature, where Hobbes’s materialist soteriology (‘in a prodigious volume of his, called by him as prodigiously Leviathan’) was placed in a tradition linking the philosopher to Pietro Pomponazzi and Daniel Sennert.136 Holland simply reiterates the view that the soul is in fact an intellectual substance, and suggests that Hobbes’s readings of scripture put an unnatural construction upon the sense of the text.137 The response is typical of the incomprehension that tended to accompany readings of Leviathan’s theology, and although his hunch about Leviathan’s tradition wasn’t a bad one, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that there was at this stage no real consensus amongst Leviathan’s early readers about where Leviathan came from, or what its unusual theories meant. This may be part of the reason why the immediate response to Leviathan was relatively muted. Hobbes’s readers had to work out exactly what they were getting from the strange mixtures and paradoxes in the book, which defied straightforward attempts to enlist it in a particular cause. This feature of Leviathan made it difficult to use as propaganda for the republic, as Rand realised. Hobbes’s defection made it equally problematic for Royalists like Filmer. In religious terms we have noted that what Leviathan could provide by way of support for toleration, it simultaneously took away with its notion of a civil religion. What was one to make of Hobbes’s rhapsody? If the verdicts of Filmer and Ross are at all representative, then one short answer was that the book was a potentially dangerous mess, and nothing more than that. But in this paradoxical weakness lay Leviathan’s slow-burning strength. Leviathan may not have mapped onto one particular political template, but 136

137

G. H., The grand prerogative of humane nature (1653), pp. 119–20. Petrus Pomponatius was Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1524), whose Tractatus de immortalitate animæ (Bologna, 1516) defended the notion that the intellective soul is mortal and must perish with the body. Daniel Sennert (1572–1637) was a Wittenberg professor of medicine, whose work on the soul suggested that the soul was conjoined with seminal matter. G. H., The grand prerogative of humane nature, pp. 124–5.


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it was capable of speaking to many different agendas simultaneously; to the authoritarian Royalist at one moment, to the supporter of the republican regime at another; to the anti-clerical religious radical, and to the supporter of a national church. The relative critical silence thus concealed the extent to which Leviathan was being read and absorbed, in all sorts of different contexts, even if individual readers were not necessarily moved to endorse or condemn Hobbes’s work tout court. In part, this process was made easier by Hobbes’s self-consciously rhetorical presentation of the argument. Hobbes’s metaphorical imagery was novel and readily transferable. It is striking that Leviathan’s sound-bites and imagery start to appear in the most unusual contexts. One interesting example is the Royalist gentleman and friend of Brian Duppa, Richard Ligon. Ligon had travelled to Barbados in 1647 and had returned to England in 1650, to be thrown into jail by his creditors. Still in prison in 1653, Ligon composed a now famous account of his voyage to Barbados, where the imagery of Leviathan allegorically shapes the memory of his first sight of the Barbadian jungle. Ligon comments on the symbiotic reciprocity that sustains the forest, in which the tall trees take nourishment from the earth and roots and in return offer protection and shelter from the heat of the sun.138 The encounter is used to confirm the essential truth of Hobbes’s political theory, an important lesson for Ligon’s contemporaries: And truly these vegetatives, may teach both the sensible and reasonable Creatures, what it is that makes up wealth, beauty, and all harmony in that Leviathan, a well governed Common-wealth: Where the Mighty men, and Rulers of the earth, by their prudent and carefull protection, secure them from harmes; whilst they retribute their paynes and faithfull obedience, to serve them in all just Commands. And both these, interchangeably and mutually in love, which is the Cord that bindes up all in perfect Harmonie. And where these are wanting the roots dry, and leaves fall away, and a general decay, and devastation ensues. Witness the woefull experience of these sad times we live in.139

Leviathan is used to mediate and politicise Ligon’s memories, but at the same time Ligon’s image of the jungle is used to validate Leviathan’s political theory, a striking example of the way that Hobbes’s work could insinuate itself through its appeal to nature. Leviathan and its peculiar and paradoxical sets of political relationships become new ways to see the world, and to characterise relationships within it.

138 139

R. Ligon, A true & exact history of the island of Barbados (1657), p. 20. Ibid., pp. 20–1.

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The ability of Leviathan to provide transferable and memorable interpretative metaphors extended beyond politics. Mildmay Fane, the second Earl of Westmoreland, was a Royalist compounder who perhaps had more reason than most to ponder the mysteries of Leviathan. It is evident from his poetry, and other sources, that he was interested in Hobbes and his most notorious book.140 In a poem to another Royalist poet John Cleveland, Fane’s own puzzlement about the identity of Leviathan is dissolved when he realises that it characterises perfectly his relationship with Cleveland. Fane proffers his verse: Which I heer offer to the skan Of all great Arts Leviathan For now I shall noe longer looke Whence Hobbs intiteled his booke Though surreptitious and by stealth Since thou’rt above all commonwealth Thy Straines Monarkike, nor can bear, Th’affront of a Competitor Wher Science Liberall is who guives Not unto All prerogatives Over the Tongue and Pen but brings Those best deserve to be her Kings Yet what are such if left alone Nor Honord by Subjection.141

Fane ultimately uses Hobbes’s argument in a complex way to stress the mutuality that underlies his submission to Cleveland’s judgement. It is unsurprising that Hobbes’s theory was attractive to defeated Royalists like Ligon and Fane. But at the same time Ross’s anxieties about Hobbes’s influence on a younger generation suggest another constituency for whom Hobbes’s new way of seeing the world proved particularly attractive. Although the traditional stuff of moral panic, especially for those like Ross who bemoaned the breakdown of traditional sources of values, there is some evidence that Hobbes was in fact gaining young converts. Charles Cotton is one obvious example, but there are other documented cases. In 1654 we find Hammond writing to Sheldon, concerned about the effect of Leviathan’s ‘heathen principles’ on Lady 140

141

Fane was a kinsman of the dedicatee of Cotton’s translation of De Cive. His copy of Davenant’s Gondibert was described as having MS. Verses on Hobbes, Waller and Cowley, by the Earl of Westmorland, Sotheby’s 1887 lot 229, cited in Cain (ed.), The Poetry of Mildmay Fane, Second Earl of Westmorland, ed. T. Cain (Manchester, 2001), p. 421 n. Ibid. p. 257, ll. 9–22.


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Packington’s nephew, Sir George Savile, the future Marquis of Halifax.142 Many of the attacks upon Hobbes in the later 1650s are prefaced by the thought that Hobbes had had a sometimes unexpected influence amongst impressionable young gentlemen, and students in the universities, and that this needed to be put right with a definitive statement of Hobbes’s heterodoxy. But by this time Hobbes’s paradoxical worldview and his metaphors had become common currency for many of his readers. In spite of its critics’ belated efforts, Hobbes’s paradoxical and novel philosophy was providing attractive organising structures for the thoughts of many different kinds of reader. HOBBES AND ATHEISM

It is often assumed that the publication of Leviathan was swiftly followed by outraged public accusations of atheism, but in fact this didn’t happen. Given the level of modern interest in the question of whether Hobbes was an atheist or not, it is slightly surprising that this point has not been investigated more carefully. There is no doubt that individuals did believe that Hobbes was an atheist and were prepared to say so in private.143 That said, demonstrating that Hobbes was an atheist from his works was no straightforward matter. Hobbes talked about God at length, and in ways that were familiar to his audience. Indeed, the modern debate about Hobbes’s atheism smoulders on precisely because there are no unambiguous statements of atheism in any of Hobbes’s texts, something that Hobbes would later point out to critics. As a result, and possibly wishing to avoid an easy Hobbesian rejoinder, Hobbes’s early critics tended to shy away from public accusations of atheism, and what is remarkable is not the volume of such accusations, but rather how few there were, and how cautiously they were made. No one appears to have made the allegation in print until the publication of Seth Ward’s Vindiciae academiarum of 1654. Hobbes’s doctrines were called heretical and blasphemous, charges grave enough, but the direct accusation of atheism did not appear for several years after the publication of Leviathan. 142

143

BL MS Harleian 6942 f. 27, see the discussion in Hayward ‘Mores of Great Tew’, p. 227. Sheldon may not have been completely successful in rooting out the influence of Hobbes; for examples of Halifax’s occasionally Hobbesian views on property for example see The Works of George Savile Marquis of Halifax, ed. N. Brown (1989), II, p. 224 and n1. A copy of the first edition of Leviathan is recorded in Halifax’s London library in catalogues of 1683 and 1684; a copy at Rufford (probably the one referred to here) is recorded in a catalogue of 1693. Ibid. See, for example, Robert Baillie’s remarks, above, p. 55.

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This may explain the otherwise puzzling fact that anti-atheist works of the period do not refer to Hobbes either. Indeed, Walter Charleton’s The darknes of atheism dispelled by the light of nature (1652) refers quite favourably to Hobbes and we have already seen that he was an admirer of Hobbes’s work. Even Henry More’s An antidote against atheisme (1653), with its attempt to combat the distinctive form of atheism fostered by scientific naturalism, neither mentions Hobbes nor engages directly with Leviathan’s arguments. More would go on to attack Hobbes (although without accusing him of atheism) in The immortality of the soul (1659) after the publication of the latter’s materialist science in De Corpore (1655) but his attitude towards Hobbes in the early 1650s is more difficult to establish. A Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and member of the group of divines known subsequently as the Cambridge Platonists, More’s preoccupation from the 1640s onwards was to find a way of reconciling the new science with religion, specifically by demonstrating the role played by spirit. As he himself would testify later, his concern in the Antidote was to counter the materialist dangers that emerged from modern French natural philosophy, specifically Gassendi’s neo-Epicureanism and even Descartes’s mechanistic philosophy.144 In this case More’s desire to deal with the more general implications of cutting-edge French science may have taken priority over refuting Hobbes’s highly ambiguous and apparently derivitive variant. The thought that Hobbes’s work was simply a misreading of French philosophy, particularly Gassendi’s work, would become an important part of the way that More and his associates would make sense of the philosopher’s oeuvre. From the late 1650s onwards Hobbes would be cast as a disreputable imitator of classical and more modern Continental Epicureanism. Given the difficulty of establishing exactly what Hobbes was in philosophical terms this characterisation supplied a simple answer, ‘deciding’ his paradoxical arguments in favour of traditions with which contemporaries were more familiar. Hobbes’s complex argument would be regularly reduced to the caricatured anti-providential hedonism with which Epicureanism was commonly associated. This identification was also useful to Hobbes’s critics because of the battery of anti-Epicurean arguments available in Cicero’s works, particularly De natura deorum and De finibus. If Hobbes was really an Epicurean, then all one needed to do was to quote Cicero’s anti-Epicurean characters against Leviathan. This classical mode of argument also carried with it additional benefits for those 144

H. More, An explanation of the grand mystery of godliness (1660), Preface, p. vii.


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who might be worried about Hobbes’s proximity to their own discourse; by redefining Hobbes as an Epicurean it was possible to put some clear classical water between Leviathan and one’s own argument. For these reasons, the presentation of Hobbes as a disreputable Epicurean became a recurrent feature of anti-Hobbes works. Robert Sharrock’s suggestively titled De officiis (1660) would attack Hobbes using a large dose of Cicero. Charles Wolseley in 1669 would redefine Hobbes almost exclusively as an Epicurean atheist, Richard Cumberland’s 1672 refutation of Hobbes would rely heavily upon a Ciceronian stoic critique of Hobbes’s Epicureanism, and right at the end of the century Richard Bentley’s celebrated Boyle Lectures of 1692 would deploy exclusively anti-Epicurean arguments against Hobbes. In all of these cases, the authors had good reason to ensure that Hobbes’s complexity and relationship to their own position was flattened out in a blanketing use of the anti-Epicurean critique.

CHAPTER

3

The storm (1654–1658)

HOBBES AND THE PROTECTORATE

Thus far Leviathan had attracted suprisingly little public comment. The Royalists had attacked Hobbes after his defection, and the Presbyterians and Episcopalians had launched minor attacks on his theology and ecclesiology from the autumn of 1652 onwards, but this hardly amounted to a major campaign. The relative silence was such that in 1654 John Davies commented that ‘On this side of the sea, besides the dirt and slander cast on him in Sermons & private meetings, none hath put any thing in Print against him, but Mr Rosse.’1 However all of this would soon change, and the reasons were political. One of the most decisive political changes to affect the reception of Leviathan during the 1650s was the establishment of the Protectorate after the Nominated Assembly dissolved itself in December 1653. John Lambert’s Instrument of Government envisaged the restitution of a triadic constitutional structure, with a Lord Protector, Council of State and Parliament. Cromwell’s installation as Head of State was soon followed in the spring by implementation of religious reforms which created a tolerant national church along the lines proposed by John Owen’s Humble proposals. If Hobbes’s political and ecclesiastical vision was a rather uncomfortable fit with the republican and tolerationist agendas of the Commonwealth, Leviathan’s absolutism and Erastianism were now highly relevant to the new political situation where Cromwell’s authority was now publicly recognised and identified with a new settlement in the established church. This development would ensure that Hobbes’s political, religious and scientific work would come under renewed scrutiny by enthusiastic supporters and anxious critics of the new government.

1

Hobbes, Liberty and Necessity (1654), Sig A8r.

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Too little is known of Hobbes’s activities in the early 1650s to say with any certainty that the philosopher himself, then engaged in writing De Corpore in London, involved himself with the new regime, although the suggestion that he did would become a feature of attacks upon him after the Restoration.2 What is clear is that many of Hobbes’s friends, who often shared his political and religious views, were keen supporters of, or at least happy to be associated with, the Protectorate. Hobbes’s friend Edmund Waller was Cromwell’s second cousin, and expressed enthusiasm to Hobbes about his kinsman’s regime3 whilst William Davenant appears to have enjoyed the personal favour of the Protector.4 William Petty, who had been part of the Cavendish circle in France and who had provided some of the drawings for Hobbes’s optical treatises, served the Cromwellian government in Ireland.5 Then there were the English Catholic natural philosophers Hobbes had known in exile, Kenelm Digby and Thomas White. By 1652 White was back in England and, according to Wood, frequently in Hobbes’s company.6 As we shall see shortly, White would seek to justify his obedience to Cromwell’s regime using a theory close to Hobbes’s own. Digby returned to England in 1654 and became an intimate of Cromwell, serving as a diplomatic representative of the Protectorate.7 In addition to old friends, Hobbes appears to have been associating with other anti-clerical supporters of the new regime including the translator John Davies of Kidwelly, and his friend the Mercurius Politicus war correspondent John Hall of Durham. Davies may well have known Hobbes in France; Hall had, of course, picked out Hobbes’s ambivalence about monarchy in De Cive, but his defence of the dissolution of the Rump suggests that he had become more sympathetic to Hobbesian ideas of

2

3 4

5 6 7

For evidence of Hobbes’s complicity with the new regime, see chapter 5 of Collins’s The allegiance of Thomas Hobbes. For Restoration attacks on Hobbes’s conduct see John Dowel, Leviathan heretical, p. 137, Ursa major and minor 19. See also Samuel Morland’s comments in 1691 about Hobbes’s hopes for a government pension. Lambeth MS 931 f.6. For Waller’s enthusiasm for Cromwell, see J. R. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, (Oxford, 2005), pp. 177–8. M. Edmond, Rare Sir William Davenant: Poet Laureate, Playwright, Civil War General, Restoration Theatre Manager (Manchester, 1987), p. 133, J. R. Jacob and T. Raylor, ‘Opera and Obedience: Thomas Hobbes and ‘‘A propositon for Advancement of moralitie’’ by William Davenant’, Seventeenth-century Studies, 61 (1991), pp. 207–8. For Petty’s career see E. Strauss, Sir William Petty: Portrait of a Genius (1954), and the comments in Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, pp. 192–4. Wood, Athenae Oroniensis, III, col. 1247; see J. Peacey, ‘Nibbling at Leviathan: Politics and Theory in England in the 1650s’, Huntington Library Quarterly 61: 2, p. 250. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, pp. 178–9.

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representation without popular participation.8 Although this needs to be set against Hobbes’s association with more traditionally Royalist circles such as Sir Charles Scarborough’s scientific group, many of Hobbes’s friends and associates during the period did find the Protectorate a congenial political, religious and intellectual environment, and thus it comes as no surprise to find Hobbes and his ideas being deployed by them in support of the Protectorate and its projects. That said, although recognisably Hobbesian ideas do appear in works sympathetic to the Protectorate, it is nevertheless extremely rare to find Leviathan itself explicitly quoted or approved as a source. Although Cromwell’s regime was a closer fit for Hobbes’s political and ecclesiastical theory than previous incarnations of the Commonwealth, Leviathan was nevertheless compromised in two ways; firstly by its strange theology and secondly by its unusually individualistic contract theory, with its exclusive emphasis upon self-preservation. When political theorists of the Protectorate borrowed Hobbes’s conceptual tools, they often nested them in theoretical frameworks at odds with Hobbes’s theory, in just the same way that Dudley Digges had had to do when appropriating Hobbes’s arguments for the royal cause. As a result, the theorists of the Protectorate could often combine elements of substantial critique together with their borrowings as they sought to tame the Leviathan. This process can be seen in one of the most influential ‘Cromwellian’ works, Thomas White’s The grounds of obedience and government (1655), written at the behest of Kenelm Digby and with the purpose of legitimating submission to Cromwell’s regime. Critics of The grounds would quickly move to convict White of cribbing his argument from Leviathan.9 Although there was some truth in this, it is also important to recognise the considerable differences of emphasis and occasional downright disagreements between the two writers.10 In general what Hobbes and White share is a scepticism about the possibility of rational agreement in the state 8

9

10

Peacey, ‘Nibbling’, pp. 246–7. Hall’s Confusion confounded (1654) refers to Hobbes in passing as a ‘learned Modern’ (p. 9) and has a distinctively Hobbesian ‘tone’, attacking the religious fundamentalism of the Rump’s MPs (p. 3) and making the case for an Erastian civil religion (p. 18). George Leyburn, Henrietta Maria’s chaplain, commented that The grounds was ‘cut out of Mr Hobbe’s Leviathan’. For more on White see particularly B. C. Southgate, ‘ ‘‘That Damned Booke’’, the Grounds of obedience and government (1655) and the Downfall of Thomas White’, Recusant History 17 (1985), pp. 238–53. Leyburn is quoted on p. 245. See also the comments in Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, p. 180. This is consistent with Wood’s remarks that when Hobbes and White met, they ‘seldom parted in cool blood: for they would wrangle, squabble and scold about philosophical matters like young Sophisters’. Wood, Athenae, p. 497.

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of nature and the consequent need for a powerful and authoritative arbiter. This leads White to adapt the mechanics of Hobbesian contract theory in order to establish government: Government is, naturally, a power or right of directing the common affaires of a multitude, by a voluntary submission of the communities wills to the will of the Governours; whom they trust, upon opinion that they are understanding and honest, and will administer the Commonalty by the rules of wisedom and goodnesse, as is most convenient and advantageous for the people.11

White deploys Hobbes’s account of the voluntary submission of will, but even here it is possible to identify the divergence between the two philosophers. Hobbes’s version makes it clear that individuals submit to any individual who can protect them. By contrast, White’s process of choosing appears to involve a rational evaluation of the sovereign’s wisdom and goodness.12 In fact White’s theory places Hobbesian borrowings within a neo-Aristotelian framework in which man’s natural sociability and the common good is stressed rather than trademark Hobbesian anti-social tendencies and individualism. In his account of the origin of society, White attributes sociability to three factors: natural love, need, and lastly fear.13 White self-conciously issues a rebuke to those who put fear first, claiming that ‘it is against all generosity, and embases Nature it selfe, to set the Throne of Feare above that of Love; and agreeth neither with Philosophy nor Morality.’14 White effectively corrects Hobbes by restoring some of the more conventional aspects of natural sociability, while acknowledging that there will be cases where there is a practical need for a common arbiter who can be entrusted with the care of the common good. White’s Hobbism is thus selective and critical. White’s repeated emphasis upon the common good is another feature of his neo-Aristotelian theory in tension with Hobbes’s distinctive individualism. For White, the focus upon the common good is what binds the interests of subjects and governors together. White’s sovereign is entrusted with the task of identifying and pursuing the common good and this is the source of his supreme power, but also the condition of his rule. The governor’s determination of what the common good is allows him the power to override oaths and laws,15 but at the same time a governor’s failure to pursue the common good leads to his own downfall. Just as the common 11 12 13

T. White, The grounds of obedience and government (1655), pp. 47–8. Ibid. See also p. 79. For discussion of this point see S. State, Thomas Hobbes and the Debate Over Natural Law and Religion (New York, 1991), pp. 132–3. White, The grounds of obedience and government, pp. 42–4. 14 Ibid., p. 44. 15 Ibid., pp. 88–94.

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good entitles a sovereign to ignore oaths and promises where they restrain that end, so the failure to deliver what is in the common interest negates any obligation in the subject as the magistrate effectively abdicates his own authority: the whole end and intention of their promise being, purely, to submit to Government, that is, conduce to the common good & safety; which having failed, there is no more obligation in their oath or promise, then if they had never made them.16

The diagnostic sign of such a condition is anarchy, in which case the people are free to establish another government. As this argument suggests, the common good would also be the source of White’s controversial de facto argument for obedience. Even where a sovereign is unjustly deposed White asked his readers to consider the baleful consequences to the common good of attempts to restore him.17 For White undisturbed trade was a sign of the common good sufficient to warrant allegiance to any successor regime.18 White’s more traditional emphasis upon the common good avoided the reductive effects of Hobbes’s individualism but at the same time delivered an unbounded sovereignty and a de facto account of obedience. White takes some of Hobbes’s premises and his conclusions, but avoids some of the more unpalatable consequences of Hobbes’s theory. By emphasising the magistrate’s promotion of the common good he escapes identification with the Hobbesian magistrate who could potentially act in his own interest without injustice. White identifies such a condition of arbitrary rule as tyranny,19 and the condition of subjects under arbitrary rule as unacceptable slavery,20 between them generating no form of obligation or obedience in the subject ‘farther than out of feare or present utility’.21 Here White criticises Hobbes, who systematically collapses these distinctions. When White condemns those who model earthly power upon God’s absolute and arbitrary dominion rather than His reason and understanding, Hobbes is clearly one of his targets.22 We can find a similar combination of critique and adaptation in a work published in 1654 by another and rather different John Hall. John Hall of Richmond had been a minor courtier before the civil war, working as comptroller of the royal household. During the 1640s he was a servant to 16 20 22

Ibid., p. 123. 17 Ibid., pp. 135–7. 18 Ibid., p. 154. 19 Ibid., pp. 65–7. Ibid., pp. 53–67. 21 Ibid., p. 66. See pp. 158–171; on p. 159, White attacks those who cite the Book of Samuel’s tyrannical jus regis as a description of the power of monarchs; a move, of course, made by Hobbes in chapter 20 of Leviathan, p. 143.

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royal secretary Robert Long and clerk comptroller to the Prince of Wales. Hall left England in 1648, but by 1651 he was back; his employer Long was suspected of double-dealing and had fallen out with Hyde. Although Hall was suspected of being a Royalist agent, he lived quietly at Richmond devoting his time to political theory. The result was Of government and obedience. Hall’s political treatise is an extended hymn to monarchy, although his defence of one-man rule would stray a long way from traditional Royalist treatments of the subject, aimed as it was to cure the ‘disrespect and contempt of the present Sovereign power’.23 Hall’s sources appear to have been various radical Royalist treatises and pamphlets in English, including work by Hobbes and Filmer, nested within a Hookerian conception of natural law, although the Bible is the only text that is cited.24 The Hobbesian resonance of Hall’s opening discussion of the state of nature is immediately evident; it is usually supposed to be a ‘confused condition . . . wherein equality of persons and community of goods set every one against another, where while all things were all mens, no man had the enjoyment of any thing’.25 Such miseries bring men to submit to government, and the mechanics of submission evoke Hobbes again: ‘But it is . . . to be considered, that in submitting thus Politiquely to have each private wil swayed by a publique, which thereupon became the only legal wil or sentence.’26 In fact Hall was taking this material from Dudley Digges’s Unlawfulnesse of subjects taking up armes against their soveraigne,27 and he uses the model simply to illustrate the thought that even in a hypothetical state of nature monarchy is the necessary result. Hall apparently goes on to contrast this purely hypothetical account with the state of war in Leviathan itself, an account which appears to deny God’s providential role in leading men out of such a condition: Therefore that which hath hitherto been spoken of the original of Government . . . must be understood onely as supposing it to have its Reason in Nature, and that thereby it might have been known, although the same had been by no other light or positive Law found out and appointed: and not as determining that ever men were, or could be left by a careful God in such a confused condition, where, like a brood of Cadmus, wanting all manner of Breeding and Instruction, they should 23 24

25 27

J. Hall, Of government and obedience as they stand directed and determined by Scripture and reason four books ( 1654), A2r. For Hall’s linguistic limitations see Duppa’s comments. G. Isham (ed.), The Corrrespondence of Bishop Brian Duppa and Sir Justinian Isham 1650–1660 (Northamptonshire Record Society 17 (1951)), Duppa to Isham, 20 January 1656, p. 118. Hall, Of government and obedience, p. 9. 26 Ibid., p. 10. Compare Hall’s remarks on willing (p. 10) with p. 4 of Digges’s The unlawfulnesse of subjects taking up armes against their soveraigne.

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fall to the slaughter of one another, till their bleeding wounds, and not his Precepts of Providence, had taught them rules of Subjection.28

Hall’s motive for denying Leviathan’s version of the state of war is to reject any thought that political authority might arise from a contract. Hall remained within the Royalist natural right tradition in arguing that the monarch’s power comes from God alone. In addition he explicitly rejected theories based upon the idea of self-interest because they potentially undermined all forms of political obligation.29 Hall’s discussion of the many and various mistakes made by contract theorists eventually alights upon those make ‘mutual and reciprocal Pactions amongst one another’ and he uses it as an opportunity to parody Hobbes’s description of contract in chapter 17 of Leviathan: For if John say to Thomas, I give you all my right in governing my self, on condition that you give the same and all yours to such and such, and this we mutually oblige ourselves by oaths to do, Then, taking these pactors by pairs, here will be a long work, and to no purpose.30

Hall’s critique draws upon Filmer’s Observations, particularly when Hall derides Hobbes’s account of democracy by institution.31 Hall had taken Filmer’s hint that it was better to start from a patriarchal account of political authority rather than a subversive account of obligation which might open the door to reciprocal forms of obligation. To that end Hall envisages an extreme form of sovereign power embodied in fathers and kings, rejecting any notion of representation to argue that the only divinely ordained form of political authority was that vested in one man.32 Having arrived at that conclusion, Hall liberally helps himself to arguments that Hobbes had used to legitimate his account of absolute sovereignty. Like Hobbes, Hall thought that many mistaken ideas in politics and Christianity stemmed from the inappropriate use of Greek ideas, and he appeals to the thought that accusations of tyranny and slavery were empty charges levelled at legitimate regimes the republican Greeks simply disliked.33 He also argues less convincingly that slaves could often be better off than ‘free’ men.34 Further Hobbesian consequences followed from Hall’s dim view of liberty, not least the thought that in obeying the prince the 28 30 31 32 33

Hall, Of government and obedience, p. 79; see also pp. 95 and 110. 29 Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 166, cf. Leviathan, p. 120. Hall, Of government and obedience, p. 167, cf. Filmer, Observations, p. 185. Hall, Of government and obedience, p. 58; indeed Hall argues that any other forms (e.g. aristocracy and democracy) are simply anarchy by another name. Ibid., p. 94; Cf. Leviathan, pp. 470–1. 34 Hall, Of government and obedience, pp. 124, 126–7.

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subject is more free than in a condition where greater ‘traditional’ liberties pertain.35 When Hall talks about the powers of the sovereign, his absolutism comes very close to Hobbes’s account. The sovereign’s interpretative brief extends to divine and natural law. If property ultimately belongs to God, then kings are God’s ministers and all private property is subject to public use.36 Hall’s Hobbism is particularly stark when it comes to talking about the relationship between church and state. For Hall, as for Hobbes, under a Christian monarch, church and state are the same thing, and the idea of a separate spiritual jurisdiction is a nonsense. Like Hobbes, Hall makes ordination and excommunication exclusively civil sanctions and gives the monarch authority over scriptural interpretation.37 Perhaps most distinctively Hobbesian is Hall’s argument that the sovereign has the right as ‘God’s Minister and Steward’ to exercise the powers of the ministry, a feature of monarchic power that Hall represents as the restitution of the kingly authority over the church enjoyed by Moses and David.38 When it came to the tricky question of obeying de facto powers, Hall’s theory, in contrast to Hobbes, stressed the role of obedience to a monarchic government in particular, rather than sovereign power in general. The overthrow of a monarchic regime simply reduces individuals to a state of nature: since the destruction of their former government must be acknowledged unlawful, they are to consider that till they return to that form again they are in no true political way, but do altogether depend upon the natural way of continual force.39

In practice this meant that the English republic represented an illegitimate exercise of force. That said, Hall’s analysis may have brought a smile to the faces of Cromwellians when he pointed out that once monarchic rule was restored, in any form, so was legitimacy.40 Hall’s theory differs from Hobbes’s in this exclusive focus on the role of one-man rule, but although Hall rejects Leviathan’s contractarianism and its theory of representation (which allowed Hobbes to countenance non-monarchic forms of sovereign representative), he nevertheless takes on board some of the more controversial features of Hobbes’s absolutism, not least his authoritarianism and his Erastianism. It was probably for that reason that Brian Duppa commented to Justinian Isham that compared with Leviathan Hall had ‘better grounds laid, though I do not approve all his super-structions’.41 Hall’s 35 38 41

Ibid., p. 121. 36 Ibid., pp. 132, 136. 37 Ibid., pp. 227, 240–1, 243–4, 254, 259–60. Ibid., pp. 341, 339. 39 Ibid., pp. 188–9. 40 Ibid., p. 204. Isham, Correspondence, Duppa to Isham, 1 August 1654, p. 91.

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reception in official circles was more welcoming; Marchamont Nedham recommended the book in Mercurius Politicus in June 1654 describing it as an ‘excellent piece’.42 Ironically the return to favour of monarchist thought may well have made De Cive more attractive to the Cromwellians than the version of the theory expressed in Leviathan. It may be no accident that when the Middle Temple lawyer Michael Hawke sought in 1656 to deploy Hobbes more explicitly in defence of Cromwell’s right to rule, he quoted Cotton’s translation of De Cive, the Philosophicall Rudiments rather than Leviathan. Hawke’s The right of dominion initially cites Hobbes in favour of a very un-Hobbesian position, in support of Grotius and Gassendi claiming that there is an obligatory law of nature in the state of nature and that it should be kept.43 Hawke’s faith in natural sociability turns out to belong only to the first ages of man, although unusually he seems prepared to extend this beyond the Fall and to the time of Noah. The post-diluvian repopulation of the earth appears to usher in a situation where families grow numerous, avarice possesses the minds of the naturally ill-affected and a state of war arises.44 Hawke’s model thus provides a historical space for Hobbes’s state of war, to which he explicitly appeals.45 The seriousness of this state of conflict allows Hawke to disallow any idea of voluntary subjection in favour of a rather brutal account of authority arising from conquest alone.46 At this point Hobbes’s account of sovereignty by acquisition becomes particularly useful and Hawke cites chapter 4 of the Philosophicall Rudiments: and as Mr Hobs, a sure and irresistible power conferreth the right of dominion and ruling over those cannot resist; and the conqueror may by right compel the conquered, unless he will choose to dye, or give caution of his future obedience, which is a just right and title, surmounting and swallowing all other rights.47

Hawke then follows this up with an extravagant paean to monarchy and the benefits of unitary control that echoes Hall.48 True natural liberty, argues Hawke, can only be found by living in accordance with the rules of the state.49 Kings and emperors were originally priests and in England the king is a ‘mixed person’ with a priest.50 Hawke would make the same use of De Cive to vindicate Cromwell’s right to rule in his 1657 pamphlet Killing is 42 43 44 49

Mercurius Politicus 208 (1–8 June 1654), 3540 see also Peacey, ‘Nibbling’, p. 255. M. Hawke, The right of dominion, and property of liberty, whether natural, civil, or religious (1655), p. 25. Hobbes is also cited in support of the peaceable quality of natural law on pp. 27, 30. Ibid., pp. 32–4. 45 Ibid., p. 45. 46 Ibid., p. 41. 47 Ibid., p. 50. 48 Ibid., pp. 70–7. Ibid., pp. 105–6. 50 Ibid., pp. 137–9.

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murder, again suppressing the account of sovereignty by institution for the more robust argument from conquest.51 These works demonstrate that Hobbes’s theories could be useful in expressing the principles underlying the Protectorate’s claim to power, but they also show his Cromwellian readers’ anxiety about the contractual mechanism and its potentially subversive effects, precisely the problems that Hobbes’s Royalist critics had identified in the 1640s. Ironically, even though Hobbes’s use of a contractarian model was designed to disable its seditious character, Hobbes was now identified with the theoretical position he had sought to neutralise.52 These dangerous elements of Hobbes’s theory needed to be suppressed, modified or simply criticised and the onus placed on the undeniably useful accounts of conquest, authority and obedience, effacing any reference to the role of consent. Such adaptations helped to foster the idea that Hobbes’s theory involved a simple justification of de facto authority, when in fact Hobbes’s argument was a more sophisticated rewriting of the relationship between authority and consent. Hobbes’s political utility thus shaped the public uses of his theory to foster the modern image of Hobbes as perhaps England’s most influential de facto theorist. HOBBES AND THE UNIVERSITIES

Hobbes may have been gaining a more attentive readership amongst Cromwellian supporters of the Protectorate, but the anxiety that those in power might take Hobbes’s views seriously may have prompted Hobbes’s Anglican and Presbyterian opponents to launch a more systematic assault upon both his reputation and his philosophy. One area where Leviathan posed a particular threat was in Hobbes’s hostility towards the universities. This had been a feature of Hobbes’s political theory from the very beginning and his early readers had all taken note of it.53 For Hobbes the false doctrines inculcated in the clerically dominated universities had been one of the main sources of political and religious conflict, and by the time he wrote Leviathan he had developed an elaborate historical and sociological 51 52

53

M. Hawke, Killing is murder, and no murder (1657), pp. 7 (where Hawke now argues that the Hobbesian state of war began after the Fall), 12. See, for example, Lord Saye and Sele’s comments to Lord Wharton in December 1657, where he complains that the maxim ‘whear thear is might thear is right, it is dominion if it succeed, but rebellion if it miscarry’ is ‘fitter for hobbs & athiests then good men and christians’. C. H. Firth, ‘A Letter from Lord Saye and Sele to Lord Wharton’, English Historical Review 10 (1895), p. 107. Hobbes, Elements of Law, 28.8.

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account of their central role and the baleful consequences of their ideas. In chapter 46 Hobbes argued that a university is: a Joyning together, and an Incorporation under one Government of many Publique Schools, in one and the same Town or City. In which, the principall Schools were ordained for the three Professions, that is to say, of the Romane Religion, of the Romane Law, and of the Art of Medicine. And for the study of Philosophy it hath no otherwise place, then as a hand-maid to the Roman Religion: And since the Authority of Aristotle is onely current there, that study is not properly Philosophy . . . but Aristotelity. And for Geometry, till of very late times it had no place at all; as being subservient to nothing but rigide Truth.54

The absurd and seditious scholastic philosophy of the Schools had infected religion, and through the preaching of the ministers trained in the universities had finally corrupted the country as a whole. Keenly aware that what was taught in the universities would eventually trickle down to ordinary people, Hobbes saw their reform as a vital part of his practical project of political re-education. With characteristic gusto he offered his own book as the set text, a point noted immediately by his scholarly readers. He argued that Leviathan might be: profitably printed, and more profitably taught in the Universities . . . For seeing the Universities are the Fountains of Civill, and Morall Doctrine, from whence the Preachers, and the Gentry, drawing such water as they find, use to sprinkle the same (both from the Pulpit, and in their Conversation) upon the People, there ought to be great care taken, to have it pure, both from the Venime of Heathen Politicians, and from the Incantation of Deceiving Spirits.55

Although Hobbes was unusual in suggesting the imposition of his own views upon the universities, he was not alone in his view that the universities were in need of reform. Similar demands were also emerging from religious radicals, and this led to serious discussions in the Nominated Assembly about the ‘propriety of suppressing universities and all Schools for learning as heathenish and unnecessary’.56 The suggestion provoked a pamphlet discussion in the autumn of 1653 where two radical ex-army chaplains, John Webster and William Dell (now intruded Master of Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge), argued the case for radical reform. The most celebrated product of the debate, Webster’s Academiarum examen, was addressed to Major General John Lambert and appeared a few days after Cromwell was installed as Lord 54 56

Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 46, p. 462 [370 O.P.]. 55 Ibid., p. 491. Barbara Shapiro, John Wilkins 1614–72 (Berkeley, 1969), p. 97; N. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), p. 326.

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Protector.57 Webster’s reformist agenda, which he shared with Dell, envisaged the removal of theology from the university curriculum altogether and the replacement of scholasticism with a version of the new natural philosophy. This would see authors like Bacon, Paracelsus, van Helmont and Robert Fludd studied instead of Aristotle, whose doctrines Webster dismissed in terms not dissimilar to Hobbes’s own. That Webster was a sympathetic reader of Hobbes’s politics at least, was indicated by his suggestions for suitable texts to replace Aristotle’s on ‘Political and Oeconomical learning’: yea even our own Countreyman master Hobbs hath pieces of more exquisiteness, and profundity in that subject, than ever the Graecian with was able to reach unto, or attain; so that there is no reason why he [Aristotle] should be so applauded, and universally received, while more able pieces are rejected, and past by.58

Although Hobbes and the radicals approached the problem of university reform from very different starting points, they shared the thought that the universities needed to be purged of scholasticism and new forms of natural philosophy encouraged. Towards the end of May 1654, Seth Ward and John Wilkins published Vindiciae academiarum, an animadversion of Webster’s charges which included appendices attacking Hobbes and Dell.59 Whether Webster’s pamphlet was a real threat or not, the Vindiciae was clearly designed to provide an extended apologia for the universities to dispel the thought that they were in fact backward or in need of reform. But Ward’s appendix on Hobbes went a lot further than merely vindicating the practices of the universities. Ward used the opportunity not only to ridicule Hobbes’s desire to impose Leviathan on the universities but also to accuse him of being out of touch, of plagiarising the scientific work of others, gesturing at the same time towards his atheism. If Ward made allusions to ‘the Learning and Reputation of Mr Hobbs’60 at the beginning of his attack, there was no doubt that by the end of it he had attempted to destroy both. The surfacing of Leviathan in the debate over the universities meant that Hobbes’s reformist credibility as a spokesman for natural philosophy had to be systematically destroyed. Ward’s main tactic is to steal Hobbes’s thunder, elaborating in print the arguments that he had put to Hobbes in person shortly after his return 57 58 59 60

Thomason received his copy on 19 December; Webster’s address to Lambert was dated 21 October. J. Webster, Academiarum examen (1654), p. 88. Thomason received his copy on May 26. S. Ward, Vindiciae academiarum containing some briefe animadversions upon Mr Websters book stiled, The examination of academies (Oxford, 1654), p. 51.

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from France.61 Where Hobbes had claimed that the universities rejected the doctrine that sense could be explained in terms of motion, Ward asserted that they had in fact embraced that doctrine (as elaborated by Descartes, Gassendi and Digby) long before Hobbes himself had published anything like it.62 Even worse, Ward claimed that the version touted by Hobbes was actually plagiarised from the papers of the mathematician Walter Warner.63 In fact the charge was false, but whether Ward believed it or not, it served to provide a less controversial paternity for those doctrines that the scientists held in common with Hobbes while at the same time suggesting that Hobbes was an intellectual fraud.64 Ward gives a similar treatment to Hobbes’s claim in chapter 47 of Leviathan that the universities ‘received their Discipline, from Authority Pontificall’. In fact, as Ward was keen to stress, English universities ‘have bin Modelled by commission from the Civill Power’.65 Ward’s strategy was to argue that the universities already exhibited the political characteristics required by Hobbes. One of the interesting features of Ward’s critique is that he does not attempt to argue with the political conditions that Hobbes wished to lay down for the universities; he simply argues, for the benefit of those who might be interested in using Hobbes’s charges as a basis for reform, that they had already been fulfilled. This strategy is followed in Ward’s dissection of the argument of chapter 46 of Leviathan, which forms an extended attempt to demonstrate that the universities actually do all the things that Hobbes claims that they do not. In the first instance this involves denying the thought that the Greek intellectual heritage decried by Hobbes had, as he claimed, retarded the development of geometry. Ward cites a roll call of ancient geometers to falsify Hobbes’s position, and to suggest that Hobbes’s ignorance betrays the fact that he may not be as good a mathematician as he pretends to be. With regard to Hobbes’s definition of a university, Ward argues that it is defective in that English universities are regulated by the civil power, and that the universities have opposed the Roman Catholic church. Aristotle was not the sole authority and university dons knew more about geometry than Hobbes would find comfortable.66 Ward suggests that Hobbes’s sketch of university backwardness may have been true when he was a 61 63 64

65

See above, pp. 117–18. 62 Hobbes’s charge is made in Leviathan, chapter 4. Ibid., p. 53; see also p. 7 where the same charge is made by Wilkins. For discussion of the plagiarism charge see J. Prins, ‘Ward’s Polemic with Hobbes on the Sources of his Optical Theories’, Revue d’histoire des sciences 46: 2 (1993) and D. Jesseph, Squaring the Circle: The War between Hobbes and Wallis (Chicago, 1999), p. 68. Ward, Vindiciae, p. 54. 66 Ibid., p. 58.

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student at Oxford in the early part of the century but it certainly wasn’t the case now. In terms of the theological and moral ‘errors’ identified by Hobbes and supposedly taught by the universities, Ward argues that aside from the existence of immaterial substance and the scholastic conception of eternity, which Ward proposes to defend later, none of the positions attacked by Hobbes was defended by any member of the universities.67 Although Hobbes had produced lists of caricatured scholastic absurdities, to say that no one in the universities supported them, particularly some of the moral and political propositions, was actually to go quite a long way towards endorsing substantial portions of Hobbes’s political agenda. This perhaps demonstrates Ward’s sensitivity about denying an authoritarian political theory that was close to the political realities of the Cromwellian regime. Indeed, politically, Ward’s attack on Hobbes was designed to show that the universities were already behaving according to a state-regulated standard. Nevetheless, another major aim of the Vindiciae was to paint a picture of Hobbes designed to ruin his reputation and remove his authority as a mathematician and a scientist, thus neutralising one major source of his influence. In a portrait that would become one of the standard images of the philosopher, Ward portrayed Hobbes as an old man who was out of date and out of touch, whose useful scientific theories were stolen from others, and whose assault upon the universities was simply the result of an extraordinary arrogance. In his preface John Wilkins had made the usual reference to Hobbes’s ‘good ability and solid parts’, but had followed it up by observing that Hobbes was ‘otherwise highly magisteriall, and one that will be very angry with all that do not presently submit to his dictates’.68 The Vindiciae’s portrait of Hobbes would become one of the most influential descriptions of the philosopher, fusing popular understandings of Hobbes’s political doctrine with his personal character. The correspondence networks were soon buzzing with news of the attack. In August, Brian 67

68

Ibid., pp. 59–60. The list of theological positions includes the following propositions: ‘That any body may be in many places, many in one; That gravity is the cause of heavinesse; That quality is put into Body already made; That the Soule of man is Poured into the body, meaning it literally and grossely; That the power of willing is the (totall) cause of Actual willing; That Fortune or Ignorance, is an occult cause of things, although we may professe to know the causes of all things.’ The moral errors listed by Ward from Hobbes text are: ‘That one makes things Incongruent, and the other Incongruity; That private appetite is the rule of publick good; Lawfull Marriage is unchastity; That all Government but Popular is Tyranny; That not Men but Law Governes; That humane Lawes ought to extend to the inquisition of mens Thoughts and Consciences, notwithstanding the conformity of their Speeches and Actions; That private men may interpret the Law, and restraine where the Soveraign hath left a liberty.’ Ibid., p. 6.

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Duppa wrote to Isham commenting on the ‘witts of Oxford . . . who begin now to nibble at his great Leviathan, as you may find in the Vindiciae Academiarum, the author of which (whosoever he is) makes him self very merry with that freakish old man (for so he ventures to call him)’.69 The anti-Hobbes strategy revealed in the Vindiciae did not augur well for the reception of Hobbes’s long-awaited De Corpore when it appeared in May 1655.70 The first part of Hobbes’s philosophical trilogy, De Corpore provided the most extensive statement of the materialist science trailed in Leviathan. The study of matter and more importantly matter in motion was presented as the definitive means of analysing all phenomena.71 Hobbes’s consistently materialist causal explanations would replace the obscure and inconsistent explanations provided by scholastic physics and provide the common and comprehensible foundation for all forms of scientific enquiry. Emblematic of Hobbes’s extraordinary ambition in proposing his new science was his claim that mathematics itself could be reconceived in materialist terms. Hobbes argued that mathematical qualities are ultimately grounded in the nature of body and all mathematics could therefore be interpreted as a science of body.72 This meant that Hobbes could dispose of the conventional abstractions commonly found in pure mathematics (e.g. points without parts or breadthless lines). Just as Hobbes had sought in Leviathan to use materialism to rewrite traditional interpretations of scripture, in De Corpore the same reductive principle was deployed to reinterpret the foundations of physics and classical mathematics. Making philosophical sense of either required them to be conceived in material terms, or not at all. Natural philosophy would thus be liberated from the corrupted doctrines of the Schools. Hobbes was unable to resist counter-attacking Ward, assaulting one of his demonstrations of the finitude of the world from the Philosophicall essay, but more disastrously taking up the geometrical challenge laid down in the Vindiciae. One of Hobbes’s ambitions for his new materialist geometry was that it would allow the solution of some of the traditional problems in mathematics, such as the quadrature of the circle. Chapter 20 of De Corpore included several attacks upon Ward together with what Hobbes hoped would be the first successful demonstration of the squaring of the circle. Unfortunately, as some of Hobbes’s friends pointed out to 69 70 71

Isham, Correspondence, Duppa to Isham, 1 August 1654, pp. 91–2. Duppa refers to the insults delivered by Ward on p. 54 of the Vindiciae. The dedication, to William Cavendish, is dated 23 April 1655; Thomason dated his copy 31 May. See K. Schuhmann, Hobbes, une chronique (Paris, 1998), p. 136. Hobbes, EW, I, p. 70. 72 Jesseph, Squaring the Circle, p. 74.

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him, the demonstration was faulty.73 Instead of giving up at this point, Hobbes went on to produce another two attempts to solve the problem by his new method, with varying degrees of failure, and these were eventually published in the first edition. Hobbes’s new work soon attracted the attention of a man who would become one of the philosopher’s most dangerous opponents. John Wallis was Savilian Professor of Geometry, a colleague of Ward’s and a Presbyterian divine, who had served as secretary to the Westminster Assembly of Divines from 1644 to 1649. Wallis already had something of a rottweiler reputation within the scientific community, but now he launched a major attack upon Hobbes’s mathematics, aiming to savage the Hobbesian project at its mathematical core. Somehow Wallis had managed to get hold of an early version of the printed text of De Corpore, complete with the original failed quadrature and Hobbes’s triumphal remarks to Ward (toned down in the version of the text eventually released). His dissection of Hobbes’s failure to make good his claims about the quadrature would constitute the core of his Elenchus geometriae Hobbianae, published towards the end of 1655. Dedicating the book to John Owen, the Independent Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, Wallis argued that Hobbes needed to be opposed for three reasons. The first was that his mathematical conceit should be deflated. Wallis made it clear that Hobbes was not to be regarded as a mathematician of any stature at all. His second and related point was that in attacking Hobbes’s geometry ‘others less skilled in geometry, may know that there is no more to fear from this Leviathan upon this account, since its armour . . . is easily pierced’. Thirdly, Wallis also wished to attack Hobbes ‘so that outsiders (if they saw him maintain such things unchecked) might not think that all who practise Geometry here are like him’.74 Hobbes was to be discredited, his wider authority undermined, and geometry cleared of any association with his ideas. The Elenchus is a lengthy condemnation and rejection of Hobbes’s novel approach to mathematics and natural philosophy. ‘Who ever, before you’, asked Wallis, ‘defined a point to be a body? Who ever seriously asserted that mathematical points have any magnitude?’75 Wallis showed no mercy over Hobbes’s errors in the quadrature, lampooning Hobbes’s failure to deliver the mathematical goods.76 But Wallis’s comments weren’t simply restricted to Hobbes’s mathematical failings. Hobbes’s extravagant claims 73 74 75

Schuhmann suggests that it was William Brereton 1997, Introduction, p. xlv, n. 65. J. Wallis, Elenchus geometriae Hobbianae (Oxford, 1655), Ep. Ded. Ibid., p. 6; quoted in Jesseph, Squaring the Circle, p. 79. 76 Wallis, Elenchus, pp. 2–3.

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about his natural philosophy were ridiculed and his arrogance described in an account of Ward’s encounter with Hobbes in the early 1650s.77 In addition, Wallis took full advantage of the dispute to condemn Hobbes’s ideas in Leviathan. In his dedicatory letter Wallis had complained to Owen about the imperiousness with which Hobbes had trampled upon all things human and divine, ‘writing terrible and horrible things of God, of sin, of the Holy Scripture, of all incorporeal substances in general, of the immortal soul of man, and of other weighty points in religion’.78 In the text Wallis went further, suggesting that perhaps Hobbes took ‘the whole story of Adam’s fall for a fable’ and that he openly hoped that the Christian religion should be ‘frightened off and driven away’.79 Wallis ridicules a doctrine so extreme that it suggests that questions concerning the origin of the world were not to be dealt with philosophically, or from scripture, but by the sovereign. Despairing of a theory where even the authority of scripture was to be determined by the magistrate, Wallis gestures towards Hobbes’s possible atheism: ‘But you appear to be no more concerned with God Himself than with the divine word, since you appear, I think, easily ready to set Him aside.’80 For Wallis, the logic of the materialism of De Corpore and Leviathan, and the denial of incorporeal substance as scholastic absurdity, could only lead to one outcome, an outcome that Hobbes was only reluctant to express openly because of the law: Who does not see that thereby you not only deny (and not just in words) angels and immortal souls, but the great and good God himself; and if you were not wary of the laws (which to you is the highest ‘rule of honouring and worshipping God’) you would profess this openly. And however much you may mention God and the Holy Scriptures now and again (although I do not recall your mentioning the immortal soul), it is nevertheless to be doubted whether you do this ironically and for sake of appearance rather than seriously and from conviction.81

Wallis’s comments indicate some of the problems with identifying Hobbes as an atheist. Nevertheless, Hobbes’s avowed doctrine of upholding legally approved positions gave plenty of reasons to suspect that his nominal statements concealed very different private opinions, and this view seems to be supported by Hobbes’s own comments about the utility of withholding his opinion on matters such as free will. Every serious charge of atheism levelled at Hobbes had to work from the consequence of his doctrines rather than from any of his written statements, a point that 77 79 81

Ibid., p. 116. 78 Wallis, Elenchus, Sig A2 quoted in Jesseph, Squaring the Circle, p. 312. Wallis, Elenchus, p. 89. 80 Ibid. Ibid., pp. 89–90, quoted in Jesseph, Squaring the Circle, p. 314.

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Hobbes would frequently explain to his accusers. This allowed Hobbes to be read as both a theist and an atheist, depending upon the audience, and would have made it very hard to make any legal accusation of atheism stick. Nevertheless, Wallis’s insinuations were the most severe printed indictment that Hobbes had had to face, one that combined an unprecedented assault upon his scientific ability with a clear reference to his godlessness. LIBERTY AND NECESSITY

As if Hobbes didn’t have enough trouble with Ward and Wallis, he simultaneously found himself fighting another polemical fire with the unauthorised publication of his response to Bramhall on the question of liberty and necessity. Hobbes had gone to some trouble to try to ensure that that discussion never made it into the public domain. But as with his political treatises, Hobbes was not always able to control the manner in which his philosophical works appeared in print. The man responsible was John Davies of Kidwelly, a prolific translator of French literary and philosophical works.82 Davies was a graduate of Jesus College Oxford and St John’s Cambridge, where he met and befriended John Hall of Durham, whose Latin Paradoxes he would later translate in 1653. It also seems to have been at Cambridge that Davies picked up his virulent hatred of Presbyterianism. Between 1649 and 1651 Davies spent time on the Continent, most probably in France. On his return he divided his time between London and Wales, eking out a marginal existence as a translator and preface-writer. It isn’t clear whether Davies first encountered Hobbes in France or England, but we do know that at some point Hobbes engaged Davies to translate his discourse on liberty and necessity for the benefit of a French friend. Davies took a copy for himself, and in 1654 Hall’s publisher Francis Eaglesfield published it under the title Of libertie and necessitie a treatise, wherein all controversie concerning predestination, election, free-will, grace, merits, reprobation, &c. is fully decided and cleared, in answer to a treatise written by the Bishop of London-derry, on the same subject. These extravagant claims suggested that Hobbes’s comments were much more wide-ranging than they in fact were, and they seem designed to pull in the considerable market for religious books connected with salvation. Davies provided an excitable preface completing the picture of Hobbes as a new force in radical anti-clerical theology. Denouncing the practice of 82

For Davies’ biography, see D. Hook, ‘John Davies of Kidwelly: A Neglected Literary Figure of the Seventeenth Century’, The Carmarthenshire Antiquary 11 (1975), pp. 104–24.

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priests as ‘the greatest disturbance, burden and vexation of the Christian part of the world’,83 Davies ridiculed their ability to ‘spin out volumes out of half sentences, nay out of points and accents’. By contrast ‘this great Author’ in ‘so few sheets hath performed more than all the voluminous works of the Priests and Ministers’.84 Davies was fully aware of Hobbes’s controversial reputation; he hopes that this work will find ‘no worse entertainment than the Leviathan’, both because of its brevity ‘and that it doth not strike so home at the Ministers and Catholick partie as that did’.85 Hobbes’s private discussion of the free will problem was enlisted as a piece of theological advice to put Presbyterians and Catholics alike to shame. The publication of Hobbes’s work prompted Bramhall, still enduring a miserable exile on the Continent, to retaliate. In May 1655 John Crook published Bramhall’s compendium of the entire debate in A defence of true liberty.86 Bramhall’s strategy was to package up his initial essay, Hobbes’s arguments against it and Bramhall’s 1646 response to that, thus exposing the entire debate to public view in what he could claim to be the definitive account of proceedings between them. The reappearance of Bramhall’s ten-year-old critique in 1655 thus added to the public denunciations of Hobbes’s project coming from Oxford. Ward, Wallis and Bramhall had insinuated that Hobbes was an atheist, the first time that this suggestion had been made seriously in print. The charges undoubtedly marked an important development in the reception of Hobbes’s work in that they drew attention to it and made his supposed atheism a prominent feature of the public discussion of his arguments. Although it seems clear that Hobbes was not in any real danger of prosecution for his views, the potential damage to his reputation and to his philosophical projects spurred him to respond. This in turn was an important change in Hobbes’s attitude towards his critics. Up to this point Hobbes’s stated strategy concerning his critics had been to engage in dialogue with those he regarded as rational, but to simply ignore assailants who he felt were attacking him on the basis of their own agendas. The increasing persistence and virulence of these assaults resulted in a change of tactics: Hobbes was now determined to have a showdown with the forces of priestcraft. He explains his own view of the situation at the end of his 1656 83 85 86

Hobbes, Of Libertie and Necessitie, a Treatise (1654), Sig. A3r. 84 Ibid., Sig. A7v. Davies was nevertheless still prepared to defend Leviathan, on the grounds that no one had refuted it ‘which till it is done, we shall not count the Author an Heretick’. Ibid., Sig. A8v. A defence of true liberty from ante-cedent and extrinsecall necessity, being an answer to a late book of Mr. Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, intituled, A treatise of liberty and necessity.The book was entered into the Stationers’ Register on 2 March; Thomason received his copy on 2 May 1655.

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response to Bramhall. Hobbes argued that in spite of going to some trouble in Leviathan to make arguments ‘without any word tending to the disgrace either of episcopacy and presbytery’ he had nevertheless come under attack: I find since, that divers of them, whereof the Bishop of Derry is one, have taken offence especially at two things; one, that I make the supremacy in matters of religion to reside in the civil sovereign; the other, that being no clergyman I deliver doctrines, and ground them upon words of the Scripture, which doctrines they, being by profession divines, have never taught.87

In their books and sermons, Hobbes notes, they have reviled him ‘and endeavoured to make me hateful for those things’. Noting his reception to date, he comments that: I have been publicly injured by many of whom I took no notice, supposing that that humour would spend itself; but seeing it last, and grow higher in this writing I now answer, I thought it necessary at last to make of some of them, and first this Bishop, an example.88

With hindsight Hobbes’s retaliation looks like an extraordinary mistake. All three of Hobbes’s assailants would strike back at him repeatedly in the following years, creating a literature that would do much to structure the hostility aimed at Hobbes for the rest of the century. But at the time, Hobbes’s decision to take on his opponents made a lot more sense. It was far from clear that either the Presbyterians or the Episcopalians would ever wield significant political or religious power again, and in 1656 Hobbes’s attackers were all in positions of significant political weakness. Bramhall was an impoverished Royalist exile and the Royalist and Episcopalian cause was at an extremely low ebb. Hobbes’s Oxford opponents were similarly on the back foot. A microcosm of national politics, Oxford in the mid-1650s was dominated by the Independent faction under the leadership of John Owen. Ward was an Episcopalian, Wallis an Independent-hating Presbyterian and neither of them enjoyed much wider political favour. They were also Cambridge men originally, intruded into the Chairs of ejected Royalists. Their intellectual allegiance to neo-scholastic moral theology made them objects of suspicion to more radical Protestant dons.89 Set in this context, Hobbes’s determination to do battle with the residual forces of priestcraft makes more sense. Not only would it allow him to rescue his damaged reputation and clear himself of atheism, but it 87 89

Hobbes, EW, V, p. 454. 88 Ibid., p. 455. Ward’s biographer noted that Ward and his colleagues were subject to criticism from ‘peevish people’ to whom they were ‘mere moral men’. Walter Pope, The Life of Seth, Lord Bishop of Salisbury (1697), p. 43.

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would also give him the opportunity to remarket his ideas as theologically legitimate and peaceable alternatives to the seditious absurdities peddled by the Presbyterians and Episcopalians. Hobbes tackled Bramhall first, in Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance (1656). Taking his cue from Bramhall’s presentation of the debate, Hobbes reproduced all of the material, but added his own reply to the bishop’s first set of objections. What is striking about Hobbes’s treatment of the issues in Questions are the lengths to which he goes to establish his credentials as an orthodox Protestant Reformation theologian. Hobbes effectively recasts the debate as one between a sincere lay admirer of the Protestant Reformers and a scholastic priest whose doctrines originate in Roman Catholic theology. From the very first pages Hobbes makes much of his claim that his position reflects a legitimate commonsense interpretation of scripture, arguing that Bramhall’s version of free will was jargonridden, non-scriptural and primarily an invention of the Roman church. In spite of its rejection by the Reformers, the doctrine had crept back into Protestant theology: And though by the reformed Churches instructed by Luther, Calvin, and others this opinion was cast out, yet not many years since it began again to be reduced by Arminius and his followers, and became the readiest way to ecclesiastical promotion; and by discontenting those who held the contrary, was in some part the cause of the following troubles.90

Here Hobbes makes an explicit attack upon Laudian churchmen, of whom Bramhall was a leading representative. Bramhall’s own views on free will, Hobbes argued, were simply derived from Roman Catholic theologian Suarez, a charge that Hobbes repeats on several occasions with the clear intention of making the common and damaging association between the Arminian clergy and the Roman church.91 By contrast, Hobbes cites the Protestant Reformers in support of his position, arguing that he ‘always very much reverenced and admired’ Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin and William Perkins, enlisting them as allies in his fight against the doctrines of scholasticism in general and free will in particular.92 As Jurgen Overhoff has stressed in his examination of the controversy, Hobbes’s claims about the Reformers’ position were by no means ill-founded.93 Some of Hobbes’s 90 91 92 93

Hobbes, EW, V, p. 1. Ibid., V, pp. 11, 18, 37. Hobbes argues that the source of Bramhall’s doctrine is Suarez’s Opuscula varia opuscula theologica (1600). Hobbes, EW, V, pp. 266, 64–5. J. Overhoff, Hobbes’s Theory of the Will: Ideological Reasons and Historical Circumstances (Lanham, 2000), p. 155.

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positions were very close to those defended by the Reformers, even if it could hardly be said that Hobbes shared the more spiritual dimension of their doctrines.94 Setting his views in this context, Hobbes was unrepentant about his basic position, dismissing Bramhall’s assertion that the will might be free in the scholastic sense of the term as an illusion: A wooden top that is lashed by the boys, and runs about sometimes to one wall, sometimes to another, sometimes spinning, sometimes hitting men in the shins, if it were sensible of its own motion, would think it proceeded from its own will, unless it felt what lashed it. And is a man any wiser, when he runs to one place for a benefice, to another for a bargain, and troubles the world with writing errors and requiring answers, because he thinks he doth it without other cause than his own will, and seeth not what are the lashings that cause his will?95

But Hobbes did not restrict himself to defending his philosophical position; he also responded to the attacks upon his theology and his politics, transforming his answers into assaults upon the bishop’s own political and ecclesiological views. In one example, Hobbes attacks Bramhall’s attempt to argue that there is a distinction between God’s general causal power and the specific power of individual free will. In theological terms Hobbes felt that the distinction was meaningless and he likens it to the argument that bishops have a divine right to ordain priests independent of the sovereign and his laws: ‘they say they get it from Christ, and yet acknowledge that it is unlawful if the civil power forbid them; but how have they right to ordain, when they cannot do it lawfully.’96 Theology and ecclesiology were intimately related, and Hobbes was determined to make this clear. The same went for politics: Bramhall’s constitutional Royalist theory about selfobligating monarchs had reflected his theological belief in a self-binding God. Hobbes attacked both simultaneously in his reductive account of obligation: ‘For he that can oblige, can also, when he will, release; and he that can release himself when he will, is not obliged.’97 To speak of selfobligating sovereigns of any sort, be they gods or kings, was just another example of scholastic absurdity. Hobbes was happy to dwell upon the seditious consequences of Bramhall’s theology. To argue that right reason constituted some independent and divinely ordained standard of justice, was an error ‘that hath cost many thousands of men their lives. Was there ever a King, that made a law which in right reason had been better unmade? And shall those laws therefore not be obeyed? Shall we rather rebel?’98 94 98

Ibid. 95 Hobbes, EW, V, p. 55. Ibid., p. 176, see also p. 194.

96

Ibid., pp. 142–3.

97

Ibid., p. 144.

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Power, including ecclesiastical power, ultimately had to lie with the sovereign, and if the Episcopalians had realised this, they might not have given their Roman Catholic opponents so much ammunition to use against them.99 Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance was more than a simple refutation of a position on free will. Hobbes also provided an extended defence of his religious and political projects, locating them firmly in theological positions with Protestant Reformist warrants. Aimed at opponents in a politically weak position, this was part of Hobbes’s attempt to repackage his ideas in such a way as to make them attractive to an Independent readership. The same was true of the assault upon Ward and Wallis, produced during the summer of 1656 with the title Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematiques. Hobbes’s strategy here was to vindicate his mathematical and natural philosophical method (the work would accompany a slightly amended English version of De Corpore) but in addition he sought to defuse the various charges against him. The sixth lesson mounted a defence of Hobbes’s reputation and the orthodoxy of his political and religious thought. He noted that a summary version of De Cive had appeared in France under the title ‘Ethics Demonstrated’; he also noted the approving remarks made about the book itself by Sorbie`re, Gassendi and Mersenne. De Cive’s doctrine, Hobbes argued, ‘is generally received by all but those of the clergy who think their interest concerned in being made subordinate to the civil power; whose testimonies therefore are invalid’.100 Hobbes was similarly unrepentant about promoting the political theory of Leviathan, and in a remark that can only have been calculated to emphasise the political utility of the book to the Cromwellian regime, Hobbes argued that ‘as it is, I believe it hath framed the minds of a thousand gentlemen to a conscientious obedience to present government, which otherwise would have wavered in that point.’101 Equally he wouldn’t apologise for Leviathan’s doctrine, ‘That all men that live in a Commonwealth, and receive protection of their lives and fortunes from the supreme governor thereof, are 99 100 101

Ibid., V, p. 447. Hobbes was referring to John Serjeant’s Schism dis-arm’d of the defensive weapons, lent it by Doctor Hammond, and the Bishop of Derry by S. W. (Paris, 1655). Hobbes, EW, VII, p. 332. Ibid., p. 336. This comment also gives an interesting insight into the target readership (‘gentlemen’) and the size of the print run of the first edition of Leviathan (1,000 copies). Hobbes perhaps attempts to cover himself by referring simply to ‘present government’ rather than ‘the present government’, but this wouldn’t stop his post-Restoration critics accusing him of complicity with the Cromwellian regime. See particularly Hyde’s use of the passage in his Brief view and survey (1676), pp. 92–3.

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reciprocally bound, as far as they are able, and shall be required, to protect that governor.’102 Hobbes’s opponents, by contrast, were revealed to be a new and insidious kind of schoolmen masquerading as natural philosophers: And your doctrine, that even here you avow, of abstracted essences, immaterial substances, and of nunc-stans; and your improper language in using the word . . . successive eternity; as also your doctrine of condensation, and your arguing from natural reason the incomprehensible mysteries of religion, and your malicious writing, are very shrewd signs that you yourselves are none of those which you say do freely philosophise; but that both your philosophy and your language are under the servitude, not of the Roman religion, but of the ambition of some other doctors, that seek, as the Roman clergy did, to draw all human learning to the upholding of their power ecclesiastical.103

Hobbes’s encounters with his Oxford opponents had convinced him that there was now a Presbyterian-Episcopalian scientific movement that reproduced the political and ecclesiastical function of scholasticism. Eventually this would become a conspiracy theory that Hobbes would use to explain the generally poor reception of his scientific and mathematical ideas, but it did have some basis in fact. Both Ward and Wallis favoured a natural philosophy that at least did not exclude the possibility of integrating traditional discussions of God and immaterial substances with a mechanical and mathematical approach to nature. Hobbes’s materialist physics in De Corpore, of course, rewrote natural philosophy in such a way as to deliberately exclude such integration as meaningless absurdity. This ideological conflict over the proper aims of and approaches to natural philosophy lay at the heart of the dispute between Hobbes and his clerical critics. Perhaps the crucial charge that Hobbes sought to rebut at the end of the Six Lessons was that of atheism, insinuated by Ward in the Vindiciae and Wallis in the Elenchus. Hobbes’s tactic was partly to appeal to evidence of reader response, something that he could do quite successfully given the absence of other printed accusations of atheism. In addition he referred his opponents to his use of scripture, the same move that he made in response to Bramhall’s accusations: But do not many other men, as well as you, read my Leviathan, and my other books? And yet they all find not such enmity in them against religion. Take heed of calling all atheists that have read and approved my Leviathan. Do you think I can be an atheist and not know it? Or knowing it, durst have offered my atheism to

102

Hobbes, EW, VII, p. 344.

103

Ibid., p. 348.

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the press? Or do you think him an atheist, or a contemner of the Holy Scripture, that sayeth nothing of the Deity but what he proveth by the Scripture?104

Hobbes’s statements here of course prove nothing about his personal beliefs, but they do demonstrate the difficulties faced by those accusing him of atheism. Indeed, as we shall see, even Seth Ward was ultimately forced to acknowledge that whatever Hobbes could be charged with, it couldn’t be a straightforward form of atheism. RECEPTION OF QUESTIONS CONCERNING LIBERTY, NECESSITY AND CHANCE

Bramhall replied to Questions in 1657 in his Castigations of Mr Hobbes, a lengthy restatement of his views that involved churning through the various passages of scripture cited on each side together with more general attacks upon Hobbes’s political and religious project. Although little in Bramhall’s substantial argument about the character of free will had changed, it was clear that Hobbes’s challenge to Bramhall’s Protestant orthodoxy, and his response to the insinuations of atheism, had hit home. Bramhall needed to defuse the charge that he was the one who had departed from orthodoxy and the views of the Protestant Reformers, in showing allegiance to the Catholic philosophy of the Schools. He simply, and perhaps slightly disingenuously, denied knowing anything about Suarez’s view of free will. On the issue of fidelity to the Reformers, Bramhall was forced to concede that Luther and Melanchthon and particularly Calvin had indeed held the opinions that Hobbes had attributed to them, but he took refuge in references to revised versions of Luther’s views published later.105 Pinning his Protestant credentials upon these passages, Bramhall attempted to turn the point against Hobbes: ‘Either he did know of Luther’s retraction, and then it was not ingenuously done to conceal it; or (which I rather believe) he did not know of it, and then he is but meanly versed in the doctrine and affairs of the Protestants.’106 In fact, as Ju¨rgen Overhoff has pointed out, Bramhall was skating on very thin ice here. Hobbes had represented the Reformer’s views correctly, and when Bramhall attempted to argue that the Protestant discussion of necessitarianism did not apply to ‘natural or civil actions’, he was simply incorrect.107 If Bramhall found it hard to lay a glove upon Hobbes’s use of Protestant authority, the obvious alternative move was to demonstrate that Hobbes 104 107

Ibid., p. 350. 105 Luther’s Visitatio Saxonica. Overhoff, Hobbes’s Theory of the Will, p. 157.

106

Bramhall, Works, IV, p. 218.

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was being disingenuous in deploying it, and this was one of the reasons for extending the discussion in Castigations to Hobbes’s broader politics and theology. If the Reformers might be useful for Hobbes’s argument about free will, Bramhall suggested that it was significant that Hobbes didn’t call upon their authority elsewhere: although he makes much of admiring Luther Melancthon Perkins and Calvin he does not refer his two sorts of devils, his temporary pains of hell, his lawless state of mankind, necessary of obedience to all human laws, inefficacy of prayer, infallible rule of moral goodness or universal necessity of all events by physical determination of second causes, or any one of his hundreds of paradoxes, to their determination.108

This was a more promising strategy, in that Hobbes clearly couldn’t call upon authorities for views that were more evidently novel, and it probably was the case that Hobbes was being extremely opportunistic in defending his case about necessity in the way that he did. Although much of the Castigations rehearses well-worn philosophical argument, Bramhall also responded to Hobbes’s political charges against him. Hobbes had attempted to wrongfoot Bramhall by drawing attention to the seditious consequences of the bishop’s view that laws might be unjust or tyrannical. Bramhall’s long-standing problem here was that although he did want to cling to a worldview in which the laws of God and nature were immutable, eternal and obligatory, he also wanted to make it clear that active disobedience could never be warranted. Hobbes’s theory took seriously the thought that this scholastic position was fundamentally subversive and so it was relatively easy for Hobbes to suggest that the logical consequence of Bramhall’s argument was rebellion. Bramhall’s entirely traditional answer was passive obedience, which ‘is a mean between active obedience and rebellion’.109 Individuals ought not to obey actively because one should obey God rather than man; at the same time one could not rebel. In the end Bramhall concedes that he doesn’t deny some of Hobbes’s key political propositions, namely that the sovereign is keeper of both tables, that he has an ‘architectonical power’ to see that his subjects do their duty; that doctrines compatible with peace are taught and seditious ones discouraged; that sovereign princes owe no account to mortal man but to God alone; and that kings of England are supreme governors over ecclesiastical as well as civil causes.110 That said, he nevertheless utterly denies that true 108


109

Ibid., p. 323.

110

Ibid., p. 499.

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religion should consist in obedience to the civil magistrate or that he should be obeyed actively in unlawful commands. On the question of atheism, Hobbes’s aggressive self-defence forced Bramhall to clarify that he hadn’t actually accused Hobbes of atheism ‘in the concrete’. He argued that one could say that a man’s opinions might be ‘blasphemous or atheistical in the abstract, without charging the person with formal atheism or blasphemy’. The reason was that a person blinded by prejudice might not see the consequences of those opinions in the way that others might see them.111 It is striking that whenever Hobbes confronted his opponents on this charge they would usually issue a similar retraction. A better tactic was to call attention to Hobbes’s departure from Christian orthodoxy, and to characterise him as a heretic rather than a downright unbeliever.112 But in spite of the attacks, there are signs that Hobbes’s remarketing of his projects as philosophy consistent with orthodox Protestant theology had some success even amongst individuals who one might expect to be completely hostile to his project. In May and July 1656, Hobbes received letters from a Presbyterian named Philip Tanny, commenting upon the debate with Bramhall. Tanny was an Oxford graduate who in the early 1650s had occupied a minor government post.113 By the mid-1650s he had developed an interest in the debate between Hobbes and Bramhall, having read Liberty and Necessity and Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance. In his letter of July 1656 he commented of Liberty and Necessity that ‘its seeming ingenuity hath much swayed mee heretofore to thinke you a good man, and the rather because I observed in it certaine high mysterious speculations, as I thought, the best opened by you, of any man living that I ever saw.’114 Tanny nevertheless suggests that Hobbes probably shouldn’t have printed it ‘unles your affections had bin more sweetely carryed forth to glorify Jesus Christ and not your owne wit, which doth abound in diverse parts of your little booke’.115 Tanny went on to ask Hobbes about his theory, with a view to discussing it in a work of his own which never appeared. Another supporter of Hobbes’s position on liberty and necessity was the former Royalist-turned-republican James Harrington, who in spite of his critique of Hobbes’s political project, explicitly praised Hobbes’s work on the topic as ‘the greatest of new lights, and those which I have followed and 111 112

113

Ibid., pp. 418–19. See for example, John Whitefoote’s attack upon Hobbes in Bishop Joseph Hall’s funeral sermon, Israea agchithanes (1656), pp. 30–1. Here Hobbes’s necessitarianism is linked to the heretical content of Leviathan (particularly chapter 42). CTH, II, pp. 902–4. 114 CTH, I, p. 277. 115 Ibid., p. 278.

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shall follow’.116 Hobbes’s necessitarianism was also well received amongst Independents, and evidence of this can be found in a letter to Hobbes sent by Edward Bagshaw in March 1658. Bagshaw, a graduate of Christ Church College Oxford and a client of the Independent Vice-Chancellor John Owen, addresses Hobbes as his ‘Ever honoured Friend’. He wrote that he had been discussing ‘your Excellent Tract about Necessity’ with a lady ‘of Eminent both Quality and Understanding’. Bagshaw wanted Hobbes to give an explanation as to how God’s prescience would be inconsistent with free will, in order to convince his female friend of Hobbes’s case.117 We don’t have a reply from Hobbes, but Bagshaw evidently found nothing heterodox in Hobbes’s discussion of God and necessity.118 In fact, despite Bramhall’s criticism and the controversy over the philosopher’s other ideas, Hobbes’s doctrines on liberty and necessity would continue to find an approving readership. In November 1661, Samuel Pepys ‘lay long reading Hobbs his liberty and necessity . . . a little but a very shrewd piece’.119 When Aubrey commented that John Dryden made use of Hobbes’s ideas in his plays, it seems likely that he was referring to Dryden’s recurrent interest in Hobbesian ideas of necessity.120 The clergy would continue to attack Hobbes for his necessitarianism, but in contrast to the treatment of his other views, such attacks were often part and parcel of attacks upon hardline reformed theology; even Hobbes’s opponents could therefore accept that this aspect of Hobbes’s work linked up to wider Protestant agendas rather than simply reducing to atheism.121 As for the Six Lessons, it is unlikely that more than a very small and specialist audience fully understood the mathematical and scientific issues disputed between Hobbes and Wallis, but there was nevertheless plenty of material for non-specialist readers to get to grips with. It is clear that the book did little to mend Hobbes’s relationships with the Episcopalians, but Hobbes had not sought to appease his Episcopalian or Presbyterian audience.122 Perhaps more representative of Hobbes’s target audience was 116 117 119 120 121

122

J. Harrington, The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1977), p. 423. CTH, I, pp. 497–8. 118 See Noel Malcolm’s comments in CTH, II, p. 783. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. C. Latham and W. Matthews, 11 vols. (1970–83), II, p. 217, 20 November 1661. See chapter 5 below. See for example, Thomas Pierce’s Eautontimoroumenos (1658), pp. 70–1, and his Autokatakrisis (1658). For Restoration discussion of the issue, see Bishop Laney’s observations on Liberty and Necessity in A letter about liberty and necessity (1676). The latter may well have been a response to the apparent misuse of Hobbesian fatalism in the popular culture of the 1670s. See Brian Duppa’s response, Isham, Correspondence, p. 118.

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Edmund Waller, writing to Hobbes in July 1656 with a disparaging review of a new critique by Royalist Episcopalian William Lucy. Waller commented that he thought that Hobbes had finished his opponents off: ‘confident I am that all they write will neuer be read ouer, nor printed twise’.123 WARD AND WALLIS STRIKE BACK

In Oxford, Wallis, Ward and their allies were already preparing the next assault upon him. Ward’s extended attack on Hobbes was titled In Thomae Hobbii philosophiam exercitatio epistolica and it appeared in the second half of 1656 after the publication of the Six Lessons, to which it devoted an appendix. Made up of six sections, Ward targeted those areas which hadn’t been covered by Wallis (who had dealt with the mathematics) and Bramhall (who had covered liberty and necessity),124 including Hobbes’s natural philosophy, his politics and his religious beliefs. Ward’s opening letter to John Wilkins attributes to the latter the desire that Ward should examine Hobbes’s opinions and comment upon them. It also indicates that opinion about Hobbes was far from uniformly hostile, Ward referring to the ‘large number of highly divergent opinions held by great numbers of men’ about Hobbes’s works.125 Indeed, Ward saw any attack upon Hobbes as a perilous task, in that however he goes about it ‘I shall not be able to escape the censure of those men who appear to have sworn allegiance either to Hobbes or (the majority) his opponents.’ In contrast to the increasingly abusive exchanges between Wallis and Hobbes, 123

124 125

CTH, I, p. 295. William Lucy’s Examinations, censures, and confutations of divers errours in the two first chapters of Mr. Hobbes his Leviathan (1656 [Thomason’s copy is dated 21 July]), was the first of a series of rambling critical commentaries on chapters of Leviathan. Hobbes apparently expected that Lucy, writing under the pseudonym Christopher Pike (a play on the Latin ‘Lucius’), would put up a better performance than Ward and Wallis, flagging the forthcoming publication of Lucy’s work in Six lessons (p. 64). Lucy’s critique was largely a bewildered restatement of Aristotelian positions in response to Hobbes’s natural philosophy. Lucy sent a second work (probably dealing with chapters 3–11 of Leviathan) to Oxford, but according to Henry Stubbe (writing to Hobbes in January 1657) he ‘did receiue no great incouragement to print it, being told, yt many things which he stopped at as absurd, were not only yor principles, but admitted generally, by those who have learned to search into nature, & not to acquiesce in ye traditions of others. I heare he is very angry at it’, CTH, I, p. 440, see also p. 441, n. 16. Lucy went on to reissue his original critique in 1658 and to publish Observations, censvres & confutations of divers errors in the 12, 13, and 14 chap. of Mr. Hobs his Leviathan (1657 [Thomason’s copy is dated 1 January, i.e. 1658]). The critiques were reprinted as part of the much longer Observations, censures, and confutations of notorious errours in Mr. Hobbes his Leviathan (1663), discussed below, pp. 233–7. S. Ward, In Thomae Hobbii philosophiam exercitatio epistolica (Oxford, 1656), p. 14. Ward, Exercitatio, p. 1.

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Ward claimed that his approach would be to take Hobbes’s statements seriously in an effort to come to an unbiased assessment of Hobbes’s work.126 In fact there was a marked and deliberate contrast in tone with Wallis’s virulent attacks upon Hobbes. What had obviously become clear to Ward was that simply railing against Hobbes raised the suspicion that there was no rational philosophical answer to his doctrine: ‘This of course is what the wretched students of this master boast, that religious ministers are wont to thunder from their pulpits against Hobbes’ dogmas with great heat, but understand the dogmas themselves hardly at all, and are much less able to disprove them.’ Ward explained that he had designed his analysis to start where the theologians had left off, relying ‘solely upon philosophical, or, if you will, natural principles; if one proceeds in this way then there is a place not so much for heat as for strong and unshakeable reason’.127 To that end, Ward had carefully gone through Hobbes’s works and in his attack upon them had allowed Hobbes’s own statements to condemn him. Ward’s assault was easily the most meticulous to date; he identified and reproduced brief extracts from De Corpore (subject at several points to chapter by chapter animadversion) and Leviathan that other critics had passed by. Although Ward was careful to give the impression that the book was a sober and balanced assessment, self-consciously eschewing the noisy accusations of atheism and blasphemy, the effect nevertheless amounted to the same thing. Ward drew attention to the fact that he wasn’t directly accusing Hobbes of atheism, but his arrangement of the material and airing of the issue really only led to one conclusion. Ward was particularly concerned to deny Hobbes’s materialism and the effects that it had throughout Hobbes’s philosphical system. Materialism simultaneously undermined the idea of God and the immortality of the soul, not to mention free will and the possibility of divine justice. Ward’s scientific attack on the materialist physics of De Corpore dovetails with his attempts to refute Hobbes’s materialist science of man. Ward assembles Hobbes’s views on man to expose his errors. Hobbes wants to reduce man, he observes at one point, to the level of other animals, necessitated to act in exactly the same way. Ward argues that Hobbes’s materialist account of motivation and psychology is simply inadequate in explaining man’s higher functions: it can in no way be understood how a body, impelled this way or that, perceives some thing by a reflective act. Yet in the case of man there are countless things, 126

Ibid., p. 2.

127

Ibid.

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which not only have this, but also surpass the entire force of the imagination, both in the simple apprehension of objects, in passing judgment, in discourse, in the struggle with the flesh, and countless other cases. We have shown above in this little work that every universal notion surpasses the entire force of the imagination such as Thomas describes it. The very apprehension of an incorporeal substance is not achieved by any force of the body, whether at rest or in motion.128

The soul of man, responsible for such effects, is naturally indivisible, incorruptible and consequently immortal; Hobbes’s attempts to prove otherwise simply open the door to the charge of atheism.129 Ward’s treatment of Hobbes’s political theory is brief and deals with the argument of Leviathan, where, Ward observes, the absurdities of the rest of Hobbes’s philosophical system are brought together. Ward targets the twin foundations of Hobbes’s project; the idea that there is a lawless state of nature, and that in order to escape from it is is necessary to create an absolute authority by contract. Ward, in common with most of Hobbes’s critics, found the characterisation of the state of nature deeply problematic, not least the thought that it might be a juridical void where, as Leviathan had implied, there were no common standards of right and wrong before the existence of the magistrate. Ward attempts to show that Hobbes simply contradicts himself when it comes to the detail of a natural state that had never existed. Hobbes had acknowledged in chapter 13 that there had never been a general state of nature in the abstract form that he had described.130 Ward also points to Hobbes’s acknowledgement in chapter 30 that originally fathers were sovereigns, suggesting that man had never been without patriarchal forms of sovereignty.131 In making his argument, Hobbes was also contradicting scripture. Not only did the detail of Hobbes’s fiction contradict scriptural history, but it also contradicted passages making clear that divinely ordained standards of right and wrong preceded positive law.132 Ward defends traditional natural law theory, pointing out that even Hobbes had cited St Paul’s famous comment that the law of nature was written in men’s hearts.133 Every individual has a faculty to discern good and evil and nature itself imprints knowledge of the immutable laws of nature. Ward’s faith in our natural ability to identify good and evil marks out a crucial difference between his approach to the issue of natural obligation 128 130 131 132 133

Ibid., pp. 272–3. 129 Ibid., pp. 274–80. Ibid. p. 287, referring to Leviathan (1651), p. 63, see also p. 312. Ward, Exercitatio, p. 287, referring to Leviathan (1651), p. 178. Ward refers to Romans 5:12–14 where human sinfulness appears to precede law. Ibid., p. 293; Hobbes had used the formula in ch. 42 of Leviathan (p. 282 O.P.).

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and Hobbes’s scepticism about the possibility of deriving an obligatory natural ethics beyond that required by self-preservation. Ward’s formulation of this difference would be important for later opponents of Hobbes. Ward argues that ‘there are certain truths made manifest by nature, which are the object of human understanding.’ They are natural in the sense that knowledge might be innate or imprinted upon the mind, but there are also other ways that knowledge might be called natural. Natural knowledge can be derived from the process of reasoning itself, provided that reason is not deficient. In addition ‘nature, or, if you will, the combination of all causes, leads by suggestion, and in a certain way . . . forces one to the perception of some matter, and to the forming of some judgement.’ These processes allow individuals to derive from nature a working knowledge of natural obligations that reach far beyond Hobbes’s limited conclusions drawn from self-preservation alone: ‘Judgments then about good and evil are made at the ordaining, and almost incitement, of nature, and before Hobbes all men were accustomed also to call them justice and injustice.’ Armed with such knowledge there was no need to rely upon the positive law of the sovereign to provide a foundation for ethics. Ward’s optimistic statements about the possibility of teasing from nature an extensive story about natural obligation would become a key feature of Latitudinarian critiques of Hobbes, and it summed up one of the most important distinctions between Hobbes and the Oxford scientists in the Wilkins circle. Where Hobbes was sceptical that nature straightforwardly revealed sufficient evidence of our obligation to perform extensive natural duties, Wilkins and Ward believed that such information might be derived from an examination of nature. This confidence can be seen in later critiques of Hobbes, particularly Richard Cumberland’s De legibus naturae (1672) where the thought that science could actually be used to assist in the demonstration of the laws of nature, was taken to its natural conclusion. It was important to make this case in the 1650s precisely because Hobbes and his rationalist approach to science seemed to be subverting traditional natural ethics. Ward showed that reason and philosophy need imply no such thing. If individuals could detect their natural obligations and if justice and injustice preceded positive law, then there was no need for Hobbes’s state of war, and no need for the extreme account of sovereignty designed as a remedy to it. Hobbes’s contract theory was also deeply implausible: Yet has there ever been a covenant of this kind entered into by men? Can Thomas produce any covenant of this kind, from the records and history of all times, either remote or more recent, where individual men have sworn to individual men to entrust themselves in all matters concerning this life and their future life to the

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judgment of any one man, (who has no intention of giving them any guarantee about his rules for governing them), although he will thereafter exercise every power over their bodies, their fortunes, their very lives and their immortal souls? Has any state at any time (I say) in any part of the whole world, been established and set up in this way?134

Hobbes’s conclusions about the rights of his absolute sovereign were, as a result, unjustified, not least those concerning church government. As an Episcopalian Ward predictably found Hobbes’s Erastianism one of the most objectionable features of his theory, particularly the extensive range of ecclesiastical powers given to the sovereign. Ward was particularly concerned about the powers over ordination, preaching, teaching and excommunication in chapter 42 and also with that chapter’s recommendation that one ought to comply with a sovereign’s command to deny one’s faith. In the chapter on religion, Ward sets himself the question of working out whether Hobbes’s doctrine is friendly or hostile towards Christianity. Ward suggests that a theory hostile to Christianity is one that perverts its rule, diminishes or destroys its authority, disorders the Christian church or attempts to root out the spiritual exercise of the religion. Predictably he finds Hobbes guilty on all counts; Hobbes ‘strives utterly to destroy the whole system and force of the Christian religion (by perverting its entire object)’. Ward’s main objection is that Hobbes makes the sovereign the arbiter of all religious matters, a move that puts his theory completely at odds with a serious faith. As he puts it: ‘Religion is a sacred and serious thing, belonging to the innermost reaches of souls; nor can it in any way consist with this opinion, which holds that religion should take its origin from the will of some man and from a civil institution.’135 In spite of Hobbes’s claims to take Christianity and scripture seriously, his treatment of it reveals his true intent, particularly in chapter 33 of Leviathan where the sovereign effectively authorises revelation. Ward examines the way that Hobbes progressively undermines the independent authority of scripture, prophecy and Christ himself in favour of the sovereign. Referring to Alexander Ross’s work, Ward similarly concludes that Hobbes’s theology is a mass of heresies and ‘wicked dogmas’, not least Hobbes’s treatment of the Trinity. Like Ross Ward refers to Hobbes’s theory as ‘quasi-muslim’, an alien and deformed version of faith that seeks to overturn Christianity.136 That said, Ward finally holds back from a bald accusation of atheism: 134 136

Ward, Exercitatio, p. 312. 135 Ibid., p. 319. Elsewhere in the text Ward makes much of the similarity with Islamic political and philosophical views to reinforce the alien character of Hobbes’s religious discourse. Ibid., pp. 128–9.

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I do concede that a man may be religious whether he embraces the beliefs of the Sadducees or the Epicureans; such men of course have a religion, as long as they grant the existence of God. I am unwilling to ascribe that dreadful crime of Atheism to this man at any time, (although he does not personally consider Atheism a crime, as long as it is suppressed within the heart and intends not the least mischief against human laws . . .). I refuse (I say) ever to reproach him with Atheism, yet I beg and beseech him to ensure, by explaining his opinion, that he appears to me to believe in God.137

The problem, explains Ward, is that if God cannot be a body (as orthodox theology maintained), and on Hobbes’s account cannot also be an incorporeal substance, then ‘I do not understand how God could exist in the Hobbesian way of considering things.’138 The accusation was left hanging; if Ward was unwilling to impose the label, it was up to Hobbes to prove that he wasn’t actually an atheist. This formulation of the problem, offering Hobbes a difficult choice between affirming God’s materialism on the one hand and denying his very existence on the other, would become a favourite challenge of Hobbes’s clerical critics in the absence of a knockdown identification of his atheism. As a response to his indeterminate accounts of God it was a challenge that however it was answered resulted in a position that was potentially heretical. As we shall see, Hobbes would eventually opt for the materialist horn of the dilemma, and a whole new barrage of criticism. As Ward was finishing the Exercitatio, Hobbes’s Six Lessons appeared and in response Ward added an appendix dealing with Hobbes’s new text. The tone seems to be largely sarcastic: ‘This book won me over to Thomas, and made it possible for me to pardon him everything.’ Reflecting on his ‘new friendship’ Ward asks ‘How could I not love Hobbes? He affords me so many triumphs in this debate over his good name.’ Ward is not moved by Hobbes’s counter-attack, and reaffirms the views that he had stated in the Vindiciae. The only concession that Ward makes concerns the language that he had resorted to in talking about Hobbes’s treatment of religion in that work: ‘I acknowledge’, he says, ‘that I could have expressed my opinion more mildly, and perhaps should have; yet he will, I think, grant (when he reads the last part of this treatise) that I was not lacking in reasons for my opinion.’ Although Ward’s book draws upon the extant critical literature on Hobbes it marks a departure in that Ward does not simply reiterate scholastic commonplaces in response to Hobbes’s position. Ward 137

Ibid., p. 340.

138

Ibid.

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defended the broader features of a Thomist worldview with a new kind of scientific naturalism that actually had much in common with the mechanistic materialism promoted by Hobbes. Arguably these common features of their projects are what drew Ward to Hobbes’s work in the first place, but Hobbes’s denial of incorporeal substance and his rejection of meaningful philosophical discussion of God and His will meant that Ward had to distance himself from Hobbes’s philosophical project. To the extent that this involved a novel statement of the relationship between natural philosophy and theology, Ward’s discussion would become an influential text for those Latitudinarian divines seeking a means to reconcile the claims of science and religion, often against the reductive claims of Leviathan.139 In contrast to Ward’s more measured attempts to deal with Hobbes’s work, Wallis’s Due correction for Mr Hobbes,140 which came out in October 1656 reached new lows in terms of abusive rhetoric. Wallis lambasted Hobbes for responding to the Latin Elenchus in English, suggesting that one reason for doing this was Hobbes’s lack of ability in the learned language.141 In response to Hobbes’s claims about his reputation, Wallis marshalled testimony from various sources attesting to Hobbes’s mistakes and plagiarism.142 Unmoved by Hobbes’s attempts to deflect the accusation of atheism, Wallis also returned to the charge that Hobbes’s materialism left him in a difficult position when it came to talking about God. Was it the case that Hobbes was claiming God to be somewhere and finite, or nowhere and nothing? ‘If you say the first, you deny God to be Infinite: if the second you deny him to bee. And, either way, you may without injury be affirmed to maintain horrid opinions concerning God.’143 Paradoxically, although Wallis was in fact getting the better of the mathematical argument, the obscurity of the technical issues meant that it was far from clear to some observers that Hobbes was being beaten, or, especially in the light of his recent statements, that he was as unacceptable as Wallis and Ward were suggesting. Given Hobbes’s attempts to realign himself in political and religious terms, it is perhaps not surprising that at least one of Hobbes’s supporters at Oxford saw an opportunity to bring about a rapprochement between Hobbes and the university Independents.

139

140 141

E. Elys, a friend of Henry More, commented in 1694 that Ward’s Exercitatio ‘prov’d a most effectual Antidote against the Plague of the Hobbian Errors, which at that time began to spread most dreadfully.’ H. More, Letters on several subjects (1694), p. 94. J. Wallis, Due correction for Mr Hobbes. Or schoole discipline, for not saying his lessons right (Oxford, printed by Leonard Lichfield printer to the University for Tho: Robinson, 1656). Ibid., pp. 1–2, 13–26. 142 Ibid., 4–8. 143 Ibid., 31–2.

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RECONCILIATION WITH OXFORD?

Henry Stubbe (1632–76) was another young disciple of Hobbes; like Edward Bagshaw he had attended Westminster school, and in 1649 matriculated at Christ Church Oxford under the patronage of the radical politician Henry Vane the younger. Noted for his ability with Latin and Greek, Stubbe also served with the parliamentary army in Scotland in the 1650s. It isn’t clear when and where he first enountered Hobbes but his acquaintanceship with John Davies of Kidwelly suggests that he was connected to the London literary circles where Hobbes had been gaining followers. In 1655 or 1656 Stubbe returned to Oxford, but this time under the patronage of John Owen himself. The extent of Stubbe’s devotion is clear from his correspondence with Hobbes, a series of letters beginning in April 1656 and ending in October 1659. The initial subject of the correspondence is Stubbe’s translation of Leviathan into Latin; a project that Hobbes appears to have encouraged and to which Stubbe devoted his spare time. By the autumn of 1656, however, Stubbe, who had been following Hobbes’s various disputes with his antagonists, saw an opportunity to improve Hobbes’s standing with the Oxford Independents. In a letter of October 1656 referring to Wallis’s Due correction as ‘a most childish answer’, Stubbe revealed to Hobbes that Wallis had published Mens sobria. In this work Wallis denied a central tenet of Independent Congregationalism, that a minister’s power was restricted to his congregation. As a Presbyterian, Wallis believed that he was a minister of Christ’s universal church, a position that Independents could not accept. John Owen asked Stubbe to attack Mens sobria, which he did, to be rewarded in 1657 with the position of Deputy-Keeper of the Bodleian under Thomas Barlow.144 Stubbe passed Wallis’s book to Hobbes, commenting that Wallis ‘assumes an authority beyond y[e] Pope . . . if euer they preuayle, their jurisdiction will bee ample, for euery Parish-priest is now Oecumenicall, [nor sh]all it bee a marke of AntiXt to bee an vniversall bishop . . . ’145 He also invited Hobbes to contribute a short letter to his own refutation, on the grounds that it would ‘doe much to disgrace ye d:r’.146 Even though Hobbes didn’t provide the letter for Stubbe’s book (so rude that it remained unpublished), it is evident that the two men were agreed in their attitude towards Wallis’s ecclesiology and when Hobbes decided to compose a response to Due correction, he included an attack upon the arguments of Mens sobria. Stubbe, who had agreed to contribute a 144

CTH, I, p. 311.

145

Ibid., pp. 333–4.

146

Ibid., p. 337.

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letter to Hobbes’s work attacking Wallis’s Latin grammar, urged Hobbes to put in more positive remarks about Oxford ‘wherein you haue many fauourers, and wch hath uindicated you so much by slighting both the lectures & bookes of yor Antagonists’.147 The suggestion that Hobbes had supporters seems to have persuaded the philosopher to soften his attitude towards Oxford. Stubbe was keen to encourage this development, and particularly keen to calibrate Hobbes’s assault on Wallis so that it appealed to Owen and his particular supporters. In December Stubbe commented to Hobbes that favourable remarks about the university ‘will redound to D:r Owens honor’, noting that Owen had little time for either Wallis or Ward.148 In another letter just over a week later, Stubbe reported that there were rumours going around ‘yt you haue omitted wt might reflect upon ye u[niversi]tie which all are glad of ’. Even if Hobbes didn’t attack the university, he could still attack Ward and Wallis: ‘you may distinguish ym both easily from our vniuersity, being Cambridge men, and not brought in by ye vtie, but imposed in yt ignominious Visitation.’ 149 Stubbe was going to a lot of trouble to try to rehabilitate the philosopher by linking Hobbes’s attack on Wallis to wider Oxford politics. As we have seen, in many ways this was not a bad idea; Hobbes and Owen both loathed Wallis and would have shared a lot of the arguments against Wallis’s Presbyterian ecclesiology. There were young Westminster-educated Independents like Stubbe and Bagshaw who might find it possible to endorse various aspects of Hobbes’s projects. But that said, it is important not to make too much of Stubbe’s account of Hobbes’s support. Young Independents at Christ Church were one thing, but the chances that the very junior Stubbe could rehabilitate Hobbes with senior members of the university were another matter entirely, especially in the teeth of the sustained Presbyterian and Episcopalian opposition to the philosopher. Perhaps indicative of the difficulties is the correspondence that emerged from Stubbe’s attempt to put Hobbes in touch with his boss at the Bodleian, Thomas Barlow. In the letter suggesting that Hobbes had admirers in Oxford, Stubbe had indicated to Hobbes that Thomas Barlow was one of their number, and that he would be pleased to receive a copy of the English De Corpore. Hobbes sent the volume to be delivered by Stubbe. Stubbe’s story about Barlow’s enthusiasm had been so convincing that Hobbes even appears to have asked in his letter whether Barlow might openly defend him. As Stubbe confessed to Hobbes, he had had to blot out ‘openly’, a comment 147

Ibid., p. 383.

148

Ibid., p. 384.

149

Ibid., p. 395.

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revealing the limitations of even a moderate reconciliation. In any case, it seems that Stubbe had misjudged Barlow’s willingness to sing Hobbes’s praises. Barlow’s reply is polite but betrays some slightly prickly unease. Thanking Hobbes for his ‘rich present’, Barlow commented that ‘I neuer did, nor doe thinke yt you could condemne Vniversityes, you haue too great an vnderstanding, absolutely to condemn the seminaries, and Nurseryes of good literature.’150 Barlow, a moderate Episcopalian, indicated that he agreed with Hobbes’s comments about ‘ye Scotch Diuines’ and their transcendant power. But that much agreed, Barlow gave a slightly barbed account of his own reception of Hobbes’s work: I haue read your bookes constantly as they came out, and doe thankefully acknowledge to you (as I haue done, and still doe to all I discourse with) that I haue learn’d much by them, in many particulars. I confesse (at present) I doe not concurre with your judgement in euery thing, yet I haue (as I think all sober men should) according to ye principles of naturall reason, and Christianity, learned thus much Ciuility, as to be thankefull for those discoueryes of truth, wch any man makes to me, and where I doubt, or differ, to suspend my censure till more mature consideration.151

Barlow concluded by suggesting that he had learned to suspect his own judgement ‘hauing by experience found (both in yours, and other learned mens writeings) that to be true at Last, wch at first readinge I much suspected as hereticall’. It would be difficult to take this as an unalloyed compliment, and Stubbe’s anxiety at Hobbes’s subsequent silence suggests that Hobbes may well have been slightly nettled by it.152 Barlow shared the widely held view that Hobbes’s work was a mixed bag of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, but it seems unlikely that this expert in late scholastic philosophy had much sympathy with Hobbes’s broader projects.153 As we have seen, almost everyone could approve of something in Hobbes but the dangerous extremity of his controversial ideas meant that very few were likely endorse his works publicly and incur potentially damaging accusations of Hobbism. It is also extremely doubtful that Hobbes’s anti-Presbyterianism was enough to make him any more than an undesirable fellow-traveller for Stubbe’s patron Owen. Owen did not approve of Stubbe’s project to translate Leviathan, and the latter was forced to conceal his activities from the Vice-Chancellor.154 Writing to Hobbes, Stubbe reported that 150 153 154

Ibid., p. 420. 151 Ibid., p. 421. 152 Ibid., p. 430. As Noel Malcolm points out, the fact that Barlow could recommend Ross’s Leviathan drawn out with a hook to students rather suggests where his sympathies lay. CTH, II, p. 786. Ibid., I, pp. 383, 459.

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Owen had commented that Leviathan ‘was a booke ye most full of excellent remarques of any, onely you deify the magistrate, & spoyled all by yor kingdome of darknesse’.155 Like most readers, Owen could find things of value in the book, and the ‘excellent remarques’ probably included Hobbes’s attacks upon clerical pretensions and aspects of his ecclesiology.156 That said, Hobbes’s ultra-Erastianism, and the eccentricity of Part IV were clearly too much for Owen. Even for someone whose basic political and ecclesiological positions corresponded to many of Hobbes’s own, Hobbes’s extremism made unqualified praise, even privately, impossible.157 Public endorsement was even less likely. Hobbes himself acknowledged this, recalling bitterly in 1661 that Owen had once said ‘Whatever be Hobbes’s doctrine we will not accept it.’158 The Presbyterian and Episcopalian campaign to expose Hobbes’s heterodoxy meant that it was not possible to consider or cite Hobbes without calling to mind the charges against him and potentially inviting a set of ready-made assaults and slurs. The upshot of this was that the Presbyterian position on Hobbes was effectively hegemonic, at least in terms of public discourse. No one apart from Stubbe was prepared to stand up for Hobbes in public, in spite of the librarian’s best efforts to reconcile Hobbes to possible sympathisers. The means by which the Presbyterians exercised such power over public statements are revealed in a letter from Stubbe to Hobbes in February 1657, discussing, and deterring, the possibility of Hobbes visiting the university: ‘I could bee very glad to see you here’, wrote Stubbe, ‘but it is hardly seasonable yet, & ye Presbyterians haue so filled men’s eares agt you, yt none would dare to exhibite yt respect wch they haue for you, least they might suffer in their preferment.’159 Such considerations may ultimately have swayed Stubbe himself. After contributing to Hobbes’s pamphlet he was accused of Hobbism by the Presbyterian Daniel Cawdry.160 Stubbe replied in a private letter denying that he had done any more than defend Hobbes’s Latin and Greek. Anyone who read Cawdry’s book, he complained, might ‘apprehend that I own the Leviathan, and have defended the 155 156

157

158 159

Ibid., p. 459. Hobbes wrote to Stubbe commending Owen’s ecclesiological writings during this period, particularly Owen’s Of schism, a fact that Stubbe sought to make much of around Oxford. Ibid., pp. 448–9. Noel Malcolm suggests that in Of the divine originall, authority, self-evidencing light, and power of the scriptures, Owen framed some of his arguments against Hobbes’s scriptural criticism. See Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Ezra and the Bible’, in Aspects of Hobbes, p. 429, n. 160. Hobbes Dialogus Physicus LW, IV, pp. 273–4, translated in S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985), p. 370. CTH, I, p. 449. 160 D. Cawdrey, Independency [further] proved to be schism (1658), pp. 129–30.

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greatest blasphemy which it is said to contain’. To complete his litany of denials, Stubbe argued that ‘I no more defended Mr. Hobbes than you do now the pope and papal church.’161 When Stubbe pursued his own grammatical dispute with Wallis, he made similarly disingenuous statements in attempt to put distance between himself and Hobbes.162 Stubbe couldn’t avoid confronting the fact that he knew Hobbes, but sought, like many of Hobbes’s earlier critics, to distinguish between the man and his doctrines, possibly anxious about his future at the Bodleian. The story of Hobbes’s fate in Oxford offers a revealing glimpse into the micropolitics of Hobbes’s reception in mid-1650s England. After the relative public silence that had greeted Leviathan, the dispute with Ward and Wallis returned Hobbes to public attention by the middle of the decade, and sparked the first systematic campaigns against his various projects. The disputes with his critics had had a number of effects. Hobbes, characteristically combining attack and defence, had repackaged his work to stress its orthodoxy and its fit with the religious and political policies of the Protectorate. The appearance of new works (by accident and design) may well have earned Hobbes new readers like Bagshaw, who might have found it easier to take Hobbes’s theology seriously as a result of the rebranding exercise. But at the same time, the printed campaign against Hobbes inevitably changed the polemical environment in which his works were read. The complicated mathematical dispute by itself may not have had a decisive effect, but the wider significance of the war with Wallis and Ward lay in the noisy polemic that surrounded the technical disagreements. Up until 1654, insinuations of atheism had been a private affair; the dispute with Wallis and Ward made them very public. The extended exposure of Hobbes’s unusual theological views raised the discursive stakes for anyone who might want to appeal to Hobbes’s authority. A growing catalogue of pre-prepared critique potentially awaited anyone aligning themselves too obviously with Leviathan, as Henry Stubbe soon realised. That said, it needs to be stressed that although being tarred with accusations of Hobbism might well damage an argument or one’s job prospects in Oxford, there is no evidence at this stage that Hobbism would result in any more serious legal sanction. Although the Presbyterians exercised indirect and local forms of censorship, Hobbes remained unmolested, fearing only that the accusations of atheism might 161 162

Stubbe to Cawdry, 17 March 1657, Bod. MS Savile 104, fol. 1. See the discussion in Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, pp. 236–9. Henry Stubbe, Clamor, rixa, joci, mendacia, furta, cachini, p. 1.

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lead to some kind of personal physical assault upon him by individuals. This reflected the reluctance of the authorities to endorse the calls for censorship and prosecution. The booksellers’ petition to ban Leviathan in 1652 and Baxter’s call for the book to be burned in 1655, fell upon deaf ears. In January 1657, the MP Thomas Burton recorded an attempt to have Leviathan investigated by Parliament. A Scotsman named Robinson presented Leviathan to a parliamentary committee ‘as a most poisonous piece of atheism’, along with Matthew Kellison’s Catholic work, Touchstone of the Reformed Gospel. Burton noted that Robinson was ‘corrector of his Highness’s press’ which plausibly identifies him as Humphrey Robinson, one of the biggest and most powerful stationers in St Paul’s Churchyard. Robinson did serve as a licenser during the period, as the Stationers’ Register testifies; although not apparently a Presbyterian, he was well connected with Episcopalians in England and Royalists on the Continent. However, Robinson’s attack didn’t impress the MPs. Burton commented that Robinson was ‘a very busy person, and swelling in his own opinion, and skill in the tongues, who openly arraigned, not only the Cambridge translation of the Church Bibles, but all other bibles, whatsoever now in England, as faulty, both in printing and difference from the original’. Burton recorded that Robinson was compared to a Jesuit, and his response earned him a reproval from the committee members.163 There is no record that Robinson’s complaint led to any further official action. Although Hobbes was subject to abusive critique and few were prepared to stand up and defend him in public, there was also a reluctance by anyone in authority to take any positive action against him or to prevent him publishing his work, much to the annoyance of his critics. POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS RESPONSES

1656–1659:

HARRINGTON, LAWSON, BRAMHALL

Politically the most important context for the reception of Hobbes’s work during this period was the debate surrounding the character and future of the Protectorate. We have seen that the Protectorate had been effectively defended in terms borrowed from Hobbes’s arguments by writers such as the two John Halls, Hawke and White. Even if the Protectorate did not 163

T. Burton, Diary of Thomas Burton ed. J. T. Rutt, 4 vols. (1828), I, p. 348 (Wednesday, 14 January 1657). Robinson went on to publish Royalist William Lucy’s Observations, censvres & confutations of divers errors in the 12, 13, and 14 chap. of Mr. Hobs his Leviathan (1657 [Thomason’s copy is dated 1 January, i.e. 1658]).

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officially endorse Leviathan’s doctrines, Leviathan-style absolutism constituted a useful stalking horse for those writers critical of the regime.164 Two important examples are James Harrington’s republican work Oceana, and George Lawson’s Presbyterian Examination, both of which use critiques of Hobbes as a springboard for their own preferred political alternatives. Leviathan thus became a surrogate for the worst that a Cromwellian monarchy might turn out to be. This symbolic use of Hobbes’s theory was an important part of the development of Leviathan’s public image as the exemplar of unacceptable absolutism, and neither Harrington nor Lawson had much interest in the subversive aspects of Hobbes’s theory. In Harrington’s case, this symbolic function also served to conceal the considerable intellectual affinity between Leviathan and Oceana; a striking example of the way that Hobbes’s work could be publicly criticised but quietly assimilated, even in apparently antithetical traditions like republicanism. The last major attack on Hobbes’s religious and political thought in the 1650s was John Bramhall’s The catching of Leviathan (1658); here, in contrast to Harrington and Lawson, the Royalist view of Hobbes as a subversive resistance and de facto theorist received one of its most influential treatments. Although Bramhall’s discussion would not receive much attention immediately after it was published, his arguments shaped the official Restoration response to Hobbes’s political theory. HARRINGTON’S OCEANA

As we have seen, the ambiguous politics and controversial theology of Leviathan meant that there was never an easy fit between Hobbes’s paradoxical theory and practical political causes. This was the book’s weakness and its strength; it was a weakness in that Hobbes gained very few open advocates for his theory. Almost no one, particularly by the mid-1650s, was prepared to state that they were straightforward disciples of Hobbes, and few were prepared to use Hobbesian ideas without heavy qualification. That said, almost everyone could admit that some of the things that Hobbes said were very well said indeed. This was the book’s strength; Leviathan’s odd paradoxes spoke to a wide range of concerns in politics and ecclesiology; to the Cromwellians’ authoritarianism, to the Independents’ Erastianism, to the radicals’ anti-clericalism. Where long passages of Leviathan might seem outrageous or extravagant to a particular reader, 164

See for example, Hyde’s comments on the the Hobbism of Cromwellian security measures. A letter from a true and lawfull member of Parliament (Holland?, 1656), pp. 65, 45–6.

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there would always be moments when more familiar positions and relationships would come into focus, but crucially seen through a new and distinctive lens. We noted at the beginning that charting a characteristically Hobbesian influence is more a matter of scouting for distinctive relationships and formulae rather than particular concepts by themselves. This relational distinctiveness and Leviathan’s accessibility to a wide range of theoretical concerns means that Hobbes’s novel perspectives could even turn up in traditions usually held to be most at odds with Hobbes’s political outlook. Nowhere is this clearer than in James Harrington’s republican work Oceana, published between September and November 1656. The noisy polemic against the ideas of classical republicanism in chapter 21 of Leviathan had made it clear to readers that Hobbes had deliberately positioned himself against the political tradition of the civitas libera, or the free state, as laid out in Livy, or Machiavelli. One republican writer, refusing Cromwell’s summons to serve in the nominated Parliament in April 1653, referred in passing to the ‘controversye between Mr Hobbs and Machiavell concerning tiranny and liberty’ revealing that for many republicans Leviathan stood opposed to the popular republican Machiavelli of the Discourses.165 Hobbes’s critique undoubtedly made it difficult for republicans to exploit the book openly in the same way that they had exploited De Corpore Politico, and Robert Filmer had gone to some trouble to ensure that they realised this. That said, Livian and Machiavellian traditions of republicanism didn’t exhaust the intellectual options open to those for whom arbitrary monarchic power was antithetical to political liberty, and here the soil for cultivating Hobbesian hybrids was certainly a lot more fertile. James Harrington was educated at Oxford and became a gentleman of Charles I’s bedchamber at some point in the later 1630s, serving the king as a personal attendant in the later 1640s until his execution in 1649.166 Harrington’s biographers indicate that the regicide severely affected Harrington, prompting him to withdrawal that turned into study of the events that had brought about this cataclysmic event. By the mid-1650s Harrington was associated with individuals who had become discontented with the authoritarianism of the Protectorate; radical army officers like 165

166

Leeds ML MSS Political and Miscellaneous II, f. 39. The letter comes from the Marten-Loder papers, and of those individuals who refused Cromwell’s summons, Luke Robinson had the closest links with Henry Marten. Harrington, Political Works, p. 4.

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Colonel Okey and the republican Henry Neville, who on some accounts is credited with persuading Harrington to turn his hand to political theory. Harrington’s Oceana draws from the full range of intellectual resources associated with the English republican tradition to offer a utopian vision of a perpetual commonwealth ruled by law.167 Although Harrington was keen to invoke classical republican thought, the character of his republicanism was in many respects at odds with the ideals of active citizenship and selfgovernment presented by Livy and Machiavelli and their modern adapters like Nedham and Milton. Instead of the turbulent Machiavellian Rome, Harrington’s model was the idealised Venice found in Giannotti and Guicciardini, the republican model of choice for conservative Englishmen; a stable rule-bound political community where virtue resided in the laws rather than the people. As Jonathan Scott has noted, Harrington was preoccupied with stability and longevity, searching for a constitutional form that would escape the vicissitudes of time and chance, and he found the solution in this conservative republican tradition. Taking its inspiration from classical writers like Plato and Thucydides, and moderns like Guicciardini and Bacon, conservative republicans were preoccupied with the evil of conflict, the dangers of uncontrolled political participation and the value of stability. It was these preoccupations that provided the fertile soil for Harrington’s reading of Hobbes. In some ways Hobbes’s own project might be regarded as a highly original variant of conservative republican themes. Hobbes’s early work, both in the Horae Subsecivae and in his translation of Thucydides, speaks to the anxieties central to the tradition. Peace and stability are central to Hobbes’s project as they would be to Harrington’s; they are delivered through a carefully poised system that seeks to balance the desires of self-interested rational calculators to produce the utopian image of perpetual peace celebrated in the preface to De Cive. That said, there are obvious differences, and as will become clear, much of Harrington’s engagement of Hobbes is about correcting Leviathan’s attempt to pivot his system around unitary sovereign power rather than a constitutional mechanism and a material balance of property. But as Scott has pointed out, these disputes are more akin to sibling rivalry than a clash of ideological opposites,168 and in the process of reacting to Hobbes, Harrington at the same time adopts distinctive Hobbesian conceptual relationships and distinctively Hobbesian perspectives upon the traditional elements that they have in common, a process that Harrington’s 167

Ibid., p. 161.

168

J. Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 330.

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contemporaries were quick to spot and Harrington unusually prepared to acknowledge.169 We know that Harrington was an enthusiastic reader of Hobbes’s political and philosophical work. In addition to Leviathan, he read Hobbes’s translation of Thucydides, Humane Nature and De Corpore Politico.170 Harrington mentions Hobbes’s remark from De Corpore about political science being no older than De Cive, but there is no evidence that he had read De Cive itself, either in Latin or in Cotton’s translation. The allusion to Hobbes’s comment, however, together with a reference to Hobbes’s Six Lessons show that Harrington had probably read the English De Corpore which was issued in 1656, only a few months before Oceana was published, with an appendix containing the Six Lessons.171 In addition Harrington had also read one or both of Hobbes’s treatises on liberty and necessity.172 As will become clear, this wide range of Hobbesian reading is important for understanding the relationship between Harrington’s political theory and Hobbes’s ideas in that some of the most interesting Harringtonian adaptations of Hobbes involve his materialism, his psychology and his account of motivation. Harrington opens Oceana with a concerted attack upon Leviathan. One of Harrington’s major problems with Hobbes is his rejection of classical political thought. Hobbes’s contextualist critique of the relevance of Greek and Roman writers was that they had derived their theories not from nature, but from their own particular democratic political communities.173 Harrington’s counter-claim was that there was no reason to suppose that there was nothing natural about what Aristotle and Cicero had described. Hobbes’s statement was like that of a man who should tell Harvey ‘that he transcribed his circulation of the blood not out of the principles of nature, but out of this or that body’.174 A shared project to identify the principles of

169

170

171 172 174

What follows is inspired by Jonathan Scott’s seminal treatments of the relationship between Harrington and Hobbes; see particularly ‘The Rapture of Motion: James Harrington’s Republicanism’, in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 139–63; ‘The Peace of Silence: Thucydides and the English Civil War’ in G. A. J. Rogers and T. Sorell (eds.), Hobbes and History (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 112–36. For Humane Nature see Harrington, Political Works, pp. 171, 423; for the reference to De Corpore Politico, see p. 712. For discussion of Harrington’s Hobbesian debts see A. Fukuda, Sovereignty and the Sword: Harrington, Hobbes & Mixed Government in the English Civil Wars (Oxford, 1997), p. 71, n. 6. For the reference to De Corpore see Harrington, Political Works, p. 183; for the reference to the Six Lessons, see p. 185. Harrington, Political Works, pp. 422–3. 173 Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 149–50. Harrington, Political Works, p. 162. Harrington also comments that Hobbes himself appeared to take his own model from the Rump Parliament, ibid., 205.

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politics from nature did not exclude sympathetic consideration of what Harrington called ‘ancient prudence’. Hobbes is straight away cast squarely as the anti-republican opponent of the empire of law, which ‘Leviathan (who would have his book imposed on the universities) goes about to destroy’.175 Harrington quotes chapter 40 of Leviathan where Hobbes derides Aristotle’s advocacy of the rule of law in favour of the brutal truth that rule comes from the ‘hands and swords of men’.176 Harrington wasn’t convinced that Hobbes’s analysis was particularly revealing. He concedes that magistratus est lex armata, but finds Hobbes less than convincing about what gives the magistrate power over others in the first place. Hobbes’s account is not wrong, so much as lacking any real account of what power is: Leviathan . . . hath caught hold of the public sword, unto which he reduceth all manner and matter of government . . . But as he said of the law that without the sword it is but paper, so he might have thought of this sword that without an hand it is but cold iron.177

As Fukuda notes, Harrington wants to anatomise the basis of the power of the sword, a task that Hobbes had neglected.178 Harrington’s answer to that question is one of the theoretical foundations of Oceana: the theory of the balance or the basis of political power in property. All government had a material foundation in the distribution of property, and political stability was the product of a balanced distribution of property. The other foundation was the embodiment of the balance in a constitutional framework which could harness self-interest to sustain the whole. Again, Harrington accepted Hobbes’s view that individuals were self-interested, but instead of using the calculation of self-interest to bring about subjection to a potentially arbitrary sovereign, Harrington sought to harness that self-interest in a system of law. Harrington’s device to divide the senatorial function of proposing legislation and the popular function of voting upon it was summed up in his metaphor of girls cutting a cake. If one girl divides the cake and the other chooses, the shares will always be equal. This is combined with an executive answerable to the people, ‘by which Leviathan may see that the hand or sword that executeth the law is in it, and not above it’.179 The encounter is typical of Harrington’s relationship with Hobbes; less of a simple rejection of the sort that we have seen with many of Hobbes’s 175 177 179

Ibid., p. 161. 176 Ibid., pp. 161–2; cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 46, p. 471 (pp. 377–8 O.P.). Harrington, Political Works, p. 165. 178 Fukuda, Sovereignty and the Sword, p. 76. Harrington, Political Works, p. 174.

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critics, but more of a creative engagement by which concepts of power and self-interest are developed in a conservative republican fashion. It is striking that the superiority of Harrington’s constitutional arrangements is proposed to Hobbes in Hobbesian terms. The test of perfect government ‘lieth upon such a libration in the frame of it, that no man or men, in or under it, can have the interest or, having the interest, can have the power to disturb it with sedition’. Leviathan’s preference for monarchy fails the test because it fosters violence from the people, the army or the nobility. By contrast, Harrington’s ‘equal commonwealth’ passes Hobbes’s test.180 Harrington’s point is that Hobbes’s unitary poising power is not enough to guarantee stability; Leviathan’s unstable prudential balance has to be instantiated into a legal framework. ‘I can never wonder enough at Leviathan,’ comments Harrington, ‘who without any reason or example will have it that a commonwealth consisteth of a single person, or of a single assembly; nor sufficiently pity that thousand gentlemen whose minds, which otherwise would have wavered, he hath framed.’181 Oceana accepts Hobbes’s project, but answers that Leviathan’s politics don’t deliver and potentially make things worse. Ironically it may have been the case that Hobbes had a lot more faith than Harrington in the possibility of persuading individuals to internalise the deliberative logic of self-preservation. For Harrington equilibrium could only be the product of a more tangible framing of men’s minds and a concrete realisation of power that was in many respects far more brutally materialist and determinist than Hobbes’s subtle appeal to self-interest. Harrington had taken the coherence between natural philosophy, psychology and politics much further than Hobbes himself. Harrington’s praise for Human Nature and Liberty and Necessity may betray the extent to which these elements of Hobbes’s project were driving Harrington’s faith in the material and determinist characteristics of law.182 But if Harrington had problems with Leviathan’s political mechanism, there were more obvious similarities between the ecclesiologies of the two thinkers. As an Erastian Independent Harrington shared with Hobbes the connected aims of collapsing the distinction between civil and ecclesiastical authority and the destruction of the independent authority of the clergy. The major difference was that where Hobbes had settled civil authority on 180 182

Ibid., p. 180. 181 Ibid., pp. 184–5. This is indicated by Harrington’s use of Hobbes’s doctrine in The Prerogative of Popular Government (1658), ibid., p. 422. See also Jonathan Scott’s comments in Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), particularly pp. 162–6.

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a unitary sovereign, Harrington invested that authority in a law-bound republican political community. When it came to the idea of the church, the difference between the two men was that for Hobbes the church was the state of Leviathan, with ecclesiastical power vested in the sovereign; for Harrington, the church was the republic, with ecclesiastical power vested in the people themselves. Neither had any time for the corrupt political and religious claims of priests, and indeed Harrington may well have been the first writer to use the term ‘priestcraft’ in print.183 For readers of Oceana this kinship was probably most apparent where Harrington argued that the word ecclesia ‘was also anciently and properly used for the civil congregations or assemblies of the people’ and his argument that ordination was a process of election by the congregation (chirotonia) rather than the laying on of hands (chirothesia) insisted upon by the Presbyterians and Episcopalians. The first argument had been insisted upon by Hobbes since De Cive and the second had appeared in chapter 42 of Leviathan.184 In addition, Harrington’s portrayal of God’s rule of Israel by covenant recalled Hobbes’s account, even if Hobbes invested Moses with sovereign authority where Harrington wrote of a theocratic republic of divine law. In spite of the formal differences in the constitution of the state/church, Harrington was soon picked up on the correspondence. The Royalist Episcopalian Henry Ferne, archdeacon of Leicester, wrote a private letter to Harrington’s sister which Harrington published,185 in which Ferne commented that ‘what is said in relation to the church, or religion in the point of government, ordination, excommunication, had better beseemed Leviathan and is below the parts of this gentleman, to retain and sit down with those little things and poor mistakes which the ignorance or wilfulness of many in these days hath broached in way of quarrel against the Church of England.’186 Harrington didn’t respond to Ferne’s jibe about Hobbes in Pian piano, but that wasn’t the end of the accusations of Hobbism. In August 1657 Matthew Wren, son of the Laudian Bishop of Ely, also noted that although Harrington ‘professes a great Emnity to Mr Hobs his politiques, underhand notwithstanding he holds a correspondence with him, and does silently swallow down such 183

184 185 186

M. Goldie, ‘The Civil Religion of James Harrington’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Europe (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 197–224 at p. 215, referring to Pian Piano in Harrington, Political Works, p. 372. See the discussion of Hammond above, pp. 116–17. As preface to its refutation in Pian Piano (1657), an extraordinary breach of manners; see Pocock, introduction to Harrington, Political Works, pp. 77–8. Ibid., pp. 370–1.

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Notions as Mr. Hobs hath chewed for him’. Wren identified Harrington’s deployment of the covenant between God and the Israelites, as well as the discussion of chirotonia and ecclesia, as signs of Oceana’s Hobbism.187 As we shall see, Wren’s criticism here actually concealed his own sympathy for Hobbes’s political ideas, but the charge prompted Harrington to reply in The prerogative of popular government (1657), where he argued that the ideas in question were ‘more ancient than Mr Hobbes’.188 The claim was plausible, but less plausible was his excuse that he did not recall that Hobbes had spoken of the usage of ecclesia, perhaps one of the most controversial claims in Leviathan. But if Harrington wanted to avoid the thought that his ecclesiology could be tracked back to Leviathan, he was prepared, very unusually, to signal his admiration for Hobbes more generally: It is true I have opposed the politics of Mr. Hobbes, to show him what he taught me, with as much disdain as he opposed those of the greatest authors, in whose wholesome fame and doctrine the good of mankind being concerned, my conscience bears me witness that I have done my duty. Nevertheless in most other things I firmly believe that Mr Hobbes is, and will in future ages be accounted, the best writer at this day in the world; and for his treatises of human nature, and of liberty and necessity, they are the greatest of new lights, and those which I have followed and shall follow.189

Here Harrington’s intellectual relationship with Hobbes is laid bare with a surprising candour. It is almost impossible to come across a similar public statement of unqualified admiration for the non-political parts of Hobbes’s ideas at this time, even amongst the many who shared Harrington’s view that works like Humane Nature were great achievements. For many anticlerical Independents, Leviathan’s theology was still far too extreme for Hobbes to be cited, even if they agreed with his ecclesiology. Harrington, by contrast, was happy to make himself a target for the Episcopalians and Presbyterians, and demonstrated this by taking on Henry Hammond and Lazarus Seaman, the Presbyterian Master of Peterhouse, over the question of ordination. Harrington examined some of Hammond’s scriptural arguments against Hobbes in the Six quaeres of 1653 and challenged Hammond’s interpretation, upholding the thought that the power of election was in the congregation. Although Harrington’s exegesis sought 187 188 189

Matthew Wren, Considerations on Mr. Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana (1659), p. 41. Harrington, Political Works, p. 423. Harrington cites Jacques Cappel, the contemporary theologian, as an alternative source for the doctrine of God’s political rule. Ibid., p. 423.

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to stress the republican features of the process, he was happy enough to unite Hobbes’s cause with his own. Harrington closed with a contemptuous quotation of Hammond’s own disgust at Hobbes: ‘‘‘Thus beyond all measure improsperous’’ are this divine’s undertakings against Mr Hobbes, and the undertakings of divines upon this subject.’190 Unfortunately we do not know what Hobbes made of all this,191 but one effect was that Oceana and Leviathan would soon be twinned in the popular imagination, in spite of their political differences. As Wren had noted, their very titles seemed to indicate a correspondence in their ideas192 and observers were quick to make the connection. At one level this was simply because they both appeared to be abstract schemes of political constructivism, but contemporaries were alive to a more substantial intellectual relationship between the ideas of the authors as well. Richard Baxter, for example, identified Harrington as Hobbes’s sibling in proposing equally dangerous anti-clerical political novelties.193 Oceana suggested that Leviathan, rather than being an isolated and eccentric aberration, had inaugurated a new and dangerous genre of speculative political thought that needed to be corralled by a reassertion of traditional authorities. LAWSON’S EXAMINATION

This strategy was a feature of what was perhaps the most significant Presbyterian response to Hobbes’s political thought during this period, George Lawson’s An examination of the political part of Mr Hobbs his Leviathan, published at the end of May 1657.194 Lawson (1598–1678), a Yorkshireman by birth, had been educated at Emmanuel College Cambridge, and eventually became minister to the village of More in Shropshire in the 1630s, where he remained until his death. Although Lawson had enjoyed some court patronage early in his career, his position at More involved him with a patron who supported Parliament and with 190 191

192 193 194

Ibid., p. 563. Hobbes’s only recorded reaction to Oceana is preserved by Aubrey: ‘Mr T. Hobbes was wont to say that Henry Nevill had a finger in that pye . . .’ John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, 2 vols., I, p. 289. Wren, Considerations, p. 14. Baxter, The crucifying of the world, by the cross of Christ (1658), f1r–v. Both of Thomason’s copies (E1591 (3) and E1723 (2)) were purchased in May – E1591 on the 31st. The best discussion of Lawson is Conal Condren’s George Lawson’s Politica and the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1989); see also Condren’s discussion of the Examination in his article ‘Confronting the Monster; George Lawson’s Reactions to Hobbes’s Leviathan’, Political Science 40:1 (1988), pp. 67–83.

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the Presbyterian organisation in his county after the abolition of episcopacy in 1645.195 In the later 1650s Lawson published a series of connected works including his critique of Hobbes in 1657, his theological work the Theopolitica (1659) and his political treatise, the Politica sacra et civilis (1660). Lawson himself suggests that he was at first a reluctant hunter of Leviathan; like Thomas Hill, his initial reading had convinced him that the book wouldn’t be taken seriously.196 What changed his mind were reports that Leviathan was having some success ‘with many Gentlemen and young Students in the Universities, and that it was judged to be a rational piece’.197 Lawson was drawn into the Presbyterian campaign against Hobbes, most probably by Richard Baxter, with whom he corresponded during the period.198 He penned a response for his friends, and they urged him to publish the work. The Examination was eventually printed by Francis Tyton, one of the Presbyterian booksellers who had petitioned against Leviathan in 1652. Lawson’s aim in the Examination is not to offer a comprehensive refutation of Hobbes (he only really deals with Parts II and III), but rather to use a commentary upon Hobbes’s absolutism as an opportunity to give his own account of the proper political position to be adopted. Extracted chapter-by-chapter summaries of Hobbes’s views are juxtaposed with Lawson’s own. The strategy makes the Examination a parallel exposition of Lawson’s political views, a theory which he had already elaborated in manuscript and which would soon be published (without an extensive discussion of Hobbes) as the Politica sacra et civilis. This mode of presentation suggests that, like Oceana, Lawson’s treatment of Hobbes had a wider political context in its determination to promote parliamentary constitutionalism against the potential dangers of a Leviathan-style Cromwellian monarchy. As Conal Condren points out, Lawson’s main concern was to undermine Hobbes’s authoritarian absolutism: ‘the logic of Lawson’s riposte to Hobbes is that if God is the absolute ruler of the universe, then human power must be held provisionally and contingently; if human power is absolute then it can compel sacrilegious behaviour.’199 Lawson’s own 195 196 197 198 199

Essentially a conformist rather than a Presbyterian zealot, Lawson would conform to the Episcopal Church of England after the Restoration. Lawson, Examination, Sig. A2r: ‘upon perusal of the Political part of his Leviathan, I conceived, that as little good was to be expected, so little harm was to be feared from that book.’ Ibid., Sig. A2r-v. Baxter cites Lawson’s Examination in his Holy Commonwealth (1659), pp. 82, 196. Condren, ‘Confronting the Monster’, p. 69.

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theory was based around the attempt to construct a position that took these fundamental arguments as their starting point. In common with Bramhall, Lawson started from the proposition that God ruled according to his wisdom and justice, and that men were bound by divine and natural law. But for his political theory Lawson drew upon a much more radical political tradition. Lawson vested primary sovereignty in the idea of a pre-political community which could constitute different forms of government by consent. Lawson’s natural jurisprudence meant that he could make little sense of Hobbes’s state of nature: ‘That the State of Nature is the State of War, may be doubted if not denied.’ Man was simply a rational creature whose adherence to the laws of nature promoted peace. The only way that Hobbes’s argument could make sense was if it applied to the post-lapsarian state of corruption and sin, but even then nature led men back to a communitarian starting point.200 Lawson was deeply sceptical about abstract contractarianism and regarded Hobbes’s model of covenant as ‘an Utopian fancy’ and a ‘chimaera’. The absolute sovereignty that Leviathan delivered as a result oversimplified a much more complex set of constitutional relationships. Crucial to Lawson’s critique was a distinction between sovereign power as vested in the original community, and the delegated power of administration and execution entrusted to the government. This was a distinction between real majesty and personal majesty, here attributed to Besold; one that Hobbes had simply effaced in his desire to create an absolute source of political authority. The crucial result for Lawson was that the supreme authority’s power was necessarily limited by the law of God and by the consent of the people. Hobbes was right to say that sovereignty was indivisible and inalienable,201 but when it came to the administration or execution of sovereignty, then power could be distributed in a number of ways, subject always to consent and divine justice. Inevitably this meant that Hobbes’s absolutism was deeply unacceptable at a number of levels. Surveying the series of extreme propositions about sovereignty in chapter 18 of Leviathan, Lawson rejected Hobbes’s assertion that the people could not change the form of government; admittedly this was not in their capacity as subjects but as the original community in a state of liberty.202 Lawson was predictably circumspect about allowing the possibility of resistance (on the grounds that the remedy might prove to be worse than the disease), but nevertheless made it clear that if rulers 200

Lawson, Examination, pp. 3–4.

201

Ibid., p. 29.

202

Ibid., p. 15.

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behaved unjustly in exceeding the terms of their authority or in violating the laws of God then they effectively cease to be sovereign.203 The community then had the right to appoint new governors. In his comments on chapter 19, Lawson made it clear that a government could take a variety of forms, and that Hobbes’s phobia about mixed government proceeded from a misunderstanding of the difference between real majesty (original sovereign powers vested in the people) and personal majesty (the powers divided up for government).204 In the English case, Lawson argued, the forty counties constituted the original community with Parliament as its representative; this legislative arm of sovereignty then established the executive and administrative authority that lay in the sovereign. Contrary to Hobbes’s view, English kings never had an absolute sovereignty and their rule was always bound by law and custom, being possessors of personal but not real majesty.205 The domestic examples were not simply illustrative; Lawson’s Examination was designed to promote a parliamentary constitutionalism that was in every way preferable to Leviathan-style monarchy, a matter of some importance in the later 1650s. Lawson’s hostility to absolutism also meant that Hobbes’s attempted reconciliation of liberty and authority in chapter 21 of Leviathan was fundamentally erroneous; liberty was not simply a matter of non-interference or the liberty left by the laws. Liberty for Lawson, ‘is not opposed to obligation but servitude. For to be subject to a wise Soveraign according to just Laws, is so much liberty as any reasonable man can desire: for in this respect he is rather subject to God than man.’ In practice this meant that liberty was inconsistent with subjection to an arbitrary and absolute human authority, a vigorous reassertion of the classical republican understanding of liberty. Lawson admitted as much, arguing that England, even under kings ‘hath much of a free-State in the Constitution, but not in the Administration’.206 In other words, Lawson was arguing that the constituting community had a republican form even if the form of government chosen did not. Lawson repeatedly stressed that God was the ultimate arbiter of political authority and that revealed and natural law inevitably took precedence over any form of human law. This very traditional view made a nonsense of Hobbes’s complicated claims about the interdependence of natural and civil law in chapter 26 of Leviathan. Unlike Hobbes, Lawson never had any doubts about what constituted the obligatory force of natural law. Lawson argued that natural laws bind ‘not as commanded by the magistrate, but as 203

Ibid., pp. 19, 25.

204

Ibid., p. 34.

205

Ibid., pp. 40–3.

206

Ibid., p. 69.

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written by the hand of heaven in the heart of man . . . How the Laws of Nature, and Laws Civil should be of equal extent, and yet contain one another, and be parts of one another, I do not understand.’207 The same went for revelation, which gave infallible knowledge of the law of God and was to be obeyed over the rules of the state: ‘No subject may or ought to make the Law of the State his absolute guide. For the Law may be against the Law of God; and then, how can the subject undertake to obey it, and make it his rule, and not offend God?’208 If Lawson’s political analysis of Hobbes involved the restoration of categories collapsed in Leviathan, the same was true when it came to ecclesiology. Like nearly all of Hobbes’s clerical critics, Lawson was appalled by Hobbes’s super-Erastianism, and sought to rescue the thought that spiritual and temporal authority were different things. His solution was similar to Thorndike’s in that he asserted that the church and the state were distinct entities.209 However, and perhaps in contrast to Thorndike’s apparent gallicanism, Lawson acknowledges the existence of a Catholic or universal church, whose parts may organise in various ways, in states that might or might not be Christian.210 Thorndike’s ecclesiastical structure mirrors his political structure; the constitution of the community of believers is separable from its administration. That said, like the moderate Episcopalians, Lawson was happy to allow the magistrate extensive powers to regulate and order the church where this was required for civil reasons, an argument designed to remove the need for extreme Hobbesian solutions. One problem with this is that Lawson does not give much guidance as to where the spiritual remit begins and the civil ends; a characteristically Hobbesian problem that would come back to haunt those attempting to find a stable account of the relationship between church and state in less tolerant times. Lawson is perhaps at his critical best, however, when he takes Hobbes to task over his reading of scripture. Where the rest of the book consists of occasionally weary reiterations of his own political theory, Lawson had a sharp eye for Hobbes’s abuse of scripture and for some of his sources. Lawson did not take a particularly charitable view towards the scriptural scholarship in Leviathan; Hobbes’s supposed political demonstrations from scripture were made ‘in such a loose and impious abusive manner, that I verily perswade my self, he doth not believe them to be revealed and written from heaven, or that Jesus Christ was an ordinary just man, much less the Eternal Son of God Incarnate.’211 For example, Lawson notes that 207

Ibid., p. 98.

208

Ibid., p. 125.

209

Ibid., p. 139.

210

Ibid., p. 189.

211

Ibid., p. 50.

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when Hobbes famously evokes 1 Samuel 8’s description of kingship (effectively tyranny) he misquotes the Authorised Version’s ‘This will be the manner of the King’ for the much more prescriptive ‘This shall be the right of the King.’ For Lawson the passage was an exemplary description of unjust tyranny, and Hobbes’s manipulation of scripture could not change its essential meaning.212 In general Lawson felt that Hobbes ‘doth not conform his notions to Scripture, but wrests it, and makes it to speak that which God never intended’.213 As Lawson turns to Hobbes’s more exotic theology, his patience runs out; when Hobbes revises Christ’s role as a returning civil sovereign, Lawson comments that ‘This discourse is void of reason, and so much the more insufferable, as the matter is so sublime, and this sacred Book of God so much profaned by him.’ As for Hobbes’s account of the Trinity: ‘This deserves no answer but detestation, because its not onely blasphemous, but also devoid not onely of divine but humane learning: and no ways to be suffered amongst Christians.’214 Lawson was sure that the consequence of Hobbes’s doctrines indicated that he was an unbeliever. Hobbes’s refusal to take seriously the idea that covenants could be made with God revealed the cast of his mind: ‘By these words he may be proved to be an Atheist, whatsoever he pretends, and to deny the immortality of the soul, all Religion and fear of the Deity, and his providence over the world’.215 Even if the charge couldn’t be made directly, it seemed to follow from what Hobbes said. Lawson’s Examination served a number of functions; it was designed to wean disciples off Hobbes’s brand of absolutism and to give them a more appropriate framework for thinking about politics. This was important at a time when critics of the Protectorate felt a need to propose alternatives to an authoritarianism symbolised above all by Leviathan. In Harrington’s case the alternative was a conservative republican form; in Lawson’s a constitutionally flexible model that reserved real sovereignty to the community. Lawson would go on to develop his theory in the Politica sacra et civilis in 1660, but with the political radicalism of his critique of Hobbes toned down in what by then was a debate not about the present dangers of absolutism, but a new political settlement. Nevertheless Leviathan’s symbolic role as the exemplar of arbitrary absolutism would persist and this ensured a future for tracts like Lawson’s in the Restoration period. When anxiety about arbitrary government re-emerged in the 1670s, so too did the anxiety about Hobbesian absolutism. It was thus no accident that a reader 212 213

Ibid., pp. 51–3. See also Lawson’s despair at Hobbes’s reading of Matthew 21.2–3, ibid., p. 55. Ibid., p. 161. 214 Ibid., p. 202. 215 Ibid., p. 22.

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like John Locke should turn to the anti-Hobbes literature of the 1650s, and find in Lawson’s work so many of the arguments that would feature prominently in the second Treatise of government.216 JOHN BRAMHALL’S THE CATCHING OF LEVIATHAN

(1658)

When Bramhall responded to Hobbes’s Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance he issued the Castigations together with a short critique of Hobbes’s politics and theology, The catching of Leviathan (1658). I argued earlier that The catching, with its concentration on the first edition of De Cive, was based upon the critique Bramhall made of De Cive in 1645. Bramhall originally intended to include The catching as an appendix to Castigations but in the preface to the reader he says that ‘some of my good friends have prevailed with me to alter my design, and to make this small treatise independent of the other.’217 The catching is usually found bound together with Castigations although it was clearly designed to be issued separately, to make a compact anti-Hobbesian work. The ‘good friends’ on the Continent with Bramhall probably included Hyde and Sir Edward Nicholas who were active in keeping up the pressure against Hobbes. Bramhall suggests that Hobbes has already been refuted,218 and that he is simply completing the process of burial by throwing ‘on two or three spadefuls of earth towards the final interment of his pernicious principles and other mushroom errors’.219 The bishop identifies Hobbes with Leviathan,220 the true king over the children of pride, and sets out to hunt his errors in chapters dealing with theology and politics, finishing with a chapter demonstrating the inconsistency between his various positions. It is clear that this structure mirrors the substance and arrangement of Bramhall’s original critique of De Cive which put together about sixty objections divided into political and theological categories. This was probably one reason for Bramhall’s metaphorical conflation of Hobbes with Leviathan; the book itself does not take centre-stage. When Leviathan does feature, it is usually as an extension of the more original arguments 216 217 218

219

Locke owned all of Lawson’s published works. See below, p. 366. Bramhall, Works, IV, p. 513. Bramhall refers to an English work by DRC, and a planned Catholic work by PIS, although it isn’t clear to whom these initials refer. Bramhall’s nineteenth-century editor makes the plausible suggestion that DRC might be Dr Ralph Cudworth. PIS may refer to Father John Sargeant. Bramhall, Works, IV, pp. 515–16. Ibid. 220 Ibid., p. 517.

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made against De Cive, except in treatments of Hobbes’s outlandish theology, where there are no corresponding passages. It is also worth noting that although the discussion of Hobbes’s inconsistencies occasionally draw upon contrasts between De Cive and Leviathan, Bramhall just as often focuses upon problems within those texts. He clearly saw continuity in both the doctrines and the internal contradictions of the two works. Inevitably the treatment of Leviathan plays a larger role in the first chapter dealing with Hobbes’s theology, although the criticism made of the later work is in general much less original than the attacks upon De Cive. Bramhall sets the scene by drawing attention to the apparent absence of religion in Hobbes’s discussion of natural law or the Commonwealth in De Cive. If this might lead to suspicion, he suggests, Hobbes puts the matter beyond doubt in chapter 12 of Leviathan. Here Hobbes’s suggestion that the natural seeds of piety consist in opinions of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, fear and superstition, leads Bramhall to comment that Hobbes’s principles are ‘brimfull of prodigious impiety’.221 Bramhall attacks Hobbes’s denial in De Cive that atheism is any more than imprudence before laying out the charge that Leviathan’s materialism is inconsistent with the existence of an incorporeal God, following Wallis and Ward.222 The idea that there is no incorporeal spirit, Bramhall argued ‘is that main root of atheism, from which so many lesser branches are daily sprouting up’.223 Dealing with Leviathan’s exotic theology, Bramhall condemns Hobbes’s account of the Trinity, following Ross’s argument that any discussion of representation would soon multiply the persons of the Trinity: ‘Upon this account, God Almighty hath as many ‘‘Persons’’ as there have been sovereign princes in the world since Adam.’224 Hobbes had demoted Christ, and set up the sovereign in his place.225 Leviathan’s eschatology had succeeded in killing the devil and reducing Heaven and Hell to earthly states. For Bramhall, Hobbes was simply off the intellectual map, and his ideas ‘without either precedent or partner’.226 Summarising what was most offensive about Hobbes’s depiction of religion, Bramhall isolates six propositions resulting from Hobbes’s extreme Erastianism. The first was Hobbes’s suggestion that no man need hazard himself for his faith; the second that Christians could deny Christ if commanded to do so; the third that a Christian might commit 221 223 226

Ibid., p. 521. 222 Bramhall makes use of this argument twice; ibid., pp. 523–5 and 535–6. Ibid., p. 525. 224 Ibid., p. 526. 225 Ibid., p. 528. Ibid., p. 538. The ‘merciful doctors’ to whom Bramhall, following Augustine, refers include Origen.

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idolatry if commanded; the fourth that in the kingdom of nature (as opposed to pact) God was not to be obeyed before men; the fifth that the magistrate could determine religious doctrine and the last that the civil laws were in fact the laws of good and evil.227 Bramhall was appalled at Hobbes’s paradoxical inversions of authority: ‘God help us! Into what times are we fallen! When the immutable laws of God and nature are made to depend upon the mutable laws of mortal men; just as if one should go about to control the sun by the authority of the clock.’228 If Bramhall’s theological and religious objections were fairly conventional by the later 1650s, his political objections to Hobbes were more unusual for the period. In contrast to the anti-absolutism of other critiques Bramhall focused upon the subversive and de factoist features of Hobbes’s contract theory that had so alarmed early Royalist readers of De Cive. In part this was because Bramhall was drawing upon a critique formulated during the 1640s, but Leviathan, together with Hobbes’s return to England, had confirmed his thought that Hobbes’s work was indeed a rebel’s catechism. Constructing Hobbes as a resistance theorist involved putting together the equivocations about allegiance from De Cive with the new material concerning obligation in chapter 21, and the ‘Review and Conclusion of Leviathan’. Bramhall had already identified that Hobbes’s emphasis upon individual security and the retention of an essentially subjective right of self-defence was fundamentally at odds with sovereignty. Commenting on chapter 6.3 of De Cive, Bramhall remarked that: Either it must be left to the sovereign’s determination, whether the subject’s security be sufficiently provided for . . . or to the discretion of the subject (as the words themselves do seem to import); and then there need no other bellows to kindle a fire of a civil war, and put a whole commonwealth into a combustion, but this seditious article.229

Bramhall had identified a resistance theory in De Cive’s claim that no one could be bound not to resist anyone who threatened ‘death, or wounds or other bodily harm’.230 Leviathan merely confirmed the doctrine. Bramhall drew attention to the passage in chapter 21, which Filmer had also noticed, where Hobbes had argued that a group of rebels who expected execution if caught had the liberty to join together and defend each other. Although their initial rebellion was unjust, their attempts to defend their lives were 227 228

In order the references are to Leviathan, ch. 43; ch. 42; ch. 45; ch. 31; ch. 38; De Cive 12.1. Bramhall, Works, IV, p. 544. 229 Ibid., p. 554. 230 Ibid., p. 555, cf. De Cive, 2.18.

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not. ‘Why should we not change the name of Leviathan into the Rebels’ Catechism?’ asks Bramhall, ‘T. H. alloweth rebels and conspirators to make good their unlawful attempts by arms. Was there ever such a trumpeter of rebellion heard of before?’231 In a similar fashion, Bramhall attacks Hobbes’s de factoism, foreshadowed by the discussion in chapter 7 of De Cive, and fully spelled out in chapter 21 and the ‘Review and Conclusion’ to Leviathan. In De Cive, much to the horror of Royalists, Hobbes had suggested that sovereignty was lost after conquest. This brief suggestion was for Bramhall fleshed out in Leviathan where Hobbes argued that obligation lasted as long as the sovereign was able to provide protection. Bramhall fastened on the passages of the ‘Review’ which suggested that living under the protection of a conqueror constituted submission and consent: Where these principles prevail, adieu honour, and honesty, and fidelity, and loyalty; all must give place to self-interest. What? For a man to desert his sovereign upon the first prevalence of an enemy, or the first payment of a petty contribution, or the first appearance of a sword that is more able to protect us for the present?232

Bramhall’s analysis of Hobbes’s faults inevitably falls most critically upon those most prejudicial to the Royalist cause; his failure to distinguish between just and unjust conquest; the fact that conquest alone could not extinguish right and the fact that merely living under a conqueror does not imply full submission.233 Bramhall sought to leave a space to suggest that subjects in England should not disregard their former obligations, whatever their current situation, or the situation of the defeated prince. When he eventually comes to Hobbes’s absolutism, Bramhall regards it as a trick: Hobbes ‘maketh the power of kings to be so exorbitant, that no subject, who hath either conscience or discretion, ever did or can endure; so to render monarchy odious to mankind’. Hobbes’s theory leaves no restraints in terms of coronation oaths, liberties and charters, and violates property rights without law or precedent need. The terms for this attack are taken from Bramhall’s constitutional Royalist theory in The serpent-salve, in which unitary sovereignty is exercised by a monarch who binds himself to the rule of law, a model that Hobbes had simply dismissed as nonsensical. Bramhall completes his analysis by demonstrating from chapter 9 of De Cive that Hobbes’s theory not only subverted political relationships but 231 233

Bramhall, Works, IV, p. 555, cf. Leviathan, ch. 21. Ibid., p. 559.

232


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also non-political forms of dominion; Hobbes undermined paternal dominion by suggesting that women might have power over their children and that there was nothing inevitable about women’s subordination to men. He even appeared to suggest that slaves might justly kill their masters. Hobbes’s novel theory eroded all forms of traditional restraint and authority: ‘T. H. taketh a pride in removing all the ancient land-marks, between prince and subject, father and child, husband and wife, master and servant, man and man.’234 In his third and final chapter, Bramhall attempts to convict Hobbes of inconsistency by citing contradictory passages of his work. In part this is another attempt to expose Hobbes’s paradoxical juxtaposition of reassuringly orthodox with dangerously heterodox statements. One of Bramhall’s particular concerns is Hobbes’s treatment of natural law, which in some places is held to be eternal and immutable, and in others silent and powerless.235 Bramhall finds Hobbes in several places admitting that the laws of nature are God’s laws, and that right reason is a law.236 But at other times, and Bramhall quotes the notorious passage at the end of chapter 3 of De Cive, Hobbes suggests that they aren’t laws at all.237 Bramhall admits that Hobbes qualifies this statement with the suggestion that as those laws are given by God through scripture, then they are laws, but he is justifiably suspicious about the consequence that the laws of nature do not oblige anyone who has not read scripture. But the problem does not end there, because Hobbes also argues that scripture is only authorised by the church, and ultimately the sovereign. The same paradoxes emerge in Hobbes’s treatment of religion, where Bramhall finds him arguing that true religion consists in obedience to the magistrate and yet at the same time he exempts from this all things that are contrary to the laws of God. Equally Hobbes argues in De Cive that if a subject be commanded to do something that is contumelious to God, or should forbid him to worship God, he ought not to obey, and yet in Leviathan the same subject might be commanded to deny Christ with his tongue. Bramhall was suitably indignant about the contradiction: ‘Hath he so soon forgot himself? Is not the denial of Christ ‘‘contumelious to God?’’’238

234 236 237 238

Ibid., p. 575. 235 Ibid., p. 578, quoting De Cive 3.29 against 5.2. Bramhall, Works, IV, p. 577, quoting Leviathan, ch. 30, De Cive 2.1. Bramhall, Works, IV, p. 577, quoting De Cive 3.33 (the same point is made in Leviathan, ch. 15). Bramhall, Works, IV, p. 579 quoting De Cive 15.18 against Leviathan, ch. 42.

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Bramhall finds similar political examples in Hobbes’s account of rights transfer. In Leviathan chapter 14 it is a matter of laying down one’s right and not hindering the sovereign’s original right. Bramhall notes that in chapter 17 it is a surrender, conferring power and strength upon one man, or a submission of will and judgement: ‘Before, we had a transferring without transferring; now we have a giving up without giving up, an appointment or constituting without appointing or constituting, a subjection without subjection, an authorizing without authorizing. What is this?’239 Hobbes’s ecclesiology makes a good hunting ground for the bishop. In chapter 42 of Leviathan Hobbes claims that from the ascension of Christ to the first conversion of kings, ecclesiastical power was in the hands of the Apostles and their successors. Nevertheless in De Cive and the same chapter of Leviathan Hobbes ‘alloweth them no power to make any ecclesiastical laws, or constitutions, or to impose any manner of commands upon Christians’.240 These powers Hobbes reserves to the church, which by Hobbes’s definition is ‘a company of men professing Christian religion, united in the person of one sovereign’. Bramhall points out that there was no Christian sovereign in the time of the Apostles or for two hundred years afterwards, and therefore according to Hobbes’s definition no church. This leads to another paradox: Hobbes’s argument in chapter 43 of Leviathan that heathen sovereigns are to be obeyed externally, a passage that conflicts with the argument in De Cive that where the sovereign is not Christian, some church of Christians is to be followed and that where we may not obey them we ought to suffer for it.241 Bramhall points up some genuine difficulties with Hobbes’s accounts, not all of which can be explained away simply, but Bramhall argued that where Hobbes did appear to be equivocal, he was often leaving himself an alibi. The bishop compared Hobbes’s tactics to those of a fortune-teller: ‘He setteth down his opinion just as gipsies tell fortunes, both ways; that if the one miss, the other may be sure to hit; that when they are accused of falsehood by one, they may appeal to another.’242 There is no doubt that Hobbes did this, and Bramhall had first-hand experience in Hobbes’s Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance. Using such means, Hobbes was able to put across potentially unacceptable doctrine under the cover of more conventional statements.

239 242

Bramhall, Works, IV, p. 584. Bramhall, Works, IV, p. 592.

240

Ibid., p. 586.

241

Ibid., p. 587, cf. De Cive, 18.13.

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Bramhall summed up by concluding that there were two main causes of Hobbes’s errors; his ‘fancying to himself a general state of nature’ and ‘his gross mistake of the laws of nature’. The first described a state that had never existed and the second misrepresented natural law as exclusively concerned with self-preservation. This verdict would set the agenda for Restoration critiques of Hobbes’s work, where Bramhall’s account of Hobbes as a political theorist of resistance and rebellion quickly became the semi-official position on the interpretation of Hobbes’s political thought. HENRY MORE’S THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL

Although it seems that More had initially regarded Hobbes and Leviathan as a derivative product of French natural philosophy, and thus unworthy of direct confrontation, his view had altered by 1659. In More’s The immortality of the soul, Hobbes features for the first time as a primary target.243 What had changed since Leviathan was the appearance of De Corpore with its systematic materialism. More’s philosophical project in the 1650s aimed to prove that the new science could be compatible with the existence of God and spirit. As the reaction to De Corpore had indicated, Hobbes seemed to be directly challenging those ideas. His unequivocally materialist natural philosophy presented More with the opportunity to prove the falsity and danger of such views. Rejecting the idea of incorporeal substance led to a whole series of unacceptable consequences: That it is impossible that there should be any God, or Soule, or Angel, Good or Bad; or any Immortality or Life to come. That there is no Religion, no Piety nor Impiety, no Vertue nor Vice, Justice nor Injustice, but what it pleases him that has the longest Sword to call so. That there is no Freedome of Will, nor consequently any Rational remorse of Conscience in any Being whatsoever, but that all that is, is nothing but Matter and corporeal Motion.244

Although the consequences of Hobbes’s positions were atheism and immorality, it should be noted that More never once attempts to make a direct accusation of atheism or vice against Hobbes. He also never resorts to the abusive language of the Oxford critics. Indeed, More’s attitude towards Hobbes is surprisingly respectful, politely referring to ‘the 243 244

For useful discussions of More’s work see the introduction and accompanying notes to the modern edition of More’s work: H. More, The Immortality of the Soul, ed. A. Jacob (Kluwer, 1987). More, The immortality of the soul, so farre forth as it is demonstrable from the knowledge of nature and the light of reason by Henry More (1659), p. 56.

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excellency of his natural Wit and Parts’.245 This was partly an attempt to reach his target audience; for many Hobbes was still a respected philosopher and it was this sort of reader that More wished to reconvert to the idea of incorporeal substance using philosophical premises. More presents Hobbes’s work as a serious, if fundamentally flawed, philosophy. More begins his treatment of Hobbes with a long and detailed exegesis of his views on materialism and incorporeal substance, gathering by now familiar passages from Leviathan, De Corpore and Humane Nature.246 The philosophical problem, argues More, is that Hobbes has simply presupposed what is to be proved. More’s solution is to show that the existence of spirits can be demonstrated from the evidence of nature in such a way as to render a materialist thesis invalid. Natural philosophy could support the religious claims that Hobbes was trying to debunk. Crucial to his argument against Hobbes was More’s unusual and controversial view that spirit should be understood as an extended substance.247 More had argued that describing incorporeal substance as unextended was the first step in driving spirit out of the world altogether. To combat this, and to provide the basis for a scientific view of the world that accommodated traditional belief, More developed an argument that spirit was co-extensive with matter. Where matter was extended, solid, separable and ultimately passive, spirit was also extended but penetrable, unified (indiscernible) and active. The advantage of this argument was that spirit was part of the world and capable of performing the tasks that brute matter alone could not. Hobbes’s materialism, by contrast, simply could not account for all natural phenomena, particularly the intellectual activities of the mind and soul. More points out that mere matter is incapable of perception. Hobbes’s attempts to render a coherent account of perception and memory as functions of motion in matter carry with them the absurd consequence that a ringing bell or a bent bow must have the same properties of imagination and recall. More argues that matter by itself simply cannot do the job even if we do think that these faculties are related to motion; spirit is needed to make sense of them. Spirit can also make sense of the existence of purely intellectual objects such as those found in mathematics. Hobbes’s materialist empiricism is simply unable to deal with the real existence of innate ideas. More also brought his anti-materialist critique to 245 247

Ibid., p. 57. 246 Ibid., I.ix. For discussion of this aspect of More’s work see A. Gabbey, ‘Philosophia Cartesiana Triumphata: Henry More (1646–1671)’, in T. Lennon (ed.), Problems of Cartesianism (Kingston, Ontario, 1982), pp. 171–250; J. Henry, ‘A Cambridge Platonist’s Materialism: Henry More and the Concept of Soul’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 49 (1986), pp. 172–95.

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bear upon the free will issue. In contrast to Bramhall, More points out that Hobbes’s materialism entangles him in a necessary determinism which is superfluous once the existence of spirit is posited; the willing object is the immaterial and spiritual soul. It is sometimes true, concedes More, that man can be caused to act in a certain way, but the fact that he does act freely is a demonstration that there is a faculty incompatible with mere matter. In short Hobbes’s materialist presuppositions produce most of his philosophical mistakes, not least the thought that the soul and its functions are purely material effects. More’s rejection of Hobbes’s materialism was less remarkable than the theory that he deployed to counter it. When The immortality of the soul occasioned any sustained comment, it was about this rather than his rejection of Hobbes. Readers saw danger in attempts to render the mysteries of religion in rational scientific terms, which could ultimately end up favouring the sceptics.248 In particular More’s conception of extended spirit seemed to concede a little too much to the materialism that he sought to combat. Hobbes himself may well have been aware of this. Richard Ward, More’s biographer, recorded that ‘even Mr Hobbes himself, as I have been informed, hath been heard to say, That if his own Philosophy was not True, he knew of none that he should sooner like than MORE’s of Cambridge’.249 Ward presents this as a genuine sentiment, but it sounds more like a double-edged response by Hobbes (or someone else) drawing attention to the philosophical dangers that More found himself in. More’s project to demonstrate the compatibility between religion and science began as an attempt to head off the dangerous potential of Cartesianism by adopting the guise of the mechanical naturalist. In Hobbes More found an opponent whose thoroughgoing materialism led many to question whether such a synthesis was in fact possible without corrupting the traditional meaning of religion altogether. It would be a question that would haunt many of those individuals whose science was uncomfortably close to Hobbes, and it would become one of the main reasons why they became some of his most persistent critics. 248

Hartlib to Worthington, 22 February 1660.

249

R. Ward, The Life of Henry More (1710), p. 80.

CHAPTER

4

Restoration (1658–1666)

POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT

1658–1660:

COVERT

HOBBISM AND ANTI-HOBBISM IN THE SETTLEMENT CRISIS

Cromwell’s death in September 1658 led to a period of political instability that provoked an outpouring of discussion about the political and religious direction of the state. Richard Cromwell, mistrusted by both the army and the republicans found it difficult to hold together the various interest groups on which the stability of the regime depended. Beset by debt he was forced to call the third Protectorate Parliament in January 1659, but its attempts to reduce the powers of the army led to its dissolution in April and the recall of the Rump, re-establishing the Commonwealth until the army again dissolved it in October. The army’s Committee of Safety in turn dissolved itself in December, leaving England ungoverned until troops restored the Rump and, in February, General Monck restored the Long Parliament, paving the way for the Restoration of Charles II. This difficult period proved to be remarkably fertile in terms of political theory; between the ending of the Protectorate and the re-establishment of the monarchy there was a window of political opportunity and the chance to lobby for a new political order. There was also the danger of anarchy, and a need to provide some sort of political and religious stability. In these circumstances Hobbes occupied an unusual position. Whereas some apologists for the Protectorate had been happy to use his ideas in defence of authoritarianism a few years earlier, the critical battering he had received in the meantime had made acknowledgement of his work even more problematic. Nevertheless Leviathan did offer a set of theoretical tools that addressed the dangerous political situation. Hobbes was by now too notorious to cite openly, or without heavy qualification, but at the same time his political theory was too useful to ignore. As a consequence of this slightly paradoxical status, when we look at some of the political writing produced during the period, we can find several theorists drawing upon 200

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Hobbes’s ideas either without acknowledgement or with self-conscious disclaimers, moves that simultaneously demonstrate the persistant power of Leviathan’s political analysis as well as the dramatic effect of the intensive criticism that Hobbes had faced since 1654. PERCEPTIONS OF HOBBES IN THE LATE

1650S

There can be little doubt that Hobbes’s dispute with the Oxford mathematicians helped to keep his work in the public gaze and sustained the demand for his works. When William London, a Newcastle bookseller, produced A catalogue of the most vendible books in England in the late summer of 1658 he listed nearly all of Hobbes’s printed works.1 London’s entries also suggested that Hobbes criticism was doing equally well, and he included Ross’s critique, Lawson’s Examination, Bramhall’s Defence of true liberty, Ward’s Exercitatio and Wallis’s Due correction. That London could still lay his hands on new copies of Leviathan supports the thesis that the initial print run of the book had not sold out, but the growing notoriety and increasing scarcity of the work may have begun the inflation of prices that is recorded by the late 1660s.2 By the late 1650s Hobbes’s paradoxical approach to religion and philosophy had earned him a variety of public images, some of which had taken on greater importance than others. In general, Hobbes’s critics could still (like More) be polite about Hobbes’s parts and learning, even though many were now prepared to insinuate that he might be an atheist. Few informed readers, however, could be left with the impression that Hobbes’s religious views were unproblematic, particularly Leviathan’s unusual theology. In response, Hobbes had attempted to portray himself as an orthodox Protestant thinker, a strategy that may have redeemed some of his views on ecclesiology and free will for the Independent opponents of Presbyterianism and Episcopalianism. But that said, the notoriety and eccentricity of Parts 3 and 4 of Leviathan were probably the main reason why shared beliefs did not blossom into any sort of alliance. Hobbes was 1

2

W. London, A catalogue of the most vendible books in England, Sigs. L2r, X1r. Those that do not appear include Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, Six Lessons, Stigmai and De Homine (although the latter had only just been published). The latest datable price that we have for the 1650s is the 9 shillings paid in 1654 for the copy in the State Library of Victoria in Australia, showing a very slight increase from the 8 shillings and six pence recorded for the newly published work in 1651. The next available price data, from 1668, show prices of 24 shillings and 30 shillings, but additional factors, such as the destruction of stock in the fire of London, may well have influenced these extraordinary prices of Leviathan after 1666. For discussion see N. Malcolm, ‘The Printing of the Bear’, in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), esp. pp. 341–5.

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never credited or approved openly in print by Independents like Owen and Du Moulin in spite of compatible beliefs about church organisation.3 In terms of politics, there were essentially two typical public accounts of Leviathan that emerged from the internal tensions of the book: Leviathan as a primer of arbitrary absolutism, and Leviathan as rebel’s catechism. Republicans like Harrington, and anti-Cromwellians like Lawson painted Hobbes as an unacceptable absolutist. At the other end of the spectrum were Royalists like Bramhall and Filmer who had always suspected that Hobbes’s contract theory was essentially subversive. These images in time bred for each reading community an automatic association between Hobbes and absolutism on the one hand, and Hobbes and sedition on the other. This negative stereotyping was reinforced by the general suspicion and criticism of Hobbes’s religion which ensured that to call something Hobbist was to infer that it was heterodox, blasphemous and unacceptable. In this way labelling something as Hobbesian became a way of categorising forms of political action. This would ensure that Hobbes and Hobbism would take a prominent role in the political debate of the Restoration period, haunted as it was by the recurrent fears of sedition and absolutism. Up to this point we have been concentrating upon the dedicated literature that made up the debate over Hobbes’s work, but it is also important to recognise that by the end of the decade discussion of Hobbes was not restricted to technical discussions of his philosophy, but had spilled over into popular culture. Emblematic of this move is the treatment of Hobbes in Nathaniel Ingelo’s best-selling romance Bentivolio and Urania, first published in 1660. Ingelo, a Fellow of Eton College, was an associate of the Cambridge Platonists, and Bentivolio borrows heavily from More in presenting an allegorical work of religious and moral instruction.4 Ingelo’s interminable tale of the triumph of good over evil includes an extensive and detailed discussion of Hobbes’s philosophy, which turns out to be the ideology of the book’s principal villain, the evil usurper Antitheus. Antitheus is the corrupt nephew of the good King Anaxagathus and, jealous of his virtuous cousin Alethion, successfully 3

4

This conclusion is endorsed by the most recent historian to examine the relationship between Hobbes and the Independents, see J. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005), esp. pp. 224–41. For Ingelo’s relationship with the Platonists, see particularly Joseph Glanvill’s character sketches in his account of the ‘Cupri-Cosmits’ where Ingelo features as ‘Illegon’, and is praised for his work in Bentivolio. J. I. Cope, ‘ ‘‘The Cupri-Cosmits’’: Glanvill on Latitudinarian Anti-Enthusiasm’, Huntington Library Quarterly 17 (1954), pp. 269–86, at pp. 283–4.


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conspires to imprison the latter and bring about the king’s death, thereby ensuring his own succession to the throne. The hero Bentivolio enquires after the usurper’s philosophy, and is told that Antitheus ‘brags that the Civil World was not known till he discover’d it . . . and that the Principles of true Policy are no older then his Books’. He also makes extravagant claims about his achievements in mathematics and natural philosophy, and ‘hath prov’d the Doctrine of Vertue and Vice to be a mere Fiction, by a new way of Reasoning which he hath invented’.5 Ingelo goes on to summarise over a decade of hostile commentary. Antitheus’s teachings about God are something of a riddle in need of interpretation: ‘This Great Phoebus looks at all his Dictates as Oracles, but they are useless to mankind till some other Apollo rise up to unriddle them.’6 That said, Hobbes’s contradictory statements ‘jarre so horridly that they are incapable of Reconciliation, they are forc’d rather to conclude that he is in jest when he mentions God, and useth the name Deity by way of scorn, or for fear of the Fate of Vaninus.’ For Ingelo, as for many critics, Hobbes was merely covering his tracks for fear of prosecution and hides his impiety under ‘the plausible Notion of God’s Incomprehensibility’.7 Antitheus describes religion as a con-trick, takes no notice of the law of nature or the Gospel of Christ and ‘assigns no Rule but the Arbitrary Commands of the Civil Magistrate, and esteems that true Religion in every Country which the Governour thereof prescribes’.8 Ingelo gives a hostile account of Hobbes’s ecclesiology and theology before turning his attention to Hobbes’s science. Hobbes/ Antitheus deliberately perverts science to subvert theology, ‘turning the sound Principles of sober Discourses into bold Paradoxes, and fitting extravagant Fancies, which are apt to take with vain Souls, not only to oppose true Notions, but to lay Foundations of Atheism in his Disciples minds’.9 For Ingelo Antitheus is an Epicurean with the fundamental notion that ‘the World was made by a fortuitous concourse of stragling Atoms’ and whose materialism leads to the absurd consequences laid out in More’s Immortality. Antitheus’s ethics involve a rejection of the eternal rules of good and evil and a denial of free will,10 and his ‘new Modell’ of politics has been condemned as ‘a fictitious supposal of a state of Humanity that never was or will be, and that his several Dictates are useless Consequences drawn from false Principles, and perversly applied to the 5

6

N. Ingelo, Bentivolio and Urania in four bookes (1660), p. 132. Hobbes claims that civil science is no older than his book De Cive in the preface to De Corpore Politico (1655), Sig. A2v–A3r (Sig B1r–v in the English translation of 1656). 7 8 9 Ibid. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 136. Ibid., p. 140. 10 Ibid., p. 143.

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Condition of Mankind, which doth not only reject them as impertinent, but abhor them as mischievous to the Nature and Happiness of Men.’11 His absolutism is compensated by the grant of ‘unreasonable Allowances to Subjects’ in that they are authorised to resist when threatened with wounds or death, and told that they may absolve themselves from pacts and oaths. In all cases ‘the longest Sword is the true Measure of Right, and the strongest Arm the only Infallible Judge of Wrong.’12 Ingelo’s summary of Antitheus’s politics reveals the philosophical legitimation for his act of usurpation, powerfully demonstrating the corrupting effects of Hobbesian philosophy. In Antitheus we also find an early example of a figure that would become a common feature of Restoration drama, the Hobbesian usurper. Philosophically Hobbesian and politically Cromwellian, Ingelo’s Antitheus is one of the first characters to modify the traditional figure of the tyrant according to hostile readings of Hobbes and the Protector. The character merges the philosophy and politics of the Interregnum and both are unmistakably condemned. The importance of this characterisation for the reception of Hobbes’s work should not be underestimated; far more people would have read Bentivolio than any of the dedicated discussions of Hobbes.13 The conversion of anti-Hobbesian critique into the ideology of the literary villain marks an important waypoint in the reception of Hobbes’s work. When Hobbes published Leviathan his audience was genuinely uncertain about what it all meant. By the end of the decade Hobbes’s critics had produced a series of interpretations and refutations of his work that exposed the heterodoxy of his project. In Bentivolio and Urania these interpretations were packaged for a wider and more popular market in a way that would make it harder for readers to approach Hobbes’s texts without the prejudice of his critics. COVERT HOBBISM IN THE LATE

1650S

AND EARLY

1660S

We have already noted several writers’ anxiety about the effect of Leviathan upon the young, particularly university students and gentlemen. Ross, Lucy and Lawson all cite the potential or actual influence of Leviathan as a motive for writing against Hobbes.14 Although this is the traditional stuff of moral panic, there is some evidence that Hobbes’s work was appealing to 11 13 14

Ibid., p. 144. 12 Ibid., p. 148. Bentivolio was extended in 1664 with further editions in 1669, 1673 and 1682. Ross, Leviathan drawn out, Sig. A3r; Lucy, Examinations, censures, and confutations of divers errours in the two first chapters of Mr. Hobbes his Leviathan. Sig. B3v: ‘yet this book [Leviathan] I find admir’d by many Gentlemen of sharp wits, and lovers of learning’; Lawson, Examination, Sig. A2r-v.


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a younger generation who had come to maturity in the midst of civil war and political uncertainty. Hobbes’s works made sense of a world of political and religious conflict in a way that more traditional political theory did not. Hobbes’s ideas were also attractive to those with an interest in the new natural philosophy. If one were looking for a practical political application of the new scientific methods to the worlds of ethics and politics, Hobbes was one of very few writers to offer an account of what such a civil science would look like. By the end of the 1650s a generation of writers who had grown up and been educated under the shadow of civil war and political upheaval began to contribute to political and religious theory. In some of these contributions the powerful attractions of a Hobbesian approach to political and religious problems is unmistakable and disturbing, not only to readers of the new political theory, but sometimes also to the writers themselves. In the section that follows we consider three of these individuals: Matthew Wren, Edward Stillingfleet and John Locke, all of them in their mid-twenties, and all of them showing evidence of the powerful but problematic influence of Hobbes’s ideas. In June 1659 Edward Hyde, then in Brussels, wrote to John Barwick, former Fellow of St John’s College Cambridge. The subject of their correspondence was a plan to persuade Matthew Wren, fresh from his assault upon Harrington, to pen an attack upon Leviathan.15 But Hyde was to be disappointed in Wren; the young man prevaricated over Barwick’s suggestion, making the excuse that he wasn’t up to the task and that it was properly the job of a clergyman to take on Hobbes’s religious ideas. Sensing something other than simple modesty in Wren’s stalling, Hyde wrote to Barwick a month later dimissing these thoughts and reiterating the need to counter Hobbes’s influence in the universities by combating the philosopher’s ideas.16 Wren, however, was not to be persuaded, and the reason, as Hyde had perhaps feared, was that he was in fact a follower of Hobbes. It was evident from his first exchange with Harrington that Wren was familiar with Leviathan, and that he did not share Hyde’s loathing of

15 16

P. Barwick, The Life of the Reverend Dr John Barwick DD (1724), pp. 421–2. Ibid., pp. 430–1: ‘it is high Time, if what I hear be true, that some Tutors read his Leviathan, instead of the others, to their Pupils. Mr Hobbs is my old Friend; yet I cannot absolve him from the Mischief he hath done to the King, the Church, the Laws, and the Nation: And surely there should be enough to be said to the Politicks of that Man, who having resolved all Religion, Wisdom and Honesty into an implicit Obedience to the Laws established, writes a Book of Policy, which I may be bold to say, must be by the established Laws of any Kingdom or Province in Europe condemned for impious and seditious; and therefore it will be very hard, if the Fundamentals of it be not to be overthrown.’

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Hobbes’s political theory.17 The sound of Leviathan would also echo in Wren’s Monarchy asserted, a further attack upon Harrington published in 1659, and in a second edition in 1660. It wasn’t the case that Wren cited Hobbes or quoted Leviathan directly; indeed he seems to have been very careful to avoid doing so. Wren’s ‘Hobbism’ lay in his use of distinctively Hobbesian conceptual relationships. In responding to Harrington’s republicanism, Wren made use of a contract theory very similar to that deployed by Royalists in the 1640s. He described a state of nature where individuals were required to give up their natural rights to a sovereign due to the inconveniences that arose from holding them. Although writers like Digges, Hammond and Ferne had used these arguments, they had, for example, stressed the role of God in giving the magistrate the power of the sword and in legislating through scripture. By contrast, theological factors hardly figure in Wren’s brief discussions. The state of nature is a state of war where there is no common interest and ‘every particular Man had Right to prosecute his own Advantage, though to the ruine of other Men.’18 Referring to property, Wren argued that before the establishment of authority, ‘every man had Right to every thing’19 and that property rights were only properly established by the sovereign. It was in the establishment and characterisation of sovereignty that Wren was at his most Hobbesian, borrowing from chapter 5 of De Cive and chapter 17 of Leviathan: In order to establish government, ‘every particular Man was necessitated to part with his Native power, and instrust it with the Sovereign, whose Actions He did thereby authorise and make his own.’20 Wren went on to argue ‘that in the Sovereign the diffused strength of a Multitude is united on One Person, which in Monarchy is a Naturall Person, in a State an Artificiall One procreated by a majority of Votes.’21 Harrington himself wasn’t slow to pick up on the resemblances, especially after Wren had accused him of Hobbism: ‘The opposition made by Mr Wren unto a commonwealth, and his pretended asserting of monarchy, run altogether upon Mr Hobbes’s principles, and in his very words.’22 It seems likely that Harrington was right about the paternity of Wren’s theory; the accumulation of trademark Hobbesian terminology suggests 17 18 20 21 22

For the Hobbism of Wren’s work, see Malcolm’s comments in Aspects of Hobbes, pp. 327–8. M. Wren, Monarchy asserted (1659), pp. 48–9. 19 Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., pp. 76–7. Cf. Leviathan, chs. 17–18, pp. 87–8 [O.P]. M. Wren, Monarchy asserted, p. 97. Cf. Leviathan, chs. 17–18, pp. 87–8 [O.P]; On the Citizen, 5.9–12, pp. 73–4. Harrington The art of lawgiving, in Harrington, The Political Works, p. 698: Quoting the same section of Wren’s work, Harrington commented sarcastically ‘Who reads Mr Hobbes, if this be news?’


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that Wren was a follower of Leviathan’s political theory, and this was probably the reason why he dragged his feet over the refutation of Hobbes proposed by Hyde and Barwick. The book was never written. Wren wasn’t the only theorist to find Leviathan-style arguments useful during the period. A near contemporary of Wren was the Cambridgeeducated clergyman Edward Stillingfleet. In November 1660 Stillingfleet published the first edition of Irenicum, a treatise that sought to use natural law theory to cut through the intractable scriptural debates between Presbyterians and Episcopalians as to which form of church government was jure divino. If scripture proved to be rather inconclusive about which form of church government was established by divine right, Stillingfleet’s preferred alternative was to examine the question from the perspective of natural right. Doing this involved an examination of the relationship between natural rights and natural law, and it was here that Stillingfleet’s methodology and conclusions started to look more than a little Hobbesian. Stillingfleet postulated a state of absolute liberty where the silence of the law of nature constituted a natural right of permission for individuals to do whatever they wanted.23 Knowing well enough that this might raise the suspicion of unacceptable Hobbism, Stillingfleet was careful to point out that even Hobbes in De Cive acknowledged that this was a hypothetical state and that in reality children are born into patriarchal authority.24 This much established, Stillingfleet went ahead with a contractarian story in which individuals part with their natural right to establish a civil state.25 The argument was made pertinent to religion by considering religious worship to be ius naturae permissivum in the state of nature. Although such rights were exercised justly in the state of nature, disagreements over religion made it necessary for individuals to part with their natural rights of worship for the common good. The implication of Stillingfleet’s argument was that each side in the dispute over church government should abdicate their right to decide the manner of worship to the magistrate, particularly where there was no authoritative judgement of natural law or scripture. Stillingfleet clearly knew that he was playing with dangerous ideas when he deployed these concepts in Irenicum. In order to avoid misunderstanding he made it clear that the duties of natural law were not subject to 23 24 25

Stillingfleet, Irenicum. A weapon-salve for the Churches wounds (1661 [amended to 1660 in ms. on Thomason’s edition]), p. 32. Stillingfleet refers to the note Hobbes added to De Cive 1.10 (although he erroneously refers to 1.11n). Stillingfleet, Irenicum, pp. 32–3.

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positive human law, this being the notorious Hobbesian inversion of the traditional relationship between the two forms of obligation.26 Stillingfleet’s characterisation of the state of nature was also designed to avoid suggesting anything remotely like a state of war, or that individuals were relinquishing their rights to an arbitrary and duty-free sovereign. In other words, he had tried to insulate his account from identification with unacceptable Hobbism. But that said, what Stillingfleet ended up with was a super-Erastian account of magistrates determining the form of church government in a way that wouldn’t have looked out of place in De Cive or Leviathan. As Irenicum went into multiple editions, it wasn’t long before Stillingfleet’s critics picked up on the point and began to accuse him of excessive Erastianism and Hobbism. Stillingfleet answered the charge in an appendix to the second edition of Irenicum published in 1662 where he attempted to demonstrate that his discussion of the magistrate’s relationship to church government did not affect the fact that the church was a separate and spiritual jurisdiction. Anxious to demonstrate his distance from Hobbes, Stillingfleet devoted a section to attacking Leviathan’s argument ‘that no Precepts of the Gospel are Law till enacted by Civil Authority’.27 Stillingfleet argued that to say this was to suggest that there was no higher obligation to God’s own laws, which should always come before positive human laws, just as he had tried to argue in Irenicum. Another writer who would find himself in an ambiguous relationship with Hobbes and Hobbism was the young John Locke, who composed his unpublished Two Tracts on Government early in 1661. Locke was a student at Christ Church Oxford, the college of Owen, Stubbe and Bagshaw and probably the most favourable environment for the study of Hobbes in the university. There can be no doubt that Locke was familiar with Hobbes’s works and the discussion of them even if he was not personally associated with the young Hobbists who had taken up the philosopher’s cause. Indeed, the occasion for his early use of Hobbesian ideas was in reaction to published statements by Owen and more particularly Bagshaw about liberty of conscience. The issue was whether the state had the right to impose forms and ceremonies that fell under the category of adiaphora, or things indifferent. These included the wearing of surplices by ministers, the use of the sign of the cross at baptism, and the posture of kneeling to take communion. These were actions that were not specifically required by scripture and all sides agreed that they were not part of God’s law. The central question was who had the right to legislate on such matters; was it 26

Ibid., p. 31.

27

Stillingfleet, Irenicum (1662), Appendix, p. 10.


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the individual according to their conscience? Or was it up to the state to regulate the public conduct of ministers and parishioners? The debate generated a large literature, some of it based upon natural law theory. For Owen and Bagshaw, the silence of divine law created a right for individuals to do as their consciences dictated. Provided that individual practice did not threaten public safety such rights should be respected; any attempt to impose particular forms would be a violation of conscience and Christian liberty.28 For Locke, deeply affected by the political and religious disruption that had marked his coming to maturity, the Christian liberty promoted by Owen and Bagshaw had a dark side. If it were generally indulged in England, Locke felt that it ‘would prove only a liberty for contention, censure and persecution and turn us loose to the tyranny of a religious rage’.29 Writing against Bagshaw in the first of his Two Tracts, Locke’s solution was to argue that because of the danger to public order it was necessary to leave the determination of adiaphora to the civil magistrate. To demonstrate this point, he used a distinctly Hobbesian-sounding contractarian argument: supposing man naturally owner of an entire liberty, and so much master of himself as to owe no subjection to any other but God alone (which is the freest condition we can fancy him in), it is yet the unalterable condition of society and government that every particular man must unavoidably part with this right to his liberty and entrust the magistrate with as full a power over all his actions as he himself hath.30

In a provocatively Hobbesian vein Locke goes on to suggest that this was the case in a commonwealth or a monarchy, ‘the same arbitrary power being there in the assembly (which acts like one person) as in a monarch’.31 The relinquishing of natural rights means that ‘the supreme magistrate of every nation what way soever, must necessarily have an absolute and arbitrary power over all the indifferent actions of his people.’ Like Stillingfleet, whose use of the contractarian hypothesis in Irenicum may have influenced his deployment of it, Locke attempts to insulate his argument from the charge of Hobbism by stressing that the laws of God and nature are nevertheless binding independently of any earthly authority. However, Locke’s solution shares the stark Hobbesian thought about the 28 29 30 31

J. Owen, Two questions about the power of the supream magistrate about religion (1659); E. Bagshaw, The great question concerning things indifferent in religious worship (1660). J. Locke, Political Essays, ed. M. Goldie (Cambridge, 1997), p. 7. Locke, Political Essays, p. 11; cf. the version in the Latin Tract, ibid., p. 70. Ibid.; cf. Leviathan, ch. 21.

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extent of sovereign power required to avoid situations of conflict, a position that shades into a profoundly Erastian understanding of the magistrate’s control of the external characteristics of the church. Doubtless Locke found this a useful solution to the problem of adiaphora, but he may also have found it an attractive rhetorical response to those members of his college for whom Hobbes’s ecclesiology had until very recently made a lot of sense. Bagshaw, Owen and Du Moulin had all endorsed profoundly Erastian visions of ecclesiastical authority under a Cromwellian regime prepared to endorse toleration. The use of a quasi-Hobbesian model may have been calculated to defeat Bagshaw with the sort of argument he had used himself; they were, as Locke pointed out, positions ‘which I think my author will not deny me’.32 Playing this sort of game with the followers of Hobbes at Christ Church was one thing, but revealing it to the world was evidently quite another. Locke never published the Two Tracts, and their Hobbism may well have been one reason, especially in the light of Stillingfleet’s own public difficulties. Hobbes’s theory may well have been useful, but using a Hobbesian contract theory without having some way of demonstrating that the laws of nature and God were obligatory independent of the sovereign and human law meant that using Hobbesian formulae always carried with it the danger of incurring accusations of Hobbism. The recurring questions would focus on the murky borderline between human and divine obligation; where did the state’s authority end, and God’s begin? This problem would become particularly acute for those, like Stillingfleet and Locke, who wished to support the power of the magistrate when it came to ordering the church. In the 1650s, Erastianism had resulted in a broadly tolerant regime not obviously identifiable with the potentially invasive religious absolutism of Leviathan; after the Restoration, any Erastian or natural-law based claims made for the Church of England would be associated with the reimposition of episcopacy and the state persecution of religious dissent. Anglican Erastians, unlike their Interregnum equivalents, would quickly become associated with authoritarian Hobbism. A great deal of the anti-Hobbesian literature of the period after 1660s would be concerned with defusing this association. Ironically, it would be precisely those writers who were closest to Hobbes who would generate a lot of this literature. This tendency could already be seen in the writers that we have looked at; both Stillingfleet and Locke tried to make it clear that they did not subscribe to distinctively Hobbesian doctrines, and this would ultimately develop for both authors 32

Locke, Political Essays, p. 11.

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into explicit denunciations of Hobbes’s position. For others, the process of disentangling their own position from Hobbes’s required more explicit statements from the start. In 1660 James Arderne published an authoritarian paean to the power of the magistrate which included the thought that the sovereign ‘hath power in dubious points to be Gods Interpreter to me’.33 Realising that this sounded a little too Hobbesian for comfort, Arderne hopes that no one will mistake this for ‘Mr Hobs’s assertion . . . whose opinion I abhorre, as a subtle design to introduce irreligion and Atheism into the world.’34 Arderne dodged an association with Hobbes’s religious ideas here, but this did not stop him suggesting later that Hobbes was right about the state of nature being a state of anarchy.35 Careful readers may well have retained their suspicion about the paternity of Arderne’s authoritarianism. HOBBES AND NATURAL LAW: ROBERT SHARROCK’S HYPOTHESIS ETHIKE AND LOCKE’S

‘ESSAYS

ON THE LAW

OF NATURE’

As Stillingfleet and Locke had both realised, the main obstacle to using Hobbesian models of sovereignty was the difficulty of demonstrating that the law of nature did carry the sort of obligatory force that Hobbes’s theory had undermined. This was a problem that dogged the natural law tradition more generally; what was natural law and how could it be shown to be obligatory? The traditional scholastic starting point for natural law was to assert that its contents were the dictates of right reason, and that they bound by virtue of the shared rationality of God and man. This account of natural law was adapted for a Protestant audience by Hugo Grotius in his De jure belli ac pacis of 1625. For Protestant thinkers who followed Grotius the problem with this way of understanding natural law was that it placed far too much emphasis on the assumption that human reason revealed God’s will and thus our natural obligations. Human reasoning was far too unreliable to offer an accurate guide to God’s will, and was, by itself, incapable of generating obligation, which could only come from the command of a superior. John Selden had argued that God had somehow promulgated special knowledge of the laws of nature to Adam and then to Noah, enjoining them to perpetual obedience, but his suggestion that these commands were primarily embodied in Hebrew tradition was controversial. More conventionally, Jeremy Taylor 33 34

J. Arderne, The kingdom of England the best commonwealth (1660), p. 8. Ibid., citing chapter 16 of De Cive. 35 Arderne, The kingdom, p. 17.

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argued that God’s command was simply given through scripture. Others wishing to preserve some aspects of the scholastic argument, such as the Cambridge don Nathaniel Culverwel, sought to find evidence of God’s commands from ‘the nature of things’, believing that God had designed the natural world in such a way that the dictates of obligatory natural law could be derived from a careful empirical study of nature. Hobbes’s contribution to this debate was typically disruptive and alarming, combining a minimalist ethical naturalism with Selden-style positivism; natural laws were derived from self-preservation but only became properly obligatory when commanded by the sovereign. Few of Hobbes’s doctrines caused more consternation amongst his readers, not least those who were interested in the ethical naturalism of the sort that Culverwel had undertaken. In 1660 Robert Sharrock (1630–84), an Oxford friend of Robert Boyle, sought to tackle this thorny question in his Hypothesis ethike with a view to establishing a systematic understanding of the duties required by natural law. As Sharrock noted, the only person to have offered such a system was Hobbes, but the problem with it was that it was built around selfpreservation and self-interest alone.36 Worse still, Hobbes had used this argument to legitimate ‘all-embracing obedience to rulers’, even in matters of ethics. This may have produced ‘an easy Hypothesis regarding morality’ but it had entailed dreadful consequences that Sharrock simply couldn’t accept, particularly conceptual absurdities such as the state of war. As a result, part of Sharrock’s project involved a rejection of the Hobbesian thought ‘that man is not naturally bound to anything other than the promotion of his own advantage by any means’.37 Sharrock’s anti-Hobbesian strategy was to argue both that self-interest by itself could never ground an ethical system and that in fact nature and a deluge of classical testimony offered decisive evidence that mankind was obliged to considerably more. In Ciceronian terms (and the Ciceronian rejection of Epicurean ethics to some extent shapes Sharrock’s approach), the priority given to individual interest in Hobbes’s scheme has the bizarre outcome that what is utile defines what is honestum: ‘He would have it that the single originating dictate of conscience and nature is the desire to benefit oneself, and that therefore one is only bound to some external thing that can be derived from this precondition: so that to harm the innocent, and break one’s word is more honourable for anyone than to do otherwise.’ In Hobbes’s scheme crime potentially becomes a virtue if it 36 37

R. Sharrock, Hypothesis ethike, De officiis secundum naturae jus (Oxford, 1660), Preface. Ibid., p. 46.


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leads to personal advantage. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the individual pursuing Hobbes’s ethical theory could never be properly bound to any further obligation because if one is bound to one’s own advantage ‘then it is right and possible to cast away everything to which we are bound and consider it worthless’. Sharrock’s counter-argument was that nature provided clear evidence that individuals were obliged to more than self-interest. Even allowing Hobbes’s starting point that nature has generated certain notions within us, Sharrock argues that they have much more content than selfpreservation alone. Sharrock proves his case with recourse to the testimony of the pagans, who, although they had no natural knowledge of God’s will, were nevertheless made aware of broader obligations through the workings of conscience. Even the powerful, who could easily escape retribution, were nevertheless assailed by the pangs of conscience for their deeds, thus hinting at their injustice.38 The existence of conscience makes it clear that other-regarding actions are at some level demanded by natural justice. What Sharrock would go on to suggest was that conscience operated in such a way that virtuous actions would be rewarded with the pleasures of a good conscience, and vices with the pains of a bad conscience. Conscience itself was informed by nature, which in turn had been designed for this purpose by God.39 The existence of natural sanctions would be an important part of Sharrock’s natural jurisprudence and his response to Hobbes; the pleasures and pains naturally attached to moral behaviour by God conspire to imprint a clear idea of the contents of the law of nature, and, as a result, in true Ciceronian fashion, behaviour that is honestum turns out to be what is genuinely utile (for example, natural sociability), whereas the Hobbesian alternative is ultimately self-defeating (the state of war). Even in cases where the long-term advantage to moral action was not immediately obvious, the knowledge that God had willed such outcomes gave appropriate evidence that sanctions occur at some point (i.e. the afterlife). The pleasures and pains naturally annexed to human actions helped to establish that there was such an obligation in the first place and the sorts of duties to which it referred.40 Sharrock’s Hypothesis offered a systematic alternative to Hobbes’s ethical scheme, and to a certain extent Sharrock’s project was designed to show 38 40

Ibid., p. 51. 39 Ibid., p. 53. Sharrock extends this argument in his Judicia (Oxford, 1662), see Hans Blom’s remarks on this work in his Morality and Causality in Politics (Utrecht, 1995), pp. 131–5.

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that one could have ethical naturalism without it having to look like Hobbes’s ethically impoverished account. If Hobbes had raised the bar when it came to thinking about what a science of virtue and vice might look like, his critics were concerned enough to rise to the challenge in order to vindicate traditional natural jurisprudence in terms common to them all. We can detect the influence of Sharrock’s Ciceronian solution, and its political importance in John Locke’s manuscript essays on the law of nature (1664). As we have seen Locke was one of the writers who had used natural law to legitimate political authority in such a way that it might be taken for Hobbism. It was only to be expected therefore that he would address the issue of pre-political moral obligation at some point, not least because he needed such an account to distinguish his own position from that of Hobbes. The shadow of Hobbes’s reductive naturalism falls heavily across the last three of Locke’s quaestiones, where he systematically rejects the thought that self-interest or self-preservation could act as the basis for the laws of nature, in terms that strongly suggest a recent critical reading of Sharrock.41 Locke endorses the claim that the law of nature can be known naturally and that bad conscience is a mark of the binding existence of natural law, following Sharrock’s arguments against Hobbesian utilitarianism.42 However Locke was queasy about Sharrock’s Ciceronian resolution of the relationship between the honourable and the useful. The observance of natural law may well give rise to happiness, Locke notes, but that cannot be the ground of obligation, which in strict voluntarist terms could only come from the recognition that natural law is God’s will. Locke would always remain wary about the use of natural sanctions for this reason, possibly because it came too close to the Hobbesian utilitarianism that it was designed to combat. Other contemporaries took a better view of Sharrock’s efforts, and his Ciceronian account of natural duties would become an important resource in the war against Hobbes. Richard Cumberland in particular would take this line of argument much further in his attempts to offer an explicitly anti-Hobbesian natural law theory based upon natural rewards and punishments. He would be followed in turn by Samuel Pufendorf, Samuel Parker and Locke’s friend James Tyrrell. The irony for Locke would be that even though he rejected this discourse for its Hobbesian utilitarianism, its success as an anti-Hobbesian genre would mean that his failure to produce something like it would leave Locke himself suspected of Hobbism, as we shall see in the last chapter. 41

J. Locke, Political Essays, p. 116.

42

Ibid., pp. 118, 122.


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HOBBES AND THE RESTORATION

Charles II’s return to England in May 1660 was an event with mixed implications for Hobbes. Hobbes may have known that Charles himself was not necessarily hostile towards the old philosopher,43 but with Charles would come Clarendon, and with Clarendon were the Episcopalian clergy, and these men had played a central role in removing Hobbes from the court and in the ongoing campaign against Hobbes’s ideas. In conditions where the Royalist narrative about the subversive qualities of Hobbes’s work would soon become the dominant interpretation, Hobbes was potentially in danger of being caught up in the execution of victor’s justice (the Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion would not become law until August). It was probably a matter of some relief for Hobbes that he and his friends managed to engineer reconciliation with Charles soon after he arrived back in London.44 Hobbes’s recovery of royal favour, complete with an irregularly paid pension of £100, seems to have emboldened Hobbes to take revenge of his own. In July he completed an opportunistic mathematical attack on Wallis, Examinatio et Emendatio Mathematicae Hodiernae, unsparingly drawing attention to Wallis’s Presbyterianism. With the political tables turned, Hobbes clearly felt that this was the moment to try to restore his reputation as a natural philosopher. His political instinct may have been sound in this respect; Wallis did not immediately rush into print against Hobbes. His reply to the Examinatio would not appear until the spring of 1662 and in the context of Hobbes’s broader dispute with the nascent Royal Society. HOBBES AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY

The Royal Society was formally constituted at Gresham College in November 1660, but although its heterogeneous membership included many Fellows who were personally well-disposed to Hobbes, the 43 44

Hobbes, Considerations, p. 28. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, 2 vols., I, p. 340: ‘It happened about two or three days after his majesty’s happy return that, as he was passing in his coach through the Strand, Mr. Hobbes was standing at Little Salisbury House gate (where his Lord then lived.) The king espied him, put off his hat very kindly to him and asked him how he did. About a week after, he had oral conference with his majesty at Mr. S. Cowper’s, where, as he sat for his picture, he was diverted by Mr. Hobbes’s pleasant discourse. Here his majesty’s favors were redintegrated to him and order was given that he should have free access to his majesty, who was always much delighted in his wit and smart repartees.’

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philosopher was never proposed for membership.45 Hobbes’s exclusion was deeply ironic at a number of levels; for a society that claimed Bacon as its patron saint, Hobbes was one of only a few people who could have claimed to actually know the great man; there were also many members whose claims to be interested in science were far less respectable than Hobbes’s own, and several who shared many of his purely scientific views. Thirdly, Hobbes had actually been enthusiastic about a lay-academy which would function independently of the clerically dominated universities, but the problem was that the new institution was dominated by Hobbes’s clerical enemies. The Society was the institutional successor to the groups of scientists who had met informally in London and Oxford in the 1640s and 1650s. The Oxford influence was decisive. Wallis, Ward and Wilkins were all instrumental in the Society’s foundation and Wilkins in particular, in his capacity as one of the original secretaries, was in a position to deter anyone thinking of promoting Hobbes’s cause. That said, there is no evidence that anyone ever did make a formal attempt to put his name forward. As several historians have pointed out, there was no provision for black-balling potential fellows. The situation recalled Hobbes’s problems at Oxford; although there were plenty of individuals who rated Hobbes in various ways, some of the Society’s key players had made no secret of their hostility towards him and no one was prepared to insist that Hobbes’s candidacy be taken seriously. It is tempting to characterise Hobbes’s exclusion as the result of an ideological clash between the ethos of the new Society and Hobbes’s approach to science. Shapin and Schaffer have drawn attention to the contrasts between the Society’s sceptical and experimental programmes, and Hobbes’s more prescriptive insistence on certain forms of explanation and his distrust of experimental technology.46 But, as Noel Malcolm has recently indicated, this may be to overemphasise the differences between thinkers like Hobbes and Boyle. Hobbes and Boyle would have agreed that different hypotheses could be found for natural phenomenon, and many of Hobbes’s own scientific views had been formed as a result of considering experimental results.47 Ideology may not have played a decisive role in 45

46 47

For discussions of this issue see Q. Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Politics of the Early Royal Society’ in Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 2002), III, pp. 324–45; S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985); Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the Royal Society’, in Aspects, pp. 317–35. See also the comments in J. Parkin, Science, Religion and Politics in Restoration England: Richard Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae (Woodbridge, 1999), ch. iv. Shapin and Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and Roberval’, in Aspects, pp. 156–99.


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distinguishing some of the more practical aspects of their natural philosophical programmes. But ideology did play a role in the looser sense that Hobbes remained convinced that the only way that scientific discourse could avoid absurdity was if it embraced philosophically consistent causal explanations in terms of matter and motion. Herein lay the problem for the Oxford scientists; although they shared the project of studying matter and motion, it was important for the survival of the new science to present itself as open to the idea that its findings could were at least compatible with non-material causal stories. Hobbes’s thoroughgoing materialism had been the key issue animating the charges of atheism against him. For all their shared scientific interests, it would be this recurring issue that would constitute the red line between Hobbes and his Oxford opponents, and it would become all the more important as the Royal Society’s religious orthodoxy itself was called into question. Hobbes ‘dogmatism’ about the need to structure scientific discourse in a particular way would increasingly run up against the Society’s attempts to show that its own projects could be left open-ended enough not to exclude orthodox religious views. For Hobbes, of course, this would be the door through which science would be restored to the Kingdom of Darkness and the control of priests. To that extent, ideology was surely a major issue in Hobbes’s disputes with the Society in the early 1660s. Hobbes was clearly irritated by his exclusion from the now expanding Royal Society’s activities, and as a result he began a campaign in the summer of 1661 to get his own natural philosophy onto their agenda, making use of his royal patronage to do so. In the summer of 1661 he presented a demonstration of the duplication of the cube to the king, who forwarded it to be examined by the Society, and in August, he published his Dialogus Physicus de Natura Aeris, a dialogical treatment of the Society and the experimental results presented by Boyle in his New experiments physicomechanical, which had been published the previous year. The dialogical form, also deployed against Wallis in the Examinatio, was a new stylistic departure for Hobbes. In almost every case that Hobbes uses it one of the characters is Hobbes himself and the other a junior interlocutor who is brought around to Hobbes’s way of thinking. This educational format, adopting a traditional Socratic ‘master and student’ form, was designed to show the persuasive power of Hobbes’s argument at work; Hobbes sought to persuade his scientific readers that his approach could offer a properly philosophical approach to the phenomena studied by Boyle. Hobbes’s interlocutor (B) tells the philosopher (A) about the Royal Society and its members. Hobbes queries the semi-private and exclusive

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character of an organisation but acknowledges that it has a similar character to Mersenne’s informal meetings that he used to attend in Paris. When B tells A about the membership, Hobbes even appears to praise Boyle, referring to its leading member as honest, subtle and ingenious, but when his attention is drawn to other members he condemns them as ‘Algebraists . . . not pleasing among physicists’.48 Turning to the experiments with the air pump, Hobbes proceeded to criticise the research programme set out by Boyle, arguing that the tests devised simply didn’t prove what the experimenters claimed that they proved and that their suggested reasons for the phenomena did not constitute proper philosophical explanations. In particular Hobbes focused upon the deficiencies of the air pump, which had been designed to remove the air from a glass receiver. Hobbes argued that in practice it could never do this; the receiver would always leak, and the phenomena attributed to vacuity could be attributed to the movement of air within the receiver. This meant that any suggestion that the experimental machinery had produced a vacuum was always false. It should be noted that Hobbes was not opposed to the idea that a vacuum could exist in theory, it was just that the machine’s deficiencies meant that it was incapable of producing one in practice. Therefore it was a mistake to think that one could use such engines to demonstrate anything particularly decisive about natural processes. Hobbes was also dismissive of the hypotheses that Boyle had used to characterise the effects of air pressure, that air had a natural spring. For Hobbes this was simply a poor explanatory device that didn’t say anything about the cause of the observed phenomena. For Hobbes any decent explanation would work from the basic principles of matter and motion, and Hobbes suggested ways in which this might be done. Without those principles, Boyle’s experiments would never produce properly causal explanations of the kind outlined in De Corpore, and so would never constitute effective natural philosophy: ‘they may meet and confer in study and make as many experiments as they like, yet unless they use my principles they will advance nothing.’49 Lying at the bottom of Hobbes’s argument was the thought that the experimenters’ explanatory strategies were hopelessly underdetermined by a methodology that put a premium upon generating experimental results and deferring detailed discussion of causal hypotheses. Hobbes’s campaign to reassert his scientific reputation went badly wrong. He had belatedly realised that his proof of the duplication of the 48 49

Hobbes, EW, p. 242 (Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump, p. 352). Ibid., p. 236; see also p. 273.


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cube contained mistakes, but the piece was presented to one of the Society’s meetings in the autumn of 1661, together with a refutation by Viscount Brouncker. Worse was to follow: Wallis took the opportunity to savage Hobbes in early 1662, publishing his Hobbius heauton-timorumenos, protesting that Hobbes’s objections to Boyle were prompted by Boyle’s association with Wallis and Ward. Although the bulk of the work was devoted to ridiculing the mathematical charges in the Examinatio, Wallis cast some potentially dangerous aspersions upon Hobbes’s loyalty: Hobbes had deserted his royal master in 1651 and Leviathan ‘was written in Defence of Olivers Title . . . placing the whole Right of Government, meerly in Strength’.50 The political charges were a clever appeal to the Royalist view of Hobbes as a subversive de facto theorist, and Wallis returned to the theme several times in his introductory discourse, suggesting that Hobbes’s doctrine was effectively that a magistrate only held sovereignty as long as he had the power of compulsion ‘and consequently, that ’tis Lawfull, to Rebell or Disobey, when ever we be Able’.51 Wallis repeated his by now familiar insinuations of atheism, drawing attention to Hobbes’s continued denial of the existence of incorporeal substance. In a particularly vicious move he also suggested that age was getting to the 73-year-old Hobbes; he had had the misfortune to outlive his own reputation. His dialogues were effectively between Thomas and Hobs: ‘Wherein Thomas commends Hobs, and Hobs commends Thomas, and both commend Thomas Hobs as a third Person.’52 Because Hobbes no longer talked to anyone else, he was now talking to himself. It was perhaps to be expected that Wallis would take advantage of the dispute, but more surprising was Boyle’s involvement. Before 1662, as he noted, Boyle had refrained from making adverse comments on Hobbes’s work, and was surprised that he should have come under attack himself. The result was Boyle’s Examen of Mr. T. Hobbes, published soon after Wallis’s assault in 1662, as an appendix to the second edition of New experiments.53 In contrast to Wallis’s triumphalist asssertion of Hobbes’s ineptitude, Boyle’s more restrained critique revealed some of the anxiety that surrounded Hobbes’s assault on the experimental programme. For Boyle Hobbes needed to be opposed because of the danger that ‘his Fame and Confident way of writing might prejudice Experimental Philosophy in the minds of those who are yet strangers to it.’54 Whereas Wallis was keen to 50 52 54

Wallis, Hobbius heauton-timorumenos (Oxford, 1662), p. 5. 51 Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 15. 53 The Examen was published early in March 1662, CTH, II, p. 526, n. 3. Boyle, Examen, Sig. A2v.

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suggest that Hobbes’s arguments were simply ridiculous, Boyle’s response acknowledged the concern that there were readers outside the experimental community who might take Hobbes seriously. But Boyle had also been enlisted into the broader anti-Hobbesian cause. It had been pointed out to him by unnamed individuals (probably Wallis and Wilkins) that Leviathan’s religious theories had been influential in some quarters because of Hobbes’s reputation as a scientist, and so Boyle suggested that ‘it might possibly prove some service to higher Truths than those in Controversie between him and me, to shew that in the Physicks themselves his Opinions, and even his Ratiocinations, have no such great advantage over those of some Orthodox Christian Naturalists.’55 Hobbes’s science was to be attacked as part of the campaign to undermine Leviathan and at the same time to vindicate an experimental philosophy compatible with Christianity. This strategy informed Boyle’s treatment of the Dialogus. He argued that Hobbes’s demand for materialist causal accounts was fundamentally misplaced. There might well be mechanical explanations for the phenomena observed in the experiments, but Boyle had not set himself the task of producing such arguments. The Society, and Boyle, had deliberately sought to avoid committing themselves to such accounts precisely because they were not unproblematic. This issue meant that it was necessary to defer discussion of general causal stories, and to pay attention to experimental results, which Hobbes’s objections about the physical integrity of the air pump were not strong enough to destroy. In addition, Boyle refused to commit himself to the essentially metaphysical issue as to whether there was a true vacuum after the air pump had been exhausted; this simply wasn’t what he was doing: ‘the Title of my Book promises some Experiments touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects, not Speculations of the Causes of Springs in general.’56 Boyle’s response was disastrous for the development of any positive dialogue between Hobbes and the Royal Society. Although Hobbes’s critique had forced Boyle to think hard about some of the problems with the air pump, the Examen set the tone for a decade of hostile commentary on Hobbes’s science from one of the most influential natural philosophers in the country, confirming Hobbes’s status as an unacceptable and dogmatic outsider. This caricatured portrait of Hobbes owed its origins to Ward’s personal encounter with Hobbes in the early 1650s. It had been embroidered by Wallis and adopted by Hobbes’s Oxford critics to be taken 55

Ibid., Sig. A2v.

56

Ibid., pp. 10–11.


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up by Boyle in the 1660s. Of course there was no smoke without fire; when arguing with ideological opponents, Hobbes was unlikely to compromise. But at the same time, the construction of Hobbes as an eccentric and dogmatic outsider was calibrated to emphasise the distance between Hobbes and the scientists, symbolising the distinction between ‘good’ Christian and ‘bad’, potentially atheistic, natural philosophy. Ward had used it to distinguish himself from Hobbes; Wallis followed suit. Boyle appealed to the same image in his writings against Hobbes, even though, as Martinich and Malcolm have pointed out, there were many scientific issues on which Boyle and Hobbes could have agreed. The effect of this stereotyping can be seen in a letter from Robert Hooke to Boyle in 1663, reporting his first encounter with Hobbes in Richard Reeve’s instrument shop: I soon found . . . that the character I had formerly received of him was very significant. I found him to lard and seal every asseveration with a round oath, to undervalue all other men’s opinions and judgements, to defend to the utmost what he asserted though never so absurd and pitiful, &c. He would not be persuaded, but that a common spectacle-glass was as good an eye-glass for a thirty six foot glass as the best in the World, and pretended to see better than all the rest, by holding his spectacle in his hand, which shook as fast one way as his head did the other; which I confess made me bite my tongue. But indeed Mr Pell’s description of his deportment, when discoursed with about mathematicall demonstrations (which he gave last Wednesday) surpasses all the rest.57

Hooke’s slightly cruel account served to reinforce the shared and increasingly dominant narrative amongst the core members of the Royal Society that Hobbes was indeed Wallis’s silly and obdurate old man. Hooke’s comment that Pell’s account surpassed all the rest suggested that such stories about Hobbes were common currency amongst Royal Society scientists. Little wonder that no one was prepared to challenge this particularly insidious form of social exclusion.58 That said, while this account of Hobbes was undoubtedly the dominant understanding in Boyle’s circle, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it did not prevent Hobbes’s scientific work from being taken seriously, even by some of those who had joined in the ridicule. Boyle’s own anxieties about Hobbes’s influence are one example. Hooke was another. In spite of 57 58

R. Boyle, The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 1636–1691, ed. M. Hunter, A Clericuzio and L. M. Principe, 6 vols. (2001), II, p. 97: Hooke to Boyle, 3 July 1663. For the way that Wallis reinforced this view see, for example, his letter to Boyle on 30 December 1661: ‘I am now upon another work as hard almost as to make Mr Hobbes understand a demonstration. It is to teach a person deaf and dumb to speak.’ Boyle, Correspondence, I, p. 473.

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Hooke’s comments to Boyle, Hooke was an assiduous reader of Hobbes’s works. He maintained contact with the philosopher and even asked on one occasion if he had any unpublished philosophical or mathematical material.59 Although this contact may have been the result of Hooke’s growing antipathy to Wallis, others in the scientific community were not deterred from reading and making use of Hobbes’s work. In Cambridge, the young Isaac Newton was reading De Corpore in the mid 1660s.60 In 1669 the mathematician William Neile proposed a causal theory of motion to the Royal Society using ideas which, he wrote, ‘I gladly acknowledge taking from the books of Mr Hobbes.’61 Others had to be more circumspect about their use of Hobbes’s ideas, having committed themselves publicly to criticism of Hobbes. Newton’s colleague at Trinity, the mathematician Isaac Barrow had been openly hostile to Hobbes’s political and theological stance, but in his Lectiones opticae of 1668 he proposed a description of refraction which proceeded from a mechanical theory of local motion. He failed to mention that the theory, complete with its accompanying diagrams (although reversed and slightly altered) were directly copied from Hobbes’s Tractatus Opticus.62 Although Wallis had succeeded in entrenching his view of Hobbes institutionally, individual scientists still realised that Hobbes could never be entirely written off, and that in some matters his work might still actually have value. HOBBES ON HIS OWN REPUTATION: AN APOLOGY FOR HIMSELF AND CONSIDERATIONS UPON THE REPUTATION, LOYALTY, MANNERS,

&

RELIGION OF THOMAS HOBBES OF MALMSBURY

The dispute with the scientists had put the spotlight back on Hobbes, and it ushered in a period of renewed anxiety for the elderly philosopher. In early 1662, he evidently became concerned about the possibility that some

59

60 61 62

For Hobbes’s response to his queries see CTH, II, pp. 751–2; Hooke’s Diary records a visit to Hobbes in June 1674 (R. Hooke, The Diary of Robert Hooke, 1672–1680, ed. H. Robinson and W. Adams (1935), p. 108) with John Aubrey. Hooke’s Diary gives evidence for his Hobbesian reading in the 1670s; for his purchase of Hobbes’s Thucydides in 1672 see Diary, p. 14; he borrowed Hobbes’s pastoral poem De Mirabilibus Pecci in August 1675 (p. 176). In 1679 he read Behemoth and discussed it with friends (p. 419). For Newton’s early interest in Hobbes, see Isaac Newton, Certain philosophical questions: Newton’s Trinity notebook, ed. J. E. McGuire and M. Tamny (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 219–21, 451. Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. and tr. A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall, 9 vols. (Madison, 1965–73), V, p. 542. For discussion see Parkin, Science, Religion and Politics, pp. 136–7. F. Brandt, Thomas Hobbes’s Mechanical Conception of Nature (Copenhagen, 1927), pp. 211–16.


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kind of legal action might be launched against him. Aubrey gives the fullest account of this anxiety: There was a report, (and surely true) that in Parliament, not long after the king was setled, some of the bishops made a motion, to have the good old gentleman burn’t for a Heretique; which he hearing, feared that his papers might be search’t by their order, and he told me he had burn’t part of them.63

Philip Milton’s careful investigation of Aubrey’s claim has revealed no hard supporting evidence that there were in fact such proceedings either in the Lords (where the bishops were restored in November 1661) or in Convocation, but it is possible that Hobbes (from whom Aubrey got most of his information) believed that such a charge was lurking, particularly in the light of allegations of the sort that Wallis was making. Whether in real danger or not, Hobbes decided to act. He published two defences of his work. The first, An Apology for Himself and his Writings prefaced his Problemata Physica, which was read at the Royal Society’s meeting of 19 March.64 Addressed to Charles II, the piece was carefully worded and, as Milton has pointed out, uncharacteristically defensive in tone: Your Majesty will be pleased to pardon this following short Apology for my Leviathan. Not that I rely upon apologies, but upon your Majesties most Gracious General Pardon. That which is in it of Theology, contrary to the general Current of Divines, is not put there as my Opinion, but propounded with submission to those that have the Power Ecclesiastical. I never did after, either in Writing or Discourse, maintain it. There is nothing in it against Episcopacy; I cannot therefore imagine what reason any Episcopal-man can have to speak of me (as I heare some of them do) as an Atheist, or a man of no Religion, unless it be for making the Authority of the Church wholly upon the Regal Power; which I hope you Majesty will think is neither Atheism or Heresie. But what had I to do to meddle with matters of that nature, seeing Religion is not Philosophy, but Law. It was written at a time, when the pretense of Christs Kingdom was made use of for the most horrid Actions that can be imagined; And it was in just indignation of that, that I desired to see the bottom of that Doctrine of the Kingdom of Christ, which divers Ministers then Preached for a Pretense to their Rebellion; which may reasonably extenuate, though not excuse the writing of it. 63 64

Aubrey, Brief Lives, I, p. 339. Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London 4 vols. (1756–7), I, p. 78. Hobbes’s admirer Walter Charleton read the letter to the meeting.

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There is therefore no ground for so great a Calamny in my writing. There is no sign of it in my Life; and for my Religion, when I was at the point of death at St Germains, the Bishop of Durham can bear witness of it, if he be asked. Therefore, I most humbly beseech Your Sacred Majesty not to believe so ill of me upon reports, that proceed often (and may do so now) from the displeasure which commonly ariseth from differences in Opinion; nor to think worse of me, if snatching up all the Weapons to fight against Your Enemies, I lighted upon one that had a double edge.65

Hobbes was primarily worried about his episcopal critics, now in a position to do him harm with heresy charges, and he was probably thinking primarily of Ward, soon to become a bishop himself. In spite of their disagreements over De Cive and Leviathan, Hobbes clearly felt that John Cosin (now Bishop of Durham) would testify in his favour. Hobbes’s attitude to Wallis was different, possibly reflecting the political weakness of his Presbyterian opponent. The Presbyterians were now marginalised in political terms and the church settlement determined over the summer ensured that any refusing to conform to the Episcopalian settlement would be stigmatised as religious and political dissenters. In his Considerations, published in 1662 Hobbes simultaneously attempted to rewrite himself as a loyal Royalist whose actions presented a sharp contrast to Wallis’s Presbyterian treachery. Placed in this context, Hobbes claimed that much of his political theory had been motivated by the desire to expose the subversive character of Presbyterian claims. Even De Cive had been written so that ‘all nations which should hear what you and your Con-Covenanters were doing in England, might detest you.’ The same was true of Leviathan, which far from being written in favour of Cromwell, was in fact a condemnation of him: ‘For there is scarce a page in it that does not upbraid both him, and you, and others such as you, with your abominable hypocrisy and villainy.’ There was undoubtedly some truth in the claim that Hobbes had written with Presbyterianism in mind; Presbyterians had always been near the top of his list of ideological seducers, even if their political power had made him cautious about expressing his hatred openly in De Cive and Leviathan. Hobbes had had the chance to express his sentiments more openly in his assaults upon Wallis’s ecclesiology in the 1650s, but the political weakness

65

Hobbes, Seven Philosophical Problems (1682), Sig. A2v–A3v (EW, VII, pp. 4–6). The original Latin version is in OL, IV, pp. 301–30. As Philip Milton notes (‘Hobbes, Heresy and Lord Arlington’, History of Political Thought 14: 4 (1993), p. 507, n. 24), William Crooke stated that the translation was Hobbes’s own. EW, VI, p. 164.


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of the Presbyterians in the 1660s gave Hobbes the opportunity to attack them with impunity. If Wallis had raised the issue of Hobbes’s conduct during the past twenty years, Hobbes was more than happy to reciprocate, drawing attention to the fact that Wallis had not only helped to decypher captured Royalist correspondence during the 1640s and 1650s, but had boasted of it in print: ‘How will you justifie your self ’, commented Hobbes with some relish, ‘if you be reproached for having been a Rebel and a Traytor?’ Perhaps unsurprisingly Wallis did not respond to these charges. Hobbes’s parallel strategy was to describe himself as a loyal supporter of the crown and the restored Episcopalian church. Hobbes argued that he had not deserted the king; he had returned home because ‘he would not trust his safety with the French Clergy’.66 Hobbes challenged Wallis to produce any evidence that he had sought any favour from Cromwell or his party either before or after his return, contrasting his behaviour with Wallis’s own attempts to curry favour with Owen in the Elenchus. In fact, argued Hobbes, his conduct was no worse than the bishops who had stayed in England during the Interregnum. As for Leviathan, it couldn’t have been written for Cromwell because Cromwell was only a general when it was written and didn’t become head of state until 1653.67 Why hadn’t Parliament or Cromwell thanked Hobbes for the book if it was written in support of them? In fact, Hobbes argued, Leviathan had been written for loyal subjects in extremis, who ‘having no other means of Protection, nor (for the most part) of subsistence, were forced to compound with your Masters, and to promise Obedience for the saving of their Lives and Fortunes, which in his Book he hath affirmed they might lawfully do’.68 Hobbes admitted that Leviathan was essentially a compounder’s charter, but claimed, as he had done at the time, that this was actually the most loyal course of action in the circumstances; unless the Royalists reclaimed their estates and resources they would have fallen into parliamentarian hands.69 But if Leviathan’s theory allowed defeated Royalists to compound for their estates, it did not legitimise initial rebellion or the submission of rebels to Cromwell. Only faithful cavaliers who had done all that they could were in a position to submit to the new regime, unlike Wallis, who had taken an active part in the rebellion in the first place. Referring to the extra law of nature in the ‘Review and 66 67 68

Hobbes, Mr. Hobbes Considered in his Loyalty, Religion, Reputation, and Manners, by Way of a Letter to Dr. Wallis (1662), p. 8. See Collins’s recent book The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, ch. 4, for an examination of the thought that Leviathan was in fact written with Cromwell in mind. Hobbes, Mr. Hobbes Considered, pp. 19–20. 69 Ibid., p. 26. Cf. Leviathan, p. 485.

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Conclusion’, which stated that every man was bound to protect his sovereign, Hobbes concluded that his theory offered no excuse to rebels. Those Royalists who had suggested otherwise had simply misconstrued his argument. Hobbes’s claim here does explain why Leviathan’s political theory took the form that it did, although Hobbes was being slightly disingenuous in suggesting that he had done nothing at all to ingratiate himself with the Cromwellian regime after his return. Having dealt with the political charges, Hobbes turned to the recurrent and dangerous charge of atheism. His treatment of the issue is interesting because he concedes that his strange divinity could give that impression: ‘I thought once’, he wrote, ‘that that slander had had some (though not firm) ground in that you call his new Divinity.’70 Nevertheless Hobbes reasserts his belief that accepting the authority of scripture and the magistrate is perfectly respectable. Hobbes sticks to his position that God is fundamentally incomprehensible and that the idea of immaterial substance is non-scriptural. His own view was certainly not incompatible with some forms of traditional Christian doctrine: There has hitherto appeared in Mr. Hobbes his Doctrine no sign of Atheism; and whatsoever can be inferr’d from the denying of Incorporeal Substances, makes Tertullian, one of the ancientest of the Fathers, and most of the Doctors of the Greek Church, as much Atheists as he.71

Alexander Ross had identified Tertullian as a possible source for Hobbes’s materialism in 1653; it isn’t clear whether Hobbes’s appeal to the Church Father in the Considerations, and later in the Latin Leviathan, was simply an opportunistic attempt to associate himself with more congenial Christian views. Appeals to Tertullian certainly now formed part of his defence against the accusation that he was an atheist by virtue of his materialism. When it came to ecclesiology, Hobbes gave a slightly double-edged endorsement of episcopacy, claiming (again slightly disingenuously) that he had never written against it: it is his private opinion, That such an Episcopacy as is now in England, is the most commodious that a Christian King can use for the governing of Christs Flock, the misgoverning whereof the King is to answer for to Christ, as the Bishops are to answer for their mis-government to the King, and to God also.

Hobbes claimed to have been surprised at the uncharitable treatment he had received, but saw in it a relic of popish ambition to perpetuate the false distinction between temporal and spiritual power. Those bishops who held their authority from the king, Hobbes argued, had no cause to be angry 70

Hobbes, Mr. Hobbes Considered, p. 29.

71

Ibid., p. 37.


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with him; those who considered that they held their spiritual power by divine right, and who took their power from the imposition of hands and by Christ, ‘it is these that are displeased with him.’72 As with his theology, Hobbes stuck to the ecclesiological principles he had held since 1640, even though doing so can only have irritated those Laudians who had now returned to positions of authority. As for Hobbes’s view of his own reputation, Wallis’s attack was proof enough of his potency: ’tis no Argument of Contempt, to spend upon him so many angry lines as would have furnisht you with a dozen of Sermons: If you had in good earnest despised him, you would have let him alone, as he does Dr Ward, Mr. Baxter, Pike and others, that have reviled him as you do. As for his Reputation beyond the Seas, it fades not yet.

Hobbes was equally keen to dispel his now common image as a morose dogmatist, referring back to the meeting with Ward in London which seemed to have started the issue off: When vain and ignorant young Scholars, unknown to him before, come to him on purpose to argue with him, and to extort applause for their foolish Opinions, and missing of their end, fall into undiscreet and uncivil expressions, and he then appear not very well contented, ’tis not his Morosity, but their Vanity that should be blamed.

Hobbes grandly informed Wallis that when the Royal Society applied themselves to the doctrine of motion, Hobbes ‘will be ready to help them in it, if they please, and so long as they use him civilly’.73 With the politically disadvantaged Wallis in his sights, Hobbes gave a typically aggressive performance and the Oxford mathematician, unusually, did not come back for more, at least for a few years. It is more difficult to tell whether Hobbes’s Apology had any deterrent effect upon possible legal proceedings from the Episcopalians, if indeed they were planning such a move in the first place. It seems unlikely that they were; those like Ward who had tried to take Hobbes on directly knew the difficulties of making charges of atheism and heresy stick. As Hobbes himself had pointed out, he was covered by the Act of Oblivion and Indemnity. The trial of Thomas Hobbes, however it might be accomplished, would be a difficult business that might blow up in the face of his accusers, not least because Hobbes’s own principles would allow him to recant anything that the civil authorities decided was unacceptable.74 72 74

Ibid., pp. 44, 45. 73 Ibid., pp. 51, 60, 55. Arguably this is what happened when the University of Cambridge attempted to prosecute the professed Hobbist Daniel Scargill in 1668–9. See below, pp. 244–52.

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The alternative was to contain the problem. Hobbes’s influence and his writings were to be censured and controlled, but the philosopher himself was to remain unmolested. It seems likely that this was also the unofficial policy towards Hobbes adopted by both Sheldon and Clarendon, now occupying two of the most senior positions in the country, towards their wayward former friend. Clarendon explained the policy clearly in his Brief view and survey, written towards the end of the decade: it having bin thought best, that the impious Doctrines of what kind soever, which the license of those times produc’d, should rather expire by neglect, and the repentance of the Authors, then that they should be brought upon the Stage again by a solemn and public condemnation, which might kindle some parts of the old Spirit with the vanity of contradiction, which would otherwise, in a short time, be extinguish’d.75

Sheldon appears to have taken the same view, even to the point of trying to use his influence to discourage messy showdowns with Hobbism during the later 1660s. Although it is clear that he worked to counter the worst effects of Hobbism in particular cases, one gets a sense from the scattered evidence that Sheldon felt that the best way to deal with Hobbes’s ideas was not to give them the oxygen of publicity that accompanied confrontation. This seems to have been the guiding thread behind the attempts at rapprochement in the late 1640s and the relatively restrained Episcopalian response to Leviathan in the following decade. As Philip Milton’s research has suggested, the preferred official strategy in the Restoration was to use the stringent licensing laws to control Hobbes’s output and neutralise his influence. Hobbes faced severe difficulties in getting his work licensed for publication after 1662 and the authorities would certainly not allow Leviathan to be published again, in spite of several attempts to do so. For Sheldon and Clarendon, the view seemed to be that if the Leviathan could not be domesticated, it was better to cage it with censorship, perhaps in the hope that the exotic creature would be forgotten along with the other misshapen progeny of England’s troubles. Although this strategy seemed to work in the short term, it wouldn’t survive the end of the decade: in an environment deeply sensitised to Hobbes, it wouldn’t even need Hobbes himself to stir up Hobbesian controversy.

75

Ibid., p. 189.


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POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS RESPONSES TO HOBBES

1660–1665

The fairly lenient official attitude towards Hobbes meant that aside from the ongoing controversy with the scientists, the early Restoration period was relatively quiet in terms of new or substantial printed critiques. What commentary there is tends to reinforce the view, established authoritatively by Bramhall, that Hobbes’s work was politically subversive, a position developed in Roger Coke’s Justice vindicated (1660), Seth Ward’s sermon Against resistance of lawful powers (1661) and William Assheton’s Evangelicum armatum (1663). This semi-official critique of Hobbes’s theory allowed crown supporters to associate their opponents with a seditious Hobbism. But it also served another purpose in helping to distance occasionally Hobbesian-sounding justifications of royal authority from Hobbes himself. It is striking that both Coke and Ward propose authoritarian arguments that sound distinctly Hobbesian, and contemporaries were sensitive to the fact that ultra-Royalist statements often appeared to come straight out of Hobbes’s work.76 Condemnation of Hobbes’s work as the doctrine of rebels helped to establish the anti-Hobbesian credentials of writers who might be liable to the charge of Hobbism on other grounds. COKE’S JUSTICE VINDICATED

Coke was a Royalist lawyer and, like Clarendon, he argued that Hobbes, along with White and Grotius, had failed to produce a satisfactory theory of moral and political obligation. For Coke, this was a generic problem of contract theory. The error lay in basing government upon false principles of natural equality and subjective right and the erroneous assumption that rights transfers could generate obligation. For Coke as a strict voluntarist, any bottom-up story about political obligation was inherently fissile 76

See for example John Beale’s comment to Henry Oldenburg in May 1661 on the way that Hobbes’s principles seemed to be upheld in Parliament. Oldenburg, Correspondence, ed. A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall, 13 vols. (Madison, 1965–73), I, p. 410. As Mark Goldie indicates (‘The Reception of Hobbes’, in J. Burns and M Goldie (eds.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 596–7) Oldenburg is probably referring to the speech of the Commons’ Speaker Sir Edward Turner, on 16 May 1661, in which Turner praised monarchy ‘as being nearest to divinity itself’ and rejected aristocracy and democracy on the grounds that the former tended to degeneracy and the latter to confusion, the result being one in which ‘homo homini lupus, homo homini daemon’, an echo of Hobbes’s use of the same tag in De Cive. Later on Turner strikes another Hobbesian note when he argues that ‘our obedience and affection to your majesty are returned upon our heads, in plenty, peace and protection.’ The Parliamentary History of England, ed. W. Cobbett (1808), IV, pp. 202–3.

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because there was no prior authority to bind contractors; they could just as easily undo the contract on the same grounds. The focus upon obligations created via subjective rights also underplayed the role of divine authority and thus undermined faith and religion. Coke chose to examine Hobbes’s theory in the second edition of De Cive, which he praised for its clear definition of terminology and relative transparency.77 That said, Coke was unconvinced by Hobbes’s discussion of the state of nature. If Hobbes had started from the proposition that the state of nature was a condition in which men were subject only to the law of nature, then there wouldn’t have been a problem.78 But instead he starts from the proposition that all men are equal, with power to kill any other and that any laws to restrain them are to be of their own making. This was ‘such a monstrous Paradox and absurdity, as I wonder any Ingenuous man should assent to it’.79 Like Clarendon, Coke was unable to accept the assumption of natural equality: ‘There is no one Proposition in the world more false then this, nor more destructive to all faith, and truth of Sacred History.’80 Coke bases his case for natural inequality upon an assumption about the character of divine obligations. If God had granted Adam any authority at all, then no two men could have been equal since. Moving the argument into a historical mode, Coke was then able to point to a number of passages where Hobbes appeared to agree, not least the now notorious note to 1.10 where Hobbes made it clear that everyone was born into subjection.81 Coke is even less impressed with De Cive’s downgrading of the law of nature. If it is the case that the laws of nature are simply the dictates of right reason, then the laws of God the creator are subject and inferior to the faculty of one of his creatures. This was actually an argument used by Protestant voluntarists against scholastic accounts of recta ratio, a critique that Hobbes endorsed, but here used to point out Hobbes’s dependence upon human reasoning alone. For Coke the main problem was one that Selden had pointed out: How was it possible to bind oneself when there was no precedent obligation? Obligation could not arise ex nihilo. No man could will anything to be law over him and no man could oblige himself. If man had the authority to do this then he would crucially have the same authority to unbind himself. The juridical problem stemmed from Hobbes’s attempt to separate lex and jus, where the latter now took precedence; for Coke, rights transfers alone could not create obligations, because obligations could only arise from laws. If jus naturae was superior to lex naturae then, as Coke puts it, every man’s natural 77 79

Coke, Justice vindicated (1660), ‘To the Reader’. Ibid., p. 25. 80 Ibid., p. 26. 81 Ibid.

78

Ibid., p. 25, see also p. 36.


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right is superior to any law. For Coke Hobbes confirmed this in his statements about the end of obligation in 2.18. If men always have a natural right to what preserves them then no human or divine obligation can bind them. Coke was particularly concerned about the consequences of Hobbes’s supposed sovereignty by pact. If the sole source of any sovereign’s authority was the will of the individual then this meant that the sovereign was not bound by any form of divine law either. Coke agreed that the artificial civitas could issue commands in areas of human law but Hobbes’s thought that it could effectively command anything against divine or natural law was abhorrent. Picking up on some of the ecclesiological implications of this position, Coke queried whether Christianity could be preached if the temporal laws forbade it.82 Coke’s own view was that civil pacts in fact provided none of the powers associated with government; the powers of property and the power of the sword were not in the people in the first place, but in God alone.83 Like Bramhall, Coke was appalled at Hobbes’s inversion of the traditional structure of divine obligation, a position that went hand in hand with Hobbes’s apparent lack of religion: It is not worth the examining, what he would have under the title of Religion; for men say, the man is of none himself, and complains (they say) he cannot walk the streets, but the Boys point at him, saying, There goes HOBBS the Atheist! It may be therefore the reason, why in all his Laws of Nature, he allows no place for the Worship and Service of GOD.84

Coke’s anti-Hobbesian credentials seem to be complete, but Justice vindicated came bound with another work by Coke, his Elements of power & subjection. Here, although Coke is still occasionally critical of De Cive, he makes a number of statements about sovereignty which are remarkably close to Hobbes’s position. Coke makes it clear that princes are not bound by their own laws (on the voluntarist grounds already established), and that no subject has any property but by the laws of his country. Coke also approvingly cites chapter 12 of De Cive on the sources of sedition. Coke clearly wanted to tell a partially Hobbesian story about the absolute power of the sovereign, but to neutralise Hobbes’s thought that such authority was manmade and restore what Hobbes occasionally hinted at, that such authority actually came from God.85 Coke’s argument in the Elements reveals that he is 82 85

Ibid., p. 29. 83 Ibid., p. 33. 84 Ibid., p. 25. See particularly Coke, Elements, pp. 81–2 where Coke refers to Hobbes as a man ‘of most exquisite parts and learning’ who ‘possibly might have had a peaceable intention in making the Civitas the Judge of all matters of faith as well as manners’. The problem is that Hobbes has based his arguments on natural right, even though there are moments when he acknowledges a more conventional approach (Coke cites a Hobbesian remark that God makes Kings from De Cive 12.3).

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engaged in something of a rescue mission as well as a critique. To that extent, Coke’s treatment resembles the critical strategy adopted by John Hall of Richmond, rejecting the dangerous contractarian substructure but endorsing many elements of Hobbes’s account of sovereignty. WARD AND ASSHETON

Coke was critical of De Cive, but it was clear that he saw Hobbes’s motives as misplaced rather than politically malicious, and let down by a faulty mode of argument. Predictably enough, Seth Ward’s 5 November sermon Against the resistance of lawful powers (1661) takes a much more robust approach to Hobbes’s arguments. November 5th sermons were an important political part of the church calendar, traditionally mixing attacks on Roman Catholic sedition with injunctions to political obedience. Ward’s sermon took a different tack, seeking to counter the charge that Christianity might be in any way subversive. Those who had made this charge were the ‘Writers of Politicks; Machiavel abroad, and others nearer home’ whose remedy is ‘to enervate the Principles of all Religion so far as to remove the Doctrine of Good and Evil, the Immortality of the Soul, the Rewards and Punishments of the world to come; that so Religion may appear wholy to derive from Policy’.86 There can be little doubt who Ward’s domestic target is here. His strategy is to demonstrate that Christianity in fact works to underpin the authority of the magistrate and to show that the claims of writers like Hobbes are not only false, but conceal a subversive agenda of their own. Ironically the first part of Ward’s response required him to cite many of the same scriptural injunctions to obedience that Hobbes himself had deployed. When this is extended to the right of the magistrate to order the church, Ward was forced, like Arderne, to qualify his suspiciously Hobbesian statement by stressing that this did not mean (as Hobbes had meant) that the magistrate had the power to exercise spiritual offices and functions.87 Ward was only too aware that much of what he was saying echoed Leviathan, making it particularly important to demonstrate that Hobbes’s alternative to traditional Christianity did nothing to support obedience, but rather undermined it. Reflecting upon what he called the ‘Philosophical Theory’ of government (Hobbes’s) Ward argued that:

86

Ward, Against the resistance of lawful powers (1661), pp. 2–3.

87

Ibid., pp. 17, 20–1.

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It tells us in effect, that Might is Right; that every thing is just, or unjust; good, or evil according to the pleasure of the prevailing Force, whom we are to obey till a stronger then he cometh, or we be able to go thorough with resistance. That, in reference to this life, Obedience is a matter of Wit, and Prudence, and after life there remain for us no Concernments.88

Wallis picked up on this formula in his attack on Hobbes’s loyalty in Hobbius, and it undoubtedly helped to reinforce the thought that Hobbes’s theory was really one that encouraged rebellion. The classic treatment of Leviathan as a rebel’s catechism was Bramhall’s Catching of Leviathan, and it is no surprise to find Bramhall’s critique getting a new lease of life in the same year that its author died as sections of it were excerpted in William Assheton’s pamphlet Evangelicum armatum (1663).89 Aimed primarily at the supposedly seditious principles of Presbyterian dissenters, Assheton nevertheless thought it fit ‘to bring the Papists and the Hobbians upon the same Stage, as venting Doctrines no less pernicious to the Civil, than to the Ecclesiastical State’.90 Assheton quotes a brief selection of passages from Bramhall’s Catching.91 The extracts are a distillation of Hobbes’s most controversial political theses focusing upon his discussion of the relationship between protection and obedience in the case of conquest and the individual’s subjective right to preserve himself (including the now notorious section in chapter 21 of Leviathan allowing a group of condemned men to band together to protect themselves).92 The selection left little doubt that Hobbes was a de facto theorist of the worst kind, whose emphasis upon self-preservation subverted every other form of obligation. WILLIAM LUCY’S OBSERVATIONS

(1663)

William Lucy’s piecemeal critiques of Hobbes had failed to impress his contemporaries during the 1650s, but the clergyman nevertheless pursued Hobbes with a dogged determination. Lucy’s steadfast loyalty to the crown during the Interregnum had been rewarded in 1660 with a bishop’s mitre, but his diocese would be St David’s. This was one of the largest and poorest 88 89 90 91 92

Ibid., p. 35. Assheton was Fellow of Brasenose College Oxford. Newton E. Key, ‘Assheton, William (bap. 1642, d. 1711)’, ODNB. W. Assheton, Evangelium armatum (1663), Preface. Ibid., pp. 58–9; The passages come from Catching the Leviathan (1658), pp. 513–18. Assheton cites incorrect page references for Leviathan, but the passages quoted come from Leviathan, chapter 21, the ‘Review and Conclusion’ and De Cive 2.18, 7.18, 13.3, 13.5.

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sees in the country, and Lucy faced a huge reconstruction job. Episcopal administration of the diocese had effectively stopped in 1640 and the church properties were more or less in ruins after two decades of neglect and active destruction.93 In tandem with the reconstruction of his distant posting, Lucy sought to put together his various notes on Hobbes into a more orderly volume, and the result was the Observations, censures and confutations of notorious errours in Mr Hobbes his Leviathan (1663), dedicated to Clarendon.94 Lucy explained the unhappy printing history of his first two critiques,95 admitting the opposition that the first had faced from ‘men of great worth, and deserved reputation in Letters’.96 The other critique, he explained, was ‘so falsly printed, that when I saw them, I could scarce know them for mine own’. He went on to explain that he had actually written against most of Leviathan, but that his notes had either been lost or misplaced when he had had to hide his papers from soldiers. Lucy said that he would publish them when he could find them and when he might have time to do so; dramatic testimony to the conditions under which Royalist critics of Hobbes sometimes found themselves working in dangerous times. Observations reprints the two critiques but extends them to cover chapters 15 and 16 together with some extended assaults upon Socinianism only tangentially related to direct criticism of Hobbes’s texts. Unfortunately Lucy exercised as much editorial care over the new sections as he had done with the original critiques and they have the same rambling pedantic quality; Lucy seizes upon small details of Hobbes’s text and criticises them at length, but sometimes fails to see the wood for the trees, and sometimes even misses sections that most other critics found to be central to the refutation of Hobbes’s position.97 Occasionally, as with his treatment of Hobbes’s religion, the detailed attention could cast light on Hobbes’s subtly subversive strategies, but more often the effect was blunted as standard scholastic objections were heaped upon individual sentences, providing neither novel readings nor particularly telling objections. The discussion of chapter 15 is typical of Lucy’s treatment of Hobbes’s text. Lucy picks up Hobbes’s argument that where there are no covenants, 93 94 95 96 97

Jon Parkin, ‘Lucy, William (1594–1677)’, ODNB. W. Lucy, Observations, censures and confutations of notorious errours in Mr Hobbes his Leviathan (1663), Sig. A4r. See above, p. 164, n. 123. This tallies with Waller’s account of the poor reception of Lucy’s work in Oxford, and possibly even alludes to Waller himself. See CTH, I, pp. 294–5. See also Stubbe’s remarks, ibid., p. 440. Aubrey’s comment of Lucy’s Observations that ‘they are but weak ones’, Brief Lives, I, p. 373.


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nothing can be unjust; justice being properly the non-performance of a covenant. Commenting that ‘this definition was never (I think) writ before’ Lucy immediately rejects Hobbes’s positivism for the traditional belief in a network of prior legal obligations (for example natural law). Lucy argues cogently that without such obligations there is little to make Hobbes’s covenants themselves binding, an argument similar to that made at greater length by Coke. The same critique is applied to Hobbes’s suggestion that in the absence of a commonwealth there can be no property. Lucy argued strenuously that property rights existed before the state in accordance with a natural law that granted property to the first occupier. In both cases natural obligations of various kinds voided Hobbes’s argument that obligations could only be the result of covenants. This position meant that Lucy was unimpressed with Hobbes’s answer to the Foole (in chapter 15 of Leviathan), who argues that there is no such thing as justice and that one should break one’s agreements when it suited. Hobbes’s response was crucial to making his theory of obligation work: fools may act this way for their short-term benefit but ultimately it isn’t in their interest to be seen as a promise-breaker. Lucy, like many modern commentators, felt that the fool simply couldn’t be answered on Hobbesian principles, particularly those in chapters 13 and 14 where the individual’s subjective assessment of what is required to preserve themselves makes their decisions just and reasonable for them.98 Lucy also picks up on an ambiguity in Hobbes’s treatment of the question to suggest that in fact Hobbes may only have provided an argument against the fool who makes his covenant-breaking explicit: ‘his answer is drawn from a declaration that that man should should make, that he think’s it fit to deceive . . . he speak’s onely of such who manifest and declare they will deceive.’99 Hobbes’s principles simply answer the fool who keeps quiet about his opinion. As Kinch Hoekstra has argued, this may be a perceptive reading of Hobbes’s argument in that Hobbes may only have been seeking to respond to those individuals (explicit or loud fools) who propagate the view that covenant breaking is a good thing.100 For Lucy this represented a failure to answer the key problem of the silent fool, and the only argument that would suffice here was the conventional thought that all deceit was unjust and all injustice ultimately unprofitable.101 98 100

101

99 Lucy, Observations, p. 218. Ibid., pp. 222–3. See K. Hoekstra, ‘Hobbes and the Foole’, Political Theory 25: 5 (1997), pp. 620–54. Hobbes may well have agreed that the silent fool could perceive a divergence between their self-interest and covenant-keeping. Lucy, Observations, p. 222.

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Hobbes’s determination to downplay forms of prior obligation leads Lucy to a typically lengthy defence of our natural knowledge of the existence of eternal felicity.102 Hobbes’s attempt to reorient ethics towards the calculation of self-interest needed to be countered by an insistence upon our knowledge of the existence of a future state. If Hobbes wished to take such considerations of faith out of the process of natural reasoning (for fear that they might lead to faith-based challenges to human authority103), Lucy was determined to demonstrate that natural reason required individuals to take seriously the idea of an afterlife in their moral and political calculations. This opened Lucy’s position to the political difficulties of an obligation to obey God rather than man, but Lucy countered that the truly seditious argument was one that based authority upon human consent.104 Lucy’s comments on chapter 16 turn into a substantial refutation of Socinianism, mainly because Hobbes’s short chapter on his theory of representation controversially applies it to the Trinity.105 Lucy finds Hobbes’s terminology and etymology novel and baffling, suggesting that normal usage rebelled against defining representers as persons; the constable, he argues, represents the person of the king, but is not his person (only the king can be his own person). Lucy rejects the thought that anyone might personate God on the grounds that this was ‘too great an exaltation of the Creature, and diminution of his excellency’.106 Moses might properly be characterised as a messenger but not as God’s person.107 The problems multiplied when Hobbes applied the theory to Christ: the thought that Christ represented God in the same way as Moses cast doubt upon his divinity, a position related to Socinianism. Lucy doesn’t level the charge directly, but he uses the discussion as an opportunity to launch an extensive refutation of Socinian doctrine.108 Lucy becomes so involved in the attack on the Socinians that Hobbes’s problematic treatment of the Holy Spirit appears to be completely forgotten. Lucy doesn’t clarify his view of the relationship between Hobbes’s views and Socinianism. As with his discussion of Hobbes and Epicureanism, Lucy avoids charging Hobbes with the label but draws attention to the similarities. Here, the bishop’s careful attention to the text prevented him from the more sweeping generalisations of some of his contemporaries.

102 104 107 108

Ibid., pp. 226–48. 103 See Leviathan, p. 103 (O.P. p. 73) for the passage discussed by Lucy. Lucy, Observations, p. 225. 105 See above, p. 91. 106 Ibid., pp. 284–5. Ibid., pp. 289–90: Lucy asserts that Moses was not even the King of the Israelites (this was, as he agrees with Hobbes, God Himself) but rather a kind of judge or general. Ibid., pp. 292–387.

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The last section of the work takes a slightly different turn in attacking a work that openly endorsed Hobbes’s natural law theory. Lucy had managed to get hold of the anonymous Epistolica dissertatio de principiis justi et decori (1651), a short treatise that praised and built upon the natural law theory of De Cive. The author was the Dutch writer Lambert van Velthuysen, an eclectic anti-clerical thinker who had declared himself an ‘entire follower’ of Hobbes’s ethical doctrine and who had sought in the book to defend Hobbes from the aspersions cast upon him by his Dutch clerical critics. Velthuysen’s theory was an adaptation rather than a fullblooded reiteration of Hobbes’s work, attempting to show that an orthodox moral theory could be strained from Hobbes’s premises. Velthuysen argued that God had indeed created men with a natural right to what preserved them, but argued that a rational appreciation of God’s intended ends in so doing would direct men to the peaceable division of goods through contract. Essentially, Velthuysen’s rationalistic faith in man’s ability to identify God’s substantive will and to act upon it allowed him to avoid the suggestion that the state of nature would be a state of war. Lucy approves the augmented role of God in Velthuysen’s theory; the problem is the retained Hobbesian emphasis upon man’s preservation as the major ethical consideration. Velthuysen had rearticulated Hobbes’s theory to argue that God’s willing man’s preservation meant that God had also willed the means, creating a theoretical right to all things.109 Although Velthuysen argued that this wouldn’t result in a state of war, Lucy couldn’t stomach the Hobbesian notion that there should be a subjective right to all things for the same reasons that he opposed it in Hobbes; it gave undue priority to man’s ends and ignored prior natural obligations.110 This led to unpalatable consequences such as the notion that property rights and political authority are a product of contract; the former Lucy strenuously denied, restating his belief that first occupancy generated a natural right to property.111 Hobbes’s principles were no foundation for any sound theory, no matter how much they had been rewritten to emphasise God’s role. In essence, Lucy shared the conviction of Bramhall and Coke that Hobbes’s natural jurisprudence started in the wrong place by talking about selfpreservation and subjective rights. God’s will and his objective law were the only starting points for orthodox ethical discourse. Any theory taking Hobbes’s rights-based jurisprudence seriously was both flawed and dangerous. 109

[Velthuysen], Dissertation, p. 75.

110

Lucy, Observations, pp. 424–5

111

Ibid., pp. 433–6.

CHAPTER

5

Hobbes and Hobbism (1666–1675)

The disasters of plague, fire and war that affected England between 1665 and 1667 ushered in a new and potentially very dangerous period for Hobbes. They would also herald a new phase in the reception of Hobbes’s work, one that would see an explosion of allusion to Hobbes and his works within popular culture, as well as the creation of the popular image of Hobbes as the archetypal atheist philosopher and Leviathan as the handbook of irreligion and amorality. If discussion of Hobbes and Hobbism had seemed to go into abeyance after the philosopher’s struggles with his academic critics in the 1650s, the later 1660s undoubtedly saw a renaissance in critical discussion of Hobbes’s work and a popular reconstitution of his public image in many different contexts. There were many connected reasons for the rise of Hobbesian discourse in the later 1660s, but there can be little doubt that it had an important relationship to the increasingly turbulent politics of the period. As earlier chapters have shown, the reception of Hobbes’s work was often conditioned by the relationship between his ideas and the prevailing politics, and the situation in the later 1660s offers a complex example of this phenomenon. One factor central to the upsurge in Hobbesian discussion was the shift in the politics of the period. In the early Restoration period the basic alignment between crown, church and Parliament, fostered particularly by Clarendon and Sheldon, had allowed the suppression of the traditional centrifugal pressures that had traditionally plagued the Stuart polity. However, it soon became clear that the facade of unity around constitutional Royalist and Anglican principles was precisely that. The Restoration regime found it difficult to weather the problems of the mid-sixties without casualties and the most notable was Clarendon, whose fall in 1667 ushered in a less settled period in which the agendas of the crown and the church began to diverge. The heterogeneous Cabal government’s preference for a toleration-based settlement encouraged dissenters to lobby for liberty of conscience. The Cavalier Parliament’s intransigence on this 238


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issue led to more radical appeals for toleration by royal prerogative. This potent mixture of circumstances brought the natural jurisprudence of Grotius, Selden and Hobbes back onto the political agenda as the dissenters appeared to deploy Hobbesian sounding theories. Anglican propaganda stigmatised dissenters’ arguments as Hobbist, but the attempt to argue the political necessity of conformity attracted the same charge from dissenters. With the church potentially under threat from Hobbesian-style arguments and even sometimes associated with Hobbist arguments itself, it is no surprise to find churchmen becoming increasingly sensitive to the slightest suggestion of Hobbism or the influence of his ideas. In 1669 the trial and recantation of the Cambridge don Daniel Scargill would put a very public spotlight upon the issue of Hobbes and his malign influence, allowing the university authorities to give a public demonstration of their disapproval of Hobbes and his work. Scargill’s Recantation would provide an enduring and influential statement of Hobbes’s supposed views, but it would also intensify the debate about Hobbism more generally. This can be seen most clearly in the debate over Samuel Parker’s Discourse of ecclesiastical polity, a work that was popularly regarded as a piece of Anglican Hobbism. The controversy over the Hobbism of Scargill and Parker would lead to a series of antiHobbesian works, often by Latitudinarian Anglicans seeking to distance themselves from Hobbes’s theory. Thomas Tenison’s Creed of Mr Hobbes examined (1670) and Richard Cumberland’s De legibus naturae (1672) both emerge from these debates. By the early 1670s the extensive discussion of Hobbes and Hobbism would make the philosopher and his thought an important cultural reference point. Hobbism as a term of abuse had become part and parcel of political and religious polemic, signifying the unacceptable boundaries of public discourse. This was the period when the more familiar modern images of Hobbes were constituted, and mostly by his clerical critics. Hobbes and Hobbism, filtered through the debates surrounding Scargill and Parker, became an issue that formed a staple of countless books, sermons, pamphlets, poems and plays. HOBBES IN THE LATER

1660S

Although the clergy may not have been prepared to take direct action against Hobbes, they were not the only threat that he faced. The Great Fire of London in September 1666 had led to widespread introspection about the deeper causes of such a symbolic event. Mindful that the fire was being widely portrayed as a divine punishment for national apostasy, the

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Commons appointed a committee to look into former laws against ‘atheism, profaneness, debauchery and swearing’. A few weeks later the committee received instructions that it should investigate books that might lead to atheism, blasphemy or profaneness. Two were named, Thomas White’s De mundo and Hobbes’s Leviathan, texts that had been linked by Coke and more recently by Assheton. The investigation never came to anything but the rumour went around that Leviathan was to be burned by the public hangman.1 According to White Kennett’s account, the news affected Hobbes greatly. His fear was that Parliament might commit him to an ecclesiastical court to be declared a heretic, a crime for which he could be burned.2 Kennett suggests that Hobbes was reduced to confessing that he meant no harm and that he was willing to repent his views, composing lengthy arguments as to why he could not be prosecuted as a heretic. Although Kennett’s account was written a long time after the events he described, there is no doubt that Hobbes was deeply concerned about the implications of the parliamentary investigation. Heresy would remain a crime punishable by burning until 1677, and this explains the recurrent concern with heresy law that is a distinctive feature of Hobbes’s output during this period. The appendix to the new Latin edition of Leviathan, the Historical Narration Concerning Heresy and passages in Behemoth and Hobbes’s Dialogue of the Common Laws were all probably composed between 1666 and 1670 and all touch upon the issue.3 Hobbes’s defence in these passages is the technical position that he would adopt in response to all challenges to his orthodoxy; Hobbes claimed that none of his writings published since 1660 opposed the doctrines of the Church of England or corresponded with beliefs that the church had identified as heresies. He could not, therefore, be charged with heresy. We should not, however, be misled into thinking that Hobbes’s anxiety over the heresy issue was the only reason for his extraordinary level of activity in the years after 1666. The period 1667–70 witnessed a remarkable burst of productivity from England’s most notorious philosopher. An 1

2 3

P. Milton, ‘Hobbes, Heresy and Lord Arlington’, History of Political Thought 14: 4 (1993), p. 515; A. P. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 318–22. See also J. Milward, The Diary of John Milward, ed. C. Robbins (1938), p. 25. W. Kennett, A sermon preach’d at the funeral of the Right Noble William Duke of Devonshire (1708), p. 109. For the best and most recent attempt to date the various manuscripts involved, see Milton, ‘Hobbes, Heresy and Lord Arlington’, pp. 542–6. See also Alan Cromartie’s remarks in his introduction to Hobbes’s A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student, of the Common Laws of England (Oxford, 2005), esp. pp. xlix–lviii.


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edition of his works in Latin was published in Amsterdam in 1668, complete with a revised Latin edition of Leviathan. In addition to this he produced a dialogue history of the civil war (otherwise known as Behemoth) and his Dialogue on the Common Laws of England. He also produced his Historical Narration Concerning Heresy and an extensive Answer to John Bramhall’s The catching of Leviathan, together with his verse history of the church, the Historia Ecclesiastica, all within the space of three or four years. This was an extraordinary level of output for a man who was 80 years old in 1668 and a vigorous reassertion of his entire philosophical project. Although some aspects of Leviathan had been toned down, the basic argument remained unchanged. What was Hobbes up to? Why reissue so much controversial material at such a dangerous time? Hobbes may well have seen the regime change of 1667 as an important window of political opportunity.4 Those individuals at court with whom Hobbes was most closely associated, notably Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, were the main political beneficiaries of Clarendon’s fall. Behemoth, a work dedicated to Arlington, offered lessons about how the state should be recast, not least in terms of reforming the universities, by force if necessary. Hobbes’s complete works were available in Latin to be used as textbooks. Hobbes’s other dialogues seemed to offer similar educational materials, either promoting his views (the Dialogue of the Common Laws) or providing ready-made responses to his critics (Historical Narration Concerning Heresy and the Answer to Bramhall). Taken together, Hobbes’s various writings look like a determined and perhaps final effort to get his work adopted as official policy, reasons enough for Hobbes to arm himself against a heresy charge. Official censorship, however, prevented this Hobbesian offensive from being unleashed. Hobbes was refused a licence to print anything that might cause trouble. According to Aubrey, the bishops refused to license Behemoth; when the king was approached he refused to allow it.5 Sir Joseph Williamson demanded a cut to An Historical Narration but ultimately refused a licence.6 Judges Hale and Vaughan had misgivings about licensing the Dialogue on the Common Laws.7 As we shall see in the case of 4 5 6 7

See Paul Seaward’s comments in ‘‘‘Chief of the Ways of God’’: Form and Meaning in the Behemoth of Thomas Hobbes’, Filozofski Vestnik 24: 2 (2003), pp. 187–8. Aubrey to Wood, 3 February 1673, Bod. MS Wood F.39, f.196v. CTH, II, p. 699. Hobbes to Williamson, 30 June 1668, where Hobbes agrees to drop the short passage that concerned the latter. Aubrey to Locke, 11 February 1673, in J. Locke, The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. De Beer, 8 vols. (Oxford, 1976–89), I, p. 375.

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the Scargill affair, even Hobbes’s attempts to respond to the use of his name in debate would be censored. The policy of keeping Hobbes out of print and out of trouble meant that works like Behemoth would only appear a decade later (and only then as pirated editions), and some of the others would not appear until after his death in 1679. This meant that at a time when his ideas were being widely discussed, Hobbes was effectively gagged and unable to participate in the debate. The only part of his output to find its way onto the shelves of English booksellers was his Latin Opera. Published in Amsterdam by Blaeu, copies of this edition under the imprint of the London bookseller Cornelius Bee, complete with the revised Latin version of Leviathan, were freely available in London for the first time since the 1650s.8 As I shall discuss presently, the appearance of the new work did make a small impact on the debate over Hobbes in the late 1660s and the early 1670s, as critics took note of the changes that Hobbes had made to his theory. THE POLITICS OF RELIGION

1667–1669

The doctrines that would become identified as ‘Hobbist’ during this period emerged from debates over the issue of religious dissent. In the spring of 1668 the new Lord Keeper, Orlando Bridgeman, sponsored talks between Latitudinarian Anglicans led by John Wilkins, and the leading moderate Presbyterians (including Richard Baxter). The plan was to broach the idea of ‘comprehension’, an attempt to broaden the terms of the established church in order to accommodate moderate dissenters. The theory underpinning the project was the Latitudinarian thought (expressed in Stillingfleet’s Irenicum) that the precise form of the church could be altered by the magistrate, provided that it accorded with the general requirements of the law of nature, specifically a settled society with an orderly worship of God. The talks broke down over the question of episcopal reordination, which Baxter refused to accept. Attempts to pass a Bill in an unsympathetic Parliament failed. The failure of the comprehension project polarised debate on all sides. For many dissenters, particularly Independents like John Owen, the only viable solution was toleration by royal prerogative, a position that influential members of the Cabal regime, most notably the Duke of Buckingham, were prepared to support. Some of the arguments deployed to support this 8

They were advertised in the Term Catalogues in the spring of 1669, priced at 20 shillings, E. Arber (ed.), The Term Catalogues, 1668–1709, 3 vols. (London, 1903–6), I, p. 7.


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position sounded Hobbesian at times in their emphasis upon the relationship between protection and obedience. The former Cromwellian Sir Charles Wolseley’s Liberty of conscience in the magistrate’s interest (1668) advocated toleration on the grounds that dissenters would ‘love that Prince or State where they find favour or protection’. John Corbet’s Second discourse on the religion of England (1668) suggested that it was in the king’s interest to grant toleration ‘to keep them [dissenters] all in Dependence upon Himself, as procuror of their Common Safety’. Although this is not to suggest that such arguments were based upon Hobbesian sources, it did occur to some supporters of toleration that the new emphasis upon rights and interests might make Hobbes an unexpected ally.9 In 1669, Louis du Moulin commented to Baxter on the surprising thought that ‘men as ill-principled as Grotius and Selden, yea Hobbes as bad as can be, should come nearer the truth than many good men.’10 In March 1668 the pro-toleration MP Edward Seymour even quoted Hobbes in support of a more moderate response to dissenting activity.11 But the supporters of toleration were not the only group to find themselves increasingly and unexpectedly associated with Hobbes during the period. Although Hobbes’s theory could be used to support toleration, it was much more plausibly associated with the idea of an authoritarian civic religion imposed by the state. The Latitudinarian defence of comprehension had relied upon the thought that the magistrate could determine non-essential aspects of worship (adiaphora), a position that to Stillingfleet’s critics had seemed Hobbesian enough. However, the resemblance to the doctrine of Leviathan would soon become even more problematic for the Latitude-men. In the wake of the abortive negotiations the Latitudinarian line hardened against the toleration-based alternative, demanding that will-worshipping separatists drop their demands and simply conform to the church as it was established by law.12 Typical of the change in tone was Simon Patrick’s vitriolic pamphlet series A friendly 9 10 11

12

And their opponents, see A. Wright, Anarchie reviving (1668), p. 37. Letter quoted in M. Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), p. 231. Anchitell Grey, Debates of the House of Commons from the year 1667 to the year 1694, 10 vols. (1763), I, pp. 103–4. See also Richard Tuck’s comments in ‘Hobbes and Locke on Toleration’, in M. Dietz (ed.), Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory (Kansas, 1990), p. 159. Although clergymen like Stillingfleet and Tillotson were prepared to talk about altering the form of the established church, they were very reluctant to countenance a situation in which religious pluralism was established by law. To do so would be to abandon the idea of rational dialogue within the church and to entrench a religious obstinacy that might ultimately undermine society itself.

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debate betwixt two neighbours (1668–70). Patrick drew attention to the connection between religious and political separatism, demanding that dissenters submit to the church as ordered by the magistrate. His case was based on the Latitudinarian natural law argument that the generality of God’s explicit prescriptions about religious worship required the details to be determined by the state. Obedience was essential ‘or . . . there will be nothing else but confusion’.13 There was a potentially dangerous similarity between the Latitudinarian defence of the Church of England and Hobbes’s religious authoritarianism, one that would soon be exposed as the issue of Hobbism and the religious politics of the period collided in the closing years of the decade. On both sides of the toleration debate, then, positions were being taken that gave off a peculiarly Hobbesian odour. The various species of Hobbism colouring the political environment may well have persuaded Samuel Pepys to finally get around to purchasing a copy of Leviathan. On 3 September 1668 he called by his bookseller ‘for Hobbs’s Leviathan, which is now mightily called for; and what was heretofore sold for 8s I now give 24s at the second hand, and is sold for 30s, it being a book the Bishops will not let be printed again.’14 Although some of this price inflation was undoubtedly to do with the effects of the Great Fire upon book stocks, Pepys’s comment suggests that there were demand factors as well.15 It would not take much for the issue of each side’s Hobbism to become a serious matter. A major catalyst for this discussion would be an event that would propel the question of Hobbes and his influence to national prominence; the uncovering of a genuine Hobbist at the University of Cambridge. THE SCARGILL AFFAIR

The thought that Hobbes’s ideas might seduce the minds of students in the universities had been a recurrent theme of many of the responses to Hobbes’s work. The vision that had haunted Ross, Lawson and Clarendon was that Hobbes’s arguments might persuade a rising 13 14 15

Patrick, Defence and continuation of the friendly debate (1669) pp. 421–2. Samuel Pepys, Diary, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. C. Latham and W. Matthews, 11 vols. (1970–83), IX, p. 298. On the effect of the Fire, see John Worthington, The diary and correspondence of Dr John Worthington, ed. R. C. Christie, 2 vols. (Manchester, 1847–86), pp. 209–13; for the effect on the availability of Hobbes’s works see N. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), p. 344; there Malcolm suggests that Hobbes’s notoriety after his mention in Parliament was also a factor.


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generation for whom self-interest would be all and religion nothing but laughable superstition. As we have seen, Hobbes’s paradoxical work and the problems that it raised, undoubtedly did influence the minds of those university-educated individuals who were forming their views in the 1650s and early 1660s, but for all the critics’ nightmares, there were very few publicly confessed disciples of Leviathan. The most obvious reason for this was the volume of influential criticism aimed at Hobbes since the mid 1650s. Hobbes’s unacceptable heterodoxy had been laid bare by numerous critics, and anyone declaring themselves a follower of Hobbes potentially faced a barrage of criticism that could be damaging both personally and professionally. As a result, even those who did sympathise with Hobbes’s views had every reason to keep their thoughts to themselves. This fact makes the exposure and recantation of a self-confessed Hobbist at Cambridge in 1669 a particularly interesting episode, and not only because it reveals the existence of sympathy for Hobbes’s views within the university. The Hobbism that Daniel Scargill would be made to confess had less to do with his genuinely Hobbesian sympathies than it did with wider anxieties about Hobbes’s influence. The recantation offered the university the chance to make an authoritative statement of the dangers of Hobbism, with Scargill as their living embodiment. It would be a definition that would be profoundly influential not only for contemporaries, but also for the image of Hobbes that we have today.16 Daniel Scargill was in some ways an unlikely candidate for the role of wicked Hobbist that he would be called upon to play. A native of Cambridgeshire, he had been admitted as an undergraduate to Corpus Christi College Cambridge in 1662 at the age of fifteen.17 He soon came under the guidance of one of the college’s rising stars, the 27-year-old Norwich Fellow and future Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Tenison. Tenison was a moderate Anglican with a Latitudinarian outlook and a keen interest in the new science. Scargill appears to have flourished under Tenison’s supervision, winning the Manners Scholarship in 1666 and the following year securing election to a Fellowship at the College. Scargill specialised in the teaching of Greek and rhetoric, but also pursued his old tutor’s interest in natural philosophy.18 In the autumn of 1668, however, things started to go wrong. During a routine exercise in the Schools, 16 17 18

What follows is drawn from and revises my article ‘Hobbism in the Later 1660s: Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker’, Historical Journal 42: 1 (1999), pp. 85–108. J. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigiensis, IV, p. 28. Corpus Christi College Chapter Book, 1660s.

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Scargill defended two controversial theses: that the origin of the world could be explained mechanically and that the system of the universe does not prove the existence of God.19 Neither position was distinctively Hobbesian, but their potential heterodoxy worried Scargill’s colleagues, who tried to persuade the precocious Scargill to keep his exotic opinions to himself.20 Friendly advice, and even threats, from colleagues led Scargill to withdraw from another disputation in 1668 and he made promises not to do the same again, but, possibly piqued by the attempts to silence him, he went ahead with something even more shocking.21 Appearing in the Schools once more, Scargill proposed to defend the Hobbesian theses that moral justice was founded in positive civil law, and that good and evil were not eternal.22 Scargill was suspended23 and in the first week of December 1668 he was hauled in front of the university court,24 which demanded that Scargill make a recantation in the Schools (which it would appear that he did) and he was suspended from his duties until the following June. This might have been the end of the affair but for the damage done to Corpus Christi’s reputation, now associated with Scargill’s heterodox pronouncements. It would seem that the Master, John Spencer, and some of his close colleagues set about organising a smear campaign to remove the now suspended Scargill. Testimony was gathered about Scargill’s conduct, mostly scurrilous gossip and innuendo about his private life: Scargill was accused of association with the ‘younger scholars of the college, townsmen of inferior quallity’, or, even worse, ‘young women’. He was reported to begin his day ‘with a pint of sack, or some other strong liquor, often to drink to distemper and then us’d to shew himself openly to 19 20

21 22 23 24

Lambeth Palace MS 941, fo. 108. This supports Michael Hunter’s suggestion that we should reconsider the degree to which public and published sentiments reflect the full extent of heterodox discussion, particularly as the Scargill affair reveals the existence of such discussion in private conversation. M. Hunter, ‘The Witchcraft Controversy and the Nature of free thought in Restoration England’ and idem, ‘Aikenhead the Atheist’ in M. Hunter, ed., Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth Century Britain (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 286–307, 308–32. Lambeth Palace MS 941, fo. 108, section 5. Shortly before the disputation, Scargill asked to be sent ‘Ward’s pretence against Hobbes’ (probably the Exercitatio), a comment indicating the controversial thrust of his argument. Ibid., section 6. Worthington, Diary and correspondence, vol. II, Part II, p. 286, see also pp. 287–8. Scargill was interviewed by Peter Gunning, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, who brought up discrepancies between the offending theses and Hobbes’s published views. Scargill commented that ‘in such places Mr Hobbs canted’ indicating that he was aware that Hobbes’s public statements did not necessarily reflect his private views, private views that it seems Scargill, a little like John Davies, had chosen to make public. For discussion of the point see Kinch Hoekstra’s discussion in ‘The End of Philosophy’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106: 1 (2006), p. 50 and n. 117.


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the just scandall of the Society’. He was said to keep gaming tables in his rooms, with which he would play at dice with the younger students. Perhaps the best story tells of Scargill’s disastrous trip to the seaside at King’s Lynn in the spring of 1669, on what was described as a ‘frolick’. Scargill, in the company of some Corpus students, was allegedly ‘several times disorder’d with wine and strong waters and moreover there did quarrell with one of his company and caus’d by it a tumultuous concourse of people in the public streets and the drawing of one or more swords in that quarrell’. Now it is clear that Scargill was hardly a model citizen, but much of this, far from being habitual (and more importantly unrelated to his philosophical positions) seems to have been the unfortunate result of his suspension. The accounts of Scargill’s recreational activities, however, gave Spencer the evidence that he needed to get rid of Scargill for good. It may be no coincidence that at the same time Edward Stillingfleet both wrote to the university calling for Scargill to be expelled and preached an antiHobbesian sermon at Whitehall shortly before the consistory court hearing.25 On 12 March 1669, faced with Spencer’s evidence against the junior Fellow, and calls from beyond the university to take action, the consistory court expelled Scargill. The furious Scargill commented to a friend that he would be ‘revenged of Dr Spencer and complices’ and rode off to London to seek assistance.26 What happened next indicated that Scargill could muster support in high places. Two months after he had been expelled, letters arrived at Corpus from the king ordering that Scargill should be restored to his fellowship. It isn’t clear how the relatively powerless Scargill had managed this. The clearing house for this sort of interference in university affairs was Lord Arlington’s office, and more specifically that of his secretary Joseph Williamson. One possible source of assistance might well have been Hobbes himself, who was of course another client of both Arlington and the King.27 We know that Hobbes personally tried to intervene in the case, doubtless concerned that this might be a trial run for proceedings against him. Aubrey records that he wrote a reply, or protest, in the form of a letter on 25 26 27

Stillingfleet’s sermon, delivered on 2 March, argued that one could not trust anyone who held the views that Scargill had defended, Fifty Sermons (1699), p. 138. Lambeth Palace MS 941, fo. 108. For discussion of the Scargill case in the context of disputes between the crown and the universities, see J. Axtell, ‘The Mechanics of Opposition: Restoration Cambridge v. Daniel Scargill’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 38 (1965), pp. 102–11 and J. Twigg, The University of Cambridge and the English Revolution (Woodbridge, 1990), pp. 259–60.

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the case, sending it to an unnamed Colonel, who then passed it on to Sir John Birkenhead for licensing. Birkenhead refused, allegedly ‘to collogue and flatter the bishops’, and also refused to return the piece.28 Scargill, it seems, got hold of a copy during his time in London, possibly from Hobbes himself. Years later he gave a brief summary of the contents to Tenison which make it clear that Hobbes saw Cambridge’s action as a violation of its charter and a basis for legal proceedings against the university as a whole. This was combined with an extensive quoting of Leviathan probably explaining the legality of its arguments, something that characterises Hobbes’s output during the period.29 Scargill clearly felt that Hobbes’s legal argument might help his cause, because he promptly made copies and sent them to Ralph Cudworth (Master of Christ’s and a member of the consistory court) and to a lawyer friend. Growing short of cash, Scargill also decided to sell the piece for publication. Roger L’Estrange refused to license it, and soon Sir John Birkenhead got wind of the project and promptly confiscated Scargill’s remaining copy.30 It was clear that the government was not about to let Hobbes restart his war with the universities. That said, it may have been prepared to back Scargill’s case in another way; the royal letters suggested that he be allowed to recant again ‘and to declare his future adherance to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England’. Spencer held his ground, but this prompted another letter a month later, this time from Gilbert Sheldon, chivvying the process along and suggesting to Spencer that he ‘consider well whether it be not fit for you to readmitt, without putting the King to the trouble of another letter’.31 The archbishop’s suggestion produced a response: Scargill was duly ordered by the consistory court to draw up a suitable recantation. Although he initially turned up empty-handed, Scargill eventually produced a text which the court amended several times before it was officially sanctioned.32 Scargill flippantly referred to the recantation as his

28 29

30 31 32

CTH, I, p. lvi; John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1898), I, p. 360. British Library, Additional MS 38693, fo. 30: ‘He [Hobbes] writt about 3 or 4 sheets of paper, but I remember little of ym but yt he pleaded ye University had forfeited her Charter by exceeding her Commission or delegated Authority and he made a mighty quoting of his Leviathan in defence of himself yt I remember Sir John Birkenhead fell a Swearing This man’s starved yt takes his own flesh.’ British Library, Additional MS 38693, fo. 30. Lambeth Palace MS 674, fo. 9, Sheldon to Spencer, 28 June 1669. According to the university records of the hearing, the Recantation was checked by Gunning after the meeting on 14 July, and again by Theophilus Dillingham and John Pearson after the meeting on 21 July. Cambridge University Archives CUR (d–e).


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‘evensong’, which Spencer felt was ‘a speech signifying . . . he was not hearty and serious therein’.33 Penitent or not, Scargill delivered his recantation to what must have been a packed congregation at Great St Mary’s on 25 July 1669 and the sermon was issued as a pamphlet immediately afterwards. The public distribution of the text shows that the Recantation had become an opportunity for the consistory court to deliver a semi-official declaration of what they saw as unacceptable Hobbism. Given the various revisions to Scargill’s original offering, it is no surprise to find that the text has something of a ‘copy and paste’ quality about it. The baroque flourishes of self-condemnation sound like the work of the former rhetoric tutor; he summons up the devil as his Hobbesian inspiration, being ‘possessed with a foolish proud conceit of my own wit, and not having the fear of God before my eyes’, he professed ‘that I gloried to be a Hobbist and an Atheist: and vaunting that Hobbs should be maintained by Daniel, that is, by me’. He conceded that he had ‘lived in great licentiousness; swearing rashly; drinking intemperately; boasting myself insolently; corrupting others by my pernicious principles and example: To the high dishonour of God; the reproach of the Universitie: the Scandal of Christianitie; and the just offence of mankinde’. The recantation includes references to Scargill’s role as an agent in spreading the ‘Accursed Atheism of this age’ and also dire warnings to all of his ‘victims’ urging them to ‘lean not to their own understanding, but consult the holy scriptures . . . that from thence they may learn to be wise unto sobriety’. There can be little doubt that Scargill’s debauchery was crucial to the explanation of his errors; it was important for the court to stress that advocacy of Hobbesian views was a position only arrived at through sinfulness and lust rather than sober, rational reflection. One gets the sense that much of the sermon was delivered along these programmatic lines, but there were passages where the process of revision had left room for ambiguity. Recantation, as Clarendon would later note, possibly with this incident in mind, was always a flawed punishment for a Hobbist, because of Hobbes’s belief that it was possible to make an external profession without subscribing to the views internally.34 Someone must have realised this and required Scargill to produce the slightly bizarre codicil to the sermon, in which he brings up this very problem:

33

Lambeth MS 941, fo. 107.

34

Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 343–5.

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Now lest anyone should mistake or suspect this confession and unfeigned renunciation of my sinful and accursed errors, for an act of civil obedience or submission in me, performed according to my former principles . . . I call the searcher of all hearts to witness, that I loath and abhor such practices as the basest and most damnable hypocrisy.35

Of course the addition fundamentally destabilises the whole text, leaving its sincerity even more doubtful by drawing attention to the fact that recanting Hobbists are intrinsically unreliable. In this sense, Scargill may have had the last laugh.36 Perhaps the most interesting and important feature of the sermon is the way in which Scargill’s Hobbism is defined. The Hobbist charges are listed twice, once at the beginning and again towards the end, perhaps for the benefit of the hard of understanding. The substantial arguments are first, that all right of dominion is founded only in power; secondly, that all moral righteousness is founded only in the law of the civil magistrate; thirdly, that the holy scriptures are ‘made law onely by the civil authority’, and fourthly, ‘that whatsoever the magistrate commands is to be obeyed notwithstanding contrary to divine moral laws’.37 These were clearly adaptations of actual Hobbesian positions which had been pursued in the critical literature, particularly by Ward and Bramhall. What is striking though, is that although these arguments occur within a matrix of diabolic inspiration and libertine debauchery, in themselves they are remarkably focused upon one particular aspect of Hobbes’s work, the relationship between power and moral/religious authority. As we have seen, Scargill had also discussed controversial statements about materialism, mechanism and the universal system, but these standard topics of Hobbesian controversy are not discussed at all in the Recantation, which reduces the offending Hobbism to a much narrower definition. When Scargill talked about the manner in which his theses were disruptive of the various levels of community, such as corporation, college, university, city and commonwealth it is clear that the point being made was an acutely political one, indicating a position which held that a sovereign might be able to determine the 35 36

Scargill, Recantation, pp. 5–6. The Corpus fellows clearly recognised the disastrous effect of the interpolation, and quoted Scargill’s own discussion of the problem as a reason why they could not take the Recantation seriously. Lambeth MS 941, fo. 107. The distinctive legal problem posed by Hobbists was also commented upon in a broadside of 1670, The atheists help at a dead lift: ‘If Justice Catch Leviathan in’s hook, Will he implore the Benefit of’s book?’

37

Scargill, Recantation, pp. 1, 4.


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requirements of natural law and religious worship. As we have seen, this was the sort of Hobbesian argument that was starting to appear in the arguments of the pro-toleration dissenters and in the Erastian arguments of the Latitude men. After reading Scargill’s Recantation it would be hard not to see the connections with these groups’ positions, as would soon become abundantly clear. Scargill’s pamphlet gained instant notoriety. John Gibson of St John’s wrote to a friend the day afterwards that ‘the news that fills all mouths here is the recantation of Sir Scargill, which I have sent you in print . . . to read at large.’38 Astonishingly, in spite of the political pressure that had been put upon the college, Corpus Christi still refused to readmit Scargill, complaining that Scargill was ‘now become so infamous throughout the University if not the whole nation for his pernicious principles and debaucheries’.39 The affair would drag on for several years and would only be resolved when Scargill was quietly ordained in 1672 and set up as rector of the parish of Mulbarton in Norfolk. The reinvention of Scargill as a libertine and politically undesirable Hobbesian atheist marked an important development in the reception of Hobbes’s ideas. The various clerical anxieties about Hobbes had come together in Cambridge to produce a walking, talking Hobbist openly proclaiming the structural relationship between the reading of Hobbes and godless immorality. This was something that it had been difficult to derive directly from Hobbes’s paradoxical texts, or from any of Hobbes’s heterogeneous readers. Hobbes himself had proved to be a slippery target in the 1650s, and censorship had kept him off the public stage in the following decade. When concerns about Hobbism became focused in the later 1660s, it was almost inevitable that those fears would generate the Hobbist that the clergymen had always dreamed of. That image in turn helped to define the public understanding of Hobbes’s work at a time when his books were in short supply.40 The unveiling of Scargill would also play an important part in intensifying sensitivity to any utterance that could be characterised as Hobbist, something that, as we shall see, would have knock-on effects in a number of political and religious debates. In wider social terms, the presentation of Scargill in the Recantation brought together the figure of the libertine and 38 39 40

‘The Letters of John Gibson’, Cambridge Antiquarian Proceedings and Communications 8 (1891–2), p. 73. Lambeth MS 941, fo. 107. For an example, see the commonplace book entry on ‘The principles of Mr Hobbes’ which reproduces Scargill’s theses. British Library, MS Sloane 904.

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the atheist and bound them tightly with Hobbesian philosophy in a novel fashion. It is noticeable that the stereotypical account of libertine Hobbism only starts to inform sermon literature and popular culture after 1669. This is not to suggest that Scargill alone was responsible for this development. There had always been plenty of critical mileage in associating Hobbes with immoral behaviour, although usually of a calculating and political kind rather than that commonly associated with libertine hedonism. However, once the link had received an official imprimatur in such a public fashion, it wouldn’t take long for similar thoughts to take root in the imagination of sermon-writing clergymen and pamphleteers concerned about popular immorality. The relationship between Hobbism and libertinism soon became a standard topic. As I shall suggest in a later section, that discourse may well have encouraged some of the more famous engagements between genuine libertines and Hobbes’s ideas during the 1670s, in turn providing the basis for some of the most notorious readings of Hobbes’s ideas. Scargill’s Recantation had been designed as an attempt to put an end to Hobbes’s influence by presenting the unacceptable atheism and immorality of the Hobbist. But this was one of the more risky strategies for taming the Leviathan, in that the appalling creature fashioned by Hobbes’s critics could sometimes take on a life of its own. SAMUEL PARKER’S DISCOURSE OF ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY

The Scargill affair brought the issue of Hobbism to national prominence, and it was inevitable that it would spill over into the increasingly heated religious politics of the late 1660s. The main credit for linking the debate over Hobbism and atheism with the debate over toleration has to go to the Anglican propagandist Samuel Parker, chaplain to Gilbert Sheldon, and author of the Discourse of ecclesiastical polity (1669). On the face of it, Parker seemed to have hit upon a winning formula; he would take the anxiety about atheism, combine it with the Royalist view of Hobbism as sedition, and associate both with the interest-based toleration arguments of writers like Wolseley and Corbet. However there was a danger lurking in Parker’s attempt to throw Hobbesian mud at the tolerationists. His own position was based upon the Latitudinarian natural law theory which proposed a thoroughly Erastian account of the sovereign’s religious authority. The charge of Hobbism could just as easily be applied to him. Predictably his opponents would see Parker’s work as undiluted Hobbism of the absolutist variety, and confirmation that Latitudinarianism and Leviathan had rather too much in common. The resulting debate would lead to a rash of


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anti-Hobbesian works, some of them classics in the genre, seeking to restore the distance between writers on all sides and the philosopher of Malmesbury. The 29-year-old Parker was an Oxford graduate who had been converted to Anglicanism from radical Presbyterianism by Ralph Bathurst. He had gone on to become the model of a modern rationalist divine, combining the zeal of the convert with a fashionable interest in science. His theological essay Tentamina de deo (1665) sought to show that natural philosophy, far from leading to atheism, constituted an effective means of combating it. Nominated by John Wilkins, Parker became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1666, endorsing a mechanistic natural philosophy in his Free and impartial censure of the platonick philosophy. More controversially, in the Nature and extent of the divine dominion published in the same year, Parker had criticised the essentialism of the idea that God’s power was restricted by his goodness. Perhaps tempting fate a little Parker had approvingly cited Hobbes’s definition of right from De Cive.41 The passage in question was one of Hobbes’s more conventional statements about right being a liberty to use one’s faculties in accordance with right reason, but Parker went on to emphasise God’s power as the source of his dominion. This would be, of course, Scargill’s first ‘Hobbesian’ thesis in 1668, although the view was not exclusively Hobbes’s own. Parker’s early works attracted critical comment for their Hobbesian content, not least from Richard Baxter, ever sensitive to the surfacing of Leviathan.42 By 1669 Parker was working for Sheldon as one of his domestic chaplains, one of a group spinning anti-toleration propaganda. The Discourse of ecclesiastical polity came out in the autumn of 1669 and earned instant notoriety for its hysterically abusive style. The work was peppered with passages aimed at the ‘wild and fanatic rabble’, whose sects and parties ‘shatter peace and common love’ and who were ‘utterly incapable of being either a good subject, or good neighbour’. For Parker, who had probably taken his stylistic cue from his friend Simon Patrick, religious dissent was subversive of the entire fabric of church and state.43 But Parker’s work wasn’t just about dissent. Mindful of the controversy over Hobbism, Parker sought to play on popular anxieties about the spread of atheism and infidelity, linking the case for toleration to subversive Hobbism.

41 42 43

Parker, An account of the nature and extent of the divine dominion (Oxford, 1666), p. 2. See Baxter’s Reasons of the Christian religion (1667), p. 520. Samuel Parker, Discourse, iv, viii, x, xxxv. Parker cites Patrick’s work approvingly, defending it from Nonconformist criticism at pp. xiii–xix.

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Although Parker doesn’t mention Scargill by name, one can detect his presence in Parker’s description of the ‘young Nurslings’ and ‘wild and hair-brain’d Youths’ who were swallowing down ‘the Principles of the Malmsbury Philosophy, without any chewing, or consideration.’44 Parker’s aim was to expose the dangers of such enthusiasm and in chapter 4 he offers a full refutation of Hobbes’s moral and political theory. The argument here adapts the Royalist critique of writers like Bramhall and Coke that for all Hobbes’s talk of moral and political obligation, the dependence upon selfinterest ultimately erodes obligation in a subversive fashion.45 Individuals would only submit for as long as they perceived it to be in their interest to do so: ‘and therefore when that Tye happens to cease, their Obligation becomes Null and Void, and they may observe them if they please, and if they please break them’.46 Parker’s highly conventional strategy is to attack the foundation of the theory, Hobbes’s understanding of the state of nature as a state of war, a hypothesis that Parker suggests has ‘become the Standard of our Modern Politicks’.47 In common with many critics, Parker argues that Hobbes makes the mistake of positing a state of nature ‘as never was, nor ever shall be’, one that was ‘so far from being suitable to the Natural Frame of things, that ’tis absolutely inconsistent with it’.48 It was important for Parker to develop an alternative theory at this point, one that stressed the existence of God-given natural obligation in order to refute the thought that the state of nature was necessarily characterised by conflict. The account sketched by Parker would become crucial to Latitudinarian attempts to disentangle themselves from accusations of Hobbism and rested upon the assumption that a providential God had created mankind in such a way that there was a natural obligation to sociable behaviour. Individuals did act for their own good, as Hobbes had suggested, but factors like mutual need required co-operation and sociability in order to achieve this. The result was an obligatory natural sociability arising from human nature itself: That as every man is obliged to act for his own Good, so also to aim at the Common Good of Mankind, because without this the Natural Right that every individual man has to Happiness cannot possibly be obtain’d; so that there will plainly arise from the Constitution of Humane Nature an Essential Justice that

44 45 48

Ibid., pp. xxii, xxv. Parker lists unacceptable Hobbesian ideas on p. xxxvi. Ibid., p. 114. See also pp. 128–9, 131, 134. 46 Ibid., p. 116. 47 Ibid., p. 118. Ibid., p. 119. Parker’s formula recalls Ingelo’s.


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demands of every man Offices of Love and Kindness to others as well as to himself.49

Hobbes’s ahistorical misanthropy simply got human nature fundamentally wrong. His hypothesis also led to the unpalatable implication that either there was no God at all, or, worse, one that obliged his creatures ‘to seek their own mutual Ruine and Destruction’.50 The political payoff of Parker’s critique came in the following chapter, titled provocatively A Confutation of the Consequences that some men draw from Mr Hobs’s Principles in behalf of Liberty of Conscience. Here he revealed that the reason why he had spent so much time on Hobbes’s theory was because ‘’tis become the most powerful Patron of the Fanatick Interest’.51 Parker embarks upon a complicated account of the relationship between Hobbism and the pro-toleration argument. He suggests that at the back of the most important pro-toleration claims is a Hobbesian thought that religion is simply a policy instrument to be manipulated by the sovereign. Given that one religion is no better than another, it therefore becomes prudent to ‘endear them all to himself, by Indulging them their Liberty in their different Follies’.52 One would be hard pushed to find such a view expressed openly in the dissenting literature, but it was one way that Parker could read the cases made by writers like Wolseley and Corbet, with their stress upon the prudential interest of the monarch in granting toleration. In response Parker argued that such a position, resting upon appeals to selfinterest, was a poor foundation for political stability. Tolerating sects whose beliefs were often politically subversive was a recipe for disaster, and could only be achieved with a standing army and a great deal of difficulty. Prudential pluralism created problems of perpetual quarrelling. It was clearly much better for the magistrate to authorise a religion compatible with sociability and obedience, and then to require conformity to it. Herein lay the distinctively Hobbesian features of Parker’s own position, and they stemmed from his Latitudinarian understanding of the relationship between religion and government. Like Stillingfleet and Patrick, Parker bypassed scriptural arguments about what form of church government was divinely appointed to argue that the state had an omnicompetent role as arbiter when it came to external matters of religion or politics. The warrant for this role came from natural law, which demanded that man 49 50

Ibid., p. 122. This argument would later be central to Richard Cumberland’s De legibus naturae (1672), see below, pp. 272–82. Ibid., 126. 51 Ibid., p. 137. 52 Ibid., p. 139.

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should be sociable and that the institution of government was the best means to that end.53 Parker’s absolutism was uncompromising, demanding that the government of every commonwealth ‘must of necessity be universal, absolute and uncontroulable’.54 This included the organisation of religious worship and even the practical determination of morality. Although a general requirement for moral virtue and pious devotion was declared by the law of nature and revelation, it was nevertheless necessary for the state to be involved in their application to particular cases.55 The outcome of this position was that all things sacred and civil, not already determined by the law of nature or the law of God, could be determined by the sovereign. The implications of this position for the questions at issue in the toleration dispute were clear: the sovereign had an absolute right to order religious worship as he saw fit for the common good. Claims of conscience, as internal matters of private belief, could take no precedence over the requirements of social order. The problem with this argument, as many of Parker’s critics would soon identify, was the grey area between divine obligation and the interpretation of the magistrate. Although Parker had attempted to preserve the thought that there were immutable laws of God and nature, how much of a limitation could they be when they authorised apparently unlimited sovereign power on the one hand, and permitted the sovereign considerable discretion as to their application on the other? Where did the magistrate’s power end if it also trumped conscience? And didn’t this also look a little like Leviathan’s suggestion that the civil law effectively authorised the practical obligation to divine and natural law? There can be little question that Parker took the Latitudinarian discourse about sovereignty and pushed it closer to Hobbesian absolutism than any previous version. The immediate outcry was loud and predictable. One critic observed that in the course of refuting Hobbes, Parker had become a ‘young Leviathan himself ’. The anonymous author of Insolence and impudence triumphant agreed: ‘doth he attempt to confute Atheists, whose Writings do directly tempt to Atheism?’ John Owen replied to Parker in his Truth and innocence vindicated (1669), attacking the hypocrisy of Parker’s apparently Hobbesian suggestion that one could think as one pleased internally provided that one conformed outwardly.56

53 56

Ibid., pp. 78–9. 54 Ibid., p. 27. 55 Ibid., pp. 80–1; see also p. 179. J. Humfrey, A case of conscience (1669), p. 12; Anon., Insolence and impudence triumphant (1669), Sig. A3r; Owen, Truth and innocence vindicated (1669), p. 103.


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Parker’s anti-Hobbesian strategy had blown up in his face. He was now the Hobbist, in spite of his best efforts to put sufficient distance between himself and Leviathan. It was a difficulty that he had to confront when he replied to Owen in his Defence and continuation of the Discourse in the autumn of 1670. He remained unrepentant about his defence of sovereign power. But when he responded to Owen’s charge that he was asking men to follow a public conscience rather than their own, he wrote that ‘this is somewhat rank doctrine, and favours not a little of the Leviathan. But yet how can I avoid it? Are these not my own words? . . . I am content to confess that I have said something not unlike them.’57 Symbolic of Parker’s transformation from critic of Hobbes to a Scargill-style Hobbist was Herbert Thorndike’s contribution to the discussion in his Discourse of the forebearance (1670), amended to take the controversy into account.58 Alert as ever to the evils of hardcore Erastianism, he bracketed Parker and Scargill together. There are those, he suggests, clearly with Parker in mind, ‘that are perswaded by the Leviathan, that a church is nothing but a Christian Commonwealth. And that the civil power thereof, which is Sovereign, hath full Right to enjoyn whatsoever it please, for the Christian Religion.’ The veteran critic of Hobbes found the idea of hypocritical subscription to a state religion as objectionable as Owen. And it led to the very atheism outlined in the Recantation: As the Propositions first maintained, and afterwards recanted by his [Hobbes’s] late Disciple at Cambridge, do import; ‘That there be no difference between good and bad, before Civil Power that is sovereign inact it’; then it must be said further, that he is properly an atheist. For if God govern not the world, if he reward not the good, if he punish not the bad, though men do not . . . then he is not God. Particularly if Civil Power can oblige a man to say or swear, that which he means not, there remains not that Ground for Civil Society which the Heathens themselves . . . maintained.59

57

58 59

Parker, Defence and continuation, p. 279. John Locke, perhaps only too aware of his own troubling proximity to Parker’s thought, also made the Hobbesian link in a manuscript remark: ‘That the magistrate should restraine seditious doctrines who denys but because he may then has he power over all other doctrines to forbid or impose, if he hath not the argument is short, if he hath how far is this short of Mr Hobbs’s doctrine?’ J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Toleration and Other Writings on Law and Politics, 1667–1683, ed. J. R. and P. Milton (Oxford, 2006), p. 326. Thordike’s work was advertised in the 17 May edition of the Term Catalogue. Arber, Term Catalogues, I, p. 31. Herbert Thorndike, Discourse (1670), pp. 113–14. The difference between the printed version and the manuscript is discussed in Herbert Thorndike, The theological works, ed. J. H. Parker, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1844–56), V, p. 449, note u. I would like to thank Mark Goldie for bringing this reference to my attention.

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The Recantation provided a fatal terminus for Parker’s argument, and this was a serious issue for those Latitude men who had been promoting Erastian-style solutions to the problem of dissent. Latitudinarianism was now popularly associated with Hobbism. The reception of Parker’s Discourse prompted a defensive reaction from his Anglican colleagues. It was now important to demonstrate that whatever the latitude men were, they were not Hobbists. Edward Fowler’s The principles and practices of certain moderate divines of the Church of England abusively called Latitudinarian was published anonymously in 1670 and sought to do just that. Written in defence of writers like Parker and Patrick, Fowler singles out those arguments which mark the true Hobbist, quoting three of the arguments of Scargill’s Recantation verbatim.60 His defence of Parker’s position was to suggest that in fact ‘these divines have proved better than anyone else that Moral Good and Evil are not onely such, because God commands the one and forbids the other’. Fowler endorsed Parker’s hard line against toleration and his work was concerned to elaborate upon the anti-Hobbesian position so that he could clarify the arguments put so brutally in the Discourse of ecclesiastical polity. Fowler’s work is indicative of the way in which Parker’s Hobbism could generate creative responses to Leviathan, and it is worth looking at much of the antiHobbesian literature of the period in the light of this debate. THE CREEDS OF MR HOBBES EXAMINED

By the end of the 1660s, Hobbes and Hobbism had become major issues once more, driven by Hobbes’s role as a marker of unacceptable heterodoxy. But as we have seen in the case of Parker, the accusation of Hobbism was an unstable signifier that could quickly backfire on its users. The existence of several different accounts of what was bad about Hobbism meant that as a language of criticism, it could be liberally applied to all sides of the church government debate, and, courtesy of Scargill, linked directly to atheism and immorality in a way that had not been quite so easy prior to 1669. This network of potentially dangerous associations meant that groups affected by charges of Hobbism had a new set of reasons to engage in criticism of Hobbes. Criticism could serve a number of useful functions; it could deflect any immediate suggestion of an association with Hobbes or his works, but it could also provide an opportunity to construct readings of 60

Fowler quotes theses 2 to 4 of the Recantation. E. Fowler, The principles and practices of certain moderate divines of the Church of England (1670), p. 12.


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Hobbes that would place him as far from one’s own position as possible. Removing the stain of Hobbism from one’s discourse required the representation of Hobbes as something else. These motives may account for the appearance of a number of Hobbist or atheists’ creeds during the period which itemise Hobbes’s heterodoxy in a way that would become profoundly influential for the perception of Hobbes in the following decade. This reconstitution of Hobbes’s print identity would mark another important stage in the development of Hobbes’s reputation; for many readers, these credos would become authoritative representations of Hobbes’s views, especially at a time when Hobbes’s works were becoming extremely hard to get hold of. One example is Sir Charles Wolseley’s best-selling Unreasonableness of atheism, the first edition of which actually appeared shortly before Scargill’s Recantation in the summer of 1669. Wolseley had reasons to position himself against atheism; his interest-based approach to the toleration issue had left him vulnerable to the charge of Hobbism. His treatment of the issue suggested that the greatest atheist threat came from those who attempted to found religion upon human authority, an argument that could of course be applied to Anglican Erastianism. Wolseley provocatively draws attention to Hobbes’s Erastianism in Leviathan, quoting passages from chapters 42 (on the need for scripture to be authorised by the sovereign) and 38 (on the political dangers of belief in eternal rewards and punishments), to argue that they are consistent with his definition of religion as ‘fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind or imagined from tales publicly told’.61 The whole effect is to point men to ‘direct Atheism’ and ‘to make the rise and termination of all Religion to be from civil and humane Authority’.62 Wolseley builds up a composite picture of the atheist’s views, occasionally quoting anonymous italicised gobbets of atheistical views. Although these look like quotations they run together a variety of sources. Some of them undoubtedly allude to Hobbes. Wolseley sidesteps the problem of Hobbes’s ambiguous theism by showing the reader that an atheist would be committed to Hobbesian conclusions. If God did not exist, man would be self-legislating and there would be no natural distinction between good and evil, just and unjust, and no natural right to property. Without any higher authority there could be no grounds for oaths or promises, and 61 62

Wolseley, The unreasonableness of atheism made manifest (1669), p. 17, citing Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 360–1 [O.P. 285], 306–7 [O.P. 238], 42 [O.P. 26]. Ibid., p. 18.

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consequently no ground for government: ‘Without government, all men live in a state of war. Every man has a right to what he can get, and no right to any thing that he cannot keep. One sayes truly, That force and fraud must needs be the two cardinal vertues of such a condition.’63 The paraphrase of chapter 13 of Leviathan allows Wolseley to work Hobbes into his composite portrait without having to worry about Hobbes’s theism or engaging too closely with his political theory. Wolseley’s manufactured, and distinctly Epicurean ‘atheist’ is a much easier target than the slippery Hobbes. Hobbes is folded into the story in such a way that an unwary reader might assume that all of the italicised quotations come from Leviathan. This is important because Wolseley’s best-selling pamphlet undoubtedly cemented an association between Hobbism, Epicureanism and atheism that would be one of the recurrent tropes of the following decades, in spite of Hobbes’s own stated antipathy to Epicureanism and his reputation in the 1650s as a sort of unusual stoic. At the end of the work Wolseley completes his caricature in summary form: I have taken him as one legally condemned, and do think my self reasonably justified to hang him up in Effigie. And therefore, as the most pertinent Appendix to this discourse, I have presented your Lordship with an Atheists Catechism; wherein you shall see him epitomized, and an endeavour to represent an image of him, as much to the life, as so small a figure will afford.64

The striking thing about Wolseley’s catechism is actually how far from Hobbes’s doctrine it is; the views that seem to be related to Hobbesian arguments are systematically realigned to create Wosleley’s self-refuting and primarily Epicurean atheist.65 Nothing in Wolseley’s analysis was particularly new; critics had accused Hobbes of Epicureanism, and implied that he was an atheist before, but Wolseley’s effigy produced a character that linked Hobbes, Epicureanism and atheism tightly, a character almost immediately made flesh by Daniel Scargill. TENISON’S CREED OF MR HOBBES EXAMINED

One individual for whom both the Scargill affair and the debate over Parker’s Hobbism had an intensely personal significance was Thomas Tenison, Latitudinarian don and former tutor to the Cambridge Hobbist. In the aftermath of the Recantation, Tenison attempted his own process of creedmaking, not least to stress the differences between his own Latitudinarian 63

Ibid., pp. 157–8.

64

Ibid., pp. 193–4.

65

Ibid., pp. 197–9.


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views and Hobbism. He acknowledged this explicitly in the dedication to the Earl of Manchester commenting that he had not ‘escaped the trouble of meeting with some, who, having heard of the Error, and Recantation, of an unhappy young man, committed, sometime, to my care; began to reproach my self as a favourer of such opinions’.66 Tenison had devoted himself to the study of Hobbes’s works in the winter and spring of 1669/70 and the result was The creed of Mr Hobbes examined, a treatment of twelve Hobbesian positions constructed in the form of a dialogue between Tenison’s alter-ego, a young divine, and Hobbes himself. The style parodies the ‘master and student’ form that Hobbes had used in his post-Restoration writings; in Tenison’s version the student gets the better of the master. Hobbes’s side of the dialogue is carefully (and accurately) stitched together from his works, creating a virtual Hobbes who even rants and rails in the language that he used against Wallis in the 1650s. The passages are copied and pasted, however, as responses to sometimes very different points, and Hobbes’s personal tics are organised according to the stereotypes generated by the scientists. Tenison’s critique builds upon the literature of the 1650s, particularly the work of Ward, Wallis, Bramhall and More. Using the natural theology of Ward in particular, Tenison offers a modern defence of traditional theology, moral philosophy and scriptural interpretation against Hobbes’s relentless materialism. Like Wallis and Ward, Tenison attempts to undermine Hobbes’s claims to originality. Lastly, Tenison continues Wallis’s work in casting aspersions upon Hobbes’s personal conduct, and, for the first time since Wallis’s Hobbius, the philosopher’s Restoration defence of his actions is subjected to critical scrutiny. The action takes place over two days. A young clergyman encounters an appropriately diffident Hobbes at Buxton well and coaxes him into conversation over dinner.67 The divine proposes to discuss Hobbes’s philosophy in terms of twelve articles he has heard referred to as the ‘Hobbist’s Creed’, summarised as follows: I believe that God is Almighty matter; that in him there are three Persons, he having been thrice represented on earth; that it is to be decided by the Civil Power, whether he created all things else; that Angels are not Incorporeal substances, (those words implying a contradiction) but preternatural impressions on the brain of man; that the Soul of man is the Temperament of his Body; that the Liberty of 66 67

T. Tenison, The creed of Mr. Hobbes examined in a feigned conference between him and a student in divinity (1670), Sig. A2r–v. T. Tenison, The creed of Mr. Hobbes examined, p. 3. Tenison’s scene-setting plays an important symbolic role; his Hobbes is sociable only by necessity and generally fearful, in line with his theory but also with the classical account of fearful atheists like Epicurus, with whom he is explicitly paralleled.

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Will, in that soul, is physically necessary; that the prime Law of nature in the soul of man is that of self-Love; that the Law of the Civil Sovereign is the obliging Rule of good and evil, just and unjust; that the Books of the Old and New Testament are made Canon and Law by the Civil Powers; that whatsoever is written in these Books, may lawfully be denied even upon oath, (after the laudable doctrine and practice of the Gnosticks) in time of persecution, when men shall be urged by the menaces of Authority; that Hell is a tolerable condition of life, for a few years upon earth, to begin at the general Resurrection; and that Heaven is a blessed estate of good men, like that of Adam before his fall beginning at the general Resurrection, to be thenceforth eternal upon Earth in the Holy-Land.68

This list seems to be Tenison’s own, and it is certainly the first time that it occurs in print. The articles focus upon Hobbes’s unusual theology, although they incorporate some of the more political arguments dealt with in the Recantation. These are areas where Tenison could put distance between himself and Hobbes, in some cases using the existing literature to cast Hobbes as an unacceptably heterodox religious thinker. Tenison starts with Hobbes’s account of God as first cause. Unimpressed by the argument, the divine comments that ‘By this argument, unwary men may be, perhaps, deceived into a good opinion of your Philosophy; as if by the aids of it, you were no weak defender of natural Religion.’69 In fact, suggests Tenison, search Hobbes’s books and one discovers that Hobbes’s arguments actually undermine religious belief, particularly the thought that whatever exists is material. Moving straight to the absurdities of a material God, Tenison suggests that Hobbes simply assimilates Him to nature. ‘Hobbes’ gruffly resorts to abuse (originally aimed at Wallis) and points to his rejection of the belief that God might be considered the soul of the world, but Tenison chalks this up as a palpable contradiction. The discussion moves on to Hobbes’s denial of immaterial substance as unscriptural, and Tenison’s divine produces a flurry of citations that demonstrate the contrary. He gives the same treatment to Hobbes’s attempt to use Tertullian (most recently reiterated in the appendix to the Latin Leviathan), keen to deprive Hobbes of any authoritative claim to Christian legitimacy; the weight of opinion amongst the Fathers was against Tertullian’s view, and ‘he was condemned of old as a heretick for it.’70 68 70

Ibid., pp. 8–9. 69 Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 21. Tenison goes even further to argue that Hobbes had in fact oversimplified Tertullian’s De carne Christi; for Tertullian body could sometimes mean passive matter and at other times substance or essence (p. 22). In fact, Hobbes’s reading was probably closer to the mark, and Tertullian was widely understood to be a thoroughgoing materialist. Tenison’s treatment of Hobbes’s use of Tertullian appears to reflect anxiety that this might well be taken seriously as an orthodox defence of materialism.


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‘Hobbes’ moves swiftly on to the logical claim that the idea of an incorporeal body is an absurdity. For Tenison the problem with this claim lies in the identification of substance, being or essence with body alone. Characterising God as a body violates the church’s official understanding (to which Hobbes is logically committed by his own philosophy) that God is without parts. Hobbes takes refuge in asserting God’s incomprehensibility, but Tenison restates the Latitudinarian thought that we can know about God, albeit to an imperfect degree. This argument had been at the core of the Latitudinarian response to Hobbes’s extreme nominalism since Ward’s Philosophical essay and Tenison uses Ward’s simile of the two men looking at Jupiter to make the same point that Hobbes is like the man whose refusal to use a telescope leads him to deny the existence of the object. Hobbes’s determination to tie the world of ideas to the world of corporeal images causes him to reject the thought that one might conceive an abstract but nevertheless true understanding of God’s attributes. Tenison continues with this theme when dealing with Hobbes’s denial that the creation of the world could be proved by philosophy. Tenison follows Ward in suggesting that it is possible to get from the evidence of the visible world to an understanding of an intelligent creator. Hobbes’s solution was to leave the arbitration of such non-rational positions to the sovereign, but Tenison, interpreting this as a strong claim that the sovereign could determine the truth or otherwise of such statements, protests that this gives the prince the power to violate the truths of religion. Tenison was prepared to accept a regulatory role for the sovereign, but not a position where the sovereign effectively determined the truth.71 For Tenison, Hobbes’s willingness, most recently expressed in Mr Hobbes considered, to submit such questions to the authority of the magistrate raised the possibility that the magistrate potentially retained ‘a Right of banishing the Profession of a Deity out of his Dominions’.72 Tenison’s dedication showed that he was aware that Hobbes had republished Leviathan in Latin, but he clearly hadn’t noted Hobbes’s change to his views on the Trinity. The divine comments that ‘You surprize me here with such an explication of the Trinity, as has not been invented by any Heretick of the unluckiest wit, for these sixteen hundred years.’73 Following Ross, Tenison objects that under Hobbes’s theory of representation, the Trinity will become a century. If everyone who had represented God (civil powers and priests) were to be counted, they would be ‘not only three, but six hundred’.74 71

Ibid., p. 48.

72

Ibid., p. 49.

73

Ibid., p. 38.

74

Ibid., p. 41.

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Tenison is predictably less than impressed with Hobbes’s rewriting of other aspects of scripture. The thought that angels are merely images in the fancy, rather than logically inconceivable incorporeal susbtances, gets short shrift. Tenison responds that it is entirely possible for individuals to conceive of angels as understanding entities not united to matter or aether, and that the same goes for ghosts. On the question of witches, Tenison’s critique takes a slightly different tack. In Leviathan Hobbes denied that witchcraft was any real power, but allowed that individuals could be justly punished for holding that they had such a power. In response Tenison suggests that punishment is unusually cruel if confessed witches are genuinely harmless, who ‘ought to be provided for in Bedlam, than executed at Tyburn’. Witches were to be judged from their effects and not from the public statements of their beliefs. One of the more philosophically distinguished parts of the dialogue, and one that would be picked out by contemporaries as worthy of note, is Tenison’s treatment of Hobbes’s doctrine of soul, mind and sense. Hobbes’s relentless materialism required the rejection of the idea of the soul as a separable incorporeal substance and its redefinition as life or motion in the limbs, an interpretation designed to eliminate the dualism of mind/soul and body. Tenison’s general strategy in this section is to reinstate a distinction between the mere effects of motion and the existence of an independent entity that would accord with traditional ideas of mind and soul. Agreeing that sensation is caused by external motion (rather than Aristotelian species), Tenison nevertheless follows More in arguing that the act of sensation requires something to perceive it; matter by itself is incapable of perception: ‘If Impressions were, not only Instruments, but acts of Sense; might we not strongly argue, that a Looking-glass saw, and a Lute heard?’75 Tenison chips away at other aspects of Hobbes’s materialist understanding of mind; if memory is merely residual motion in the brain, how can individuals recall events at great distance of time, and by what power is that residual motion perceived?76 If forgetting is the cessation of motion, how can Hobbes account for sudden recall, if not by the existence of an immaterial soul?77 The same went for the issue of personal identity, something independent of the body’s parts must hold together the essence of individual personality.78 On Tenison’s view, Hobbes’s materialism could not explain these features, and neither could it provide a compelling explanation of the 75 77

Ibid., p. 82. 76 Tenison, The creed of Mr. Hobbes examined, pp. 88–9. Ibid., pp. 91–4. 78 Ibid., p. 92.


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reasoning process itself. In line with his Latitudinarian appeal to an independent world of ideas, Tenison argues that in the ability to conceive abstract figures like triangles and universal ideas there is a faculty that is not material. How is experience ordered, if not by such a rational means? These idealist presuppositions mean that Hobbes’s materialism simply can’t make sense and this made the resolution of the free will debate fairly straightforward. The assumption that there is an immaterial soul allows Tenison to reject the idea that the will is necessarily determined.79 Turning to the political dimension of Hobbes’s project, Tenison discusses Hobbes’s natural law theory. Tenison’s general aim is to restate a traditional understanding of natural law, and to point to the seditious consequences of Hobbes’s version. Tenison agrees that the distinction between right and law is legitimate,80 but what is problematic is Hobbes’s attempt to suggest that the two are independent; right actions are in fact those in accordance with natural law. Tenison rejected Hobbes’s suggestion that the dictates of right reason were merely theorems and countered with a traditional statement that they represented God’s law. Hobbes’s reduction of such dictates to considerations of self-preservation is firmly resisted, which leads inevitably to a discussion of the state of nature. Here Tenison’s judgement is completely conventional: ‘It is a very absurd and unsecure course to lay the ground-work of all civil Polity and formed Religion, upon such a supposed state of Nature, as hath no firmer support than the contrivance of your own fancy.’81 Tenison prefers the testimonies of scripture and experience, which reveal men to be born into subjection, a position that Hobbes appeared to concede.82 Tenison’s central contention is that the law of nature always obliges, even outside the state, and in a far more extensive sense than mere self-preservation. Tenison agreed that positive law could extend and modify the provisions of natural law (the examples he gives are incest and polygamy, not forbidden by natural law but by divine and human law), and also conceded that it was difficult to establish common principles from the supposed consent of nations, but this did not mean that the there was no such thing as natural law: Yet is there not to be taken such licentious advantage, as if there were no Law of Nature. For however various soever the opinions and customs of several Nations 79 80 81 82

Ibid., pp. 106–8. Here Tenison follows More rather than the scholastic Bramhall, who is lightly scolded for failing to challenge Hobbes’s materialism. Tenison claims that the distinction can be found in the work of Lorenzo Valla. Tenision, The creed of Mr. Hobbes examined, p. 131. Ibid., pp. 133–4. Tenison cites Hobbes’s comments from chapter 13 of Leviathan and the now notorious note on sons in the state of nature from De Cive 1.10n.

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are; in this, they all agree, that good is to be done, and evil to be shunned . . . And indeed all the Laws of nature, which relate to certain states, though alterable in the alteration of Circumstances, yet, in reasons of them, they are everlasting: And reason that bids a man obey his Father, bids him, in some cases, obey not Man but God: and yet the reason is unchangeable on which both depend; to wit, of allegiance to the higher Authority.83

This passage goes to the heart of the Latitudinarian dilemma over Hobbes’s interpretation of natural law. The problem is essentially Parker’s in The discourse of ecclesiastical polity; if natural law is a rather hazy general rule, to be applied through positive law, how does this differ from Hobbes’s position? Hobbes had acknowledged that his natural laws were eternal and internally obligatory, but not externally obligatory until the subject of a command. Tenison’s position isn’t far from this.84 Like Parker, Tenison wants to hang on to the idea of an externally obligatory natural law, but his concessions to Hobbes’s case are damaging. It is hard to establish exactly what the common reason of an obligatory natural law actually is without some sort of human determination. As we shall see, this problem would lead other Latitudinarian writers to attempt to establish better answers, most notably Richard Cumberland’s De legibus naturae (1672). Tenison’s slightly clumsy treatment of the natural law issue is a result of his unreflective use of traditional arguments in a theoretical environment where those assumptions were under pressure. Turning to Hobbes’s instrumental understanding of reason (decoupled from right reason), Tenison’s response is simply to protest that right reason does exist as the essence of the law of nature and ‘consisteth in that moral congruity or proportion which is betwixt the action . . . and the object, considered relatively in their proper circumstances’. Tenison suggests that this formula was plain enough to allow all but complete sceptics to identify appropriate moral actions, and to derive enough certainty to identify obligatory moral law. However, it is far from clear that such assumptions provided a convincing response in the light of Tenison’s earlier sceptical acknowledgement of the self-evident fact of moral pluralism. Nevertheless, it was important for Tenison to stress that the product of right reasoning reflected God’s essentially rational justice, not least because of the spectre of Scargill’s arbitrary and despotic God, whose power alone was the essence of his justice.85

83 84 85

Tenison, The creed of Mr. Hobbes examined, pp. 140–1. See, for example, Tenison’s discussions of social virtues on p. 141. Ibid., pp. 143–4.


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If Hobbes’s theory denied prior natural and divine obligation, this meant that his politics were fundamentally unstable and this thought leads Tenison to rehearse the standard Royalist account of Leviathan as rebel’s catechism: ‘the Fundamentals of your Policy are Hay and Stubble, and apter to set all things into a blaze, then to support Government, and the Laws of Society.’86 Self-preservation alone could warrant rebellion just as readily as it sustained obedience leaving pacts as ‘so many loose materials’ to be ‘trodden down, or broken through, by every herd of unruly men’.87 Although this argument was by 1670 absolutely standard fare, Tenison gave the discussion a personal twist by reopening the question of Hobbes’s conduct, a feature of the debate that had lain undisturbed since 1662. Taking up the baton where Wallis had left off, Tenison suggested that Hobbes effectively legitimated successful rebellion, associating him with the Cromwellian Thomas White. As for Hobbes’s defence of himself, Tenison pointed out that Hobbes had only argued that Cromwell’s title was unjust after the king’s return.88 Hobbes’s argument that he had only behaved in the same way as the Anglican bishops attracted particular scorn. Tenison also exposed Hobbes’s slightly thin claim that he had never written against episcopacy, drawing attention to chapter 47 of Leviathan, where Hobbes had ‘called Episcopacy a Praeterpolitical Church Government, and preferred Independencie above all other forms; for, at that time, it was gotten uppermost, and seem’d the growing Interest, and Presbytery decayed’. Tenison quoted the offending passage at length before concluding that Hobbes should ‘speak no more of your reverence for Episcopacy, whilst you have cried hail to it, and yet betraid it . . . It is not, for you, to pretend to loyalty, who place right in force, and teach people to assist the Usurper, with active compliance, against a dispossessed Prince.’89 Hobbes’s theory was seditious, and also unoriginal: ‘Carneades and divers others bottom’d Policy and self-Interest, and you have only wire-drawn that which is delivered by them in a lump.’90 When ‘Hobbes’ defends his account of sovereignty, Tenison concedes that ‘In some things you are just to the Praerogative of Kings’ and goes further to suggest that ‘For that which you have justly said in favour of a Monarch, had it bin printed before Forty-eight, it might have bin of good effect, at least it might have shewed a disposition to promote Loyalty.’91 But being published after Charles I’s execution ‘it served the purposes of

86 89

Ibid., p. 147. Ibid., p. 157.

87 90

Ibid., p. 147. Ibid., p. 162.

88 91

Ibid., pp. 150–1. Ibid., pp. 165–6.

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those people who had then the Militia in their hands.’ Even if Parliament hadn’t thanked him, notes Tenison, they should have done. Of course Hobbes’s doctrine, as Tenison’s own bibliography of Hobbes’s material recorded, had been published before 1648, but on Tenison’s account Leviathan was clearly exhibit A in the case against Hobbes’s loyalism. The fictional Hobbes is given no time to answer these charges, and the argument moves on to the baleful consequences of Hobbes treatment of scripture and Christian doctrine, both in terms of Hobbes’s scepticism about the authorship of the Pentateuch92 and the implications of the suggestion that scripture is only law when commanded by the sovereign. The latter charge had always been problematic for Hobbes’s Anglican critics, firstly because it implied that Christ’s authority was inferior to that of princes93 but also that prior to the existence of a Christian sovereign, the Apostles and Christianity itself apparently had no doctrinal authority at all. Tenison rightly identified that this was the source of Hobbes’s extreme Erastianism and countered with Hobbes’s acknowledgement in chapter 42 of Leviathan that after Christ’s ascension ecclesiastical power was in the Apostles and their successors. What was at issue for Hobbes was the character of the ecclesiastical power exercised, which could only be authoritative once commanded by a sovereign who was fully empowered to act as chief pastor. For Tenison, Hobbes’s elevation of the sovereign to chief minister without ordination was the main stumbling block; as the 37th article suggested, kings might have outward jurisdiction but they had no right to minister the word or exercise sacramental powers. If Hobbes had read Thorndike’s defence of a separate ecclesiastical power, suggests Tenison, he would have seen the error of his ways. Christian doctrine required no additional sanctions to make it law.94 One of the most controversial features of Hobbes’s Erastian ecclesiology was his apparent endorsement of outward compliance to whatever religion was commanded by the magistrate. This was an argument which had resurfaced in the debate over Parker’s Hobbism. Tenison doesn’t address the question of Anglicanism directly, but he points out that Hobbes’s doctrine is simply incompatible with Christianity. If Hobbes were right the Apostles were guilty of sin in propagating the gospels under a nonChristian magistrate, and the Christian martyrs had made a needless 92

93 94

Tenison argues that Hobbes picked this up from Isaac de la Peyre`re. For discussion of the complicated origins of positions that the two men shared, see Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Ezra and the Bible: The History of a Subversive Idea’, in Aspects of Hobbes, pp. 383–431. Tenison, The creed of Mr. Hobbes examined, p. 182. Ibid., p. 188.


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sacrifice in throwing away their lives. In fact, argues Tenison, Christianity requires that ‘outward profession answereth to the inward act of assent’ and public profession of one’s faith.95 Tenison distances himself from Hobbes here on the issue of subscribing to heathen magistrates but avoids getting into the thornier Parkerian question of the extent to which one is obliged to subscribe to the Christian magistrate’s ecclesiastical rules. In the remaining two articles Tenison examines Hobbes’s unusual account of the afterlife. Hobbes’s redefinition of Heaven as God’s restored kingdom on earth and his portrait of Hell as a finite return to earthly existence leaves Tenison, like many of his contemporaries, simply puzzled. Tenison’s objections range from the practical (how will there be room for everyone on earth?96) to the theoretical concerns that follow from Tenison’s belief in the existence of an immaterial soul. Hobbes’s account of material resurrection presents philosophical problems (if man’s material existence is subject to change, is all the matter involved resurrected?97). Again, characteristically, Tenison picks away at the underdetermined elements of Hobbes’s re-reading of Christian theology to raise doubts about its sincerity. For every piece of scripture Hobbes can cite to support his position, there is plenty of evidence supporting the orthodox view. When Hobbes deals with scripture, comments Tenison, he enters into it not ‘by any expedite unlocking of its mysteries; being resolved to force a way, through it, to your own novel conceits’.98 Eventually, true to form, Hobbes breaks off the debate with his abusive closing comments to Wallis in Stigmai. The young divine argues that ‘if the scene be so changed, that we must rail and quarrel instead of debating matters with sober reason, it is time to have done.’ Tenison’s work was a critical success, running to a second edition published in the spring of 1671.99 The dialogue format and mock presentation of Hobbes’s views may also have inspired similar modes of presentation in John Eachard’s popular dialogues (the first of which was published in 1672) and John Templer’s Idea theologiae Leviathanis (1673). There is also evidence that with the difficulty in getting hold of Hobbes’s works, Tenison’s book, like Scargill’s Recantation, began to serve as a source 95 99

Ibid., p. 199. 96 Ibid., p. 215. 97 Ibid., p. 229. 98 Ibid., p. 248. See, for example, the review in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions 64 (10 October 1670), pp. 2080–1, which praised Tenison’s attack upon Hobbes’s materialism. These aspects of Tenison’s work clearly went down well with scientifically inclined Anglicans; Robert Sharrock’s collection of sermons De finibus virtutis Christianae (Oxford, 1673) includes anti-Hobbesian comments that seem to be drawn from Tenison’s work, see particularly the comments about memory and the soul on pp. 113, 117–18.

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of information about Hobbes’s views. One commonplace book from the period presents a summary of Hobbes’s doctrine in a list of twelve articles that clearly follows the formulae of Tenison’s ‘creed’.100 As we shall see, one paradoxical effect of the renewed critical interest in Hobbes’s work was to make such accounts of Hobbes’s views available to readers who may not have had the chance to read the original. Ironically much of the superficial and fashionable Hobbism decried by the clergy in the 1670s may have had its origins from these sources. Hobbism and natural jurisprudence Tenison’s critique of Hobbes was a largely defensive engagement; Tenison was concerned to restate, with nods to contemporary natural theology, Hobbes’s distance from mainstream theology and moral philosophy. However, as we have seen, the problem thrown up by Parker’s Hobbism was the problematic status of natural law as a binding obligation. Even Tenison’s expicitly anti-Hobbesian account demonstrated the potential dangers that the Latitudinarians found themselves in. Tenison was more than happy to subscribe to a great deal of what Hobbes had to say about sovereignty, but his account of a natural law that was interpreted in particular instances by sovereigns sat uneasily with his assurance that natural law carried an eternal and indispensable obligation. If Tenison wasn’t willing to grasp the Hobbesian nettle when it came to natural law theory, other Latitudinarian writers were. In the early 1670s we can see a number of attempts to rethink the obligatory status of natural law in a way that would explain the compatibility of powerful sovereignty with a natural and divine obligation and thus avoid the association with Hobbism. Some of these responses even attempted to show that this move could be made using Hobbes’s own premises. One example can be found in the writings of one John Shafte, whose pamphlet, The great law of nature, composed in the period 1670–1, was subtitled ‘self-preservation examined, asserted and vindicated from Mr Hobbes his opinions’. Shafte noted that if, as Hobbes suggested, individuals in the state of nature pursued rights without reference to natural laws a state of war would inevitably result. Like Velthuysen, Shafte argued that in fact individuals were unlikely to act this way precisely because they could see the potential dangers of such a state. Self-preservation required sociable 100

BL Sloane MS 1458, f. 35; see also The last sayings (1680), where three items from Tenison’s Creed are presented as verbatim quotes from Hobbes.


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behaviour and natural sociability could therefore be regarded as a practical dictate of natural law.101 This argument removed the necessity for the creation of an artificial source of moral and political authority: political society was natural, and a consequence of natural law. Shafte argued that he had made this case ‘to shew out of these principles granted by Mr Hobbes, that those eternal laws of Justice, Charity, Temperance, Reward, Virtue &c . . . are makers and foundations of it [natural justice], and grounded in the very nature of man, so as to oblige him to act according to them, though there were no civil magistrate in the world, or though the civil magistrate positively commanded the contrary.’102 In other words, Hobbes’s own principles required him to acknowledge natural law’s priority over the exercise of rights. Shafte’s defence of natural law was not, however, the sole purpose of his pamphlet. The great law of nature also attempted to sketch out the compatibility between an obligatory natural law and the power of the sovereign. Arbitration is necessary for social harmony making the sovereign’s arbitrative role an extension of natural law.103 Although Shafte conceded that this might sound like an apology for arbitrary and despotic rule, he argues that it is not. The sovereign power is guided in its decisions by the natural obligation to the common good, the good for which it is established in the first place.104 Shafte argues that this is the case with the English monarchy, which is, as a result, far from being a Hobbesian tyranny: ‘Though there be one monarch, and the government resembling that applauded by Mr Hobbs’, wrote Shafte, ‘yet doth he not pretend to that arbitrary and unlimited power Mr Hobbs would give his prince.’105 The final pages reveal that the pamphlet was also a contribution to the toleration debate, and Shafte appears to take Parker’s side. Although people may well disagree over what is required by conscience, he argues, the free exercise of contradictory beliefs puts society at risk. Natural law thus requires that the magistrate, for the common good, must judge ‘what liberty may be or is consistent with the civil government and not every private person’.106 The consequence is that religious freedom in public worship, other than what is permitted by the magistrate ‘is not a thing to be desired’. Liberty of conscience, if introduced, ‘will certainly dissolve and bring to ruin all civil government’. Like Parker, Shafte prioritised a natural duty to the common good over individual rights, and made sovereignty the guardian of the former. 101 103

J. Shafte, The great law of nature (1673), p. 18. Ibid., pp. 25–6. 104 Ibid., p. 41. 105 Ibid.

102 106

Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 79.

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If Parker had run into trouble for his Hobbism, Shafte’s response was to reinforce the thought that it was possible to deploy a powerful account of sovereignty which could be distinguished from Leviathan. The trick here was to stress that sovereignty could be seen as an extension of nature’s law, not as something human and artificial that was required to create effective obligation where it did not exist. This was why Hobbes’s state of nature would become such a crucial target for writers seeking to vindicate this view of sovereignty. Leviathan’s absolutism was required in order to overcome the instability of an anarchic state of war. If it could be demonstrated that the state of nature was bound by obligatory natural laws then sovereign power was determined by those natural laws and did not determine them. Parker had sketched this answer and Shafte had developed it, but it would be the Anglican clergyman Richard Cumberland who would offer the definitive account in a work that was explicitly aimed at Hobbes’s theory. Cumberland’s De legibus naturae Richard Cumberland (1632–1718) was the younger son of a Salisbury Court tailor, educated at St Paul’s (where he became friendly with Pepys) and Magdalene College Cambridge.107 Like many of the young men educated in the universities during the 1650s, Cumberland developed an interest in mathematics and the new natural philosophy, interests that would shape his peculiarly scientific attempt to refute Hobbes’s natural jurisprudence. Appointment to a rural parish in Northamptonshire might have signalled the end of Cumberland’s significance, but in 1667 he became the client of, and possibly domestic chaplain to, Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Clarendon’s successor as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. This connection, which gained Cumberland affluent livings in Stamford, places Cumberland at the centre of the religious politics of the late 1660s. Bridgeman had sponsored the abortive Latitudinarian attempts to bring about a comprehension in 1668; Cumberland’s close friend and editor Hezekiah Burton had been a prime mover in these negotiations alongside the indefatigable John Wilkins. Cumberland was married in Simon Patrick’s church in Covent Garden in the autumn of 1670 and Samuel Parker would license his book in the summer of 1671. Although an abstract and occasionally abstruse work of theory, Cumberland’s De legibus spoke directly to the dilemmas facing 107

For Cumberland, see J. Parkin, Science, Religion and Politics in Restoration England: Richard Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae (Woodbridge, 1999) and L. Kirk, Richard Cumberland and Natural Law (Cambridge, 1987).


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those Anglicans accused of Hobbism in the later 1660s; how to demonstrate against Hobbes that there existed a divinely ordained and obligatory natural law. What makes Cumberland’s contribution to this discussion particularly distinctive is his determination to refute Hobbes not by simple reassertions of traditional positions, but from Hobbes’s own premises. This was an unusual move, and one that brought Cumberland’s theory into a closer dialogue with its Hobbesian sources than many critics managed. For that reason alone, Cumberland has been seen as one of Hobbes’s most interesting and creative critics, and one who would influence other antiHobbesian writers, including Samuel Parker and even continental critics like Samuel Pufendorf.108 Cumberland’s primary aim was to demonstrate not only the content of natural law, but also its status as God’s obligatory law. The latter issue had been a recurrent problem in Protestant adaptations of scholastic natural law arguments, as we have seen already in our discussion of Robert Sharrock’s work. Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis was acknowledged to be one of the most important of these adaptations. Grotius had followed the scholastic suggestion that the law of nature was a law of reason, demonstrable from empirical evidence of human practices. For Grotius’s Protestant readership, there were two problems with this approach. Firstly, it was far from clear that the empirical examples offered decisive evidence of the content of the law of nature, and secondly there was the crucial problem as to whether the dictates of fallible human reason could by themselves constitute laws. As John Selden argued, the only way that ‘laws’ of nature could be understood to be binding was as commands of a superior (in this case God). Selden’s insistence on this voluntarist position led him to argue controversially that God had legislated directly in handing down positive moral rules to Adam and Noah. Other Protestant theologians, such as Jeremy Taylor, argued that effective obligation came from 108

The editor of the 1750 edition of Hobbes’s Works commented that ‘Dr Cumberland’s excellent Treatise Of the Laws of Nature was . . . written against our Author’s System, and is deservedly esteemed the closest and best Book of its kind; indeed, he is the only one of all Mr Hobbes’s Antagonists, that understood the Advantages the old Man had, as appears by his chusing a fresh Ground, and disputing in a way quite different from the rest.’ The moral and political works of Thomas Hobbes (1750), xxxv, note m. See also G. C. Robertson’s remark that Cumberland’s effectiveness as a critic derived from the fact that he stood ‘much closer to Hobbes in method of inquiry than any other of his opponents.’ Robertson, Hobbes (London, 1886), p. 219; John Dewey also noted that ‘Cumberland, not Cudworth, was Hobbes’s most intelligent opponent, and in his De legibus naturae we find an attempt to meet Hobbes upon his own ground.’ John Dewey, ‘The Motivation of Hobbes’s Political Philosophy’, in Studies in the History of Ideas, i (Columbia, 1918), p. 108.

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God’s revealed word in scripture. Hobbes, notoriously, rejected that path to argue that rational theorems could only have the formal status of obligatory external laws when authorised as such by the sovereign. Hobbes’s solution to the problem pushed the voluntarist critique to the limit and appeared to sever any connection between natural reason and God’s identifiable will. This is what Cumberland sought to restore, in an attempt to show that the practical propositions of reason could also be shown to be God’s will, as obligatory natural laws. Crucial to this attempt was Cumberland’s faith in the new natural philosophy. In the 1650s Ward’s Philosophical essay and More’s Antidote to atheism had attempted to argue that the study of the natural world could be an integral part of a natural theology that had something to say about God’s will, a position that had subsequently become a key feature of the Latitudinarian engagement with science, and a recurrent argument in the Latitudinarian engagement with Hobbes. Cumberland’s work was part of the ongoing struggle to demonstrate that natural philosophy did not simply reduce to the atheistic materialism commonly associated with Hobbes. Flagging his admiration of the Royal Society’s projects throughout De legibus, together with admiring references to Ward in particular, Cumberland argued that the new natural philosophy offered a solution to the problem of moral obligation: ‘the whole of moral philosophy, and of the laws of nature’, he wrote, ‘is ultimately resolved into natural observations known by the experience of all men, or into conclusions of true natural philosophy’. Careful observation would reveal the laws of nature and God’s will, scientifically. The ambition to develop scientia moralis was more commonly associated with Hobbes and this was where Cumberland wanted to counter Hobbes, not only in his own scientific idiom, but with many of his own scientific premises. Cumberland’s alternative scientia would work from presuppositions explicitly allowed by Hobbes: God as first cause and mechanistic theory. Cumberland’s strategy was twofold; to show that science properly applied to ethics refuted Hobbes, and that Hobbes’s own supposedly scientific inferences were deeply flawed. Cumberland would produce an anti-Hobbesian scientia moralis from Hobbes’s own arguments. Cumberland’s starting point was to re-establish the connection between God as first cause and right reasoning. Although Hobbes had used the term in De Cive, he had made it clear in the 1647 annotation that he rejected the scholastic account of right reason as an infallible faculty linking God and man. Cumberland agreed that right reasoning was not an infallible faculty, but it could nevertheless still be understood as a faculty ‘not false in these


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Acts of judging’.109 In other words, reason could still deliver true judgements from the objective evidence of the nature of things, as they had been created by God. Cumberland argued that if God was, as Hobbes had suggested in chapter 12 of Leviathan, the author of all motion in the universe, then it followed that God was author of all sense impressions received by man.110 If individuals then drew rational conclusions from that sense data, it would follow that not only was the conclusion true, but it was one that was willed by God.111 Anticipating the Hobbesian objection that individuals would find it easy to make false connections, Cumberland argues that this was where the rigorous observational discipline of natural philosophy could help; true natural relationships could in fact be identified if sufficient care was taken in observing them. Cumberland’s first chapter uses this argument to deconstruct Hobbesian claims about self-preservation and subjective rights. Cumberland agrees with Hobbes that the desire for self-preservation is a basic feature of human nature, but rejects the Hobbesian suggestion that it necessarily leads to narrow self-interest and a rejection of natural sociability.112 Objective facts about the nature of man suggest that this is so. Individuals self-evidently lack a capacity for self-sufficiency. This natural limitation, combined with a manifest inability to coerce others makes it naturally necessary to procure the help of others by offering them services in return. Self-preservation therefore, far from encouraging anti-social behaviour, rationally requires forms of sociability as a consequence of the objective limits to human nature. Cumberland deploys the same argument to undermine Hobbes’s notional right to all things. For Hobbes to suggest that an individual can have a theoretical right to all things simply ignores the natural fact that it is impossible to exercise such rights. Practical reasoning upon these facts leads to the unavoidable conclusion that a notional right to all things is simply an absurdity and that goods and services must naturally be divided if they are to be used at all.113 In chapter 2, Cumberland examines human nature with a view to demonstrating that natural facts again have ethical consequences running against the grain of Hobbes’s theory. If the first chapter had shown that individuals are bound to sociable behaviour by their limitations, the second 109 112

113

Ibid., 2.5, p. 377. 110 Ibid., 1.10, pp. 302–3. 111 Ibid., Introduction, 8, p. 255. This position was something of a commonplace amongst Latitudinarian writers who acknowledged that self-preservation had a role, but only as a starting point in discovering wider ethical obligations. See, for example Thomas Traherne, Christian ethicks (1675), p. 519; J. Tillotson, Sermons, ed. R. Barker (1704), I, p. 375; J. Wilkins, Of the principles and duties of natural religion (1675), p. 12. Cumberland, A treatise of the laws of nature, 1.28, p. 339.

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demonstrated that they were also designed to flourish in society. The logical consequence for Cumberland is that right reasoning about human nature inevitably points to the natural goods to be had from society. This empirical observation has an ethical consequence; because the pursuit of the common good is a greater realisation of human nature than narrow selfinterest, the individual should, therefore, prioritise the common good, in which his own good would be most effectively realised. To be truly selfinterested was not to follow Hobbes’s reductive path, but to embrace the common good at all times, and this was effectively the law of nature. Cumberland argued that a more careful reading of nature derived the practical proposition that man’s proper action should in fact be ‘an endeavour, according to our ability, to promote the common good of the whole system of rationals’. Cumberland’s main problem was to prove that a requirement for sociable behaviour could be identified as the will of God as lawgiver. Cumberland had set himself a hard task here because he had deliberately refused to deploy scripture or a priori assumptions about God’s attributes, precisely because such arguments were rejected by Hobbes. Cumberland’s novel solution in chapter 5 of De legibus was to argue that another careful examination of nature would reveal the existence of God’s rewards and punishments for observance and dereliction of the law of nature. This would answer Hobbes on his own terms, piling up the evidence that there was a lawgiver who had inscribed obligatory laws into nature, complete with a confirmatory system of sanctions.114 Cumberland’s rewards and punishments take various forms, from the conventional pangs of conscience discussed by Sharrock through to more ingenious quasi-scientific discussions. These were designed to show that mechanistic physics could do more for ethics than Hobbes’s theory seemed to suggest. If the community of rational agents behaved like a closed mechanical system, actions contrary to the determination of the whole system would bring about two forms of punishment: reduction in the good of the malefactor on the one hand, and on the other a rational desire amongst other agents to punish the wrongdoer. Cumberland uses this model to provide a reinterpretation of Hobbes’s state of war. On Hobbes’s account, individuals pursuing self-interest inevitably fall into a 114

Ibid., 1.12, p. 308. Although Cumberland’s scheme appears to run the risk of deism, he argued that natural sanctions were not causes of obligation in themselves but rather an indicator that there was a lawgiver whose will was the cause of obligation, thus satisfying voluntarist criteria for effective obligation. See Parkin, Science, Religion and Politics, pp. 108–9 and note 64.


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state of conflict. Cumberland doesn’t disagree. In fact Hobbes’s argument serves to demonstrate his argument about rewards and punishments. The war and destruction of the Hobbesian state of nature are in fact natural punishments for breaking the law of nature.115 Selfish behaviour undermines the common good and encourages non-cooperative and violent responses. Conflict is the awful punishment for unnatural, selfish and malevolent behaviour. Hobbes had been right to see a connection between self-interest and conflict, but wrong to diagnose it as the natural, as opposed to the aberrant, state of man. By contrast, peace, security and prosperity are counted amongst the natural rewards attending the pursuit of the common good and the virtuous observance of the law of nature. As this brief summary of Cumberland’s positive argument indicates, Cumberland seeks at every point to demonstrate that a scientific and empirical approach to the question of natural law delivers a theory that is almost the polar opposite of Hobbes’s position, from materials that Hobbes would allow. Hobbes’s ideas thus play an important role in the construction of Cumberland’s alternative theory and the criticism is central to the development of Cumberland’s system. At each stage, Hobbes’s premises are reclaimed to an orthodox end. The political point of this exercise is revealed in chapter 9 which contains the most sustained engagement with Hobbes’s political ideas, and Cumberland’s aim here is to distinguish between a legitimate natural law-based account of sovereign power, and Hobbes’s illegitimate and ultimately subversive alternative. Cumberland’s positive argument follows the outline of Parker’s theory of sovereignty in claiming that absolute sovereign power is a necessary co-ordinating function of any attempt to pursue the common good in a particular society. This function is present in every form of human society, patriarchal or political, and historically sovereignty has developed from the former to the latter. Although Cumberland was keen to stress that this sovereignty is limited by the end for which it was established (the common good), he also argues that those measures required for the common good are ‘few and very evident’ which means that the limits of the civil power ‘remain very extensive’116 largely involving the non-violation of natural property rights.117 Cumberland’s sovereign turns out to have an extensive jurisdiction in church and state, 115 117

Cumberland, A treatise of the laws of nature, 5.24, p. 546. 116 Ibid., 9.6, p. 715. Ibid., 9.6, pp. 715–16. See J. Parkin, ‘Probability, Punishments and Property: Richard Cumberland’s Sceptical Science of Sovereignty’, in I. Hunter and D. Saunders (eds.), Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 76–90.

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legitimated only by its responsibility to act for the common good. If this sounded like Parker’s Hobbism by the back door, Cumberland was inevitably concerned to untangle the charge. On Cumberland’s account, Hobbes’s rejection of the idea of right reason meant that there was no objective standard by which such decisions could be made. The sovereign’s decisions are necessarily arbitrary. In contrast, Cumberland argued that his sovereignty was always circumscribed with reference to an identifiable common good. This did mean that on occasion, in controversies that it was necessary to end for the common good, it was necessary for the contending parties to ‘willingly relinquish their Decision to the Reason of the CommonWealth, and fully acquiesce therein’ just as Hobbes had suggested, but not for Hobbesian reasons; rather ‘this common and right Reason persuades; because it is certain, That this Decision will either be right, or a righter cannot be had, consistently with the Common Good.’118 This reasoning, argued Cumberland, ‘is preferable to that given by Mr Hobbes upon this account, that it supposes, that there is somewhere among Men a practical right Reason; and gives them such Directions, that they may either reach it exactly, or that which approaches nearest it, which is sufficient for all the purposes of Human Happiness and our Duty.’119 In making such arguments Cumberland sought to distinguish between a legitimate natural law-based theory of sovereignty and Hobbes’s illegitimate and arbitrary model. Cumberland’s parallel strategy was to devote the rest of chapter 9 to an extensive critique demonstrating that Hobbes’s theory, rather than supporting the powers of princes, ‘is so inconsistent with the Establishment and Continuance of all States; that, if that obtain’d, they could either never be form’d, or must, of necessity, be immediately dissolv’d’.120 Cumberland marshals a variety of arguments, some already familiar from the literature, to demonstrate that Hobbes’s position findamentally undermines sovereignty. Hobbes’s description of men in general and princes in particular seemed calculated to alienate subjects rather than winning them over: ‘Who could trust such a one with his Life and Fortune and all his Hopes?’ asked Cumberland: ‘Must not all of necessity be afraid that he will destroy them one by one?’121 Cumberland deploys the familiar argument that Hobbes’s contract is subversive because individuals retain a natural right to defend themselves, referring in addition to the notorious passage in Leviathan about the justice of condemned conspirators attempting to defend their lives.122 In the same 118 119

Cumberand, A treatise of the laws of nature, 9.9 p. 721. Ibid. 120 Ibid., 9.8, p. 718. 121 Ibid., 9.9, p. 719.

122

Ibid., 9.10, pp. 724–5.


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vein Cumberland zeroes in on Hobbes’s problematic discussion of slavery in chapter 8 of De Cive, condemning Hobbes’s suggestion that where no credit is given to a promise, then there is no compact and no obligation. In Hobbes’s theory this has the unusual result that physically bound slaves have no obligations, thus allowing them to kill their master (if they got the chance) without injustice. Although Hobbes’s argument here referred to quite specific examples involving physical imprisonment, Cumberland saw danger in the possibility that ordinary subjects might find it difficult to discern whether or not they were trusted by the prince and thus be able to argue that they, too, were free of obligation.123 Cumberland raises a similar concern about Hobbes’s qualification that compacts can be nullified by ‘just fears’.124 As with the more traditional example of the right of selfdefence, Cumberland draws attention to subversive risks attached to the subjective judgements required of Hobbesian citizens. Cumberland’s next target is Hobbes’s treatment of oaths, whose additional binding force Hobbes had effectively denied, a move that Cumberland felt ‘destroys Civil Society, by destroying or rendering ineffectual its greatest Security’. Turning again to Hobbes’s account of contract, Cumberland argues that when Hobbesian contractors agree not to resist the sovereign, the obedience produced is merely passive and not active. At the same time, even if subjects do convey sufficient power to their sovereigns, Hobbes leaves them to be the judge of what that power should be, reopening the prospect of subjects setting their own bounds to obedience. If Hobbes is in fact basing the power of the sovereign to rule and punish upon his initial right of nature to all things, then that proposition fails because Cumberland has already demonstrated the incoherence of the foundational argument.125 In addition Cumberland points out that if a subject rebels (thereby putting himself in the state of nature) he has the same right to punish his prince as the prince has to punish him. Should the sovereign decide to exercise Hobbesian powers, Cumberland argues, they would inevitably weaken themselves. If the sovereign were to hold that he was not bound by civil law, natural law or scripture, the way is open for political opponents to accuse them of being ‘wholly lawless’ and denies them the possibility of praise for their wisdom and justice. Without some self-evident standard of wisdom and justice ‘Subjects will of necessity lessen their Reverence for the Laws.’126 By removing standards of judgement, Hobbes also encourages rash behaviour amongst princes, who have 123 125

Ibid., 9.11, pp. 726–7. 124 Ibid., p. 727; cf. De Cive 2.11. Cumberland, A treatise of the laws of nature, 9.12, pp. 731–2.

126

Ibid., 9.13, pp. 737–8.

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in fact rejected the privilege Hobbes offers them. Cumberland points out that Hobbes is inconsistent on the power that he would grant the sovereign when he concedes both that there are things that the magistrate cannot command (suicide, regicide or patricide) and that it is possible for the magistrate to sin against the law of nature.127 Equally, in De Cive Hobbes had also suggested that the state did not necessarily have carte blanche to command whatever it liked with respect to God,128 suggesting that in spite of Hobbes’s juridical gymnastics, the reason of the commonwealth is not always right.129 The second example of self-defeating Hobbesian power comes from the one-sided nature of the Hobbesian contract. As the contract is made between the subjects, the sovereign is not bound at all. Cumberland argued that this was an opinion ‘before unheard of, new out of Mr Hobbes’s Mint’.130 Cumberland asks whether subjects would really grant the power for sovereigns to free themselves from any obligation. Such a move would automatically violate a law of nature requiring a common obligation to respect the common good. Destroying the obligation to compacts removes the whole reason why states should either be formed or continue. Hobbes’s theory thus gives an unstable basis for any kind of political community, not least because subjects would never have any reason to trust their rulers.131 The same is true for Hobbes’s international relations theory, as laid out in chapter 13 of Leviathan, portraying the international scene as a lawless state of war: ‘This, tho it seem to flatter them [Princes], under the appearance of Liberty, does in truth greatly weaken their Power, and leaves them hardly any Security.’ No state, argues Cumberland, is self-sufficient, and yet Hobbes’s theory removes the possibility of stable agreements. Trade would become difficult and there would be no safety or indeed any role at all for ambassadors. These, remarks Cumberland sarcastically, ‘are the Gifts and no-Gifts’ which Hobbes offers to princes out of a desire to flatter them. Turning to the more directly seditious aspects of Hobbes’s theory, Cumberland draws attention to Hobbes’s discussion of treason, described in De Cive as a violation of the law of nature rather than the civil law;132 a rebel thus puts himself back into the state of nature with a natural right to 127 129

130 131

Ibid., 9.13, pp. 740–1; Cf. De Cive 6.13. 128 De Cive 15.18. In fact, the reason of the Commonwealth is always right on its own terms; the crucial distinction for Hobbes was that civil laws effectively defined what was just or unjust, and therefore what was externally obligatory. Cumberland, A treatise of the laws of nature, 9.13, p. 742. Ibid., 9.13, pp. 742–4. 132 De Cive 14.21.


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put his sovereign to death. Hobbes’s argument here is particularly reprehensible, notes Cumberland, because Hobbes has done so much in all of his works to undermine the thought that the law of nature is a law at all. If the law of nature is only properly a law as it is part of the civil law, it thus follows ‘That Treason is not forbid by any Law properly so-call’d, and therefore, that it is not properly a Crime.’ Hobbes encourages this view, argues Cumberland, when he states that the law of nature does not oblige external acts. In effect the civil power and the obligation to obey it are supported by a foundation that Hobbes has completely undermined. Cumberland concludes that ultimately Hobbes has created a theory that encourages rebellion by granting sovereign power to whoever can seize it, drawing attention to Hobbes’s comment in the dedication to Leviathan that he defends supreme power like the geese warned the garrison of the Roman capitol, not because of who they were, but because they were there. Even the softened Latin version seeks to insinuate the same thing ‘more covertly’, and this seemed to Cumberland a sufficient proof ‘That Hobbes, whilst he pretends on the one Hand to bestow Gifts upon Princes, does with the other treacherously strike a Dagger to their Hearts.’133 Cumberland’s arguments, both in terms of his novel natural law theory and his description of Hobbes’s subversive position, would become a particularly important and influential anti-Hobbesian statement. Samuel Parker recognised that Cumberland’s theory reinforced his position and in 1681 he incorporated Cumberland’s theory of rewards and punishments into his Demonstration of the divine authority of the law of nature to strengthen the anti-Hobbesian features of his own argument.134 On the continent, another writer accused of Hobbism, Samuel Pufendorf, would do the same, incorporating anti-Hobbesian elements of Cumberland’s work into the second edition of his De jure naturae (1684). James Tyrrell would also produce an English version of Cumberland’s thesis in his 1692 Brief disquisition of the law of nature, a work that was partially designed as a response to accusations of Hobbism surrounding the publication of Locke’s Essay concerning human understanding in 1690. For all of these writers, Cumberland had demonstrated how one could talk about natural obligation in such a way as to avoid association with Hobbes. At the same time, Cumberland’s account of obligatory natural law grounded a theory of sovereignty delivering the kind of political authority that these thinkers 133 134

Cumberland, A treatise of the laws of nature, 9.14, p. 752. Parker, A demonstration of the divine authority of the law of nature and of the Christian religion (1681), p. ix.

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required. That such an account of sovereignty not only shared Hobbesian features, but was crucially built upon premises that Hobbes would allow, demonstrates the extent to which the Leviathan could be tamed, and put to work in mainstream political theory. But the sanitising of Hobbes’s ideas was only a part of Cumberland’s achievement. His representation of Hobbes as a patron of sedition, although not novel in itself, would play an important role in shaping the public perception of Hobbes’s work. As we shall see in a later chapter, it would be Cumberland’s representations of Hobbes’s theory that would be publicised in one of the most influential public responses to Hobbes’s work, the University of Oxford’s 1683 Judgement and decree.135 Responses to the Latin Leviathan Cumberland’s attack on Hobbes was one of the first to make use of the new Latin edition of Leviathan that had first appeared as one of the three parts of the 1668 Opera. The reception of this edition in England has been largely ignored, but contemporary readers not only registered that the new edition existed, but also that it contained some significant changes. Hobbes had produced the Latin edition during the period 1667–8, part of his extraordinary burst of activity during the later 1660s. He made numerous subtle changes to the text, some clearly in response to the critical reception of the earlier work. The most obvious change was one of tone. The provocative language of the English edition was considerably calmed down in the Latin, and some of the more controversial satire and abuse quietly dropped.136 Some of the more controversial sections were also excised, including the whole of the ‘Review and Conclusion’ and Hobbes’s positive remarks about Independency in chapter 47. Hobbes also revised his arguments at some points. He jettisons the idea that Moses might be a member of the Trinity, admitting that this was a mistake, replacing the argument with the marginally more acceptable suggestion that God represented Himself as a person in the Trinity when He created the world. Other arguments are tidied up, in some cases to clarify them, and at other points to remove hostages to fortune, for example the suggestion that there might be natural rewards and punishments attending misgovernment is removed from the end of chapter 31.137 135 136 137

See below, pp. 371–3. See the examples discussed by Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 398, 405, 408, 409, 410. Cumberland notes that in the Latin edition this passage is ‘somewhat maim’d’, A treatise of the laws of nature, 5.51, p. 624.


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The most significant addition came at the end where the ‘Review’ was replaced by a three-chapter appendix designed to head off the most serious criticism of Hobbes’s work. As with all of Hobbes’s writing in the 1660s, the appendix took the form of a ‘master and student’ dialogue in which an interlocutor (A) questions B, who seems to be Hobbes. In the first chapter Hobbes develops his own interpretation of the Nicene Creed with a view to explaining its compatibility with his own theological views. The second chapter on heresy picks up a theme that recurred throughout Hobbes’s work during this period as the philosopher sought to head off any potential prosecution. In common with his other contributions on the topic, Hobbes deployed a historical investigation into the origin and development of the term heresy to expose its appropriation by the church and its eventual politicisation. Hobbes argued that the only authority that could punish a heretic was the civil authority, and one could only be classified as a heretic or an atheist if one had clearly stated something directly contrary to law. Of course Hobbes’s reading of the Nicene Creed demonstrated that his own views accorded with the official doctrine of the Church of England, and therefore Hobbes could never be prosecuted for heresy, blasphemy or atheism. The last chapter dealt with some of the more serious theologial objections to Leviathan. In response to the now common objection that Hobbes’s philosophy made God matter or nothing, Hobbes responded, as he had done in 1662, that God was material. Hobbes also defended as orthodox his definition of religion as fear of invisible powers, on the grounds that Ecclesiastes and the Psalmist inferred the same thing. Hobbes explains his retraction of his initial formulation of the Trinity and defends his materialist soteriology. He also defends the thought that an authoritative church could not exist without a sovereign and that his reading of the Naaman passage in the Book of Kings really did give permission for individuals to obey their sovereign and to deny Christ if commanded, a reading that Hobbes argued had been legitimated by the Nicene Council. Finally he made it clear that the sovereign was entitled to administer the sacraments and gave his standard defence of credal minimalism (i.e. that the one article of belief in Christ actually entailed many others). It was a typical Hobbesian performance in that the philosopher offered an unashamed restatement of some of his most controversial theses and argued that they were entirely consistent with the doctrine of the Church of England and the law of the land. The fact that Hobbes was making this case suggests that his new edition was partly aimed at an English audience. Hobbes’s correspondence indicates that he was interested in the distribution of the Opera in England.

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Because the work was published in Amsterdam by Blaeu he was not required to seek a licence and the result was that towards the end of 1668 Hobbes’s most controversial books were freely available in England for the first time since the 1660s, distributed by the London bookseller Cornelius Bee. A separate edition of the Latin Leviathan, also published by Blaeu, followed in 1670 and a London publishing acquaintance of Blaeu named John Thompson resissued unsold copies of that edition in 1676 and 1678, apparently without incurring the wrath of the authorities.138 News of the Latin edition was soon circulating amongst Hobbes’s clerical adversaries. An unimpressed John Tillotson wrote to More’s friend John Worthington in April 1669 reporting a sighting of the latest version of Leviathan in the Opera Philosophica: Mr Hobbes hath added nothing in this new edition, but only an Appendix to his Leviathan, which is an explication of the Council of Nice, in which he gives an account of his own faith. Some things in it seem to be knavishly intended, but the greatest part is very foolish. He still maintains that God is a body, but retracts what he had written before concerning Moses, viz: that he was the first Person of the Trinity, which, he is now convinced, was a mistake.139

The clergymen may have been expecting more. William Lucy, at that time working on the next instalment of his response to Leviathan, had delayed publication because he had heard that Hobbes was going to make amendments to the new edition.140 The expectation was that any changes might constitute a substantial retraction of Hobbes’s position, but, as Tillotson’s comments on the new edition suggest, they found the changes distinctly underwhelming. When Lucy finally caught up with the new edition, he was disappointed that it did very little to amend the English work. Hobbes had removed ‘only the virulency of some English Phrases, now and then more gently expressed in Latine’.141 The changes to the text might not be all that substantial, but to the eagle-eyed and inventive critic, they did offer a chance to expose evidence of Hobbes covering his tracks, or contradictions in his earlier work. Cumberland, for example, a careful reader of all of 138

139 140 141

See Schuhmann, Introduction, pp. 256–7. Schuhmann suggests that the Thompson reissue implies poor sales on the Continent, and that the second reissue means that the edition didn’t fare any better in England. Another edition published by London bookseller Mark Pardoe is advertised in the Term Catalogues, I, p. 473, but according to Schuhmann no copies are known to be extant, and it may be a ghost title. Schuhmann, Introduction, p. 250. Worthington, Diary and correspondence, vol. II, Pt II 1886, p. 316: Tillotson to Worthington, 22 April 1669. Lucy, An answer to Mr. Hobbs his Leviathan with observations, censures, and confutations of divers errours, beginning at the seventeenth chapter of that book (1673), Postscript. Ibid.


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Hobbes’s works, pointed out that in chapter 6 Hobbes had removed from his definition of benevolence, good will and charity the thought that it might be extended to men in general in the form of ‘good nature’ ‘as not consisting with his other opinions’.142 But at the same time, another change at the end of chapter 31, had reintroduced the thought that there might be such a thing as the public good.143 Hobbes thus still found it difficult to expunge a notion of the common good from his philosophy practically, even if he tried to do so conceptually. Cumberland also pointed to the fact that even though Hobbes had moderated the notorious case in chapter 21 where the group of rebels are permitted to defend each other without injustice, the effect of the passage was still seditious: ‘I think, indeed, he was to be commended, that, in the Latin Edition he somewhat soften’d so wicked a Doctrine; yet even these second Thoughts seem destructive enough, and to breathe forth nothing less than Rebellion.’144 Cumberland’s conclusion was that in spite of the minor changes, Hobbes was simply insinuating the same rebellious doctrine more covertly.145 Another writer to subject Hobbes’s minor changes to critical scrutiny was John Templer.146 Templer was a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge and is perhaps most famous as Dryden’s tutor, but in 1673 he added his Idea theologiae Leviathanis to the growing pile of critiques. Although Mintz passed the slightly harsh verdict that Templer’s critique was ‘feeble’, it is true that many of Templer’s arguments were by 1673 both unoriginal and derivative.147 Nevertheless some of his comments are worth exploring because he takes the Latin edition as his main text. Templer’s strategy is to offer refutations of forty-two Hobbesian dogmas, juxtaposing extensive quotations from Hobbes with his own systematic answers. Inevitably Templer’s concern to refute the whole of Hobbes’s project means that he does not focus exclusively upon the changes to the Latin Leviathan, but as he deals with Hobbes’s broader arguments he does identify problems with the new material. For example, Templer noticed that Hobbes had 142 143 144 145 146 147

Cumberland, A treatise of the laws of nature, 3.2, p. 467; cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Curley, p. 30. Cumberland, A treatise of the laws of nature, 3.4, pp. 473–4. Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Curley, p. 244, n.15. Cumberland, A treatise of the laws of nature, 9.10, pp. 724–5. Cumberland notes that the Latin merely suggests that the men commit no new crime, which amounts to the same thing. Cumberland, A treatise of the laws of nature, 9.14, pp. 751–2. J. Templer, Idea theologiae Leviathanis (Cambridge, 1673). S. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge, 1962), p. 56; cf. Peter Pett, who in 1693 praised Templer’s work as an ‘admirable Confutation of Leviathan’. Memoirs of the Right Honourable Arthur, Earl of Anglesey (1693), Sig. A4r.

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introduced a new example of the state of war into chapter 13, where the revised text met the objection that there had never been a state of war. Hobbes now referred the reader to Cain’s murder of Abel, a crime suggesting the absence of a common power.148 Templer rejected the new example, which patently ignored the authority of Adam: If the sin of Cain in killing his brother proved that no communal power existed that could have avenged him, then by the same argument you would conclude that murders carried out in this realm prove that no power of coercion exists among us.149

Templer was even less impressed with the changes presented in the appendix. He argued that Hobbes’s revision of his doctrine of the Trinity had created more anomalies. The problem here was that Hobbes was still trying to make the religious facts fit his eccentric understanding of personation, and the theory, which conformed to the understanding of ‘person’ neither in the scripture nor in any other context, could never capture the meaning of the Trinity without falling unto absurdity and multiplying members of the Trinity.150 William Lucy, bewildered at the best of times, had not even realised that Hobbes was claiming that Moses was an additional person in the Trinity until he read the mea culpa in the appendix.151 His objection was similar to Templer’s in that Hobbes’s language of personation was completely absent from the catechism or the confession of any Christian church, so the chances of even the amended version of the doctrine making sense were slim. Templer also attacks Hobbes’s reiterated defence of God’s corporeality, one of the issues singled out in Tillotson’s letter to Worthington. Here Templer argued that if Hobbes was claiming the authority of Tertullian for his arguments, he had simply read Tertullian incorrectly. Although it was true that Tertullian referred to God as body, that term in Tertullian had two meanings: ‘for it is used either to indicate a passible nature, or the bare essence of a thing . . . When Tertullian calls God body, he uses ‘‘body’’ in the latter significance, that is, to represent bare essence and substance.’152 Tertullian wasn’t referring to body in terms of corporeal body, and even if he had ‘we would still not be obliged to follow in his footsteps in this matter.’ For Templer, the basic problem still remained; Hobbes thought that body was something that was part of the universe, that was accessible to sense, and latterly in the appendix something with magnitude, but not 148 150 152

Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Curley, p. 77, n. 7. 149 Templer, Idea theologiae, p. 60. Ibid., pp. 76–7. 151 Lucy, An answer, Postscript, pp. 23–4. Templer, Idea theologiae, p. 34.

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magnitude itself.153 If the first two points already violated the doctrines of the Church of England, the latest argument committed a further heresy: ‘If God is a body possessing magnitude, and is not that magnitude itself, then the simplicity of the Divine Essence is utterly destroyed, since it is composed of substance and magnitude that are truly distinct.’154 On any of these accounts, Hobbes’s understanding was still violating legally established doctrine, and particularly the first of the thirty-nine Articles which taught that ‘God is without body and without parts.’ Hobbes had mentioned this in the first chapter of the appendix, commenting that because it was part of the law ‘it is not to be denied.’155 Cumberland triumphantly swooped upon the admission: in the Appendix to his Leviathan lately publish’d, he openly declares, ‘God to be a Body,’ in the beginning of the Third Chapter; and he endeavours to prove it; forgetting in the mean time, that in the First Chapter of the same Appendix (near the end) he had promised not to deny the First Article of the Church of England, in which it is expresly said, that ‘God is without Body, and without Parts.’156

In spite of his attempts to justify his position, for Templer and Cumberland, Hobbes was still caught between his philosophy and the requirements of his politics; the new material had failed to demonstrate the coherence between the two. Nevertheless although this reopened the possibility that Hobbes might still be liable for prosecution, Lucy was quick to identify that such proceedings would not be any easier after the Latin Leviathan: I think he never can be judged for [a heretic] amongst amongst us, nor ever will be, for by him a man may deny any Truths if Leviathan exact it; yea, he must be judged of Leviathans Religion, and then he can never be judged an Heretick, because Leviathan must be supream judge . . .157

HOBBES AND HOBBISM IN THE EARLY

1670S

There can be little doubt that the debate over toleration, the Scargill and Parker affairs, and the anti-Hobbesian literature that they produced were responsible for a dramatic upsurge of popular interest in the Malmesbury philosopher. The writings of Mr Hobbes had become a common reference point in a whole series of linked debates about religion, irreligion, politics and morality. One concrete sign of this new fascination for Hobbes and his 153 155 156 157

Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Curley, p. 519. 154 Templer, Idea, p. 35. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Curley, p. 519. Cumberland, A treatise of the laws of nature, 1.11, p. 304. Lucy, An answer, Postscript, pp. 15–16.

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work was the first attempt since the 1650s to publish another edition of the English Leviathan.158 The astronomic prices being demanded for Leviathan in the later 1660s (Pepys was asked to pay thirty shillings for a new copy in 1668) suggested that such an enterprise would be profitable, but Hobbes’s notoriety meant that it was also dangerous. The problem was that it was now impossible to get a licence to publish Hobbes’s work; to print Leviathan again would be to break the law. It is perhaps an additional sign of the money at stake that Hobbes’s publisher Andrew Crooke and another bookseller named John Williams engaged the printer John Redmayne to do the work in the late summer of 1670. The ‘new’ edition would look almost exactly like the first edition, even down to the date. However, the authorities had been tipped off and Redmayne’s workshop was raided by officers of the Stationers’ Company in late September 1670. A second raid in October led to the seizure of Redmayne’s press along with sheets from the new edition. Williams was fined. Crooke, a senior figure in the company, seems to have escaped unscathed. The confiscated sheets appeared to have been ‘damasked’ or defaced some time in 1674, and this was apparently the end of the affair. However, Noel Malcolm’s recent investigation of the evidence suggests another outcome. Crucially the number of sheets destroyed amounted to only half of an average print run. Peculiarities in the so-called ‘Bear’ edition of Leviathan suggest that it was made up by two different printers. Malcolm suggests that the ‘Bear’ might in fact have been composed out of a combination of the sheets missing from the damasking process and pages set by the Amsterdam printer Christoffel Cunradus, with whom the ‘bear’ ornament can be positively identified. The ‘Bear’ was on sale in England by 1678, and may well be the edition of Leviathan advertised by Richard Chiswell in 1680, and remarked upon by Wood in the same year. The story illustrates the remarkable lengths to which publishers would go to meet what was evidently a new and insatiable demand for Hobbes’s most notorious work. JOHN EACHARD’S MR HOBBS’S STATE OF NATURE CONSIDERED

(1672)

AND SOME OPINIONS OF MR. HOBBS

CONSIDERED

(1673)

Another sign that the market for books dealing with Hobbes was becoming more popular was the success of John Eachard’s satirical pamphlet attacks 158

I have summarised the details from the account given in Malcolm, ‘The Printing of the ‘‘Bear’’’ in Aspects, pp. 336–82.


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on Hobbes, Mr Hobbs’s state of nature considered (1672) and its longer sequel Some opinions of Mr. Hobbs considered (1673). Eachard was not a particularly original critic of Hobbes, but taken together, these works serve as a revealing example of the way that Hobbes’s ideas became a part of a more popular discourse during the 1670s. Eachard was also one of the first to analyse the issue of Hobbism as it had reared its head during the period, and his observations help to bring into focus some of the dynamics of the phenomenon of Hobbism at a moment when it occupied a position of some prominence as a cultural discourse. Eachard’s involvement with the issue of Hobbes and Hobbism may have originated (as is so often the case with critics of Hobbes) as a response to criticism of his own orthodoxy. A Fellow of St Catherine’s College Cambridge (and from 1675 its Master), Eachard had caused outrage amongst churchmen when in 1670 he had published an anonymous pamphlet titled The grounds and occasions of the contempt of the clergy and religion enquired into. Eachard attributed anti-clericalism to the clergy’s poor education, insufficient incomes and poor motivation, and he ruthlessly satirised these shortcomings in the newly fashionable drolling style, burlesquing the absurdities of contemporary pulpit oratory with a savagery that made it unclear where his sympathies really lay. Clerical critics were unimpressed, and a series of replies attacked Eachard, suggesting that he might be a dissenter, pagan, papist or even an atheist.159 Eachard’s commentary on Hobbes emerged from works designed to vindicate The grounds and occasions from the suspicions that had been raised. Although in general Eachard’s tactics involved brutally satirising his critics, he was clearly concerned at the same time to demonstrate himself a friend to orthodoxy by adding to his targets some of modish causes of anticlericalism. Diagnosing and tackling the causes of Hobbism offered one means to do this. In Some observations upon the answer to an enquiry into the grounds & occasions (1671), Eachard devoted a few pages towards the end of the pamphlet to the role of Hobbists in the contempt of the church. He satirises the scoffing gentry whose superficial attachment to Hobbes gives them a patina of fashionable anti-clericalism. In every case, the gentlemen take Hobbes’s authority on the credit of others: one he comes, and says he is very confident that Mr. Hobbs is a Gentleman, and a great Discoverer of Truth; for he hears of several very accomplish’d and creditable 159

See for example W. S., An answer to a letter of enquiry into the grounds and occasions of the contempt of the clergy (1671), f.7v–8; Anon., A vindication of the clergy from the contempt imposed upon them by the author of the Grounds and Occasions (1672); D. T., Hieragonisticon (1672).

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persons, that do very much admire the old Gentleman, and are close adherers to his Principles: and therefore he is resolv’d to be a fine person too.160

Another hears a Hobbes-quoting acquaintance assert atheism against a clergyman and is impressed more by the quality of his friend than the coherence of the doctrine. On this man’s credit another decides that ‘Mr Hobbes’s Philosophy is certainly the only Philosophy.’ A fourth has carried Hobbes around in his pocket for the last six months day and night ‘and have above twenty places of moment turn’d down: some before and some after the Candle was out’, an exposure that has meant that ‘two or three of his [Hobbes’s] Phrases are got through his pocket, and have insinuated themselves into his temper.’161 It would be this largely uncomprehending and fashionable fascination with Hobbes amongst the gullible gentry, so conducive to popular anticlericalism, that would become the focus of Eachard’s particular interest in Hobbes over the next two years. On Eachard’s account, sections of the lesser gentry had foolishly allowed themselves to be persuaded that Hobbes was a serious philosopher, and this was the view that Eachard sought to demolish in dialogues designed to droll them out of their allegiance. It was a position which came with a carefully developed sociology of Hobbism, upon which Eachard elaborated at length in the preface to Some opinions of Mr Hobbs in 1673. Here Eachard argued that there were essentially three classes of Hobbist, who he compares to sections of a theatre-audience. The first, Mr Hobbes’s ‘pit friends’ are a sort of people who were ‘sturdy, resolved Practicants in Hobbianism; and would most certainly have been so, had there never been any such man as Mr. Hobbs in the World’. These were the libertines, who had adopted Hobbes as their philosopher: when they heard that ill Nature, Debauchery, and Irreligion was Mathematicks and Demonstration: and that he who reported this, was a very grave, studious, contemplative, and observing Gentleman; and yet writ as viciously and prophanely, as their own vanity and lusts could tempt them to practise: then had these Gentlemen found out a Philosopher exactly for their purpose, and the Philosopher had found out as right Gentlemen for his.162

160 161 162

J. Eachard, Some observations upon the answer to an enquiry into the grounds & occasions of the contempt of the clergy, with some additions (1671), p. 196. Ibid., p. 198. J. Eachard, Some opinions of Mr. Hobbs considered in a second dialogue between Philautus and Timothy (1673), Sig. A3v–A4r.


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At bottom, the libertines were bad before they read a word of Hobbes, and so their Hobbism was accidental rather than essential to their debauchery. Given the fact that Eachard was writing from Cambridge (and in fact just across the road from Corpus Christi), it seems likely that this portrait was informed by the similar analysis of Scargill’s libertine Hobbism in the Recantation. Nevertheless, it was this species of baying libertine Hobbist in the pit who had led the impressionable gentry in the gallery astray, Eachard’s second class of Hobbist. The ‘small, soft, little, pretty, fine Gentlemen: who having some little wit, some little modesty, some little remain of Conscience and Country Religion, could not tear and Hector it, as the former; but quickly learnt to chirp and giggle, when t’other clapt and shouted.’ The gentlemen were squeamish at first, but they had eventually been won over by Hobbes’s scientific reputation. Hobbes had caught them ‘by his fame of being a Mathematician, by filling his Books with Schemes, by frequent using the word Demonstration, and calling all kind of vice and irreligion, humane Nature, and obedience to the Civil Magistrate; and the like’.163 The last category were the serious but secret followers of Hobbes, secluded in their boxes: they are the solemn, the judicious, Don-admirers, and box friends of Mr. Hobbs: who being men of gravity and reputation, don’t only defie the name of Sot or Villain, but are unwilling to venture upon the more ingenious one of Hobbist: and will scarce simper in favour or allowance of the Philosopher; but can make shift to nod and nod again; and think that no man but Mr. Hobbs has gone to the Fundamentals of Government or humane Nature.164

Although heightened for satirical effect, Eachard’s categories do offer some perceptive insights into the mechanics of Hobbism in the early 1670s. What is striking is that the only serious engagement with Hobbes’s ideas comes from Hobbes’s box-friends and don-admirers, and that at this stage in Hobbes’s reception, it is effectively an underground allegiance. The evidence suggests that Eachard’s account contains a great deal of truth; we know that Hobbes had admirers and followers, but as events like the Scargill affair and debate over Parker illustrated, the early 1670s were not a time to make such allegiances public, given the almost entirely negative way that the anxiety over Hobbism was being played out. Where Eachard’s account is most interesting is in its portrayal of the relationship between Hobbism and libertinism, and the resulting effect upon gadfly gentry readers. This is not to suggest that there were in fact 163

Ibid., Sig. A4r–v.

164

Ibid., Sig. A4v.

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hordes of libertines overunning the country in the way that Anglican clergymen often liked to suggest. In fact, Eachard’s discussion is interesting for what it inadvertently reveals, and that is an anxiety that the clerical campaign against Hobbes had created a form of blow-back. Hobbes’s notoriety had paradoxically increased Hobbes’s cachet amongst certain sorts of reader. Although Eachard doesn’t make this explicit, when his libertines ‘heard that ill Nature, Debauchery, and Irreligion was Mathematicks and Demonstration’ it seems likely that they heard this from Hobbes’s critics, and it was this critical association that led them to make Hobbes their champion. On Eachard’s account, the knock-on effect was to encourage the more easily led amongst the gentry to take Hobbes, and particularly his scientific pretensions, more seriously than they had done before, assimilating his philosophy to a sloganising anti-clericalism with which they could berate their local clergymen. Eachard doesn’t supply a chronology for the processes that he describes, but the specific correlation between libertinism and Hobbism was really a product of the late 1660s and the Scargill affair in particular. Also, when Eachard talks about the gentry’s late conversion to Hobbes’s cause, and suggests that his ignorant gentleman has kept Hobbes in his pocket for the last six months, it seems that he is referring to the latest surge of interest in Hobbes’s work. Eachard’s story fits with a lot of the evidence we have about Hobbes’s readership during the period, and as we shall see, his categories capture quite effectively the different sections of Hobbes’s audience. Disarming this low-grade gentry Hobbism was the avowed central aim of Eachard’s two dialogues, on the grounds that the other two classes of Hobbist were either too debauched or too resolved to be persuaded out of their beliefs. That this was part and parcel of Eachard’s strategy to rehabilitate himself after The grounds and occasions, is suggested by the ostentatious dedications to Sheldon.165 Perhaps picking up on the satirical possibilities offered by Tenison’s mock master and student dialogue, Eachard adapts the genre to make Hobbes look utterly ridiculous. Philautus (Hobbes) converses with Timothy, the young gentleman who is Eachard’s mouthpiece. Just as in Tenison’s dialogue, Hobbes is shown to be as timorous and suspicious as his philosophy would suggest, initially refusing to venture out alone with Timothy for fear of being assaulted. Eachard doesn’t restrict himself to quoting Hobbes and texts; Philautus’s fears are patently absurd. Eachard’s Philautus is a supercharged version of Wallis’s caricature, obsessed with his 165

J. Eachard, Mr Hobbs’s state of nature considered, ed. P. Ure (1958), p. 3.


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own reputation and eminence, and unable to cope with Tim’s satirical onslaught. For his part, Tim aims to satirise Hobbes’s whole philosophical project as a compilation of unoriginal commonplaces tied together with a terminology designed to give it the superficial appearance of novelty and demonstrative rigour, effectively a philosophical con-trick. This was something of a departure for Hobbes commentary in the sense that most of Hobbes’s critics had taken the view that there was a distinctive argument in Hobbes to be refuted. By contrast, Eachard’s claim that the Hobbesian corpus was nothing but a triumph of style over content put him in the slightly unusual position of arguing that most of what Hobbes had said about politics consisted of ‘common acknowledg’d things new phrased, and trim’d up with the words power, fear, City, transferring of right, and the like; and such is the most part of your Book, called Dominion; which chiefly consists of such things as have been said these thousand years, and would follow from any other Principles, as well as yours’.166 There was of course some truth to this and we have noted on several occasions that everyone could agree with some of Hobbes’s more trivial observations about government, but Eachard’s determination to stress the complete banality of Hobbism led him to statements which would have raised the eyebrows of more serious critics. At one point Tim challenges the reader to look at the eighth and ninth chapters of De Cive ‘and if he find anything considerable more than what is commonly delivered in the ordinary Civil Law-Books upon that occasion . . . I’le become an earnest spreader of your fame, and have you recorded for a great discoverer.’167 Given that chapter 8 endorsed a bound slave’s legitimate right to kill his master and chapter 9 overturned the conventional basis of patriarchal government, and that both were already the occasion of considerable critical commentary, readers might be forgiven for thinking that this might be more than ‘the old plain Dunstable stuff that commonly occurs in those that have treated of Policy and Morality’. However, for Eachard the effect is more important than the detail, and his general aim was to demystify Hobbism by suggesting that it could only be news to young gentlemen who hadn’t read their Machiavelli and Justinian. The same strategy is applied to Hobbes’s natural philosophy where Eachard builds upon the Oxford scientists’ charges of Hobbes’s plagiarism to argue that here as well Hobbes takes very ordinary observations and calls them by ‘new affected names’, in De Corpore recasting ‘logic’ as ‘computation’.168 Hobbes’s obsessive overuse of words like power and fear empties 166

Ibid., p. 15.

167

Ibid., p. 16.

168

Ibid., p. 19.

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them of significance; if everything is power, comments Eachard, referring to chapter 10 of Leviathan, then nothing is: ‘you call close connexion, and demonstration, which are nothing else but a company of small cheats, and jingling fetches.’169 Eachard reserves particular ridicule for Humane Nature, arguing that its only original contribution was ‘some small matter that was shirk’d up in France from some of Cartes’s acquaintance, and spoyled in the telling’. Eachard also argued that Hobbes’s much-vaunted three-part philosophical system did not fit together in the way that he claimed.170 When Eachard finally gets around to discussing some of Hobbes’s ideas in detail, he applies the same deflationary strategy to a reading of De Cive; Hobbes’s assertion that men are not born fit for society simply boils down the trivial observation that children cannot participate in government.171 Tim condescends to grant Hobbes his state of nature, the Isle of Pines, together with four gentlemen, Dick, Roger, Tumbler and Towser172 but ridicules the thought that they should necessarily be at war with each other. Hobbes’s account of human nature simply mistakes aberrant behaviour for a natural norm.173 Eachard is more concerned about the issue of property, arguing that Hobbes’s insistence that property is the creation of contract and ultimately the sovereign counts as yet another example of Hobbes mistaking the importance of words and artificial signs for the underlying thing. The right of each of the Pineyards to all presents a similar commonsense difficulty both in terms of practical ownership and the absence of justice. Eachard’s tactic is to compare Tim’s common sense with Hobbes’s nonsense; four individuals have an equal right to a quarter of any unclaimed land. The nearest Eachard gets to a positive philosophical answer to Hobbes is to assert the existence of the natural good and evil detectable through common equity and his own reason.174 Eachard does show some critical acumen in exploiting some of the ambiguities introduced into the annotations to De Cive, to argue that Hobbes himself acknowledges that in fact it is possible to break the law of nature and that a man may act against reason before there is a positive law.175 Although Philautus gives the Hobbesian answer that laws of nature 169 172 173 175

Ibid., p. 24. 170 Ibid., p. 33. 171 Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 49. The Isle of Pines alludes to Neville’s pamphlet of the same name (1668). Ibid., p. 63. 174 Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., p. 87 Eachard refers to 1.10n where Hobbes argues that if an individual does not genuinely believe that an act will conduce to self-preservation, they sin against the law of nature. Both Filmer and Charles Cavendish had also noticed that this argument makes the right of nature look like a traditional right (i.e. an act sanctioned according to law).


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in the state of nature are silent, Eachard refers to another annotation where Hobbes seems to suggest that the obligation to observe some laws of nature do not cease in time of war.176 The effect is to suggest that in spite of himself, Hobbes is actually committed to a conventional account of natural law. Eachard’s critique here again contains some truth; Hobbes did accept, as his annotations made clear, that natural law did carry obligatory force insofar as it was tied to the imperatives of self-preservation, but that qualification did much to distance his account from the conventional story about intrinsic goods and bads that Eachard offered up in summary. Eachard’s critique valuably points up some of the conventional elements in Hobbes’s account, but his steamroller tactics unusually flatten out most of the features that other critics felt were distinctive, deliberately creating the impression that Hobbes’s claims to novelty were simply a confidence trick. Mr Hobbs’s state of nature went into a second edition and was also reprinted along with The grounds and occasions in the year of its publication, success that inspired Eachard to produce a longer sequel in the summer of 1673.177 Some opinions of Mr Hobbs considered, complete with its perceptive analysis of Hobbism, again sought to use drollery ‘to cure a Company of easie, giddy, smallpated Gentlemen; who swagger that Mr. Hobbs hath said more for a bad life, and against any other life after this, than ever was pleaded by Philosopher or Divine to the contrary’.178 The second dialogue deploys the same satirical tone but the subject matter ranges more widely to include discussion of the free will debate and Hobbes’s failed mathematical project. In the case of liberty and necessity Eachard accepts the terms of Bramhall’s engagement with Hobbes. Hobbes’s views here are distinctive and distinctively wrong; on Hobbes’s account, quips Tim, a wheel-barrow has as much liberty as the most powerful prince. If the original debate was deadlocked into incommensurable positions, Eachard follows Bramhall in sidestepping Hobbes’s examples to preserve a space for autonomous free will. There might well be a necessary outcome once dice are cast, but for Eachard, following Bramhall, there was no necessity to the decision of the thrower. Eachard’s refutation appeals to common sense rather than any extended philosophical argument; if a man were ever to lift up his finger by his own volition, this is enough demonstration for Tim that both Hobbes’s necessitarianism and his materialism are simply false. Eachard ties together 176 177 178

Eachard, Mr Hobbs’s state of nature, p. 87. Eachard cites the text as 3.18, but in fact refers to 3.27n. Eachard, Some opinions of Mr. Hobbs considered. The dedication to Sheldon is dated 20 May 1673. Ibid., Sig. A3r.

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the defence of free will and immaterial substances with the argument that if matter can be necessitated then for free will to exist at all, something nonmaterial must be causing it. The same position applies to the existence of God; if God is simply material as Hobbes claims, then He isn’t God but part of the world; for God to exist on Eachard’s terms He must be nonmaterial on the same basis.179 Eachard’s critique here is largely a matter of recycling popular versions of assaults by Bramhall and Wallis and one gets the sense shared by contemporaries that Eachard was less effective when it came to extended philosophical discussions than he was in exercising his skills in drollery.180 Eachard’s eye for rhetoric, however, made him a much more perceptive stylistic critic, particularly in recognising the potential inconsistencies between Hobbes’s theoretical pronouncements about the use of metaphor and simile, and his practice in using those very figures. Tim mischievously remarks that ‘Why, Sir, you know that a little slice or so of a trope, or figure, gives a fine relish and hogoo. ’Tis as good, Sir, as an anchovy or shalot.’181 Such seasoning, he notes, occurs not just ‘in your Peak or Ulisses, (for a Poet has his priviledges as well as a Jugler or Barber;) but in your grave and Philosophical reckonings’.182 Eachard is relentless in tracking down Hobbes’s use of metaphor, bludgeoning a reeling Hobbes into submission with examples of his own rhetorical handiwork that contradict his methodological prescriptions.183 The exposure of Hobbes’s use of rhetoric is designed to devalue the philosopher’s scientific claims, and his failure to deliver what he has promised paves the way for an extended treatment of Hobbes’s mathematical shortcomings. Eachard’s treatment takes Wallis’s claims against Hobbes at face value and portrays Hobbes’s initial romance with mathematics turning sour as he has been progressively exposed as a charlatan, excusing himself with ever more outlandish explanations.184 If Hobbes’s mathematical credit had been more or less blown amongst professional mathematicians by the early 1660s, Eachard conveyed the outline of Wallis’s case for a more popular market. That he needed to do so suggests that the sheer difficulty of the technical issues had left Hobbes 179 180

181 182 183 184

Ibid., pp. 107–8. Swift’s famous verdict was that he had known ‘men happy enough at ridicule, who, upon grave subjects, were perfectly stupid; of which Dr Eachard of Cambridge . . . was a great instance.’ Prose Works, ed. H. Davis (Oxford, 1939–74), XII, p. 279. Eachard, Some opinions of Mr. Hobbs considered, p. 123; ‘hogoo’ from haut gouˆt, high flavour or taste. Ibid., p. 185 Eachard refers to Hobbes’s De Mirabilibus and his newly published sample of his Homeric translation, The Travels of Ulysses (1673). Eachard, Some opinions of Mr. Hobbs considered, pp. 185–6. Ibid., p. 224.


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with some residual credit, particularly amongst those for whom the dispute was not simply one about mathematics and geometry. Many lay followers of the dispute had to take the mathematics upon trust, and that would have had much to do with whether they saw Wallis as a defender of religion, or in Hobbes’s terms as a Presbyterian defender of priestcraft. Eachard’s Philautus takes refuge in his political treatises, arguing that they support the authority of princes and encourage perpetual peace. Echoing Cumberland, Tim swiftly despatches these arguments: ‘’Tis a vast power indeed, Philautus, that you have bestowed upon him; and he is very much beholding to you: for, at one stroke, it utterly destroys both himself and his Government.’185 Encouraging princes to Hobbesian absolutism ultimately undermines them, and with the suggestion that men can recover their power when it is to their advantage Hobbes gives every subject ‘leave to take away his throne, and life also’. At the mention of Cromwell, Hobbes protests his hatred of the Protector, but Eachard quashes this with Hobbes’s own distinctions; Philautus might well hate Oliver in his heart, explains Tim, but just as Hobbes’s philosophy allows him to love Christ internally and deny him externally, so did Hobbes’s writings ‘favour his actions so very much, that there is not one thing that he, and his Rogues did, but upon your Principles may be easily defended’. The difficulty of taking Hobbes’s utterances seriously given his beliefs also dogs Hobbes’s other attempts to defend himself. Eachard has particular fun with Hobbes’s appeal to Cosin’s testimony about his orthodoxy. Tim asks Philautus whether he confessed to the Bishop with his tongue alone: Truly, Philautus, you are such a moveable, slippery, and Philosophical kind of Christian, that I think the Church ought to appoint a peculiar sort of confession for you. For if, after you were recovered, you had but met with any body that had a little scar’d you, you should have unconfessed all again; and have sworn, and curs’d, that you did but droll with the Bishop.186

Eachard, in common with most of his contemporaries, realises that the direct charge of atheism won’t stick, and contents himself with the standard insinuation of atheism by consequence. Although occasionally obtuse when it came to Hobbes’s argument, Eachard was nevertheless alive to the complexities of Hobbes’s deliberately evasive discussion of God. Eachard’s satirical approach certainly attracted attention and was widely regarded as a literary and polemical success. Ferrand Spence commented in 1683 that Eachard had ‘with the Greatest Height of Wit, and depth of 185

Ibid., p. 241.

186

Ibid., p. 270.

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Reason, Writ Dialogue-wise against Mr Hobbs, and done more then all the Grave and Magisterial Authors, who have so formally taken that famous Man to Task’.187 Although a few found the spectacle of Eachard’s attack in itself amusing,188 it could not be denied that Eachard had lightened and popularised the tone of Hobbes commentary and facilitated the extraordinary explosion of popular allusion to the philosopher and his works that characterised the early 1670s. POPULAR DISCUSSION OF HOBBISM IN THE

1670S

Discussion of Hobbes and Hobbism was now no longer restricted to the learned tract. Hobbes and Hobbism were now routine topics for sermons, drolleries, poems and even plays. Hobbesian allusion resonated through sermon literature of the period. In April 1670 Miles Barne, a Fellow of Peterhouse Cambridge, characterised atheistic beliefs that ‘we can dethrone the King of Kings; murther the immortality of the Soul; cancel the immutable laws of Good and Evil; banish the reward which belongs to the one, and take away the punishment which is due to the other’. Barne concluded with an allusive call to spiritual arms: ‘This Faith which stopped the mouths of lions, let it not be devoured by the Leviathan of our age.’ In October 1671, John North, Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge, preached before the king at Newmarket against atheism and profanity amongst the young, complaining that: now men are led into an Apostacy by believing that we are all born mortal enemies one to the other: that each has a design of usurping a Power over the rest; that its onely a little policy that cements us together, which may without blame be broken upon a prospect of our Emolument: that there is no tie of gratitude: and success gives a right to whatever we attempt. The mischief of all which is that it teaches men to be so indeed.189

In February 1672, William Smyth preached against ‘the new admired prudential love and Leviathan kindness of the World, designed only to 187 188 189

F. Spence, Lucian’s works (1683), Sig. C3v–C4r. See also Dryden’s similar comments in his ‘Life of Lucian’ in vol. I of The works of Lucian (1711), pp. 29–30. See for example, the Presbyterian poet Robert Wild, A letter from Dr. Robert Wild to his friend (1672), pp. 14–15. John North, A sermon preached before the king at New Market, 8 October 1671 (Cambridge, 1671), pp. 26–7. North also produced a manuscript attack on Hobbes (which has not survived) taking a similar line to Cumberland and anticipating Rousseau’s comments on Hobbes in the Discourse on inequality. The work is described in R. North, The Lives of the Norths, ed. A. Jessop (1890), II, pp. 310, 314–15.


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center in self interest’.190 The following month Adam Littleton declared the author of Leviathan to be an enemy of society and nature.191 In 1676 Robert South, preaching in Westminster Abbey and lamenting ‘the great prevalence of that Atheistical Doctrine of the Leviathan’192 condemned the principles of the modern ‘politician’. Many of these turn out to be critical representations of Hobbes’s ideas, including the doubt that there is ‘either an Heaven, or an Hell, or an immortal Soul ’.193 In some cases it is possible to detect the direct influence of specific critical works. In December 1674, William Jane preached a sermon at the consecration of the new Bishop of Oxford, Henry Compton, where he inveighed against the ‘Apostate Principles of the Leviathan’ in banishing the spiritual authority of the church.194 Jane took the opportunity to point out that Hobbes’s arguments, in spite of their appearance, ultimately undermined the power of the prince. His arguments were taken from chapter 9 of Cumberland’s De legibus.195 The critics offered a handy shortcut removing the need to wade through Hobbes’s works for a passing anti-Hobbesian jibe; in such ways they helped to shape the popular perception of Hobbes’s work, even amongst audiences who had never read them. If Hobbism by itself was a favourite topic of clergymen battling atheism and infidelity, it was also being used against them by Nonconformists and their supporters. The discussion of Parker’s Hobbism, for example, refused to go away.196 This was partly to do with the complicated religious politics of the period. In March 1672, Charles II made the controversial (but shortlived) decision to suspend the penal laws against dissent.197 This was profoundly embarrassing for writers like Parker who had staked their ecclesiological position upon the absolute power of the crown. Parker’s rambling defence of the church in his preface to Bishop Bramhall’s vindication of himself (1672) attracted the satirical attention of his literary nemesis Andrew Marvell, who savaged him in The rehearsal transpos’d in 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197

W. Smyth, Two sermons preached at two publick assizes for the county of Svffolk (1672), p. 6. A. Littleton, A sermon preached in Lent-assizes (1671), pp. 17–19. R. South, Twelve sermons preached upon several occasions (1692), p. 438. Ibid., p. 450. W. Jane, A sermon preached at the consecration of the Honourable Dr. Henry Compton, Lord Bishop of Oxford (1675), p. 28. Ibid., pp. 35–6. Cf. Cumberland, De legibus naturae, 13.9. See for example, An answer to the Geneva ballad (1674). Charles was only able to issue the Declaration of Indulgence because he had briefly managed to escape his financial dependence upon the reactionary Parliament. When the money ran out, Charles had to go back to Parliament, and was forced to suspend the Declaration in March 1673.

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the autumn of the same year. One of Marvell’s critical devices was to reconstruct Parker as an incompetent disciple of Hobbes. His authoritarian hypotheses were laid out like the theses of Scargill, and Parker’s arguments are pulled and stretched to become a system whose principles, Marvell argues, ‘confine upon the Territories of Malmesbury’ and whose style ‘imitates that language’. Parker’s defenders struck back with countercharges of Hobbism addressed to Marvell’s defence of liberty of conscience. Samuel Butler and the author of S’too him bayes quipped about Marvell’s ‘Malmesbury Philosophy’ and suggested that his state of conscience would lead to a wilder anarchy than the Hobbesian state of nature.198 Marvell hit back in the second part of the Rehearsal transpros’d but with a characteristically subtle reading of the issue of Hobbism. Drawing attention to Parker’s refutation of Hobbes, Marvell commented that ‘under pretense of confuting Mr Hobbs (who I believe could explain himself as innocently as you have done)’, Parker has ushered in ‘whatsoever Principles Men lay to his [Hobbes’s] charge, only disguised under another Notion to make them more venerable’. Unusually, Marvell indicates that these aren’t really Hobbes’s principles; they are principles men lay to his charge, that is, his unpopular image. Marvell’s stance becomes more intriguing when when he goes on to point out that for all his apparent Hobbism, Parker is actually something much worse: I do not see but your Behemoth exceeds his Leviathan some foot long, in whatsoever he saith of the Power of the Magistrate in Matters of Religion and Civils; save that you have levyed the Invisible Powers to your assistance the better to fright men out of their wits, their Consciences and their Proprieties.199

Marvell’s sketch of clerical absolutism gone mad is balanced by his suggestion that Charles II should use his power to put the clergymen in their place and exercise his prudence in desisting from persecution, thus securing absolutism by consent. Failure to do this, warns Marvell, creates a danger that the people will ‘ferment and tumultuate at last for their own preservation’. If Marvell’s portrait of a prudential, tolerationist absolutism has a Hobbesian ring to it, his warning to Charles is very close to Hobbes’s similar caution to sovereigns at the end of chapter 47 of Leviathan. Both writers make it clear that political and religious stability is conditional upon the destruction of the illegitimate political power of the clergy. In dealing with Parker’s clerical Hobbism, Marvell perhaps unexpectedly 198 199

R.L., The Transproser Rehears’d (1673), pp. 105, 112. Anon., S’too him Bayes, p. 84. Marvell, Rehearsal transpros’d, II, p. 214.


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reveals his sympathy for the genuine article.200 This is not to say that Marvell was necessarily a closet Hobbesian, but merely to point out that during this period he could distinguish between Hobbes’s public image and what he actually said, and that he had every reason to be a sympathetic box-admirer (to adopt Eachard’s terminology) of the anti-clerical sections of Hobbes’s work. If Marvell was too canny a penman to allow any more than a Hobbesian resonance to escape his prose, the early 1670s would see another poet paying the satirical price for a more overt association with Hobbes. There can be little doubt that John Dryden, like Marvell, had been an attentive reader of Hobbes’s work in the 1650s. Aubrey famously remarked that ‘Mr John Dreyden, Poet Laureat, is his great admirer, and oftentimes makes use of his doctrine in his plays – from Mr Dreyden himselfe.’201 Dryden seems to have been interested in two connected aspects of Hobbes’s work. The first, and less exceptional interest, was Hobbes’s understanding of psychology, particularly as it played out in Hobbes’s aesthetic theory. When Dryden described the imagination of the poet like a ‘high ranging Spaniel’ in the dedicatory epistle to The rival ladies (1664) and the preface to Annus mirabilis (1667) he was borrowing distinctively Hobbesian imagery available in Humane Nature and Leviathan.202 When the poet insisted upon the importance of judgement in controlling the imagination or fancy, his emphasis recalls Hobbes’s cautions to Davenant in the former’s Answer. Dryden’s emphasis upon the balance between judgement and imagination would result in his ostentatiously philosophical approach to a number of dramatic issues, some of which, like his theory of dramatic representation and his psychological approach to producing theatrical effects, had Hobbesian resonances.203 The second and connected aspect was Hobbes’s philosophical theory of liberty and necessity, a theme 200

201

202 203

For a consideration of Marvell’s allusions to Hobbes see J. Parkin, ‘Liberty Transpros’d: Andrew Marvell and Samuel Parker’, in W. Chernaik and M. Dzelzainis (eds.), Marvell and Liberty (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 269–99. Martin Dzelzainis and Annabel Patterson have recently claimed that Marvell is self-consciously distancing himself from Hobbes in these sections, particularly with regard to his emphasis upon the Christian duties of the magistrate, The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, 2 vols. (Yale, 2003), I, pp. 212–13. However Marvell’s odd account of consent and the prudential account of duty, for whatever reason, shadows Hobbes quite closely. I would like to thank Kinch Hoekstra for drawing my attention to further similarities between Hobbes and Marvell’s views on consent. Aubrey, Brief Lives, I.372. Anna Battigelli argues that Aubrey’s judgement was incorrect, but this seems hard to sustain in the light of Dryden’s ongoing interest in several aspects of Hobbes’s work. See ‘John Dryden’s Angry Readers’, in J. Anderson and E. Sauer (eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, 2002), esp. pp. 263–71. EL 1.4.4; Leviathan, ch. 3. For discussion see C. D. Thorpe, The Aesthetic Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Ann Arbor, 1940), ch. 7.

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that recurs, as Bredvold has demonstrated, throughout Dryden’s drama.204 Although Dryden seems closest to Hobbes in these areas, already explored in print and on stage in the 1660s, the poet only attracted critical attention for his Hobbism as a result of the publication of his blockbuster heroic tragedy of 1670, The conquest of Granada (1672). Here Dryden had strayed into riskier terrain, giving off Hobbesian signals in his dramatic theory and his characters at a moment when the critical environment was peculiarly sensitised to such allusion. The printed version of the play contained a prefatory essay ‘Of Heroique Plays’, one section of which attempted to argue that poets were better than philosophers or divines at representing supernatural spiritual entities. The reason was the complexity of the philosophical and theological issues surrounding incorporeal substances, which, commented Dryden, ‘Mr Hobbs, with some reason thinks to imply a contradiction’.205 Hobbes’s scepticism about incoporeal substances had attracted criticism for over twenty years, and Dryden’s contemporaries were quick to notice his apparent sympathy for Hobbes’s argument. John Eachard ruthlessly burlesqued the passage at length in Some opinions of Mr Hobbs considered with Tim referring to Dryden as ‘so hearty a friend to your opinion, that he has added much strength to it’.206 The comment is ironic; Eachard, aware that Dryden was developing his own eccentric, and un-Hobbesian account of the poet’s role from a Hobbesian scepticism, portrays Philautus’s dismay at his follower (‘I am already almost quite kill’d with this damnable Poet’). But Hobbes is made to see that the arrogant and misguided Dryden is the only disciple that he is likely to get.207 But it wasn’t just Dryden’s dramatic theory that drew attention for its Hobbism; some critics detected a more straightforward Hobbesian influence behind Dryden’s characters. In 1673 Richard Leigh accused Dryden of violating the accepted rules of heroic tragedy by creating a hero who knew no restraint. In doing so he had secured ‘the Reason and Politicall Ornaments from Mr Hobs’. Dryden’s Almanzor was undoubtedly an almost superhuman and shocking character, whose speeches and actions portrayed a naturalistic individual initially unbound by any form of conventional restraint. Having intervened in a factional struggle, Almanzor is

204 205 206 207

See for example, Dryden’s dedication to Lord Orrery before The rival ladies (1664) A3r. John Dryden, The conquest of Granada (1672), preface, Sig. A4r–v. Eachard, Some opinions, pp. 95–119. Ibid., p. 117. Dryden did not respond to Eachard’s taunts, indeed in his ‘Life of Lucian’, he even complimented Eachard on his success as a critic of Hobbes. The works of Lucian (1711), pp. 29–30.


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condemned to death by the king, Boabdelin. Almanzor’s now famous defence of himself reminded some of Hobbes’s natural man: But whence hast thou the right to give me death? Obey’d as Soveraign by thy Subjects be, But know, that I alone am King of me. I am as free as Nature first made man ’Ere the base Laws of Servitude began When wild in woods the noble Savage ran.208

The character’s apparently wayward conduct during the play led Leigh to comment that he was the subject of ‘a Poeticall Free-State . . . where all were Monarchs . . . and all swore Allegiance to themselves . . . where every man might invade anothers Right, without trespassing on his owne, and make, and execute what Lawes himself would consent to each man having the power of Life and Death so absolutely, that if he kill’d himself, he was accountable to no body for the murder.’ Almanzor was exempt from both poet’s rules and prince’s laws, ‘and in short, if his revolting from the Abencerrages to the Zegrys, and from the Zegrys to the Abencerrages again, had not equally satisfi’d both parties, it might admit of the same defence, Mr Drydens Out-cries, and his Tumults did, that the Poet represented Men in a Hobbian State of War.’209 Leigh’s criticism raises the perennial suspicion that in addition to endorsing some aspects of Hobbes’s philosophical and psychological project, Dryden was sneaking Hobbesian political ideas into his plays. At its most crude this suggestion involves the thought that Dryden was actually advocating Hobbesian ideas, but as several generations of literary critics have realised this is a vastly oversimplified reading. Not only is Almanzor almost self-parodying, but it is also far from clear that his description of the state of nature owes anything specifically to Hobbes, for all that the lines might bring Hobbes to mind. In fact Almanzor begins with a crude sense of honour and fair play absent from Hobbes’s juridical thought experiment and in the course of the play submits to the limitations demanded by love, family ties, religion and political obedience in a manner that owes little to Leviathan.210 But if Leigh seems to be wrong to paint Almanzor as a thoroughgoing Hobbist, some of the other characters do appear at times to use more plausibly Hobbesian arguments. The unscrupulous Boabdelin

208 209 210

Dryden, The conquest of Granada, Part 1, 1.1. The censure of the rota on Mr. Driden’s Conquest of Granada (Oxford, 1673), pp. 2–3. J. Winterbottom, ‘The Place of Hobbesian ideas in Dryden’s Tragedies’, Journal of English and German Philology 57 (1958), pp. 670–1.

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retorts to Almanzor’s speech quoted above with a lesson that could be plausibly traced to Hobbes: Boabdelin: Since, then, no pow’r above your own you know, Mankind shou’d use you like a common foe, You shou’d be hunted like a Beast of Prey; By your own law, I take your life away.

Unravelling the character of the speech act here is difficult, but Boabdelin’s answer can plausibly be read as an ironic Hobbesian response to someone who claims to believe that they are under no form of jurisdiction; in Hobbesian terms this renders them enemies in a state of war. But a clue to Dryden’s intentions is perhaps revealed when we come to see that Boabdelin is a ruthless tyrant and also a usurper, given to justifying his rule in de facto terms: ’Tis true, from force the noblest title springs: I therefore hold from that, which first made kings.

Another character immediately points out the absurdity of the position, given that it grants an equal right to anyone who can take the throne by force. Here Hobbism is part of an unstable complex of political beliefs associated with Cromwellian usurpation and power politics, a combination we first came across in Ingelo’s character Antitheus, from Bentivolio and Urania. In Dryden’s work, most of the individuals using this language tend to come to a sticky end, in line with the conventional Royalist moral of the tale. For Dryden’s usurpers and tyrants to make Hobbesian noises merely acknowledges that Hobbism was by the early 1670s firmly linked to this form of stage villainy, a tradition given a recent boost by the extended discussion of Hobbes’s interregnum career in Tenison’s Creed (1670). Although it would be a mistake to make his presentation of tyranny a conclusive argument for Dryden’s rejection of Hobbes’s politics tout court, his willingness to put recognisably Hobbist utterances in the mouths of his villains at least suggests that he was unwilling to resist the now accepted cultural associations to which he alluded. HOBBISM AND LIBERTINISM

211

By the early 1670s the clerical campaign against Hobbes had publicised the linkage between Hobbism and libertinism, not least in the representation 211

The best general account of this topic is chapter 7 of Mintz’s Hunting, but see also the first chapter of Warren Chernaik’s Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (Cambridge, 1995); D. Underwood, Etherage and the Comedy of Manners (1957); H. Weber, The Restoration Rake-Hero (Madison, 1986).


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of Scargill. Once the link was established it became a popular theme for commentators seeking to condemn both. In 1672 Charles Wolseley made the point that ‘’Tis but of late that men come to defend ill living and secure themselves against their own guilt by an open defiance to all the great maxims of piety and virtue . . . and most of the bad principles of this age are of no earlier a date than one very ill book, are indeed the spawn of Leviathan.’ Robert Sharrock’s presentation of Hobbes’s ideas a year later painted a similar picture of the connection between Hobbesian/libertine behaviour: ‘Fill yourselves with costly Wine and Oyntments and let none of you go without some part of his voluptuousness, Contemn the laws of God and Nature. Oppresse the poor righteous man, spare not the widow and (which is perfect Hobbisme) Let your strength be the Law of Justice and what is feeble count it little worth.’212 The rise of such accusations at this time takes us back to Eachard’s analysis of the libertine issue; was it Hobbes who had given rise to libertinism, or was it the case that the extensive criticism of Hobbes in the late 1660s and early 1670s had led those associated with libertine behaviour to adopt the clerical version of Hobbes as their patron saint? Contemporary representations of the libertine’s relationship with Leviathan tend to support Eachard’s account of Hobbes’s ‘Pit Friends’, and they focus particularly upon the contrast between the fashionable claims made by libertines for their philosophical patron and their practical ignorance of Hobbes’s book. The character of a coffee-house (1673) includes a portrait of the young aristocratic debauchee frequently seen in the company of ‘three or four wilde Companions, half a dozen bottles of Burgundy, two leaves of Leviathan’. The pages of Leviathan turn out to be mere fashion accessories; the libertine ‘boasts aloud his Gospel from the Apostle of Malmesbury, though it is more than probable he ne’er read, at least understood ten leaves of that unlucky Author’. The Character of a town gallant (1675) makes the same point. The Gallant’s religion ‘is pretendedly Hobbian: And he Swears the Leviathan may supply all the lost Leaves of Solomon, yet he never saw it in his life, and for ought he knows it may be a Treatise about catching of Sprats, or new Regulating the Greenland Fishing Trade, However, the Rattle of it at Coffee-Houses, has taught him to Laugh at Spirits, and maintain that there are no Angels but those in Petticoats’.213 There is probably more than a little truth to such portraits, not least 212 213

Charles Wolseley, The reasonableness of scripture-belief (1672), Sig. A4r; Sharrock, De finibus virtutis Christianae, p. 195. Anon., The character of a coffee-house (1673), pp. 4–5; Anon., The character of a town gallant (1675), p. 7.

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because Leviathan was hard to come by in the 1670s; the libertine’s ignorance is replaced by a working knowledge of the heresies Hobbes was most commonly charged with by his clerical opponents. If these accounts supply us with a critical account of libertine Hobbism in the coffee-houses and taverns, it is possible to track the development and influence of the real thing in the form of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.214 If a minor character like Scargill helped to put Hobbes and libertinism together in the popular imagination, Rochester would be responsible for turning that connection into a positive creed and a character that would come to dominate cultural representations of the libertine, particularly those on the stage. Born in 1647, Rochester had spent most of his life abroad, at first in Paris, returning to England, and Wadham College in Oxford briefly in 1660–1 before setting off again upon a European tour that would last until 1664. After spending time in the Tower for kidnapping his future wife Elizabeth Mallet, he redeemed himself by serving with the navy in 1666–7, becoming a favoured courtier of his surrogate father Charles II.215 The rest is notorious history, as Rochester became the epitome of the libertine aristocrat, repeatedly embroiled in scandal. Anthony Wood squarely blamed Rochester’s interest in Hobbes on the influence of the court, ‘which not only debauched him but made him a perfect Hobbist’.216 Wood’s verdict is true if we take Hobbism to refer to the stereotype that Rochester would help to define, but it would be a mistake to think that Rochester simply took his beliefs from Hobbes’s works. It is perhaps no surprise given his biography that Rochester’s outlook incorporated continental traditions of scepticism, libertinism and satire represented by Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld and Boileau respectively. This intellectual mixture meant that although aspects of Hobbes’s work would be congenial, ultimately what emerged from their synthesis would transform them into the ingredients of another philosophical position altogether. This can be seen most clearly in Rochester’s influential Satyr against reason and mankind, published in 1679, but circulated widely in manuscript from 1674. The Hobbesian cue-words leap from the page from the opening stanzas to be followed by conceptual reductions familiar from Hobbes’s work; if reason is an ‘ignis fatuus in the mind’, Rochester decisively rejects the scholastic right reason of the Platonists and 214 215 216

The best account of Rochester’s ‘Hobbism’ is still Samuel Mintz’s discussion in Hunting, pp. 140–2. Frank H. Ellis, ‘Wilmot, John, second earl of Rochester (1647–1680)’, ODNB. A. Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, ed. P. Bliss, 4 vols. (1813–20), III, p. 1229.


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Latitudinarians, preferring instead a reductive account of a right reason informed by sense.217 Rochester’s preference for sense over abstract reasoning signals a correspondence with Hobbes but it is the launching pad for his satirical attack upon mankind. Comparing men with animals, Rochester observes that both are driven by passions, but there is a contrast between animals motivated by love and hunger, and men who are motivated solely by fear. Rochester’s satire takes on board Hobbesian elements here, but only to condemn them. Rochester takes the view that fear underpins the hypocritical facade that is civilisation: Base fear, the source whence his best passions came: His boasted honor, and his dear-bought fame; That lust of power, to which he’s such a slave, And for the which alone he dares to be brave; To which his various projects are designed; Which makes him generous, affable, and kind; For which he takes such pains to be thought wise, And screws his actions in a forced disguise, Leading a tedious life in misery Under laborious, mean hypocrisy. (ll. 143–52)

Rather than ending the state of war, as Hobbes had suggested, Rochester effectively argues that society is the continuation of war by other means, substituting hypocritical deceit for violence in a world of distorted values. Rochester’s implied alternative is a naturalistic ethics where instincts are not suppressed through spurious artificial value systems. Where Hobbes saw artifice as the solution to the difficulties of the human condition, Rochester saw a Hobbesian account of the character of society as part of the problem. Such a reading of Hobbes particularly commended itself to dramatists and writers at a time when the optimistic artifice of the Restoration settlement had been exposed as a hypocritical failure. The thought that society barely concealed a state of war is a theme that runs through several comedies of the 1670s not least the most famous, Wycherley’s The country wife (1675).218 Rochester’s adaptation of Hobbes was also particularly influential in articulating a philosophical characterisation of the libertine as an individual who makes the indulgence of sensual desire a quasi-Hobbesian naturalistic credo. As recent commentators have noted, Rochester’s Satyr generated identifiable responses amongst the dramatists with whom he 217 218

Lines 98–103. Rochester names Nathaniel Ingelo and Simon Patrick. See Chernaik, Sexual Freedom, pp. 24–5.

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was associated, a discourse that became in part a discussion about the proper interpretation of Hobbes’s philosophy.219 John Crowne made one of the first dramatic ripostes to Rochester’s adapted Hobbism in Calisto (1675) where Jupiter justifies his unrestrained pleasure-seeking in Hobbesian terms along the lines suggested by the Satyre.220 In The countrey wit (1675), Crowne’s character Ramble, ‘a wild young Gentleman of the Town’ occasionally paraphrases the adapted Hobbesian views expressed in Rochester’s Satyre to the effect that ‘the order of Nature is to follow my appetite.’221 Ramble announces that he is for ‘reducing Love to the state of nature: I am for no propriety, but every man get what he can.’222 A more interesting response to the Satyre can be found in perhaps the most famous stage treatments of Restoration libertinage and Hobbism, Shadwell’s The libertine (1676). Shadwell’s version of the Don Juan story is often taken at face value to be an indictment of Hobbes’s views, and at first this looks like a plausible reading. Shadwell’s serial-killer anti-hero comes complete with a philosophical outlook that seems to be directly informed by Hobbes’s work. Don John begins the play by reviewing his gang’s actions to date: Thus far without a bound we have enjoy’d Our prosp’rous pleasures, which dull Fools call Sins: Laugh’d at old feeble judges, and weak Laws: And at the fond fantastick thing, call’d Conscience. Which serves for nothing but to make men Cowards; And idle fear of future misery; And is yet worse than all that we can fear.223

The Hobbesian demotion of conscience and the afterlife as motives for obedience are turned into grounds for rejecting ethical and legal standards in favour of an amoral relativism that licenses a limitless desire for sensual gratification.224 When asked to give an account of their behaviour, Don

219

220

221 222 223

See particularly B. Hammond and P. Kewes, ‘A Satyre Against Reason and Mankind from Page to Stage’, in N. Fisher (ed.), That Second Bottle: Essays on John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (2000), pp. 135–52, and their interesting comments on contemporary dramatists like Crowne and Shadwell: ‘If at time it does seem as if they are writing with a copy of Leviathan open on the desk, Rochester’s poem has sent them back to the book’ (p. 134). J. Crowne, Calisto (1675), II, pp. 15–16, where Jupiter clearly plays upon Hobbesian themes common to anti-Hobbesian literature, specifically the relationship between power and moral authority. Ibid., p. 139, noting the resemblance of the passage from Act II, p. 22 with lines 105–9 of the Satyre. J. Crowne, The countrey wit (1675), p. 23. See also the comments of the character Merryman in Charles Sedley’s Bellamira (1687), Act III, Scene iv. Sedley was, of course, an associate of Rochester. T. Shadwell, The libertine (1676), Act 1, Scene 1. 224 Ibid., I.i, lines 140–2.


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John and his friends appeal to Hobbes’s necessitarianism: ‘All our actions are necessitated, none command their own wills.’225 However Shadwell’s relationship with Hobbes involves more than a simple rejection of Hobbes’s ideas. We know that Shadwell, a client of the Marquis of Newcastle, was actually an admirer of Hobbes’s nonpolitical work. In his will he left to his son John ‘five pounds for mourning and my latine and philosophicall books wth Mr Hobbes his workes warneing him to have a care with some ill opinions of his concerning government but hee may make excellent use of what is good in him’.226 Shadwell would align himself with the Whigs in the coming political crisis, and it is clear that although this meant that he would have had little time for Hobbes’s absolutism, he certainly shared Hobbes’s anti-clerical impulses and a respect for his materialist philosophy. Shadwell also had in common with Hobbes an admiration for Jonson’s comedy of the humours and the argument that the presentation of exemplary characters representing virtues and vices could and should have an improving impact upon their audiences.227 Such an attitude links Shadwell to the theatrical programmes discussed between Hobbes, Davenant and Newcastle in the late 1640s, and cumulatively these connections put The libertine in a rather different light. It seems clear that what Shadwell was targeting in The libertine were the various libertine adaptations of Hobbes that had become culturally significant by the mid-1670s. Shadwell brings out the fundamental amoralism of these arguments and ensures that they are thoroughly condemned to leave the audience in no doubt about the evil consequences of such views. Rochester’s version of Hobbism is clearly a major target, and ideas taken directly from the Satyre are reproduced as part of Don John’s creed: Nature gave us our Senses, which we please: Nor does Reason war against our Sense. By Nature’s order, Sense should guide our Reason, Since to the mind all objects Sense conveys.228

Equally, Shadwell points to the misuse of Hobbes’s doctrine of necessitarianism when it is used to legitimate libertine behaviour. In this, as in 225 226 227

228

Ibid., III.ii, lines 82–5. Don John goes on to adapt Hobbes’s Liberty and Necessity (lines 91–7). Quoted in H. Pellegrin’s critical edition of The libertine (1987), pp. lxxiii–lxxiv. See particularly the preface to The royal shepherdess (1669), discussed in A. Jaffe’s useful article ‘Seditious Appetites and Creeds: Shadwell’s Libertine and Hobbes’s Foole’, Restoration 24: 2, pp. 66–8. Shadwell, The libertine, I.i.30–3.

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other aspects of the play, Shadwell may also be reacting to Dryden’s ‘Hobbism’. Dryden’s use of necessitarian doctrine has already been remarked upon; his superhuman and apparently amoral characters like Almanzor sent out mixed signals about desirable behaviour, and to a certain extent Shadwell may have been reminding his audiences that in fact Drydenian and Rochesterian Hobbism is always something to be condemned and that the views that it proposes are ultimately self-destructive. In some ways this could reflect a more authentically Hobbesian answer to the Hobbist; it may not be unreasonable to follow Aaron Jaffe’s interesting suggestion that The libertine constitutes a dramatisation of Hobbes’s response to the ‘Foole’ in chapter 15 of Leviathan.229 If the ‘Foole’ mistakes Hobbes’s discussion of self-interest to warrant the breaking of contracts whenever it suits him, Hobbes’s answer was that such untrustworthy behaviour was inevitably self-defeating.230 Shadwell’s Don John eventually gets carried off to Hell for making a similar error in interpretation of the philosophy he has swallowed. If this was Shadwell’s intention, it is unsurprising that like Marvell, he kept his Hobbism to himself, and concentrated his fire upon the corruptions of Hobbes’s ideas found in Rochester rather than upon Hobbes.231 The dramatic fate of Rochesterian Hobbism illustrates the complex manner in which Hobbes’s ideas could be used, transformed and received during the 1670s. Libertinism and Hobbism may not have been automatically associated in the 1660s but a decade later libertine readings of Hobbism would be an important component of Hobbes’s public image. For many commentators Hobbes was now understood to be the font of vice and immorality. Thomas Lessee’s response to Rochester’s Satyre devoted a section to Hobbes as ‘Hell’s great Agent’ in a way that demonstrates the easy move from Rochester’s work to identifying Hobbes as its primary source and diabolic inspiration: The Devil’s Apostle sent to preach up Sin, And so convert the debauch’d World to him; Whom Pride drew in as Cheats, their Bubbles catch, And made him venture to be made a Wretch.

229 231

Jaffe, ‘Seditious Appetites’, pp. 63–4. 230 Hobbes, Leviathan, XV, pp. 102–3 [73 O.P.]. The modern confusion over the play’s targets was mirrored by contemporaries, who as Hammond and Kewes note, did not always know what to make of the presentation of Hobbism. Hammond and Kewes, ‘A Satyre against Reason and Mankind’, p. 149. Shadwell would continue the assault upon Rochesterian Hobbism in The history of Timon of Athens (1678).


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Hobbs, Nature’s pest, unhappy England’s shame, Who damns his Soul to get himself a Name.232

Rochester himself would be transformed into a victim rather than a hijacker of Hobbes’s ideas. When Robert Parsons preached Rochester’s funeral sermon in 1680 the penitent Rochester was quoted on his deathbed as saying that ‘that absurd and foolish Philosophy, which the world so much admired, propagated by the late Mr. Hobbs, and others, had undone him, and many more, of the best parts in the Nation.’233 Towards the end of his final illness, Rochester had been attended by John Fell and Thomas Pierce, both enemies of Hobbes, so it was no surprise either that the topic was raised or that it became an important part of the presentation of Rochester’s final change of heart.234 Samuel Holland’s An Elegie . . . to the Memory of . . . Rochester adapted the point in verse: Himself his looser lines to Flames bequeaths And Hobbs’ creed with Detestation leaves.235

The story was a priceless asset for Hobbes’s opponents. Here, after all, was the libertine himself, the model for rakes like Horner, Ramble, Don John and Dorimant, confirming that very relationship. 232 233 234

T. L., ‘A Satyr’, in J. Barker, Poetical recreations (1688), p. 74 [second pagination]. R. Parsons, A sermon preached at the funeral of the Rt Honorable John Earl of Rochester (Oxford, 1680), p. 26. Mintz, Hunting, pp. 141–2. 235 Ibid.

CHAPTER

6

Hobbes and the Restoration crisis (1675–1685)

Hobbes’s work had been associated with many features of political and cultural life in the early 1670s; atheism, libertinism, authoritarian churchmen and seditious dissenters. But as the crown appeared to drift towards what critics like Marvell would characterise as popery and arbitrary government, Charles’s policies began to look more like the Hobbism condemned by Harrington and Lawson. Although Hobbes’s absolutism had always been condemned, this feature of Hobbes’s argument had drawn less attention in the early Restoration period. Partly this was because Hobbes had been successfully recast by Royalist propaganda as a seditious contract theorist, but a connected reason was that most parties had good reasons to magnify royal authority in a manner sometimes not unlike that described in Leviathan. Parliamentarians, Anglican churchmen and dissenters, for example, all sought royal support for their causes; if Eachard found nothing exceptional in chapters 18–20 of Leviathan, Marvell, as we have seen, could also appeal to Charles’s absolute authority in a Hobbesian fashion as a possible means of bringing about a more moderate approach to dissent. As the decade wore on, however, the king’s absolute authority started to seem less benign. The increasing (and to a large extent justified) suspicion that the court favoured popery and absolutist France began to motivate political opposition. The court’s attachment to foreign arbitrary absolutism took centre-stage as a danger to law, property and religion. In this context, Leviathan’s earlier reputation as the textbook of despotic absolutism could be fitted into more general anxieties about the court. For example, republican John Ayloffe’s Britannia and Raleigh (1675) explicitly associated Leviathan with the corrupting absolutist advice Charles was receiving from his French courtiers, who ‘Tell him him of golden Indies, fairylands / Leviathans, and absolute commands.’1 Although such popular 1

John Ayloffe, Britannia and Raleigh (1674–5) in Poems on affairs of state, vol. I, ed. G. Lord (Yale, 1963), p. 232.

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concerns about Hobbesian absolutism at court were very much products of the mid 1670s, the critique that managed to encapsulate them most effectively for contemporaries was composed some years earlier. Clarendon’s A brief view and survey (published in 1676) had been motivated by the former Chancellor’s fears about Hobbes’s possible influence in court circles. Designed as a warning, above all to Charles, of the selfdestructive consequences of adopting Hobbesian sovereignty, A brief view and survey would also serve as a succinct restatement of the way in which Hobbism could be identified first and foremost with absolutism. For those worried about the absolutist drift of crown policy, that identification would make discussion of Hobbes a live issue and recurrent trope in the polemical literature of the Restoration crisis. CLARENDON’S BRIEF VIEW AND SURVEY

(1676)

The turbulent relationship between Clarendon and Hobbes, which had played such an important role in shaping Hobbes’s life and reputation, reached its climax in a work that would confirm for many Hobbes’s status as an apostle of arbitrary power and an apologist for Cromwell. It would be easy to see Clarendon’s parting shot at Hobbes as a purely personal settling of old scores, but it would be doing Clarendon an injustice not to see the wider contexts for his final showdown with his former friend. From the very beginning in 1640, and possibly before that, Clarendon’s disagreement with Hobbes had been ideological rather than personal, and the tension between an amicable personal relationship and a deepening ideological divide complicated the younger man’s attempts to deal with his intellectually single-minded older acquaintance. The personal and intellectual admiration that Clarendon had for Hobbes, an admiration shared by many of the visitors to Great Tew, made it difficult for him, and for them, to give up the hope that Hobbes might be somehow reconciled to their conception of church and state, a hope that must have seemed to dissolve with the second edition of De Cive, and which disappeared completely with the publication of Leviathan. Right from the start Hyde felt that Hobbes’s ideological position was potentially subversive, a conviction that over the 1640s had hardened into a belief that Hobbes’s work was actually corrupting and undermining the Royalist cause. This explains Hyde’s ruthless determination to have Hobbes removed from court in the autumn of 1651. In these circumstances, personal relationships came second. Forcing Hobbes back to England removed his influence and paved the way for those destructive principles to be identified with the republic,

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Protectorate and sedition more generally. Clarendon’s actions created the situation in which his analysis of Hobbes’s ideas was demonstrated to be true. After 1660 Clarendon clearly hoped, as he explained in the Brief view and survey, that Hobbes’s influence would ‘expire by neglect’ and render any public confrontation unnecessary. The Brief view and survey even hints that Clarendon may have thought that it might be possible to achieve some sort of rapprochement: Hobbes visited him once after the Restoration and Clarendon ‘receiv’d him very kindly, and invited him to see me often’.2 Although there are reasons to distrust Clarendon’s testimony to his own generosity, the recollection strikes an authentic note in the context of the peculiar combination of personal respect and ideological opposition, and it seems plausible that, even after everything that had happened, Clarendon might have thought that he could persuade Hobbes to retract his arguments. But Hobbes only met with his former friend once, only too aware that the principles that he still held were diametrically opposed to Clarendon’s own.3 But the final moves in the drama had yet to be played out. One thing that stands out from A brief view and survey is Clarendon’s recurring anxiety that Hobbes’s ideological influence was on the rise. Although the philosopher’s capacity to publish widely had been curtailed after 1660, his reconciliation with the king nevertheless gave him a dangerous forum at court. Clarendon would note that after the king’s return Hobbes ‘came frequently to Court, where he had too many Disciples’.4 Clarendon doesn’t name names, but he was probably thinking of men like Henry Bennett, Earl of Arlington, one of Hobbes’s court patrons. After Clarendon’s fall from power in 1667, Bennett became a key member of the Cabal regime, a regime whose religious and political agendas, as we have seen, could be identified with Hobbes and Hobbism. Hobbes himself realised this, dedicating several of his works to Arlington during the later 1660s. From exile Clarendon monitored Hobbes’s attempts to get back into print and the good graces of the government.5 Clarendon’s anxiety about the dangers of resurgent Hobbism constitute the essential context for the Brief view and survey, which was completed in 1670, although not 2 3 4

5

Clarendon, Brief view and survey, p. 9. Hobbes’s remarks in Behemoth seem to make it clear that he had no time for Clarendon’s constitutional Royalist stance. See Hobbes, Behemoth, pp. 116–17. Clarendon, Brief view and survey, p. 9; cf. Aubrey’s recollection that Hobbes was granted free access to Charles II ‘who was always much delighted in his witt and smart repartees’. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1898), I, p. 340. Clarendon, Brief view and survey, p. 310.


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published until 1676.6 The book sought to demonstrate the dangers of Hobbism to those who might be taking a more benign view of the philosopher’s work, not least the king himself.7 As Clarendon writes in the introduction, his aim is to give ‘warning to both [King and Country], of the danger they are in by the seditious Principles of this Book, that they may in time provide for their Security by their abolishing and extirpating those, and the like excesses.’8 This account of the work’s origins and purposes may explain the peculiar mixture of personal and ideological commentary in the book. Clarendon’s treatment of Hobbes bears all the tensions of his complicated personal relationship with the philosopher. On the one hand Clarendon asserts that ‘Mr Hobbes is one of the most antient acquaintances I have in the World, and of whom I have alwaies had a great esteem, as a Man who besides his eminent parts of Learning and knowledg, hath been alwaies looked upon as a Man of Probity, and a life free from scandal.’9 But the compliments soon give way to an analysis in which personal recollection is used to bolster the thought that Leviathan represented an act of betrayal. Where once Clarendon had tried to use his personal relationship with Hobbes as a means of preventing a more public disagreement, the details of that personal relationship now became part of a public war upon Hobbes’s malign influence.10 Clarendon didn’t hesitate to give the worst possible construction of Hobbes’s conduct during the 1650s. Leviathan had been written to flatter the future Protector: the ‘Review and Conclusion’, was ‘in truth, a sly address to Cromwell’. Hobbes sought by his advice to become Cromwell’s counsellor; his religious ideas were designed to augment Cromwell’s religious power and support his ecclesiastical policies. Clarendon had either not read, or simply ignored Hobbes’s own explanation in Mr Hobbes Considered; Hobbes’s intention to serve Cromwell in Leviathan was simply presented as a revealed truth.

6 7

8 10

The reasons were probably political, given the tension between the anti-absolutist thrust of Clarendon’s work and the absolutist trajectory of goverment policy. In a letter of 1672, asking for Charles’s permission to publish the work, Clarendon suggested that Charles ask his son Laurence to provide extracts of Hobbes’s ‘desperate conclusions as well in Policy as Religion, which I believe hath never been presented to you, nor it may be taken notice of by many who hath read his Booke’. Bodleian Library MS Clarendon 87, f. 192. The extracts, Clarendon’s own ‘Hobbists Creeds’, are included in the printed version. 9 Clarendon, Brief view and survey, p. 5. Ibid., p. 3. This wouldn’t go down well with some of his readers, particularly those who had been close to Hobbes; William Petty would complain that in dealing with Hobbes, Clarendon ‘treats more of Persons than Things’. The Petty–Southwell Correspondence 1676–1687 (1928), p. 260.

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The critique itself is a chapter by chapter analysis, but Clarendon doesn’t stick closely to the text. Possibly aware of the failure of Lucy’s work (dedicated to Clarendon in better days) he comments that he has always thought it ‘a great excess in those who take upon them to answer other Mens Writings, to hold themselves oblig’d to find fault with every thing they say, and to answer every clause, period, and proposition which he . . . hath laid down.’11 Such tactics could blow up in one’s face if there was as much to approve as there was to censure, and this was the case with Leviathan. Clarendon skips through some of the early and later chapters with brief comments, devoting the bulk of his commentary to the political sections in chapters 13–31 and in the theological sections devoting most commentary to traditional critical ‘hot spots’ in chapters 38, 42, 45 and 47. But A brief view and survey isn’t simply a refutation of Hobbes, and it would be wrong to see Clarendon’s lessons and warning as a purely negative critique. It is also, at crucial moments, a statement of Clarendon’s constitutional Royalist creed; an exposition of the path that should be followed if the monarchy wants to avoid the disaster that would be ushered in if Hobbes’s principles are followed instead. These themes struggle to escape from the book’s organising structure but they make what would otherwise be a rather mediocre critique into an important and interesting political intervention. Clarendon noted himself that he had only read some of the existing antiHobbesian literature after completing the work, but this hadn’t put him off the task of writing against Hobbes’s politics.12 That critique was one that he had pondered from his earliest encounter with the Elements of Law, and it is no surprise to find the same themes covered in his notes on that work, and the manuscript on De Cive, reappear as parts of his critique of Leviathan. The defence of natural inequality, the repeated reference to Hobbes’s statement that the laws of nature were eternal and unchangeable, the sacred nature of oaths and promises as well his recurrent concerns about matters such as the end of obligation and idolatry link A brief view and survey with the manuscript response to the first edition to De Cive. Although there is no evidence that Clarendon had read Eachard’s books, he shares with Eachard an awareness that much of Hobbes’s power of persuasion came from its rhetoric. In part, like Eachard, Clarendon was trying to undermine the thought that Leviathan held together philosophically, but his observations are often acute in identifying some of Hobbes’s literary strategies. Leviathan was counted amongst those books: 11

Clarendon, Brief view and survey, p. 1.

12

Ibid., p. 4.


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in which the Authors, by the Ornament of their Style, and the pleasantness of their method, and subtilty of their Wit, have from specious Premises, drawn their unskilful and unwary Readers into unwarrantable Opinions and Conclusions, being intoxicated with terms and Allegorical expressions, which puzzel their understandings, and lead them into perplexities, from whence they cannot disentangle themselves.13

Hobbes’s order and method in writing were in general ‘very remarkable and commendable’, but in it Hobbes set traps for the unwary reader. Clarendon notes that Hobbes occasionally provides startling and unexpected links from one theme to another. Like Eachard he also notes that Hobbes’s definitions discover ‘a master faculty in making easie things hard to be understood’,14 but in contrast to Eachard’s assurance that nothing unusual is being said, Clarendon detects a more sinister agenda at work. Hobbes’s ‘mist of words, under the notion of explaining common terms . . . dazles mens eies from discerning those Fallacies upon which he raises his Structure’.15 This was the means by which unwary readers could be duped into thinking that Hobbes’s conclusions flowed from his premises, a position that Clarendon sought to expose. Clarendon’s substantial comments on Hobbes’s political project take apart familiar targets, rejecting Hobbes’s claim that men are naturally equal with the same defence of Aristotle’s belief in natural inequality deployed in the response to De Cive. The state of war is equally absurd, and nothing could be said ‘more contrary to the Honor and Dignity of God Almighty, then that he should leave his master workmanship, Man, in a condition of War of every man against every man’.16 At the heart of Clarendon’s critique is the apparent incongruity between Hobbes’s insistance that natural laws are eternal and obligatory, and his preparedness to envisage a state where no one obeys them. Referring to the mayhem in chapter 13, Clarendon wondered why Hobbes made it ‘unavoidably necessary for every man to cut his neighbour’s throat’ when at the same time he set down a body of ‘immutable and eternal’ natural laws prescribed by nature itself as a remedy.17 The critique becomes more interesting when it moves on to the question of Hobbes’s absolutism and here we see the real political point of Clarendon’s warning: that adopting Hobbesian justifications of absolutism is ultimately self-defeating. Clarendon points out that Hobbes’s theoretical account of a sovereignty is ultimately unstable and unsustainable. Although Hobbes gives his sovereign ‘such an extent of power and autority, 13

Ibid., p. 2.

14

Ibid., p. 21.

15

Ibid., p. 26.

16

Ibid., p. 28.

17

Ibid., p. 37.

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as the Great Turk hath not yet appear’d to affect’,18 that power is based upon the signature asymmetry of the Hobbesian contract; subjects contract between themselves to accept a sovereign who is not a party to the contract and absolved from any form of agreement. In effect, the sovereign remains in the state of nature to behave as prudence rather than any formal obligation dictates. Clarendon argued that making the provocative claim that a sovereign was completely free from any form of obligation was more likely to provoke subversion that prevent it.19 By far the better alternative was the constitutional Royalist theory of monarchic self-limitation where promises are mutual, although not conditional (as Clarendon notes ‘the Soveraign must not be at the mercy of his Subjects’20). As subjects submit to the sovereign, ‘so he promises not to use that power wantonly or tyrannically’.21 Formal self-restraint, rather than one-sided declarations of unlimited power, was the practical means to create political stability. Clarendon of course agreed with Hobbes, as he had done all along, that sovereignty was always in the sovereign alone, and that the only practical sanctions involved were those provided by God and the laws of nature, but the crucial difference was that for Clarendon a monarch always had good reason to bind himself publically and practically to the observation of promises, oaths, liberties and property rights. Making the Hobbesian claim that a sovereign was exempt from any form of limitation was guaranteed to sap obligation and loyalty amongst subjects.22 Clarendon pursues this theme into his discussion of chapter 21 of Leviathan, the chapter where Hobbes had redefined liberty to render it compatible with his idea of unlimited sovereignty and where he had also claimed that it was impossible for the sovereign to commit an injury against a subject. In the first case individuals retain a liberty to whatever the sovereign has left unregulated; in the second, the lack of a formal juridical relationship between sovereign and subject makes it impossible for a sovereign to commit an injustice upon the subject. Hobbes’s aim was to make it impossible for subjects to appeal to terms like liberty and justice against the sovereign. For Clarendon, again, the practical effect was quite the opposite. For subjects to believe that their liberty, life and property could be interfered with arbitrarily and without injustice constituted a fatal threat to the security of even the greatest prince.23 The concern about property rights surfaces throughout A brief view and survey. Clarendon believed that property was a foundation of civilisation, 18

Ibid., p. 42.

19

Ibid., p. 48.

20

Ibid., p. 50.

21

Ibid.

22

Ibid., p. 55.

23

Ibid., pp. 82–3.


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and that without security of property, barbarism beckoned.24 Political attempts to undermine property rights could only lead to disaster, sapping political obligation and generating political strife. The shadow of Ship Money and its consequences in the early 1640s fell darkly across Clarendon’s analysis. Arbitrary taxation, defended by Hobbes in chapter 24, usually meant that ‘the Soveraign hath receiv’d much more dammage than profit by it, and the Kingdom bin in a worse state of security then it was before.’25 Promoters of sedition could foster the fear that all property was at risk and hurry the people ‘into all those acts of rage and despair, which prove so fatal to Kingdoms’.26 Clarendon concluded that subjects would never defend a state if they have no security of property.27 The message to his court audience was clear: adopting a Hobbesian understanding of arbitrary sovereignty was political suicide and this was even before one got into the issue of Hobbes’s de factoism. Discussion of Hobbes’s seditious side plays a much smaller role in A brief view and survey than it does in other Restoration critiques, primarily because Hobbesian absolutism was Clarendon’s major concern. Clarendon was of course happy, however, to signal the tension between Hobbes’s defence of unconditional absolutism and his preparedness within a few pages to countenance its end. The guiding thread of Clarendon’s Royalism had been his belief in the indefeasibility of his political obligations and this part of Hobbes’s doctrine had always been the hardest for Clarendon for swallow. Clarendon took full advantage of the thought that Hobbes’s doctrine had not only sapped loyalty to the Royalist cause but had also gone on to underpin the power of the Protectorate.28 That Hobbism created a poor foundation for long-lasting obedience was abundantly demonstrated by the notorious passage where Hobbes had allowed convicted men to band together to defend themselves without injustice.29 If Hobbes’s theory had shown its true colours in the experience of usurpation, history had also confirmed Clarendon’s alternative: ‘many Princes have recover’d, and redeem’d themselves from that period, and arrived again at their full height and glory by the constancy and vertue of their Subjects, and their firmly believing, that their obligations could not be extinguish’d as long as the right of their Soveraign Monarch was not.’30 Clarendon’s lesson to his court audience couldn’t have been clearer; even giving the appearance that the government endorsed Hobbesian rather 24 28 30

Ibid., p. 111. 25 Ibid., p. 112; see also pp. 179–80. 26 Ibid., p. 108. 27 Ibid., pp. 163–4. Ibid., pp. 92–3, glossing Hobbes’s comments in Six Lessons to the same effect. 29 Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 167.

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than constitutional Royalist principles was the path to disaster: ‘God forbid that the Soveraign powers should contribute to the making those principles believed, which would be in great danger to be destroied, if it were but suspected that they affected to have that power, which he would have to belong to them.’31 As we shall see, Clarendon’s warning was prescient in that Charles’s government would be suspected of a drift towards Hobbesian-style arbitrary absolutism during the 1670s as anxieties about popery and arbitrary government took hold. Clarendon’s summary of Hobbes’s dangerous political positions (lists that Laurence Hyde was supposed to read to Charles himself 32) rams home the point with a pre´cis of what Clarendon saw as unacceptable absolutism.33 When Clarendon turns to Leviathan’s treatment of religion it is only to expose Hobbes’s essentially subversive approach to Christianity. In line with his absolutist agenda, Hobbes aims to undermine the independent power of religion. Clarendon doesn’t make a direct accusation of atheism, but makes it clear that he understands why others should think him to be of no religion at all. Although some readers had taken Hobbes’s comments at face value, Clarendon detected across the range of Hobbes’s unusual theology and ecclesiology a deliberate attempt to satirise and discredit traditional religious beliefs. When Hobbes has recourse to scriptural evidence ‘he presumes to give such unnatural explanations, descriptions, and definitions to several words and terms . . . as disturbs the whole Analogy of Scripture, and exposes those expressions . . . to the mirth of those who are too much inclin’d to be merry with the Scripture.’34 Hobbes’s interpretations ‘hath in truth traduced the whole Scheme of Christianity into Burlesque’.35 The purpose of each move is to augment the sovereign’s control over religion in a frightening and arbitrary fashion. In De Cive at least the religion in question was assumed to be Christianity; in Leviathan it could be anything at all, including, most alarmingly for readers in the 1670s confronted with the prospect of a popish successor, Catholicism. Clarendon’s commentary explores the details of Hobbes’s strategy. Lessening the authority of scripture by casting doubt upon its authorship (the example is Moses’ authorship of the Pentateuch) goes hand in hand with sourcing their authority in the sovereign. If ‘prophet’ is revealed to mean one who speaks incoherently and that the claims of the prophets are merely dreams or ‘extasy’, this was designed to help Cromwell free himself from clerical interference. Allowing the sovereign to interpret what is or is 31 33

Ibid., p. 161. 32 Bodleian Library MS Clarendon 87, f. 192. Clarendon, Brief view and survey, pp. 190–3. 34 Ibid., p. 199.

35

Ibid., p. 200.

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not a miracle potentially gives a Roman Catholic sovereign the ability to authorise the truth of transubstantiation. The sovereign was also empowered to authorise what in a private person would be idolatry, and even the denial of Christ. If the sovereign is magnified to the status of Moses or Abraham, Christ’s practical authority is reduced to nothing, ‘degrading him below the model of Socinus, and in no degree equal to the description of his Power in Scripture’.36 Hobbes, of course, stripped the church of its power and Clarendon found it ‘a very painful thing’ to read Hobbes’s forty-second chapter. Here Hobbes’s ‘loose and licentious’ reflections upon piety, religion and scripture were brought together into ‘a Mass of impiety’ making ‘all Ecclesiastical power to be of no signification, and the most useless thing upon the earth’.37 Clarendon did share with Hobbes a horror of the kind of priestly tyranny they both associated with Roman Catholicism and the conviction that the clergy should be subordinated to the sovereign, and this occasionally leads him to qualify his criticism and sometimes even praise Hobbes’s anti-clerical sentiments (particularly Hobbes’s commentary upon the distinction between temporal and spiritual power and some of Hobbes’s comments about excommunication38). But although Clarendon agreed that the church possessed no coercive temporal power, he was anxious to refute the thought that the church had no authority but to preach whatever doctrine the king commanded. For Clarendon, as for Hammond and Thorndike, Hobbes had always hit the wrong target when he attacked the Church of England: ‘there is’, Clarendon commented, ‘neither Bishop not Priest who pretends to any Power or Jurisdiction, inconsistent with the King’s Supremacy, in Ecclesiastical as well as Temporal matters.’39 In repairing one perceived fault Hobbes had created an arbitrary source of religious authority that swallowed up every aspect of religious authority. If Hobbes’s political apostasy caused Clarendon particular grief, Hobbes’s apparent hostility towards the Episcopalians came a close second. Clarendon regarded it as ‘a very ungenerous and vile thing’ to have published a work ‘with so much malice and acrimony against the Church of England, when it was scarce strugling in its own ruines’, not least because of the loyalty of the clergy to the king.40 Hobbes’s ecclesiastical allegiance, by contrast, was tuned by his willingness to submit to the usurper. Hobbes had simply complied with the views of the dominating power, in accordance with his doctrine. In 1651 this meant opposing the 36

Ibid., p. 244.

37

Ibid., pp. 264–5.

38

Ibid., p. 273.

39

Ibid., p. 249.

40

Ibid., p. 305.

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Episcopalians and approving Independency ‘because Cromwell was then thought to be of that faction’.41 Clarendon’s eighteen-point summary of Hobbes’s dangerous religious propositions mirrors his political list in its concern about the creation of an arbitrary power; half deal with the problem directly and the others are linked to it in the text.42 It seems reasonable to suppose that lying at the root of his anxieties was a concern that the flirtation with Hobbism might encourage Charles or his ministers to dismantle the Restoration settlement. Clarendon knew that Charles had sought toleration for Catholics in the early years of the Restoration; the Declaration of Indulgence had signalled that such a position was still in play. The Catholicism of the Duke of York, exposed in 1673, threatened dangers to come. Clarendon’s comments upon the utility of Hobbism for a sovereign wishing to reimpose Catholicism would provide a topical critical framework for writers dealing with Hobbes, now as the apostle of dangerous but frighteningly plausible absolutism. Clarendon’s importance, and the relevance of his critique to the politics of the period, ensured that the book was read. In 1676 the Earl of Shaftesbury sent his servant Thomas Stringer special instructions to procure ‘the Earl of Clarendon’s book against Mr Hobbes, well bound and gilt and titled on the back’.43 We don’t know what Shaftesbury made of it, but it seems likely that at this stage of his opposition to the crown Clarendon’s constitutionalist response to Hobbesian absolutism made it a useful resource. Shaftesbury’s secretary John Locke purchased the work in December 1681, possibly casting around for ideas to use in his own theoretical attempts to critique arbitrary political power. As we shall see, the use of Hobbes’s work as Tory propaganda, and the occasional Hobbism detectable in court propaganda, would make it natural for Whig writers to make use of Clarendon’s work.44 RALPH CUDWORTH’S TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM

(1678)

Although the Cambridge Platonists are often regarded as Hobbes’s most important critics, before 1678 they had made a relatively modest printed contribution to the anti-Hobbesian cause. Henry More had come late to the close fighting with The immortality of the soul in 1659, but after this controversial contribution to the literature his work tended to focus upon 41 43 44

Ibid., p. 308. 42 Ibid., pp. 311–15. K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford, 1968), p. 219. See below, pp. 335–6, 340–2, 366.


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the problems with Cartesianism.45 This accounts for the relatively minor attention that More gives to Hobbes and his works during this period.46 However, Hobbes does plays a greater role in the work of More’s friend Ralph Cudworth. Cudworth, Master of Christ’s College and Regius Professsor of Hebrew at Cambridge did confront Hobbes’s materialism, his ethics and his politics in his monumental work, the True intellectual system of the universe. Although published in the late 1670s, the project probably began as a more modest response to Hobbes’s position on liberty and necessity in the 1650s.47 As More’s commentary on the same issue in Immortality shows, the Cambridge writers felt that the real answer to Hobbes’s extreme necessitarianism lay not in the elaborate scholastic distinctions deployed by Bramhall, but rather in dealing with the materialism that lay at the foundation of Hobbes’s project. From this starting point, and possibly in response to the indeterminacy of Hobbes’s own statements about the relationship between God and necessity, Cudworth broadened his enquiry to include other species of fatalism. In addition to the atheistic or ‘Democritick’ fatalism of the atomists, he included the theistic fatalism of those who believed that God determined the world and even good and evil arbitrarily (Divine Fate Immorall), and also those who believed that God acted according to justice and wisdom, but nevertheless denied free will (Divine Fate Morall). Cudworth’s response would be a three-part treatment of these issues in which atheism, voluntarism and necessitarianism would be dealt with sequentially to prove against the atheist that God existed, against the voluntarist that God is essentially good and just, and that differences of good and evil are natural and necessary, and lastly, against the necessitarian, that man has free will. Taken together these demonstrations would constitute the true intellectual system of the title. The relationship between this project and Hobbes’s work is striking. Hobbes was by the end of the 1650s infamous for being by turns an atheist, an extreme voluntarist and a necessitarian. This is not to insist that Cudworth’s interest in these matters was initiated by a reading of Hobbes so much as a more general hostility towards Calvinist versions of 45 46

47

Hobbes receives only brief ‘walk-on’ parts in More’s works of the later 1660s, see Divine dialogues (1668), pp. 5–6, and Enchiridion metaphysicum (1671), pp. 114–18, 324–5. More discusses ‘the prophane Hobbians and Spinozians’ in his Apocalypsis apocalypseos (1680), p. xvi; see also the contemptuous remarks in his letter to Joseph Glanvill in the preface to Saducismus triumphatus (1681), p. 16. Glanvill himself was more pro-active in pushing a Morean agenda against Hobbes, as this work demonstrates. See Cudworth’s comments in the preface. Cudworth, The true intellectual system of the universe (1678) [hereafter TIS], Sig. A3r. Bramhall’s reference in Catching (1658) to an English refutation of Hobbes by ‘DRC’ may well refer to [D]r [R]alph [C]udworth.

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voluntarist and predestinarian arguments. But what Hobbes would ultimately provide was the appalling collision of these elements in a mixture that was transparently conducive to atheism, and this probably focused Cudworth’s mind to produce his own systematic alternative.48 Although Hobbes’s presence may well account for the architecture of Cudworth’s philosophical system, the scale of the exercise soon made the explicit antiHobbism of the work a relatively minor feature, foregrounding instead more Olympian treatments of the questions themselves. Cudworth transformed them into wide-ranging enquiries about the ancient origins of atheism, voluntarism and necessitarianism, recovering the structural arguments of those traditions and their defects in order to defend the contrasting traditions of theism, essentialism and free will. In the midst of this avalanche of scholarship, Hobbes recurs as a modern symptom of an ancient disease, and a debased and rather poor example at that. This explains one of the oddest aspects of a project that owes and contributes so much to the debate over Hobbes; in the published portions Hobbes is never named once. He is, by turns, ‘a Modern Writer’, the ‘Author of Leviathan’, an ‘Atheistick Politician’, a ‘Modern Atheistick Pretender to Wit’. The only other writer to receive the same treatment is Spinoza, the other modern atheist dealt with at length, a development that presumably dates from the early 1670s. Both are cut down to size as unoriginal and typically ‘sottish’ imitators. It isn’t the case that Cudworth uses Animaxander or Protagoras as a surrogate for Hobbes; Hobbes is reduced to an epiphenomenal manifestation of that tradition. It took until 1678 for the True intellectual system to appear, and even then it wasn’t complete. Cudworth probably began with some of the work on free will now preserved in manuscript. In the early 1660s he began work on the second portion of the project, a discussion of eternal and immutable morality, but this appears to have come to an acrimonious halt after he discovered that More was planning to write something similar in the winter of 1664/5.49 In the mid-to-late 1660s Cudworth must have started work on 48

49

It is possible that we can see the earliest evidence of this response in the verse forms of two theses by Cudworth, dated June 1651. One defends the thought that good and evil are eternal and indispensable, and the other that incorporeal substances are immortal. Although there is no direct evidence that the theses refer to Leviathan, it seems at least plausible that they, or their publication, could represent a very early reaction to the book. R. Cudworth, Dantur rationes boni, & mali aeternae, & indispensabiles (Cambridge, 1651). For the dating of theses, see David A. Pailin’s discussion in ‘Cudworth, Ralph (1617–1688)’, NDNB. John Worthington, The diary and correspondence of Dr John Worthington, ed. R. C. Christie, 2 vols. (Manchester, 1847–86), II, Part I, pp. 157–8, 161–2, 164–5, 172. More’s work would become the Enchiridion ethicum (1668).


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the anti-atheist sections of the System because this part of the project, the only part to be published during his lifetime, received an imprimatur from Samuel Parker in May 1671. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Cudworth’s work during this period was yet another response to the anxieties about Hobbism and atheism in the later 1660s, especially as Cudworth was one of those who had sat in judgement upon Scargill in Cambridge’s consistory court in 1669. Why Cudworth failed to complete the publishing process at this stage is not clear. It may have been the need to expand the work to confront the new challenge of Spinoza’s Tractatus (1670), or as with More’s Enchiridion, he may well have been dismayed at the proliferation of similar works appearing in the early 1670s, particularly Cumberland’s De legibus (1672). A more prosaic explanation may be that as a very busy Head of House at Christ’s he simply didn’t have time.50 The anti-atheist section that did appear as The true intellectual system of the universe weighed in at 900 folio pages, a rich and challenging mixture of classical philology, modern science, philosophy and critique. Even Cudworth himself announced his own surprise at just how long it had turned out to be. Every page is littered with classical quotations from a huge range of sources harnessed very loosely in support of a meandering and digressive thesis. Cudworth had a foot in both Renaissance and Enlightenment, and indeed, would have rejected the thought that there was a difference between the two. It was only through a proper understanding of classical traditions that a true modern science could be generated. The Platonist belief in the essential unity of true knowledge meant that the philosophical truth was already embedded in philosophical traditions; the question of scientific enlightenment was essentially philological: could one read those traditions rightly? This was what the atheists had failed to do, and it was an old mistake. Central to Cudworth’s opening chapter was a genealogy of the ‘Atomick Physiology’, a materialist hypothesis usually supposed to be no older than the writings of Democritus and Leucippus. Cudworth, however, argues that this is a mistake. In fact the true atomic physiology, compatible with both God and spirit, was the work of Moses.51 Democritus and Leucippus had corrupted this theory by introducing the Anaximandrian view that all things were material. Although Hobbes isn’t mentioned at all, Cudworth makes Anaximandrian and Democritick theories speak in the Hobbesian language of materialism and local motion. Hobbes begins to surface more 50 51

See also Henry More’s comments in E. Elys, Letters on several subjects (1694), pp. 28–9. Cudworth, TIS, p. 13.

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clearly in chapter 2 where the grounds for atheism are surveyed and unattributed quotations are given from a ‘Modern Writer’.52 Cudworth’s hostile commentary confirms the atheist intentions behind Hobbes’s more complex arguments thus establishing him as a modern version of a Democritick unbeliever. Hobbes is also the lead example when Cudworth covers the atheist’s rejection of incorporeal substances, again combining unsourced quotations from Hobbes’s texts.53 A quotation from De Corpore is used to present the atheistic argument that the idea of an unmoved first mover is absurd.54 Hobbes predictably figures heavily in Cudworth’s exposition of the argument that it is in man’s political interest that there be no God. Fear of God swallows up fear of the magistrate, a sentiment backed with quotation from Leviathan.55 Cudworth’s presentation of the atheist case here spins out the implications that Hobbes had left ambiguous, transforming Hobbes’s passages into more clearly heterodox texts. Although this is no more than most of Hobbes’s critics did with his work, Cudworth’s systematic elaboration of the rational arguments for atheism, made separately from his critique, led some of his readers to wonder whether he had done the cause of atheism a service rather than undermined it. Cudworth’s critique, and the most substantial treatment of Hobbes, comes in chapter 5, titled ‘A Confutation of Atheism’. Here, for the first time, Hobbes’s works are cited directly. Cudworth’s opening assaults are perhaps some of his most successful, in that they deal with specific Hobbesian positions. He first seeks to refute the atheist’s claim that we can have no ideas but those that come from the senses, an ingredient of Hobbes’s rejection of our ability to conceive of God.56 For Cudworth Hobbes’s view denies the existence of ideas independent of sense, an important feature of his idealist epistemology. Although we cannot have perfect knowledge of a being like God, Cudworth argues that we can at least conceive internally of a being that is absolutely perfect. Hobbes also lurks behind the atheist claim that God is incomprehensible, and here, for Cudworth, the mistake is to assume that something that is incomprehensible to us is inconceivable.57 The third claim, that infinity is inconceivable, and therefore an infinite deity an impossibility, is also dealt with through a refutation of Hobbes’s argument in Leviathan. Hobbes had argued that the 52

53 54 55

For example, on pp. 63–4 the atheist’s claim that we can have no idea of a God is supported by an anonymous quotation from De Corpore, ch. 26 and Leviathan, ch. 46 to the effect that it is impossible to speak of God philosophically. Ibid., p. 68; cf. De Corpore ch. 3.4; Leviathan ch. 46; ch. 11. Cudworth, TIS, p. 76; cf. De Corpore, ch. 26.1. Cudworth, TIS, p. 97; cf. Leviathan, ch. 46. 56 Cudwoth, TIS, p. 634. 57 Ibid., pp. 638–9.


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term infinite could not be used to conceive of God but only to honour Him. Cudworth reaches beneath what he perceives to be subterfuge in order to point out that if God’s infinity signifies nothing and that God cannot be finite, ‘since God is neither Finite not Infinite, he is an Unconceivable Nothing’.58 Cudworth dismisses Hobbes’s comments on infinity as a particularly stupid mistake rarely made by ancient atheists, for if there were nothing infinite, how could there be anything at all? Cudworth agrees that we can have no practical grip on the infinite, but this does not stop us from conceptualising a positive thing negatively, and to conceptualise an infinite being is to assert the existence of God.59 The atheist’s charge that theology is riddled with contradictions leads Cudworth to examine Hobbes’s attack upon the idea of incorporeal substance.60 Cudworth argues that any contradiction disappears if substance includes something other than body (specifically, spirit). The problems only arise when atheists insist that there is nothing but body, in which case it is impossible to make sense of theology, or the attributes of a necessarily perfect and consistent being like God. When it comes to the question of fear acting as the source of religion and belief in God, Cudworth gets to work on Hobbes’s notorious definition of religion as fear of power invisible, feigned in the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed.61 For Cudworth Hobbes’s theory of religion comes directly from ‘the old Atheistick Cabal’, particularly from Epicurus and Lucretius, who both attributed religious belief to fear and ignorance.62 Cudworth asserts that although men do have a religious fear of God this is not the source of their belief in Him; in fact men invoke the deity because they believe it to be good, benign and above all just. The atheist portrait of God owes more to the atheist’s psychological mindset than to the nature of God, and this, precisely because it is irreligious, foregrounds fear before questions of justice and goodness.63 Another of Hobbes’s ‘seeds of religion’ was ignorance of natural causes, but Cudworth turns the tables on the Hobbesian case: in fact, as More had also argued, it is ignorance of natural causes that leads to atheism, whereas a true knowledge of causes leads to an understanding of the necessary existence of God. The atheist’s mechanical and material science simply cannot account for phenomena such as the soul, the mind, reason and 58 59 61

Ibid., p. 641. This is a version of the favoured argument of the Oxford geometers which presents Hobbes with the unpalatable choice of God’s material finitude, or His non-existence. Ibid., pp. 648–9. 60 Ibid., p. 650, quoting ch. 46 of Leviathan and ch. 10 of De Corpore. Cudworth, TIS, p. 655; cf. ch. 6 of Leviathan. 62 Cudworth, TIS, pp. 656–7. 63 Ibid., p. 663.

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understanding.64 They also cannot explain the movement of matter itself, which, being completely passive, requires something else to be the cause of motion. For Cudworth, as for More, these problems with a purely materialist account of the world provided the most compelling evidence for the existence of spirit, and he uses his critique as an opportunity to elaborate his distinctive version of an incorporeal hylarchic principle, in which matter is moved by a separate spiritual substance.65 Cudworth next turns to the suggestion that religion is merely a fraud perpetrated by political leaders to keep the people in their place. Here the argument becomes slightly clumsy because Hobbes himself hadn’t stressed this argument, and yet Cudworth was keen to use a refutation of it to get at some of Hobbes’s ideas. Cudworth’s initial argument is that Christanity itself serves as a self-evident refutation of this position, being a religion ‘founded in no Humane Policy, nor tending to promote any Worldly Interest or Design’.66 Returning to one of the main planks of his general argument, Cudworth also argues that the idea of God as an absolutely perfect being is an innate idea lodged in the minds of men, and in spite of atheistic attempts to show that such ideas could be fabricated, God’s being is not an idea that could be created by man.67 Religion, therefore, cannot be imposture if there is a universal idea of God that simply could not have been made or feigned by politicians, poets or philosophers. Cudworth then turns to Hobbes again to make the argument that religious obligation actually grounds the obligation to obey civil authority. Cudworth argues that civil power cannot exist without religion, and if religion does not exist, then neither can civil power. Cudworth works a critique of Hobbes into this point: ‘For Pacts and Covenants (into which some would resolve all Civil Power) without this Obligation in Conscience, are nothing but meer Words and Breath.’68 Laws and commands presuppose a higher obligation, which even ‘the Writer De Cive, could not dissemble it’. Cudworth quotes Hobbes’s acknowledgement that a sovereign cannot command that his subjects be obedient, as this presupposes that there is already an obligation to obey the sovereign’s command.69 That obligation, argues Cudworth, cannot come from self-interest alone, because any subject would rebel when it suited them. Only religion could provide the prior obligation that Hobbes had identified, and in reality that is what it does. Cudworth’s conclusion was that ‘Religious 64 67 69

Ibid., p. 666. 65 Ibid., pp. 667–80. Ibid., pp. 692–7; cf. Leviathan, ch. 2. Hobbes, On the Citizen, 14.21.

66 68

Ibid., p. 692. Cudworth, TIS, p. 697.


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Obligation cannot be thought to be the Fiction or Imposture of Civil Sovereigns, unless Civil Sovereignty itself, be accounted a Fiction and Imposture; or a thing which hath no Foundation in Nature, but is either or wholly Artificial, or Violent.’70 This, of course, was what Cudworth thought Hobbes had proposed, and Cudworth uses the issue as an opportunity to demonstrate that Hobbes’s prescriptions for religion and morality effectively subordinated to the will of the sovereign were the atheist source of genuine religious imposture, built upon a rickety political foundation.71 Cudworth argues that no one would be taken in by this: ‘True Religion & Conscience, are no such Waxen things, Servilely Addicted, to the Arbitrary Wills of men’, and this is precisely why ‘Prophane Politicians’ declare war on genuine religion because it ‘introduces a Fear greater than the Fear of the Leviathan’. This explains why Hobbes condemns the idea that individuals can make a judgement of good and evil and argues that subjects sin in disobeying the sovereign.72 Hobbes’s sustained rejection of true religion actually proves that it cannot be the mere creation of politicians. Cudworth returns to Hobbes’s politics towards the end of the chapter where he attempts to unravel atheistic ethics and politics. He observes that the foundation for this position is first laid in the exclusive focus upon individual appetite and utility which end up as the only measures of good in nature. This moral relativism results in the Hobbesian claims that ‘there can be nothing Naturally Just or Unjust, nothing in itself Sinful or Unlawful, but every man by Nature hath jus ad omnia, a Right to Every thing.’73 Cudworth notes the vicious consequences of opposing jus and lex, natural right and natural law, in that it potentially allows individuals to behave as they please if natural law has no obligatory force: Should therefore a Son not only murder his own Parents, who had tenderly brought him up, but also Exquisitely torture them, taking pleasure in beholding their ruful Looks, and hearing their lamentable Shreiks and Outcries; there would be nothing of Sin or Injustice at all in this, nor in anything else; because Justice is no Nature, but a meer Factitious and Artificial thing, Made only by Men and Civil Laws.74

This was a particularly disingenuous example to use in the light of the fact that Hobbes had deliberately pointed out in the notes to the 1647 edition of 70 72 73

Cudworth, TIS, p. 698. 71 Ibid. Ibid., p. 699, citing Leviathan, p. 168; De Cive 12.2; Cudworth also cites Leviathan, ch. 38, p. 238, p. 8, p. 373 [O.P.] Cudworth, TIS, p. 890. 74 Ibid., p. 891.

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De Cive that sons were not in the state of nature and therefore could not do as they pleased, and secondly that cruelty that does not further the cause of self-preservation is, on Hobbes’s terms, a wrong.75 Cudworth deliberately bulldozes the complexity out of the argument and gives the crudest possible example of its consequences. His account of the state of nature and the resulting form of government follows the argument in De Cive, but with the critical gloss that the theory makes justice and civil sovereignty to be ‘nothing but an Ignoble and Bastardly Brat of Fear; or else a Lesser Evil, submitted to, meerly out of Necessity; for the avoiding of a Greater Evil, that of War with every one, by reason of mens Natural Imbecility.’76 Hobbes might claim that this theory is no older than his De Cive, but Cudworth cuts him down to size by quoting Glaucon from Plato’s Republic, who develops a very similar argument. Cudworth’s substantial criticism is a familiar one about the impossibility of generating lasting obligation through individual will alone: ‘what is made Made meerly by Will, may be Destroyed by Will.’77 The ineffectual quality of such obligations renders Hobbes’s formal constitution of justice, as a quality pertaining to a citizen, an empty grammatical formality. The covenants used to arrive at these relationships have no force at all. Hobbes’s only way out of this dilemma is to ‘to fly to Laws of Nature, and to Pretend, this to be a Law of Nature, That men should stand to their Pacts and Covenants.’ If this is a straightforward contradiction of the initial thought that nothing is just or unjust, the attempt to make the laws of nature obligatory as commands of the civil sovereign reinforces the circularity of Hobbes’s position: if the atheistic politician derives the obligation of civil laws from covenants, and the obligation of covenants to the law of nature, and the laws of nature from the civil laws, they ‘plainly daunce round in a Circle’.78 To make justice artificial, comments Cudworth, is as difficult as tying knots in wind or water, or to build castles and palaces out of sand – will and words simply aren’t enough. Cudworth suggests that thinkers like Hobbes realise this, which is why they place a stress upon force and the role of fear of punishment. Such a position is ultimately unstable because it relies upon power alone for legitimacy, thereby inviting rebellion by anyone who feels that they might be successful. Cudworth’s alternative is the recognition of natural justice which is founded upon the right and authority of God. The civil sovereign thus participates in a prior and essential moral order. Cudworth offers a 75 77

Hobbes, On the Citizen, 1.10n, pp. 28–9; 3.27n, p. 54. Ibid., p. 893. 78 Ibid., p. 894.

76

Cudworth, TIS, p. 891.


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Platonist spin upon traditional Royalist political theory when he argues that the sovereign is not a creature of the people, and receives the power of life and death from the natural order of things. Ruling and being ruled, superiority and subjection are features of God’s ordering of the community of rational agents. The sovereign is part of this natural hierarchy, acting ‘not in meer Brutish Force and Fear, but in Natural Justice and Conscience, and in the Right and Authority of God himself’. Cudworth rejects the idea that the sovereign’s power is unlimited, being determined by obligations to natural justice, just as God’s power is bounded by His essential justice and wisdom. However, at this point, faced with the possibility of opening up space for rulers to be held to account for violations of ‘essential justice’, Cudworth is forced to admit that elements of Hobbes’s story about sovereignty have some validity. Although sovereigns may sin against God in making unjust laws, they cannot be held to ‘Sin Politically or Civilly’.79 Such rulers are, according to Cudworth, ‘UnJudicable’ or ‘Un-Censorable’ by any human court because if the ruler were accountable the adjudicating court would in fact be the superior sovereign body, a position that could lead to an infinite regress of authority. For Cudworth, this was ‘a thing not only Absurd, but also utterly Inconsistent with Government and Property, because there being no Ultimate Judgement Unappealable from, there could never be any Final Determination of Controversies’. The price of that, he observes, would be that ‘all must be devolved, to the Multitude of Singulars, which would be a Dissolution of the Body Politick, and a State of Anarchy’.80 As this perhaps surprising account suggests, Cudworth’s defence of natural immutable morality does not efface the need for an almost Hobbesian account of sovereignty, complete with a warning about the consequences of indeterminate authority that could have come straight from the pages of Leviathan itself. The peculiarity of Cudworth apparently endorsing Hobbesian formulae persists as Cudworth deals with Hobbes’s objection that the private judgement of good and evil undermines civil society. Cudworth, again perhaps surprisingly, agrees, but argues that it is in fact Hobbes’s atheist theory that introduces the individual calculation of self-interest into civil societies and thereby undermines them. The only way to achieve the moral agreement necessary for societies is by recourse to the prior common standard of natural justice ‘which is a thing not of a Private, but of a Publick and Common Nature’.81 Informed by natural justice and respecting divine law, impartial justice, equity and the good of the whole, man’s conscience 79

Ibid., p. 897.

80

Ibid., pp. 897–8.

81

Ibid., p. 898.

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indicates an obligation to obey lawful commands of the sovereign, whether or not they are contrary to his appetite or private interest. It is true, argues Cudworth, that individuals have to consult their own consciences, and they might sometimes be wrong, but the rule that the conscience judges by is neither private not unaccountable. Should a sovereign command something unlawful, although man ought to obey God rather than man, yet individuals are also obliged not to resist. Cudworth’s story grounds sovereignty in a prior immutable and eternal morality, but it faces the same tensions as the Latitudinarian argument inasmuch as an account of natural justice becomes a legitimation for a powerful account of sovereignty unaccountable to any human court. As with the Latitudinarians, such a position required a full account of natural justice. Although Cudworth doesn’t take his account any further in the True intellectual system, the arguments to support this position are developed in his draft for the second part of his system, the Treatise concerning eternal and immutable morality which was published for the first time in 1731. Here Cudworth laid out the basis for his ethical arguments through his account of metaphysical realism and its accompanying epistemology, arguments foreshadowed in the treatise against atheism.82 Inevitably Hobbes figures as one of Cudworth’s main targets, although in the same slightly oblique fashion we observed in the System. Hobbes is a modern theorist following in the footsteps of Protagoras and Epicurus by arguing that doctrines of justice and injustice are artificial creations of will and law.83 Cudworth’s response is to argue that morality and justice are essential to the nature of things, so much so that even God could not alter their character by an act of will. Cudworth explores the political dimensions of this theological anti-voluntarist argument at some length, and part of the reason is surely the tension between his moral essentialism and the positive and powerful doctrine of sovereignty we have seen him upholding in the True intellectual system, something that could easily be mistaken for a disingenuous Hobbism. Cudworth argues that natural justice requires us to obey the sovereign, and grounds the legitimacy of the sovereign’s commands. Should the sovereign then command ‘any thing to be done that is not unlawful in itself, upon the intervention of this voluntary act of theirs, those things that were before indifferent become by accident for the time obligatory, such things as ought to be done by us, not for their own 82 83

R. Cudworth, A treatise concerning eternal and immutable morality, ed. S. Hutton (Cambridge, 1996), Introduction, pp. xxiv–xxv. Ibid., p. 13.


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sakes, but for the sake of that which natural justice absolutely obligeth to.’84 In making this argument Cudworth explains how a sovereign can generate positive forms of obligation by command in such a way that it does not violate natural justice. The sovereign’s authority, being rooted in natural justice, underwrites the creation of positive goods, modifying the moral status of things indifferent. In this combination of theological and political commentary we have Cudworth’s response to the debate over Latitudinarian Hobbism, in that he offers us an explanation as to how the sovereign’s determination of adiaphora achieves an obligatory status based upon more than arbitrary Hobbism. Certainly Cudworth wanted the reader to be clear that the ability of the sovereign to extend moral obligation in some cases did not mean that natural justice dropped out of the picture. Book II of the Treatise consists of an exploration of the source of the Hobbesian/Protagorean mistake, and finds it in the materialism and sensebased epistemology of the corrupted atomic theorists. Cudworth argues that sense is unable to produce genuine knowledge alone, dealing as it does with the material particularity that gives rise to relativism.85 The rest of the Treatise (particularly book IV) is given over to an elaboration of an alternative epistemology showing that in fact true knowledge comes not from the material world, but is actually found in the mind. Following his neo-Platonist agenda, Cudworth maintains that true knowledge comes from within, the mind being stocked with innate ideas. Hobbes, of course had denied this, arguing that there are no ideas in the mind but phantasms of individual corporeal things, there being no universals but names.86 Cudworth’s response is to posit the existence of intellectual objects independent of body and sense, his favourite example being the abstract immaterial idea of triangle, for which there is no perfect individual analogue in the world, and which every geometer regardless of experience can conceive in the same terms as a universal entity. The understanding is furnished with such noematic forms and ideas and these include such immaterial intellectual concepts as wisdom, honesty and justice, which simply cannot be explained in corporeal terms. Cudworth’s lengthy arguments attempt to establish that these distinct concepts represent universal eternal and immutable ideas shared in the minds of all rationals including God their ultimate source. Mind being prior to matter, they structure our understanding of the world and provide the epistemological basis for a common ethical understanding. 84

Cudworth, A treatise, p. 20.

85

Ibid., p. 145.

86

Ibid., pp. 116–17.

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The Treatise concerning eternal and immutable morality offered not only a decisive riposte to Hobbes’s voluntarism but also a fully worked out account of an innatist epistemology to ground his essentialist response. Together with the attack upon atheism in the published book and the manuscripts on free will, Cudworth’s project amounts to one of the most ambitious and interesting, if curiously indirect engagements with Hobbes’s philosophy during the period. A little like Cumberland, Cudworth had built his theory by inverting some of the crucial features of Hobbes’s argument, and it is worth considering whether Cudworth would have gone as far as he did in his idealist alternative had Hobbes not presented himself as such an extreme materialist. Cudworth certainly went further in this argument than More, and this may have been related to the strength of their relative engagements with Hobbes. Contemporaries recognised Cudworth’s phenomenal scholarship in the True intellectual system, and it soon earned a reputation as one of the most important contemporary assaults upon atheism in general, if not Hobbes in particular.87 It also earned a less welcome reputation as a book that was a little too effective in describing the arguments of the atheists. John Dryden allegedly remarked that Cudworth had ‘raised such strong objections against the being of a God and Providence, that many think he has not answered them’. The third Earl of Shaftesbury also noted that Cudworth had been accused of giving the upper hand to atheists.88 We don’t have any direct evidence of Cudworth being used in this manner, but it seems plausible to assume that sceptics could find the System’s meticulous accounts informative. Newcastle doctor Henry Atherton, possibly with Cudworth in mind, commented in 1683 that ‘those very Arguments which have been made use of to confute one Atheist, have made twenty; for the less curious and examining . . . seing learned persons start so many difficulties, and spend so much time and labour in the Argumentative part to convince, do from thence conclude that the thing is at least dubious.’89 HOBBES AND HOBBISM IN THE RESTORATION CRISIS

The public hysteria that followed the exposure of the Popish Plot in the late summer of 1678 focused public attention upon the dangers of Roman 87 88 89

See for example, Locke’s verdict in Some thoughts concerning education (1693), pp. 230–1. Quoted in Thomas Birch’s ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Cudworth’ prefaced to the 1743 edition of True intellectual system, p. xiii. H. Atherton, The Christian physician (1683), p. 4.


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Catholicism, and this, to some extent, may have crowded out antiHobbesian messages from the pulpit and the press. It wasn’t long, however, before some members of the Anglican clergy were reasserting their traditional agendas in the context of the new situation. In February 1679 Thomas Pierce, the ultra-Royalist Dean of Salisbury, chaplain to the king and an inveterate opponent of Hobbes, delivered a vitiriolic antiHobbesian sermon to the court.90 Identifying various forms of intellectual enemy, Pierce referred to ‘Disciples of the Book which is call’d Leviathan; the greatest Monster in all the World, excepting only the Authour of it’.91 The main threat posed by Hobbism was the public propagation of atheism: for any one to Teach, (as the Monster of Malmesbury has been permitted to doe in Print,) that there is no Spirit at all, or that there is no incorporeal Substance, (two Expressions of the same Thing,) what is it but to pluck up all Religion by the Root? ’Tis publickly to set up a School of Atheism.92

But Pierce also registered his anxiety over Hobbes’s suggestion that the sovereign should be the judge of doctrines, prophets and scripture. For Pierce this sort of authority was a ‘greater power than is ascribed by the Jesuites themselves, either to the Bishop or Church of Rome: a power to abrogate the old, and (as often as he will) to make a new Canon of Scripture, or none at all’.93 Pierce was no enemy to royal absolutism, but his stern warnings about doctrines supporting arbitrary changes of religion reflect a more general anxiety linking Hobbism to popish plots. That connection was made decisively by another critique of Leviathan that appeared in 1679, John Whitehall’s Leviathan found out. Whitehall was an Inner Temple lawyer and his critique was nominally designed as a companion to Clarendon’s Brief view and survey. The idea was to cover all those things passed over by Clarendon ‘as ridiculous in themselves and not worthy of his Pen’. If this sounds like an unpromising project to some extent the results showed that it was; Whitehall duly goes through his notes 90

91 92

93

T. Pierce, A seasonable caveat, printed in A decad of caveats (1679). John Evelyn heard this sermon, noting the anti-Hobbesian content; Evelyn, Diary and Letters, ed. W. Bray (1819), p. 406. Pierce had alluded to Hobbes during the 1650s in an attempt to tar anti-episcopal Protestants as atheists. See for example his comments on William Barlee in Eautontimoroumenos (1658), pp. 70–1. See also Pierce’s Autokatakrisis (1658), where Pierce repeatedly associates his targets with the necessitarianism revealed by Hobbes in the course of the debates with Bramhall. Pierce, Decad, p. 2. Ibid., p. 3. Pierce appears to have coined the title ‘Monster of Malmesbury’. He deploys Wallis’s version of the charge that Hobbes’s materialism either meant that God was finite and a divisible body, or He was nothing at all; see Decad, p. 4. Ibid., pp. 10–12.

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of the sections that Clarendon hadn’t bothered with, applying Clarendon’s arguments. Following Clarendon’s analysis, Whitehall repeatedly argues that Hobbesian sovereignty is self-defeating, decoying ‘the Prince into the hatred of his Subjects’. By undermining property rights Hobbes encouraged rebellion.94 What makes Whitehall’s analysis interesting, however, is the way that he explicitly attempts to link Hobbes’s theory to the politics of the Popish Plot. This is achieved by drawing attention to the implications of Hobbes’s theory of obligation and his account of the sovereign’s role in determining religion. Hobbes’s apparent de factoism creates the possibility that were it to be the case that the sovereign should certainly be incapacitated, his subjects would be absolved from their allegiance: And in case their Governour shall be imprisoned by a Popish Plot, or by any Invasion or Rebellion, though but for a Week, be made otherwise uncapable to exercise his Authority, the Subjects are absolved (which nick’d with Oliver Cromwel then, and the Papists now) from their Allegiance.95

Popish usurpation simply replaces the Cromwellian version to make Hobbes an apologist for a Jesuit attempt on the throne. These errors, argue Whitehall, flow from Hobbes’s conflation of power and right, when in fact a simple topical example could show that right did not simply flow from the power to do something: ‘when Sir Edm. Bury Godfrey was decoy’d into Somersethouse, and there strangled with a twisted Handkerchief, by Romish Priests and Iesuits, there was irresistable Power to do the fact, but no right to do it.’96 Whitehall was suggesting Hobbism might be used to justify the murder of the Plot’s greatest martyr, and he went further to argue that Hobbes’s Erastian ecclesiology could also be deployed to impose popish worship and even idolatry upon Protestants.97 Clarendon had primed this argument in 1676, but Hobbes’s apparent endorsement of idolatrous practice in chapter 45 of Leviathan had an added significance in 1679. Whitehall wasn’t claiming that Hobbes was a Catholic, but he was making it clear that in addition to undermining legitimate sovereignty, Hobbes’s principles could be used to support plots to overthrow the king and bring about the forcible reCatholicisation of the country.98 94 95 98

J. Whitehall, The Leviathan found out, or, the answer to Mr. Hobbes’s Leviathan in that which my Lord of Clarendon hath past over (1679), p. 7. Ibid. 96 Ibid., p. 78. 97 Ibid., pp. 61–2; on idolatry see p. 156. The connection between atheism and popish plots was not new, see Anon., The voice of the nation (1675), brs, and B. Turner, Testimonium Jesu (1681), p. 33.


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Hobbes himself, even though he was ninety-one, kept a close eye on the developing political crisis. William Cavendish, heir to the third Earl of Devonshire had been involved in the parliamentary investigation into the Plot and later helped to draft a bill protesting against the growth of popery.99 As Quentin Skinner has noted, this brought him into contact with Shaftesbury’s plans to exclude the Duke of York from the succession. James Wheldon, Hobbes’s amanuensis, made a copy of Shaftesbury’s opening speech to the House of Lords in March, for the philosopher’s use.100 Hobbes’s papers also contain a copy of the Exclusion Bill introduced in May. Cavendish, unsure as to which side to support, evidently asked Hobbes’s advice on the issue.101 In response to the question as to whether a king could be obliged to exclude an unsuitable heir, Hobbes applied his theory to argue that while a king did possess such a power of disinheritance, he could never be forced to exercise it. Conscious as ever of the danger of his utterances, Hobbes added that he would ‘speak of that subject no more till we have such a weak king’.102 The comments betray Hobbes’s unease, increasingly felt by many, at the radical character of the developing exclusion campaign. For many, events recalled memories of the political breakdown of 1640–2 and there was a widespread belief that exclusion and anti-popery were simply pretexts for troublemakers to start another civil war. In this increasingly heated atmosphere someone with a loyalist agenda decided that it was time to publish Hobbes’s History of the Civil Wars of England, or Behemoth as it would be better known, taking advantage of the lapsing of the Licensing Act. Behemoth had been in existence in manuscript since 1668 but had been refused a licence for publication as part of the general policy of censoring Hobbes’s political works. In the meantime it had been available to readers through Hobbes’s publisher William Crooke.103 Crooke appears to have allowed his customers either to read

99 100 101 102 103

Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 2002), III, p. 33. Skinner, ‘Historical Introduction’ in Hobbes, Writings on Common Law and Hereditary Right, ed. A. Cromartie and Q. Skinner (Oxford, 2005), at pp. 159–61. Hobbes’s ‘Questions Relative to Hereditary Right’ in Hobbes, Writings on Common Law, pp. 177–8. Ibid., p. 35. In February 1673, John Aubrey wrote to John Locke suggesting that he call by Crooke’s shop: ‘You may there see likewise his History of England from 1640 to 1660 about a quire of paper, which the King haz read and likes extremely, but tells him there is so much truth in it he dare not license for feare of displeasing the Bishops.’ John Locke, The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. de Beer, 8 vols. (Oxford, 1976–89), I, pp. 375–6.

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his copy of the manuscript in the shop, or to have it copied in turn.104 In the early summer of 1679, Crooke discovered that the book had been, or was about to be, published, and he got in touch with Hobbes proposing to respond with an authorised printing. Hobbes replied on 19 June commenting that he ‘would fain have published my Dialogue of the Civil Wars of England, long ago’ but the king had refused to allow publication, and Hobbes did not want to offend him.105 Crooke was asked ‘not to meddle in the business’. Hobbes said that he ‘would be content to lose twenty times the value of what you expect to gain by it’ than to be thought to have in any way encouraged the printing. Hobbes was right to be anxious. Judging by its more traditional title, Hobbes’s work appeared to be just another listing of events between 1640 and 1660, and in fact it was based upon James Heath’s Brief chronicle of the late intestine war, published in 1662 and reprinted in 1663. One doesn’t have to read the book for long however, to see that Hobbes’s contribution to the genre does far more than that. Hobbes uses the period between 1640 and 1660 to give a view from what he calls ‘the Devil’s Mountain’, giving ‘a prospect of all kinds of injustice, and of all kinds of folly’.106 Following his post-Restoration practice of using the ‘master and student’ form of dialogue, the old philosopher (Hobbes, ‘A’) instructs a younger man (‘B’) who is too young to appreciate the causes of the conflict. What we get is Hobbes’s analysis of the ideological and political reasons for the political breakdown in the 1640s. Hobbes lists the various ideological ‘seducers’ who made the political disaster possible including Presbyterians, papists, Independents and the gentlemen corrupted by their reading of the classics. Hobbes was particularly ferocious about the role that faulty education had played in this process. The universities were singled out as a fifth column supporting clerical doctrines of supremacy, at first papal and later Episcopalian, propagating the kind of inappropriate beliefs that had contributed to the political breakdown. Hobbes argued that they needed to be reformed, at gunpoint if necessary. The remaining dialogues folded Hobbesian analysis into the historical narrative. In describing the events of the 1640s Hobbes repeatedly blames the Presbyterians who he identifies as the driving force behind parliamentary attempts to take sovereignty

104

105

He would do the same with other Hobbesian works that had been denied a licence. This was how Charles Blount managed to read Hobbes’s Historical Narration Concerning Heresy ahead of its publication. Blount, Oracles of reason (1693), p. 97. That the manuscript of Behemoth was copied seems to be suggested by the number of manuscript copies in existence. CTH, II, p. 771. 106 Hobbes, Behemoth, p. 1.


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from the king, the civil war and ultimately Charles’s execution.107 But others were not spared responsibility for the disaster. Laud had been responsible for bringing disputes about free will into politics and religion, and Charles had been ill-served by his constitutional Royalist advisers, who had been ‘in love with mixarchy’ and who had weakened the king’s chances of achieving a decisive military victory in their determination to reach a negotiated settlement.108 For those conservatives who felt that they were now reliving the crisis of the early 1640s, Behemoth could not have been more relevant, and possibly more so than it had been in the late 1660s. Shaftesbury’s cause was associated with the cause of religious dissent and Presbyterianism in particular. At a time when Parliament’s role was increasingly coming under scrutiny, Hobbes’s disparaging treatment of the conduct of the Long Parliament seemed to have been written as a courtier commentary upon the current crisis. When Hobbes’s young interlocutor asks what Parliament meant when it complained about arbitrary government, Hobbes responds that ‘the true meaning of the Parliament was, that not the King, but they themeslves, should have an absolute government’. The lapsing of the licensing laws had resulted in a flood of anti-government material; for some supporters of the crown, Behemoth was welcome counter-propaganda. Sir Peter Pett, a Tory admirer of Hobbes, later recalled that the book, ‘notwithstanding all the prejudice against the Author (whether just or unjust) being writ with so much strength and beauty of Wit, as to make it fly like lightning round the Kingdom in so many Impressions, did then prove to many ingenious and thinking Men an effectual Antidote against the poysons of those old Artifices then again scatter’d in the Press, being so destructive to Loyalty as heretofore.’109 Hobbes’s history was certainly being read that summer and autumn. There were no fewer than three editions, one of which also appeared in a second issue. When William Crooke finally managed to publish the first authorised edition in 1682, he commented ruefully in his preface that there was ‘no book being more commonly sold by all booksellers’.110 Robert Hooke purchased it at the end of July 1679 and a few days later was 107

108 109 110

Hobbes’s analysis could at times be extreme: ‘Had it not been much better that those seditious ministers, which were not perhaps 1000, had been all killed before they had preached? It had been (I confess) a great massacre; but the killing of 100,000 [the casualties of the war] is a greater.’ Hobbes, Behemoth, p. 95. This notorious passage was annotated ‘NB’ by John Evelyn in his copy (p. 129). Hobbes, Behemoth, pp. 116–17. P. Pett, The obligation resulting from the Oath of Supremacy (1687), p. 39. Hobbes, Works, xx; William Crooke, To the Reader, Tracts (1682).

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discussing it with his friend Godfrey.111 Just over two weeks later Hobbes wrote to Aubrey regretting only that the work had not gone out under an official licence: I have been told that my booke of the Civill Warr is come abroad, and am sorry for it, especially because I could not get his majestye to license it, not because it is ill printed or has a foolish title set to it, for I believe that any ingenious man may understand the wickednesse of that time, notwithstanding the errors of the presse.112

The official attitude to Behemoth was more complicated, reflecting the still diverse composition of the Privy Council. In early September the Council met to discuss a crackdown on illegal provocative literature of all kinds, and Behemoth was specifically mentioned.113 Sir Roger L’Estrange was ordered to go after the publishers with a view to prosecution, and Hobbes himself had to explain to the Council that the printing was unauthorised.114 However Hobbes’s work was now firmly embroiled in the partisan conflict that was increasingly polarising opinion in the country. Although for future Tories like Pett, Behemoth had been a welcome antidote to the wave of anti-absolutist propaganda, for those championing the opposition to arbitrary government Behemoth was a target to be attacked. John Whitehall followed up Leviathan found out with a dedicated assault on one of the 1679 editions in a pamphlet titled Behemoth arraign’d: or, a vindication of property, against a fanatical pamphlett STILED Behemoth. If Leviathan had been written to vindicate Cromwell, commented Whitehall ‘there is a strange Creature risen up called Behemoth . . . and his part (except I be deceived) is to try whether he can now separate the King in his affection from his subjects . . . by telling him, with a flattering slyness, the absoluteness of his Power, the injuriousness of Parliaments, and that all the Property of the People of England is at his Arbitrary dispose, being Master of the Militia.’ For Whitehall, Hobbes’s history was a provocative attempt to persuade the king into the kind of

111 112 113

114

Hooke, The diary of Robert Hooke, 1672–1680, ed. H. Robinson and W. Adams (1935), p. 419. CTH, II, p. 772. PRO, Privy Council Minutes 2/68, f. 364, 5 September 1679. Those in attendance that day included the Marquis of Worcester, Lord Russell, the Earl of Radnor, Viscount Fauconberg, Lord Chief Justice North, Secretary Coventry and Sir Thomas Chicheley. Chicheley was clearly one of those who largely approved of Hobbes’s work. In 1679 he recommended it to a friend: ‘I think [it] as well worth your reading as any thing you have read a great while there is no fault in it but his animosity to the universityes.’ Legh MS, John Rylands Library (unnumbered). PRO, Privy Council Minutes 2/68, f. 365.


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arbitrary absolutism that Clarendon had warned against and a direct contribution to the current political crisis.115 Whitehall’s major concerns were the threats to property and Parliament posed by Hobbes’s analysis of the civil war period. As in Leviathan found out, Whitehall’s Clarendonian political theory made private property the cornerstone of a flourishing political community. Without it the kingdom was reduced to despotism and slavery.116 For that reason Hobbes’s defence of Charles I’s right to tax without consent (particularly in the case of the Forced Loan and Ship Money) was completely unacceptable. Again echoing Clarendon, Whitehall argued that it was those very policies, undermining the role of Parliament, that had actually led to conflict in the first place.117 Hobbes’s rejection of parliamentary consent to taxation and his attack upon parliamentary rights to impeach crown servants were simply designed to drive a wedge between the king and his loyal subjects.118 Whitehall’s alternative was the Clarendonian account of sovereignty according to the rule of law. The king could change the laws in Parliament with the good advice and good will of his subjects ‘which is his greatest happiness and security’. To argue, as Hobbes did, that this tied the hands of the king, was a mistake: ‘And tis no tye or obligation upon the King, that he is to govern by Law [as obligation is taken for restraint] but the King’s greater freedom and happiness, to have the rule of the Law to walk by, whereby the murmure of his Subjects against his particular Actions may be prevented.’ Hobbes’s allergy to mixed monarchy was simply a confusion about the proper relationship between crown and Parliament, and the necessary and ancient symbiosis between the two.119 In dealing with Behemoth’s discussion of religion, Whitehall adopted a two-pronged attack, drawing attention to Hobbes’s apparent critique of the Church of England and suggesting that his doctrine supported popery. Although Hobbes had appeared to endorse a popular Anglican devotional manual, Richard Allestree’s The whole duty of man, he had gone on to point out that if the civil war Presbyterians had been tried by its teachings, specifically Allestree’s recommendations to refuse commands contrary to God’s will, they could make a case for their innocence.120 Whitehall seizes on the point to accuse Hobbes of placing the Anglican Allestree in seditious 115 116 120

Whitehall, Behemoth arraign’d (1680), p. 2, and p. 6 where Whitehall suggests that Hobbes was using the past to tax the present ‘which trick is the Art of the Book’. Ibid., pp. 29–30. 117 Ibid., p. 19. 118 Ibid., pp. 49, 63. 119 Ibid, pp. 65, 68. Hobbes, Behemoth, p. 47. Allestree regularly attacked Hobbes; see his Eighteen sermons (1669), p. 28 and pp. 222–3, Forty sermons (1684), pp. 70–1 and A discourse concerning the period of humane life (1677), p. 68.

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company: ‘to bring the Church of England’s Divines into contempt equally with the Presbyterians’.121 But for Whitehall Hobbes wasn’t just cocking a snook at Anglicanism. His agenda was potentially far worse. As he had argued in Leviathan found out, Whitehall indicated that Hobbes’s doctrine in Behemoth was actually a sly means of promoting popery. Hobbes had tracked the rise of subversive religious sects to the availability of the Bible in English, a move that had thrown the business of scriptural interpretation open to anyone. Whitehall read this as a covertly papist disapproval of the wider availability of the text ‘From hence any one may easily infer, that he would teach the King to prohibit the Scriptures being in English, if he will keep the people from rising against him’, a doctrine which ‘wonderfully befits a Romish Priest or a Jesuit to have the people bred in Ignorance, whereby they may be capable at pleasure to have Romish Idolatry put upon them’.122 Whitehall’s critique aligned Behemoth’s message with ‘the Tories and Hectors of our days’ and it seems likely that this would have been a representative response of those supporting what might be called a mainstream anti-court position in the autumn of 1679. But as Peter Pett’s recollections suggest, this wasn’t the only way that the work could be read. Pett, like increasing numbers of his countrymen was or had become sceptical about the Plot, and he approved Hobbes’s sentiments about the dangers of parliaments invading the fundamental rights of the crown. Although in many respects Pett was not a typical reader of Hobbes, particularly in terms of his sceptical approach to religion, such views were an increasingly common response to a radicalising Whig cause. In the political circumstances of the later 1670s, Behemoth may well have contributed to a rehabilitation of some of Hobbes’s political ideas amongst loyalists alarmed at the turn of events. The number of editions suggests that it certainly struck a chord, and standing apart from Leviathan it avoided association with the more politically sensitive text, if not the connection with its notorious author. However, the book’s direct political relevance did not mean that it wasn’t read in other ways. John Evelyn purchased one of the pirated 1679 editions, making some brief annotations.123 His marginal scorings highlight passages that we know shocked Hobbes’s other readers; his view that the universities had been to the nation as the wooden horse was to the 121 123

Whitehall, Behemoth arraign’d, pp. 59–60. 122 Ibid., pp. 8–9; cf. Hobbes, Behemoth, pp. 21–2. This was the only imprint of 1679 to go into a second edition. Evelyn’s copy of The history of the civil wars of England is in the British Library, shelfmark Eve.a.14.


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Trojans, the comments on university reform, his description of Parliament’s attack upon the king’s prerogative.124 Evelyn also marks passages dealing with individuals, particularly Laud, Strafford and Hobbes’s assault upon the king’s constitutional counsellors.125 In addition some of the more quotable remarks receive a marginal ‘nota bene’, for example Hobbes’s comment that religion is a law of the land and that it ought not to be disputed, Hobbes’s remarks about Presbyterian responsibility for the war dead, and some of Hobbes’s comments about London.126 Although Evelyn picks out some sections pregnant with contemporary meaning, it is also clear that he was reading the book as a historical record of events that he had participated in. His manuscript additions testify to this, supplementing Hobbes’s narrative with snippets of historical or personal information.127 The multiple editions of Behemoth testify to its popularity, and possibly even to a sympathetic Tory reading of that work, but this has to be set against the persistance of the traditional Royalist hostility to Hobbes’s formal political theory in Leviathan and even De Cive. Court-oriented discussions of political theory in the later 1670s maintained the view that Hobbes’s theoretical foundations were flawed and that they ultimately favoured an ascending theory of political authority incompatible with the assumptions of Royalism. In 1677 John Nalson, although he referred to Hobbes as ‘a Master of so great Wit and Parts’, commented that he was astonished that Hobbes should in De Cive ‘lay that down for a firm and solid foundation of his future City, which is a perfect quicksand; and if admitted, will shipwrack all Laws, Society and Happiness’.128 In 1679 William Falkner placed Hobbes alongside Spinoza as a threat to princely government. Falkner made the now familiar argument that building sovereignty upon self-preservation was self-defeating: if subjects made contracts for self-preservation, they could just as easily break them for the same reason. Associating Hobbes with the more radical Spinoza amplified the critique. Falkner pointed to Spinoza’s occasionally shocking adaptations of the same theory as an implicit guide to the positions to which Hobbes too must be committed. If Spinoza explicitly allowed for fraud and deceit in the state of nature, and thereby also in the making of 124

125 126 128

Behemoth [pagination from Evelyn’s copy in square brackets], 40 [53], 56–8 [75–9], 73–8 [99–105]. Hobbes’s discussion of the universities also enraged Anthony Wood, who beside Hobbes account of the origins of the universities wrote in red ink ‘false’, ‘false’ and ‘veri false again’. Wood 213(2), p. 53. Behemoth, pp. 62 [83–4], 66–9 [89–92], 114–15 [112–13]. Ibid., pp. 90 [121–2], 95 [129], 104 [141–2]. 127 Ibid, pp. 64 [87], 69 [93], 100 [136], 122 [123]. J. Nalson, The common interest of king and people (1677), pp. 5–7.

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pacts ‘so the Leviathan model must according to the principles there laid, allow the same’.129 1679 would also see the republication of Filmer’s Observations, reinforcing the traditional Royalist view that Hobbes’s work was fundamentally incoherent and subversive.130 If Hobbes’s reputation might have been redeemed for some sections of the loyalist audience by Behemoth, the hostile Royalist reading of Leviathan would continue to inform political allusions to Hobbes’s work throughout the years of crisis that followed. THE DEATH OF A PHILOSOPHER

The impact made by Behemoth and the persistence of Hobbesian allusion in popular politics drew attention to Hobbes’s political and religious beliefs in the summer of 1679, but the end of the year brought an event that would ensure public attention for the philosopher and his works: Hobbes’s death. Hobbes was ninety-one in 1679 and his death had been expected for a long time. The deaths of notorious individuals were interesting to contemporaries; would the unbeliever take communion? Would he repent? Hobbes had already figured in this peculiar genre of gossip. His own near-fatal illness in the 1640s gave rise to his now well-worn alibi that in extremis he had accepted John Cosin’s ministrations; however, Aubrey also had a story that priests (perhaps others) had been sent away with a characteristically anti-clerical flourish.131 Hobbes’s actual death would inevitably spawn similar stories132 but the truth had only a little of the drama beloved of rumour-mongers. Hobbes was afflicted with an ulcerated bladder from mid-October which his physician had pronounced incurable. Near the end of November the Cavendish family wanted to move from Chatsworth to Hardwick. The initial plan was to leave Hobbes at Chatsworth because of his condition, but the old philosopher, who had always been anxious about being separated from his patron and protector, insisted on going with them. Some 129 130 131

132

W. Falkner, Christian loyalty (1679), pp. 407, 410. Filmer’s Observations were republished together with The free-holder’s grand inquest (1679) and as Reflections concerning the original of government (1679). For the story about Cosin, see Aubrey, Brief Lives, I, p. 353, but see also p. 357, where Viscountess Purbeck is the source for the story that Hobbes expelled the divines with the words ‘Let me alone or els I will detect all your cheates from Aaaron to yourselves.’ See for example the brief comment in John Barret’s The rector of Sutton committed (1680), p. 25: ‘the report goes, that when some serious counsel was given him concerning his Soul, and his everlasting State a little before his Death, he sware ‘‘If I was at Heaven, what a fall should I have?’’ As if he would have the World know, he lived and died an Atheist. Qualis vita, finis ita.’


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days after the ten-mile journey he suffered a stroke which prevented him eating. He died on 4 December. Anthony Wood heard the news a few days later in Oxford, confirming it in his diary on 10 December complete with a report of his last words, that ‘he was 91 yeares finding a hole to go out of this world, and at length found it’.133 In the same entry Wood provided a snapshot of the philosopher and his reputation. He recalled the Hobbes of Behemoth ‘an enimy to Universities, school-divinity, Aristotle, Presbyterians, metaphysics. [He called] Duns Scotus ‘‘a blockhead’’’.134 Wood compiled a brief list of Hobbes’s adversaries including Eachard, who ‘hath tormented him in one of his books with buffonry’, Wallis, Ward, Bramhall, Clarendon, Lucy, Vilvaine and Fell. The roll call showed that the accepted canon of Hobbes’s major opponents was already well-established, as was the prevailing view of the philosopher, for Wood at least: ‘An ill-natur’d man they say, proud, scornfull . . . his Leviathan hath corrupted the gentry of the nation, hath infused ill-principles into them, atheisme.’135 Similar news reached a government informant in Newcastle a day later who reported that Hobbes had died in ‘much the same humour as he lived, his last words being said to be that he waited for the coming of the carrier, Death, and that he had been fourscore and twelve years in looking for a hole to go out of the world’.136 The popular anecdote was tailored into a suitable deathbed motif reflecting Hobbes’s robust outlook, although it would turn out that Hobbes didn’t say half of it, and certainly didn’t say it on his deathbed, where he had been incapable of saying anything at all.137 Hobbes’s death was soon picked up by the London newsletters, with varying degrees of commentary and accuracy.138 The brief reports presuppose a reading public very familiar with Hobbes’s controversial reputation, but even at this early stage Hobbes’s admirers attempted to put the record 133 134

135 136 137

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Wood, The life and times of Anthony Wood, ed. A. Clark, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1891–1900), II, pp. 471–2. Wood’s comments refer directly to Hobbes’s discussion in Behemoth and match the sheet of references attached to his copy, see N. K. Kiessling, The Library of Anthony Wood (Oxford, 2002), p. 337, item 3619. Wood, Life and times, II, pp. 471–2. CSPD, 1679–80, p. 308: 11 December newsletter to Christopher Bowman at Newcastle. Harris’s newsletter reported more or less the same story on the 12th. Justinian Morse, the Earl of Devonshire’s secretary, put the record straight in a letter to Wood on 9 January. Hobbes had apparently made his original comment in response to his physician’s news in November that his ulcerated bladder could not be cured, and had said that ‘he should be glad to finde a hole to creepe out of the world at’. Morse went on to comment that ‘of his being 90 yeares seeking a hole is a mistake’. Quoted in A. Pritchard, ‘The Last Days of Hobbes’, Bodleian Library Record 10: 3 (1980), pp. 178–87. See for example Thompson’s Domestic intelligence for 12 December.

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straight. One obituary in Mercurius Anglicus noted that Hobbes was ‘thought to have little Religion, though a great portion of Reason’. However, noted the writer, those that were acquainted with him ‘knew him to be a person of most fair Morality, and punctually just in his Dealings’. Leviathan had made ‘so small noise in the World’ and this had led to two attempts ‘to put a Hook in his Nostrils, but to little purpose . . . Let him go with this Elogy, That he was a Man much blam’d, but little understood.’139 This would be the first of several attempts by Hobbes’s admirers to project a positive image of the philosopher. This was extremely rare, and potentially dangerous given the intensity of odium hobbii (all of the positive broadsides and pamphlets would be anonymous), but the new freedom of the press may well have encouraged Hobbes’s admirers to come out in commemoration of his passing. As a result 1680 would see something of a battle over Hobbes’s posthumous reputation, as commentators simultaneously sought to stamp their own versions of his life upon the event of his death. ELEGIES FOR MR HOBBES

By the early spring of 1680, several broadsides and pamphlets were in circulation dealing with Hobbes. Some of these were reprintings. By February William Crooke, taking advantage of events, had reissued Hobbes’s 1662 defence of his reputation as Considerations upon the reputation, loyalty, manners, & religion of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, alongside Hobbes’s Latin verse autobiography and its English translation.140 There also appeared, in addition, two broadsides, Memorable sayings of Mr Hobbes and The last sayings of Mr Thomas Hobbs and the verse An elegie upon Mr Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, together with critical pamphlet True effigies of the monster of Malmesbury. The broadsides followed the anti-Hobbesian practice of creed-making to present lists of Hobbesian quotations and sayings focused around particular agendas. Aubrey attributes the Memorable sayings to a ‘club’ including Dr Francis Bernard, a doctor at St Bartholomew’s Hospital 139 140

Mercurius Anglicus, 13 December. Crooke would also take advantage of his new-found liberty to publish as he pleased by issuing the first edition of Hobbes’s Historical Narration Concerning Heresy (1680). Aubrey reported to Wood on 17 December that the Latin verse life had appeared in the previous week. In another letter at the end of the month he suggested that it might be translated into English by Wadham don Thomas Pigot, or John Davies of Kidwelly, the publisher of Liberty and Necessity, both admirers of Hobbes. Who actually produced the translation is not known, although both candidates mentioned are plausible. Bodleian MS Wood F39, f. 331r, 334r.


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and later surgeon to James II, and his brother Charles. Bernard would later assist Aubrey in preparing material for Hobbes’s Vita and Aubrey’s comments suggest that he was an admirer of Hobbes.141 Memorable sayings, complete with a pugnacious portrait, consists of forty-one quotations, some of them alleged to be Hobbes’s table-talk, but many coming from Leviathan. The quotations deal with religion, although there are some political comments included towards the end. The tone is predominantly and appropriately anti-clerical. Hobbes is quoted as saying that ‘The Absurd Opinions, and Evil Lives of the Clergy make them contemptible’ together with his remarks about ‘unpleasing priests’ from Leviathan and a long sequence of quotations from Parts 3 and 4 of the same book upon the priestcraft of the Roman Catholic church. However, the editor clearly did not want to reinforce the suspicion that Hobbes was actually an atheist. In fact he goes to some lengths to demonstrate that Hobbes is a believer. The first quotation is Hobbes’s argument from chapter 11 of Leviathan that man’s pursuit of the knowledge of causes leads necessarily to the thought that there is one eternal cause which is God. Some of the other quotations seem designed to reassure the reader that Hobbes was simply a cautious religious rationalist rather than an unbeliever.142 Towards the end of the selection, the quotations take on a more political flavour. Perhaps to allay the interpretation of Hobbes as a purveyor of seditious beliefs, the list includes Hobbes’s ‘extra’ law of nature from the ‘Review and Conclusion’ which argued that every individual was required ‘to protect in War the Authority by which he is himself protected in time of peace’. Many of the comments seem to support an agenda of political stability, warning of the dangers of ambitious men and the constant desire of the people to change government on grounds of oppression and corruption. Others seem to be more even-handed warnings where Hobbes seems (a little uncharacteristically) to be counselling political moderation in princes: princes should remember that they govern rational men ‘who scorn at Follies, and repine at injuries’. The doctrine of passive obedience, of prayers and tears in the face of tyranny, should be handled carefully ‘least the people believe, they made themselves slaves, when they became Christians’, and lest princes should so far mistake ‘as to believe their Subjects made up of Knees and Eyes, and no Hands’. Hobbes’s trademark absolutism is noticeably absent 141 142

Aubrey, Brief Lives, I, p. 392–3. For Bernard’s own extensive collection of Hobbes’s writings, see A catalogue of the library of the late learned Dr Francis Bernard (1698). For example, ‘To be slow in the belief of Miracles, is not a contempt of Divine Power, but a just circumspection that our reason be not over-reacht’ and ‘All Devotion ought to be grounded upon Reason and Truth, else it is Will-worship, and the Sacrifice of Fools.’

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here, and this may be an attempt to depoliticise a thinker who is primarily portrayed as the champion of rational religion and the opponent of priestcraft in a way that could appeal to like-minded individuals across the political spectrum. The other broadside, The last sayings, or dying legacy, which appeared around the same time, brings out a much more radical Hobbes using a different set of quotations, this time mostly from Leviathan. This work is more of a puzzle. The tone is similarly anti-clerical, but far from reassuring the reader that Hobbes was nevertheless a convinced believer, the quotations seek from the outset to plant the thought that Hobbes believed religion in general to be imposture. The opening quotation cites Hobbes’s controversial statement in chapter 6 of Leviathan that religion is ‘Fear of Power invisible feign’d by the mind, or from Tales publickly allowed.’ A more orthodox reading might have included Hobbes’s qualification that ‘when the power imagined is truly such as we imagine, True Religion’, but the clipped version, with its suggestion that all that separated religion from superstition was civil authority, retains a rather radical effect.143 The same tone pervades the quotations that follow with no fewer than four quotations from chapter 32 elaborating Hobbes’s sceptical views about prophecy including the provocative rationalist statement that ‘To say that God hath spoken to a man in a Dream, is no more than to say, he Dreamt that God spake to him.’ The extracts include Hobbes’s scepticism about the existence of witchcraft, fairies and ghosts, inspiration and demons, together with the bald statement of Hobbes’s most problematic theological position, that ‘God is Almighty Matter’ towards the end (apparently taken from Tenison’s Creed). Although there is little by way of political commentary, one of the concluding quotations completes the radical effect by stating that ‘the Law of the Civil Magistrate, is the only obliging rule of Just and Unjust’, reproducing one of Scargill’s heretical positions. The editorial position is undoubtedly more extreme than that of the Memorable sayings with none of the ameliorative material of the other broadside. Unfortunately we know very little about who was behind The last sayings. The broadsheet itself claimed official status by purporting to have been printed for ‘the Author’s Executors’, but, taken literally, this seems extremely unlikely. Aubrey reported that it was the work of the 25-year-old deist Charles Blount. Blount, who had corresponded with Hobbes, was at the time producing a series of controversial radical tracts which revealed his 143

B. T. Stocks, ‘Two Broadsides on Hobbes’, Elizabethan Studies 2: 4 (1945), pp. 211–14.


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sympathies for the philosopher. In 1679 Blount published Anima mundi, a copy of which he sent to Hobbes, that purportedly explored pre-Christian discussions of the nature of the soul and its fate after death. The clerical authorities detected another agenda behind the lengthy citation of sceptical views; the book was suppressed by the Bishop of London, and even burnt by over-zealous officials. Undeterred, Blount published Great is Diana of the Ephesians (1680), a work that claimed to uncover the pagan origins of idolatry, a conventional mode of anti-Catholic polemic. However, many rightly suspected that Blount’s attack upon priestcraft was also an attack upon Christianity itself. Blount paraded his Hobbesian sympathies openly in the notes to his edition of Philostratus (1680), citing Hobbes’s radical definition of religion together with his sceptical views about ghosts and visions, quotations that also appeared in the broadside.144 But this evidence, although suggestive, is not conclusive. Blount’s manuscript copybook (dating from 1681) contains quotations included in both broadsides and he would have been unlikely to have recorded them had he been responsible for one of the publications.145 Although it is just possible that The last sayings was the work of a radical admirer, there is another possibility, suggested by the borrowings from anti-Hobbesian literature. As a statement of Hobbes’s most controversial views, the broadside may not have been designed to celebrate Hobbes’s ideas, but to confirm his heterodoxy in the face of attempts to sanitise his reputation. This would give another, perhaps more plausible, meaning to the otherwise peculiar comment that it had been printed for Hobbes’s ‘Executors’: the broadside may well have been the work of Hobbes’s critics. These attempts to spin Hobbes’s posthumous reputation reveal the range of possibilities contained in Hobbes’s deliberately indeterminate texts, something that had always been both a strength and a weakness of Hobbes’s defensive presentation of his views. Readers, then as now, did have enough material to construe an orthodox, if deeply anti-clerical, Hobbes from the textual evidence and this version evidently remained persuasive to the editors of the Memorable sayings and other moderate supporters of Hobbes.146 For radicals (and Hobbes’s critics) by contrast, although there were few unguarded statements of heterodoxy there was, as we have seen, plenty of material with which one could furnish more 144 145 146

C. Blount, The two first books of Philostratus (1680), pp. 28, 32–3, 151–2. CTH, II, p. 794. As Malcolm suggests, the copy-book entries also raise the possibility that both broadsheets were derived from a common manuscript source. See also Walter Charleton’s The harmony of natural and positive divine laws (1681), p. 9 where Charleton draws attention to Hobbes’s statements about divine law in De Cive.

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extreme positions. However, even here Hobbes needed to be supplemented to achieve a genuinely radical effect; in Miracles, no violations of the laws of nature (1683), Blount, rather like Falkner in Religion and loyalty, juxtaposed sceptical extracts from Hobbes with material from the more openly heterodox Spinoza to make his deistic argument. One critic who had identified Blount’s sources was quick to point out that Hobbes’s argument, however dubious his account was in other respects, simply did not support Blount’s deist thesis.147 Hobbes undoubtedly inspired his radical followers to read between the lines, but his careful arguments rarely supplied ‘off the peg’ formulae for them to use unmodified. Like Hobbes’s critics they had to adapt his ideas for their own purposes. If the two broadsides reflected the views of Hobbes’s ‘box-admirers’ and his critics, a third would represent the typical views of Hobbes’s ‘Galleryfriends’ amongst the gentry. In contrast to the other broadsheets, An elegie upon Mr Thomas Hobbes takes a slightly more whimsical approach to commemorating the philosopher’s death with a witty commentary upon Hobbes’s impact that acknowledges and reveals some of the complexities of the Hobbes phenomenon. Hobbes was probably wrong, noted the writer breezily, but he couldn’t help but admire the style with which the errors were made: If he mistakes: ’tis still with so much Wit, He errs more pleasingly than others hit ... All were by him so plausibly misled, They chose to lose the Way with such a Guide, And wander pleasantly, rather than be In the right Way, with duller Companie.

The Elegie captures some of the genuine aesthetic attraction of Hobbes’s work for the ordinary reader, but it also reflects the success of some of the key propositions in the anti-Hobbesian case, particularly as it had been developed in the 1670s. Hobbes’s success is attributed to his persuasive power rather than any rational consistency, an analysis which echoes the comments of Eachard and Clarendon about the primacy of rhetoric over reason, with its concomitant suggestion that Hobbes had failed as a philosopher: With such sweet Force he does out Thoughts invade, That where he cannot Teach, he does Perswade. 147

Thomas Browne, Miracles, work’s above and contrary to nature (1683), pp. 3–4, 20–2.


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And we that read his Writings wish them true, If we do not believe them to be so. If he be in the Wrong, we hold it still, Because the Right appears not half so well.

These guilty aesthetic pleasures nevertheless make Hobbism a rather agreeable malady, and the writer is disparaging about the efforts and success of Hobbes’s critics in attempting to stamp it out: With ill success, some fond Disputers strove, What Doctrines he had planted, to remove; And justly are they blam’d: for that Disease Is ill remov’d, which more than Health does please.

Even the critics were not immune, as the writer shrewdly observes; they have been influenced in spite of themselves: ‘For who his Writings still accus’d in vain / Were taught by him, of whom they did complain.’ If Hobbes’s doctrines were more like ‘delightful Frenzies’ rather than sober philosophy, they nevertheless succeeded in infecting admirers and critics alike; Hobbes’s influence, as the writer makes clear, was not to be beaten by cold reason alone. That said, the Elegie here unwittingly testifies again to the critics’ partial victory. When giving a potted summary of those very doctrines they appear as the thought that there is no devil, or the simpleminded moral relativism so often offered in caricature by his critics: ‘Vice and Vertue both were our Opinion / And vari’d with the Laws of each Dominion.’ The Elegaist, like Eachard’s gentlemen, shows little familiarity with the actual doctrine of Leviathan, showing at once the strengths and weaknesses of the campaign against Hobbes. The critics had been successful in telling lay readers what Hobbes believed, and that it was both wrong and philosophically flawed. But those readings were now in themselves objects of fascination for fashionable anti-clerical gentlemen, for whom the versions of the arguments of The last sayings, for example, now constituted serious challenges to clerical orthodoxy. And it was here, with thinkers like Blount, that Hobbes’s radical legacy really lived on, as the Elegie’s epitaph makes clear: Leviathan the Great is faln! But see The small Behemoths of his Progenie, Survive to duel all Divinitie.

Of course it was only a matter of time before more explicitly antiHobbesian works appeared. True effigies of the monster of Malmesbury: or, Thomas Hobbes in his proper colours seems to have been composed before

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Hobbes’s death, but it was published in 1680 to offer a full–blooded assault upon Hobbes’s reputation from a Latitudinarian clerical and Cartesian perspective. True effigies systematically animadverted Abraham Cowley’s 1656 Ode in praise of Thomas Hobbes verse by verse, literally defacing Cowley’s verse portrait for the ‘true effigies’ offered in turn by the critic. The critic prefaced his assault by commenting that it had been about twenty years since he had ‘conceived that Indignation against him [Hobbes], and that Hatred of his Illogical and Atheistical Genius which he has here Exprest’ ascribing Hobbes’s deficiencies to the ‘DARKNESS of this Mans Heart, and the Cause of the Encrease of it, that he holds that there cannot be an Idea of an Infinite Being’. In response he cites Romans 1:20 and Psalm 19 to argue that ‘The Invisible things of him from the Creation of the World are clearly seen’ and that ‘the Light of the Visible World’ demonstrates God’s existence, referring to texts beloved of Latitudinarian natural theology. He also takes the opportunity to attack a passage in the newly published Historical narration concerning heresy suggesting that the will to commit sin proceeds from God: ‘Unhappy man, who endeavours so plainly and openly to stain the Glory of the HOLY ONE!’ Agreeing with the composer of the Elegie, the writer concedes that Hobbes may have ‘a very Elegant Style both in English and Latine, Prose and Verse’ but his Leviathan and other books are ‘full of Madness and Folly’. The introduction sets the tone for the inversion of Cowley’s poem, although the animadverter’s lack of literary ability only draws attention to the effectiveness of the original. The attacks are crude and follow familiar themes in the critical literature. Hobbes’s philosophy is a combination of the unexceptional and the impious: Good Men his Knavery spie: His Books contain some Truths, and many a Lie, Some Truths well known, but strange Impiety.

With numerous echoes of Clarendon, and more recently Thomas Pierce, whose nickname for Hobbes the writer has borrowed for the title of the pamphlet, Hobbes’s political theory is a compound of disloyalty and unsustainable religious and political absolutism: The Power of Earthly Princes he doth foolishly pretend By his fictitious Loyalty t’ extend To larger measures; gives to Kings what’s due to God alone: Thus what he seems to make more great, he really makes none: For sure on Earth there is No Monarchy, If it consist in ABSOLUTE Sovereignty.


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In contrast to the Elegie, where the critics were accused of being unsuccessful, Hobbes’s Anglican opponents Bramhall and Ward are given credit for a decisive victory over the monster in the 1650s. The beaten Hobbes becomes a translator of Homer and a poet, and the writer wishes that he had stuck to this activity in the first place.148 Another edition of Mr. Cowley’s verses in praise of Mr. Hobbes, oppos’d by a lover of truth and virtue was issued in 1680 minus the slightly clumsy preface, suggesting that the pamphlet had done well in terms of sales. There was now clearly a market for Hobbes-related products of all kinds, as William Crooke was characteristically quick to recognise. The next few years would see all of Hobbes’s unpublished works printed in ‘official’ versions by Crooke; in June 1680 he was even selling copies of David Loggan’s engraving of Hobbes for sixpence a time, or two shillings for a framed version.149 Although Hobbes’s death had been marked by these ephemeral works, his friends were also thinking about providing a more substantial literary memorial to the philosopher. John Aubrey had been planning this for some time, initially intending to publish the short Latin prose autobiography that Hobbes had completed in the 1670s. In the aftermath of Hobbes’s death Aubrey, together with Sir George Ent and Anthony Wood, set about putting this plan into effect, gathering additional information from Hobbes’s friends and acquaintances to go into a supplement covering events that Hobbes himself had omitted.150 The project quickly grew as Aubrey’s ‘supplementary’ material began to take on a life of its own,151 and by the end of January Aubrey felt the need of an assistant to help to organise his notes and translate the material into Latin and after considering suitably sympathetic candidates, eventually decided upon Richard Blackburne.152 Blackburne, like so many of Hobbes’s admirers, was a physician. He had been educated at Trinity College Cambridge in the late 1660s and the University of Leiden. In February 1680 Aubrey described him to Wood as one of ‘the best scholars in London, & uiko Hobbist’ as well as a ‘mighty read man’ who ‘hath harried all Mr Hobbes’s adversaries’.153 Initially Blackburne advised Aubrey on the layout, but Aubrey eventually 148 149 150 151 152 153

Anon., The true effigies of the monster of Malmesbury (1680), Sig. B1v, B2r. E. Arber (ed.), The Term Catalogues, 1668–1709, 3 vols. (London, 1903–6), I, p. 406. MS Wood F39, f. 327r: Aubrey to Wood, 27 December 1679. M. Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning (London, 1975), pp. 77–8. The other candidates included Charleton and Thomas Pigot, a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. Hunter, John Aubrey and the realm of learning, pp. 77–8. Ibid.

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relinquished his notes and editorial control to Blackburne, who undertook to organise Aubrey’s manuscripts and produce a Latin translation of the supplement. At first Aubrey was pleased with Blackburne’s ‘delicate style’, commenting to Wood in March that ‘it was as if Mr Hobbs’s soule were come into his body’. However, a serious difference of opinion soon arose over the nature of the biography. Blackburne and his advisers John Dryden and John Vaughan advocated what Aubrey disparaged as a panegyric ‘High Style’; to Aubrey’s horror, small details would be omitted or manipulated to improve the work’s literary merit. ‘There will be trueth’, Aubrey complained to Wood in March, ‘but not the whole.’ The work was completed by September 1680, providing a fascinating and controversial compendium of biographical and ancillary material, much of which sought to repair the cumulative damage to Hobbes’s reputation. This was particularly evident in the short Latin prose Vita, composed some time in the 1670s. Hobbes had deliberately referred to himself in the third person, possibly in order to escape publishing restrictions, and as a result the work appears as biography rather than autobiography, and an account designed to vindicate the philosopher. Leviathan was written to describe the right of kings, and also, less plausibly, to persuade ‘those who had rejected the episcopacy, of its truth’.154 Of Leviathan’s theology he reiterated the excuse that he had written when the church’s power was in abeyance but also claimed that what he had written was not against scripture or the teachings of the church as established by royal authority before the war. Hobbes was also at pains to prove his devotion to episcopal government, evidently still in the 1670s very worried about a possible threat from the bishops. In addition to the alibi provided by his behaviour during his illness in 1647 (rejecting Mersenne’s Catholicism, and accepting Cosin’s ministry), Hobbes also made the new and unverified claim that he sought out an Episcopalian service after he had returned to London. On his own reception, Hobbes’s account was relatively acute, acknowledging the institutional failure of his project and the character of his admirers, even if his assessment of his critics betrayed his characteristic hubris: his doctrines were condemned by almost all academics and ecclesiastics, but they were praised by noblemen, and by learned men among the laity. No man was able to refute him: those who sought to make such refutation, merely confirmed his

154

Hobbes, ‘The Prose Life’ in Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford, 1994), p. 248.


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tenets . . . Poised as it were in equilibrium between between friends and enemies, his doctrines were neither whole-heartedly accepted, nor yet oppressed.155

Hobbes’s final verdict did reflect the curious situation in which his work had avoided official censure for so long, something for which he had his old Great Tew friends Sheldon and Clarendon to thank. Blackburne’s supplement organises Aubrey’s material, but with some distinctive twists, some of which would turn out to be controversial. Blackburne’s account of the Scargill affair was a case in point. Blackburne, who had been at Trinity College Cambridge during the late 1660s, suggested that Cambridge at the time was a hotbed of Hobbism: ‘even in the universities Hobbes’ philosophy began to gain ground, and young academics in public debates in their classes not infrequently defended Hobbes’ opinions.’ Among them Scargill ‘a man of precocious genius and somewhat dissolute life, defended certain theses with possibly insufficient caution, and with excessive acrimony’.156 The clerics then took their revenge on the young Hobbesian, on Blackburne’s account imprisoning him before forcing him to recant, depriving him of his degree, discharging him from his fellowship and expelling him from the university.157 Here Blackburne engaged in some embroidery of the facts, specifically in the accusation that Scargill had been locked up. The clear implication was that Scargill was a martyr for the cause, and that the Recantation had been designed to blacken and distort Hobbes’s reputation, which Blackburne argues that it effectively did.158 The cumulative effect of the criticism suffered by Hobbes was summed up most effectively in Blackburne’s listing of works pertaining to Hobbes. After several pages of critiques and hostile references, Blackburne could find only one defender of Hobbes’s ideas, Lambert van Velthuysen. In trying to explain this parlous state of affairs Blackburne offers the frankly implausible thought that Hobbes’s lack of defenders may owe something to the fact that there were few with the ability to defend such a great man, and that his followers ‘who are convinced of the certainty of his teaching and venerate the great genius with a religious silence, have concluded that while he is alive nobody needs to act in defence of Hobbes’s philosophy’. This rather strained explanation perhaps betrays a touch of embarrassment from a professed philo-Hobbist that more had not been done, but Blackburne holds out the optimistic hope that one day Hobbes would be delivered from the distortion of his critics: 155 157

Ibid., pp. 249–50. 156 Thomae Hobbes Angli Malmesburiensis philosophi vita (1681), p. 104. Ibid., p. 107. 158 Ibid., 108–9.

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At some time men will arise who are eager to explain that splendid philosophy with proper commentaries, and it will be accepted in schools and universities (as the author has promised himself in a prediction that will be fulfilled) and win the honours it is due. In the meantime we pray that he may avoid the calamity that struck Aristotle, who was overwhelmed by so great a multitude of commentators that he could scarcely recognize his own philosophy when it had been obscured by foolish comments.159

Aubrey had known from the beginning that the Vita might be difficult to publish. The controversy over Behemoth had shown that anything to do with Hobbes was likely to cause problems. In his initial correspondence with Wood he had commented that he would try to get the work licensed by the Royal Society ‘for the Bishops chaplains will never doe it’. If the Royal Society said no, he would think about publishing in Holland or Scotland.160 In the end William Crooke took on the job, but apparently without a licence. Crooke may have had some anxiety about this; on the title page the reader is informed that the book was published ‘In Charles’s city by a Free Englishman under the Sign of the Truth’.161 However, and probably later in the production process, Crooke seems to have changed his mind and appended his name to the addenda, commercial considerations possibly outweighing caution.162 Aubrey was particularly nervous, not least because of Blackburne’s alterations to the material he had supplied; he wrote to Wood in early September complaining again that ‘I could not governe him so well as I wisht. He hath not so religiously observed two or 3 passages as you may see . . . God deliver us from the fury and pride of some of [the] English Eps [Bishops].’163 Aubrey was right to worry, but not necessarily about the English bishops. Thomas Tenison, now the newly appointed rector of St Martin in the Fields, did have a problem with Blackburne’s embroidered account of the Scargill case. Some of Tenison’s correspondence from the period suggests that he might have been toying with the idea of putting together another anti-Hobbesian publication to counter the claims in the Vita.164 159 161 162

163 164

Ibid., pp. 216–17. 160 MS Wood F39, f. 327r. Carolopoli: apud eleutherium Anglicum sub signo veritatis. Sig. A3r. Charles Hatton had commented to Crooke in a letter that he believed that Hobbes’s Vita ‘will be a very vendible booke both here and beyond sea, for ther is noe lover of learning but will have the curiosity to be particularly informed of the life of soe eminent a person’. Aubrey, Brief Lives, I, p. 390. Bodleian MS Wood, F39, f. 347v. See, for example, Tenison’s correspondence with Wallis from November 1680 in Lambeth Palace MS 930, f. 55, and his correspondence with Scargill from the same period, where he appears to have asked for a full written account of the events of 1668–9. British Library Additional MS 38693, f. 30.


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Perhaps fortunately for Aubrey and Blackburne, the project never came to fruition. Although Hobbes’s clerical critics continued to rail at him in general terms from the pulpit,165 the direct response to the Vita appears to have been muted, not least because of the political drama that was unfolding at the time that Exclusion agitation reached its height. Aubrey wrote to Wood early in 1681 asking him ‘what the Academiquos say at the Coffee houses about Mr Hobbs’s Life’. Although we don’t know Wood’s answer, Aubrey probably accurately anticipated it when he observed that the Vita may well have been pushed to the back of people’s minds by ‘the grave concern of the present Politiques’.166 The second Exclusion Parliament had recently been dissolved by Charles, and Oxford was to be the controversial venue for a new Parliament in March. When Hobbes did enter into public discourse during this period, it had less to do with the details of the philosopher’s life, than with a concern about the Hobbism that now seemed to be pervading practical politics.167 HOBBISM IN THE EARLY

1680S

However muted the response to Hobbes’s Vita, there can be little doubt that the combination of political crisis and the publicity surrounding Behemoth and Hobbes’s death raised interest in the philosopher’s ideas on all sides of the political and religious spectrum. For that reason the early 1680s would resemble the early 1670s in terms of a heightened sensitivity to Hobbism.168 This accounts for the appearance of a series of incidents where Hobbism was a central issue, and it also accounts for the continuing presence of Hobbesian allusion across a range of political and religious discussions. The implication of Hobbes’s work in these debates would culminate in what would be for many loyalists the definitive attempt to 165 166 167

168

See for example G. Burnet, A sermon preached before the Aldermen of the city of London (1681), p. 9; Joseph Cutlore, Two sermons (1682), p. 15. MS Wood F39, f. 351v. Wood does note, almost gleefully, the reaction of one of his Oxford colleagues, noting in the Life and times that ‘Dr Fell frets and fumes.’ II, p. 500, 6 November 1680. This may account for the paradox that although discussion of Hobbism was topical in terms of the feverish politics of the period, there seems to have been a very muted response to the new issue of Hobbes’s works in the period 1681–4. Here for the first time all of Hobbes’s earlier works, together with the authorised edition of Behemoth and the hitherto unpublished response to Bishop Bramhall, were published by Crooke, but there are few commentaries of any note upon these works. For example, in 1682 John Beale, apparently concerned about the possibly critical reception of John Houghton’s Collection of letters for the improvement of husbandry and trade, suggested to Boyle that the Royal Society (who was publishing the work), should reissue Scargill’s Recantation. Robert Boyle, Correspondence, V, pp. 312–13; N. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the Royal Society’, in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), pp. 330–1.

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establish the essential meaning of Hobbes’s political theory, the Judgement and decree of the University of Oxford in 1683. TILLOTSON, STILLINGFLEET AND LATITUDINARIAN HOBBISM

Samuel Parker had suffered for the Hobbism of the Discourse of ecclesiastical polity but a decade later history was about to repeat itself as John Tillotson and Edward Stillingfleet were pilloried as Hobbists for attacks upon religious dissent.169 The context for both attacks was the renewed danger to the Church of England apparently posed by toleration, again in the wake of failed discussions about comprehension. At a time when Protestantism was considered to be under genuine threat, the response of many churchmen was to attack dissenting calls for toleration and separation on the grounds that they destroyed Protestant unity. Inevitably calling for unity in the national church again raised the question about the relationship between church and state, and here critics, particularly Nonconformist critics, needed no prompting to identify Erastian arguments as Hobbism in disguise. Louis du Moulin complained in 1680 that the Church of England was not only infected with popery, but also with ‘the venom of Arminianism, Pelagianism, and Socinianism, and the Maxims of Dr Hobbes’.170 Tillotson’s Hobbesian moment came in early April. Called upon to preach before the king at short notice, Tillotson delivered a sermon titled The Protestant religion vindicated, most of which consisted of a fairly conventional defence of the Church of England against Roman Catholic charges of novelty and schism. However, Tillotson opened with an argument about the responsibility of the magistrate to enforce an appropriate religion for his people, fashionably paralleling the magistrate’s responsibility in this area with the patriarchal authority widely acknowledged in families.171 No doubt aware that he was heading into difficult territory, Tillotson actually attempted to head off a Hobbesian interpretation of his ecclesiastical absolutism by explicitly rejecting the thought that the 169

170

171

My commentary here is indebted to John Marshall’s seminal article on Latitudinarian ‘Hobbism’, ‘The Ecclesiology of the Latitude-men 1660–1689: Stillingfleet, Tillotson and Hobbism’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36: 3 (1985), pp. 407–27. L. du Moulin, A short and true account of the several advances the Church of England hath made towards Rome (1680), p. 9. Du Moulin includes offenders such as Heylin, Thorndike, Bramhall and, of course, Parker. A furious response rounded in particular on the association with Hobbes, decribed as ‘abominable slander’. Anon., A letter to Dr du Moulin (1680), p. 3. Tillotson, The Protestant religion vindicated, pp. 10–11.


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sovereign might have the right to establish a false religion by his own authority, or a right to determine scripture and the word of God.172 But having jumped out of a Hobbesian frying pan, Tillotson then jumped straight into a Hobbesian fire. Targeting religious dissenters, Tillotson argued that no ‘pretence of Conscience’ could warrant subjects to ‘affront the establish’d Religion of a Nation (though it be false) and openly to draw men off from profession of it in contempt of the Magistrate and the Law’.173 The only individuals who could do this were the Apostles who had an extraordinary divine commission to do so. As John Marshall has shown, there is a connection with Hobbes’s theory here: Hobbes argued that only a divine commission could warrant such proselytising activity and otherwise individuals were obliged to conform to the religion established by law. The only substantial differences were that Tillotson did allow that the Apostles possessed an extraordinary commission to oppose false religion174 and that where Hobbes made a case for external compliance with a false religion, Tillotson recommended passive obedience: one was not bound to profess the false belief but rather to suffer patiently for the true. However, for Tillotson’s critics, the message was clear enough and the distinctions were not enough to make a difference. Dissenters should neither criticise the Church of England nor seek to undermine it in public, and on grounds that seemed to be derived from Leviathan. Rumour had it that this was recognised immediately by the audience. The king, who had as usual been asleep during the sermon, was told afterwards by a nobleman that ‘’tis a pity your majesty slept; for we had the rarest piece of Hobbism that ever you heard in your life. Ods fish, he shall print it then, says the King.’175 True or not, the printed version of the sermon soon attracted criticism for its Hobbism; in June Tillotson, now under fire from his friend Richard Baxter, complained about finding himself ‘in the odious company of Spinosa & Mr. Hobbs, as of the same Atheistical principles with them; a blow which I least expected’.176 Just over a month later Stillingfleet found himself in a similarly unhappy position. On 11 May, he preached the sermon The mischief of separation, here attacking the very idea of separation from the national church. Allowing separation on the basis of ‘a bare difference of opinion as to 172 174 175 176

Ibid., p. 11. 173 Ibid, pp. 11–12. Hobbes in chapter 42 made it clear that the Apostles’ commission was restricted to preaching of Christ’s kingdom to come. E. Calamy, Memoirs of the life of the late Revd Mr John Howe (1724), pp. 75–7. John Tillotson to Richard Baxter, 2 June 1680 from Calendar of Correspondence of Richard Baxter, II, p. 78.

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some circumstances of Worship and the best constitution of Churches’ would inevitably lead to the complete fragmentation of the community of believers ‘without any possible stop to farther Separation’.177 Stillingfleet’s preferred course was conformity to the national church, but this was defined in provocative gallican terms: National Churches are National Societies of Christians, under the same Laws of Government and rules of Worship. For the true notion of a Church is no more than a Society of men united together for their Order and Government according to the Rules of the Christian Religion.178

Although Stillingfleet had converted from the more straightforward Erastianism of Irenicum to a more sophisticated (or perhaps more confused) view of the church’s independent functions,179 his account of the church here nevertheless appeared to associate it with the political community and this instantly rang Erastian alarm bells amongst dissenters. Baxter asked whether Stillingfleet took ‘a Christian Kingdom and a Christian Church for the same, as the Erastians do?’ One major concern about such a position was that it seemed to boil down to a Hobbesian acquiescence in whatever religion the magistrate chose to establish by law, a particular worry with the prospect of a Roman Catholic successor.180 As John Whitehall had already pointed out, Hobbism could be a shortcut to popery, and Stillingfleet’s opponents exploited these anxieties to suggest that his doctrine looked in the same direction. The debate would drag on into the 1680s. Stillingfleet answered his critics in The unreasonableness of separation where he acknowledged that Baxter had in effect given him many ‘tremendous aggravations of Atheism and Hobbism’,181 but his only solution, as Marshall has pointed out, was ‘to stress the fortuitous coincidence of the law and the true religion’.182 The maintenance of such positions also began to incur the hostility of high churchmen. Although this group had tended to support the attacks upon dissent, it was inevitable that they would also begin to feel that the Latitudinarian emphasis upon the state threatened to drain away any independent authority from the Church of England. As a result, both Tillotson and Stillingfleet found themselves attacked from the religious right as well as 177 179

180 181

Stillingfleet, The mischief of separation, Sig. A3v. 178 Ibid., p. 17. For discussion of Stillingfleet that rejects the idea that he was an Erastian in Mischief, see M. P. Sutherland, ‘Protestant Divergence in the Restoration Crisis’, Journal of Religious History 21: 3 (1997), pp. 285–301. See for example, John Barret’s comments in The rector of Sutton committed with the dean of St Paul’s (1680), p. 25. See also p. 26. Stillingfleet, Unreasonableness, p. 132. 182 Marshall, ‘Ecclesiology’, p. 420.


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the left for undermining the possibility of autonomous religious authority. The charges of Hobbism soon emerged here too. In Of the subject of church power (1685), Simon Lowth suggested that if the reader compared the controversial sections of Tillotson’s sermon with lists of Hobbesian absurdities, Hobbes’s arguments come ‘so very near what is said by the Dean, as his own present Judgment, that no less than an Ambition of being suspected for a Hobbist, if not embraced as really such, could have drawn it from his Tongue and Pen.’183 How, asked Lowth, could Tillotson avoid the consequence ‘that there is no Church Power on Earth’? Lowth attacked Stillingfleet in the same way, helpfully reproducing parallel passages of Irenicum and Leviathan to make his point.184 Similar charges would be revived by the non-jurors Charles Leslie and George Hickes after 1690. The persistence and the virulence of such assaults reflected the recurrent problem that Latitudinarian divines had in being bracketed with Hobbes. They undoubtedly shared with Hobbes a sense of the danger posed by unregulated religious enthusiasm and the role of the magistrate in restraining such forces. Where they repeatedly claimed a theoretical difference was in the nature and extent of the sovereign’s power, as Tillotson had tried to make clear in his sermon. The difficulty here, for Parker, Cumberland, Tillotson and Stillingfleet, was the practical limit of such power, which although it might be justified theoretically on non-Hobbesian premises, produced the practical sovereignty of Leviathan. If Latitudinarians suffered for their account of sovereign power, they were also left vulnerable by their moderation. Again this was something that they had in common with Hobbes in terms of a desire to moderate the requirements of the religious establishment. But it left them vulnerable to the charge that their moralism concealed a fundamental indifference to religion proper that could also be identified with Hobbes. But in neither case was it true to say that their positions were informed by Leviathan; the ecclesiologies of Hobbes and the Latitudinarians shared similar roots, but that kinship unfortunately meant that Hobbes’s more shocking development of similar themes could always be pointed at by critics as the logical consequence of Latitudinarian ideas. HOBBES, HOBBISM AND POLITICS

1679–1684

As politics polarised in the political crisis, accusations of Hobbism flew around on all sides. Hobbes’s name and work, as a reliable marker for 183 184

S. Lowth, Of the subject of church power (1685), pp. 380–1. S. Lowth, A letter to Edw. Stillingfleet (1687), pp. 43–6.

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religious and political heterodoxy, became a universally available term of abuse. Both Tories and Whigs attacked each other with (sometimes the same) accusations of Hobbism. But both public positions concealed more positive engagements with Hobbes’s ideas, creating a paradoxical situation where Hobbes’s arguments could be publicly condemned by all parties, but at the same time used to further each of their agendas. For all the loyalist enthusiasm for Behemoth, Hobbes, for most Tories, remained inextricably linked to the seditious and disloyal contract theory of Leviathan. Their distaste for Hobbes’s theory can almost be measured in terms of their enthusiasm for Filmer’s Patriarcha, which could deliver an equally if not more authoritarian account of monarchy based upon theoretical foundations diametrically opposed to Hobbes’s unusual consent theory. Tapping into the rich vein of Royalist propaganda since the 1650s, loyalist writers cast Hobbes as the philosopher of subversion and rebellion. The loyalist Anglican author of The counter-plot (1680) made the by now familiar assertion that Hobbes’s theory undermined oaths and promises and made ‘rebellion as lawful as obedience is necessary’.185 Samuel Parker commented that Hobbes’s placing of power in the people ‘’tis to tell the Subjects, that no Man has any Right or Power to Govern them, but as themselves think good to be Govern’d; that is, in a word, that they are under no Government at all.’186 For White Kennet, Hobbes ranked alongside Milton and Hunton as one of the ‘Grand Patriots of Rebellion and Confusion’.187 This view made it natural for loyalists to use Hobbism as a term of abuse to characterise the seditious doctrines of their opponents. One pamphleteer in 1679 claimed to be assaulting his opponent’s ‘Leviathan: I mean the Original Soveraign Power of Mr Multitude’, going on argue that God was author of order and government and not man ‘as the Hobbeans vainly fancy’.188 When a pamphlet from 1684 imagined a sale of Whig items Leviathan was high on the list for similar reasons: Lot 1 item 3: One Hobbs Leviathan with large additions, much studied by the late E of S [Earl of Shaftesbury] in his Retirements, Teaching the reasonableness of Seperation, and laying the foundation of Government in the people, valued above all the Fathers, to advance Atheists and Republicans.189

185 187 188 189

Anon., The counter-plot (1680), p. 9. 186 S. Parker, Religion and loyalty (1684), pp. 50–1. W. Kennett, A letter from a student at Oxford to a friend in the country (1681), p. 14. Anon., A letter to a friend shewing from scripture, fathers, and reason, how false that state-maxim is, royal authority is originally and radically in the people (1679), pp. 4, 6. Anon., At Amsterdamnable coffee-house, brs (1684).


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The same thought that Leviathan was required reading for the ‘commonwealthsmen’ was expressed by Edmund Bohun: ‘His Study is well stuffed with seditious Pamphlets and intelligences, but his Staple Author is the Leviathan, which he hath read ten times oftener than the Bible, and Practiseth a thousand times more.’190 The perhaps unlikely association with republicanism can be found elsewhere; amongst Shaftesbury’s allies one lampoon listed ‘holy Macchiavel to more holy Hobbes / (The grand duumvirate for republic jobs)’.191 But these were not the only strategies deployed. One variation emerged in the wake of the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in 1681, turning the charge of Hobbesian absolutism back upon the Whigs. Tories suggest the claims made for the Parliament displayed a desire for the absolute power of Leviathan. Robert Brady pointed to the Hobbism of the exclusionist claim ‘That there is a Supreme, Uncontroulable Power lodged in the King and Parliament’.192 Another Tory pamphlet from 1681 complained that ‘It appears plainly that an House of Commons, is that Leviathan which he Adores: that is his Sovereign in effect, and a third Estate is not only greater than the other two, but than him who is presiding over the three.’193 The existence of this view owed something to the success of critical work by Wallis and Tenison that had suggested that Leviathan could be read as a defence of the sovereignty of the Rump. Parliamentary absolutism, in spite of Behemoth’s antipathy towards Parliament, could thus be characterised as Hobbism. But although Tory propagandists were adept at pointing to their opponents’ Hobbism, the increasingly authoritarian tone to Tory political argument in the 1680s inevitably brought them closer to positions that could look and sound remarkably Hobbesian. This was partly a function of the revival of some of the more Hobbesian arguments from the 1640s and 1650s. Digges’s Unlawfulness of subjects taking up arms was reprinted in 1679, giving a sanitised version of the Royalist natural right position. In spite of his patriarchal theory, Robert Filmer, could also sound like a distinctively Hobbesian absolutist.194 For all that he rejected Hobbes’s general

190 191

192 193 194

E. Bohun, Reflections on a pamphlet stiled, A just and modest vindication of the proceedings of the two last parliaments (1683), p. 128. Anon., A summons from a true Protestant conjurer to Cethegus’ ghost (1682). See also the dedicatory epistle to Plutarch’s lives (1683), Sig. B7v: ‘The broad Republicans are generally Men of Atheistick principles . . . Hobbists in their politicks and Morals.’ Note also the associations made in the typical Tory pamphlet as represented by John Crowne in City politiques, p. 49. R. Brady, The great point of succession discussed (1681), pp. 37–8. John Dryden, His majesties declaration defended (1681), p. 5. As Locke’s friend James Tyrrell was happy to point out in his Patriarcha non monarcha (1681), p. 97.

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philosophy, Thomas Barlow’s The original of kingly and ecclesiastical government (1681) could occasionally echo Leviathan. Rubbishing the idea that there could be such a thing as a free state, or republic, Barlow commented that ‘I could find the word Libertas, fairly written over their Gates, but within their Walls the greatest Bondage and arbitrary power that could possibly be imagined in any part of the world, but no Liberty at all that I could find, but only some few there were, who had liberty to do what they would with all the rest.’ The passage paraphrases Hobbes’s disparaging remarks about Lucca in chapter 21 of Leviathan. Barlow’s lesson is similarly Hobbesian in its antirepublicanism: when it comes to liberty, it is not self-government that matters, but rather the extent to which you are left alone.195 More common were quasi-Hobbesian justifications for obedience. High churchman William Sherlock argued that ‘It is absolutely necessary in all wellgoverned Societies, that there should be some supreme and soveraign Power, from whence there lies no appeal, and which cannot and must not be resisted.’ If no such authority existed human society would be turned into ‘a state of War, and no man is secure any longer, than he happens to be on the prevailing side’.196 Warnings about the threat of a state of war were not unusual. Samuel Parker argued in 1684 that ‘were it not for fear of Authority, every Man would be exposed a Prey to all Men, and all mankind would unavoidably fall into a State of War, then which State, nothing can be more defenceless and deplorable.’197 Explicit allusions to Hobbes’s account also occur with an increasing regularity during this period. Roger L’Estrange commented in 1679 of opposition principles that ‘this way of Reasoning Lessens all the Bonds of Human Trust, and Concord, and runs us back again into Mr. Hobb’s Original State of War.’198 In 1683 Thomas Gipps commented in a sermon that those rebels (referred to elsewhere as ‘Leviathans’) who resist and engage the people in rebellion ‘do by consequence overthrow the Ends of Society, and reduce us into that Condition, (which some Men call the State of Nature,) wherein every Man having a General Right to every thing, but a Particular Right to nothing, we fight and devour one another’.199 Whig propaganda built upon the constitutionalist critique of the 1670s to place Hobbes and his ideas firmly on the side of arbitrary absolutism, the 195 196 197 198 199

T. B. The original of kingly and ecclesiastical government (1681), p. 67; cf. Hobbes, Leviathan ch. 21, p. 149. W. Sherlock, The case of resistance of the supreme powers stated and resolved according to the doctrine of the Holy Scriptures (1684), p. 108; see also pp. 126–7. Parker, Religion and loyalty (1684), pp. 111–12. R. L’Estrange, An answer to the appeal from the country to the city (1679), p. 31. T. Gipps, Three sermons (1683), pp. 49, 70.


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unacceptable face of Toryism. We have already noted Whitehall’s identification of Behemoth with the Tory cause. Thomas Hunt also suggested that ‘the great Leviathan-maker’ was the Tories’ friend.200 Algernon Sidney cast Hobbes alongside Laud, Manwaring, Sibthorpe, Filmer and Heylyn as Royalist theorists who ‘compleat the shame and misery of our age and country’.201 Whigs even targeted the king as a Hobbist. Stephen College’s satirical treatment of the Oxford Parliament, A raree show, one of the lampoons for which he was ultimately executed, characterised Charles II as ‘Leviathan’ and a ‘child of heathen Hobbes’.202 The Hobbesian authoritarianism of Royalist theory was an easy target, perhaps not least because, as we have seen, there was some truth to the charge. James Tyrrell was happy to point this out in his Patriarcha non monarcha of 1681 when he commented of Filmer that ‘to affirm as the Author does without any qualification or restriction, that it is a sin to disobey the Kings personal Commands in all cases however issued out; savours of Mr. Hobs Divinity as well as Law.’203 It is of course true that the primary target of Whig theorists during this period was the work of Filmer and other Anglican Royalists but it is also important not to ignore the fact that Hobbes was present in the debate. As a theorist identified with Toryism and also as a potent symbolic representation of unacceptable arbitrary absolutism, Whig theorists had reasons to engage with Hobbes in their political writings. James Tyrrell directly attacked Hobbes in Patriarcha non monarcha. He indicted Behemoth for suggesting that the idea of a king bound by law was a novelty, and attacked De Cive’s rejection of limited sovereignty.204 Algernon Sidney also attacked De Cive for perverting contract theory into a justification for absolutism.205 This secondary engagement with Hobbes perhaps explains why there are moments in Locke’s second Treatise of government where he crosses swords with Hobbes in parallel with his attack upon Filmer. Two passages in particular indicate that Locke is seeking to associate Tory absolutism with Hobbism, and to condemn them both. In the first Locke ridicules a transparently Hobbesian account of the origin of sovereignty: As if Men quitting the State of Nature entered into Society, they agreed that all of them but one, should be under the restraint of Laws, but that he should still retain 200 201 202 203 205

T. Hunt, Mr. Hunt’s postscript (1682), p. 44. Algernon Sidney, Discourses, ed. T. West (Indianapolis, 1990), p. 11. Poems on Affairs of State, vol. II, E. F. Mengel Jnr (Yale, 1965), p. 429. L’Estrange noted the reference to Hobbes in his Notes upon Stephen College (1681), p. 11. Tyrrell, Patriarcha non monarcha, p. 138. 204 Ibid., pp. 151, 256–7. Sidney, Discourses, p. 409.

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all the Liberty of the State of Nature, increased with Power, and made licentious by Impunity. This is to think that Men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what Mischiefs may be done them by Pole-Cats, or Foxes, but are content, nay think it Safety, to be devoured by Lions.206

A little later Locke also makes reference to a Hobbesian style contract theory with a view to condemning its absolutism: It cannot be supposed that that [Men] should intend, had they a power to do so, to give to any one, or more, an absolute Arbitrary Power over their Persons and Estates, and put a force into the Magistrates hand to execute his unlimited Will arbitrarily upon them: This were to put themselves into a worse condition than the state of Nature, wherein they had a Liberty to defend their Right against the Injuries of others, and were upon equal terms of force to maintain it, whether invaded by a single Man, or many in Combination.207

In neither case does the argument directly concern Filmer (who rejected any discussion of the state of nature), which suggests that Locke at least had the issue of Hobbesian absolutism in his mind when he was composing the second Treatise. This did not tempt him into a full-blown or explicit engagement with Hobbes, but it may have encouraged him to consider other critiques of Hobbesian absolutism as he developed his own argument. Locke’s attacks upon arbitrary government occasionally share the constitutionalist tone of Clarendon’s Brief view and survey, a book that Locke had acquired by December 1681. Commentators have also noted some of the similarities between Locke’s position and that of George Lawson, whose critique of Leviathan Locke also owned. It is tempting to suggest that the Hobbesian dimension of the crisis of the 1680s may have sent Locke back to Clarendon and Lawson, and possibly encouraged him to adapt some of their more important conceptual resources for the theory of the second Treatise.208 Given that both Tyrrell and Sidney were happy to attack Hobbes openly, Locke’s own comparative silence on Leviathan seems to stand out, but he may well have had other reasons for not drawing attention to Hobbes, and one of these may well have been the risk of courting accusations of Hobbism. If Tory arguments for obedience recalled Hobbes’s ideas in their superstructures, Whig positions were vulnerable to charges that

206 208

Locke, Two treatises, II.93, p. 328. 207 Ibid., II.137, p. 359. Ibid., p. 75n. For the connections between Locke and Lawson, see A. H. Maclean, ‘George Lawson and John Locke’, Cambridge Historical Journal 9: 1 (1947), pp. 69–77; see also Conal Condren, George Lawson’s Politica and the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1989).


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they could often resemble Leviathan in their theoretical foundations.209 This was particularly true for those writers deploying natural law contractarian and consensual motifs. There was, of course, a family resemblance between Hobbes’s unusual variant of natural law theory and its more mainstream Grotian varieties, and it is undeniable that Hobbes’s striking rewriting of Grotian natural law theory had an impact upon all European theorists working within the tradition. In England we have seen this in terms of the early work of John Locke and on the Continent perhaps the most important figure was Samuel Pufendorf, whose Elementa jurisprudentiae universalis of 1660 was complimentary about De Cive. But these writers acknowledged that ultimately Hobbes’s devaluation of natural obligation and his overriding positivist emphasis upon the sovereign was unacceptable. The reworking of natural law theory in the early 1670s in books like Cumberland’s De legibus naturae and Pufendorf’s De jure naturae (both 1672) sought to re-emphasise natural obligation and at the same time to discriminate between those elements of the Hobbesian project that could be adopted and those that had to be rejected. When writers like Locke and Tyrrell used natural law theory in the 1680s, therefore, their arguments, informed by such developments, were already structurally anti-Hobbesian in several respects, most crucially in their vigorous reassertion of the existence of natural obligations. But if Whig natural law theory was already self-consciously at odds with Hobbes’s account, this did not mean that such theories, with their shared conceptual furniture, would not be tarred with a Hobbist brush. We have already seen that Tory propagandists were more than happy to make this sort of link when contract theory was mentioned and Whigs were extremely wary of suggesting that they might endorse anything that Hobbes said. After suggesting at one point that even Hobbes could occasionally follow the voice of mankind and the dictates of common sense (the joke was that Filmer couldn’t) Sidney immediately qualified the comment with ‘whatever he may be guilty of in other respects’. After rubbishing Filmer’s engagement with Hobbes in the Observations, Tyrrell was quick to 209

Indeed, in one interesting and unusual case, Hobbes’s ideas were actually cited as the foundation of Whig positions. In a pro-Exclusion pamphlet from 1681, William Cavendish, Hobbes’s patron, cites Hobbes to the effect that monarchic government is formed by agreement for security and protection. However, Cavendish then goes on to make the very un-Hobbesian argument that contractors wouldn’t have been so ‘void of sense, and so servilely inclin’d’ to give up their lives and liberties unconditionally. If Cavendish believed that Hobbes’s views might be laundered in this way, he was very much on his own. Anon., Reasons for His Majesties passing the Bill of Exclusion (1681), p. 2. See Quentin Skinner’s discussion of Cavendish’s position in Hobbes, Writings on Common Law and Hereditary Right, ed. A. Cromartie and Q. Skinner (Oxford, 2005), pp. 175–6.

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point out that ‘I neither like the foundation nor the building which Mr Hobs hath set up.’210 Thomas Hunt also added the reassuring caveat to his mention of Hobbes that ‘I mention him onely to render him detestable; for I take his Books to be the Dehonestamenta humani generis.’211 We know that Locke shared this anxiety, particularly when it came to his natural law theory, because he goes to some trouble to make clear his rejection of Hobbes’s state of war. Locke refers on two occasions to the unsuitability of accounts that present the natural state as one of conflict.212 When he argues in chapter 3 that ‘some men’ have confounded the state of nature and the state of war, the reference is to Hobbes.213 Locke’s anxiety over potentially Hobbesian readings of this early section may have been reinforced by the fact that he goes on (in II.21) to make the avoidance of the state of war ‘one great reason’ why men enter society, a passage that Laslett describes as Locke’s ‘closest formal approach to him [Hobbes] in his political theory’.214 Locke was thus undoubtedly conscious that his work could be taken for Hobbism and wished to avoid attracting such charges. In addition it may not have escaped his notice that writers like Parker and Tillotson, who had made a deterrent feature of their anti-Hobbism, had often ended up suffering for it. By quietly deflecting Hobbesian views at important moments, Locke could advertise his anti-Hobbesian stance without drawing unecessary attention to the issue of Hobbism itself. Locke may not have written the Two treatises against Hobbes, but we can nevertheless see Hobbes’s presence in the debates of the 1680s shaping his targets, his fears and even perhaps his anti-absolutist theory. THE CARDONNEL AFFAIR AND THE JUDGEMENT AND DECREE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

As the previous section indicates, political concerns about Hobbes and the Hobbism of all sides were a feature of political discourse during this period, and one of the things that tended to happen when discussion of Hobbes was prominent, was the uncovering of ‘Hobbists’ (as Locke may have feared) and the formal condemnation of Hobbes’s doctrines. In the 1660s, the anxieties about Hobbism had produced in Cambridge both a 210 212 213 214

Tyrell, Patriarcha non monarcha, p. 97. 211 T. Hunt, Mr. Hunt’s postscript, p. 44. Locke, Two treatises, 2.1, p. 268; 2.6, p. 271. Interestingly, as Laslett notes, Locke’s rejection of the state of war follow Filmer’s remarks in the Observations. Locke Two treatises, 2.19, p. 280. Ibid., 2.21, p. 282 and note. Laslett also comments that this passage was missing from one version of the first edition.


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‘genuine’ Hobbist and a formal condemnation of Hobbes’s doctrines as a result of the Scargill affair. In the early 1680s, afflicted with similar concerns about Hobbism, Oxford would also produce what appeared to be a Hobbist and a little later an influential formal judgement upon Hobbes’s political ideas. Although the two events in Oxford were not directly related as in the Cambridge episode, the structural resemblances are worthy of note; in both cases the Hobbist’s exposure was related to local political pressures, and in the case of the formal statement, wider political issues conspired to produce a condemnation of Hobbes’s ideas represented in terms provided by his critics. Oxford’s Judgement and decree, like Scargill’s Recantation, would prove to be an influential statement of the meaning of Hobbes’s ideas, doing much to shape the public understanding of Leviathan and De Cive. That it would rely for its content upon critiques produced during the previous Hobbesian ‘crisis’ demonstrates the mechanisms by which such hostile interpretations of Hobbes’s work would become hegemonic. Oxford’s Hobbist was in many ways a much less impressive catch than the colourful Daniel Scargill, but he did have closer links to the notorious philosopher. William Cardonnel was the son of Pierre de Cardonnel, a French Protestant merchant, printer and poet whose intellectual connections (recently meticulously researched by Noel Malcolm) included the Earls of Devonshire and possibly even Hobbes himself.215 William Cardonnel entered Magdalen College Oxford in 1671 aged sixteen and five years later became a Fellow of Merton College, serving as its Praelector in Greek and subsequently as one of the college’s Bursars. We also know that between August 1678 and August 1679 William, possibly through his father’s connections, also worked for the Devonshire family, perhaps as a tutor. This would have put him in close proximity to the elderly Hobbes, and it seems plausible to suggest that they knew each other. Cardonnel’s return to his duties at Merton in 1679 ushered in a less happy phase of his career. Serving as the Bursar, Cardonnel fell out with the Warden, Sir Thomas Clayton, over expenditure on the college gardens. Matters came to a head in the spring of 1681 when, after insulting Clayton, Cardonnel was forced to recant his remarks on his knees before the entire Fellowship. The disgrace proved to be too much for Cardonnel, who was also racked by guilt over money that he had embezzled. After a failed 215

N. Malcolm, ‘Pierre de Cardonnel (1614–1667), Merchant, Printer, Poet, and Reader of Hobbes’ in Malcolm, Aspects, pp. 259–316; see particularly the account of William Cardonnel on pp. 309–11, although my account stresses the political dimensions to the charge against Cardonnel.

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attempt to drown himself in the Cherwell, Cardonnel eventually committed suicide in October 1681, hanging himself from the door of his bedchamber. The verdict was insanity. Cardonnel’s suicide, borne of petty college squabbles that had got out of control, was clearly an embarrassing scandal to the college and the university. Writing a few days later, Humphrey Prideaux wrote to John Ellis that ‘I suppose our whig newsmongers will represent him to be in orders, and make od reflections of it.’216 For Tory Oxford at that particular moment, Cardonnel’s suicide was embarrassing politically, and this may account for the rumours that subsequently started to spread. Prideaux subsequently added a postscript to his letter to Ellis alerting him to a new, alternative, account of the reason for the young don’s suicide: the baleful influence of Thomas Hobbes. During his time with the Devonshires Cardonnel had been ‘poisened by Hobs’ and on his return talked frequently of atheism and blasphemy. Finally aware of the enormity of his lapse, guilt had driven Cardonnel to take his own life.217 The story has a number of peculiarities, not least the thought that it was Cardonnel’s recognition of his guilt which seems to have driven him to the even greater sin of suicide.218 But the narrative thrust is clear; Hobbesian poison had turned a perfectly respectable Oxford don into an atheist and a blasphemer, and Cardonnel’s belated consciousnesses of the true awfulness of his crime had led to his extreme action. The story uses Cardonnel’s brief contact with Hobbes to convert the don’s rather sad end into an antiHobbesian parable, and simultaneously effaces the role played by the dispute between the Warden and the Fellows. Arguably, pointing to the existence of Hobbism in Oxford was potentially more scandalous than the original scenario, but the rumour is constructed in such a way as to emphasise the fact that Cardonnel’s decline and fall was a result of his trip to Derbyshire, and that he had attained consciousness of his fault after his return to his orthodox alma mater. Oxford’s reputation is unsullied, and the odium can be directed at Hobbes. That the story has this dimension is enough to make one wonder whether it was designed for the consumption of the Whig newsmongers Prideaux had been worrying about earlier in his letter to Ellis. The fact that Cardonnel’s ‘Hobbism’ is not mentioned in Wood’s account of the affair (Wood had friends in Merton) is an additional reason to suspect that the presentation of the 216 218

H. Prideaux, Letters, p. 115. 217 Ibid., p. 116. Malcolm points out that Prideaux’s account uneasily combines the sterotypes of the libertine who commits suicide with no fear of the aferlife and the stereotype of the penitent obsessed with his own sinfulness. ‘Pierre de Cardonnel’, p. 310.


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unfortunate don as a doomed Hobbist had nothing to do with the real reasons for his suicide. Perhaps because the account of Cardonnel as a Hobbist did have a double-edged quality as propaganda, Oxford did not turn the rumours about him into a broader opportunity to condemn Hobbism. It should be remembered that Cambridge probably would not have taken this route with Scargill, had his own college not pushed so hard for that outcome in an attempt to avoid taking him back. In this case Cardonnel was dead, and there could be few advantages in engaging in the damaging process of exorcising his rumoured Hobbism. But Tory Oxford soon got its chance to display its anti-Hobbesian credentials anyway, and in a way that bears comparison with Cambridge’s condemnation of Hobbism in 1669. The Rye House conspiracy of June 1683 may have failed, but its impact was dramatic, and nowhere more so than the intellectual headquarters of Royalism. The university authorities decided that this was an opportunity to make a political statement, and one that would not only advertise Oxford’s loyalty, but also send out a message to the country at large about the sort of political beliefs that were absolutely unacceptable.219 Oxford therefore undertook to search into the principles which had inspired the conspirators and to expose the intellectual foundations of opposition to the crown. John Fell, now Bishop of Oxford, took the lead along with the Vice-Chancellor Lloyd following the precedent of the 1647 condemnation of the Solemn League and Covenant. The recently appointed Regius Professor of Divinity William Jane, in consultation with the senior doctors of divinity, was asked to examine the entire output of opposition literature, a task that was apparently completed in just five days between 16 and 21 July, to come up with what Robert Beddard has called ‘the Anglican equivalent of the Index librorum prohibitorum’. Jane had produced a list of propositions, together with their sources. It included figures from the sixteenth century like Knox and Buchanan, and very recent writers like Hunt, Johnson and Doleman, but most of the list consisted of a roll call of the political classics of the English Revolution: Milton, Rutherford, Hunton, Owen, Baxter, and of course Hobbes. The main targets of the list were Whiggery and dissent, and as we have seen Hobbes in the 1680s was regularly implicated as one of the guiding lights of Whiggery, and occasionally as a patron of religious dissent. That said, with both Fell and Jane directing matters, it 219

R. A. Beddard, ‘Tory Oxford’ in N. Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1997), IV, p. 892.

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would be hard to see how Hobbes could have escaped. Hobbes’s entries bulked large, making up six of the twenty-seven propositions to be condemned, the largest contribution of a single writer. Given the recent attempts to publish sympathetic accounts of Hobbes’s doctrines, the Judgement returned a more traditional account of Hobbism to centrestage. The over-reliance upon Hobbes probably also reflected a more general belief that Hobbes was in fact the evil influence lying behind many contemporary ills; for the hard-pushed Jane, several instances of subversive Hobbism could stand for the ideas expressed in Whig propaganda. Hobbes’s entries begin at number 7: 7. Self-preservation is the fundamental law of nature, and supercedes the obligation of all others, whenever they stand in competition with it. (Hobbes de Cive. Leviathan)220

Jane follows tradition in highlighting Hobbes’s trademark emphasis upon self-preservation, identifying both De Cive and Leviathan as dangerous texts. Although De Cive seems to have been acknowledged by Whig theorists as the more absolutist text, by the 1680s any of Hobbes’s contractarian productions could be labelled in the same way by loyalists. The Hobbesian passages pick up again from proposition 10 to form a Hobbesian series running through to proposition 14: 10. Possession and strength give a right to govern, and success in a cause or enterprise proclaims it to be lawful and just; to pursue is to comply with the will of God, because it is to follow the conduct of his providence. Hobbes. Owen’s Sermon before the Regicides Jan. 31. 1648. Baxter, Jenkin’s Petition Octob. 1651. 11. In the state of nature there is no difference between good and evil, right and wrong; the state of nature is a state of war, in which every man hath a right to all things. 12. The foundation of Civil Authority is this natural right, which is not given, but left to the Supreme Magistrate upon mens entring into societies, and not only a foreign Invader but a domestic Rebel puts himself again into a state of nature, to be proceeded against not as a subject but an enemy: and consequently acquires by his rebellion the same right over the life of his Prince, as the Prince for the most heinous crimes has over the life of his own Subjects. 13. Every man after his entring into society retains a right of defending himself against force, and cannot transfer that right to the Commonwealth, when he consents to that union whereby a Commonwealth is made; and in case a great many men together have already resisted the Commonwealth, for which every one 220

The judgment and decree of the University of Oxford past in their convocation July 21, 1683, against certain pernicious books and damnable doctrines destructive to the sacred persons of princes, their state and government, and of all humane society, p. 3.


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of them expecteth death, they have liberty then to joyn together to assist and defend one another. Their bearing of arms subsequent to the first breach of their duty, tho it be to maintain what they have don, is no new unjust act, and if it be only to defend their persons, is not unjust at all. 14. An Oath superadds no obligation to pact, and a pact obliges no further than it is credited: and consequently if a Prince gives any indication that he does not believe the promises of fealty and allegiance made by any of his subjects, they are thereby freed from their subjection, and notwithstanding their pacts and oaths may lawfully rebel against, and destroy their Sovereign. (Hobbes de Cive. Leviathan.)

Proposition 10, by including Hobbes with individuals who could be grouped as de facto theorists, completely elides the distinctiveness of Hobbes’s unusual claim, which made no reference to providence, and actually relied on an account of consent. Hobbes became a representative of the crude de factoism that he had gone to some trouble to distance himself from. Proposition 11’s reference to the state of war is again completely traditional, repeating a formula that just about every educated reader would recognise as a Hobbesian signature, whether they had actually read Hobbes or not. The three remaining arguments have a slightly different character in that they would require the reader to have either read Hobbes or to be familiar with the critical literature to immediately recognise the propositions as Hobbesian. Of the three, proposition 13 is the most instantly recognisable, as the example of the conspirators from chapter 21 had been a mainstay of just about every political critique since the 1650s. The other two elaborate upon the subversive consequence of passages from chapter 28 of Leviathan and chapter 8 of De Cive. These sections were not often discussed in this form in popular commentary or even dedicated critiques; one of them is labelled but the other is not. Neither reproduces actual Hobbesian texts. In fact both of them, and Jane’s whole series, come from Cumberland’s critical discussion in chapter 9 of De legibus naturae, the text that he used to prepare his anti-Hobbesian sermon of 1674.221 Jane had evidently decided to use Cumberland rather than returning to the texts themselves. Cumberland’s critique thus shaped the official response to Hobbes’s work rather than Hobbes’s own words, a classic example of the manner in which the public understanding of Hobbes could be shaped by his critics’ hostile readings. The Decree was promulgated at a meeting of Convocation on Saturday 21 July. In front of an audience of 250 dons, Jane read the propositions, 221

Proposition 12 comes from Cumberland’s discussion in 9.12, pp. 732–3; Proposition 14 comes from 9.11, pp. 726–7; proposition 13 quoted in the more damning English version of Leviathan is also dealt with by Cumberland in 9.10, pp. 724–5, noting the differences between the English and the Latin.

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asserting that they were ‘false, seditious and impious; and most of them to be also Heretical and Blasphemous, infamous to Christian Religion, and destructive of all Government in Church and State’.222 He went on to assert that the books which contained the propositions were ‘fitted to deprave good manners; corrupt the minds of unwary men, stir up seditions and tumults, overthrow States and Kingdoms, and lead to Rebellion, murther of Princes and Atheism it self’. All members of the university were banned from reading them and the books were ordered to be burnt by the university Marshal. When John Lloyd proposed that they be accepted, the congregation hummed their approval. Immediately afterwards the books were burned in the Schools quadrangle ‘to the evident satisfaction of scholars of all degrees and qualities who gave several hums of approval whilst they were burning’.223 The Judgement and decree was immediately disseminated. Within Oxford it was ordered that copies should be publicly displayed in the ‘Libraries, Refectories, or other fit places’ of every college and hall.224 To reach a wider audience a pamphlet version costing 3d was immediately issued in Latin and English, and was also published for a third time in the Gazette.225 The broader impact of the Decree is perhaps suggested by the antiHobbesian passages contained in the sermons of the period, many of which reproduce the positions condemned. Preaching at Manchester on 9 September, designated as a day of thanksgiving for the failure of the conspiracy, Edward Foreness was typical in his attack upon those who based their resistance claims upon the thought that self-preservation ‘must supercede all other obligations whatsoever’ and who plead ‘this Fundamental Law of Nature . . . in their defence’.226 Foreness’s choice of words makes it clear that he was glossing proposition 7, a suspicion reinforced by his subsequent comment that ‘Its no wonder then, there should be of this sort of men in the present Conspiracy, men of Atheistical principles, of the Spawn of that great Leviathan, who for many years hath been playing in these our waters, infested this our Land with the most lewd and pernicious practices and opinions.’227 On 23 September, James Brome, rector of Cheriton in Kent and a royal chaplain, condemned ‘our Republican Leviathans’ for their responsibility for the conspiracy, making use of the same point: 222 225 226 227

Judgement and decree, p. 7. 223 (PRO 22 July 1683). 224 Judgement and decree, p. 8. Another edition was also published in Dublin (Wing 0892). E. Foreness, A sermon preached at Manchester, upon the 9th of September (1683), p. 17. Ibid., pp. 17–18.


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what greater Encouragement can possibly be given to conspire against a Government, and contrive its utter Subversion, then when men are told publickly that self preservation is such a fundamental Law of Nature as superseeds the Obligation of all others which stand in competition with it, and that it is Lawfull for their own defence.228

The Judgement and decree thus provided handy shortcuts for clergymen delivering obedience sermons, of which there were many in the summer and autumn of 1683, and Hobbesian elements thus reconstituted became a staple of such performances. There is no doubt that the Judgement and decree did go a long way towards forming what might be called an ‘official’ view of Hobbes’s political theory, and this was replicated in numerous sermons and books from the period. But it is typical of Hobbes’s reception that official condemnation was also paralleled by the frequent positive use of distinctively Hobbesian positions. The simple fact was that although Hobbes could be blamed at moments of political crisis, it was precisely those moments of potential or actual political breakdown that a Hobbesian analysis captured so well. The clear and present threat of a genuine state of war meant that clergymen searching for suitably dire warnings of the consequences of disobedience often painted their picture in unmistakeably Hobbesian terms. In his 9 September sermon, Norfolk rector John Clapham made precisely this Hobbesian point: ‘Thro Government our very Lives are preserved in safety, else homo homini lupus, one Man would be a Wolf and Lion to another: What Violences, Murders, and Bloodshed would be committed amongst Men!’229 On the same day Thomas Pomfret, rector of Ampthill, began his sermon with an equally Hobbesian warning that if the sword is taken out of the magistrate’s hand, the ‘Nation is presently in a state of War, and every man may thrust his dagger into his Neighbour’s side, if he has a stronger Arm, and a more bloudy mind’.230 However, Pomfret went on, what people need to realise is that they have given up their natural rights to do what they would: For because it was soon found out that every single man would be a Prey to any other that was stronger than himself, therefore all people thought it necessary to combine themselves into Societies, and unite their Strength by putting it all into the hand of one man, who should defend all the rest.231

228 229 230

J. Brome, The original of plotts (1683), pp. 9, 13; Brome also reproduces proposition 10 on p. 13. J. Clapham, Obedience to magistrates recommended (1683), p. 9. T. Pomfret, Passive obedience, stated and asserted (1683), p. 2. 231 Ibid., p. 11.

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If this sounds a little like Hobbes, Pomfret later gives away that it is actually Hobbes when he suggests that individuals have: given up their right of all, and the dispose of themselves to the wisdom and discretion of their Governors, [and] have no reason to resist their Commands and Injunctions, because in so doing they contradict themselves: first willing and desiring one thing in their supreme Governour, (who is vertually each of them) and then the contrary by a new affection of their own.232

The mention of Hobbes’s distinctive theory of representation confirms Pomfret’s highly heterodox source, and reveals an extraordinary example of the silent appropriation and use of Hobbes’s ideas at a time when the prejudice against his work was at its height. We have already observed that distinctively Hobbesian messages could be found in loyalist propaganda precisely because Hobbes’s arguments spoke to the concerns of individuals faced with the prospect of conflict. It is thus no surprise that at a moment of particular political stress, many clergymen chose to express their calls for obedience in explicity Hobbesian terms. In some cases, there was embarrassment, and an attempt to rationalise the borrowing. In 1684 John Walker gave a typical exposition of chapter 13’s argument in the course of lecturing on the consequences of disobedience, commenting that ‘of this kind and sort was that state of Nature . . . Mr. Hobbs speaks of ’.233 But Walker immediately attempts to justify the usage by arguing (pace Hobbes and in the terms of Clarendon’s Brief view and survey) that this was not the condition in which God had created man. In fact the state of war was God’s punishment for political disobedience, a providential reinterpretation that lay behind most clergymen’s willingness to engage with Hobbes’s texts. Naturally others attempted to restate the conventional thought that Hobbes had got human nature wrong234 but when it was necessary to present the alternatives to obedience, chapters 13–18 of Leviathan or the opening chapter of De Cive seem to have expressed the contemporary mood. Here perhaps we find the genuine influence of Hobbes in shaping contemporary responses to political crisis. If Englishmen were haunted by the experience of civil war, their nightmares were shaped by Hobbes’s peculiarly potent representation of a state of war. The Hobbesian train of thought that only unquestioning obedience to an absolutist sovereign stood between them and disaster was a lesson that was not lost on those 232 234

Ibid., pp. 13–14. 233 J. Walker, The antidote (1684), p. 80. See for example James Lowde, The reasonableness of the Christian religion (1684), pp. 42–3.


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facing political breakdown in the 1680s, and it was a lesson reiterated constantly in sermons and pamphlets. The official view may well have been that Hobbes’s arguments were detestable, but for many readers, decades of exposure to his teachings combined with the threat of political violence, may well have persuaded them that at some level the Malmesbury philosopher was right.

CHAPTER

7

Hobbism in the Glorious Revolution (1685–1700)

James II undoubtedly benefited at first from both the Hobbesian anxieties and attitudes generated in the first half of the 1680s. At the level of propaganda, the Tory view of Hobbes as the patron of sedition could be wheeled out to condemn opposition. In the thanksgiving sermons for the defeat of Monmouth at Sedgemoor in July 1685, Henry Hesketh, preaching before the king, alluded to Leviathan as part and parcel of the republican consent theories that had motivated the rebels.1 More common were allusions to Hobbes’s de factoism as a theory that had encouraged individuals to believe that they could seize the throne. John Goodricke preached to the lawyers at Lincoln’s Inn that Mr Hobbes’s state of nature ‘would justify all Wars, Rebellions, and unjust Invasions upon the Rights of Others’ and that his theory had been designed in the first place ‘to support an Olivarian Usurpation’.2 Thomas Wagstaffe similarly assaulted the thought ‘That every Man should enjoy the Benefit of Laws, and Society, and the King . . . should be in Hobs’s State of Nature, and every Man had a Right to everything of His. And if a Man can but get together Men and Arms . . . he may lay Claim to the King’s Crown and Dignity.’3 But the condemnations again went hand in hand with the thought that the beckoning Hobbesian anarchy, however unnatural its genesis, required an authoritarian solution. What we might call a Hobbesian mood to such discussions simultaneously provided at one level a mode of criticism but also a frequent and stark reminder of the Hobbesian calculus that protection required obedience, for all that the talk was of right rather than power. But although Hobbesian instincts might work to secure loyalty to the Jacobite regime in the short term, they would rapidly tell against James’s 1 2 3

Henry Hesketh, A sermon preached in His Majesty’s Chapel-Royal at White-Hall (1685), p. 7. J. Goodricke, A sermon preached before the Honble Society of Lincolns-Inne (1685), pp. 26–7; see also p. 14. T. Wagstaffe, A sermon preached on the 26th day of July (1685), p. 18.

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cause after the Dutch invasion and James’s flight in December 1688. It is unsurprising in the light of the engagement with Hobbes’s political theory in the previous four decades that at this extraordinary political moment, individuals and groups simultaneously reached for distinctively Hobbesian formulae while often at the same time trying to avoid a direct association with the condemned doctrines of Leviathan, with various degrees of success or failure. Typical of this phenomenon were the deployment and ultimate suppression of Hobbesian arguments in parliamentary debate. The question was how to characterise a new and embarrassing political situation where the king had simply left the country. Where did this leave his subjects in terms of political obligations? Of course, Hobbes’s name wasn’t mentioned, but there were some pungent reminders of the theory of Leviathan in some of the arguments prepared by the House of Commons for their debate with the Lords in January 1689: It is from those who are upon the throne of England, (where there are any such), from whom the people of England ought to receive protection; and to whom, for that cause, they owe allegiance. But there being none now from whom they can expect regal protection, and to whom therefore they owe the allegiance of subjects, the Commons conceive the throne is vacant.4

Although such arguments were evidently acceptable in the lower house, the Commons managers decided not to use this particular reason in their discussions with the more conservative House of Lords, probably because they were a little too Hobbesian for comfort, as John Miller has suggested.5 This did not, however, prevent the issue of Hobbism from arising, albeit indirectly. Several MPs did endorse the idea that James had forfeited the throne because he had violated the contract between king and people. The mere mention of contract theory was too much for many conservatives and particularly for the second Earl of Clarendon, who had more reasons than most to be sensitive to Hobbesian allusions. Objecting to the use of contractarian language he commented that ‘this breaking the original contract is a language that hath not been long used in this place; nor known in any of our law books, or publick records. It is sprung up, but as taken from some late authors, and those none of the best received.’6 Hobbes thus resumed his traditional role as the embodiment of all that was bad about contract theory and Tory parliamentarians, wishing to dissociate their actions from 4 5 6

Commons Journals, x, 19. J. Miller, ‘The Glorious Revolution: ‘‘Contract’’ and ‘‘Abdication’’ Reconsidered’, Historical Journal 25 (1982), pp. 541–55, at p. 543. Quoted in J. Kenyon, Revolution Principles (Cambridge, 1977), p. 16.

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the suggestion of resistance or usurpation, preferred instead to emphasise the less controversial fiction that James had abdicated. It nevertheless remained true that however the Lords and Commons chose to justify themselves, their willingness to accept a role in determining the character of the succession reveals, as Howard Nenner points out, a distinctively Hobbesian cast of mind.7 For all that the politicians sought to avoid the issue of Hobbism, the Hobbesian dimensions to the political problems thrown up by the Revolution meant that Leviathan was hard to avoid, and this was particularly true of the allegiance controversy. The new Oath of Allegiance deliberately avoided the issue of whether William and Mary were rightful monarchs and instead asked simply that subjects swear to ‘bee faithfull and beare true Allegiance to their Majesties King William and Queen Mary’. The formula allowed Tories who could never accept that the new regime was established by right to accept it on de facto grounds instead. Although this concession did allow many Tories to square their consciences, it was unacceptable to others because it involved perjuring oaths already sworn to James. The debate generated a large pamphlet literature arguing the pros and cons of the case, and inevitably Hobbes makes regular appearances. The author of a bestselling compendium of non-juring arguments, The history of passive obedience, published in August 1689 as the deadline for subscription passed was ‘sham’d to find that his [Hobbes’s] Authority and the Reasons which he derived from Milton and both from . . . Parsons the Jesuite, are of a sudden so generally receiv’d’.8 The seamlessness of the links between Hobbes, Milton and Parsons show the lasting effect of the Oxford Judgement and decree, the ‘Hobbesian’ provisions of which the author goes on to summarise. The charge was echoed by non-juror George Hickes who supported The history’s attack upon those who would follow ‘Hobbs, Milton and Parsons’ in asserting that ‘power is originally in the people, that the foundation of all Government is in compact, that the Crown of England is as conditional, as that of Poland’.9 The argument even appeared in a verse attack upon Gilbert Burnet, arguing that the Williamite propagandist’s ‘medley politics new stamped/Are Hobbes’ and Milton’s atheism new vamped.’10 7 8 9

10

H. Nenner, The Right to be King (Basingstoke, 1995), p. 207. Sellars, The history of passive obedience since the Reformation (1689), A3v. G. Hickes, A letter to the author of a late paper, entituled, A vindication of the divines of the Church of England, &c. (1689), pp. 5–6. See also Jeremy Collier’s condemnation of ‘Hobs his Pacts’ as the foundation of government. Vindiciae juris regii (1689), p. 27. Burnet’s character (1689) in Poems on affairs of state, vol. V 1688–97, ed. W. J. Cameron (Yale, 1971), p. 128.


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However, even Hickes was forced to concede that there were few who openly made such arguments because most justifications of subscription were couched in terms that deliberately avoided the suggestion of popular sovereignty and active resistance. Indeed, pro-subscription pamphlets during this period did all that they could to avoid the suggestion that they were endorsing stereotypical Hobbesian propositions.11 Latitudinarian Anglicans like Gilbert Burnet, Edward Fowler and William Lloyd preferred frequent reiteration of the thought that William’s successful invasion was the result of God’s providential intervention in the nation’s affairs, or a Grotian version of conquest theory insisting that William’s invasion had been legitimate as part of a ‘just’ war. However some of the Latitudinarian responses sailed a little closer to the wind, notably Edward Stillingfleet’s A discourse concerning the unreasonableness of a new separation (1689). In one section, Stillingfleet engaged in a slightly risque´ analysis of Hobbes’s argument in De Cive, to parallel his encounter in Irenicum. Stillingfleet’s general aim was to refute the Royalist natural right argument that when individuals give up their natural rights, they do so permanently and indefeasibly. Hobbes’s discussion in De Cive is used as a presentation of this case: Mr. Hobbs indeed saith, That those who submit upon Compact, are capable of no Injury afterwards; because they have given up their Wills already, and there can be no Injury to a willing mind. But this is very false reasoning; for himself grants, That where there is such a Compact, there goes some Liberty or Priviledge along with it. And it is not to be imagined, that such who entred into compact for their Benefit, should renounce all right to it when they have done it; and if they have Right, they may be wronged.12

The slightly strange spectacle here is to see Stillingfleet using the argument that obedience is conditional (a position regularly denounced as Hobbism) against Hobbes’s absolutist suggestion that consenting subjects cannot be injured by their sovereigns. What narrowly saves Stillingfleet from Hobbism, however, is his argument that the point of the compact is the common good, and when the common good is violated then natural law voids the contract, leaving individuals free to submit to another sovereign who will pursue the common interest. This was the direct politicisation of the anti-Hobbesian emphasis upon the common good that Cumberland 11

12

Although in private some of the arguments could come closer to Hobbism, as Clarendon discovered when he discussed the issue privately with Tenison and Lloyd. The correspondence of Henry Hyde, ed. S. W. Singer (1828), II, p. 300. E. Stillingfleet, A discourse concerning the unreasonableness of a new separation, on account of the oaths (1689), pp. 6–7.

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had developed in the De legibus, but one that left the Latitude men perilously close to what had been repeatedly deemed unacceptable in Hobbes’s doctrine.13 Stillingfleet was predictably hammered for his Hobbesian commentary; Samuel Grascombe complained in 1691 that it was not ‘kindly done to condemn Mr Hobb’s for laying down a Proposition, which tended to the securing of Government when once established in his way, when any Man may see that he hath borrow’d the worst of Mr Hobbs’s Principles to patch up his Discourse’.14 Although the Latitudinarians were regularly charged with Hobbism by their non-juring and high church opponents on a range of issues, the most notorious Hobbesian scandal to emerge during the allegiance controversy did not involve them but rather the high churchman and sometime nonjuror William Sherlock. Although Sherlock had remained a leading advocate of non-resistance and passive obedience, he had taken a prominent role in the clerical opposition to James in the months leading up to the Revolution. In 1689 he had adopted a high church position, recommending James’s recall upon conditions. He eventually refused to take the oaths to William and Mary, and in August joined the ranks of the 400 non-juring clergymen, acting as a leading spokesman for their cause. However, it soon became clear that Sherlock’s attitude to the issue was not straightforward. On 2 February 1690, the day after he, along with the other non-jurors were ejected from their posts, Sherlock preached a sermon praying for William and Mary as de facto sovereigns. By the spring, Sherlock’s opposition to the oaths had begun to waver, and he eventually took them in August. Sherlock’s apostasy immediately attracted critical comment, and it was suggested that his volte-face had proceeded from a combination of naked careerism, the influence of his wife or, more plausibly, James II’s defeat at the Battle of the Boyne in July. Faced with such a damaging barrage of criticism, Sherlock attempted to justify himself in a pamphlet published towards the end of 1690, and in the process, opened himself to the charge of Hobbism that had always lurked behind the acceptance of William and Mary as de facto rulers. The Case of the allegiance due to sovereign powers was an instant bestseller, running into no fewer than six editions in 1691. Sherlock attempted to give a coherent account of how it was possible to accept William and Mary’s 13

14

In fact in the same section, Stillingfleet covertly follows Hobbes by agreeing with ‘the Best Writers on this Subject’ that a bound slave possesses a right of war against his master. This section of chapter 8 of De Cive had been assaulted by Clarendon and Bramhall as a legitimation of rebellion. Ibid. S. Grascombe, A brief answer to a late discourse concerning the unreasonableness of a new separation (1691), pp. 13–14.


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de facto authority when James II still had a legal right to the crown. Sherlock’s strategy was to dissolve the question; it wasn’t the case that the claims were mutually exclusive. If it could be proved that allegiance was not due only to those with legal right, then the problem would effectively disappear. Sherlock argued that where de facto powers were ordained by God this created a political obligation. Individuals were bound to obey ‘those Princes whom God hath placed and settled in the Throne, whatever Disputes there may be about their legal Right, when they are invested with God’s Authority’.15 Sherlock acknowledged that this proposition ‘may startle some men at first’, but it was a principle that had traditionally made for the ‘ease and safety of Subjects in all Revolutions’, and had always been followed by ‘the generality of Mankind, from an inward principle of Self-preservation’. Sherlock claimed that his own conversion to the argument had come from a reading of the Jacobean Bishop John Overall’s Convocation book (1606), published by Archbishop Sancroft in 1690 to support the non-juring interest.16 Sherlock had discovered a passage connected with Canon 28 where the belief that ‘when any new Forms of Government, begun by Rebellion, and after thoroughly settled, is not of God’ was declared to be an error.17 From these unpromising beginnings Sherlock went on to argue that it was therefore possible for a de facto ruler to have no legal right at all and yet have God’s authority; what was more, when such a ruler was thoroughly settled, they must be obeyed. Clearly much of the argument here depended upon the meaning of ‘thoroughly settled’, and Sherlock listed a set of necessary conditions; firstly when the administration and power of the country are in the new prince’s hands; secondly, when the estates of the realm and the ‘great body of the nation’ has submitted to him; thirdly when the de facto prince is in a position to crush opposition; and lastly when the legal monarch is no longer in a position to reassert his rights. This was clearly a list tailored to the political circumstances of the early 1690s, particularly the last condition which made James’s defeat on the Boyne a major incentive to subscribe. Fulfilment of these conditions created an obligation to the individual in authority, but not as a legal sovereign. One of the peculiarities of Sherlock’s theory, and one that profoundly irritated Whigs, was his insistence that the existence of a de facto sovereign in these circumstances did not transfer or 15 16 17

W. Sherlock, Case of the allegiance due to sovereign powers (1691), p. 3. John Overall (1560–1619) was Bishop of Norwich, and was closely associated with the canons of 1606. Sherlock, Case of the allegiance, p. 5.

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completely extinguish the legal right. Individuals were still bound to the thought that there was a legal claimant to the throne, but the circumstances required that practical allegiance be given to the de facto incumbent. Sherlock’s ‘Two Kings of Brainford’18 occasioned much mirth in the pamphlet literature but it also needs to be said that Sherlock was only making explicit the logic that allowed many anxious Tories to take the minimalist oath. However, in spite of the concessions to de jure authority, Sherlock’s argument was extremely vulnerable to the charge that for all the talk of God and right, his theory was ultimately nothing but rank Hobbism of the sort that had been condemned repeatedly during the past four decades: ‘that Dominion is naturally annexed to Power’. Sherlock was well aware of this and tried to head off the charge by engaging in some Hobbesian exegesis. Those who say this, he comments, ‘do not understand Mr Hobbs, or me’.19 If Hobbes made power the test of right, Sherlock attempted to argue that in his theory God’s right as Creator authorises power.20 Although ingenious, this was a distinction without a practical difference, given that either way those who managed to gain power ended up with right anyway. A similar problem emerged when Sherlock tried to make sense of the relationship between protection and allegiance. Typically he argued that protection and obedience were not, strictly speaking, correlative, but if the prince was not in a position to govern at all, then practical allegiance had to end.21 It is hard to see how Sherlock’s exceptions open a meaningful gap between his theory and Hobbes’s, especially when he made the argument that de facto allegiance was required to avoid societies dissolving into ‘a Mob, or Mr Hobbs’s state of Nature, because the Legal Prince has lost his Throne, and can no longer govern’.22 Critics were soon lining up to make precisely these points. Sherlock’s unwieldy and uncomfortable theory offended just about everyone. His former non-juring friends turned upon him with a vengeance, appalled at his apostasy and his concessions to the Williamite cause. On the other side, Whigs were furious at the half-way house solution that left William and Mary with a potentially unstable de facto authority and James with a legal right. The non-jurors in particular were quick to make the accusations of Hobbism. The charge became a way of exposing the ugly and unprincipled truth lying behind Sherlock’s awkward theory and the new regime, 18 19 20

A mocking allusion to the multiple Kings of Brentford of the playwright Bayes in Buckingham’s The rehearsal; a satire at the expense of Dryden’s heroic drama. Sherlock, Case of the allegiance, p. 15. Ibid. 21 Ibid., p. 42. 22 Ibid., p. 38.


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stripping away the meagre protection offered by his protestations about divine right. Sherlock’s attempts to distance himself from Hobbes were typically the focus of attacks, demonstrating once again the dangers of trying to pre-empt such criticism in front of sensitised audiences. The nonjuror John Kettlewell homed in upon Sherlock’s discussion of power and right, complaining that ‘for all this Difference about the way, how it came by it, since Strength always has Right, there will be no Difference in the Effect . . . So his Power carrying Right, throws all into a state of War, as much, I conceive, as Mr Hobbs’s Power giving it.’23 Jeremy Collier subjected the same section to withering criticism; if Hobbes made power give right to dominion, Collier wondered where the difference was: ‘And pray does not the Doctor do the same? I am much mistaken if this be not the design of his whole Book.’24 Collier pointed out that Sherlock’s case required him to state unequivocally that God’s right was independent of His power; Sherlock’s claim that God’s right depended upon His powers of creation fudged the issue and potentially implied that His dominion was based on power leaving ‘the Doctor and Mr Hobbs . . . perfectly agreed’.25 Even if this issue could be resolved Collier couldn’t see how right and power could be separated when Sherlock made mere power the sign of right for human government. Theophilus Downes also noticed that Sherlock’s theological alibi made little difference to the Hobbism of his political theory; the question was whether Sherlock and Hobbes taught the same doctrine about sovereignty. Downes was in no doubt that they did. Citing chapter 21 of Leviathan, Downes concluded that the Sherlock had made the same argument about the relationship between protection and obedience.26 Both had claimed that although a sovereign’s right could not be extinguished by the act of another, obligation of its members could be.27 If Sherlock bound the subject to an actual assistance and defence of the usurper, so did Hobbes. ‘Thus it appears’ concluded Downes, ‘that they are Fratres Fraterrimi, and it is not within the Power of Metaphysicks to 23 24 25 26

27

J. Kettlewell, The duty of allegiance settled upon its true grounds (1691), p. 53. J. Collier, Dr. Sherlock’s Case of allegiance considered with some remarks upon his vindication (1691), p. 73. Ibid., p. 74. T. Downes, An examination of the arguments drawn from scripture and reason, in Dr. Sherlock’s Case of allegiance, and his vindication of it (1691), pp. 14–15; Leviathan ch. 21, p. 114 [O.P.] Quotation of this part of chapter 21 of Leviathan would be a common response to Sherlock’s position. Downes, An examination of the arguments drawn from scripture, pp. 14–15; Leviathan ch. 29, p. 174 [O.P.]. Although the textual similarity made this a particularly inviting parallel for Downes, the sense of ‘right’ was rather different in each case. In Sherlock’s case this referred to the sovereign’s positive legal right, whereas for Hobbes the sovereign’s right was simply his natural right, which could never be extinguished by any means.

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distinguish them.’28 Even Sherlock’s attempts to make God responsible for worldly power ultimately fail to separate him from Hobbes: ‘Mr Hobbs does often call his Sovereign God’s Lieutenant, and his Vicegerent, and Sovereign under God . . . He agrees with the Doctor then, that the Right of Government does flow from God’s Authority; so that still it seems impossible to distinguish their Opinions.’29 Jeremy Collier reproduced the same parallel passages asking whether Sherlock could ‘find in his Heart to quarrel with Mr. Hobs after all this harmony in Opinion?’30 This sort of criticism was particularly damaging because it invited the thought that Sherlock’s project entailed all of the familiar consequences of Hobbes’s theory. Sherlock travelled a high road that led to the moral relativism and arbitrary violence laid out by Hobbes’s critics. The author of A confutation of sundry errors in Dr. Sherlock’s book argued that: ‘Your Doctrine is the very same with Hobbism, because you plainly confound Right and Wrong, most rightful and most wrongful Monarchs, and make them to be equally the Effects of God’s Omnipotent Power and Providence; which is perfect Hobbism, and destructive of True Religion and Morality.’31 The same was true of Sherlock’s allusions to the Hobbesian state of nature and self-preservation, which soon had commentators thumbing through their critiques of Hobbes for suitably damning rejoinders. Thomas Browne argued that Sherlock’s position amounted to saying that ‘Hobbs’s Self-Preservation is the primary Law of Nature, and justifies the doing of any thing without which I cannot preserve my Life, though it be renouncing my King, my Countrey, my Religion; my God.’32 Downes made a similar point when he argued that Sherlock’s stress upon worldly ease and safety ‘may equally serve as a persuasive to the denial of Christ, the Existence of Spirits, Hell Torments, and to divers other Articles of the Hobbian Belief ’.33 Here the accusation of Hobbism was used to embellish Sherlock’s crime; Sherlock never made the suggestion that individual self-preservation should be the criterion of allegiance, but once the issue of Hobbism had been identified Sherlock faced a full barrage of pre-prepared charges of Hobbism. These included lectures from the Oxford Judgement and decree, which was reprinted in its entirety as an appendix to Proteus ecclesiasticus.34 But Sherlock’s critics didn’t restrict 28 31 32 33 34

Ibid., p. 15. 29 Ibid. 30 Collier, Dr. Sherlock’s Case of allegiance, pp. 81–2. Anon., A confutation of sundry errors in Dr. Sherlock’s book concerning allegiance (1691), p. 10. T. Browne, An answer to Dr. Sherlock’s Case of allegiance to sovereign powers (1691), p. 17. Downes, An examination of the arguments drawn from scripture, p. 3. W. P., Proteus ecclesiasticus (1691), pp. 22–31; see also Anon., A review of Dr. Sherlock’s Case of allegience due to sovereign powers, &c. (1691), p. 4.


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themselves to repeating traditional criticism; once Browne had the Hobbesian scent, he found that the best way to read Sherlock’s peculiar willingness to promise fidelity to legal right was with reference to Hobbes’s comments on promises made for the future in chapter 6 of De Cive. Hobbes had explained that they were effectively meaningless and permanently deferred.35 In 1691 Sherlock attempted to dig himself out of this Hobbesian hole with another pamphlet: Their present majesties government proved to be throughly settled, and that we may submit to it, without asserting the principles of Mr. Hobbs. Here Sherlock attempted to revise his account of what constituted ‘thorough settlement’ to pare back the emphasis upon power and possession, stressing instead the role played by consent, hoping thereby to avoid the ‘might is right’ accusation that had dogged his previous work. Sherlock argued that this put significant distance between his work and Leviathan; if a king abandons his people we must submit ‘not upon Mr Hobbs his base Principle, because dominion is founded in Power; but by Virtue of the Determination of our Representatives, which is lookt upon as the Act of the whole People, and includes the Consent of every Particular Person’.36 One of the characteristics of Sherlock’s handling of this debate is his reluctance to engage directly with Hobbes’s texts, and he had good reason to avoid them. Although he could legitimately claim that individual selfpreservation did not lie at the heart of his theory, his attempt to relocate legitimacy in consent got him out of one Hobbesian situation and into another. The stock image of Hobbes as an apologist for a simple equation between power and dominion concealed the fact that what distinguished Hobbes from other de facto theorists in the 1650s was that even in situations of conquest, obligation was always self-obligation and flowed from consent, however desperate the situation of consenting subject. Hobbes had gone to some lengths in the ‘Review and Conclusion’ of Leviathan to make this point clear, in order to avoid what he saw as the misrepresentation of his own case.37 Sherlock’s argument relied upon the thought that he could use consent to decouple himself from the popular stereotype of Hobbism as an uncomplicated de facto theory. Ironically his argument drove him back to a more authentic representation of the role of consent in Hobbes’s theory. It is difficult to tell from the text whether Sherlock was aware of this, and the 35 36 37

Browne, An answer to Dr. Sherlock’s Case of allegiance to sovereign powers, p. 51. W. Sherlock, Their present majesties government proved to be throughly settled (1691), pp. 15–16. Hobbes, Leviathan, ‘Review and Conclusion’, p. 486.

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critics, who tended to be fixated on the issue of simple de factoism, don’t seem to have picked up the parallel either. Sherlock effectively arrived at distinctively Hobbesian solutions in trying to avoid the popular representation of Hobbism. This paradox sums up the complexities of assessing Hobbes’s impact upon political discourse during this period. Hobbes’s presence in the debate is most tangible in terms of providing a set of well-established positions which were absolutely unacceptable modes of argument. Hobbes acted as a boundary marker for what constituted orthodox political theory. Just as Locke had had to tread extremely carefully when deploying concepts such as the state of war a decade before, so Sherlock had to find ways of expressing the theory behind submission without falling foul of Hobbism. And yet for both writers Hobbes’s formulation of the response to the problems of political obligation was an inescapable part of their intellectual furniture. Sherlock was fascinated by a specifically Hobbesian account of the state of war; the stark equation between protection and obedience was a distinctively Hobbesian formula that informed his understanding of the political problem. It is true that other writers had expressed these ideas, but by the time of the Revolution, as the critical response alone shows, these issues were part of an intellectual matrix ineluctably associated with Hobbes; the issue was how to rework those ideas to avoid the undesirable consequences of Hobbes’s system, effectively how to tame the Leviathan. For all the intellectual shortcomings of Sherlock’s argument, he did have supporters, particularly amongst those Tories who had subscribed to the oaths upon similarly Hobbesian grounds. It is difficult to assess the role played by the Hobbesian ‘mood’ in these cases, but the parliamentary discussion and the print debate over the oaths suggests that Hobbes’s distinctive world-view undoubtedly played some part in shaping individuals’ responses to the crisis. If late seventeenth-century Englishmen were haunted by the spectre of civil disorder, Hobbes’s brilliant analysis gave shape to the ghosts, and offered a set of conceptual tools for their exorcism. That he was so loudly condemned shouldn’t blind us to the more subtle ways in which his influence shaped the political responses of his readers. HOBBES AND HOBBISM IN THE

1690S:

HUNTING

THE ATHEIST

The moral compromises demanded by the Revolution exposed for many an ugly truth about the fundamental Hobbism of English society. As cases like Sherlock’s seemed to indicate, self-interest and self-preservation had


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won out over the sanctity of oaths and traditional allegiances. Face-saving formulae had been found, but there was certainly a consciousness amongst the clergymen that Hobbesian values were only too prevalent in society at large. In June 1689 Thomas Tenison preached a sermon against self-love arguing that ‘Perhaps the Doctrine of Personal worldly Self-Love, as the measure and ultimate end of all Man’s Designs, has, in no Age, and in no Countrey, been more closely thought of; more cultivated with the Art of pretended Philosophy, more diligently spread, and with more fatal Contagion propagated, than in our own.’ Occasionally this anxiety could be tracked back to Hobbes explicitly; in 1692 Edward Fowler warned against the ‘ill natured Principle’ of the ‘Malmesbury Philosopher’ that self-interest was the sole cause of society and friendship.38 Ironically, in spite their jeremiads on this topic, no group came in for greater criticism on this score than the clergy themselves. There were plenty of critics only too willing to point out that they had compromised their moral authority by their political adjustments. A Whig character in one of Daniel Defoe’s pamphlets lambasted the Tory clergymen who had followed Sherlock’s Hobbesian lead as ‘having no Principle, but that of SelfInterest’. William Stephens made a similar point in 1696 when he commented that ‘the name Church signifieth only a Self-interested Party, and that the Clergy have no Godliness but Gain.’39 If the church’s moral leadership had been compromised by incidents like the Sherlock affair, it had also been fatally undermined by acceptance of the Toleration Act in 1689. High churchmen and non-jurors argued that if Parliament was able to grant toleration, the church was reduced to a mere cypher with no divine jurisdiction. The non-juror Charles Leslie commented with some justice that the Toleration Act ‘has divested us of all our authority over the people’. Religious pluralism was now a legal fact, and this was a devastating blow to those who had fought to prevent the institutionalisation of religious dissent. Others were concerned that toleration allowed the people to quit religion altogether. Humphrey Prideaux commented that ‘The mischief is, a liberty being granted, more lay hold of it to separate from all manner of religious worship to perfect irreligion than go to the meeting-houses.’40 The effect was compounded for many by the 38

39 40

T. Tenison, A sermon against self-love, &c. preached before the honourable House of Commons (1689), p. 16; E. Fowler, A sermon preach’d at the meeting of the sons of the clergy in S. Mary-le-Bow Church (1692), p. 16. D. Defoe, A dialogue betwixt Whig and Tory (1693), p. 6; W. Stephens, An account of the growth of deism in England (1696), p. 10. H. Prideaux, The Letters of Humphrey Prideaux, ed. E. M. Thompson (1875), p. 154.

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wholesale transformation of the Bishop’s bench between 1688 and 1691. The combined result of non-juring and deaths during the period was an unprecedented number of vacancies, allowing the new regime to completely remodel the episcopacy. The resulting personnel change represented a temporary triumph for the moderate Tory Latitudinarians. In 1689 Edward Stillingfleet, Simon Patrick and Gilbert Burnet were elevated to the episcopate. In 1691 John Tillotson succeeded Sancroft to become Archbishop of Canterbury. In the same year Thomas Tenison became Bishop of Lincoln, Edward Fowler took over at Gloucester and Richard Cumberland became Bishop of Peterborough. But the new appointments were far from popular, and this was particularly the case with Tillotson’s primacy. Tillotson had been a Presbyterian during the Interregnum, and his Erastianism in the 1670s and 1680s had earned him a reputation amongst Tories as a Hobbist; his circle of friends included dissenters, Whig philosophers like John Locke and the notorious publisher of Socinian works, Thomas Firmin. For high church Tories his elevation was nothing short of a disaster and even Burnet noted that in 1693 that ‘the Clergy seemed to have combined in opposition to him, to decry him in every thing.’41 It didn’t take long for the accusations of Hobbism to resurface as part of the campaign against Tillotson. George Hickes and Charles Leslie in particular covered ground familiar from the early 1680s. Leslie wrote that Tillotson’s sermons ‘are all the genuine effects of Hobbism, which loosens the notions of religion, takes from it all that is spiritual, ridicules whatever is called supernatural: it reduces God to matter, and religion to nature . . . His politics are Leviathan, and his religion is Latitudinarian, which is none.’42 For many contemporaries these developments inevitably helped to foster a sense of moral panic; if Restoration morality had been scandalous, at least the church had been able to take the high moral ground in opposing atheism and vice. With a weakened church in the hands of Erastians of dubious orthordoxy themselves, the way was open for a tidal wave of atheism and irreligion to sweep the nation unchecked. As Richard Lapthorne put it in 1690 ‘The world with us is very unruly debauched and profane . . . aboundance of Robberies committed and vice very little checked by those in Authority.’ Even clergymen themselves recognised that the diminution of the church’s authority encouraged infidelity. Burnet pointed out that when he spoke to those who had fallen into corruption 41 42

Burnet, quoted in C. Rose, England in the 1690s (Malden, 1999), p. 183. C. Leslie, The charge of Socinianism against Dr. Tillotson considered (1695), see also pp. 14, 16.


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‘they have very often owned to me, that nothing promoted this so much in them, as the very bad Opinion which they took up of all Clergy-men of all sides.’ Things were perceived to get much worse after 1695 when the lapsing of the Licensing Act unleashed a flood of deist and anti-clerical material. In 1696 Thomas Bray, later founder of the SPCK, commented that ‘All the Fundamental Articles, both of Natural and Revealed Religion, are now either furiously storm’d at by Atheists, Deists, and Socinians on the one hand, or secretly and dangerously undermined by Enthusiasts and Antinomians on the other.’43 In the same year Francis Atterbury, making a case for reconvening Convocation, argued that if ever there was a need for such a meeting, it was then: ‘when such an open looseness in men’s principles and practices, and such a settled contempt of religion and the priesthood have prevailed every where; when heresies of all kinds, when scepticism, deism, and atheism itself have overrun us like a deluge.’44 At a moment like this, with the widespread perception that the church and Christianity itself was in danger, it was almost inevitable that Hobbes would figure prominently in the discussion. The same set of clerical anxieties that had contributed to his demonisation in the 1660s and the early 1680s were replayed in the 1690s, and indeed it was precisely because of the successful impact of those earlier campaigns against him that Hobbes remained an important focus. Through the work of those now in authority in the Church of England, Hobbes had been cast as the patron of atheism and irreligion in England and it was only natural to put him in the frame for the new upsurge in heterodoxy. As the clergy faced yet another moral panic about infidelity, it was a cue for the dead philosopher and his monstrous book to take a central role in new campaigns designed to save the country from his pernicious influence. THE BOYLE LECTURES

The Latitudinarian response to the difficulties they found themselves in during the early 1690s was to launch campaigns for godly reformation in the church and in the country at large. Part and parcel of these campaigns were assaults upon atheism and heterodoxy, necessary not only to combat the perceived increase in irreligious attitudes but also to demonstrate to their doctrinal critics that Latitudinarian rationalism supported rather than subverted Christianity. A typical example is Thomas Tenison’s February 43 44

C. Rose, England in the 1690s, pp. 205, 184; T. Bray, A course of lectures upon the church catechism (Oxford, 1696), ep. ded. F. Atterbury, A letter to a convocation-man (1696) in Somers Tracts, IX, p. 412.

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1691 sermon Concerning the folly of atheism designed to reveal both the folly and the vileness of those who live without God. Hobbes’s name may not be mentioned in the text but when Tenison comes to adumbrate the shortcomings of the atheists’ logic, his marginal citation of Hobbes’s Decameron Physiologicum (1678) makes explicit exactly who he has in mind.45 Tenison’s atheist is transparently Hobbesian where he denies that the world came out of nothing, believes that all we do is necessary, has no faith in divine prophecy and mocks the being of ghosts and spirits. Given Tenison’s background as a respected critic of Hobbes his use of Hobbesian ideas to structure his portrait of the atheist is unsurprising, but demonstrates that the critique of Hobbes would continue to inform discussions of atheism in general. Nowhere was this more true than in the inaugural series of Boyle lectures given by Richard Bentley. Boyle had left provisions in his will for the establishing of a lectureship ‘To preach Eight Sermons in the Year, for proving the Christian Religion against notorious Infidels, viz. Atheists, Deists, Pagans, Jews and Mahometans; not descending to any Controversies that are among Christians themselves.’46 Tenison had been intimately involved in establishing the lectureship, acting alongside John Evelyn as Boyle’s executor, making up the inadequate funding left by Boyle, and determining the choice of lecturer.47 Bentley was a Cambridge-educated classical scholar and tutor to Edward Stillingfleet’s younger son James. His choice of topic was consistent with the wider concerns of his Latitudinarian patrons, as was his concern that the atheism to be combated included Hobbism. Bentley wrote a revealing letter to a friend in which he explained exactly why Hobbes constituted an important focus of his attack. In answer to the thought that atheism was difficult to combat because no atheists had gone into print, Bentley responded that: Must we then pass by the Atheists, against the judgement and command of my Honble Benefactor [Boyle], who hath put them in the very first place as the most dangerous enemies? Atheism is so much the worse that it is not buried in books, but is gotten [into life]; that taverns and coffee-houses, nay Westminster Hall and the very churches, are full of it . . . But are the Atheists of your Mind, that they have no books written for them? Not one of them but believes Tom Hobbes to be a rank one; and that his corporeal God is a meer sham to get his book printed. They understand that Cabbala well enough: that all that is but juggle; and that a coporeal infinite God is downright nonsense. I have said something to this in 45 46 47

T. Tenison, A sermon concerning the folly of atheism (1691), p. 6. R. Bentley, The folly of atheism (1692), Sig. A2r–v. M. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution (Ithaca, 1976), p. 33.


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my first sermon, and I know it to be true by the conversation I have had with them. There may be some Spinosists, or Immaterial Fatalists, beyond seas; but not one English Infidel in a hundred is any other than a Hobbist; which I know to be rank Atheism in the private study in select conversation of these men; whatever it may appear to be abroad.48

Bentley believed that in the absence of explicit apologies for atheism, Hobbes’s work had not only fulfilled the same function surreptitously, but had been directly responsible for the atheism now stalking England. As we shall see, this was a verdict that was widely echoed. But we should also bear in mind that it was also in some ways a predictable view for a Latitudinarian preparing to combat atheism. Hobbes was a familiar enemy that forty years of critique had taught them how to handle. By identifying Hobbes as the patron of a heterogeneous and complex modern atheism Bentley could describe the problem in a way that allowed a clearly scripted and well-trodden response. Although Hobbes’s work was undoubtedly one element going into the complicated formula of early Enlightenment free-thought, its opponents had good reasons to highlight its role and this may go part of the way towards explaining why Hobbes retained his distinctive place in Bentley’s sermons, and Latitudinarian attacks upon atheism in general. As Bentley indicates in his letter, much of his direct attack upon Hobbes occurs in the first sermon of the series, The folly of atheism, the title probably a deliberate allusion to Tenison’s court sermon of the previous spring. Typically Bentley’s approach largely eschews explicit mention of Hobbes’s name, setting up a stock composite figure of the atheist incorporating Hobbesian, Epicurean and Deist characteristics. Indeed Bentley seems particularly concerned to tar the latter with the views of the others. Such an approach was common in the anti-atheist literature of the period, and we have seen it already in Wolseley and to a certain extent in Cudworth. This approach allowed a variety of types of atheism to be conflated and attacked, and also avoided the problematic exegesis of an author like Hobbes whose orthodox statements could complicate the process of denunciation. Nevertheless popular images of Hobbes clearly inform Bentley’s representation in the same way that they had informed Tenison’s. In an echo of Scargill’s recantation, the atheist ‘allows no Natural Morality, nor any other distinction of Good and Evil, Just and Unjust; than as Human Institution and the modes and fashions of Various Countries do denominate them’. Some atheists, Bentley comments, 48

Museum Criticum (1826), II, pp. 557–8.

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drawing upon traditional Hobbesian themes, ‘impugn the assertion of a Providence, of the Immortality of the Soul, of an Universal Judgement to come, and of any Incorporeal Essence’. Others that ‘all their Thoughts, and the whole of what they call Soul, are only various Action and Repercussion of small particles of Matter kept a-while moving by some Mechanism and Clock-work, which finally ceases and perishes by death’.49 As he had remarked in his letter, Bentley was keen to dismiss the thought that discussion of God established the orthodoxy of such writers. In doing so the atheists follow the strategy of Epicurus, who introduces a paltry idea of God ‘purely that he might not incurr the offence of the Government’. Epicurus’s nominal gods had no practical connection with the world, revealing Epicurus to be an atheist by consequence. Bentley argued that the same was true of ‘modern disguised Deists’ who ‘do only call themselves so for the former reason of Epicurus, to decline the publick odium and resentment of the Magistrate; and do cover the most arrant Atheism under the mask and shadow of a Deity’.50 Bentley breaks cover and deals with Hobbes directly in the consideration of atheistical politics towards the end of the sermon. Atheism’s asssault upon religion is shown to undermine communities and governments. In a world where religious oaths have no purchase there can be no government: ‘For an Atheist [sidenote to Hobbes de Cive, Leviathan] to compose a System of Politicks is as absurd and ridiculous, as Epicurus’s Sermons were about Sanctity and Religious Worship.’ Hobbes’s political theory is essentially a ruse, designed to permit the growth of atheism: ‘there was hope’, comments Bentley, ‘that the Doctrine of absolute uncontroulable Power and the formidable name of Leviathan might flatter and bribe the Government into a toleration of Infidelity.’ Bentley’s recurrent concern is that the plan is working. As his letter to Bernard had suggested, Bentley feared that ‘some of all orders of men, even Magistracy it self, have taken the Infection: a thing of dreadful consequence and most immediate danger.’ The infectious Hobbism that haunted the Latitude men was on the march in a vulnerable society, and if it gained authority and power, nothing could be expected ‘but the basest Cowardise and Treachery, but the foulest prevarication in Justice, but betraying and selling the Rights and Liberties of a People, but arbitrary Government and tyrannical Oppression’.51 The lesson was clear; the government should take action to stop Hobbism before it infected and undermined society. 49

Bentley, Folly of atheism, pp. 3, 6, 13.

50

Ibid., pp. 9–10.

51

Ibid., pp. 35, 38.


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Bentley’s remaining sermons showcased the full range of Latitudinarian argument against a composite Epicurean and Hobbesian atheism, with a predictable emphasis upon the former as the more easily refuted straw man. Nevertheless, Bentley was not averse to borrowing some explicitly antiHobbesian arguments to stir into the mixture. For example, Bentley’s attack upon the idea that matter could think borrowed positions from his patron Tenison’s Creed to ridicule the thought that inanimate objects might be sensitive creatures.52 Similarly Bentley drew from Ward and Wallis’s critiques in attacking the idea that there could be infinite generations of men and therefore no act of Creation, one of the earliest topics in the war against Hobbes.53 But on the whole Bentley preferred to concentrate his fire upon Epicurean atheism. Three of the eight sermons dealt with refutations drawn from the origin and structure of human bodies, using the argument from design to reject the idea that the arrangement of nature was a product of chance. Borrowings from Cumberland are particularly evident here,54 but even when Bentley was concentrating explicitly upon Epicurean themes, this did not prevent him flagging them as antiHobbesian arguments. One of his favourite quips, repeated twice in the course of the lectures, was to suggest that the idea that the creatures of the world were created by chance was as absurd as believing that ‘a Monky may once scribble the Leviathan of Hobbes, but may do the same frequently by an Habitual kind of Chance, even above the number of all the Impression.’55 Such moves reveal the extent to which Hobbes was on Bentley’s mind, even when he wasn’t directly confronting his arguments. The casual auditor might easily come away with the impression that Hobbes explicitly denied God’s providential involvement in the world. It would be overstating the case to argue that anti-Hobbism was a vital component of every single Boyle lecture. Boyle’s list of target infidels was broad and several lectures did not touch upon Hobbes or Hobbism at all, but those that did (usually dealing with the plague of atheism) became influential conduits for the official condemnation of Hobbes in the 1690s and beyond, helping to perpetuate the public view of Hobbes as the leading domestic atheist. In 1698 John Harris’s series of lectures responded to the 52 53 54 55

Bentley, Matter and motion cannot think (1692), p. 14; cf. Tenison, Creed, pp. 82ff. Bentley, A confutation of atheism from the structure and origin of humane bodies (1692), e.g. pp. 18–19. See J. Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion (London, 1976) p. 107. See, for example, Bentley, A confutation of atheism from the structure and origin of humane bodies (1692), e.g. p. 8; A confutation of atheism from the origin and frame of the world (1692), p. 10. Bentley, A confutation of atheism from the structure and origin of humane bodies, Part III (1692), p. 30, see also A confutation of atheism from the faculties of the soul (1692), p. 38.

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post-1695 flood of deist material by uncovering it as Hobbism. If Charles Blount’s deism was the contemporary target, Blount’s radicalism was ‘unmasked’ by putting him alongside the more obviously unacceptable Hobbes and Spinoza. Harris noted that this sort of man frequently disguises their true meaning, but that ‘their Disguise is so very thin and superficial, that any one may easily see through it, and discover their true Meaning and Design.’56 If Blount could prove slippery, ‘the author of Leviathan speaks a little plainer’ in his views of religion. Harris cited Cudworth and Locke against Hobbes, perpetuating the thought that he was the patron and surrogate for contemporary atheism. The tradition would be maintained into the eighteenth century, particularly in the sermons of Samuel Clarke (1704–5), John Hancock (1706), Lilly Butler (1709) and John Leng (1717–18). The Boyle lecturers’ genealogical understanding of the relationship between Hobbes and contemporary deism and atheism in the 1690s kept the issue of Hobbism alive, even when there were new figures to be attacked. Indeed, new targets like Blount, Toland and Collins could be redescribed, and not without some justification, as Hobbists. The sermons of Bentley and Harris offer good examples of the way that it was easier to draw upon the existing reservoir of anti-Hobbesian literature in attacking stereotypical Hobbesian views than it was to confront the complexities of the new free-thinking. But the flipside of this continuing fascination with Hobbes was that it kept interest in Hobbes alive for a new generation of radicals. Like all anti-atheist literature, the Boyle lecturers subverted their own ends by providing accessible potted summaries of atheist and deist views. Anthony Collins observed that they raised doubts rather than quelled them: ‘the existence of God is often made a question, which otherwise would be with few any question at all.’57 Benjamin Franklin famously reported that the Boyle lectures had converted him to deism, since ‘the arguments of the deists which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me so much stronger than the refutations.’ It seems plausible to suggest that the more open admiration for Hobbes that one finds in early eighteenth-century freethinkers may owe something to the fact that influential public statements like the Boyle lectures were keeping Hobbes’s profile high.

56 57

J. Harris, The notion of a God neither from fear nor policy (1698), p. 4. Quoted in E. G. Rupp, Religion in England 1689–1791 (Oxford, 1986), p. 249.


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LOCKE’S HOBBISM

Hobbes’s continuing role as the supposed guru of English heterodoxy meant that the charge of Hobbism was unlikely to go out of fashion. We have already observed that non-jurors and high churchmen were happy to attack the newly elevated Latitudinarian divines, and particularly Tillotson as Archbishop of Canterbury, for their Hobbism. The same would be true of the critics of John Locke, whose controversial work in philosophy and religion, appearing at a particularly difficult time, would instantly generate Hobbesian anxieties in its readers. Locke’s Essay concerning human understanding caused particular concern, not least because of its forthright rejection of innatism and its apparent scepticism about natural moral obligation. Locke’s friend Tyrrell wrote to him from Oxford in June 1690 describing the reaction of some ‘thinkeing men’ to the Essay in which he commented that he had ‘found them dissatisfyed with what you have sayed concerning the Law of nature, (or reason) whereby we distinguish moral good, from evil and vertue, from vice’.58 Locke had derived moral obligation from three laws: divine law, the law of the commonwealth and what he called the law of opinion or reputation. In the first edition, the reference to divine law appeared to suggest that Locke was referring to revelation alone. The absence of an explicit reference to natural law, coupled with the stress upon sources of moral authority such as positive law and the law of opinion or fashion, immediately led Locke’s critics to suspect him of Hobbism. Tyrrell reported that Locke’s laws, particularly the third law of fashion ‘come very near what is so much cried out upon in Mr:Hobs; when he asserts that in a state of nature and out of a commonwealth, there is no moral good or evil: virtue, or vice but in respect to those persons, that practice it, or thinke it so.’59 Isaac Newton clearly had the same thought when he famously asserted that he had taken Locke for ‘a Hobbist’ because he had seemed to strike ‘at ye root of morality in a principle you laid down in your book of Ideas’.60 By appearing to leave nothing between revelation and the law of opinion, Locke seemed to be making the very Hobbesian mistake of denying that the content and obligation to moral behaviour could be discerned by the light of nature alone. 58 59 60

Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. de Beer, 8 vols. (Oxford, 1976), IV, pp. 101–2. Ibid., p. 102. Newton, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. H. W. Turnbull, 7 vols. (Cambridge, 1959–), III, p. 280.

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This problem reveals the structural similarities lying at the heart of Locke’s difficult relationship with Hobbes’s natural jurisprudence. In common with many English Protestant writers, Locke and Hobbes both shared a scepticism about the Scholastic theory that unaided right reason could somehow act as an autonomous source of information about natural moral obligation. Hobbes, to the horror of his contemporaries, ultimately repaired this defect by locating moral and political authority in the sovereign. Locke by contrast, had experimented with the Latitudinarian alternative that there might be sufficient evidence in nature to point out the moral behaviour required by God. As he had suggested tentatively in his 1664 manuscript Essays on the law of nature, God’s moral law was advertised with sufficient clearness in the constitution of human nature to act as a source of moral obligation. The trouble with this solution was one of interpretation; how could the content of, and obligation to God’s law be known with any certainty from the evidence of nature? Hobbes’s theory had cut through this problem by making the sovereign the authoritative interpreter but the Latitudinarian account was vague and underdeveloped by contrast. As we have seen, this weakness was fully exposed by the debate over Samuel Parker’s Hobbism; Parker’s natural law legitimation for the sovereign’s right to order the church simply looked like Hobbesian Erastianism. Richard Cumberland had sought to show that the evidence of nature could be rescued without Hobbism. God had annexed identifiable rewards and punishments to natural law; scientific study of nature could therefore uncover the content and obligatory force behind natural law. Probably following the lead of Cumberland and Pufendorf, Locke had deployed a similarly anti-Hobbesian theory in the second Treatise of government, arguing that natural law was self-evident and obligatory. The Essay however, offered a much more austere account of natural obligation, and this is what had triggered the suspicion of Locke’s Oxford critics. Locke responded to Tyrrell by arguing that natural law was included in divine law, but Locke’s critics still complained that natural law had apparently dropped out of the picture altogether. Tyrrell urged Locke to offer a Cumberland-style addition in which a demonstration of the natural rewards and punishments annexed to natural law featured more prominently.61 Locke’s rather testy rejection of his friend’s suggestion reveals some of the reasons why he would remain under suspicion for Hobbism throughout the 1690s: ‘Will nothing then passe with you in Religion or Morality but what you can demonstrate? If you are of so nice a stomach I 61

Correspondence of John Locke, IV, pp. 107–9.


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am afraid if I should examine how much of your Religion or Morality you could demonstrate how much you would have left.’ Such demonstrations were far from conclusive and Locke was reluctant to be drawn into speculation about the problematic operation of natural justice, even if it would vindicate him from Hobbism. This was why he preferred to subsume natural law under a more general heading of divine law, but it was also the reason why his Oxford critics remained suspicious. Tyrrell, always eager to help, tried to solve the problem himself by publishing his own epitome of Cumberland’s De legibus in 1692, inserting passages from Locke’s Essay and unattributed excerpts from Locke’s unpublished Essays on the law of nature in an attempt to demonstrate that the two positions were compatible. Locke was unmoved. Sceptical about the possibility of offering this sort of demonstration in a satisfactory or legitimate manner, he preferred to locate the content and obligation of natural law in revelation. This had the advantage over Cumberland of making the terms and duties of natural law readily available to ordinary men and women without requiring complicated mathematical and scientific deductions. Man could know enough to recognise that Christ as Messiah had supplied the defect of natural reason in the teachings of the New Testament. Ultimately this would be the solution that Locke would develop in The reasonableness of Christianity, where he rejected a Cumberlandian solution in favour of a more traditionally Protestant emphasis upon scripture.62 Although this solution to the question followed a traditional Protestant precedent, Locke’s credal minimalism in the anonymous Reasonableness of Christianity would also mire him further in accusations of Hobbism. Central to Locke’s project in The reasonableness was an attempt to show that the belief that Jesus Christ is the Messiah was all that was required for a Christian to be saved. In reducing the essentials of Christianity to this element, Locke was following in the footsteps of William Chillingworth, John Hales and Jeremy Taylor. All three had sought to promote Christian unity and promote toleration by reducing the Christian faith to easily observed core beliefs. This eirenic approach had been adopted by Locke’s Latitudinarian acquaintances, particularly Tillotson and, from a Dutch Remonstrant perspective, by his friend and correspondent Phillip Limborch. Unfortunately for Locke, the argument that belief in Christ was all that was needed for salvation was also one of the most controversial theses of Hobbes’s De Cive (18.5–10), repeated in chapter 43 of Leviathan, where Hobbes had argued that ‘The (Unum Necessarium) Onely Article of 62

Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. J. Higgins-Biddle (Oxford, 1999), pp. 152–3.

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Faith, which the Scripture maketh simply Necessary to Salvation, is this, that JESUS IS THE CHRIST.’63 Hobbes was drawing from the same tradition with the political aim of dismantling priestly control over the means of access to salvation. Once faith was redefined in this manner the sum of Christian obedience could be expressed as a minimalist and internal profession of faith consistent with the unchallenged external authority of the temporal sovereign. Although this argument had attracted severe criticism from clergymen in the 1640s and 1650s, Hobbes’s Restoration opponents had not made it a prominent feature of their critiques, probably because many of them were Latitudinarians who sympathised on theological grounds with the idea of a credally minimalist Christianity. This may explain why it took Locke’s critics a while to discover the connection, but when they did Locke was duly charged with plagiarising Hobbes. In 1696 Richard Willis claimed that Locke had borrowed the formula from chapter 43 of Leviathan, and in 1697 Richard West also quoted the passages from De Cive, commenting that Locke’s argument ‘is the same with what is maintain’d by Mr Hobbs, and proved after the very same manner’.64 Locke’s indefatigable critic John Edwards (son of the heresy hunter Thomas Edwards, author of Gangraeana) commented of Locke that ‘When that Writer was framing a New Christianity, he took Hobbes’s Leviathan for the New Testament, and the Philosopher of Malmsbury for our Saviour and the Apostles.’65 Locke, responding to Willis’s charges in his Second vindication of The reasonableness of Christianity (1697) simply denied all knowledge of Hobbes’s use of the same thesis, claiming that ‘he did not know that those words he quoted out of the Leviathan, were there, or any thing like them. Nor do I know yet any farther, than as I believe them to be there, from his Quotation.’66 The most recent editor of The reasonableness of Christianity suggests that there are three possible explanations for Locke’s emphatic denial: firstly that Locke was simply covering up his borrowing; secondly that Locke, having read Hobbes’s formula in the past had unconsciously reproduced it as his own; or thirdly that Locke had never read chapter 18 of De Cive or chapter 43 of Leviathan. The evidence, as HigginsBiddle concludes, makes it extremely difficult to adjudicate between these 63 64

65 66

Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 43, p. 407 [324 O.P.] [R. Willis] Occasional paper, 1 (1697), pp. 19–30; [R. West], Animadversions on a late book entituled, The reasonableness of Christianity as delivered in the scriptures (1697), pp. 64–5. For discussion of these and other responses see John C. Higgins-Biddle’s ‘introduction’ to his edition of Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity (Oxford, 1999), especially pp. lxxiv–cxv. John Edwards, A brief vindication of the fundamental articles of the Christian faith (1697), Sig. A3r. J. Locke, A second vindication of the reasonableness of Christianity (1697), pp. 471–2.


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claims. Although Locke did not have access to his personal copy of Leviathan when he was composing the second Treatise of government, he did have it to hand in the 1690s, so it is at least possible that Locke had been inspired by Hobbes’s formula. At the same time, however, similar positions were being promoted by Locke’s Latitudinarian friends, and Locke was undoubtedly drawing upon an indentifiable tradition of credal minimalism. But although this is a good argument for rejecting the idea that Locke was intellectually dependent upon Hobbes, this is not to find Locke innocent of the knowledge that Hobbes had made this case. Locke’s response to Parker’s Hobbism and his careful presentation of the argument in the second Treatise of government show that Locke was sometimes painfully aware of the moments when he was sharing intellectual territory with the most reviled philosopher in England. Indeed, as this study has attempted to demonstrate, it was hard not to have encountered Hobbes’s most notorious doctrines, even if one had never read a word of Leviathan. Locke was not only familiar with (and very concerned about) public understandings of Hobbism, he also owned Leviathan and critiques of it. He had been attacked for the supposed Hobbism of the Essay. In this context Locke’s denials start to look like a distinctive strategy for preserving his reputation rather than a genuine claim not to have known what was in Hobbes’s book. He would do the same in 1699 after Stillingfleet pointed to the Hobbesian and Spinozist dangers of Locke’s apparent indifference to the necessity of supposing the incorporeal nature of the soul. In response Locke made the frankly implausible assertion that ‘I am not so well read in Hobbes or Spinoza, as to be able to say, what were their Opinions in this Matter.’67 It wouldn’t have been necessary for Locke to have read Leviathan particularly well for him to be aware of Hobbes’s materialism and its implications; books and sermons had been advertising their dangers for more than forty years and as we have seen that discourse had gained a new lease of life in the 1690s in response to the perceived rise of heterodoxy during the period. Given the shared intellectual inheritance Locke may well have felt that denial was a much safer solution than the alternative, which would have been either to engage in a full-scale assault on Hobbes (a tactic that he had seen backfire on several occasions), or an attempt to brazen out and justify the similarities. His supporter Samuel Bold attempted to do just this in his defence of The reasonableness of Christianity, and 67

Locke, Mr. Locke’s reply to the right reverend the Lord Bishop of Worcester’s answer to his second letter (1699), p. 422; for Stillingfleet’s comments see The Bishop of Worcester’s answer to Mr. Locke’s letter (1697), pp. 54–6.

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the result makes slightly uncomfortable reading. Bold attempted to establish his anti-Hobbesian credentials by mentioning that he had been inculcated in a hatred of Hobbism by his tutor George Lawson, but he went on to say that: I dare say, if Mr. Hobs hath maintained this very same Assertion that is maintained in the Reasonableness of Christianity, &c. viz. that the believing that Jesus is the Messiah . . . he maintained a very great and important Truth: And if he never published any Notion less true, and less useful than that, he could not justly fall under the Censure of any of those who have employed their Pens against him.68

Bold protested that the bare invocation of Hobbes’s name shouldn’t be enough to invalidate the idea. The problem was that the well-established web of negative connotations associated with Hobbes’s name meant that in practice it was enough to seriously compromise the legitimacy of Locke’s view. It is thus unsurprising that Locke took a less problematic route in attempting to vindicate his arguments. Ultimately Locke’s chosen method of avoiding Hobbes’s shadow was to deny that it existed. Historians’ continued willingness to take his professions of ignorance at face value suggests that it was also an effective one. HOBBES AND RADICALISM IN THE

1690S

Reading Augustan discussions of atheism, free thought and deism it is easy to come to the conclusion that Hobbes was the single most important figure behind the burgeoning religious heterodoxy of the last decade of the seventeenth century. In the anonymous Visits from the shades (1704), Hobbes’s ghost converses with the eccentric English radical John Asgill, reviewing Hobbes’s intellectual legacy. Hobbes observes that his work had ‘lay’d the Foundation and rais’d the scaffolding’ for the destruction of the Christian religion. Asgill agrees, commenting that William Coward, John Toland and others had revived his hypotheses; indeed, notes Asgill, referring to the work of Toland, Charles Gildon and the Socinians, ‘their Books are grounded on your Notions; and had you not writ at all, I question whether the Oracles of Reason, or Christianity not Mysterious, had ever seen the Light.’ This verdict was echoed by the third Earl of Shaftesbury writing in 1709: ‘In general truly it has happened, that all those they call FreeWriters now-a-days, have espoused those Principles, which Mr HOBBES 68

S. Bold, Observations on the animadversions (lately printed at Oxford) on a late book, entituled, The reasonableness of Christianity (1698), pp. 19–20.


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set a foot in this last Age.’ Anthony Collins commented that Hobbes was a ‘great influence of learning, virtue and freethinking’.69 As we shall see, there is a lot of truth in these comments. But Hobbes’s relationship to English radicalism during this period is a little more complicated than this confident testimony would suggest. The idea that Hobbism and radicalism naturally went together was a claim made by the clerical opponents of deism and free thought who had good reasons of their own to identify a traditional enemy in the confusing ferment of ideas, but it wasn’t the case that this supposed influence was clearly on display. The regular presence of Hobbes in attacks upon atheism and irreligion meant in turn that few radicals were prepared to cite him openly as the inspiration for their heterodox views. Hobbes’s influence is therefore subterranean and clandestine, and it is also difficult to discern clearly because by 1690 a rich cocktail of similar ideas, most notably those contained in the work of Spinoza and Locke, were also informing radical thought. Given the difficulties of teasing out the various influences during this period, some historians have fallen back upon a priori assumptions about the relationship between Hobbes’s theory and radicalism to argue that Hobbes’s work could not in fact have had a particularly decisive influence upon the development of free thought. Rosalie Colie first set out this case arguing that there were three reasons why Hobbes was not a particularly attractive source for the early deists. The first was that Hobbes had been consistently read as an atheist, which made him unattractive to theist radicals. The second reason was that Hobbes’s absolutism and political conservatism were not congenial to political radicals. The last reason was that Hobbes’s pessimistic view of human nature ran ‘directly counter to the optimism and pride with which essentially Blount, Collins, Tindal, and Toland viewed themselves and their fellow human beings’. More recently Jonathan Israel has reiterated Colie’s claims, with a view to establishing that Spinoza rather than Hobbes came to be the main stimulus behind British radical thought. Israel claims that ultimately Hobbes’s work, with his anti-libertarian politics, high church sympathies, and support for religious and political censorship, could not act as ‘the philosophical underpinning of a broadbased philosophical radicalism’.70

69 70

Anon., Visits from the shades (1704), pp. 32, 34; Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Several letters (1716), p. 38; A. Collins, A discourse of free-thinking (1713), p. 152. R. L. Colie, ‘Spinoza and the Early English Deists’, Journal of the History of Ideas 20: 1 (1959), pp. 30–1, n. 31; J. I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001), p. 602.

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It is true that Hobbes presented a more complex resource for radical thinking than Spinoza, but we should be wary of discounting Hobbes’s influence entirely on the grounds that his work was defined exclusively by the list of characteristics cited. One of the aims of this study has been to stress that the indeterminacy of many of Hobbes’s ideas in interpretation and polemic was in fact a feature of Hobbes’s approach that allowed their uptake. The priests always had difficulty pinning the term atheist on Hobbes, and even when they did, sophisticated readers like Stubbe and Blount were easily capable of looking beyond the polemic and reading Hobbes in a theist fashion. Equally although it is true that Hobbes’s work was identified as authoritarian, Leviathan was routinely associated with the contractarian and radical civil war tradition, and denounced as a subversive theory of individual authority every bit as seditious as Spinoza’s republicanism. Although Hobbes’s absolutism is undeniable, attentive readers of Harrington and the Dutch republican tradition could easily recognise that Hobbesian ingredients could sustain forms of republicanism; indeed this appears to be the reason why English readers like William Falkner bracketed Spinoza’s political theory with Hobbes’s own. It is also important to point out that in the war against priestcraft, as Justin Champion has recently stressed, freethinkers could often see a powerful secular authority as a vital weapon against clerical power, and provided that such authority was properly regulated it could even be compatible with a republican political theory.71 In terms of ecclesiology, very few readers regarded Hobbes as a man of high church sympathies, and indeed most Restoration readers would have found it hard to avoid the common assertion that Hobbes was England’s premier anti-clerical writer; a widely proclaimed enemy to the established church and even occasionally a defender of religious toleration. The fact that all of these interpretations were made suggests that particular interpretations of Hobbes as a conservative need not necessarily prevent Hobbes’s work acting as the inspiration for English radicals, even if there were plenty of reasons why they might not choose to acknowledge this influence. In addition, there is no reason to suppose that, like Harrington, radicals would not pick and choose which elements of the Hobbesian project they bought into. As Margaret Jacob notes, ‘the radicals simply stripped Hobbes of his royalism’ taking what they wanted from his politics and capitalising upon the religious implications of his materialism.72 71 72

J. Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture 1696–1722 (Manchester, 2003), pp. 248–9. M. C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment (London, 1981), p. 76.


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Bearing these thoughts in mind, it is worth turning some examples to consider the ways in which Hobbes did play a part in the radical thought of the 1690s. The most obvious starting point is a figure who we have already encountered in the early 1680s: Charles Blount, perhaps the only English radical thinker of the period to consistently parade his allegiance to Hobbes in his published works. In the 1680s this took the form of openly citing controversial sections of Hobbes’s work as well as the silent appropriation of passages from Leviathan on miracles.73 Blount appears to have accepted that Hobbes was a theist but he was particularly influenced by Hobbes’s scepticism about the existence of incorporeal substances and his critical attitude towards scripture. In the 1690s he once again deliberately foregrounded his admiration for Hobbes in The oracles of reason, a collection of tracts written between 1678 and 1693 by Blount, his friend Charles Gildon, and other freethinkers on a variety of controversial topics. The full title provocatively flagged Blount’s allegiance to Hobbes: The oracles of reason . . . in several letters to Mr. Hobbs and other persons of eminent quality and learning. The letter to Hobbes dated from 1678 and congratulated him on his Historical Narration Concerning Heresy, a copy of which Blount had read in manuscript in William Crooke’s shop. Blount wrote that ‘you have certainly given us a more accurate and faithful account of the Nicene Council, together with their particular Grounds and Reasons for each distinct Article of their Faith in the Nicene Creed, than is anywhere else to be met with.’74 Blount was particularly taken with Hobbes’s exposure of the political interests that had shaped the development of Christian doctrine, and compared Constantine’s doctrinal manoeuvres with the twists and turns of Louis XIV’s religious policy: ‘For Mankind’, comments Blount, ‘ever lived and died after one and the same Method in all Ages, being governed by the same Interests and the same Passions at this time, as they were many Thousand Years before us, and will be many Thousand Years after us.’75 If Hobbes’s observations on Christian history informed Blount’s cynical view of organised religion, he was also interested in Hobbes’s scriptural criticism, citing Hobbes’s doubts on the authority of the Pentateuch and deploying distinctively Hobbesian scriptural exegesis to question the natural immortality of the soul.76 Hobbes’s work clearly 73

74 76

For comementary on Blount’s Hobbism see Redwood, ‘Blount, Deism and English Free Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas 35: 3 (1974), pp. 490–8, esp. p. 493; Noel Malcolm’s comments in CTH, II, pp. 790–5. Blount, Oracles, p. 97; see also CTH, II, pp. 759–66. 75 Blount, Oracles, p. 97. Ibid., pp. 16–17, 118. See also Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Ezra and the Bible’ in Aspects of Hobbes, esp. p. 429, n. 159.

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provided important critical resources for deconstructing organised religion, revelation and superstition77 and this was probably his central contribution to the deism formulated by Blount and his colleagues. Put alongside authors like Spinoza and Herbert, Hobbes’s critical treatment of religion could be added to a deist’s conceptual toolkit. There seems to have been little anxiety about Hobbes’s reputation as an atheist, one of Colie’s stumbling blocks to the adoption of Hobbes by radicals. Blount clearly did not think that he was one, and Toland denounced the injustice of the accusation directly in his Two Essays of 1695: ‘what an outcry against Mr Hobs! because he describ’d God Almighty as Corporeal, though Moses and the Scriptures had done so before him.’78 Further indirect evidence that this was the case comes from the deists’ enemies. John Edwards reported encountering one that was ‘a Wellwisher (according to his poor ability) to Mr. Hobbes’s Mathematicks, was this, His Leviathan is the best Book in the world next to the Bible: He himself was a Man of great Piety, and is spoken against by none but the Priests.’79 We find a similar story from the hand of Blount’s friend Charles Gildon. Gildon, a former Roman Catholic and talented journalist and playwright, edited and contributed to the Oracles of reason and produced an apologia for Blount after the latter’s suicide in 1693. He also produced a collection of short tales titled The post-boy rob’d of his mail (1692–3) where he signalled his knowledge of Hobbes.80 Condemned by Defoe as ‘a First Rate Rake’ Gildon was converted to Anglicanism by Charles Leslie’s Method with deists (1698), and went on to become a champion of orthodoxy in The deist’s manual (1705).81 Here Gildon stages a dialogue between several characters, some of whom are deist sympathisers, and there is a discussion of Hobbes. Although Gildon’s new-found faith leads him to portray them in a less than flattering light, their discussions of the attractions of Hobbes have some interest because Gildon either knew such individuals or was drawing from his own experience in explaining their engagement with Hobbes. The character Pleonexus is presented as a deist sympathiser, but also one profoundly influenced by Hobbes, a man whose library consists of ‘the great Hobbs of Malmesbury, Spinosa, the Guide to a Justice of the Peace’, 77 78 79 80 81

Toland noted Hobbes’s debunking of daemons, spirits and witches in Two essays sent in a letter from Oxford to a nobleman in London (1695), p. 35. L. P., Two essays sent in a letter from Oxford to a nobleman in London (1695), pp. ii–iii. J. Edwards, Some thoughts concerning the several causes and occasions of atheism (1695), pp. 128–9. C. Gildon, The post-boy rob’d of his mail (1692), p. 86. J. Sambrook, ‘Charles Gildon’, DNB (2004), available at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/ 10720.


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and several law books ‘that are for the Information of my Conduct’. The discussion turns to Hobbes and his merits. Christophil (Gildon) is dismissive of Hobbes, making the traditional accusation of atheism and asserting that he has been completely confuted by the clergy.82 Pleonexus protests that he ‘cannot find nothing but Magnificent Expressions of the Deity in him [Hobbes]’ and neither can he find ‘that he has been so baffled’. Christophil is forced to acknowledge ‘that there may be some favourable Expressions of God in Mr Hobbs . . . but when the Principles he lays down are destructive of the Existence of a God, those who are willing to have it so, easily distinguish betwixt formal and empty Words, and the Force and Energy of an Argument.’83 Gildon’s point was that Hobbes was a genuine speculative atheist, but his dialogue indicates that it was still possible for individuals to believe that Hobbes’s position might be compatible with theism, in spite of the all the polemic to the contrary. These accounts suggest that the freethinkers of the 1690s rejected the accusations of atheism and irreligion as priestly propaganda, thus allowing them to adapt those critical aspects of Hobbes’s project which made a good fit with their deist assault upon priestcraft and superstition. But this does not mean that Hobbes was the only influence behind late seventeenthcentury radicalism, as his clerical critics often wanted to suggest. Radicalism was more of a syncretic exercise, in which Hobbes’s materialist philosophical critique was combined with the resources available from thinkers like Herbert, Spinoza and Locke, making up what Josiah King called ‘Mr Blount’s Commonwealth of Learning’.84 As such, and as King’s republican metaphor suggests, it is an extremely difficult task to establish the greater importance of one particular author over another. There can be no doubt, however, that Hobbes and Spinoza were important sources of free thought in late seventeenth-century England, but we need to recognise the complicated manner in which they mutually conditioned readings of the other’s texts. One way of making sense of Spinoza when the Tractatus first appeared was to consider the work as part of the familiar Hobbesian–Epicurean heterodox tradition. As one clergyman put it in 1681: ‘you may know him [Spinoza] the First-born of the Leviathan, and by their Hypothesis, whose Scholars both were, even his who resolv’d the Creation of the Universe into the fortuitous concurs of Atoms.’85 But if Spinoza was frequently characterised and read as the ‘late Off-spring of the 82 84 85

C. Gildon, The deists manual (1705), pp. 193–4. 83 Ibid., pp. 194–5. J. King, Mr. Blount’s oracles of reason examined and answered (1698), p. 33. B. Turner, Testimonium Jesu (1681), pp. 13,17.

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Leviathan’, at the same time the contemporary view of Leviathan could be revised through its linkage with the Tractatus. When William Falkner referred to the Tractatus in 1679 for a revelation of the radical positions to which Hobbes must be committed, Hobbes’s text was radicalised in a Spinozist direction. Ironically the flourishing of both Hobbes and Spinoza as patrons of radicalism in circles more sympathetic to their ideas may well have depended upon this sort of interaction. Spinoza’s work mapped onto a familiar domestic tradition of sceptical anti-clericalism and the more complex Hobbes read through Spinoza could more easily provide resources for a deist approach to religion. The interaction not only allowed Spinozism to take root as part of that domestic radical tradition, but in turn allowed users of that tradition to re-evaluate its own Hobbesian resources. Blount offers the best example of this subterranean process in his juxtaposition of Hobbes and Spinoza in Miracles, no violation of the laws of nature (1683). Again, Hobbes’s underdetermined and paradoxical approach to religion and politics allowed this reinterpretative process to flourish and Hobbes to remain a central feature of English Enlightenment discourse. It is possible that such connections were an intellectual option precisely because they were so frequently articulated by Hobbes’s opponents and it is important to stress the the role played by the forces supporting orthodoxy in perpetuating Hobbesian themes. A work like the Oracles of reason was a gift to the clergymen who to a certain extent wanted to believe, like Bentley, that Hobbes was the major intellectual influence lying behind the new freethinking.86 Sermons and polemical literature capitalised upon the connection because it allowed them to move seamlessly from Blount or Toland to Hobbes and then to the exposition of pre-packaged antiHobbesian arguments courtesy of writers like Cudworth or Tenison. A good example of this is the assault on Blount and the Oracles in John Harris’s Boyle lectures of 1698, where Blount is the representative target of modern freethinking, whose nominal deism conceals the atheism of Hobbes. In the second lecture Harris was thus able to argue on these grounds from Blount’s minimalist understanding of God and his attributes to Hobbes’s denial that we can have any idea of God to a refutation based around Cudworth’s demonstration that we can have an idea of God’s perfection.87 Josiah King, having diagnosed Blount’s Hobbism in his presentation of the scriptural case against the immortality of the soul, 86 87

See, for example, William Talbot’s The unreasonableness and mischief of atheism (1694). J. Harris, The atheist’s objection that we can have no idea of God refuted (1698), pp. 6–7, 10–11, 25.


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was able to deploy Tenison’s Creed against him.88 On one level the continual reiteration of such themes and strategies discouraged open acknowledgement of Hobbes’s work but at the same time it repeatedly emphasised Hobbes’s relationship to radical thought, encouraging new generations of thinkers to consider Hobbes afresh. We can see the fruit of these paradoxical developments in some of the writers of the early eighteenth century, who show an increasing willingness to cite Hobbes and his ideas openly. It was a tentative process, given the weight of the accumulated odium Hobbii, but we can see things changing when we encounter William Coward in 1704 defending his materialist account of the soul with explicit reference to Hobbes: If I approve of, or concur in the Opinion of the Learned Mr Hobbs of Malmsbury, that it is a very odd Notion to call any Created Being an Immaterial Substance, I know I shall be receiv’d upon that very account of his Name, both with Censure and Prejudice.89

Such attitudes were not to deter Coward, however, because the simple fact was that Hobbes’s observation was nothing less than the truth. 88 89

J. King, Mr. Blount’s oracles of reason examined and answered (1698), p. 111. [W. Coward], Second thoughts concerning the human soul (1704), p. 71.

Conclusion

By 1700 the cumulative effect of five decades of critical engagement with Hobbes’s writings had produced the images of the philosopher with which I began this book. Hobbes had attained a possibly unique position in the English imagination of the time. He had become a household name, but one associated with atheism, immorality, selfish behaviour, a poor view of human nature and unacceptable political views. Taken together these views constituted ‘Hobbism’, a well-documented creed to be detested by all Godfearing people and a set of views associated with a minority of ‘Hobbists’.1 These debased disciples fell broadly into two categories; the libertine and the hypocrite. The libertine, typically young, always immoral and often drunk, is a stock figure by the later seventeenth century, a lively combination of Scargill and Rochester. Robert Dixon captures him in his Canidia: The brave young Hobbist scorns and flies The Inns of Court and Universities, He vilifies the Man in Black, Makes the poor Curate drunk with Sack.2

In 1688 Jane Barker spots him with his friends up to no good, exemplifying the corruption of the town, when they: Kick Tavern Boys, and Orange-Wenches wooe, Are Machiavellians in a Coffee-house, And think it wit a poor Street-Whore to chouse; And for their Father Hobbs will talk so high, Rather than him they will their God deny . . .3

1

2 3

The term ‘Hobbist’ is defined in what is reputed to be the first slang dictionary in 1699: ‘a Disciple, and fond Admirer of Thomas Hobbes, the fam’d Philosopher of Malmsbury’. B. E., A new dictionary of the canting crew (1699), Sig. F8r. R. D., Canidia, or the witches (1683), p. 30. J. Barker, ‘To Mr Hill’, from Poeticall recreations (1688), lines 17–32.

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Conclusion

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The other kind of Hobbist is the similarly irreligious but more calculating hypocrite whose superficial conformity to social norms and values conceals his adherence to the controversial philosopher. A familiar stage villain in the 1690s, we can see him in Farquhar’s The constant couple as Vizard, who reads Leviathan under a plain cover, and Father Politico, who in The converts hides his copy of the book in case visitors should see that it is so thumbed.4 Now a serious rival for Machiavelli’s Prince, Hobbes’s Leviathan was the handbook for villainy and vice. In its open and covert forms, Hobbism was to be rejected, Hobbists reproved and Hobbes himself to be reviled. The undeniably hegemonic status of anti-Hobbesian propaganda at the close of the century nevertheless conceals a deeper and wider engagement with Hobbes’s work hinted at even in the covert reading practices of stage villains. As we have seen, Hobbes’s reputation was still high amongst radicals like Blount and Toland, the former perhaps the only open supporter of Hobbes at the time. In addition there were what Eachard had called Hobbes’s ‘Box-admirers’, readers like Charleton, Petty and Blackburne, who had never believed the anti-Hobbesian hype and who still regarded Hobbes as a serious, if seriously misunderstood, philosopher. Their numbers were nevertheless small, and they rarely defended Hobbes in public. But as I have indicated we need to take a broader view of the conduits of Hobbes’s influence upon later seventeenth-century England. First and foremost here must be Hobbes’s many critics, and in two senses. Firstly, they were largely responsible for maintaining Hobbes’s public profile, particularly during the Restoration period when Hobbes’s own work was hard to come by. They provided clear and eventually popular summaries of Hobbes’s most controversial ideas. But more problematically, Hobbes’s critics also emphasised the most radical consequences of those theories, and this in turn may have made Hobbes more attractive to anti-clerical radicals and libertine writers like Rochester. Eachard’s work shows signs of anxiety about this sort of ‘blowback’ from the anti-Hobbesian campaign in the 1670s, as the assault on Hobbes generated interest in him. Similar concerns were expressed over Cudworth’s monumental work on atheism. Hobbes’s eighteenth-century editor even went so far as to suggest that Hobbes’s critics had had a more pernicious effect than Hobbes himself: 4

G. Farquhar, The constant couple (1700), p. 2; Anon., The converts or the folly of priestcraft (1690), p. 55.

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[they] perhaps have done more Hurt to the Christian Religion by their Surmises, and publishing atheistical Notions extracted, as they pretended, out of his Books, than ever he did by his Philosophy or Politicks, when read unaccompanied by such Comments.5

Ironically, if the spreading of atheism and irreligion was Hobbes’s aim, Hobbes’s critics were some of his most effective agents. The second sense in which Hobbes critics were important was the way that they often absorbed his ideas at the same time as they attacked him. This can be seen most clearly when we consider Hobbes’s politics. Hobbes’s account of sovereignty was purpose-built to confront the practical political problems of war and pluralism faced by seventeenth-century Englishmen. However shocking Hobbes might be, his English readers could and did readily identify with his authoritarian solutions. Critics like Filmer, Hall, White, Locke and Parker, to mention but a few, admired or were attracted to Hobbes’s conclusions, even if they didn’t care much for his means of deriving them. The crucial question for all of these writers was how to overcome the unacceptable steps in Hobbes’s argument, but nevertheless preserve what was valuable in Hobbes, and many of the critiques of Hobbes’s position sought to do precisely this work. Brian Duppa may have preferred John Hall to Thomas Hobbes, but many aspects of the practical political argument that Hall ended up with were, as I have argued, distinctively Hobbesian. The same went for the practical account of sovereignty that Cumberland derived from his refutation of Hobbes’s natural law theory; if Cumberland had successfully offered an alternative natural law theory, it was there to support the Hobbesian arguments that Samuel Parker had been attracted to in the first place. In Sherlock’s case, the fig-leaf of critique was so thin as to be virtually non-existent; in offering his barely differentiated account of de facto allegiance, Sherlock promoted a theory practically indistinguishable from Hobbes’s own. In cases like these, the critical engagement with Hobbes’s work concealed, and sometimes barely concealed, the process of appropriation. Contemporaries were well aware that such surreptitious borrowing often went on; one of the several elegies for Hobbes written after his death in 1679 made the point that those ‘who his writings still accused in vain / were taught by him of whom they did complain’. Samuel Butler, who was one of Hobbes’s friends, identified the same phenomenon when he compared those that ‘condemned and stole from Hobs’ with the ‘French thief that murthers when he Robs’.6 5 6

The moral and political works of Thomas Hobbes (1750), p. xxvii. Anon, An elegie (1679) brs; Butler, Satires and miscellanies, ed. R. Lamar (1928), p. 241.

Conclusion

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The net result of such borrowing was that English political theory after Hobbes did contain Hobbesian components, and occasionally spoke in a Hobbesian register. The paradoxical attribution of Hobbesian characteristics to the arguments of both Whigs and Tories to some extent reflected the fact that both sides were using arguments that had been influenced by Hobbesian formulations, even if those borrowings had already been concealed by antiHobbesian statements. Arguably this is where one should look if one wants to establish the lasting effect of Hobbes’s work; not amongst Hobbes’s avowed admirers, but rather in the work of his many critics, where the critical process of taming Hobbes’s ideas allowed them to be incorporated into the mainstream of seventeenth-century political thought. If this account of Hobbes’s impact upon formal political theory captures another level of Hobbes’s hidden influence, there is a still deeper, and possibly more important way in which Hobbes’s ideas informed his contemporaries’ understanding of the turbulent world that they lived in. There can be no question that Hobbes’s deliberate deployment of the ars rhetorica in Leviathan had precisely the effect that he hoped that it would. As we saw at the very beginning of the reception of Leviathan, Hobbes’s rhetoric captured the imagination of his contemporaries, offering them powerful images and metaphors which mediated and organised their experience of the world. It was, and remains, difficult to talk about Hobbes’s world without falling for the temptation to use his language and his metaphors to describe it. But Hobbes’s metaphors carried a conceptual payload that could wreak havoc with one’s world-view, and once one embraced, for example, the description of the state of nature as it appeared in Hobbes’s work, it would be hard to avoid the conclusion that what was required to escape it was some sort of Leviathan. Leviathan in turn was a metaphor whose indeterminate meaning extended the understanding of sovereign power into areas literally unimaginable in any other theoretical discourse. To become a user of Hobbesian language was thus potentially to enter another language game altogether. Hobbes’s critics attempted to resist the temptation, pointing to Hobbes’s mistaken account of human nature and confining the power of his monster to the traditional boundaries of human and divine law. But even they ensured that they quoted all of Hobbes’s best lines, and perpetuated his sometimes nightmarish visions even while they refuted him. As a result, Hobbes’s imagery haunted his contemporaries, particularly at times of political stress. Literally dramatic testimony to this effect is the recurrent interest in the state of war in Restoration theatre where, particularly during the 1670s, a Hobbesian account of the state of nature is never far away, and where on Rochester’s account even society

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itself could turn out to be a state of war by other means. Naturally the shaping potential of Hobbes’s metaphors was most effective when readers were confronted with the very real threat of political breakdown. The remarkable profusion of explicit references to the dangers of a Hobbesian state of war in the late 1670s and early 1680s is perhaps testimony to Hobbes’s ability to script and sometimes to direct the fears of his readers. Hobbes was the theorist who captured these anxieties most effectively, and if contemporaries bought into Hobbes’s analysis of what anarchy would look like, they were also prepared to contemplate a Hobbesian account of what might be required to solve it. The willingness of ordinary clergymen like Thomas Pomfret to reach for Hobbesian arguments at the very same moment that Hobbes was being publicly condemned for sedition indicates the distance between the psychological and subliminal impact of the metaphorical world of Leviathan and the formal public debate over his reputation and ideas. At such moments everyone affected by such language could in some sense be described as a Hobbist. The Glorious Revolution demonstrated what this meant in practical terms, and historians’ detection of residual Hobbism in English reactions to this most Hobbesian of moments should perhaps come as no surprise, even if at a formal theoretical level, as Sherlock discovered, such things could never be admitted. The Latitudinarian concerns about Hobbism seem to bear witness to the fact that whatever the public rhetoric about Hobbes, a pragmatic strand of low-level Hobbism had now become a significant feature of the intellectual landscape. The continuing campaign against Hobbes might be thought of less as a triumphant assertion of intellectual confidence, than as a recognition that this residual Hobbism was more widespread than anyone wanted to admit. Although it is clearly oversimplifying to attribute the pragmatic adaptations of English men and women to the effects of Hobbes’s philosophy, it might nevertheless be said that the cultural presence of Hobbes’s ideas and imagery may well have played some role, either directly or indirectly through his commentators, in fostering the pragmatic attitudes to questions of allegiance and obedience; by the late 1680s it would be difficult to think about that issue without thinking about Hobbes, and however disreputable Hobbes might be, it is probably true to say that his was the most coherent and widely known theoretical story about the relationship between protection and obedience. If this analysis is correct, it suggests that Hobbes’s unusual combination of reason and rhetoric may well have played a role in the long-term pacification of the English polity, both directly through his work and indirectly through his critics.

Conclusion

415

Hobbes’s lessons would take a long time to learn, and in this respect the reception process was intimately related to the more general process by which the English political community came to terms with the midcentury Revolution and its intellectual progeny. The optimistic thought that both might be rejected and forgotten was soon dispelled as the Restoration regime faced recurrent political crises with similar root causes. Hobbes’s uncompromising vision of a modern solution to the problem of conflict may have alienated many readers when he first proposed it, but repeated exposure to the aftershocks of the earlier political earthquake forced his contemporaries to reconsider Hobbes’s work afresh. It is striking that discussion of Hobbes tended to accompany these moments of political tension (particularly 1667–72 and 1678–83) and it was at these moments that the reception process was at its most productive, sorting what was patently unacceptable about Hobbes’s ideas from what there was a need to appropriate. In that sense, the story of the reception of Hobbes is part of a wider story about the way that the English people came to terms with their revolutionary past, through a paradoxical mixture of formal condemnation and informal accommodation. The reception process may well have been a way of dealing with the past, but the complicated engagement with Hobbes also had important implications for the future. As Mintz first suggested, Hobbes’s subtle influence was exercised indirectly in requiring that his opponents meet him on his own distinctively rationalist terms; in response to Hobbesian challenges More attempted to offer rationalist and scientific defences of traditional soteriology and Cudworth to demonstrate in rationalist terms the true intellectual system of the universe. As I have argued, there are grounds for supposing that this influence went even further than the negative effects charted by Mintz. The rationalism of writers like Stillingfleet, Locke and Sharrock appears to have been not only a reaction to, but an adaptation of, Hobbes’s controversial political and religious vision. Cumberland’s occasionally secular-sounding and utilitarian theory of moral obligation represents not only a rejection of Hobbes’s work but a wholesale borrowing of weapons from Hobbes’s theoretical arsenal. It is possible therefore to suggest that the reception of Hobbes played more of a role in England’s peculiar process of Enlightenment than is commonly supposed.7 At one level, the necessity of meeting the radical challenge of Hobbes’s work 7

A view that supports Noel Malcolm’s recent general conclusions about Hobbes’s relationship with the European republic of letters. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the European Republic of Letters’, in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), pp. 457–545.

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required his rationalist critics to raise their game. At another Hobbes’s work was often appropriated as part of this process, thereby influencing not only the style but often the content of English Enlightenment thought. Lastly, in going to war with Hobbes as they did, English thinkers could establish their own credentials as orthodox believers. Ironically, given the complex relationship between the philosopher and his opponents, the rejection of Hobbes may well have been an important condition for the acceptance of some of his views. Hobbes is often written out of the history of the Enlightenment, but the evidence dealt with here and in other recent studies suggests that he should be written back in. His work was too useful to ignore but too dangerous to leave unchallenged, and this was why it needed to be tamed. Recovering the evidence of that process in action not only uncovers the strategies and tactics of his critics, but also the true scale of Hobbes’s intellectual achievement.

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Cambridge Cambridge University Library CUR 18/6(d-e): Consistory Court Records. Corpus Christi College Library Corpus Christi College Chapter Book, 1660s. Durham Palace Green Library Shelfmark Cosin T.5.57: John Cosin’s annotated copy of De Cive Leeds Brotherton Library Marten Loder Papers, Political and Miscellaneous II, f.39: Draft letter to Cromwell London British Library Add. 4978–4982: Ralph Cudworth’s writings on free will Add. 38693: Letters of Daniel Scargill to Thomas Tenison Egerton 1910: Hobbes, Leviathan Egerton 2005: Hobbes, Elements of Law Harl. 6942: Payne to Sheldon; Payne to Hobbes; Hammond to Sheldon Sloane 904: Commonplace book (1670s) Sloane 1458: The creed of Thomas Hobbes (f. 35). Shelfmark Eve.a.14: John Evelyn’s annotated copy of Behemoth. Dr Williams’ Library MS 59: Richard Baxter’s correspondence Lambeth Palace Library Lambeth Palace MS 674: Papers relating to the Scargill affair Lambeth MS 930: Thomas Tenison’s correspondence Lambeth MS 931: Papers of Samuel Morland Lambeth Palace MS 941: Papers relating to the Scargill affair 417

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Index

Abel 286 Aberdeen University 120 absolutism clerical 300 critical discussion of TH’s 49, 100–1, 123, 186, 188, 194, 297, 317–18, 365, 366 Hobbesian 3, 177, 202, 312–13, 352 parliamentary 363 Act of Indemnity and Oblivion 215, 227 Adam 152 authority of 109, 230, 286 in natural law theory 211, 273 responsibility for sin 39, 47, 48 adiaphora 208, 210, 243, 333 air pump 218, 220 allegiance controversy 380–8 Allestree, Richard The Whole Duty of Man 341 Amsterdam 99 TH’s works published in 62, 241, 242, 284, 288 anarchy 140, 142 An Elegy upon Mr Thomas Hobbes 350–1 angels 152, 261, 264, 305 Anglicanism; see episcopacy, Church of England Animaxander 324 anti-clericalism 177, 289, 292–5, 404 antinomianism 113 Apostles 66, 127 Creed 68 ecclesiastical authority of 67, 117, 171, 196, 268, 359 TH on 100 Arderne, James 211, 232 aristocracy 108, 142 Aristotle 51, 127, 180, 181, 345, 356 authority in universities 118, 146, 147, 148 on natural inequality 51, 317 Arlington, Henry Bennett, First Earl of 241, 247, 314 Arminians 358 Arminius 156

Ascham, Anthony 72, 88, 89, 108 assassination of 88, 105 Of the confusions and revolutions of government 72–4 Asgill, John 402 Assheton, William 229, 233, 240 atheism 323, 335, 391–6; see also Hobbes and atheism campaigns against 391–6 Cudworth on 326 in 1690s 390 Atherton, Henry 334 Atterbury, Francis 391 Aubrey John 340, 346, 348, 353–4, 356–7 on Behemoth 241 on Dryden’s use of Hobbes 163 on TH 223, 247, 344 Augustine, St. 53 Austin, John, alias William Birchley 101–2, 129–30 authorisation 124, 206 Ayloffe, John 312 Bacon, Francis 147, 179, 216 Bagshaw, Edward 163, 171, 172, 175, 208–9, 210 Baillie, Robert 55 baptism 67–8, 208 Barberini, Cardinal Francesco 35 Barebones Parliament; see Nominated Assembly Barker, Jane 410, 411 Barlow, Thomas 128, 171, 172–3, 364 Barne, Miles 298 Barrow, Isaac 222 Barwick, John 205 Bathurst, Ralph 75, 76, 97–8, 253 Baxter, Richard 114, 115, 227, 242, 371 calls for Leviathan to be burned 176 on Harrington 185–91 on TH 112–14 and Lawson 186

436

Index named in Oxford Judgement and Decree 371, 372 on Parker 253 on Stillingfleet 360 on Tillotson 359–67 Beale, John 229, 357 Beale, William 25 Beddard, Robert 371 Bee, Cornelius 242, 284 Bellarmine, Robert 91 Bentley, Richard 135, 392–5, 408 Berkeley, Sir John 53 Bernard, Charles 346 Bernard, Francis 346 Besold, Christoph 187, 191–7 Beza, Theodore 129 Bidle, John 116 Birkenhead, Sir John 248 bishops; see episcopacy Blackburne, Richard 353–4, 355–7, 411 Blackloism 101 Blaeu, Johan 242, 284 blasphemy 162, 165 Blount, Charles 338, 350, 396, 403, 404, 407, 408, 410, 411 and TH 348–9, 405–6 target of Boyle lectures 396 Bodleian Library 21, 171, 172 Bohun, Edmund 363 Bold, Samuel 401–2 Born, Henrick 60 Boswell, Sir William 60 Bowle, John 4–5 Bowman, Francis 75, 76 Boyle, Robert 212, 217, 218, 219, 357, 392 compared with TH 216, 221 Examen of Mr T. Hobbes 219–20 praised by TH 218 Boyle Lectures 391–6 Brady, Robert 363 Bramhall, Bishop John 5, 15, 28, 37–50, 57, 69, 71, 73, 87, 89, 153, 187, 199, 202, 250, 261, 295–6, 323, 345, 353 career 37–9, 53 Castigations of Mr Hobbes 160–2, 187, 191 critique of De cive, 40–50, 188, 191–6 Defence of True Liberty 40, 47–50, 154–8, 201 on liberty and necessity 38–40, 47–50, 153–8 The Catching of Leviathan 41–7, 177, 187, 191–7, 233 The serpent-salve, 43–7, 194 Bray, Thomas 391 Bredvold, Louis 302 Brereton, William 151 Bridgeman, Orlando 242, 272

437

broadsides commenting on TH 346–50 Brome, James 374, 375–7 Brouncker, William 219 Browne, Richard 36 Browne, Thomas 120, 386, 387 Bruno, Henrick 79 Bucer, Martin 129 Buchanan, George 129, 371 Burnet, Gilbert 380, 381, 388, 390 Burton, Hezekiah 272 Burton, Thomas 176 Butler, James, Earl of Ormonde 104, 105, 106 Butler, Lilly 396 Butler, Samuel 300, 412 Cadmus 141 Cain 286 Calvin, John 129, 156, 160 Cambridge, University of 112 colleges: Christ’s 325, 340 Corpus Christi 244–52 Emmanuel 185 Gonville and Caius 146 Jesus 298 Magdalene 272 Peterhouse 184, 298 Sidney Sussex 37, 84 St John’s 25, 153 Trinity 28, 65, 112, 353 Scargill affair 244–52 Cambridge Platonists 5, 134, 202, 306, 322 Cappel, Jacques 184 de Cardonnel, Pierre 369 Cardonnel, William 368–71 Carey, Lucius, Lord Falkland 21, 22, 24, 25–6 Carneades 267 Cartesianism 199, 323 Cavendish, Sir Charles 38–9, 103, 110 Cavendish, William, first Duke of Newcastle 47, 82, 106, 309, 311 commands Royalist forces 37, 38–9 and The Elements of Law 19–20 Cavendish, William, third Earl of Devonshire 19, 32, 86, 150 Cavendish, William, fourth Earl of Devonshire 337, 367 Cawdry, Daniel 174 censorship 176 and TH 176, 228 Cerinthus 122, 125 de la Chambre, Cureau 75 Champion, Justin 404 Charles I 80, 178

438 Charles II 55, 60, 87, 88, 90, 141, 254, 359 absolutist policies 312 as a Hobbist 365 refuses to allow publication of Behemoth 338 relationship with TH 103, 314 religious policies of 299, 322 restoration of 215 Charleton, Walter 82, 134, 349, 353, 410, 411 Chicheley, Sir Thomas 340 Chillingworth, William 21, 22–3, 129, 399 Chiswell, Richard 288 Christ, Jesus 54, 92, 100, 125, 162, 189, 190, 192 authority of 42, 54, 168, 268 belief in as sole article of faith 29–32, 35, 58–9, 63, 67, 68, 84, 399–400 denial of, if sovereign commands, 168, 192, 195, 283, 297, 321, 386 as member of Trinity, 126, 236 church TH’s view discussed 18, 42, 62–8, 71, 72–3, 82–3, 183, 189, 196, Cicero, Marcus Tullius 134, 180, 212 Clarke, Samuel 396 Clayton, Sir Thomas 369 clergy accused of self-interest 389 sermons against TH 298–9, 358–61, 374–5 Cleveland, John 132 coffee houses 357, 392, 411–12 and Hobbism 305–6 Coke, Roger 235, 240 Elements of Power and Subjection 230, 231–2 Justice vindicated 229–31 Colie, Rosalie 403 Collier, Jeremy 385, 386 Collins, Anthony 396, 403 coloquintida 121 common good 139–40, 271, 276, 285, 381 common law 128 Commons, House of 176, 363 Exclusion Bill 337 Hobbesian ideas in 229, 243, 379 investigates TH 239–40 compounding/compounders 37–9, 53, 84, 132 Leviathan written to support 225 comprehension 242, 243–4, 358 Compton, Henry 299 Condren, Conal 186 conquest 31, 45, 53, 73–4, 79, 87, 88–9, 108–9, 144–5, 194, 381, 387, 388 conscience as natural sanction 213, 276 consent 31, 49, 87, 145, 300, 387–8 Constantine, Emperor 405

Index constitutional Royalism 32, 38, 52, 56, 57, 123, 316, 318, 320 attacked by TH in Behemoth 26, 339 theory of self-obligation 157 contract theory 28, 32, 65, 75, 90, 110, 139, 142, 167, 229, 279 Cromwellian anxiety over 145 TH associated with subversive account 145 Convocation 223, 391 Covenants TH’s account attacked 167, 187, 234, 328, 330 Corbet, John 243, 252, 255 Cosin, Bishop John 69, 70, 99, 103, 126, 297 ministers to Hobbes 62, 76, 224, 344, 354 response to De Cive 62–3 Cotton, Charles 80–1, 83, 132, 144 Coward, William 402, 409 Cowley, Abraham 106, 352 Cudworth, Ralph 5, 191, 331, 393, 396, 408, 411, 412, 415 and the Scargill affair 248, 325 projects as a response to TH 323–4 The true intellectual system of the universe 322–34 ‘Treatise concerning eternal and immutable morality’ 332–4 Cromwell, Oliver 136, 144, 146, 200, 224, 225–6, 267, 297, 313 church settlement of 136 TH’s alleged support for 86, 320, 322, 336, 340, 378 Cromwell, Richard 200 Crook, John 154 Crooke, Andrew 61, 94, 95, 288 Crooke, William 337–8, 339, 346, 353, 356, 405 Crowne, John 308 Culpepper, Sir John 26 Culverwel, Nathaniel 212 Cumberland, Richard 7, 16, 135, 214, 297, 325, 334, 361, 390, 394, 395, 398, 412 De legibus naturae 167, 239, 266, 272–82, 299, 367, 373 use of natural philosophy 274 response to Latin Leviathan 284–5, 287 Cunradus, Christoffel 288 Davenant, William 27, 94, 106, 137, 301, 309, 311 Gondibert 82–3, 84, 94 David, King 143 Davies, John of Kidwelly 128, 136, 137, 153–4, 171, 346 Declaration of Indulgence 299, 322 de facto theory of obligation 31, 72, 88, 140, 304, 382–8, 412 TH associated with 6, 13, 88, 109, 145, 194, 219, 233, 319, 372, 373, 378, 387, 388

Index Defoe, Daniel 389, 406 deism/deists 391, 393, 394, 395, 396 TH as a source for 350, 406, 407 Dell, William 146 democracy 142 Descartes, Rene´ 75, 82, 84, 118, 134, 148 reaction to De Cive 35–6 TH on 59 despotism 341 Turkish 124 De Vic, Sir Henry 38 devil 115, 190, 192, 351 democracy 108, 142 Democritus 325 dialogue Master and Student form 217, 261, 283, 290–1, 292, 338 Digby, Kenelm 118, 120, 137, 138, 148 Digges, Dudley 13, 16, 28–32, 37, 138, 141, 206 Unlawfulness of subjects taking up arms 29–32, 35, 363 divine right 30, 385 episcopal 157, 227 Dixon, Robert 410, 411 Dowel, John 137 Downes, Theophilus 385–6 Downham, John 94–5 Drake, William 75 Dryden, John 163, 285, 301–4, 334, 354 criticised for Hobbism 243, 302–3, 310 The Conquest of Granada 302–4 uses Hobbesian imagery 301 duplication of the cube 217, 218 Duppa, Bishop Brian 83, 84, 131, 143, 149, 412 reaction to Leviathan 98–9, 101 on TH 63, 84 Dzelzainis, Martin 20, 23 Eachard, John 15, 93, 269, 288–98, 312, 316–17, 345, 350, 410, 411, 412 analysis of Hobbism 289–92, 305 criticises De Cive 294–5 on Dryden’s Hobbism 302 Mr Hobbs’s state of nature considered 289, 292–5 Some opinions of Mr Hobbs considered 295–8 Eaglesfield, Francis 153 Earles, John 51, 70, 103, 104 Edwards, John 400, 406 Edwards, Thomas 400 Eleazor 67 Ellis, John 370 Elsevier 59, 61–2 engagement controversy 6, 77 Leviathan as a contribution to 85–90 Enlightenment 415–16

439

Ent, George 353 Epicureans/Epicureanism 169, 203 and Hobbism 260 TH portrayed as 260, 393 Epicurus 327, 332, 394 Episcopacy 25–6, 58–9, 63, 68–70 TH on 26, 58–9, 67, 91, 223, 226–7, 354 TH’s view criticised 64–5, 267 Episcopalians 42, 62–71, 82–3, 155, 321 opposition to TH 172, 174 TH’s relationship with 91, 163 equality natural 230, 317 Erastianism/Erastians 84, 177, 210 Anglican Erastians 210, 358, 390 TH’s 32, 42, 62–71, 75, 82–3, 143 TH’s attacked 66–8, 168, 189, 190, 192, 259, 268 eternity 149, 159 ethical naturalism 214 Evelyn, John 36, 342–3 Exclusion Parliament 357, 358–9 excommunication 43, 64, 67, 115, 143, 168, 321 experiment 216, 218, 219 Falkner, William 343–4, 350, 404, 408 Fall, of man 39, 144, 152, 185–91 Fane, Lady Ann 80 Fane, Mildmay 95 Farquhar, George 411 Fawn, Luke 114–16 fear 35, 139 Fell, John 72, 309, 311, 345, 357, 371 Ferne, Henry 28, 183, 206 Fiennes, William, First Viscount Saye and Sele 27 Filmer, Sir Robert 107, 112, 121, 123, 130, 141, 178, 193, 202, 365, 366, 367, 411, 412 Hobbism of 363, 365 Observations concerning the Originall of Government 107–12, 142, 344 Patriarcha 362 Fire of London 96, 239 Firmin, Thomas 390 Fludd, Robert 147 Foole 235, 257, 310 Forced Loan 341 Foreness, Edward 374 Fowler, Edward 258, 381, 389, 390 Foxe, John 129 Franklin, Benjamin 396 free state 178, 188, 194, 364 free will debate 10, 153–8, 160, 162–3, 165, 199, 265, 295–6 TH on 47–8, 156–8 Fukuda, Arihiro 181

440

Index

gallicanism 189 Gassendi, Pierre 59, 60, 75, 86, 118, 144, 148, 158 neo-Epicureanism of 134–5 gentry Hobbes’s influence upon 289–90, 291, 292, 293, 295, 345 geometry 146, 148, 150–1 ghost/s 264, 348, 392 holy 67, 122 Giannotti, 179 Gibson, John 251 Gildon, Charles 402, 405, 406–7 Gipps, Thomas 364 Glanvill, Joseph 323 Glorious Revolution 378–80, 414 God dominion of 140, as first cause 262, 274 incomprehensibility 326 infinity 170, 326–7 TH materialist account of 169, 348 attacked as atheism/heresy 125, 169, 170, 286, 392 defended 406 Godfrey, Sir Edmundberry 336 Godolphin, Sidney 95 Goldie, Mark 7–8 Goodricke, John 378 grace 113 gravity 149 Great Tew Circle 7, 21, 24, 25, 36, 64, 313 Grotius, Hugo 50, 54, 72, 73, 74, 144, 229 De jure belli ac pacis 211, 273 natural jurisprudence of 239 Guicciardini, Francesco, 179 Hale, Matthew 241 Hales, John 399 Hall, John, of Durham 79, 137, 138, 153, 176 Hall, John, of Richmond 176, 230, 232, 412 and Filmer 142 Of government and obedience 140–4 Hall, Joseph 162 Hammond, Henry 66, 67, 72, 74, 78, 79, 99, 102–3, 132, 184–5, 321 A letter of resolution 116–17, 184 response to De Cive, 63–5 Hancock, John 396 Harrington, James 10, 162, 182, 202, 206, 312, 404 Oceana 177–85 reader of TH 180 republicanism of 179 The Prerogative of Popular Government 184 on TH 180–5 on Wren’s Hobbism 206

Harris, John 395–6, 408 Hartlib, Samuel 99, 128 Harvey, William 180 Hatton, Charles 356 Hawke, Michael 144–5, 176 Hayward, J. C., 51 Heath, James 338 heaven 92, 102, 126, 190, 192, 269 Heereboord, Adrian 60 hell 92, 102, 115, 126, 161, 269, 386 van Helmon, Francis Mercury 147 Henrietta Maria, Queen of England 106 Herbert 406, 407 heresy 126–7, 133, 162, 223, 240–1, 283 Hesketh, Henry 378 Hickes, George 361, 380, 390 Higgins-Biddle, John C. 400 Hill, Thomas 112, 113, 186 Hoadly, Benjamin 17 Hobbes, Thomas An Answer to a Book Published by Dr Bramhall 241 An apology for himself and his writings 223–4 angered by divines in France 70, 102 Answer to the Preface before Gondibert 42, 62–71, 82–3 anti-Catholicism of 104 arrogance alleged 118, 149, 152 associate of Bacon 18 and atheism 15, 47, 55, 102, 133–5, 152–3, 154, 175, 197, 230, 231, 335, 392, 411–12 Bramhall on 42, 162, 188, 192 Eachard on 297 Lawson on 190, 192 TH rejects charge 57, 62, 159–60, 223, 226 Wallis on 152–3, 219 Ward on 165, 168–9 banished from Stuart court in exile 104 behaves as his theory dictates 90 Behemoth 26, 241–2, 337–43, 356 on constitutional royalists 26, 339 on heresy 240 licensing difficulties 241, 337 on Presbyterians 338 publication of 337–8 Privy Council investigates 340 Tory reading of 339, 343, 365 on universities 342 Whig criticism of 365 candidate for Short Parliament 19 changing attitude to critics 154 client of the Cavendishes 18 concern about public profile 86, 87, 88 death 344–6

Index Decameron Physiologicum 392 De Cive, 32–84, 87, 90, 93, 96, 97, 98, 101, 108, 179, 183, 207, 279, 280, 291, 293, 316, 330 first edition (1642): atheism discussed 42 circulation amongst English readers 36 as civil science 33 European reception of 34–6 intended audience 33 publishing and distribution 34 redefinition of church 42, 62–71, 82–3 relationship with larger project 32 scientific character of 33 TH discourages translation of 36 utopian ambitions for 32 annotations to second edition, 46, 55–9, 63, 68, 73, 109, 110, 230, 274, 294–5, 329 and compounding 87 Cromwellian use of 144–5 French edition of 158 frontispiece to 61 preferred to Leviathan 96 TH on 33, 158, 224 Tory hostility to 343, 362–4, 372 second edition 54–74, 230–2, 313 Whig criticism of 365 De Corpore 85, 90, 137, 150–3, 158, 159, 165, 172, 180, 197, 218, 222, 293, 326 attacks Ward 150 criticism of 151–3, 164–6, 197–9, 293–4, 325–8 De Corpore Politico 74, 77–9, 81, 88, 95, 96, 112, 178, 180, 198, De mirabilibus pecci 18, 296 Desire to return to England from exile 86, 95 Dialogue of the Common Laws of England 240, 241–2 Dialogus Physicus de natura aeris 217–18 dramatic use of ideas 243, 301–4, 307, 308–10, 411 Eight Bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre 18, 62, 180 Elements of Law 18–32, 90, 93, 110, 119, 316 adapted by Digges 28–32 church government 25 distinction between law and right 30 divine right in 30 earliest response to 21–6 intended audience 20 intentions in writing 19 manuscript circulation of 20–1 obligation, end of 24 property 23 reception in Oxford 28–32 slaves, rights of 23

441 sovereignty 22, 23 taxation 23 Examinatio et Emendatio Mathematicae Hodiernae 215, 217 flees England in 1640 25 flees Paris in 1650/1 105 friends associated with Protectorate 137–8 and Great Tew 21, 24 Historia Ecclesiastica 241 Historical Narration Concerning Heresy 240, 241–2, 352, 405 Humane Nature 74–7, 82, 83–4, 117, 180, 182, 184, 198, 301 praised 82, 184 criticised 294 humanism of 18, 71 identified with Leviathan 97, 99 inability to control publication 153 influence 102 on clergymen 376 on the court 103, 106, 314 on critics 351, 392, 411–12 on the gentry 289–90, 291, 292, 293, 295, 345 on libertines 290–1, 292 on public debate 387, 388, 414 on radicals 392, 393, 402–9 on the young 121, 132–3, 186, 204, 244 identified with Toryism 365 legal proceedings against TH discussed 104, 223, 227, 287, 340 Leviathan 3, 4, 14, 15, 16, 33–4, 46, 69, 81, 83, 138, 154, 155, 165, 174, 177–8, 179, 180, 198, 301, 305–6, 313, 315, 326, 335 ambivalence of 101, 130 associated with republicanism 363, 374, 375, 378 associated with sedition 378, 404 associated with Whiggery 362 ‘Bear’ edition 288 and Christianity 92, 93 composition of 85, 88, 94 and De Cive 90 defended by TH 158, 223–4, 225–6 difficulties of using as propaganda 138 early responses to 97–103 and engagement controversy 85–90 eschatology of 92 frontispiece of 91, 94 intended audience 95, 96 investigated by Parliament 239–40 licensing of 94 manuscript copy of 90, 104 materialism in 92–3 price of 95, 288 print run 95

442

Index

Hobbes, Thomas (cont.) publication of 94–7 ‘Review and Conclusion’ 85–6, 87–90, 97, 99, 194 sales 96–7, 201 scriptural interpretation in 93 soteriology 92 target audience 96, 158 theology of 92–3 title 98–9, 132 viral character 94 Leviathan (Latin edition) 226–7, 241–2, 281 appendix 240, 262, 263, 283 changes to 282 responses to 282–7 target audience 283 Liberty and Necessity 162–3, 180, 182, 184, 301 meets Bramhall 38 Mr Hobbes Considered 224–7, 315 Opera Philosophica 282 Philosophicall Rudiments 79–81, 96, 144 plagiarism charges against 147, 148, 170, 292, 293 as Protestant theologian 156 prudential view of public statements 47, 152 Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance 156–8, 162, 196 reconciliation with Charles II 215, 216 reputation before 1640 18, 71 royalism of 87 and the Scargill affair 247–8 scientific reputation 18, 60, 75, 76, 81–2, 97, 98, 118, 149, 220, 291, 293 Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematiques 158–60, 163, 164, 180 structural continuity of thought 90 theological oddity of 92, 93 Thomae Hobbes angli malmesburiensis philosophi vita 354–7 Tractatus Opticus 222 Travels of Ulysses 296 on Wallis 224–5 Hobbism 3, 6–7, 10–12, 175, 202 and church government 258 Eachard on 289–92 and libertinism 291–2, 293, 304–11 linked with toleration 255 Scargill’s 250–1 and Tory absolutism 365, 366 Hobbists 368, 410–11 creeds 15–16, 259, 261, 348 libertine 410 Hoekstra, Kinch 76, 235 Holland, Guy, 129, 130 Holland, Samuel 309, 311 Hollar, Wenceslaus 79

Homer 353 Hooke, Robert 221–2, 339 Hooker 141 Horae Subsecivae 18, 179 Hunt, Thomas 365, 368, 371 Hunter, Michael 246, 310 Hunton, Philip 107, 362, 371 Hyde, Edward, first Earl of Clarendon 15, 21–6, 27, 50–4, 60, 71, 73, 74, 87, 88, 89, 93, 95, 141, 177, 187, 191, 205, 234–7, 336, 341, 345, 350, 352, 355 as architect of Restoration polity 238 Brief view and survey 228, 313–22, 335–6, 366, 376 ecclesiology of 52 political theory of, 21, 22–3 reaction to De Cive 50–4 reaction to The Elements of Law 21–4 reaction to Leviathan 103–4 relationship with TH 313–15 role in expulsion of Hobbes from court in exile 103–6 return to England 215 Restoration policy towards 228 shares Hobbes’s views 321 warns of danger of Hobbism 313 Hyde, Laurence 320 idolatry (image-worship) 53, 63, 71, 101, 191, 192, 321, 336 incorporeal substance 159, 189, 302, 326, 335, 394 TH on 92, 119, 159, 170, 226 TH’s view cited 405 TH’s view criticised 118, 149, 152, 166, 197–9, 219, 262–3, 327 Independents 92, 113, 163, 322 infallibility, doctrinal 43, 50, 67 Ingelo, Nathaniel 304 Bentivolio and Urania 202–4 innate ideas 198, 328, 333, 397 Inns of Court Lincoln’s Inn 378 Middle Temple 144 Inquisition 129, 130 inspiration 348 international relations 280 Isham, Sir Justinian 83–4, 98, 143, 150 Israel, Jonathan 403 Israel, Kingdom of 67 God’s rule over 183 Jacob, Margaret 404 Jaffe, Aaron 246, 310 James II, King of England 106, 337, 378 Catholicism exposed 322

Index Jane, William 299, 371–3 Jermyn, Henry 27, 55, 82, 106 Job 99 Johnson, Dr Samson 60 Jonson, Ben 309, 311 Joshua 67 just war theory 381 Justinian 291–2, 293 Jus Zealotarum 73, 74, 89 Kellison, Matthew 176 Kennett, White 240, 362 Kettlewell, John 385 King, Josiah 407, 408 kingdom of darkness 174 Knox, John 371 Koran 95, 124 Lambert, John 136, 146 Lamprecht, Sterling 3–4, 10 Laney, Benjamin 163 Lapthorne, Richard 390 Laslett, Peter 368 Latitudinarian Anglicans 7, 11, 306, 381, 400, 414 campaign against atheism 391–6 critiques of TH 167, 352 Hobbism of 7, 252, 258, 333, 358–61 involvement in comprehension schemes 242, 243–4 and natural law 255–6, 266, 270, 332, 398 on sovereignty 361–2 and the Williamite church 390 Laud, William 339, 343, 365 Laudianism 25 Lawson, George 10, 177, 202, 312, 366 attacks TH’s absolutism 186 Examination of the political part of Mr Hobbs his Leviathan 185–91, 201 Politica sacra et civilis 186, 190, 192 Theo-politica 185 Leiden, University of 353 Leigh, Richard 302–3 Leng, John 396 Lessee, Thomas 309, 310 L’Estrange, Roger 248, 325, 340 allusions to TH 364 Leslie, Charles 361, 389, 390, 406 Leucippus 325 Leyburn, George 138 libertinism 6, 250 and Hobbism 252, 290–2, 293, 304–11, 410 liberty 109, 124, 142, 188, 192, 318, 364 of conscience 208, 271, 300

443

Licensing Act lapsing of (1679) 337, 339 lapsing of (1695) 391 Ligon, Richard 131 Limborch, Phillip 399 Littleton, Adam 299 Livy 178, 179 Lloyd, John 371, 374 Lloyd, William 381 Locke, John 4, 191, 192, 210, 211, 322, 337, 368, 387, 390, 396, 403, 407, 412, 415 denies knowledge of TH’s works 401 early Erastianism of 210 Essay Concerning Human Understanding 281, 397 Essays on the law of nature 214, 398, 399 Hobbism of 209, 214, 397–402 reaction to Samuel Parker 257, 310, 401 second Treatise of Government 365–8 silence on Leviathan 366 The Reasonableness of Christianity 399–402 Two Tracts 208–10 Lockey, Thomas 21, 75, 76, 77 Loggan, David 353 London, William 96, 128, 201 Long Parliament 343 Long, Robert 141 Lords, House of 223, 379 Louis XIV, King of France 405 Lowth, Simon 361 Lucca 364 Lucian 99 Lucretius 327 Lucy, William 164, 227, 316, 345 Observations 233–7 response to Latin Leviathan 284, 287 Luther, Martin 156, 160–1 Machiavelli, Niccolo 50, 178, 179, 232, 291, 293, 363 The Prince 411 Mahomet 126, 127 Mahometans 122 majesty personal 187, 188 real 187, 188 Malcolm, Noel 7, 8, 80, 216, 221, 370 on the ‘Bear’ 288 on Blount 349 on Cardonnel 369 on TH’s scientific reception 119 Mallet, Elizabeth 306 Manchester, Earl of 65, 261 Manichees 122 Maria, Henrietta 71 marriage 149

444

Index

Marshall, John 7, 359, 360 de Martel, Thomas 35 Marten, Henry 178 Martin, John 77 Martinich, Aloysius, 33, 221 martyrs 116, 268 Marvell, Andrew 13, 312 criticises Parker 299–301 echoes Leviathan 300, 312 Masoyer-Deshommeaux, Baptiste 35 materialism TH’s 92–3, 150, 152, 325 TH’s criticised 122, 165–6, 170, 188, 192, 197–9, 262, 264, 295–6, 323, 333 mathematics 150, 170, 175, 296–7 Melanchthon, Philip 156, 160–1 Memorable Sayings of Mr Hobbes 346–8 memory 198, 264 Mendle, Michael 27 Mercurius Anglicus 346 Mercurius Politicus 79, 82, 88, 105, 112, 137, 144 Mersenne, Marin 34–6, 158, 218, 354 metaphor 296 Miller, John 379 Milton, John 107, 179, 362, 371, 380 Milton, Philip 223, 228 Mintz, Samuel 5–6, 14, 285, 415 monarchy 63, 141 mixed 31–2, 46, 188, 191, 341 Monck, George 200 Monmouth, Duke of 378 Montague, Walter 106 Montaigne, Michel de 306 moral relativism, Hobbesian 3, 49, 329, 351 More, Henry 5, 201, 202, 261, 264, 322, 324, 325, 334, 415 Antidote against atheism 134, 274 The immortality of the soul 197–9, 203, 323 Morland, Samuel 137 Morse, Justinian 345 Moses 93, 100, 142–3, 183, 236, 282, 325, 406 as author of Pentateuch 125, 320, 405 as a member of the Trinity 126 du Moulin, Louis 202, 210, 243, 358 Naaman 283 Nalson, John 343 natural law 14, 31, 33, 43–4, 51–2, 56, 63, 80, 90, 141, 209, 211–14, 270–82 Bramhall on, 161, 195, 197 Coke on 230–1 Cudworth on 329, 330 Eachard on 294–5 Filmer on 110 Hawke on 144

Hyde on 317–18 Latitudinarian account of 270 Lawson on 188–9, 192 Locke on 397–9 Selden on 273 Stillingfleet on 207–8 Tenison on 265–6 Velthuysen on 237 Ward on 166 natural rights 72, 74, 372 Bramhall on 196 Cudworth on 329 Cumberland on 275 Digges on 28–32 Filmer on 110 Locke on, 209 Stillingfleet on 207–8, 381 Wren on 206 natural sanctions 213, 276–7, 282 natural sociability 139, 144, 213, 254 Naude´, Gabriel 35 Nauta, Lodi 34 Nedham, Marchamont 13, 88, 89, 111, 144, 179 on TH’s return to England 105 uses Hobbes’s work 78–9 Neile, William 222 Nenner, Howard 380 neo-Aristotelianism 139 Neville, Henry 179, 185 Newton, Isaac 222, 397 reads De Corpore 222 Nicene Council 405 Nicene Creed 283, 405 Nicholas, Sir Edward 60, 103, 106, 188, 191 Noah 144, 211, 273 Nominated Assembly 136 and educational reform 146 Nonconformists targeted in Oxford Judgement and Decree 371 Tillotson attacks 359 non-jurors 382, 384 North, John 298 oaths 44, 52, 57, 279, 373, 394, 395 of Abjuration 129 of Allegiance 380–8 obedience 414 Hobbesian arguments for 364 passive 161, 347, 359, 382 obligation 24 natural 167, 211, 254, 271, 281, 367, 397, 398 ordination 43, 67, 70, 91 bishop’s right to 157 Hammond on 117

Index Hall on 143 Harrington on 183, 184–5 TH on 157 Ward on 168 Osiander 129 Overall, John 383 Overhoff, Jurgen 156, 160 Overton, Richard 126 Owen, John 136, 152, 155, 171–2, 202, 208–9 attitude to TH 173–4 dedicatee of Elenchus 151 Erastianism of 210 on Leviathan 174 in Oxford Judgement and Decree 371, 372 and Samuel Parker 256–7 patron of Edward Bagshaw 163 patron of Henry Stubbe 171 and toleration 242 Oxford Parliament 363 Oxford University 65, 97–8, 171–5 colleges: All Souls 21 Christ Church 20, 32, 75, 163, 171, 172, 208 Jesus 153 Magdalen 369 Merton 369 Trinity 62, 76, 97 Wadham 346 Judgement and Decree 282, 368–9, 386 Pakeman, Thomas 74 Paracelsus 147 paradox 35, 43, 55, 121, 130, 161, 162, 177, 193 Ross notes Hobbes’s use of 123 Pardoe, Mark 284 Parker, Henry 27–32, 37–8, 43–7 Parker, Samuel 214, 272, 273, 291, 293, 325, 361, 362, 368, 398, 412 absolutism of 256 adapts Cumberland’s De legibus 281 Discourse of Ecclesiastical Polity 239, 252–8, 266, 358 Fellow of Royal Society 253 Hobbism 252, 256, 299–301, 364 Parliament 341 parliamentary constitutionalism 188, 192 Parsons, Robert 309, 311 Parsons, Robert (the Jesuit) 380 passions 75 patriarchal authority 107, 142, 166, 195, 358 Patrick, Simon 243–4, 253, 272, 390 Paul, Saint 166 Payne, Robert 64, 65, 68–71, 76, 80 concerned about alienating TH 84 on De Corpore Politico 77

disseminates TH’s work in Oxford 20 on episcopacy 68–70 on Humane Nature 75 on Leviathan 88, 94, 97, 102 Pelagianism 358 Pell, John 221 Pepys, Samuel 96, 163, 244, 272, 288 perception 198, 264 Percy, Lord Henry 27, 106 Perkins, William 129, 156 Pett, Peter, 339, 342 Petty, William 76, 137, 315, 411 Philodemius, Eutactus 72–3, 78 Pierce, Thomas 163, 335, 352 attends Rochester 309, 311 Pigot, Thomas 346, 353 Pike, Christopher; see Lucy, William Plato 179, 330 Pomfret, Thomas 375, 414 Pomponazzi, Pietro 130 Pope, Walter on De Cive 96 popery and arbitrary government 320 Popish Plot 337–8 power 123, 181, 294 preaching 168 seditious 146 predestination 113 Presbyterians 69, 91, 121, 155, 345 booksellers attack TH 114, 176, 186 ecclesiology of 171 opposition to TH 112–16, 172, 174, 175 situation in early 1660s 224 TH attacks 338, 341, 343 TH’s relationship with 163 Prideaux, Humphrey 370, 389 priestcraft 183, 404 property 72, 73, 74, 194, 259 Cudworth on 331 Cumberland on 277 Eachard on 294 Hall on 143 Harrington on 179, 181 Hyde on 318–19 Lucy on 235, 237 Ross on 124 TH on 23 Whitehall on 341 Wren on 206 prophecy 92, 93, 115, 168, 320, 348, 392 Protagoras 324, 332 protection and obedience 385 Protectorate 136–45, 319 shapes reception of Leviathan 176–7 TH’s alignment with 175

445

446

Index

providence, divine 142 Pufendorf, Samuel 214, 273, 281, 367, 398 on De Cive 367 punishments civil 330 natural 276 quadrature of the circle 150–1 Rand, William 99–101, 112, 128, 130 Rawson, Ralph 80 rebellion 161, 330 Leviathan as promoting 111 TH as philosopher of 362 recantation 249–50 Redmayne, John 288 representation allusion to TH’s view 376 discussion of TH’s view 100, 108, 126, 143, 236, 263, 286 TH on 90–1, 100 Robinson, Humphrey 176 Robinson, Luke 178 Roy, Henrick de (Regius) 60 Reeve, Richard 221 religion imposture 328–9, 348 TH on 93, 348 TH’s definition approved 349 TH’s definition attacked 122, 259, 327 Republicanism 178, 179 Republicans view of TH 202, 404 resistance theory 187, 191 identified in Hobbes 111, 193, 267, 281, 285 Resurrection 92 revelation 92 rhetoric 82, 83, 94, 296, 316, 350, 413–14 in Leviathan 93–4 Ridley, John 77 right reason 211, 253 Cumberland on 274, 278 Hobbes on 56, 157, 230, 231, 274 Locke on 398 Rochester on 306 scholastic account of 274 Tenison on 266 Rivet, Andre´ 35 Ross, Alexander 95, 132, 136, 168, 189–90, 192, 201, 226–7, 263 compares Leviathan with Islamic thought 124, 126, 126, 127 Leviathan drawn out with a hook 120–8 scholastic views of 120 sees Leviathan as heretical 122

Royal Society 7, 215–22, 274, 356 experimental programme 216 and TH 215–22 Royalists Louvre group 86 Old 103, 106 view of TH 202 Royston, Richard 79, 81, 107, 116, 128 Rump Parliament 88, 89, 363 Rutherford, Samuel 371 Rye House conspiracy 371 Sadducees 122, 169 Salmasius 78 salvation 113 Sancroft, William 383, 390 Savile, George, Marquis of Halifax 133 Saye and Sele, Lord 145 Scarborough, Sir Charles 117, 138 Scargill, Daniel 239, 242, 244–52, 260, 266, 291, 293, 305, 306, 325, 355, 356, 369, 371, 410, 411 admits to being an atheist 249 Hobbism of 250–1 Recantation 249–52, 257–8, 269, 291, 292, 300, 348, 357, 393 Schaffer, Simon 216 Scholasticism 147, 156 Schuhmann, Karl 95, 284 Scot, Philip 71, 102, 114 Scott, Jonathan 179 Scotus, Duns 345 Scripture Kings 283 Pentateuch 125, 268, 320 Proverbs 38, 46 Psalms 99, 352 Romans 352 Samuel 124, 140, 190, 192 sovereign’s right to interpret 66–7, 71, 91, 92, 143, 152, 168 attacked 114, 259, 268, 359 Seaman, Lazarus 184 Selden, John, 84, 211, 230, 231–2, 239, 273 self-interest 142, 299, 388–9 self-preservation 343, 388 Cumberland on 275 Filmer on 110 Oxford Judgement and Decree 372, 374–5, 380 Shafte on 270–1 Sherlock’s use of 383, 386 TH’s use of 212 Senault, Jean-Franc¸ois 75 Sennert, Daniel 130

Index Sergeant, John 130, 158, 191 sermons discussion of Hobbes in 298–9, 358–61, 374–5 Seymour, Edward 243, 281 Shadwell, Thomas 308–10, 311 Shafte, John 270–2 Shaftesbury, Ashley Cooper, Anthony, first Earl of 322, 337, 339, 362 Shapin, Steven 216 Sharrock, Robert 269, 273, 276, 305 Hypothesis ethike 135, 212–14 Sheldon, Gilbert, Archbishop of Canterbury 21, 37, 64, 68, 69, 75, 77, 80, 88, 94, 97, 103, 253, 289–90, 292, 355 Restoration policy towards TH 228 role in Restoration settlement 238 and the Scargill affair 248 Sherlock, William 364, 412, 414 accused of Hobbism 384–7 and allegiance controversy 382–8 criticises TH 384, 387 Ship Money 23, 24, 319, 341 Short Parliament 43–7 Sidney, Algernon 365, 366, 367 Skinner, Quentin 6–7, 12, 85, 93, 337 on rhetoric in Leviathan 93 slavery 109, 124, 140, 142, 279, 341 slaves 23, 195, 291, 293 Smyth, William 298 Socinians/Socinianism 54, 84, 236, 321, 358, 390, 391, 402 Solemn League and Covenant 371 Sommerville, Johann 71 Sorbie`re, Samuel 35, 59–62, 86, 158 soul 92, 152, 327, 349 immortality of 115, 118, 130, 165, 232, 394 sleepers 126 Tenison on 264–5, 269 TH on 125 Ward on 166 South, Robert 299 Southampton 118, 120 sovereignty 139, 142–3, 187, 206, 267, 272, 277–8, 318, 331, 332–3, 343, 361–2 TH on 22, 23 Spence, Ferrand 297 Spencer, John 246, 248–9 Spinoza 324, 359, 403, 404, 407–8 placed alongside Hobbes 343–4, 350, 359, 396, 406 Tractatus Theologico-Politica 325 Spinozists 393 spirit 198, 328, 335, 386, 392

447

Sprigge, Joshua 116 spring of the air 218, 220 state of nature 272, 300, 372, 413 allusion to TH’s view 374, 375, 376 reception of TH’s view 28, 29, 49, 73, 109–10, 138, 141–2, 143, 144, 166, 185–91, 197, 203, 206, 207, 208, 211, 230, 254, 265, 294, 330, 343, 365, 378 TH on 56 state of war 141–2, 213, 303, 373, 374, 375, 376, 385, 413 reception of Hobbes’s view 144, 276–7, 286, 307, 317, 364, 368 Stephens, Philemon 94 Stephens, William 389 Stillingfleet, Edward 210, 211, 243, 309, 358, 359–61, 381–2, 390, 392, 415 accused of Hobbism 208, 360, 361, 382 criticises Hobbes 208 Erastianism of 208, 360 Irenicum 207–8, 209, 242, 360, 361, 381 on Locke 401 and the Scargill affair 247 Stringer, Thomas 322 Stubbe, Henry 171–5, 208, 404 accused of Hobbism 174 denies influence of TH 174 translates Leviathan into Latin 171 Suarez 74, 156, 160 Tacians 122 Tanny, Philip 162 Taylor, Jeremy 211, 273, 399 taxation 23, 80, 319, 341 Templer, John 269, 285–7 Tenison, Thomas 15, 356, 363, 389, 390, 391–2, 393, 408 ‘Hobbist’s Creed’ 261, 348 natural law theory of 265–6 suspected of Hobbism 261 The Creed of Mr Hobbes Examined 239, 260–70, 304, 394, 395, 409 tutor to Daniel Scargill 245, 260–1 Tertullian 125, 226, 262, 286 Thebaean legion 45 The Last Sayings, or Dying Legacy of Mr Thomas Hobbs of Malmesbury 348–9, 351 theology natural 274 Thompson, John 284 Thorndike, Herbert 189, 192, 268, 321 criticises Erastianism 257 reaction to De Cive 65–8 on Samuel Parker 257

448

Index

Thucydides 50, 179 Tillotson, John 357, 358–9, 360–1, 368, 390, 397, 399 ecclesiology of 243, 310 Hobbism 359, 390 response to Latin Leviathan 284, 286 Tindal, John 403 Toland, John 11, 396, 402, 403, 406, 408, 410, 411 toleration 101–2, 210, 239, 242, 358, 404 Act (1689) 389 for Catholics 129–30, 322 Latitudinarian response to 271 and Leviathan 101–2, 129–30 linked with Hobbism 252, 255 Tories 361–2, 413 and allegiance controversy 380, 387, 388 Behemoth as propaganda for 342, 362 Hobbism of 363–4 hostility towards Leviathan 362–4 trade 140 transubstantiation 321 Trinity, the 54, 91, 100, 102, 168 TH amends view 282, 283 TH’s view criticised 126, 189, 190, 192, 236, 263, 286 True Effigies of the Monster of Malmesbury 351–3 Tuck, Richard 7, 33, 35, 72 Turner, Edward 229 tyranny 123–4, 140, 142, 149, 190 Tyrrell, James 214, 281, 365, 366, 367 adapts Cumberland 399 and Locke 397, 398–9 Tyton, Francis 186 Underhill, Thomas 114 universities 145–50 reaction to Hobbes’s views on 97, 127, 147–50, 342, 343, 345 reform of 146 TH on 145–6, 338, 342 vacuum 220 Vane, Henry (the younger) Vasquez 74 Vaughan, John 241, 354 van Velthuysen, Lambert 110, 237, 270, 355 Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham 242 Vilvaine, Robert 345 voluntarism 323 Wagstaffe, Thomas 378 Walker, John 376 Waller, Edmund 36, 36, 106, 137, 163

Wallis, John 118, 151–3, 154, 155, 158, 163, 188–9, 192, 227, 261, 291, 292, 296, 345, 356, 363, 394, 395 accuses Hobbes of atheism 152–3 attacks Leviathan 152–3 Due Correction for Mr Hobbes 170, 171, 201 Elenchus geometriae Hobbianae 151–3 Hobbius heauton-timorumenos 219, 233 Mens sobria 171 questions Hobbes’s loyalty 219 and the Royal Society 216 view of Hobbes 220, 221 Ward, Richard 199 Ward, Seth 76, 98, 121, 128, 154, 155, 158, 172, 189, 192, 227, 250, 261, 345, 353, 394, 395 Against Resistance of Lawful Powers 229, 232–3 Hobbism of 232 encounter with Hobbes 118, 220, 227 Exercitatio 76, 164–70, 201 attacks Leviathan 166–9 influences Latitudinarians 170 Philosophical Essay 118–19, 263, 274 role in Royal Society 216 Vindiciae academiarum 133, 147–50 Warner, Walter 148 Warren, Albertus 128–9 Warrender–Taylor thesis 7 Webster, John 146–7 Wentworth, Thomas, Earl of Strafford 24, 25, 37, 343 West, Richard 400 Westminster Assembly of Divines 151 Westminster School 171 Wharton, Lord 145 Wheldon, James 337 Whigs 384, 413 criticism of Behemoth 340–2, 365 criticism of De Cive 365 targeted in Oxford Judgement and Decree 371 use of TH 364–8 White, Thomas 137, 176, 229, 267, 412 De Mundo 240 Grounds of Obedience and Government 138–40 Hobbism of 138 Whitefoote, John 162 Whitehall, John 360, 365 Behemoth Arraign’d 340–2 Leviathan Found Out 335–6 suggests that TH supports popery 341–2 Wilkins, John 120, 147, 149, 164, 242, 253, 272 circle of 167 and the Royal Society 216 William III, King of England 380 Williams, John 288

Index Williamson, Sir Joseph 241, 247 Willis, Richard, 400 Willis, Thomas 76 Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester 306–11, 410, 411 witchcraft 264, 348 Wolseley, Charles 135, 259, 305, 393 on toleration 243, 252, 255 Unreasonableness of atheism 259–60

449

women 195 Wood, Anthony a` 76, 137, 353, 356–7 on Rochester’s Hobbism 306 on TH 343, 345 Worsley, Benjamin 100 Worthington, John 284, 286 Wren, Bishop Matthew (the elder) 102 Wren, Matthew (the younger) 183–4, 185, 205–7

IDEAS IN CONTEXT

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RICHARD RORTY, J. B. SCHNEEWIND AND QUENTIN SKINNER

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Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain hb 978 0 521 39242 6 25 JAMES TULLY An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts hb 978 0 521 43060 9; pb 978 0 521 43638 0 26 RICHARD TUCK Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 pb 978 0 521 43885 8 27 R I C H A R D R . Y E O Defining Science William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain hb 978 0 521 43182 8; pb 978 0 521 54116 9 28

MARTIN WARNKE

The Court Artist The Ancestry of the Modern Artist hb 978 0 521 36375 4 29 PETER N. MILLER Defining the Common Good Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain hb 978 0 521 44259 6; pb 978 0 521 61712 3 30

CHRISTOPHER J. BERRY

The Idea of Luxury A Conceptual and Historical Investigation pb 978 0 521 46691 2 31 E. J. HUNDERT The Enlightenment’s ‘Fable’ Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society hb 978 0 521 46082 8; pb 978 0 521 61942 4 32 J U L I A S T A P L E T O N Englishness and the Study of Politics The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker hb 978 0 521 46125 2; pb 978 0 521 02444 0

33 K E I T H T R I B E Strategies of Economic Order German Economic Discourse, 1750–1950 hb 978 0 521 46291 4; pb 978 0 521 61943 1 34 SACHIKO KUSUKAWA The Transformation of Natural Philosophy The Case of Philip Melancthon hb 978 0 521 47347 7; pb 978 0 521 03046 5 35

DAVID ARMITAGE, ARMAND HIMY AND QUENTIN SKINNER

(EDS.)

Milton and Republicanism hb 978 0 521 55178 6; pb 978 0 521 64648 2 36 M A R K K U P E L T O N E N Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 hb 978 0 521 49695 7; pb 978 0 521 61716 1 37 P H I L I P I R O N S I D E The Social and Political Thought of Bertrand Russell The Development of an Aristocratic Liberalism hb 978 0 521 47383 5; pb 978 0 521 02476 1 38

NANCY CARTWRIGHT, JORDI CAT, LOLA FLECK AND THOMAS E. UEBEL

Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics hb 978 0 521 45174 1 39 DONALD WINCH Riches and Poverty An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 pb 978 0 521 55920 1 40 JENNIFER PLATT A History of Sociological Research Methods in America hb 978 0 521 44173 5; pb 978 0 521 64649 9 4 1 K N U D H A A K O N S S E N ( E D .) Enlightenment and Religion Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain hb 978 0 521 56060 3; pb 978 0 521 02987 2 42 G. E. R. LLOYD Adversaries and Authorities Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science hb 978 0 521 55331 5; pb 978 0 521 55695 8 43 ROLF LINDNER The Reportage of Urban Culture Robert Park and the Chicago School hb 978 0 521 44052 3; pb 978 0 521 02653 6

44 ANNABEL BRETT Liberty, Right and Nature Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought hb 978 0 521 56239 3; pb 978 0 521 54340 8 45 STEWART J. BROWN (ED.) William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire hb 978 0 521 57083 1 46

HELENA ROSENBLATT

Rousseau and Geneva From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–1762 hb 978 0 521 57004 6; pb 978 0 521 03395 4 47 DAVID RUNCIMAN Pluralism and the Personality of the State hb 978 0 521 55191 5; pb 978 0 521 02263 7 48 ANNABEL PATTERSON Early Modern Liberalism hb 978 0 521 59260 4; pb 978 0 521 02631 4 49 DAVID WEINSTEIN Equal Freedom and Utility Herbert Spencer’s Liberal Utilitarianism hb 978 0 521 62264 6; pb 978 0 521 02686 4 50

YUN LEE TOO AND NIALL LIVINGSTONE

(EDS.)

Pedagogy and Power Rhetorics of Classical Learning hb 978 0 521 59435 6 51 REVIEL NETZ The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics A Study in Cognitive History hb 978 0 521 62279 0; pb 978 0 521 54120 6 52

MARY MORGAN AND MARGARET MORRISON

(EDS.)

Models as Mediators hb 978 0 521 65097 7; pb 978 0 521 65571 2 53 JOEL MICHELL Measurement in Psychology A Critical History of a Methodological Concept hb 978 0 521 62120 5; pb 978 0 521 02151 7 54 RICHARD A. PRIMUS The American Language of Rights hb 978 0 521 65250 6; pb 978 0 521 61621 8

55 ROBERT ALUN JONES The development of Durkheim’s Social Realism hb 978 0 521 65045 8; pb 978 0 521 02210 1 56 ANNE MCLAREN Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I Queen and Commonwealth 1558–1585 hb 978 0 521 65144 8; pb 978 0 521 02483 9 57 JAMES HANKINS (ED.) Renaissance Civic Humanism Reappraisals and Reflections hb 978 0 521 78090 2; pb 978 0 521 54807 6 58 T . J . H O C H S T R A S S E R Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment hb 978 0 521 66193 5; pb 978 0 521 02787 8 59 D A V I D A R M I T A G E The Ideological Origins of the British Empire hb 978 0 521 59081 5; pb 978 0 521 78978 3 60 IAN HUNTER Rival Enlightenments Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany hb 978 0 521 79265 3; pb 978 0 521 02549 2 61

DARIO CASTIGLIONE AND IAIN HAMPSHER-MONK

( E D S .) The History of Political Thought in National Context hb 978 0 521 78234 0 62 IAN MACLEAN Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance The Case of Learned Medicine hb 978 0 521 80648 0 63 P E T E R M A C K Elizabethan Rhetoric Theory and Practice hb 978 0 521 81292 4; pb 978 0 521 02099 2 64 GEOFFREY LLOYD The Ambitions of Curiosity Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China hb 978 0 521 81542 0; pb 978 0 521 89461 6 65 MARKKU PELTONEN The Duel in Early Modern England Civility, Politeness and Honour hb 978 0 521 82062 2; pb 978 0 521 02520 1

66 ADAM SUTCLIFFE Judaism and Enlightenment hb 978 0 521 82015 8; pb 978 0 521 67232 0 67 ANDREW FITZMAURICE Humanism and America An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 hb 978 0 521 82225 1 68 PIERRE FORCE Self-Interest before Adam Smith A Genealogy of Economic Science hb 978 0 521 83060 7 69 ERIC NELSON The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought hb 978 0 521 83545 9; pb 978 0 521 02428 0 70 HARRO HOPFL Jesuit Political Thought The Society of Jesus and the state, c.1540–1640 hb 978 0 521 83779 8 71 MIKAEL HORNQVIST Machiavelli and Empire hb 978 0 521 83945 7 72 DAVID COLCLOUGH Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England hb 978 0 521 84748 3 73 JOHN ROBERTSON The Case for the Enlightenment Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 hb 978 0 521 84787 2 74 DANIEL CAREY Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond hb 978 0 521 84502 1 75 ALAN CROMARTIE The Constitutionalist Revolution An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642 hb 978 0 521 78269 2 76 HANNAH DAWSON Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy hb 978 0 521 85271 5

77

CONAL CONDREN, STEPHEN GAUKROGER AND IAN HUNTER

(EDS.)

The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe The Nature of a Contested Identity hb 978 0 521 86646 0 78 ANGUS GOWLAND The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy Robert Burton in Context hb 978 0 521 86768 9 79 PETER STACEY Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince hb 978 0 521 86989 8 80 RHODRI LEWIS Language, Mind and Nature Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke hb 978 0 521 87475 0 81 D A V I D L E O P O L D The Young Karl Marx German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing hb 978 0 521 87477 9 82 J O N P A R K I N Taming the Leviathan The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700 hb 978 0 521 87735 0 83 D WEINSTEIN Utilitarianism and the New Liberalism hb 978 0 521 87528 8

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