The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes

The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes

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The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes JEFFREY R. COLLINS

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Jeffrey R. Collins  The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) Crown copyright material is reproduced under Class Licence Number CP with the permission of OPSI and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland First published  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–926847–9 978–0–19–926847–4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Randall and Patricia Collins

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Acknowledgements This book has taken the better part of a decade to complete, and over the course of those years I have incurred many debts. I must thank, at the start, the professional staffs of the following institutions: the Widener Library and the Houghton Rare Books Library at Harvard University; the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University; the Regenstein Library and the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago; the Bodleian Library and the Queen’s College archive at Oxford University; the Cambridge University Library; the Manuscripts Room of the British Library; the Lambeth Palace Library; the British Public Record Office; the Dr William’s Library in London; and the archive at Chatsworth in Derbyshire. The librarians and archivists at these institutions provided me with enormously valuable guidance through their magnificent collections of rare books and manuscripts. For financial support, my thanks go to the History Department and Graduate Society of Harvard University, and to the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program of the United States Department of Education. More pressing still are those personal debts that I have accumulated during the course of researching and writing this book. I have benefited enormously from outstanding colleagues in both the history department and the history and literature program at Harvard University, the Harper Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago, and, most recently, the history department at Queen’s University. My sincerest appreciation goes to Susan Pedersen, James Hankins, Matthew Maguire, Hugh McNeal, Josh Millet, Brian Domitrovic, Mark Molesky, Caroline Elkins, Eric Lohr, Frederick Schnabel, Tony D’Elia, Adrian Johns, Richard Strier, Paul Cheney, and Erik Grimmer-Solem. Most of these colleagues have either read parts of this book, or responded to presentations based upon it. Their advice has been invaluable. I must also thank the participants in the Early Modern European and Renaissance and Reformation seminars at Harvard University, the Early Modern European Workshop at the University of Chicago, the North American British Studies Association, the Early Modern History seminar at Queen’s University, the Early Modern Britain seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in London, Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Books and Media, and the Political Thought and Intellectual History Seminar at Cambridge University. Each of these forums provided me with vital feedback. Mark Goldie, John Morrill, Blair Worden, Nigel Smith, Justin Champion, Paul Monod, Steve Pincus, and Noel Malcolm all provided more detailed advice— invariably sound—on various occasions. To the scholarship of Dr Malcolm, as with all scholars of Hobbes, I am particularly indebted. For skilful editorial assistance, my sincere thanks go to Ruth Parr, Anne Gelling, and Kay Rogers of Oxford University Press.

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Acknowledgements

Richard Tuck served on my dissertation committee, and in that capacity provided regular encouragement and guidance. His published work has also strongly influenced me, in ways that will be detailed in the coming chapters but must be gratefully acknowledged here as well. Finally, my greatest intellectual debts are to my graduate adviser, Mark Kishlansky. Professor Kishlansky has an enormously sharp editorial eye, a tremendous appreciation for scholarship, and the forensic capacities of a trial attorney (always as prosecutor). He has been a model adviser, and has influenced innumerable aspects of this book. This book is dedicated to my father and mother, Randall and Patricia Collins, whose patient support of their son during a very long education is something for which I will remain forever grateful. My final and most profound debts are to yet another historian: my wife, Ana Siljak.

Contents Note on Quotations and Dates

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Abbreviations

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Introduction

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1. Thomas Hobbes and the Uses of Christianity

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2. Hobbes, the Long Parliament, and the Church of England

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3. Rise of the Independents

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4. Leviathan and the Cromwellian Revolution

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5. Hobbes among the Cromwellians

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6. The Independents and the ‘Religion of Thomas Hobbes’

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7. Response of the Exiled Church

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Conclusion

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Bibliography

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Index

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Note on Quotations and Dates The spelling, capitalization, and punctuation of all quotations generally follow the source text. On rare occasions clarity required some minor modernization. Quotations from Hobbes’s correspondence have followed the translations of Dr Malcolm. Within the footnotes, for titles published before the nineteenth century, the place of publication is assumed to be London unless otherwise noted. Dates are Old Style, but with January  taken to mark the new year.

Abbreviations ABL

Brief Lives, Chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey between 1669 and 1696, edited from the Author’s MS, ed. Andrew Clark ( vols., Oxford, )

Beh.

Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth or The Long Parliament, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies with introduction by Stephen Holmes (Chicago, )

BL

British Library, London

Bodl.

Bodleian Library, Oxford University

CHPT

J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (eds.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge, )

Corr.

The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcolm ( vols., Oxford, )

CSPD

Calendar of State Papers Domestic

CSPV

Calendar of State Papers Venetian

DC

Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge, )

DH

Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen: De Homine and De Cive, trans. Charles Wood, T. S. K. Scott Craig, and Bernard Gert (Indianapolis, Ind., )

EL

Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic (slightly corrected version of  edition by Ferdinand Tönnies), in Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford, )

HE

Historia Ecclesiastica Carmine Elegiaco Concinnata. Authore Thoma Hobbio Malmesburiensi (London, )

HMC

Historical Manuscripts Commission

JHC

Journal of the House of Commons

Lev.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, )

ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, ) PRO

Public Record Office, London

PW

Eight Bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre written by Thucydides the sonne of Olorus Interpreted . . . out of the Greeke by Thomas Hobbes (London, )

xii SL

Abbreviations Thomas Hobbes, Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematiques. One of Geometry, the other of Astronomy: In the Chaires set up by the Noble and Learned Sir Henry Savile, in the University of Oxford (London, )

Vita [prose] Thomae Hobbes Angli Malmesburiensis Philosophi Vita (London, ) Vita [verse]

Thomae Hobbesii Malmesburiensis Vita. Authore Seipso (London, )

WSC

The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. W. C. Abbott ( vols., Cambridge, Mass., –)

Introduction The life of Thomas Hobbes spanned ninety-one years, from the defeat of the Spanish Armada to the Exclusion Crisis, but the English Revolution of 1640 to 1660 served as its fulcrum. Hobbes’s career as a political theorist began in 1640 and essentially ended during the Interregnum of the 1650s. All of his chief works appeared during these two fateful decades, and the sole exception, Behemoth, was a history of those years. The vicissitudes of the Revolution propelled Hobbes from England to France and back again, and the conflict exerted a gravitational pull over his intellect throughout his life. ‘If in time, as in place’, he would write, there were degrees of high and low, I verily believe that the highest of time would be that which passed between the years of 1640 and 1660. For he that thence, as from the Devil’s Mountain, should have looked upon the world and observed the actions of men, especially in England, might have had a prospect of all kinds of injustice, and of all kinds of folly, that the world could afford . . .1

Before 1640, Hobbes’s modest reputation was largely as a man of letters. He was chiefly known for his translation of Thucydides. In 1640 his first political work, The Elements of Law, appeared, but it circulated only in manuscript. Where known it was read as an unadulterated apology for the absolutizing policies of Charles I, one probably composed to comport with the politics of Hobbes’s aristocratic patrons. Such a profile spurred Hobbes to flee England in 1640 as the political opposition to the king stiffened. He remained abroad, sporadically attached to the royalist court in exile, for eleven years. By the time Hobbes returned to his native land in 1651/2, the world had been turned upside down and his reputation had been fundamentally transformed. His return, indeed, was partly a second banishment, this time from the presence of the Stuart court. Hobbes, now author of two published treatises, De Cive and Leviathan, had earned a Europe-wide reputation. Among the royalists, however, he was despised as a traitor. Across the final three decades of his life, Hobbes was relentlessly charged with having betrayed the Stuart cause. In particular, he was alleged to have written Leviathan to justify the usurpation of Oliver Cromwell.2 This political indictment, in turn, would all but end Hobbes’s meaningful career as a political theorist. After the Restoration he was effectively prohibited from publishing on political and religious topics. 1

Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth: or the Long Parliament, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (Chicago, 1990), 1. See, among others: Edward Hyde, A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and Pernicious Errors to Church and State, in Mr. Hobbes’s Book entitled Leviathan (Oxford, 1676), 5; John Wallis, Hobbius Heauton-timorumenos (Oxford, 1662), 5; William Lucy, An Answer to Mr. Hobbes his Leviathan: with Observations, Censures, and Confutations of Divers Errors . . . (1673), 4, 146. 2

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Introduction

Leviathan was repeatedly condemned and publicly burned, and Hobbes feared (undoubtedly a touch hyperbolically) that his person would be added to the pyre. This book is an attempt to explain Hobbes’s great reversal of fortune, and to extract from the history of that reversal an understanding of the relationship between Thomas Hobbes and the English Revolution. It is an effort to read Hobbes as a revolutionary philosopher, not in the weak sense of the term (as in a ‘revolutionary’ idea or innovation), but in a more direct sense. Why was it that contemporaries read Hobbes’s writings, particularly Leviathan, as a justification of the English Revolution and as a betrayal of royalism? Were their assumptions about the partisan implications of Hobbes’s writings well grounded? What does an investigation into Hobbes’s political partisanship reveal about the broader issues that governed allegiance during the Revolution? To pose these questions is to challenge the assumptions of broad swathes of modern scholarship on Thomas Hobbes. Historians of Hobbes have acknowledged the upheavals in his reputation, but have largely treated the matter as just that: a question of his reputation, not his actual political allegiance. It is widely assumed that Hobbes’s troubles developed as a result of his heterodox theological views, which naturally upset ‘pious opinion’ but did not necessarily implicate his political positions per se.3 That Hobbes, a famed monarchist, would have written in defence of parliament is rejected as implicitly absurd. As for the contemporary charge that he wrote to justify the protectoral rule of Oliver Cromwell, Hobbes’s own defence—that this was impossible as Leviathan preceded the Protectorate by years4—has been widely accepted by historians.5 Hobbes is thus often portrayed as a consistent royalist stigmatized for his heterodoxy. In defending this portrait, historians have been both hampered and aided by Hobbes’s decision to burn most of his personal papers.6 In the absence of readily accessible countervailing evidence, they have relied heavily on Hobbes’s own autobiographical writings. Composed as self-apologetical efforts after the Restoration, these consistently portray him as a life-long royalist plagued by clerical gadflies. Many works of scholarship on Hobbes essentially reproduce this self-portrait. For a generation the sole significant effort critically to examine these assumptions about Hobbes and his intellectual relationship with the English Revolution was that of Quentin Skinner. In path-breaking articles of the early 1970s, Professor Skinner argued that Hobbes’s theory of political obligation, which favoured de facto holders of sovereign power (including conquerors) over alternative claimants, constituted the feature of his political theory most resonant with the 3 Michael Oakeshott, introduction to Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford, 1946), pp. l–li; Miriam M. Reik, The Golden Lands of Thomas Hobbes (Detroit, 1977), 113–32; A. P. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography (Cambridge, 1999), 214, 296, 319–22; Samuel Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan (Cambridge, 1962), 45–6; Arnold Rogow, Thomas Hobbes: Radical in the Service of Reaction (New York, 1986), 175–7, 208. 4 Thomas Hobbes, Mr Hobbes Considered in his Loyalty, Religion, Reputation, and Manners, by way of a Letter to Dr Wallis (1662), 18. 5 George Croom Robertson, Hobbes (Edinburgh, 1886), 71; Glenn Burgess, ‘Contexts for the Writing and Publication of Hobbes’s Leviathan’, History of Political Thought, 11 (1990), 675–702 at 677–9; M. M. Goldsmith, ‘Hobbes’s Ambiguous Politics’, History of Political Thought, 11 (1990), 639–73 at 654; Martinich, Hobbes, 309; Reik, 6 ABL, i. 339. Golden Lands, 172; Mintz, Hunting Leviathan, 13; R. S. Peters, Hobbes (Westport, Conn., 1979), 36.

Introduction

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ideological climate of the Revolution.7 This aspect of Leviathan, Professor Skinner argued, was intended to facilitate the deference of Hobbes and other royalists to the post-regicidal Commonwealth regime. To buttress this thesis he traced the influence of Hobbes among a set of ideologues who justified the Commonwealth’s Engagement, a declaration of allegiance promulgated in early 1650. This view, that Hobbes wrote within the context of the Engagement controversy, has proven enormously influential, and it successfully accounts for some of the contemporary charge that Hobbes wrote in defence of Cromwell’s usurpation. Professor Skinner’s thesis represented an immense improvement over the conventional wisdom that Hobbes’s royalist credentials were impugned only by those who thought him impious. However, as an effort to understand Hobbesian political theory within the context of the English Revolution, foregrounding Hobbes’s theory of obligation proves, though not incorrect, insufficient. For one thing, the charge that Hobbes wrote to justify the quiescence of royalists to the Commonwealth would not have been particularly explosive. Many royalists compounded with the new regime in order to preserve their estates, some with the permission of Charles II himself.8 Indeed, the possibility that Leviathan was written to defend the ‘faithful Servants and Subjects of his Majesty’ seeking to protect their ‘lives and livelihood’ was so benign that Hobbes himself employed this defence to uphold the royalist credentials of the work after the Restoration.9 As Glenn Burgess has observed, Hobbes formulated his theory of political obedience during the 1640s, when it had royalist implications. That it assumed a rather different cast in 1651 was not entirely within Hobbes’s control.10 Professor Skinner has likewise retreated from some of his stronger claims for viewing Leviathan as a straightforward contribution to the ideological defence of the Engagement.11 Thus, even those who concede that the theory of obligation in Leviathan was ‘warmly received’ by the English Commonwealth largely credit Hobbes’s later claim that the work was essentially an ‘exercise in loyalism’.12 In any case, the most that can be said for Hobbes’s theory of obligation is that it facilitated his submission to the Commonwealth in 1651. It cannot explain why he decided to make that submission. De factoism allowed subjects (and specifically exiles) to submit themselves to conquerors, but it did not require their submission. The fundamental problem of explaining Hobbes’s motivation in returning to 7 Quentin Skinner, ‘Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy’, in G. E. Aylmer (ed.), The Interregnum: the Quest for Settlement, 1646–1660 (1972), 79–98 and ‘The Context of Hobbes’s Theory of Political Obligation’, in Maurice Cranston and Richard Peters (eds.), Hobbes and Rousseau: a Collection of Critical Essays (New York, 1972), 109–42. 8 Edward Vallance, ‘Oaths, Casuistry and Equivocation: Anglican Responses to the Engagement Controversy’, 9 Mr Hobbes Considered, 19–21. Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 59–77 at 64. 10 Burgess, ‘Contexts for Leviathan’, 676–702; also Reik, Golden Lands, 101. 11 Quentin Skinner, ‘Hobbes on the Proper Signification of Liberty’, in his Visions of Politics, iii: Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge, 2002), 209–37. 12 Burgess, ‘Contexts for Leviathan’, 682–3, 692; Quentin Skinner, ‘Introduction: Hobbes’s Life in Philosophy’, in Visions, iii. 21–3; Conal Condren, Thomas Hobbes (New York, 2000), 7, 9; J. P. Sommerville, ‘Hobbes, Behemoth, Church-State Relations, and Political Obligation’, Filozofski vestnik, 24 (2003), 205–22 at 220–2.

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Introduction

England in 1651 thus cannot be solved by focusing exclusively on his theory of political obligation. To plug this hole some historians again reach for the convenient persecuting ‘priests’, who are alleged to have harassed a heterodox Hobbes back to England with a ‘campaign of vilification’. This skirts the question of motivation, as it implies that Hobbes returned to England unwillingly. More plausibly, other commentators have suggested that he returned to England for essentially personal reasons, chiefly a desire to rejoin the Cavendishes.13 This thesis provides him with a motivation, but one that is apolitical and thus detracts little from his presumed royalism. Hobbes’s de factoist theory of obligation may have riled Stuart loyalists attached to divine-right notions of political legitimacy. Certainly his heterodox theology angered many royalist clergy. But neither of these transgressions sufficiently justified the charge that Hobbes wrote Leviathan as an appeal to the Commonwealth and its defenders. That charge continues to be characterized as an ‘absurd’ allegation of ‘weak and politically motivated minds’.14 This book draws very different conclusions. It argues that Hobbes’s return to England in 1651/2 represented not merely a personal decision but a consequential political gesture. That gesture, announced and justified by Leviathan, moved Hobbes away from the royalist cause and implicitly allied him with a central project of the English Revolution. A positive, if partial and often hesitant, agreement with aspects of the Revolution motivated Hobbes to break with royalism. If this development is to be fully understood, much more than Leviathan’s theory of political obligation must be investigated. This book will argue that the conventional scholarship on Hobbes has failed fully to excavate his political leanings because it has failed to grasp the fundamentally religious nature of the Hobbesian project. This is not to suggest that Hobbes’s religion per se has not received attention. It has, increasingly, and much of that work has been exploited in the present book. However (with a few exceptions, discussed below), there has been a pronounced tendency to treat Hobbes’s religion and his political views as discrete subjects, except to the extent that the former motivated his clerical opponents to cast unwarranted aspersions on his loyalty. Professor Skinner exemplified this mind-set when he once surmised that ‘the relation of Hobbes’s political thought to the ideologies of the English Revolution’ had been partly confused by attention to ‘the fulminations of Hobbes’s numerous clerical opponents’.15 It is argued here, however, that it was precisely these clerical opponents (and, by the same token, anticlerical proponents) who fully grasped the partisan implications of Hobbes’s political writings within the context of the English Revolution. Their primary concern, moreover, was neither Hobbes’s theory of obligation, nor his theological heterodoxy as such, but his 13 Skinner, ‘Hobbes’s Life’, in Visions, iii. 22–3; Noel Malcolm (with some qualification), ‘A Summary Biography of Hobbes’, in his Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), 19–21; Rogow, Hobbes, 135; Peters, Hobbes, 35–6. 14 Martinich, Hobbes, 219. 15 Quentin Skinner, ‘The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought’, Historical Journal, 9 (1966), 286–317 at 292, 297; an inattentiveness to religious questions is the major failure of Professor Skinner’s otherwise pre-eminent scholarship on Hobbes. Professor Burgess’s contextualization of Leviathan is also marred by his professed failure to consider the evolution of ‘Hobbes’s religious thought’ (‘Contexts for Leviathan’, 683).

Introduction

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radically Erastian ecclesiology: his project to reduce the Christian church, its clergy and doctrine, to an arm of the state. The political career of Thomas Hobbes—his career as a writer intending to justify various political factions and governing policies—has been mischaracterized by scholars enamoured with a speciously secularized version of his political theory. Those purely ‘secular’ implications of Hobbes’s thought that have dominated modern scholarship—his monarchism, his hostility to republicanism, his interest-based theory of political obligation—do not fundamentally explain his shifting reactions to the English Revolution. The migrations in Thomas Hobbes’s political allegiance, away from the royalist cause and towards the triumphant revolutionary regimes, were instead driven by an obsessive fear of the independent power of the Christian church, and by a sympathy with one of the central political goals of the English Revolution: securing an Erastian church settlement under the aegis of the modernizing state.16 Thomas Hobbes is perhaps the most famous Erastian theorist in the history of Western political thought. But the persistent tendency—only recently partially redressed—to separate the religious implications of his work from the political has obscured the vital position that Erastian ecclesiology enjoyed in Hobbes’s political theory. Among leading commentators on Hobbes, Richard Tuck has begun the process of recovering the centrality of ecclesiological concerns within Hobbes’s thought. He has demonstrated that while much of Hobbes’s fundamental political theory—his use of natural rights, his definition of sovereignty, and so forth—remained consistent after 1640, his theory of church power moved from the periphery of his concerns into the foreground during the course of the decade. Leviathan, in particular, constituted a masterpiece of Erastian theorizing, and Professor Tuck has convincingly argued that it was this Erastian ecclesiology, above all, which marked it as a watershed work within Hobbes’s intellectual development.17 Professor Tuck’s work locates Hobbes within a tradition of natural rights theorizing running through Hugo Grotius and John Selden. The present book places Hobbes within somewhat different intellectual traditions, and directs its attentions more closely towards the ideological and political history of the English Revolution, but it builds on many of Professor Tuck’s seminal observations.18 16 The term ‘Erastian’ is used in a broad sense throughout this book, to denote not just the specific doctrine (on excommunication) of the 16th-c. theorist Erastus, but the more general subordination of ecclesiastical jurisdiction to the state. The contextual appropriateness of such a usage is defended in Ch. 5. 17 Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government: 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), 314–35; id., ‘The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes’, in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), 120–39. On important points I have differed with Professor Tuck’s conclusions, but the general shape of his interpretation has strongly influenced my reading of Hobbes. Aspects of Ch. 4, in particular, build on his work. 18 Other influences will be acknowledged below, but a few should be noted here. Mark Goldie makes some highly perceptive remarks on the reception of Hobbes in ‘The Reception of Hobbes’, in CHPT, 589–615. Chapter 6 has profited from James Jacob’s Henry Stubbe: Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983). Though they concern the Restoration period, the work of John Marshall (‘The Ecclesiology of the Latitude-men, 1660–1689: Stillingfleet, Tillotson, and “Hobbism” ’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 36 (1985), 407–27) and Justin Champion (The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992)) have influenced what follows.

6

Introduction

The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes is an effort to explain, and partially to vindicate, the charge that Hobbes eventually wrote in sympathy with broad religio-political ends of the English Revolution. That effort requires two parallel, historical investigations. First, the central and evolving function of Erastian ecclesiology within Hobbes’s political project must be established. Secondly, the neglected role of Erastianism as a core ideological and political commitment of the Revolution itself must be recovered. This book is an effort to execute both of these investigations within a common interpretative study. If many Hobbes scholars have been misled about his politics by their own inattention to its religious dimensions, they have also been ill-served by the broader historiography of the English Revolution. The English Revolution was triggered in part by animosities between parliament and the bishops of Caroline England. During the course of the Revolution, parliament executed remarkable innovations in the constitution of the church. Episcopacy itself was abolished. Then, after a traumatic rupture between the Presbyterians and Independents who comprised the parliamentary coalition, a proposed Presbyterian church settlement was gutted by an Erastian House of Commons. As the Revolution wore on, its religious base of support narrowed. The execution of Charles I irreparably alienated the Presbyterians. By the time the post-regicidal Commonwealth was erected in 1649, the Independents dominated the scene under their champion, Oliver Cromwell. As Lord Protector (1653–8), Cromwell settled the vexing question of church government by establishing a controversial system of Erastian committees to govern England’s religious life. Cromwell’s church settlement represented a striking seizure of ecclesiastical power by the central government, and proved deeply controversial. But his settlement was broadly true to the dominant Erastian impulses of the Long Parliament, and represented the culmination of the Revolution’s central religious project. It is the fundamental premiss of this book that Thomas Hobbes was sympathetic to the church revolution effected by Cromwell and the Independents, a sympathy that he decisively expressed in his masterpiece, Leviathan. It was increasingly towards this project of ecclesiological reform, above all, that Hobbes’s political attentions were directed. Grasping this has required much fresh research into his biography and intellectual development, but it has also required original research into the broader religious history of the 1640s and 1650s. It will be argued that the dominant revisionist interpretation of the English Revolution, while correctly emphasizing the role of religion in the conflict, has construed those religious factors too narrowly, as straightforward matters of theology proper.19 In truth, the Revolution was propelled more forcefully by ecclesiological conflicts, issues of church government and religious authority. In this regard the history of the English Reformation provides the essential backdrop for any clear view of the English Revolution of 1640–60. For a generation, historians of the English 19 As will become clear, the ‘revisionist’ interpretation of religion during the civil war has been lately subject to considerable modification. The present study is thus a contribution to a broader historiographical development.

Introduction

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Reformation have demonstrated that the Reformation was initially motivated by church jurisdictional conflicts, rather than by popular theological commitment. Taming the power of the clergy and securing ecclesiastical authority as a function of the state served as the motivating force behind the Henrician schism. The Reformation descended from the top, as a political revolution perpetrated by the monarchy. It did not rise up from a groundswell of deep theological commitment, as older historians of the Reformation tended to argue or imply.20 The English Revolution, in turn, marked the violent culmination of this struggle by the state to crush the independence of the clerical estate. The Revolution was dedicated to preserving an Erastian church settlement far more than a Calvinist one; it was, in fundamental ways, a struggle to protect the ecclesiological legacy of the Reformation. And it was, above all, as an apologist for the temporal control of religion that Thomas Hobbes made an appeal to the political context of his time. Demonstrating this truth, and uncovering its implications, are the aims of this book. The centrepiece of the book is an effort to establish Hobbes’s surprisingly favourable assessment of Oliver Cromwell and his main faction, the Independents. Uncovering the particulars of Hobbes’s assessment of Cromwell, an assessment that he later repudiated, has required a careful reconstruction of suppressed historical evidence. It has also required a revisionist interpretation of Cromwell himself, and of the relationship between English Independency and Erastianism. If this study has a fulcrum point it is the moment after the execution of Charles I, when Thomas Hobbes saw in Oliver Cromwell a scourge of the clergy and a champion of unified state power. The title of this book quite precisely indicates the limits of its content. This is a study of Thomas Hobbes’s allegiance, of the vicissitudes of his political choices during the English Revolution, and of the partisan implications of those choices. It is an effort to understand Hobbes not just as a political theorist, but as a political actor, and his printed works as political acts intended to justify particular policies and regimes. This book is not an effort to comprehensively explain Hobbesian political thought in context, precisely because many aspects of Hobbes’s thought do not usefully contribute to an explanation of his evolving allegiance.21 Hobbes’s fundamental theory of sovereignty was in place by 1640, before subjects of the British kingdoms faced the tragic problem of defining their own allegiance in an environment of catastrophic political collapse. The first principles of Hobbesian political theory—his portrait of the state of nature, his minimalist and rightsoriented formulation of natural law, his absolutist theory of sovereignty—were originally conceived within the context of the Caroline personal rule. The present study has no quibble with the conventional account of how these initial political 20 This follows: J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984); Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, 1992). 21 For more encyclopedic accounts, see Johann P. Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (New York, 1992); Hans-Dieter Metzger, Thomas Hobbes und die englische Revolution, 1640–1660 (Stuttgart, 1991).

8

Introduction

principles predisposed Hobbes towards the cause of Charles I. However, Hobbes’s basic theory of sovereignty was a relatively static feature of his thought. To explain its origins is not to explain the evolution of its application within a dynamic context, which is the subject of the present study. And it is in confronting the latter problem that this book makes a strong claim: namely, that Hobbes’s religious thought eventually became the determinant of his allegiance, that his Erastian ecclesiology finally trumped other considerations and drew him away from the Stuart cause. While that thesis does not presume to explain Hobbes’s political theory in its totality, it does prioritize the contemporaneous implications of that theory, and argues for the central importance of religious concerns within his overall political project. The argument of this book thus marginalizes (at least in contextual terms) other aspects of Hobbes’s political thought that have commanded scholarly interest. The importance of Hobbes’s de factoist theory of political obligation is not disputed in what follows, but its sufficiency as the determinant of his allegiance is. Alternatively, Hobbes’s constitutional preference for monarchy is often presumed to have governed his politics. This book does not deny that Hobbes had such a preference, but it does argue for its relative irrelevance in explaining his allegiance. More recently, historians have highlighted Hobbes’s rejection of an emerging English republicanism (see Ch. 5). While this book acknowledges Hobbes’s opposition to republicanism, it argues that the contextual importance of that opposition has been seriously overstated. As a contextual study, this book does not primarily ask where Hobbes’s political theory came from, but how he applied it to the traumatic events of the 1640s and 1650s. In a sense this reverses the traditional priorities of the dominant ‘Cambridge School’ of contextualist intellectual history. This mode of contextualism has been strongly marked by its intellectual roots in the linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Austin. Cambridge School contextualism seeks to explain the origin of texts, or to provide an ‘account of the agent’s utterance’.22 This involves a careful reconstruction of texts as ‘speech acts’ within a given context. The context examined, however, is typically defined as the intellectual or linguistic milieu of a given author: ‘speech acts’ are manipulations or deployments of various linguistic traditions. The history investigated by this sort of contextualist is thus ‘heavily textual, a matter of written and printed utterance and response’.23 In delineating ‘the full range of communications that could have been conventionally performed’ by any given agent, contextual scholarship should thus be ‘essentially linguistic’.24 This involves placing texts within various ‘languages of debate’ or (following Foucault) ‘discursive regimes’. Professor Skinner characterizes such an undertaking as a ‘pure archaeology of utterances’.25 22 Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, in Visions of Politics, i: Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002), 78. 23 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Concept of Language’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early 24 Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding’. Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), 19–38 at 22. 25 Quentin Skinner, ‘Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts’, in Visions, i. 117–20, 125.

Introduction

9

Contextualism of the Cambridge School variety has thus primarily directed us to the study of linguistic paradigms. Many objections of varying cogency have been lodged against this methodology. At present I would make one fairly modest observation: namely, that the effort to establish the linguistic context of texts often leaves other, more material aspects of a subject’s context relatively unexplored. As Professor Skinner (with J. G. A. Pocock) has allowed, linguistic context need not be immediate: ‘The appropriate context for understanding the point of . . . writers’ utterances will always be whatever context enables us to appreciate the nature of the intervention constituted by the utterances.’26 More often than not the relevant linguistic context turns out to be chronologically distant from the subject, and requires attention to the longue durée of a textual tradition.27 That such studies contain enormous erudition and value is not to be doubted. Their specific focus on linguistic context, however, can crowd out original research into the social, political, and biographical context of a given subject. In this sense contextual studies of the Cambridge School are chiefly interested in providing a sound hermeneutical method. They are less interested in viewing texts as artefacts of a given, and often more chronologically and geographically bounded, historical moment. This tendency is not problematic per se. As Professor Pocock once remarked, the ‘historian is not ashamed to appeal to the division of labour’.28 It does mean, however, that the prevailing contextualist school of intellectual history often leaves to one side questions of greatest interest to political and social historians. The present study aims precisely to exploit the works of Thomas Hobbes as artefacts of the English Revolution. It is less interested in providing a hermeneutic key for interpreting Hobbes than it is in using Hobbes—his biography, the immediate political purposes of his writings, the pattern of their reception—as evidence of the broader dynamics of the Revolution itself. Thus, while this book contains some linguistic or intellectual contextualization (primarily in Ch. 1), much of it adopts different (and perhaps more traditional) methodologies: biography, prosopography, a study of Hobbes’s reception, and research into the political and religious history of the English Revolution itself. To sceptical readers this may at times seem like mere scene setting, but The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes is as much about the scene—the English Revolution—as it is about Hobbes. The book, it is hoped, will prove as interesting to historians of the Revolution as to students of the philosopher. This book’s aim, on one level, is to understand Thomas Hobbes as a political theorist whose fundamental beliefs were relatively static, but whose political priorities proved dramatically dynamic under the pressure of remarkable events. In this regard, it hopes to answer those questions posed at the start of this introduction: who constituted the intended audience of Hobbes’s various texts? 26

Ibid. 116. Thus, for instance, Hobbes is read as ‘a contributor to a series of debates about the moral sciences within Renaissance culture’. Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), 6. 28 Pocock, ‘Concept of Language’, 22. 27

10

Introduction

what policies and regimes were those texts intended to support? how, in short, did the allegiance of Thomas Hobbes evolve during the 1640s and 1650s? On a broader level this book aims to say something original about the nature of the English Revolution as a religious conflict. Viewing the Revolution through Hobbes’s eyes is, in this regard, merely to exploit one body of evidence pertaining to that larger question. Thomas Hobbes was an unusually keen observer of the crisis that occasioned and animated his chief political works. He understood the English Revolution not, primarily, as a constitutional struggle over monarchy, nor as an outburst of republicanism, nor as a theological struggle over Calvinism. Hobbes understood the Revolution as a war over the nature of the church as an independent corporate body, and the status of the clergy as an estate of the realm. In this sense, Hobbes interpreted the English Revolution as an ecclesial crisis, and as the culmination of the long Reformation struggle to redefine the political structure of Christendom by submitting the universal church to the power of emerging modern states. This book is an effort to vindicate Hobbes’s diagnosis of the English Revolution, and to investigate some of its implications.

1

Thomas Hobbes and the Uses of Christianity By 1651, when Thomas Hobbes published his masterpiece, Leviathan, his political theory was dominated by an Erastian theory of the church unsurpassed in its stridency. This Erastianism determined in large measure his political response to the English Revolution and governed—not exclusively, but above all other factors— the reception of his work among contemporaries. Understanding how Hobbes’s statist ecclesiology evolved under the pressure of political events in the 1640s and 1650s requires a contextual investigation that will consume the bulk of this book. First, the present chapter will explore the basic conceptual traditions that framed Thomas Hobbes’s understanding of church power. These foundational elements of his ecclesiology were in place long before the outbreak of the crisis that would elicit their fateful publication. They formed part of the broad Protestant and humanist intellectual culture in which Hobbes’s mind matured. Thomas Hobbes’s comprehensive subordination of the church to state control was necessitated by his absolutist theory of sovereignty. For Hobbes, stable sovereignty was the most elevated of human achievements, for it secured what he considered the abiding end of political life: peace. Sovereignty was generated from rationally discovered natural laws, of which two were identified by Hobbes as ‘Fundamentall’: first, that each human must seek peace and is empowered to defend himself by all means that he (individually) judges necessary; second, that each human be willing to surrender this power ‘when others are so too’ willing, in order to secure peace. The first law expansively defines the ‘summe of the right of Nature’, but it is limited by the second law, which leads to the creation of sovereignty through contract. This contract, according to Hobbes, requires the transferring of one’s natural rights to another, the binding of oneself in return for protection. When done commonly by a group of men, the collected contracted right creates sovereignty. The validity of contracts depends on the sovereign, for a man cannot be bound by a covenant that might be broken by others, and only a sovereign exercises the coercive power necessary to force general compliance with covenants. Only with the creation of sovereignty is justice created, for Hobbes’s third law of nature dictated that men must honour valid covenants.1 1

Lev., 91–104.

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Hobbes enumerated nineteen other laws of nature, but the first laws were fundamental or ‘general’.2 The others merely diversely reformulated the basic laws that compel humans to seek their own survival in covenants. The combination of fear, which drives men to contracts, and force, which makes those contracts valid, creates sovereignty. Sovereignty absorbs all of the natural rights of the members of the commonwealth (except self-preservation) and becomes an incontestable authority. Divided sovereignty was the chief foil against which Hobbes formulated his political philosophy. Leviathan could exist only as a unity. Importantly, sovereignty could be held by an assembly, but monarchy—rule by the single will of an individual rather than rule by the single will of a group—was functionally preferable because less prone to division.3 Hobbes condemned the division of sovereignty, or its mixture among several institutions, and blamed civil war on diverse species of divided sovereignty. Sovereignty could be illegitimately divided in various ways (among branches of government, for example, or between the sovereign and the law) but the spectre that continually visited Thomas Hobbes was the division of sovereignty between temporal and spiritual authorities. In Leviathan, he wrote: As there have been Doctors, that hold there be three Soules in a man; so there be also that think there may be more Soules (that is, more Soveraigns,) than one, in a Common-wealth; and set up a Supremacy against the Soveraignty; Canons against Lawes; and a Ghostly Authority against the Civill . . . Where one can make Lawes, and another make Canons; there must needs be two Common-wealths, of one and the same Subjects; which is a Kingdome divided in it selfe, and cannot stand. For notwithstanding the insignificant distinction of Temporall, and Ghostly, there are still two Kingdomes, and every Subject is subject to two Masters.

In such terms did Hobbes condemn the dualist model of spiritual and temporal sovereignty. He despised the pretensions of the clergy to independent spiritual power, because ‘either the Civill, which is the Power of the Common-wealth, must be subordinate to the Ghostly, and then there is no Soveraignty but the Ghostly; or the Ghostly must be subordinate to the Temporall, and then there is no Supremacy but the Temporall’.4 The division of spiritual and temporal authority, Hobbes concluded, emboldened clerics to claim seditious authority independent of the sovereign, and individual Christians to claim specious religious liberties. He feared the catastrophic potential of such claims, and blamed seditious turmoil on religious dogma freed from sovereign control. Doctrinal conflict bred political conflict. As a friend of Hobbes phrased it, there had ‘always been a war of minds, so far as opinions and feelings are concerned, and this war is exactly like the state of nature’.5 Hobbes criticized 2 Hobbes’s minimalist natural law essentially submerged natural law into natural right. Lev., 100–11; DC, 33–57. For an alternative view, see David Boonin-Vail, Thomas Hobbes and the Science of Moral Virtue (Cambridge, 1994). 3 Lev., 131–2; DC, 91–101. 4 Lev., 226–7. 5 Peleau to Hobbes, 25 Dec. 1656, Corr., 424; Robert Kraynak, History and Modernity in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes (Ithaca, NY, 1990), ch. 2.

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13

clerics who required a ‘power in matters of religion either above the power civil, or at least not depending on it’. From such men arose ‘all seditions concerning religion and ecclesiastical government’.6 It was thus of particular importance that the Hobbesian sovereign enjoy full spiritual authority (both institutional and intellectual). Part 3 of Leviathan, for instance, argued for the church’s total dependence on the sovereign. By what authority was religion made binding? ‘If publique’, Hobbes answered, it is the Authority of the Common-wealth, or of the Church. But the Church, if it be one person, is the same thing with a Common-wealth of Christians; called a Commonwealth because it consisteth of men united in one person, the Soveraign; and a Church, because it consisteth in Christian men, united in one Christian Soveraign.7

Here was the Hobbesian image of the Erastian state. The separation of spiritual and temporal authority is despised; the sovereign sits atop both temporal and spiritual realms, encompassing within his own prerogative both the church and the commonwealth. In the ‘Kingdome of God, the Policy, and lawes Civill, are a part of Religion; and the distinction of Temporall, and Spirituall domination, hath there no place’.8 Clergy, Hobbes warned, ‘demand that kings themselves, the supreme governors of the Church, be ruled by them; yea, with greatest dangers to the state, they wish it to seem that this office hath been granted to them, not by kings, and by those whom God hath commissioned for the care and safety of the people, but directly by God’.9 But he denounced such claims to jure divino clerical power. For him, the church consisted of ‘a company of men professing Christian Religion, united in the person of one Soveraign; at whose command they ought to assemble, and without whose authority they ought not to assemble’. The sovereign constituted the institutional authority of the church by means of a contracted and inviolable power: And therefore a Church, such a one as is capable to Command, to Judge, Absolve, Condemn, or do any other act, is the same thing with a Civil Common-wealth, consisting of Christian men; and is called a Civill State, for that the subjects of it are Men; and a Church, for that the subjects thereof are Christians. Temporall and Spirituall Government, are but two words brought into the world, to make men see double, and mistake their Lawfull Soveraign.10

Though it came to dominate his published writings, Hobbes’s Erastianism was long given short shrift by modern commentators. Older works, inclined to view Hobbes anachronistically as an early secular political scientist, often ignored it altogether. Even the pioneering contextual studies of Quentin Skinner, we have seen, are inattentive to the religious components of Hobbes’s thought. This unsatisfactory state of affairs prevailed until Richard Tuck influentially analysed Hobbes’s statist ecclesiology as part of his broad effort to read Hobbes within the tradition of natural right theory. Natural right theories, as pioneered by John Selden, Hugo Grotius, and Thomas Hobbes, essentially reduced traditional 6

EL, 142, 164–6.

7

Lev., 268.

8

Ibid. 83.

9

DH, 67.

10

Lev., 321–2.

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natural law to the keeping of contracts. Binding contractualism was in turn dependent on the coercive authority of the sovereign. Churches lacked this authority and thus enjoyed no independent capacity to enforce obedience. All of the major natural right theorists were consequently strict Erastians. Analytically, there is no doubt that Hobbes’s Erastianism can be understood within the context of an emerging natural rights discourse, as one manifestation of the claim that men cannot ‘be bound by institutions independently of the latter’s capacity to administer physical punishments’.11 This has spawned a widespread assumption in the secondary literature that Hobbes’s Erastianism was merely one particular and unproblematic consequence of his theory of undivided sovereignty. For example, many commentators flatly equate Hobbes’s Erastianism with his rejection of constitutionalist theories of mixed monarchy, or with his disdain for the tradition of independent law courts.12 If viewed as a mere variation on this theme of undivided sovereignty, his Erastianism demands little sustained attention. But such an analysis of Hobbes’s Erastianism fails to capture the full contextual significance of his ecclesiology. Other intellectual traditions, more long-standing than natural rights theorizing, critically informed Hobbes’s hostility to selfsufficient clerical power. Moreover, these traditions had a wider appeal within the intellectual culture of the mid-seventeenth century than did natural rights discourse, and locating Hobbes within them better uncovers the contextual significance of his political theory during the English Revolution. Specifically, Hobbes’s Erastianism operated within two centuries-long intellectual traditions: first, the discourse of reforming Christian ecclesiology; second, the humanist tradition of advocating ‘civil religion’. These traditions (in Hobbes and others) at times dovetailed and at times diverged. To the extent that Hobbes cast himself as a Protestant Erastian reformer, he appealed to a legitimately Christian tradition interested in neutralizing the political threat of a supposedly corrupt clericalism. But he was more fundamentally influenced by a humanist sensibility about the instrumental value of controlled religion as a governing instrument. In this sense he hoped Erastianism would enable the creation of a civil religion reminiscent of those devised by the ancients. This instrumental thinking about religion, at once neo-pagan and strikingly modern, placed Hobbes outside of the Christian Erastian tradition. For those interested chiefly in the internal logic of Hobbes’s philosophy, it may be sufficient to understand his Erastianism as an implication of his natural right theorizing. For those interested in Hobbes’s historical place within the context of the English Revolution, however, his church theory must be understood within Protestant and humanist traditions that had deeper resonance in contemporary culture.

11

Richard Tuck, Natural Right Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, 1979), 94–5. Tom Sorell, Hobbes (1991), 131; M. M. Goldsmith, ‘Hobbes’s “Mortall God”: Is there a Fallacy in Hobbes’s Theory of Sovereignty?’, History of Political Thought, 1 (1980), 33–50 at 41; Peters, Hobbes, 228, 255; Norberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition, trans. Daniella Gobetti (Chicago, 1993), 83–4. 12

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15

i Erastian ecclesiology must be understood, first and foremost, as a tendency within Christian thought, a tendency pronounced within Protestantism and particularly so within English Protestantism. In important if finally superficial ways, the political theory of Thomas Hobbes marked the apogee of England’s Erastian tradition. As an institutional tendency within the Christian church, pronounced statism can be traced back to the Constantinian conversion of the fourth century. As a theoretical matter, however, statist ecclesiology emerged much later within Christianity, primarily between the fourteenth century and the Reformation. Its emergence represented a divergence from the ecclesiological tradition of the primitive and patristic eras.13 Under pagan rulers, the Church Fathers had exhorted Christians to maintain unity through obedience to the clergy. The first-century letters of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, for instance, and Saint Cyprian’s foundational The Unity of the Catholic Church (AD 251), taught that priestly authority would ensure the survival of the persecuted church and restrain centrifugal tendencies as Christianity spread.14 The conversion of the Empire, of course, increased the temptation to appeal to state power in protecting and governing the church, but in general a dualist distinction of spiritual and secular authority prevailed in patristic thinking. Saint Ambrose of Milan, for instance, if capable of counselling emperors legally to privilege Christian worship in the Empire, nevertheless insisted that church unity depended on clerical authority held outside of state auspices. ‘Of faith’, Ambrose wrote, ‘bishops usually judge Christian Emperors, not Emperors bishops.’ Ambrose’s excommunication of the Emperor Theodosius for a massacre at Thessalonia became a paradigmatic moment in the history of church dualism.15 The influence of Ambrose was manifest in the epochal writings of his most famous convert, Saint Augustine. If Augustine was willing to employ coercive imperial power in suppressing the Donatist schism, he nevertheless retained a vivid memory of hostile pagan power. The City of God enshrined within Latin Christianity the fundamental duality of the power of the fallen secular city and the holy authority of the church.16 By the end of the fifth century, Pope Gelasius had influentially defined the relation of priestly to secular power as analogous to two spheres: ‘sacred authority’ (auctoritas) stood against ‘royal power’ (potestas).17 As the Empire collapsed, Western churchmen did assume more and more political authority, but this did not spawn an open theoretical conflation of secular and ecclesiastical power. It would be centuries before patristic dualism faced serious challenge. The so-called 13 Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon (2 vols., New York, 1931), 33–48, 51, 79, 91–9; Alister McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction (Oxford, 1994), 404–25. 14 Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans and to the Ephesians, in Apostolic Fathers, trans. Father Gerald Walsh (New York, 1947), 95, 121; Cyprian, The Lapsed and The Unity of the Catholic Church, trans. Maurice Bévenot (1957), 44–8, 58–60. 15 Letters of Saint Ambrose, trans. Sister Mary Beyenka (New York, 1954), 52, 20–1. 16 Geoffrey Willis, Saint Augustine and the Donatist Controversy (1950), 93–125; H. A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York, 1963). 17 Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, 1050–1300 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1964), 10, 13–14.

16

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papal monarchy of the years 1050 to 1300 has often been construed as an effort to collapse ecclesiological dualism into a unified power structure favouring Rome.18 There is no doubt that between the papacies of Gregory VII and Innocent III the church became a formidable worldly power. Claims on plentitudo potestatis and an assertion of the right to depose secular rulers dramatically exalted papal authority. Boniface VIII’s Unam Sanctam (1302) represented the apex of papal claims on universal political jurisdiction.19 Nevertheless, even the period of the papal monarchy did not witness a wholesale abandonment of the dualist ecclesiological tradition. Indeed, the reform efforts of Gregory VII, which triggered the great Investiture controversy, sought to preserve precisely this strict separation between temporal and spiritual spheres.20 Despite their intemperate power claims, medieval popes fundamentally relied on the basic conceptual opposition between regnum and sacerdotium. By the fourteenth century, church dualism had been strengthened by influential conciliarist writings such as John of Paris’s De Potestate Regia et Papale and Nicholas of Cusa’s De Concordantia Catholica (1433). Their powerful critiques of papalism tapped into the dualist tradition and urged the church to maintain the distinction of its sphere of authority.21 Even imperial apologists and scathing critics of the papacy—William of Ockham and Dante Alighieri, for instance—preserved a marked allegiance to the dualist model of temporal and spiritual power.22 The first intellectual challenge to Christian dualism on behalf of temporal power was devised by Marsilius of Padua in the fourteenth century. His Defensor Pacis, completed in 1324, rebuked the claim on a plenitude of power asserted in Boniface VIII’s Unam Sanctam. Marsilius stingingly asserted the singular importance of unified authority in maintaining civil peace, and flatly denied that clergy possessed any coercive authority. Defensor Pacis pressured not only the papal doctrine of plentitudo potestatis, but the Gelasian doctrine of separate spheres as well.23 Marsilius surrendered to the clergy an apostolic duty to teach and make doctrinal judgements, but he eroded the clergy’s disciplinary jurisdiction. Excommunication itself enjoyed outward efficacy only under the aegis of the secular magistrate. Further, Marsilius denied any divine-right claims for episcopacy, and rendered the form of church government dependent on temporal policy.24 Significantly, he married his statist ecclesiology to a generally reformist religious outlook, and his doctrines found their most forceful adherents among the leaders 18

Walter Ullman, The Medieval Papacy: Saint Thomas and Beyond (London, 1959), 8–9, 17. Francis Oakley, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1979), 37–8; Tierney, Crisis, 24–6. 20 Colin Morris, The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250 (Oxford, 1989), 1, 79, 121–33, 568. But see J. A. Watt, ‘Spiritual and Temporal Powers’, in J. H. Burns (ed.), Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–1450 (Cambridge, 1988), 367–419. 21 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (5 vols., Chicago, 1971–89), iv. 81–4, 98; Francis Oakley, The Political Thought of Pierre d’Ailly (New Haven, 1964), 41–54; Nicholas of Cusa, The Catholic Concordance, trans. Paul Sigmund (Cambridge, 1991), 173–8, 188, 201. 22 Dante Alighieri, Monarchy and Three Political Letters, trans. Donald Nicholl (New York, 1958), 62–70, 76–85, 92–3; Arthur Stephen McGrade, The Political Thought of William of Ockham (Cambridge, 1974), 16–28. 23 Introduction to Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis, trans. and ed. Alan Gewirth (New York, 1956), pp. xxiv, 24 Marsilius, Defensor Pacis, 9.1–2, 6.12, 15.2–7. xxx, liv. 19

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17

of sectarian reform movements.25 The English reformer John Wycliffe (d. 1384), hero of the Lollard movement, powerfully linked proto-Erastian ecclesiology and church reformism in his battles against the Avignon papacy on behalf of Edward III. His writings exalted the reforming potential of national monarchs, argued against papal government, and subordinated clergy to temporal jurisdiction.26 This deference to temporal power in ecclesiastical affairs, and Wycliffe’s neoDonatist conception of the church, gained influence on the Continent when they were adopted by the influential Czech reformer Jan Hus.27 The Great Schism of 1378–1417 enervated the moral authority of the Roman church, and rising national kingdoms jealous of church power proved willing to patronize reformers such as Marsilius, Wycliffe, and Hus.28 The fourteenth century thus saw the merger of a reformist program hostile to clerical power, the surrender of coercive religious authority to the temporal magistrate, and a neo-Donatist conception of the church as the body of predestined saints. This constellation of ideas powerfully anticipated the Reformation, and it was within Protestant ecclesiology that the mature Erastian impulse was born. Martin Luther, to be sure, maintained a theoretical deference to traditional church dualism. His Zwei-Reiche und Zwei-Regimente doctrine insisted upon the divide between humanity’s spiritual and temporal nature, and he considered the conflation of temporal and spiritual power nothing short of demonic. But Luther’s ecclesiology underwent terrific strain: on the one hand, he had a prescient fear of dependence on secular power, and was instinctively attached to Augustinian dualism; on the other, his was inescapably a revolt against an established clerical hierarchy that had long defined catholicity. Protestantism required an alternative source of unifying authority. In the end Luther was compelled to rely on the jus reformandi of secular magistrates, and he designated sovereigns as ‘emergency bishops’ (Notbischofs). ‘Luther’, concludes one authority, ‘undoubtedly contributed in practice if not in theory to the development of Erastianism in later Lutheranism’.29 Other Lutherans went still further. Philip Melanchthon celebrated the sovereign’s ecclesiastical authority as a positive principle. Johann Brenz, who designed the paradigmatic Württemberg church, founded it on a bedrock of state authority. Luther’s desire to preserve Christian dualism slowly surrendered to the exigencies of the Reformation as a political movement.30 At the Reformation’s other pole, Zurich, Ulrich Zwingli’s ecclesiology merged ecclesiastical and secular power into 25 Ibid. 15.1, 20.7, 25.11; K. E. Spiers, ‘The Ecclesiastical Poverty Theory of Marsilius of Padua: Sources and Significance’, Il Pensiero Politico, 10 (1977), 3–21. 26 K. B. McFarlane, John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (New York, 1953), 54, 62–6, 97; A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (London, 1964), 22–3. 27 Claire Cross, Church and People, 1450–1600: The Triumph of the Laity in the English Church (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1976), 9–26, 45–9; Matthew Spinka, John Hus’ Concept of the Church (Princeton, 1966), 260–3. 28 Watt, ‘Spiritual and Temporal Powers’, 368, 381; Pelikan, Christian Tradition, iv. 81; Oakley, Western Church, 67–71. 29 W. D. J. Cargill Thompson, The Political Thought of Martin Luther (Brighton, Sussex, 1984), 7, 11, 20–5, 133–54; Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ii: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge, 1978), 14–19. 30 Francis Oakley,‘Christian Obedience and Authority, 1520–1550’, CHPT, 173; James Estes, Christian Magistrate and State Church: The Reforming Career of Johannes Brenz (Toronto, 1982), chs. 2–3; Robert Walton, Zwingli’s Theocracy (Toronto, 1967), 17–29.

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what has been described as a ‘church-civic commonwealth’. Erastus himself (the Swiss physician Thomas Lüber, b. 1524) was a Zwinglian.31 His seventy-five Theses, posthumously published in 1589, controversially justified the efforts of the secular government of the Palatinate to maintain state control over excommunication and other spiritual functions.32 Such statism angered (among others) the pre-eminent Calvinist Theodore Beza, but Erastus’s doctrines enjoyed sufficient influence eventually to lend the name ‘Erastianism’ to any general ‘ascendancy of the State over the Church in ecclesiastical matters’.33 To a degree, Calvin mitigated the Erastianism of the Reformation by leavening the authority of secular magistrates over church discipline with powerful presbyters. But though Calvin erected a theocracy rather than an Erastian state, he nonetheless forged a fundamental unity between clerical and magisterial authority that violated traditional dualism.34 In short, for most Protestants the competing mandates of the Reformation—reform, the maintenance of an institutional church, and a rejection of clerical primacy—made appeals to state power irresistible. The use of Erastian ecclesiology to legitimize the Reformation was nowhere more marked than in England. For students of Thomas Hobbes, this is contextually fundamental. The best historians of the English Reformation have understood it as a political schism initiated by the monarchy, an act of state rather than a popular uprising of the theologically committed.35 If a sincere Protestant consensus had matured by Elizabeth’s reign (at the latest), England nevertheless experienced Europe’s model ‘Magisterial Reformation’. The English Reformation was permanently reliant on the Royal Supremacy as its constitutional cornerstone.36 English Erastianism, however, was more than just a political fact. It was also a highly distilled intellectual tradition. No dynasty in Europe exploited the canonical texts of the Erastian tradition more diligently than the Tudors. The regime of Henry VIII recognized the value of Marsilius of Padua and ordered Defensor Pacis translated. The work powerfully influenced Henry’s vicegerent, Thomas Cromwell.37 Wycliffe, of course, was a home-grown Erastian whose polemical efforts were exploited in the Reformation’s early years.38 William Tyndale, perhaps England’s most influential reforming writer, publicized a zealous enthusiasm for 31 Robert Walton, ‘Der Streit zwischen Thomas Erastus und Caspar Olevian . . . ’, Monatshefte für Evangelische Kirchengeschichte des Rheinlandes, 37–8 (1988–9), 205–11. 32 Thomas Erastus, The Theses of Erastus Touching Excommunication, trans. Robert Lee (Edinburgh, 1844), 73; Ruth Wesel-Roth, Thomas Erastus: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Reformierten Kirche und zur Lehre von der Staatssouveränität (Baden, 1954), 43–89. 33 The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd edn., ed. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (Oxford, 1997), 558; J. N. Figgis, ‘Erastus and Erastianism’, Journal of Theological Studies, 2 (1901), 66–101. 34 Émile Léonard, A History of Protestantism, ed. H. H. Rowley (2 vols., 1965–6), 295, 305–39. 35 Scarisbrick, Reformation; Haigh, English Reformations; Ethan H. Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), 29–60. Professor Shagan’s focus is different (on the popular mediation of the Reformation) but his ‘collaborationist’ model still casts the Tudor state as the engine of religious change. 36 E. T. Davies, Episcopacy and the Royal Supremacy in the Church of England in the XVI Century (Oxford, 1950), 8–10, 63–75; Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), 3–10; Skinner, Foundations: Reformation, 86–7, 91–108. 37 Marsilius of Padua, The Defence of Peace: lately translated out of Laten in to Englysshe with the Kynges moste gracyous priuilege, trans. William Marshall (1535); Watt, ‘Spiritual and Temporal Powers’, 419; Duffy, Stripping of the 38 Dickens, English Reformation, 23. Altars, 382.

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the ecclesiastical authority of the Godly magistrate in his The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528). Cromwell’s efforts to enlist Tyndale into Henry’s cause failed, but others, including Edward Fox, Richard Sampson, and Thomas Starkey, all composed Erastian polemics on the King’s behalf.39 The greatest coup, however, was Bishop Stephen Gardiner’s De Vera Obedientia, which defended the Royal Supremacy by borrowing from Marsilius of Padua and by abolishing the jurisdictional separation of Church and State, all while defending traditional Catholic theology.40 By the reign of Elizabeth, the English church was unambiguously dependent on statist ecclesiology and a pronounced hostility to clerical dualism. Defence of the Elizabethan church settlement, indeed, was aided by the first ever publication of Erastus’s Theses in 1589, apparently at the initiative of Archbishop Whitgift.41 No major apologist for the Elizabethan church dared to claim clerical authority on grounds other than royal mandate. Bishop John Jewel’s landmark Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1562) not only condemned Catholics for usurping temporal power, but also vigorously defended the role of reforming princes in governing the church.42 Such deference to the ecclesiastical prerogatives of monarchy strongly marked the writings of Jewel’s most famous student, Richard Hooker. Hooker’s Of the lawes of ecclesiastical politie (1593–7, 1648, 1682) defended episcopal church governance but based the authority of the bishops entirely on the power of Christian rulers.43 Ecclesiastical officers acted as overseers of the church and as instruments of the sovereign, not as the divinely legitimated governors of an independent spiritual sphere. Hobbes’s upbringing within the assertively Erastian ideological climate of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras would strongly influence his later published writings. In Leviathan, in Behemoth, and in more obscure works such as his verse Historia Ecclesiastica, Hobbes would consistently locate his own ecclesiology within the long tradition of Reformation Erastianism. Judaeo-Christian political history was, for Hobbes, a prolonged war between temporal sovereigns and clerical dualists. Abraham, first ‘Father of the Faithfull’, and his successors had ruled as covenanted leaders endowed with both spiritual and temporal authority. Moses served as Hobbes’s paradigmatic sovereign, controlling both temporal and spiritual power with awesome decisiveness. Moses’ sovereignty had faced a rebellion by Aaron on behalf of independent ‘Sacerdotall’ power. The crushing of this rebellion preserved Moses’ supremacy in religion, and the incident provided Hobbes with a model for his theory of civil war. ‘Is this not full Power’, marvelled Hobbes, ‘both temporall and spirituall, as they call it, that would divide it?’44 Christian monarchs, Hobbes asserted with a philo-Semitic tendency typical of Reformation Erastians, properly ruled as heirs of Moses.45 The Gospel had left the 39 William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. David Daniell (London, 2000), 36–58; Dickens, English 40 Shagan, Popular Politics, 47–50. Reformation, 74; Oakley, ‘Christian Obedience’, 176–81. 41 Figgis, ‘Erastianism’, 77. 42 John Jewel, The apology of the Church of England (translation of 1635), 140–56, 291–310. 43 Richard Hooker, Of the lawes of ecclesiastical politie. Eight Bookes (1611), 89–125. 44 Lev., 322–9. 45 Ibid. 329–30.

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Old Testament model of earthly sovereignty untouched. The Kingdom of God, as proclaimed by Jesus, did not belong to this world. Christ the Messiah would rule a temporal kingdom, but only after his second coming.46 Jesus Christ had bequeathed to his apostles no coercive authority, and he gave no mandate for the Christian church to consider itself spiritually sovereign, even under pagan rulers. According to Hobbes, Christ had not undermined the spiritual sovereignty of Jewish and Roman sovereigns, and had left the apostles only a power to teach.47 The primitive Christian church practised no excommunication, nor did it enforce any definitive scriptural interpretations.48 Only after the conversion of Constantine was coercive authority exercised by the Christian church, and then only by the will of the sovereign. The authority of the sovereign alone was held jure divino; priests ruled jure civili, at the sovereign’s will.49 Faced with Christian monarchies, the Western church began to assert a transnational political and intellectual overlordship. Pope Zachary’s deposing of Chilperic in favour of Pepin, and Pope Leo’s crowning of the Emperor Charlemagne, marked the progress of clerical ambitions.50 Clerical celibacy was used to exclude monarchs from the priesthood; excommunication and the confessional were fully exploited as instruments of clerical power. The dualist doctrine of separate spheres covered a seditious power grab by the Roman clergy. The highest pitch of clerical usurpation in Christendom, Hobbes wrote, was reached between the papal tenures of Popes Leo III in the eighth century and Innocent III in the thirteenth.51 At the council of Nicea, the church had already usurped from Constantine the power to judge heresy and determine orthodoxy. Next, by claiming the exclusive right to invest bishops, it had assumed control of the clerical estate throughout Europe. Pernicious, obscure doctrines such as transubstantiation were concocted. The purpose of these doctrines was not truth, but power: ‘I think that neither the preaching of friars nor monks, nor of parochial priests, tended to teach men what, but whom to believe. For the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people. And the end which the Pope had in multiplying sermons was no other but to prop and enlarge his own authority over all Christian Kings and States.’52 The church’s Byzantine doctrinal system of ‘mysteries’ was made even more shadowy with nebulous philosophical conceptions, mostly extracted from Aristotle but descended from the astronomers and conjurers of ancient Egypt.53 Peter Lombard, Duns Scotus, and other obscurantist schoolmen used such doctrines to propagate clerical power, and transformed the universities into hotbeds of seditious teaching.54 Hobbes was particularly sensitive to the supposedly pernicious influence of the papacy within medieval England. William the Conqueror, he argued, had erred disastrously by swearing ‘not to infringe the liberty of the Church’.55 The privileges thus secured—exemptions from royal law, 46 50 51 53 55

47 Lev., 334–7. 48 Ibid. 340–1, 348–50, 353–5. 49 Ibid. 374; Beh., 5–7. DC, 206–7. Beh., 12; Hobbes, Decameron Physiologicum, or Ten dialogues of natural philosophy (1678), 8. 52 Beh., 16. Beh., 12; HE, lines 1239–1809. 54 Beh., 17–19; HE, lines 1883–5. Ibid. 17; Decameron Physiologicum, 4–8; HE, lines 155–228. Lev., 222.

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appeals to Rome, tithes, the power to judge royal marriages, the power to grant indulgences—empowered an illegitimate spiritual authority within the kingdom.56 Hobbes’s later writings would linger angrily over particularly rancorous incidents in relations between the English monarchy and the papacy: Thomas Becket’s resistance to Henry II; assertions of church power against Edward III; the rebellion (‘raised by churchmen’) against John.57 The Reformation at last broke the relentless pattern of this history. Hobbes theorized that the historical rise and fall of dominant religions had been determined by recurring revulsion at clerical corruption.58 By the early sixteenth century, Christian clerical malfeasance had ripened into rot. The privileges of the church hung heavily, and it was Henry VIII who shook the branch. Hobbes understood the Reformation as a hard-headed power contest between temporal sovereigns and the church. Lutheranism provided a theological justification for the reclamation of spiritual authority by monarchs, but theology was not at the crux of the dispute. Sovereignty was the real prize. Hobbes cast Henry VIII and Elizabeth as the heroes of his Reformation history: proud monarchs both, and slayers of papal pretension.59 The circumstances that would motivate Thomas Hobbes to publish this historical interpretation will be treated later in this book. It is sufficient here to note that his condemnation of clerical dualism, and his celebration of the Tudor Reformation as a political act, were partly patterned after the Reformation polemic dominant during his youth. Hobbes was born in 1588, a year before the first publication of Erastus’s Theses. His father was a minister in the Elizabethan church when Hooker’s foundational Lawes of ecclesiastical politie appeared in print. As an adolescent, Hobbes was schooled by the local vicars of Westport and Malmesbury, the Reverends Evans and Latimer.60 At the age of 14, he matriculated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, which was headed during his five years there by the staunchly Protestant principals James Hussey and John Wilkinson.61 At Oxford Hobbes would have sworn allegiance to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Royal Supremacy. Little is definitively known of his formative years, but these bare facts serve to drive home an often overlooked point: Hobbes was part of the first generation of Englishmen raised in an entirely Protestant intellectual environment. He was educated in the era of the Church of England’s foundational theological and ecclesiological development. During Hobbes’s adulthood the reforming Erastianism of the English church would be challenged and modified, but his mind matured during the golden age of the Godly magistrate. For Queen Elizabeth and King James, and for the church over which they presided, the Royal Supremacy was a vital political fact. Indeed, in many ways the young Thomas Hobbes was ideally situated to be maximally saturated with the Erastian ideology of the era. He attended Oxford during a particular moment in the history of its religious sensibilities. 56 60

Beh., 7–11. ABL, i. 328–9.

57

Lev., 222; Beh., 14–18, 20. 61 Martinich, Hobbes, 8–12.

58

Lev., 85–7; DH, 80.

59

Beh., 18–21.

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The purging of Lombard and Scotus from the curriculum,62 and the enforcement of the Thirty-nine Articles and the Royal Supremacy, had occurred decades earlier, but by the reign of Elizabeth even residual Catholic sentiment at Oxford had been stamped out. As for challenges to Tudor Erastianism from the hot Protestant flank, Hobbes would have encountered little of this either. Cartwright’s Cambridge was the centre of Presbyterian resistance to the Elizabethan settlement. Although Oxford had indeed hosted some hot reformers (it had played a role in the Vestiarian Controversy), by the 1580s they had been reigned in. Hobbes arrived soon after the Chancellorship of Sir Christopher Hatton and during that of Thomas Sackville, both of whom were vigorous upholders of the Queen’s prerogative. By the end of the sixteenth century ‘the energies of protestants in Oxford were therefore expended in combating the lures of Rome rather than in attempts to change the 1559 church settlement’. Hobbes’s Oxford was the conformist university of Hooker and Jewel.63 There is little direct evidence of what religious texts Thomas Hobbes encountered at university, but the Oxford college libraries were certainly well stocked with the patristics, Reformation writings from Luther and Calvin to Bucer and Martyr, and English classics such as Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.64 Years later Hobbes would diligently locate his Erastian ecclesiology on the spectrum of these authorities. Patristic ecclesiology, dependent as it was on the ‘two-city’ ideal, was decisively rejected in Leviathan. Saint Cyprian and Saint Ambrose, the fathers who had formulated the church’s dualist ecclesiology, are each explicitly criticized in Leviathan. Hobbes would rebuke Cyprian for denying that the sovereign, by natural law, is the ‘Head, the Source, the Roote, and the sun’ from which church authority is derived.65 He would accuse Saint Ambrose of a ‘Capitall Crime’ for excommunicating the Emperor Theodosius.66 By contrast, Hobbes’s writings would pay regular homage to the Protestant (and proto-Protestant) writers who challenged the medieval church’s dualist traditions. His Historia Ecclesiastica would include a favourable allusion to the lay spiritualist and defier of popes, Valdes (‘Peter Waldo’).67 Many of Hobbes’s later writings would praise England’s earliest defender of the monarchy’s religious power, John Wycliffe, for setting ‘forth divers doctrines contrary to the determination of the Church of Rome’, and for vindicating Edward III’s sovereignty against clerical usurpation.68 Elsewhere Hobbes would remember that the ‘followers of Wiclif (called Lollards)’ were burned ‘for such Doctrines, as by the Church of England, ever since the first year of Queen El[izabeth], have been approved for 62 Although the late 16th c. saw some renewed interest in scholasticism and neo-Aristotelianism. C. B. Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston, Ont., 1983), 26–76. 63 Jennifer Loach, ‘Reformation Controversies’, in The History of the University of Oxford, iii: The Collegiate University, ed. James McConica (Oxford, 1986), 365–93; Penry Williams, ‘Elizabethan Oxford: State, Church, and 64 N. R. Ker, ‘The Provision of Books’, ibid. 448–55. University, 1558–1600’, ibid. 420–39. 65 Lev., 393; the single reference to Augustine in Leviathan is hostile (p. 434). 66 Ibid. 402. 67 HE, lines 2108, 2147–8. 68 Samuel Mintz, ‘Hobbes on the Law of Heresy: A New Manuscript’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 29 (1968), 409–14 at 412; HE, lines 2144–69.

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Godly Doctrines, and no doubt were Godly then’.69 Luther would function as the hero of Hobbes’s Historia Ecclesiastica, a righteous Saxon come to expose the frauds of Rome.70 In Behemoth Hobbes would commend the doctrines of Luther for having aided the reforms of both Henry VIII and Edward VI, and for preventing any fresh ‘rebellion’ on behalf of the Pope.71 Hobbes thus consistently located his Erastian theory of the church within the longue durée of anti-dualist Protestant ecclesiology. This no doubt reflected his religious education. More specifically, Hobbes’s later writings would gesture towards the particularly anti-Catholic and Erastian climate of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras. A host of circumstances made the decades of Hobbes’s young adulthood a hothouse era for the production of anti-Catholic polemic. English Protestants were challenged by the invigorated apologetical efforts inspired by the Tridentine renewal and composed by luminaries such as the Jesuit Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the ecclesiastical historian Cardinal Caesar Baronius, and the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez. These churchmen composed ringing endorsements of transnational papal power that relied on a Thomistic understanding of the church. Their interlocutors were, of course, theological Protestants, but they also directed their pens against advocates of national churches governed by temporal sovereigns. This latter category most notably included English Erastians and French ‘Gallican’ Catholics. From the 1580s through the first decade of the seventeenth century, a series of religious conflicts served to clarify the theoretical fault lines between the ultramontane papalism of the Jesuits and the ecclesiological statism of English and French politiques: the zealous papalism of the French Holy League; the French wars of religion; the assassinations of Henry III and Henry IV; the excommunication of Queen Elizabeth; and Jesuit resistance to the Oath of Allegiance promulgated by James I after the Gunpowder Plot. Within the context of these events, works such as Bellarmine’s De Summo Pontifice (1586) and Suárez’s Defensio Fidei (1613) defended the ecclesiological stance of the papacy. These in turn triggered angry rejoinders by the Church of England and by French anti-papalists, both Huguenot and Gallican Catholic.72 This barrage of polemic constituted the context in which Thomas Hobbes received his religious education. Oxford churned out works against Bellarmine and his colleagues, such as De Romanae Ecclesiae Idolatria (1596) by the eventual president of Corpus Christi, John Rainolds. After departing Oxford and entering the service of William Cavendish, Baron of Hardwick, as tutor for his son in 1608, Hobbes had access to a library stocked with literature against the papal advocates.73 Hobbes was a primary patron of the Cavendish library, and thus almost certainly consumed much of the anti-Catholic literature within 69 Hobbes, A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, ed. Joseph Cropsey 70 HE, lines 1625–8, 2177–220. (Chicago, 1997), 127. 71 Beh., 18–20. 72 J. H. Salmon, ‘Catholic Resistance Theory, Ultramontanism, and the Royalist Response, 1580–1620’, in CHPT, 219–50; Skinner, Foundation: Reformation, 144–7. 73 Linda Levy Peck, ‘Constructing a New Context for Hobbes Studies’, in Howard Nenner (ed.), Politics and the Political Imagination in Later Stuart Britain (Rochester, NY, 1997), 172–4.

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it.74 If his later published writings carefully positioned him within the broad sweep of medieval Christian ecclesiology, they were also marked by the influence of these more immediate ecclesiological controversies of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Both Behemoth and Leviathan would contain angry denunciations of Suárez as a latter-day master of ‘school-divinity’ that was designed not to elucidate truth but to uphold papal authority.75 More significantly, a central chapter of Leviathan (ch. 42, ‘Of Power Ecclesiastical’) would be organized as a point-by-point rejoinder to De Summo Pontifice by Bellarmine, that ‘Champion of the Papacy, against all other Christian Princes, and States’.76 Bellarmine had taken Henry VIII as a particular target, associating him with the pro-magisterial ecclesiology of Johannes Brenz, and had countered with the dualist tradition of the church fathers.77 This made him, as we shall see, an ideal foil for Hobbes’s own strident Erastian ecclesiology.78 Indeed, polemical works against Bellarmine dating from the early seventeenth century—by both English and French authors—exerted a lasting influence on Thomas Hobbes. In Behemoth he recalled that ‘Monsieur Mornay du Plessis, and Dr. Morton, Bishop of Durham, writing of the progress of the Pope’s power and intituling their books, one of them, “The Mystery of Iniquity”, the other, “The Grand Imposture”, were both in the right. For I believe there was never such another cheat in the world, and I wonder that the King and States of Christendom never perceived it.’79 Thomas Morton, successively bishop of Chester, Lichfield, and Durham, was a prominent theologian and favourite of James I. A friend of Hooker’s, Morton was the sort of moderate Erastian divine that dominated the Elizabethan and Jacobean church.80 As a theologian he made his mark as an antiCatholic polemicist. That the young Thomas Hobbes knew of Morton and his hostility to the papal church can be established from his early correspondence.81 The allusion in Behemoth pays tribute to Morton’s The Grand Imposture of the (now) Church of Rome, a 1626 work in which the bishop attacked Bellarmine, Baronius, and others for the ‘witcherie’ and ‘imposterous inchantment’ used to justify the Roman Church’s universalist aspirations.82 The work was a fairly standard Erastian attack on papal monarchists and their post-Tridentine defenders for a ‘dedignifying and abasing of Princes’. Dedicated to Charles I, Morton’s defence of the ‘Regall Supremacie’ over the church was a typical production of the English Church during Hobbes’s formative years.83 Hobbes’s long memory of the work suggests that the Erastian ecclesiology of the early Stuart church exerted considerable influence on his developing religious opinions. 74

75 Beh., 17–18; Lev., 59. 76 Lev., 338–402. Malcolm, Aspects, 458 n. 3, citing R. Talaska. Cardinal Bellarmine, De Summo Pontifice, vol. 1 in Roberti Cardinalis Bellarmini Omnia Opera (Naples, 1956), 311, 319–20. 78 Sommerville, Hobbes in Context, 120–34; Patricia Springborg, ‘Hobbes, Heresy and the Historica Ecclesiastica’, 79 Beh., 20–1. Journal of the History of Ideas, 55 (1994), 553–71. 80 Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990), 253–62. 81 Mason to Hobbes, 10 Dec. 1622, Corr., 3. 82 Thomas Morton, The Grand Imposture of the (now) Church of Rome, manifested in the one Article of the now Roman Creed, viz. ‘The Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church, without whom there is no Salvation’ (1626), 18–29. 83 Ibid., preface, 2, 144–58. 77

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That French anti-papal writings of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century also influenced Hobbes is indicated by his allusion to Philippe du Plessis Mornay’s Mysterium iniquitatis of 1611, a massive history of the papacy written against Bellarmine and Baronius and intended to prove that the pope was the antiChrist. Mornay was a leader of the Huguenot resistance and a counsellor to Henry of Navarre during the French wars of religion. His anti-Catholic polemic was translated into English for well-disposed Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences.84 A translation of his Mysterie of Iniquitie was published in London in 1612. Though Mornay’s resistance theory undoubtedly repelled Hobbes, The Mysterie of Iniquitie proved very much to his liking. The text exhaustively detailed the ‘progression’ of papal power from the high Middle Ages to the Reformation, and concluded that the papacy represented the anti-Christ foretold in Revelation, a Caligula at the seat of the church.85 The work relentlessly detailed the papal usurpation of the authority of emperors and kings, and the heroic efforts of European princes to reclaim their lost patrimony.86 That such a work influenced Hobbes’s own historical understanding in general terms is hardly surprising, and he may well have borrowed specific historical details from Mornay’s voluminous tome.87 Even Hobbes’s repeated tributes to John Wycliffe can be read as evocations of the anti-clerical polemics of his young adulthood. The first decade of the seventeenth century witnessed a number of publications intended to defend Wycliffe from the ‘calumnations’ of the Jesuit Robert Parsons, among others. These tracts recalled Wycliffe as a forerunner of Luther and particularly celebrated his appeals to parliament and King in defiance of the jurisdiction of the papacy.88 Thomas James, Keeper of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, published an apology in which he lauded Wycliffe’s defence of the ‘king’s Regaltie’ against the ‘Pope’s Supremacie’. Indeed, Hobbes’s later assertion that Wycliffe anticipated the orthodox teachings of the Church of England echoed James’s tract virtually word for word.89 More could be said, but these textual allusions in Hobbes’s later writings demonstrate the abiding influence over him of the Protestant anti-Catholic polemic of his youth. Hobbes consistently framed his Erastian ecclesiology within a Protestant context, and this has lent credence to the thesis that he is best understood as a kind of late Reformation theorist.90 But two qualifiers must be made. First, though Hobbes made rhetorical appeals to Reformation ecclesiological traditions, the 84

Salmon, ‘Catholic Resistance Theory’, 232–3. Phillipe du Plessis Mornay, The Mysterie of Iniquitie . . . , trans. Samson Lennard (1612), 2, 656. 86 Ibid. 651–5. 87 For instance, on the use of clerical celibacy against the English monarchy, or on Innocent III’s role in the troubles of King John. Ibid. 290, 343 and Beh., 14, 18. 88 Two short treatises, against the orders of the begging friars, compiled by that famous doctour of the Church, and preacher of Gods word John Wickliffe (1608), epistle dedicatory. 89 Compare James: ‘he maintained the same doctrine then, which the Church of England now (being guided by the Holy Ghost and sacred writings of Scripture and Fathers) doth professe’, with Hobbes, Dialogue of the Common Laws, 127; Thomas James, An apologie for John Wickliffe shewing his conformitie with the now Church of England . . . (1608), epistle dedicatory. 90 Mark Whitaker, ‘Hobbes’s View of the Reformation’, History of Political Thought, 9 (1988), 45–58; Patricia Springborg, ‘Leviathan and the Problem of Ecclesiastical Authority’, Political Theory, 3 (1975), 289–301; Eldon Eisenach, ‘Hobbes on Church, State, and Religion’, History of Political Thought, 3 (1982), 215–37; J. P. Martinich, The Two Gods of the Leviathan (Cambridge, 1992), ch. 10. 85

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extremity of his own Erastianism distinguished him from virtually all Protestant theorists of the church. Traditional Erastians typically distinguished jurisdictional and spiritual (sacramental) powers, ceding the former to temporal magistrates but reserving some attenuated version of the latter for the clergy. Hobbes obliterated this distinction. The Hobbesian sovereign would act as absolute lord of the commonwealth’s spiritual life, an archbishop with his dominion as his diocese.91 The sovereign might choose to delegate sacerdotal powers to a priesthood, but he need not do so and could execute those powers personally if he so desired.92 The sovereign, Hobbes would insist in Leviathan, had the right to execute all priestly offices: to preach, to baptize, to consecrate ministers, to administer the sacraments.93 Hobbes would go so far as to cede control of scriptural interpretation to the sovereign. The control of Scripture had, Hobbes would come to believe, empowered clerical usurpations of temporal sovereignty throughout history. Manipulating scriptural interpretation, the churchmen thus ‘endeavoured to passe their Doctrine, not for Counsell, and Information, as Preachers, but for Laws, as absolute Governours’.94 Hobbes would seek to defeat this effort by ceding the power of scriptural interpretation to the sovereign.95 In short, Hobbes would fully surrender to the sovereign not just jurisdictional power and disciplinary authority, but spiritual functions and the power to fix revelation itself. The extreme statism of his ecclesiology would outstrip even the most uncompromising Erastians within the Protestant ecclesiological tradition. But the most serious problem with any effort to portray Hobbes as a Protestant political theorist is the general failure to consider his ecclesiology in the light of his broader theory of religion. It is not enough to place Hobbes within the Erastian tradition formally, or schematically, without accounting for his underlying estimation of Christianity. If Hobbes displayed some affinity with Protestant Erastianism, his religious thought was animated by a religious scepticism that rendered this affinity superficial. Furthermore, his deference to the religious authority of the state did not follow from a sincere concern for Godly reform, but from a realist’s sense of the political dangers of religious feeling. Hobbes developed this psychological understanding of religious belief and instrumental view of religious power not within a Protestant context, but within the context of Machiavellian humanism.

ii Once his reputation had been established, it would become a stock charge among Hobbes’s many critics that he was an atheist. Hobbes ardently denied this, and modern commentators have differed starkly as to the merits of his denial. One school of thought—over which Howard Warrender long presided—has held that Hobbesian philosophy required a God who would divinely undergird the natural law, thus obliging humans to exit the state of nature and enter binding social 91 95

92 EL, 160–2. Beh., 14. Beh., 54–5; Lev., 353–62.

93

Lev., 374–5; DH, 75–9.

94

Lev., 265–7.

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contracts.96 There is some textual support for this view, although critics have successfully demonstrated that it is slender support indeed.97 Warrender’s critics have also argued that Hobbes’s theory of political obligation collapses almost entirely into a theory of psychological motivation, which removes it from the tradition of divine natural-law theory.98 In any case, whatever the merits of Warrender’s analysis, it could only establish Hobbes’s theism, not his opinion of Christian theology. As innumerable contextualists have observed, in the early modern world ‘atheism’ was not a charge limited to those who literally denied the existence of God. It was also levelled against all traces of pantheism, deism, and anti-Trinitarian heresy. Hobbes’s contemporary critics operated with this broader definition of atheism. Furthermore, Hobbes himself did not simply deny that he was an atheist (in the narrow sense), but also insisted that he was a believer in Christian revelation. Thus, for any contextual study of Hobbes’s religious views, the integrity of his Christianity is decidedly more relevant than his mere theism.99 Here there exists a great deal more scholarly consensus. To be sure, a few efforts have been made to present Hobbes as a Christian. Scholars such as F. C. Hood and A. P. Martinich— relying on aspects of the Warrender thesis, a belief in the sincerity of Hobbes’s scriptural interpretation, and his mechanistic determinism—have presented Hobbes as a predestinarian Christian, a kind of idiosyncratic Calvinist.100 More will be said below doubting the cogency of this theological reading of Hobbes’s determinism; it suffices here to note that the portrait of Hobbes as a staunchly voluntarist Christian has not proven particularly influential. Such an interpretation ignores some of his more minor writings (including his all but explicitly antiTrinitarian poem Historia Ecclesiastica), and assumes the complete sincerity of his often highly dubious scriptural interpretation and appeals to patristic authority. These assumptions, however, have been undermined by scholarship convincingly demonstrating the highly rhetorical nature of Hobbes’s religious writing,101 the scepticism implicit in his understanding of Scripture,102 and the haphazard nature of his appeals to traditional religious authorities.103 96 A. E. Taylor, ‘The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes’, in Keith Brown (ed.), Hobbes Studies (Cambridge, 1965), 185–236; Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation (Oxford, 1957), 3–10, 97, 102, 140. 97 Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford, 1989), 109–10; Thomas Nagel, ‘Hobbes’s Concept of Obligation’, Philosophical Review, 68 (1959), 68–83 at 69, 75–6; Paul D. Cooke, Hobbes and Christianity: Reassessing the Bible in ‘Leviathan’ (Landham, MD. 1996), chs. 3–4. 98 Bobbio, Hobbes and Natural Law, 44, 122; C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962), 15–19. 99 For Hobbes as a proto-deist, see Paul L. Johnson, ‘Hobbes’s Anglican Doctrine of Salvation’, in Ralph Ross et al. (eds.), Thomas Hobbes in his Time (Minneapolis, 1974), 102–28; Herbert Schneider, ‘The Piety of Hobbes’, ibid. 84–101 at 84–7, 95–101. 100 F. C. Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 1964), 11–13, 234; Martinich, Two Gods of Leviathan, 9, 33, 83, 208, 333–4; Leo Damrosch, ‘Hobbes as Reformation Theologian: Implications of the Free-Will Controversy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 40 (1979), 339–52. 101 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), 1–6, 13–14; David Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton, 1986), 27–9, 67, 88. 102 Edwin Curley, ‘ “I Durst not write so Boldly”, or How to read Hobbes’s Theological–Political Treatise’, in Daniela Bostrenghi (ed.), Hobbes e Spinoza: Scienza e politica (Naples, 1992). 103 Arrigo Pacchi, ‘Hobbes and the Problem of God’, in G. A. J. Rogers and Alan Ryan (eds.), Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 1988), 171–87; R. W. Hepburn, ‘Hobbes on the Knowledge of God’, in Maurice Cranston (ed.), Hobbes and Rousseau: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City, NJ, 1972), 85–109.

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Leaving aside his potential theism, it proves virtually impossible to read Hobbes as the orthodox, Trinitarian Christian he claimed to be. Christian theology is, of course, dependent on revealed knowledge embodied in divine scripture and historic miracles. Hobbes keenly understood this, but—in contradistinction to contemporaries such as Pascal—his mature religious writings would launch a sustained attack on the sources of Christian revelation: miracles and the Scriptures. Hobbes would be remarkably frank in refusing to admit that revelation might provide religious ‘knowledge’. In his Elements of Law, for instance, he would assert that all knowledge was based on sensorially perceived ‘evidence’. Even science (the use of reason to form general propositions), though distinct from raw sensory knowledge, was dependent on sensory perception in the first instance.104 Any mental discourse that began not with definitions of sensory perceptions but with assumed (or ‘revealed’) propositions could not result in knowledge but merely in opinion. If the propositions that constituted mental discourse were based upon the assertions of another, this constituted belief or faith, which was even more distant from reason than opinion. Hobbes understood all disputes about Christianity as matters not of knowledge, or even of opinion, but of belief or faith in a given human authority.105 Throughout his life Hobbes harboured a deep concern about the capacity to ‘feign’ sanctity and concoct revealed wisdom. It was, he would argue in Leviathan, wrongheaded to assert ‘that Faith and Sanctity are not to be attained by Study and Reason, but by supernaturall Inspiration, or Infusion’.106 On the other hand, ‘the Mysteries of the Christian Religion’ were ‘above Reason’.107 This dilemma was resolved by Hobbes’s assertion that right reason would lead individuals to believe, or have faith, in proper authority (i.e. human sovereigns). As for sources of revealed knowledge originating outside of such authority, Hobbes’s writings consistently cultivated a scepticism about their integrity. Hobbes did affirm at times that miracles distinguished true religious prophets. But, as other commentators have observed, his mature understanding of miracles was ‘shot through with scepticism’.108 Rather than accept the orthodox definition of miracles as a divine superseding of the natural law, Hobbes defined miracles as events ‘rarely produced’, or events that men could only ‘imagine’ to have been produced by the ‘immediate hand of God’.109 Such a definition opened up the possibility that miracles were merely unusual natural occurrences that exceeded the scientific understanding of their witnesses. It was, in any case, not the evidentiary value of miracles that interested Hobbes, but their utility. The end of miracles, he would write, was ‘for the procuring of credit to Gods Messengers, Ministers, and Prophets’.110 In its chapter on miracles, Leviathan eschewed discussion of the resurrection and instead focused attention on the miracles of the sovereign Moses. Hobbes highlighted the passage in Exodus when Moses’ ‘true’ miracles are 104

105 Ibid. 68–9; Lev., 48–9. 106 Lev., 223. 107 Ibid. 233. EL, 40–1. Sommerville, Hobbes in Context, 144–5. 109 Lev., 300–1; Edwin Curley, ‘Calvin and Hobbes, or, Hobbes as an Orthodox Christian’, Journal of the History of 110 Lev., 301. Philosophy, 34 (1996), 257–83 at 261–2. 108

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contrasted with the identical wonders performed by Egyptian conjurers. The traditional lesson taken from this passage was that Moses, because finally able to perform wonders beyond the conjurers’ ability, demonstrated the power of the true God. Hobbes ignored those miracles that the conjurers failed to achieve and left their respective ‘wonders’ implicitly equal with those of Moses, distinguished only by the status of their agents. Moses, Lord of the Jews, enjoyed the power to sanctify his wonders; the conjurers did not enjoy this power. The ‘Soveraign Governour of Gods people’ was to be consulted before credit was given a prophet or miracle.111 This subordination of miracles to the sovereign ran against the orthodox reading of miracles as incontrovertible evidence of God’s power. Hobbes’s discussion of miracles thus conformed with his broader understanding of revelation as a phenomenon cultivating belief in authority rather than producing true knowledge. His treatment of Scripture pointed in a similar direction. In chapter 33 of Leviathan, Hobbes presented one of early modern Europe’s most modern works of scriptural hermeneutics. His discussion was beset with scepticism about the textual integrity of Scripture. Posterity could not know who wrote the Scriptures, he insisted, when they wrote them, or for what purpose. He denied, for instance, that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, and was among the first to attribute it to the scribe Ezra. The book of Joshua, Hobbes insisted, was written long after his death. Judges and Ruth were composed years after the end of the captivity. The book of Job was not a history at all but a philosophical treatise on the question of good and evil. Psalms and Proverbs were compilations with no authorial consistency or integrity.112 Hobbes was constantly aware of the political uses of Scripture. There was a suspicious gap between the composition of the books of the New Testament and their reception by the Church as canonical. Scripture was first received by the Church during the Council of Laodicea in AD 364, at which time, Hobbes noted darkly, ‘ambition had so far prevailed on some Doctors of the Church as no more to esteem Emperours, though Christian, for the Shepherds of the people, but for sheep’. Much Scripture, particularly the Old Testament, Hobbes accepted as a vaguely accurate (if corrupted) account of Jewish history. But we could not know, he insisted, that the entirety of Scripture had not been falsified while in ecclesiastical hands. The question was moot in any case. What was important was not truth but authority. The pertinent issue was not judging revelation, but ascertaining by what authority purported revelation was made law.113 Much more could be said on this subject, but it is essential to recognize that Hobbes’s mature writings would be marked by a rejection of revelation that dramatically alienated him from the Christian theological tradition. Despite the copious scriptural criticism found in certain of his later writings (the sincerity of which is precisely at issue), Hobbes did not understand religion as a body of revelation, but as an aspect of human psychology. 111

Ibid. 305–6. Ibid. 259–65; Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia, 1985), 220–2; Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Ezra, and the Bible: History of a Subversive Idea’, in 113 Lev., 260–9; 458–9. Aspects, 383–431. 112

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In Leviathan, Hobbes devised a strikingly modern ‘projection’ theory of religion. Religion grew from basic mental seeds, chief among which were a driving curiosity about the cause of all things and a deep anxiety about the future. The desire to know causes and effects was basic to all regulated ‘Mentall Discourse’, but religion went beyond this and attempted to ascertain the first cause and the final effect. This was impossible, as causal relations could only be understood by sensory interactions with matter.114 Ultimate causes and effects were not subject to such interactions. Nevertheless, the desire for such knowledge—a ‘perpetuall feare’—induced humans to postulate an ‘invisible power’ that would both explain human origins and determine the future. This invisible power was in turn assumed to be incorporeal and above human understanding. It was reverenced in the same way powerful men were reverenced, with gifts, gratitude, and submission.115 The religious impulse was thus entirely natural but not reasonable. It eschewed the sensible world and vainly sought to know ‘second causes’.116 Gods were fears ‘personated’, invisible entities imagined to explain the caprices of material existence.117 Men did not fear God directly, rather they feared the unknown, and they personified this fear into a supernatural, incorporeal, and omnipotent entity. Fear formed ‘in every man his own religion: which hath place in the nature of man before Civill Society’.118 Reason did not lead humans to a conception of God. Likewise the ‘Attributes which we give to God’ were not aspects of ‘Philosophicall Truth’ but rather of ‘Pious Intention’.119 They had merely instrumental value. Hobbes’s projection theory of religion might have been reconciled with a sincere Christianity if it had been paired with a faith in revelation. Indeed, in Leviathan he claimed that though Christianity and pagan religions were similarly motivated by fear, the former was true because it was created ‘by God’s commandment and direction’.120 However, this assurance was fatally undermined by Hobbes’s deep scepticism about all revealed sources of divine ‘commandment and direction’. Hobbesian religious logic would oscillate around the following paradox: religion was properly ordered by the sovereign according to revelation, but revelation itself was often dubious and always dependent on sovereign authority for its obliging status. Hobbes left nothing other than the volition of sovereigns for distinguishing the religions of history. If religion was a fear of invisible power ‘feigned by the mind or imagined from tales publiquely allowed’, superstition was merely a similar belief in tales not ‘publiquely allowed’.121 Hobbes’s fully developed religious thinking was thus built on two propositions: a belief (potentially compatible with sincere Christianity) in the psychological necessity of religion; and a profound scepticism (incompatible with Christianity) of revealed knowledge. To these foundational points must be added a third consideration: Hobbes’s constantly reiterated conviction that elemental features of Christian metaphysics were irreconcilable with his own political philosophy. 114 119

Lev., 20–1, 31–2. Ibid. 252.

120

115 Ibid. 75–80. Ibid. 79, 283–5.

116 121

Ibid. 78–9. Ibid. 41–2.

117

Ibid. 114.

118

Ibid. 99.

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Hobbes’s civil science depended on the fear of death as the chief psychological force motivating humans to accept social constraint. If the fear of death was not the most basic of all fears, then it would not motivate naturally anti-social individuals into ordered society. Christianity, by promising eternal salvation and threatening eternal damnation, trumped the mere fear of death. Christian justice was transcendent, otherworldly, and eternal. It short-circuited the logic of a political theory in which the war of all against all was the ultimate evil, and civil stability the ultimate good.122 ‘For if one sovereign commands him to do something under penalty of natural death’, Hobbes wrote, and another forbids it under pain of eternal death, and both have right on their sides, it follows not only that innocent citizens may rightly be punished, but that the commonwealth is radically undermined. For no one can serve two masters; and the one to whom we believe that obedience is due, under fear of damnation, is no less a Master than the one to whom obedience is due through fear of temporal death, but rather more.123

Hobbes’s discomfort with Christian soteriology would prove centrally important in his mature religious writings. Most critically, it has been identified by scholars as the motivation for many of the heterodox theological opinions expressed in Leviathan. The controversial theology of Leviathan, notorious in Hobbes’s later decades, particularly targeted those features of Christianity—the afterlife, the spiritual soul, the divinity of Christ—that most threatened the psychological mechanisms of his political theory. Much could be said on this point, but a few examples will suffice. Leviathan employs the terms ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’, but recasts them as earthly phenomena. Conceding the novelty of his proposition, Hobbes argued that eternal life in Scripture did not refer to life ‘in the heavens’ but rather signified the promise of eternal life on earth. Salvation was the promise of an endless delivery from the perils of the state of nature. Hobbes expended even more energy debunking traditional concepts of demons, purgatory, and hell itself. Leviathan dismissed these as heathen and Aristotelian notions. Originally a corrupt pagan art, demonology had been co-opted by the Jews. Jesus, Hobbes claimed, spoke of demons only metaphorically, but Christian clergy found the concepts of possession and damnation useful as props to their power.124 He argued, with scant scriptural foundation, that the torments of hell were temporary, not eternal.125 Christian conceptions of salvation and damnation were profoundly at odds with Hobbes’s vehement materialism, his rejection of all ‘substances incorporeall’, and his insistence that references to the ‘spirit of God’ were absurdities of speech.126 Perhaps Hobbes’s boldest effort to defuse the threat of Christian soteriology was his adoption of the mortalist heresy. Mortalism held that the soul died with the body, and thus would only live eternally in bodily form after the second coming of Christ. This, it has been convincingly argued, served to 122 Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Genesis, trans. Elsa Sinclair (Chicago, 1984), 19–21; 123 DC, 80; Lev., 227; Beh., 14–15. Cooke, Hobbes and Christianity, 46–58. 124 Lev., 306–7, 418–19, 441–4; Hobbes pointedly equated metaphors with lies. Lev., 25–6. 125 Curley, ‘Calvin and Hobbes’, 25–6. 126 Lev., 269–74.

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delay divine judgement of individuals to an almost unimaginable point in the future, and thus further thwarted the challenge posed by eternity to Hobbes’s political theory.127 Against the Christian understanding of the Kingdom of God as the perfect and invisible unity of the saints, Hobbes understood it as a literal kingdom on earth, a series of polities—first Israel, now the Christian commonwealths—passing through history. The high priests of these kingdoms were temporal sovereigns. The ‘holy’ was the public power of the state, and the sacrament was a sign of entry into the commonwealth.128 Abraham, Moses, David, and even Jesus figure in Hobbes’s writings as essentially political figures. Revelation and the Scriptures all ‘conspire[d] to one and the same end, which is the setting forth of the Rights of the Kingdome of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost’. But Hobbes would undermine this gesture towards Trinitarianism by defining the Trinity in a remarkably earthly and political manner. His Trinity consisted of Moses (God the father), Jesus (the son), and the Spirit in the ‘apostolic successors’ (Kings). It was thus a Trinity of human ‘personators’.129 Hobbes was exceptionally reticent on the matter of Christ’s divinity and resurrection. He insisted that Christians must declare a belief in Jesus as the Messiah, but he construed the term ‘Messiah’ as a worldly office, and tended to speak of Christ as a ‘sovereign prophet’ rather than a divinity. Hobbes’s Historia Ecclesiastica is shot through with scepticism about the formation of Trinitarian orthodoxy.130 As for Christ’s teachings, Hobbes consistently interpreted them as affirmations of the Mosaic paradigm, upholding a fundamental deference to the religious powers of temporal sovereigns.131 Thus, the best scholarship on Hobbes’s mature religious views, if somewhat divided as to his potential atheism, has reached a consensus on his hostility to revelation, his rejection of traditional Christian soteriology, and his disbelief in Trinitarian orthodoxy. Nor did Hobbes find it possible to keep this scepticism entirely hidden. His conviction that religion was psychologically irresistible, combined with his belief that Christian orthodoxy undermined his own philosophy, forced him to publish a dangerously heretical recasting of Christian dogma. He did not publish these heresies as an end in themselves, but to reconcile his civil science with a hegemonic Christianity that was the imperfect but inevitable object of early modern religious instincts. In order to counter the political threat posed by religion, sovereigns needed to control not just the jurisdictional power of the church, but the content of religious doctrine as well. The theology of Leviathan was intended to be both sufficiently Christian to attract the allegiance of the philosophically unsophisticated, and sufficiently detached from those aspects of Christianity that were irretrievably incompatible with sound civil science. In this sense Hobbes’s mature theological project was to prove fundamentally esoteric in nature. 127

128 Lev., 280–6. David Johnston, ‘Hobbes’s Mortalism’, History of Political Thought, 10 (1989), 648–63. Ibid. 266, 339–41; D. H. J. Warner, ‘Hobbes’s Interpretation of the Doctrine of the Trinity’, Journal of Religious History, 5–6 (1969–70), 299–313; Curley, ‘Calvin and Hobbes’, 265–9. 130 On which see Blount to Hobbes, 1678, Corr., 759–62. 131 Lev., 331–8; Cooke, Hobbes and Christianity, 148–52. 129

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This assertion will raise the hackles of those suspicious of the Straussian habit of regarding esotericism as an inevitable characteristic of great minds. A fixation on esotericism is doubtless a dangerous interpretative habit, one capable of magically transforming textual ambiguities into secret subtleties.132 However, whatever the shortcomings of Strauss’s hermeneutic technique, his specific thesis that Thomas Hobbes wrote esoterically on religious questions has received considerable support from unexpected quarters. Most notably, in his contextual study of Hobbes’s shifting response to classical rhetoric, Quentin Skinner has concluded that Hobbes’s later writings were marked by a strategic employment of irony and other rhetorical techniques. This was especially true when he wrote on theological matters, and Professor Skinner’s conclusion on this point has been confirmed by other scholarship.133 Those hostile to the thesis that Hobbes wrote esoterically (or ‘rhetorically’) on religion have responded by defending his courage and intellectual honesty.134 Such rejoinders utterly miss the essential point. Esoteric writing is not always a mere means to protect nervous authors from persecution. Esotericism can also serve as a strategy of composition designed to render a single work cogent to different and incompatible audiences. It can thus be motivated less by the timidity of authors than by the intellectual or psychological profile of diverse readers.135 There is a great deal of evidence that this was true in the case of Thomas Hobbes, particularly in Leviathan. Hobbes had two ends in writing Leviathan. First, he intended the work to educate rulers in civil science; secondly, he designed the book to serve as a pedagogical tool inculcating obedience among political subjects. Attaining both of these aims with a single text required him to employ esoteric or rhetorical compositional strategies. For enlightened readers (particularly sovereigns), Hobbes needed to undercut Christianity in order to expose the true foundations of politics. But his doctrines would only be palatable for general consumption if sweetened with a certain elusiveness on religious questions. The ambiguity of Hobbesian theology was also intended to preserve the utility of Christianity as a civil religion. The task of undermining Christianity while preserving its instrumental value, rather than Hobbes’s lack of intellectual courage, explains the esoteric qualities of Leviathan. Recourse to the distinction between the enlightened and the vulgar was a demonstrable feature of Hobbes’s mentality. There are some designs of the prince, he intimated to a friend in 1622, of which ‘it becomes us to be ignorant’.136 In 1636 he worried that public controversy over the Sabbath would ‘put such Thoughts 132

Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding’, in Visions, i. 71. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 6, 13, 216; Curley, ‘ “I Durst not write so Boldly” ’, 497–8; Johnston, Rhetoric of Leviathan, 27–9, 67, 88. 134 Martinich, Two Gods of Leviathan, 31; K. C. Brown, ‘Hobbes’s Grounds for Belief in a Deity’, Philosophy, 37 (1962), 339–40; J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Time, History, and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes’, in Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought (New York, 1971), 148–201 at 161; Howard Warrender, ‘Political Theory and Historiography: A Reply to Professor Skinner on Hobbes’, Historical Journal, 22 (1979), 931–40 at 936. 135 David Wootton, ‘New Histories of Atheism’, in Michael Hunter and David Wootton (eds.), Atheism from the 136 Mason to Hobbes, 10 Dec. 1622, Corr., 3. Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1992), 13–53 at 36. 133

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into the Heads of vulgar People, as will conferre little to their good Life’.137 Later in the decade he and Kenelm Digby discussed the religious ‘gullibility of some gentle and piously weak-natured souls’, and spoke of the ‘apprehensions of all men’, the ‘vulgar as well as the learned’.138 Hobbes’s political philosophy posited an unbridgeable divide between sovereigns and subjects. Sovereign ethics and popular ethics existed in two entirely separate realms.139 Throughout Leviathan Hobbes maintained a distinction between the wise and the vulgar. His discussion of miracles, for instance, contrasted ‘ignorant and superstitious men’ with those who controlled religion ‘by confederacy and secret intelligence’.140 Hobbes was thus constantly attentive to the varying capacities of his readers. In Leviathan he frankly confessed that his work was intended to serve different purposes for different audiences. He conceded that the doctrines of Leviathan might unsettle the ‘Western parts’ of the world, but he placed his hopes in an enlightened prince. ‘I recover some hope’, he wrote, that one time or other, this writing of mine, may fall into the hands of a Soveraign, who will consider it himselfe, (for it is short, and I think clear), without the help of any interessed, or envious Interpreter; and by the exercise of entire Soveraignty, in protecting the Publique teaching of it, convert this Truth of Speculation, into the Utility of Practice.141

The context for this passage will be considered below, but suffice it here to note that Hobbes intended Leviathan, on one level, as a guidebook for sovereigns. England required another Henry VIII, willing to reinvigorate the undivided sovereignty of the state and tame the clergy and the universities. Wise monarchs would use religion not according to divine direction as determined by the clergy, but in the service of their own authority. Sovereigns needed to absorb the basic religious lesson of Leviathan: the ‘secret working of God’ was not ‘Naturall power’ but ‘Instrumentall power’, not true but useful.142 But if Leviathan was written on one level to enlighten sovereigns, it was also a body of political dogma intended for a broader audience. ‘Common people’, Hobbes wrote in Behemoth, ‘know nothing of right or wrong by their own meditation; they must therefore be taught the grounds of their duty’.143 Hobbes’s new ‘science of justice’ would prevail only if it were propagated in the universities and churches. Proper civil science had been long neglected by the clergy, and sovereigns had disastrously indulged this negligence.144 The universities, he warned, ‘yet retain a relish of that subtile liquor, wherever they were first seasoned, against the Civill Authority’.145 England’s pulpits had been commandeered by ‘those who want supreme power in the kingdom to belong to an ecclesiastical in civil form’.146 To counter these ‘divine disputers’, Hobbes urged sovereigns to exploit Leviathan. The doctrines of Leviathan should be taught in the universities and preached from the pulpits. The people needed to accept a new ‘captivity of understanding’.147 Hobbes 137 139 140 141 145

138 Digby to Hobbes, 17 Jan. 1637, Corr., 42, 47. Hobbes to Glen, 6 Apr. 1636, Corr., 30. Beh., 44–5. Lev., 301; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 426–35; Kraynak, History and Modernity, 88–9, 113–15. 142 Lev., 62–3, 78–9. 143 Beh., 144. 144 Ibid. 159–60. Lev., 254. 146 DH, 68. 147 Lev., 256. Lev., 233–8; Beh., 39–40.

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went so far as to suggest that special days be reserved, Sabbath-like, during which subjects were to learn their duties of obedience.148 ‘If the Soveraign power give me command’, he would challenge the minister John Wallis during the Interregnum, ‘(though without the ceremony of imposition of hands) to teach the Doctrine of my Leviathan in the Pulpit, why am not I . . . a Minister as well as you, and as publick a person as you are?’149 To borrow a metaphor from one of Hobbes’s correspondents, knowledge fit for subjects was merely the current of the river, while the knowledge of sovereigns channelled deep into the ‘secret passages under the earth’.150 Leviathan was at once both truth and dogma. This dual nature explains its evasive rhetorical style. The work’s fundamental arguments were deeply anti-Christian, and this needed to be signalled. But if Leviathan were too tainted with heretical opinion, its wider appeal and utility would be undermined. Any recognition by the ‘vulgar’ that religious law was jus humanum might prove unsettling to the state.151 Hobbes understood the historic hold of Christianity. This, and not a genuine devotion to scriptural ‘truths’, explains his effort to offer a reading of the Bible consistent with his philosophy. Hobbes’s copious use of Scripture, occasionally cited as evidence of his religious sincerity,152 proves nothing of the kind. Hobbes knew that his scriptural reading was no truer than any other; he was insistent on the subjectivity of any individual interpretation of the Bible. He offered his scriptural interpretation as a plausible one, useful to the sovereign because consistent with Hobbes’s own philosophy of obedience. Biblical doctrines were not the source of philosophical truth, but might be consistent with it provided they were not subject to ‘unskilfull Interpretation’.153 Hobbes found ‘passages and examples from holy scripture’ which ‘appear to support our account’.154 His aim was to preserve the utility of religion, not its truth, to harness the reverence generated by religious passion and redirect it towards sovereignty.155 Hobbes would seek to transform Christianity into an instrument of sovereignty, thus destroying its inherent challenge to the absolute state. For these purposes it was insufficient merely to equip the sovereign with jurisdictional control over the church, or even to make him the high priest of a stable body of revelation. Rather, Christian orthodoxy, like all other claims of objective right outside of the Hobbesian contractual system, was surrendered wholesale to the purposes of the sovereign. Prudence might dictate the usefulness of Christianity, after centuries of existence, as an object for the religious passions of the vulgar. Prudence would certainly prevent the wise sovereign from dispensing with Christianity altogether. But the reconfigured Christianity of Leviathan—shed of any faith in revelation, heretical in its soteriology, and sceptical of Christ’s divinity—was little more than 148

Beh., 39, 159. Stigmai Ageometrias, Agroichias, Antipoliteas, Amatheias, or, Markes of the Absurd Geometry, Rural Language, Scottish Church-Politicks, and Barbarismes of John Wallis . . . (1657), 18. For the context of this remark, see Ch. 6. 150 Mason to Hobbes, 10 Dec. 1622, Corr., 3–4. 151 Hobbes to Glen, 6 Apr. 1636, Corr., 30. 152 Warner, ‘Hobbes’s Interpretation of the Trinity’, 299–313; S. R. Sutherland, ‘God and Religion in Leviathan’, Journal 153 Lev., 256; EL, 99. of Theological Studies, 25 (1974), 373–80; Pocock, ‘Time, History, Eschatology’, 167–8. 154 DC, 127. 155 Michael Oakeshott, introduction to Leviathan, pp. lxii–lxiii. 149

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a sanctified doctrine of worldly obedience. This recognition in turn forces a reconsideration of the thesis—entertained above—that Hobbes’s Erastian theory of the church is best understood within the tradition of Protestant ecclesiology.

iii The momentous circumstances that moved Thomas Hobbes to publish his distinctive religious doctrines are the subject of the remaining chapters of this book. Before casting attention forward, however, it is necessary to complete our exploration of the intellectual foundations of Hobbes’s religious perspective. Hobbesian Erastianism bore structural and rhetorical similarities to the magisterial theories of the church prevalent among English Protestants, but Protestants shared nothing of his instrumental understanding of religious belief. Protestants invoked the magistrate to reform the church and protect a body of revealed knowledge to which they were passionately committed. For Hobbes, Erastianism provided the institutional means by which Christian orthodoxy would be debilitated. Despite the rhetorical homage Hobbes paid to Protestant ecclesiology, his understanding of religion had deeper roots in a very different intellectual tradition: namely, a broadly humanist, early modern discourse about civil religion. Hobbes’s boyhood tutor, Robert Latimer, bequeathed to him the enormous gift of a training in both Latin and Greek, and Hobbes developed an early enthusiasm for antique literature.156 In personal reminiscences, he portrayed his early interest in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome as a revolt against what he took to be the desiccated scholasticism dominant at Oxford, an aspersion that was at least half justified.157 Hobbes’s enthusiasm for humanist literary studies fully flowered after his departure from Oxford into the employment of William Cavendish. With Cavendish’s considerable library at his disposal, Hobbes threw himself into the traditional scholarly pursuits of the humanist: grammar, history, and rhetoric.158 As tutor, successively, to the second and third Earls of Devonshire, Hobbes structured the education of the Cavendish heirs around the studia humanitatis. Furthermore, Hobbes’s initial literary efforts—including a paraphrase of Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric and a translation of Thucydides—were firmly in the humanist mode. During the first fifty (and indeed the final six) years of his long life, Thomas Hobbes wrote not as the progenitor of a new civil science, but as a humanist man of letters.159 Scholarship on Hobbes long treated his humanistic literary career as an idiosyncratic interest of Leo Strauss. Such dismissiveness, however, has been decisively 156

ABL, i. 329; Vita [verse], 2. Vita [verse], 3–4; J. M. Fletcher, ‘The Faculty of Arts’, History of Oxford University, iii. 171–6. 158 Vita [prose], 1–3; Tuck, Hobbes, 1–11. 159 Skinner, ‘Hobbes’s Life in Philosophy’, in Visions, iii. 2–4, 32–3; for doubts as to the authorship of the paraphrase of Aristotle, see Karl Schuhmann, ‘Skinner’s Hobbes’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 6 (1998), 115–25. 157

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rejected by contextualist scholars such as Quentin Skinner and Richard Tuck, and few now doubt the formative importance of Hobbes’s immersion in the culture of European humanism. The influence of humanism has been detected in his preoccupation with Renaissance debates on rhetoric, in his anxiety over the revival of ancient republicanism, and (more controversially) in his concern over neoscepticism.160 The remainder of this chapter will explore another implication of Hobbes’s humanism: the extent to which it attracted him to an instrumental understanding of religion. The long intellectual tradition of idealizing civil religion has been an orphaned subject among intellectual historians.161 The Renaissance revolt against Christianized Aristotelian moral philosophy, with its emphasis on private ethics and politically passive religiosity, reinvigorated an interest in civic virtue and the public utility of ancient religious practice. This in turn cultivated an ‘instrumental view of religion’ and an admiration for the ancient civil religions among some humanists.162 For the more pious reforming humanists of the Northern Renaissance, such an impulse threatened to justify, rather than rebuke, the medieval confusion of sacred and temporal authority. Among humanists of a more Italianate or ‘Machiavellian’ inflection, however, admiration for the instrumental civil religions of the pagans was widespread. Such appreciation for ancient religion, widely but unevenly diffused throughout humanist culture, is not easily characterized. Most economically, it might be reduced to an aspect of Machiavellianism, as Machiavelli was certainly the most prominent enthusiast for the pagan state cults.163 Alternatively, it might be interpreted as an aspect of ‘reason-of-state’ or Tacitean humanism, which arose in the wake of the religious wars to rival the more civically activist Ciceronian humanism. Cicero himself, however, was a crucial source for those attached to the ideal of a civil religion, and some pre-eminent reason-of-state theorists were surprisingly critical of the statist ecclesiology implied by any civil religion model.164 There is thus no simple way of characterizing the early modern enthusiasm for civil religion, although it was surely more prevalent among humanists of a religiously sceptical bent. For a seventeenth-century thinker such as Thomas Hobbes, the state religions of antiquity were viewed through a double prism. Hobbes would have been influenced, in the first instance, by humanist commentators such as Machiavelli, who brought their own political and religious sensibilities to bear. Beyond this, the ancient historians and moralists who were the primary sources on the pagan religions were themselves often chronologically removed by centuries from their 160 Strauss, Philosophy of Hobbes, chs. 1–3; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric; Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Descartes’, in Rogers and Ryan (eds.), Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, 11–41. 161 Mark Goldie, ‘The Civil Religion of Harrington’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern England (Cambridge, 1987), 197–224 at 197–9. 162 Richard Tuck, ‘Humanism and Political Thought’, in Anthony Goodman and Angus MacKay (eds.), The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe (New York, 1990), 43–65 at 43–50, 58–9. 163 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), 202, ch. 11. 164 Botero himself was deferential to clerical jurisdiction and civil law. Giovanni Botero, The Reason of State, in Eric Cochrane and Julius Kirshner (eds.), The Renaissance (Chicago, 1986), 238–41.

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subject. Both sets of commentators magnified that aspect of pagan religion that most distinguished it from the other-worldly dualism of primitive Christianity: namely, a thorough intermingling of matters ‘sacred and profane’. From the earliest Greek polytheism, ‘religion was intimately interwoven with all other elements of Hellenic civilization’. The creation of city gods, the apotheosis of civic heroes, and the utter lack of a ‘division between the priesthood and the magistracy’ typified ancient Greek religious practice. Such tendencies also informed the ‘civil polytheism of pagan Rome’, where temples served both religious and civic functions, the priesthood performed political duties, and religious festivals were infused with an overtly political spirit. These trends culminated, of course, with the ‘dynastic piety’ of the Roman imperial cults.165 Such observations are imprecise generalizations, applying, in any case, only to the state religions of ancient Greece and Rome. Enthusiastic popular cults, infused with an other-worldly spirit akin to that of primitive Christianity, periodically spread throughout the ancient world. But, whatever the actual intricacies of ancient religion, the historians and moralists on whom humanist scholarship relied accentuated the instrumental political value of the state cults. Cicero, Tacitus, Varro, Polybius, and others treated religion as a matter of public utility, not as a source of speculative wisdom. They also tended to portray religion as an esoteric phenomenon, a tool by which elites mobilized and disciplined the masses. Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, for instance, continually employs the distinction between the wise and the vulgar, concedes the falsity of the ancient myths, but affirms their importance as a governing tool. ‘Destroy this and everything collapses’, Cicero wrote. ‘System and order’ depended on the punishments, rewards, and moral distinctions that only ‘divine governance’ could provide. The ‘fables of the poets’ and the ‘divine honours’ bestowed on the brave served to ‘promote valour and civic virtue’.166 A century earlier the Greek historian Polybius had viewed such politic exploitation of religious myths as a key to Roman greatness: The sphere in which the Roman commonwealth seems to me to show its superiority most decisively is in that of religious belief. Here we find that the very phenomenon which among other peoples is regarded as a subject for reproach, namely superstition, is actually the element which holds the Roman state together. . . . Many people may find this astonishing, but my own view is that the Romans have adopted these practices for the sake of the common people. This approach might not have been necessary had it ever been possible to form a state composed entirely of wise men. But as the masses are always fickle, filled with lawless desires, unreasoning anger and violent passions, they can only be restrained by mysterious terrors or other dramatizations of the subject.

Polybius’s histories endorsed the manipulation of popular superstition. He praised, for instance, Scipio Africanus for feigning a providential encounter with Neptune in order to rally his troops before New Carthage.167 165 Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘Greek Religion’, and Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Roman Religion of the Imperial Period’, in Robert Seltzer (ed.), Religions of Antiquity (New York, 1989), 163, 172–8, 220–2; Alan Wardman, Religion and Statecraft among the Romans (Baltimore, 1982), pp. iv, 10, 79, 87. 166 Cicero, Nature of the Gods, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), 7, 61, 333–5, 363, 371–5. 167 Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (1979), 349, 411–14.

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Sallust’s history of the Catilinian conspiracy also treated piety as a fundamentally civic virtue, and records the factional struggle over priesthoods, the political manipulation of oaths and portents.168 More revealing still are the comments on ancient religion shot through the Lives of Plutarch, himself a priest at Delphi. Like Polybius, Plutarch believed that the Romans owed their greatness more to their ‘religious observances’ than their military triumphs. These religious practices, Plutarch constantly made clear, were often ‘devices’ designed to gull subjects into obedience or bravery.169 Such a sensibility informed his life of Numa Pompilius, the legendary Roman king supposed to have founded the office of Pontifex, the vestal virgins, and many of Rome’s religious ceremonies. Casting doubt on Numa’s alleged conversations with the gods, Plutarch concluded that those ‘having to governe rude, churlish, and stiffe necked people, and purposing to bring in straunge novelties into the governments of their countries, did faine wisely to have conference with the gods, considering this fayning fell to be profitable and beneficiall to those themselves who they made to believe the same.’ Numa’s prosperous rule, he concluded, depended on this capacity to so ‘play’ upon vulgar religious sensibilities.170 Examples could be multiplied. The instrumental and esoteric character of Roman religion was ubiquitously observed by ancient chroniclers. Revealing, in this regard, are the comments of Saint Augustine. In Christianity’s pre-eminent case for the duality of temporality and spirituality, Augustine condemned Varro’s compendium (now lost) of the ancient religions. Varro upheld the proposition that religious fictions could be justified according to their utility. ‘We see’, wrote Augustine, ‘that many beliefs that are now [by pagans] consecrated and included in religion of a sort may have been fabricated, when lies even about the very gods have been thought to make citizens better.’171 For Augustine, the contrast between the politicized civic cults of the ancient pagans and the transcendent other-worldliness of Christianity was entirely to the discredit of the former. It was, however, a very different assessment of this contrast that fired the imaginations of many later humanists. Exactly why certain strains of humanist scholarship developed such an enthusiasm for ancient civil religion has not been sufficiently investigated.172 Interest in the pagan religions partly reflected humanistic sources, where, we have seen, religious matters were regularly chronicled. Such an interest could also emerge out of the humanists’ historical–critical understanding of primitive Christianity and early Christian sources.173 It is also true that the heroic age of humanism coincided with a series of political crises in the life of the Christian church: the Avignon Captivity and the Great Schism, the 168

Sallust, The War with Catiline, trans. J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 21–2, 37–9, 51, 57. Plutarch, Makers of Rome, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (London, 1965), 88–9, 205–6, et passim. Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes . . . trans. Thomas North (1595), 69–71. 171 Augustine, City of God against the Pagans, Books I–III, trans. George McCracken (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), i. 277–9. 172 For brief remarks, see Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 1995), 29; Tuck, ‘Humanism and Political Thought’, 43–50. 173 Salvatore I. Camporeale, ‘Renaissance Humanism and the Origins of Humanist Theology’, in John O’Malley, Thomas Izbicki, and Gerald Christianson (eds.), Humanity and Divinity in Renaissance and Reformation (Leiden, 1993), 101–24. 169 170

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era of invasions in Italy, the Reformation and wars of religion. Political and ecclesial chaos of this magnitude exposed the dualist model of the Catholic Church to critique, and piqued interest in the seemingly more politically stable state cults of the ancient world. The pre-eminent case is, of course, Niccolò Machiavelli. Italian politics in Machiavelli’s age were tumultuously roiled by clerical intrigue: the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478; the subsequent interdict of Florence by Sixtus IV; the chiliastic theocratic regime of Savonarola; the brute political machinations of Alexander VI and Julius II.174 In the face of this chaos, Machiavelli blamed the Roman church for possessing sufficient power to prevent a political recovery, but not enough to generate one. He was struck by the potential political effectiveness of religious leaders, and he admired Moses as a temporal sovereign whose legitimacy was buttressed by pretended spiritual excellence.175 But Machiavelli considered the division of spiritual and temporal power disastrous. Savonarola had failed to emulate Moses because he had not married prophetic authority to armed power. Louis XII had lost Italy by sharing the spoils of his conquest with Pope Alexander VI. Halfpoliticized, the Church interfered with princes and exacerbated Italy’s internal divisions.176 Machiavelli hated the ecclesiological dualism of Catholic Christianity, and the tendency of Christian theology to cultivate an other-worldly passivity among subjects.177 The Prince notoriously called upon sovereigns to embrace prudence rather than morality, to cultivate cunning rather than godliness. Machiavelli freed rulers from the moral mandates of religion, while accommodating the superstitious habits of subjects. Princes were to acquire a pious reputation as a matter of prudence, and as a concession to the religious instincts of the vulgar.178 Superstition always served to ‘animate the plebs’. Princes were required to maintain religious fundamentals, ‘even though they judged them false’.179 These attitudes drew Machiavelli towards an admiration for the pagan religions of antiquity. He repeatedly contrasted the virtuous achievements of the ancients against the ‘weakness into which the present religion has led the world’. He recounted how the Romans used the religious fear of the plebs to crush civil tumults, how the ancient Samnites used religion to instil wartime bravery, how Numa had used religious authority to reduce the Romans to civil obedience.180 Tightly controlled by the state, lacking both independent institutional power and an other-worldly theology, the ancient state cults had proven powerful tools of rule. Machiavelli followed on what was, by the late fifteenth century, a well-established body of humanist scholarship on the pagan religions. The antiquarian researches 174 On Savonarola see Machiavelli to Bechi, 9 Mar. 1489, in The Letters of Machiavelli, trans. Alan Gilbert (New York, 1961), 85–9; Robert Ridolfi, The Life of Machiavelli, trans. Cecil Grayson (Chicago, 1963), 6–9. 175 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge, 1988), 20–1; Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago, 1996), 8, 30. 176 Machiavelli, Discourses, 30, 38; Prince, 12–14. 177 Machiavelli, Discourses, 6, 131. 178 Machiavelli, Prince, 62, 76–9. 179 Machiavelli, Discourses, 34–7; Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Originality of Machiavelli’, in Myron Gilmore (ed.), Studies on 180 Machiavelli, Discourses, 6, 34–6, 39–44. Machiavelli (Florence, 1972), 149–206.

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of Flavio Biondo and Pomponio Leto, among others, had investigated the nature of Roman religious practice. Interest in the pagan state cults was not unique to Machiavellianism. Other strains within sixteenth-century humanism contributed as well. It might be argued that early modern fascination with the ancient civic religions crescendoed during the decades of Thomas Hobbes’s youth. From the 1580s, with Europe rocked by ruinous religious warfare, Ciceronian and Aristotelian political morality were increasingly challenged by the rise of ‘Tacitean’ humanism. This ‘second wave’ humanism, inspired by a stylistic and substantive preference for Tacitus over Cicero, enshrined self-preservation as the cardinal virtue of private morality, and reason-of-state as the governing prescript of politics.181 Humanist political thought increasingly moved away from a valorization of civic virtue, transparency, and activism, and towards an understanding of statecraft as a secret and esoteric art. This development only heightened humanist fascination with the instrumental uses of religion. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than among the neo-Stoics. In the face of a catastrophic blending of civic activism with religious zealotry, pre-eminent neo-Stoics such as Justus Lipsius and Michel de Montaigne cultivated an inward and passive understanding of the conscience, and urged sovereigns to govern outward religion with uniformity and discipline. In both respects Lipsius and Montaigne found attractive models in the ancient religions. Prudent statecraft, according to Lipsius’s Politicorum libri sex (1589), would control all ‘firebrands of sedition’ inspired by the ‘pretext of piety’.182 Such control was ensured by protecting the religious authority due to princes. In contrast to the unleashed religious chaos of his own age, Lipsius appealed to the politic religious control enjoyed by the ancient Romans. Augustus, he wrote, upheld religious custom and punished irreligion ‘not onely in regard that it is God’s cause’, but because those who ‘finde out new religions do stirre up many to desire an alteration of things, whence proceedeth conspiracies, seditions, conventicles, which doubtlesse are more dangerous in any state’. Cicero, Lipsius wrote, had been ‘bolde to bragge, that the Romaines did not surmount all other people and Nations by pollicie or by maine force, but thorowe pietie and religion’.183 And Aristotle ‘did admonish that a Prince ought earnestly and above all things to have care to things divine. He addeth the reason hereof, For the subjects do hope that they shall suffer lesse injustice from that Prince, whom they deeme religious and who feareth God: and lesse conspiracies are complotted against him, as having even God for his help and succour.’184 Equally distressed over the European religious wars, Montaigne also espoused a marked deference to the state’s ecclesiastical authority. Whatever the prerogatives of inward individual doubt, polities required stable and disciplined religious observances. In his Essays Montaigne employed the distinction between the ‘wisest 181

Peter Burke, ‘Tacitism, Scepticism, and Reason of State’, CHPT, 484–90; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 28–39. Justus Lipsius, Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine . . . , trans. William Jones (1594), 63. 183 Ibid. 61–2. 184 Ibid. 86; for Machiavellian influences in Lipsius, see Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. B. Oestreich and H. G. Koenigsberger, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge, 1982), 42–8. 182

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men’ and the ‘crudest common herd’.185 Religious customs, divinations, and providential signs were, above other matters, subject to the manipulation of philosophical and political elites.186 ‘Of simple souls, less curious and less learned’, wrote Montaigne, ‘are made good Christians, who, through reverence and obedience, believe simply and live under the laws’. The wise, by contrast, ‘penetrate to a deeper and more abstruse light on the Scriptures and sense the mysterious and divine secret of our ecclesiastical polity’.187 Montaigne believed that his Christian contemporaries had failed to maintain the delicate balance between ‘justice and utility’. Time and time again he contrasted the violent disorder of Christianity with the prudent ‘administration’ of the ancient civic religions. He appealed, for instance, to Livy’s account of the Roman senate’s instrumental use of the gods to sanctify customs. From Cicero’s De Natura Deorum Montaigne approvingly cited Cotta’s dictum: ‘When it is a question of religion, I follow . . . the sovereign pontiffs, not Zeno or Cleanthes or Chrysippus.’188 Christians had allowed the vulgar too great a role in the governance of religion, and had thus eroded its essential mystery. The ‘secrets of the Christian religion were scattered about the market place in the hands of the merest artisans’, whereas the more prudent gentiles ‘forbade Socrates, Plato, and the wisest men to speak of and inquire into the things committed to the priests of Delphi.’ Montaigne’s ideal was an obedience among subjects ‘so simple that of the religion they observe so scrupulously they understand not a single word’. Such were the pagans, who, though devout, knew ‘nothing about their gods except simply their names and statues’.189 Recalling the instrumental religious lies of Numa, Zoroaster, Lycurgus, and others, Montaigne affirmed that ‘there is no polity in which there is not some admixture either of empty ceremony or of lying opinion to serve as a curb to keep the people in their duty. That is why most of them have their fabulous origins and beginnings, enriched with supernatural mysteries.’190 Thus, for Hobbes’s generation, the interest in civil religion found in the antique sources themselves had been magnified by successive generations of humanist scholarship. In the wake of the political failures of the Renaissance papacy, and then the calamitous religious wars, Ciceronian and Tacitean humanists alike celebrated aspects of the pagan state cults. Where Augustine had condemned the instrumental manipulation of religious feelings, some humanists, confronting a very different Christian universe, were inclined to commend this feature of ancient political life. It was, rued Hooker, an age when many ‘wise malignants’ viewed religion itself as ‘a mere politique devise’.191 In his later life, posing as the father of a new civil science, Thomas Hobbes would frequently disdain the wisdom of the ancients. It is nevertheless important to recover the enduring influence of humanist learning on his mind. If the mature Hobbes would denigrate the ‘democraticall’ propensities of the ancients, a positive 185 Michel de Montaigne, Essays, in The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford, Calif., 186 Ibid. 27–8, 79–83, 160. 1948), 82. 187 Ibid. 227. 188 Ibid. 87–8. 189 Ibid. 232–3. 190 Ibid. 477. 191 Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, 6.

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inclination towards ancient civil religion was a humanist trait that he never repudiated. This chapter has already detailed Hobbes’s political critique of Christian theology, his understanding of religion as an instrument of rule, and his reliance on a conceptual distinction between the wise and the vulgar. All of these traits resonated with the religious sensibilities of Machiavellian or Tacitean humanists. Further, the textual evidence suggests that an early exposure to humanist learning decisively shaped Hobbes’s understanding of religion and its political uses. Throughout his later writings, Hobbes betrayed the neo-pagan cast of his ecclesiology. In De Cive, for example, he longed to return to the ‘golden age’ of antiquity, when men ‘revered the supreme power, whether it resided in one man or in an assembly, as a kind of visible divinity’. That golden age had been fatally disrupted by the ‘ambivalent dogmas of the moral philosophers’.192 The Elements of Law candidly praised the ‘Grecians, Romans, or other Gentiles’ for ordering their religions with ‘civil laws’. ‘Christians only’ had disrupted civil peace by ‘requiring a power in matters of religion either above the power civil, or at least not depending on it’.193 Railing against clerical usurpation in Behemoth, Hobbes reiterated the point. ‘Is not a Christian king as much a bishop now,’ he wrote, ‘as the heathen kings were of old?’ Only in Christendom were priests permitted to convene congregations and indoctrinate subjects on their own authority. ‘I believe heathen Kings foresaw’, he concluded, ‘that a few such orators would be able to make a great sedition.’194 Among Hobbes’s exemplary models was Ergamenes, the ancient King of the Ethiopians. The Ethiopian kings, ‘their reason mastered by superstition’, had been pathetically governed by their priests. Ergamenes, ‘having had his breeding in philosophy after the manner of the Greeks’, went to the ‘golden temple of the Aethiopians; killed all the priests . . . and rectified the kingdom according to his will’. Hobbes contrasted this act of bloody decisiveness favourably with the passivity of Christian monarchs in the face of clerical sedition.195 In his Restoration Dialogue on the Common Laws he credited the Emperor Constantine with an instrumental use of religion. Constantine, he wrote, banned Arianism ‘not for the regard of Truth and Doctrine, but for the preserving of the Peace, especially among his Christian Souldiers, by whose valour he had gotten the Empire, and by the same was to preserve it’.196 Leviathan contains Hobbes’s longest consideration of the ‘religion of the Gentiles’. Here, in his most extensive treatment of ecclesiological questions, Hobbes repeatedly weighs the relative political merits of Christian and heathen religious practices. He sympathetically explicated the ‘ancient Heathen’ religious myths, for instance: their attribution of vices to the gods reflected an appropriate understanding of religious ‘honours’ as tributes to power rather than to moral justice.197 Detailing his own theory that the fear of death animated the religious 192 196

193 EL, 141–2. 194 Beh., 13, 16. 195 Ibid. 93–5. DC, 9. 197 Lev., 66–7, 252. Dialogue of the Common Laws, 127.

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impulse, Hobbes noted that the ancient poets openly acknowledged this when celebrating the ‘many Gods of the Gentiles’.198 It was, however, chiefly the pagan subordination of religion to law that Leviathan commended. Hobbes affirmed that the ‘Gods of the Heathen’, though imaginary, were only ‘personated’ at the command of the state. In keeping with the Erastianism of Leviathan, he urged Christian sovereigns to emulate the ancients: ‘In all Common-wealths of the Heathen, the Soveraigns have had the name of Pastors of the People, because there was no Subject that could lawfully Teach the people, but by their permission and authority.’ Driving this point home, he contrasted Augustus Caesar’s title of Pontifex Maximus, by which he enjoyed an appropriate ‘Supreme Authority’ over religion, with the disastrous usurpation of this title by the Roman bishops.199 To be sure, Hobbes also condemned aspects of the ‘religion of the gentiles’ in Leviathan, primarily its demonology and its use of religious imagery. He blamed these features of ancient belief on primitive superstition, and he further argued that superstitious aspects of Christian theology had been bequeathed by the ancient religions, conveyed in particular by Aristotelian philosophy.200 It is, however, vital to distinguish ancient metaphysics, which Hobbes scorned, from the political organization of ancient religion, which he admired. Indeed, he tended to deplore not so much the ancient superstitions per se, but their survival as relics in a Christian context. Ancient states had promulgated absurd myths and doctrines, but they had done so with prudent political intent and under the direction of temporal sovereignty. Christian clergy maintained these doctrines (and their own jurisdiction over them) as part of a conspiracy against sovereign power. The difference in authority was decisive. Indeed, Hobbes defined ‘superstition’ itself as religious tales ‘not allowed’ by public power.201 Superstition was not defined by ignorance alone, but by ignorance alloyed with political disobedience. These distinctions emerge clearly in chapter 12 of Leviathan, ‘Of Religion’. Here Hobbes conceded that ancient polytheistic mythology was a rationally absurd projection of human fear. Gentile worship practices and sacrifices were equally arbitrary and irrational. Hobbes did not, however, assert that the designers of these practices were themselves deluded. Rather, the authors of the gentile religions ‘pretended Experience’, feigned revelation, crafted oracles ‘ambiguous by designe’, and manipulated the fears of the ‘ignorant sort’.202 The superstitions of the ancients were thus the superstitions of the vulgar. Properly channelled by governors, such ignorance did no harm. Indeed, the ancient religions were feigned by ‘the first Founders, and Legislators of Commonwealths among the Gentiles’ in order to ensure ‘obedience and peace’. In an established humanist trope, Hobbes employed Numa Pompilius as the paradigmatic crafter of a stable civil religion. In a trope more typical of the Enlightenment, he employed Mahomet in a similar way. Both aimed at the ‘peace of the Commonwealth’, and their religious lies successfully rendered their subjects ‘less apt to mutiny against their Governors’.203 198 202

Lev., 76–7. Ibid. 80–2.

199 203

Ibid. 113–14, 327, 455–6. Ibid. 81–4.

200

Ibid. 18, 275, 331, 440, 463.

201

Ibid. 42.

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The ‘Law-givers of the Gentiles’, Hobbes asserted, had made religion a part of ‘humane Politiques’. He did acknowledge, rhetorically at least, that revelation had—by contrast—taught ‘Divine Politiques’ to Judaeo-Christians.204 Leviathan, however, repudiated the notion that Christian revelation superseded the political model of the ancient religions. Christian clergy acted corruptly not merely by maintaining ancient superstitions but by doing so without sovereign authorization. The useful myths of the ancients, their prudent instruments of rule, became weapons of sedition in the Christian era. Ancient ‘daemonology’, for instance, was used by pagan governors to ‘regulate’ fear and ensure ‘publique peace’. Christian clergy employed it for precisely contrary purposes. The former constituted religion, the latter superstition.205 Something of this distinction can be glimpsed in Hobbes’s Answer to the Preface before Gondibert, a work composed simultaneously with Leviathan.206 There Hobbes analysed the holy poetic sayings of the ancient Greek ‘prophets and priests’. Like Christian divines, the Greek priests let their words ‘passe for the word of God, and not of man’, and in both cases this was deceptive. However, rebuking the Christian clergy, Hobbes wrote: when they call unseasonably for Zeal, there appears a spirit of Cruelty; and by the like errour instead of Truth they raise Discord; instead of Wisdome, Fraud; instead of Reformation, Tumult; and Controversie instead of Religion. Whereas in the Heathen Poets, at least in those whose works have lasted to the time we are in, there are none of those indiscretions to be found, that tended to subversion or disturbance of the Commonwealths wherein they lived.207

Leviathan’s blasts against Aristotle and ancient metaphysics have been used by some to minimize Hobbes’s enthusiasm for pagan religion. J. G. A. Pocock and Richard Tuck have argued that, for Hobbes, scriptural revelation broke JudaeoChristians from the religious patterns of antiquity and bound sovereigns to a stable body of doctrine.208 But both Professor Pocock and Professor Tuck rely heavily on Hobbes’s professions that he found the Scriptures intellectually authoritative. In this they fail fully to acknowledge either Hobbes’s doubt as to the veracity of Scripture, or the esoteric overtones of his own scriptural interpretation. True, widespread belief in Christian revelation was a historic fact that Hobbes needed to confront, and in this sense Christianity represented an epochal break with antiquity. It is doubtful, however, that Hobbes considered even his own interpretation of Scripture to be revealed truth. Leviathan’s task was to suggest a model of Christian theology that would render it as politically malleable as the pagan religious doctrines had been. Leviathan was to costume the virtues of the ‘golden age of antiquity’ with a Christian cloak. This would require the suppression of metaphysical notions that, if once serviceable, had become instruments of clerical sedition. It would also require Christian princes to emulate the tight political control of religion exercised by pagan sovereigns. 204 207 208

205 Ibid. 441. 206 Cavendish to Pell, BL Add. MS 4278, fo. 295. Ibid. 79, 83. William Davenant, A Discourse upon Gondibert . . . with an answer to it, by Mr. Hobbs (1650), 127–9; Lev., 291. Pocock, ‘Time, History, and Eschatology’, 167–9; Tuck, ‘Civil Religion’, 130–3.

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Hobbes’s view of gentile religion was thus best captured by his greatest student on these matters, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Contrasting the pagan ‘religion of the citizen’ with the ‘dual power’ of the Christian ‘religion of the priest’, Rousseau conceded that the former ‘deceives men, and makes them credulous and superstitious’. It was, however, superior to the religion of the priest in that ‘it joins divine worship to the love of the law, and that in making the homeland the object of the citizens’ adoration, it teaches them that the service of the state, is the service of the tutelary god. This is a kind of theocracy, in which there can be no pontiff other than the prince, and no priests except the magistrates.’ ‘Of all Christian authors’, Rousseau wrote: ‘the philosopher Hobbes is the only one who saw clearly both the evil and the remedy, and who dared to propose reuniting the two heads of the eagle and fully restoring that political unity without which neither the state nor the government will ever be well constituted.’209 Rousseau is often credited with having coined the term ‘civil religion’, but he borrowed a great deal from Hobbes’s analysis of what Hobbes had earlier called the ‘Civill worship’ of the gentiles.210 Both thinkers rejected, as they were bound to do, the metaphysics of the ancients. But both also sought to redeem what Augustine had despised: the instrumental control of religion by sovereignty. That Hobbes absorbed his understanding of the pagan religions directly from the ancient sources will hardly be challenged. The extent of this influence can be gauged from allusions in his writings and the surviving booklist of the Cavendish library at Hardwick Hall.211 Hobbes’s use of Numa as an exemplary fashioner of a civil religion, for instance, was surely influenced by his close familiarity with Plutarch (attested to in many of his published works).212 His knowledge of the religious practices of the Druids, Persians, Egyptians, Assyrians, and Ethiopians— evidenced in Behemoth—was taken from the histories of Julius Caesar, Strabo’s Geographia, and especially Diodorus Siculus’ Bibliothe-ke-.213 As for Roman political and religious history, Hobbes was closely familiar with the main sources, including Sallust, Appian, and Livy. He would certainly have encountered Polybius’ thesis about the central role played by civil religion in Rome’s rise to greatness.214 Leviathan makes passing mention of Varro, and Hobbes would have known Augustine’s précis of Varro’s instrumental theory of religion.215 Hobbes’s knowledge of Cicero, one of the chief sources on ancient religion, was vast.216 The influence of Tacitus on Hobbes’s intellectual development has recently occasioned scholarly interest.217 Some have attributed to Hobbes the ‘Discourse upon the Beginning of Tacitus’ published as part of the anonymous Horae 209

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (London, 1968), 176–82. Lev., 447–9. Chatsworth Hobbes MS E1A. I have benefited from Noel Malcolm’s unpublished analysis of this booklist, provided to me by Charles Noble, archivist at Chatsworth; also James Jay Hamilton, ‘Hobbes’s Study and the Hardwick Library’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 16 (1978), 445–53. 212 Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Studia humanitatis’, in Visions, iii. 44 and 48–9 n; PW, ‘to the readers’. 213 Beh., 91–4. 214 Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Studia humanitatis’, in Visions, iii. 43–4. 215 Lev., 473. 216 DC, 48; Lev., 34, 149–50, 171, 183, 218, 471; Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Studia humanitatis’, in Visions, iii. 45. 217 Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 4–5, 282, 340–7; Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Studia humanitatis’, in Visions iii. 46, 55, 62. 210 211

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Subsecivae of 1620.218 This collection of humanistic essays was just as plausibly the supervised work of Hobbes’s tutee, William Cavendish, later the second Earl of Devonshire. But whether written by Hobbes or under his tutelage, the essay captures (directly or indirectly) Hobbes’s fascination with the political utility of Roman religion. Admiringly narrating Augustus’ rise to power (following the Annales), the ‘Discourse upon Tacitus’ asserts that Augustus secured his rule partly by elevating his nephew to the office of Pontifex, which ‘in matters of their Heathenish religion, was of supreme authority. . . . This was one stay and strength of his government, to put into the hands of his Nephew (as I may so say) the Supremacy in matters Ecclesiastical, which is one of the chiefest guides of a Commonwealth.’219 A sense of the political superiority of ancient Roman religion over Christian ‘superstition’ similarly marks the ‘Discourse of Rome’, also published in the Horae Subsecivae and attributed by some to Hobbes. Far from turning their eyes to the afterlife, the ancient Romans embraced temporal glory. Their monuments ‘immortal[ized]’ and ‘deif[ied] the persons of their worthiest men’. They did not aim at heaven, ‘Yet I think, if ever men of any place, in any time desired to have their names and action to continue to Posterity, not knowing any farther immorality, these were they, and this one consideration produced better effects of virtue and valor, than religion, and all other respects do in our days.’220 In the light of Hobbes’s later doctrine that Christianity’s soteriological emphasis was its greatest political liability, this tribute to the virtues of the Roman state cults appears all the more significant. But among the sources on pagan religious practice, none could have influenced Hobbes as profoundly as Thucydides. Hobbes’s 1629 translation of Thucydides was his first major work, and in it he first coined the phrase ‘Civill worship’ to characterize the ‘Religious worship of the Gentiles’. Thucydides provides considerable detail about the workings of public religion throughout ancient Greece. He himself was often accused of irreligion, and where his history touches on oracles, omens, and popular religiosity the tone of his writing is markedly sceptical. But Thucydides was always mindful of the political importance of religion. His vivid account, for instance, of the plague at Athens paired political lawlessness and impiety as intricately related phenomena. ‘Neither the feare of the Gods’, he wrote, in Hobbes’s rendering, ‘nor Lawes of men awed any man.’ A similar loss of respect for the religious law (and particularly for the sanctity of oaths) is included in Thucydides’ narrative of the civil war in Corcyra.221 He recounted the expedient use of prophecies and oracles in the run-up to the Peloponnesian war, and narrated the use of religious superstitions successfully to rally the Boeotians against Athens.222 His history is full of incidents in which the religious susceptibilities of the vulgar are, with varying degrees of effectiveness, manipulated by elites. The Spartan King Pleistoanax was alleged to have bribed the oracles at 218 Based on controversial word-print analysis. Three Discourses: A Critical Modern Edition of Newly Identified Work of the Young Thomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Reynolds and Arlene Saxonhouse (Chicago, 1995). 219 ‘Discourse upon the Beginning of Tacitus’, in Three Discourses, 50. 220 ‘Discourse on Rome’, ibid. 81–2. 221 PW, 109–10, 187–90. 222 Ibid. 86, 263–6.

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Delphi. Charges of irreligion were used strategically as part of the campaign against Alcibiades. Nicias promised ‘favour from the Gods’ in a vain effort to rally his army before Syracuse.223 Thucydides was constantly aware of the power of common superstition, and he understood both the promise and peril of manipulating it. That Hobbes grasped this point is indicated by several marginal notes within his translation. (‘The oracles’, he observed, ‘were always obscure, that evasions might be found to salve their credit.’ Spartan complaints about Athenian sacrileges were cynical means ‘to pick better quarrels for the Warre’.224) Indeed, Hobbes’s introductory essay on the life of Thucydides defended him from the charge of the ‘vulgar’ that he was an atheist. Hobbes conceded that Thucydides was too rational to swallow the more superstitious aspects of ancient religion, but he implicitly commended him for grasping the importance of the religious observances of princes.225 Hobbes’s Thucydides was neither superstitious nor atheistic, but a shrewd judge of the political function of religiosity. Beyond his knowledge of the ancient sources themselves, during his early life Hobbes was immersed in a humanist culture that was increasingly fascinated with the religious life of the ancients. Hobbes’s early career unfolded during the era when European culture turned away from Ciceronian civic humanism and towards humanism of a more realist, Tacitean, or neo-Stoic shade. His understanding of the political liabilities of dualist Christianity, particularly relative to the ancient civil religions, surely reflected his exposure to the literary productions of this era. Hobbes was circumspect about his influences, but it is likely that he was familiar with the writings of both Machiavelli and Montaigne. Certainly both authors were available to him. Machiavelli was found in the Cavendish library at Hardwick,226 and Professor Skinner has identified several allusions to Montaigne in Leviathan.227 Of Hobbes’s familiarity with Lipsius we can be more certain: he directly referenced De Doctrina Civili in his Thucydides.228 Hobbes was thus well read in the broad, interpretative works of humanists such as Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Lipsius, all of whom were interested in the gentile religions. There is also evidence that he was familiar with humanist scholarship, more antiquarian in nature, on the minutiae of ancient religion. De Theologia gentili et physiologica Christiana (1641), by the pre-eminent historian Gerardus Vossius, offered the era’s most distinguished treatment of ancient pagan religion. From prominent academic posts at Leiden and Amsterdam, Vossius presided as a luminary in the republic of letters. His works on history, grammar, and rhetoric were read across Europe. Vossius was among Grotius’s closest associates, and sided with the Remonstrants during the Dutch Republic’s vicious dispute over Arminianism.229 Though direct evidence is lacking, it is difficult to believe that 223

224 Ibid. 65 (marginal notes). PW, 299, 365, 383–4, 460, 469–70. ‘Of the Life and History of Thucydides’, in PW (unpaginated). 226 Chatsworth Hobbes MS E1A; Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the European Republic of Letters’, in Aspects, 458; 227 Skinner, ‘Hobbes on Rhetoric and the Construction of Morality’, in Visions, iii. 121. ABL, i. 337–8. 228 ‘Life of Thucydides’, in PW. 229 C. S. M. Rademaker, Life and Work of Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577–1649) (Assen, 1981), 93–120; Nicholas Wickenden, G. J. Vossius and the Humanist Conception of History (Assen, 1993), 6–20. 225

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Hobbes was not familiar with Vossius’s work. Vossius’s profile in England was very high. His English correspondents were many, and serious efforts were made to lure him to Cambridge. After a 1629 tour of England in which he enjoyed an audience with Charles I, Vossius was awarded a canonry at Canterbury.230 Vossius and his work, moreover, were greatly admired by Hobbes’s closest French colleagues. In 1642, for instance, Hobbes’s French translator Samuel Sorbière heard Vossius lecture and reported his strong admiration. Sorbière later corresponded with Vossius’s son Isaac about Hobbes’s De Cive.231 It is thus highly probable that Thomas Hobbes knew Vossius’s De Theologia Gentili, a compendious history of the ancient mythologies and idolatries.232 There are certainly strong thematic echoes of Vossius in Hobbes’s work. Both men understood the religious impulse as natural and universal, and believed that Judaeo-Christianity and the heathen religions were motivated by the same psychological impulses.233 Vossius, like Hobbes, had a minimalist understanding of Christian theology, viewed religion in largely moral and political terms, and diminished the importance of revelation.234 Hobbes’s account of the rise of heathen superstition paralleled that of Vossius. Both men believed that gentile religion emerged partly out of scientific ignorance.235 Each, however, also assumed that the gentile poets and priests manipulated the incredulous masses, largely for political purposes. Vossius, like Hobbes, detailed the manner in which the civic heroes and lawgivers of antiquity were given divine honours. He was particularly interested in the history of the god Jupiter, whose legend he traced back to a series of heathen princes.236 These researches may well have informed Hobbes’s own use of Jupiter in Leviathan to illustrate the proposition that ‘The Gentiles worshipped for Gods, Jupiter, and others: that living, were men perhaps that had done great and glorious Acts.’237 This was, Vossius affirmed, idolatrous, but he, like Hobbes, could prove sympathetic with gentile efforts to use false religion to keep the people in their ‘duty’. Of the Egyptians and their use of magic to veil the arcana imperii, Vossius wrote: ‘Machiavelli is said to have revealed these [arcana imperii], and is blamed on that account. . . . As if these things were to be done, but not talked about. But there are many secrets which are not evil.’238 Vossius thus viewed the ancient religions as corrupt idolatries, but he leavened this pejorative view with a Machiavellian sensibility about the use of religion as a tool of statecraft. It seems likely that his work influenced Hobbes’s own similar understanding of gentile religion, although the evidence is more suggestive than definitive. That Hobbes was generally familiar with the wider universe of humanist 230

Rademaker, Vossius, 223–32, 256. Ibid. 245 (see also 282); Hobbes’s associates Gassendi and Mersenne eagerly anticipated Vossius’s De Theologica Gentili; Sorbière to Vossius, 17 Sept. 1649, Karl Schuhmann (ed.), Hobbes: Une Chronique. Cheminement de sa pensée et de sa vie (Paris, 1998), 112. 232 On Vossius and Hobbes’s Historia Ecclesiastica, see Springborg, ‘Hobbes and the Historia Ecclesiastica’, 553–71. 233 Vossius wrote that the heathens, through natural reason, believed (fitfully) in one, incorporeal divinity. Gerardus Vossius, De Theologia Gentili, et Physiologia Christiana; sive de Origine ac Progressu Idololatriae . . . 234 Wickenden, Vossius, 40–6. (Amsterdam, 1668), 5–6. 235 Vossius, De Theologia Gentili, 6–13, 32. 236 Ibid. 13–14, 45–50, 51, 200–16; Wickenden, Vossius, 105–6. 237 Lev., 451, 66–7. 238 Wickenden, Vossius, 145–6, 159. 231

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scholarship on the ancient pagan religions is, however, certain. For instance, his Historia Ecclesiastica, it has tentatively been established, was based on a reading of Johann Clüver’s Historia totius mundi epitome a prima rerum origine usque ad annum Christi (1645).239 Hobbes also knew the historical work of Vossius’s Leiden colleague Philip Clüver. The manuscript version of Leviathan references Philip Clüver’s Germaniae Antiquae Libri Tres of 1616 (which was held in the Cavendish library).240 This massive work of geography, linguistic analysis, and history is credited by Hobbes for its analysis of ornaments, coats of arms, and crests. But the Germaniae Antiquae also contains long chapters on German heathen religion, which are part of a more general comparative analysis by Clüver of ancient gentile religion.241 Clüver narrated the rise of sacred rites, divinations, sacrifices, and the ancient heathen priesthoods. In a manner reminiscent of Vossius he viewed many gentile superstitions as corruptions of a natural, monotheistic religious impulse. He was, moreover, constantly aware of the political functions of gentile religion and the gentile priests. In this regard Clüver exploited an extensive variety of ancient literary sources, including Caesar, Strabo, and, above all, Diodorus Siculus. Hobbes’s own account of the gentile priests (in Behemoth) relies on precisely these authorities, and it seems possible that his attention was drawn to them by Clüver. In particular, several of Hobbes’s extensive quotations from Diodorus are found printed in Germaniae Antiquae.242 A shared interest in the ancient religions is also a neglected aspect of the muchstudied intellectual affinity between Hobbes and John Selden. Selden himself was, of course, a prominent Erastian. Richard Tuck has argued that Selden built his political thought on the belief that natural law essentially reduced to the keeping of contracts, which in turn demanded that sovereigns enjoy a monopoly on coercive force. Churches lacked coercive authority, and thus enjoyed no independent claim on moral obedience.243 How fully Selden abandoned conventional naturallaw theory in favour of a minimalist, Grotian model has proven a contested subject.244 His undoubted leanings in this direction, however, probably influenced Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes admired Selden’s Mare Clausum (belatedly published in 1635), in which contractarian property arguments were employed to assert, against Grotius, English sovereignty over the northern seas.245 But if the influence of these aspects of Selden’s work on Hobbes has been well investigated, less known is the possible influence of Selden’s antiquarian researches into ancient religion. Hobbes read and admired, for instance, Selden’s 1614 Titles of Honor.246 While discussing the evolution of sovereign titles such as ‘emperor’ and ‘king’, Selden’s work detailed ancient traditions of worshiping sovereigns as minor deities.247 That Titles of 239

Patricia Springborg, ‘Hobbes and Cluverius’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 1075–8. Hamilton, ‘Hobbes’s Study and the Hardwick Library’, 450; BL Egerton MS 1910, 53. 241 Philippus Cluverius, Germaniae Aniquae Libri Tres (Amsterdam, 1626), 189–313. 242 Diodorus on the Druids, for instance, is quoted in Beh., 91 and Germaniae Antiquae, 198; on the Egyptians see, 243 Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, 82–100. Beh. 91–2, and Germaniae Antiquae, 201. 244 Johann Sommerville, ‘John Selden, the Law of Nature, and the Origins of Government’, Historical Journal, 245 Hobbes to Glen, 6 Apr. 1636, Corr., 30; Tuck, Natural Right Theories, 86–90. 27 (1984), 437–47. 246 Chatsworth Hobbes MS E1A. 247 John Selden, Titles of Honor (1614), 9–13, 38–9, 62–3. 240

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Honor might have influenced Hobbes’s sense of the ancient civil religions is indicated by his also describing—in terms very similar to Selden’s—the ancient gentile practice of swearing by princes.248 It is also possible that Hobbes was familiar with De Dis Syris (1617), Selden’s historical investigation into the ancient pagan divinities mentioned in the Pentateuch and the prophetic books of Scripture.249 Some of Hobbes’s writing on the ancient religions relied on Selden’s sources (which were also exploited by Vossius and Clüver). Diodorus Siculus provided Hobbes and Selden with details about ancient Persian and Syrian religious practice.250 Strabo was also a common source for the two men.251 Perhaps De Dis Syris was Hobbes’s source on the ancient divinities Baal and Moloch, both of which are mentioned in Leviathan.252 Additionally, both Behemoth and Selden’s Analecton Anglo-Britannicon (a 1615 collection of early British historical documents) rely on Diodorus Siculus and Caesar for accounts of the ancient prophets among the Druids in ancient Brittany and Gaul.253 Whether Hobbes consulted authorities on gentile religion such as Diodorus Siculus and Strabo on his own, or whether (as was quite common) he borrowed from the much more compendious researches of Selden, Vossius, and Clüver, the paralleling of his interests with theirs is suggestive. Indeed, the marriage of this sort of humanist research into the pagan religions with a Protestant ecclesiological position marked another of the pre-eminent Erastian theorists of the age: Hugo Grotius. The emergence of Grotian Erastianism out of his fundamental theory of sovereignty is well known, as is the probability that Hobbes might have been influenced by this line of thought. Again, Hobbes was at the very least familiar (through Selden) with Grotius’s Mare liberum, in which concepts such as the state of nature, natural law, and contracted sovereignty were brought to bear on the vexed question of the open seas. Grotius, however, defended sovereign control of the church not just based upon the logic of natural law and natural rights. He also employed, at great length, Protestant and Catholic ecclesiological traditions, and humanist researches into the government of ancient religion (both Jewish and Gentile). Most significantly, these sources informed his De Imperio Summarum Potestatum Circa Sacra, which was composed in 1617 (with assistance from Vossius) as a contribution to the Dutch Remonstrant controversy, but not published until 1647.254 The possibility that Hobbes read this text before 1647 is slim, although it did circulate in manuscript in France and England (in the latter case among Laudian churchmen not entirely pleased by its Erastianism).255 Possible influence aside, however, the ecclesiological conclusions of Grotius and Hobbes can be revealingly paralleled. Like Hobbes, Grotius strongly rejected 248

Lev., 100; Selden, Titles, 63–5. Reid Barbour, John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in 17th-c England (Toronto, 2003), 101–11; on Selden and Vossius, see D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the 250 Selden, De Dis Syris (1617), 90–1, 97; Beh., 92–3. Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY, 1972), 164–86. 251 Selden, De Dis Syris, 47, 92, 97–9, 107–9, 134–6, 255–6 et passim; Beh., 91. 252 On Baal, see Selden, De Dis Syris, 103–41; Lev., 85, 328; on Moloch, see Selden, De Dis Syris, 74–98; Lev., 313. 253 Barbour, Selden, 183–5; Beh., 91. 254 Harm-Jan Van Dam, introduction to Hugo Grotius, De Imperio Summarum Potestatum Circa Sacra (2 vols., 255 Grotius, De Imperio Summarum Potestatum, 41–62. Leiden, 2001), i. 13–43. 249

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the erection of ‘two supreme powers within one people’. He subordinated the sacraments, ordination, canon formation, and the convening of synods to the jurisdiction of sovereignty. He denied individual church forms—and specifically episcopacy—divine right status. These conclusions, again, partly emerged out of a natural rights paradigm, but Grotius also defended them with copious reference to reformed Christian ecclesiology. Marsilius, Erastus, Bullinger, Brenz, Hooker, Jewel, and dozens of others are utilized in De Imperio Summarum Potestatum Circa Sacra. Furthermore, Grotius, like Hobbes, also exploited the evidence of pagan antiquity on the question of the wise organization of religious authority. Undoubtedly reflecting Vossius’s influence, Grotius wrote that ancient sovereigns governed religion partly because ‘divine providence’ dictated that they must: ‘The other reason consists in the nature and the particular power of religion: it makes people quiet, obedient, patriotic and adherents of justice and equity. Where the citizens are so well disposed, the state must needs be happy.’256 Grotius lengthily exemplified this more instrumental logic about the uses of politically subdued religion with the testimony of the ancients. He appealed to Aristotle and Plutarch to defend the proposition that religious sanction was essential to making sound civil laws. Diodorus provided examples of kings functioning as priests in pagan societies. From Plato, Livy, Horace, Valerius Maximus, and Cicero, Grotius extracted historical examples of the heathens’ wise use of religion to promote political ‘happiness and harmony’. Religion, ‘even false religion’, thus contributed to ‘the foundation of human society’.257 In all of these respects Hobbes’s intellectual profile very much paralleled that of Grotius. In the work of each a modern ideal of civil religion emerged from a mingling of Protestant ecclesiological traditions with a humanistic understanding of the ancient gentile religions. Beyond his reading, Hobbes’s situation as secretary and tutor to the Cavendishes placed him within the orbit of several leading humanists of the age. Most notable among these was Francis Bacon. The wave of Tacitean thinking that swept England during Hobbes’s youth was propelled by men such as the Earl of Essex and his client Francis Bacon. Bacon was also deeply influenced by Machiavelli and the neo-Stoics, and his political thought was shaped by a utilitarian understanding of religion typical of the new humanism.258 Bacon’s Essays approvingly cited Machiavelli’s belief that Christianity, by magnifying ‘goodness’, had ‘given up good men to prey on those that are tyrannical and unjust’.259 In memoranda on religion written for Queen Elizabeth, Bacon justified the utility of Puritan preachers as engines of anti-Catholic propaganda by appealing to Machiavelli and ‘reasons-ofstate’.260 As a matter of public policy, Bacon preferred atheism over any attachment to ‘superstitious’ revealed religion, and he numbered discord in religious belief among the chief causes of sedition.261 The strength of the church was largely to be 256

257 Ibid. 191, 171–9. Grotius, De Imperio Summarum Potestatum, 175. Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (London, 1964), 73–6; Perez Zagorin, Francis Bacon (Princeton, 1998), 29, 49; Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Chicago, 1968), 59. 259 Francis Bacon, The Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral, in Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, 260 Zagorin, Bacon, 6. ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford, 1996), 363–4. 261 Bacon, Essays, in Works, 368–73. 258

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valued as a help to the ‘laws of charity and of human society’. Observing the turmoil of the European religious wars, Bacon noted that ‘quarrels and divisions for religion were evils unknown to the heathen’.262 Many of these sentiments would be echoed by Hobbes’s work, so it is of great interest to note his early and close association with the great humanist. As a young man, thanks to the connections of the Cavendish family, Hobbes served as an informal secretary to Bacon. Aubrey recalled that ‘Lord Chancellor Bacon loved to converse’ with Hobbes, and other contemporaries testified that Hobbes had a high ‘regard for Mr. Bacon’s writings’.263 Hobbes assisted Bacon with the translation of several of his Essays. Perhaps influenced by Hobbes’s occasional distaste for the Baconian scientific method, historians have given his association with Bacon only cursory attention. But the evidence indicates that it was precisely Bacon’s esoteric understanding of religion and myth that most influenced Hobbes. The distinction between the vulgar herd and the philosophically wise, and the belief that religious myths constituted allegorized philosophy for the masses, are ideas that run throughout Bacon’s writings, but nowhere are they more systematically promulgated than in his De Sapientia Veterum of 1609. That work, which interprets the philosophical truths contained in the ancient myths in a manner reminiscent of Natalis Comes, emerged from Bacon’s interest in ancient religious mythology.264 Interpreting pagan myths was a favourite project of Renaissance humanists.265 Many were fascinated by the ancient habit of ‘transmitting wisdom “secretly” in this “disguised form” . . . so that the wonders of philosophy might not be shown to the common people’.266 This fascination with the esoteric myths of the ancients reinforced Bacon’s view that public religion should be employed to buttress state power and the moral discipline of subjects. In this way, his effort in De Sapientia Veterum to uncover ‘hidden meaning in the myths of pagan antiquity’ confirmed aspects of Machiavelli’s political realism.267 Bacon’s esoteric, instrumental understanding of the pagan religions prefigured Hobbes’s own, and De Sapientia Veterum seems to have been a direct influence. Hobbes’s close associate François du Verdus—about whom more will follow— would strongly indicate such an influence in correspondence later in Hobbes’s life. In 1654 Du Verdus boasted to Hobbes that he would ‘swear by nothing but your philosophy and Mr. Bacon’s book De Sapientia Veterum’, and he announced that he was undertaking a translation of the latter work. Du Verdus referenced Hobbes’s high regard for Bacon’s writings and, in composing his own interlinear commentary on De Sapientia Veterum, he chiefly ‘elaborated’ on interpretations 262

Ibid. 300. ABL, i. 331; Du Verdus to Hobbes, 24 July 1664, Corr., 628; Samuel Sorbière, Relation d’un voyage en Angleterre (Paris, 1664), 75; Robin Bunce, ‘Thomas Hobbes’ Relationship with Francis Bacon: An Introduction’, Hobbes Studies, 16 (2003), 41–83. 264 Barbara C. Garner, ‘Francis Bacon, Natalis Comes, and the Mythological Tradition’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 33 (1970), 264–90. 265 Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York, 1968), 17–25; Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. Barbara Sessions (Princeton, 1953), 219–56, 312–16. 266 Garner, ‘Bacon and the Mythological Tradition’, 265. 267 Rossi, Bacon, 96. 263

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provided by Hobbes.268 Hobbes indeed accepted the dedication of Du Verdus’s planned translation of Bacon.269 All of this suggests that Hobbes’s interest in the ‘civill worship’ of the gentiles reflected, in part, his familiarity with contemporaneous humanist research into the subject. Nor was Du Verdus the only associate of Hobbes who would reflect a warm enthusiasm for Francis Bacon. Bacon was included on a list of intellectual heroes sent to Hobbes by his friend Samuel Sorbière in 1658. Also on this list was the Venetian jurist and theologian Paolo Sarpi.270 No thinker better exemplifies the influence of Tacitean humanism on early modern religious attitudes than Sarpi. As adviser to the Venetian Senate during the Interdict crisis, and as scourge of the papacy thereafter, Sarpi was among the most prominent religious polemicists of the early seventeenth century. He espoused a theory of religion that resembled that of Hobbes. Like Hobbes he was a materialist, a determinist, and a nominalist. Some have seen him as a closeted atheist.271 On theological matters proper, the corrosive effects of neo-scepticism are clearly seen in the writings of both Sarpi and Hobbes. The more daring aspects of Sarpian theology were contained in his Pensieri and were unknown to contemporaries. Sarpi’s contemporary influence depended more on his ecclesiological and political critique of Roman ‘papalism’, a critique contained in a series of polemical tracts produced during the Interdict crisis and in his masterpiece, The History of the Council of Trent (1619). In the latter work Sarpi excoriated the Tridentine papacy for elevating its own power and usurping the just authority of temporal states.272 This polemical case was in partial sympathy with the magisterial ecclesiological tradition of European Protestantism.273 More fundamentally, however, it sprang from Sarpi’s engagement with ancient sources such as Tacitus, and humanist commentators such as Machiavelli. These influences cultivated in him a deeply psychological understanding of religious belief and an instrumental understanding of religious authority.274 Sarpi’s influence was strongly felt in England. James I hoped to entice him to England and played a role in securing the publication of the History of the Council of Trent.275 The religious inclinations of Sarpi and Francis Bacon, both Machiavellian and Tacitean in their inflection, were not merely parallel phenomena but were part of a common intellectual context. The vacillating Catholic Marc Antonio de Dominis, Sarpi’s ally and fellow author of vigorous anti-papal polemic during the Interdict crisis, fled to England for a time and executed a translation of

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Du Verdus to Hobbes, 10 Aug. 1654, Corr., 196. Du Verdus to Hobbes, 25 Sept. 1665 and 11 Dec. 1665, Corr., 680–6; Bacon’s works, including De Sapientia Veterum, were in the Cavendish library (Cavendish Hobbes MS E1A). 270 Sorbière to Hobbes, 13 Dec. 1656 and 22 Jan. 1658, Corr., 390, 494. 271 David Wootton, Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983), 15–18, 30, 41; id., ‘New Histories of Atheism’, 36. 272 William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty (Berkeley, 1968), 30–9, 72–4, 119. 273 Noel Malcolm, De Dominis (1560–1624): Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist and Relapsed Heretic (1984), 37–8. 274 Wootton, Sarpi, 20, 37, 68. 275 John Leon Lievsay, Venetian Phoenix: Paolo Sarpi and Some of his English Friends (1606–1700) (Lawrence, Kans., 1973), 11–19; Malcolm, De Dominis, 55–65. 269

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De Sapientia Veterum.276 Sarpi’s devoted secretary and biographer Fulgenzio Micanzio was also an enthusiastic Baconian. Thomas Hobbes, for his part, was positioned precisely at the intersection of Bacon’s circle with that of Paolo Sarpi’s Venetians. During a tour of Italy, Hobbes and William Cavendish met Fulgenzio Micanzio, and from 1615 to 1628 Cavendish and Micanzio engaged in an extensive correspondence translated by Hobbes. This correspondence was a conduit for a revealing exchange of political and religious news. Micanzio kept Cavendish and Hobbes abreast of developments in the battle against Rome and in the publication of Sarpi’s Historie of the Council of Trent, a work with which his English correspondents were familiar.277 Micanzio also evidenced the influence of Bacon on the Venetians. He fulsomely praised Bacon’s ‘judgment and learning’, particularly in the Essays and De Sapientia Veterum. The latter work, indeed, was first sent to Micanzio by Cavendish, and Micanzio gratefully acknowledged its ‘learning politique, morall, and divine’.278 Micanzio was chiefly interested in soliciting works ‘against the usurpations of the court of Rome’. He fumed against unnamed papal figures who delayed the publication of Bacon’s Essays based on their impolitic remarks on religion, and expressed amazement that their anti-clerical tenor did not prevent their eventual appearance in Italy.279 Throughout, Micanzio addressed Hobbes and Cavendish as sympathetic fellow travellers in the war against clericalism and in favour of untrammelled sovereignty.280 The Historie of the Council of Trent perfectly captured that blend of Christian reformism and Tacitean humanism that informed Hobbes’s ecclesiological views. The work scarcely concealed Sarpi’s sympathy with the Reformation, and entirely failed to conceal his fierce hostility to Rome and all its works. Sarpi’s quasiProtestant sensibilities were in part theological. Hobbes undoubtedly appreciated his unflattering account of the debates between the Tridentine Council’s Franciscans and Dominicans over minute theological points, particularly free will and purgatory (both highly insidious doctrines to Hobbes). Sarpi’s dry observations that grammarians found the Latin of the Tridentine theological decrees ‘not intelligible’ would also have delighted Hobbes.281 Sarpi’s main critique of the papacy, however, was a political one. As his English translator, Nathaniel Brent, put it in an epistle dedicatory to James I, Sarpi exposed the ‘stratagems’ used to ‘weaken the lawfull right of Kings and Princes’ and ‘lift up the Papacy to an unsufferable height of pride’. And Sarpi indeed pursued this theme relentlessly. His history was utterly sympathetic to the Princes of Germany, 276 Hobbes probably knew de Dominis and was perhaps influenced by his De Respublica Ecclesiastica; Malcolm, De Dominis, 46–53, 82–3; Mason to Hobbes, 10 Dec. 1622, Corr., 2–3. 277 Micanzio to Devonshire, 17 Apr. 1619 and 24 Apr. 1620, BL Add. MS 11309, fos. 14 and 19; David Wootton, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Machiavellian Moments’, in Donald Kelley and David Sacks (eds.), The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction (Cambridge, 1997), 210–42 at 222. 278 Micanzio to Devonshire, 31 Mar. 1616 and 17 Jun. 1616, BL Add. MS 11309, fos. 3, 4. 279 Micanzio to Devonshire, 12 Jan. 1618 and 27 Dec. 1619, BL Add. MS 11309, fos. 8, 16. 280 Micanzio to Devonshire, 24 Feb. 1617, BL Add. MS 11309, fo. 5. 281 Paolo Sarpi, The Historie of the Council of Trent Conteining Eight Bookes. . . . , trans. Nathaniel Brent (1620), 227.

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endlessly detailing their efforts to preserve their sovereignty in the face of papal usurpation. Dispensations, absolutions, excommunications, interdicts, and church courts were all presented as clerical efforts to ‘appropriate unto themselves the jurisdiction of the secular magistrate’.282 Sarpi attributes the papacy’s long resistance to a theological Council to its utter refusal to allow its own ecclesiastical authority to be threatened.283 Eventually convened, the Council of Trent failed to address the political sins of Rome and instead enraged European sovereigns by affirming the full slate of pretended ecclesiastical rights against princely encroachment.284 Sarpi sympathetically narrated the reaction of French Gallican Catholics to these developments, and included an account of the Erastian English Reformation that was all but openly flattering.285 But if Sarpi’s history betrayed Protestant sympathies it was also marked by its author’s Tacitean and Machiavellian inclinations. Pope and Emperor alike are presumed to be posturing in order to pursue their ‘private interests’. Sarpi constantly portrayed the papacy manipulating monarchs and vulgar Christians alike. The ‘reverence shewed toward the Pope’ by Charles V, Sarpi suggested, was ‘and Arte of government covered with the cloake of religion’.286 Sarpi’s history—dominated by seditious clergy, proud sovereigns, and an instrumental use of theology by both—strongly resonated with Thomas Hobbes’s own account of the Reformation. Superficially favourable to the Lutheran reformers, both men were more fundamentally animated by a Machiavellian understanding of religion and power. Thomas Hobbes’s religious scepticism, his tendency to write esoterically on religious questions, his sense of Christianity’s political shortcomings, and his instrumental understanding of religion all marked him as a participant in the humanist project seeking to revive the ideal of ‘civill worship’. His subtle understanding of the capacities (and shortcomings) of gentile religion as a model for a reformed Christian church partly emerged out of his direct knowledge of the ancient historians and moralists. He was, however, also initiated into humanist scholarship on the gentile religions. His understanding of the virtues of the pagan religions was influenced by a familiarity with, among others, Montaigne, Lipsius, Selden, Machiavelli, Sarpi, and Bacon. To the extent that Hobbes participated in this project to render Christianity a latter-day civil religion, he remained beyond the pale of Protestant Erastianism. To be sure, his anti-clericalism and his evocation of the reforming magistrate all place Hobbesian theory, superficially, at the apex of a long Protestant ecclesiological tradition. But Hobbes’s religious scepticism, his esoteric rhetorical strategy, and his instrumental understanding of religion undercut his Protestant posture, and expose him—like Machiavelli—as a thinker inimical to Christianity itself. As a means of understanding Hobbes’s civil philosophy in an essential way, 282 Paolo Sarpi, The Historie of the Council of Trent Conteining Eight Bookes. . . . , trans. Nathaniel Brent (1620), 283 Ibid. 34, 49. 23–4, 28–9. 284 Ibid. 228, 790–1, 812. 285 On the French, ibid. 314, 819; on the English, 65–87. 286 Ibid. 41–3, 49, 383, 805.

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Hobbes’s humanism trumps his Protestantism. But in any effort to explain the contextual history and reception of Hobbes’s work, both readings of his Erastian ecclesiology prove equally important. The production and reception of Hobbes’s work were determined by the events of the English Revolution, and his dual use of Erastian ecclesiology would reflect deep tensions in the religious dynamics of the Revolution itself. The remainder of this book will explain how this was so.

2

Hobbes, the Long Parliament, and the Church of England Hobbes’s Erastianism must not be reduced to a mere logical implication of his theory of sovereignty, but must be understood within Protestant and humanist traditions that resonated strongly in early modern political discourse. The remainder of this book will explicate how Hobbes’s understanding of religious power interacted with fundamental political ends and ideological tendencies of the English Revolution. It will be argued that the Revolution was less a battle over theology than a struggle over the location of religious power within the emerging modern state. So understood, the Revolution provides a much clearer backdrop against which to view Hobbes’s political writings. Hobbes’s consuming interest in the political neutralization of the Christian church dovetailed with the militant Erastianism of the Revolution, undermined his natural sympathy with Stuart royalism, and finally motivated him to make open (if cautious) common cause with the revolutionary regimes of the Interregnum. If the Revolution is correctly understood as a war to protect England’s Erastian Reformation church settlement, to beat back resurgent clericalism within the church hierarchy, and to consolidate the coercive authority of the state, Thomas Hobbes emerges from the shadow of his royalist reputation and appears as a defender of core elements of the revolutionary cause. This is not to argue that Hobbes was a revolutionary firebrand. Such a suggestion would tip reinterpretation into distortion. Hobbes believed in order. He was deeply averse, theoretically and personally, to factionalism and political resistance. There is no doubt that his initial political sympathies were with Charles I. However, this book argues that Hobbes’s evaluation of the English Revolution slowly evolved during the civil war and Interregnum, after severe disorder had destroyed traditional authority and the state required reconstruction. Pressured by these extremities, Hobbes’s natural deference to established power had no clear object. His religious and ecclesiological views then rose to the fore, and drew him away from royalism. The process took a decade fully to unfold. What follows, in other words, is the narrative of a slow conversion to the revolutionary cause. It is also the story of an eventually regretful convert. The implosion of the Protectorate and the Restoration of the Stuarts left Hobbes dangerously exposed. He spent his final decades attempting to repair the damage

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caused by his political miscalculation in 1651. For this reason Hobbes’s Restoration writings, though essential, must be read cautiously. His post-1660 insistence on his lifelong royalism has been far too uncritically accepted by modern scholarship. After the Restoration, Hobbes became a hostile witness for those interested in an honest reckoning of his career during the 1640s and 1650s. That said, one of the profitable results of such a reckoning is a fresh understanding of Hobbes’s most neglected major work, Behemoth. Composed after the Restoration and purportedly a royalist history of the civil war, Behemoth emerges as a highly rhetorical and esoteric apology for the religious project of the English Revolution. The next three chapters of this book will narrate the evolution of Hobbes’s politics from 1640, when he fled into exile, until 1651, when he returned to an England transformed by civil war and regicide. These chapters will chart Hobbes’s shifting political positioning and explain how his main works of political thought responded to the pressure of events. The final three chapters of the book attend to the most neglected phase of Hobbes’s life, the Interregnum. The aims here are to recover the suppressed history of Hobbes’s accommodation with England’s revolutionary regimes, and to explicate the formative initial reception of his work among the various religious and political factions of the era. This book, it bears repeating, does not attempt to explain the origins of Hobbes’s general political thought. Those origins pre-date the outbreak of the English Civil War. Hobbes first turned his full attention to politics in the late 1630s, when he wrote the manuscript later known as The Elements of Law Natural and Politic. This work, never published in an authorized form, was circulating in manuscript by the spring of 1640. Key aspects of Hobbes’s mature political thought—his doctrine of natural rights, account of the state of nature, and so forth—are contained in the Elements and would evolve very little in his published writings. The Elements were almost certainly written as a political memo of sorts for the Earl of Newcastle, to whom the work was dedicated on 9 May 1640. (Hobbes references ‘principles’ discussed ‘in private discourse’ with the Earl.1) It was a period of political turmoil, when ‘many Points of the Regal Power’, Hobbes later recalled, ‘were disputed and denied’.2 The Elements was clearly intended as a rebuke to those in England’s governing class who were busily resisting Charles’s vigorous assertions of royal prerogative.3 Hobbes’s autobiographical writings rarely reference The Elements of Law, and he never authorized publication of the work. (A pirated edition would appear soon after the execution of the King.) As we shall see, only in the very changed circumstances of 1642 would Hobbes introduce his political thought into print, and even then only for the Latin-reading elite. In the spring of 1640 Hobbes did have a tantalizing brush with a more direct role in political affairs. When Charles I, starved for cash and facing war with the Scots, called for parliamentary elections, the Earl of Devonshire threw his considerable weight behind his long-time servant Thomas Hobbes as a candidate for Derby. This effort to fortify the King’s faction 1

EL, 19.

2

Mr Hobbes Considered, 4.

3

Sommerville, Hobbes in Context, 17–18; Tuck, Hobbes, 23–4.

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of parliamentary supporters proved futile when the electors ‘resolved to give no way to the election of Mr. Hobs’ and another candidate was selected.4 The failure may have resulted from typical dickering over patronage and local prerogative.5 Or perhaps, in the fevered atmosphere of 1640, Hobbes had already earned a reputation for his absolutist principles. There is no evidence that Hobbes tried to revive his parliamentary prospects when, after the failure of the Short Parliament, King Charles convened the Long Parliament in November. Hobbes did remove to London in late September, awaiting the appearance of the Cavendishes. Exposed to a plague victim, he was quarantined for six weeks. Then, in November, mere weeks into the parliament, Hobbes was ‘violently’ seized with a resolution to flee London. He did so within three days. Only Devonshire, who sent along his trunk, knew of his departure. Hobbes travelled to France, where he would remain for eleven years. Why he was among (in his own words) the ‘first of all that fled’ is not entirely easy to explain. Hobbes himself wrote that ‘the reason I came away was that I saw words that tended to advance the prerogative of kings began to be examined in Parlament. And I knew some that had a good will to have had me troubled . . .’6 Hobbes’s Elements had been circulating privately for months, and had apparently stirred animosity. Early in the parliament, some members moved against clergy who had preached in favour of royal absolutism. Aubrey later claimed that Hobbes had been frightened by attacks on the arch-royalist Bishop Roger Maynwairing.7 Maynwairing was not impeached until February of 1641, but by mid-November of 1640 others had already come under attack.8 That the members would have troubled themselves with the author of an unpublished manuscript may seem odd, but we should not forget Hobbes’s efforts to secure a parliamentary seat, or his status as an adviser to the powerful Cavendish family. The Cavendishes themselves enjoyed influence over the King, and Hobbes’s Elements had provocatively suggested that Newcastle introduce the book to ‘those whom the matter it containeth most nearly concerneth’.9 In any case, Hobbes saw a ‘disorder coming’.10 We may doubt his later suggestion that civil war was manifestly ‘unavoidable’ at this early date, but certainly the political chaos was, as he would claim, ‘injurious to study’.11 Hobbes would remain in France for over a decade, but it is important to recognize that his was not strictly the exile of a persecuted royalist. In 1640 civil war and regicide were all but unthinkable. (In this sense everyone—and no one— was a royalist in 1640.) Devonshire left England only after his own impeachment in 1642; Newcastle, like most committed partisans of the King, only after the military setbacks of mid-decade. Whatever his fears of parliamentary retribution 4

John Coke Sr. to John Coke Jr., 5 Feb. 1640, HMC: Manuscripts of the Earl Cowper (1888), 251. On parliamentary electors, see Beh., 121. 6 Mr Hobbes Considered, 6; Hobbes to Scudamore, 2 Apr. 1641, Corr., 114–15. 7 ABL, i. 334. 8 The Journal of Simonds D’Ewes from the Beginning of the Long Parliament . . . , ed. Wallace Notestein (New Haven, 1923), 389–90; Malcolm notes parliamentary criticism of William Beale (and others) for ‘preaching for monarchy’ 9 EL, 20. (Corr., 115 n. 5). 10 Hobbes to Scudamore, 2 Apr. 1641, Corr., 115. 11 Vita [prose], 5–6; Vita [verse], 6. 5

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for his Elements, Hobbes was also seeking a quieter atmosphere in which to pursue his philosophical interests during a ‘troublesome time’.12 He took up residence in Paris. Already acquainted (from previous European tours) with the disciples of the new science grouped around the celebrated friar Marin Mersenne, Hobbes was soon occupied studying chemistry and participating in dissections.13 During these early months Mersenne arranged for Hobbes to publish a critique of Descartes’s optical theory and objections to his Meditations.14 It was within the context of these pursuits that Thomas Hobbes decided to publish, for the first time, his theory of politics. Written in Latin, this initial work appeared in 1642 under the title Elementorum Philosophia Sectio Tertia de Cive. For a second edition in 1646 Hobbes retitled the book De Cive (‘short and simple’ he would say15), but the original title reminds us that he considered his political thought merely the final section of a three-part, comprehensive philosophy of matter and man. The decision to publish the politics out of sequence poses no mystery. Hobbes himself later explained that the composition of his full philosophy had been interrupted by the political disputes ‘seething’ in England ‘concerning the right of Government and of the due obedience of citizens, forerunners of the approaching war’.16 De Cive was apparently completed in November 1641, by which time the Long Parliament had been sitting for an eventful year. Whether Hobbes composed it (as he had the Elements) at the bidding of the Cavendishes cannot be said. He would later recall that a royalist party was building itself in parliament during 1641, and perhaps this waxing of Charles’s support awakened Hobbes’s political engagement.17 There is little doubt that he followed political developments attentively. His contacts at home were many. Devonshire and Newcastle were at the centre of events. Hobbes was a longstanding associate of Viscount Falkland, who was also politically active. Another possible contact was Hobbes’s friend Sir Kenelm Digby, who was briefly imprisoned for raising funds among fellow Catholics on behalf of the King. Digby travelled to Paris in the summer of 1641 and may have visited Hobbes there.18 During these months Hobbes also corresponded with Newcastle’s brother Sir Charles Cavendish, who served the King both in the Short Parliament and on the field of battle.19 Intellectual historians, understandably fascinated by the textual difference between De Cive and Hobbes’s masterwork, Leviathan, have often presented De Cive itself as a lightly modified version of The Elements of Law. This has obscured the status of De Cive as a piece of political commentary specifically responding to the first year of the Long Parliament. It is certainly true that De Cive, the Elements, and indeed Leviathan contain broadly similar discussions of familiar Hobbesian doctrines: the state of nature, natural rights, contracted sovereignty, the dangers of mixed constitutions, and so forth. These are generally static features of Hobbes’s 12 14 17 19

13 Vita [prose], 5; ABL, i. 336–7. Hobbes to Cavendish, 29 Jan. 1641, Corr., 85. 15 Hobbes to Sorbière, 22 May 1646, Corr., 133. Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Descartes’, 28. 18 Malcolm, Biographical Register, Corr., 830. Vita [prose], 6. Hobbes to Charles Cavendish, 29 Jan. 1641, Corr., 80.

16

DC, 13.

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political thought, and only their small details evolved during the course of the English Revolution. However, De Cive contained entirely new and extensive theoretical discussion on the proper relationship between temporal and spiritual authorities. This was far and away its most striking innovation. If Hobbes formed the fundamentals of his politics during the controversies of the Personal Rule, the first publication of his political thought—a much more significant political act— occurred in a very different context. And by 1641, Hobbes had become increasingly concerned with the threat to political stability posed by a resurgence of dualist ecclesiology. Chapter 1 located Hobbes’s own powerfully statist ecclesiology within two distinct, if related, traditions: Protestant Erastianism, and the late humanist fascination with civil religion. Hobbes was immersed in these modes of thinking throughout his life, and their influence on him long pre-dates the composition of his formal political theory. The unfolding of the English Revolution, however, dramatically heightened the political relevance of his ecclesiology. The project of fashioning a politically stable church would prove the evolving, dynamic feature of his published political works. This evolution would culminate radically with Leviathan, but De Cive also introduced vital ecclesiological innovations into his thought. Hobbes’s political positioning during the 1640s cannot be understood unless the nature of these innovations is clarified. In the preface to a revised edition of De Cive Hobbes characterized the work by writing that it offered not merely a treatment of law and civil society, but a treatise on ‘the Christian Religion itself (so far as the limits of my design allow)’. His aim in this was twofold: to reconcile his theory of sovereignty with Scripture and divine law; and to explicate the requirements of Christian soteriology.20 The ultimate purpose of Hobbes’s religious theorizing—rendering a modern civil religion out of Christianity—has already been discussed and need not be reiterated here. It is, however, vital to note how many of Hobbes’s religious doctrines were first introduced in 1642.21 The Elements of Law contained one brief chapter partly treating the perils of independent clerical authority. Its efforts to ‘confirm’ Hobbesian theory ‘out of the word of God’ is contained in two chapters of approximately ten printed pages.22 By contrast, these matters consume the entire final third of De Cive, running to well over eighty printed pages in modern editions. To be sure, a few of Hobbes’s religious teachings are found in the Elements, particularly points about the nature of God, reason, and revelation that pertain to the treatment of human nature included in the Elements but not in De Cive.23 But the expansion of religious theorizing in the latter work is so considerable as to constitute a difference in kind, not just degree. Indeed, De Cive’s enhanced thematic emphasis on religion was visually reflected in its engraved frontispiece.24 There, a native American standing before 20

21 Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 317–19. 22 EL, chs. 18 and 26. DC, 7, 171, 234–5. Ibid., ch. 5, for instance, considers ‘knowledge, opinion, and belief ’. 24 The frontispiece of Leviathan has been extensively studied; not so that of De Cive. The engraver of the latter work (details from which are reproduced on the jacket of the present book) is unknown. The second and third 23

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scenes of savage violence symbolizes the Hobbesian state of nature. Opposite, Hobbes’s glorification of absolute sovereignty is represented by a crowned figure bearing a sword and the scales of justice in the foreground, and in the background by scenes of settled agriculture. But perhaps the most striking details of the frontispiece rise above these emblems of libertas and imperium, and represent religio. Here, filling nearly half of the printed page, is an intricate visual account of the Last Judgement. Christ, bearing the cross, descends from parted clouds. On his right angels bless the elect as they ascend into heaven. On his left demons flay the damned as they are ushered into the sulphurous pits of hell. It is doubtful that Hobbes himself awaited such an Apocalypse, but much of De Cive examined the political implications following from the fervent millenarian beliefs of his contemporaries. It is also true that, between the composition of the Elements and De Cive, the polemical thrust of Hobbes’s ecclesiology had markedly shifted. De Cive includes discussions on the nature of God’s kingdom, on the extent of divine omnipotence, and on the links between human obligation and divine omnipotence, none of which is given significant exposition in the Elements.25 Also novel are passages on the ends of religious worship and on the sovereign’s control of worship practices.26 De Cive offers Hobbes’s first full interpretation of the sacred history contained in Scripture, an interpretation that critically demonstrated the Erastian nature of the ancient polity of Israel, and confirmed Christ’s supposed consistency with this model. These hermeneutic exercises had been much briefer in the Elements.27 Still more strikingly, the nature of the intersection between Hobbes’s religious and political doctrines was sharply clarified by De Cive. For instance, while the Elements did place all religious authority under the magistrate, the dualist division of spiritual and temporal was not directly employed to exemplify seditious theories that divide sovereignty; this occurred for the first time in De Cive.28 The latter work contains Hobbes’s first flat conflation of church and state. In De Cive Hobbes also included, for the first time, his thesis that religious disagreement caused most civil wars.29 By far the most notable difference between the Elements and De Cive, however, is that the former text was implicitly directed against ‘covenanted’ sectarians, while the latter aimed its criticisms more forcefully against traditional clerical dualists. editions of De Cive (1647) contain a different frontispiece, although based on a similar thematic scheme (religion, liberty, and sovereignty are portrayed as female figures). A few copies of the second edition contain a cruder and simplified version of the 1642 frontispiece. This variation may have followed the late removal of the first two leaves of this edition (which contained a portrait of Hobbes that he did not welcome; see Ch. 3 below for details of this episode). For what is known of the frontispieces of De Cive, see Howard Warrender,‘Introduction’ to Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: The Latin Version . . . a Critical Edition by Howard Warrender (Oxford, 1983), 1–67 (although Warrender’s view that Hobbes executed the English translation of the work is now known to be false); Hugh MacDonald and Mary Hargreaves, Thomas Hobbes: A Bibliography (London, 1952), 16–18 (who assume three 1647 editions of De Cive, seemingly in error); M. M. Goldsmith, ‘Picturing Hobbes’s Politics: The Illustrations to the Philosophicall Rudiments’, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 44 (1981), 231–7 at 234–5; Goldsmith, ‘Hobbes’s Ambiguous Politics’, 641–3, figs. 1 and 2. 25 29

26 Ibid. 176–81, 182. DC, 172–4. DC, 221–2 and 26.

27

EL, 155–62; DC, 187–202.

28

EL, 166–7; DC, 135.

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This shift in emphasis proves contextually crucial. It is often assumed that Hobbes, in common with many royalists, was chiefly concerned (in the religious sphere) with the corrosive implications of spiritual individualism. Hobbes was certainly alarmed by excessive sectarian zealotry but, as the crisis of the 1640s progressed, he increasingly betrayed a more pressing anxiety over the corporate authority of hierarchical clergy. In the Elements of Law, Hobbes’s remarks about religiously inspired sedition seem chiefly to reflect a concern over the capacity of radical Calvinism to inspire individual political resistance.30 The frame of reference here was certainly the Scottish National Covenant, the oath crafted in 1637 to bind together Scottish Presbyterian resistance to Caroline church reform. The dictum that it was ‘impossible for any man to make a covenant with God’ was repeated in all of Hobbes’s political writings, but its initial appearance in the Elements was surely a response to the rebellion inspired by the National Covenant.31 (In Behemoth, Hobbes would describe the Scottish Covenant as a ‘Covenant with God’.32) Discussing religious sedition, the Elements argued primarily against political action based on ‘private opinion’ of Scripture and on ‘scruple of conscience’. Hobbes’s aim was to demonstrate that an individual ‘man must submit his opinions, in matters of controversy, to the authority of the commonwealth’.33 Where the Elements upheld the religious supremacy of the state, it did so chiefly to check the spiritual individualism and disobedience potentially inspired by the Calvinist idea of ‘covenant’, an idea that potentially bore a dangerous resemblance to Hobbes’s own theory of contracted sovereignty. De Cive did not jettison these concerns, but added to them. The work’s vastly expanded ecclesiological sections exhibited a growing concern with the threat posed by entrenched clerical power. Hobbesian Erastianism, it was argued in Chapter 1, was chiefly intended as a response to those looking to revive antique Christian dualism, but only with De Cive did this emerge clearly. By 1642 Hobbes’s persistent distaste for the ‘covenanters’ was being overwhelmed by his more fundamental objections to traditional clerical dualism. Where the Elements had dealt only briefly with the political threat posed by ‘sacerdotal jurisdiction’,34 De Cive attacked this threat volubly and with great specificity. In De Cive, discussing threats to sovereignty, Hobbes wrote: The effect of one kind of division is to grant sovereign power to the civil authority on issues affecting peace and the good things of this life; and to concede issues involving salvation of souls to others. But since the most essential prerequisite of salvation is justice, the result of this division is that citizens measure justice not, as they should, by the civil laws, but by the commands and teachings of people who are, in relation to the commonwealth, either private persons or foreigners. In superstitious terror they refuse to offer the obedience due to their Princes; falling by fear itself into what they fear. What can be more dangerous to a commonwealth than for citizens to be turned by the threat of eternal torment from obeying their princes, i.e. from obeying the laws, or from being just?35 30 Skinner, Foundations: Reformation, 189–225; Robert Kingdon, ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–1580’, 31 EL, 85; Sommerville, Hobbes in Context, 52–3. CHPT, 193–214. 32 Beh., 28. 33 EL, 142–3, 153. 34 Ibid. 160–2. 35 DC, 135.

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The thrust of this passage was not aimed at private religious opinion, but at religious ‘authorities’ or clergy, some ‘foreign’. Among the religious doctrines that cultivated sedition, the Elements had included only the teaching that ‘a man may lawfully do or omit any thing against his conscience’.36 De Cive added a condemnation of clerical dualism. De Cive also included Hobbes’s first formulation of what would prove a foundational distinction between public and private worship. ‘Worship may be either public or private’, he wrote: Public worship cannot be spontaneous with respect to individual worshippers, but may be with respect to the commonwealth. For since spontaneous worship is offered at the discretion of the worshipper, it would not be offered in a uniform manner, but in as many different forms as there are worshippers, unless all their wills were united by the power of one man. But private worship may be spontaneous, if it offered without the knowledge of others; for whatever is offered openly is constrained either by the laws or by shame before others, and that is against the nature of spontaneity.37

This distinction between public and private worship is missing from the Elements. It represents a shifting in Hobbes’s concerns away from the threat of individual conscience—which is now conceded its (admittedly small) private sphere— towards the threat posed by the failure to impose ‘the power of one man’ over public religion. That this concern with centralized religious authority was, in De Cive, now aimed more directly at destroying the traditional rights and perquisites of the clerical estate emerges very clearly. For instance, in De Cive Hobbes, for the first time, specifically attributed the right of convening the church to the civil sovereign. The ‘authority to summon Synods and assemblies of Christians’, often claimed by the clerical estate, belonged to the state.38 De Cive attacked other traditional aspects of sacerdotal authority in similar terms, presenting excommunication, the selection of clergy, and marriage as prerogatives of temporal power.39 This innovation was not aimed at restraining the individual conscience of sectarians (who were hardly sacramentalists), but at removing a prop of traditional clerical power. Similarly motivated were Hobbes’s assertions that the formation of doctrine and canon law was a state privilege, and that church property belonged entirely to the temporal sovereign.40 De Cive also contained Hobbes’s first (of many) published barbs against the universities, which he would consistently present as bastions of clerical influence.41 Indeed, Hobbes concluded De Cive with an extremely precise attack on traditional sources of clerical power. ‘The question of church properties’, he wrote, is a question about the right of government; for as soon as one knows what a Church is, one knows immediately who should have government of Christians. For if every Christian commonwealth is the Church which Christ himself teaches that every Christian subject of that commonwealth should listen to, then every citizen is obliged to obey his 36 41

EL, 165. Ibid. 146–7.

37

DC, 177.

38

Ibid. 221.

39

Ibid. 86, 223–9.

40

Ibid. 230, 246.

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commonwealth, i.e. the man or men who have power over them, not only in temporal but also in spiritual matters. But if every Christian commonwealth is not that Church, then there is some other, more universal Church which one should obey. . . . The question about infallibility has the same point; for anyone who was truly and inwardly believed by the whole human race to be incapable of error, would be certain of both temporal and spiritual power over the whole human race, unless he refused it himself. . . . The privilege of interpreting the scriptures also has the same point. He whose business it is to settle the disputes that can arise from different interpretations of scripture, has also the business of settling all disputes absolutely. . . . This is also the point of the dispute about the power of remitting and retaining sins, or about the authority to excommunicate. . . . This is the point of the power of authorizing [religious] societies; for they depend on the man by whom they exist, and he has as many subjects as he has monks even in a commonwealth of enemies. This is the point of the question about the judge of legal marriage. For the one who has the right to make that judgement also has the trial of cases about the inheritance and succession to all goods and rights not only of private individuals but also of sovereign Princes. . . . Canonization of saints has the same point; the Pagans call it Deification. For he who can attract other people’s subjects with such a reward can induce those who are avid for such glory to dare and do anything.42

Infallibility, religious societies, marital law, canonization: these were not abuses perpetrated by sectarians but by traditional corporate clergy. De Cive thus concluded with a summary attack on the clerical estate. Where the Erastian passages of the Elements of Law had chiefly aimed at checking the political claims of individual conscience, De Cive targeted the threat of clerical hierarchy. From the Elements to De Cive, the evolution in Hobbes’s ecclesiology was not merely quantitative but qualitative. It is true that Leviathan would present Hobbes’s Erastian ecclesiology with still greater rhetorical force. It is also true that De Cive contains one puzzling passage which runs against the broader grain of the work. Concluding chapter 17, Hobbes distinguished between ‘two kinds of disputes’: One is about spiritual matters, i.e. about questions of faith whose truth cannot be examined by natural reason. Among these are questions about the nature and office of Christ, about future rewards and punishments, about the resurrection of the body, about the nature and offices of Angels, about Sacraments and external worship, and so on. The other kind of dispute is about questions of human knowledge, whose truth is drawn out by natural reason and Syllogisms from human agreements and definitions . . . this kind includes all questions of right and Philosophy. . . . The commonwealth need not settle questions of this [latter] kind by interpretation of holy scripture because they do not belong to the Word of God. . . . But to decide questions of faith, i.e. questions about God, which are beyond human understanding, one needs God’s blessing (so that we may not err, at least on essential questions) and this comes from Christ himself by laying on of hands. . . . Our Saviour promised this Infallibility (in matters essential to salvation) to the Apostles until the day of judgement, i.e. to the Apostles and to the Pastors who were to be consecrated by the Apostles in succession by the laying on of hands. As a Christian, therefore, the holder of sovereign power in the commonwealth is obliged to interpret holy scripture, when it is a question about the mysteries of faith, by means of duly ordained Ecclesiastics.43 42

DC, 246–7.

43

Ibid. 232–3.

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Richard Tuck has relied on this passage in arguing that the ecclesiology of De Cive affirmed a ‘Christian sovereign’s subordination to the Apostolic Church’, and advocated ‘something like Anglicanism, in which the state had the power to choose offices such as bishops (and, by implication, any clergymen), but in which those officers had to be appropriately ordained, and in which the sovereign had to rule of strictly religious matters through their judgment’.44 But this analysis fails to observe the ways in which the broader arguments of De Cive decisively undercut almost every specific of this passage. The crucial question Hobbes addressed here was the distinction between philosophical conflicts adjudicated by language and reason, and ‘spiritual’ conflicts adjudicated by scriptural interpretation. On the surface, the passage counsels deference to the ‘infallibility’ of duly ordained clergy. Elsewhere in De Cive, however, on at least three occasions, Hobbes specifically attributed the ‘authority to interpret holy scripture’ to the sovereign power.45 He also utterly rejected clerical claims on divine infallibility, specifically warning that such claims undermined temporal obedience.46 As for the assertion that ordained clergy were authoritatively to adjudicate ‘spiritual matters’, Hobbes rendered this concession meaningless by repeatedly asserting: ‘As our Saviour did not teach us the distinction between what is temporal and what is spiritual, its definition is a question of reason, and belongs to the temporal authority.’47 Indeed, Hobbes affirms this very point adjacent to the passage highlighted by Professor Tuck: ‘And so in Christian commonwealths judgement of spiritual and temporal matters belongs to the civil authority. And the man or assembly which hold sovereign power is the head of both the commonwealth and the Church; for a Christian Church and a Christian commonwealth are one and the same thing.’48 The power to decide what constituted ‘spiritual matters’ clearly trumped the subordinate authority to pronounce on those matters. Hobbes drove this point home by ascribing to the sovereign most of the ‘spiritual matters’ seemingly reserved for clerical governance in the passage cited by Professor Tuck. ‘Future rewards and punishments’ are given with one hand, but taken away by the determination that the power to ‘retain’ and ‘remit’ sins actually belongs to the sovereign. The ‘Pastors’ task’ is merely to formally expel sinners once this determination has been made.49 As for the sacraments, both marriage and baptism are construed by Hobbes as functions authorized (if not ceremonially executed) by sovereign power.50 In the passage emphasized by Professor Tuck, Hobbes seemingly concedes ordained clergy the power to determine theological matters such as the nature of angels and bodily resurrection. But in chapter 18, he argues at length that only one doctrine—that ‘Jesus was the Christ’—was mandated by faith as ‘necessary for salvation’. All other articles of faith, all other doctrinal laws, are determined by obedience to the commands of the sovereign.51 Hobbes’s pronounced doctrinal minimalism thus rendered any clerical power of 44 46 50

Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 318–19; Martinich, Hobbes, 257. 47 DC, 216. Ibid. 246; Sommerville, Hobbes in Context, 125. 51 Ibid. 239–40. Ibid. 246–7.

45 48

DC, 218–19, 230–3, 246. 49 Ibid. 227. Ibid. 233.

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doctrinal interpretation moot. As for determining the means of ‘external worship’, Hobbes’s seeming concession of this power to ordained clergy conflicted with his insistence, elsewhere, that it belonged to the commonwealth.52 Finally, though Hobbes seems to concede the importance of ordination and consecration in the passage highlighted by Professor Tuck, he elsewhere renders these ceremonies utterly formal and without substance. Distinguishing between the selection of clergy and their ordination, Hobbes firmly insisted that the original apostles (and their successors) were selected by the sovereign church. He grudgingly concedes that they were (‘admittedly’) ordained by existing ‘teachers and prophets’, but the burden of the passage is clearly intended to undermine this admission by denying that the selection of clergy was a clerical prerogative.53 As for the suggestion that this model (with sovereigns appointing new ministers and clergy ordaining them) closely followed the practice of the Church of England, that interpretation is undermined by Hobbes’s insistence that the favour of the ‘Holy spirit’ required of clergy was determined by the sovereign church, not by the apostles and their successors. This meant that the church (the sovereign), and not ecclesiastics, undertook the examination of candidates.54 Such an examination to determine the presence of the holy spirit was of critical importance; ordination was merely a ceremony ratifying its outcome. In the Church of England, examination of clerical nominees was normally undertaken by the bishops. Bishops did not merely ratify, but mediated the royal selection of clergy. No doubt the passage highlighted by Professor Tuck (and to a lesser extent, by Professor Sommerville55) presents a piece of evidence countervailing the broader argument of this chapter. But the passage is by no means decisive, and its implications are all but gutted by the much more voluminous Erastian arguments of De Cive as a whole. Behemoth may shed light on this problem. There, Hobbes would render the entire distinction between sovereignty and ordained religious authorities moot in terms pertinent to this discussion: And seeing a Christian bishop is but a Christian endued with power to govern the clergy, it follows that every Christian King is not only a bishop, but an arch-bishop, and his whole dominion his diocese. And though it were granted, that imposition of hands is necessary from a priest; yet, seeing Kings have the government of the clergy, that are his subjects even before baptism; the baptism itself, wherein he is received as a Christian, is a sufficient imposition of hands, so that whereas before he was a bishop, now he is a Christian bishop.56

Thus would Hobbes later resolve the paradox seemingly contained in De Cive by making ordination superfluous for sovereigns. Presented with a conflict between a single paragraph in De Cive seemingly deferential to apostolic succession, and pages upon pages of argumentation that vitiate any traditional understanding of apostolic succession, it is sounder to read the former as anomalous. That does not 52 DC, 182. Lodi Nauta has independently reached a similar conclusion. Lodi 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, 53 DC, 222–3. 63 (2002), 587–91. 54 Ibid. 222–3 55 For Sommerville’s partial agreement with Tuck, see his Hobbes in Context, 127. 56 Beh., 14.

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mean that the passage’s inclusion poses no contextual problem. Perhaps we might speculate that Hobbes included this jarring concession to ordained clergy—at variance though it was with the broader polemical thrust of De Cive—in order to lightly sweeten what he knew would be precisely that aspect of the text most bitter to royalist churchmen: its profound Erastianism. In any case, as we shall see below and in the next chapter, the English churchmen harboured no illusions as to the political and ecclesiological implications of De Cive. As an explicit response to the parliamentary crisis of 1640–1, De Cive has long been read as an unproblematic royalist text. Its dedication to Devonshire, composed on 1 November 1641, lashed out against those dazzled and inspired by the quasi-democratic writings of antiquity.57 De Cive also attacked constitutional theories of mixed sovereignty and rejected as deluded self-styled critiques of ‘tyranny’. Like all of Hobbes’s political works, De Cive was not a formally monarchist work (in that it recognized the legitimacy of assemblies holding sovereignty). Nevertheless, in the ante-bellum context of 1641, it is difficult not to read its defence of established authority as a brief for King Charles. However, the innovations found in De Cive, its most marked responses to the intellectual climate of the early 1640s, chiefly concerned matters of church governance. ‘The section on the Kingdom of God’, Hobbes wrote, ‘has been added so that no conflict should be thought to exist between the dictates of God through nature and the law of God given in the scriptures.’ The work set ‘out men’s duties, first as men, then as citizens, and lastly as Christians’. It was primarily the latter concern with the ‘essence of Christian Religion’ that was new in De Cive.58 And if the static features of De Cive—its account of the origins and nature of sovereignty—tended to buttress the King’s cause much as the Elements had, the dynamic, religious features of the work had less straightforward partisan implications in the context of 1641.

i That the English Civil War was in large measure a war of religion was a truth recognized as soon as its first shots were fired. The importance of religion in explaining the conflict has remained a staple of historical interpretation ever since. For generations this conviction produced magisterial narratives of the ‘Puritan Revolution’, narratives premissed on the belief that a radicalized Protestant party had arisen in the seventeenth century to force modernity on a collapsing ancien régime. The Whiggish Puritan Revolution, following the great Samuel Gardiner, cast the puritans as champions of spiritual individualism (and as unwitting vehicles of secularization). In the Marxist version, puritanism predictably functioned as the opium of the rising bourgeoisie. In recent generations, of course, these triumphalist and determinist historical models have been decisively toppled by 57

DC, 3.

58

Ibid. 6–7.

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the ‘revisionists’. The revisionists, methodologically conservative and hostile to teleology, have objected to constitutionalist and materialist explanations of the civil war as anachronistic. They have, furthermore, rejected interpretations that construe early modern religion as an epiphenomenal manifestation of social and economic change. This does not mean that revisionists reject the importance of religion in explaining the civil war. If anything, their dependence on the explanatory power of religion has been even greater than that of their predecessors. For the revisionists, religious passion—because so deeply traditional and rooted in the discourse and assumptions of the seventeenth century—has replaced social and economic tension as the engine of the civil war.59 In employing religion within their historical narratives, the revisionists have rejected epiphenomenal interpretations and have studied religious conflict in early modern terms. They have offered minute analyses of the theological disputes that envenomed religious life in the run-up to the civil war. The dominant thesis in this regard, formulated by Nicholas Tyacke, presents the vicissitudes of predestinarian theology as the key to understanding religious unrest in the early seventeenth century. The rise of an Arminian (free will) faction in the early Stuart episcopate, it has been argued, triggered a furious reaction by a traditionally Calvinist church.60 By cultivating Arminianism, Charles I and Archbishop William Laud threatened a longstanding Calvinist consensus and thus unhinged the kingdom. The influence of the Tyacke thesis has been enormous, but it has not gone entirely unchallenged.61 Recent work has demonstrated that neither the supposed Calvinist consensus in the early Stuart church, nor the supposed Arminianism of Laud’s cohort, were as monolithic as once asserted.62 Eyebrows have also been raised at the assumption that rarefied points of soteriology alone accounted for the broad religious passions of the civil war. The widespread habit of conflating Arminian theology with a broad array of Laudian ceremonial and sacramental reforms that might have reflected free will commitments63 (but often did not) has been critiqued.64 The ceremonial and jurisdictional reforms of the Laudian era, it is now felt in many quarters, were more provocative than theological innovations proper.65 59 Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990), 58–130; Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (New York, 1981); John Morrill, ‘The Religious Context of the English Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 34 (1984), 155–78. 60 Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism, and Counter Revolution’, in Conrad Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War (London, 1973), 199–234; id., Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c.1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987). 61 Criticism is summarized in Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War (London, 1991), 97–101. 62 Peter White, Predestination, Policy, and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge, 1992); Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism, 1625–1641 (Oxford, 1992), 87–113. 63 For ‘Arminian’ reform of pews, see Roger Lockyer, The Early Stuarts: A Political History of England, 1603–1642 (London, 1989), 317. Fletcher and Foster both use the tag ‘Arminian’ overly broadly. Fletcher, Outbreak, 91–3; Andrew Foster, ‘Church Politics of the 1630s’, in Richard Cust and Anne Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics (London, 1989), 193–223 at 197–9. 64 Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, ibid. 72–106 at 91; Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Laudianism and Political Power’, in Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans: 17th-c Essays (Chicago, 1988), 69. 65 Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992), 275–402; Davies, Caroline Captivity, 2–4 et passim.

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The ‘rise of Arminianism’ thesis crucially overthrew the ‘revolutionary puritanism’ model and revealed the extent to which the Laudian high-churchmen were often the innovators offending prevailing opinion during the 1620s and 1630s. But a historiographical consensus has emerged that reliance on the explanatory power of rising Arminianism has proven reductionist, trapped within the orbit of old sociological notions about the propulsive force of Calvinist theology.66 A model of change is needed that preserves the powerful scheme of the revisionist thesis (emphasizing Laudian, not puritan, innovation) while giving pride of place to the ceremonial and ecclesiological (rather than the theological) implications of Laudianism. It is also essential to distinguish, to some degree, the religious disputes of the Personal Rule from the agitation against the church that consumed the Long Parliament. Studies of the causes of the civil war typically end their analysis in 1640, thus foregrounding the printed theological disputes of the 1630s rather than the more politicized and less overtly theological religious unrest of the 1640s.67 This chapter will argue that during the Long Parliament, it was the clericalism of the Laudian church—its efforts to revive ecclesiological dualism—that chiefly provoked the political class of Stuart England. Arminian theology and a certain ceremonial style could and often did inform Laudian clericalism. But most Caroline churchmen maintained a circumspect silence on the doctrine of free will, and it is far from clear that ceremonial innovations—however they enraged some minorities—had the potential to galvanize widespread parliamentary opposition. Rather, the demise of the Laudian church was secured by opponents of its systematic effort to revive clerical power, to challenge the Erastianism of the English Reformation by resuscitating an almost medieval ecclesiological dualism. The fundamental Erastianism of the Long Parliament’s campaign against the Caroline church has not, of late, been given sufficient attention by historians of the Revolution.68 In this regard there has been a failure to digest the best revisionist work in Reformation historiography. Historians of the Tudor age have been acutely sensitive to the ecclesiological and political nature of Reformation religious upheaval. By contrast, revisionist historians of the Stuart era tend to portray their subjects as motivated chiefly by engrained theological beliefs. A disconcerting gap has thus been opened between the Machiavellian practitioners of statecraft who presided over the Reformation, and the pious defenders of Calvinist theology who launched the English Revolution. The analysis offered here will try to narrow this gap by locating the religious conflict of the Revolution within the context of English Erastianism. Properly assessing both the central importance of religious reform within the Long Parliament’s political programme, and the extent to which that religious reform was fundamentally an effort to protect England’s Erastian church settlement, is critical if Thomas Hobbes’s political point of view is to be recovered. 66

Noted by Kenneth Fincham (ed.) in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke, 1993), 1–22. Davies, Anthony Milton (see below), Cust and Hughes, Tyacke, and Sharpe all end their studies at or before 1640. 68 Exceptions are William Shaw’s dated but essential History of the English Church during the Civil Wars and under the Commonwealth, 1640–1660 (2 vols., London, 1900); also William Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–60 (London, 1969). 67

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Fundamentally, the religious struggle at the heart of the English Revolution was a violent and radicalized effort to check an Anglo-Catholic revival. The recovery of English high-churchmanship from its Tudor nadir began around the turn of the seventeenth century and was promoted by, among others, the Duke of Buckingham.69 The ascendancy of the high-church faction, however, awaited the end of James I’s temporizing religious policies and the accession of the more assertively reformist Charles I.70 The English church’s most pronounced Anglo-Catholic era may conveniently be dated from the installation of Richard Neile as Archbishop of York in 1632 and of William Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. During Charles’s personal rule, these men and their allies presided over an energetic church reform programme, the specifics of which are well known. Their chief aims were liturgical uniformity and ceremonial order. Laud, earnestly supported by the King, committed considerable sums to church repair and revived church disciplinary mechanisms that had been neglected for a generation. In a bid to control preaching, the Feoffees for Impropriations, by which laymen had pooled money for the funding of lectureships, were prohibited as an illegal corporation.71 The protection of church wealth—by preventing further alienation of church land, tightening lax leasing policies, and collecting fines with greater vigour—was another Laudian priority. This reversed, however modestly, a century of lay appropriation of church riches.72 Laudian visitations provocatively reintroduced high-church ceremonial practices that, in many corners of the kingdom, had lapsed, including: kneeling to receive the Eucharist, crossing oneself, bowing at the name of Jesus, railing communion tables and positioning them in the east end of the chancel.73 Most contentiously, the Laudians launched a rigorous defence of episcopal ecclesiology, asserting that bishops governed by divine right, not merely as state servants. From the era of Cramner through that of Hooker, English episcopacy had been rendered consistent with the Royal Supremacy by denying it jure divino status: bishops served as mere ‘overseers’ at the sufferance of the monarch.74 This Tudor consensus over the jus humanum of episcopacy initially showed signs of cracking in the late sixteenth century, but even the high-church writings of Richard Bancroft, Hadrian Saravia, and Thomas Bilson had rarely directly avowed episcopal divine right. The most that can be said is that by the Jacobean era more 69 Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592–1628 (New York, 1981), 114–15, 305–8. 70 Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policies of James I and Charles I’, in Fincham (ed.), Early Stuart Church, 23–50. 71 Paul Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560–1662 (Stanford, Calif., 1970). 72 Felicity Heal, ‘Archbishop Laud Revisited: Leases and Estate Management at Canterbury and Winchester before the Civil War’, in Rosemary O’Day and Felicity Heal (eds.), Princes and Paupers in the English Church, 1500–1800 (Leicester, 1981), 129–52; Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Archbishop Laud in Retrospect’, in From Counter-Reformation to 73 Sharpe, Personal Rule, 317–40; Lockyer, Early Stuarts, 313–16. Glorious Revolution (Chicago, 1992), 148. 74 Davies, Episcopacy and the Royal Supremacy, 13–53; Claire Cross, Royal Supremacy in the Elizabethan Church (New York, 1969), 64–6, 177; Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), 88–91, 220–5.

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assertive defences of episcopacy ‘had ceased to be a scandal’, and that they vied with still-dominant Erastian defences of the bishops.75 The Laudians, however, transformed this situation. Laud, trained in Bancroft’s church, was dedicated to reviving the English clergy as an ‘estate of the realm’. A churchman of the ancient mould, he sought unity in a visible church hierarchy and in regular administration of the sacraments. The creedal definition of catholicity formulated by the fathers animated Laud’s programme of church reform. Hostile to CounterReformation papalism, he was nevertheless open to reunification with a reformed Roman church. The Greek Orthodox Church, freed from papal primacy but dedicated to catholicity and apostolic episcopacy, served in many ways as his model.76 Laud’s ascendancy thus emboldened defenders of the divine right of episcopacy. Laud himself argued the case, and assumed an involved role in editing Bishop Joseph Hall’s controversial Episcopacy by Divine Right Asserted (1640). Archbishop Neile argued for episcopal divine right during the notorious Star Chamber case against Alexander Leighton. Another high-flying Laudian, John Cosin, drew the hostile attention of the Council for this impolitic defence of episcopacy jure divino.77 The Caroline age thus witnessed the first full-blown defence of ecclesiological dualism since the Henrician schism. Laud’s entire reformist programme—reviving church courts, renewing sacramentalism and ceremonialism, securing church property, promoting the divine right of bishops—traced to his elemental interest in reasserting the clergy’s status as an independent estate of the realm. To characterize this programme as ‘Arminian’ is fundamentally misleading. Some Laudians embraced free-will doctrines, to be sure, but Laud himself remained circumspect on the issue. The York House Conference, presided over by Buckingham, was suspected of inclining towards Arminianism but published no definitive judgement. Charles I, doubtless advised by Laud, prohibited disputation on the question. Hypersensitive Calvinists such as William Prynne no doubt read conspiratorial intent into these moves, and this accounts for the occasional use of ‘Arminian’ as a pejorative label for the Laudians. But the term is reductive in the extreme. Laud’s ceremonial and jurisdictional innovations were both more assertive and more divisive than his theological proclivities proper. Laud was fortunate to enjoy the patronage of a monarch equally committed to his dualist clericalism, and as archbishop he was always deferential (in practice, if not in theory) to Charles’s supremacy.78 But the threat Laud posed to the Erastian settlement of the English church alarmed a political class that had enthusiastically 75 Davies, Episcopacy, 27–33; Collinson, Religion of Protestants, 17; J. P. Sommerville, ‘The Royal Supremacy and Episcopacy Jure Divino, 1603–1640’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 34 (1983), 548–58; Fincham presents a somewhat different view in Prelate as Pastor, 10, 300. 76 Trevor-Roper, ‘Arch-bishop Laud in Retrospect’, in Counter-Reformation, 140–5; id., ‘The Church of England and the Greek Church in the Time of Charles I’, in Counter-Reformation, 99–111. 77 Davies, Caroline Captivity, 259; Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1994), 460–1; CSPD, Charles I, 1628–9, 390. 78 See the balance struck in his ‘Answer to the Speech of Lord Saye and Sele touching the Liturgy’, in The Works of Most Reverend Father in God Archbishop Laud, ed. William Scott (Oxford, 1847–60), iv. 43, 142; Trevor-Roper, ‘Laudianism and Political Power’, 69.

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and profitably protected that settlement for a century.79 Both the Short and Long Parliaments (convened, significantly, to pay for a war triggered by efforts to enforce liturgical conformity on Scotland) were dominated by determined efforts to undo Laudian religious innovations. Once radicalized, this campaign would culminate in the abolition of episcopacy and the beheading of Archbishop Laud, and it spawned the great disputes on English church governance with which this book is concerned. These disputes, and the awful war they partly caused, were fundamentally ecclesiological rather than theological in nature. The Long Parliament convened on 3 November 1640, and pent-up anger at the church hierarchy exploded within days. Complaints against the Laudians, including a condemnation of Hall’s Episcopacy by Divine Right Asserted, had been sounded during the Short Parliament, and many of the members had provocatively sympathized with Scottish opposition to liturgical reform.80 Charles I had caused further outrage by permitting the Convocation to continue its session after the dissolution of the Short Parliament. Convocation then approved the contentious Canons of 1640, which included ceremonial innovations and the notorious ‘etcetera oath’. This last bound churchmen to uphold ‘the government of this Church by archbishops, bishops, deans, and archdeacons, etcetera’.81 The King received six subsidies from his clergy and rioting from his inflamed subjects. An armed guard was required to protect the final session of Convocation in late May.82 Worse was in store for the church. On 12 December the Long Parliament formed a Committee for Scandalous Ministers to launch investigations of allegedly scandalous and delinquent clergy. Four days later, the Canons of 1640 were declared illegal. Archbishop Laud was impeached on the 18th, and others were soon targeted. Parliament charged the Laudian Bishop of Ely, Matthew Wren, with treason and removed him to the Tower, where he remained until the Restoration.83 Anti-Catholic paranoia gripped the members. Catholics were purged from the army and JPs were instructed to enforce the recusancy laws vigilantly.84 The cases of Prynne, Burton, Bastwick, and others were reopened, their victims celebrated like conquering heroes. Meanwhile, organized petitions flooded parliament from the counties, modelled on the monster London petition of 11 December and calling for the ‘root and branch’ abolition of episcopacy.85 The Root and Branch bill languished in parliament while the King marched north to Scotland. Its smooth constitutional passage was a hopeless dream. The Grand Remonstrance, presented to Charles on 1 December 1641, bitterly 79 As early as 1628, as Bishop of London, Laud had angered parliament for circumventing its religious authority. Diary of John Rous, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London, 1856), 35. 80 Morrill, ‘Religious Context’, 161–7, 175–8; S. R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 1603–1642 (London, 1904), 87–107. 81 J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge, 1969), 169. 82 Diary of Rous, 99; William Holden Hutton, The English Church from the Accession of Charles I to the Death of Anne (London, 1903), 81–5. 83 Gardiner, History of England, 227–49; Trevor-Roper, ‘ “Little Pope Regulus”: Matthew Wren, Bishop of Norwich and Ely’, in Counter-Reformation, 166–7; Diary of Rous, 80. 84 Caroline Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, NC, 1983). 85 Shaw, English Church, i. 13–16.

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complained of ‘ecclesiastical tyranny and usurpation’, but Charles rebuffed its reform demands.86 When thirteen of the bishops declared that parliament was no longer free they were immediately impeached. This in turn triggered the attempt on the five members and the King’s flight from London in January of 1642. The next month the bishops were excluded from the Lords, and on 8 April 1642 the Commons published a declaration promising a reformation of church government. But parliamentary demands for liturgical and ecclesiological reform were rejected when Charles condemned the Nineteen Propositions. A parliamentary resolution of September 1642, aimed at securing a Scottish alliance, declared episcopacy incompatible with both reformation and royal government. In January of 1643 a bill abolishing episcopacy passed both houses.87 Propelled by deep dissatisfaction with the Laudian hierarchy, permitted by the flight of royalists from parliament, the abolition of episcopacy was the boldest stroke in the church revolution. All that followed—the convening of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, the execution of Archbishop Laud, the passage and then collapse of a Presbyterian church settlement, the rise of Independency—was set in motion by this act of decisiveness. It will not do to explain the spectacular collapse of the Caroline church with an overly reductionist thesis. Nor can the present discussion offer a comprehensive account of that collapse. Various historians have highlighted Laud’s alleged sympathy with Arminianism,88 his ceremonial innovations,89 and his complacency regarding Roman Catholicism.90 These factors doubtless contributed to the church’s catastrophe. But close attention to the religious debates of the Long Parliament itself reveals the vital importance of a related but different aspect of Laudianism: its dualist ecclesiology. The religious war waged by the Long Parliament was at heart a fight to preserve England’s Erastian church settlement against the first overtly clericalist Protestant monarch since the Reformation. From the earliest days of November 1640, the Erastian tenor of the Long Parliament sounded with perfect clarity. Harbottle Grimston, in a widely reported speech, condemned the ‘etcetera oath’ of the Canons of 1640—which bound all clergy to episcopacy—specifically as an assault on the state’s right to alter church government. Laudian arguments for episcopal divine right, Grimston charged, were an abomination: the bishops’ ‘Jurisdiction is meerly Humana Institutione’, he warned, ‘and they must thank the King for it’.91 Benjamin Rudyard likewise described the Laudian reforms as a ‘great design upon this kingdom’, and pointedly characterized Laud’s opponents as those who ‘would be governed by the king’s laws’.92 John Pym himself charged the bishops with ‘keeping the King in 86

87 Shaw, English Church, i. 117–20. Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, 232. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinism; Russell, Causes of the English Civil War. 89 Davies, Caroline Captivity; Sharpe, Personal Rule. 90 Hibbard, Popish Plot; Milton, Catholic and Reformed. 91 John Nalson, An Impartial Collection of the Great Affairs of State from the Beginning of the Scotch Rebellion . . . to the Murther of King Charles I (2 vols., 1682–3), i. 510; D’Ewes, Journal . . . Beginning, 5–6. 92 John Rushworth, Historical Collections . . . the third part in two volumes. Containing the Principle Matters which happened from the Meeting of Parliament, November 3 1640 to the End of the Year 1644 (1691), i. 24. 88

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constant necessitie’ in order to usurp his power.93 The prominent Erastian Bulstrode Whitelocke complained that ‘in the censure of Bastwick, all the bishops then present denied openly that they held their jurisdiction as bishops from the king . . . which denial of the supremacy of the king under God Hen[ry] VIII would have taken ill’.94 Throughout the early months of the session, the activities of the Laudian faction were construed not as features of royal absolutism, but as usurpations against temporal supremacy over the church. In this regard, no innovation enraged the members more than the Canons of 1640, the regulative pinnacle of the Laudian reformation. The content of the canons—their insistence on an ‘altar-wise’ positioning of the communion table, on altar rails, on the divine right of kings and bishops—offended many.95 But opposition to the canons was galvanized by anger at the procedural circumstances of their passage. Convocations traditionally sat only during parliamentary sessions. The Convocation of 1640 had adopted Laud’s canons after the dissolution of the Short Parliament. This was viewed as an affront to the religious authority properly exercised by the state. Much as the Reformation had itself enjoyed parliamentary imprimatur, new canons also required parliamentary authorization. The relentless fury directed at the Canons of 1640 never failed to reiterate this point. In November 1640—in orations later published— Edward Bagshaw denounced the canons as a usurpation of sovereignty: religious law could not bind the ‘laiety’, he argued, ‘without consent of Parliament’.96 ‘Mr. Bagshawe also declared’, reported one observer, ‘that the bishops and clergymen who held the late synod were in Premunire for holding it.’97 Alexander Rigby spoke against the canons in similar terms. This view, that the Convocation of 1640 had violated medieval and Tudor statutes privileging temporal control of church law, prevailed in parliament and in county petitions, and was affirmed by John Pym himself.98 The canon’s etcetera oath struck MPs as both vague and presumptuous, for while it implied the divine right of bishops it made no mention of temporal authority.99 One critic wondered if the oath ‘denied the Royal Supremacy’.100 Another characterized it as ‘a covenant against the king for bishops’ (whereas the Scottish covenant was ‘against the king and bishops’).101 Parliament’s use of the Royal Supremacy against Convocation was theoretically dexterous and politically audacious. Charles I was fervently devoted to the Laudian reform programme and had confirmed the Canons of 1640.102 But the members, of course, intended to defend the ecclesiastical prerogative of ‘King in Parliament’. From the Henrician era onward the theory of the Royal Supremacy 93

D’Ewes, Journal . . . Beginning, 8–9. Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of English Affairs from the Beginning of the Reign of Charles the first to the Happy Restoration of King Charles the Second (4 vols., Oxford, 1853), i. 63. 95 Kenyon, Constitution, 167–71; Sharpe, Personal Rule, 879–80. 96 D’Ewes, Journal . . . Beginning, 21. 97 Nalson, Collection, i. 523; Edward Bagshaw, Two Arguments in Parliament, the First Concerning the Cannons, the Second Concerning the Premunire upon those Cannons (1641), 1–4, 12–19. 98 D’Ewes, Journal . . . Beginning, 38, 126–7; Diary of Henry Townshend, 1640–1663, ed. J. W. Willis Bund (London, 99 Kenyon, Constitution, 169. 1915), i. 12. 100 Sharpe, Personal Rule, 883. 101 Whitelocke, Memorials, i. 111. 102 Davies, Caroline Captivity, 251–6. 94

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had been enveloped in a political ambiguity as to whether supremacy descended from God to the monarch, or ascended from the body of Christians through parliament.103 Most critics of the Canons of 1640 ascribed to the latter interpretation, and blamed the prelates for ‘usurp[ing] to themselves the grand preeminence of Parliaments’.104 Nevertheless, the Erastian rhetoric of the parliament was often specifically employed to defend the king’s prerogative in the church, and in this the MPs were entirely sincere.105 Among the charges against the thirteen impeached bishops was promulgating canons ‘against the Kings prerogative’ and contrary ‘to the fundamental laws and statutes of the realm’.106 This allegation also figured in the treason charge against Laud himself.107 The Root and Branch petition accused the bishops of ‘spoiling both the King and the Parliament of their Power’ by promulgating the Canons of 1640 and by asserting the divine right of episcopacy.108 So too the Grand Remonstrance upbraided the bishops for usurping royal power over the church.109 The Canons of 1640 became a lightning rod precisely because they revealed, to many MPs, the threat that the Laudians posed to the Erastian settlement of the English church.110 Sir Ralph Verney, in notes taken during Committee proceedings considering the Ministers’ Petition against the bishops, captured the spirit of parliament’s anger when he observed that bishops who claimed divine authority were ‘noe supporters of prorogative’. Such bishops, he wrote, ‘pretend to bee the only supporters of prorogative of the kinge. But they exercise all there jurisdiction in there owne names and not in the king’s’.111 The Minister’s Petition itself, presented on 23 January 1641, expressed the general view of reformist clergy that Laudian principles were an affront to the Royal Supremacy. In the coming months this petition became a major rallying point for parliament’s increasingly strident anti-episcopal MPs.112 The ideological purchase of Erastianism in the Long Parliament was further evidenced when the members moved against individual churchmen. John Cosin—prebend at Durham Cathedral, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, and client (with Laud) of the high-churchman Richard Neile—had embroiled himself in controversy by enthusiastically implementing Laudian reforms. Cosin’s AngloCatholic ceremonial tastes particularly riled the godly. ‘He was master of ceremonies of the new order’, wrote Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘prepared not only to attack the ideas but outrage the senses of the church puritans.’113 In the Long 103

J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (Stanford, Calif., 1968), 392–8. Speeches of Digby and Fiennes, quoted in Margaret Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution: An Essay in Constitutional Thought in England, 1603–1645 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1949), 359–61. 105 Verney Papers: Notes of the Proceedings in the Long Parliament, ed. John Bruce (London, 1845), 81–3. 106 Diurnall Occurrences, or Dayly Proceedings of Both Houses of this Great and Happy Parliament, 3 November 1640 to 3 November 1641 (1641), 325–6; The Journal of Simonds D’Ewes from the First Recess of the Long Parliament . . . ed. 107 D’Ewes, Journal . . . Beginning, 163, 395, 413. Willson Havelock Coates (New Haven, 1942), 136. 108 Rushworth, Historical Collections, i. 95; D’Ewes, Journal . . . Beginning, 139–40. 109 Kenyon, Constitution, 232, 238; William Lamont, Marginal Prynne, 1660–1669 (London, 1963), 14–28. 110 Sharpe, Personal Rule, 877–8; Fletcher, Outbreak, 105–6. 111 Verney, Papers, 5, 11. 112 The Petition is lost, but see D’Ewes, Journal . . . Beginning, 485–60; Shaw, English Church, i. 24–6, 35–6. 113 Trevor-Roper, ‘Laudianism and Political Power’, 61, 71; ODNB. 104

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Parliament, Cosin became an immediate target. Revealingly, he proved an ideal whipping boy for members anxious to flaunt their Erastian credentials. Years earlier, in a Star Chamber investigation of 1628, Cosin had been accused of claiming that ‘King Charles is not supreme head of the Church of England next under Christ, nor has he any more power of excommunication than my man that rubs my horse’s heels.’114 Even at the time, Cosin’s defence had not satisfied many. He had ‘pittyed’ those who ascribed sacramental and disciplinary power to the King. ‘Externall coaction’, he had declared, did spring from temporal power, ‘but the power of spirituall jurisdiction itself was from Christ, who had given it unto his Apostles, and they to their successors in ordination’.115 Star Chamber had spared Cosin in 1628, but the Long Parliament was not inclined to forgive such bold characterizations of clerical power. Twelve years after the fact, members with long memories meted out some exemplary punishment to Cosin. He was impeached on 21 November 1640, accused of affirming that ‘the King was nott supreme Head of the Church of England’. Kneeling at the bar of the House, Cosin was forced to hear charges against him that were a decade old.116 Nor was Cosin the only cleric accused of denying the Royal Supremacy. It seems to have been a stock charge in the early 1640s, levelled, for instance, against one Reverend Utie, who was accused of having ‘said that the King was not head of the church under Christ, but the Bishops’.117 The clearest indication of the Erastian proclivities of the Long Parliament came on 15 July 1641, when the House passed a church settlement scheme under which lay commissioners were to assume episcopal and arch-episcopal authority, and lay county commissions were to administer justice in ecclesiastical cases. County committees of five ministers were appointed to perform ordination, but the nomination of new ministers was a power vested in the lay commissions.118 The Erastian character of this proposal was further heightened when a parliamentary committee suggested removing all clergy from the central commission, which thereafter was to consist of nine laymen.119 ‘We shall have nine lay bishops for one consecrated’, complained one critic of the scheme’s naked Erastianism.120 It was, according to one authority, ‘a peculiarly secular’ plan, and its near implementation marked the high-water mark of parliamentary Erastianism in the early 1640s.121 But events overtook the 1641 church settlement proposal. By 1642, new parties with an interest in church reform had appeared on the scene. The Grand Remonstrance (December 1641) promised a synod of learned divines to advise parliament on reforming the church, and throughout the spring of 1642 nominations for this assembly were received.122 Meanwhile, with war pending, pressure was building 114

CSPD: Charles I, 1628–9, 362; Diary of Rous, 36. ‘Conversation as to the Royal Supremacy’, The Correspondence of John Cosin . . . , ed. George Ornsby (2 vols., Durham, 1869–72), i. 149. 116 Selden participated in the prosecution. D’Ewes, Journal . . . Beginning, 50, 437, 541; Diurnall Occurrences, 6, 54–5; 117 CJ, ii. 65; D’Ewes, Journal . . . Beginning, 232; Nalson, Collection, i. 719. Townshend, Diary, 12. 118 Shaw, English Church, i. 90–9. 119 Gardiner, History of England, 407; Verney, Papers, 104–5. 120 Fletcher, Outbreak, 102–4; Conrad Russell, Fall of British Monarchies (Oxford, 1991), 185, 345. 121 Shaw, English Church, 101. 122 Kenyon, Constitution, 238. 115

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for parliament to secure a Scottish alliance. The Scots, devoted to a jure divino Presbyterian settlement, demanded that both kingdoms adopt such a model. In September the Commons promised the abolition of episcopacy and the summoning of the clerical assembly, but the MPs resisted an iron-clad commitment to Presbyterianism. This impasse was finally broken in mid-1643, when the parliamentary war effort neared collapse. Forced by military necessity, parliament assented to the Solemn League and Covenant in September. Though the treaty’s language was kept usefully vague, the members had essentially agreed to establish Presbyterianism in England.123 In June, the summoning of the Westminster Assembly of Divines was finally approved, and the Presbyterian interest was well represented in that body as well. The battle over establishing a Presbyterian church would prove an exhausting drama in the coming years. For now, it suffices to note that the arrival of a Presbyterian interest on the political stage marked the end of a two-year period in which the Erastian instincts of the Long Parliament enjoyed free rein. The impeachments of Cosin and Laud, the attack on Hall’s Episcopacy by Divine Right Asserted, the campaign against the Canons of 1640, all welled up from a deep distrust of clerical power. Parliament’s hysterical anti-Catholicism—out of all proportion to the Catholic ‘menace’ at court—depended on an association between Laudian episcopacy with Roman clericalism.124 Theological and ceremonial debates of course added fuel to the religious fires of the Long Parliament, but a defence of England’s Erastian ecclesiological settlement proved the surest timber with which to stoke agitation against the church.125 Before the departure of the royalists from parliament, and before the achievement of the Scottish alliance, fear of a reviving clerical dualism propelled the crusade against Laud’s church. This struggle was fundamentally a recurrence of the jurisdictional wars—pitting emerging national kingdoms against independent religious authority—that revisionist historians have increasingly located at the centre of the English Reformation. The Laudian church may have upset the balance of a theological via media achieved by Tudor and Jacobean Protestants, but its cardinal sin was to threaten the stability of England’s Erastian ecclesiological settlement.

ii The first edition of Thomas Hobbes’s De Cive appeared in the spring of 1642. The work’s political implications cannot be recognized absent an understanding of the profound ideological importance of Erastianism in justifying the radical parliamentary attack on the Caroline church. In a host of ways De Cive upheld the 123

Shaw, English Church, i. 122–3, 131–4. Lake, ‘Anti-Popery’, 79–82; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 310–73. 125 Henry Parker encapsulated much of the Erastian programme of the parliament in his Jus regum. Or, a vindication of the Regall Power: against all Spirituall Authority . . . (1645); William Lamont, ‘The Puritan Revolution: A Historiographical Essay’, in J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1993), 119–45 at 133. 124

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absolute sovereignty of the English monarchy, and any historical account of the English Revolution that is primarily constitutional in focus will find Hobbes’s royalism unambiguous. But this chapter, along with the preponderance of recent scholarship, has interpreted the Revolution fundamentally as a religious war. It has also argued that the evolution of De Cive out of the pre-revolutionary The Elements of Law introduced marked changes most of all in Hobbes’s ecclesiology. The work contained an intensely heightened scrutiny of ecclesial questions, and it employed Erastianism against the traditional prerogatives of the clerical estate. Hobbes insisted that De Cive was intended as a response to the parliamentary turmoil of 1640–1, and in specific instances it directly echoed the logic of parliament’s church reform campaign. Its implicit rejection of divine-right defences of episcopacy, for instance, was an obsessive theme of the early 1640s. De Cive’s explicit insistence on the right of the state to formulate canon law was strikingly reminiscent of parliamentary complaints about the irregular Canons of 1640. The work’s assertion that the convening of synods was a prerogative of sovereignty was theoretically convenient to any defender of parliamentary plans (voiced in the Grand Remonstrance) to convene an assembly of learned divines to assist in rolling back Laudianism. De Cive rendered the ordering of the ceremonies of ‘external worship’ an aspect of the Commonwealth’s power. This echoed similar claims made on behalf of the Long Parliament. As a treatise on the proper location of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, Hobbes’s De Cive manifested a strong sympathy with the statist ecclesiological proclivities of the Long Parliament, and a decided lack of sympathy with the clerical dualism of Archbishop Laud and Charles I. Nor, in assessing the religio-political implications of De Cive, are we reliant on the text’s internal evidence alone. Evidence survives in Hobbes’s correspondence, where, at a critical juncture, he expressed jarringly candid sympathy with the Long Parliament’s efforts to dismantle the Laudian church. The crucial letter, composed on 23 July 1641, was sent to the Earl of Devonshire: I have seene the Nottinghamshire petition against B[ishop]s. In it there are reckoned up abondance of abuses committed by Ecclesiasticall persons and their Officers, which can neyther be denyed nor excused. But that they proceed from the Episcopacy it selfe, is not so evidently proved. Howsoever since the Covetousnesse and supercilious behaviour of the persons, have made the people weary of that forme, I see nothing to be misliked in the new way propounded. If it displease any that there are to be so many Lay Commissioners for church matters and so few ministers, I thinke it will be those that have most desired the change and made account to have the Episcopall authority divided amongst them. I am of the opinion, that Ministers ought to minister rather then governe; at least that all Church government depend on the state, and authority of the Kingdome, without which there can be no unity in the church. Your Lordship may perhaps thinke this opinion but a fancy of Philosophy. But I am sure that Experience teaches, thus much, that the dispute for [precedence] betwene the spirituall and civill power, has of late more then any other thing in the world, bene the cause of civill warres, in all places of Christendome.126 126

Hobbes to Devonshire, 23 July 1641, Corr., 120.

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This letter, far too rarely highlighted by scholars of Hobbes, provides strong evidence that the ecclesiological innovations of De Cive were intended as comments upon the revolution in the church unfolding in England. The letter directly anticipates, for instance, Hobbes’s thesis—publicly offered for the first time in De Cive—that struggles over church power caused most European civil wars. In this letter Hobbes also offered an endorsement (albeit one qualified with a minor reservation) of efforts to abolish, and not just reform, episcopacy. This was a step of enormous political significance. In the early months of the Long Parliament, anger at the Laudian church was widespread, and reform efforts had earned the support of many later royalists.127 The radicalization of the agitation against the church, however, and particularly the effort to abolish episcopacy, alienated many moderates in 1641 (including Hobbes’s associates Edward Hyde and Lord Falkland).128 Arguably more than any other issue, the root and branch movement helped create a royalist party for Charles I.129 But at this critical watershed moment, Hobbes’s sympathies broke with the increasingly radicalized reformers of parliament. The ‘Nottingham petition’ (perhaps sent to Paris by Devonshire) that occasioned Hobbes’s letter of 23 July was part of the root and branch campaign. It argued not merely against tendentious interpretations of episcopacy power, but against the very ‘Forme or Constitution’ of episcopacy.130 The petition strongly echoed the Erastian rhetoric of the larger anti-episcopal campaign, blasting the bishops for extending ‘their Ecclesiasticall Jurisdiction’ over temporal power, for exempting church courts from civil authority, and for ‘assuming Civill power . . . that they may sway both swords’. The petitioners repeated the familiar allegation that the Canons of 1640 lacked proper state authorization; they attacked the doctrine of jure divino episcopacy for undermining the stability of civil government.131 Hobbes found all of this consistent with his own belief that ‘all church government depend on the state’. Most strikingly, he allied himself with the petitioners’ endorsement of the settlement plan whereby lay commissioners were to replace bishops. In keeping with his principles, Hobbes reserved final arbitration of ecclesiological questions to the sovereign, but he did not disguise either his sympathy with anti-episcopal sentiment in parliament, or his conviction that the ‘new way propounded’ of governing the church via lay commissioners accorded better with his own political principles. Hobbes’s original flight from England had purportedly been triggered by anxiety that his absolutist political theory would draw unwelcome parliamentary attention. Aubrey later testified that Hobbes feared that his principles would be grouped with the arch-monarchist sermons of churchmen 127 David Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, 1640–1649 (Cambridge, 1994), 62–9. Dr Smith’s argument that Erastian opposition to Laud appealed chiefly to later royalists is, however, overly 128 D’Ewes, Journal . . . First Recess, 30; Verney, Papers, 76. simplified. 129 Morrill, ‘Religious Context’, 175–8; a pro-episcopacy campaign began in 1641; D’Ewes, Journal . . . First Recess, 290. 130 A Petition Presented to the Parliament from the Countie of Nottingham. Complaining of Grievances under the 131 Ibid. 5, 13, 18–20. Ecclesiasticall Government by Archbishops, Bishops . . . (1641), epistle dedicatory, 16.

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such as Roger Maynwairing and Robert Sibthorp.132 But Hobbes’s assessment of the Nottinghamshire petition overlooked its complaint that churchmen had sermonized in support of royal absolutism.133 In 1640, such sentiments had sent Hobbes out of the country. By 1641, he passed over them in order to associate himself with the Nottingham petition’s Erastian critique of the bishops. In doing so, Hobbes allied himself with the parliamentary radicals on one of the thorniest issues of the crisis. After the Restoration, Hobbes cryptically remembered that ‘one part of the clergy compelled me to flee from England to France’.134 Given his apparent nervousness about any intellectual proximity to clergymen such as Maynwairing and Sibthrop, it seems possible that Hobbes had been displeased that high-churchmen had discredited his own absolutist political theory by associating it with their own heavy-handed rule of the church. Elsewhere Hobbes would complain that the ‘tenets’ and ‘pretended sanctity’ of the bishops had made the ‘King and his party odious to the people’.135 Hobbes may have feared that the Laudians had tainted his civil science, and De Cive may have been an effort to free his own principles from their regrettable Laudian associations. This is speculative, but Hobbes’s letter of 23 July makes crystal clear the extent to which the ecclesiological innovations of De Cive responded sympathetically to the anti-episcopal agitation in the Long Parliament. Perhaps the most powerful evidence that Thomas Hobbes blamed the misguided principles of the Laudian churchmen for helping to trigger the crisis of 1640 is found in his Behemoth—a history of the civil war in dialogue form. The next three chapters will offer an interpretative reading of Behemoth intended to sustain the thesis that Hobbes’s Erastianism essentially determined his analysis of the English Revolution. On this point Behemoth, a Restoration text, is an anachronistic source to be employed cautiously. Fortunately, enough is known of Hobbes’s political position during the Restoration, and of the composition and publication history of Behemoth (detailed below), to allow for an informed reading between the lines of the text. After 1660 Hobbes was continually on the defensive for his religious views, and he habitually veiled his hostility to the Church of England. Within bounds, this defensive habit can be accounted for, and the full political implications of Behemoth recovered. The essential point is that Behemoth was at once a history of the civil war and a treatise on the nature of religious power. In this respect the contextual value of the work is its capacity to further evidence the role of the civil war in heightening Hobbes’s ecclesiological concerns. The work also establishes Hobbes’s belief that the English Civil War was fundamentally a religious war fought in defence of Erastianism. Establishing that point is vital if the partisan implications of Hobbes’s published works of political theory are to be fully grasped. To a remarkable extent Hobbes wrote Behemoth as an indictment of clerical dualism and a defence of the religious power of the temporal state. The 132

133 Petition . . . Nottingham, 6. Lockyer, Early Stuarts, 309; Sommerville, Hobbes in Context, 80–9. Hobbes, Dialogus Physicus (1661), trans. Simon Schaffer in Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the 135 Beh., 89. Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1986), 348. 134

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work begins by arguing that the English Civil War could be blamed on several sets of malcontents: ‘papists’, ministers, sectarians, gentlemen educated in the misguided political notions of antiquity, the money-men of London.136 As the history unfolds, however, the nuances of this thesis fall away, and Hobbes offers a virtually monocausal theory of the conflict as a war against seditious clergy. Behemoth begins with an interpretative history, stretching back into the Middle Ages, of the jurisdictional struggles between the Catholic church and European states.137 This history, which presents the Middle Ages as an age of usurping clergy and the Reformation as a heroic fight to protect sovereignty, undoubtedly will seem tangential to modern readers conditioned to understand the English Revolution in constitutional terms. This perhaps explains Behemoth’s relative scholarly neglect. But Hobbes understood the civil war as a religious war, fought not over theology but over the revival of a seditious clerical dualism that had long destabilized Christendom. For this reason Behemoth portrays the English civil war as an episode in the history of church and state conflict, a culmination of the ecclesiological struggles that had animated the English Reformation. Hobbes dedicated the first of Behemoth’s four dialogues entirely to establishing this long-term context. The dialogue begins with an assault on the Catholic doctrine that the church should enjoy all power ‘to determine points of faith, and to be judges, in the inner court of conscience, of moral duties, and a power to punish those men, that obey not their precepts, by ecclesiastical censure, that is, by excommunication’. This doctrine encroached on sovereignty, Hobbes argued, and he castigated the medieval church for claiming clerical exemptions from juridical decisions, for demanding tithes by divine right, for appealing court decisions to Rome, for usurping jurisdiction over marital law, and for absolving ‘heretical’ subjects of their civil duties. Medieval dualism, he concluded, established ‘two kingdoms in one and the same nation, and no man be able to know which of his masters he must obey’.138 This was familiar Protestant polemic, but its appearance at the start of Behemoth is not immediately logical. Although the work contains a number of barbs against the Caroline court Catholics, it did not ascribe to the theory of a ‘popish plot’ in Charles’s government. Indeed, Hobbes explicitly rejected this theory as a ‘calumny’.139 But if specifically Catholic sedition in England did not concern Hobbes, he was interested in the political sins of the Church of England, and his critique of medieval dualism assisted him in framing this issue. Capping his condemnation of papal ecclesiology, Hobbes wrote: ‘And this power not only the Pope pretends to in all Christendom; but most bishops also, in their several dioceses, jure divino, that is, immediately from Christ, without deriving it from the Pope’.140 This passage is deleted in the edition of Behemoth used by many commentators (see below), but it is absolutely essential. It served to broaden the application of Hobbes’s Erastian critique, and in particular to direct it against the 136

Ibid. 2–4.

137

Ibid. 6–22.

138

Ibid. 5–8.

139

Ibid. 60.

140

Ibid. 6.

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Laudian church. Throughout Behemoth Laudianism is construed as an illegitimate effort to rehabilitate the dualist ecclesiology of the medieval church. Even in the transformed atmosphere of the Restoration, Hobbes could not hide his belief that the English bishops bore a heavy responsibility for the civil war. His strategy for conveying this in Behemoth was to associate the bishops with an obnoxious clerical dualism commonly attributed to Catholics and Presbyterians. He also structured his narrative to foreground the contributions of the Laudians to Charles I’s ruin. The ‘unlucky business’ of the Scottish prayer book, for instance, entirely blamed on the ‘advice’ of Laud, is fully detailed in Behemoth. Hobbes condemned the Scottish National Covenant not for ‘put[ting] down episcopacy’ but for doing so ‘without consulting the King’, and he implicitly commended Charles for securing a truce with the Scots by agreeing to the abolition of episcopacy.141 Hobbes took the Laudians to task for their Arminianism, a ‘Papistical doctrine’ that had inflamed the people and lent a specious credence to the Popish plot.142 Such sophistic ‘philosophical points’, wrote Hobbes, ‘tend not at all to the salvation of [subjects’] souls in the world to come, nor to their ease in this life, but only to the direction toward the clergy of that duty which they ought to perform to the King’.143 As for the renewed respectability, in the Caroline era, of divine-right defences of episcopacy, Hobbes scathingly denounced such claims on jus divinum, which undermined the Royal Supremacy. The bishops were attempting to assume the Pope’s exalted power.144 The English church’s original acquiescence in the Royal Supremacy, Hobbes provocatively alleged, had been strategic, intended to cripple papal authority and make way for divinely mandated episcopal power. He went so far as to cast aspersions on the bishops’ devout royalism. This had been merely a function of self-interest. Royalism had been the bishops’ only viable political choice, as their claims on divine-right power had rendered them acutely unpopular.145 Perhaps most strikingly, Behemoth included a frankly captious portrait of Archbishop Laud, who by the Restoration had been all but sainted as a martyr to church and king. After delivering a stingingly backhanded compliment to Laud as a ‘zealous promoter of the Church-government by bishops’, Hobbes wrote that ‘to bring, as he did, into the State his former controversies, I mean his squabblings in the University about free-will, and his standing upon punctilios concerning the service-book and its rubric, was not, in my opinion, an argument of his sufficiency in affairs of State’.146 This fault-finding was particularly explosive in that it was framed as an explanation for the Archbishop’s execution. In Behemoth Hobbes noted that the Grand Remonstrance had been in part composed against ‘bishops, and that part of the clergy that cherish formality as a support of their own ecclesiastical tyranny and usurpation’. He all but endorsed this sentiment by having one of the dialogue’s interlocutors observe that ‘it may very well be, that some of the bishops, and also some of the court, may have, in pursuit of their private interest, done something indiscreetly, perhaps wickedly’.147 Discussing the abolition of episcopacy, of the High Commission, and the purging 141 146

Beh., 28–9. Ibid. 73.

142 147

Ibid. 42, 61–2. Ibid. 81–2.

143

Ibid. 71.

144

Ibid. 56–7.

145

Ibid. 19–20, 95.

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of episcopal men from the House of Lords, Hobbes all but justified parliament’s hostility toward the bishops. ‘For indeed’, he wrote, the most of them so carried themselves, as if they owed their greatness not to the King’s favour and to his letters patent . . . but to the merit of their [own] conceived [wit and] learning [and had] no less care of the praises of each other, than they showed irritability to defend the dignity of their jurisdiction and of their office, being ever highly offended with those that dissented from their spirit or their ideas.148

These censures were broad barrages at episcopacy in general, not narrowly fashioned critiques of Laud’s immediate circle. Behemoth landed a particularly low blow when it characterized The Whole Duty of Man—a 1658 work of Anglican devotion wildly popular during the Restoration—as a justification of the late ‘Presbyterian rebellion’. The work’s sedition, Hobbes argued, hinged on its willingness to countenance the distinction between passive and active obedience.149 Hobbes thus lashed the bishops to Presbyterian sedition, and elsewhere blamed the civil war on disputes between ‘Presbyterians and Episcopals’.150 This was a clever rhetorical strategy. As a Restoration text, Behemoth necessarily laid a great deal of blame for the civil war at the feet of the Presbyterians, and at times presented the Long Parliament as wholly ‘partial to the Scotch’.151 But Hobbes’s flogging of the Presbyterians, certainly heartfelt, was, like his excoriating of the medieval papacy, also expedient. It obscured the extent to which the early years of the Long Parliament had been dominated not by a partisan Presbyterianism but by a staunch Erastianism that had appealed to Hobbes himself. It also allowed him to undermine the political standing of the bishops by associating them with a host of Presbyterian sins. And in the climate of the Restoration, if Hobbes’s critique of the Presbyterians was utterly unremarkable, his criticisms of the bishops— however carefully couched—were dangerously impolitic. Indeed, Hobbes’s censure of the bishops in Behemoth is all the more striking for having been composed after the Restoration, when prudence strongly counselled against such criticisms. This was particularly true for Thomas Hobbes who, for reasons detailed in their remainder of this book, had secured the violent hostility of the Restoration bishops. There is strong evidence that Behemoth’s hostility towards the Laudians was responsible for securing the official prohibition of the manuscript’s publication. Some anticipation of this history proves revealing. Hobbes composed Behemoth around the year 1668, and shortly thereafter presented it to Charles II.152 The King ‘flatly refused’ to authorize its publication.153 Manuscript copies circulated from at least the early 1670s,154 and four pirated versions of the work appeared in 1679–80.155 The unauthorized 148

Ibid. 89. Ibid. 47–9. See John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, 1991), 23, 281–3. 150 Beh., 95. 151 Ibid. 35. 152 Vita [prose], 7. 153 Hobbes to Crooke, 19 June 1679, Corr., 771. 154 Royce MacGillivray, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s History of the English Civil War: A Study of “Behemoth” ’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 31 (1970), 179–98 at 181. 155 Hobbes complained of the ‘foolish title’ of one edition. That ‘Behemoth’ was Hobbes’s title seems clear, as this was on the manuscript owned by his amanuensis. Hobbes’s Historia Ecclesiastica also refers to both Leviathan and Behemoth suggestively. Hobbes to Aubrey, 18 Aug. 1679, Corr., 772; HE, line 1228. 149

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editions alarmed Hobbes, and he refused to endorse his publisher’s plan for a corrected edition.156 That the suppression of Behemoth was in large measure due to its attack on the Caroline bishops can hardly be doubted. In a 1673 letter to no less a figure than John Locke, John Aubrey reported that ‘the king read [Behemoth] and likes [it] extreamly, but tells [Hobbes] there is so much truth in it he dares not license for feare of displeasing the Bishops’.157 Why the bishops might have been offended should by now be evident, but further clues are provided by a strategic suppression of passages of the text very likely undertaken by Hobbes himself in the early 1670s. Hobbes’s own manuscript of Behemoth (written in the hand of his amanuensis) survives, and it contains imperfectly erased passages that were only reconstructed by Ferdinand Tönnies in his 1889 edition. These passages were almost certainly suppressed by Hobbes himself, as they are also missing from the 1682 edition published by William Crooke, which was in turn based on a copy of the manuscript made (with Hobbes’s knowledge) shortly after Charles II had perused the work.158 All of this is significant because the suppressed passages are precisely those portions of Behemoth in which Hobbes most daringly attacked the Laudian church. In an apparent effort to placate the Restoration bishops, he removed passages that justified parliamentary opposition to the Laudians, railed against divine-right episcopacy, and cast doubt on the royalist credentials of the bishops. Additionally, he suppressed the critical passage identified above in which he widened his critique of papal clericalism to encompass all episcopal churches.159 Hobbes’s attack on the bishops, it may be surmised, had led to the suppression of a work that was, after all, a purportedly royalist history. His hasty effort to hide the more impolitic features of Behemoth has long been successful, and continues to account for the lack of attention paid to the work’s anti-Laudian thesis. No printed edition until that of Tönnies restored Hobbes’s excisions. (This includes Molesworth’s venerable edition, which is unsoundly used by some historians even today.160) Attention to the pattern of Hobbes’s attempted suppressions only clarifies the central importance of Behemoth’s anti-episcopal thesis.161 It would be a step too far to argue that Thomas Hobbes’s willingness to partially endorse the Erastian campaign against the Laudian church had, as early as 1642, estranged him from the royalist cause. On constitutional questions, the absolutism of De Cive could only have been read as a defence of royal authority. Nor was 156

ABL, i. 358; Hobbes to Crooke, 19 June and 18 Aug. 1679, Corr., 771, 774. Aubrey to Locke, 1673, in Maurice Cranston, ‘John Locke and John Aubrey’, Notes and Queries, 197 (1952), 383–4. Anthony Wood wrote that Behemoth contained ‘several things against religion, antient learning, Universities, etc.’; 158 Hobbes to Crooke, 19 June 1679, Corr., 771. Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis . . . (1691), ii. 481. 159 Beh., 6, 89, 95. The reprinted Tönnies edition brackets the recovered text. 160 See, for instance, Metzger, Thomas Hobbes, and Martinich, Two Gods. MacGillivray knew of the excisions but mysteriously dismisses them as ‘interesting rather than important’. Royce MacGillivray, Restoration Historians and the English Civil War (The Hague, 1974), 65. 161 J. P. Sommerville has argued that ‘the political creed of Behemoth is far closer to that of royalists and Anglicans than it is to Catholicism, Independency, or Presbyterianism’. His account, however, does not reconstruct the suppression of the work by the Anglican church, and it provides only a partial account of the many anti-Laudian passages in the full text of Behemoth. Nor does Professor Sommerville include contextual evidence such as Hobbes’s 1641 letter to Devonshire all but endorsing the abolition of the bishops. Sommerville, ‘Hobbes, Behemoth’, 216–20. 157

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Erastianism by any means an ideological bent found only among parliamentarians. For royalists, however, the campaign to abolish episcopacy proved a moment of decision, and virtually all of them rallied to the bishops. Charles I’s adamant loyalty to episcopacy remained a constant factor in the political calculus of these years. The stridency of Hobbes’s Erastianism, and his willingness to follow its logic even in the company of parliamentary radicals, did not sit easily with his royalism. De Cive was Hobbes’s effort to balance these two convictions, and in this, as we shall see in coming chapters, the work was not entirely successful. It has been argued that Hobbes’s Erastian ecclesiology employed two mutually exclusive but superficially similar intellectual traditions: Protestant magisterial ecclesiology, and the humanist celebration of the pagan ideal of civil religion. As a religious war the English Revolution was, elementally, an effort to protect the first of these traditions when it was threatened with a revived ecclesiological dualism. England, above all other European kingdoms, had distilled the Erastian tendencies of Christian ecclesiology, had served as a central battle ground with the medieval papacy, and had established its Reformation as a naked act of state. The Long Parliament marked the culmination of this history and launched the most violent struggle yet to preserve the Reformation’s Erastian church settlement. Thomas Hobbes certainly understood the religious impulse of the Revolution in this way, and this served to complicate his political sympathies. He was constitutionally drawn to royalism, but Charles I’s allegiance to the renewed dualism of the Laudians affronted his deeply Erastian ecclesiological instincts. By 1642 Hobbes had betrayed a considerable sympathy with the Long Parliament’s campaign against Laudianism. In this regard his participation in the Protestant tradition of magisterial reformism was on display. But Protestant ecclesiology was not the deepest spring of his Erastianism. More fundamentally, Hobbes’s statist ecclesiology aimed at reducing Christianity to a civil religion, freeing the sovereign from its mandates, while preserving its utility as an instrument of rule. As the Revolution progressed, this Machiavellian project would draw him towards a more fateful political commitment.

3

Rise of the Independents Thomas Hobbes had composed De Cive as a direct comment on the parliamentary crisis of 1640–1, but as the conflict boiled over into civil war, his own political engagement seemingly cooled. The mid-1640s were for Hobbes, as for many, years of personal loss. The war claimed some of his close associates. Charles Cavendish, the militarily accomplished son of the Earl of Devonshire, died at the siege of Gainsborough in 1643. Old friends Sidney Godolphin and Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, also fell in battle, the former leaving Hobbes a legacy of 200 pounds.1 For several years after the publication of De Cive, Hobbes withdrew from politics and occupied himself with scientific researches as a member of Father Marin Mersenne’s cohort of natural philosophers. Residing chiefly in Paris, he threw himself into the physical studies then engaging those devoted to the new science. Hobbes intended these studies to appear in print as the first two sections of his philosophical system, dealing respectively with matter and man.2 His work proceeded slowly, encumbered, he claimed, by laziness and the sheer magnitude of his task.3 A nearly fatal illness in 1647 further retarded his progress.4 The eventual productions of Hobbes’s labour—De Homine and De Corpore—did not appear until the 1650s, but in 1643 Hobbes composed a lengthy manuscript against his associate Thomas White’s neo-Aristotelian treatise De Mundo.5 In 1644 he published a short work on vision, the Tractus Opticus, and contributed to Father Mersenne’s Ballistica.6 Otherwise, Hobbes laboured on De Corpore, seemingly unexercised by events unfolding in England.7 This period of relative isolation, however, did not last. After the royalist defeat at Marston Moor in June of 1644, William Cavendish (then Marquis of Newcastle) fled to the Continent.8 He arrived in Paris in April of 1645, and his arrival fatefully interrupted the routine into which Hobbes’s life had settled. Newcastle and Hobbes resumed the scientific pursuits that they had begun in the 1630s.9 More importantly, Newcastle provided Hobbes with an entrée into the court of Prince Charles, who was sent to reside with his mother in Paris in the summer of 1646.10 1 3 5 7 8 9 10

2 Vita [verse], 7–8. Hyde to Earles, 1 Jan. 1647, Bodl. Clarendon MS 29, fo. 354. 4 Vita [verse], 8; Hobbes to Sorbière, 17 Nov. 1646, Corr., 164. Hobbes to Sorbière, 22 May 1646, Corr., 133. 6 Martinich, Hobbes, 174. Tuck, Hobbes, 25. Cavendish to Pell, 27 Dec. 1644, BL Add. MS 4278, fo. 190. Margaret Cavendish, The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, ed. C. H. Firth (London, 1886), 87. Jean Jacquot, ‘Sir Charles Cavendish and his Learned Friends’, Annals of Science, 3 (1952), 13–27. Ronald Hutton, Charles II: King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Oxford, 1989), 13–16.

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Newcastle himself had directed Charles’s education until 1638, and it was probably through his good offices that Hobbes was appointed mathematics instructor to the Prince in 1646.11 Hobbes had been planning to pursue his scientific work in the quiet of the French countryside, but he now found himself plunged into the intrigue-ridden world of the exiled royalists.12 The Stuart court in exile was plagued by acrimonious factions. The so-called old royalists—led by Edward Hyde, Edward Nicholas, Ralph Hopton, and James Butler, Earl of Ormonde—were pitted against the ‘Louvre’ party of Queen Henrietta Maria.13 The former group, banking on the resilience of English royalism, advocated a strict adherence to the principles for which Charles I fought. Among these, loyalty to the Church of England loomed large, and thus the episcopal churchmen in exile, to a man, allied themselves with the old royalists. This Anglican clerical faction included John Cosin; the bishop of Derry, John Bramhall; Hyde’s chaplain, George Morley; and John Barwick, who was imprisoned as a royalist agent from 1650 to 1652. Further, those episcopal clergy who stayed in England and remained in correspondence with the exiled court—above all Henry Hammond and Gilbert Sheldon—also allied with the old royalists.14 The Louvre group around Henrietta Maria—which included Sir Kenelm Digby, John Culpepper, and Henry Jermyn, and had a decidedly Catholic cast—largely scorned reliance on English royalism in favour of seeking international assistance and expedient alliances with either the Scottish or the Irish.15 The split between the Louvre group and the old royalists debilitated the Stuart cause. It opened fully in June of 1646, when Henrietta Maria summoned Prince Charles from Jersey against the wishes of his nearest advisers, Edward Hyde and Ralph Hopton. With the royalist cause collapsing, the Queen sought her son to serve as a figurehead for a variety of recovery schemes: securing French aid, launching an Irish invasion, and furthering the Scottish alliance then being pursued by Charles I. Hyde, the guiding spirit of the old royalists, remained on Jersey and out of favour for several years. From 1646 to 1648, Charles resided with his mother in the French palace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, situated in a royal forest near Paris. To Saint-Germain the exiled royalists flocked as Charles I’s military fortunes crumbled.16 To Saint-Germain as well came Thomas Hobbes, on his appointment as the Prince’s mathematics instructor in the autumn of 1646. Situating Hobbes among the royalist factions is an exercise that reveals a great deal about the pattern of his political and religious views in the mid-1640s. As we have seen, Hobbes had, by this time, formed a decidedly critical opinion of the Laudian church. He was hardly one to be tempted by the long-suffering episcopalianism of the old royalists. 11

Malcolm, Biographical Register, Corr., 814. Hobbes to Sorbière, 6 May and 22 May 1646, Corr., 127, 133; Vita [prose], 6; Cavendish to Pell, 9 July 1646, in Schuhmann, Chronique, 95. 13 David Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy in England, 1649–1660 (New Haven, 1960); Hutton, Charles II, ch. 2. 14 Spurr, Restoration Church, 1–28. 15 Robert Ashton, Counter-Revolution: The Second Civil War and its Origins, 1646–8 (New Haven, 1994), 10–11. 16 Hutton, Charles II, 18–22. 12

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The Louvre group, by contrast, consistently privileged the interests of temporal power over those of church allegiance. The Irish and Scottish alliances pursued by Henrietta Maria, for instance, committed the royalists to religious policies that were to be unceremoniously reversed once the Stuarts had regained the throne.17 The attractions of such strategies to a religious sceptic and political realist such as Hobbes are obvious, and he accordingly fell under the sway of the Louvre group during the mid-1640s. Hobbes maintained some friendships among the old royalists, to be sure. The preponderance of his English associates in exile, however, was found among the members of the Louvre group. His original link with the Queen’s circle was probably Newcastle, a favourite of Henrietta Maria since before the war.18 Newcastle himself had fairly instrumental views on religion (in the 1630s he had advised Prince Charles to ‘show respect for religion only to set an example to the masses’), and he would prominently agitate for the expedient alliance with the Scottish Presbyterians advocated by the Louvre group.19 Another of Hobbes’s apparent patrons was the Catholic courtier Henry Jermyn, later Earl of St Albans. Jermyn, the Queen’s favourite and the most dogged partisan of the Louvre group, seems to have played a role in securing Hobbes’s post as the royal mathematics instructor.20 Many of Hobbes’s literary friends during the 1640s—including the poets Abraham Cowley and William Davenant—were courtiers to the Queen.21 As will be detailed further in the next chapter, old royalists such as Edward Nicholas positioned Hobbes securely within the orbit of the ‘Queen’s court’.22 It is also notable that Behemoth would contain traces of a residual loyalty to Henrietta Maria, denouncing parliamentary charges that she sought to convert England to Catholicism as a ‘slander’.23 Hobbes’s links to the Louvre group were further strengthened by his friendships within a cohort of English Catholics known as the ‘Blackloists’. Blackloism was a philosophical and political response, among certain English Catholics, to the Counter-Reformation. The group’s founding father was Thomas White, an English secular priest ordained at Douai in 1617 who wrote under the alias ‘Blacklo’.24 Over three decades White taught theology and philosophy at the English Catholic colleges in Douai, Rome, and Lisbon. In the 1620s he served as the agent in Rome for Bishop Richard Smith, who had been given episcopal authority in England as the Catholic bishop of Chalcedon.25 Politically, as we shall see, the Blackloists disparaged the ultramontane tendencies of the 17 See, e.g., Henrietta Maria to Charles I, 19 Oct. 1646, Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London, 1857), 325. 18 Geoffrey Trease, Portrait of a Cavalier: William Cavendish, First Duke of Newcastle (London, 1979), 61, 143–4, 158. 19 Hutton, Charles II, 3, 44–5. 20 Cavendish to Pell, 7 Dec. 1646, BL Add. MS 4278, fo. 265. 21 Arthur Nethercot, Abraham Cowley: The Muses’s Hannibal (Oxford, 1931), 112–27; id., Sir William D’Avenant: Poet Laureate and Playwright Manager (Chicago, 1938), 234–70. 22 Nicholas to Hyde, 11 Jan. 1652, BL Birch MS 4180, fo. 53. 23 Beh., 60–1. 24 The Douay College Diaries, 1598–1654, ed. Edwin Burton and Thomas Williams (The Catholic Record Society, 10; London, 1911), 370. 25 ODNB; Beverley Southgate, ‘Covetous of Truth’: The Life and Work of Thomas White, 1593–1676 (Dordrecht, 1993), 35–9; Robert Bradley, ‘Blacklo and the Counter Reformation: An Inquiry into the Strange Death of Catholic England’, in Carter Charles Howard (ed.), From Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation (New York, 1965), 355–8.

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Tridentine papacy and the Jesuits. Philosophically, Blackloism sought to answer the threat of scepticism by wedding features of the new science with a committed Aristotelianism.26 Such eclecticism pleased neither church traditionalists nor more zealous free-thinkers, but it did earn White some devoted followers, including the priest John Sergeant (later a perjurious witness during the Popish Plot), and two doctors of divinity at the English college at Paris named Henry Holden and Peter Fitton.27 The poet Edmund Waller, a friend of Hobbes, was acquainted with some of the Blackloists. Evelyn reported him discussing religious matters with Henry Holden in late 1649.28 The most politically powerful ‘disciple of Blacklo’ was certainly the philosopher, poet, and adventurer Kenelm Digby. The leading Blackloists were attached, in the mid-1640s, to the Louvre group royalists. White fled to France in 1643, ensconced himself at the Queen’s court, and at least once travelled to Rome on Henrietta Maria’s behalf.29 The priests Holden and Fitton also drifted within the orbit of Saint-Germain.30 Kenelm Digby served as Henrietta Maria’s envoy to the Pope for a number of years.31 The Blackloists provided Thomas Hobbes with further links to the Louvre group, for Hobbes was closely associated with leading Blackloists throughout the 1640s and 1650s. White was a leading member of Mersenne’s circle, and he probably met Hobbes in this context. Hobbes’s lengthy manuscript against White’s treatise De Mundo evidences their differences. But the two men shared a dedication to the new science, and theirs was a friendly rivalry, as both Aubrey and Wood attest.32 Hobbes had been a friend of Digby since the 1630s (they had met in Paris).33 They renewed their acquaintance in the 1640s when Hobbes presented Digby with an inscribed copy of De Cive.34 By this time Digby had established himself as a key adviser to the Queen. He was in Rome on her business from 1645 to 1648, but thereafter, back in Paris, provided Hobbes with an important connection at court.35 Richard Tuck and Quentin Skinner have recently examined the intellectual influence of the Blackloists on Hobbes,36 but his proximity to the Blackloists’ political manoeuvrings has been largely ignored. As this chapter and the next will demonstrate, Hobbes’s political opinions closely paralleled those of the Blackloists throughout the English Revolution. During the middle of the 1640s, they probably worked to secure Hobbes’s ties to the Louvre group. 26 New Catholic Encyclopedia, xiv. 894; Southgate, ‘ “A Medly of Both”: Old and New in the Thought of Thomas White’, History of European Ideas, 18 (1994), 53–9 at 53; Southgate, ‘ “To Speak the Truth”: Blackloism, Scepticism, and Language’, Seventeenth Century, 10 (1995), 237–54. 27 Dorothea Krook, John Sergeant and his Circle: A Study of Three Seventeenth-Century English Aristotelians (Leiden, 1993), pp. xi, 172. 28 The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer (Oxford, 1959), 282. 29 Bradley, ‘Blacklo’, 359–60. 30 ODNB; Blacklo’s Cabal, ed. Robert Pugh (1680), epistle to the reader. 31 R. T. Petersson, Sir Kenelm Digby: The Ornament of England, 1603–1665 (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), 212–24. 32 ABL, i. 369; Wood, Athenae, ii. 497. 33 Digby to Hobbes, 1 Oct. 1636, 17 Jan. 1637, 11 Sept. 1637, Corr., 36, 42–50. 34 Malcolm, Biographical Register, Corr., 830. 35 Quentin Bone, Henrietta Maria: Queen of the Cavaliers (Urbana, Ill., 1972), 179–91. 36 Skinner has examined both as de factoist theorists, and has presented Hobbes’s ‘Critique of White’ as evidence of Hobbes’s scepticism towards rhetoric (‘History and Ideology’, 251; Reason and Rhetoric, 262–3); Tuck has traced some of Leviathan’s heterodoxies to the influence of White and Digby (‘Civil Religion’, 134–5); Southgate, ‘Covetous of Truth’, 130–66.

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As for the old royalists, their unflinching support for the bishops did not incline them in Hobbes’s favour. Again, Professor Tuck has argued that De Cive was ‘extremely well-judged as a defence of either Anglicanism or Gallicanism’, and that ‘episcopalians could welcome De Cive but not Leviathan’.37 There is, however, strong evidence that anger at Hobbes among the churchmen—which would culminate dramatically in 1651—was first piqued by the publication of De Cive.38 For instance, when Newcastle removed to Paris after the disaster at Marston Moor, within his entourage was the distinguished theologian and future primate of Ireland, Bishop John Bramhall. At some point in 1645 Hobbes and Bramhall found themselves together in Newcastle’s company. It was on this occasion that the two launched their famed debate on free will, but Bramhall also seized the moment to unburden himself of ‘60 exceptions’ to De Cive, ‘one half of them Politicall, the other half Theologicall’.39 That summer, visiting the Earl of Devonshire in Rouen, Hobbes encountered other unnamed scholastics who had ‘bayted’ his opinions.40 As we shall see below, important episcopal clergy, including Brian Duppa and Herbert Thorndike (the latter of whom would publish voluminously against Hobbes), strongly disapproved of the religious and ecclesiological implications of De Cive (see Ch. 7). Nor were English churchmen alone in voicing such concerns. Thomas Hill, the Presbyterian master of Trinity College, Cambridge, first suspected Hobbes’s ‘spirit in religion’ on reading De Cive.41 Mersenne had fielded complaints from a Catholic associate that Hobbes had sought to ‘unite sovereign priesthood with princely power’.42 Hobbes would long remember the enmity with which the clergy—‘who think their interest concerned in being made subordinate to the Civil Power’—had received De Cive.43 De Cive had earned the ‘aversion’ of both Catholic and Protestant clergy, Hobbes later recalled, by freeing sovereign power from their authority.44 The episcopal clergy were doubtless angered by the aspersions Hobbes had implicitly cast on Laudian ecclesiology. The nature of their complaints, and Hobbes’s defensiveness in the face of them, were confirmed when a second edition of De Cive was printed in the Netherlands in early 1647.45 Hobbes had supervised the preparation of this edition over the previous summer and autumn, with the assistance of his admirer Samuel Sorbière.46 The second edition of De Cive, more commercially successful than the first, included marginal additions in which Hobbes responded to his critics. 37

Richard Tuck, ‘Warrender’s De Cive’, Political Studies, 33 (1985), 308–15 at 313–14. This differs from Tuck’s reading (Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 329–40). 39 John Bramhall, 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 (1655), to the reader. 40 Hobbes to Waller, 29 July 1645, Corr., 124. 41 Hill to Baxter, 13 Feb. 1652, Dr Williams Library, Baxter Correspondence, iii, fo. 266. See Ch. 6 for more on Hill’s anti-Hobbesian opinions. 42 Masoyer-Deshommeaux to Mersenne, 10 Sept. 1642, quoted in Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the Republic of Letters’, 43 SL, 56. in Aspects, 473. 44 Reported to Balthasar de Monconys in 1663; Schuhmann, Chronique, 180. 45 Sorbière to Hobbes, 22 Feb. 1647, Corr., 154. 46 Hobbes to Sorbière, 6 May, 22 May., and 24 Sept. 1646, Corr., 127, 133, 140. 38

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These additions in turn suggest a great deal as to how De Cive had been received since its initial appearance. Hobbes blasted ‘any preacher or confessor or casuist’ who denied that De Cive was ‘consistent with the Word of God’.47 Apparently responding to charges of impiety, he declared his acceptance of the Apostle’s Creed and denied charges that he skirted near atheism.48 ‘I found my book very sharply criticized’, he wrote, ‘on the ground that I have immoderately enhanced the civil power, but by Churchmen; on the ground that I have taken away liberty of conscience, but by Sectarians’.49 Responses to the ‘churchmen’ bulked particularly large in Hobbes’s marginal notes. He rejected, for instance, objections to his argument that the ‘sacrament’ of marriage fell under state jurisdiction, not that of the clergy.50 Elsewhere he affirmed his conclusion that the ‘will of the commonwealth’ properly determined the legitimate uses of religious imagery and ceremony.51 He also reiterated, in the face of displeasure from unnamed ‘theologians’, that he did ‘not hold the view that all those who do not give internal assent to whatever articles are defined by the Church . . . are damned for eternity’.52 Most revealing of all was an extended explanatory note in which Hobbes reiterated his condemnation of the view that doctrinal interpretation was a prerogative of ecclesiastical rather than secular authorities. ‘I do not conceal’, he continued, ‘that this applies to the authority in foreign countries which may 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.’ This obvious blast against the English bishops made explicit the more carefully formulated critique contained within the first edition of De Cive. And Hobbes twisted the knife further with the rhetorical query: ‘What war ever broke out in the Christian world that did not spring from this root or was fed by it?’53 He had first voiced this impolitic opinion in his 1641 letter to Devonshire endorsing the Nottinghamshire petition against the bishops.54 By 1647, angered and perhaps emboldened by the hostility of the English clergy, he brazenly reiterated it in print. Indeed, it was probably the royalist clergy who ensured that Hobbes’s influence over the crown prince was limited to the sphere of mathematics. In September of 1646, Sorbière congratulated Hobbes on his new ‘exalted position at Court’ and enthused: ‘how fortunate your country will be when it receives a King full of wisdom and imbued with your teachings!’55 But Hobbes demurred: I acknowledge your good will in congratulating me on my present employment; but beware of thinking it more important than it is. For I am only teaching mathematics, not politics. I would not be able to teach him the political doctrines contained in the book which is being printed, both because he is too young, and because my doing so will always be forbidden by those whose counsels, justly, govern him.56 47 52 55

48 Ibid. 164, 240–1. 49 Ibid. 15. 50 Ibid. 87. 51 Ibid. 185. DC, 14. 53 Ibid. 81 (emphasis added). 54 Hobbes to Devonshire, 23 July 1641, Corr., 120–1. Ibid. 240–1. 56 Hobbes to Sorbière, 24 Sept. 1646, Corr., 141. Sorbière to Hobbes, Sept. 1646, Corr., 137.

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We may wonder if Hobbes’s deferential ‘justly’ was included for the eyes of potential censors, and whether his modesty was born of mere prudence or of actual warnings from Anglican courtiers. It is interesting, in this regard, to note that among the Prince’s other tutors was the Anglican chaplain John Earles. Earles was familiar with De Cive, and seems to have been one of Edward Hyde’s sources of information about Hobbes’s doings.57 In any case, some royalist faction considered De Cive inappropriate schooling for Prince Charles, and the episcopal clergy were, by this time, Hobbes’s only obvious court foes. The deterioration of Hobbes’s relations with the exiled clergy may be gauged by Aubrey’s report that, when the philosopher fell deathly ill in 1647, he dismissed the divines who ‘tormented him’ by warning: ‘Let me alone, or els I will detect all your cheates from Aaron to yourselves.’58 It was around this time that Hobbes worried to Sorbière that ‘the people who hold sway in the universities’—probably code for traditionalist clergy—would ‘hinder the publication’ of the second edition of De Cive.59 Still more striking evidence that Hobbes had earned enemies at court was provided by his reaction, in March of 1647, to the belated arrival of the printed copies of this edition. An unauthorized inscription within the volume identified him as ‘academic tutor’ to the Prince of Wales, and to this Hobbes reacted with raw panic. ‘I am sure’, he wrote Sorbière, you put this at the beginning of my book with the best of intentions towards me. Nevertheless, the matter is such that, given the times we are in, I would willingly have paid a great deal for it not to have been put in. . . . For, in the first place, and most importantly, those who are at present in power in England are assiduously searching for and seizing upon any pretexts on which to stir up popular ill feeling against the royal family. So when they see his name set before a political theory which offends the opinions of almost everyone, his enemies will attack him in a haughty and hateful way, claiming that he is now revealing what sort of sovereignty he expects, and intends to demand. Then whatever ill consequences follow from that (or will be said to be capable of following from it, by those people at the Prince’s Court who are ready to aggravate my every fault with their own interpretation and glosses), they will all be blamed on my carelessness and vanity, to my great dishonour. . . . So my enemies will be able to say that I lied out of ambition; and they are not a few.60

The significance of Hobbes’s desire publicly to distance himself from the Stuart cause will be considered below. In the present context it is sufficient to observe that, mere months after his arrival at Saint-Germain, he found it necessary to defuse the determined opposition of many enemies at the exiled court. Among these enemies were surely the episcopal clergy allied with the old royalists. The Louvre group, indifferent to the old English church, proved consistently willing to consider expedient religious concessions in order to fracture the parliamentarians and secure allies for the King. The old royalists, viewing the bishops as a pillar of 57 Hyde to Nicholas, 1 Jan. 1647, Bodl. Clarendon MS 29, fo. 40; Hyde to Earles, 1 Jan. 1647, Bodl. Clarendon MS 29, 58 ABL, i. 357–8. fo. 45. 59 Hobbes to Sorbière, 6 May 1646, Corr., 127. 60 Hobbes to Sorbière, 12 Mar. 1647, Corr., 157–8.

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monarchy, considered this strategy a rank betrayal. In the end, Thomas Hobbes would take his own political path, but his views on the tangled religious politics of the mid-1640s seem to have accorded with the sensibilities of the Louvre group.

i By 1646, the political situation in England had become factionalized and radicalized. In 1643, driven by military necessity, parliament had acceded to the Solemn League and Covenant. Scottish military aid was bought at the price of a commitment to a unified church form for England and Scotland. In spite of a useful vagueness in the language of the Covenant, this was widely understood as a commitment to Presbyterianism.61 After August of 1643, parliament’s religious reform programme thus found itself set on new tracks at a crucial juncture. The work of dismantling the Laudian church was all but completed; the construction of a new church authority was now required. This triggered a divisive struggle, which played out not just in parliament but in the recently convened Westminster Assembly of Divines as well. The Assembly—consisting of 121 clerical and thirty lay delegates— was dominated by English Presbyterians and their Scottish allies.62 An Erastian consensus continued to dominate parliament, supported by an anti-Presbyterian minority in the Assembly. This minority included an emerging faction of Independents, who were dedicated to the ideal of free-standing, gathered congregations. It also included a group of explicit Erastians, who were more flexible on ecclesiological form but opposed any efforts to establish a church government by divine right.63 The Assembly Erastians were lead by two noted Hebraists, Thomas Coleman and John Lightfoot, and by the venerable John Selden.64 The Presbyterians enjoyed the upper hand in the Assembly, and for the remainder of the war, the fight to reform the English church was largely a clash between parliamentary Erastianism and the clericalist Presbyterianism dominant among the Westminster delegates. The early months of the Assembly session were taken up debating the Thirty-nine Articles of the church and reaffirming their Calvinist tenor.65 In October, the more arduous debate to define the new church government began. The Scottish Commissioners, who tried to manage the Assembly Presbyterians from behind the scenes, agitated for a jure divino church of pastors, teachers, ruling elders, and deacons, organized into church sessions, presbyteries, provincial and national synods. Such specificity alienated many reformers for whom Presbyterianism had always been more vaguely understood as a flexible alternative to divine-right episcopacy. Independents and Erastians thus opposed the proposed settlement. Equally contentious were subsidiary tasks such as the 61 Lawrence Kaplan, Politics and Religion during the English Revolution: The Scots and the Long Parliament, 62 Shaw, English Church, i. 122, 145. 1643–1645 (New York, 1976), pp. xviii–xxi. 63 Robert Paul, The Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the Westminster Assembly and the ‘Grand Debate’ 64 Lamont, Godly Rule, 115–26. (Edinburgh, 1985), 102–27. 65 Paul, Assembly, 80–8.

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need to form a Directory for church discipline, to define the process of ordination, and to determine procedures for administering excommunication. Throughout the so-called ‘Grand Debate’ of February through May of 1644 the Presbyterians won a string of Pyrrhic victories in the Assembly. Quashing the objections of the Erastians and Independents, they passed a series of proposals for a Scottish-style church of presbyteries and synods.66 These proposals were then presented to the House of Commons. In January of 1645, conducting the Uxbridge negotiations with Charles and wishing to present him with a fait accompli, parliament accepted the Assembly proposals in principle. But as the details of the settlement were negotiated, a conflict of will developed between the jure divino Presbyterians in the Assembly and a parliament fearful of renewed clericalism. Parliament’s Erastian instincts re-emerged with fury. The members had not slain the clericalism of Laud only to see it resurrected by the Presbyterians. The Assembly’s ordinance on ordination, for instance, was modified by the MPs, who disliked the divine-right overtones of the ordinance’s admonition that church members were to ‘obey and submit to those that are set over them in the Lord’. Such parliamentary meddling annoyed the Assembly Presbyterians, but it was felt ‘not seasonable for ministers to insist too much upon their own rights’.67 Issues of church discipline—who was to determine which offences merited excommunication, and who would handle appeals—triggered the hottest fight. The insistence of Presbyterians such as George Gillespie that church discipline was a divine-right prerogative of the church raised fears among many that the Assembly was erecting ‘two collateral powers in the kingdom, the civil and the ecclesiastical’.68 Finally, parliament resolved these matters in favour of its own discretionary power. Ordinances were produced defining which sins merited excommunication. A parliamentary committee was established to handle appeals.69 The Assembly repeatedly petitioned the members with complaints about such modifications to their proposals.70 One such petition, in the autumn of 1645, provoked a spirited rebuke. In a declaration the MPs reminded the divines that ‘the Assembly had been summoned only to advise the Parliament’, and warned that their presumptions had proved ‘no great inducement to move us to put a boundless power into the hands of those that are so eager to claim it by such a right’. Parliament would reform the church ‘as Queen Elizabeth and King Edward’ had, and they would forbid the erection of a ‘Higher Commission or a power more arbitrary’ than the detested bishops.71 Throughout the spring of 1646, the House of Commons debated various motions rebuking the Westminster Assembly (and their Scottish allies) for breaking the ‘privileges of Parliament’.72 A vote of 21 April affirmed that 66

Shaw, English Church, i. 153–8, 177–83; Paul, Assembly, 243–88. George Gillespie, Notes of Debates and Proceedings of the Assembly of Divines and other Commissioners at Westminster. February 1644 to January 1645, ed. David Meeks (Edinburgh, 1846), 86. 68 Ibid. 91, 115. 69 Shaw, English Church, i. 185, 204. 70 Minutes of the Sessions of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, ed. Alex F. Mitchell and John Struthers (London, 1874), 116–17. 71 HMC: 13th Report, appendix pt. 1. Manuscripts of the Duke of Portland at Welbeck Abbey, i (London, 1891), 296–300. 72 Parliamentary Diary of J. Harrington, BL Add. MS 10114, fos. 11–12. 67

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all jurisdiction in ‘spiritual causes did reside in the Civil Magistrate in England’, rejected the divine right of Presbyterianism, and upheld the capacity of parliament to determine heresies, define the boundaries of excommunication, and oversee the ordination process.73 The Commons eventually sent the Assembly a series of queries challenging the divine-right claims that apologists such as Samuel Rutherford were increasingly making on behalf of Presbyterianism.74 Eventually, after much delay, a Presbyterian settlement was approved by parliamentary ordinance in August 1648.75 But, as the Scottish Commissioner Robert Baillie bitterly editorialized, it was a ‘lame Erastian presbytery’. The reformist instincts of the Scottish and English had proven irreconcilable. For generations the Scots had feared episcopacy for its potential to serve as an instrument of English tyranny.76 The Long Parliament, in diametric contrast, had come to perceive the bishops as a clericalist threat to temporal sovereignty. In the fault line between these two positions, the reform promised by the Solemn League and Covenant came to grief. In any case, wider events crippled prospects for the successful establishment of even this reduced church settlement. The defeat of Charles in 1646 stripped the Scots of the political leverage that English military desperation had provided. The collapse of the Uxbridge negotiations, the fall of Manchester, and the rise of Oliver Cromwell all augured ill for the Scots.77 The New Model Army, if not the sectarian hotbed of lore, was nevertheless ill-disposed towards the Assembly of Divines.78 In May of 1646, possession of the defeated King briefly revived Presbyterian hopes. But when Charles remained steadfast in his episcopalianism, the Scots ransomed him to parliament. They were then paid and retreated over the border.79 As for the Presbyterian church settlement in England, even adulterated it proved unpopular. Other than in London and Lancashire (Presbyterian strongholds), it was scarcely in full operation anywhere. By the outbreak of the second civil war, the scheme was a dead letter. Parliamentary Erastianism had proved no more amenable to divine-right Presbyterianism than it had to divine-right episcopacy. As for Thomas Hobbes, his scorn for ministers of the ‘Geneva print’ long predated the civil war.80 The Elements of Law, we have seen, almost certainly had the Scottish National Covenant in mind when it condemned ‘covenants with God’, and these condemnations were reiterated in De Cive.81 Further, Hobbes took pains, in De Cive, to subordinate presbyters, as well as bishops, to the jurisdiction of sovereignty.82 In his later autobiographical writings he remembered the Westminster Assembly as a hothouse of sedition.83 His objections to Laudian clericalism were necessarily somewhat covert, but the Presbyterians—combining as they did a dualist ecclesiology with sedition against the King—served as ideal whipping boys. Thus is explained their exaggerated prominence in Behemoth. 73 74 75 78 79 81

Ibid., fo. 13. John Coffey, Politics, Religion, and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge, 1997), ch. 7. 76 Coffey, Rutherford, 190–200. 77 Paul, Assembly, 459–62. Paul, Assembly, 517–19. Mark A. Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge, 1979), 92–7. 80 Hobbes to Clifton, 9 Apr. 1630, Corr., 10. Kaplan, Scots and Parliament, 153–6. 82 Ibid. 222–4. 83 Vita [prose], 10. DC, 37–8.

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There Hobbes consistently, and misleadingly, presented the seditious impulses of the Long Parliament as ‘Presbyterian’. He sharply denounced the Westminster Assembly for its usurpation of state prerogative, and, echoing many parliamentarians of 1645–6, rejected the Presbyterian settlement for setting up ‘the national assembly [as] an archbishop’ and the ‘provincial assemblies [as] so many bishops’.84 Hobbes’s disenchantment with English Presbyterians would peak, we shall see, after the publication of Leviathan, but there was already bad blood by 1646. Many Scots were, by this time, very ready to seek religious concessions from the Stuarts. Presumably aware of Hobbes’s ecclesiological principles, they did not appreciate his appointment as mathematics instructor to the prince. In August of 1646 the Scottish Commissioner Robert Baillie reported that ‘the placeing of Ho[bbes] (a professed Atheist, as they speak) about the Prince as his teacher is ill taken’ among the Scots.85 A month later Baillie was imploring courtiers of Charles I to prevent the ‘ruine of the innocent Prince’ by removing him from France, or at least by ensuring that Hobbes, ‘and such wicked men, be put from about him’.86 As for Hobbes’s assessment of the Erastian resistance to Presbyterianism within the Westminster Assembly, the contemporaneous sources are silent. It is, however, surely significant that among the leaders of that resistance numbered one of Hobbes’s intellectual influences, John Selden. The venerable Selden was, of course, a veteran of Jacobean and Caroline parliamentary battles, and his constitutionalist instincts differed dramatically from those of Hobbes.87 We have seen, however, that the two theorists—as pre-eminent participants in the emerging tradition of natural rights theorizing—shared staunchly Erastian ecclesiological principles. The political implications of Selden’s Erastianism unfolded over the course of decades. His 1617 History of Tithes had enraged the church by attacking the divine right to tithe. This work had earned him an appearance before the court of High Commission, where he was forced to express his regret.88 The History of Tithes was thereafter suppressed, but it nevertheless became, arguably, Selden’s most widely read work. In it he attempted to vindicate the legitimacy of lay authority over canon law and, by means of a voluminous historical survey, to present tithes as a matter of utility rather than right.89 He justified the work as a lay scholarly investigation into a sanctified doctrine, and condemned the clergy for supposedly opposing such investigation into church prerogatives.90 The History of Tithes thus established Selden as an opponent of the rising clericalism of the early Stuart era, and as a defender of the statist English church settlement. In the parliament of 1626 he defended the jurisdiction of lay judges over clergy in criminal proceedings, and supported efforts to keep 84

Beh., 63, 75, 82, 89, 131, 165. Baillie to Henderson, 13 Aug. 1646, Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, ed. David Laing (3 vols., Edinburgh, 86 Baillie to Murray, Sept. 1646, Letters of Baillie, ii. 395. 1841–2), ii. 388. 87 Richard Tuck, ‘Selden and the Civil War’, in John Morrill (ed.), Reactions to the English Civil War, 1642–1649 (New York, 1988), 137–62. 88 John Selden, My Purpose and End in Writing the History of Tithes, in Johannis Seldeni Jurisconsulti Opera Omnia, ed. David Wilkins (3 vols., 1726), iii, pt. 2, 1455–7. 89 Selden, History of Tithes, in Omnia Opera, iiii, pt. 2, 1169, 1229. 90 Ibid. 1070. 85

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clergy off commissions of the peace. His criticism of the Caroline bishops could be exceptionally biting. Speaking of the 1626 bill against scandalous ministers, he remarked that it would have been better titled de episcoporum ignorantis.91 In 1629 Selden allied himself with the opponents of alleged episcopal tyranny by supporting the petition of booksellers against censorship. He also sat on the subcommittee charged with investigating the sermons of Roger Maynwairing, and in this capacity delivered several speeches strongly invoking the English Reformation’s fundamentally Erastian ecclesiological settlement. Discussing lay jurisdiction over the clergy, he surmised that ‘since the 21th of H.8 they have been total’, and he was reported to have opined that, in moral matters, ‘ministers and clergymen are already subject to lay jurisdiction and may now be punished by justices of the peace’.92 An adroit courtier, Selden managed to befriend Archbishop Laud in the 1630s, and in the Long Parliament he sat for Oxford University, a decidedly traditional constituency. Perhaps these connections explain his decision, in May of 1641, to sign a declaration of loyalty to the episcopal church form.93 Nevertheless, as the religious reform campaign began to break apart the unity of parliament, Selden moved inexorably away from the bishops. He sat on the committee charged with drawing up impeachment articles against Laud. Selden could ‘never forgive the bishops’, Aubrey recalled, for his grilling by the High Commission, and he did ‘in his writings levell them with presbyterie’.94 Increasing disenchantment with episcopacy undoubtedly motivated him to publish, in 1642, his translation of passages from the historical writings of the tenth-century Alexandrian Patriarch Eutychius. This translation focused attention on the role of the ancient presbyters, and explicitly diminished the ecclesial role of primitive bishops.95 Throughout his parliamentary career Selden strongly supported the contention that parliament was empowered to confirm doctrinal decisions rendered by Convocation.96 Eventually, along with Hobbes, Selden supported the scheme to replace episcopal authority with lay committees.97 His logic in this was revealing: ‘It do’s not follow we must have Bi[shops] still because they have continued soe long. They are equally mad who say that Bi[shops] are so Jure Divino, that they must be continued, and they who say they are soe Antichristian that they must be put away. All is as the State likes.’98 This position—consistently Erastian in permitting episcopacy at the discretion of the sovereign, but willing to justify those who felt lay committees more consistent with the state’s supremacy than episcopacy—closely mirrored Hobbes’s opinions as expressed in his 1641 letter to Devonshire. Selden’s ecclesiological doctrines were one implication of his partial adoption of Grotian natural rights theory and, as we have seen, his writings in this broader 91 David Berkowitz, John Selden’s Formative Years: Politics and Society in Early Seventeenth-Century England 92 Barbour, Selden, 161–2. (Washington, DC, 1988), 113–14. 93 Tuck, ‘Selden and the Civil War’, 138. 94 ABL, ii. 220. 95 Selden, Eutychii Aegyptii, Patriarchae Orthodoxorum Alexandrini . . . Ecclesiae Suae Origines (1642); Barbour, 96 Barbour, Selden, 165. Selden, 276–82. 97 Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 218. 98 John Selden, Table Talk, ed. Frederick Pollock (London, 1927), 20; Tuck, ‘Selden and the Civil War’, 155.

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context probably influenced Hobbes. It is less likely that Selden’s fellow MPs fully grasped the logic of his political theory, but his position on questions of church governance undoubtedly made him a hero among those parliamentary Erastians anxious to preserve the church settlement established by the English Reformation. He was thus appointed as a lay member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines in 1643 and became, along with Bulstrode Whitelocke and others, a leading figure in its Erastian faction.99 Selden’s interventions in the Assembly debates invariably sought to undermine the jure divino claims of Presbyterianism, and to preserve the discretion of parliament over ecclesiastical affairs. He participated prominently in contentious efforts to prove that the Jewish Sanhedrin had been sovereign in both spiritual and civil matters.100 In February of 1644 Baillie reported that Selden had avowed, ‘with Erastus, that there was no such censure’ as excommunication in Scripture, and that such punishment was ‘meerlie civill’.101 ‘Ever since it was a kingdom’, Selden argued against the Scottish divine George Gillespie, ‘Christian excommunication hath ever been by a temporal power.’102 As an MP as well as an Assembly delegate, Selden was in a position to convey these sentiments to the House of Commons, and he did so throughout 1645–6.103 His point of view on questions of church authority can be usefully gauged by his posthumously published Table Talk. These aphorisms are marked by several prototypical Erastian traits, including a pronounced philo-Semitic instinct, a denial of any clerical monopoly over excommunication, and a tendency to compare ministers with physicians as mere learned advisers to the sovereign.104 Additionally, Selden appealed to the Erastian legacy of the English Reformation. In denouncing claims on divine-right authority, he blasted bishops and presbyters alike, although he did conclude that ‘presbyters have the greatest power of any Clergie in the world, and gull the Laytie most’. His intense spite for Presbyterianism doubtless explained his later sarcastic criticism of the Westminster Assembly, and his contempt for what he took to be the sophistry of its arguments.105 Selden’s early intellectual influence over Hobbes was touched on in Chapter 1, and Chapter 5 will examine the significance of Hobbes’s later efforts to befriend Selden during the Interregnum. For the intervening period, no evidence survives to explain how Hobbes assessed Selden’s parliamentary career, or even to indicate that he was aware of it. Nevertheless, the pattern of Selden’s political allegiances proves suggestive. As with Hobbes, Selden employed a natural rights and contractarian understanding of sovereignty. As with Hobbes, this led him to a thoroughgoing subordination of ecclesiastical authority to the state. Further, both men were 99

Tuck, ‘Selden and the Civil War’, 155. John Lightfoot, The Journal of the Proceedings of the Assembly of Divines, in The Whole Works of Rev. John Lightfoot, ed. John Rogers Pitman (13 vols., London, 1824), xiii. 80. 101 Baillie to Spang, 18 Feb. 1644, Letters of Baillie, ii. 129. 102 Lightfoot, Journal, 106, 167; Gillespie, Notes of the Assembly, 25. 103 The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 1605–1675, ed. Ruth Spalding (Oxford, 1990), 179; Parliamentary Diary of 104 Selden, Table Talk, 27, 30–1, 63, 45–6. Harrington, BL Add. MS 10114, fo. 11. 105 Ibid. 112–13, 125–6. 100

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drawn by these convictions away from Caroline episcopacy and towards the radical vanguard of parliamentary Erastianism. Each effectively endorsed the strikingly statist church settlement scheme of 1641, and each was diametrically opposed to the rising political influence of divine-right Presbyterianism. On the crucial ecclesiological questions of the Revolution, there was no space between John Selden, the parliamentary hero, and Thomas Hobbes, the royalist in exile. From a certain perspective, the rise of the Presbyterians to replace the Laudians as the main foils of revolutionary Erastianism might have served to clarify Hobbes’s royalist credentials over the long term. His ecclesiological polemic now had a dualist enemy outside of the religious allies of the King. In the event, however, Hobbes’s contempt for Presbyterianism did not prove to be the main determinant in the evolution of his political views. Complicating factors arose, including: the sharp decline of Presbyterian influence among the revolutionaries; the forging of successive alliances of convenience between the Scots and the Stuarts; and, most fatefully, the rise to dominance of the Cromwellian Independents. In ways to date not fully chronicled, Thomas Hobbes’s allegiance to the Stuarts’ cause was compromised by the dovetailing of his own Erastian proclivities with the rise of the Independents. For Hobbes, securing sovereign control of the Christian church was the most essential step on the road to restoring political stability in England. Chapter 4 will explain how he came to view the Cromwellian Independents as the party most likely to secure such control. First, however, the role played by the Independents in forwarding the cause of the Erastian revolution must be clarified.

ii The removal of episcopacy as a unifying oppositional force, and the rise of an assertive Presbyterianism in the Westminster Assembly, opened up severe fractures between English Presbyterians and Independents. The former party attracted some straightforward conservative opinion (and even some Erastians), but, in the Assembly of Divines and in printed disputes, Presbyterianism was pulled towards a divine-right orthodoxy by its Scottish vanguard. For many this development threatened merely to replace Laudian ecclesiological dualism with a Presbyterian variant. The Independents, a small minority in the Assembly, were necessarily less assertive. Some did espouse the ‘congregational way’ as a matter of divine right, but the marginality of the Independents and the very nature of Independency (suspicious of centralization and of clericalism) discouraged any effort to secure a monopoly on church power. The best the Westminster Independents—led by Philip Nye, Thomas Goodwin, and Sidrach Simpson—could hope for was to obstruct the most offensive elements of the Assembly’s predominantly Presbyterian proposals. The upshot of this balance of power was twofold: first, it threw the Independents into a working alliance with the Westminster Erastians; secondly, it encouraged Independents, in their printed works, to accentuate their deference to the religious authority of the secular state.

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The significance of Thomas Hobbes’s eventual endorsement of Independency cannot be comprehended unless the fundamentally statist orientation of revolutionary Independency is first understood. Too often, taking their cue from the venerable tradition of Whiggish history, commentators associate early Independency with modern tolerationist sentiment, an acceptance of religious pluralism, and the institutional separation of Church and State. Eventually, once marginalized by the Restoration, Congregationalism would indeed privilege free conscience to such an extent that it helped to establish the distinctly modern dualism of a religiously neutral political sphere and a privatized sphere of religion. However, what we will here call the ‘Magisterial Independency’ that flourished during the English Revolution, though challenged by separatism on its left flank, remained largely dedicated to a national religious settlement, and abhorred both unqualified toleration and religious pluralism. A cohort of historians, lead by Blair Worden, has begun to correct the pervasive impression that the Independents—and their champion Oliver Cromwell—were essentially tolerationists and separatists. Independents espoused ‘free conscience’ only within a narrowly defined theological spectrum, one that accommodated the Protestant left but eschewed the majority religion of Europe (Catholicism) and of England (Anglicanism). The religious policy of the Independents, Professor Worden writes, ‘becomes much clearer when we see it as a search not for the toleration with which [they are] often commended, but for union; for the unity of the godly party’, for the ‘creation of a Commonwealth fit for God’s eyes’.106 Beyond the narrow arena of free conscience necessary for the creation of this Godly Commonwealth, the Independents could and did coerce their religious opponents.107 Moreover, where they did permit religious coercion, the Independents sharply distinguished between clerical and state power. To the latter they could be surprisingly accommodating. If historians have anachronistically exaggerated the tolerationist instincts of the Independents, they have even more thoroughly ignored the broad ideological common ground that they shared with revolutionary Erastians. Torn between the claims of free conscience and the need to maintain a unified, orthodox polity, early Independency was typified by a marked deference to Godly magistrates. This was perhaps most famously exemplified in colonial Massachusetts, where settlers built a dominant Congregationalist church while disavowing both religious toleration and the church–state distinction.108 Antiseparatist sentiment also typified the leadership of the English Independent party during the civil war. Congregationalist divines such as Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, and Sidrach Simpson—all destined for prominence during the Interregnum—sought to preserve the religious unity of the Commonwealth under the aegis of the magistrate, while undermining the coercive power of any 106 Blair Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, in W. J. Sheils (ed.), Persecution and Toleration (London, 1984), 199–233 at 207, 210. 107 István Bejczy, ‘Tolerantia: A Medieval Concept’, Journal of History of Ideas, 58 (1997), 365–84 at 367. 108 George Yule, The Independents in the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1959), 8–15.

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national clerical establishment.109 This point of view pervaded the canonical statements of Independency produced during the 1640s. Foremost among these was the Apologeticall Narration, a manifesto of 1643 justifying the Independents’ dissent from the Westminster Assembly’s dominant Presbyterianism. Far from a plea for toleration and pluralism, the Apologeticall Narration chiefly argued that Congregationalism was more consistent than Presbyterianism with the religious authority of the sovereign. The Narration ‘abhor[red] and detest[ed]’ challenges to the church’s ‘subjection’ to the civil magistrate. Its authors defended a via media between separatism and Presbyterianism, which rejected a national clerical establishment but embraced the ecclesiastical authority of the state.110 So too the anonymous The Ancient Bounds, an influential defence of Independency published in 1645, argued the case for free conscience against the clergy, but was equally concerned to offer an ‘apology’ on behalf of the Christian magistrate, and to delineate his extensive authority over spiritual matters.111 Among Congregationalist ministers, none better exemplified the magisterial slant of Independency than John Owen. Owen had sprung to prominence for publishing a polemic against Arminianism and for several high-profile sermons before parliament.112 During the 1640s he presided over a parish in Essex. After a brief period as a Presbyterian, Owen adopted the Congregational Way on reading John Cotton’s Keyes of the Kingdoms of Heaven, a pre-eminent defence of Independency.113 In 1649 he came to the attention of Oliver Cromwell and served as his army chaplain during the crucial expeditions into Ireland and Scotland. From this point on he acted as Cromwell’s chief ecclesiastical adviser. He would eventually serve as chaplain to the Council of the Commonwealth, and, after 1652, as Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University.114 Owen was arguably the most influential Independent divine of the era. Captivated by his Restoration writings, historians have largely presented him as the paradigmatic tolerationist Independent.115 However, Owen was in fact typical of his brethren in the way that he managed to reconcile a commitment to free conscience with a considerable deference to the religious competence of the state. Owen was not willing to accommodate a pluralistic free market in religion, with toleration of all theological ‘opinion’ as its guiding principle. Rather, he espoused free conscience within a strictly defined set of theological fundamentals. 109 Avihu Zakai,‘Religious Toleration and its Enemies: The Independent Divines and the Issue of Toleration during the English Civil War’, Albion, 21 (1989), 1–33 at 4–7; Yule, Independents, 11–15. 110 Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, et al., An Apologeticall Narration, humbly submitted to the Honourable Houses of Parliament (1643), 17, 19, 23; Zakai, ‘Toleration’, 8–12. 111 The Ancient Bounds, or Liberty of Conscience Tenderly Stated, Modestly Asserted, and Mildly Vindicated (1645), 2–4, 7, 10; Zakai, ‘Toleration’, 26–8; Yule, Independents, 11. 112 Peter Toon, God’s Statesman: The Life and Work of John Owen (Exeter, 1971), 3, 10–12. 113 John Owen, A Vision of Unchangeable Free Mercy . . . Whereunto is Annexed A Short Defensative about Church Government (1646). 114 Toon, God’s Statesman, 33–5; Cromwell to Owen, 16 Oct. 1652, Correspondence of John Owen (1616–1683), ed. Peter Toon (Cambridge, 1970), 52. 115 W. A. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England (3 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1932–8), iii. 140–2; R. Glynne Lloyd, John Owen: Commonwealth Puritan (Pontypridd, 1972), 44.

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Outside of these fundamentals, he gave the secular magistrate free reign to govern the religious life of the country. Professor Worden had gone so far as to characterize Owen, ‘the most influential clergyman of the 1650s, as an opponent of toleration’.116 The two mandates of free conscience and Godly reform pulled Owen, as they pulled many Independents, in opposite directions. He resolved this tension by severely curtailing the authority of the clergy, and by allowing the state to dominate the coercive authority that remained permissible in the reformed society. Owen’s enthusiasm for the religious competence of the Godly magistrate was fired by a providentialist understanding of the English Revolution. As a chaplain witnessing Fairfax’s siege at Colchester (1648), and then Cromwell’s crushing defeat of the Scots (1650–1), Owen had intoxicating encounters with the divine forces of history. Cromwell, in particular, became an awesome instrument of God in his eyes, and in a series of printed sermons Owen waxed passionate about an age of divine reformation achieved by a providentially inspired army.117 By the late 1640s he had become bitterly abusive of the Scots and their seditious divine-right Presbyterianism. His zeal over the potential for temporal power to serve divine ends peaked inversely. This shift was reflected in a series of Interregnum writings, when Owen’s deference to the state’s religious power would be further encouraged by the alarming rise of sectarian radicalism. In his 1649 Discourse about Toleration, and the Duty of the Civil Magistrate about Religion, Owen limited the use of coercive power to ‘Peace-disturbing enormities’, but left this potentially wide category undefined, and he chiefly sought to reject clerical claims on the exercise of such power.118 He limited the ‘priesthood function’ to teaching and persuasion, and empowered the magistrate to act as the ‘Governour or Shepherd of the people’ in religious matters. The sovereign was to wield the ‘magistrate’s sword’ against those who perpetrated abominations in worship. Included in this group were Catholics, Anabaptists, other sectarians, and episcopalians.119 Owen went on to assert that coercion was justified against those who, ‘being perswaded that the power of the Magistrate is in Christian religion groundlesse, unwarrantable, and unlawfull, should thereupon stir up the people to the abolishing and removall of that power’.120 This would have effectively added some radical Independents to the catalogue of religious sects that could be outlawed, specifically because they denied the state’s religious authority. Thus did Owen help distinguish ‘magisterial’ Independency from the separatism emerging among some radical Independents. He reiterated these points in his Two Questions Concerning the Power of the Supream Magistrate about Religion and the 116

Worden, ‘Toleration and Protectorate’, 207. On Fairfax, Eben-ezer: A Memoriall of the Deliverance of Essex County (1648); on Cromwell, The Advantage to the Kingdome of Christ in the Shaking of the Kingdoms of the World (1648). 118 John Owen, A Sermon Preached to the House of Commons . . . With a Discourse about Toleration and the Duty of 119 Ibid. 70, 72–3, 78–9. the Civill Magistrate (1649), 40–1. 120 Ibid. 80. 117

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Worship of God (1659). Here he emphatically endorsed the view that the sovereign was to employ his power for the ‘preservation and furtherance’ of true religion, and to ‘forbid, coerce, or restrain such principles and practices as are contrary to them’.121 He based his case, in part, on a reading of the law of nations. The legitimacy of the magistrate’s power to further true religion was a maxim of the law of nature and of nations, manifest by the ‘constant usage’ of ‘all mankind in their political societies’.122 After buttressing his case with familiar passages of Old Testament history, Owen denied that the New Testament had ended all coercion in religion, and argued that Christ had affirmed the religious powers of Godly magistrates. Revealingly, he concluded that the religious authority of magistrates was particularly confirmed by those ‘who suffer in the world on account of the largeness of their principles as to toleration and forbearance, the Independents’.123 By 1659 this claim—that Independency, more than other Christian factions, maintained the religious power of the state—had become a standard feature of Congregationalist apologia. It had been employed, for instance, during the New Model Army’s 1648 Whitehall debates on the demand for complete religious toleration made by the Agreement of the People.124 This debate pitted army radicals and the sectarian Independents against the army grandees and the more conservative Independent divines. The radical separatist John Goodwin—later a tenacious critic of Cromwell—argued than any magisterial authority over religion violated conscience. He and other radicals, such as John Wildman, reserved religion to a sealed sphere of private belief. Cromwell’s ally Henry Ireton violently disagreed, and insisted that the sovereign’s authority comprehended ‘spiritual’ as well as ‘civil’ causes.125 This claim was supported by the prominent minister Philip Nye. Anxious to debunk episcopal power, Nye nonetheless wished to preserve the spiritual authority of the state. He is reported to have remarked of the magistrate’s power in religion that it was as lawfully exercised in modern times as ‘it was once exercised under the Jewish commonwealth’.126 Nye’s is a significant case. He had helped draft the Apologeticall Narration and would number among Cromwell’s most important religious advisers. His deference to the state and suspicion of religious pluralism, if anything, outstripped Owen’s. During the Interregnum it was reported that ‘Mr. Nye and Mr. Thomas Goodwin [were] preaching against toleration’ (in this supposedly following Oliver Cromwell’s new ‘gaite’).127 After the Restoration, while Owen moved closer to separatism, Nye published defences of the King’s ecclesiastical supremacy.128 In his 1683 Lawfulness of the Oath of Supremacy, and Powers of the King in Ecclesiastical Affairs, he argued that the ‘Independency of Churches was asserted (by those 121 Owen, Unto the Questions Sent Me Last Night . . . under the Title of Two Questions Concerning the Power of the 122 Ibid. 2–3. Supream Magistrate about Religion and the Worship of God (1659), 1. 123 Ibid. 5. 124 ‘First Agreement of the People’, 28 Oct. 1647, Stuart Constitution, 309. 125 A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, Being the Army Debates (1647–9) from the Clarke Manuscripts 126 Ibid. 146, 153–4, 159. (London, 1966), 126, 131, 143–4. 127 Diary of Archibald Johnston of Wariston, ed. David Hay Fleming (3 vols., Edinburgh, 1919–40), ii. 206. 128 Philip Nye, A Case of Great and Present Use, Whether we may lawfully Hear the now Conforming Ministers . . . (1677); D. Nobbs, ‘Philip Nye on Church and State’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 5 (1935–7), 41–59.

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learned men of a former Age) in relation only to a superior Church Power properly spiritual, and such as is claimed jure divino; and not in relation to that Ecclesiastical Power which is in, or exercised from the civil magistrate.’129 Nye thus reprised the argument that Independency was ‘more consistent with the Magistrate’s Supremacy’ than other church forms.130 It was a point reiterated by Nye’s colleague Thomas Goodwin, another author of the Apologeticall Narration and a close adviser to both Oliver and Henry Cromwell.131 In his published sermon The Great Interest of States and Kingdoms, Goodwin eschewed a broad religious toleration and called on the government to wed itself to the Godly cause, to act as the protector of true religion. He explicitly evoked Constantine as the paradigm of the Godly magistrate. In a strange marriage of Davidic rhetoric with the Duc de Rohan’s idiom of state interest, Goodwin warned that active governance of religion necessarily informed any well-judged ‘reason of state’. On this point ‘State Maxime’ and ‘Church rule’ agreed.132 The mould for ‘magisterial Independency’ was formed in New England, where the Congregational way had enjoyed an unrivalled supremacy for decades. In 1653 the Massachusetts Independent Thomas Cobbet published his Civil Magistrates Power in Religion Modestly Debated, which defended the thesis that the sovereign was charged with administering both tables of the Mosaic law, not merely the commandments against moral offences, but those against ceremonial offences as well. Christ, Cobbet insisted, had permitted the use of coercive force in propagating the Gospel, and such force was entrusted to the temporal sovereign.133 The highest secular authority was rightly empowered to enact God’s will; ‘a Religious State’ was to ‘make Political Laws, properly such, about matters of Religion, and matters respecting the churches of Christ’. Inward conscience was left free, but ‘outward’ religion was subject to the civil magistrate’s discretion.134 Cobbet’s book was published in London. He claimed that Oliver Cromwell and others had desired such a work, and that he had been encouraged to employ Cromwell’s name in making its arguments.135 Cobbet’s conclusions paralleled those of his more illustrious colonial colleague, John Cotton. Cotton was a divine of immense authority. His Congregationalist treatise, The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven, influenced Owen, Nye, and Goodwin. The work traced the proper boundaries of church power, at once debunking Presbyterianism, defending Independency, and enumerating the spiritual authority of secular officers. ‘The establishment of pure Religion’, Cotton wrote, ‘and the reformation of corruptions in Religion, doe much concerne the civill peace.’ The church was ‘not to refuse subjection to the civill Magistrate, in exercise of some publick spirituall administrations, which may advance and help forward the publick good of the Civill State according to God’.136 129 130 132 133 134 136

Philip Nye, The Lawfulness of the Oath of Supremacy and Power of the King in Ecclesiastical Affairs . . . (1683), 42. 131 CSPD, viii. 1; BL Lansdowne MS 821, fo. 113. Ibid. 43, 16–17. Thomas Goodwin, The Great Interest of States and Kingdoms (1646), 7–8, 28–9, 48–57. Thomas Cobbet, Civil Magistrates Power in Religion Modestly Debated . . . (1653), 3–5, 9–10. 135 Ibid., epistle dedicatory. Ibid. 54, 73. John Cotton, The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven . . . (1644), 50–1.

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The influence of such arguments reached all the way to Oliver Cromwell himself. Cotton corresponded with Cromwell after his celebrated victories in Scotland, and characterized the Lord General as ‘a vessell’ of God fighting the ‘Lord’s battell’. Cromwell, for his part, delighted that his ‘engagement’ against the Scottish Presbyterians had been blessed by one ‘whome I love and honour in the Lord’.137 Indeed, the religious outlook of Cromwell himself is impossible to grasp unless the quasi-Erastian features of revolutionary Independency are understood. A former student at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (a ‘hotbed of Puritanism’), a client of a circle of ‘Puritan’ aristocrats (including the Earl of Warwick and Viscount Saye and Sele), Cromwell was naturally inclined towards the cause of church reform.138 His adherence to the Congregational Way emerged only by degrees, but Cromwell was an immediate and enthusiastic participant in the war against Laudian clericalism.139 As an MP for Huntington in the parliament of 1628–9, Cromwell’s first parliamentary speech signalled his opposition to the high-churchmen by blasting Archbishop Neile for supposedly suppressing antiCatholic sermons.140 In the early weeks of the Long Parliament, Cromwell was appointed to the grand committee on religion, to the committee investigating the Laudian Bishop Matthew Wren, and to the committee seeking to abolish ‘superstition and idolatry’.141 Cromwell presented John Lilburne’s petition protesting his conviction by Laud of having distributed an anti-episcopal work by John Bastwick.142 He also served on the committee investigating the Star Chamber conviction of Alexander Leighton for disputing the divine right of episcopacy.143 Cromwell participated in the campaigns against the episcopal seats in the House of Lords and against Charles’s effort to invest five new bishops in 1641. He aided in the preparation of the Root and Branch petition.144 Cromwell’s speeches ‘touching the irregularitie of Bishops’ were so vehement that they provoked demands that he be called to account at the bar of the Commons.145 In the early 1640s Cromwell was neither (apparently) an Independent nor a staunch tolerationist. He was mostly concerned to defuse the power of the clergy. Once the bishops were gone, his anti-clerical and Erastian instincts undoubtedly motivated his opposition to stringent Presbyterianism. He involved himself (surely negatively) in the debate on the Scottish demands that religious uniformity be a condition of any military alliance.146 The transformation of Oliver Cromwell from a mere ally of the Erastian Revolution into the instrument of its achievement was secured by his astounding 137 Cotton to Cromwell, 28 May 1651, and Cromwell to Cotton, 2 Oct. 1651. Hutchinson Papers, 1711–1780 (2 vols., Albany, NY, 1967), ii. 262–5, 266–7. 138 Barry Coward, Oliver Cromwell (London, 1991), 6–9, 16–7; John Morrill, ‘The Making of Oliver Cromwell’, in id. (ed.), Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London, 1990), 20–30; Robert Paul, The Lord Protector: Religion and Politics in the Life of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1955), 17–19. 139 J. C. Davis, ‘Cromwell’s Religion’, in Morrill (ed.), Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, 181–5. 140 WSC, i. 61–2; Whitelocke, Memorials, i. 34. On spurious additions to the speech, see Morrill, ‘Making of 141 Coward, Cromwell, 16. Cromwell’, 26. 142 D’Ewes, Journal . . . Beginning, 18, 531; Lockyer, Early Stuarts, 314. 143 Morrill, ‘Making of Cromwell’, 46. 144 WSC, i. 125–8; Coward, Cromwell, 16; D’Ewes, Journal . . . First Recess, 40, 53. 145 D’Ewes, Journal . . . Beginning, 340. 146 Cromwell to Willingham, Feb. 1641, WSC, i. 125.

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military career. War heightened his Erastianism, both by increasing his confidence in the exercise of religious power by a providentially ordained magistrate, and by intensifying his hatred of the Scottish Presbyterians, who became the main clericalist opponents of Erastianism after the abolition of the bishops. As the 1640s wore on, Cromwell drifted ever nearer the rising Independency movement. By the summer of 1644, Presbyterians were characterizing him as the mastermind of the ‘Independents’ great plott’.147 The capacity of Magisterial Independency to absorb Erastian sentiment would be sharply reflected in Cromwell’s vision of the church. Cromwell employed his tremendous political influence against the Presbyterian settlement proposed by the Westminster Assembly. In September of 1644, basking in the glow of Marston Moor, he reappeared in parliament and argued against the Assembly Presbyterians. Revealingly, he sought to reassert secular authority over the settlement issue, calling for a parliamentary conference to resolve the disputes embroiling the Assembly.148 The following year, flush with confidence from his victory at Naseby, Cromwell repeatedly wrote to Speaker Lenthall urging parliament to reject the Presbyterian settlement. His counsel struck a decidedly Erastian note. ‘If any’, he wrote, ‘would wring [God’s sword] out of your hand, or steal it from you under what pretence soever, I hope they shall do it without effect.’ He prayed that God would protect parliament’s just control of religious questions.149 Cromwell’s war against the Earl of Manchester was informed partly by the latter’s Presbyterianism and by accusations that Cromwell’s army would not fight if the Presbyterian settlement were erected.150 In 1647 he appeared in parliament as a teller in favour of efforts to limit the establishment of Presbyterianism to a trial period of three to seven years.151 Cromwell’s Erastianism partly reflected his view that clerical power was the ‘mystery of iniquity’, but it did not merely serve a negative function. Like the Independent divines who influenced him, Cromwell believed fervently that magistrates should play a leading role in securing the Godly Commonwealth. His providential interpretations of his own successes on the field of battle only heightened his confidence in the potential Godliness of temporal power, and deepened his contempt for the self-interested clerical estate.152 Such providentialism sanctified the forces of history, and took no notice of the distinction between spiritual authorities and temporal, clerical and lay. Further, like many of his fellow Independents, Cromwell did not espouse a thoroughgoing toleration. Rather, he sought a limited free conscience, the ‘unity of the godly party’, and a strong Christian polity.153 Those unable to contribute to this project—Catholics, episcopalians, radical sectarians—were legitimately repressed by the state. By the mid-1640s such views located Cromwell firmly within the camp of the Magisterial 147

148 WSC, i. 294. Robert Baillie, quoted in Coward, Cromwell, 35. Cromwell to Lenthall, 14 June and 14 Sept. 1645, WSC, i. 360, 377–8. 150 Coward, Cromwell, 36–7. 151 WSC, i. 488, 508–9. 152 Blair Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’, Past and Present, 109 (1985), 55–99 at 55–60; id., ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Sins of Achan’, in D. Beales and G. Best (eds.), History, Society, and the Churches 153 Worden, ‘Toleration’, 210. (Cambridge, 1985), 125–33. 149

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Independents, who insisted that the Congregational Way best protected the magistrate’s religious prerogatives. Erastianism and Independency must not, of course, be conflated. Erastians such as Selden understood ecclesiology in purely instrumental terms, and reserved ecclesiological matters entirely to the discretion of the state. Independents were generally more committed to the superiority of the Congregational Way, and some understood it as a matter of divine right. However, the minority status of the Independents, and their defensive posture versus Presbyterianism, discouraged divine-right defences of Independency and encouraged Congregationalists to emphasize their deference to state power.154 An overly separatist or sectarian image of Independency risks overlooking its ideological compatibility with more strongly Erastian opinion. Indeed, this compatibility produced a critical development in the religious history of the English Revolution: an effective alliance between the Independents and Erastians. By the mid-1640s, the Independents’ considerable deference to civil power, and a growing fear of assertive Presbyterianism, encouraged them to lock arms with Erastian opinion in the Westminster Assembly and in parliament. The leading Independents in the Westminster Assembly—Philip Nye, Thomas Goodwin, and Jeremiah Burroughs—openly allied themselves with Erastian arguments and strategies against Presbyterianism. Launching the great debate on church government in October of 1643, the Assembly Erastians proposed a debate on whether scriptural rules of a binding nature were possible on such a question. That this would be contested at all horrified the Assembly Presbyterians, but the Independents spoke in favour of the motion.155 The Independents had their own reasons for doing so, to be sure, and they did not share the thoroughgoing scepticism of the Erastians, but the episode marked the beginning of a pattern of tacit cooperation between these two anti-Presbyterian minorities. One historian has gone so far as to argue that the cooperation between the two factions created an ‘Independent Erastian resistance’.156 The two parties certainly found themselves jointly combatting the Presbyterians on numerous occasions.157 When, in January of 1644, the Scottish commissioners to the Assembly submitted a paper detailing their own model of Presbyterian church government, the Independents and Selden argued against its consideration.158 When the Presbyterians sought to prevent the bishops from ordaining new clergy, Selden and Nye together argued against them: the former on Erastian grounds (as the law had not yet deprived the bishops of this power), the latter in order to uphold ordination by any and all individual ministers (among whom the bishops still numbered).159 In an extensive debate on excommunication in February of 1644, Selden and Nye each spoke against the argument that 154 See, e.g., The Independants declaration delivered in to the Assembly . . . Declaring their grounds and full resolutions concerning church-government (1647), where the divine right of Presbyterianism is denied, but that of 155 Lightfoot, Journal, 20. Independency not openly asserted (p. 2). 156 Jordan, Religious Toleration, iii. 44, 64–7. 157 Barbour, Selden, 283–8. 158 Lightfoot, Journal, 120. 159 Ibid. 121–3.

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scriptural mandate could be found attaching church discipline specifically to a proto-Presbyterian model.160 Selden and the other Erastians surrendered church discipline to the state; Nye and Goodwin vested it within the power of individual congregations. In the course of this debate, however, the quasi-Erastian nature of the Independents’ arguments emerged. Characterizing Presbyterianism as a ‘power over a power’, Nye warned that such jurisdictional redundancies would create an ‘ecclesiastical government commensurate to the civil’. Nye judged it ‘inconvenient to nourish such a vast body in a commonwealth’. The Independent Lord Saye followed this speech by suggesting that unless ‘Christ hath instituted a church government . . . the state must judge’ what model best suited the kingdom.161 Nor was this the only occasion when Independents in the Assembly seemingly made a play for Erastian support. In a debate on the propriety of hierarchical church authorities, for instance, Thomas Goodwin pointed out the ‘great inconveniences’ of such a model: ‘if the magistrate assist the congregations there needs no subordination’.162 When the Independent William Bridge was challenged to explain how, in the absence of a Presbyterian hierarchy, independent congregations would be disciplined for wrongs, he responded that ‘appeal may be [made] to the magistrate’ on such occasions.163 For his part, Robert Baillie had no doubt that the Independents and Erastians were in league. In February of 1644, he lumped together the objections of Selden, Erastus, and the Independents to clerical excommunication. Later that year, he angrily reported that parliament had altered the Assembly’s Paper on Ordination in order to ‘scrape’ out whatever ‘might displease the Independents, or patrons, or Selden’. He feared that the ‘Independents and Civilians’ would allow ‘Erastus’s way to triumph’ in the end.164 The collaboration of the Erastians and Independents was partly a marriage of convenience born of their common desire to beat back staunch Presbyterianism. But a proper understanding of revolutionary Independency must free itself from the anachronistic notion that Independents were equally hostile to magisterial and clerical church power. Before 1660, English Independents largely defined themselves against clerical hierarchies, not secular ones. They did not espouse separatism, nor the destruction of organized national religion. Rather, they objected to centralized clerical power. In fact, to the extent that Independents preserved some desire for a national unity of religion, and sought to reconcile this with their hostility against clerical authority, an important strain of Independent ecclesiology tended to glorify the role of the Godly magistrate in the Christian state. Particularly between the rise of Oliver Cromwell and the Restoration—their period of maximum power—the Independents’ ecclesiology was typified by a quasi-Erastian deference to sovereign authority. For much of the 1640s such nice gradations between the revolutionary religious factions would have meant very little to the exiled royalists. Throughout the first civil war, Presbyterians and Independents were but fellow-travellers in sedition, 160 163

161 Ibid. 168–9; Gillespie, Notes, 26–7. 162 Gillespie, Notes, 83. Lightfoot, Journal, 164–8. 164 Baillie to Spang, 18 Feb. and 28 June 1644, Letters of Baillie, ii. 129, 197–9. Ibid. 22.

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allied against their lawful church and King. But between the end of the first civil war in 1646 and the start of the second in the spring of 1648, the distinctions between Presbyterian and Congregationalist ecclesiology began to assume a new relevance among the royalists. These years witnessed the collapse of unity among the parliamentarians, a collapse forced partly by differences over general war aims and partly over religious dissension in both parliament and the Westminster Assembly. ‘Independents’ became shorthand not only for Congregationalists but also for hard-line opponents of peace negotiations with Charles. The ‘Presbyterians’ assumed a softer line with the King and were behind the Newcastle Propositions of the spring of 1647, which made the establishment of Presbyterianism for three years a condition of peace. The correlation of true Presbyterianism or Independency with these political factions was by no means perfect. But it is generally true that the army and its allies in parliament were dominated by Independents and sectarians, and that their falling out with the moderate MPs was partly precipitated by fears that Charles would assent to a Presbyterian establishment.165 All of these matters came to a head on 3 June 1647, when the army, fearing an imminent treaty not to its liking, seized the person of the King. This established the four-cornered power structure—the King, the Scots, the moderate MPs, and the radicalized New Model Army—that would determine the final act of the civil wars. Before his eventual flight to the Scots at the end of 1647, Charles tried to play the Army and the moderates off one another, angling for the best treaty conditions possible. The issues under negotiation were various (control of the militia, the regularity of parliaments, pardons for royalists, and so forth), but perhaps chief among them was the future of the English church. And it was precisely in this context that the more statist ecclesiology of the Independents first impressed itself on some of the royalists. Both the parliamentary moderates and the Scots had predicated negotiations on the establishment of Presbyterianism, and in this regard had left the King very little latitude to settle the church according to his own convictions. The army, conversely, greatly fearing an intolerant Presbyterian settlement, offered Charles a far more amenable religious deal.166 The Heads of the Proposals, drawn up by the army grandees and offered to Charles in the summer of 1647, called for a general religious toleration (secured by abandoning the uniformity and church attendance acts). In exchange, however, the Heads accepted the return of episcopacy, albeit shorn of the traditional church courts.167 Presbyterians, more conservative than the Independents in other respects, took a hard line with the King and left him no discretion on religious 165 David Underdown, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1971), 73–87; John Bowle, Charles I: A Biography (London, 1975), 286–95. 166 In 1644 the Westminster Assembly had been alarmed by those believing that ‘if the moderate Protestant and fiery Independent could be brought to withstand the Presbyterian’, a ‘great party’ might ‘be brought to the king’ (Lightfoot, Journal, 126). 167 Ashton, Counter-Revolution, 24–8; The Journal of Thomas Juxon, 1644–1647, ed. Keith Lindley and David Scott (Camden Society, 5th ser., 13, London, 1999), 117; Memoirs of Sir John Berkley, in Select Tracts Relating to the Civil Wars in England, ed. Francis Maseres (2 vols., London, 1815), i. 366–7.

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questions. Such a stance reflected the underlying ‘divine right’ thrust of revolutionary Presbyterianism. The Independents were more concerned to prevent any stringent clericalist settlement, and in exchange were willing partially to defer to the monarch’s own ecclesiological preferences. These calculations reflected both the tolerationist and quasi-Erastian impulses of Magisterial Independency. The royalists reacted to these alternative treaty proposals as they reacted to so much else, along factional lines. The old royalists rejected all proposed treaties with the traitors who made up the various parliamentary factions. Charles was closely advised by his Anglican advisers (including Henry Hammond) during his time as a prisoner, and they urged him to reject any modification of the traditional episcopal church. To the Louvre group, however, such a hard-line position was utter folly. Always willing to deal expeditiously, Henrietta Maria jumped at the accommodating stance assumed by the army in the summer of 1647. The Queen sent a series of agents to England in order to treat with Cromwell’s faction of Independents.168 Sir John Berkley, acting on instructions ‘from the Queen and Prince’, assured Cromwell that it was the aim of the exiled court to ‘incline his Majesty’ to comply with the Independents.169 An angry Edmund Ludlow later gave voice to the fears of the radicals when he reported that the King began, in the summer of 1647, ‘to look upon the Independent interest as more consisting with episcopacy than the Presbyterian’.170 Enthusiasm over the proposed deal with the Independents ran particularly hot among the Blackloist Catholics, with whom Thomas Hobbes had close ties.171 Cromwell’s efforts to secure a political settlement encouraged him to treat not only with the royalists, but also with England’s Catholic subjects. Even the Jesuits, acting in tandem with Henrietta Maria, negotiated with the army in the summer of 1647.172 These negotiations, which promised to secure some level of religious toleration for Catholics, even received hesitant and fleeting approval from Rome. But the demands of the army were steep: disarmament, a ban on Catholic office holders, strictly private religious services, and a declaration of allegiance that revived memories of the divisive Jacobean oath of allegiance.173 Catholics were also required to assent to three controversial propositions, known as the Three Oaths, which denied the Pope’s authority to dissolve civil obligation, repudiated religiously motivated assassinations, and renounced the Pope’s power to release Catholics from political oaths. The Three Oaths troubled the Jesuits, and Rome flatly refused to countenance them. At this point of impasse, the negotiations with the army collapsed.174 For most leading English Catholics, including Bishop Smith, George Leyburn (President at Douai), and Henrietta Maria’s influential chaplain Walter Montagu, this doomed effort of 1647 marked the first and last Catholic flirtation with the army Independents. 168

169 Memoirs of Berkley, 360. Ashton, Counter-Revolution, 355–6; Bone, Henrietta Maria, 216. Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, 1625–1672, ed. C. H. Firth (2 vols., Oxford, 1894), i. 150. 171 Fitton to Digby, 30 Aug. 1647, Blacklo’s Cabal, 21. 172 Thomas H. Clancy, ‘The Jesuits and the Independents: 1647’, Archivum Historicum Societatis Jesu, 40 (1971), 67–90; John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973), 71. 173 Miller, Popery and Politics, 73–6. 174 Ibid. 76–80. 170

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For their part, the Blackloists were bitterly disappointed in the collapse of negotiations with the army Independents. White and his cohort had long resisted the monopoly of authority—political and intellectual—claimed by the papacy and its Jesuit allies. Indeed, Blackloism exacerbated a long-standing schism in the church’s English chapter, a schism that dated back to the Jacobean oath of allegiance and split Jesuit-influenced papalists from the secular priests and gentry who submitted themselves fully to the temporal authority of Protestant monarchs.175 During the civil war, and for decades thereafter, the Blackloists were pitted against members of the English chapter more favourably inclined towards the papacy. For years the war between these factions was fought over the question of whether the English chapter could elect a bishop without Rome’s approval.176 Though this controversy mattered nothing to the Stuart dynasty, the Blackloists expended massive energy on it during their period in Rome serving Henrietta Maria during the mid-1640s.177 But the Pope’s advisers had remained adamant in insisting on papal authority over episcopal appointments. When the promise of Catholic toleration had arisen in 1647, the Blackloists and the English Jesuits had parted company on strategy. The Jesuits had been guided by papal opinion, and Rome’s objections to the terms of the negotiations proved decisive in their minds. The Blackloists, on the other hand, had tried to cut Rome out of the negotiations of 1647.178 This had angered the Jesuits, Henrietta Maria’s chaplain Montagu, and even Charles I. For their part, White, Sergeant, and Digby, along with the English priests Henry Holden and Peter Fitton, were appalled by Rome’s intransigence in 1647.179 In their minds, the corrupt interests of the Pope had ruined a golden opportunity to restore Charles I and secure toleration for Catholics at one blow. It was not a betrayal that the Blackloists would soon forget. In any case, whatever the hopes of the Louvre group generally and the Blackloists in particular, Charles himself was disinclined to trust ‘men whose hands were yet hot with the blood of his most faithful Subjects’.180 He was bolstered by his Anglican advisers on the scene to assume a hard line against both parliamentary factions. But the agents sent by Henrietta Maria had certainly urged the King to deal with Cromwell. When the grandees offered Charles a restored episcopal church and a treaty that excepted only seven royalists from pardon, Berkley despaired at Charles’s intransigence: ‘never was a Crown (that had been so near lost) so cheaply recovered’. For a time rumours flew that Cromwell had adopted an almost unbelievably accommodating attitude towards Charles, giving assurances of ‘faithfulness’ with ‘great protestacions and oathes upon his knees privately before the Kinge’. Berkley was thus astonished at the bitterness with which Charles spurned the Independents’ proposals in the late summer.181 Plans for

175

John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (Oxford, 1976), 35–43; Bradley, ‘Blacklo’, 352–4. Miller, Popery and Politics, 43–4. Fitton to Digby, 21 Sept. 1646 and 1 Feb. 1646, Holden to Digby, 28 Dec. 1646, White to Digby, 25 Oct. 1646; 178 Fitton to Digby, 30 Aug. 1647, Blacklo’s Cabal, 21. Blacklo’s Cabal, 5–6, 9–11. 179 Clancy, ‘Jesuits and Independents’, 80–2; Articles Proposed to the Catholiques of England . . . (1648). 180 Memoirs of Berkley, 361. 181 Ibid. 366–7. 176 177

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an Independent deal with the King faded in the autumn after the repression of Leveller revolt and as Cromwell looked to unify the army, much of which was appalled at rumoured concessions to Charles.182 For a time, however, when the circumstances were more promising, the Queen’s agents had been instrumental in urging an alliance between Charles and the Independents. These efforts overlapped with Hobbes’s period of greatest contact with the exiled court, and if his later history is a reliable guide, he was well informed about the progress of the negotiations between Charles and the Independents encouraged by Henrietta Maria in 1647. Charles, he would recall, ‘was much complimented by Cromwell, who promised him, in a serious and seeming passionate manner, to restore him to his right against the Parliament’.183 It is reasonable to speculate that the Louvre group’s brief flirtation with the Cromwellians first brought Hobbes’s attention to the political virtues of Independency. If so, then his initial interest in the Cromwellian Independents must be placed within the context of the royalist plotting of the Louvre group. As the next chapter will demonstrate, however, Hobbes’s own estimation of revolutionary Independency, and his willingness to accommodate its rise to power within England, would soon take him down a fatefully divergent path. 182

Berkley was received coldly by Cromwell in November; ibid. 382–6.

183

Beh., 137–8.

4

Leviathan and the Cromwellian Revolution By late 1647, any hope that King Charles might strike a separate peace with the army Independents had been dashed.1 On 24 December, desperate for a treaty, parliament offered Charles the Four Bills, which required him to surrender both the prerogative to adjourn parliament and control of the militia for twenty years. Two days later, Charles signed an Engagement with the Scots, and on 3 January the enraged Commons passed the Vote of No Addresses. A Scottish army of 10,000 under the Marquis of Hamilton and rising anti-parliamentary sentiment in the localities breathed new life into the royalist cause. But the second civil war, under way by April of 1648, would prove Charles Stuart’s final undoing. By the time the dilatory Scots invaded, local risings in Wales and elsewhere had been crushed. In August, Cromwell’s hardened troops defeated the Scots at Preston. When the last royalist holdout, Colchester, fell later in the month, its commanders were summarily executed. It was an ill omen for King Charles. He had played his last card and lost. In the summer of 1647, as hopes for a resolution to the crisis faded, Thomas Hobbes engaged in his own mortal struggle. In August he was struck with a severe fever, abscesses, and swelling of the joints. Unable to recognize his associates, he remained bedridden for months at Saint-Germain.2 When at last recovered and able to turn his mind towards his ‘friends’ affairs’, it was not to politics that he turned. In the face of political crisis, Hobbes retreated, as he had earlier in the decade, to natural science. In November he promised swift delivery of the ‘first part of my “Philosophy”, which is about body’. By the spring he was corresponding with Father Mersenne on matters such as optics and the vacuum.3 An encounter with Sir John Coke, whose family had impeded Hobbes’s candidacy for the Short Parliament of 1640, occasioned bemused remarks about the ‘proceedings which were then’ dominant. But those political struggles—the context for Hobbes’s Elements of Law—must have seemed a world away. Even De Cive belonged to a different political universe. The English world had been turned upside down 1 On these expectations, see Nicholas to Basire, 3 Oct. 1647, The Correspondence of Isaac Basire, ed. W. W. Darnell (London, 1831), 64; Basire to Evelyn, Apr. 1648, Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, ed. William Bray (4 vols., London, 1894), iii. 8. 2 Hobbes to Sorbière, 17 Nov. 1647, Corr., 164; Mersenne to Sorbière, 5 Nov. 1647, in Schuhmann, Chronique, 104. 3 Hobbes to Sorbière, 17 Nov. 1647, Corr., 164; Hobbes to Mersenne, 7 Feb., 15 May, and 9 Jun. 1648, Corr., 166–8, 172–5.

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again, and Hobbes little desired to reacquaint himself with its tumults. ‘I have no inclinations to the place where there is so little security’, he wrote Devonshire at the height of the second civil war. ‘When I consider how dangerous a time there is like to be for peaceable men, I am apter to wish you on this side, then my self on that side of the sea.’4 Hobbes’s engagement with the affairs of the exiled royalists had, throughout the 1640s, been sporadic: peaking with the publication of De Cive, waning during the first civil war, reviving with his appointment at the court in exile and the republication of De Cive. By 1648, his impulse towards political quietism had again asserted itself. His presence at Saint-Germain, virtually continuous since 1646, ended in 1648. In June Prince Charles had departed for the Dutch Republic, hoping to lead a Scottish effort to rescue his imprisoned father, and Hobbes was left to pursue his own occupations. In his last surviving letter from Saint-Germain, dated 9 June 1648, he voiced doubt that the Prince of Wales would return to France for any duration.5 For his part, Hobbes took rooms in Paris not long after the prince’s departure.6 With royal instruction no longer a going concern, he entered the employment of an obscure ‘Mr. Ridgely’ some time in 1648, probably as a secretary.7 Charles Cavendish reported that, with the prince gone, ‘Mr. Hobbes hath more leisure to study’.8 It is essential to acknowledge Hobbes’s retreat from the churning crisis of 1648. First, it serves to highlight the surprising nature of his re-engagement with politics only months later, in 1649, when he again abandoned natural philosophy and embarked unexpectedly on his masterpiece of political theory, Leviathan. Second, recognizing Hobbes’s relatively isolated position after June of 1648 clears away the common but mistaken assumption that Leviathan must have represented the political programme of some royalist interest or another. In other words, we must recognize the historical problem presented by Hobbes’s decision to compose Leviathan. Commentators have largely ignored the issue of his motivation in writing his masterpiece, but it is not enough to assume that great works will periodically hatch from great minds. Why did Hobbes, having only recently issued a revised edition of De Cive and finally returned his attention to natural philosophy, again change course and compose the third formulation of his civil science? In what ways did the events of the English Revolution shape Leviathan as they had shaped De Cive before it? The purpose of this chapter is to throw light on Leviathan as a revolutionary text, not composed to re-establish a traditional monarchical order but, rather, one emerging out of the forward-looking state-building and religious reform projects of the English Revolution. Leviathan represented the flowering of Hobbes’s long germinating sympathy with the Erastian ideology of the Revolution. The text 4

5 Hobbes to Sorbière, 9 June 1648, Corr., 175. Hobbes to Devonshire, 2 May 1648, Corr., 169–70. His letters are marked ‘Paris’ after June. Evelyn visited his rooms in 1651. Diary of Evelyn, ed. de Beer, 302. 7 Hobbes to Devonshire, 2 May 1648, Corr., 170. Probably (according to Malcolm) Luke Ridgley or one of his 8 Cavendish to Pell, 12 Aug. 1648, BL Add. MS 4378, fo. 273. brothers, associates of Gervase Clifton. 6

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marked his final estrangement from the confessional politics of the royalist factions, and his accommodation with the post-regicidal regime. Its composition was triggered by the execution of Charles I and by the rise of the Cromwellian Independents. It is important at the start to emphasize the limitations of this thesis. Thomas Hobbes abhorred civil discord. Under the status quo ante bellum it is impossible to imagine him even gesturing to the enemies of the established monarchy. As an endorsement of certain revolutionary principles, Leviathan was cautious, and was composed only after the complete collapse of royal authority. Under these conditions, Hobbes’s natural deference had no clear object, and his principled religious and political positions could be presented without violating his theoretical commitment to obedience. The execution of Charles I was, of course, the watershed moment. This event shocked the English in exile beyond measure. The King’s death, wrote Hobbes’s friend Abraham Cowley, ‘hath loosened all parts of [the] Commonwealth . . . and it is hard to guess whether or no things will settle’.9 Hysterical rumours reported Englishmen dropping dead on hearing news of the ‘monstrous fact’.10 The sad event, wrote the divine Isaac Basire, ‘had almost spoyled my life’.11 Stunned, Henrietta Maria increasingly secluded herself in convents.12 Divines counselled patience in the face of persecution, and directed those ‘interested in the English desolation’ to the book of Lamentations.13 Thomas Hobbes was less inclined to such pious resignation, but the regicide marked a palpable breaking point in his life as well. Only months after expressing scepticism that he would soon return to England, he voiced precisely the opposite expectation merely weeks after Charles’s death. In April he insisted that he intended to ‘come over to visit his friends’, although the looming AngloIrish war concerned him.14 By September, as Cromwell was smashing royalist resistance in Ireland, Hobbes informed a friend: ‘I am certainly looking after myself, preserving myself for my return to England, should it happen by any chance.’15 It was almost certainly during these months that Hobbes began composing Leviathan.16 His severe illness occurred in 1647, at which point he told associates that he had been working on the natural-philosophical aspects of his philosophy. He mentioned no new political work in late 1647 or early 1648, despite corresponding with Samuel Sorbière about a third edition of De Cive.17 His correspondence in 1648 is consumed with natural science, although by June of 1649 he was apologizing 9 Cowley to Bennett, 5 Dec. 1650, Miscellanea Aulica: or, a Collection of State-Treatise never before 10 Hatton to Nicholas, 9 Mar. 1649, BL Egerton MS 2533, fo. 477. published . . . (1702), 156. 11 Basire to his wife, 19 June 1649, Basire Correspondence, 103. 12 BL Add. MS 15857, fo. 113. 13 Basire to his wife, 14 Mar. and 19 June 1649, Basire Correspondence, 101, 104; Diary of Evelyn, ed. de Beer, 288, 292. 14 Payne to Sheldon, 25 Apr. 1649, BL Harleian MS 6942, no. 134. 15 Hobbes to Gassendi, 12 Sept. 1649, Corr., 179. 16 Professor Burgess dates the start of the composition to 1647, thus Hobbes ‘cannot initially have intended it as a passport for his return to England’ (‘Contexts for Leviathan’, 682–3). But there is no evidence for this date. 17 Hobbes to Sorbière, 17 Nov. 1647, Corr., 164.

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for ‘tardiness’ in publishing his findings, and he had certainly begun Leviathan by this time.18 Once begun, the work consumed him. He ‘walked much and contemplated’, a notebook in his pocket. As ‘soon as a thought darted, he presently entred it into his booke’.19 When, in May of 1650, an associate urged him to translate De Cive, Hobbes informed him that he had ‘another task in hand, which is politicque, in English, of which he hath finished 37 chapters (intending about 50 in the whole)’.20 Assuming a reasonably even pace of composition, this would place the start of Hobbes’s writing of Leviathan around January of 1649, the very month of the regicide. The work was typeset in early 1651, and he corrected some of the sheets in March and April.21 By the first week of May Leviathan had appeared in the London bookstalls.22 Hobbes’s decision to return to England was very likely motivated in part by personal, apolitical considerations. Father Mersenne had died in 1648. Political turmoil had been growing within France. Hobbes may have wished to rejoin the Earl of Devonshire (who had invited him to do so in 1648).23 But Devonshire had returned long ago, in 1645, after putting the interests of his household above those of his King. The Earl avoided his great house of Chatsworth but lived in sufficient comfort at his Buckinghamshire estate of Latimers.24 In June of 1651 he managed to free still more of his land from the clutches of the Committee for Compounding.25 If the Cavendishes were inclined to support Hobbes, there is little reason they would have taken his exile ill. In any case, Hobbes had received a £200 legacy from Sidney Godolphin, and seems to have enjoyed some measure of financial stability.26 Further, if Hobbes’s return to England is often portrayed by historians as a personal matter,27 he himself was always mindful that his return would carry political implications. When, as we have seen, he reacted with overheated anxiety to the description of himself as ‘academic tutor’ to Prince Charles in the second edition of De Cive, his reasoning was revealing: ‘this title will prevent me from returning to my own country, if the desire to return ever comes over me—and I do not see why I should not wish to return, if it is permitted, when England has somehow or other been pacified’.28 Hobbes recognized that his 18

Hobbes to Sorbière, 4 June 1649, Corr., 177; Cavendish to Pell, 5 Oct. 1649, BL Add. MS 4278. 20 Payne to Sheldon, 13 May 1650, BL Harleian MS 6942, fo. 128. ABL, i. 334–5. Cavendish to Pell, 6 Mar. 1651, BL Add. MS 4278, fo. 313; Hyde, View and Survey, 7; the ‘tract’ was registered with the Stationer’s Company on 30 Jan. 1651; Schuhmann, Chronique, 120. It is highly unlikely that Hobbes corrected every sheet of Leviathan in this fashion. Professor Skinner has suggested to me that Hobbes may have corrected only sheets containing errata. 22 Payne to Sheldon, 6 May 1651, BL Harleian MS 6942, fo. 132; Hartlib had acquired it by July. The Hartlib Papers, 2nd edn. (Sheffield, HROnline, 2002), 31/20/12a; Pell to Cavendish, 24 Oct. 1651, BL Add. MS 4280, fo. 137. 23 Hobbes to Devonshire, 2 May 1648, Corr., 170. 24 John Pearson, Stags and Serpents: The Story of the House of Cavendish and the Dukes of Devonshire (London, 1983), 42. 25 Calendar of the Proceedings of the Committee for Compounding etc., 1643–1660, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (5 vols., London, 1889–92), iv. 289–30. 26 Hyde to Earles, 1 Jan. and 12 Feb. 1647, Bodl. Clarendon MS 29, fos. 45v, 101; Hobbes purchased Newcastle’s collection of telescopes and microscopes in 1648. Malcolm, ‘Royal Society’, in Aspects, 320. 27 Reik, Golden Lands, 85–6; Robertson, Hobbes, 67; Martinich, Hobbes, 219. 28 Hobbes to Sorbière, 2 Mar. 1647, Corr., 157–8. 19 21

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return might require him to distance himself from the royalist cause. That Leviathan was intended, in part, as a gesture of political independence is not difficult to establish. Indeed, Hobbes conceded the point. In the spring of 1651 he encountered Edward Hyde, a long-time associate deeply offended by Leviathan. Pressed about the work, Hobbes explained: ‘The truth is, I have a mind to go home.’29 Some historians, attempting to preserve Hobbes’s royalist credentials, have dismissed this report as a ‘jest’, or Hyde’s report of it as a ‘slanderous’ lie.30 In truth, and in the light of the evidence presented below, Hyde’s report is entirely credible. That Hobbes intended Leviathan for an English audience is also indicated by his decision to write it in English and publish it in London, rather than Amsterdam. Further evidence on this point is presented below, but it is clear that Hobbes composed Leviathan for an English audience, and that the text was intended to ease his return and to soften his royalist reputation. It remains to be uncovered precisely how the text was designed in order to achieve these ends. As already detailed, by rejecting divine-right claims on power and espousing obedience to de facto authority, Leviathan echoed the polemical literature justifying the Commonwealth’s Engagement.31 Indeed, Leviathan explicitly affirmed that the work was partly intended to ‘set before mens eyes the mutuall Relation between Protection and Obedience’. Hobbes further opined that Leviathan would be welcomed by ‘any that desires the continuance of Publique Peace’, and he alluded to ‘divers English Books’ then appearing on the subject of political obedience.32 It is clear that Hobbes’s theory of obligation was a contextually significant feature of Leviathan, and that this aspect of the work further evidenced his desire to ingratiate himself with England’s new masters. But though Hobbes’s theory of obligation did not defend the Stuart’s divine legitimacy, neither did it oblige royalist exiles to obey the Commonwealth. The theory required individuals who accept the protection of a conqueror to recognize his sovereignty based upon his possession of power. Exiles who refused (or were refused) such protection, however, incurred no such obligation.33 ‘Exile perpetual’, Hobbes wrote, ‘is a release of subjection, forasmuch as being out of the protection of the sovereignty that expelled him, he hath no means of subsisting but from himself.’34 Leviathan explicitly averred that when civil war dissolved a Commonwealth, any subject was ‘at liberty to protect himselfe by such courses as his own discretion shall suggest unto him’.35 De factoism merely required Hobbes’s deference to the Commonwealth once he had accepted its protection. His motivation for doing so must be sought outside of his theory of obligation. Hobbes’s de factoism, in short, crucially facilitated the malleability of his political allegiance, but does little to explain its vicissitudes. 29

Hyde, View and Survey, 8. Burgess, ‘Contexts for Leviathan’, 694; Martinich, Hobbes, 214; the Cromwellian spy Samuel Morland later found Clarendon’s report credible. Morland to [Thomas Tenison?], 11 June 1691, Lambeth MS 931, fos. 1, 6. 31 See the Introduction above. 32 Lev., 491–2, 484. 33 Ibid. 153–4; DC, 101. 34 EL, 125. 35 Lev., 230. 30

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It is also critical to note that Hobbes’s theory of obligation was an utterly static feature of his political theory, appearing without significant change in all his writings. Leviathan would hardly have been necessary to restate his long-standing views on political obligation. Placing Leviathan merely within the context of the Engagement controversy ignores the more compelling and dynamic features of the work. As a theory of sovereignty, Leviathan added little to Hobbes’s earlier writings. As an ecclesiological statement, however, Leviathan introduced a host of contextually crucial innovations. Hobbes himself repeatedly pointed to the ecclesiological arguments of Leviathan when explaining the origins of the text. ‘The cause of my writing that Book’, he would write, ‘was the consideration of what the Ministers before, and in the beginning of the Civill War, by their preaching and writing did contribute thereunto.’36 In an appendix to the Latin translation of Leviathan published in 1668, Hobbes reiterated this point. Leviathan, he wrote, had been animated by the conviction that ‘the civil war which was being waged then throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland, had no other cause than the disagreement, first between the Roman church and the Anglican, and then in the Anglican church between the Episcopal pastors and the Presbyterians concerning theological matters’.37 Any effort to understand Leviathan within the context of the Revolution must privilege, as Hobbes did, the religious aspects of his masterpiece.

i It would be an exaggeration to claim that Leviathan added nothing to the basic theory of sovereignty presented in De Cive. Some points of detail evolved significantly in the later work, and Hobbes’s presentation is both more rhetorically forceful and—as we shall see—more uncertain in its constitutional conclusions.38 The vast preponderance of the new elements in Leviathan, however, touches religion. Hobbes’s concern with the instability caused by the institutional power of the church had been notably heightened in De Cive, but it fully culminated only with Leviathan. Parts 3 and 4 of Leviathan, which contain Hobbes’s religious 36

SL, 56; Vita [prose], 7. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; with Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis, Ind., 1994), 538–9. Professor Curley’s edition includes footnotes indicating many of the additions and deletions found in the Latin translation of Leviathan. He is noncommittal as regards François Tricaud’s view (for which see his French translation of Léviathan (Paris, 1971)) that substantial portions of the Latin text pre-date the English Leviathan. There are certain passages in the Latin text that might indicate such a chronology of composition (see, for instance, Leviathan, ed. Curley, notes on pp. 116–17 and 214). Other passages in the Latin (including chs. 46 and 47, which contain the most dramatic variations between the two editions) seem clearly to have been composed after the publication of the English text, and probably after the Restoration. Tricaud’s case rests mainly on his sense that the English Leviathan reads like an elaboration of the Latin on certain points. His arguments in that vein are interesting, but are very far from conclusive. In the absence of more decisive evidence, the present book has assumed that, as regards the English and Latin versions of Leviathan, the order of publication substantially reflects the order of composition. 38 Professor Skinner notes some innovations in Leviathan’s discussion of the agency of the state in ‘The Purely Artificial Person of the State’, Visions, iii. 177–208. 37

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argumentation, consume more than half the work’s length and are together longer than either De Cive or The Elements of Law. The religious theorizing contained in Leviathan falls into two distinct categories: theology and ecclesiology. Leviathan is one of the few texts in which Hobbes tackles theology directly. He treats a host of theological subjects for the first and last time in Leviathan: scriptural criticism, the mortalist theory of resurrection, the sacraments, purgatory, saints, the nature of heaven and hell, demons and angels, idolatry, church ceremonies. Chapter 1 of this book has already offered some analysis of this theological material, arguing that Hobbes’s highly original reinterpretation of Christian theology in Leviathan—materialistic, rationalistic, and often sceptical—was designed to minimize the truth claims of Christianity and to maximize Christianity’s intellectual passivity in the face of political sovereignty. It is significant that Hobbes chose the regicidal moment of 1649–51 to publish his heterodox religious doctrines. The decision speaks volumes about his sense of the revolutionary nature of his age. The remainder of this chapter, however, will focus less on Hobbes’s theology than on the ecclesiological innovations introduced by Leviathan. Hobbesian theology was instrumental, and subordinate to his overriding effort to control the political challenge of the Christian church, which was in turn fundamentally an ecclesiological project. Furthermore, the theological stance of Leviathan was highly original and provocative (as we shall see) to virtually all orthodox Christians. Hobbesian ecclesiology, on the other hand, explicitly supported and attacked various religious factions of the era. It was intended, and read, as a partisan statement, and in it Hobbes openly conceded the political implications of his rigorous Erastianism. That Hobbes’s Erastian attack on clerical dualism was thematically central to Leviathan is indicated by the work’s famed frontispiece. It is generally accepted that the original, drawn frontispiece was commissioned by Hobbes from the Czech Wenceslaus Hollar, although it was perhaps engraved by another hand.39 (Hollar, interestingly, himself returned to London during the Interregnum.) Scholarly interpretation of the frontispiece has generally focused on the arresting sovereign figure with a body composed of a multitude, an image illustrating Hobbes’s understanding of sovereignty as an impersonation of its subjects.40 Equally outstanding, however, are the Erastian overtones of the image. The figure of Leviathan holds in one hand a sword, symbolizing temporal power, and in the other a large crozier, emblem of spiritual power. The matched panels on the lower half of the frontispiece elaborate on the theme. A royal fortress stands against an episcopal palace, a sovereign’s crown against a bishop’s mitre. As the eye descends the implications of the pairings become more ominous. A charged cloud, presumably representing spiritual power, is paired with a cannon. Demonic forked 39

Keith Brown, ‘The Artist of the Leviathan Title-Page’, British Library Journal, 4 (1978), 24–35. Noel Malcolm, ‘The Title Page of Leviathan Seen in a Curious Perspective’, in Aspects, 200–8; Professor Goldsmith is right to dismiss as fruitless efforts to identify the sovereign’s face. Goldsmith, ‘Hobbes’s Ambiguous Politics’, 639–73. 40

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shafts labelled ‘syllogisme’ and ‘spiritual/temporal’ also face an arsenal of weaponry. At the base of the page are engraved the battlefield of civil strife and a clerical conclave, pictorially representing Hobbes’s thesis that disputes over ‘precedence’ between temporal and ecclesiastical authorities were the engines of civil war. The frontispiece to Leviathan thus elaborately reinforced its central ecclesiological doctrines. De Cive had dissented from Charles I’s devout loyalty to episcopacy and had marked the first rent in Hobbes’s royalist credentials. By the time Hobbes began Leviathan, the episcopal church had been outlawed and its presiding bishop and royal champion both executed. In this context the full extent of Hobbes’s distaste for the old Church of England revealed itself. De Cive’s passing nod to the idea of apostolic succession had been awkward and contradictory, but even this grudging concession was dropped in Leviathan.41 The divine right of episcopal authority was utterly inconsistent with the larger ecclesiology of De Cive, but Hobbes had not explicitly dissented from this Laudian orthodoxy there. In Leviathan he did so, forcefully proclaiming that only civil sovereignty enjoyed power jure divino.42 Leviathan alleged that the Tudor and Stuart bishops, theoretically subordinate to the state under the Royal Supremacy, had ‘seemed to usurp, if not a Supremacy, yet an Independency’ by ‘maintaining their imployment to be in Gods Right’.43 Hobbes’s thesis that clerical dualism—setting up ‘Supremacy against the Soveraignty; Canons against Lawes; and a Ghostly Authority against the Civill’— caused civil war had originally been voiced in De Cive. But this explosive argument was much more expansively justified in Leviathan. Few would have missed the criticism directed at the Laudian church by Hobbes when he condemned ‘Ghostly’ authorities, their disciplinary censures and ‘Schoole distinctions’, who would ‘either Overwhelm the Commonwealth with Oppression, or cast it into the Fire of a Civill warre’.44 In a scathing passage blaming religious upheavals on the corrupt rule of powerhunting priests, Hobbes condemned ‘those not onely amongst Catholiques, but even in that Church that hath presumed most of Reformation’.45 This strategy, of heaping scorn on the dualist ecclesiology of Roman Catholicism while subtly associating the English bishops with Catholic sins, was marked in Leviathan. ‘For it is not the Romane Clergy onley’, Hobbes wrote, ‘that pretends the Kingdome of God to be of this World, and thereby to have a Power therein, distinct from that of the Civill State.’46 Much of Leviathan’s Erastian ecclesiology was included in chapter 42, the book’s longest, in which it was presented as a refutation of Cardinal Bellarmine’s Counter-Reformation text De Summo Pontifice (1590). No doubt Hobbes was happy to use his Erastianism as a whip against Bellarmine’s papalism. But for contemporary English readers, the more daring aspect of Leviathan’s forty-second chapter would have been its implicit attack on the Laudian church. Clericalism, Hobbes asserted, was not merely a sin of clerical power ‘monarchicall’ 41 Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 316–25; id., ‘Civil Religion’, 121–2; Richard Tuck, ‘The Christian Atheism of 42 Lev., 374, 421. Thomas Hobbes’, in Hunter and Wootton (eds.), Atheism, 122–8. 43 Ibid. 475. 44 Ibid. 266–8. 45 Ibid. 86. 46 Ibid. 482.

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(papal) but also of clerical power ‘aristocraticall’ (episcopal). Indeed, he wasted little time undermining the authority of the Pope (a redundant exercise for his intended audience), and more volubly rejected the argument, dear to the Laudians, that a ‘diversity of Authority’ in the primitive church distinguished bishops from mere pastors and elders.47 In this regard, an often overlooked feature of Leviathan is Hobbes’s agreement with Bellarmine on the issue of episcopal divine right. The English bishops had long asserted episcopal divine right as a counter to the divine authority claimed uniquely by the papacy. Bellarmine, conversely, upheld papal supremacy by insisting that subordinate bishops derived their divine right only indirectly through the papacy. Although Hobbes naturally argued (against Bellarmine) that bishops and other ecclesiastics ‘derived’ their authority through temporal sovereignty, he was happy to concur with the Cardinal’s insistence that bishops lacked immediate divine-right authority. Of Bellarmine’s argument against episcopal divine right, Hobbes concluded ‘The argument is good; I have therefore nothing to say against it’.48 His condemnation of episcopacy as a church form tending towards seditious ecclesiological dualism thus became significantly more definitive in Leviathan. Nor did he soften his criticism of Presbyterianism. Leviathan reiterated Hobbes’s absolute prohibitions on covenants with God, and equated the claims of Presbyterians to be ‘Supreme Moderators in Religion’ with the similar claims of Roman Catholics.49 Hobbes’s decision, in Leviathan, to maintain his position against Presbyterianism and to harden his criticism of episcopacy would, as we shall see, have fateful political consequences in the context of 1651. More dramatic still, however, was his decision to use his new work not just to criticize clerical foes of his own Erastianism, but to assess positively an alternative church structure. Hobbes’s endorsement of Independency is one of the most contextually striking innovations in Leviathan. The endorsement built upon several broad themes of Leviathan. First, Hobbes’s masterpiece, far more than De Cive, had frequent rhetorical recourse to the language of conscience. He averred repeatedly in Leviathan that ‘mens beliefe, and interiour cogitations, are not subject to the commands, but only to the operation of God, ordinary, or extraordinary’. Belief and disbelief, he wrote, ‘never follow mens Commands. Faith is a gift of God, which Man can neither give, nor take away by promise of rewards, or menaces of torture’.50 In De Cive he had written of conscience primarily as a threat to political stability, characterizing it as a spur to the convictions of religious zealots.51 Leviathan treated the claims of conscience with much greater deference. To be sure, Hobbes remained wary of the disobedience that an over-painful conscience might justify. He insisted on a rigid distinction between obligations in foro interno and those in foro externo.52 The claims of conscience remained firmly within the former realm, and Leviathan repeated the stricture of De Cive against the ‘repugnant’ doctrine that ‘whatsoever a man 47 51

Ibid. 341, 365–6. Ibid. 131–3.

52

48 Ibid. 391–4. Ibid. 110.

49

Ibid. 97, 122, 163, 427, 476.

50

Ibid. 198, 343.

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does against his Conscience, is Sinne’. If such a ‘diversity’ of ‘private Consciences’ realized itself in a diversity of unauthorized actions, all political stability was lost.53 The Hobbesian conscience was thus extremely private and individual. Nevertheless, the markedly deferential tone adopted in Leviathan when discussing the sanctity of internal conscience is significant. It is also significant that Hobbes continually described belief as a divine gift, and flatly rejected the argument that external force could compel inward belief. ‘For internall Faith is in its own nature invisible’, Hobbes wrote, ‘and consequently exempted from all humane jurisdiction’.54 Leviathan warned against efforts to force conscience.‘Faith hath no relation to, nor dependence at all upon Compulsion or Commandement’, Hobbes wrote, and he mined the Scriptures for warnings against new articles of faith which ‘oblige men to a needlesse burthen of Conscience, or provoke them to break the union of the Church.’55 It was, he wrote, a grave error ‘to extend the power of the Law, which is the Rule of Actions onely, to the very Thoughts, and Consciences of men’.56 Hobbes’s limitations on conscience in the external realm were designed to preserve the power of the sovereign, and they would have displeased advocates of free conscience who demanded more latitude for conscience to govern action. But the discussion of conscience in Leviathan was not very distant from the conception of ‘free conscience’ that prevailed among the magisterial Independents. The Independents surely gave more scope for conscience-based resistance to religious abominations, but they too limited such resistance severely in the case of Catholics, episcopalians, and sectarians. Hobbes and the Independents both viewed religious faith as an internal phenomenon, granted by God. It is revealing to note the repeated occasions—at least twelve—on which Leviathan speaks respectfully of God’s ‘elect’, adopting, in a way Hobbes rarely had previously, the rhetoric of the Calvinist low church.57 And though they would have upset England’s radical sectarians, Leviathan’s repeated warnings against those who allowed conscience to fire a rebellious zeal would not necessarily have given the magisterial Independents much pause. They were as capable as Hobbes of warning against ‘he that presumes to break the Law upon his own, or anothers Dream, or pretended Vision’, or against ‘such private men as pretend to be supernaturally Inspired’.58 Hobbes had long wished to protect conscience from the clergy, who never rightfully enjoyed coercive power in any case. In Leviathan, however, he dwelt on the folly (although not the impermissibility) of even state efforts to force conscience. This increased rhetorical deference to conscience was a notable innovation in Leviathan, and surely reflected Hobbes’s sense of the changed balance of power among England’s religious factions in 1651. More striking still, however, was Leviathan’s vision of the church. Ever suspicious of clerical power, 53 57 58

54 Ibid. 360. 55 Ibid. 342, 351. Lev., 374, 48, 223. Ibid. 224, 247, 285, 299, 302–3, 309, 319–21, 335–7, 430–3. Ibid. 207 and 224; see also 19, 22, 55–7, 99, 103, 257, 300.

56

Ibid. 471; see also 323, 354–6.

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increasingly dubious about the wisdom of coercing conscience, Hobbes endorsed a Congregationalist ecclesiology. In keeping with his consistent Erastianism, Hobbes presented the church as a corporation subordinate to the authority of the state. In Leviathan, however, for the first time, he expressed a clear preference for the localization, or atomization, of the national church. In the thirty-ninth chapter of Leviathan, he prepared the ground by discussing how the scriptural word ‘church’, ecclesia, should be defined. This chapter asserted again the Hobbesian doctrines that no church could assemble without sovereign command and that, for this reason, no transnational church authority existed. However, Hobbes added to this familiar Erastian analysis the observation that ecclesia, in ancient Greece, signified ‘a Congregation, or an Assembly of Citizens, called forth, to hear the Magistrate speak unto them’. This etymology in turn informed his conclusion that the term ‘church’ could not properly designate either all Christians or the hidden saints, but only ‘a Congregation assembled, of professors of Christianity’. Only an assembled congregation could ‘will’, ‘pronounce’, or ‘command’, and it was illegitimate to exert such authority over those ‘absent’ from or in disagreement with the congregation. This definition of a church as an assembled congregation had obvious affinities with the gatheredchurch model of the Independents, as would be recognized, as we shall see below, by commentators as astute and diverse as Henry Hammond and James Harrington. Hobbes’s Erastianism dictated that all church models—not excepting even Roman Catholicism—were available to the sovereign. Nevertheless, his discussion of the term ecclesia normatively privileged gathered congregations, and handicapped more universal models of the church.59 Hobbes concluded that only gathered, voluntary congregations enjoyed church authority in the absence of an alternative ecclesiastical authority mandated by the sovereign. Such a thesis blasted the assumption that a broader corporate (i.e. proto-episcopal or presbyterian) church enjoyed authority in the era of primitive Christianity, and would thus continue to exert authority if outlawed by modern states. Reinforcing this point in Leviathan’s pivotal forty-second chapter, Hobbes theorized about the primitive method of excommunicating sinners, based on his interpretation of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. A sentence of excommunication was: pronounced by the Apostle, or Pastor; but the Judgment concerning the merit of the cause, was in the Church; that is to say (as the times were before the conversion of Kings, and men that had Soveraign Authority in the Commonwealth,) the Assembly of the Christians dwelling in the same city; as in Corinth, in the Assembly of the Christians of Corinth.60

This interpretation minimized primitive pastoral (and even apostolic) authority, and deferred to the democratic judgement of congregations. As we shall see when discussing John Owen below, this interpretation of Corinthians—holding that the 59

Ibid. 320–2.

60

Ibid. 349.

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authority of the church resided in the congregation itself, not in overseers, presbyters, or bishops—was fundamental to Congregationalist apologetics. That Hobbes’s understanding of the primitive church inclined in a Congregationalist direction is further evidenced by Leviathan’s lengthy discussion of ordination. Here he sought to eradicate the ‘distinction of Clergy and Laity’, and to limit apostolic authority to literal witnesses of Jesus (thus preventing its succession). He went on to interpret the accounts of the creation of Matthias as a ‘new Apostle’ to replace the fallen Judas, and the elevation of Paul and Barnabas to apostleship. These episodes (narrated in the book of Acts) were often taken to provide a paradigm for the creation of ecclesiastical officers. In Hobbes’s interpretation Matthias, Barnabas, and Paul were elected by ‘the act of the Congregation’ (Jerusalem in the first instance, Antioch in the second) and ‘not of St. Peter, nor of the eleven, otherwise than as Members of the Assembly’. This was an essential finding, demonstrating that the highest officers of the primitive church were designated by each ‘particular Church’ and not by an emerging clerical hierarchy.61 Those devoted to the ideal of primitive episcopacy or Presbyterianism would have recoiled from this reading, and from Hobbes’s attendant conclusion that ‘Bishop, Pastor, Elder, Doctor’, ‘Teacher’, and ‘Presbyter’ were but ‘divers names of the same Office in the time of the Apostles’. Independents, by contrast, agreed with Hobbes that the primitive church did not permit any ‘diversity of Authority’. Hobbes extended this Congregationalist reading of the primitive church when discussing the ordination of presbyters. Interpreting Acts 14, he dissented from the traditional view that existing ecclesiastical officers selected and ordained new presbyters. This reading, he argued, was based on mistranslations. ‘But if we consider the Originall text’, Hobbes wrote, ‘it will be manifest, that they were authorized, and chosen by the Assembly of the Christians of each City. For the words there are, cheirotonesantes autois presbuterous kat’ ekklesian, that is, When they had Ordained them Elders by the Holding up of Hands in every Congregation.’ Hobbes rejected the translation of the original Greek as ‘laying on of hands’ and instead translated it as a raising of hands, thus rendering the selection of elders a matter of election ‘by the Assemblies of the Christians in every severall Town’.62 This reading of primitive ordination, which allied Hobbes firmly with English Independents, was defended at great length in Leviathan. Using numerous other scriptural passages, he repeatedly confirmed that the Apostles presided over church assemblies and ‘declared’ new elders ‘elected; yet the Congregation chose them’.63 The ecclesiology of Leviathan thus went well beyond the mere debunking of the jus divinum of episcopacy or presbytery. At considerable length, Thomas Hobbes defended a decisively Congregationalist interpretation of the primitive church. Such an interpretation assisted his long-standing effort to defuse 61

Lev., 374, 363–4.

62

Ibid. 365–7. The Greek is transliterated here.

63

Ibid. 366, 369.

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the power of the clergy and his newfound interest in protecting the internal sphere of conscience. Primitive Independency, for instance, helped Hobbes present Christian clergy as mere teachers, offering ‘counsell’ rather than ‘command’.64 It undergirded his extremely minimalist understanding of the sacraments, and his endorsement in Leviathan of the practice, defended by Independents, of allowing laymen to preach.65 What renders Hobbes’s positive case for primitive Independency striking, however, is its superfluous quality. Throughout Leviathan, in keeping with his strict Erastianism, he made clear that the example of the primitive church did not bind Christian sovereigns. Christian states might empower presbyters, bishops, and even popes as they saw fit. Hobbes’s extensive interpretation of the primitive church thus went beyond the requirements of his ecclesiological principles. This point can be illustrated by comparing Leviathan with Grotius’s De Imperio Summarum Potestatum Circa Sacra. Chapter 1 demonstrated the similarities between Grotius’s Erastian treatise on church power and Hobbes’s later writings: both blended reformed ecclesiological argumentation with humanist scholarship into the religious arrangements of pagan antiquity. It is doubtful that Hobbes knew Grotius’s work before the 1640s, but, as it was finally published posthumously in 1647, he might well have read it before composing Leviathan. Certainly many of the Erastian conclusions of Leviathan are anticipated in Grotius, including: the definition of ecclesia (interpreting Corinthians) as an ‘assembly of the people living in the same city’; the strict subordination of canon formation, excommunication, and other spiritual functions to the sovereign; a thorough rejection of the thesis that bishops governed the church by divine right; and, paralleling Selden, an Erastian (as opposed to a dualist) interpretation of the Sanhedrin.66 That Hobbes borrowed from Grotius on these points cannot definitively be established, but would hardly surprise. However, Hobbes’s interpretation of the primitive church—with all of its Congregationalist overtones—could not have been borrowed from Grotius, and this indicates its superfluous and surprising nature. Indeed, while Grotius does indeed discuss the translation of the passages in the New Testament describing the creation of ecclesiastical officers (including the elevation of Matthias), he reaches conclusions precisely opposite to those of Leviathan. Of Matthias, Grotius wrote, ‘some men have persuaded themselves that he was elected by the people for the office of apostle. But I cannot find a semblance of proof for this fact in Luke’. He conceded that cheirotonia referred to a ‘stretching of hands’ and cheirothesia to an ‘imposing of hands’, but he denied that the use of the former phrase proved the popular election of ecclesiastical officers. That interpretation he specifically characterized as overly subtle. Grotius, like Hobbes, was concerned to subject the process of 64

Ibid. 176–9, 267–8, 351. Ibid. 167, 286, 472. See also (p. 291) Hobbes’s decidedly low-church definition of prophets as those who ‘have a Calling to say publique prayers for the Congregation’. 66 Grotius, De Imperio Summarum Potestatum Circa Sacra, 325–9, 375–97, 403–15, 553–97, 577–97. 65

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election and ordination to ancient political sovereignty, but he specifically rebutted the view that the primitive church allowed for the popular election of priests, bishops, apostles, and so forth.67 Hobbes’s own interpretation of the primitive church thus went well beyond the needs of a standard natural rights Erastianism. He surely understood that by offering such an interpretation he was entering into a super-heated controversy on the side of the Independents and against Presbyterians and episcopalians alike. His motivations for joining this fray are enormously important, and they pertain to an often overlooked aspect of Leviathan: its effort to advise sovereigns. Leviathan is usually read as a text setting forth universal, iron political laws. Crucial passages of the text, however (including the ‘duties’ of the sovereign—justice, industry, and so forth—enumerated in chapter 30), essentially constitute an effort to counsel sovereigns. In this way Hobbes’s extensive account of the primitive church was intended to provide counsel, directing sovereigns to Independency as the church form most likely to defuse the threat of clerical usurpation and maintain the religious peace of commonwealths. This is indicated in chapter 42 itself. There, having offered his interpretation of the primitive church, Hobbes considered the nature of ecclesiastical power after ‘Civill Soveraignes have embraced also the Christian faith’. He concluded, as his readers no doubt expected, that Christian sovereigns act as ‘Supreme Pastors of their people’, completely free to order the church according to their own judgement. Tellingly, however, he exemplified this point by assuming that a Christian sovereign might maintain the primitive, Congregationalist church model. ‘Again’, he wrote, let the right of choosing [pastors] be (as before the conversion of Kings) in the Church, for so it was in the time of the Apostles themselves (as hath been shewne already in this chapter); even so also the Right will be in the Civill Soveraign, Christian. For in that he is a Christian, he allowes the Teaching; and in that he is the Soveraign (which is as much to say, the Church by Representation,) the Teachers hee elects, are elected by the Church. And when an Assembly of Christians choose their Pastor in a Christian Common-wealth, it is the Soveraign that elected him, because tis done by his Authority.68

This passage is, to be sure, more suggestive than decisive. Hobbes could have similarly justified any mode of church governance, provided it was approved by the sovereign. Nevertheless, it is surely significant that, having demonstrated the atomized, Congregationalist nature of the primitive church, he explicitly justified the potential compatibility of Independency with the religious supremacy of Christian sovereigns. In any case, Hobbes would voice his counsel on the question of church governance much more explicitly later in Leviathan. In the work’s final chapter, recapitulating the fundamentals of his assault on ecclesiological dualism, he narrated the historical rise of corrupt church authority. The Apostles bore witness to Christ, he wrote, in humble simplicity, and they were popularly obeyed ‘out of 67

Grotius, De Imperio Summarum Potestatum Circa Sacra, 463–75.

68

Ibid. 372–3. Emphasis added.

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Reverence, not by Obligation’. As the body of Christians grew, presbyters were appointed, who tied the ‘first knot upon their liberty’ by devising the concept of orthodoxy and by inventing excommunication. As the flock of presbyters increased, bishops were appointed as overseers, ‘a second knot on Christian Liberty’. Finally, the pope perpetrated the greatest usurpation, binding all Christendom with his illegitimate power. This history was the ‘Synthesis’ of clerical power, the corruption of the primitive church. ‘And therefore’, wrote Hobbes, ‘the Analysis, or Resolution is by the same way; but beginneth with the knot that was last tyed’, as wee may see in the dissolution of the praeterpoliticall Church Government in England. First, the Power of the Popes was dissolved totally by Queen Elizabeth; and the Bishops, who before exercised their Functions in the Right of the Pope, did afterwards exercise the same in right of the Queen and her Successours; though by retaining the phrase of Jure Divino, they were thought to demand it by immediate right from God: And so was untyed the first knot. After this, the Presbyterians lately in England obtained the putting down of Episcopacy: And so was the second knot dissolved: And almost at the same time, the Power was taken also from the Presbyterians: And so we are reduced to the Independency of the Primitive Christians to follow Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos, every man as he liketh best: Which, if it be without contention, and without measuring the Doctrine of Christ by our affection to the Person of his Minister, (the fault which the Apostle reprehended in the Corinthians,) is perhaps the best: First because there ought to be no Power over the Consciences of men, but of the Word itself . . . and secondly, because it is unreasonable in them, who teach there is such danger in every little Errour, to require of a man endued with Reason of his own, to follow the Reason of any other man . . . Nor ought those Teachers to be displeased with this losse of their ancient Authority: For there is none should know better then they, that power is preserved by the same Vertues by which it is acquired; that is to say, by Wisdome, Humility, Clearnesse of Doctrine, and sincerity of Conservation; and not by suppression of the Natural Sciences, and of the Morality of Naturall Reason; nor by obscure Language; nor by Arrogating to themselves more Knowledge than they make appear; nor by Pious Frauds; nor by such other faults, as in the Pastors of Gods church are not only Faults, but also scandalls, apt to make men stumble one time or other upon the suppression of their Authority.69

It was a dramatic conclusion. For the first time, Hobbes publicly endorsed the abolition of episcopacy and the eclipse of Presbyterianism. This effectively condemned, we shall see below, the political calculations of all of the royalist factions. Moreover, the passage made explicit what was implicit elsewhere in Leviathan: Hobbes’s new conviction that Independency was the church model most likely to secure religious peace and protect the ecclesiastical supremacy of the state. The ‘Congregational Way’ did not, of course, bind the sovereign as law. Nevertheless, having detailed the perils of episcopacy and presbytery, heightened his rhetorical deference to conscience, and extensively defended a Congregationalist interpretation of the primitive church, Hobbes concluded Leviathan by counselling England’s sovereign to maintain Independency. What is more, the scriptural arguments 69

Ibid. 479–80.

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exploited in Leviathan to defend the Congregational Way paralleled arguments offered by prominent Independent divines. This point will be examined more closely in Chapter 6, but in the interim it is instructive to place Hobbes’s arguments against those offered by the ‘dissenting brethren’ in the Westminster Assembly of Divines. Hobbes’s definition of ecclesia, for instance, paralleled that offered by the Assembly Independents Thomas Goodwin and William Bridges. Both definitions employed Matthew 18: 17 (Christ’s injunction to ‘Tell it to the Church, and if he neglect to hear the Church, let him be to thee as a Gentile, or Publican’) to define ecclesia as ‘a Congregation assembled, of professors of Christianity’.70 Both Hobbes and Goodwin interpreted parts of Acts as demonstrating that ‘the people . . . lay on hands as well as the apostles’ in the process of electing church ministers in particular congregations.71 Both mined Corinthians for evidence that excommunication was, in the primitive church, a sentence executed by assembled congregations.72 Modern commentators have badly underestimated the significance of the endorsement of Independency found in Leviathan. Contemporaries, as we shall see, made no such mistake. Hobbes’s endorsement of Independency was not a casual or ill-considered aside, but a carefully structured conclusion. Capping the religious arguments of Leviathan, it effectively represented the culmination of what was thematically innovative in Hobbes’s masterpiece. Moreover, far more than its de factoist theory of political obligation, the ecclesiological conclusions of Leviathan carried explosive partisan political implications. To grasp this latter point fully, we must return our attention to the events of the English Revolution and read Leviathan as Hobbes’s comment on those events.73 70

71 Lev., 363–6; Gillespie, Notes, 36, 47–8. Lev., 321; Gillespie, Notes, 23–4; Lightfoot, Journal, 160–8. Lev., 349–50; Gillespie, Notes, 17, 55–6. 73 J. P. Sommerville has recently written against the view (ascribed to Professor Tuck and me) that the endorsement of Independency in Leviathan is contextually critical. Indeed, he goes so far as to suggest that Hobbes ‘went out of his way to portray [Independent] principles as those of lawless, greedy, rebellious, madmen’. The shortcomings in Professor Sommerville’s arguments supporting this view are treated at appropriate points in the notes below. Suffice it here to note that he fails to provide any explanation for the explicit endorsement of Independency included in Leviathan. (He does note, noncommittally, Professor Martinich’s unsustainable view that the endorsement was ironic.) Nor does he explain (or mention) Hobbes’s purging of pejorative mentions of Independency from the manuscript of Leviathan before its publication. Moreover, he does not note Hobbes’s reported praise of key apologetical works composed by leading Independents (see Ch. 6). In general, Professor Sommerville argues for an unbridgeable gulf between Hobbes and the Independents. He defends this proposition by creating a paradigm of ‘Independent thinking’ that contains features incompatible with Hobbesian doctrine. This paradigm, however, distorts by conflating very different strains of Independency. Separatism or ‘Brownism’, providentialism, tolerationist thinking, zealotry, resistance theory, anti-absolutism: these and other traits are bundled together to create a composite Independency that manages to encompass fairly conventional thinkers such as John Owen and Louis du Moulin along with radical separatists such as John Milton and John Goodwin. That the latter two men were vehement critics of the former two on precisely the issues of interest to Hobbes is not observed by Professor Sommerville. Professor Sommerville’s understanding of Independency has been strongly influenced by dated (if distinguished) work by Leo Solt, George Yule, and Michael Walzer. He does not reference the more recent, revisionist work of Blair Worden (among others), where the difference between separatism and mainline Independency is decisively demonstrated. Few would agree, for instance, with Professor Sommerville’s generalizations that all Independents taught that the ‘state ought not to interfere in the religious affairs of the churches of the saints, which were gathered congregations, not a national institution’, or that Independents prided ‘themselves on their nonconformity, or disobedience, to religious requirements imposed by English sovereigns’. Likewise, to suggest that Hobbes means to condemn all Independents when he condemns ‘fanatics’ or deluded prophets is, in this sense, a question-begging exercise. Hobbes, for instance, applauded the Independent Oliver Cromwell for throwing fanatical prophets out of London (Beh., 187–8). 72

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ii Chapter 3 demonstrated the ecclesiological compatibility that existed between Independency and Erastianism, a compatibility that cemented the alliance between Congregationalists and Erastians in the Westminster Assembly. By the time Hobbes had begun to compose Leviathan, the magisterial potential of Independency was more apparent than ever. Between 1649 and 1651, the anti-clerical, quasi-Erastian features of Independency found an immensely powerful voice in Oliver Cromwell. After playing his part in the drama of the King’s trial and execution, Cromwell embarked on two monumental struggles in defence of the infant Commonwealth, campaigns to subdue the Irish Rebellion and to defeat the Scottish army allied with Charles Stuart. Tremendous success in these campaigns established Cromwell as the dominant man of the hour and formatively shaped his own sense of his mission. Cromwell did not interpret his victories in Scotland and Ireland primarily as triumphs over the royalist threat. In each case he understood himself to be battling religious enemies and particularly seditious clerical interests. The Commonwealth’s clerical enemies figured far more prominently than Charles Stuart in Cromwell’s declarations. ‘I had rather be overrun with a Cavalierish interest’, he declared in March of 1649, ‘than a Scotch interest; I had rather be overrun by a Scotch interest, than an Irish interest.’74 And in both the Scottish and Irish cases, he was convinced that Charles Stuart was used expediently, to veil the true face of rebellions by usurping clergy. Cromwell landed in Ireland in August of 1649, declaring it the ‘duty’ of the ‘magistrate’ to reform the benighted Catholic land.75 In January of 1650, after the bloodletting at Wexford and Drogheda, he issued a declaration against the Catholic clergy, which justified his cause with Erastian rhetoric. Cromwell presented the war as a great victory over spiritual usurpation. He blasted the doctrine ‘that secular power hath nothing to do to appoint and superintend [the clergy’s] spiritual conventions’, and he denounced the distinction of clergy and laity. The Irish rebellion, Cromwell charged, was fought to protect clerical power. The Stuart cause was a mere instrument of the clergy, a convenient pretence.76 In a letter to Nor is it relevant that Hobbes rejected the sort of resistance theory that some (not all) Independents espoused. He was drawn specifically to Independent ecclesiology, not the political theory of Independents (whatever that might have been). He was perfectly capable of distinguishing ecclesiology from broader political theory, as he did, for instance, when he praised the anti-papal polemic of the pre-eminent resistance theorist Philippe du Plessis Mornay (Beh., 20–1). Finally, while it is true that Hobbes surrendered to the state power over scriptural interpretation and religious ceremony that most Independents reserved to individuals and congregations, this is hardly decisive. No one has suggested that Hobbes embraced every article of the Congregational Way. Figures such as Marchamont Nedham and John Harrington rejected these aspects of hard-line, divine-right Independency as well, and nevertheless supported Independency generally. Professor Sommerville demonstrates that there was not an absolute congruence between Thomas Hobbes and the Independents, but this is to conquer a straw man. The real question is whether, after 1649, a set of common interests and beliefs emerged between the Independents and Thomas Hobbes that was sufficiently strong to tip him, temporarily, into their camp. J. P. Sommerville, ‘Hobbes and Independency’, Rivista di storia della filosofia, 59 (2004), 155–73, esp. 156, 160–4, 167–8; Sommerville, ‘Hobbes, Behemoth’, 213, 217. 74 75 76

WSC, ii. 38; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 167–72, 184–207. ‘Declaration to Dublin’, 23 Aug. 1649, WSC, ii. 110. ‘Declaration to . . . a Conventicle at Clonmacnoise’, Jan. 1650, WSC, ii. 196–7, 199.

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parliament he alleged that the Irish Catholics fought only to ‘give precedency to their religion’, and made mere ‘use’ of the Stuart name.77 Such charges followed an ideological pattern set by the Long Parliament, which portrayed the Revolution as an effort to protect the religious authority of the state against resurgent clerical dualism. Only returned from Ireland since May, Cromwell invaded Scotland on 22 July 1650. As he had in Ireland, he minimized the threat posed by Charles Stuart, and again portrayed his enemies as the dupes of power-hunting clergy. In a declaration seeking to reconcile his invasion with the Solemn League and Covenant, Cromwell denied that any particular church form enjoyed divine-right status. Divines, he warned, were to preach and leave off ‘meddling with, or engaging, the authorities of the world’. Scottish clergy had ‘seduced’ the people by mingling ‘the Presbyterian with the kingly interest’. As he had in Ireland, Cromwell dismissed this alliance as mere ‘pretense’.78 The secret cause of the Scots was the usurpation of temporal power by lordly clergy. After his triumph at Dunbar, Cromwell wrote parliament that God had dealt a blow to the ‘ministers of Scotland’ for ‘meddling with worldly policies, and mixtures of earthly power, to set up that which they call the kingdom of Christ’.79 In a series of letters to the besieged royalist Governor of Edinburgh Castle, Cromwell availed himself of a captive audience of Presbyterian ministers who had sought refuge in the fortress. ‘We look at ministers’, he chided them, ‘as helpers of, not lords over, the faith of God’s people.’ In the face of charges that the Commonwealth had imprisoned pious divines, and had repressed sermons ‘against the sins and enormities of the civil powers’, Cromwell was defiant. Such ministers, he wrote, ‘railing against the civil power, calling them murderers and the like’, were justly punished for ‘assuming the infallible chair’, and for aiming to wield authority ‘over civil governors’. Ministers were to preach the Word, ‘not to rail, nor, under pretense thereof to overtop the civil power, or debase it as they please’. Nor was preaching itself a purely clerical privilege. Cromwell defended preaching by men ‘of civil employments’.80 During the campaigns of 1649–51, providentially inspired and increasingly coming ‘to regard himself in loco pastoris’, Cromwell gave his Erastian convictions their most forceful expression.81 He insisted on the propriety of employing coercive force in securing the New Jerusalem, on the importance of the Christian Magistrate exercising this force, and on the dangers of the clergy usurping it. He denounced the clerical–lay distinction itself. These were also the years in which Cromwell secured his status as the great patron of Independency. John Cotton corresponded with Cromwell during the Scottish campaign and celebrated him as a ‘vessell’ waging the ‘Lord’s battell’ (see Ch. 3). John Owen served as Cromwell’s 77 78 79 80 81

Cromwell to Lenthall, 16 Jan. 1650, WSC, ii. 206. ‘Declaration . . . upon the March into Scotland’, WSC, ii. 285–6. Cromwell to Lenthall, 4 Sept. 1650, WSC, ii. 325. Cromwell to Governor of Edinburgh Castle, 9 and 14 Sept. 1650, WSC, ii. 335–8. Paul, Lord Protector, 222.

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army chaplain during these years and secured his own standing as the general’s most powerful ecclesiastical adviser. Other prominent Independents, such as Sidrach Simpson, also came to view Cromwell as their champion during these years of providential victory.82 Throughout 1650, petitions arrived at Cromwell’s camp from Independent congregations around England, urging him to settle ‘that part of religion which is outward, and so in the magistrate’s power’.83 These were indeed heady days for the Independent faction. A decided minority, they nevertheless moved from the periphery to the centre of power after the regicide. In early 1649 a few gestures were made by the Rump Parliament to conciliate moderate Presbyterians, but rumoured concessions on the church government question provoked Cromwell and the army.84 Accommodationist sentiment soon gave way to open antagonism between the Presbyterians and Independents. ‘Cutting sermons’ had raised the ‘wrath of the rulers against Presbyterian ministers’ in London.85 Clement Walker, caustic author of the hostile Anarchia Anglicana, or, the History of Independency, was imprisoned in the Tower.86 In November of 1650 an order was issued for the removal of ministers who refused to engage with the Commonwealth.87 Political sermonizing was outlawed, and the London pulpits were soon full of ‘novices and novelties’.88 The culminating blow was the passage of the Toleration Act on 27 September 1650, which repealed the Elizabethan act mandating attendance at a recognized place of worship. The act sounded the death knell for the terminal Presbyterian church settlement of 1646. The Rump’s repression of Presbyterian disaffection culminated in the spring of 1651 with the arrest of three prominent Presbyterians for planning a royalist uprising. On 22 August the Presbyterian clergyman Christopher Love was beheaded for complicity in this plot. Thus had the Rump resorted to the most brutal means to break the ‘back of the clerical opposition’.89 Oliver Cromwell was occupied with campaigning during these years, but his influence was felt nonetheless. Love’s defenders begged Cromwell to intercede for his life, but he refused and allowed the execution to proceed.90 The Toleration Act, passed in the aftermath of the battle of Dunbar, was encouraged by Cromwell’s letters from Scotland.91 His personal political influence helped to secure the defeat of the Presbyterian church settlement. By the time Hobbes had begun to compose Leviathan, episcopacy had lost its royal patron, Presbyterianism had been thwarted, and the Cromwellian Independents were enjoying a political sway well 82 Toon, God’s Statesman, 33–5; Lilburne to Cromwell, 7 Jan. 1651, and Simpson to Cromwell, 20 Sept. 1650, Original Letters and Papers of State Addressed to Oliver Cromwell . . . Found among the Political Collections of John Milton, ed. John Nickolls (1743), 22–3, 48. 83 Hickman to Cromwell, 16 Nov. 1650; several churches to Cromwell, 1 Feb, 1650; ministers at Newcastle to Cromwell, Letters to Cromwell, 32, 80–1. 84 Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament, 1648–1653 (Cambridge, 1974), 40–2, 206–81. 85 The Life of Adam Martindale, Written by Himself, ed. Richard Parkinson (Manchester, 1845), 87. 86 BL Add. MS 12184, fo. 94. 87 Worden, Rump, 80–2. 88 The Chronicle of Fife, being the Diary of John Lamont of Newton from 1649 to 1672 (Edinburgh, 1810), 45; Diary of 89 Worden, Rump, 243–8; Spemont to Hall, 30 Aug. 1651, BL Add. MS 15858, fo. 162. Evelyn, ed. de Beer, 291. 90 Samuel Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–1656 (4 vols., London, 1901), i. 415–16. 91 Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 268–9, 275; Worden, Rump, 238; Cromwell to Lenthall, 4 Sept. 1650, WSC, ii. 325.

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beyond their numbers. All of this was closely followed by the exiled royalists. Throughout the mid-1640s Independency and Presbyterianism had grappled ‘like Jacob and Esau struggling in the womb’, but after King Charles’s death the exiled royalists recognized that affairs in England were increasingly driven by the ‘barbarous carriage of the Independents’.92 This was a matter of grave concern, as the Presbyterians—generally opposed to the regicide—were the faction of former parliamentarians most likely to turn against the Commonwealth. But hopes were slim indeed by 1649. Secretary Browne rued the ‘yoake’ under which the ‘Presbyterian Party’ groaned.93 ‘It is written to me’, recorded Nicholas in 1649, ‘that it is now in London fully as dangerous for the Presbyterians as for those of the King’s party’.94 Early in 1650 the royalists took note when the Commonwealth recalled its French envoy for one ‘lesse Presbyterian’. By July all recognized that the Commonwealth was governed by ‘schisms and sects’ and did not ‘intend the establishment of presbytery’.95 The ecclesiological politics of Leviathan must be read against this backdrop of shifting factional fortunes. Within this context Hobbes’s commentary on Independency was read as thoroughly inimical to the royalist cause. In the summer of 1647, to be sure, it had appeared that the Cromwellian Independents might prove more flexible than the Presbyterians in negotiating a separate peace with Charles. This hope had particularly animated the Louvre group, and it is tempting to construe Leviathan’s endorsement of Independency as a belated product of the politique royalism of the Queen’s party.96 However, such a royalist interpretation of Leviathan cannot be sustained in the face of the vastly changed circumstances of 1649–50. The Independents were widely blamed for the King’s murder. As the rising power in the Commonwealth, they had the most to lose if it collapsed. There was thus scant prospect of an Independent–royalist alliance. As for the Louvre group, after 1649 it concentrated on securing external alliances that would aid in toppling the regicidal regime. Hope was held out for Continental assistance, but more realistically, the Louvre group sought to exploit the disaffection of the Scottish Presbyterians and Irish Catholics. Sir John Berkley, once the Queen’s agent in negotiating with the Independents, was by 1649 calling on royalists to give one hand ‘to the Chatholike Roman, and the other to the Presbyterian’, to crush their ‘common enemy’.97 An alliance with the Independents defied the political calculations of Henrietta Maria and her son, and no such alliance was contemplated after the start of the second civil war. It is certainly true that in the wake of Charles I’s execution the Louvre group held the upper hand in the councils of his son. Few were inclined patiently to await a resurgence of monarchist sentiment in England.98 ‘I had rather suffer as a dove 92

Life of Martindale, 61; Nicholas to Hatton, 11 Jan. 1649, BL Birch MS 4180, fo. 9. 94 Nicholas to Hatton, 11 Jan. 1649, BL Birch MS 4180, fo. 8. BL Add. MS 12184, fo. 103. 95 BL Add. 12186, fos. 140, 165. 96 For efforts to place Leviathan more broadly within the context of Louvre group politics, see Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 322–6, and his introduction to Leviathan, p. xii; also Metzger, Hobbes und Revolution, 99–102. 97 Berkley to Hyde, 3 Dec. 1649, Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers preserved in the Bodleian Library (4 vols., Oxford, 98 Paul Hardacre, The Royalists during the Puritan Revolution (The Hague, 1956), ch. 4. 1869–1919), ii. 32. 93

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than prevail as a serpent’, wrote a disheartened Edward Nicholas, but Henrietta Maria and Charles were not similarly inclined.99 Immediate hopes settled on Ireland, where the Marquis of Ormonde remained in the field. In August of 1649, however, Ormonde was defeated at Rathmines and Oliver Cromwell arrived to finish off the Irish resistance brutally. News of the fall of Drogheda in September devastated the royalists. Ormonde soon fled to France, and all hope had gone out of the Irish venture.100 Royalist attentions now swung north. After consultations with his mother in the spring of 1650, Charles travelled to Breda to strike a deal with the Scots. An agreement was reached in April, with ‘hard conditions’, including Charles’s taking the Covenant.101 This infidelity to the episcopal cause appalled the old royalists. It was reported that the King’s decision ‘hath had strange effects upon all his party in England’.102 Leviathan’s endorsement of Independency cannot be construed within a royalist context. Hobbes could not plausibly have intended it to revive any expeditious alliance with the Independents. First, as we shall see, he did not view Independency merely as a potentially useful pawn in royalist scheming. His interest in the merits of Congregationalism was much more sincere. Second, any talk of a deal with the Independents directly undermined the Louvre group’s much prized Scottish alliance. During the very weeks when Hobbes was probably composing his thoughts on Independency, a prominent member of the Louvre group—Hobbes’s friend Abraham Cowley—wrote that ‘the Scotch treaty is the only thing now in which we are vitally concerned’.103 This throws into serious doubt the assertion that Hobbes’s politics during 1650 were ‘likely to be most sympathetic to the political attitude represented by Newcastle’ and other leading lights of the Louvre.104 Newcastle, indeed, had accompanied Charles to Breda and had been instrumental in convincing him to swallow the Scots’ hard terms.105 Indeed, as late as 1653 Edward Nicholas characterized Newcastle as ‘well affected’ to ‘Scots Presbytery’.106 Hobbes’s views on Independency must be read as an independent commentary on events unfolding within Britain. The critical ecclesiological sections of Leviathan were most likely written between the spring of 1650 and early 1651.107 These were the months when power swung decisively behind Oliver Cromwell and the Independents. Cromwell crushed the Irish between August of 1649 and the 99

Nicholas to Ormonde, 1 Mar. 1651, BL Birch MS 4180, fo. 30. Cowley to Bennett, 30 Apr. 1650, Miscellanea Aulica, 131. 101 Hutton, Charles II, 39–47; Cowley to Bennett, 17 May 1650, Miscellanea Aulica, 134. 102 Hyde to Berkley, 18 Mar. 1650, Clarendon State Papers, 2:49; Hatton to Nicholas, 13 Aug. 1650, BL Egerton MS 2534, fo. 34. 103 Cowley to Bennett, 30 Apr. 1650, Miscellanea Aulica, 130; Nicholas to Hatton, 16 Aug. 1650, BL Birch MS 4180, fo. 17; Nicholas to Hatton, 5 Apr. 1651, BL Birch MS 4180, fo. 38. 104 Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 320, 322; Professor Tuck, however, does note Hobbes’s proximity to White and the other Blackloists (p. 326). 105 Intelligence from Paris, 4 Dec. 1649, BL Egerton MS 2533, fo. 507; Nicholas to Ormonde, 13 Apr. 1650, Bodl. Carte MS 27, fo. 241; Hatton to Nicholas, 21 May 1650, BL Egerton MS 2534, fo. 24. 106 Nicholas to Hyde, 15 May 1653, BL Birch MS 4180, fo. 90. 107 Payne to Sheldon, 13 May 1650, BL Harleian MS 6942, no. 128. Hobbes had finished thirty-seven out of fifty planned chapters (forty-seven were published). If Leviathan was written in order this would have brought him into the early chapters of the work’s second half, ‘On the Christian Commonwealth’. The content of his correspondence with Payne lends this plausibility. 100

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following May. In September he inflicted a crushing defeat on Charles and the Scots at Dunbar. The summer of 1650 saw critical legal moves against the Presbyterians, culminating with the Toleration Act in September. Cromwell’s manifestos against the Irish Catholics and Scottish Presbyterians appeared in print throughout the year. These declarations, including the Erastian letters Cromwell composed during the siege of Edinburgh Castle, circulated among the exiled royalists. ‘London prints’ and news sheets were also widely available.108 During these weeks, as we shall see, Hobbes himself corresponded with English associates on precisely these matters. Leviathan was thus written after Charles had allied with the Scots and while the Independents were securing their ascendancy. The text’s crucial ecclesiological innovations did not speak for any royalist faction. This is not, however, to suggest that Hobbes wrote his masterpiece in total isolation. Leviathan envisaged an accommodation with the new Commonwealth based on its establishment of an Erastian and pluralistic religious settlement. In moving towards this position after 1649, Hobbes was not alone. In a neglected episode, his friends Thomas White and Kenelm Digby, along with their ‘Blackloist’ followers, conspired to abandon the Stuart cause and strike a separate peace with the Cromwellian Independents.109 This conspiracy may well have influenced the political calculations of Thomas Hobbes. The Blackloists had expectantly followed the royalist negotiations with the Independents in 1647, and had been enraged by the papacy’s meddling in that affair. As early as the autumn of 1647 they had threatened to ‘go streyght to the Independents Army’ and secure religious toleration on their own terms.110 For a time matters lay dormant, until in November of 1648 the spy Leonard Watson, scoutmaster to Cromwell’s army and a loyal Independent, appeared in Paris.111 On 28 November Watson corresponded with another Cromwellian, the Independent MP Thomas Westrow.112 ‘I am fallen into the acquaintance’, Watson wrote, of 3 or 4 Catholiques of very great ingenuity and in their way of very much Religion. Undoubtedly it is an errour to look at all papists through the same perspective . . . I finde their opinion of and dependance upon the Pope little or nothinge what we imagine it to bee, and better principled to make members of a Commonwealth then the most English. Their opposition to the Kinge is not to be reconciled, their hopes are now upon the Armie, to whome they wish all prosperity.113 108 Cowley to Bennett, 23 July and 18 Nov. 1650, Miscellanea Aulica, 144, 152; Browne Papers, 5 Nov. 1650, BL Add. MS 12186, fo. 195; Browne Papers, BL Add. MS 15857, fo. 113. 109 What follows is more fully detailed in Jeffrey R. Collins,‘Thomas Hobbes and the Blackloist Conspiracy of 1649’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002), 305–31. 110 Holden to Digby, 6 Sept. 1647; White to Digby, 19 Sept. 1647; Digby to Fitton, 30 Oct. 1647, in Blacklo’s Cabal, 26–8, 41–6. 111 C. H. Firth, Cromwell’s Army: A History of the English Soldiers during the Civil War, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate (London, 1902), 65, 139. 112 Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 291, 389; D. Brunton and D. H. Pennington, Members of the Long Parliament (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), 51, 244. 113 ‘A true copie of a letter written by an Independent agent for the Armie . . .’, Bodl. Clarendon MS 31, fo. 316; printed in A Full and True Relation of the Officers and Armies Forcible Seizing of Divers Eminent Members of the Commons House . . . (1648), 12–13.

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Watson had established links with the Blackloists, and he requested Westrow’s assistance in securing a passport for Kenelm Digby. In the face of Henrietta Maria’s loyalty to Rome, the Blackloists were becoming estranged from the royalist court. Even Digby, the Queen’s long-standing servant, was threatening to disregard her in an effort to secure toleration from the army. Presented with this schism, Watson worked assiduously to exploit it.114 Not even the execution of Charles I in January deflected the Blackloists from their new course. A few weeks after the regicide, Watson and Digby undertook a secret journey to London for direct discussions with the now ascendant Independents. By now, the exiled royalist court was following the conspiracy through spies and intercepted correspondence.115 In February a royalist Catholic named Winstad encountered Digby in Rouen and uncovered his plan to secure ‘toleration’ from ‘the bloody mutherers’ of the King.116 Horrified, Winstad passed this information on to Edward Nicholas at the royalist court, who in turn informed Ormonde that ‘those horrid rebels the Independents’ were promising ‘toleration to all manner of relligious except that of the Church of England’.117 Digby was in London by March. He was accompanied by John Winter, a Hertfordshire iron-works owner and former Catholic royalist who had fallen in with the Blackloist plotters.118 Digby and Winter held secret talks with the Cromwellian Independents throughout the spring.119 English Catholics, it was rumoured, were to recognize either the abolition of the monarchy or its transformation into an elective office. All of the old demands of 1647 were revived, including the Three Oaths eschewing the pope’s temporal power. The Jesuits were to be expelled from the country. Parliament was to be granted vast control over English Catholicism, including the authority closely to govern the Catholic bishop in England. English Catholicism would become one sect among many in the Independents’ pluralistic and statist religious settlement. In exchange for a limited toleration, Catholics were to provide ‘assurance’ of their ‘Fidelity to the commonwealth they are to live under’, and were to accept the normative status of the ‘Congregational Way’.120 The Blackloist conspiracy enraged and worried the exiled royalists, chiefly because of its potential diplomatic impact. The royalists desperately hoped that aid from France or Spain might buttress their military efforts in Scotland and Ireland. This possibility exercised the Commonwealth as well. The new regime was fortunate in that France and Spain were themselves destabilized by the Fronde and 114

He was sheltered by the Blackloist priest Peter Fitton. Clarendon MS 37, fo. 218. Bodl. Clarendon MS 31, fo. 316; Ormonde to King, Feb. 1649, Bodl. Carte MS 24, fo. 76. Winstad to Nicholas, 27 Feb. 1649, Bodl. Carte MS 24, fo. 14. 117 Nicholas to Ormonde, 27 Feb. 1649, Bodl. Carte MS 24, fo. 15. 118 Evelyn to Brown, 1 Mar. 1649, BL Add. MS 15948, fo. 26; Nicholas to Ormonde, 4 Mar. 1649, Bodl. Carte MS 24, fo. 38; Digby and Winter had earlier been jailed by parliament; see The Examination of Sir Ralph Hopton, Sir John Winter . . . with articles of high treason . . . (1642), 3, 7–8; Petersson, Digby, 154, 161. 119 Edward Somerset, Marquis of Worchester, was also rumored to be a ‘prime actor’. Byron to Ormonde, 1 Mar. 1649, Bodl. Carte MS 27, fo. 3; Nicholas to Ormonde, 3 May 1649, Bodl. Carte MS 24, fo. 610. 120 Holden’s Instructions, Blacklo’s Cabal, 37–41; Byron to Ormonde, 1 Mar. 1649, Bodl. Carte MS 27, fo. 3; Bodl. Clarendon MS 37, fo. 219; Holden to Digby, 24 Mar. 1649, Blacklo’s Cabal, 77. 115

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the revolt of Catalonia. The two powers were also at war with one another, and neither could afford to see England thrown into the balance against it. An enervated Spain was the first foreign power to recognize the Commonwealth.121 France, though dynastically closer to the Stuarts, was also jittery about the ‘overgrown strength of the Present power in England’. Anxious to outflank Spain, Cardinal Mazarin and the regent, Anne of Austria, sent secret agents to London.122 Some in England, preoccupied with the Irish and Scottish threats, strongly urged an alliance with France.123 The Commonwealth’s shadowy diplomacy almost certainly necessitated negotiation over Catholic toleration, and this explains the real threat of the Blackloist conspiracy. The Stuarts could manage without the support of the tiny English Catholic community, but they desperately feared that the toleration of Catholicism would help to pacify Ireland or would facilitate a foreign treaty with Spain or France. Indeed, during these very months the royalists were anxiously following negotiations between the Independents and the Irish Marquis of Antrim, the royalist military commander. Antrim was promising to accommodate the Commonwealth and help pacify Ireland in exchange for Catholic toleration.124 Oliver Cromwell, by no means attached to Catholic toleration as a matter of conviction, was surely motivated to deal with the Blackloists by these diplomatic considerations. Indeed, in March he sent John Winter into Ireland ‘with large offers of toleration for the Roman religion here as well as there to make them leave all hopes of the king’.125 Edward Nicholas reported from several sources that scheming between the Independents and the Irish Catholics was part of the ‘same business that K. Digby is going for into England’.126 This ‘divellish designe’ very much exercised Ormonde, who feared that it would undermine his efforts to secure Irish Catholic support.127 Charles II himself ordered Ormonde to capture and imprison Winter.128 In the event, royalist fears, and Blackloist hopes, went unfulfilled. In August of 1649 royalist spies reported that the ‘business’ between the Blackloists and ‘Cromwell’ had broken off. Papal interference in Ireland had impeded any deal. More crucially, Cromwell’s departure for Ireland had given free reign to antiCatholic sentiment in the Rump Parliament. In September John Winter was imprisoned and Kenelm Digby banished.129 ‘This is done’, reported one royalist, ‘by the presbiterean party that doth now beginne to showe more courage and confidence in the carriage of affayres since Cromwell’s departure.’130 121 Charles P. Korr, Cromwell and the New Model Foreign Policy (Berkeley, 1975), 9–18; J. R. Jones, Britain and Europe 122 Browne Papers, BL Add. MS 12186, fos. 111, 202. in the 17th c. (London, 1966), 30–3. 123 Korr, Foreign Policy, 14–27; Philip A. Knachel, England and the Fronde (Ithaca, NY, 1967), 14–49. 124 The linkages between the Antrim and Blackloist conspiracies remain shadowy. Collins, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Blackloist Conspiracy’, 319–20. 125 Hyde to Edgeman, 19 Mar. 1649, Bodl. Clarendon MS 37, fo. 40; Bodl. MS Carte 23, fo. 489. 126 Nicholas to Hatton, 1 Mar. 1649, and Nicholas to Clanricarde, 8 Mar. 1649, BL Birch MS 4180, fo. 9. 127 Byron to Ormonde, 1 Mar. 1649, Bodl. Carte MS 27, fo. 3; Ormonde to Lord President of Munster, 26 Mar. 1649, 128 Charles II to Ormonde, 12 Mar. 1649, Bodl. Carte MS 24, fos. 116, 118. Bodl. Carte MS 24, fo. 251. 129 CSPD: Commonwealth, i. 294–5. 130 Anon. to Clainricarde, 7 Sept. 1649, Bodl. Carte MS 25, fo. 482.

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In France, the implications of the Blackloists’ betrayal were immediately felt. Henrietta Maria had sent her chaplains George Leyburn (under the alias Winter Grant) and Walter Montagu into England in order to hinder their scheme.131 A despondent Kenelm Digby returned to France, but he avoided the court, condemned by Stuart loyalists as an ‘errant mountebank’.132 Thomas White, also persona non grata among the royalists, languished in miserable poverty at The Hague.133 Charles II ordered Edward Hyde and Edward Nicholas to investigate the treason of the Blackloist priests Fitton and Holden. They were soon sent packing.134 More than the machinations of the Louvre group, the Blackloist conspiracy provides the context for understanding the ecclesiological politics of Leviathan. There is no evidence that Hobbes was himself directly involved in the plot. He had no apparent interest in the toleration of Catholicism, nor was he prone to political conspiracy. Nevertheless, there were striking parallels between the political judgements of the Blackloists and those reflected in Leviathan. Both Hobbes and the Blackloists were drawn to the Erastian, anti-clerical tenor of the Independent regime. Both saw in the Commonwealth’s pluralistic religious settlement the promise of a stable, Erastian religious order. As demonstrated above, some of Hobbes’s closest links to the Louvre (White and Digby) were Blackloists, and he was in close proximity to the leading Blackloists during 1648–9, when their conspiracy was hatched. He was distant from Saint-Germain and his former Louvre group patrons, Jermyn and Newcastle. It is difficult to believe he was entirely ignorant of the Blackloist conspiracy, the disgrace it had brought his close friends, and the implications it had for any endorsement of Independency. There exists, furthermore, evidence of a strong intellectual influence between Hobbes and the Blackloists during the years when both were turning their eyes towards the Independents. Indeed, the very first printed reference to Leviathan, published only weeks after its appearance, is found in a London tract written to justify Catholic toleration and the Blackloist negotiations with Oliver Cromwell.135 Thomas White himself would eventually publish a justification of the Blackloist conspiracy (The Grounds of Obedience and Government) that was heavily reliant on Leviathan’s theory of political obligation. A fuller analysis of these works follows in Chapter 5, but it is critical to observe this Hobbesian influence on the Blackloists as evidence of their close association in 1649 and 1650. Indeed, if historians have overlooked the likely influence of Blackloism on Hobbes’s politics, royalist observers at the time did not doubt that Blackloism and Hobbism were kindred phenomena. Henrietta Maria’s chaplain George Leyburn, a hated foe of the Blackloists, characterized White’s book as ‘horrid, unparalleled, 131 Nicholas to Ormonde, 18 Feb. 1649, Bodl. Carte MS 23, fo. 444; Holden to Digby, [1649?] and 24 Mar. 1649, Blacklo’s Cabal, 74–7. 132 Browne Papers, BL Add. MS 12186, fo. 265; Diary of Evelyn, ed. Bray, iii. 47; Journal of Sir John Finch, quoted in Corr., 831. 133 Evelyn to White, 26 Mar. 1650, BL Evelyn MS 39a, fo. 41; White to Digby, 21 Dec. 1649, Blacklo’s Cabal, 78. 134 Bodl. Clarendon MS 37, fos. 216, 218; Meynall to Cottington, 28 Jan. 1650, Bodl. Clarendon MS 39, fo. 21. 135 [John Austin], The Christian Moderator, or Persecution for Religion Condemned (1651); the reference (although not the Blackloist connection) is observed by Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Marvell Transpos’d’, English, 33 (1984), 140–7 at 144.

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unauthorised, unchristian’, and ‘cut out of Mr. Hobbe’s Leviathan’.136 Given his intimate knowledge of the Blackloist conspiracy, Leyburn’s testimony on this point is highly significant, but he was not alone in noting the parallels between Hobbism and the Blackloists’ leading light. The Presbyterian Richard Baxter blasted White as a defender of Cromwell and linked his writings to those of Hobbes.137 After the Restoration, the royalist historian and political theorist Roger Coke bitterly recalled that both Hobbes and White had allied with the cause of the ‘atheists and schismaticks’ who had brought ‘distractions and confusions’ to religion and ‘devoured the patrimony of the Church’.138 Joseph Glanvill wrote that White’s thought had ‘shaken hands with the Leviathan’.139 The anonymous royalist tract Evangelium Armatum, a work dedicated to exposing sectarian sedition, concluded that ‘it will not be amiss to lay down some of the Principles of the Papists and the Hobbians’. Its author proceeded to cite passages from both Hobbes’s and White’s work.140 An anonymous Restoration tract accused both Thomas White and Thomas Hobbes of having accepted pensions from Oliver Cromwell for their helpful political theory.141 The extent of Blackloist influence on Hobbes’s politics must remain partly a matter of conjecture. At the very least the Blackloist conspiracy helps explain why the endorsement of Independency in Leviathan—conforming as it did to an established pattern of betrayal—so agitated the royalists. It is further likely that the conspiracy was among the factors riveting Hobbes’s attention on the Independents, and convincing him that Independency might secure a stable religious order. If the allurements of Independency were fracturing the Louvre group, it was Hobbes’s definitive abandonment of episcopacy that exercised the episcopal clergy allied with the old royalists. The final collapse of Hobbes’s relations with the exiled Anglicans can be followed in the correspondence of two Anglican priests: Robert Payne and Gilbert Sheldon. Payne, former chaplain to the Earl of Newcastle, had met Hobbes in the 1630s and had helped to initiate him in the new science.142 (Many now believe the manuscript ‘Short Tract on First Principles’—once read as Hobbes’s first foray into natural philosophy—was composed by Payne.143) Loyal to the old church, Payne lost his Gloucestershire rectory and his Oxford canonry 136 Beverley Southgate, ‘ “That Damned Booke”, the Grounds of obedience and government (1655) and the Downfall of Thomas White’, Recusant History, 17 (1985), 238–53 at 245. 137 Reliquiae Baxterianae or, Mr. Richard Baxters Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times. faithfully Publish’d from his own Original Manuscript by Matthew Sylvester (2 vols., London, 1696), i. 118. For another linking of Hobbes’s ‘ingenious and free sparkish notions’ to those of White (and Digby), see Rand to Hartlib, 18 July 1651, Hartlib Papers, 62/30/4a. 138 Roger Coke, A Survey of the Politicks of Mr. Thomas White, Mr. Thomas Hobbs, and Hugo Grotius . . . (1662), 139 Martinich, Hobbes, 313. epistle dedicatory. 140 Anon., Evangelium Armatum . . . also the Papists and Hobbists like Pernicious Principles (1663), 53. 141 Ursa major and minor, or, A Sober and Impartial Enquiry into those Pretended Fears and Jealousies of Popery and Arbitrary Power (1681), 19. 142 Corr., 872–5; Jacquot, ‘Cavendish and his Friends’, 21; Payne to Hobbes, 26 Oct. 1636, Corr., 40; Hobbes to Newcastle, 15 Aug. 1635, Corr., 29. 143 Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Descartes’, 17–18; Noel Malcolm, ‘Robert Payne, the Hobbes Manuscripts, and the “Short Tract” ’, in Aspects, 80–145; but see Perez Zagorin, ‘Hobbes’s Early Philosophical Development’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 54 (1993), 505–18; Karl Schuhmann, ‘Le Short Tract, première oeuvre philosophique du Hobbes’, Hobbes Studies, 8 (1995), 3–36.

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in the 1640s and retired to his family home in Abingdon. From there he corresponded with Hobbes until his death in 1651. One of these letters survives, as does an account of the others in a series of letters sent from Payne to Gilbert Sheldon. Sheldon, destined for the archbishopric of Canterbury, had himself been purged from Oxford and served throughout the Interregnum as a private chaplain in Nottinghamshire. He was a leader among the persecuted Anglicans and one of their key contacts with the exiled Stuart court.144 Sheldon had probably been acquainted with Hobbes when both men were occasional guests of Viscount Falkland in the years before the civil war.145 Through Payne, he received news of Hobbes during the critical years of Leviathan’s composition.146 The Erastian polemic in Leviathan was ostensibly directed against the papalist ecclesiology of Cardinal Bellarmine, but we have already seen how it was designed to scourge the old Church of England. Hobbes’s correspondence with Robert Payne reveals just how fully aware of this the beleaguered episcopalians were. The extreme Erastianism of De Cive had already raised the ire of many Anglicans, but only with Leviathan did Hobbes take the final step of publicly endorsing the abolition of episcopacy as a salutary remedy against clerical threats to the state. The implications of this development became the source of anxious disagreement between Payne and Hobbes. In May of 1650, urged by Payne to translate De Cive into English, Hobbes informed him that he was composing Leviathan.147 This was the first Payne knew of the work, but for six months, unawares, he had been engaged in a dispute with Hobbes over what would prove one of its most dramatic conclusions: Hobbes’s abandonment of episcopacy. In a letter of late 1649, Payne wrangled with Hobbes over whether English episcopacy had undermined the unity of state sovereignty. Regretting the necessity to ‘saw at a dispute’, Payne nonetheless felt that something had to be said, ‘if not to justifye at least to excuse those actions of our Bishops which in your opinion seem to deserve blame’.148 Payne proceeded to defend a series of Anglican practices that had provoked Hobbes’s Erastian sensibilities. He defended clerical ordination and episcopal consecration as analogous to the ‘creation of a Doctour in any faculty by another of the same faculty’. He similarly justified church courts as forums for the exercise of a profession under the aegis of the sovereign. He furthermore denied that the use of the phrase providentia divina during episcopal consecrations constituted a claim on divine right, and instead construed it as a sign of ‘religious gratitude’. Clerical anointing of kings, Payne argued, was not necessary, but was merely useful, making the ‘people more ready to obey’. He could not deny that many English bishops had claimed ‘some power above in generall’, but he justified this as a necessary fiction: ‘it is no more’, he wrote, ‘than what all states, whether 144

ODNB; Victor D. Sutch, Gilbert Sheldon: Architect of Anglican Survival, 1640–1675 (The Hague, 1973), 35–6. Robert Beddard, ‘Sheldon and Anglican Recovery’, Historical Journal, 19 (1974), 1007; Tuck, Hobbes, 33. 146 Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 323–5, and ‘Civil Religion’, 120–35. 147 Payne to Sheldon, 13 May 1650, BL Harleian MS 6942, no. 128. 148 Payne to Hobbes, late 1649, BL Harleian MS 6942, no. 153; for identification and dating, see Jeffrey R. Collins, ‘Christian Ecclesiology and the Composition of Leviathan: A Newly Discovered Letter to Thomas Hobbes’, Historical Journal, 43 (2000), 217–31. 145

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Christian or heathen that will enjoy the benefit of religion must in some sort and degree allow their priests, at least in the opinion of the people, without which religion would soon lose all its efficacy, and the publicke those benefits they expect from it’.149 Each of Payne’s justifications responded to a specific complaint raised by Leviathan. The letter thus reveals the full extent to which Hobbes’s masterpiece was composed as a rebuke to the episcopal church. Payne’s defence, which denied divine right and had a strongly utilitarian flavour, was not typical of episcopal apologetics during the Interregnum. As will be demonstrated in Chapter 7, most Anglican ecclesiology remained true to the high-church legacy of Laud. Nevertheless, Payne’s dispute with Hobbes laid bare the deep hostility against the old Church of England that animated Leviathan. Virtually all the complaints that Payne sought to defuse in 1649 were nevertheless aired in Leviathan itself.150 Hobbes’s Erastianism had been intensified by his perception that the English church had played a leading role in precipitating the civil war, and Payne understood this. He wrote in February of 1650 that his was an effort to ‘vindicate our Bishops’ from the charge that they sought a ‘power in the state, independent from the supreme, with right to execute the acts thereof, without leave from the sovereign’.151 He intuited that Leviathan was to be a manifesto of sympathy with the Erastian revolution. He went so far as to associate Hobbes with parliamentarians who, seeking to ‘possese themselves of [church] revenues and power in the state’, had represented the bishops in the ‘foulest shape’, and had rendered their ‘office odious to the people’.152 By August of 1650, Payne viewed Hobbes’s betrayal of episcopacy as a fait accompli. ‘The truth is’, he despondently informed Sheldon, ‘I feare he is engaged too farre already to retreat, and therefore I have small hops to prevail.’153 Fearful that Hobbes would undermine the cause of church and king, Payne desperately reminded him that ‘all truths are not fitt to be held at all times’. At this point, he was probably unaware that Leviathan would explicitly endorse Independency, but he was beginning to see that handwriting on the wall. He urged Hobbes that episcopacy should ‘finde at least so much favour with him, in regard of Presb[yterianism] and Indep[endency], as monarchy had don in respect of Democr[acy] and Aristoc[racy]’. But Payne understood that Hobbes’s Erastianism— his effort to make the civil sovereign a ‘Chief Pastor’ empowered to ‘settle which kinds of church government he shall think fitt’—had earned the English bishops his particular enmity. Hobbes had decided to ‘justify those who have cashired Bishops’.154 In later years, with Payne long dead and the bishops returned to favour, Hobbes tried to hide the anti-episcopal implications of Leviathan. He would brazenly assure the restored Charles II that there was ‘nothing in [Leviathan] 149

Payne to Hobbes, late 1649, BL Harleian MS 6942, no. 153. Hobbes specifically condemned: the phrase divina providentia (Lev., 374); episcopal divine-right claims (374, 421); clergy crowning kings (420); church courts (226–7, 347–5). 151 Payne to Sheldon, 4 Feb. 1650, BL Harleian MS 6942, no. 173. 152 Payne to Hobbes, late 1649, BL Harleian MS 6942, no. 153. 153 Payne to Sheldon, 19 Aug. 1650, BL Harleian MS 6942, no. 130. 154 Ibid. 150

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against Episcopacy’.155 But the evidence of the time tells a different tale. Indeed, in his prose Vita Hobbes would explicitly affirm that Leviathan had been written to sway his countrymen, ‘particularly those who had defended episcopacy’.156 The crucial innovation in Leviathan was not merely its intensified Erastianism, but its public identification of Erastianism with the cause of Independency. The extent to which these developments earned Hobbes powerful enemies at the exiled court would be reflected years later in Edward Hyde’s View and Survey of Leviathan. Hyde would play a role in Hobbes’s loss of favour among the royalists, and his later anti-Hobbesian tome would make perfectly clear how powerfully Hyde’s Anglican political allies had resented Leviathan for its ecclesiological sentiments. Hyde condemned Hobbes for having published ‘his Leviathan with so much malice and acrimony against the Church of England, when it was scarce struggling in its own ruines’, and the loyal clergy were ‘weltering in their own blood upon scaffolds’.157 Hyde—by no means a staunch clericalist—nevertheless censured Leviathan for making ‘all Ecclesiastical power to be of no signification, and the most useless thing upon the earth’.158 He specifically denounced Hobbes for the ‘good opinion he had of Independency when he published his book, because it left every man to do what liked him best in Religion, as he saies, but in truth because Cromwell was thought to be of that faction’.159 Written while the old royalists continued to adhere to traditional episcopacy, and while the Louvre group had placed the Stuart interest in the hands of the Scottish Presbyterians, Leviathan did not advance the agenda of any royalist faction. Leviathan directed its message towards Westminster, not towards Edinburgh or Saint-Germain. It did not offer a blueprint for the restoration of Stuart rule, but announced Hobbes’s own sympathy with the Erastian religious impulses of the Revolution. Leviathan was, as Hobbes conceded to Hyde, intended to facilitate his own return home, not that of Charles II. This truth has been obscured to posterity by a single event: Hobbes’s presentation of Leviathan to Charles II in late 1651. Historians have long taken this presentation to imply that the prince was always the envisaged audience for the work.160 This reading of Hobbes’s behaviour, however, proves implausible on closer inspection. Leviathan appeared in the spring of 1651. When Payne learned of its appearance in May, even this well-disposed friend read it as an abandonment of royalism. It ‘seemes to favour the present government’, he despaired to Sheldon, 155 Hobbes, Seven Philosophical Problems and Two Propositions of Geometry by Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury; with an apology for Himself and his Writings (London, 1682), epistle dedicatory; Mr Hobbes Considered, 43. 156 Vita [prose], 7. Mistranslated by Mary Lyons as ‘those who had rejected episcopacy’ in ‘the Prose Life’ printed in EL, ed. Gaskin, 248. Hobbes here also asserts his preference for episcopacy. The evidence offered to support this (his taking communion according to the prayer book on two occasions) is meagre and, in the Restoration context, self-serving, but such special pleading has convinced some historians (Reik, Golden Lands, 84, 130–2; Matinich, 157 Hyde, View and Survey, 305. Hobbes, p. x). 158 Of Leviathan’s forty-second chapter, its longest and the centrepiece of its ecclesiology, Hyde wrote that it contained ‘all the loose and licentious reflections upon piety, and religion, the undervaluing and perverting the Scripture, and the utter contemt of the Church, which are a little more warily scatter’d throughout his book . . .’ Ibid. 265. 159 Ibid. 308–9. 160 Robertson, Hobbes, 68; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 323–5; Reik, Golden Lands, 83–4, Martinich, Hobbes, 219.

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and he worried that Leviathan would encourage accommodation to the Commonwealth among the ‘better witts’.161 By the time Cromwell had decisively beaten back Charles’s attempted invasion from Scotland, Leviathan had been available for months. Charles’s defeat at Worcester occurred in early September 1651, and word of the ‘fatal battle’ trickled slowly back to France in the following weeks.162 Charles himself returned to Paris only in late October, after a harrowing escape from England incognito. Around this time the well-connected Henry Hammond reported that Hobbes had ‘been angered by some Divines’ and had ‘a mind to return’ to England.163 Presenting Leviathan to the prince had apparently not yet suggested itself to him. Indeed, Hobbes had assured Edward Hyde in the spring of 1651 that when he ‘read his Book [he] would not like it’.164 Why then did Hobbes eventually present Charles with a copy of Leviathan, handsomely hand-copied and beautifully bound?165 The incident bears all of the hallmarks of an ad hoc effort by Hobbes to cover his tracks once Charles had unexpectedly returned to France. No one expected both the defeat and the survival of the Stuart heir. His motto, reportedly, had been ‘a Crowne or a Coffin’.166 Mere days before the prince’s appearance in Paris, Bishop Bramhall wondered whether he was alive or dead and feared the worst. Such speculation was rampant.167 That Charles had escaped those who ‘thirsted after his blood’ was considered nothing short of ‘miraculous’.168 The prince’s sudden return upset the existing factional balance at the exiled court. The Louvre group, abetters of the disastrous Scottish alliance, fell from favour; the old royalists climbed back in.169 Charles’s renewed adherence to the old Church of England was now widely assumed.170 The restoration of episcopal influence made Hobbes’s position more precarious, to be sure, but he had begun to burn his bridges long before the autumn of 1651. Much earlier, in the spring, he had expressed his desire to return to England.171 By that time he fully knew that Leviathan had displeased the royalists. Hyde (through Charles Cavendish) had severely condemned the work to Hobbes, and was by June soliciting public rejoinders to it.172 Long before September, Hobbes’s loyalties had become apparent to all. Why then, did he delay his return to England through 1651? This failure to flee has been taken as evidence of Hobbes’s clear conscience.173 In truth, the delay in his departure was very likely forced by a second near-mortal illness suffered in the summer.174 Widely ignored (or perhaps conflated with his 161

Payne to Sheldon, 6 May and 16 Sept. 1651, BL Harleian MS 6942, nos. 131–2. Nicholas to Hatton, 29 Sept. 1651, BL Birch MS 4180, fo. 49. 163 Hammond to Wren, 21 Oct. 1651, ‘Illustrations of the State of the Church’, in Theologian and Ecclesiastic, ix. 295. 164 Hyde, Survey, 7. 165 BL Egerton 1910. 166 Spemont to Hall, 30 Aug. 1651, BL Add. MS 15858, fo. 265. 167 Bramhall to Ormond, 14 Oct. 1651, HMC: Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde at Kilkenny Castle (8 vols., London, 1902–20), i. 217; Browne Papers, 7 Oct. 1651, BL Add. MS 12186, fo. 296; Nicholas to Browne, 168 Browne Papers, BL Add. MS 12186, fo. 303. 29 Sept. 1651, BL Add. MS 15858, fo. 91. 169 Hutton, Charles II, 72–3. 170 Hyde to Nicholas, 13 Jan. 1652, Clarendon State Papers, ii. 115. 171 This was said to Hyde between March and June, when Hyde was between diplomatic trips to Spain and the Netherlands. Hyde, View and Survey, 7–8; Miller, Hyde, 13. 172 Hyde to Barwick, 21 June 1651, Bodl. Clarendon MS 61, fo. 206. 173 Robertson, Hobbes, 71; Hobbes himself used the defence after the Restoration (Mr Hobbes Considered, 7), but the claim that he had no ‘desire to return into England’ when he wrote Leviathan is demonstrably false. 174 Du Verdus to Hobbes, 13 Dec. 1655, Corr., 229. Du Verdus was only in Paris from 1651 (Corr., 908). 162

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illness of 1647), the 1651 illness surely prolonged Hobbes’s presence in France. He indicated to the physician Gui Patin, who attended him on this occasion, that he intended to return to England.175 This occurred many weeks before Charles II’s unexpected escape from England. Charles’s return undoubtedly caught Hobbes, like all others, by surprise.176 His presentation of Leviathan to the prince (according to Edward Hyde’s account) occurred late in 1651. This would have allowed time for the manuscript to have been copied after October, as an improvised response to Charles’s arrival. More likely, the vellum copy had already been made177 and was not originally intended for the prince. It is notable that the manuscript lacks a dedication to Charles. The printed edition was innocuously dedicated to Francis Godolphin, whom Hobbes had never met, to thank him for paying Sidney Godolphin’s legacy to Hobbes of 200 pounds.178 Surprised by the prince’s arrival, Hobbes probably hoped that the presentation of Leviathan would blunt the implications of his betrayal. This it failed spectacularly to achieve. Charles, Hobbes later conceded, was ‘displeased’.179 Near the end of 1651, Thomas Hobbes was ‘compell’d secretly to fly out of Paris’ under threat of arrest.180 Whatever its origins, the manuscript Leviathan contains textual evidence confirming the importance Hobbes attached to his own shifting evaluation of Independency. The common assumption that the manuscript is identical to the printed Leviathan is in fact false.181 In two critical passages it contains revealing divergences. Railing against the division of sovereignty, the manuscript Leviathan reads: For unless this division precede, division into opposite Armyes can never happen. If there had not first been an opinion receaved of the greatest part of England, that these powers were divided between the King, and the Lords, and the House of Commons, the people had never bene divided and fallen into this civill warre first between the temporall factions of parliamentarians and royalists, by the names of Roundheads and Cavaliers, and since between the doctrinall factions of presbyterians and Independants, which have so instructed men in this point of Soveraign Right.182

This pejorative reference to the Independents jars with the endorsement of Independency found later in Leviathan. It is thus of great interest to note that Hobbes dropped it from the published version of the work, replacing ‘doctrinall factions of presbyterians and Independants’ with a generic reference to the ‘Dissenters about the Liberty of Religion’.183 This pattern repeats itself in chapter 22. There, condemning factions in religion, the manuscript Leviathan castigates 175

Patin to Falconet, 22 Sept. 1651, Lettres de Gui Patin (3 vols., Paris, 1846), ii. 593–4. Henrietta Maria herself expected her son dead six weeks after Worcester; Hyde learnt of his survival only in November. Hamilton, Henrietta Maria, 238; Hyde to Nicholas, 7 Nov. 1651, Clarendon State Papers, ii. 110. 177 This is Tuck’s supposition. Introduction to Leviathan, pp. lxvi–lvi. 178 Hyde, View and Survey, 7; on the dedication, Lisa T. Sarasohn, ‘Was Leviathan a Patronage Artefact?’, History of 179 Mr Hobbes Considered, 28; ABL, i. 335. Political Thought, 11 (2000), 606–31 at 629–31. 180 Hyde, Survey, 8–9; Kirton to Verney, 3 Feb. 1652, HMC, 7th Report, 458. 181 As Richard Tuck has demonstrated in his Introduction to Leviathan, pp. xlvi–lvi. 182 BL Egerton 1910, fo. 59. 183 Lev., 127. 176

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‘factions for government of Religion, as of Papists, Protestants, Independents’. In the published Leviathan, ‘Independents’ is replaced by an innocuous ‘etc.’184 Given the small number of differences that mark the manuscript and printed editions of the text, these changes are surely of significance. They strongly suggest that the manuscript predates the printed Leviathan. This in turn indicates that, as Hobbes composed the ecclesiological sections of his masterpiece in 1650, his assessment of the Independents evolved in a favourable direction. Eventually deciding to endorse Independency, he presumably struck these two incidental slights against the Independents from earlier portions of Leviathan before its publication.185 This seemingly minor decision says a great deal about the intended audience and message of Leviathan. Years later Hobbes recalled that Leviathan was taken, at the exiled court, as an endorsement of Cromwell’s rule, and that he had been terrified that he might suffer ‘Dorislaus and Ascham’s fate’.186 These two regicides had been assassinated by royalists while serving the Commonwealth in Europe, and Hobbes’s evocation of their memory evidences the perilousness of his standing at court.187 Hobbes had no doubt that court clergy were his most dangerous foes. In his prose Vita he recalled that Leviathan had enraged both ‘certain English theologians’ and ‘Roman clerics’.188 It is not entirely clear which group took the lead in securing Hobbes’s banishment. De Cive had angered leading Anglicans in exile, and as early as 1649 Hobbes blamed the English clergy for the loss of his stipend.189 A report in the Commonwealth’s newssheet blamed Hobbes’s banishment on Charles’s ‘priests’, presumably meaning his Anglican advisers.190 In early 1651, Nicholas reported conflicting rumours about ‘the forbidding Hobbes to come to court’. Lord Percy (a prominent member of the Louvre group) blamed Hyde and ‘other Episcopal men’, while Nicholas had heard that ‘Papists (to the shame of the true Protestants) were the chief cause that that grand Atheist was sent away’.191 Indeed, Nicholas identified Walter Montagu as Hobbes’s chief nemesis, highly significant testimony given Montagu’s status as the Blackloists’ leading enemy. Hyde assured Nicholas that he himself had ‘indeed some hand in the discountenancing of my old friend Mr. H[obbes]’, and denied that the Catholics had played any role.192 His memory in the View and Survey of Leviathan, however, that Hobbes was threatened with arrest by a Parisian ‘justice’, seems to implicate the Catholics in the move against the philosopher.193 Both factions probably did their part in isolating Hobbes. The philosopher had alienated himself from both the old royalists and the Louvre group. Uniting these factions was a difficult trick, one uniquely turned by the Blackloists and by 184

Egerton 1910, fo. 78; Lev., 164. The alternative is that the manuscript post-dates the printed Leviathan. But this would require Hobbes to have added slights against the Independents despite his endorsement of Independency (which is included in the vellum 186 Vita [verse], 9. copy). The slights are more plausibly read as vestiges than as inconsistent additions. 187 Both are mentioned in Beh., 163. 188 Vita [prose], 9–10. 189 Payne to Sheldon, 7 Mar. 1649, BL Harleian MS 6942, no. 127. 190 Mercurius Politicus, 84 (8–15 Jan. 1652), 1344. 191 Nicholas to Hyde, 18 Jan. 1652, BL Birch MS 4180, fo. 54. 192 Hyde to Nicholas, 27 Jan. 1652, Bodl. Clarendon MS 42, fo. 316v. 193 Hyde, View and Survey, 9. 185

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Thomas Hobbes. Indeed, his departure from court coincided with a general flight by the Blackloists. To the exasperation of the royalists, the spy Watson and the banished priest Henry Holden removed to the French court in March of 1651, doing ‘much mischief ’ in favour of the Commonwealth.194 This development heightened royalist concerns that France might strike a peace with Oliver Cromwell.195 The other Blackloists were also making their move. Kenelm Digby had been writing to the Council of State for months, begging its ‘indulgence’ that he might be readmitted to England as a loyal subject of the new regime.196 Now hated among the royalists, he was again seen in Paris in July of 1651, acting ‘with such politique conduct as that he appeares not at the Louvre’.197 Digby’s return to England was delayed for some years, but Thomas White himself returned to London in the very months as did his friend Hobbes.198 So too Edmund Waller— Hobbes’s friend and a man with at least some connection to the Blackloists—made his much resented return to London in these weeks, having ‘obtain’d leave of the Rebells’ by January of 1652.199 Hobbes’s decision to publish Leviathan had been made without regarding the interests of any of the royalist factions, but his behaviour continued to parallel closely that of his Blackloist associates. In December of 1651 or January of 1652, Hobbes’s wish to return home was fulfilled. His final journey proved a rough one: ‘Th’ wind, frost, snow sharp, with age grown gray; a plunging beast, and most unpleasant sway.’200 At 63, Hobbes was a relatively elderly man, recently deathly ill on two occasions, suffering from the palsy that would blight him for the remainder of his life. He could only have expected to live out his remaining years under the triumphant English Commonwealth.

ii De Cive was, in tone and content, primarily a rueful comment on the causes and consequences of sedition. Leviathan sustained, on many occasions, that catastrophic note, but it was also marked by a more forward-looking reformist theme. Considering the dissolution of Commonwealths, Hobbes wrote of men becoming ‘at last weary of irregular jostling’, and desiring ‘with all their hearts, to conforme themselves into one firme and lasting edifice’.201 The year 1651 was, he continued, ‘a time wherein the interests of men are changed (seeing much of that Doctrine which serveth to the establishing of a new Government, must needs be contrary to that which conduced to the dissolution of the old)’. Alluding to his own account 194

Nicholas to Norwich, 13 Mar. 1651, BL Birch MS 4180, fo. 33; Nicholas to Hyde, 27 Jun. 1652, ibid., fo. 68. Browne Papers, BL Add. MS 12186, fo. 216. 196 Digby to his cousin, 21 Feb. 1650, Blacklo’s Cabal, 79, 83–6; Digby to Boeve, 14 Oct. 1650, Blacklo’s Cabal, 101–2. 197 Diary of Evelyn, ed. de Beer, 310; Browne Papers, BL Add MS 12,186, fo. 265. 198 Evelyn saw him in Paris in late May of 1651. He was in London by February. Diary of Evelyn, ed. de Beer, 302; Digby to White, 25 Feb. 1652, Blacklo’s Cabal, 91. 199 Waller was at Saint-Germain in Aug. 1651, and in London by February. Diary of Evelyn, ed. de Beer, 305, 312, 315. 200 Vita [verse], trans. in EL, ed. Gaskin, 260. 201 Lev., 221. 195

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of the salutary establishment of Independency, he wrote of the need to protect the ‘clean swept house’ that was England in 1651.202 As demonstrated in Chapter 1, Hobbes believed that a new era of stability would dawn when his own doctrines were preached from the pulpit and inculcated in the schools. These doctrines included his absolutist theory of sovereignty, to be sure, but also his Erastian ecclesiology and his unorthodox theology of obedience. The religious components of his thought consumed ever more of his attention as the revolution evolved, and it is a measure of his sense of a new age dawning that they were only fully expressed in 1651. Leviathan is shot through with calls for the establishment, by sovereign authority, of true religious and political doctrines, ‘therby to prevent Discord and Civill Warre’.203 We are now in a position to understand to whom Hobbes’s reformist manifesto was directed. He wrote of his hope that ‘this writing of mine, may fall into the hands of a Soveraign, who will consider it himselfe, (for it is short, and I think clear,) without the help of any interessed, or envious Interpreter; and by the exercise of entire Soveraignty, in protecting the Publique teaching of it, convert this Truth of Speculation, into the Utility of Practice’.204 Such appeals to ‘those that have the Power to make use’ of Leviathan must be read alongside the clear acknowledgement throughout the work that sovereignty in England had fallen into new hands. Edward Hyde recognized this, and would later castigate Hobbes for having proffered his heterodox theology to the ‘Civil Soveraign’ ruling England ‘when his Leviathan was published’.205 Doctrines were needed that would serve the ‘new Government’, not the old. Hobbes wrote of his willingness to expose Leviathan to the ‘censure of my Countrey’. On repeated occasions, specifically defending the political and religious innovations in his work, he appealed to the new legal and intellectual environment that had emerged in post-regicidal England. Where Leviathan ‘treateth of a Christian Common-wealth’, he wrote, there are some new Doctrines, which, it may be said, in a State where the contrary were already fully determined, were a fault for a Subject without leave to divulge, as being the usurpation of the place of a Teacher. But in this time, that men call not onely for Peace, but also for Truth, to offer such Doctrine as I think true, and that manifestly tend to Peace and Loyalty, to the consideration of those that are yet in deliberation, is no more, but to offer New Wine, to bee put into New Cask, that both may be preserved together.206

Leviathan, he strongly suggested, was his own effort to help shape the new regime. ‘And though in the revolution of States’, he continued, ‘there can be no very good Constellation for Truths of this nature to be born under . . . yet I cannot think [Leviathan] will be condemned at this time, either by the Publique Judge of Doctrine, or by any that desires the continuance of Publique Peace.’207 In contextualizing Leviathan, historians have traditionally focused on royalist anger at its theory of political obligation. But that indiscretion pales alongside Hobbes’s 202 205 207

203 Ibid. 125; see also 145, 231–5, 461. 204 Ibid. 254; see also 232. Lev., 482, 489. 206 Lev., 489–90; see also 482. Hyde, View and Survey, 302–3. Ibid. 491. See also the appeal to (presumably present) ‘civill law’ to silence his critics (p. 474).

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positive appeals to the new regime to act as a historic agent of reform, to ‘judge’ and implement Leviathan as the ideology of a new age. It is in this light that we must consider the persistent allegation of Hobbes’s enemies that he had composed Leviathan for Oliver Cromwell. As we shall see, Hobbes was not particularly alarmed by this charge during the Interregnum. After the Restoration, however, he rebutted it by observing that the publication of Leviathan preceded the start of the Protectorate by several years.208 This tidy self-defence has been uncritically accepted by many modern commentators.209 It does not, however, survive close inspection. It is, of course, true that England’s constitutional condition was very much in flux in 1651. Hobbes naturally understood this and, in keeping with his political principles, Leviathan reiterated on literally dozens of occasions that sovereignty could be held by ‘a man or Assembly of men’.210 That this point is repeated so relentlessly in Leviathan probably reflected Hobbes’s uncertainty as to what sort of state would emerge in England in the wake of Charles’s death. In this regard it is likewise notable that, though Leviathan maintains Hobbes’s constitutional preference for single-man rule, it is arguably less dogmatic on this point than De Cive had been. De Cive flatly pronounced monarchy ‘the best of the listed kinds of commonwealth’, whereas Leviathan compared merely their ‘difference[s] of Convenience’.211 And while this comparison in Leviathan does favour single-man rule, Hobbes dropped or minimized several points in favour of monarchy that were included in De Cive.212 Notably omitted were his assertion that monarchies were only unjust towards ‘conspicuous’ courtiers, and that monarchy was ‘the best government of all in an armed camp’.213 The latter assertion, which implied the military superiority of monarchy, must have seemed particularly flimsy in the wake of Charles I’s defeat and death. Hobbes’s continued preference for monarchy need not be doubted, but the diminishing of his insistence on this point undoubtedly reflected the constitutional indeterminacy of the moment. It is thus plausible that Leviathan’s deference to the ‘present power’ was directed towards the Rump Parliament. However, it is also plausible—even likely—that Hobbes wrote Leviathan with one eye on the rise of Oliver Cromwell. It is true that in 1651 Cromwell had not yet attained a quasi-monarchical ascendancy in the legal sense. His dominant position in the Commonwealth, however, had become blatantly obvious by the summer of 1650. Cromwell’s leading role in the regicide was widely known and even exaggerated. His conquest of Ireland and subsequent elevation to the Lord Generalship raised him above all rivals. ‘For the first five months of 1650’, writes a leading historian of the period, ‘the absent Cromwell held the public imagination, where he had acquired an elemental force.’ With Cromwell’s return from Ireland expected, parliament awarded him state palaces and gardens in February of 1650. His 208 210 212 213

209 See the introduction above for examples. Mr Hobbes Considered, 18–19; ABL, i. 335. 211 DC, 117; Lev., 131. Lev., 120–1, 128–9, 147, 157, 172, 208–9 (et passim); DC, 72, 79–80. Leviathan offers six points of comparison favouring monarchy, as opposed to approximately twelve in De Cive. DC, 120–6.

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eventual reception in London was a pomp-laden affair marked by a procession of lords, MPs, and army officers through Hyde Park.214 All this occurred while Hobbes was probably composing the passages in the latter portion of Leviathan most congenial to the new regime. Hobbes’s sense of Cromwell’s political position, moreover, was not dependent on his actual dominance within the state, but on the perceptions of observers. Critically, Cromwell’s reputation was nowhere more towering than among the exiled royalists. Attentive as they were to the last-ditch military efforts against Cromwell in Ireland and Scotland, the royalists uncannily anticipated his ascendancy. As early as 1649 royalist tracts appeared with suggestive titles such as The Coronation of Oliver Cromwell and A Coffin for Charles; a Crowne for Cromwell; a Pit for the People.215 Cromwell’s aspirations to the crown became a truism of the post-regicidal pamphlet wars.216 The royalist newssheets recognized Cromwell as the ‘proudest rebel in the pack’, presciently predicting his ascent to dominance.217 Reports that Cromwell was plotting to ‘settle himself Lord of the new Republick’218 formed the critical backdrop to the composition of Leviathan, and they worked their way into circles close to Hobbes. He was acquainted, for instance, with the Marquis of Ormonde (who would inform him of his banishment from court). Ormonde’s reports from the field in Ireland formatively shaped the royalists’ political perceptions, and if Hobbes was privy to them they can only have heightened his sense of Cromwell’s power. Ormonde constantly struggled to rally his unstable coalition of allies by warning of the Independents’ plan ‘to constitute an elective kingdom’, with ‘Crumwell or som such John of Leyden being elected . . . to establish a perfect Turkish tyranny’. Many observers, indeed, were convinced that if Cromwell defeated Ormonde he would be made king ‘in the heat of his victories over Ireland’.219 Prefiguring the eventual rule of the Major Generals, Edward Nicholas predicted that Cromwell would dissolve the Rump and govern ‘absolutely’ by means of regional military governors.220 Royalist rumours about Cromwell’s ambitions could have an eerie seer-like prescience. Hobbes’s friend Abraham Cowley, in June of 1650, reported that ‘Cromwell was received [from Ireland] with great Triumph and Magnificence at London; and it is believed, will have some new great Title conferr’d upon him (as Protector of the People’s Liberty, or some such like)’.221 Similarly, around the time of Cromwell’s departure for Ireland, the royalist Mercurius Pragmaticus reported 214 Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 258, 271; Blair Worden, ‘The Politics of Marvell’s Horatian Ode’, Historical Journal, 215 WSC, ii. 3. 3 (1984), 525–47 at 528, 530. 216 The Right Picture of King Oliver from Top to Toe (1650); The Earl of Pembroke’s speech to Nol-Cromwell . . . (1649); [Marchamont Nedham], The Second Part of Crafty Crumwell; or Oliver in his Glory as King (1648). 217 Mercurius Elencticus, Feb. 1649, and Mercurius Pragmaticus, Feb. 1649, quoted in WSC, ii. 17, 20; The Man in the Moon, 9 Jan.–14 Feb. 1650, quoted in Worden, ‘Horatian Ode’, 528. 218 Intelligence from Paris, 15 Apr. 1649, A Collection of Original Letters and Papers . . . Found among the Duke of Ormonde’s Papers, ed. Thomas Carte (2 vols., 1739), i. 265. 219 Ormonde to Bishop of Clogher, 16 Feb. 1649, Bodl. Carte MS 23, fo. 481; HMC, Report of the Pepys Manuscripts at Magdalene College Cambridge (1911), 299. 220 Nicholas to Ormonde, 8 Nov. 1651, HMC Ormonde, i. 224; Nicholas to Hyde, 11 Jan. 1652, BL Birch MS 4180, fo. 53. 221 Cowley to Bennett, 21 June 1650, Miscellanea Aulica, 139–40.

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that he would be made Lord Protector with royal prerogative.222 In May of 1650, a correspondent wrote to William Sancroft forecasting that Cromwell would be made ‘Lord Protector’.223 Months after Hobbes’s return to England, Edward Nicholas also predicted that Cromwell would dissolve the Rump, make a puppet monarch of the Duke of Gloucester, and declare himself ‘Protector’.224 These predictions shed light on an often overlooked addition to Leviathan. Discussing the occasional need for minor royal heirs to be governed by regents, Hobbes wrote that: So also (in great Common-wealths,) the Soveraign Assembly, in all great dangers and troubles, have need of Custodes libertatis; that is of Dictators, or Protectors of their Authoritie; which are as much as Temporary Monarchs; to whom for a time, they may commit the entire exercise of their Power; and have (at the end of that time) been oftner deprived thereof, then Infant Kings, by their Protectors, Regents, or any other Tutors.225

This discussion of a Protector superseding a sovereign Assembly does not appear in De Cive. Why Hobbes added the passage to Leviathan cannot be said for certain, but no small number of royalists—during the very months of its composition— expected Oliver Cromwell shortly to exemplify its thesis. Historians have been too quick to dismiss the testimony of Hobbes’s contemporaries that he wrote Leviathan to justify Cromwell’s ‘usurpation’. At the very least, a brief survey of perceptions at the time gives the lie to Hobbes’s indignant assertion that he could not possibly have predicted Cromwell’s rise in 1650–1. Certainly his Blackloist associates understood Cromwell as the essential man in their secret negotiations, and others close to Hobbes predicted Cromwell’s very Protectoral title years before its realization. And if Hobbes’s emerging interest in ecclesiology is born in mind, Cromwell’s central political role emerges only more sharply. Leviathan’s endorsement of Independency could have been read as nothing other than a declaration in favour of the Lord General’s party. Historians tend to portray Cromwell as a sectarian firebrand. Given Hobbes’s hostility to such Godly zealotry, this has rendered most modern commentators suspicious of efforts to link the philosopher and the general. Contemporaries, however, often had a very different understanding of Cromwell’s religious and political motivations. If Cromwell was in some respects a loyal son of the Reformation and an honest Protestant Erastian, he was also—in the eyes of many contemporaries— a realist prince, a Machiavellian practitioner of statecraft. Thus, where Hobbes’s Erastianism was informed by a Tacitean or Machiavellian fascination with such conquering strongmen, Oliver Cromwell was to prove an alluring figure. Contemporaneous evidence for this view follows in the following chapters, but this chapter will close by examining the retrospective evidence provided in 222

WSC, ii. 182. Dillingham to Sancroft, May 1650, Tanner Letters: Original Documents and Notices of Irish Affairs in the 16th and 17th Centuries: Extracted from the Collection in the Bodleian Library (Dublin, 1943), 328. 224 Nicholas to Hyde, 19 Sept. 1652, BL Birch MS 4180, fo. 73. 225 Lev., 133; the closest De Cive comes to such a discussion of ‘Protectors’ is its discussion of elected monarchs (pp. 98–9), but this passage does not directly parallel that of Leviathan. 223

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Hobbes’s Behemoth. Given Hobbes’s precarious position after the Restoration, open approval of Cromwell’s regime in Behemoth would have been inconceivable. His historical treatment of Cromwell is thus couched with a degree of disapprobation. As Richard Tuck has argued, however, beneath rather formulaic words of censure, Behemoth provided an assessment of the Protector that bordered dangerously on open admiration.226 Hobbes’s political doctrines called for a powerful sovereign willing to free himself from vulgar Christian morality, and able to tame the institutional church with brute force. Cautious though Behemoth necessarily was, it could not entirely hide the conviction that Oliver Cromwell had been just such a sovereign. Behemoth’s thematically central condemnation of clerical dualism, we have seen, was directed at Catholics, Presbyterians, and, more subtly, English episcopalians. Hobbes blamed sectarians, by contrast, for cultivating a dangerous religious individualism, and among those so indicted were Independents, Anabaptists, Quakers, Fifth Monarchy men, and ‘divers other sects’.227 However, although sectarian zealots are criticized in Behemoth, the work is largely a manifesto against the dangers of clericalism. Furthermore, the Independents themselves are rarely directly criticized in Behemoth. Hobbes, we have seen, had himself justified the establishment of Independency in Leviathan. In Behemoth, the magisterial Independency established by Cromwell receives virtually no rebuke, and is more often implicitly commended. As demonstrated in Chapter 3, Hobbes insisted, in Behemoth, on equating the seditious unrest of the Long Parliament with Presbyterian sentiment. However convenient in the Restoration context, this was deeply implausible. The early years of the revolt, before the Solemn League and Covenant, were marked not by hegemonic Presbyterianism but by an assertive Erastianism with which Hobbes himself had been in sympathy. In Behemoth, however, Hobbes repeatedly equated the ‘doctrine of the Presbyterians’ with the ‘very foundation of the then Parliament’s treacherous pretensions’.228 Absurdly, given his own private endorsement of the abolition of episcopacy, Hobbes attributed this drastic church reform to the Presbyterians.229 Even the execution of Charles I, which had been bitterly opposed by Presbyterian opinion, Hobbes nonetheless laid at their door. The King, he wrote, had been ‘murdered’: at the incitement of Presbyterian ministers; who are therefore guilty of the death of all that fell in that war; which were, I believe, in England, Scotland, and Ireland, near 100,000 persons. 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 is a greater.230

This chilling passage reveals both the violence of Hobbes’s anti-clericalism, and the extent of his willingness duplicitously to blame the civil war almost entirely on 226

227 Beh., 2–3. 228 Ibid. 82. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 343; Tuck, Hobbes, 35. ‘The main cause of pulling them [the bishops] down, was the envy of the Presbyterians, that incensed the 230 Beh., 95. people against them, and against episcopacy itself.’ Beh. 88–9. 229

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the Presbyterians. ‘I understand now’, proclaimed one interlocutor in Behemoth, ‘how the Parliament destroyed the peace of the kingdom; and how easily, by the help of seditious Presbyterian ministers, and of ambitious ignorant orators, they reduced this government into anarchy’.231 In the climate of the Restoration, such an inaccurate effort to blame the entire civil war on the unpopular Presbyterians served an obvious polemical purpose. As we have seen, the demonizing of the Presbyterians provided Hobbes with sufficient cover to lob shots at the episcopalians as well. Behemoth’s use of Presbyterianism was analogous to Leviathan’s use of Bellarmine. Both allowed Hobbes to rail against clericalism generally, while deftly slipping in indictments of the English bishops. In this regard it is revealing that Robert Payne, striving to protect the bishops from Leviathan’s impending critique, tried to deflect Hobbes’s criticisms onto the Presbyterians.232 But this was purely a defensive strategy. Hobbes was not inclined, as Payne recognized, to spare the English bishops from his lash. The second function of Hobbes’s conflation of the war and regicide with Presbyterianism was that it permitted him to exonerate the faction that was more conventionally blamed for those traumatic events: the Independents. In a revealing passage, he wrote that the regicide itself ‘was done by the hands of the Independents, but by the folly and first treason of the Presbyterians’. Later he warned his readers: ‘Do not believe that the Independents were worse than the Presbyterians: both the one and the other were resolved to destroy whatsoever should stand in the way to their ambition.’233 Given the prevalent Restoration perception that the Independents had perpetrated the regicide, such purportedly even-handed statements by Hobbes constituted efforts to shift the balance of the blame for Charles’s death.234 Cromwell and his Independent faction certainly play a role in Behemoth’s drama, but largely they enter the scene late, after the King has been defeated, his seal broken, his sovereignty lost. Given Hobbes’s own political decisions during the Interregnum, it did not suit his purposes to cast Cromwell and the Independents as the villains of Behemoth. The Presbyterians, as clerical usurpers, were much more useful to him in that role. After the defeat of the bishops, the clericalism that Hobbes held responsible for the war found institutional embodiment in the Presbyterian church settlement of 1646. Unsurprisingly, Hobbes vociferously condemned this settlement. He damned the Westminster Assembly, its church settlement and Directory, and the use of the Convent as a political oath.235 Such efforts to uphold clerical control, he concluded, had triggered the civil war and 231

Ibid. 109. Payne to Hobbes, [late 1649?], BL Harleian MS 6942, no. 153. Payne tried to distinguish between the Presbyterians and Anglicans by observing that the former employed Calvinist resistance theory, while the latter espoused passive obedience. Hobbes debunked this distinction in Behemoth. See his critique of the Whole Duty of Man. If ‘the Presbyterian ministers were tried’ by this text, wrote Hobbes, ‘they would go near to be found not guilty’ 233 Beh., 155, 165. (Beh., 47). 234 ‘It seems that Presbyterians also (in order to their ends) would fain have had the King murdered.’ Ibid. 131. 235 Ibid. 89, 131, 124, 172. 232

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achieved the execution of Charles. In contrast to this bitter portrait of the Presbyterians as the sowers of sedition, Hobbes largely spared the Independents in his account of the civil war itself. Throughout his narration of events up to 1649, the Independents generally, and Oliver Cromwell particularly, figure scarcely at all. Cromwell, though a national figure by 1645, does not make a substantive appearance in Behemoth until after the defeat of the royalists.236 This rhetorical strategy allowed Hobbes to attribute the civil war to the influence of the Presbyterians, and to portray Cromwell as a strongman promising to restore order. After yet another passage blaming the war on ‘seditious Presbyterian ministers’, he noted that the task of reconstituting government promised to be more difficult than the task of destroying it. He then observed that parliament, after the war, found itself beholden to the general who had secured its triumph. Hobbes did not doubt that Cromwell, for his part, was motivated by a desire for supreme power.237 Cromwell dominates the final two dialogues of Behemoth, and the constant, underlying contrast is between parliament as the usurping body that caused the civil war and Cromwell, the ambitious strongman and restorer of order. Hobbes understood the victorious Cromwell as Interregnum England’s great power holder, and Behemoth looks to Cromwell to settle the sovereignty question. Recounting the King’s imprisonment at the hands of the army, Hobbes recalled the old royalist hope that Cromwell might resettle Charles on the throne. ‘He was resolved’, wrote Hobbes, ‘to march up to the city and Parliament, to set up the King again (and be the second man), unless in the attempt he found better hope, than yet he had, to make himself the first man, by dispossessing the King.’238 Either way, Hobbes assumed, Cromwell’s desire was to re-establish single-man rule in England. This was, of course, the form of government preferred by Leviathan, and Behemoth scarcely hid its conviction that Cromwell should have established himself on the throne. Cromwell, he wrote, ‘after he had gotten into his own hands the absolute power of England, Scotland, and Ireland, by the name of Protector, did never dare to take upon him the title of King, nor was he ever able to settle it upon his children’. The conqueror who fails to assume the monarchy, Hobbes wrote, ‘will be thought a fool’, and Hobbes did not doubt that Cromwell’s failure to secure the crown was a failure of nerve, and not a matter of conviction.239 Of the 1657 effort to grant Cromwell the crown, Hobbes wrote that this was ‘a bold motion, and which would, if prosperous, have put an end to a great many men’s ambition, and to the licentiousness of the whole army’.240 Throughout Behemoth, the ineptitude and usurpations of parliament are placed against Cromwell’s lustrous military victories and desire to reassert unified sovereign power.241 But the essential feature of Hobbes’s Cromwell was not merely his capacity to secure de facto power by force of arms. Behemoth consistently 236

237 Beh., 109. One passing mention does note Cromwell’s first military forays. Beh., 122. Ibid. 138–9. 239 Ibid. 109; although see the Restoration Dialogue of the Common Laws (p. 64), in which Hobbes recalls the 240 Beh., 188–9. ‘republic returned into monarchy by Oliver . . .’. 241 Ibid. 122–9. 238

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portrayed Cromwell as a ruler who had freed himself from the constraints of Christian morality, and who specifically employed his power in the interest of taming the clergy. Cromwell himself had developed a particularly keen sense of his mission against clerical power during the campaigns in Ireland and Scotland. Hobbes’s account of these campaigns, which were undertaken during the very composition of Leviathan, took a similar view. Remarkably, given that these wars were waged against the interests of the Stuarts, Hobbes accepted Cromwell’s own understanding of these campaigns as victories won over sinister clerical enemies. His account of the Irish revolt castigated the ‘Papists’, who would ‘by no means subject themselves to Protestants’. After recounting the ‘extraordinary diligence’ with which Cromwell subdued Ireland, Hobbes exclaimed: ‘What a miserable condition was Ireland reduced to by the learning of the Roman, as well as England was by the learning of the Presbyterian clergy!’ The defeat of the Catholic interest was, he wrote, ‘one more step towards Cromwell’s exaltation to the throne’.242 Hobbes portrayed the campaign in Scotland similarly. Charles had made himself a ‘prisoner’ of the Presbyterians, and ‘yielded to all that the Church required’. He went so far as to conclude that the defeat at Dunbar ‘happened well for the King’, delivering as it did a blow to his Presbyterian allies.243 Hobbes characterized the resistance of the Scottish Presbyterians to union with Cromwell’s England as antiErastian, and blamed it on Scottish rejection of ‘a subordination of the Church to the civil state in the things of Christ’.244 This language was reminiscent of the Lord General’s own admonition to the Scottish clergy at Edinburgh castle. Behemoth, indeed, sets up a general opposition between Cromwell and his clericalist enemies. The divisive decision to behead the Presbyterian conspirator Christopher Love, approved by Cromwell and damaging to the royalist cause, was nonetheless credited by Hobbes in Behemoth. ‘Both [Love] and the rest of the Presbyterians’, he wrote, ‘are and were enemies to the King’s enemies, Cromwell and his fanatics, for their own, not for the King’s sake.’ Hobbes expressly characterized Love’s correspondence with Charles II as a second ‘treason’ against the Commonwealth.245 The Toleration Act of 1650, rammed through the Rump by Cromwell and his allies, was characterized in Behemoth as a blow against the Presbyterians: ‘They voted liberty of conscience to the sectaries; that is, they plucked out the sting of Presbytery, which consisted in a severe imposing of odd opinions upon the people, impertinent to religion, but conducing to the advancement of the power of the Presbyterian ministers.’246 Behemoth thus endorsed the Toleration Act by adopting the quasi-Erastian logic of Congregationalist polemics. Cromwell’s own self-image then, as a slayer of clerical pretension, found a striking parallel in Hobbes’s account. Moreover, while modern accounts attribute great sincerity to Cromwell’s religiosity, Hobbes understood Cromwell as a 242

243 Ibid. 166–8. 244 Ibid. 172. Ibid. 162–3. ‘These Presbyterians therefore cannot be rightly called loyal, but rather double perfidious, unless you think that 246 Beh., 169. as two negatives make an affirmative, so two treasons make loyalty.’ Beh., 174–5. 245

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manipulator of religious passions, not a slave to them. He conceded that Cromwell’s power was partly sustained by his sectarian allies in the army, but he did not attribute sincere religious motives to the Lord General himself. The sects, Hobbes wrote: ‘were Cromwell’s best cards, whereof he had a very great number in the army, and some in the House, whereof he himself was thought one; though he were nothing certain, but applying himself always to the faction which was strongest, and was of a color like it’.247 Such a manipulation of religious passions, though a dubious characterization of Cromwell, would nonetheless have constituted a classic realist strategy on the part of a Tacitean sovereign. It calls to mind Machiavelli’s dictum that the prince must feign piety. The ideal of the Tacitean prince inspired many of the greatest early modern political theorists, particularly Machiavelli and the French sceptics.248 As demonstrated in Chapter 1, Hobbes’s great innovation was to wed a Tacitean amoral politics with an emphasis on sovereign control of the church typical of Protestant political theory. His political doctrine sought to inculcate in the sovereign a willingness to employ Erastian ecclesiology in order openly to control the political power of the institutional church, and secretly to control the intellectual and emotional power of Christian doctrine. To judge from Behemoth’s treatment of Cromwell, Hobbes entertained the possibility that Cromwell might prove just such a sovereign.249 Where Charles I had martyred himself serving the interests of the Laudians,250 and Charles II had foolishly placed his fortunes in the hands of the Presbyterians, Cromwell strode across the pages of Behemoth in utter command of his own fortunes, manipulating religious passions for his own political ends. Hobbes’s Cromwell recalled the Augustus of the Horae Subsecivae, who had seized the ‘Supremacy in matters Ecclesiastical, which is one of the chiefest guides of a Commonwealth’.251 Posterity remembers Cromwell as a true believer, the ringleader of the saints, and such zealotry hardly seems likely to have seduced Hobbes’s hard-nosed political loyalties. But contemporaries were far more prone to portray Cromwell as a strongman, an ambitious practitioner of statecraft. From 1648 on, he was relentlessly characterized as a ‘Machiavellian’.252 He was widely believed to have aimed at the crown from the earliest days, and among the ‘Machiavellian treacheries’ 247 Beh., 136. This echoed the anonymous Perfect Politician: Or the . . . Life and Actions (Military and Civil) of Oliver Cromwell (1681). There Cromwell’s attachment to toleration is explained as a ‘masterpiece in politics’, which ‘procured 248 Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 5–62. him a party’. Quoted in MacGillivray, Restoration Historians, 24. 249 Noel Malcolm has discovered evidence of one translator of Behemoth who read Hobbes’s portrait of Cromwell in precisely this way. Adam Ebert, a Frankfurt law professor and servant of Frederick I, believed that Hobbes had presented Cromwell as a skilful practitioner of the Tacitean art of statecraft. Malcolm considers this a plausible reading of Behemoth. Noel Malcolm, ‘Behemoth Latinus: Adam Ebert, Tacitism, and Hobbes’, Filozofski vestnik, 24 (2003), 85–120 at 106–19. 250 Charles had been ‘a King that sought no greater Glory upon earth, but to be indulgent of his people, and a pious defender of the Church of England’. From the author of Leviathan, this was faint praise. Hobbes, Dialogue of 251 Three Discourses, 50. the Common Laws, 64. 252 Pejorative portrayals of Cromwell commonly presented him as a Machiavellian. Raab, English Face of Machiavelli, 146–54; Worden, ‘Marvell’s Horatian Ode’, 535–47; William Prynne, The Machavilian Cromwellist and Hypocritical, Perfidious New Statist (1648), 11; Anon., The World in a Maize, or Oliver’s Ghost (1659), 5; The Loyall Subjects Jubilee, or Cromwel’s Farewell to England (1649).

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continually ascribed to him was the political manipulation of religious zeal. ‘This is a saint, and no saint’, declared one critical tract, ‘his religion is nothing but regicide. . . . His success his savior, his will his law.’253 ‘If the people will say the Lord’s prayer’, ran the mock advice of another, ‘let them pray to your Lordship, as becomes a good Christian.’254 The image of Cromwell as ‘an outside Saint with a white devil within’255 could reach hyperbolic heights (‘he hath always hated the true God . . . hated the church and all discipline and order therein’).256 The memory of Cromwell as a conscientious Puritan vied in his day with a more prevalent image of him as a Machiavellian realist, aiming at power and willing above all to manipulate religious sentiment to achieve it. Such a figure was far more likely to have lured Hobbes’s political sympathies in the chaotic years after Charles I’s death, and is consistent with the portrait of Cromwell he later drew in Behemoth.257 By disassociating Cromwell from sectarian zealotry, Hobbes deftly managed to maintain him as a representative of power and order amid the chaos of the Revolution’s religious unrest.258 And herein lay the logic of Leviathan’s endorsement of Independency. Properly manipulated, Congregationalist ecclesiology could serve as a useful tool for securing unified sovereignty. Atomized, the institutional church posed little political threat to the prince. Shorn of authority, the church’s insidious sway over the moral calculations of the sovereign was diminished. Hobbes’s political theory was dedicated to destroying clerical power both institutional and intellectual. Behemoth gave the Cromwellian devil his due for having served this project with his sword. Leviathan had likewise commended Independency for wresting away from the clergy their power over doctrine—the source of their ‘ancient authority’—and for freeing human reason. It credited the Independents with loosening the knots of ‘Pontificall power’, Catholic, episcopal, and Presbyterian, and for exposing the ‘Pious Frauds’ which had undermined state sovereignty.259 Hobbes returned to England in 1651 because, with the war over, the King dead, and the Presbyterians fallen from grace, he saw an opportunity to achieve a political settlement that accorded with his own principles. The Stuart cause had been undermined by the combined efforts of its Laudian and later Presbyterian allies, but the newly dominant Independents promised to constitute a regime along Erastian lines. Cromwell in particular may well have appealed to Hobbes as 253

254 Earl of Pembroke’s Speech to Nol-Cromwell, 2. A Hue and Cry After Cromwell (1649), 1–2. ‘The Character of Protector’, anonymous manuscript poem in Tomason tracts [E 743 (12)]. 256 Picture of King Oliver, 4–5. 257 Different Machiavellian undertones in Behemoth are identified in Wootton, ‘Hobbes’s Machiavellian Moments’, 228–34. 258 Professor Sommerville disagrees. He does so, however, largely by citing the passages in Behemoth that condemn Cromwell, and neglecting countervailing evidence. No one would suggest that Hobbes penned an openly ‘gentle’ or ‘respectful’ account of Cromwell. The argument is that he wrote a rhetorically clever account, in which pro forma criticism veiled more dangerous admiration. It is thus insufficient, as a rebuttal to this argument, merely to cite critical passages of the former type as if they were conclusive. Even less satisfactory is Professor Sommerville’s use of Hobbes’s 1662 self-apologia, Mr Hobbes Considered in his Loyalty, Religion, Reputation, and Manners, as a transparent account of his political views. Sommerville, ‘Hobbes and Independency’, 170; Sommerville, ‘Hobbes, Behemoth’, 213–15. 259 Lev., 478–80. 255

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a sovereign potentially true to Leviathan’s ideal. Manipulating religious sentiments rather than serving them, he had wielded his sword in defence of the state’s ecclesiastical prerogative. In the name of godly reform, malcontents had been purged from pulpit and university. Allying himself expeditiously with Congregationalist ecclesiological principles, Cromwell had systematically eradicated clerical privilege and transformed (as the next chapter will demonstrate) the ministry into a theological and political arm of the state. Hobbes’s judgement about Cromwell’s religious sincerity almost certainly missed the mark, but his judgement about the Lord Protector’s desire to crush the institutional power of the church proved dead right. If Hobbes failed to find a Machiavellian sovereign in Cromwell, or a ruler freed from any internal obligation to Christianity, he nonetheless found an Erastian ruler dedicated to waging war on the church’s institutional power. To this revolutionary end, cautiously but decisively, Hobbes declared his allegiance. His double-edged Erastianism—pointing in one direction towards the ecclesiological traditions of Protestantism, in the other towards the deeply secular political realism of Machiavellian humanism—was a weapon he believed Cromwell had taken up in the revolutionary cause. In this way Hobbes’s later critics were vindicated. Leviathan was to prove a fitting political theory for the Cromwellian revolution.

5

Hobbes among the Cromwellians By late January of 1652, Thomas Hobbes was again in London for the first time in eleven years. The new Commonwealth was governed by the Rump Parliament and a Council of State, but many perceived that a single, dominant hand directed affairs. Only weeks after Hobbes’s return, his associate Lodewijck Huygens reported from London that Cromwell and his army were ‘master of everything’, and other observers surmised that ‘General Cromwell’ was ‘practical director of the government here’, or ‘in effect King’.1 This was only partially true, but was nonetheless an engrained perception. Hobbes himself would conclude retrospectively that by 1652 the Rump Parliament was a mere fig leaf covering Cromwell’s supremacy.2 In these months Cromwell had, in fact, presided over private counsels in which the possibility of a monarchical settlement had been seriously discussed.3 That he would himself assume the throne was widely rumoured. Since his triumphant return from Scotland in September, Cromwell was at the apex of his popularity among supporters of the Revolution. He had been re-elected to the Council of State only weeks before Hobbes’s arrival. Perhaps he encountered the philosopher when Hobbes presented himself to the Council and declared his submission to the regime. Hobbes later claimed that he had appeared before the Council out of fear that he would be mistaken for a spy.4 He was probably required to subscribe to the regime’s Engagement, which he had implicitly defended in Leviathan’s final pages. The Interregnum is the most neglected and least understood period in the biography of Thomas Hobbes.5 Quentin Skinner once influentially surmised that Hobbes, though ‘widely admired’ abroad, met with ‘unthinking rejection’ among his countrymen.6 Hobbes is assumed to have spent the 1650s in ‘seclusion’, preparing his works of natural philosophy for the press and corresponding with his Continental associates, a ‘prophet without honour in his own country’.7 This picture—of an apolitical Hobbes quietly immersed in his scientific researches, 1 Lodewijck Huygens, The English Journal, 1651–1652, ed. and trans. A. G. H. Bachrach and R. G. Collmer (Leiden, 1982), 75–6; CSPV, xxviii. 233; Leo Miller, John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard (New York, 1985), 49. 2 Vita [verse], 9. 3 Diary of Whitelocke, 273–4. 4 Vita [verse], 9. He later advised Du Verdus on this subject. Du Verdus to Hobbes, 26 Mar. 1656, Corr., 263. 5 For brief accounts, see Tuck, Hobbes, 31–2; Sommerville, Hobbes in Context, 23–6; Reik, Golden Lands, 165–76; Rogow, Hobbes, ch. 9. Longer, but misleading in some respects, is Martinich, Hobbes, chs. 8–9. 6 Skinner, ‘Thomas Hobbes and his Disciples in France and England’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 8 (1965–6), 153–67. 7 Skinner, ‘Hobbes’s Life’, in Visions, iii. 23; Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the European Republic of Letters’, in Aspects, 458.

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secure in the ‘protective bosom of the Cavendish family’8—has buttressed the prevailing assumption that Hobbes, though marginalized by his clerical foes, remained a royalist throughout the Interregnum. It is a portrait of Hobbes that places a distance between the philosopher and his times. The next three chapters aim at closing that distance and recovering his political assessment of the Cromwellian decade. The patchy nature of the sources renders a detailed narrative of Hobbes’s Interregnum biography impossible.9 However, a great deal of suggestive and neglected evidence—in Hobbes’s correspondence, minor writings, pattern of association, and reception—permits a considerable reconstruction of his life and politics during these critical years. Far from a marginalized royalist, Thomas Hobbes during the Interregnum came as near as he ever would to finding a hospitable environment for his political thought. His admixture of Protestant Erastian and secular humanist impulses earned him devotees among men whose allegiance to the Cromwellian regime was similarly motivated. From 1652 to 1660, Hobbes is best understood as a supporter of the English Revolution, and though his de factoist theory of obligation eased his accommodation with the Commonwealth, it was not a mere deference to established authority that drew him to the Cromwellian regime. Rather, Hobbes was drawn by the seductive Erastianism of triumphant Independency. The Interregnum reception of his work, furthermore, reflected the double-bottomed quality of his ecclesiology. Chapter 6 will examine Hobbes’s reception among the Independent divines loyal to Cromwell: to them he was a thinker attractive for his Erastianism, but dangerous because of his underlying religious scepticism. First, however, this chapter will examine those most congenial to Hobbes and his religious politics: the anti-clerical, sceptical, and often republican circles of Interregnum London.

i Few historians have grasped how Cromwellian London proved an intellectual environment very much to Hobbes’s liking. Arguing that Hobbes was an ‘isolated figure’ during the Interregnum, Professor Skinner once asserted that the philosopher spent the Interregnum rusticating in Derbyshire with the Cavendishes, where he supposedly missed the ‘learned conversation’ he had known in France. But Skinner precisely inverted Aubrey’s report on this point. In truth, Hobbes eschewed the Cavendish estates and instead ‘was much in London till the restauration of his majesty’, forgoing Devonshire’s library in favour of the ‘learned conversation’ of the capital.10 Indeed, he settled in London immediately on his return to England 8

Condren, Hobbes, 8. Hobbes may have ensured this. There is a suspicious gap in his correspondence between May 1651 and Nov. 1653, the period of his return to England. Of the letters preserved in Hobbes’s papers, only four are from English correspondents and over forty are from Hobbes’s (presumably less politically compromised) French disciples. Of the letters found elsewhere, the imbalance tilts in the opposite direction (eight French letters and twenty English). 10 Skinner, ‘Disciples’, 153; ABL, i. 337–8. 9

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(Huygens visited him there in February of 1652).11 After the Restoration Hobbes would keep chambers at Devonshire’s London residence of Little-Salisbury House.12 But during the Interregnum he required independent living quarters. He maintained rooms on Fetter Lane, near Fleet Street, and collected correspondence at ‘the sign of the greene Dragon, in Paules Churchyard’ (Andrew Crooke’s bookshop). He apparently had few money worries, to judge from his decision in 1655 to settle land on his nephew.13 Hobbes’s relations with the Cavendishes apparently became somewhat patchy. Devonshire provided occasional gifts of money,14 and there is no reason to doubt Hobbes’s continued good relations with his chief patron, although when Devonshire required a mathematics tutor for his son Hobbes did not resume his old duties.15 Cavendish family tradition later held that Devonshire, though fond of Hobbes, ‘would often express an Abhorrence of some of his Principles in Policy and Religion’.16 Hobbes’s relations with Devonshire, in any event, are of little political significance. After compounding for his estates in 1645, Devonshire was not a prominent royalist partisan. More revealing are signs of Hobbes’s increasing distance from the more politically visible Newcastle. Their relations seem to have dwindled after 1651, perhaps compromised by the affront Leviathan had delivered to the royalist cause.17 (In June of 1650, Newcastle’s brother Charles Cavendish reported that while Newcastle had been at Breda—negotiating with the Scots—he had seemed not as ‘earnest’ as he once had been for Hobbes’s writings.18) Newcastle remained an exile though the 1650s, but his wife Margaret compounded in 1651. During the Interregnum Hobbes once happened upon her in London but perhaps tellingly refused her invitation to dinner. Lady Cavendish would later put distance between herself and Hobbes.19 Hobbes’s return to the rarefied, protected world of the Cavendishes would only fully occur after the Restoration. During the Interregnum London suited him, mostly for the freer intellectual environment offered by the metropolis. In his verse Vita Hobbes recalled that Interregnum Londoners wrote what they wished, uncensored, provided they remained politically quiescent.20 He attributed this freedom of thought to the collapse of clerical power in England, and contrasted this with the stifling, ‘priestly’ atmosphere of the exiled court: Down go the Miters, neither do we see That they Establish the Presbytery. Th’ Ambition of the stateliest Clergie-Men, Did not at all prevail in England then.

11 Huygens, Journal, 74. Evelyn visited in 1655, and Samuel Fermat in 1657; Diary of Evelyn, ed. de Beer, 365; Fermat 12 Pell Papers, 31 Mar. 1662, BL Add. MS 4425, fo. 238; ABL, i. 340. to Hobbes, 5 Jun. 1657, Corr., 475. 13 ABL, i. 337; other letters went to ‘Blackmore’s Head in Fetterlane’. Contrary to standard accounts, Hobbes rented lodgings in London as late as the 1670s, with a maker of mathematical instruments named Robert Jole. Malcolm, 14 Vita [prose], 12. ‘Behemoth Latinus’, 99. 15 Hartlib Papers, 29/5/15a and 29/5/43a. 16 White Kennet, Memoirs of the Family of Cavendish (1708), 14. 17 Malcolm, Biographical Register, Corr., 815–16. 18 Cavendish to Pell, 20 June 1650, BL Add. MS 4278, fo. 302. 19 Malcolm, Biographical Register, Corr., 811–12. 20 Vita [verse], 10; trans. in EL, ed. Gaskin, 259–60.

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Bishops thrown down, a threatened Presbyterian settlement gutted: these lines recall Leviathan’s endorsement of Independency for having unravelled ‘praeterpoliticall’ church government in successive stages. And Hobbes linked the plight of the clergy with the power of Cromwell. ‘There was no Prelate then, nor Presbyter. / Nothing but Arms and Souldiers, one alone / Destin’d to Rule, and Cromwel was that one.’22 Composed during the Restoration, these lines were qualified with conventional condemnations of usurpation and regicide, but Hobbes’s approval of the open intellectual culture of the Interregnum was even then scarcely concealed. Leviathan itself was published at the start of a legal hiatus—from 1651 to 1653—during which no licensing system regulated printed works in England.23 Hobbes would later concede that the publication of the controversial religious arguments of Leviathan was only possible after the collapse of clerical censorship.24 It was also during the Interregnum that he began (at least according to Aubrey) what was perhaps his most openly heretical work: Historia Ecclesiastica. This verse history of the ‘encroachment of the clergie (both Roman and reformed) on the civil power’ contained all but explicit Arian traits.25 The Protectorate would eventually recover some control of the presses, but the Revolution had triggered a massive expansion in the scale of London’s print culture.26 Interregnum London awaits its historian, but there can be little doubt that the institutions of the ‘public sphere’ traditionally associated with the Restoration were making their appearance in the 1650s. Beyond the print culture, political clubs also appeared on the scene, Harrington’s Rota being the most famous.27 The Royal Society had Interregnum paternity in the ‘Invisible College’, weekly scientific gatherings held at Gresham College. That queen institution of the public sphere, the coffeehouse, arrived in London in 1652, and by 1660 there were eighty-two in the city.28 Further study is required, but Interregnum London certainly contributed to the development of those cultural institutions that nursed the early Enlightenment.29 There is little wonder that a freethinker such as Hobbes was ‘content’ in this setting, ‘enjoying the benefit of a tranquil life’.30 His health improved, and a false 21

22 Ibid. Vita [verse], 8–9. English translation (anonymous and contemporaneous) Gaskin, 259–60. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998), 230–3. 24 Vita [prose], 7–8; see also Kennet’s account of Hobbes’s ‘Narrative of Heresy’. Kennet, Memoirs, 15. In the Latin Leviathan of 1668, Hobbes recalled that this new ‘freedom to write’ was only possible after the abolition of the court 25 ABL, i. 338. of High Commission. Leviathan, ed. Curley, 539. 26 David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Princeton, 2000), ch. 7; Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, 1994), ch. 1. 27 H. F. Russell Smith, Harrington and his Oceana (Cambridge, 1914), 101–8; Johns, Nature, 112. 28 Graham Parry, The Seventeenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1603–1700 (London, 1989), 91–5; Sean Kelsey, Inventing the Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Stanford, Calif., 1997), ch. 2; Steve Pincus, ‘ “Coffee Politicians Does Create”: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture’, Journal of Modern History, 67 (1995), 807–34 at 811–13. 29 Stephen Inwood, A History of London (London, 1998), 236–8; James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in 30 De Martel to Hobbes, 26 Aug. 1654, Corr., 201. Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2001), 19–39, 226–47. 23

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rumour even circulated that he had married!31 In late 1656 Hobbes reported that he had ‘never been better’.32 His correspondents mentioned London’s many ‘gentlemen and ladies’ (the ‘best wits’) who were Hobbes’s ‘friends’, and one assured him that his thought enjoyed the ‘vogue of those youths that pretend to any thing of ingenuity’.33 Leviathan, it was reported in some quarters, enjoyed success as a textbook among the ‘Tutors’.34 Every one of Hobbes’s major political works appeared in a 1658 catalogue of the ‘most vendible Books in England’.35 The ‘plague of the Hobbian Errors’, Henry More would write of the Interregnum, ‘at that time began to spread most dreadfully’.36 Hobbes seems to have been a familiar figure in the capital’s intellectual circles, one renowned for a curmudgeonly demeanour, a salty tongue, and a ‘supercilious, Saturnine Opiniarety’.37 As we shall see, many of his friends and colleagues had made their peace with the new regime. For his ‘learned conversation’ Hobbes attended discussion groups, such as the periodic gatherings of scientists at Charles Scarborough’s residence.38 He entertained a parade of distinguished visitors, including the lawyer and classicist Samuel Fermat.39 Hobbes also seems to have known the German educational reformer and ‘intelligencer’ Samuel Hartlib.40 It was during these years that Hobbes at last met the venerable John Selden, whose thought, we have seen, strongly influenced him.41 Leviathan, indeed, contained further evidence of Hobbes’s admiration for Selden’s researches into antiquity. The work commended Selden’s ‘excellent Treatise’, Titles of Honour (1614), which, Hobbes wrote, supported the claim that honorific titles signified merely ‘the value set upon them by the Soveraigne Power of the Commonwealth’.42 Beyond this general compliment, there are hints in Leviathan that Selden’s Titles of Honor exerted influence on Hobbes. Selden’s work, for instance, detailed the historical use of the phrase Dei gratia (or providentia Dei) by bishops to claim a ‘part of Royaltie’, complained about the usurpation by churchmen of titles containing the ‘proper notes of Soveraigntie’, and dismissingly discussed the tradition of bishops anointing kings.43 All of these historical observations buttressed Hobbes’s Erastian understanding of sovereignty and were included in Leviathan.44 (The implication of the phrase Dei gratia was particularly troublesome to Hobbes. He debated it with Robert Payne while composing Leviathan.45) 31

Mylon to Hobbes, 9 Apr. 1656, Corr., 274; Du Verdus to Hobbes, 25 July 1654, Corr., 189. Sorbière to Hobbes, 3 Dec. 1656, Corr., 389. 33 Du Verdus to Hobbes, 12 Mar. 1657, Corr., 454; Bathurst to Hobbes, 27 May 1651, Corr., 180; Stubbe to Hobbes, 34 Hyde to Barwick, 25 July 1659, in Schuhmann, Chronique, 167. 30 Jan. 1657, Corr., 440. 35 Skinner, ‘Hobbes’s Theory of Political Obligation’, in Visions, iii. 266–7. 36 Henry More, ‘Animadversions on Hobbs, concerning Thoughts of Man’, in Letters on Several Subjects . . . (1694), 94. 37 Hooke to Boyle, 1664, BL Add. MS 6193, fo. 68; Evelyn to [unknown], BL Add. MS 4229, fo. 59; Wallis to Tenison, 30 Nov. 1680, Lambeth MS 930, fo. 55; John Evelyn, Numismata; a Discourse on Medals . . . (1697), 340–1. 38 Walter Pope, The Life of the Right Reverend Father in God, Seth, Lord Bishop of Salisbury (1697), 117. 39 Fermat to Hobbes, 5 June 1657, Corr., 474. 40 In the mid-1650s Hartlib made notations (‘see Hobbes about the Magnett’) indicating an acquaintance. BL Add. 41 ABL, i. 369. MS 4279, fo. 48. 42 Lev., 68–9. 43 John Selden, Titles of Honour, 116–18, 128–34. 44 Lev., 420–1, 474. 45 Payne to Hobbes, [late 1649], BL Harleian MS 6942, no. 153. 32

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Selden’s researches into the religious life of the ancient Hebrews had also continued. The first of three volumes of his De Synedriis, published in late 1650, probably appeared too late to have influenced Leviathan. The two works, however, contain similarities that evidence the strong intellectual commonalities of their authors. The Westminster Assembly had been exercised by debate on whether the ancient Jewish Sanhedrin provided a model for modern, Christian polities, and, if so, whether it exemplified an essentially Erastian form of united spiritual and temporal authority, or a dualist model. Selden had favoured the former possibility, and his De Synedriis was designed to buttress this position. The first volume dealt primarily with the matter of excommunication. It concluded that, beyond the informal shaming and isolation used as disciplinary tools by local congregations, sovereign authority alone had coercively forbidden individual Jews from religious observances.46 Selden was also coming to focus with increasingly narrowness on the limited role of spiritual officers as preachers and teachers. He thus forbade coercive authority to the clergy, was increasingly taking small, localized congregations as normative, and surrendered jurisdictional authority over the church to the state. Several modern commentators have noted the close proximity of these views with those of the newly ascendant Independents.47 It is thus significant that Leviathan, whether directly under Selden’s influence or not, contained a very similar view of excommunication, and a similarly Erastian reading of the ancient Jewish polity. Returned to London, Hobbes presented Selden with copies of De Cive and Leviathan, and Aubrey reported that the two men became associates during the Interregnum.48 The congeniality of their association was a matter of dispute among contemporaries. Aubrey reported that Hobbes attended Selden on his deathbed in November of 1654 and, when a minister came to ‘assail’ Selden, Hobbes challenged him: ‘What, will you that have wrote like a man now die like a woman?’ This supposedly prompted Selden to turn the divine away. John Wallis, relying on Gerard Langbaine’s very different account of the story, reported that on Hobbes’s arrival Selden had refused to admit him with the cutting words: ‘No Hobbes, no atheists.’ To this Hobbes supposedly responded that Selden had ‘lived like a wise man, and died like a fool’.49 Other reports circulated of Selden’s refusal to associate with Hobbes.50 Richard Baxter would later write that ‘the Hobbians and other Infidels would have persuaded the World that Selden was of their mind’. Matthew Hale, however, had assured him that ‘Selden was an earnest Professor of the Christian Faith, and so angry an Adversary to Hobbs that he hath rated him out of the Room’.51 Whether reciprocated or not, Hobbes’s enthusiasm for Selden is not open to doubt. The open demonstration of that enthusiasm, moreover, was of more than just intellectual significance. After the execution of Charles, Selden 46 48 49 50 51

47 Tuck, ‘Grotius and Selden’, CHPT, 529; Barbour, Selden, 314–15. Barbour, Selden, 290–3, 308–14. ABL, i. 337, 369; Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the Royal Society’, in Aspects, 328–9. ABL, ii. 221; Wallis to Tenison, 30 Nov. 1680, Lambeth MS 930, fo. 55. Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, quoted in Schuhmann, Chronique, 123. Reliquiae Baxterianae, iii. 48–9.

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made his peace with the Interregnum political order. Cromwell reportedly approached him about drafting a constitution, and the Erastian arguments of De Synedriis were much appreciated by the Independents.52 The political trajectories of Selden and Hobbes thus ran in close parallel. Both began as royalists, found themselves in awkward sympathy with the Erastianism of the Long Parliament, and eventually accommodated themselves to the ascendant Cromwellian Independents. Nor was Selden the only prominent revolutionary with whom Hobbes rubbed elbows. In the summer of 1652 he visited the home of Robert Honeywood, the soldier who served in an embassy to Sweden with Algernon Sidney, married Henry Vane’s daughter, and would be named to the Council of State in 1659.53 Hobbes was also friendly with William Brereton, whose father had served as a parliamentary general and was known, according to Hyde, for a great ‘aversion to the government of the church’.54 These associations merely suggest the shape of Hobbes’s broader social and intellectual circle. He certainly did not find himself marginalized from the dominant ideological mood. Mere weeks after Hobbes’s submission to the Council of State, Edward Nicholas reported 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’. Several weeks later he complained that unnamed royalists who had gone ‘into England’ were ‘very well meet and kindly used’.55 Baxter would later write that, with the ‘Pretorian Sectarian Bands’ in control of England, ‘Mr Hobbs his Leviathan had pleased many’.56 Years later White Kennet, probably repeating accounts circulated by the Cavendish family, remembered that Hobbes ‘was call’d to no question by Oliver, who had no Reason to dislike his Tenets’.57 Walter Pope, recalling these years, wrote that Hobbes had ‘returned from Paris in order to print his Leviathan at London, to curry favour with the Government’.58 The belief that Hobbes’s political theory had made an unholy alliance with the revolutionary regime only solidified as the Interregnum wore on. In a 1657 letter refusing a seat in the new upper house devised by the Humble Petition and Advice, Lord Saye and Sele condemned the new chamber as a ‘stalkinge horse’ for Cromwell’s domination. The Protector’s new constitution, he concluded in disgust, was ‘fitter for hobbs and athiests then good men and christians’.59 Hobbes’s break with the Stuarts, and the potential utility of Leviathan for England’s new masters, was widely recognized. The Commonwealth itself fully understood the role that Hobbes’s Erastianism had played in his estrangement from the royalist court. As early as 1650, the ‘grandees at West[minster]’ intercepted a letter to Devonshire in which Hobbes reported having lost ‘the reward of his 52 Including John Milton. Jason P. Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton, 1994), 90–5; Tuck, 53 Huygens, Journal, 151. ‘Grotius and Selden’, 529. 54 Brereton to Pell, 15 Mar. 1652, in Schuhmann, Chronique, 132; Huygens, Journal, 75; Edward Hyde, History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (3 vols., Oxford, 1807), ii. 215; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 188. 55 Nicholas to Hatton, 22 Feb. 1652 and 2 May 1652, BL Birch MS 4180, fos. 55, 62. 56 Reliquiae Baxterianae, i. 118. 57 Kennet, Memoirs, 16. 58 Pope, Life of Ward, 117. 59 Lord Saye and Sele to Lord Wharton, 22 Dec. 1657, English Historical Review, 10 (1895), 106–7.

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labors with the Prince by the sinister suggestions of some of the clergy’.60 In January of 1652 the government’s news organ gleefully reported the incident’s dénouement: They write also from Paris, that M. Hobbs (he that wrote the Book of Common-wealth) 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 were 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 him by the Marquiss 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 all men shall, that run not to the same height and excess of madnesse with themselves.61

This account, notably flattering in tone, strongly suggests that the ecclesiological implications of Leviathan, more than its theory of political obligation, had angered the Stuart court. Hobbes had been drawn to England partly by the Commonwealth’s Erastian turn, and the regime returned the favour by implicitly dismissing charges of atheism against him and by commending his refusal to accommodate ‘corrupt clergy interests’. The report was a fitting herald of Hobbes’s return, as it was the religious climate of the Interregnum that most pleased him. Partly he found the mere absence of clerical authority attractive. His associates might have worried that England’s new ‘multiplicity of Religions will end in none at all’, or that the implosion of the traditional church had launched an ‘age of Atheisme’, but Hobbes did not share these concerns.62 The void in clerical authority provided space for intrepid philosophy, and Hobbes was not inclined to regret this development. But he was also pleased with the constructive religious policies of the Interregnum regimes, which conformed in striking ways with those found in Leviathan. The Independency that had arisen in the 1640s—hostile to clerical power but compatible with an extensive state role in governing religion—had earned the explicit endorsement of Leviathan. The religious policies of the Interregnum realized the promise that Hobbes had perceived in the Congregational Way. Historians have portrayed Cromwell as a mere ‘anti-formalist’, a ‘spiritual anarchist’, or as a man who lacked ‘any interest in a Church establishment alternative to the abortive presbyterianism of the Westminster Assembly’.63 In truth, under Cromwell’s direction, the Interregnum regimes vigorously implemented centralizing religious policies that augmented the spiritual authority of the English state.64 60

Payne to Sheldon, 17 Mar. 1650, BL Harleian MS 6942, no. 127. Mercurius Politicus 84 (8–15 Jan. 1652), 1344. 62 Boyle to Mallet, 23 Mar. 1652, BL Add. MS 32093, fo. 293; Evelyn to Reynolds, 3 Dec. 1657, BL Evelyn MS 39a, fo. 82. 63 Davis, ‘Cromwell’s Religion’, 201–8; Anthony Fletcher, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Godly Nation’, in Morrill (ed.), Cromwell, 220–1. 64 The following material is more fully treated in Jeffrey R. Collins, ‘The Church Settlement of Oliver Cromwell’, History, 87 (2002), 18–40. 61

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ii By 1651 the task of crafting a new church settlement had fallen to the Independents, who had ascended into power in Oliver Cromwell’s wake. In February of 1652, not long after Hobbes’s arrival in London, leading Independent ministers—including John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, and Philip Nye—presented a church government scheme to the Rump Parliament.65 Published as The Humble Proposals, the plan did not reinstate the Elizabethan church attendance act repealed in 1650, but it did maintain parishes and the tithe. The Humble Proposals were largely concerned with supervising and disciplining the clergy, and in this regard their main provisions were both statist and centralizing. The Proposals envisioned a series of local ‘committees’ of Triers, composed of ministers and laymen, to vet all ministerial nominations. They also called for a central board of ‘Ejectors’, which would purge the ministry of incumbent pastors judged ignorant, scandalous, or ‘dis-affected to the Government’.66 The Humble Proposals met a firestorm of criticism.67 Implementing them proved an exhausting political battle, one that ‘preoccupied the government and especially Cromwell’.68 Cromwell and his allies dominated the parliamentary committee established to debate the proposals in the summer and fall.69 Tellingly, the main contested issue was ‘the magistrate’s power in matters of religion’.70 Cromwell’s faction won Committee approval for the Proposals in early 1653. Parliament then assented to the proposition that ‘the magistrate hath powers in matters of religion for the propagation of the Gospel’, but then Cromwell’s forcible dissolution of the Rump intervened.71 When the Nominated Assembly convened in July, the Humble Proposals remained a priority. Cromwell exhorted the assembly to ‘encourage the Ministry’, but he condemned any clerical order ‘pretending to that which is so much insisted on,“succession” ’.72 In December the Proposals again passed committee, but sectarians in the Assembly narrowly defeated it. Again the divisive question was the ‘magistrate’s power in any matters of religion’. Indeed, this refusal to endorse the state’s religious competence motivated the despairing Assembly moderates to surrender power to Cromwell on 12 December.73 Oliver Cromwell was elevated to the Lord Protectorship in December of 1653, and securing the ‘reformation’ of the ministry was an immediate priority.74 Throughout the spring Cromwell consulted with leading Independents about ‘purginge the ministry’.75 Finally, the Cromwellian church settlement was established 65

JHC, viii. 86. The Humble Proposals of Mr. Owen, Mr. Tho. Goodwin, Mr. Nye, and Mr. Sympson . . . (1652), 1–4. Carolyn Polizzotto, ‘The Campaign against The Humble Proposals of 1652’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 37 68 CSPV, xxviii. 297. (1987), 569–81. 69 Baxter to Dury, 7 May 1652, and Dury to Baxter, 20 Oct. 1652, Dr. William’s Library, Baxter Correspondence, vi, 70 Dury to Baxter, 6 Jan. 1653, Dr. William’s Library, Baxter Correspondence, vi, fo. 77. fos. 90, 83; JHC, viii. 258. 71 JHC, viii. 258–64, 274. 72 WSC, iii. 62–3. 73 An Answer to a Paper Entitled a True Narrative of the Cause and Manner of the Dissolution of the Late 74 Intelligence letter, Bodl. Clarendon MS 49, fo. 56. Parliament . . . (1653), 8; CSPV, xxix. 160. 75 Dury to Baxter, 22. Feb. 1654, Dr. William’s Library, Baxter Correspondence, v, fo. 199; Johnston, Diary, ii. 214; CSPD: Commonwealth, vii. 1, 27, 30–41, 76, 146, 211–14, 220, 308. 66 67

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by council ordinances in March and August. The settlement inverted the original Humble Proposals by creating a central committee of thirty-eight Triers to examine new ministerial nominees, and local committees of Ejectors to supervise incumbents. The Triers, some of them clergy and some laymen, enjoyed jurisdiction over all candidates for lectureships and benefices to preach. Their deliberations were based on oral examinations and written testimonials on behalf of nominees. Private patronage rights were protected, but unfilled livings reverted to the patronage of the Protector after six months.76 The Ejectors, all of whom were laymen, enjoyed jurisdiction over incumbent ministers and schoolmasters. These could be evicted for heresy, Catholicism, moral offences, use of the Prayer Book, and for ‘any dis-affection to the present Government’.77 Historians have traditionally dismissed the Cromwellian church settlement as ‘mild’, ineffective, and concerned only to ‘curb loose living’ in the ministry.78 In truth, as Cromwell himself repeatedly asserted, the church settlement of 1654 ranks as one of the Revolution’s greatest institutional achievements.79 Over five years the Triers rendered judgements on more than 3,500 ministerial nominations.80 The Ejectors did not maintain central records, but a survey of state papers, correspondence, and tracts establishes that fully two-thirds of English counties had Committees of Ejectors at points during the Interregnum.81 The Triers and Ejectors served as the main pillars in a church settlement that was decidedly Erastian in design and operation. The Protectorate’s control of the ministerial nomination process was enormous: Cromwell made approximately 40 per cent of the nominations assessed by the Triers. Indeed, it was precisely to ensure the efficacy of the Triers, and thus ‘the ministers’ subordination to the Supreme civil power’, that the tithe was maintained in the face of sectarian opposition.82 Trustees for the Maintenance of the Ministry, created in September 1654, doled out augmentations to ministers congenial to the regime.83 Finally, as will be detailed in Chapter 6, the Protectorate secured control over ministerial education by maintaining the University Visitations first established in the 1640s. The Cromwellian church was thus an extensive centralizing apparatus, dominated by lay servants of the regime. As for its use, the Triers and Ejectors sought— relatively uncontroversially—to eradicate immoral behaviour. Both bodies also felt free to judge the spiritual qualifications of ministers, and were denounced by sectarians and clericalists alike for seeking to root out blasphemy, ‘popery’, Arminianism, and use of the Prayer Book.84 But the most despised mission of 76

Ordinance Appointing Commissioners for Approbation of Publique Preachers (1654). Ordinance for the Ejecting of Scandalous, Ignorant, and Insufficient Ministers and Schoolmasters (1654). On these characterizations, see Collins, ‘Settlement of Cromwell’, 19–20. 79 WSC, iii. 440; iv. 273, 489, 495. 80 Lambeth Palace Library, ‘Records of the Church of England during the Commonwealth Period’ (World 81 Collins, ‘Settlement of Cromwell’, 29–30. Microform Publications, 1978; 36 reels), reels 6 and 7. 82 ‘Arguments for Continuing the Payment of First Fruits and Tenths’, BL Add. 32093, fo. 387. 83 ‘Augmentations … ordered by the Protector and Council, 1653–1659’, Commonwealth Church Records, reel 18. 84 Walter Bushnell, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Commissions appointed by O. Cromwell for Ejecting Scandalous and Ignorant Ministers (1660), 3, 25; Lawrence Womock, The Examination of Tilenus before the Triers (1657). 77

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these Cromwellian church administrative bodies was their role in suppressing political dissent. Both ordinances of 1654 called for the removal of ministers ‘disaffected to the present government’. Cromwell reiterated this goal in a declaration of March 1654, and he repeatedly disavowed any liberty of conscience that threatened stable government.85 Political sins meriting ejection included: associating with royalists, disregarding official days of Thanksgiving, prophesying the downfall of the government, or merely voicing disaffection. The Ejectors were often dominated by politically loyal cadres more than willing to root out such offences.86 Ministers were jailed for praying on behalf of Charles Stuart, and were barred from Communion for refusing the Engagement.87 A surviving register, apparently recording the activities of the Ejectors in sixteen counties, records complaints against ministers for ignoring fast days, ‘speaking against the Engagement’, associating with royalists, or simply for ‘submitting not to the present government’.88 The Cromwellian church did not distinguish between political right and religious right. ‘Thus all things’, observed one contemporary in 1654, ‘whether relating to temporal or eternall concernment, conspire together (as acted by one common spirit) to confirm this establishment’.89 Hobbes’s earliest expression of sympathy with the Erastian ideology of the English Revolution had been his enthusiasm for the proposed church settlement of 1641, which would have replaced episcopal authority with lay parliamentary committees. In striking ways the Independent church settlement of 1654 represented the belated implementation of this scheme, a permanent church government by state committee.90 The settlement of 1654, declared Cromwell, was not designed ‘as jure divino, but as a civil good’. ‘We in England’, reported his servant Bulstrode Whitelocke, ‘have almost forgot the distinction of clergy and laity.’91 If the Interregnum was partly marked by a nascent toleration and disorienting religious pluralism, it also witnessed the institutional realization of the Erastian programme of the Long Parliament. Cromwell once characterized this balance thus: ‘Is not Liberty of Conscience in religion a fundamental? So long as there is liberty of conscience for the supreme magistrate to exercise his conscience in erecting what form of church government he is satisfied should be set up . . .’ The magistrate ‘hath his supremacy’, he declared, ‘and he may settle religion according to his conscience’.92 Cromwell, though concerned to protect some free conscience outside the established church, was equally driven to protect the Erastian legacy of the Reformation within it. The balance he struck between these two mandates was reminiscent of the ecclesiological prescriptions of Leviathan. 85

WSC, iii. 226–8. Ann Hughes, Politics, Society, and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987), 297; Anthony Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex, 1600–1660 (London, 1975), 106–7. 87 Chronicle of Fife, 45–7, 51, 69, 72, 101. 88 BL Lansdowne MS 459, fos. 10, 12, 44–5. 89 Intelligence letter, 23 Sept. 1654, Bodl. Clarendon MS 49, fo. 56. 90 Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 185; Anthony Fletcher, ‘Context for the Root and Branch Debate of 1641’, 91 Speech of 21 Apr. 1657, WSC, iv. 495; Diary of Whitelocke, 332 n. Studies in Church History, 14 (1977), 285–6. 92 Speeches of 12 Sept. 1654 and 25 Jan. 1658, WCS, iii. 459, iv. 715. 86

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And it was the Erastian ecclesiological implications of the Cromwellian church that enraged its many critics. Traditional clericalists were most concerned with the settlement’s disavowal of any ‘solemn or sacred setting apart of a person to any particular office in the ministry’. Herbert Thorndike, the episcopal theologian (on whom more will follow), condemned the church settlement as an assault on ‘Communion and corporation’. The Triers and Ejectors enabled mere ‘Souldiers and Justices of the Peace’ to create ministers. ‘It is manifest’, he wrote, ‘that all difference between Clergy and People is by them dissolved and made void; and by consequence, the Corporation of the church which grounds and creates all the difference . . . between these two qualities’. Cromwell’s church, he concluded, ‘maintain[ed] the interest of that Government’ rather than the ‘interests of faith’. No ‘secular Power’ could ‘cure these nullities and incapacities’ upon which the Triers and Ejectors pretended to be a true Church.93 Other episcopal critics echoed this language. The settlement’s ‘foundation was laid upon Oliver’ and it aimed solely at rooting out political ‘disaffection’. It confused ‘all concernments both of church and state’ and made a ‘pretence’ of reformation in order to ‘advance the Interest of a Commonwealth and serve the ends of “State Politiques” ’. The Protector and his lackeys were a band of ‘Antiministers’ and ‘no competent judges’ of spiritual matters.94 Similar complaints were voiced by Presbyterians.95 Robert Baillie condemned the church settlement of 1654 as a product of Cromwell’s ‘Erastiane Caesaro-Papisme’, subordinating ordained clergy to the rule of ‘English judges and sequestrators’. Throughout the 1650s he recorded the activities of Cromwell’s ‘new Erastian government’ with increasing despair.96 His assessments were echoed in Scottish petitions to the Council of State, and were directly voiced to Cromwell by the staunch Covenanter Archibald Johnston.97 Sectarian critics condemned Cromwell for impinging on individual conscience, rather than clerical prerogative, but they too characterized his church settlement as an illegitimate intrusion of state power into the spiritual sphere.98 Roger Williams, in London attempting to renew the Rhode Island Charter, attacked the Humble Proposals with anti-Erastian arguments that he had first employed against John Cotton, the pre-eminent Massachusetts Congregationalist. Williams advocated a ‘two-fold state, a civil state and a spiritual’, and warned against ‘state worships’ and ‘Commonweal religions’. ‘A state church’, he wrote, ‘(whether explicitly, as in Old England, or implicit, as in New) is not the institution of the Lord Jesus Christ.’99 A series of tracts by the separatist John Goodwin condemned 93

Herbert Thorndike, A Letter Concerning the Present State of Religion Amongst Us (1656), 1–4, 16, 19–24. Bushnell, Narrative, 67, 162, 201–2, 251; Zachary Crofton, Malice Against Ministry Manifested (1657), 1, 3, 16; Lionel Gatford, A Petition for the Vindication of the Publique Use of the Book of Common-Prayer . . . (1655), 36, 41–2; Womock, Tilneus, 1. 95 Cromwell at times promised toleration for ‘Presbyterian doctrine’, but made dire reference to ‘horrid’ Presbyterian ecclesiology. Speech of 15 Sept. 1654, WSC, iii. 466. 96 Baillie to Spang, 27 Mar. 1648, 19 and 20 July 1654, Letters of Baillie, iii. 38, 237, 253; Baillie to Ashe, 12 Jan. 1657, Letters of Baillie, iii. 331. 97 Register of the Consultations of the Ministers of Edinburgh, ed. William Stephen (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1921–30), 98 Polizzotto, ‘Campaign against the Proposals’, 569. i. 3–4, 23–4; ii. 108; Johnston, Diary, ii. 18. 99 Roger Williams, The Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody (1652), petition to parliament, epistle to the reader, 7; also id., The Hireling Ministry None of Christs (1652). 94

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the Cromwellian church for ‘Mahometanism’ and for erecting a ‘State Religion’. ‘Is there any whit more ground’, Goodwin demanded of Cromwell, ‘for the Civil Magistrate to act out of his sphere . . . than there is for the Church Magistrate or Ecclesiastical Elder to act out of his, and to interpose in matters of State, and civil policie?’100 John Milton, serving as the Commonwealth’s Latin secretary, radically advocated a free religious sphere and became increasingly nervous about Cromwell’s alliance with the Magisterial Independents. In a poetic tribute of 1652, he praised Cromwell for smashing the Scots. ‘But new foes arise’, he warned, ‘Threat’ning to bind our souls with secular chains: / Help us to save free Conscience from the paw / Of hireling wolves whose Gospel is their maw.’101 Milton’s classic Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes of 1659, composed after Cromwell’s death but aimed at his still-operational church settlement, forcefully reasserted the distinction between spiritual and temporal spheres. Where once Catholics and Laudians had threatened true religion, the new menace was an English ‘civil papacie’. Cromwell had merely replaced ‘church-ministers in state affairs’ with ‘state-ministers in church affairs’. Milton revealingly characterized his own service to the cause of liberty by writing that, in the 1640s, he had combated ‘regal tyranie over the State’, while in later years his concern had been ‘Erastus and state tyranie over the church’.102 Indeed, it reveals a great deal about the religious climate of the Interregnum that these years witnessed an expansion in the use of the term ‘Erastian’. Scholars of early modern religion often contend that the term should only be used to characterize advocates of Erastus’s specific doctrines on church excommunication, and not the broader subordination of religion to state power.103 The latter usage, however, can be applied to the period of the English Revolution without anachronism. Commentators as diverse as Milton, Baillie, and Thorndike used ‘Erastian’ to characterize pejoratively ecclesiastical innovations, such as the Triers, that governed far more than church discipline. The adjective ‘Erastian’ was apparently first coined in English in the 1640s,104 and it did not take long for it to become a byword for Machiavellian statism in religious affairs. The English Revolution, and particularly the rise of Oliver Cromwell (at whom the accusation of Erastianism was regularly hurled), forced the term ‘Erastian’ into its broader meaning. That Cromwell’s role in this linguistic evolution has not been observed says a great deal about the shortcomings of scholarship on his religious policies. All of this serves to contextualize Leviathan’s endorsement of Independency, and the favourable remarks about the religious climate of the Interregnum found 100 John Goodwin, Thirty Queries . . . Whether the Civil Magistrate stands bound by way of Duty to Interpose his Power or Authority in Matters of Religion (1653), 4–7, 15–16; id., Basanistai, or The Triers [or Tormentors] Tried and Cast . . . (1657), epistle dedicatory, 1–2, 14, 18–19, 32. 101 William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography (2 vols., Oxford, 1968), i. 405–7, 411, 413. 102 Milton, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes: shewing that it is not lawfull for any power on earth to compell in matters of Religion (1659), 7, 12, 31, 49. 103 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London, 2003), 345. 104 The Oxford English Dictionary credits Richard Baxter with the coinage, but Baillie had earlier described the church settlement of 1646 as a ‘lame, Erastian presbytery’.

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in Hobbes’s Vitae. A state that freed individual intellectual enquiry while declawing the clergy and channelling all organized religious observance towards civil obedience was precisely prescribed by Hobbes’s masterwork. In Behemoth, moreover, Hobbes frankly commended specific aspects of the Cromwellian religious regime. Behemoth echoed Leviathan in calling for a ministry of preachers dedicated to inculcating political obedience and trained by universities that were purged of nefarious clerical interests.105 The work then commended many of the measures undertaken by the Interregnum Independents to undermine clerical power. Chapter 4 has already detailed Behemoth’s condemnation of Presbyterian opposition to Cromwell, its justification of the execution of the royalist Presbyterian Christopher Love, and its praise of the Toleration Act of 1650 for ‘plucking the sting’ out of the clergy. So too did Hobbes justify the Interregnum Visitations to Oxford and Cambridge. These Visitations, initiated in the 1640s will be detailed in Chapter 6. Suffice it here to note that they performed many of the same functions as the Triers and Ejectors, vetting the universities’ theological and political principles uncongenial to the regime. At Oxford in particular the Visitation secured a general purge of episcopalians. After the Presbyterian-inclined first Visitation to Oxford, future Visitations were widely understood as instruments of Independent rule. Cromwell himself controlled them through his position as University Chancellor and through John Owen, his loyal Vice-Chancellor. Behemoth, composed years after the Restoration and after the Oxford Visitation was securely fixed in political memory as an instrument of Cromwell’s tyranny, nonetheless praised the Visitations. They ‘turned out all such as were not of their faction’, wrote Hobbes, ‘and all such as had approved the use of the Common-Prayer-book; as also such divers scandalous ministers and scholars . . . And for this last, I cannot but commend them.’ Lest his readers think Hobbes merely approved the suppression of clerical vice, he concluded that ‘an university is an excellent servant to the clergy; and the clergy, if it be not carefully looked to (by their dissension in doctrines and by the advantage to publish their dissensions), is an excellent means to divide a kingdom into factions’.106 Throughout his life Hobbes implored civil sovereigns to free the universities from clerical control in the interest of promulgating proper political doctrine and ensuring civil obedience. The Interregnum Visitations proved the one and only time he was able to commend a sovereign for heeding this advice. Behemoth also appreciated the expedients undertaken during the Interregnum for the suppression of clerical disaffection. The Protector Cromwell himself was remembered by Hobbes for having suppressed disloyal sectarians and seditious false prophets. This he favourably compared to the banishing of ‘fortune-tellers and astrologers’ out of ancient Rome. ‘If, upon some prediction’, wrote Hobbes, ‘the people should have been made confident that Oliver Cromwell and his army should be, upon a day to come, utterly defeated; would not every one have endeavored to assist, and to deserve well of the party that should give him that 105

Beh., 43–4, 58–9, 64.

106

Ibid. 147–8; Hobbes’s opinion of the Visitations is further treated below.

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defeat?’107 Thus were seditious prophets among the sectarians and fanatics justly banished. That Hobbes understood the Cromwellian church settlement itself as an instrument dedicated to the defeat of clerical power was strongly implied by Behemoth. His observation that the year 1654 ‘had nothing in it of war, but was spent in civil ordinances’, quite possibly referenced the creation of the Triers and Ejectors in what were two of the most noteworthy ordinances of that first Protectoral year.108 His account of the Humble Petition and Advice—by which Cromwell was installed as ‘an absolute monarch’—included a description of the articles calling on the Protector to ‘encourage the ministry’ and devise a ‘profession of religion’.109 The articles of the Humble Petition that Hobbes here referenced essentially endorsed the church settlement of 1654.110 Behemoth thus treated the church settlement of 1654 as an integral feature of Cromwell’s seizure of ultimate sovereignty. Behemoth and Hobbes’s Vitae thus provide tantalizing hints of his assessment of the Interregnum regimes. Equally compelling evidence is provided by prosopographical study of his Interregnum associations, and by the pattern of his Interregnum reception. Thomas Hobbes was friendly with and influenced an extensive array of Interregnum political writers. Surprisingly few viewed him as an unrepentant royalist, and while some read him primarily as a de factoist theorist, many more understood him as a pre-eminent critic of clerical power. Hobbes enjoyed his most unalloyed influence among those who supported the Cromwellian regimes based on their Erastian religious policies. Some of his enthusiasts were Catholics, others Protestant, still others religious sceptics. Some, like Hobbes himself, advocated the sort of single-man rule eventually realized by the Protectorate, but a surprising number were republicans. This diversity of theological and constitutional opinion proves the essential point: Hobbes’s most resonant appeal to the ideological climate of the Interregnum was his Erastian ecclesiology. The English Revolution itself, as a religious war, was not primarily a theological struggle but a struggle to protect the Reformation’s Erastian legacy from resurgent clerical challenges. Parties who gravitated towards Cromwell shared a basic commitment to this goal. Conversely, the diverse religious parties— both clericalist and sectarian—arrayed against Cromwell were united by hostility to his statist governance of the church. Within this ideological matrix, Hobbes’s Leviathan was read as a Cromwellian text. Positioning Hobbes politically must rely heavily on his surviving Interregnum correspondence. Consider, for instance, the letters of François du Verdus. Hobbes met Du Verdus in Mersenne’s scientific circles. Du Verdus became one of his most adoring French disciples and eventually published a French translation of De Cive.111 When mortally ill in 1651, Hobbes entrusted his manuscripts to Du Verdus and the two maintained a regular correspondence for years thereafter.112 Du Verdus, 107

108 Ibid. 184. 109 Ibid. 190. Beh., 187–8. Humble Petition and Advice, in The Stuart Constitution: Documents and Commentary, ed. J. P. Kenyon (Cambridge, 1969), 355–6. 111 Du Verdus to Hobbes, 25 Jul. 1654, Corr., 190; Malcolm, Biographical Register, Corr., 908–9. 112 Du Verdus to Hobbes, 13 Dec. 1655, Corr., 229. 110

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who engaged in vicious property disputes with the ecclesiastical authorities of Bordeaux, shared Hobbes’s deep anti-clericalism and employed Leviathan’s rhetoric about the ‘Kingdome of Darknesse’ in castigating the Jesuits.113 He celebrated Leviathan for its ecclesiological teachings, and a great deal of his correspondence with Hobbes was dedicated to the finer points of the work’s extreme Erastianism.114 That Du Verdus read Leviathan as a manifesto against clerical power assumed added significance during the Protectorate. Sharing Hobbes’s positive assessment of the intellectual climate of Cromwellian London, in 1654 Du Verdus announced his intention to retire to the ‘safe haven’ of the English capital, where he would ‘swear by nothing but [Hobbes’s] philosophy and Mr. Bacon’s De sapientia veterum’.115 Revealingly, Hobbes embraced this proposal, and advised Du Verdus on how to assure the Protectoral authorities of his political quiescence.116 Nor did the political implications of Leviathan escape Du Verdus. He constantly wondered why European sovereigns—including Oliver Cromwell—failed to ‘heap the highest rewards’ on Hobbes for having demonstrated ‘that the authority of the state is absolute and indivisible’.117 Historians have scoffed at the notion that Leviathan was intended to appeal in this manner to Cromwell, but Du Verdus failed to find the prospect at all absurd. In 1656, referencing his proposed French translation of Leviathan and Hobbes’s repeated invitations to London, Du Verdus wrote to him: ‘What a pleasure it would give me, Sir, to be supported by Protestants; to try to become known to the Lord Protector; to dedicate my translation of your book to him; and to beg him, in my dedication, to send a copy to the [French] King and invite him to read it, to learn from it about the rights of the sovereign which were stolen from him by the priests!’118 Du Verdus celebrated Cromwell as a potential patron for Leviathan and as a sovereign whose taming of the clergy conformed to the work’s Erastian political prescriptions. He was slavishly deferential to Hobbes’s opinions, and it is difficult to imagine that his assessment of English politics did not dovetail with Hobbes’s own. Other asides in Hobbes’s French correspondence gesture in a similar direction. Thomas de Martel, a French lawyer who had met Hobbes in exile, described Cromwell’s Protectorate (specifically the Humble Petition and Advice) as the ‘last act’ of the English ‘Revolution’, corresponding ‘exactly’ to Hobbes’s ‘demonstrations on the subject of sovereign authority’.119 Or consider Hobbes’s long-standing friendship with the Socinian natural philosopher Samuel Sorbière. Sorbière had shepherded the second edition of De Cive through the press and later published a French translation.120 During the Interregnum, Sorbière shared Du Verdus’s desire to visit Hobbes in London, and in 1658 he urged Hobbes to grace England with 113

Du Verdus to Hobbes, 26 Mar. 1656, Corr., 261–2; Du Verdus to Hobbes, 28 Dec. 1663, Corr., 592. Du Verdus to Hobbes, 17 Aug. 1656, 20 Oct. 1656, 23 Nov. 1656, and 12 Mar. 1657, Corr., 299, 325, 367–74, and 454. Other French followers corresponded with Hobbes on his Erastianism. De la Moulinière to Hobbes, 21 Dec. 1659, 115 Du Verdus to Hobbes, 10 Aug. 1654, Corr., 196–7. Corr., 509–11. 116 Du Verdus to Hobbes, 26 Mar. 1656 and 14 May 1656, Corr., 263, 285. 117 Du Verdus to Hobbes, 13 Dec. 1655, Corr., 228. 118 Du Verdus to Hobbes, 22 Dec. 1656, Corr., 414. 119 Martel to Hobbes, 15 Apr. 1657, Corr., 464. 120 Malcolm, Biographical Register, Corr., 894. 114

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another edition of Leviathan.121 John Evelyn, who knew both Hobbes and Sorbière, later reported that the latter fancied himself a ‘politician’ based upon the ‘heterodox pieces of Mr. Hobbes’, and that Sorbière was a ‘Great favorite of our late Rep[ublic] . . . or rather the villainy of Cromwell’.122 This blend of anticlericalism and admiration for the regime of Oliver Cromwell typified many of Hobbes’s English associates as well. If his standing had collapsed among the royalists, Thomas Hobbes increasingly enjoyed contact with and influence over a wide array of avowed Cromwellians. The miscellaneous writer Francis Osborne provides a case in point. Osborne was the fifth son of a royalist Bedfordshire clan, but after the outbreak of the civil war he broke with his family’s politics and was granted several offices by the Long Parliament. His brother-inlaw, William Draper, served as a parliamentary colonel and as a Visitor to Oxford University. In 1650 Osborne himself moved to Oxford and launched a career as an essayist and political theorist. His aphoristic advice book, Advice to a Son (1656), proved one of the most popular books of the age. Osborne supported the Interregnum regimes and served the Commonwealth as a minor official.123 John Aubrey rated Osborne as a ‘great acquaintance’ of Hobbes.124 Their friendship probably transpired between 1651 and Osborne’s death in 1659. During these years Osborne lived for a time on London’s Tower Street, a literary ‘Prodigy’ whose company was much sought.125 A defender of the new learning and a humanist wit devoted to the likes of Bacon and Machiavelli, Osborne was precisely the sort that provided Hobbes with his ‘learned conversation’. The few scholarly efforts to trace Hobbes’s influence on Osborne have focused on the latter’s composition of a de factoist tract during the Engagement controversy.126 Religious themes, however, are far more prominent in Osborne’s writings. Like Hobbes, he was a freethinking rationalist with a ‘sceptick humour’ and a reputation for atheism.127 Osborne admired Machiavelli’s analysis of religion and was himself fascinated with the political sway that religion inevitably exerted. Reflecting on his country’s misfortunes, he wrote ominously of ‘a multitude inflamed under a religious pretence’, capable of loosing a ‘sea of blood and devastation’. He wrote as a relentless scourge of ignorant priests, obscurantist universities, and usurping bishops and presbyters.128 The marriage of scepticism with an awareness of the gullibility and ‘distemper of the vulgar’ informed his instrumental understanding of religion. Sins were mere ‘Policy’ stamped by princes with ‘the images of the Devill’. The state should regulate miracles and prophecies to control the ‘mis-led zeal of the rable’. Osborne felt it ‘manifest that most Princes . . . make no more accompt of Religion then the Profit and Conveniency 121

122 Evelyn to Sprat, 31 Oct. 1664, BL Evelyn MS 39a, fo. 128. Sorbière to Hobbes, 22 July, 1658, Corr., 500. ‘Memoirs of Francis Osborne’, in Miscellaneous Works of that Eminent Statesman Francis Osborne (2 vols., 1722); 124 ABL, i. 370. Wood, Athenae, i. 267–8. 125 Osborne to Draper, 20 Oct. 1657, Works of Osborne, i. 24. 126 [Osborne], A Perswasive to Mutuall Compliance under the Present Government (Oxford, 1652); Zagorin, Political 127 ‘Memoirs of Osborne’, in Works of Osborne, i, p. xiii. Thought, 129–30; Sommerville, Hobbes in Context, 68. 128 Osborne, Advice to a Son (6th edn., Oxford, 1658), 3, 84–5, 105, 150–61; Conjecturall Queres or Philosophical Paradoxes . . . (1659), 124; Politicall Reflections Upon the Government of the Turks . . . (1656), 184–6, 209–11. 123

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it brings’.129 These instincts moved him to support the Interregnum regimes. Always effusive in praising ‘our noble Protector’, he closely followed Cromwell’s effort to tame the ‘priestly interest’. In a nod towards the parliamentary Visitations, he noted the recent ‘reforms’ in the universities.130 Cromwell, he reported, promised toleration, but only in exchange for political quiescence. The religious parties would feel ‘the Weight of the Law’ if they refused ‘to hold the Stirrup’. Osborne approved of the creation of the Ejectors to patrol the parishes and ‘eject the Obnoxious’. In 1657 he wrote that the ‘Protector, carrying all afore him’, had initiated purges of the preachers who were ‘out of the present fashion in Esteem’.131 Osborne’s political judgements, and the religious outlook that motivated them, parallel those of Hobbes, and the direct influence seems to have been strong. On lists of admired ‘modern’ philosophers who had slain the dragons of scholasticism and antiquity, he included apparent abbreviations for Hobbes’s name.132 He repeatedly characterized princes and power holders as ‘State-Leviathans’, and he sarcastically condemned the power-drunk papacy as an ‘Ecclesiastical Leviathan’.133 Distinctive Hobbesian religious and ecclesiological doctrines appear almost word for word in Osborne’s writings. Clerical power, he asserted, was based on the ability to ‘warp [individuals] towards any side, by the hope and terror they raise in consciences in relation to another world’. This was but one of his many recitations of Hobbes’s most central thesis on religion: that Christian clergy ‘freed their whole society from the Jurisdiction of the temporall magistrate, not suffering them to be liable to any punishments, but those eternall, and such as their superiours shall think fit to lay upon them’.134 Certain of Osborne’s descriptions, such as that of purgatory as a ‘Romish Goblin’, employ rhetoric strongly reminiscent of Leviathan.135 Most daringly, Osborne imported Hobbesian ecclesiological and religious doctrines into his 1656 Politicall Reflections upon the Government of the Turks. This work exploited rising English interest in Islam that had been triggered in part by the first English translation of the Koran in 1649.136 Osborne’s tract was a bold polemic against the structure of the Christian church and in favour of the Turkish model of religious governance. It opened by ruing both the ‘spirit of contention’ that roiled Christendom and the clerical usurpations that forced Christian subjects to ‘stagger betwixt two Supremes’. This rhetoric would have been familiar to Osborne’s readers, but even the most radical among them must have been startled by his thesis that the Koran contained ‘Expedients more proper for unity than have yet been employed among Christians’.137 European monarchs, plagued 129

Osborne, Advice, 88, 150–1, 166–7; Conjecturall Queres, 126, 129. Osborne, Advice, epistle dedicatory, 4, 10. Osborne to Draper, 165?, and 11 Mar. 1657, in Works of Osborne, i. 6–11, 18–9. 132 The ‘B, D, and H etc’ praised in Advice to a Son (‘to the reader’) probably represent Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes. Hobbes is probably also the ‘Ho.’ praised alongside Selden and Bacon in Osborne, A Miscellany of Sundry Essayes, Paradoxes, and Problematicall Discourses (1659), ‘to the reader’. 133 Osborne, Miscellany, 253; Reflection upon the Turks, 87. 134 Osborne, Advice, 146–7; Reflections upon the Turks, 165. 135 Osborne, Advice, 156–7; Lev., 417 et passim. 136 Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge, 1998), 73, 154. 137 Osborne, Reflections upon the Turks, epistle to reader. 130 131

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by power-seeking clergy, had been forced to introduce enervating religious schisms in order to restrain the ‘Ecclesiasticall Monarchy’ of Rome. In contrast, Mohammed—through guile and genius—had crafted a religion entirely subordinated to state interests. Mohammed had styled himself a prophet, had gulled his warriors to ‘swallow’ this claim, and had enforced obedience ‘to such marks of Worship, or religious Observations, as he was pleased to impresse upon their yet unsuborned imaginations’. He had wisely limited knowledge of the Koran to a handpicked cadre of loyal priests, had restrained preaching, and had controlled religious print and education. In the modern Islamic world, the Turkish Mufti, was accorded great respect ‘in publick’, but behind the scenes this ‘circumcised Pope yields an infallible obedience to all the Emperor inspires him with’.138 In short, Islam was a triumph of reason-of-state, manifesting a keen understanding of the political uses of religion. ‘Though the Ecclesiastical and Civill Powers be both radically in the Grand Segnior; yet the pontificall Mufty hath Studied the Art to make the people beleve these two Streames, doe flow, one from a lesse, and the other from a more Sanctified fountaine.’ Islam was but a ‘huge operation upon Obedience to the civill Magistrate’.139 Osborne’s Machiavellian analysis of religion recalls the doctrines of Leviathan, and there are considerable hints in the Reflections on the Turks that he was indeed exemplifying Hobbes’s Erastian teachings. It was in this very text that he relentlessly repeated the distinctive Hobbesian teaching that clerical power was based on a manipulation of ‘Future feare’ and the ‘ransacking the more tender Consciences of Dying men’. It was here too that he attributed civil war to religious sedition, and condemned the papacy as an ‘Ecclesiastical Leviathan’ sapping the martial strength of Christian Europe.140 Osborne’s Reflections on the Turks essentially fleshed out the briefer but similar portrait of Islam found in Leviathan, where Islam was portrayed as a religion modelled after the ancient civil religions of antiquity, designed to ‘keep the people in obedience and peace’.141 Osborne’s tract was intended to ‘advance settlement’ in England after the catastrophe of religious warfare. In a revealing juxtaposition, it at once exploited Leviathan and appealed to the religious Zeitgeist of the Interregnum. Francis Osborne was by no means the only Cromwellian literary luminary influenced by Thomas Hobbes. The poet Edmund Waller had known Hobbes since the glory days of Falkland’s Tew Circle. Banished by parliament in 1643 for involvement in the Army Plot, he had enjoyed Hobbes’s companionship during the 1640s.142 For a time Hobbes tutored Waller’s son and nephew, and the two men corresponded over Waller’s hopes (never fulfilled) to translate De Cive into English. Waller shared Hobbes’s anticlerical and Erastian instincts. As an MP he had been gravely concerned with the excesses of the Laudian bishops.143 In 1645 Hobbes gleefully narrated to Waller his run-ins with clergymen angered by 138

139 Ibid. 9–10, 44, 53. 140 Ibid. 9–11, 87, 91–4. 141 Lev., 82. Ibid. 1–4, 6–7, 13, 15, 30–1. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Great Tew Circle’, in Cahtolics, Anglicans, and Puritans, 167, 173–82; ABL, i. 275–6. 143 Edmund Waller, An Honorable and Learned Speech made by Mr. Waller in Parliament against the prelates innovations . . . (1641). 142

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De Cive, and Waller would later praise Hobbes for having thrown ‘downe the strongholds of the Church and lett in light’. Only fear of the English bishops prevented Waller from composing planned commendatory verses to Hobbes.144 After the execution of Charles I, Waller’s political and physical migrations closely paralleled those of Hobbes. Both accommodated themselves to the new political order in 1651 and had returned to London by early 1652.145 Waller became an enthusiastic supporter of the Interregnum regimes. He was Cromwell’s second cousin, maintained a close friendship with the Protector, and praised him in effusive poetic tributes.146 As an official of the Protectorate after 1655, he was derided by royalists as a ‘vassal to the usurper’. In Waller, then, Hobbes enjoyed an advocate from within the Protectorate itself. In 1656, Waller proclaimed his friendship with Hobbes the ‘chiefest delight’ of his life, and he roundly derided Hobbes’s clerical critics.147 Waller, surely cognizant of Hobbes’s political inclinations, did not hesitate to praise Cromwell’s statecraft. ‘To me it seems’, he wrote to Hobbes in 1656, ‘that his Highnes (who sees a good way before him) had layd sometyme since a perfect foundation of Government, I mean by the Ma[jor] Gen[eral]s, reducing us to provences and ruling us by those provincials with the newe Levied Army etc.’148 For his part, Hobbes presented Waller with a gift copy of his Six Lessons, a tract in which, as we shall see, he boasted of having reconciled a thousand men to the Cromwellian regime.149 Waller’s anticlericalism, his praise of Hobbes’s political theory for humbling the clergy, and his enthusiasm for the centralizing rule of the Protectorate are a suggestive convergence of political attitudes. And in Waller, Thomas Hobbes associated closely with a relation of Cromwell’s who both served the Protectorate and who championed the Erastian principles of Leviathan. Waller, like Hobbes, had apparently maintained links with the turn-coat Blackloist Catholics (see Ch. 3). The Blackloists, who probably played a part, as we have seen, in encouraging Hobbes’s defection from the royalists, continued to form part of Hobbes’s circle after his return to London. After a period at Douai, Thomas White himself removed to London in 1652, around the time Hobbes and Waller had done so. Aubrey and Wood reported Hobbes’s continued friendship with Blacklo in London.150 Kenelm Digby remained in exile longer, despite his complete estrangement from the royalist court and his pathetic appeals to the Council of State for permission to return.151 Marooned in Europe, he continued to correspond with Cromwell, and the formation of the Protectorate allowed him to make his move. ‘As soon as assurance came of Cromwell’s assuming the sole power’, Hyde wrote in disgust, ‘Sir Kenelm Digby went privately from Paris into 144

Hobbes to Waller, 29 July 1645, Corr., 124; ABL, i. 277, 372. Malcolm, Biographical Register, Corr., 914; Diary of Evelyn, ed. de Beer, 313. 146 Edmund Waller, A Panegyric to My Lord Protector (1655) and Upon the Late Storme, and Upon the Death of his 147 Waller to Hobbes, [July 1656], Corr., 294–5. Highnesse (1658). 148 Ibid. 296. 149 See Malcolm’s note in Corr., 296; on the Six Lessons, see Ch. 6 below. 150 Digby to White, 25 Feb. 1652, Blacklo’s Cabal, 91; Wood, Athenae, ii. 497; ABL, i. 369; Southgate, White, 30. 151 Digby to [unknown], 21 Feb. 1650, Blacklo’s Cabal, 79, 83–6; Digby to Boeve, 11 Nov. 1650, Blacklo’s Cabal, 101; Diary of Evelyn, ed. de Beer, 310. 145

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England.’152 Back in London, Digby numbered among Cromwell’s intimates, persistently lobbying him for the elusive goal of Catholic toleration. He even served Cromwell as a secret diplomat, travelling to the Continent to prevent a threatened Franco-Spanish alliance.153 It was perhaps while serving in this capacity that Digby visited with Hobbes’s French friends, ‘mentioning [Hobbes’s] name with much honour and drinking [to his] health’.154 When in London, Digby and Hobbes certainly remained on friendly terms.155 Digby was thus another Hobbesian in Cromwell’s service. Hobbes’s connection with the Blackloist faction thus survived their common banishment from the Stuart court. Indeed, the Blackloists were among the first publicly to exploit Hobbes’s ideological compatibility with the Interregnum’s religious climate. As already noted, the first known published references to Leviathan, appearing mere weeks after the work itself, are found in tracts by the Blackloist John Austin. Austin, an English Catholic living in London during the Revolution, was closely associated with John Sergeant and Thomas White. He was also a vigorous defender of the Blackloist cause.156 In 1651 and 1653, under the pseudonym William Birchley, Austin published two tracts that employed Hobbesian principles to defend the religious policies of Oliver Cromwell. His tracts revived the Blackloist agenda, promising that Catholics would renounce the Pope’s political powers and obey the Commonwealth in exchange for religious toleration. He defended both the Engagement and the Blackloist conspiracy of 1649.157 Austin continued to look to Oliver Cromwell for succour. Contrasting the intolerant Presbyterians with the freedom-loving army, he praised the ‘zeal’ of Cromwell and celebrated his victories over the Scots. ‘The Army ever had’, he wrote, ‘that compassion which the Clergy wanted, and the Millitary piety hath beene still eminent above the Civill or Ecclesiastick.’158 The Blackloist dream died hard. Most strikingly, amidst these fulsome tributes to Cromwell, Austin scattered argumentative points borrowed directly from Leviathan. He defended religious images by appealing to Hobbes’s thesis that image worship was idolatrous only if the image was ‘set up by private authority, and not by the authority of them that are our Sovereign Pastors’.159 He condemned Presbyterian religious oaths by enlisting Leviathan’s prohibition against extending ‘the power of the Law, which is the Rule of Actions onely, to the very Thoughts, and Consciences of men’.160 He used Leviathan to confirm that ‘ministers of Christ in this world have no Power by that title, to punish any man’.161 Austin’s exceptionally early use of Leviathan confirms 152

153 WSC, iv. 149. Bod. Clarendon MS 47, fo. 281; Wood, Athenae, ii. 240. Du Verdus to Hobbes, 12 Mar. 1657, Corr., 455; Peleau to Hobbes, 29 Jan. 1657, Corr., 439; Digby did praise Ward’s ‘booke against M. Hobbes’ (In Thomae Hobbii philosophiam exercitatio epistolica . . .), but only in vague terms and in a politic letter to Wallis. Digby to Wallis, 1 Aug. 1651, in The Correspondence of John Wallis: Volume One (1641–1659), ed. Philip Beeley and Christoph Scriba (Oxford, 2003), 292. 155 For one account of them together, see Hartlib Papers 29/5/13b. 156 ODNB; Sergeant wrote the epistle dedicatory to Austin’s Devotions (Rouen, 1672). 157 [John Austin], The Christian Moderator, the Third Part. Or the Oath of Abjuration Arraignd (1653); [Austin], 158 Austin, Oath, 3, 17, 23; Austin, Persecution, 4–5, 12. Persecution, 1, 7–8, 11, 17. 159 Austin, Persecution, 12–13; cf. Lev., 449–50. 160 Austin, Oath, 21; Lev., 471. 161 Austin, Oath, 27; Lev., 342. 154

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the likelihood that Hobbes and the Blackloists influenced one another during the years 1649–51. It also casts light on how Leviathan was read after its initial appearance, and how it could be employed as a defence of Cromwellian Independency. Austin revealingly juxtaposed the Erastian theorist Hobbes and the Erastian conqueror Cromwell in support of the same religious project. This did not go unnoticed. In 1652, petitioning parliament against heretical books, Presbyterian booksellers condemned Austin’s Christian Moderator and Leviathan side by side.162 Independents within the army, in turn, blasted the booksellers as minions of ‘Presbyterian slavery’, defended Austin, and pronounced Hobbes ‘very well able to answer’ Presbyterian attacks.163 Thus, in the first of many controversies over Leviathan, Hobbes found himself arrayed with the army Independents. Nor was Austin the only Blackloist to betray Hobbesian influences during the Interregnum. In 1655, encouraged by Digby, Thomas White published his Grounds of Obedience and Government.164 This book, condemned as seditious by Charles II himself, defended the Blackloists’ accommodation with the Interregnum regimes. White’s Grounds, like Austin’s tracts, relied heavily on fundamental Hobbesian notions: the state of nature, contracted sovereignty, and a Hobbesian account of the political function of fear.165 Like Hobbes, he rejected divine-right authority and linked political obligation to individual interest. This justified obedience to conquerors and undermined the legitimist notions favoured by the Stuarts. The royalists, as demonstrated above, broadly characterized White’s Grounds as having been ‘cut out of Mr. Hobbe’s Leviathan’.166 Critically, White’s book was not read simply as a de factoist treatise employing Hobbesian rhetoric. His defence of the Cromwellian regime was motivated by his long-standing desire to secure religious concessions, and was read by royalists as an epilogue to the conspiracy of 1649. A rejection of divine right not only undermined the Stuart dynasty but also threatened the episcopal church. Royalists specifically made this point in joint condemnations of Hobbes and White. Roger Coke excoriated both men for their devotion to the ‘atheists and Schismaticks’ who had brought ‘distractions and confusions’ to the church.167 The Evangelium Armatum likewise accused them of ‘venting Doctrines no less pernicious to the Civil than to the Ecclesiastical state’, and specifically portrayed their betrayal as a sell-out to the sectarian zealots of the Interregnum.168 These assessments, however overheated, correctly gauge the extent to which the Blackloists continued to employ Hobbesian arguments in their appeals to the Cromwellian Independents. As Catholics, the Blackloists were somewhat marginal within Interregnum political culture. Hobbes’s more prominent Cromwellian devotees were nominally 162 Luke Fawn et al., A Beacon Set on Fire: or the Humble Information of certain stationers, citizens of London, to the Parliament and Commonwealth of England . . . (1652); see Ch. 6. 163 The Beacons Quenched: or the Humble Information of Divers Officers of the Army . . . Concerning the Machiavilian Design of the Presbyterians . . . (1652), 12–13. 164 Thomas White, The Grounds of Obedience and Government (1655), ‘epistle dedicatory’. On dating see B. C. Southgate, ‘Thomas White’s Grounds of Obedience and Government: A Note on the Dating of the First Edition’, 165 White, Grounds, 5, 27–30, 43. Notes and Queries, 28 (1981), 208–9. 166 Southgate, ‘Damned booke’, 245; see above, Ch. 4. 167 Coke, Survey of the Politicks, epistle dedicatory. 168 Evangelium Armatum, preface.

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protestant and often all but open religious sceptics. Scholars and professional writers, they inclined towards humanism, particularly to the Italianate humanism of figures such as Machiavelli and Sarpi. Malleable in their political convictions, they gravitated towards republicanism, but they admired Cromwell’s realist impulses and his willingness to act as the hammer of the clergy. In locating Thomas Hobbes within this world of anticlerical humanists and wits, no figure is as critical as the radical Henry Stubbe. On the surface, Henry Stubbe and Thomas Hobbes inhabited different worlds. Stubbe was forty-four years Hobbes’s junior and born to an ‘anabaptistically inclined’ minister.169 After some years in Ireland, Stubbe and his mother moved to London, where the latter worked as a seamstress. In 1642 Stubbe somehow gained entrance to the Westminster School. Felicitously, he made the acquaintance of the younger Henry Vane, who became his patron and facilitated his entrance into Christ Church, Oxford. Stubbe’s politics were radical from the start. In 1651 he was entrusted with the task of bearing the Engagement to Oxford, and from 1653 to 1655 he served the English army in Scotland.170 Returning to Oxford, he was appointed second keeper of the Bodleian Library in 1657, and he became a dedicated partisan of Vice-Chancellor John Owen’s Independent faction. Hobbes made Stubbe’s acquaintance some time after the latter’s return from Scotland in 1655. Their early correspondence concerned Stubbe’s efforts, undertaken with Hobbes’s encouragement, to translate Leviathan into Latin.171 The translation never appeared, but for three years the project occasioned an extensive correspondence between the two. Stubbe ‘reverenced’ the elder man and his opinions, and Hobbes reportedly ‘much esteemed’ Stubbe for his ‘great learning and parts’.172 The prevailing image of Hobbes as a marginalized royalist biding his time in the company of the Cavendishes is not easily reconciled with his close connection with the anti-monarchical Independent Henry Stubbe. Critically, Stubbe served as the point of contact between Hobbes and the Oxford Independents around John Owen. That history will be detailed in the next chapter. But Stubbe also helps position Hobbes within the world of London’s ‘free-thinking, anticlerical circles’.173 In December of 1656 he thanked Hobbes for having secured him ‘esteeme’ in London.174 Hobbes had apparently introduced his protégé into the intellectual world of the capital, where Stubbe would eventually make a name for himself producing radical political tracts. Hobbes was presumably the point of contact between Stubbe and the literary figure John Davies. The Cambridge-educated Davies was a prodigious translator of French and Latin and a quintessential city wit.175 Hobbes and Davies may have met in France (Davies 169

Wood, Athenae, ii. 412; Malcolm, Biographical Register, Corr., 900–1. Wood, Athenae, ii. 412–13; ODNB; Jacob, Stubbe, 2, 8–10; Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge, 1981), 136–44. 171 Stubbe to Hobbes, 1 Apr. 1656, and Stubbe to Hobbes, 7 Oct. 1656, Corr., 271, 311. 172 ABL, i. 371; Stubbe to Hobbes, 1 Apr. 1656, Corr., 271. 173 Malcolm, Biographical Register, Corr., 900. 174 Stubbe to Hobbes, 8 Dec. 1656, Corr., 383; Stubbe was also admired by Thomas White (Wood, Athenae, ii. 497). 175 David Hook,‘John Davies of Kidwelly: A Neglected Literary Figure of the Seventeenth Century’, Carmarthenshire Antiquary, 11 (1975), 104–24. 170

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was abroad from 1649 to 1651).176 But Davies’s politics kept ‘pace with the times of Usurpation’. He was much in London during the 1650s. By mid-decade Hobbes and Davies were on friendly terms and shared several associates, including Thomas White and the radical pamphleteer John Hall, as well as Stubbe.177 Hobbes’s acquaintance with Davies further evidences his presence in London’s religiously radical circles. Davies was responsible for the 1654 publication of Hobbes’s Of Liberty and Necessity. This work (examined more fully below) presented Hobbes’s determinism and argued that the doctrine of free will had been concocted by clergy to augment their own intercessory power. The treatise circulated in manuscript, and Davies reportedly copied it while translating it into French for a friend of Hobbes. Later Hobbes claimed that he had not authorized the work’s appearence, but it is clear that he was friendly with Davies, and there is some evidence of his involvement in the publication.178 In any case, Davies penned a preface to the work that illuminates Hobbes’s profile among the religious radicals of Interregnum London. Echoing Hobbes, Davies subtly critiqued the Scriptures themselves as otherworldly, designed to ‘abstract man from this world, and to perswade him to prefer the bare hope of what he can neither see, hear, nor conceive before all the present enjoyment this world can afford’. He blasted the clergy for posing as authoritative ‘interpreters’ of Scripture. Like Hobbes he attributed the ‘calamities of war and devastation’ to ministerial ‘quarrels’. Hobbes, for Davies, loomed as a champion of reason and political order, arrived to ‘cure’ the ‘disease’ introduced by the ‘Black-Coats’. The clergy hated Hobbes, Davies argued, because his masterful scriptural interpretation—found in both Of Liberty and Necessity and Leviathan—had exposed their lust for power. Catholics and episcopalmen would bark, Davies conceded,‘discontented that these Prerogatives of Religion are taken away . . . and are invested in the Supream power of the Nation, be it of what perswasion it will’. Every Honest reader would abandon religious controversy and would ‘live justly and honestly according to the Religion of his Countrey’.179 Davies thus admired Hobbes for exposing the sedition of the clergy and for defending the religious supremacy of the prevailing state. Henry Stubbe’s lionization of Hobbes was similarly motivated. He avidly followed Hobbes’s polemical exchanges with the Interregnum clergy. When the future bishop William Lucy composed a rejoinder to Leviathan in 1657, Stubbe gleefully reported the disdain that met its scholastic arguments at Oxford.180 As Chapter 6 will demonstrate, Stubbe helped Hobbes manage his pamphlet war with the Presbyterian John Wallis, which was centrally concerned with Hobbes’s Erastian ecclesiology. Stubbe strongly sympathized with Hobbes’s critique of clericalism, and himself condemned Presbyterianism for relying on insidious notions of apostolic succession, and for 176

Wood, Athenae, ii. 902; Hook, ‘Davies’, 108–9. ABL, ii. 229, 299; Davies, ‘Preface’ to Hobbes, Of Libertie and Necessitie a treatise . . . in answer to a treatise written by the Bishop of London-derry (1654); Stubbe to Hobbes, 11 Apr. 1657, Corr., 459. 178 Stubbe to Hobbes, 11 Apr. 1657, Corr., 459; Malcolm, Corr., 280 n; Rogow, Hobbes, 180–1. 179 [John Davies], preface to Hobbes, Of Libertie and Necessitie. 180 Stubbe to Hobbes, 30 Jan. 1657, Corr., 440. 177

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defending a version of ‘that old mystery of iniquity, Episcopus Ecclesiae catholicae’.181 Advising Hobbes of his admirers and detractors at Oxford, Stubbe carefully indicated those who were for and against ‘the jus divinum of the Clergy’.182 It is true that in radical pamphlets of 1658–9 (composed on behalf of his patron, Henry Vane) Stubbe rejected coercive authority in religion and embraced a religious separatism not entirely consonant with Hobbesian principles.183 But this later position represented an explicit repudiation of John Owen’s circle of Cromwellian Independents, his former allies.184 During the Protectorate, while he was translating Leviathan, Stubbe’s enthusiasm for Hobbes’s Erastian ecclesiological principles was pronounced.185 Thomas Hobbes’s influence on radical figures such as Francis Osborne, John Davies, and Henry Stubbe exposes the politically charged implications of Leviathan, and particularly of its ecclesiological doctrines, within the Interregnum political context. Perhaps most critically, such contextualization helps to position Hobbes vis-à-vis that most celebrated intellectual product of the period: English republicanism.

iii It is a historical truism that Thomas Hobbes despised classical republicanism, and felt that the vogue for reading ancient political texts had unhinged the governing instincts of the English ruling class. This truism is virtually always evidenced by citing, first, Leviathan’s attribution of anti-monarchist sentiment to ‘the Reading of the books of Policy, and Histories of the antient Greeks and Romans’; and second, Behemoth’s condemnation of ‘books written by famous men of the ancient Grecian and Roman commonwealths’ for extolling ‘popular government’.186 For the burgeoning number of historians interested in recovering a humanist discourse of republicanism during the English Revolution—and in opposing it to the rights-based discourse of proto-liberalism—Hobbes has proven an irresistible interlocutor.187 This chapter has argued that Hobbes immersed himself comfortably in the Interregnum world of humanist literary figures. His apparent hostility to republicanism would seem the point at which this thesis might be pressured. 181

Stubbe to Hobbes, 25 Oct. and 9 Nov. 1656, Corr., 333, 339. Stubbe to Hobbes, 26 Dec. 1656, Corr., 425–6. 183 Henry Stubbe, Essay in Defense of the Good old Cause . . . (1659), preface; id., Malice Rebuked, or, A Character of Mr. Richard Baxter’s Abilities and a Vindication of the Honourable Sir Henry Vane . . . (1659), preface, 8–10. Here Stubbe explicitly defends toleration out of ‘gratitude’ for Vane’s ‘many favours’. 184 With Vane, he criticized the Independents in Light Shining out of Darkness (1659); Malcolm, Biographical 185 Jacob, Stubbe, ch. 1, 23–4, 33–9. Register, Corr., 900–1. 186 Lev., 225–6, 149–50; Beh., 3. 187 Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998), 10–2, 59–60, 85–6; Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton’s Classical Republicanism’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1995), 3–24; David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge, 1989), 35; Sarah Barber, Regicide and Republicanism: Politics and Ethics in the English Revolution, 1646–1659 (Edinburgh, 1998), 192; Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 12. 182

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The remainder of this chapter will address this challenge by arguing that Hobbes and his presumed republican foes shared considerable ideological common ground. A few preliminary points are in order. First, despite Hobbes’s status as the historians’ paradigmatic critic of republicanism, there is little contemporary evidence that he was particularly alarmed by the spectre of republicanism in the 1650s. The occasional anti-republican barbs in Leviathan and Behemoth are surely significant, but anti-republicanism is not a major theme of either work. Specifically, the amount of text Hobbes devoted to critiquing republicanism is dwarfed by the relentless Erastian polemic of Leviathan. Likewise, as we have seen, Behemoth construed the civil war chiefly as a struggle over independent clerical power, not as an effort to realize a republican constitution. Hobbes’s relative indifference to republicanism should not surprise. The Interregnum regimes were unpopular among dedicated republicans, and conformed more closely to a Hobbesian model of unified sovereignty than to any model of mixed sovereignty.188 Ideologically, republicanism was a marginal discourse during most of the Revolution, and it began to cohere only during the 1650s—primarily after the publication of Leviathan—as an ex post facto justification of the Commonwealth.189 The ideological centrality of republicanism during the English Revolution is enormously contested, but most scholars would concede the fragmented nature of the phenomenon in the 1650s, and the instability of any identifiable ‘republican’ faction.190 Republicanism did not rival constitutionalism or protestant reformism as dominant revolutionary discourses. This partly explains the marginality of anti-republican sentiment in Hobbes’s published works and correspondence. Hostility to republicanism is thus of limited value in explaining the evolution of Hobbes’s thought. This, in turn, raises a second point. However unfriendly he may have been to the political wisdom of the ancients, Hobbes did not hold himself aloof from the company of republican theorists. A number of his Interregnum associates—Francis Osborne, Henry Stubbe, and, as we shall see, William Petty and John Hall—were republicans of varying levels of commitment. Nor were these merely personal associations; all of these men were demonstrably influenced by Hobbesian doctrines, as were other republicans who did not necessarily know Hobbes personally, including Marchamont Nedham and the pre-eminent James 188 Barber, Regicide, 147–83; Blair Worden, ‘Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven’, in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, Maurizio Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1990), 225–45 at 226–8. 189 Blair Worden, ‘Republicanism, Regicide, and Republic: The English Experience’, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Republicanism, a Shared European Heritage (2 vols., Cambridge, 2002), ii. 307–29; and chs. 1–4 in David Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776 (Stanford, Calif., 1994); Steve Pincus, ‘Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth’, American Historical Review, 103 (1998), 705–36; for different perspectives, see Pocock, Machiavellian Moment; Skinner, ‘Classical Liberty and the Coming of the English Civil War’, in Republicanism, a Shared Heritage, i. 9–29; Smith, Literature and Revolution, ch. 6; Norbrook, Writing the Republic. 190 Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 250–3; David Wootton, ‘The Republican Tradition: From Commonwealth to Common Sense’, in id. (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1–44 at 16–19; Worden, ‘Marchamont Nedham and the Beginnings of English Republicanism’, in Wootton, (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 45–81 at 62–9. It is important to avoid lending ideological coherence to Interregnum republicanism by interpreting it in the shadow of the later Commonwealthsmen, who created a ‘canon’ of republican theory out of Interregnum writers.

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Harrington. Indeed, it proves easier to establish Thomas Hobbes’s links with Interregnum republicans than to establish the extent of his royalist connections. This poses a thorny historical problem, although one mostly ignored by current scholarship: how to explain Hobbes’s surprisingly complacent proximity to the world of Interregnum republicanism. It will be argued here that, however fundamentally Hobbes and the Interregnum republicans disagreed on constitutional and methodological questions, they found themselves in agreement on questions of public religion and church governance. Leading republicans were provoked by Hobbesian absolutism, but they employed Hobbesian ecclesiological doctrines in print specifically within polemical disputes about the government of religion during the Interregnum. In this respect republican reactions to Hobbes are best interpreted as a subspecies of the general reaction to him among London’s humanist literary figures. Issues of ecclesiastical politics were, moreover, just as politically significant—as determinants of allegiance—as disagreements between Hobbes and the republicans on the extent of sovereignty. Some support for these arguments has already been provided, in the cases of Henry Stubbe and Francis Osborne. Both men were at least fitful republicans, who also deployed Hobbesian doctrines specifically to justify their religious views. The remainder of this chapter will establish this response to Hobbes as a broader pattern among republicans. This raises one final preliminary point. It is important to recognize that the Interregnum republicans, with a few notable exceptions such as John Milton and Henry Vane, did not espouse a radical, separatist model of religion and politics. Leading republicans, including Harrington and Nedham, qualified their general support for liberty of conscience with calls for a statist national religious establishment. In this they both recalled Machiavelli and anticipated the civil religion ideals of later English republicans such as Moyle and Toland.191 This attachment to the ideal of civil religion, moreover, softened their assessments of Oliver Cromwell. It was also the republicans’ most significant ideological affinity with their presumed nemesis, Thomas Hobbes. We will begin, as all students of English republicanism do, with James Harrington. There is no evidence that Hobbes and Harrington ever met, although the possibility should not be dismissed. They shared several associates, including Henry Stubbe, John Aubrey, and William Petty, who were members of Harrington’s famed Rota Club.192 Hobbes knew Oceana and once opined that the army radical Henry Neville ‘had a finger in that pye’.193 This shrewd bit of speculation might indicate that Hobbes and Harrington moved in the same London circles, at least after Harrington emerged from rural obscurity with the 1656 publication of The Commonwealth of Oceana. Jarring indeed from the pen of a former attendant to Charles I, Oceana was the first in a series of works in which Harrington defended 191 Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, 170–95. The religious thought of English republicanism has been neglected, but Dr Champion’s fine study is a notable exception. 192 Anthony Powell, John Aubrey and his Friends (New York, 1948), 91; Malcolm, Biographical Register, Corr., 780, 900; Evelyn vaguely linked Hobbes to Stubbe and his ‘fellow rota-men’; Evelyn to Beale, 27 July 1670, BL Evelyn MS 193 ABL, i. 289; for Neville’s assessment of Oceana see Hartlib Papers, 29/5/98a. 39a, fo. 183.

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a neo-Roman, republican, or Machiavellian vision of political settlement. His thought married standard Machiavellian doctrines such as the glorification of active citizenry and popular armies with an original theory about the dynamic relationship between political and economic power. Stable politics required that constitutions reflect the balance of landed wealth, and so Harrington called for an agrarian law to balance property holding. To accommodate the role of interest in politics, he proposed the rotation of office holders and a bi-cameral parliament, with one chamber to debate and the other to resolve public questions. These proposals can hardly be called Hobbesian. Indeed, it is well known that Harrington framed important passages of Oceana as rejoinders to Leviathan. Harrington scorned efforts to fashion a purely rationalist ‘science of politics’.194 He dissented from Hobbes on the relative merits of republics and monarchies, on the legitimacy of dividing sovereignty, and on the merits of the ancient political wisdom.195 These disagreements are surely significant and support those who understand Hobbes as an inveterate foe of republicanism. Alongside such criticism, however, Harrington also wrote that ‘Mr. Hobbes is, and will in future ages be accounted, the best writer at this day in the world’.196 This was one of many such tributes, in the face of which scholars have lately profitably explored such matters as Harrington’s agreement with Hobbes’s psychological theory, his suspicion of rhetorical demagoguery, and his interest-based theory of political action.197 But the area in which any facile opposition of Harrington and Hobbes proves most flagrantly misleading is ecclesiology. Harrington participated in the great Interregnum debate on church governance. In this context, far from being a critic of Hobbes, he staunchly defended Hobbes’s Erastian Independency.198 This is by far the most contextually revealing ideological confluence between the two pre-eminent political theorists of the English Revolution. Harrington’s theological convictions are opaque,199 but he was deeply interested in the political implications of religious belief. Alongside his interest in the political influence of wealth (material ‘goods’), he was concerned to understand the mechanisms of ‘internal authority’, or ‘goods of the mind’. Under this category fell religion. Far from being an economic reductionist, Harrington understood 194

Worden, ‘English Republicanism’, 450–1. Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and a System of Politics, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1992) 9, 13, 30, 36; Harrington, The Art of Lawgiving in Three Books (1659), in The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1977), 698; Harrington, Politicaster (1659) in Works, 716, 724–5. Professor Pocock intriguingly notes an undated manuscript of Oceana lacking mention of Hobbes (Introduction to Harrington, Works, 7). 196 Harrington, The Prerogative of Popular Government . . . (1658), in Works, 43. 197 Gary Remer, ‘James Harrington’s New Deliberative Rhetoric: Reflection of an Anti-Classical Republicanism’, History of Political Thought, 16 (1995), 532–57; Jonathan Scott, ‘The Rapture of Motion: James Harrington’s Republicanism’, in Phillipson (ed.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, 139–63; Alan Cromartie, ‘Harringtonian Virtue: Harrington, Machiavelli, and Method of the Moment’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998), 987–1010; Paul Rahe, ‘Antiquity Surpassed: The Repudiation of Classical Republicanism’, in Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 233–56. 198 Discussions of this are Pocock, Introduction to Harrington, Works, 77–99 and Mark Goldie, ‘The Civil Religion of James Harrington’, in Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory, 197–24. 199 Some divines thought him a ‘madman or atheist’. Harrington, A Parallel of the Spirit of the People . . . (1659), in Works, 759. 195

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the importance of intellectual legitimacy for governments, and regretted that often ‘the principles of power and authority, the goods of the mind and of fortune, do not meet and twine in the wreath or crown of empire’.200 He sought to ensure that religion was governed by reason rather than passion, and that religious governance served the people, and not a narrow clerical interest. These goals would partly be achieved by the protection of free conscience. Monarchies, Harrington felt, relied on religious repression, and free government only flourished in tandem with religious liberty.201 But the language of free conscience, we have seen, cloaked a divide between radical separatists and the Magisterial Independents. Harrington belonged firmly in the latter camp. He insisted on the inevitability and desirability of a national religion. ‘A commonwealth’, he wrote, ‘is nothing else but the national conscience. And if the conviction of a man’s private conscience produce his private religion, the conviction of the national conscience must produce a national religion.’202 Harrington hated religious coercion, but he also rejected the prospect of an atomized world of internalized religious belief and private religious practice. ‘Where the minor part taketh away the national religion’, he wrote, ‘there the major part is deprived of the liberty of conscience by the minor.’203 To reconcile national religion and individual conscience Harrington proposed stringent controls on the clergy, free exercise for ‘gathered churches’, and state supremacy over national religious life. He denounced ‘fighting for religion and denying the magistrate to have any jurisdiction over it’, an ‘execrable custom’ among sectarians and clericalists alike.204 In response, Harrington’s proposed church model contained both Congregationalist and Erastian elements. It abolished clerical hierarchy, excommunication, and ordination, but maintained the ‘hireling ministers’ reviled by the sects. Ministerial vacancies would be filled by the universities, which would ensure that pastors were sufficiently versed in languages and could interpret the Scriptures in a ‘natural way’. A two-thirds vote of local Congregational elders confirmed the selected candidates in their livings. Harrington’s scheme buttressed the supervisory function of the central parliament. His upper house was to form a ‘council of religion’. These ‘learned, pious’ laymen would supervise clerical education, compose a ‘reasonable’ directory of worship, and maintain bans on Judaism, idolatry, and Catholicism. The council would also appoint ‘Censors’ as ‘overseers of the parishes . . . to put such national ministers, as in preaching shall intermeddle with the matter of government, out of their livings’. Sectarians could worship outside the national settlement, but were required to elect ‘magistrates’ who would report controversies to the council of religion for arbitration.205 As has frequently been noted, Oceana’s law-giving ‘Archon’—clearly modelled on Cromwell—voiced thinly veiled criticisms of the monarchical implications of 200

Harrington, Oceana, 10, 18–19. Harrington, Aphorisms Political (1659), in Works, 764–5; A Discourse upon this Saying: the Spirit of the Nation is 202 Harrington, Oceana, 39–40. not yet to be Trusted with Liberty . . . (1659), in Works, 742. 203 Harrington, Aphorisms, in Works, 766. 204 Harrington, Oceana, 40, 63; Goldie, ‘Civil Religion’, 212. 205 Harrington, Oceana, 93, 126–7, 198–203. 201

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the Protectorate. On religious questions, however, Oceana essentially vindicated the religious policies of the Cromwellian Independents.206 The church-reform scheme included in Oceana was closely patterned on the religious institutions already in place by 1656. Harrington’s ‘council of religion’ recalled the religious committees of the Long Parliament, and probably gestured towards Cromwell’s own board of Triers. Harrington followed the Interregnum governments in banning clergy from all political functions, in maintaining the tithe, and in requiring the registration of the sects. His ‘Censors’ strongly recall Cromwell’s ‘Ejectors’ in both design and function.207 Cromwell’s marriage of regulated free conscience with an Erastian state church thus found powerful ideological support in Oceana. When Harrington’s Archon speaks on religious matters—promising to protect sectarians who did not ‘disturb’ government, warning the clergy not to ‘meddle with the affairs of state’—the stylistic and thematic parallels with Cromwell’s own proclamations emerge powerfully. And it was precisely when defending such Cromwellian religious and ecclesiological propositions that Harrington most openly allied himself with Thomas Hobbes. Harrington, like Hobbes, couched his Erastian ecclesiology with anti-papal blasts, philosemitic evocations of Davidic ‘Godly Magistrates’, and other protestant notes. But Harrington, again like Hobbes, was more fundamentally influenced by the civil religions of antiquity. If Jewish theocracy served as a model for him, so too did the state cults of Athens and Rome.208 If he defended a state church with hot protestant rhetoric about a ‘national soul’, he also justified it based on an esoteric sense of the psychological needs of the vulgar. Prudent statesmen made use of religion because the masses required ‘comfort’; all men possessed, out of ‘terror or consolation’, some innate ‘sense of religion’. ‘The major part of mankind’, he noted, ‘giveth itself up in the matter of religion unto the public leading. . . . That there may be a public leading there must be a national religion.’209 Pagan and Jewish polities had successfully controlled religion with ‘ancient prudence’. The ‘gothic’ medievals had corrupted this with an insidious ecclesiological dualism, and had inaugurated the ruinous age of religious war.210 Where statesmen governed only by ‘human prudence’, there ‘the truth of religion and of government, once planted, have taken root and flourished’. But where prudence ‘hath not been rightly heeded’, he wrote, ‘there hath religion or the pretence of it been the hook and the line, and the state the prey of imposters and false prophets’.211 Harrington absorbed these religious attitudes from his intellectual masters: Machiavelli, Bacon, and the Venetian humanists.212 In this the language of Harrington’s Erastian ecclesiology paralleled that of Hobbes. 206

Goldie, ‘Civil Religion’, 207. Harrington, Oceana, 202–3; Art of Lawgiving, in Works, 679–82; Brief Directions Showing how a Fit and Perfect Model of Popular Government may be Made, Found, or Understood (1659), in Works, 593. 208 Harrington, Aphorisms, in Works, 767; Oceana, 39–40; Discourse upon this saying, in Works, 742–3. 209 Harrington, Aphorisms, in Works, 766; Art of Lawgiving, in Works, 678; A System of Politics Delineated in Short 210 Harrington, Oceana, 39–40. and Easy Aphorisms, in Works, 844–5. 211 Harrington, Art of Lawgiving, in Works, 652–3. 212 Goldie, ‘Civil Religion’, 205; Harrington, Oceana, 136–7, 202–3. 207

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Nor were Harrington and Hobbes merely running in parallel tracks. On ecclesiological questions, Harrington took Leviathan as one of his guides. This was readily apparent to episcopal critics who, as we shall see, were appalled by the Erastian tenor of Cromwell’s church and tended to group Erastian theorists such as Harrington and Hobbes together. In 1657, for instance, the deprived Bishop of Salisbury, Brian Duppa, condemned Harrington by lumping Oceana and Leviathan together as attacks on the ‘paternall’ model of monarchy found in the Scriptures.213 Fuller condemnation was offered by Henry Ferne, the future bishop of Chester. Ferne, deprived of his livings and retired to Yorkshire during the Interregnum, apparently knew the Harrington family. In 1656 Harrington’s sister sent Ferne a copy of Oceana, seeking the churchman’s evaluation. He returned a scathing denunciation.214 ‘What is said in relation to the church’, he wrote, 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. And lamentable it is to see so many (especially gentlemen of good parts) so opinionate, so boldly meddling in matters of religion, as if they had forgot or did not understand their article of the Catholic Church.215

Ferne thus condemned Oceana’s Erastian ecclesiology by characterizing it as an offspring of Leviathan. Harrington did not shrink from these characterizations, but embraced them. In 1656, breaching intellectual etiquette, he published Ferne’s correspondence in a tract entitled Pian Piano. He defended religious theorizing by lay intellectuals: any clerical monopoly on theology was ‘mere priestcraft’. Ferne had argued that primitive church bishops had pre-dated Christian states by centuries, and he denounced the ecclesiological meddling of secular rulers. Harrington replied by defending his plan to vest ‘supreme authority’ in religion with his proposed Senate. Against Ferne’s thesis that the Hebrews had established a dualist government of temporal and spiritual authority under Moses and Aaron, Harrington argued that Moses had governed religion as a fully sovereign prince, with Aaron as his mere ‘chaplain or orator’. Nor did Ferne’s condemnation of Cromwell’s ‘democratic’ church elicit defensiveness from Harrington. He defended the right of gathered congregations to approve their own ministers.216 In the contretemps with Ferne, Harrington positioned himself as both a Hobbesian Erastian and as a defender of Cromwellian Independency. This was not the only skirmish in which Harrington brandished his pen on behalf of Hobbes’s ecclesiology. Indeed, he vociferously defended key features of the ‘Congregationalist’ interpretation of the primitive church offered in Leviathan. 213 Duppa to Isham, Apr. 1657, in The Correspondence. of Bishop Brian Duppa and Sir Justinian Isham, 1650–1660, 214 Pocock, Introduction to Harrington, Works, 77–9. ed. Sir Gyles Isham (Northampton, 1955), 135. 215 Henry Ferne to Harrington’s sister, 4 Nov. 1656, printed in Harrington, Pian Piano or Intercourse between H. Ferne, Dr. in Divinity and J. Harrington, Esq., upon Occasion of the Doctor’s Censure of the Commonwealth of Oceana 216 Harrington, Pian Piano, in Works, 371–2, 377, 383–6. (1656), in Works, 370–1.

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As demonstrated in Chapter 4, against the tendency to understand ‘ecclesia’ as a church distinct from ancient political communities, Hobbes translated the term as a ‘Congregation, or an Assembly of Citizens, called forth, to hear the Magistrate speak unto them’.217 This served his project of collapsing the dualist hierarchies of state and church into a single sovereign structure. Crucially, Oceana included an identical interpretation of the term ecclesia. Harrington likewise adopted Hobbesian arguments about the terms cheirotonia and cheirothesia as they were employed in the book of Acts to describe the creation of ecclesiastical officers. With Hobbes, Harrington dissented from the traditional reading of these terms as meaning ‘laying on of hands’, and took them to mean a ‘showing of hands’. As argued above, such a translation suggested that ecclesiastical officers had in fact been elected by the assembled ecclesia.218 This in turn undermined any clerical monopoly on ordination and vindicated a Congregationalist interpretation of the primitive church. Episcopal critics angrily linked Hobbes’s translation of cheirotonia to his attacks on jure divino episcopacy and his defence of Erastian Independency. The chief assault along these lines was penned by Henry Hammond in his 1652 Letter of Resolution for Six Quaeres.219 Hammond’s work will be more fully examined below, but it must be anticipated here, for in 1658 it triggered another defence of Hobbesian ecclesiology by James Harrington. In his Prerogative of Popular Government of that year, Harrington again distanced himself from Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty. The second book of the Prerogative, however, took up the issue of clerical ordination, and in this context he defended Hobbes’s Erastian principles from Hammond’s attack. Harrington arrayed the textual evidence that he and Hobbes had used to justify their translations of ecclesia and cheirotonia.220 Unsurprisingly, Harrington confirmed their original view that primitive ordination had occurred by election. Ordination was thus no mystical privilege of clerical caste, but was rather a ‘political thing’ and a matter of ‘prudence’. The effort to protect a clerical monopoly on ordination was an innovation ‘obnoxious’ to state power.221 In all of these respects Harrington endorsed specific argumentative points made in Leviathan. ‘Thus beyond all measure improsperous’, Harrington concluded, ‘are this divine’s undertakings against Mr Hobbes, and the undertakings of divines upon this subject.’ Accused of being ‘beholding underhand unto Mr. Hobbes’ for his Erastian principles, Harrington claimed originality but refused to ‘waive the [imputed] obligation to so excellent an author’.222 However much Harrington disliked Hobbes’s absolutism, he deeply sympathized with the anticlericalism and Erastianism of Leviathan. Leviathan’s prescriptions for ecclesiological settlement—couched in the protestant rhetoric of the Godly 217

Lev., 320–2; Harrington, Oceana, 26. Lev., 363–6; Harrington, Oceana, 142, 202; Art of Lawgiving, 649–52; Pocock, Introduction to Harrington, Works, 90–6. 219 Henry Hammond, A Letter of Resolution for Six Quaeres of Present Use in the Church of England (1653). 220 Harrington, Popular Government, in Works, 502–28, 534–7. 221 Ibid. 519, 531, 539, 551–2; Goldie, ‘Civil Religion’, 216–17. 222 Harrington, Popular Government, in Works, 528, 545, 562–3, 422–3. 218

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Magistrate, grounded in the instrumentalism of Machiavelli, culminating in an endorsement of statist Independency—closely paralleled those of Oceana. To many readers, particularly those estranged from Cromwell’s centralized church regime, these commonalities allied Harrington’s neo-Romanism and Hobbes’s new science of politics on the essential religious issue of the age. If James Harrington’s Hobbesian religious inclinations were isolated, they might be dismissed as contextually irrelevant. But Harrington was, in this respect, more paradigmatic than idiosyncratic. Consider William Rand’s instructive reaction to Leviathan. An obscure English physician residing in Amsterdam during the Revolution, Rand read Leviathan in July of 1651, shortly after its publication, and sent assessments of it to several servants of the Commonwealth. Rand was a republican, and he rebuked Hobbes for his monarchism. In a letter to Benjamin Worsley, secretary to the Commonwealth’s Council of Trade, he promoted the reading of Livy—which Hobbes had condemned—precisely because it would undermine the ‘Interest of his Leviathanlike Monarchs’. But, despite this complaint, Rand could not hide his appreciation of Leviathan. The ‘ingenious booke’, he assured Worsley, contained ‘many things to your palate’.223 To Samuel Hartlib he conceded Hobbes’s royalist reputation, but wondered ‘to find him so sound in many other points, that looke with an hostile aspect upon royallty. In a word I conceive he is cominge over to the parliament side’.224 Rand was himself a religious freethinker, possibly a Socinian, certainly a vigorous opponent of clerical power. He condemned orthodox theology as the ‘Sorcery of the reverend Clergie’, as ‘heathenish follies’, instruments used to ‘terrifie the minds of men’. He warned against the efforts of the Presbyterian clergy to ‘keepe the staff of the governement in their own hands’. But Rand was no separatist. He had a realist’s understanding of the relationship between religion and power. Statesmen, he argued, should rein in the clergy, but should also establish a religion of order and peace. Rand defended ‘Church-assemblies and Sacraments’ for their ‘utility’ and ‘necessity’, but wished to abolish prideful and lordly worship and to encourage sermons that inculcated spiritual modesty. An educational reformer, he argued that catechizing in schools encouraged zealotry, faction, and ‘corrupt’ scriptural interpretation, and should thus be abolished. So too the influence of the clergy should be purged from the universities.225 These anti-clerical religious opinions fired Rand’s enthusiasm for Thomas Hobbes. He viewed Hobbes as an enemy of clericalism and the ‘pedantick’ orthodoxy of the scholastics.226 Commending Leviathan to Worsley, Rand praised its ‘smart interpretation of the trinity’, which, as part of the Hobbes’s analysis of ‘power ecclesiastical’, had scandalously construed the Trinity as a tribute to those earthly powers that ‘personated God’.227 Urging his religious and educational 223

Rand to Worsley, 11 Aug. 1651, Hartlib Papers, 62/21/1a–2a. Rand to Hartlib, 18 July 1651, Hartlib Papers, 62/30/3b–4a. 225 Rand to Worsley, 11 Aug. 1651, Hartlib Papers, 62/21/1b; Rand to Hartlib, 18 July 1651, Hartlib Papers, 62/30/1a, 2b–3a; Rand to Hartlib, 1 Sept. 1651, Hartlib Papers, 62/27/3b–4a. 226 Rand to Hartlib, 14 Feb. 1652, Hartlib Papers, 62/17/2a; Rand to Hartlib [undated], 39/21/107a. 227 Rand to Worsley 11 Aug. 1651, Hartlib Papers, 62/21/1a; Lev., 340–1. 224

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reform ideas on England’s new ruling clique, Rand employed Hobbes as a model: ‘Had I the power of Mr Hobbs his Liviathan in England’, Rand wrote, ‘it should be the first worke I would doe, to order the churches.’228 Discussing the need to purge nefarious religious instruction from schools, Rand commended Leviathan’s ‘world of fine, cleare notions’ to Hartlib. ‘I should conceive that man’, he wrote of Hobbes, ‘an excellent Councellour in the matter of education, he is doubtless very ingenious yea, and ingenuous too, and very convinced of the devious Courses followed in the ordinary waies of teaching’. If the Commonwealth was intent on freeing education from the clutches of the clergy, Rand even suggested that Hobbes might ‘be easily engaged upon honourable termes to be serviceable to the publik’.229 Thus did Rand read Leviathan as an anticlerical manifesto, and as a programme of religious reform consistent with, and sympathetic to, the political mood of the Revolution. Rand’s profile, as a physician of republican political leanings and unorthodox religious views, closely paralleled that of William Petty. Destined for fame as a political economist, Petty was a lifelong admirer of Thomas Hobbes.230 They met in the mid-1640s in Mersenne’s circle, and had together engaged in optical and anatomical researches.231 Petty returned to England in 1646 and became another friend of Hobbes who very publicly supported the Revolution. In 1651 he launched a career as an Oxford professor of anatomy, and in 1652 he was appointed physiciangeneral to the army in Ireland. In Ireland he ingratiated himself with Henry Cromwell and supervised the regime’s massive land survey of the country.232 (In Behemoth Hobbes would demonstrate familiarity with the Irish land settlement directed by Petty.233) Petty would serve as an MP in the last Protectoral parliament, and he once boasted that his connections among the Cromwellians could have propelled him to the ‘top of [medical] practice in Oliver’s Court’.234 The precise nature of Hobbes’s intellectual influence over Petty has been relatively unexplored. Petty ranked Hobbes among the greatest of the ‘moderns’, educated his sons in Hobbesian principles, and compiled a manuscript dictionary of definitions drawn largely from Leviathan.235 Some have detected Hobbesian methodological principles in Petty’s economics.236 On constitutional questions, however, Hobbes and Petty are traditionally construed as opponents, for while Petty accepted aspects of Hobbes’s definition of sovereignty,237 he was himself a 228

Rand to Hartlib, 1 Sept. 1651, Hartlib Papers, 62/27/3b. Rand to Hartlib, 18 July 1651, Hartlib Papers, 62/30/3b–4a. 230 ABL, i. 365; Cavendish to Petty, 17 Apr. 1648, Hartlib Papers 8/29/1a. 231 Petty to Pell, 8 Nov. 1645, BL Add MS 4279, fo. 183; Pell to Cavendish, 15 Nov. 1645, BL Add MS 4280, fo. 116; Benjamin Worsley to [unknown], 22 June 1648, Hartlib Papers, 8/27/2a. 232 E. Strauss, Sir William Petty: Portrait of a Genius (London, 1954), 38–40, 55–72; Petty to Dury, 26 Aug. 1650, Yale 233 Beh., 99–100. Beinecke Library, Doc. 20 (included in Hartlib Papers). 234 Petty to Southwell, 13 July 1686, The Petty–Southwell Correspondence, 1676–1687, ed. Marquis of Lansdowne (London, 1967), 214. 235 William Petty to [unknown], 21 Sept. 1683, BL Petty Papers, 72853, fo. 3; The Petty Papers: Some Unpublished Writings of Sir William Petty, ed. Marquis of Lansdowne (2 vols., New York, 1927), i. 149. 236 Tony Aspromourgos, On the Origins of Classical Economics: Distribution and Value from William Petty to Adam 237 Petty Papers, i. 219. Smith (London, 1996), 64–70. 229

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republican and a member of Harrington’s Rota Club. In a Latin manuscript, which Petty left unpublished, he strongly disagreed with the ‘most notable Hobbes’ on the relative merits of monarchies and democracies.238 On matters of church governance, however, William Petty proved every bit the Hobbist. His papers reveal Hobbes’s religious and ecclesiological doctrines as decisive influences. Like Hobbes, Petty viewed man as a naturally religious animal, and he offered a projection theory of religion similar to that found in Leviathan.239 His own theological convictions were suspect to contemporaries,240 and he was chiefly interested in the political effects of religion. Petty believed that religious conflict was the chief engine of ‘blood shed by wars’. Particularly insidious were the superstitions and ‘philosophical conceits’ used by Catholics, Presbyterians, and English episcopalians to secure clerical power.241 ‘Religion is Natural to man’, Petty wrote, ‘and necessary to States.’ Religion could serve as an ‘Instrument of Civil peace and plenty’ if ‘justified by Magistracy and Power’.242 This view of religion as an engrained instinct, powerfully supportive of polities but easily manipulated by power-hunting clergy, led Petty to an extreme Erastianism. That Hobbes was his master in this regard cannot be doubted. Indeed, Petty drew virtually verbatim passages out of Hobbes in order to justify his own religious views. For instance, he struck a clear Hobbesian note when he condemned ‘patheticall Metaphoricall expressions’ used by the ‘vulgar’ in worship.243 Echoing one of the most distinctive arguments of Leviathan, he condemned the Catholic Church by observing that ‘whoever professes to have power of making men happy or unhappy eternally after this life, distinct from the power over life, liberty, and estate upon earth, is supreme Governor over all’. Power to ‘keep all powerfull men in feare of rewards and punishments after this life’ was crucial to the ars ecclesiastica.244 This ‘power (though called Spiritual)’, he concluded, ‘is often applied to life, liberty, limb, and estate of man in this life . . . and is very much mixt and perplexed with the temporall, Carnall, Corporeall, and Civil power’.245 To defuse the political threat of the clergy, Petty, like Hobbes, adopted a minimalist definition of Christian theology and an Erastian ecclesiology. ‘Civill lawes’, he wrote, ‘may for the most part effect what Religion pretendeth to do.’246 Petty’s definition of a Christian as ‘a person baptized and professing Christ’ in a manner prescribed by the sovereign, and of the church as ‘a State, commonwealth, or corporation of Men’ professing God ‘under the same Discipline of their Representatives or Governors’, are borrowed virtually word for word out of Leviathan.247 238 Frank Amati and Tony Aspromourgos, ‘Petty contra Hobbes: A Previously Untranslated Manuscript’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 46 (1985), 127–32. 239 Notes on natural religion and God. BL Petty MS 72887, I.18, fo.1; I.1, entire and I.71, entire; BL Petty MS 72850, 240 Petty to John Petty, 27 Mar. 1660, BL Petty MS 72850, fo. 41. fo. 221. 241 BL Petty MS 72887, I.18, fo. 3; I.68, fo. 4; Petty, ‘Causes of Contempt of the Clergy’, BL Petty MS 72887, I.79. 242 BL Petty MS 72888, I.127. 243 Petty Papers, i. 117. 244 BL Petty MS 72888, I.138; Petty Papers, ii. 190–1; Lev., 226–7; Beh., 14–15. 245 BL Petty MS 72888, I.4, fo. 4. 246 Petty Papers, i. 118. 247 BL Petty MS 72888, I 138; Lev., 321–2.

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Petty echoed Hobbes’s determinist theology, finding that it conveniently reduced religious obligation to a matter of obeying the sovereign will.248 He embraced a certain measure of religious toleration as an anticlerical measure, within bounds adopted by the civil sovereign.249 Whole passages out of Hobbes’s religious doctrines are embedded in Petty’s manuscripts.250 Both men adopted a sceptical, proto-deistic view of religion, feared the pernicious political influence of Christian theology, and sought to employ Erastianism as a means by which to render Christianity useful to the state. ‘Religion’s Naturall’, Petty versified, ‘and good / For King or State, if understood; / If not, t’is but a meere illusion, / Begetting bloodshed and confusion.’251 William Petty’s response to Hobbism—hostile to its absolutism, congenial to its statist ecclesiology—thus closely paralleled that of Harrington, Rand, Osborne, and Stubbe. This pattern emerges with even greater clarity in the cases of two final republican theorists considered here: John Hall and Marchamont Nedham. And while Petty and Rand wrote in private manuscripts, and Harrington in splendid isolation, Hall and Nedham were two of the regime’s most prominent propagandists. They thus imported Hobbesian religious polemic into the government’s published apologetical literature. John Hall of Durham was a member of Thomas Hobbes’s Interregnum circle. Thirty-nine years Hobbes’s junior, Cambridge-educated, Hall made his mark as a gifted poet, translator of classical works, and pamphleteer.252 In 1647–8 he composed two tracts deeply critical of the Scots.253 In a 1649 tract encouraging university reform, he defended the execution of Charles I as an act of providence, and in another tract of that year defended the Rump against William Prynne.254 By this time Hall had ‘screwed himself so much into the ruling power’ that he had secured a salary of 100 pounds a year and become editor of the parliamentary newssheet, Mercurius Britannicus. Hall later claimed that Cromwell himself had brought him into the ‘service of the government’, and he accompanied the General on the Scottish campaign.255 Hobbes must have met Hall after his return to England, as Hall was a mere boy when Hobbes departed for France in 1640. Hall was a prominent (if profligate and irreligious256) London wit, and he and Hobbes shared a number of associates, including Thomas White (Hall at one point planned to translate White’s De Mundo), 248

249 BL Petty MS 72889. I.9, I.10. BL Petty MS 72887, I. 133, fos. 3–5. See also a Hobbesian passage against the Catholic Church in Petty Papers, i. 122; also BL Petty MS 72889, I.11, where the language denouncing the division of spiritual from temporal sovereignty closely parallels Hobbes. Compare Petty’s definition of truth with Lev., 28. His descriptions of his own religious practice strongly echo Hobbes’s 251 Petty Papers, ii. 251. apologias. Petty’s Will, Lambeth MS 937, fo. 18. 252 John Davies, ‘Account of the Author’, in Hierocles upon the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, trans. John Hall (1657); J. T. Peacey, ‘Nibbling at Leviathan: Politics and Theory in England in the 1650s’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 61 (1999), 241–57 at 241; Joad Raymond, ‘John Hall’s A Method of History: A Book Lost and Found’, English Literary Renaissance, 28 (1998), 267–89 at 267–9. 253 Davies, ‘Account’; Hall, A True Account of the Character of the Times . . . (1647); Hall’s Satire against Presbytery (1648) is lost; Wood, Athenae, i. 459. 254 John Hall, A Humble Motion to the Parliament of England Concerning the Advancement of Learning . . . (1649), 255 Davies, ‘Account’; CSPD, ii. 174; vii. 163. 1–4; A Serious Epistle to Mr. Prynne . . . (1649). 256 Davies, ‘Account’; Raymond, ‘Hall’s Method’, 275. 250

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and John Davies.257 Apparently Hobbes knew Hall personally, and reportedly said of him that ‘had not his debauches and intemperance diverted him from the more serious studies, he had made an extraordinary person; for no man had ever done so great things at his age’.258 Hall provides more evidence of Hobbes associating with, and exerting an intellectual influence on, an Interregnum republican. Unfazed by the constitutional gyrations of the 1650s, Hall wrote tracts justifying the dissolution of the Rump, the Dutch War, the Nominated Assembly, and the Protectorate.259 But his best-known tract, The Grounds and Reasons for Monarchy Considered, was composed in Edinburgh during Cromwell’s Scottish campaign and forcefully exposed the alleged follies of monarchical rule.260 Historians have variously characterized Hall’s occasional de factoism, his educational reformism, and his dedication to the new science as ‘Hobbist’.261 But, as Mark Goldie has observed, Hobbes’s influence on Hall has not yet been properly studied.262 Like his fellow republicans, Hall disliked Hobbes’s monarchism, but a close reading of Hall’s varied corpus reveals a familiar pattern.263 His ideological commonalities with Hobbes emerge chiefly on issues of ecclesiology and public religion. And, as with Hobbes, Erastianism drew Hall towards the Cromwellian Independents. Erastianism was far and away the most consistent theme in Hall’s various political writings. In the late 1640s he excoriated the ecclesiological dualism of the Presbyterians. Their ‘new modell of Ecclesiasticall policy’ had stoked the flames of war, and was ‘incompatible . . . with civill government’. By contrast Hall was an early partisan of Independency. He defended the Independents from the ‘waspish and violent rancour’ of Thomas Edward’s Gangrena, and sympathetically publicized their landmark Apologeticall Narration. Navigating the factions of 1647, Hall all but explicitly advised the Independents to ‘close with Royallists’.264 Indeed, he continued to promote this increasingly unlikely alliance while editor of the parliamentary newssheet, Mercurius Britannicus.265 His Erastian, anticlerical polemic continued after the execution of Charles. His 1649 Humble Motion advocated the banishing of ecclesiastical ‘Drones’ from the universities. Like Harrington he called for a state committee to guide educational reform, promote science and natural religion over superstition, and ensure the proper translation of the Scriptures. All this would purify religion and ensure the political quiescence of the clergy.266 Cromwell’s Scottish campaign, we have seen, solidified the General’s sense of himself as a godly scourge of the clergy and deepened the attachment of the 257 [Davies], ‘To the reader’, in Hobbes, On Liberty and Necessity; ABL, ii. 299. Davies was a Cambridge friend; 258 Wood, Athenae, i. 456. Southgate, White, 5, 30. 259 Professor Woolrych has attributed to Hall The Grand Politick Informer Better Informed and Sedition Scourged (1653). Austin Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford, 1982), 260 n. 260 John Hall, The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy Considered in a Review of the Scotch Story . . . (1651). 261 Skinner, ‘The Ideological Context’, 307; Smith, Literature and Revolution, 187; Skinner presents Hall as a de factoist, but Hall made contradictory pronouncements on de factoism. Contrast Hall, A Letter Written to a Gentleman in the Country (1653), 15–17 with Hall, Grounds and Reasons, 35–6. 262 Goldie, ‘Reception of Hobbes’, CHPT, 612 n. 263 Hall, Grounds and Reasons, 49–50. 264 Hall, True Account, 1–5, 7. 265 Norbrook, Writing the Republic, 217. 266 Hall, Humble Motion, 11, 16–19, 25–9, 38–44.

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Magisterial Independents to his leadership. Hall’s Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy, composed in Edinburgh during the campaign, echoed the Erastian rhetoric that suffused Cromwell’s declarations and letters. The work prefigured Harrington by alleging that the ‘metaphysicks’ of the clergy and their ‘misinterpretation of scripture’ buttressed monarchy.267 Hall offered an expansive critique of the political meddling of churches: ‘We are to consider that the Gospel of Christ . . . ingages not to any Domination, but wholly taken up with its own extasties, spiritual delights, and expectations, neglects all other affairs as strange and dangerous’. Christ’s kingdom is ‘never earthly, nor known of men of earth’ and exhibited ‘meekness and obedience to civill powers’.268 Presbyterians betrayed the political legacy of Christ, and in this they repeated the sins of the crypto-Catholic Caroline bishops.269 Hall’s later Interregnum writings—thematically unstable in many respects— defended the Erastian inclinations of the dominant Independents with a relentless consistency. He admired the supervision of the clergy achieved by the university Visitations,270 and he praised the Commonwealth’s civil marriage laws for upholding the state’s ‘power circa sacra’.271 In his 1651 Gagg to Love’s Advocate Hall vigorously defended the execution of the Presbyterian conspirator Christopher Love in revealing terms. He treated Love’s royalism as a fig leaf for his Presbyterianism, and condemned Presbyterianism generally for its inconsistency with ‘civil power and human society’.272 Presbyterian ‘Hierarchie’ threatened the ‘ruine of the present government’, and ‘the whole presbyterian party’ was complicit with Love’s ‘civil treason’.273 Hall congratulated the Council of State for having prevented clergy from ‘mingling’ their ‘interest into civil affairs’ by ‘thrust[ing] all black coats out of the Commission and [making] them uncapable of civil office’.274 Most notably, in a 1654 defence of the Protectorate entitled Confusion Confounded, Hall anticipated Harrington by praising the proposals that would eventually become the Cromwellian church settlement.275 Confusion Confounded defended both the dissolution of the Nominated Assembly and justified the Independent’s Humble Proposals (the defeat of which had triggered the dissolution). Having defended the religious authority of the state against Presbyterians, Hall now trained his guns on the sects. He vilified the Assembly for having ‘odd and fanatick notions’ and for striving to set up the ‘Kingdome of Jesus Christ’. 267

268 Ibid. 23–5. 269 Ibid. 118, 123–6. Hall, Grounds and Reasons, 4–6, 13, 22. Hall, Humble Motion, 5. 271 [John Hall], Sedition scourg’d, or A view of that rascally & venemous paper, entituled, A charge of high-treason exhibited against Oliver Cromwel (1653), 10–11. 272 John Hall, A Gagg to Love’s Advocate (1651) answered the anonymous Love’s Advocate (1651), which tried to dis273 Ibid. 3–4, 6–7. associate Love’s Presbyterianism from his royalism. 274 Ibid. 14–15, 18. 275 There has been some confusion over the authorship of this pamphlet. Davies does not mention it as Hall’s. Skinner fails to attribute it to him, and Woolrych merely calls Hall the probable author (Commonwealth to Protectorate, 260 n). Abbott also fails to identify the author of Confusion Confounded, and mistakenly surmises that Cromwell’s order of May 1654 that Hall be paid 50 pounds was for his Letter to a Gentleman (1653). WSC, iii. 41, 310. But conclusive evidence is contained in the state papers, where Hall petitions Cromwell for payment of his pension and directly mentions Confusion Confounded; CSPD, vii. 163. 270

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It would be ‘impossible for the Christian Magistrate to support his sword in the midst of such confusion’. Reason and prudence, not pretended inspiration, were to ‘direct us in civil matters’.276 Condemning the defeat of the Humble Proposals, Hall accused the Assembly of ‘plucking up’ all ‘Ecclesiastical and Civil policy’. He defended the maintenance of the tithe (as law, not as right), and the Triers and Ejectors as a legitimate ‘way of scrutiny’ into ministers and as a means of ensuring peace. By denying the state’s religious competence, the Nominated Assembly had justly ensured its own demise.277 Both Hobbes and Hall were motivated towards Independency by the force of their Erastian objections to sectarians and clericalists, who alike denied the spiritual competence of the state. Hall’s Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy directly mentions Hobbes, but Confusion Confounded was without doubt his most Hobbesian work. The tract almost certainly enlists Hobbes’s authority as a ‘learned modern’ and expert on the nature of sovereignty.278 It came much closer to Hobbes’s constitutional views by jettisoning republicanism and defending the placing of ‘power immediately into the hands of the Lord General’.279 It based its arguments on the Tacitean humanist principles that, it has been argued, partly informed Hobbes’s own politics.280 Hall, undoubtedly like Hobbes, relied on John Selden in defending tithes as jus humanum and not jus divinum.281 The likely influence of Venetian humanist discourse on Hobbes also found an echo in Hall’s writing. Hall compared England’s ecclesiastical usurpers with the Roman papalists who moved against Paolo Sarpi, ‘the famous father Paul of Venice, whose excellent indeavours of asserting the Civil Right against the Ecclesiastick usurpation will scarcely bee forgotten’.282 As we have seen, Harrington’s defence of Hobbes had specifically endorsed his Erastian and implicitly Congregationalist interpretation of primitive ordination. Hall similarly construed the laying on of hands as ‘meerly a Civil sanction, and admission for orders sake’.283 That Hall, like his fellow republicans Harrington, Stubbe, Rand, and Osborne, drew his Erastian ecclesiology partly from Hobbes seems certain. It might also be speculated that the current of influence between Hobbes and Hall did not flow in only one direction. In particular, Behemoth’s praise for the university Visitations, its account of Cromwell’s Scottish campaign, and particularly its justification of the execution of Christopher Love, all parallel Hall’s writings with considerable precision.284 John Hall’s writings thus advance the thesis that Hobbesian Erastianism, and its potential to buttress a Machiavellian notion of civil religion, appealed to Interregnum republicans with a striking consistency. And among republicans with such an intellectual profile, none enjoyed more influence than Marchamont 276

[John Hall], Confusion Confounded; or, A Firm Way of Settlement Settled and Confirmed (1654), 3–5, 7–8. Ibid. 4–7, 16–18. 278 ‘Whether it be as was said of old, that man was naturally sociable, or as a learned Modern hath said, that he is compelled into society merely for the advantages and necessities of life’. Hall, Confusion Confounded, 9. 279 Peacey, ‘Nibbling at Leviathan’, 246. 280 Tacitus is quoted on the title page of Confusion Confounded. 281 Hall, Confusion Confounded, 17; Lev., 368–72. 282 Hall, Gagg to Love’s Advocate, 10. 283 Hall, Confusion Confounded, 18; Lev., 371–3, 375–7. 284 Beh., 174–5; Compare with Hall, Humble Motion, Grounds and Reasons, and Gagg to Love’s Advocate. 277

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Nedham. Throughout his convoluted career—as a parliamentarian until 1646, a royalist between 1647 and 1649, and a Cromwellian thereafter—Nedham was the most important newssheet editor in England.285 During the Interregnum his Mercurius Politicus and (after 1655) Public Intelligencer enjoyed a news monopoly. The papers, and Nedham’s important political tracts, secured him enormous influence. His words, recalled Anthony Wood, ‘flew every week into all parts of the Nation for more than ten years’.286 Nedham and Hobbes shared several associates (including John Hall, who reportedly assisted in the editing of Mercurius Politicus287) but there is no evidence that they were personally acquainted. Nedham was, nevertheless, an avid student of Hobbes. He publicized Hobbes’s writings in Mercurius Politicus, reported on his doings in exile, and included unattributed passages from his writings in his own editorials and tracts. Quentin Skinner has gone so far as to conclude that, through Nedham, Hobbes’s doctrines ‘attained the invidious status of official propaganda for the Commonwealth’.288 Nedham’s popularization of Hobbes is thus of critical importance, but to date only Skinner has investigated it, by exploiting Nedham’s use of Hobbes’s de factoist theory of political obligation. There is no doubt that this accounts for a part of Nedham’s interest in Hobbes. Other historians, more interested in republicanism than in the Engagement debate, have ignored Nedham’s enthusiasm for Hobbes, which upsets any tidy opposition of Hobbes and the republicans. Nedham was a mercenary theorist, and the theoretical instability of his writings complicates efforts to explain his Hobbesian traits.289 But Nedham’s writings contained one constant: a vigorous and often politically determinative Erastianism. Like Hall and Harrington, he had a Machiavellian sense of the deep political importance and dangers of religion. A conviction that state-dominated religion, freed from clerical authority, was critical to political stability alienated Nedham from both episcopal and Presbyterian factions, and drew him towards the Cromwellian Independents. A politicized Erastianism served as the one constant of Nedham’s career, and this, above all, marked him as a Hobbesian thinker. From the start Nedham portrayed the revolution as a struggle to secure state authority over religion. His earliest parliamentarian pamphlets blasted the bishops for their ‘popery’, excoriated that most hated of Laudians, John Cosin, and portrayed Charles I as a champion of clerical power and crypto-Catholicism.290 285 Joseph Frank, Cromwell’s Press Agent: A Critical Biography of Marchamont Nedham (Lanham, Md., 1980); Blair Worden, ‘Wit in a Roundhead: The Dilemma of Marchamont Nedham’, in Susan Ammussen and Mark Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1995), 301–37. 286 Wood, Athenae, ii. 466. 287 P. W. Thomas, John Berkenhead, 1617–1679: A Royalist Career in Politics and Polemics (Oxford, 1969), 63; WSC, 288 Skinner, ‘Ideological Context’, 311–12. ii. 584–5. 289 Commentators often read Nedham’s republican writings as more ‘sincere’, and note that his republican Excellency of a Free State (1656) was disliked by the government, and thus was not a ‘mercenary’ text. But this is also true of his royalist writings, which persisted after Charles’s execution. Further, if Nedham’s royalist and protectoral writings were bought, so too were the republican editorials of 1650–2 (by Bradshaw, in exchange for Nedham’s release from prison). The reading of Nedham presented here is not wed to any theory of the ‘essential’ Nedham. 290 Nedham, Rupert’s Sumpter and Private Cabinet Rifled . . . (1644); Mercurius Ecclesiasticus: or, Doctor Cousens his Visitation at Warrington . . . (1645).

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Nedham despised the ‘prelatick’ principle for seditiously mingling spiritual and temporal power in the ‘carnal’ interest of priests. With the rise of Presbyterianism, he became an important advocate for the Congregational Way. No writer of the era better demonstrates the capacity of Independency to attract supporters with little Puritan zealotry, but who appreciated the Erastian implications of Congregationalist ecclesiology. Nedham’s status as a partisan of the Independents has been generally overlooked, but Anthony Wood, for one, characterized him as their instrument.291 Nedham’s Independency often coloured his newssheet editorials, but his clearest service to the Independents was his 1646 Independencie no Schisme. Here, rebutting Presbyterian polemics, he defended the Independent’s Apologeticall Narration, and particularly the Erastian aspects of that manifesto. Nedham portrayed the Independent cause as a battle against episcopal and Presbyterian clerical interests. He vigorously defended the Long Parliament’s prerogative to settle the church as it pleased, unfettered by the self-serving advice of the Westminster Assembly of Divines.292 Even as a royalist, Nedham—as with John Hall, Thomas White, and Thomas Hobbes himself—remained impressed by the Erastian potential of Independency. He relentlessly excoriated the Presbyterians and encouraged Charles towards a deal with the Independents. In his 1647 The Case of the Kingdom Stated, Nedham warned Charles that an intractable ‘Antipathie’ existed ‘betwixt a Nationall Presbytery and the civill power of Common-weals and Kingdomes’.293 Independents, he concluded, were ‘the only friends to Civil government in the World, leaving it wholly in the hands of the Magistrate’. Dangerously crossing Charles’s Laudian advisers, he wrote: ‘Both Bishops and Presbyters by their Church-Policy stand Competitors with the Magistrate, and Independents leave all to him, save only the Kingdome of Christ, which (if you will take his owne word) is not of this world, and so can be no trouble to it.’294 Around this time Nedham was acting as a royalist spy and corresponding with the exiled court. It is thus possible his polemical efforts were coordinated with the plotting of the Louvre group. As late as January of 1649, he assured the royalist court that Cromwell did not intend to execute Charles but planned only to ‘work him out of any thoughts of ever admitting the Scottish Presbyterian interest’ once Charles was restored.295 This obtuse intelligence demonstrates how thoroughly Nedham was blinded by his hopes of making political allies out of the Independents. Any effort to place the careers of Marchamont Nedham and Thomas Hobbes side by side must take notice of their shared proximity to the Louvre group scheming of 1647. After the execution of King Charles, Nedham abandoned the Stuarts and made a move ‘for the Independents, then carrying all before them’.296 An Erastian 291

Wood, Athenae, ii. 466. Nedham, Independencie no Schisme. Or an Answer to a Scandalous Book entituled, the Schismastick Sifted . . . (1646), 1–3, 6–8, 10. 293 Nedham, The Case of the Kingdom Stated, according to the Proper Interests of the Severall Parties Ingaged (1647), 1–2. 294 Ibid. 4, 11, 14–16. 295 J. T. Peacey, ‘Marchamont Nedham and the Lawrans Letters’, Bodleian Library Record, 17 (2000), 24–36. 296 Wood, Athenae, ii. 466. 292

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Independency dominated Nedham’s varied Interregnum polemical writings. He allied himself firmly with the Magisterial Independents around Cromwell, and his commitment to religious toleration was qualified by a desire to preserve a national church under state control. ‘Treason never walks so secure as under the cloak of religion’, declared one editorial in Mercurius Politicus, and the newssheet worked relentlessly to expose this truth.297 Nedham persistently linked resistance to the Engagement with seditious preaching, which he blamed on a ‘priestly’ attachment to divine-right power.298 During the Scottish War, he publicized Cromwell’s Erastian proclamations, including his righteous rebuke to the Edinburgh clergy for ‘trying to over-top the Civil Power’. Nedham justified the execution of Christopher Love with logic very reminiscent of John Hall’s.299 In the Case of the Commonwealth Stated of 1650, Nedham’s chief defence of the Commonwealth, he flogged the Presbyterians for seeking to erect a jure divino power ‘distinct from the Civill . . . so that the Parliament might for ever cut the throat of their own Authority and Magistracy’.300 The national church must be ruled by ‘politic and prudential rules’. The ‘present governors’, Nedham wrote, had justly moved against Presbyterians and episcopalians alike in order not to ‘prostitute Themselves, and the Majesty of the Nation, to serve the ambitious ends of a few priests’.301 Nedham adopted this line of argument partly from his intellectual master, Machiavelli. He cited Machiavelli on the danger of armed prophets, and used Savonarola as an example of the phenomenon. In a similar humanist vein, he exploited Lipsius, Guiccardini, and Tacitus to both demonstrate the dangers of powerful priests and to defend the political utility of toleration.302 As for the emerging Erastian discourse of the natural rights theorists, Mercurius Politicus advertised a translation of Grotius’s Authority of the Highest Power about Sacred Things.303 Nedham’s defence of the Godly magistrate, then, though at times defended with the rhetoric of Bucer and Calvin,304 was largely the work of a humanist politique. Indeed, his royalist polemics against Cromwell rarely portrayed the General as a sectarian zealot but often presented him as an ‘apt scholar of Machiavelli’, skilled at manipulating the religious convictions of the masses.305 This language was intended to insult, but, coming from as convinced a Machiavellian as Nedham, was ambiguous at the very least. In an important 1654 defence of the Protectorate entitled A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth, Nedham jettisoned his republican convictions to apologize for the dissolution of the Nominated Assembly and creation of the 297

298 Mercurius Politicus, 1 (6–13 June 1650), 4, 9. Mercurius Politicus, 55 (19–26 June 1651), 879. Mercurius Politicus, 14 (5–12 Sept. 1650), 222; 16 (19–26 Sept. 1650), 273–4; 4 (27 June–4 July 1650), 50–1; 15 (12–19 Sept. 1650), 225; 2 (13–20 June 1650), 17. 300 Nedham, The Case of the Common-wealth of England Stated: the Equity, Utility, and Necessity of a Submission to the Present Government Cleared out of Monuments both Sacred and Civill . . . (1650), epistle dedicatory, 69–70. 301 Ibid. 1–2, 18, 25–30, 69, 57, 70–1, 77, 97–8, 99. 302 Ibid. 20, 98–9; Nedham, Certain Considerations tendered in all Humility to an Honourable Member of the Council 303 Mercurius Politicus, 144 (10–17 Mar. 1653). of State . . . (1649), 2–4, 9–11. 304 Nedham, Case of the Common-wealth, 31; Mercurius Politicus, 22 (31 Oct.–7 Nov. 1650), 358. 305 Nedham, A Plea for the King and Kingdome (1648), 16; Ding-Dong, or Sir Pitiful Parliament on his Death-Bed (1648), 4–6; Second Part of Crafty Crumwell, entire. 299

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Protectorate.306 The Nominated Assembly, infected with sectarian zeal, had made ‘saintliness’ into a form of ‘infallibility’. The Assembly had ‘branded the Governours and Government as Babylonish and Antichristian’, and had conspired to obstruct Cromwell’s ‘work of Reformation and Settlement’. Nedham condemned the defeat of the Humble Proposals as an act subversive of the ‘Magistrates power in any matters of religion’.307 Indeed, seditious conspiring among the members of the Nominated Assembly had only affirmed the need for a stable religious settlement. (Nedham had infiltrated Fifth Monarchist conventicles as a spy, and had reported directly to Cromwell that the Fifth Monarchists refused to acknowledge his power in ecclesiastical causes.308) The sad lessons of ‘our late experience’, Nedham wrote, taught that God did not rule the world through saints, but through ‘natural endowments and faculties’, through ‘Wisdom and Prudence’. Those who sought to erect spiritual tests for governance, or to deny the government control over religious matters, repeated the sins of the papists and prelates. Secure state administration of the church was prudent and necessary.309 Nedham’s defence of the Protectorate, like Hall’s, centrally endorsed its controversial plan to establish a state church in the interest of political stability. Nedham again rallied to the Cromwellian church settlement in 1657, when the settlement was publicly attacked by the separatist John Goodwin. Goodwin, we have seen, condemned the Triers and Ejectors as intrusions into a private religious sphere and as instruments of Machiavellian statecraft. Nedham’s rejoinder, The Great Accuser Cast Down of 1657, all but accepted these characterizations. Goodwin, Nedham wrote, had dared to tell ‘the Civill Powers, they have put a great Indignity and Affront upon Jesus Christ by issuing out the said Commissioners and Ordinances’. Such a denial of the sovereign’s religious authority, he warned, constituted nothing short of treason. To rebuke the magistrate in such terms was ‘pontificall’.310 Nedham denounced clerical claims on jus divinum. He explicitly affirmed, against Goodwin, that the magistrate enjoyed authority to govern outward religion. The ‘understanding and discretion’ of the state was necessary to order the church and protect true doctrine.311 ‘How often’, he asked, ‘had the present authority been put to a stand by such Demagogues, who have abused the pulpit and ordinances of God, to make them serve their purposes by bidding defiance to all rule and authority’?312 As with Hall and Harrington, Nedham’s distaste for the constitutional innovations of Oliver Cromwell was considerably mitigated by approval of his religious policies. And as with Hall and Harrington, Nedham’s religious outlook was critically influenced by the writings of Thomas Hobbes. In early 1651, as Hobbes was preparing Leviathan for publication and Cromwell was 306 [Nedham], A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth . . . in reference to the late established Government by a Lord Protector and a Parliament . . . (1654). This text has been neglected, presumably because it fails to conform to the republican Nedham. Some (Frank, Agent, 198) have denied that this work was by him, but Professor Worden has 307 [Nedham], True State, 13–14, 16. established his authorship (Worden, Rump, 362). 308 PRO S.P., 18/42, fo. 59. 309 [Nedham], True State, 24–8. 310 Nedham, The Great Accuser Cast Down, or a Publick Trial of Mr. John Goodwin . . . (1657), epistle dedicatory and 311 Ibid. 23, 36, 63. ‘to the reader’. 312 Nedham, Accuser, 43–4, 48, 64.

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smashing the Scots, Mercurius Politicus relentlessly hammered Presbyterian resistance to the new order. A January editorial began by asserting that God had ceased to speak to any man ‘by his private interpretation of the Scriptures’, or by any power ‘not depending on the supreme Power of every Common-wealth’. Rather, Nedham wrote, God spoke by ‘his Vice-Gods, or Lieutenants here on earth, that is to say, by Soveraign Kings, or such as have soveraign Authority as well as they’. He continued: it will easily appear, that under the soveraign Power of a Christian Commonwealth, there is no danger of Damnation from simple obedience to human Laws: For, as to Religious things, seeing that the Soveraign alloweth Christianity, no man is compelled to renounce that Faith which is enough for his Salvation; that is to say, the Fundamental Points. And for other Points, seeing they are not absolutely necessary to salvation, if we conform our Actions to the Law, we do not only what we are allowed, but what we are commanded by the Law of Nature, which is the Morall Law taught by our Saviour himself: And it is part of that Obedience which must concurr to our Salvation. And though it be true, that whatsoever a man doth against his Conscience, is Sin; yet the obedience in these Cases is neither Sin, nor against the Conscience. For, the Conscience being nothing else but a man’s setled Judgment and opinion; when his Right of judging in things indifferent, or of civill cognisance, is transferred to another, viz. to the supreme Power; then that which is commanded is no lesse his Judgment, than the Judgment of that other; So that in obedience to Laws, a man doth still according to his own Conscience, but not his private Conscience. And whatsoever is done contrary to private Conscience, is then a Sin, when the Lawes have left him to his own Liberty, and never else.313

This editorial, later reprinted in the Case of the Common-wealth, was lifted without attribution from Hobbes’s Elements of Law, which had only recently been published without authorization (and publicized in Nedham’s newssheet).314 In France, Hobbes himself was completing Leviathan, applying his long-standing Erastian principles to the political situation of 1650–1. In this Nedham anticipated him, and enlisted Hobbes’s religious doctrines—his subordination of clerical authority to the state, his minimalist soteriology, his theology of obedience—in his defence of the Commonwealth’s religious authority against sectarian and Presbyterian critics. Mercurius Politicus continued to strike Hobbesian notes of this sort throughout the year. Leviathan appeared in the bookstalls in the spring of 1651. In July a Nedham editorial celebrated the triumph of Independency against episcopal and presbyterian clerical interests ‘which had twisted an Interest with the Civill power’: Let Preachers of the Gospel be multiplyed and receive highest encouragement, and let them receive their Mission from God and the Magistrate, not from any of their Brethren without the Magistrate. Most of the imbroilments of the world have bin caused by that old corrupt principle in Politicks, admitting the division of a State into Ecclesiastical and Civill; now it is time to shake it off, let us have nothing like it. Let Ministers live as other men, as 313 Mercurius Politicus 34 (23–30 Jan. 1651), 551–2; Nedham, Case of the Common-wealth, 110; Skinner, ‘Ideological 314 EL, 152–3; Mercurius Politicus, 29 (19–26 Dec. 1650), 486. Context’, 311.

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members of the Civill State, and let their Priviledges (as those of other inferiour Societies of men) flow from the Civill Power.315

Here Nedham did not engage in wholesale plagiarism, but the parallels with Leviathan spring off the page. Both writers used the metaphor of ‘twisting’ a knot to describe the historical development of clerical power. Both insisted on the magistrate’s power to appoint preachers, and compared the clergy to lay corporations. Both defended Independency by employing Erastian principles. Nedham’s theory of civil unrest, here voiced for the first time, was strikingly similar to Hobbes’s own dictum that ‘the dispute for precedence between the spirituall and the civill power’ had caused most civil wars.316 Neham’s editorials continued their Erastian drumbeat throughout 1651. Hobbes arrived in London in December or January, and submitted himself to the Council of State. In the latter month Mercurius Politicus published its gleeful account of Hobbes’s downfall at the royalist court, attributing it to Leviathan’s brave assault on ‘priestly’ interests and implicitly defending Hobbes from the charge of atheism.317 From where Nedham gathered this intelligence is not clear, but in March Edward Nicholas complained about how well informed Mercurius Politicus was of events at the exiled court.318 In April, Nedham printed a lengthy editorial on church polity—later reprinted in his 1656 Excellency of a Free State—that seemingly contained slightly modified passages from Leviathan. The ‘first error’ observed in ‘Christian policie’, he wrote, was the ‘corrupt division of a State into Ecclesiasticall and Civill’. This closely echoed Hobbes.319 Nedham then repeated his conviction, also seemingly informed by Hobbes, that ‘most of the Civill Wars and broils throughout Europe, have bin occasioned by permitting the settlement of Clergy-Interests with the Secular . . . it will doubtless be understood, that the division of a State into Ecclesiastical and Civil, or any thing like it, must needs be one of the main errors received in Christian policy’. The editorial then explicitly praised Independency. The Lutherans, he wrote, in part did well, but having banisht the Popes actual tyranny, they left the seed and principle of it still behind, which was a State-Ecclesiasticall united with the Civil; for the Bishops twisted their own interest again with that of the Crown upon a Protestant accompt, and by vertue of that persecuted those they cald Puritans, for not being as Orthodox (they say) as themselves. This tyranny of Bishops being reformed, then our late Clergy Reformers cam in play, who did wel in banishing Prelacy, but yet retaind the old Principle of a distinct powerful body, and of being Quartermasters and Sharers with the Civil power; which having obtained for a little time, they began to persecute those they called Independent, because they embraced Principles of a purer nature than theirs, which they branded with error and heresy.320

Written only months after Leviathan’s publication and Nedham’s explicit praise of the work for exposing the ‘corrupt clergy interest’, this passage was very likely a 315 316 317 318 320

Mercurius Politicus, 60 (24–31 July 1651), 950–1. Hobbes to Devonshire, 23 July 1641, Corr., 120; DC, 81; Lev., 226–7. Mercurius Politicus, 84 (8–15 Jan. 1652), 1344. Nicholas to Norwich, 6 Mar. 1651, BL Birch MS 4180, fo. 31; see Ch. 4. Mercurius Politicus, 99 (22–28 Apr. 1652), 1553–4, 1556.

319

Lev., 226–7, 321–2.

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light reworking of Hobbes’s very similar endorsement of Independency. The passage’s structure—recounting in stages the ‘twisting’ and untwisting of clerical power, culminating in Independency—reads like a paraphrase of Leviathan’s account of tying and untying the ‘knot’ of ‘Pontificall Power’.321 Nedham’s most Hobbesian text was his True State of the Case of the Commonwealth of 1654, a work reminiscent of Hobbes in its defence of Cromwell’s quasi-monarchical dominance,322 but yet more so in its Erastian defence of Cromwell’s religious regime. Condemning subjects who rebelled on spiritual grounds, and those who had attacked the Cromwellian church settlement, Nedham wrote: When men assume Magistracie to Themselves upon any such grounds (as aforesaid) beside that of natural and civil Right, they not only lay a Foundation (as we have lately seen) for imposing upon mens consciences, and severe persecution, but do (as much as in them lies) proclaim war against all men besides their own Opinionists, cancelling the very Rights on Nature, together with all the Bonds of civil society . . . Upon this notion the Pope first set up himself, and the Prelates after him, adding the Temporal Authority to the Spiritual, and so made the Kingdom of Christ to be of this world, as those poor deluded souls do, who lay the foundation of their Fifth Monarchy upon the same carnal Supposition.323

Here, and elsewhere in the True State, Nedham introduced the Hobbesian language of natural right, civil society, the war of all against all, and unified sovereignty in a direct effort to defend the spiritual competence and church settlement of the Protectorate. Indeed, when he invoked almost identical arguments in his 1657 defence of the Cromwellian church against the separatist John Goodwin, Goodwin responded by characterizing the Triers (and their champion) as those who ‘esteeme all Laws as Leviathan esteems Iron and Brasse, who esteemth Iron as Straw, and Brasse as rotten wood’. Nedham rejoined by writing that such ‘baiting the hook with Leviathan’ was a great ‘ado’ to ‘little purpose’.324 The exchange seemingly reflected Goodwin’s perception that the principles of Leviathan and the principles undergirding Cromwell’s church settlement were fundamentally compatible. Nedham’s politic dodge notwithstanding, he probably agreed. In a 1657 roster of the ‘wits of the Commonwealth’, Mercurius Politicus included ‘Mr. Hobbes’ alongside Thomas White, John Hall, James Harrington, and Nedham himself.325 Apparently under pressure from Cromwell, Nedham called for an end to disruptive constitutional theorizing. From a distance, however, it is Hobbes’s mere inclusion among what Nedham called the ‘jolly Crew of the Inhabitants of the Island of Oceana’ that commands attention. Hobbes’s association with, and influence on, a host of republican thinkers proves particularly difficult to reconcile with the traditional image of him as the republicans’ chief nemesis. However 321

Lev., 478–80. Nedham may have alluded to Hobbes in this work when he defends an unnamed royalist writer who had been 323 Ibid. 27–8. judged ‘hereticall’ by the royalist court. Nedham, True State, 29. 324 Nedham, Accuser, 53–4. Goodwin’s original remark is found in Triers Tried, 8. 325 Mercurius Politicus, 352 (5–12 Mar. 1657), 7644. 322

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much republicans dissented from Hobbes on issues on the constitution of sovereignty, they regularly commended aspects of his Erastian ecclesiology. They also shared his estimation of Cromwellian Independency as a salutary church settlement, hostile to clerical power but sufficiently deferential to the spiritual sovereignty of the state. On the great ecclesiological questions of the Interregnum, the leading English republicans were both Cromwellians and Hobbesians. Of course, not all republicans supported a Congregationalist civil religion. Henry Vane and John Milton are notable exceptions. Both were separatists, and eschewed all coercive authority over matters of faith. The preponderance of Interregnum republican opinion, however, defended the ideal of civil religion rather than strict separatism. As for the assertion that a dedication to civil religion softened republican opposition to Cromwell, Milton and Vane—both staunch critics of the Cromwellian church settlement—are exceptions that prove the rule. Nor was either influenced by Thomas Hobbes. Milton, indeed, ‘did not like him at all’, according to his widow, finding that their ‘interests and tenets did run counter to each other’.326 Again, the exception proves the rule. Historians of English republicanism, like historians of Hobbes, have largely ignored the predominant role played by ecclesiological debates in Interregnum politics.327 This distorting secularization of political discourse has served to harden the division between ‘neo-Roman’ republicans such as Harrington and Nedham, and proto-liberals such as Hobbes and Locke. This chapter has looked beyond the polar model of competing republican and proto-liberal traditions. Part of the argument has asserted the ideological instability of republicanism in the 1650s, an instability that allowed propagandists with republican leanings to defend the Protectorate, and to exploit natural rights and interest-based arguments. But that negative argument does not go far enough. It is also critical to recognize those political questions that positively united English republicans and Thomas Hobbes. Chief among these was the great religious challenge of the Revolution: defining the relationship between the corporate church and the modernizing English state. Both Hobbes and the leading republicans rejected the dualist model of clerical and temporal power prized by the traditional clergy. Both rejected the revolutionary separatist model embraced by sectarian radicals. The former model threatened to revive the clerical estate as an agent of usurpation, the latter to create a destabilizing religious license. Both Hobbes and the republicans feared religious impulses that were loosed from the leash of political prudence. They advocated a civil religion, minimalist and rational, subordinate to the authority and purposes of the secular state. Within the context of Interregnum 326

ABL, ii. 72. There is nothing on religion in Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, and little in the impressive Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Skinner and van Gelderen; Professor Peltonen leaves the religious attitudes of the republicans to one side in Humanism and Republicanism, introduction. Jonathan Scott is much more attentive to the subject, but his conflation of republican politics and ‘anti-formal’ sectarians seeking ‘liberation of the soul from carnal oppression’ is somewhat imprecise. Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Stability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000), 294–6. More sound are the brief remarks of Worden, ‘English Republicanism’, in CHPT, 472–3. 327

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England, the Cromwellian Independents provided the closest approximation of this ideal. For this reason Leviathan endorsed Independency, and republicans such as Harrington, Hall, and Nedham, however uneasy with Cromwell’s monarchical aspirations, vocally defended his religious settlement. The convergence was no accident. However vehemently Hobbes denounced ‘democraticall’ writers such as Livy and Cicero, when church governance was at issue, his hostility to the ancients dissipated. As demonstrated in Chapter 1, Hobbes’s ecclesiological doctrines were marked by more than a touch of Machiavellianism. It should thus not surprise that English republicans were allured by the powerful synthesis of modern rationalism and neo-pagan religious attitudes achieved by Leviathan. On religious questions the division of Interregnum political theorists into proto-liberals and ancient republicans conceals more than it reveals. It is more accurate to understand Hobbes and the republicans as fellow humanist advocates of civil religion, drawn to Cromwell in part because they understood him as a latter-day Augustus, a scourge of the clergy, a unifier of temporal and spiritual power. The effort to lash the corporate power of the church and the intellectual prestige of Christian theology to the purposes of the secular state was central to the emergence of enlightened, modern government. It was an effort that appealed to radical theorists of all stripes. Hobbes and the republicans were not rivals but allies in applauding the achievement of the Erastian Revolution.

6

The Independents and the ‘Religion of Thomas Hobbes’ It has been a fundamental premiss of this book that Thomas Hobbes’s Erastianism simultaneously drew on the variant theoretical traditions of Protestant ecclesiology and humanist civil religion. For the London-based Cromwellian writers examined in Chapter 5, Hobbes’s Erastianism proved congenial in both regards. But Cromwell’s church settlement did not merely appeal to anticlerical humanist wits such as Francis Osborne and Marchamont Nedham. For the Independent divines who designed it, and very likely for Cromwell himself, the religious regime of the Interregnum was an enormous step on the road to the Godly state and the final achievement of the English Reformation. This chapter will examine Hobbes’s links to the Independents closest to Oliver Cromwell. If Hobbes’s influence as an Erastian theorist was felt among the ideological defenders of Cromwell’s church settlement, it also rippled through the circles responsible for creating it. Through the efforts of Henry Stubbe, a serious effort was made to reconcile Hobbes with the Independents around John Owen. In the event, that effort would fail, but its history reveals vital affinities between Hobbes and the Independents. The Independents were more rigorously Christian than Hobbes’s London associates, and they disliked the heterodox undercurrents of Leviathan. But even as they repudiated his theology, many Independents were allured by Hobbes’s political understanding of the church. For his part, Hobbes was reciprocally drawn towards the Congregationalist faction, and publicly supported it. In this meeting of the minds—however partial and fleeting—is revealed the striking extent to which Hobbes and the Cromwellian Independents were fellow-travellers in the Revolution’s campaign to perfect the Erastian Reformation.

i The flirtation of the Independents with Hobbesian ecclesiology occurred most notably at Oxford University, which by 1650 had become the fiercest ideological battleground in Interregnum England. Intense efforts to control both Oxford and Cambridge had exercised parliament since the early 1640s. Fairfax seized Oxford

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in 1646, and the following year, determined to cull disaffection from the university, parliament erected a Visitation Committee to regulate it.1 The authority of the Visitation was resisted, but it nevertheless launched a purge of royalists and episcopalians.2 Virtually all the colleges received new heads and perhaps four hundred scholars of various ranks were expelled. Initially, the Presbyterian faction played a significant role in perpetrating the purge, but this changed as the political situation developed at the centre. Pride’s Purge and the King’s execution alienated the Presbyterians from all mechanisms of parliamentary authority.3 The delivery of the Engagement to Oxford decisively shifted momentum in favour of the Independents, who would dominate the University for the remainder of the Interregnum. In 1650, Oliver Cromwell himself was elected Chancellor after the death of the disliked Lord Pembroke. John Owen, as his Vice-Chancellor, dominated the new board of Visitors appointed in 1652 and effectively governed Oxford on behalf of the Independents. Thomas Goodwin, President of Magdalen College and described by a contemporary as one of the ‘two Atlases and patriarchs of Independency’ (with Owen), also enjoyed enormous influence at Cromwellian Oxford.4 Purges, however, failed to eliminate Presbyterian opinion at Oxford, and even some closeted episcopalians remained in their posts. The original parliamentary Visitation had appointed a number of Presbyterians who survived after 1652. As one leading authority has observed, Cromwell aimed to both ‘reform and reconcile’ Oxford, and these aims frequently conflicted.5 With an eye on the latter task, he placed John Wilkins on a Council established in 1652 to execute the office of Chancellor. Wilkins’s religious views proved malleable (he was later Bishop of Chester), but in factional disputes during the Interregnum he allied with the Presbyterian faction. Owen and Goodwin enjoyed the best access to the Protector’s ear, but Wilkins sustained some influence for the discontented Presbyterians.6 Oxford, even under Cromwell’s thumb, thus maintained sufficient breathing space for ideological wrangling. Presbyterians repeatedly attempted to reduce the arbitrary authority of the Visitors, and they opposed Owen’s various efforts to tighten his own grip on power by diminishing the influence of Convocation.7 Nor did matters of university governance alone divide the parties. They regularly foundered on the shoals of the church government question, and divided between advocates of classical presbyteries and those of gathered churches. Ecclesiological dispute grew particularly hot after the creation of Cromwell’s church settlement in 1654, which had been devised by prominent Oxford Independents such as Owen 1 Montagu Borrows, introduction to The Register of the Visitors of the University of Oxford 1647–1658 (1881), pp. xxxi–xxxii. 2 Charles Edward Mallet, History of the University of Oxford (3 vols., London, 1924), ii. 370–8; Ian Roy and Dietrich Reinhart, ‘The Civil Wars’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), 17th c. Oxford (Oxford, 1997), 723–9. 3 Mallett, History of the University of Oxford, ii. 386. 4 Wood, Athenae, ii. 556; Barbara Shapiro, John Wilkins: An Intellectual Biography (Berkeley, 1969), 84–95; Mallett, History of the University of Oxford, ii. 389–92; Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, in 17th c. Oxford, ed. Tyacke, 5 Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, 740. iv, 733–40. 6 Shapiro, Wilkins, 81–91. 7 Mallett, History of the University of Oxford, 394–6; Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, 733, 743–5.

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and Goodwin. Oxford was, in short, itself a vast experiment in Godly reform, and its habitués produced much of the controversial religious literature of the decade. Thomas Hobbes strongly sympathized with efforts to reform England’s ancient universities. This was consistent with his general approval of the ecclesiastical regimen of Cromwellian England, for control of the universities and control of the clerical estate were understood as allied enterprises. Throughout the Revolution efforts to purge disaffection from the ministry and efforts to control the universities were animated by a common anticlerical spirit. The Interregnum University Visitations were widely understood as elements of the church settlement. Cromwell, for instance, considered founding a new Oxford college, empowered to make ‘a generall Synopsis of the true reformed Protestant Christian religion proffessed in the Commonwealth’. The Protector’s control over this process would have been explicitly secured by the Triers’ proposed control over admissions.8 For his part, Hobbes consistently portrayed the ancient universities as hothouses of clerical sedition. All his works, and particularly Leviathan, subjected the universities to acerbic critique, and urged sovereigns to pry them from the grip of the clergy.9 Hobbes understood the Interregnum Visitations as salutary efforts to accomplish such an end; as demonstrated in Chapter 5, he frankly praised them even after the Restoration.10 Hobbes’s professed sympathy with Independency would severely alienate him from both Presbyterians and episcopalians. The ultimately more fateful response of the episcopalians will be examined in the next chapter. But Presbyterians, though alienated from Cromwell, nonetheless maintained positions of considerable prominence during the Interregnum. In the short term, their hostility to Hobbes proved more visible. The incompatibility of Hobbes’s Erastianism and Presbyterian ecclesiological principles was apparent from the start. As demonstrated in Chapter 3, the Scottish Presbyterians were up in arms about Hobbes’s influence as early as 1646.11 Presbyterian suspicions burst into full-blown rancour after the publication of Leviathan. English Presbyterians, their nerves already jangled by the ascendancy of their enemies, were not disposed to tolerate a work which justified Independency along vehemently Erastian lines. Only months after Leviathan’s appearance, a campaign to secure its suppression was launched by Presbyterians within the circle of the prominent divine Richard Baxter. Thomas Hill, the Presbyterian Master of Trinity College, Cambridge,12 reported in February of 1652 that Baxter’s ‘deepe detestation of Hobbs his Leviathan hath awakened some of us to consider what is fitt to be done therein’.13 Baxter, in letters to Hill, condemned Hobbes’s Erastianism, particularly Leviathan’s doctrines that ‘Christ Doth but teach and princes Command’, and that ‘no ministers hath any power of governing or commanding; nor Christ any Kingdom now 8

‘Draught of a prospect of Oliver Cromwell for a new college at Oxford’, BL Add. MS. 32093, fos. 399–400. 10 Beh., 147–8. Lev., 461–74. 11 Baillie to Henderson, 13 Aug. 1646 and Baillie to Murray, Sept. 1646, Letters of Baillie, ii. 388, 395. 12 On Hill, see the editorial notes in Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, ed. N. H. Keeble and Geoffrey F. Nuttall (2 vols., Oxford, 1991), i. 74. 13 Hill to Baxter, 13 Feb. 1652, Dr William’s Library, Baxter Correspondence, iii, fo. 266. 9

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on earth’.14 A few months later Presbyterian booksellers and printers close to Baxter launched a public campaign to secure the outlawing of Leviathan.15 In a published appeal to parliament they attacked Hobbes, along with other ‘popish’ and blasphemous authors. Among Hobbes’s offences were the following doctrines: that ‘the Kingdom of God we pray for in the Lords Prayer . . . is nothing else but a Civil Kingdom, governed by God’s Lieutenants and Vicars upon earth’; that ‘God hath a Soveraign Prophet and Vicergerent upon Earth, who is a Christian Soveraign’; and that the prince could command Christians to forsake Christ.16 Hobbes’s statist religious inclinations had thus provoked Baxter and his allies. The petitioning effort by the Presbyterian booksellers, we have seen, elicited a general defence of Hobbes and other targeted authors by sympathetic members of the army. In 1655 Richard Baxter would himself publish a sermon that he had originally delivered at Westminster Abbey. His Humble Advice primarily called for a revivification of clerical authority, and urged the Protectoral parliament to encourage ‘Ministerial Assemblies and Associations’, modelled on his Worcestershire Association. ‘Deny us not’, Baxter pointedly declared on behalf of his clerical brethren, ‘what the Church Enjoyed under Heathen Princes’. Baxter conceded that Cromwell’s Ejectors might usefully ‘keep peace in Churches’, but he urged that ‘Associated Ministers ordain others to Ministerial office’, and that ordained ministers enjoy full control of the sacraments and catechizing.17 Within this plea for a renewal of the authority of the clerical estate, Baxter embedded an attack on Hobbes: ‘Lay a penalty on him that Prints or sels any Books against the Fundamentals or Essentials of Christianity; and that slanders or reproach Magistracy, Ministry, or Ordinances of Christ. And burn some more of this nature, that you may manifest a disowning of them. Specially Hobbs his Leviathan.’18 Hobbes was the only author so singled out in the Humble Advice. Baxter’s inclusion of this barb within a general critique of the permissive and Erastian spirit of the Interregnum evidences his sense of Hobbes as an apologist for such ills of the age. Baxter’s campaign probably accounted for one of the era’s pre-eminent rejoinders to Hobbes, George Lawson’s Examination of the Political Part of Mr. Hobbs, his Leviathan. Lawson, rector of the hamlet of More, is chiefly remembered for his Politica Sacra et Civilis of 1660. His critique of Leviathan appeared in 1657 and was his first printed work. Why the obscure Lawson felt compelled to 14

Baxter to Hill, 8 Mar. 1652, Dr William’s Library, Baxter Correspondence, iii, fo. 272–3. The booksellers were Luke Fawne, Samuel Gellibrand, Joshua Kirton, John Rothwell, Thomas Underhill, and Nathaniel Webb. On Underhill’s ‘acquaintance’ with Baxter, see Hotchkis to Baxter, 29 Mar. 1654, Dr William’s Library, Baxter Correspondence, iii, fo. 181; on Gellibrand’s, Bartlett to Baxter, 3 Nov. 1652, Baxter Correspondence, iv, fo. 179; on Rothwell, Ford to Baxter, 25 Oct. 1655, Baxter Correspondence, iii, fo. 100. Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who Were at Work in England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (London, 1907), 73, 81, 112, 157, 185, 191. 16 Luke Fawne et al., Beacon Set on Fire, 14–15; Fawne and his party published a Second Beacon Fired in 1654. Now petitioning Cromwell rather than Parliament, they dropped their complaint against Hobbes. 17 Richard Baxter, Humble Advice, or the Heads of Those things which were Offered to Many Honourable Members of 18 Ibid. 7. Parliament . . . (1655), 2–6, 9. 15

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respond to Hobbes cannot be fully reconstructed, but it appears very likely that his Examination was encouraged by the Baxter circle. Lawson claimed that ‘divers, learned, and judicious’ friends at the University had pressed him to compose it.19 Lawson was a Cambridge man, so this remark may have referred to Thomas Hill, or other Cambridge figures involved in Baxter’s campaign against Leviathan. Lawson knew Baxter himself well, and their mutual publisher, Thomas Underhill, was partly responsible for the Beacon petition.20 Further, Baxter’s Holy Commonwealth of 1659 characterized Lawson’s Examination as a decisive response to the principles of Hobbes.21 In any case, Lawson’s Examination certainly dovetailed thematically with the broader Presbyterian critique of Hobbes. The work is chiefly remembered for its constitutional objections to Leviathan, which influenced Locke.22 But the Examination also levelled severe criticism at Leviathan’s theory of the church, and it must partly be read within the context of clerical criticisms of Hobbesian Erastianism. Lawson was ideally situated to tackle this subject. At various junctures during his career he allied himself with both the episcopal and Presbyterian factions. Before the war, Lawson was known as a ‘great honourer of Archbishop Laud’, who advanced his career. In the 1640s he participated in the Westminster Assembly’s ill-fated classis system, and as late as 1660 he had kind words for it.23 However, Lawson’s status as an ecclesiological trimmer (Baxter characterized him as a ‘Conformist’24) never softened his harsh assessment of Independency. His Politica skewered the Congregational Way for having fomented schism, heresy, and scepticism. He specifically debunked the thesis, employed by Congregationalists such as John Owen (see below) and included in Leviathan, that the biblical word ecclesia permanently defined the church as a congregation or assembly ‘meeting in one place’.25 Lawson did reject jure divino ecclesiology. In other respects, however, his ecclesiology was strikingly traditional and virtually medieval in its dualism. Indeed, the fundamental thesis and structuring principle of the Politica posited a foundational ‘opposition’ between the civil and spiritual ‘communities’. The power of the keys, he wrote, in one of innumerable formulations, ‘was not given to the state. The power of the Kingdom of Heaven is not the power of the kingdoms of the earth’.26 Lawson viewed the church as a distinct and independent entity, formed from within a national Christian community and reflecting an organic 19

George Lawson, Examination of the Political Part of Mr. Hobbs his Leviathan (1657), to the reader. Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, 107–8; Conal Condren, George Lawson’s Politica and the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1989), 137. 21 Richard Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth, ed. William Lamont (Cambridge, 1994) 82, 196. Baxter credited Lawson with ‘instigating me to the study of Politicks’ (see editorial notes in Calendar of Baxter Correspondence, i. 71). 22 John Bowle, Hobbes and Critics: A Study in 17th-Century Constitutionalism (London, 1969), 86–100; Julian Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty . . . (Cambridge, 1978), 53, 86–7. 23 Condren, Lawson’s Politica, 11–12, 19; George Lawson, Politica Sacra et Civilis, ed. Conal Condren (Cambridge, 24 Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, 108. 1992), 160–1. 25 Lawson, Politica, 162–75, 190–213. 26 Ibid. 78, 16, 17, 30, 42. Though Lawson spoke of sovereignty as ‘indivisible’, he believed (contra Hobbes) that the church possessed its own sovereignty, parallel to that of the state. 20

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hierarchy.27 He devised a slate of spiritual powers—the ordination and expulsion of ministers, church discipline, the formation of doctrine—which fell within the independent sphere of the church and outside that of the state.28 Such a traditional deference to the prerogatives of the corporate church fired Lawson’s hostility to Independency, which, in his view, undermined the organic unity of the national church and cultivated contempt for its clergy. He also loathed the Erastian mood of the revolutionary years.29 The state was obliged to defend the church and execute her judgements, but it usurped ministerial power when it went beyond these duties. ‘Neither did Christ nor his apostles’, Lawson wrote, ‘think it fit to make the ministers magistrates, nor the magistrates ministers.’ He even betrayed a certain scepticism of that cornerstone of the English Reformation: the Royal Supremacy. He preferred the limp title ‘supreme administrator’ over ‘governor’ or ‘head’ of the church. Latter-day Erastians, he concluded, risked creating a heathen civil religion reminiscent of Rome’s.30 Lawson partly blamed the Erastian spirit of the age for having scuttled efforts to replace the Laudian church with a reformed episcopal or Presbyterian settlement. He viewed Independency as a product of this destructive impulse, and he keenly felt the compatibility of Independency and godless Erastianism. He condemned the many ‘statists, who knew how to make the congregational party subservient to their civil interest, not only to poise, but to beat down the Presbyterian’.31 Lawson’s ecclesiological dualism, and its attendant hostility to Erastian Independency, explains critical features of his Examination of Hobbes. This work, prefiguring the efforts of Richard Baxter, criticized Hobbes as a proponent of a Christianized civil religion. Lawson upbraided Hobbes for conflating the ‘plain difference between Civil and Ecclesiastical Power, between the Sword and the Keys’.32 He explicitly defended the ‘twofold end’ of government against Leviathan, and argued that ministers ‘derive their power from Christ by the church and not from any civil Governors’. The church and state were ‘two distinct Commonwealths, the one spiritual and the other temporal’, in ‘Power, Form of Government, Administration, Laws, Jurisdiction, Offices’.33 Lawson would later claim that his most distinguished work, the Politica, had been designed specifically to clarify the ‘difference between church and state, civil and ecclesiastical government’ against Erastian impulses.34 His Examination of Hobbes strongly anticipated the theme. What is more, Lawson’s Examination linked the Hobbesian and Independent strands of Erastianism. He blasted the ‘simple and giddy fools’ who (‘especially in 27 Lawson, Politica, 24, 29, 35, 39–40, 85, 175; Conal Condren, ‘Sacra before Civilis: Understanding the Ecclesiastical 28 Lawson, Politica, 51, 79, 81. Politics of George Lawson’, Journal of Religious History, 11 (1980), 524–35. 29 Condren presents Lawson as a quasi-Erastian, based on Lawson’s determination that church form was adiaphora. Condren, Lawson’s Politica, 176–7; Condren, ‘Confronting the Monster: George Lawson’s Reactions to Hobbes’s Leviathan’, Political Science, 40 (1988), 67–83 at 77–8. This slights Lawson’s specific rebuttals of Erastianism, and ignores the broad powers that he reserved to the church. The concept of adiaphora has Erastian potential, but in Lawson’s case did not lead to the settling of indifferent matters ‘by invoking the secular authority in the name of peace’, as Professor Condren argues. Nor was Lawson’s Erastianism ‘pretty close to the satisfaction of Hobbes’. 30 Lawson, Politica, 131–5, 50, ch. 10, 19, 88. 31 Ibid. 162, 199–202, 205–8, 213–16, 259–60. 32 Lawson, Examination of Hobbs, 8. 33 Ibid. 11, 81, 138–9, 192. 34 Lawson, Politica, 274.

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these Lunatick times’) were taken with Hobbes’s ‘design to take all power from the Church, Dethrone Christ, and confer all spiritual power in matters of Religion upon the civil Soveraign’.35 He expressly attributed Hobbes’s belief that the ‘State and Church are but one body’ to ‘some learned Divines’, a probable reference to the more Erastian-minded Independents. The ‘power of outward discipline’, he wrote, ‘is challenged by the Pope, by the Clergy, by the people Christian, and by the State civil and Soveraign of the world. And in this last party [Hobbes] is deeply engaged; but upon what reason I know not, except he intends to side with the strongest, for such are they which bear the sword.’36 The ‘party’ to which Hobbes had ‘engaged’ was certainly the Cromwellians who had usurped control of the church. The Independents, Lawson rued, had fomented schism by wholly abolishing the clerical estate. Indeed, he suggested that Cromwellian Independency itself might have served as a mere pretence by which more easily to secure civil control of religion.37 Lawson’s Examination, in short, was part of the wider Presbyterian campaign to discredit Hobbesian political theory by lashing it to the godless Erastianism of the Cromwellian era. The axis of Presbyterian clergy and conservative stationers may well have produced the complaint lodged against Hobbes before the second protectoral parliament. In January of 1657 ‘one Robinson, a Scotchman, corrector of his Highness’s press’, presented ‘Hobbes’s Leviathan to the Committee [for Bibles], as a most poisonous piece of atheism’.38 This Robinson cannot be conclusively identified, but the most likely candidate is the bookseller Humphrey Robinson, who was a leading light of the Stationers Company, and thus might have served as a press corrector for Cromwell.39 Suggestive in this regard is his apparent acquaintance with Cromwell’s newssheet editor, Marchamont Nedham.40 It is also suggestive that the parliamentary complaint against Hobbes was accompanied by an effort to convince the MPs to suppress faulty Bible translations, as Humphrey Robinson was involved in the printing and sale of Brian Walton’s 1657 polyglot Bible.41 Robinson’s religious affiliations (and nationality) are unclear, but he was an occasional partner of Joshua Kirton, who was among the Stationers behind the Beacon petition.42 He may well have favoured Presbyterianism, but he had friends in the episcopal camp as well, where hostility to Hobbes was also strong.43 Indeed, 35

Lawson, Examination, 156. Lawson was a de factoist. Lawson, Examination, 140, 201; Condren, Lawson’s Politica, 102, 124, 175. 37 Lawson, Politica, 117–18, 193. 38 Diary of Thomas Burton . . . ed. John Towill Rutt (4 vols., London, 1828), i. 348–9. Rutt does not speculate as to the identity of Robinson. 39 Plomer, Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers, 155–6; Records of the Court of the Stationers Co. 1602–1640, ed. Robert Jackson (London, 1957), 429, 279–81, 304, 312, 487–9. 40 Robinson to Joseph Williamson, 19 Mar. 1657, CSPD: Commonwealth, x. 318. 41 Robinson to Williamson, 4 Feb. 1656, CSPD: Commonwealth, ix. 161; Robinson to Williamson, 29 June 1657, CSPD: Commonwealth, xi. 19. 42 For instance, Kirton and Robinson together handled the publication of Thomas Gataker B. D. his vindication of the annotations by him published upon these words, Thus saith the Lord, learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signes of heaven, for the heathen are dismayed at them. Jer. 10. 2 . . . (London, 1653). 43 His episcopal friends included Gerard Langbaine and Joseph Williamson. Robinson to Williamson, 24 Dec. 1657 and 28 Jan. 1658, CSPD: Commonwealth, xi. 232, 276; Robinson seems to be mentioned in Hartlib’s correspondence along with Wallis and Ward (Austin to Hartlib, 21 Oct. 1653, Hartlib Papers, 41/1/54a). 36

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in the same year in which he denounced Hobbes to parliament, Robinson handled the publication of William Lucy’s Observations, Censures & Confutations of divers errors in the 12, 13, and 14 chap. of Mr. Hobs his Leviathan. In the event, Robinson’s complaint proved fruitless, but it serves to dramatize how quickly Hobbes’s reputation for godless Erastianism had solidified among religious traditionalists of all stripes. Early on, the Presbyterians at Oxford joined this chorus of their brethren against Hobbes. Around the time Baxter’s circle was beginning its campaign against Leviathan, Hobbes launched his long polemical war with John Wallis. Wallis, famed as a mathematician, was a leading figure in the clericalist circles opposed to the Independents dominant at Oxford. He had once been a loyal parliamentarian, but the execution of Charles and the rise of Independency had driven him into a quasi-royalist conservatism. Former secretary to the Westminster Assembly of Divines, Wallis was a staunch Presbyterian. Allied with him was Seth Ward, Oxford’s Savilian professor of astronomy. Ward, destined for a Restoration bishopric, quietly maintained his episcopal leanings during the 1650s. During the factional fights of the Interregnum, however, he compromised by allying himself with the Wallis–Wilkins faction. From their power base at Oxford, Wallis and Ward closely coordinated a campaign to discredit Thomas Hobbes.44 While Wallis became Hobbes’s most inveterate foe, Ward was the first to strike.45 In his 1652 Philosophical Essay— a defence of the existence of God and the immortality of human souls—Ward struck Hobbes with a glancing but hard blow. Having read Leviathan after the composition of his Essay but before its publication, Ward added a derisory dismissal of Hobbes to the epistle. He characterized Hobbes’s thesis that incorporeal substances did not exist as an irrational personal conviction. In a backhanded compliment, he then wrote that his ‘high esteem’ for Hobbes had been based on ‘belief and expectation’, and ‘not so much upon what he hath yet published to the world’.46 These remarks were a mere foretaste of what was to follow. In the spring of 1654 Ward published Vindiciae Academiarum, a defence of the ancient universities against the increasingly strident demands of reformers. The tract chiefly targeted the army chaplain John Webster (whose Academiarum Examen had demanded the purging of scholastic theology from the universities47), but an appendix took on William Dell (the reforming master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge) and Thomas Hobbes. As in the Beacon controversy launched by Richard Baxter’s circle, Hobbes found himself grouped with Interregnum 44 This effort was probably distinct from Richard Baxter’s, although it is interesting to note that Wallis knew at least two of the Stationers behind the Beacon petition: Gellibrand and Underhill. Both men published works by Wallis and at times handled his correspondence. French to Wallis, 23 July 1650 and Ward to Wallis, 19 Aug. 1650, Correspondence of Wallis, i. 20, 39. Wallis’s anti-Hobbesian tracts, however, were published in Oxford by Leonard Lichfield. 45 Douglas M. Jesseph, Squaring the Circle: The War between Hobbes and Wallis (Chicago, 1999), 335–9. Jesseph is most sound on the mathematical dimensions of the controversy; brief but perceptive comments on the Wallis–Hobbes dispute are found in Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 336; Tuck, Hobbes, 29–30, 32. 46 Seth Ward, A Philosophicall Essay . . . (Oxford, 1652), ‘to the reader’. 47 Jesseph, Squaring the Circle, 63–5.

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radicals against conservative opinion, a fact that Ward gleefully observed.48 Leviathan’s critique of the universities served a broader attack on clerical privileges; Hobbes understood the universities, with their zealously guarded corporate privileges and obscure scholasticism, as virtually medieval bastions of ‘popish’ clericalism. Ward counter-attacked by mocking Hobbes’s dated notion that Oxford and Cambridge remained wedded to Aristotelian dogma. He dismissed as ‘freakish’ Hobbes’s charge that the universities usurped state power by claiming a ‘pontificall’ legitimacy, and insisted that ‘our Universities have bin Modelled by commission from the Civill Power’.49 Ward understood that Hobbes’s hostility to the universities sprang from his Erastian inclinations, and he rebutted Hobbes’s portrait of ‘popish’ universities as hopelessly antiquated. Most striking, however, was Ward’s allegation that Leviathan was designed to curry favour with the present ‘public sovereign’. The Vindiciae characterized Hobbes’s demand for educational reform as self-interested, intended merely to transform ‘Aristotelity’ into ‘Hobbesity’. Ward pointed to passages of Leviathan where Hobbes pined for an enlightened sovereign to implement his political theory. Hobbes desired, Ward wrote, ‘that his Leviathan be by entire soveraignty imposed upon the Universities, there to be read, and publickly taught’. For this purpose, he concluded, Leviathan had denounced the Universities to the ‘Civill Magistrate’.50 Ward’s Vindiciae, in short, was in part a political indictment. Its allusions to the present ‘civill magistrate’ probably referred to Oliver Cromwell, who was known to favour university reform and who, as Chancellor, loomed over Oxford as a constant threat. The Vindiciae was designed by Oxford’s clerical conservatives (Wilkins apparently collaborated in its composition51) to dissipate the reforming atmosphere generated by the new dominance of Cromwell, Owen, and the more radical anti-clerical figures grouped around them. In this context, Ward understood the political implications of Leviathan’s Erastian ecclesiology and its endorsement of a statist Independency. In 1656 he published a longer rejoinder to Leviathan, his In Thomae Hobbii Philosophiam Exercitatio Epistolica. This work assailed Hobbes on a broader front, but its chapters on religion were also dominated by a critique of Hobbes’s Erastian church theory. Ward’s own definition of Christianity privileged the authoritative status of the canonical Scripture, and he condemned Hobbes’s ecclesiology for surrendering all scriptural interpretation to the state, and for empowering the state to define prophecy and miracles.52 Hobbes undermined the apostolic agents endowed by Christ, Ward concluded, in order to secure state control of religion. The purportedly orthodox doctrinal elements of Leviathan merely served to make its ecclesiology more palatable. The entire creation was a Trojan Horse, a strategic effort to create a civil religion, a ‘kind of Mahometan Christianity’ enslaved to the state.53 48 Seth Ward, Vindiciae Academiarum: Containing some briefe Animadversions upon Mr Websters Book, stiled The Examination of Academies. Together with an Appendix concerning what M. Hobbes, and M. Dell have published on this 49 Ibid. 54, 58–60. Argument (Oxford, 1654), 6, 51. 50 Ibid. 52–3, 59, 61. 51 Shapiro, Wilkins, 100–1. 52 Seth Ward, In Thomae Hobbii Philosophiam Exercitatio Epistolica . . . (Oxford, 1656), 317, 319–23. 53 Ibid. 329–30.

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By design, Wallis’s contribution to the campaign against Hobbes was to train fire on questions of geometry, and in this he was devastatingly effective. (Particularly relentless were his salvos against Hobbes’s efforts to solve the classic problem of squaring the circle.54) Wallis’s first blow against Hobbesian geometry, his Elenchus Geometriae Hobbianae, appeared in 1655. So lopsided were these printed mathematical disputes—which dragged on well into the Restoration—that associates of Wallis wondered why the great mathematician squandered his time wrangling with Hobbes. Wallis explained that the mathematical dimensions of his exchanges with Hobbes served chiefly as a proxy war. He hoped to destroy Hobbes’s reputation, and thus undermine his insidious (and more credible) political and religious doctrines.55 (Ward had previewed this strategy in his Philosophicall Essay.56) Wallis shared Ward’s concerns about the threat posed to the universities and the clerical estate by the new anticlerical atmosphere of the Interregnum. He was a determined defender of clerical authority over the church, and he condemned the tendency of Erastian Independency to undermine the sacramental and disciplinary power of ordained ministers. Wallis insisted on the importance of provincial and national churches, each superior to the mere collection of ‘gathered churches’ (see below). Such traditional dualism did not favourably dispose him to either Independency or to Hobbes. Wallis’s many publications against Hobbes’s geometry and grammar were peppered with angry allusions to the Erastian principles of Leviathan.57 ‘Our Leviathan’, he would write in 1659, ‘is furiously attacking and destroying our Universities (and not only ours but all) and especially ministers and the clergy and all religion, as though the Christian world had not sound knowledge.’ It was for this reason, above all, that he sought to demonstrate to Hobbes ‘how little he understands the mathematics from which he takes his courage’.58 Like Ward, Wallis was also concerned that the principles of Leviathan would appeal to the permissive religious climate of the Interregnum. Years later he recalled that Hobbes’s ‘bold daring fancy’ and ‘Magisterial way of speaking’ had pleased ‘those who loved to be Atheists and were glad to hear any body dare boldly to say what they wished to be true’. He considered it a ‘great providence’ that Hobbes had exposed his general ‘want of logick’ in philosophy and religion by making such enormous errors in his mathematical efforts.59 Thus assailed, Hobbes was not inclined to back down. When the long-awaited initial section of his tripartite philosophy, De Corpore, appeared in 1655, its grandiloquent dedication to Devonshire further tweaked the universities and their ordained elites. Hobbes derided the church fathers for their ‘foolish’ Aristotelian notions. The ‘School Divinity’ they had spawned now dominated the universities, and had ‘raised an infinite number of Controversies in the Christian World 54

These caused Hobbes considerable consternation. See Hartlib Papers, 29/5/33b. Wallis to Tenison, 30 Nov. 1680, Lambeth MS 930, fo. 55. 56 Leviathan had ‘injured the Mathematicks, and the very name of Demonstration, by bestowing it upon some of 57 Jacob, Stubbe, 10–14. his discourses’; Ward, Philosophicall Essay, epistle. 58 Wallis to Christian Huygens, 1659. Quoted in Jacob, Stubbe, 14; also Wallis, Elenchus Geometriae Hobbianae 59 Wallis to Tenison, Lambeth MS 930, fo. 55. (Oxford, 1655), epistle dedicatory. 55

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concerning Religion, and from those Controversies Wars’.60 The text of De Corpore, chiefly concerned with natural philosophy, nevertheless reiterated these warnings about the theo-philosophical origins of civil war. Hobbes insisted that theology, revelation, and the ‘doctrines of Gods worship’ were to be governed by ‘authority’ and not by philosophical ‘knowledge’.61 De Corpore was intended to exemplify a philosophy purged of theological notions and freed from the yoke of clerical interest. The work, Hobbes asserted, thus built on the foundations of his political theory, which had ‘long since reduced all Power Ecclesiastical and Civil by strong Arguments of Reason, without repugnance to Gods Word, to one and the same Soveraign Authority’.62 De Corpore thus echoed Leviathan in calling for the banishment of the clergy from the world of learning and from positions of power. Wallis later remembered it as a work that ‘despised divines for not being philosophers’.63 Hobbes clearly hoped that the new political era might witness a revolution in philosophy; a reciprocal fear had animated Ward and Wallis to campaign against his influence. And when Hobbes decided to pen a direct retort to these two Oxford luminaries, the political implications of their dispute emerged yet more clearly. In 1656 Hobbes published his Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematiques. This acerbic tract is largely consumed with efforts to rebut Wallis’s mathematics, and it has consequently been neglected by commentators on Hobbes uninterested in that subject. But embedded within the work are sections of religious and political polemic that reveal much about his political posture during the Protectorate. Hobbes dedicated the Six Lessons to Henry Pierrepont, the Marquis of Dorchester. This may itself have carried political significance. Pierrepont, a royalist throughout the 1640s, had outraged the exiled court by compounding in 1647.64 This turn had brought him into line with the politics of his younger brother William, who had been a parliamentarian and an Independent from the start. By the mid-1650s Dorchester was regularly reviled by the royalists and praised as a model aristocrat by the Cromwellian newssheets. Indeed, the Pierrepont brothers were intimates of Cromwell, and both ‘very much honour[ed] [the] Lord Protector’.65 Hobbes perhaps knew Dorchester through the Cavendishes. Alternatively, they may have met in Interregnum London’s scientific circles. (Dorchester had bucked the conventions of his caste by becoming a physician, and he knew several of Hobbes’s associates.66) It is always perilous to overread the politics of literary dedications, but in addressing his Six Lessons to Dorchester, Hobbes curried no favour with royalist readers.67 60 Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy the First Section, Concerning Body, written in Latine by Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury and now translated into English (1656), epistle dedicatory. Hobbes supervised the translation. 61 Ibid. 5–8. 62 Ibid., epistle dedicatory. 63 Wallis to Tenison, Lambeth MS 930, fo. 55. 64 Clarendon State Papers, i. 348, 368; ODNB; Goodall, ‘Henry Pierrepont’, in William Munk, The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London (2 vols., London, 1848), i. 286. 65 Clarendon State Papers, iii. 412; Mercurius Politicus, 22–29 July 1658; Pierrepont to St. John, 26 Jan. 1655, A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, ed. Thomas Birch (7 vols., London, 1742), iv. 469; The Clarke Papers . . . ed. C. H. Firth (4 vols., London, 1891–1901), ii. 50. 66 Such as Charles Scarborough and William Petty. ODNB; Munk, Physicians, i. 281. 67 It is also possible that the dedication was intended to respond to Seth Ward, whose Exercitatio Epistolica was also dedicated to Pierrepont.

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The Six Lessons again positioned Hobbes as an intrepid man of the new learning battling obscurantist scholasticism and clerical traditionalists. Like Wallis, Hobbes grasped that politics and religion lurked just below the surface of their mathematical dispute. The campaign against him was fuelled by a ‘zeal against Leviathan’ among the ‘Doctorships of Divinity’. His critics chiefly aimed at protecting the ‘incomprehensible Mysteries of Religion’ that propped up the ‘Power Ecclesiasticall’.68 Hobbes’s Six Lessons made strikingly open appeals to the political mood of the Protectorate. The tract accused Ward and Wallis of factionalism in ‘Politicks’, and implicitly trumpeted Hobbes’s own quiescence.69 His sixth and final ‘lesson’ directly addressed attacks on his religious views, and here the political implications of Hobbes’s ecclesiological disagreement with Ward and Wallis emerged into the clear. The sixth lesson began by observing that ‘now a dayes’ uncivil controversies were all too common, particularly among religious disputants. Attacked for having asserted that De Cive had invented civil philosophy, Hobbes reiterated this immodest claim, and alleged that the doctrines of De Cive were ‘generally received by all but those of the Clergy, who think their interest concerned in being made subordinate to the Civil Power’.70 Hobbes then addressed Ward’s allegation that he wished the state to impose Leviathan on the universities. ‘The cause of my writing that Book’, he wrote, was the consideration of what the Ministers before, and in the beginning of the Civill War, by their preaching and writing did contribute thereunto. Which I saw not onely to tend to the Abatement of the then Civill Power, but also to the gaining of as much thereof as they could (as did afterwards more plainly appear) unto themselves. I saw also that those Ministers, and many other Gentlemen who were of their Opinion, brought their Doctrines against the Civill Power from their Studies in the Universities. Seeing therefore that so much as could be contributed to the Peace of our Country, and the settlement of Soveraign Powers without any Army, must proceed from Teaching; I had reason to wish, that Civill Doctrine were truly taught in the Universities. And if I had not thought that mine was such, I had never written it. And having written it, if I had not recommended it to such as had the Power to cause it to be taught, I had written it to no purpose. To me therefore . . . it was very necessary to commend my Doctrine to such men as should have the Power and Right to Regulate the Universities. I say my Doctrine; I say not my Leviathan. For wiser men may so digest the same Doctrine as to fit it better for a publique teaching. But as it is, I believe it hath framed the minds of a thousand Gentlemen to a consciencious obedience to present Government, which otherwise would have wavered in that Point.71

Rather than deny Ward’s allegation that he wished the state to impose his political doctrines, Hobbes defended this possibility vigorously.72 He spoke of the ‘present power’ with unabashed deference. More remarkable still was his boast that Leviathan had reconciled a thousand men to the Protectorate. Nor was this merely the consequence of Leviathan’s theory of obligation. Rather, he claimed that the 68

69 Ibid., 16. 70 Ibid. 55–6. 71 Ibid. 56–7. Six Lessons, 19, 41, 61. Robert Payne wrote of Hobbes that ‘he seemes to favour the present government and contends his booke to be read in the universities’. Payne to Sheldon, 6 May 1651, Harleian MS 6942, fo. 132. 72

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book’s essential contribution to the political ‘settlement’ was exposing the threat to sovereignty posed by clerical sedition. Charged with atheism by Ward, Hobbes appealed to England’s newly permissive intellectual environment, insisting that his work had not offended the ‘Supreme Legislative Power’. He further insulated himself by trumpeting the popularity of his masterpiece: ‘Take heed of calling them all Atheists that have read and approved my Leviathan.’ In any case, the atheism charge was a red herring. His critics, Hobbes concluded, were actually enraged that he had entrusted religion to the hands of the Commonwealth. His critics variously fought for bishops and presbyters, while he alone defended the prerogatives of the state. And if the state had decided that neither bishops nor presbyters would interpret the rules of worship, why could it not empower Hobbes himself to do so? Hobbes concluded by linking his own cause with that of the Protectorate: ‘See therefore how much’, he wrote, ‘you have been transported by your malice towards me, to injure the Civill Power by which you live.’73 As for the claim that he had defamed the universities, Hobbes scoffed. ‘I would have the State’, he wrote, ‘make use of [the universities] to uphold the civill Power, as the Pope did to uphold the Ecclesiasticall. Is it not absurdly done to call this an Injury?’ The universities, he alleged, had produced seditious books and sermons ‘both against the former and the present Government’. The ‘Competition between the Ecclesiasticall and the Civill power hath manifestly enough appeared very lately’, he wrote, among ‘particular men that desire to uphold the Authority of a Church, as of a distinct thing from the Common-wealth’. A ‘Lay-University’ purged of such men would be ‘profitable’, but Leviathan would meanwhile condemn Oxford and Cambridge for filling the pulpits with ministers who ‘cry down the Civil Power’.74 Passages of this sort must not be read as timeless formulations of Hobbes’s Erastianism, somehow detached from the moment of their composition. They were written at a time when the Cromwellian Protectorate ruled triumphant, when its Erastian church settlement and university Visitations were fully operational, and when its supporters were floating radical educational reform proposals. Ward had charged Hobbes with seeking the favour of the regime for his political theory. Hobbes conceded the charge with his deferential references to the ‘present’ government, his warnings about the threat that seditious clergy posed to that government, and his proffer of reform proposals to those who ‘had the power’ to implement them. These were not the words of a royalist grudgingly quiescent to a de facto power. They were the words of an enthusiastic Erastian, a reformer seeking to vanquish the political and intellectual hegemony of the Christian clergy, and hopeful that the new order of the Interregnum would achieve this revolution.75 At this point the battle was joined by Henry Stubbe. As we have seen, Stubbe moved easily in the world of London’s sceptical literary wits, but he was also a 73

74 SL, 60. Emphasis added. SL, 61–2. Brian Duppa was angered by the ‘egregious’ anticlericalism of the Six Lessons. Duppa to Isham, 20 Jan. 1656, Correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa, 119. 75

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presence at Oxford, and was prominently allied with Cromwell’s Vice-Chancellor, John Owen. In this later guise Stubbe acted as a defender of Independency and a scourge of Presbyterianism. His profile made him an ideal devotee of Hobbesian political and religious thought. He was a skilled humanist, deeply versed in the Erastian writings of figures such as Grotius, Machiavelli, Selden, and Hobbes himself, but he also kept one foot in the Congregationalist camp.76 These intellectual allegiances would eventually encourage Stubbe to import Hobbesian ecclesiological doctrines into his own writings. During the 1650s they inspired him to promote Leviathan and its author at Oxford, and to involve Hobbes in the bitter religious polemics of the day. Hobbes’s correspondence with Henry Stubbe— insufficiently exploited by scholars—opened up a channel of communication between Hobbes and Cromwellian Oxford. Stubbe fed Hobbes a steady diet of information concerning the public disputes between the university Presbyterians and Independents. Hobbes’s interest in these disputes sprang not only from his own battles with Wallis and Ward, but from a conspicuous sympathy with the ecclesiological positions adopted by John Owen’s faction. Stubbe fully grasped the compatibility of Hobbes’s Erastianism with the ecclesiology of the more Magisterially inclined Independents. During 1656 and 1657, while he laboured on his translation of Leviathan, Stubbe also composed polemics in defence of Independency, and he worked to involve Hobbes in these latter efforts. His trump card was Hobbes’s consuming fury at John Wallis. In October of 1656, Stubbe wrote to Hobbes that ‘Dr. Wallis, who is putting out a most childish answer . . . to your lessons, hath put out some theses against a branch of independency’.77 Wallis’s rejoinder to the Six Lessons, entitled Due Correction for Mr. Hobbes, was published later in the month. The ‘theses’ against Independency appeared in his Mens Sobria. This work, printed in late 1656, included the disputation Wallis had delivered in July of 1654 to secure his doctorate in divinity. The disputation had rebutted the proposition that the ‘power of the minister of the gospel extends only to the members of one particular church’. This in turn, for obvious reasons, had enraged John Owen.78 Wallis, speaking for the beleaguered clerical traditionalists arrayed against Oxford’s new Cromwellian masters, had defended the importance of provincial and national churches, each superior to the mere collection of ‘gathered churches’.79 Wallis’s decision to print his disputation was impolitic. Thus challenged, Owen asked Stubbe to compose a response. Stubbe, reporting this in October, assured Hobbes that his tract would include ‘overplus of one page or 2, in revenge of you’.80 Mens Sobria appeared in print later in the month and Stubbe sent Hobbes a copy, along with a scathing assessment of its clericalist principles. Owen, Stubbe reported on 25 October, had Stubbe’s rejoinder in his hands, was ‘well pleased’, 76

Library catalogue of Stubbe, BL Sloane MS 35, fos. 1, 5–7, 13, 15–20. Stubbe to Hobbes, 7 Oct. 1656, Corr., 311. 78 This according to the Presbyterian Daniel Cawdrey, on whom see below. Jesseph, Squaring the Circle, 300–1. The disputation was published as Quaestiones in Comitiorum, Vesperiis, Oxonii, Juli: 8. 1654 in John Wallis, Mens Sobria 79 Wallis, Mens Sobria, 137–8. Serio Commendata . . . (Oxford, 1656). 80 Stubbe to Hobbes, 7 Oct. 1656, Corr., 311–12. 77

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and had rewarded Stubbe with his position as second keeper of the Bodleian Library. At this point Stubbe decided to entice Hobbes into the dispute. He asked him to ‘penne a short letter censureing’ Wallis’s attacks upon Independency, and specifically to defend Independency’s greater compatibility with state power.81 Stubbe’s request is revealing. Familiar with both Leviathan and the Six Lessons, well positioned to judge Hobbes’s political attitudes, Stubbe enlisted him as a defender of Cromwellian Independency.82 Stubbe had not misjudged the moment. Hobbes responded to Mens Sobria in a November letter. The letter is unfortunately lost, but Stubbe, commenting on it, marvelled at the ‘great correspondence betwixt my thought and yours, so that if Dr. Owen, who hath mine in his hands now at London, should but compare my notes with your remarques, hee would conclude them to bee but the transcript of yours’. It was apparent to both men, according to Stubbe, that Wallis’s principles ‘will carry us on with a farre greater apparence to a Pope, than a Presbitery; and the title of Minister u[niversa]lis Ecclesiae is the very cosen germane to that old mystery of iniquity, Episcopus Ecclesiae catholicae’.83 A few weeks later, in a further effort publicly to exploit Hobbes’s political sympathy with the Independents, Stubbe asked him to speak favourably of the university, wherein he had ‘many favourers’.84 Hobbes, he later suggested, might particularly note that Oxford was beginning to ‘flourish after the visitation’. Such praise, he informed him, would ‘redound to Dr. Owens honor’. Owen was then acting as the primary champion of the Independents, defending, according to Stubbe, ‘liberty of conscience and . . . other fundamentalls of this government’ against the same clericalists who had sunk their teeth into the back of Leviathan.85 Stubbe had shrewdly read Hobbes’s mood. Leviathan had publicly endorsed Independency, and Hobbes approved of what he took to be the open intellectual atmosphere of the Interregnum. But criticism of Leviathan from more orthodox parties was beginning to mount. Around this time Hobbes complained bitterly to Sorbière that ‘all the ecclesiastics’ had arrayed against him.86 Particularly enraged by Ward’s hostile polemics, Hobbes refused to join the scientific discussions at Charles Scarborough’s residence when he found Ward present.87 In February of 1657, Hobbes would write that his ‘politics’ had rendered him a ‘perpetual object of hatred’ to the ‘theologians’.88 Such bitterness made him more than willing to join the battle against Wallis and Ward. Though Stubbe’s own rejoinder to Mens Sobria (full of ‘harsh language against the Synod’) never appeared in print,89 in 81 Hobbes was to attack Presbyterianism for ‘erecting a power beyond the Papall in jurisdiction’. Stubbe to Hobbes, 25 Oct. 1656, Corr., 334–7. 82 Professor Sommerville has attempted to diminish the significance of this history by noting that Stubbe was something of an ecclesiastical trimmer, who supported episcopacy after 1660. Why this undermines the significance of his efforts to cultivate Hobbes’s Independent sympathies is unclear. Indeed, it precisely provides the model for understanding Hobbes’s own pre-Restoration Independency. Both were Erastian anticlerical thinkers trimming with the political winds. If this described Stubbe, why not Hobbes? Sommerville, ‘Hobbes and Independency’, 171–2. 83 Stubbe to Hobbes, 9 Nov. 1656, Corr., 338–9. 84 Stubbe to Hobbes, 29 Nov. 1656, Corr., 379. 85 Stubbe to Hobbes, 8 Dec. 1656, Corr., 384. 86 Hobbes to Sorbière, 29 Dec. 1656, Corr., 429. 87 Pope, Life of Bishop of Salisbury, 118. 88 Hobbes to Sorbière, 10 Feb. 1657, Corr., 448. 89 Stubbe to Hobbes, 17 Mar. 1657, Corr., 456.

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1657 Hobbes published his Markes of the Absurd Geometry, Rural Language, Scottish Church Politicks, and Barbarismes of John Wallis. The Markes, like the Six Lessons, has not commanded much scholarly attention. But, like its predecessor, it boldly voiced partisan religious and political sentiments. Hobbes’s Markes of an Absurd Geometry (again dedicated to Dorchester) continued his quixotic mathematical efforts, and included a letter by Stubbe defending Hobbes’s Latin grammar against Wallis.90 It also complied with Stubbe’s requests that Hobbes defend the administration of Oxford by Owen and the Cromwellian Visitation, and that he rebuke Owen’s clericalist critics. Hobbes reiterated his condemnation of scholasticism, but assured Wallis: ‘Sir, When I said that such Doctrine was taught in the Universities, I did not speak against the Universities, but against such as you.’ Wallis’s attack, he wrote, ‘does not passe for witt in these parts; nor generally at Oxford. I have acquaintance there that will blush at the reading it.’91 He thus attempted to spare Owen’s reputation by limiting his critique of Oxford. More significantly, Hobbes launched a vigorous assault on the Mens Sobria, explaining that no one with Wallis’s particular ‘Church politicks’ would ‘publish any unholesome doctrine without some Antidotes from me, as long as I can hold a pen’. He then rehearsed the ecclesiological assertions of his Six Lessons. The ‘rule of Gods worship in a Christian Common-wealth’, he wrote, was governed by the prudence of the ‘supream Governour’. Empowered by the state, the author of Leviathan had as much right as any bishop or presbyter to shape these rules. Perhaps sensing his own vulnerability, Wallis had let this aspect of the Six Lessons pass unanswered in his Due Correction.92 Hobbes, however, was not inclined to let the matter drop. ‘The truth is, you could say nothing against it without too plainly discovering your disaffection to the Government’, he wrote. ‘And yet you have discovered it pretty well in your second Thesis maintained in the Act at Oxford 1654, and since by your self published. This Thesis I shall speak briefly to.’93 By condemning the ‘disaffection’ to the Protectorate lurking beneath Wallis’s ‘church politicks’, Hobbes implicitly trumpeted the political quiescence of his own Erastian principles. Mens Sobria had defined ministers as ‘those to whom the preaching of the Gospel by their Office is injoyned by Christ’. Hobbes condemned this notion as an effort ‘to disjoyn yourself from the State’. Hints of divine right or apostolic models of clerical power merely exposed the ‘popish’ lineage of Wallis’s ecclesiology. Perhaps referencing Cromwell’s Ejectors, Hobbes defended the right of the sovereign to purge preachers for propagating ‘undutiful and seditious principles’. Reiterating the central Congregationalist logic of Leviathan, the Markes affirmed that the ‘ordination of Ministers depends not now on the Imposition of hands of a Minister or Presbytery, but on the authority of the Christian Soveraign’. Hobbes also specifically affirmed state control of excommunication, the sacraments, and 90

91 Ibid. 13–14. Hobbes, Stigmai ageometrias . . . Markes, 20–31. John Wallis, Due Correction for Mr Hobbes, or Schoole Discipline, for not saying his Lessons right (Oxford, 1656). Wallis suggested that Hobbes’s sixth lesson was aimed at Ward (p. 129); Hobbes (Stigmai ageometrias . . . Markes, 16) 93 Hobbes, Stigmai ageometrias . . . Markes, 16–17. assured him that ‘it concerned you also, and chiefly’. 92

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preaching. Such control was essential for political stability. Upstart clergy, he wrote, well knew ‘how to trouble and sometimes undoe a slack Government, and had need to be warily lookt to’. In words that would have had ominous political undertones for Presbyterians and episcopalians alike, he hammered home the point: ‘You know also how much the Divines that held the same principles in Church Government with you, have contributed to our late troubles.’94 As he had in the Six Lessons, Hobbes openly hoped that the present power might use Leviathan as a textbook on ecclesiology and politics. ‘If the Sogeraign [sic] power’, he wrote, ‘give me command (though without the ceremony of imposition of hands) to teach the Doctrine of my Leviathan in the Pulpit, why am not I . . . a Minister as well as you, and as publick a person as you are?’ These sentiments echoed the hopes of Leviathan that a prince might convert Hobbes’s speculation into the ‘utility of practice’. In 1656, they could have been read as nothing but an appeal to Oliver Cromwell. Indeed, concluding his tract, Hobbes again tried to soften his criticism of Cromwellian Oxford: ‘if any Doctrine tending to the diminishing of the civil power were taught there’, the university itself was not to blame, but only the promoters of the seditious doctrines. Clearly referencing the Oxford Visitation, he wrote that ‘it hath pleased God of late to reform [Oxford] in great measure, and indeed as I thought totally, when out comes this your Thesis boldly maintained to shew the contrary’.95 Neither the Six Lessons nor the Markes of an Absurd Geometry can be consigned to the narrow context of mathematical dispute. Hobbes himself repeatedly insisted that his controversy with Wallis and Ward was fuelled by their anger at the ecclesiological doctrines of Leviathan. In answering them, Hobbes did not hesitate to explicate the political implications of his own position. Wallis and Ward were sowers of disaffection; Hobbes had reconciled thousands to the new government. Wallis and Ward taught sedition, Leviathan true obedience. Wallis and Ward struggled against the Cromwellian reform of the university, Hobbes embraced it. Explicating these distinctions, Hobbes relentlessly reiterated the dangers of clericalism.96 As for Leviathan, he made no apology for commending his masterpiece to the regime as a guidebook on politics and religion. Any assessment of Hobbes’s political profile during the English Revolution must explain these aspects of his dispute with the Oxford clergy. It is clear that he understood himself as a man of his time, riding high on the anticlerical tide of the Cromwellian age. For his part, Wallis responded to Hobbes’s ecclesiological polemics in Hobbiani Puncti Dispunctio, published in 1657. There he reasserted his belief that both magistracy and ministry were endowed by God, and that religion could not be reduced to the ‘laws of men’.97 But it was Hobbes who pursued this particular feature of their polemical exchange most vigorously. If Wallis enjoyed the high ground on mathematical points, the political and religious terrain of the Cromwellian era favoured Hobbes. Both men sensed this, as did Henry Stubbe. He delighted in 94 96 97

95 Ibid. 18–19. Ibid. 17–19. These themes appeared yet again in Hobbes’s De Homine (1658). DH, epistle dedicatory, 65–8, 72–9, 80–5. John Wallis, Hobbiani Puncti Dispunctio, or the Undoing of Mr. Hob’s Points . . . (1657), 42.

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Hobbes’s published barbs against Wallis’s Mens Sobria. He had successfully enlisted a philosopher of towering reputation in the broader campaign to vindicate the compatibility of Independency and Erastianism. Nor did Stubbe content himself with soliciting tracts from Hobbes. He sought to promote Hobbes’s views, and perhaps his career, among the Oxford Independents. This was a trickier business. The Presbyterian (and episcopalian) campaign against Leviathan was well under way; Hobbes’s reputation as a Machiavellian atheist was fast forming. Stubbe’s promotion of Hobbes at Oxford would slam headlong into these realities and would fail. But his effort elicited some fascinating airing of opinion that reveals much about the considerable compatibility of Hobbesian Erastianism and Cromwellian Independency. Two figures were critical: John Owen and Louis Du Moulin.

ii The French minister Louis Du Moulin was born into a theological dynasty. His father Pierre was a prominent Huguenot and supporter of James I, his brother Pierre a staunch high-church episcopalian.98 For his part Louis Du Moulin studied medicine at Leiden, took degrees from Cambridge (1634) and Oxford (1649), and was licensed by the London College of Physicians (1648).99 During the English Revolution, he became a prominent controversialist, signalling his parliamentarian sentiments in tracts against Bishop Hall’s Episcopacy by Divine Right.100 In 1648 the Oxford Visitation appointed Du Moulin as Camden Professor of Ancient History.101 By now a partisan Independent, he found himself at the heart of Congregationalist intellectual circles. Wood remembered Du Moulin as a ‘fiery, violent and hot-headed Independent, a cross and ill-natur’d man’.102 He wrote no history, but instead occupied himself in religious controversy. Du Moulin was a loyal member of John Owen’s circle, and participated in its skirmishes with the Presbyterians. His obsession was the vast question of church government: on this subject he wrote with an exhausting volubility. Louis Du Moulin is not a figure of great note, but his contextual significance is considerable. More than any other writer of his age, he stood at the crossroads where the ecclesiology of English Independency met that of Thomas Hobbes. In October of 1656, Henry Stubbe informed Hobbes that John Owen and Louis Du Moulin had penned defences of Independency, partly in answer to Wallis’s 98 Bernard Cottret, The Huguenots in England: Immigration and Settlement, c. 1550–1700, trans. Peregrine and Adriana Stevenson (Cambridge, 1991), 87–92. 99 ODNB; Ole Peter Grell, Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart England (Burlington, Vt., 1996), 233; Dictionnaire de biographie française (Paris, 1970), xii. 252–6; Mark Goldie, ‘The Huguenot Experience and the Problem of Toleration in Restoration England’, in C. E. J. Caldicott, H. Gough, J.-P. Pittion (eds.), The Huguenots and Ireland: Anatomy of an Emigration (Dublin, 1987), 175–203. 100 Most notably Louis Du Moulin, Vox Populi, Expressed in XXXV Motions (1641); Wood, Athenae, ii. 753. 101 Register of the Visitors of Oxford, 186, 202, 492; CSPD: Commonwealth, vii. 392 and xi. 365; Douglas Nobbs, ‘New Light on Louis du Moulin’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, 15 (1936), 489–509 at 490; Mordechai Feingold, ‘The Humanities’, in 17th c. Oxford, ed. Tyacke, iv. 211–357 at 348. 102 Wood, Athenae, ii. 754.

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Mens Sobria.103 Owen’s contribution to this effort was his On Schism; Du Moulin’s a weighty treatise entitled Paraenesis ad aedificatores imperii in imperio. Hobbes apparently was impressed. In February Stubbe wrote him: ‘Your reconcilement to the university pleaseth, and so I give out that Du Moulin’s book and the Vicechancellors [Owen’s] are the pieces that have gained your good esteeme.’104 Hobbes was notoriously circumspect about the work of others, so his endorsement of two pre-eminent works of Congregationalist ecclesiology evidences a contextually crucial intellectual affinity. Nor is there much mystery as to why these works appealed to him. ‘Our Du Moulin’, wrote Stubbe to Hobbes in December of 1656, ‘hath subjected the ministry to the Magistracy sufficiently, for which he and Owen are cryed out upon.’105 Louis Du Moulin, indeed, composed a series of works vigorously defending the religious policies of the Independents. Most prominent among these were The Power of the Christian Magistrate in Sacred Things (1650), Paraenesis ad aedificatores imperii in imperio (1656), and Of the Right of Churches and of the Magistrate’s Power over Them (1658). The regime greatly valued this support from a famed Protestant family. Nedham’s newssheets publicized Du Moulin’s works, and the Protectorate seems to have distributed the Paraenesis abroad.106 Among other services, Du Moulin defended the Commonwealth’s Engagement, but his main interest was always ecclesiology.107 Du Moulin’s ecclesiology was built on political propositions that, as with those of Hobbes, were adopted from the Grotian natural right tradition. Both men retained the terminology of natural law, but reduced it from a developed system of ethics and justice to a mere universal rule of obedience. The content of all law— natural, divine, or sovereign—was practically determined by sovereign will. Admonition or counsel might come from other sources, but all obligation in the ‘external or visible forum’ was directed to the sovereign alone. ‘Indeed the divine precepts themselves’, Du Moulin wrote, ‘do not have the strength of law in the external forum unless they are ordered by the sovereign.’108 Only the ‘vulgar’ persisted in dividing the ‘law into divine and human, the latter given by men, the former by God’. Divine precepts might bind the conscience, but they did not constitute binding law in the external world.109 The essential feature of sovereignty, according to both Hobbes and Du Moulin, was unity. ‘It cannot be conceived’, Du Moulin wrote in The Power of the Christian Magistrate, ‘that two soveraign powers can stand together in a State . . . you can no more conceive a parity of powers then two Gods in the world’. Any imperium in 103

104 Stubbe to Hobbes, 14 Feb. 1657, Corr., 449. Stubbe to Hobbes, 7 Oct. 1656, Corr., 311. Stubbe to Hobbes, 26 Dec. 1657, Corr., 426. 106 A spy in Amsterdam nervously reported the composition of a rejoinder by ‘one Scot’. Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, v. 606–7. 107 Du Moulin, ‘Digression concerning allegiance and submission to the supreme magistrate’, The Power of the Christian Magistrate in Sacred Things (1650), epistle dedicatory, 20–4. Perhaps this was among the ‘divers English books’ on conquest and allegiance read by Hobbes while writing Leviathan (p. 484). 108 Du Moulin, Paraenesis ad aedificatores imperii in imperio; in qua defenduntur jura magistratus . . . (1656), 43–4, 109 Du Moulin, Of the Right of Churches and of the Magistrate’s Power over Them . . . (1658), 58. 50–1, 89–90. 105

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imperio would destroy a Commonwealth.110 Like Hobbes, Du Moulin was chiefly concerned to use this theory of sovereignty to rebut ecclesiological dualism. ‘Else if two Supreme Magistrates were constituted’, he wrote in 1650, ‘sharing betwixt them the Supreme power, the one being over certain actions they call Ecclesiastical, the other over the Civil, such a State cannot be conceived without a great deal of confusion.’111 Throughout the Interregnum this thesis relentlessly dominated his work. ‘It were to be wished’, he wrote elsewhere, ‘that all Christian Magistrates would govern without that distinction of Powers, Ecclesiastical and Civil.’112 No aspect of outward religious authority escaped the sovereign’s competence. A church synod had no more power than ‘a company of merchants or sea-men called by the Parliament to give them advice about trade and navigation’.113 The state was to authorize and propagate canons, select ministers, and license preaching.114 The sovereign, out of prudence, might rely on spiritual counsellors in settling doctrinal controversies, but such reliance was not required. ‘The dogmas of faith themselves are matters of law made in the external forum.’ It was the ‘highest power’ which ‘sanctified the divine principles’ in the outward world.115 Even heretical magistrates enjoyed this control of doctrine, and would answer for their enormous sins to God alone.116 On church discipline, Du Moulin was a thoroughgoing Erastian. Spiritual courts functioned as tools of the state.117 In defence of this view, he appealed to the Erastians of the Westminster Assembly: Selden, Coleman, and Lightfoot.118 He also explicitly defended Erastus,119 and presented excommunication as the pernicious instrument with which the Pope ‘hath built up his mystery of iniquity, and founded an empire within the empire of Emperours, kings, and states’.120 Both Hobbes and Du Moulin espoused the radical position that the sovereign could himself execute ministerial functions. ‘Yea the chief sacerdotall power’, Du Moulin wrote, ‘belongeth to the sovereign power.’121 ‘The Commonwealth is a visible church’, wrote Du Moulin, in a Leviathan-like turn of phrase. ‘Every Christian commonwealth is a church, and every Christian church a commonwealth.’122 Both Hobbes and Du Moulin, writing in the wake of the civil war, attributed the break-up of sovereignty largely to the persistence of ecclesiological dualism. ‘Two collateral authorities’, Du Moulin wrote, promised ‘maximum confusion and perturbation.’ Unified sovereignty alone ensured ‘a steady peace’. Generally, he concluded, ‘the causes of Heresies and Wars which 110

Du Moulin, Power of the Christian Magistrate, 104–5; Paraenesis, 51–2, 76, 83. Du Moulin, Power of the Christian Magistrate, 3. 112 Du Moulin, Paraenesis, 12–13, 114; Power of the Christian Magistrate, 11, 14, 149–50; Of the Right of Churches, epistle 113 Du Moulin, Of the Right of Churches, 18–19, 167–8; Paraenesis, 2–3. dedicatory. 114 Du Moulin, Paraenesis, 94–5, 100–1; Of the Right of Churches, 38–40, 136–9; Power of the Christian Magistrate, 8, 115 Du Moulin, Paraenesis, 90, ch. 9, especially pp. 153–4; Power of the Christian Magistrate, 105–9. 49–50, 56–7. 116 Du Moulin, Power of the Christian Magistrate, 53, 69–70, 88; Of the Right of Churches, 19–20. 117 Du Moulin, Of the Right of Churches, 120–2. 118 For Selden see Of the Right of Churches, 194; Paraenesis, 263, 268, 276–8; for Lightfoot see Of the Right of Churches, 79, and for Coleman see ibid., preface and 49. 119 Du Moulin, Of the Right of Churches, 193; Paraenesis, 83–6, 259–61, 333. 120 Du Moulin, Of the Right of Churches, 326–9, 337–340. 121 Ibid. 27. 122 Du Moulin, Power of the Christian Magistrate, 6, 8, 112–13; Of the Right of Churches, 20–1. 111

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have troubled the world’ could be blamed on clergymen ‘erecting Imperium in imperio’.123 His Erastianism, unsurpassed among major English ecclesiological writers, was composed as a reaction to the English Civil War. And this explains a critical aspect of his writing: its partisan Independency. The full contextual significance of Du Moulin’s work—and of Hobbes’s admiration for it—cannot be grasped unless it is understood that his main polemical task was to defend the compatibility of Independency and Erastianism. Du Moulin’s dedication to this effort emerged by degrees. In his 1658 Of the Right of Churches Du Moulin explicated the history of his intellectual development during the Revolution. Early on he wrote against the ‘corrupted party of the English Hierarchy’. This anti-Laudian position had evolved as the Scottish Presbyterians assumed an increasingly high profile in political affairs. The Presbyterians ‘wound up their string of ecclesiasticall jurisdiction to such a height, that it was ready to break’. Du Moulin rejected Presbyterian ecclesiology and studied the writings of Thomas Coleman, the prominent Erastian delegate to the Westminster Assembly of Divines. ‘And indeed’, Du Moulin wrote, ‘his still voice did more work upon me, then all the thundring voices of opposites.’ At some point he immersed himself in the Erastian natural rights theory of Grotius, Selden, and (as we shall see) very likely Hobbes. Inspired, Du Moulin wrote his first major work, The Power of the Christian Magistrate. This work, however, did not represent the culmination of his thinking, as it did not defend any particular church form. ‘Yet then I had no such thought’, he wrote, ‘as to conceive or imagine that the power and right of private churches or congregations could agree well with the power of the magistrate in matters of religion.’ But inexorably he came to this determination. In 1656 he wrote the Paraenesis specifically to accommodate ‘betwixt the brethren of the congregationall way and the assertors of that measure of power in sacred things allotted’ by the Erastians. In the Paraenesis and later in the Right of Churches, he undertook not merely to ‘assert the nullity of a double jurisdiction’ of ecclesiastical and civil power, but demonstrated that the ‘congregational way’ accorded very well with ‘that measure of power that Erastus, Bullingerus, Musculus, Gualterus, Grotius, Mr. Selden, and Mr. Coleman allowed to the magistrate in matters of religion and over churches’.124 The partisan context of the Paraenesis is particularly crucial. It was written as a rejoinder to Wallis, and infuriated the Oxford Presbyterians.125 Du Moulin accused the Presbyterians of perverting the Reformation by retaining ‘popish’ ecclesiological dualism. He blamed, in particular, political turmoil in Scotland on this Genevan doctrine of duo imperia, non subordinata sed coordinata.126 In fact, while the papacy tended towards unified power, Presbyterians followed the more dangerous course of creating an imperium in imperio.127 This undermined political stability, and Du Moulin explicitly blamed the Westminster Assembly of 123 124 126 127

Du Moulin, Paraenesis, 6, 31, 76; Power of the Christian Magistrate, 4. 125 Stubbe to Hobbes, 26 Dec. 1656, Corr., 426. Du Moulin, Of the Right of Churches, preface, 222–3. Du Moulin, Paraenesis, 79, 81; Of the Right of Churches, 84–5. Du Moulin, Of the Right of Churches, 285–7; Power of the Christian Magistrate, 109.

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Divines for undermining the Commonwealth’s de factoist claims on legitimacy and for fomenting civil unrest.128 By contrast, Du Moulin concluded that Independency was entirely compatible with the full supremacy of the sovereign state. He denied that any church form enjoyed divine-right status,129 but his overwhelming preference was for Independency. Independent churches were merely ‘small, private gatherings’, modelled after the practice of the ancient Christians who met secretly to avoid offending their pagan sovereigns. The atomized nature of Independent congregations made them unlikely to threaten the state. Man’s duties to God were chiefly individual, not communal: to ‘fear God, keep the Commandments, and believe in Christ’. These obligations did not require hierarchical, coercive churches.130 Private Christian worship would not attract the ire of a heathen magistrate. Christian sovereigns would take a proper interest in securing true, godly worship. In a Christian polity, Independent congregations were governed by the state, lest ‘ten thousand National Churches’ overrun the land like ‘a confusion of empires’. Human and divine wisdom had always sought unity, and the Christian sovereign would seek unity for his church. His authority alone could provide it.131 Du Moulin’s conviction that Erastianism and Independency were compatible animated his considerable enthusiasm for Oliver Cromwell’s church settlement. When in 1659 Richard Cromwell’s parliament considered abolishing the Triers and Ejectors and reinvigorating the defunct Presbyterian settlement, Du Moulin published his Proposals and Reasons . . . Toward the Settling of a Religious and Godly Government in the Commonwealth.132 These Proposals defended the Independents’ 1654 church settlement as the settlement most compatible with stable sovereign power. He proposed that ‘all Ecclesiasticall Jurisdiction be abolished and be buried with the English Episcopal Hierarchy, and that the Parliament and the Councill of State under them be invested with a supreme Jurisdiction in all causes and matters’. As the institutional settlement of 1654 found itself threatened from the left and right in 1659, Du Moulin’s Proposals defended it on both flanks. Against the interests of the sects, he called for the maintenance of the tithe, retention of which had always been critical to the structure of the Cromwellian church. Against the Presbyterians, he suggested that a scarcely modified version of the Triers regulate the ministry and universities. Du Moulin implicitly defended the Ejectors by arguing that the magistrate retained the right to license and deprive ministers.133 The Proposals explicitly affirmed that the ‘congregationall way is very compatible with the Magistrates jurisdiction in ordering matters of religion in a publick way’.134 Paying tribute to the Cromwellian 128

Du Moulin, Power of the Christian Magistrate, 24–39; Of the Right of Churches, 54–5. Du Moulin, Of the Right of Churches, 161–2. 130 Ibid. 214–20; Power of the Christian Magistrate, 74–5, 80, 94. 131 Du Moulin, Power of the Christian Magistrate, 117–22. 132 Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales 1658–1667 (Oxford, 1986), 33–5. 133 Du Moulin, Proposals and Reasons . . . Toward the Settling of a Religious and Godly Government in the 134 Ibid. 7, 16, 18–19, 24–7. Commonwealth . . . (1659), 4–6, 11, 29–31. 129

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church revolution, Du Moulin praised it for having ‘abolished the distinction of Church and State, of civil and Ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and taken away the distinction of clergy and laity’. ‘Collateral jurisdictions’ had been dismantled, and a unified ‘holy City’, ‘one Commonwealth to the lord’, had been erected where once clerical power had held sway.135 In praising Du Moulin’s Paraenesis, Hobbes praised the Revolution’s pre-eminent Erastian case for Independency. Du Moulin’s conclusions—that Independency could be mobilized to justify a rigidly Erastian church settlement—closely paralleled the logic of Leviathan’s final pages. Marrying natural rights discourse with the writings of prominent Congregationalists such as Cotton and Owen,136 Du Moulin’s Interregnum writings appealed to the political and religious outlook that Hobbes had acquired over the previous decade. And there are indications that, for his part, Du Moulin was equally influenced by Hobbes’s Erastian ecclesiology. Du Moulin was perhaps privy to the reports that his own writing had helped reconcile Hobbes to Oxford. While his Interregnum writings never directly cite Hobbes, there are a number of allusions that may well have appealed to his authority.137 Du Moulin’s writings demonstrated a considerable knowledge of Grotius and Selden, Hobbes’s fellow Erastian, natural rights theorists. It is difficult to believe that Hobbes’s works were unfamiliar to him. In any case, more direct evidence of Du Moulin’s estimation of Hobbes emerged after the Restoration.138 Purged from Oxford in 1660, Du Moulin maintained his staunch Erastianism, employing it to excoriate the restored episcopal church’s supposed drift towards Rome.139 Spurning the complete separatism increasingly espoused by ‘dissenters’, he continued to commend Independency as the church form best designed to achieve the ‘strength’ning of Empires, especially of Monarchies’. Independents shunned ‘any ecclesiastical tribunal independent of the magistrate’, he asserted, and gave ‘a great advantage unto Magistrates to possess an intire, and perfect sovereignty, and to take for their Motto, Divide et Impera’.140 Du Moulin’s essential convictions, then, survived the Restoration. Among those to whom he advocated them was Hobbes’s old foe Richard Baxter. In 1657, Baxter had dismissed Du Moulin’s Paraenesis as ‘a work unprofittable, tedious, and unhansome for me to anatomize or censure’.141 He published a fuller critique of Du Moulin in 1671, which thoroughly dismissed his zealous statism.142 But Du Moulin persistently struggled to convince Baxter of the compatibility of reformed Protestantism and Erastianism. In a 1665 letter he explicated at some length the 135

136 Ibid. 17 and Of the Right of Churches, 208–10, 221, 229. Ibid. 37–8. Hobbes potentially fits several references to ‘other learned men’ who upheld propositions similar to his own. Du Moulin, Of the Right of Churches, 209, 224. 138 Goldie, ‘Huguenot Experience’, 194; Nobbs, ‘New Light’, 489–509. 139 Du Moulin, A Short and True Account of the Several Advances the Church of England hath made toward Rome . . . (1680). 140 Du Moulin, The Conformity of the Discipline and Government of those who are commonly called Independants, to that of the Ancient, Primitive Christians (1680), 16–17. 141 Baxter to Wadsworth, 14 Aug. 1657, Dr William’s Library, Baxter Correspondence, vi, fo. 214. 142 Richard Baxter, The Difference between Power of Magistrates and Church Pastors . . . To the learned and sincere Ludovicus Molinaeus Dr of Physick . . . (1671). 137

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evils of ecclesiological dualism, and implored Baxter to assist in exposing this truth.143 In keeping with his very different ecclesiological understanding, Baxter resisted this ‘extreme Erastian’ critique of the main reformed churches, but in letters of the 1660s Du Moulin persisted in arguing that church power was the grand ‘mystery of iniquity’.144 And it was during the course of this effort that Du Moulin betrayed an influence about which he had long remained discreet. Concluding yet another disquisition on the evils of independent church power, he praised Erastus for having exposed ‘ecclesiastical jurisdiction and excommunication’ as frauds. That many Protestant clergymen had failed to grasp this truth enraged him, and his fury was deepened by the fact that God ‘hath permitted that men as ill principled as Grotius and Selden, yea Hobbes, as bad as can be, should come nearer the truth then many good men’.145 An intellectual influence that virtually sprang off the page of Du Moulin’s Interregnum writings was thus privately acknowledged late in the day. The grudging tribute was all the more revealing for its backhanded nature. The author of Leviathan was by 1669 a virtual by-word for atheism, and Baxter was one of Hobbes’s more prominent and long-standing critics. Du Moulin thus laced his words with politic disapproval, presumably of Hobbes’s heterodoxy. Nevertheless, he was forced to commend Hobbes for having exposed the dangers posed by ecclesiological dualism.146 In 1680, nearing death, Du Moulin published An Appeal of all Non-conformists in England to God. In an effort to defend nonconformity’s ‘sincerity in point of obedience to God and the King’, the tract provided a polemical account of the civil war. Predictably, Du Moulin blamed the outbreak of the conflict on the Laudians, and minimized the radicalism of the church reformers. Now vying for the support of the King and the Latitudinarians against the high-churchmen, Du Moulin emphasized Independency’s support for temporal sovereignty. In an effort to debunk the notion that the Independents were the ‘immediate authors and abettors of the King’s murder’, he made a shameless bid to distance the cause of Independency from the reviled Oliver Cromwell. He condemned Cromwell in striking, if disingenuous, terms. ‘Oliver Cromwell’s army’, he wrote, ‘like that of King David’s in the Wilderness, was a Medley or a Collection of all Parties that were discontented, as some Courtiers, some Episcopalians, few of any Sect, but most of none, or else of the religion of Thomas Hobbes.’147 This was an arresting allegation. Episcopal-men would long link Cromwell and Hobbes, but Du Moulin’s charge, coming as it did from a former Cromwellian, must have carried extra 143

Du Moulin to Baxter, 29 Jun. 1665, Dr William’s Library, Baxter Correspondence, vi, fo. 33. Du Moulin to Baxter, 6 Sept. 1669 and c. Mar. 1670, Dr William’s Library, Baxter Correspondence, ii, fo. 223; and vi, fos. 176–7. 145 Du Moulin to Baxter, late 1669, Dr William’s Library, Baxter Correspondence, vi, fos. 191–2. 146 Professor Sommerville does not consider this evidence as part of his effort to place distance between Hobbes and Du Moulin. He also ignores Stubbe’s report of Hobbes’s own admiration for the works of both Du Moulin and Owen. Sommerville, ‘Hobbes and Independency’, 170–3. 147 Du Moulin, An Appeal of all the Non-conformists in England to God and all the Protestant of Europe . . . (1681), 4–5, 20–1. 144

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weight. But if Cromwell and his party were plausibly described as devotees of Hobbes, Louis Du Moulin could hardly have expected to escape his share of the blame. Publicly, he willingly flung the charge of ‘Hobbism’ around as a term of opprobrium, as was highly in vogue during the Restoration.148 When it came to Cromwell and the Independents, however, his own writings served to prove the charge. The Erastian ‘religion of Thomas Hobbes’ never found a Christian champion, but the Christians most tempted by its doctrines during the English Revolution were the Interregnum Independents. Nor will it do to dismiss Louis Du Moulin as an ideological loose cannon. From his earliest years at Oxford, he had numbered among the strongest partisans of John Owen’s governing clique, and the accord between Du Moulin’s ecclesiological thinking and Owen’s was widely observed.149 Stubbe, as we have seen, presented the two men as ideological comrades in arms.150 Owen composed an effusive epistle dedicatory to Du Moulin’s Paraenesis, and for this he was condemned by the Presbyterians for having ‘subjected the ministry to the Magistracy’.151 When Stubbe reported Hobbes’s ‘reconcilement to the University’, he attributed it to the ‘good esteem’ in which Hobbes held the writings of both Du Moulin and John Owen. In Owen’s case, Hobbes’s commendation was almost certainly addressed to a congregationalist apologia entitled Of Schism.152 Among Owen’s most influential works, Of Schism was a classic defence of Independency. In praising it, Hobbes commended a pre-eminent work of the leading Cromwellian Independent and the architect of the Interregnum church settlement. The threat of schism exercised Interregnum England with a singular urgency. In the new era of sectarianism, the previously awful but defined cracks in the edifice of the church threatened to explode into a thousand fissures. John Owen’s contribution to the debate over schism thus excited tremendous interest. He wrote as a pre-eminent representative of English Independency, and defended a theory of the church that many felt surrendered catholicity to the forces of sectarian disintegration. Never before had a sizeable Christian land been governed by divines so suspicious of institutional church unity. Once in power, the Independents were challenged to answer those critics who blamed their war on clerical power for the undeniable explosion of sectarianism that shook England during the Interregnum. John Owen’s Of Schism was among the most prominent intellectual responses to this challenge. It appeared in 1657 and triggered a spate of rejoinders from clericalist critics, including Henry Hammond. But the Presbyterians were Owen’s chief opponents,153 and the task of answering Of Schism on their behalf 148 In 1680 he accused the bishops of having ‘been infected with the venom of Arminianism, Pelagianism, and Socinianism, and the Maxims of Dr. Hobbes’. Du Moulin, Short and True Account, 9. 149 For early evidence of their friendship, see Du Moulin to Owen, Sept. 1652, Owen, Correspondence, 52. 150 Stubbe to Hobbes, 17 Oct. 1656, Corr., 311. 151 Stubbe to Hobbes, 26 Dec. 1656, Corr., 426. 152 Stubbe to Hobbes, 11 Apr. 1657, Corr., 459. Of Schism appeared sometime in 1657 and is the only work of Owen’s published around the time of Stubbe’s remark that fits this description. Noel Malcolm has reached the same conclusion. It was thus published after Hobbes commended it, so we might speculate that Hobbes had been shown a manuscript by Stubbe, who assisted Owen in the preparation of On Schism. Stubbe to Hobbes, 14 Feb. 1657, Corr., 448–9. 153 John Owen, Of Schism: The True Nature of it Discovered and Considered with Reference to the Present Differences in Religion, in The Works of John Owen, ed. William Goold (28 vols., Edinburgh, 1826) xiii. 94–5, 188–90, 193).

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fell to Daniel Cawdrey, a Northamptonshire divine. Cawdrey had served prominently in the Westminster Assembly of Divines, had opposed Charles I’s execution, and flew sufficiently high to merit later consideration for a Restoration bishopric.154 During the Interregnum, he was not resident at Oxford but was allied with the University’s Presbyterian faction.155 Months after Owen’s treatise appeared, it was answered by Cawdrey’s Independencie a Great Schism proved against Dr. Owen. Owen replied, later in the same year, with A Review of the True Nature of Schism. In 1658 Cawdrey published Independency further Proved to be a Schism, but within months Owen had the final word with his Answer to a Late Treatise of Mr. Cawdrey about the Nature of Schism. Of Schism adopted classic Protestant methodology, appealing to sola scriptura. Owen’s chief burden was to redefine schism, which was traditionally understood as a state of unlawful separation from the unified, institutional church. Catholicity thus denoted a union of communion and discipline. But Owen argued that schism signified a ‘difference of mind and judgment, with troubles ensuring thereon, amongst men and in some one assembly, about the compassing of a common end and design’.156 This definition asserted that ecclesiastical schism occurred only within ‘one church, amongst the members of one particular society’. Separation itself, either undertaken by an individual or by an assembly, did not constitute schism, he insisted.157 In defending this definition of schism Owen eliminated ‘metaphorical’ and ‘political’ scriptural uses of the term schism and appealed only to the apostle Paul’s use of the term to describe the church turmoil at Corinth. Paul exhorted the Corinthians, who had fallen into fractious disagreement, to unity; Owen interpreted this as an admonition to a single congregation that had not yet separated into multiple congregations. Owen denied that Paul intended to reprove either ‘all the church of Achaia’, or several assemblies jointly designated as the ‘church at Corinth’. Corinth, Owen insisted, was a particular congregation, and as it had not yet divided into separate congregations, the scriptural definition of schism did not pertain to congregational separation itself. True to the principle of the gathered church, he argued that separation from a corrupted church, far from constituting schism, was required by the Gospel.158 Beyond this narrow reading of Corinthians, Owen offered a theory of the church that amplified his definition of schism. Scripture defined the church in three ways: the ‘catholic church militant’ or the ‘invisible church’; the ‘church catholic visible’; and the particular church, or individual congregation. The command to church unity, Owen argued, pertained to the invisible church alone, not to the church visible. He understood church unity as a spiritual unity—a love felt among the elect—and not a question of church polity. Schism merely signified 154

ODNB. His works explicitly alluded to his links with Owen’s Presbyterian enemies at Oxford, and referenced incidents in Owen’s Oxford career. Cawdrey, Independencie a Great Schism proved against Dr. Owen . . . (1657), 146; Cawdrey, Independencie Further Proved to be a Schism, or a Survey of Dr. Owens Review of his Tract of Schism . . . (1658), 156 Owen, Of Schism, in Works, xiii. 101. 30, 126, 129. 157 Ibid. 103. 158 Ibid. 101, 110, 122–3. 155

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breaches in this invisible unity; it was perpetrated by those lacking grace, and careless of the holy love that bound all saints together.159 Christians were to flee such threats, and thus institutional separation itself—far from constituting schism—was often required. It was the appearance and toleration of fractious differences within a particular congregation that defined schism; separation was in fact a holy response to schism. Owen unflinchingly threw the charge of schism—of fomenting internal divisions in particular churches—onto devotees of the unified institutional church.160 In response, Daniel Cawdrey mocked Owen’s innovatory definition of schism, and reasserted the traditional view that schism entailed ‘causelesse Separation from a true Church’.161 He alleged that by refusing to treat schism as a matter of church polity, Owen had conflated it with doctrinal heresy. Traditionally, heresy defined a doctrinal error and schism an ecclesiological breach. Owen, according to Cawdrey, sunk the latter into the former, with catastrophic results. After all, Cawdrey argued, Presbyterians and Independents essentially agreed on doctrine. Ecclesiology divided them, and to destroy the force of the schism charge was peremptorily to decide this disagreement for the Independents.162 Where Owen defined the church at Corinth as a single congregation, Cawdrey defined it as a group of assemblies organized into a unified church ‘collectively’ taken, much like a hierarchy of parishes. He also argued that the political usages of the word schism in Scripture, which Owen ignored, could be logically extended to cover ecclesiastical separation.163 Further, Cawdrey disputed Owen’s theory of the church, but by denying that the three definitions (visible, invisible, and particular) denoted three separate churches. Rather, the three definitions of the church were but three ‘considerations of the one church’. Thus, schism could be fomented against the catholic church visible. The dispute was tightly fought. On the one hand, Owen took advantage of the fact that all Protestants were potentially implicated in schism if the traditional definition were maintained. On the other, Cawdrey’s point that Owen had essentially conflated heresy with schism was devastating. Most fundamentally, theirs was a dispute over the function of the clergy. Owen’s defence of separation was based on traditional Protestant concerns about clerical tyranny. He had on his side the full weight of anti-papal feeling. Cawdrey in turn sought to limit the Protestant tradition of separation, and feared the growth of popular heresy among congregations freed from clerical restraint. On his side was the growing panic about the creep of English sectarianism. ‘All the present Schisms’, wrote Cawdrey, ‘strike principally at the Ministers of the Gospel.’164 For his part, Owen blamed the clergy for employing a false definition of schism in the interests of augmenting their own power.165 The Cromwellian church settlement struggled to combat both the sectarian and the clericalist threats by adopting an Erastian ecclesiastical settlement. In the 159 162 165

160 Ibid. 188, 190. Ibid. 125–32. 163 Ibid. 29–31, 39–41, 65. Ibid. 46–7. Owen, Of Schism, in Works, xiii. 98, 103.

161

Cawdrey, Independencie a Great Schism, 7–8, 10–12. 164 Ibid. 55.

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end, it was the validity of this policy that animated the Cawdrey–Owen dispute. As demonstrated in Chapter 3, Owen was generally comfortable with Independency’s Erastian implications, and had taken the lead in devising the Cromwellian church settlement. Cawdrey exploited this to the full. Owen’s insufficient sense of church unity, Cawdrey alleged, defined it as the totality of Independent congregations meeting under a civil government. But he insisted that unity consisted of ‘the same doctrine and worship, and not in the modell of civill Government’. Owen’s ecclesiology, Cawdrey alleged, was in truth a mere licentious toleration, a ‘prudentiall way of those Erastian Politicians’ who coveted religious power to secure their ‘Civill interests’.166 He pressed the point by paralleling the views of Du Moulin and Owen.167 Owen retained more reservations about endorsing full-blown Erastianism than Du Moulin had, but the implications of his own writings did diminish clerical authority and augmented state control of religion. The potential of Erastianism to cultivate godless statecraft bothered Owen,168 but, as Cawdrey pointed out, only clerical authority was subject to full critique in Of Schism. Moreover, Owen’s writings on schism presented Independency as the church form most consistent with the authority of the state. Herein certainly lay the merit of his work in the eyes of Thomas Hobbes. Owen aimed above all at rebutting the claim that the church visible was properly a ‘political church’. This involved him in a series of controversial ecclesiological claims reminiscent of Hobbesian theory. Like Hobbes, he greatly feared the potential power of the unified, visible, and catholic church. Those who called for visible church unity aimed at establishing an independent clerical estate within sovereign kingdoms. The model for this was of course Roman Catholicism, which Owen characterized as a godless imitation of the ‘old imperial government’, and which Hobbes likewise condemned as ‘the ghost of the deceased Romane Empire’.169 The entire charge of schism, Owen alleged, was a tool of the clergy designed to pry power from the state. Hobbes had warned his readers against divines who manipulated language and metaphor to craft defences of their own power. Owen echoed this allegation when he characterized the traditional definition of schism as a manipulated metaphor.170 Both Hobbes and Owen believed institutional unity to be solely a feature of political sovereignty. Owen echoed Hobbes when he explicitly limited the scriptural use of the term schism to political (not ecclesiastical) institutions. Rebellion was only possible against the state, not the church.171 He also echoed Hobbes’s theory of the civil war when he characterized the visible church as a destroyer of nations. Like Du Moulin, Owen expressed his fears of a parallel ecclesiastical sovereignty in words strongly Hobbesian in flavour. ‘In despite of policy’, he wrote, the visible, catholic church had ‘not only enslaved kings, kingdoms, commonwealths, nations, and people . . . but also, contrary to all rule of government . . . they have in most nations of Europe set up a government, authority, and jurisdiction within another 166

Cawdrey, Independencie a Great Schism, 173, 13, 17; Cawdrey, Independencie Further Proved Schism, 67. Cawdrey, Independencie Further Proved Schism, 14, 69. Owen defended Du Moulin in An Answer to a Late Treatise of Mr. Cawdrey about the Nature of Schism, in Works, xiii. 298. 168 Owen, Of Schism, in Works, xiii. 98. 169 Ibid. 116; Lev., 480–1. 170 Owen, Of Schism, in Works, xiii. 100–1. 171 Ibid. 100–1, 109–10. 167

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government and authority, settled on other accounts, the one independent of the other’.172 The English church was merely the totality of subjects gathered under a sovereign who publicly proclaimed the Christian religion. To assert a transnational Christian unity in institutional form was to claim an illegal power.173 ‘Some have said, and do yet say’, Owen wrote, that the church in this sense is a visible, organical, political body . . . An organic political body is a thing of another nature. A politic body or commonwealth is a society of a certain portion of mankind, united under some form of rule or government, whose supreme and subordinate administration is committed to several persons, according to the tenor of such laws and customs as that society hath or doth consent unto . . . In this sense, we deny the church whereof we speak to be an organical, political body, as not having indeed any of the requisites thereunto, not one law of order . . . It hath no such head or governor, as such. Nor will it suffice to say that Christ is its head, for if, as a visible political body, it hath a political head, that head also must be visible.174

In praising Owen to Stubbe, Hobbes was almost certainly endorsing the submission to the state celebrated in passages such as this. Owen justified the Revolution’s ecclesiastical project in terms that probably appealed to Hobbes’s own political views. He insisted that the Long Parliament had acted against the bishops justly, because the bishops enjoyed their power merely ‘by the laws, customs, usages of this commonwealth’. Parliament had ‘made alteration of nothing but what they found established by the laws of the nation’. The church revolution transformed ‘political administrations’ alone.175 Owen’s defence of the church revolution, then, did not assert a divine-right church form, but rather depended on the sovereign to order religious affairs. His principles in this respect paralleled those of Hobbes. Both men defended the dismantling of the Laudian church by invoking quasiErastian principles. Moreover, though Owen tried, on occasion, to distance himself from the more cynical manoeuvrings of the ‘politicians’, he nevertheless made frequent polemic use of the argument that atomized congregations were less apt to form an institutional challenge to the authority of states. It would be misleading to overstate the affinity between Thomas Hobbes and John Owen. As demonstrated below, Owen surely disliked many of Hobbes’s heterodox theological opinions. But on ecclesiological matters, Owen’s views paralleled those of Hobbes in a number of respects. Discussing church discipline, for instance, Leviathan anticipated Owen’s understanding of schism as a ‘Dissolution of charity’.176 Owen’s Congregationalist interpretation of the church at Corinthians, whereby Paul rebuked the followers of Apollos and Cephas not for separation but for uncharitable contentions over ‘unnecessary things’, mapped very closely onto the interpretation offered in Leviathan.177 The friendliness of Independency towards unified state power constituted an important weapon in 172

173 Owen, Of Schism, in Works, xiii. 182–3, 137. Ibid. 114, 167; Lev., 227–8. Ibid. 151; Owen, A Review of the True Nature of Schism, with A Vindication of the Congregational Churches in England from the Imputation Thereof . . . , in Works, xiii. 252. 175 Owen, Of Schism, in Works, xiii. 184–5, 186, 190. See also pp. 140–5 for Owen’s view that higher clerical author176 Lev., 352. ities are never jure divino but are ‘prudential’. 177 Owen, Of Schism, in Works, xiii. 101–2; Lev., 479–80. 174

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the polemical arsenal of the Independents. Hobbes’s commendation of Of Schism demonstrated how effectively such a weapon could be at winning over Erastian opinion.178 The affinity between Louis Du Moulin and Hobbes demonstrably ran in both directions. While Hobbes’s endorsement of Of Schism is sufficiently clear, Owen’s estimation of Hobbes proves more difficult to establish. Nonetheless, there are hints that Owen conformed to the pattern established by Du Moulin: public disapprobation alloyed with a measure of private approval. By the mid-1650s, Hobbes had begun to achieve notoriety as a heretical thinker, particularly among clergy affronted by his Erastianism and sceptical of his motives in propagating it. The vicissitudes of gossip-mongering at Interregnum Oxford are impossible to recreate, but through some channel Cawdrey had learnt that Stubbe was translating Leviathan into Latin. Cawdrey, loathe to pass up an opportunity to rile Owen, made full use of this information. In Independencie Further Proved to be Schism, he referenced the ecclesiological disputes between Owen and Wallis, and he noted that Owen ‘did imploy, or at least encourage (an Amanuensis of his) Mr. Stubbe of Christ Church (now advocate for Mr. Hobs) to write against’ Wallis.179 This charge elicited an outraged letter from Stubbe. Stubbe denied serving Owen as an amanuensis, and insisted that Cawdrey had exaggerated his relationship with Owen in order to bolster a more serious allegation: ‘It was for the advantage of your designs’, Stubbe wrote, ‘that the same person should be Dr. Owen’s amanuensis and Mr. Hobbs’s advocate, which is an epithete I cannot owne.’ Cawdrey had attempted to portray his opponent as a Hobbist, and had taken advantage of the fact that Owen’s client had written in defence of Hobbes. Stubbe now characterized this as a distortion. He had merely defended some ‘Latin and Greek expressions’ of Hobbes that Wallis had presumed to correct. But ‘he that reades your book’, Stubbe complained to Cawdrey, would have ‘presently apprehended that I owne the Leviathan, and have defended the greatest blasphemy which it is said to contain’. Had Wallis ‘written against Mr. Hobs so as had befitted the university and his quality, I should have rejoiced’. But Stubbe refused to tolerate petty carping. In any case, he concluded, ‘I no more defended Mr. Hobs, than you do now the Pope and Papall church’.180 Stubbe was, of course, brazenly lying.181 He was indeed engaged both in translating Leviathan and in a devoted correspondence with Hobbes.182 Stubbe’s letter to Cawdrey thus offers a revealing glimpse into the relationship between 178 In a 1699 defence of episcopacy and rebuttal of Owen, Thomas Gipps wrote that if Owen’s principles prevailed, ‘it will follow that Mr. Hobbs was in the right, when he affirms the Will and Laws of the Prince to be the Standard of the Peoples Religion’. Thomas Gipps, Tentamen novum continuatum (1699), 123. 179 Cawdrey, Independencie Further Proved Schism, 130; Stubbe’s defence of Hobbes was long held against him. See, e.g., Joseph Glanvill, A Praefactory Answer to Mr. Henry Stubbe . . . (1671), 7. 180 Stubbe to Cawdrey, 17 Mar. 1657. Bodl. MS Savile 104, fo. 1. 181 Stubbe signalled to Hobbes in May of 1657 that such public reserve might be required. Stubbe to Hobbes, 6 May 1657, Corr., 466. 182 Indeed, he penned a friendly letter to Hobbes on the very day he wrote Cawdrey (Corr., 455). Professor Sommerville nonetheless quotes Stubbe’s letter to Cawdrey in a straightforward manner. Sommerville, ‘Hobbes and Independency’, 173.

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Thomas Hobbes and the Interregnum Independents. Stubbe’s posture vis-à-vis Hobbes combined private enthusiasm with nervous public reserve. In this his response paralleled that of Du Moulin, who publicly distanced himself from Hobbes while privately admitting his achievements. At the very least, Cawdrey’s charge indicates that Hobbes’s ecclesiology and the Congregational Way shared resemblances that struck contemporaries. Cawdrey, for one, found the association between Hobbes and Owen’s circle sufficiently plausible to justify a published barb. The perception was afoot that Owen and his instruments had attached themselves to Hobbesian Erastianism. The perils of such a charge were significant, as Stubbe’s letter to Cawdrey suggests. By this time the Presbyterians around Baxter had issued pleas to the government for the suppression of Leviathan. John Wallis and Ward had published their anti-Hobbesian works.183 Some unnamed party at Oxford, presumably friendly to the Presbyterians, had apparently arranged to have hostile remarks about Hobbes publicly aired during the 1656 ceremony awarding Oxford degrees.184 The situation was equally inhospitable at Cambridge, where Thomas Hill and others had assisted Baxter’s campaign against Leviathan. A few years later, the master of Jesus College, Cambridge, John Worthington, would inform Samuel Hartlib that among the questions debated at the Minora Comitia was one ‘in opposition to the master-notion of Mr. Hobs . . . for I suspect men of that leaven have but mean thoughts of Christianity, if indeed any at all’.185 The atmosphere was turning poisonously against Hobbes, and thus the efforts of both Cawdrey and Wallis to associate Owen’s circle with Hobbes were potentially devastating.186 Owen’s expressed opinions of Hobbes must be read in this light. John Owen was certainly familiar with the writing of Hobbes. Stubbe’s testimony alone is sufficient evidence of that, but a surviving catalogue of Owen’s library indicates much more than a passing interest. In addition to a 1651 edition of Leviathan, Owen owned (by his death) Hobbes’s 1668 Opera Omnia Philosophia, his Thucydides, his obscure Wonders of the Peak in Darby-shire, and Blackbourn’s Vita of Hobbes.187 Owen’s familiarity with Hobbes is thus simple to establish. More difficult to ascertain is his estimation of Hobbes, but here again, letters of Stubbe shed light. Owen, like Du Moulin, understood the heretical implications of some Hobbesian doctrines. Indeed, he prevented Henry Stubbe from completing his translation of Leviathan. Owen ‘bade [me] not meddle with the translation’, 183 Both had achieved some notice. Ward was possibly the ‘Ingenious man at Oxford, that hath written against Mr. Hobbs’s principles of Moral Philosophy’ mentioned by Oldenburg in 1659. Oldenburg to Hartlib, 29 Sept. 1659, in Schuhmann, Chronique, 167. 184 This is based on a remark by Stubbe and Malcolm’s conjecture upon it. Stubbe to Hobbes, 29 Nov. 1656, Corr., 379. Stubbe reported that Hobbes had many Oxford partisans, who were ‘generally decryeing the act’. An ‘act’ was a ceremony at which university degrees were granted. 185 Worthington to Hartlib, 11 Mar. 1660, Cambridge Baker MS Mm. 1.40, 276. 186 When Wallis upbraided Hobbes and Stubbe, he made a particular effort to associate the latter with Owen. Wallis, Hobbiani Puncti Dispunctio, 20. 187 Bibliotheca Oweniana, sive Catalogus Librorum . . . Joan Oweni (1684) 32; under ‘miscellanies’ (separately paginated), 25–6, 31.

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Stubbe wrote Hobbes in April of 1657. As early as the previous December, Owen had anxiously enquired about the proposed translation, and Stubbe had felt compelled to lie when the subject arose.188 But this seemingly decisive evidence of Owen’s low opinion of Hobbes proves ambiguous on closer examination. By early 1657, after all, Owen and the Oxford Independents were somewhat on the defensive. The Oxford conservatives had been buoyed by the recent marriage of John Wilkins to Oliver Cromwell’s sister, and Owen found his own influence with the regime declining.189 By this date the Presbyterian campaign against Hobbes was in full swing. Owen was well acquainted with the Interregnum critiques of Leviathan, including those by Wallis and Lawson.190 Indeed, Wallis had included an epistle dedicatory to Owen (somewhat begrudging in tone) in his Elenchus Geometriae Hobbianae of 1655. Here Wallis attacked Hobbes’s geometry, but also made ominous reference to Hobbes’s ‘errors in theology and philosophy’.191 Within this charged context, Owen’s desire to distance Stubbe from Hobbes was very likely a matter of prudence. By 1657 Stubbe had gained notoriety among the Presbyterians as a champion of Hobbes. Further, Stubbe had been ‘giving out’ that Hobbes’s reconciliation to Oxford was based on his good opinion of the writings of Du Moulin and Owen. A cryptic remark by Stubbe to Hobbes—‘you have put them to play a new game’—implied that this information had perhaps riled the Presbyterians only months before Owen halted the translation of Leviathan.192 Indeed, Stubbe repeatedly reported that Hobbes had ‘many favourers’ at Oxford, not merely enemies.193 That these allies were attached to Owen’s circle of Independents is clear. Stubbe himself, of course, was both a partisan of Hobbes and a client of Owen. Owen’s colleague Du Moulin had espoused an ecclesiology close to Hobbism. There were other links as well. Among them was Edward Bagshaw, son of the anti-episcopal MP and a close ally of Owen’s at both Westminster School and at Oxford.194 At Oxford in the 1650s, Bagshaw was regarded as an instrument of Owen’s and was probably a member of that Hobbesian party at the University mentioned by Stubbe. In 1658 he actually corresponded with the philosopher. Bagshaw’s affinity for Hobbes’s work was partly attributable to their shared determinism,195 but he was equally influenced by Hobbes’s Erastianism. In published tracts of 1660 and 1662, for instance, Bagshaw denounced the exercise of temporal power on the basis of spiritual qualifications in terms that recalled the Erastian and philo-Semitic logic of Leviathan.196 All of this serves to confirm the likelihood that Hobbes’s party of devotees at Oxford were men close to John Owen. 188

Stubbe to Hobbes, 11 Apr. 1657, Corr., 459; Stubbe to Hobbes, 8 Dec. 1656, Corr., 383. Shapiro, Wilkins, 3, 11. Owen also owned works against Hobbes by Thorndike and Lucy; Bibliotheca Oweniana (under miscellanies), 191 Wallis, Elenchus, epistle dedicatory. 2, 10, 28–9, 30. 192 Stubbe to Hobbes, 14 Feb. 1657, Corr., 448–9. 193 Stubbe to Hobbes, 29 Nov. 1656, Corr., 379. 194 See Malcolm, Biographical Register, in Corr., 782–4. 195 Bagshaw to Hobbes, 1 Mar. 1658, Corr., 497; Bagshaw, A Practicall Discourse Concerning Gods Decrees . . . (Oxford, 1659). 196 Edward Bagshaw, Saintship no Ground of Sovereignty . . . (Oxford, 1660), 2–7, 26–41; Bagshaw, A Brief Enquiry into the Grounds and Reasons Whereupon the Infallibility of the Pope and Church of Rome is Said to be Founded (1662), preface, 7, 17–20. 189

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Further evidence for this view is provided by the case of Thomas Barlow. Barlow, a fellow of Queen’s College at Oxford since 1633, was in some respects atypical of Hobbes’s admirers. He was, for instance, an expert in scholastic theology, and was destined (in 1675) for the bishopric of Lincoln.197 But Barlow was not a partisan of the episcopal faction during the Interregnum. His Calvinist theological bent and remarkably pliable political habits estranged him from more loyal Anglicans such as George Morley and Hammond.198 Barlow had been John Owen’s tutor at Queen’s, and it was Owen who secured him the post of Keeper of the Bodleian Library in 1652. In 1658 he became Provost of Queen’s College. Such trimming did not endear Barlow to the more devoted servants of the old church. Even after his return to the episcopal fold after 1660, he dissented from neo-Laudian orthodoxies. Most notably in the present context, Barlow was a lifelong Erastian and foe of independent clerical power.199 During the 1650s this helped to ingratiate him with Owen’s faction at Oxford, and estranged him from the university Presbyterians. Presiding over disputations at Queen’s College, Barlow upheld staunchly Erastian ecclesiological principles, affirming that ‘supreme power included not only civil but also sacred power’.200 Such an outlook delighted his loyal deputy (at the Bodleian), Henry Stubbe, who assured Hobbes of Barlow that there was ‘no man more against the jus divinum of the Clergy than he’.201 These shared Erastian sentiments, indeed, became the nucleus of a friendly correspondence between Barlow and Hobbes. Barlow spoke ‘very honourably’ of Hobbes at Oxford, and repeatedly expressed the desire to visit with him.202 Stubbe served as a conduit for the exchange of letters and books between the two men, and what survives of the content of this correspondence reveals much about Hobbes’s profile at Cromwellian Oxford.203 Having read Hobbes’s De Corpore and Markes of an Absurd Geometry, Barlow could only concur with their Erastian themes. He echoed Hobbes’s call for the Universities to instruct students in ‘piety towards God and obedience and duty to their Governors’: I concurre in what you say of the Scotch Divines . . . They challenge a transcendent power, which hath noe foundation in scripture, or Antiquity; And it infinitely concernes the Civil Magistrate, to Be jealous of any power superior to his owne, for whatsoever makes him lesse than supreme, puts him in the capacity of a subject, and soe lyable to the punishments of that power which pretends it selfe to be greater.204

Thomas Barlow, then, was yet another figure closely associated with John Owen’s faction who inclined in Erastian and Hobbesian directions. Owen may 197

ODNB; Malcolm, Biographical Register, Corr., 785–7. Barlow to Morley, 14 June 1645, and Barlow to Hammond, 22 June 1655, in Oxford, Queen’s College MS 219, fos. 189, 342. 199 See, e.g., his Popery . . . Dangerous to all, and to Protestant Kings and supreme Powers more especially Pernicious 200 Genuine Remains of that Learned Prelate, Dr. Thomas Barlow . . . (1693), 567, 608–15. (1679). 201 Stubbe to Hobbes, 26 Dec. 1656, Corr., 425. 202 Stubbe to Hobbes, 13 and 30 Jan. 1657, Corr., 430, 439–40. 203 Stubbe to Hobbes, 29 Nov. and 25 Dec. 1656, Corr., 379, 425. 204 Barlow to Hobbes, 23 Dec. 1656, Corr., 420–1; on the Markes, see Stubbe to Hobbes, 14 Feb. 1657, Corr., 448. 198

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well have become jittery that charges of Hobbism might help to discredit Independency. As Stubbe reported in February of 1657, the ‘Presbyterians ha[d] so filled men’s eares against [Hobbes], that none would dare exhibite that respect’ which they had for him.205 The efforts by Cawdrey and Wallis to link Hobbes with Owen himself may have been the final straw. Owen’s prohibition of the translation of Leviathan was very likely an act of prudence. Indirect evidence of this is provided by a letter that Stubbe sent to Hobbes in December 1656. Stubbe informed Hobbes that Owen would approve of any attack Hobbes might make on Wallis, ‘upon a private account, though not publique’.206 For his part, Hobbes himself was apparently under the impression that Owen had undercut him under pressure. In a bitter aside in his 1661 Dialogus Physicus, Hobbes recalled Owen pronouncing that ‘whatever be Hobbes’s doctrine, we will not accept it’. But Hobbes explicitly linked this remark with the ‘angry mathematicians and physicians’ who ‘had publicly declared that they would not accept any truth that came from’ Hobbes.207 This was a clear allusion to the Wallis faction, and indicates that—as Hobbes remembered it—John Owen was under pressure from his clericalist critics to disown the teachings of Leviathan. Moreover, the evidence suggests that Owen’s true assessment of Leviathan was more nuanced than his prohibition of the translation suggests. Owen, reported Stubbe to Hobbes, ‘did speake of your Leviathan, that it was a booke the most full of excellent remarques of any, onely you deify the magistrate, and spoyled all by your kingdome of darknesse’.208 As an assessment of Leviathan, this was mixed at worst. Owen clearly suspected portions of Leviathan. Stubbe indicated that Owen disliked Hobbes’s reduction of natural law and Christian morality to a matter of sovereign jurisdiction; this probably offended Owen’s more sincere dedication to the autonomy of individual conscience. Further, Owen probably disapproved of the ‘Kingdom of Darkness’ (part 4 of Leviathan) because it contained many of Hobbes’s heretical theological opinions. There, for instance, are found his unorthodox readings of the sacraments, his denial of the resurrection of the soul, and his denial of demons and other incorporeal spirits. Crucially, however, Hobbes presented his Erastian ecclesiological opinions in part 3 of Leviathan, not part 4. Otherwise, Owen described Leviathan as ‘most full of excellent remarks’. Given the central position of Hobbes’s Erastianism in those parts of the book that Owen failed to condemn, it is likely that Owen’s opinion of Hobbes mirrored that of his ally Louis Du Moulin. The latter condemned Hobbes’s theological opinions, but was compelled to admire his Erastian ecclesiology. Owen’s assessment of Hobbes was similarly conflicted. Hobbes’s theological opinions, and the mounting Presbyterian campaign against him, led Owen to prohibit a member of his circle 205

206 Stubbe to Hobbes, 8 Dec. 1656, Corr., 384. Stubbe to Hobbes, 14 Feb. 1657, Corr., 449. Hobbes, Dialogus Physicus, in Shapin and Schaeffer (eds.), Leviathan and the Air Pump, 348; Hobbes’s memory of this history was long and bitter. The German Adam Ebert, after visiting Hobbes in 1678 in London, reported that during Cromwell’s time John Wallis had tried to have Hobbes imprisoned at Oxford. Malcolm, ‘Behemoth Latinus’, 99. 208 Stubbe to Hobbes, 11 Apr. 1657, Corr., 459. 207

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from translating Leviathan. But he did not condemn Hobbes outright, and like Du Moulin Owen maintained a grudging admiration for some of Hobbes’s views. This helps clarify Stubbe’s modestly successful efforts to involve Hobbes in the defence of Independency (and of John Owen personally). For his part, Hobbes continued to follow John Owen’s participation in the Interregnum’s bruising ecclesiological controversies. As late as October of 1659, after the death of Cromwell had triggered efforts to revive English Presbyterianism and dismantle the Erastian church settlement of 1654, Hobbes and Stubbe corresponded about the struggle to ‘overthrowe presbytery’. When a petition entitled An Essay toward Settlement upon a Sure Foundation appeared, in which sectarians denounced the ‘Rulers over men’ for contemplating a state church designed to ‘inforce any forme of Worship suited to their interest’, Hobbes asked Stubbe to identify the ‘John Owen’ who had signed the petition. He was presumably pleased to learn that this Owen was ‘not our Doctor’.209 The affinity between Hobbes and the Cromwellian Independents should not be exaggerated. Their response to his work was marked by a deep-seated tension. On the one hand, his heterodox theological beliefs were too apparent to ignore. On the other, his Erastianism and his deference to the authority of the Cromwellian state appealed to their understanding of the Godly reformation they were striving to achieve. It has been argued here that Hobbes’s use of Erastianism tapped into two divergent intellectual traditions: the ecclesiology of the Magisterial Reformation, and the functional view of religion that typified some humanist thought. Above all, the conflicted response of the Oxford Independents to Hobbes reflected these tensions in his Erastianism. For radical ‘freethinkers’ like Hall, Nedham, and Stubbe himself, Hobbesian ecclesiology was a comfortable fit. As deeply committed Christians, Owen and Du Moulin could not overlook Hobbes’s heterodoxies; but as leading participants in a church revolution dedicated to restraining the power of the clergy and to preserving England’s Erastian church polity, the Independents could not entirely escape the lure of Leviathan’s powerfully argued ecclesiology. Leading Independents thus betrayed a consistent habit of publicly disavowing Hobbes while privately endorsing elements of his thought. In this regard, Hobbes’s esoteric strategy of wedding deeply anti-Christian philosophical propositions with conventional Protestant ecclesiological arguments met with some success among the Independents. But this success proved fleeting. The power of the Independents was to collapse spectacularly, and Hobbes would live to regret his effort at appealing to their interests. By 1660, the restored Anglicans, equally cognizant of his heterodoxy and disinclined towards his Erastianism, had exposed Hobbes’s hostility to Christianity with a decisive thoroughness.

209 Stubbe to Hobbes, 9 Oct. 1659, Corr., 505–6. The petition was signed by another John Owen as well as several leading Fifth Monarchy men; An Essay Toward Settlement upon a Sure Foundation Being a Testimony in God in this Perilous Time (1659).

7

Response of the Exiled Church As an intellectual of considerable note in Interregnum London, Thomas Hobbes was by no means universally celebrated, but he enjoyed a measure of public approbation that would disappear after 1660. In his prose Vita, Hobbes remembered the 1650s as a time when ‘his doctrines were condemned by virtually all academics and ecclesiastics, but they were praised by noblemen and by learned laymen. . . . Positioned between his friends and enemies, as in equilibrium, his doctrines were neither accepted nor yet oppressed.’1 Famous, with circles of devotees in both London and Oxford, Hobbes cannot have regretted his flight from the exiled Stuart court. But the Restoration changed everything for him. After 1660 his notoriety as a heretic, an atheist, and an enemy of the traditional church would harden into a commonplace. Church authorities and parliament would target him relentlessly. His political works—celebrated across Europe—would be effectively banned in his native country. Hobbes’s reversal of fortune would be chiefly attributable to the leading members of the restored episcopal church. Of the eleven men identified in 1660 by the keen observer Robert Baillie as the ‘present leaders of the Episcopall party’, fully eight have left documentary evidence of an intense hostility towards Hobbes.2 For many historians, the hostility of the restored church to Hobbes—pitting as it did a secular, modernizing thinker against benighted traditionalists—has required only passing attention. Others have taken the English Church’s anti-Hobbism more seriously, but primarily as a feature of Restoration political culture.3 To date, however, no sustained attention has been given to the early formation of anti-Hobbesian attitudes within episcopal circles. If the Anglican campaign against Hobbes had its most dramatic impact after 1660, its intellectual structure took shape during the Interregnum, as a part of the critically important body of apologetical literature produced during the church’s exile. Recognizing this is critical, for while it is commonly assumed that the clergy despised Hobbes on theological grounds (for his materialism or atheism), this chapter will argue that their theological disagreements with Hobbes were secondary to their anxiety over his ecclesiology. To be sure, some clerical critics 1

Vita [prose], 10–1; trans. in Gaskin (ed.), 250. Thomas Pierce, Henry Hammond, Herbert Thorndike, Matthew Wren, John Bramhall, Brian Duppa, George Morley, Gilbert Sheldon. Baillie to Sharp, 16 Apr. 1660, Letters of Baillie, iii. 400. 3 Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Locke’; Goldie, ‘John Locke and Anglican Royalism’, Political Studies, 31 (1983), 61–85, and ‘Huguenot Experience’; Marshall, ‘The Ecclesiology of the Latitude-Men, 1660–1689’. 2

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did target Hobbes as a heretic, and minutely answered his theology. But the leading Anglicans feared him more as a powerful advocate for a functional model of civil religion, and they associated his Machiavellian ecclesiological thinking with the dominant Erastian mood of the 1640s and 1650s. Hobbes’s heresies fell largely beyond the pale of seventeenth-century religious discourse, but Erastianism had a long tradition and a broad appeal in England’s governing circles, and was thus more threatening. The Hobbes who became the inveterate foe of the Anglican church was not merely a religious sceptic, but a political rebel and fellow-traveller with the Erastian revolution in the church. In this way the Anglican critique of Hobbes was fundamentally ecclesiological rather than theological. It is thus crucial to understand the precise political context of its origins during the Interregnum, a time when it was men such as Hobbes, and not the episcopal clergy, who enjoyed favour, protection, and influence. A friendly historiography tends to portray Oliver Cromwell and his Interregnum religious regime as chaotic, but tolerant and ecumenical. Famous moments such as Cromwell’s respectful audience with Bishop Usher and the prayer book wedding of his daughter, combined with evidence of strong Anglican survivalism, can create the impression that the perils facing the old episcopal churchmen were not overly severe.4 This impression is misleading. Loyalty to episcopacy and the Prayer Book ranked with Roman Catholicism as legally prohibited monstrosities. During the 1640s and 1650s, at least 2,500 incumbents were purged from England’s roughly 8,600 parish livings, 650 from cathedrals and collegiate churches, and approximately 830 were forced from the universities.5 At times arms were used to break up Prayer Book services, and purged clergy were prohibited (albeit it with only fitful effectiveness) from even private employment.6 Far from softening this severity, Cromwell’s centralizing church settlement of 1654 aspired to render it permanent.7 Former bishops and prominent theologians suffered in particular. Four bishops and at least one hundred other clergy accompanied the Stuarts into exile. Others fared even worse. Richard Sterne was imprisoned in the hatches of a coal ship. Matthew Wren was locked in the Tower until 1660. Cromwell is said to have placed a bounty on the head of Accepted Frewen, and supposedly ‘declared that he would have given a good sum of money’ for the capture of Bishop Bramhall (‘the Irish Canterbury’) as well.8 The pervasive sense of fear was captured by Henry Hammond when he declared himself willing to ‘wait God’s providence’ by remaining in England, either ‘in or out of prison’.9 4 Morrill, ‘The Church in England, 1642–9’, in Reactions to the Civil War, 89–114; Spurr, Restoration Church, 6–9; Davis, ‘Cromwell’s Religion’, 196–7; On Usher, see Huygens, English Journal, 74. 5 A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised; Being a Revision of John Walker’s Sufferings of the Clergy during the Grand Rebellion, 1642–1660 (Oxford, 1988), pp. xiii–xiv. 6 Robert Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement: The Influence of the Laudians, 1649–1662 (London, 1951), 42–3; The Autobiography of Sir John Bramston, ed. P. Braybrooke (London, 1845), 91–2; Diary of Evelyn, ed. de Beer, 383–4; CSPV, xxviii. 120; Diary of Whitelocke, 481–2. 7 Evidenced in William Sheppard’s legal guide (‘published by command’) A View of All the Laws and Statutes of this Nation Concerning the Service of God or Religion (1655), 3, 20, 32–3. 8 ODNB; W. J. Sparrow Simpson, Archbishop Bramhall (London, 1927), 73–4. 9 Hammond to Sheldon, 19 Oct. 165*, BL Harleian MS 6942, no. 68.

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‘There are caves and dens of the earth’, wrote William Sancroft, ‘and upper rooms and secret chambers for a church in persecution to flee to; and there is all our refuge.’10 The episcopal succession itself was threatened with catastrophic extinction. Loyal episcopalians were directed to the book of Lamentations and urged to pray for their ‘desolate church and bleeding country’.11 ‘Our religion is gone’, wrote one, ‘and within few dayes is expected the funeral of our Liturgie which is dead allreadie.’ The English church, Sancroft predicted direly, ‘would never rise again’.12 The outlawed church faced a crossroad during the Interregnum. One path was to remain loyal to the Stuarts and to episcopacy, and thus accept internal exile. The second path was accommodation with the new regime, which required taking the Engagement and swallowing the new ecclesial order. Many parish clergy and a few ecclesiastical elites (Thomas Barlow, for instance) took the second path, and thus avoided the disquieting attentions of the authorities. In general, however, the church’s leading lights resisted accommodation and became a dominant voice among Stuart loyalists.13 Henry Hammond and Gilbert Sheldon assumed an unofficial primacy in the church, and maintained secret communications with the wandering Stuart court. Their brethren in exile—prominent divines such as John Cosin, John Bramhall, and George Morley—maintained Anglican influence within the old royalist faction. Challenged by Catholicism in Europe (and potentially in England) and by radical sectarianism at home, Anglican theology and ecclesiology drifted higher, assuming a decidedly Anglo-Catholic cast. And it was precisely this period of exile that clarified the episcopalians’ response to Thomas Hobbes. Interregnum Anglicans experienced life under their Cromwellian overlords as a virtual second primitive age. Though they regretted their fall from power, to be sure, the experience had the virtue of intensifying the dualist, high-church ecclesiology that they had inherited from the Laudian period. Laud’s anti-Erastian, divine-right ecclesiological understanding had lived in tension with an intense commitment to the Royal Supremacy. The collapse of the monarchy and the rise of sectarianism resolved this tension (temporarily) for Laud’s successors. For both Thomas Hobbes and his episcopal foes, the abolition of episcopacy proved an intellectual liberation. It freed Hobbes from defending episcopacy on Erastian grounds. It freed the Anglican clergy, for a time, from the need to base their own authority chiefly on the Erastian foundation of the Royal Supremacy. A high-church, divine-right episcopacy governed by a royal head had been the Caroline era’s great historical oddity. Its collapse permitted the Erastian Hobbes and the dualist Anglican clergy openly to air their stark ideological differences. The moment was fleeting, but while it lasted it was a moment of immense intellectual and political transparency. By the 1650s, we have seen, the episcopal faction was already arrayed against Hobbes. His shifting political allegiances during the 1640s had enraged the 10

11 Basire to his wife, 14 Mar. 1649, Basire Correspondence, 103. Bosher, Restoration Settlement, 9. Watson to Edgeman, 12 May 1650, Clarendon State Papers, ii. 58; Barlow to Morley, 14 June 1645, Oxford, Queen’s 13 Bosher, Restoration Settlement, 27–30, 40. College MS 219, fo. 189; Spurr, Restoration, 3. 12

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Anglican party. The publication of De Cive had first attracted their hostile attentions. When Leviathan openly endorsed the abolition of episcopacy and the ascendancy of the Independents, the English clergy had helped to secure Hobbes’s banishment from the Stuart court. It is thus unsurprising that Hobbes, once back in London, cut most of his ties to the stalwarts of the old church. Old associates such as Sheldon and Hammond were flatly hostile. Very few of Hobbes’s known friends remained openly loyal to the episcopal church, and what contact with churchmen he did have seems to have been occasioned by his irregular visits with the Cavendishes. In January of 1656, for instance, he met Brian Duppa at the Cavendish home at Roehampton. He presented Duppa with a manuscript of the Elements of Law, but, as we shall see, this did little to soften their disagreements.14 After the Restoration, Hobbes claimed to have attended services governed by the old ‘laws of the Church’, but this assertion was expressly made to buttress his misleading and self-serving claim that he had always had ‘reverence for episcopal power and governance’.15 He may have occasionally worshipped according to the old liturgy in the company of the Cavendishes, but the idea that he did so regularly in Cromwellian London is difficult to credit. White Kennet probably came closer to the truth when he reported Hobbes making a ‘shew of Religion’ in the Cavendish chapel out of ‘meer Compliance to the Orders of the Family’, but never attending services in the city.16 After 1651 Hobbes does not seem to have been overly concerned with the hostility that his work had generated among the episcopalians. Hostile works such as William Lucy’s 1656 Examinations, Censures and Confutations of Divers Errours in the two First Chapters of Mr. Hobbes his Leviathan were ignored or derided by Hobbes and his circle.17 Hobbes was much more concerned to defuse the opposition of the Presbyterians, who still enjoyed sufficient power to damage his standing in Cromwellian England. The Anglicans arrayed against him surely seemed like paper tigers by contrast. But Hobbes’s judgement that the times had passed the episcopal church by would, in the end, prove wrong. When the boot was on the other foot after 1660, the Anglican clergy would not forget the political stance he had struck in the 1650s.

i Among Hobbes’s Interregnum Anglican critics, none was more persistent or expansive than Herbert Thorndike. A product of Trinity College, Cambridge, a university preacher renowned as a Hebraist and biblical scholar, Thorndike was an ardent defender of the episcopal church during the English Revolution.18 During the tumults of the early 1640s he published vigorous defences of episcopacy, and in 1643 he was sequestered from his parish livings by the Long Parliament. In May 14 16 18

Duppa to Isham, 20 Jan. 1656, Correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa, 119. 17 Waller to Hobbes, July 1656, Corr., 295. Kennet, Memoirs, 15–16. ODNB; T. A. Lacey, Herbert Thorndike, 1589–1672 (London, 1929).

15

Vita [prose], 10–11.

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of 1646 he was expelled from his fellowship at Trinity College. Impoverished during the Interregnum, Thorndike divided his time between London and Cambridge, composing bold defences of the outlawed church and contributing to Brian Walton’s polyglot Bible.19 Though his importance has been minimized by some recent authorities,20 Herbert Thorndike numbered among the most well-connected and influential churchmen of the Interregnum. He closely corresponded with most of the leading divines of the period, including Gilbert Sheldon, Henry Hammond, and William Sancroft.21 He contributed volubly to the apologetical literature produced by this circle, and his Anglo-Catholic inclinations, if somewhat atypically pronounced, resonated with the general tenor of mid-century Anglicanism. When, after the execution of Charles I, some churchmen (including, privately, Robert Sanderson22) counselled obedience to the prevailing regime, Thorndike secured his position with the exiled clerical leadership by urging resistance.23 After the Restoration such steadfast loyalty would earn him prominent livings, a doctorate by royal mandate, and an appointment as a Savoy Conference delegate.24 The scholarly literature on Hobbes’s reception has almost entirely ignored Herbert Thorndike. This is a major shortcoming, as Thorndike recognized what many later commentators have failed to see: the ideological kinship between Thomas Hobbes’s religious thought and the prevailing Erastianism of the revolutionary years. Thorndike’s own theological and ecclesiological orientation positioned him as Hobbes’s diametric opposite. Arminianism, sacramentalism, and clericalism—the hallmarks of Laudian and early Restoration Anglicanism— served as the interlocking girders of Thorndike’s theological infrastructure.25 His belief in free will and horror at the antinomian potential of predestinarian theology fired his emphasis on the saving grace of the sacraments, and on the importance of the intercessory function of priests.26 This in turn encouraged in him an abiding attachment to the historic, corporate church, existing in dualist harmony with secular power. Confronting the religious turmoil of the Revolution, Thorndike became a leading advocate for revived catholicity in the English church. Predestinarian theology, in his view, had undermined the centrality of the sacraments to the Christian life. ‘No marvel’, he wrote, ‘if they break the church in pieces, and make themselves churches at their pleasure upon these terms, if they lay aside the sacraments as indifferent ceremonies.’27 Thorndike’s theological proclivities inclined him towards a universalist and clericalist understanding of the church, and the 19

20 Spurr, Restoration Church, 395. Lacey, Thorndike, 61–3. Hammond to Sheldon, 16 Dec. 165*, BL Harleian MS 6942, no. 106; Thorndike to Sancroft, 31 Mar. 1658, BL Harleian MS 3784, fos. 212, 227 (see also Harleian MS 3783, fos. 175, 195–9). 22 Vallance, ‘Anglican Responses to the Engagement’, 70–7. 23 Thorndike to Sheldon, BL Tanner MS, vol. 52, fos. 31–2. 24 Lacey, Thorndike, 21. 25 Thorndike, An Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England . . . in Three Books (1659), iii. 1, 3, 53, 73; Thorndike, Due Way of Composing the Differences on Foot, Preserving the Church . . . (1660), 49–52. 26 Spurr, Restoration Church, 314–15; Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, 64–77. 27 Undated manuscript in The Theological Works of Herbert Thorndike (6 vols., Oxford, 1844–56), vi. 124. 21

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religious chaos of the Revolution compelled him further in this direction. The ‘calamity’ of schism had ‘come upon the church’ during the civil war years.28 The Christian faith, for Thorndike, fundamentally depended upon the maintenance of institutional unity, a unity that had been decimated by the ‘horrible confusion in religion which the late war introduced’. Torn apart by the centrifugal force of religious pluralism, England had experienced nothing short of a ‘civil war in the church’.29 Thorndike’s high-church ecclesiology moved steadily higher in diametric response to the ecclesiastical revolutions of the 1640s and 1650s. He composed his first works during the early years of the Long Parliament as contributions to the great debate over the status of episcopacy.30 In 1649, after the King’s execution and with the Westminster Assembly disputes still smouldering, Thorndike published his Discourse on the Right of the Church in a Christian State. Finally, his massive Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England, composed during the ascendancy of the Cromwellian Independents, appeared in 1659. Thorndike’s dedication to the independent authority of the church and to the divine rights of episcopacy heightened in fervour as the Revolution wore on. His 1641 Discourse on the Government of the Churches had struck a moderate note, defending episcopacy but also arguing for the establishment of presbyteries to assist the bishops.31 This conciliatory stance, however, was overtaken by events. The abolition of episcopacy, the rise and fall of Presbyterianism, and creeping sectarianism encouraged him towards a more vigorous episcopalianism, and fired in him a fierce hostility towards Erastianism. Since ‘the beginning of these troubles’, Thorndike wrote in his 1649 Discourse on the Right of the Church in a Christian State, ‘Congregations have been erected, and Presbyteries Ordained, though with some tincture of Erastus his doctrine, which dissolveth all Ecclesiasticall Power into the Secular, in States that are Christian.’32 He attributed England’s ruinous schism to Erastianism, and charged that English Presbyterians and Independents relied on the assertion of state power. In response he relentlessly defended the independent authority of the church. ‘For the Church and civill Societies must needs remain distinct bodies when the Church is ingraffed into the State, and the same Christian members . . . remain distinct, according to the distinct Societies and qualities of severall persons in the same.’33 The church lacked temporal power, but it retained the divine authority to assemble itself and administer the sacraments. Thorndike conceded the state an interest in religious matters that pertained to public peace, but he sharply distinguished this ‘power in ecclesiastical matters’ from ‘ecclesiastical power’ proper. The state was permitted only to protect the church as it was instituted by Christ, 28

Thorndike, undated manuscript in Works, v. 125. Thorndike, Due Way, 1, 5; id., Just Weights and Measures: That is the Present State of Religion Weighed in the Balance and Measured by the Standard of the Sanctuary (1662), 10–12; id., Epilogue, ‘to the reader’. 30 Thorndike, Two Discourses, the one of the Primitive Government of Churches, the Other of the Service of God at 31 Lacey, Thorndike, 30–40. the Assemblies of the Church, newly inlarged with a Review (1650). 32 Thorndike, A Discourse on the Right of the Church in a Christian State (1649), ‘to the reader’. 33 Ibid. 40–1. 29

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and as it existed when Constantine first converted Rome. The inviolable Christianity of the primitive age critically depended on the maintenance of clerical authority over the core functions of the church. The sacraments and the disciplinary power of the keys lay utterly beyond state interference, and excommunication could even be employed against the civil sovereign. It was for the church to ‘determine matters of religion’, and for the state merely to maintain the church though its ‘coactive power’. Against what he understood as a destructive, revolutionary Erastianism, Herbert Thorndike tapped into the primitive and patristic tradition of Christian dualism.34 For Thorndike, the Revolution served as a reminder that the seeping of secular political concerns into the body of the church infected the true spiritual impulse. ‘For when men came not to Christianity, till they had digested the hardship of the Crosse, and resolved to preferre the next world afore this, it is no marvell if they endured’, he wrote in 1649. The ‘decay’ of Christianity, by contrast, began when ‘the world came into the church’, when ‘temporal privilege as well as temporal punishment’—rather than salvation—became the motive of a religious life.35 Anti-Erastianism was the keynote of Thorndike’s Discourse on the Right of the Church, and a dominant theme in his voluminous Epilogue of 1659. Hostility to the worldly impulse of Erastianism also informed a series of unpublished manuscripts he composed in the 1650s. These tracts established the tithe, excommunication, and the power to formulate canons as jure divino prerogatives of the church. Other unpublished tracts of the 1650s reiterated his view that schism was largely attributable to a base, Erastian instinct.36 Herbert Thorndike provides powerful evidence in support of the argument that, within the context of the English Revolution, Thomas Hobbes is best understood as a radicalized Erastian. Thorndike’s critique of Hobbes—unrivalled in its volume and persistence—was embedded within his broader case against the dominant Erastian ideology of the age. He first levelled his attention at Hobbes in his 1649 Discourse on the Right of the Church in a Christian State. This work abandoned the traditional state–church ideal of Richard Hooker, and it constituted Thorndike’s first fully developed critique of Erastianism. ‘I must not passe over this place’, he wrote, without taking into consideration the reasons, upon which, and the consequences to which, Erastus his opinion seems to be advanced, in the late sharp work, de Cive, where it is determined, that the interpretation of Scriptures (for which, I may as well say, the Power of Giving laws to the Church, seeing the greater difficulty lies in determining controversies of Faith) the constitution of Pastors, the Power of binding and loosing, belong to every Christian State, to be exercised by the ministery of Pastors of the Church.

If Hobbes’s statist ecclesiology were to gain acceptance, he warned, all that he himself had written ‘hath been said to no purpose’.37 34 35 36 37

Thorndike, A Discourse on the Right of the Church in a Christian State (1649), ‘to the reader’. 221–4, 232–7. Ibid. 265. ‘The Right of the Christian State in Church Matters, According to Scriptures’, in Thorndike, Works, vi. Thorndike, ‘A Review’, in Right of the Church, pp. cxiv–cxv.

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Hobbes’s essential error, Thorndike argued, was to define the Christian state and the Christian church as ‘both the same thing, distinguished by two severall causes and considerations, when both consist of the same persons’. He rejected the conflation of church and state on several grounds. First, employing the sort of Aristotelian category that Hobbes loathed, he distinguished the state and church as ‘Morall things’, or as things possessing abstract qualities and purposes transcending their institutional forms. Even in Christian polities, the state and church each had a distinct ‘morall’ quality, or inherent nature. The moral quality of the church was holiness. ‘Therefore, by the same common reason’, Thorndike wrote, ‘if there be such a thing as Holinesse in the souls of men, which disposes them to reverence God . . . then are the Means and the Circumstances, the Times, the Places, and the Persons by which this reverence is publicly tendred to God, capable to be denominated Holy.’ Holiness constituted a unique human end, and as ‘it is called morall Holinesse, so it is also called Ecclesiasticall . . . as depending on the Will of God, by which, Christianity, and the Church and the service of God therein subsisteth’. As different moral entities, the state and church required different institutional structures.38 Secondly, Thorndike argued that the state and church had different origins. ‘The Church’, he wrote, ‘subsists by immediate revelation from God, by our Lord and his Apostles, which no State doth.’ The church enjoyed a ‘Power of assembling, not from any State, but immediately and originally from God’. The church had a divine right to constitute itself as a visible body, and to preserve its own unity beyond the geographical and political limits of particular states. Thorndike argued this point scripturally and historically. Against the argument that the independent power of the church was lost when pagan powers converted to Christianity, he countered by observing that when Constantine converted the Empire, he swore to uphold the entire Christian faith, a faith which by the fourth century included a creedal definition of the church as a universal, corporate body ‘visibly distinct from all states’.39 Hobbes had presented dualist ecclesiology in highly politicized terms, as a usurpation of coercive authority by power-hunting clergy, and as the primary source of civil unrest within Christendom. Thorndike responded by eschewing, on behalf of the church, material ends. Christianity ‘is to be maintained by suffering the Crosse and not by force’; it thereby ‘preserveth the estate of the world in the same terms, and under the same powers, which it findeth’.40 Where Hobbes had sought to pacify Christianity politically by subordinating it to state power, Thorndike argued that a quietest church would only exist where its divine right to govern itself had not been absorbed by an overbearing temporal power. The church’s fundamental duty to constitute itself as an earthly assembly permitted it a series of attendant, inviolable rights: the authority to determine controversies of faith, interpret Scripture, adjudicate revelation, execute church discipline, and form (according to divine plan) its own priestly government.41 All these claims 38 41

39 Ibid., pp. cxix–cxxii. 40 Ibid., pp. cxviii–cxix. Ibid., pp. cxiv–cxviii. Ibid., pp. cxviii (on controversies of faith), cxxix (on ordination), and cxxviii (on church discipline).

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had been dismissed as seditious by Hobbes. Thorndike conceded that De Cive had rightly defined the church as ‘a society that may be assembled’. Nor did he quibble with Hobbes’s belief that an ‘infallible power [was] requisite for determining matters of faith’.42 Their dispute was over the locus of that authority. If Thorndike’s earliest critique of Hobbes appeared as a response to De Cive, his most vigorous dissent was composed as an assault on Leviathan.43 The entire first book of his 1659 Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England, ostensibly covering the ‘principles of Christian truth’, was in fact an extended defence of catholicity framed as a rejoinder to Leviathan. Despairing at the church’s Cromwellian captivity, Thorndike had heightened the fervour of his polemic. The Epilogue began by restating his familiar position that ‘the Church, by divine institution’, was ‘one visible Body, consisting in the communion of all Christians, in the offices of Gods service; and ought, by humane administration, in point of fact, to be the same’. Episcopacy and the liturgy, outlawed by the new political order and abandoned by all too many trimmers, served as the bulwarks of the corporate church. Thorndike’s Epilogue defended, at an inhospitable moment, the divine right of the visible church to govern the religious lives of Christians.44 Thorndike based his expanded case on Christian epistemology. Religious faith was reasonable, he argued, but only to the extent that reason directed the mind towards revelation. Rationality guided the believer to faith, but the principles of faith were supernaturally infused. This insistence on the revealed quality of Christianity immediately set him at odds with Hobbes, whose naturalistic and minimalist theology marginalized revelation.45 Whatever their differences, both Hobbes and Thorndike saw the need for a controlling authority to police scriptural interpretation. Thorndike insisted that the private interpretation of Scripture could not contain the centrifugal force of pluralism. Authority was required to preserve revelation, and the church rather than the temporal state was entrusted with that authority. ‘But there is the second opinion’, Thorndike wrote, ‘in the Leviathan, who allowes all points of Ecclesiastical Power, in Excommunicating, Ordaining, and the rest, to the Soveraign Powers that are Christian.’46 Thus did Thorndike launch his second critique of Hobbes’s Erastianism by exposing the variant epistemological positions that underlay their opposed ecclesiologies. He understood Hobbes’s Erastianism as an attack on the divine, supernatural quality of religious truth. By ‘dissolving the said Churches into the State’, Hobbes implicitly argued against revelation as binding law. The Scriptures were rendered nothing more than moral advice, until ‘the act of Soveraign power g[ave] the Scripture the force of Law’. A ‘desperate inference’ necessarily followed: that when commanded by the sovereign, a Christian could renounce Christ. Thorndike concluded that Hobbes’s minimalist interpretation of doctrine preserved Christianity only in a nominal sense. One needed only vaguely to affirm 42

Thorndike, ‘A Review’, in Right of the Church, p. cxxiv. The evidence in Thorndike does not support Professor Tuck’s thesis about the acceptability of De Cive to dom44 Thorndike, Epilogue, ‘to the reader’. inant Anglican opinion. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 329–40. 45 Ibid., i. 1–2. 46 Ibid. 6. 43

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that Jesus was the Messiah. The remainder of Scripture contained merely human history and an allegorized account of Hobbesian natural law.47 This constituted, in Thorndike’s mind, a full assault on revelation. Rationality—natural law—had been elevated to an idol. He concluded that Hobbes’s arguments could only have been made by an apostate. Such an accusation represented a considerable intensifying of his critique of Hobbes. Christ alone, he argued, obliged belief. Furthermore, Christ operated through revelation, not mere natural law. Hobbes’s creedal minimalism was a stalking horse. If one were merely constrained to believe Jesus was the ‘Messiah’, perhaps such a vague mandate could be accommodated within a purely rationalist religion. Christ then acted merely as a particular exponent of the natural law. But if Christ was divine— Thorndike perceived Hobbes’s unwillingness to concede this—his every word became revealed law. It was thus ‘proved against the Leviathan, that, whosoever acknowledges our Lord Jesus to be Christ, must acknowledge whatsoever he teaches and delivers, either by himself or the Apostles his deputies, to be Law to the Church’.48 Thorndike’s most advanced critique of Hobbes thus contained two essentials: an allegation that Hobbes did not believe in the divinity of Christ, and an attack on Hobbes’s effort to elevate rationality over revelation. On these pillars Hobbes had erected his Erastian superstructure, which subordinated not merely the political power of the church, but the divine power of revelation, to the state. Crucially, Thorndike refused to grapple seriously with Hobbes’s scriptural interpretations and shrewdly engaged only his underlying political and ecclesiological assumptions. Comprehending the immutable nature of the church’s spiritual power required a steadfast belief in Christ’s divinity. Such belief could not be attained by a geometric rationality. Against Hobbes’s rejection of the supernatural elements of Christianity, Thorndike argued that to understand Scripture one needed to comprehend the difference between its literal and mystical sense. To Hobbes this was so much primitive superstition, but Thorndike understood supernatural mystery to be inherent in the nature of Christ’s death and resurrection. Leviathan’s monstrous ‘conceit’ was that Christ came merely ‘to restore the kingdome of God which the Jewes cast off when they rejected Samuel’. Jesus was thus rendered nothing more than a second Moses. For Thorndike, however, the intervention of Christ in human history had destroyed the hold of the old law. ‘Christ’s Kingdom’—embodied in his Church and acknowledged by ‘all Christians’ until Leviathan—depended on the obliging force of Gospel revelation, which in turn depended on Christ’s divinity.49 By revealed rather than natural law, Thorndike argued, Christ had empowered the apostles to form and govern the church: to bind and loosen believers, to judge repentance, to appoint church officers, to interpret the Scriptures. Christ had endowed the church with these powers long before sovereigns had converted to the faith. Thorndike insisted on preserving the ‘difference between the Bodies of Christians in several Cities, and the Soveraign power over them’. Hobbes’s 47

Ibid. 6

48

Ibid. 40, 16–25.

49

Ibid. 101, 81, 99, 97.

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‘dissolution of Ecclesiastical Power into the Secular’ was aimed at creating a godless civil religion. ‘Christianity [was] to be no more’, wrote Thorndike, than a Religion taken up as a means to govern people in civil peace, (which is not onley the opinion of Machiavillians . . . but also those Philosophers, if any such there be, who do admit a Religion of all maxims which nature and reason hath taught men to agree in, but, that which supposeth revelation from above, onely as the Religion of their Countrey, not as true). I say, hee that should believe this, must necessarily believe nothing of the Church, more than the Soveraign Power shall make it.50

Thorndike, openly linking Hobbes and Machiavelli, grasped Leviathan’s dependence on the utilitarian, politicized understanding of religion embraced by certain strains of humanist culture. Hobbes’s effort to reinterpret the Scriptures was entirely insincere, undermined from the start by his scepticism about Christian revelation, and by his basic desire to create a civil religion out of a reconfigured Christianity. Erastianism animated Hobbes’s political theory as its fundamental end: it enjoyed no integrity as an internal element of a sincere Christian faith.51 This book has argued that Hobbes’s religious thought had two fundamental aims: to undermine religious belief among the wise, and to preserve Christianity’s utility as a civil religion. Herbert Thorndike had a similar understanding of Hobbes’s purpose. His Epilogue offered a subtle reading of Leviathan, and a striking denunciation of its esoteric religious project. What is more, he linked the Hobbesian religious project to the broader Erastian Revolution then shaking the very foundations of the English Church. Thorndike had long understood the religious reforms initiated by the Long Parliament as manifestations of a corrupt Erastian instinct utterly incompatible with catholicity and primitive dualism.52 His fears on this score reached a climax in the 1650s. He viewed the rise of the Independents and the Cromwellian church settlement of 1654 as the culmination of the Revolution’s Erastianism. His 1656 Letter Concerning the Present State of Religion amongst Us condemned the Cromwellian church for institutionalizing a loose, atomized church composed of Independent congregations and governed solely by state authority.53 The Triers and Ejectors, by locating ecclesiastical authority under the sovereign, undermined the sanctity of ordination and dissolved the clerical–lay distinction. Secular power could not properly administer the sacraments, and thus the legitimacy of the church itself had been destroyed. The settlement was intended, in Thorndike’s view, to ‘maintain the interest’ of Cromwell’s government, not to ‘maintain the interest of the faith’. The church settlement of 1654 constituted nothing short of a Machiavellian usurpation.54 On this point, Thorndike’s critique of Cromwell powerfully merged with his critique of Hobbesian ecclesiology. He understood that Hobbes and the Cromwellian Independents operated from different premisses: he conceded that Independency sought to destroy clerical authority in the interests of individual 50 53 54

51 Ibid. 150–1. Thorndike, Epilogue, ‘to the reader’, 146. See Ch. 4; Thorndike, Letter, 2–4, 7, 12–18; Thorndike, Due Way, 17. Thorndike, Epilogue, ‘to the reader’, 418.

52

Thorndike, Due Way, 3–4, 8.

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congregations, while Erastians sought to glorify the state. But the effects of these two anticlerical strategies were the same to him: both bred schism and eroded priestly authority. As early as 1649 Thorndike wrote of Independency and Erastianism: ‘if we consider the ground on which both stand, they will appear to be as the Rivers that rise out of Apennius, which empty themselves, some into the sea of Tuscany, others into the gulf of Venice’. Both Erastianism and Independency obliterated the distinct essence of the catholic church, and recognized ‘no difference between the society of the church and that of the state when it professes Christianity’. It mattered little to Thorndike whether the church was destroyed from the belief that ‘it never was, or because it ceaseth when the State becomes Christian’.55 This was an observation of considerable prescience, because it was only with Leviathan that Hobbes decisively embraced the ecclesiology of the Independents. Leviathan accordingly heightened the tone of Thorndike’s anti-Hobbesian critique sharply. By the time he again appeared in print against Hobbes, the church’s position had decayed further. Cromwell’s church settlement of 1654 had revealed the full potential of Independency to augment the state’s religious power. Cromwell’s Machiavellian religious policy—in Thorndike’s view—had lent Independency a deeper Erastian hue. Thus, in the Epilogue of 1659 he proved yet more insistent on exposing the common ground shared by Hobbes and the Independents. The visible church was equally despised, he alleged, by those who ‘do not believe there is any church but a Congregation that assembles together’, and by those ‘who believe the power of the church to eschete to the state when it declares itselfe Christian’.56 He proved increasingly less willing to note the distinctions between Independency and Erastianism. The long Cromwellian decade had made such a distinction less evident in his mind. To press the point, the Epilogue devoted considerable space to condemning the Independent Louis Du Moulin’s writings for their Hobbist Erastianism. As we have seen, Du Moulin served as one of the chief intellectual links between Hobbes and the ecclesiological project of the Cromwellian Independents. Thorndike, presumably writing in ignorance of Hobbes’s professed admiration for Du Moulin, perceptively linked the two thinkers. Independency made a pretence of defending an individual right to pursue spiritual truth, but Cromwell’s servant Du Moulin had betrayed the tendency of Independency to bend its neck to the state.57 Du Moulin’s effort to cloak the inherent godlessness of his ecclesiology, Thorndike alleged, was nothing more than an ‘equivocation of words’.58 Du Moulin served as a useful representative for the Independents in Thorndike’s critique, but he explicitly excoriated the broader Independent cohort as well, and concluded his Epilogue with a blast at the Erastian church settlement of 1654.59 The affinity between Hobbesian Erastianism and Cromwell’s church revolution thus served as a constant motif in Thorndike’s work.60 In his Just Weights and 55

56 Thorndike, Epilogue, i. 69. Thorndike, ‘A Review’, in Right of the Church, pp. iii–iv. 58 Ibid. 77–8. 59 Ibid., iii. 418. Ibid. 151–7. 60 It is also important to note Thorndike’s constant pairing of Leviathan with Selden’s De Synedriis; he characterized both as Erastian manifestos for an anticlerical age. Thorndike, Epilogue, i. 6–7. 57

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Measures of 1662, reiterating the themes of his Epilogue in the transformed circumstances of the Restoration, he characterized secular challenges to the authority of the restored church as a continuing legacy of the Revolution. ‘It was’, he observed,‘a complaint visibly just in the late Usurper’s time, that, while one side was for this Religion, another for that, they that were for no Religion would prove the strongest side’. Cromwellian Erastianism had triumphed under the auspices of Independency.61 Thomas Hobbes, Thorndike wrote, had explicitly justified an anti-Christian brand of Erastianism, but Cromwell and his party had pursued an Erastian settlement with equal determination. Cromwell had governed the spiritual state in his ‘own interest’, and established himself as the arbiter of religious affairs. Out of the atomized chaos of Independency had emerged the dread spectre of Hobbesian Erastianism. Hobbism and Independency dedicated themselves to nothing more than state interest; each destroyed the visible church and was motivated by sheer ‘Machiavellian’ atheism.62 ‘The same consequence’, wrote Thorndike of Independency and Hobbism, sprang from ‘different pretenses’, as ‘both opinions must suppose that a man may bee heir to Christs Kingdom, and Indowed with Gods spirit, without being, or before, hee bee a member of Gods church’.63 Cromwell’s church and Leviathan’s principles were two sides of the same coin; the currency of each had enjoyed ‘a Vogue during our late Confusions’, he wrote.64 The ‘Leviathan, that Monster of a Christian’, had been unleashed by the late war and by the Erastian potential of Independency.65 Herbert Thorndike offered perhaps the most astute religious critique of Thomas Hobbes produced by the seventeenth-century English Church. Perceiving the esoteric nature of Hobbes’s theological arguments, Thorndike largely ignored the scriptural interpretation of Leviathan and cut straight to the heart of the work’s Erastian ecclesiology. He understood that Hobbes’s fascination with civil religion shared the sensibilities of Machiavellian humanism. He exposed affinities between Hobbesian Erastianism and Cromwellian Independency that are widely overlooked today. And though modern scholarship on Hobbes has ignored Thorndike, the same cannot be said for contemporaries. In episcopal circles, Thorndike’s work enjoyed a wide influence. For Henry More, Hobbes’s ‘wicked paradoxes concerning the word Church, and power Ecclesiastical’ were best answered by appealing to Thorndike, who saw ‘that the church is a Society, Community, Corporation, or Spiritual Commonwealth, subsisting by the immediate Revelation and Appointment of God, without dependence upon those Christian States wherein it is harbor’d’.66 The Anglican diarist John Evelyn owned and studied Thorndike’s Epilogue. Encountering Thorndike’s association of Hobbes with Cromwellian 61

Thorndike, Epilogue, 23–4. Weights and Measures, 26–7. Thorndike in particular noted that the ‘fanatics’ who had been declared ‘publick preachers’ during the 1650s had attained this position by ‘nothing else’ but ‘Secular power, which they had by the late 63 Thorndike, Due Way, 5–11. Usurpation’. Just Weights and Measures, 54. 64 Herbert Thorndike, A Discourse of the Forbearance or the Penalties which a Due Reformation Requires 65 Ibid. 134–5, 155, 167. (1670), 28–31. 66 More, ‘Animadversions on Hobbes’, 89. 62

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Independency, Evelyn assented in a running series of marginal notes. When Thorndike defended church catholicity against Hobbes’s ‘schismatical’ ecclesiology, Evelyn noted that John Owen had undermined catholicity along similar lines in his On Schism.67 Presumably written in ignorance of Hobbes’s expressed admiration for Owen in letters to Henry Stubbe, this was a perceptive observation indeed, one given extra weight by Evelyn’s acquaintance with Hobbes throughout the 1640s and 1650s. Indeed, Evelyn’s marginalia repeatedly affirmed Thorndike’s critique with the suggestive note ‘Independents . . . Hobbists’.68 Thorndike’s antiHobbesian writings were also popularized in more minor episcopal tracts, such as the Theoremata Theologica, an idiosyncratic defence of the traditional church by the physician Robert Vilvain.69 The Theoremata openly borrowed from Thorndike, and included an essay condemning Leviathan for conflating state and church, and for employing Erastianism as a mere utilitarian means of avoiding ‘the calamities of confusion and civil war’.70 Thorndike’s influence reached far beyond such modest figures as Vilvain, however. Indeed, he corresponded with many of the period’s leading episcopal churchmen, and particularly with the triumvirate most responsible for the survival of the beleaguered church during the Interregnum: Gilbert Sheldon, Brian Duppa, and Henry Hammond.71 These three men of influence each formed decisively critical opinions of Thomas Hobbes during the 1650s, opinions that closely paralleled those of Thorndike.

ii Brian Duppa had risen through the clerical ranks as a protégé of Lancelot Andrews and William Laud. He served as Vice-Chancellor of Christ Church, as Bishop of Chichester from 1638, and of Salisbury from 1641. Duppa acted for a time as academic tutor to the future Charles II, and his faithful service to Charles I, whom he attended until the scaffold, earned him the devotion of the Stuarts.72 After Charles I’s execution Duppa retired to Richmond, where he lived under the surveillance of the Interregnum regimes. He corresponded constantly with Hammond and Sheldon, attempting to organize the deprived clergy and to secure successors for the perilously large number of vacant bishoprics.73 Duppa was also a friend of Herbert Thorndike, whom he praised for ‘knowledge and piety’.74 On one occasion in 1656, Duppa met Hobbes at the Cavendish estate at Roehampton, and he followed the philosopher’s work closely.75 But his opinion of 67

68 Ibid. 69, 151, and elsewhere. BL Evelyn B 41 (166). On Vilvain see ODNB; Wood, Athenae, ii. 216. 70 Robert Vilvain, Theoremata Theologica: Theological Treatises . . . (1654), epistle dedicatory, 117, 228–32, 240, 251. 71 Bosher, Restoration Settlement, 17–23; Sutch, Sheldon, ch. 3; John Packer, The Transformation of Anglicanism, 1643–1660, with special reference to Henry Hammond (Manchester, 1969), 36–44. 72 ODNB. Gyles Isham, Biographical essay in Duppa Correspondence, pp. xix–xxxi. 73 Hammond to Sheldon, BL Harleian MS 6942, fo. 72. 74 Duppa to Isham, 26 Aug. 1657 and 10 Nov. 1657, Duppa Correspondence, 141, 145. 75 Duppa to Isham, 20 Jan. 1656, ibid. 119. 69

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Hobbes was far from friendly. He published no formal critique, but his correspondence with his close friend Justinian Isham is peppered with hostile and revealing remarks. In April of 1651 Isham, a loyal royalist and episcopalian who also knew Herbert Thorndike (and once offered him a living), reported that Hobbes had ‘lately put forth’ a new work. He had not yet read this but, based on a knowledge of De Cive, he was not optimistic. Admitting Hobbes’s high-reaching ‘witt’ and the ‘very deepe’ foundations of his philosophy, Isham nonetheless criticized the ‘superstructure’ of his political theory. Pairing Leviathan with Selden’s De Synedriis, he rued that ‘amongst these late philosophies and the Erastian and Socinian opinions too much in request’, the church was ‘likely to be stript by learned hands’.76 For his part, Duppa shared Isham’s worry about the danger posed by Hobbes’s Erastianism, and he expressed his distaste even more vociferously. In July of 1651 he wrote of Leviathan that ‘Affrick hath not seen a greater monster’. The book’s title was apt, he concluded, given ‘how like [Hobbes] was to the Leviathan that Job speaks of . . . none ever was more gamesome in religion than he is’. Isham had condemned the ‘superstructure’ of Hobbes’s philosophy, but Duppa struck more deeply.‘As yet in the man’, he wrote,‘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 a Christian.’77 Hobbes’s philosophy, he concluded in a later letter, was bereft of divine thoughts.78 Duppa, like Isham, viewed Hobbes as an enemy of the visible church and its beleaguered clergy. He upbraided Hobbes for his anticlerical rhetoric and for his attacks upon the integrity of Christian truth. Hobbes taught his ‘disciples’ to gratify authority by ‘denying Christ with their tongue, as long as they retain him in their heart, for which you must take their own words, for no outward act of theirs can witness for them’. The extent of this capitulation to rank power undermined all Hobbes’s professions of Christianity. It transformed him, for Duppa, into ‘daemonium hominis’.79 Duppa and Isham understood Hobbes as an enemy of the church, a theorist of Erastianism, and one who pursued an anti-Christian philosophy beneath insincere (‘gamesome’) professions of Christianity. In all of this Duppa was certainly influenced by Thorndike’s more systematic but kindred attack on Hobbes. The two were friends and correspondents, and Duppa was familiar with Thorndike’s most voluble critique of Hobbes, the Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England. Indeed, Isham mentioned the Epilogue to him with some anxiety, probably bothered by its compromising attitude towards Rome, but Bishop Duppa did not share in this worry. Thorndike, he wrote, ‘hath excellent notions, but they ar veritatis in puteo, and (as you very well say) he must dig deep that findes them’.80 76 78 79 80

77 Duppa to Isham, 14 July 1651, ibid. 41. Isham to Duppa, Apr. 1651, Duppa Correspondence, 34–5. Duppa to Isham, 20 Jan. 1652, ibid. 52. Duppa to Isham: 30 July 1651, 20 Jan. 1656, 5 Jan. 1659, ibid. 43, 119, 167. Duppa to Isham, 5 Jan. 1659, ibid. 167–8.

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Brian Duppa was a prominent cleric, but Hobbes’s break with episcopacy, and his perceived subservience to the triumphant Independents, earned him even more powerful enemies among the exiled churchmen. Gilbert Sheldon and Henry Hammond were the de facto archbishops of the outlawed church, corresponding with the exiles, raising money, and directing the production of religious apologetical literature.81 The intellectual influence of Hammond, a distinguished theologian, was enormous; Sheldon, a master administrator, was eventually to attain the archbishopric of Canterbury. Both men had attended Charles I during his imprisonment, and it was to Sheldon that the doomed King had entrusted his written promise to remain ever loyal to episcopacy.82 As death, exile, and a resigned quietism eroded the church’s leadership, Sheldon and Hammond rose in stature. In the long run, at least, these were not enemies to be trifled with. Sheldon and Hammond were acquainted with Hobbes from the antebellum years when all three were associated with Lord Falkland’s Great Tew circle.83 The extent of their acquaintance in those years is difficult to gauge, but once Hobbes began to publish his hostility to episcopacy, Hammond and Sheldon decisively rejected the principles of his political theory. Hobbes, as demonstrated in Chapter 4, had dramatically alienated himself from the episcopal churchmen with the publication of Leviathan, and the clergy had done their part to secure his banishment from court. Sheldon and Hammond were in close correspondence with the court throughout these months, and they too conceived a vigorous dislike for the political and religious principles of Thomas Hobbes. Sheldon followed the composition of Leviathan through his correspondence with Hobbes’s friend Robert Payne. Payne, as we have seen, vainly attempted to soften Hobbes’s Erastian principles, and to keep him within the episcopalian and royalist fold. Sheldon’s letters to Payne have unfortunately been lost, but his interest in Leviathan was certainly similarly motivated. On at least one occasion Payne forwarded a copy of a letter to Hobbes on to Sheldon, in which he vociferously argued in favour of independent episcopal authority.84 In August of 1650 Payne wrote to Sheldon that he had ‘written to my friend abroad [Hobbes] agayne and agayne since I wrote you last’, but that Hobbes remained adamant that the ‘Civil Soveraign’ acted as the ‘Chief Pastor’ in the church. Hobbes’s Erastianism, Payne wrote, served to ‘justify those who have cashired b[ishops]’, and rendered Hobbes himself a ‘sharp adversary’ to the church.85 Payne’s tone made clear that Sheldon agreed with this political critique. The chief dispute, wrote Payne, ‘is that there should be a power in a state independent of the supreme, with right to execute the 81 Hammond to Sheldon, 23 May 165?, BL Add. MS 6942, no. 24; Hammond to Sheldon, 5 June 165*, BL Add. MS 82 BL Egerton MS 2884. 6942, no. 31; Bosher, Restoration Settlement, 36–8; Whitelocke, Memorials, i. 396. 83 For two views on the significance of these associations, see Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 272–8; Sommerville, Hobbes in Context, 134–7. 84 Payne to Hobbes, [late 1649?], BL Harleian MS 6942, no. 153. The letter is referenced in Payne to Sheldon, 20 Dec. 1649[?], ibid., no. 121. In Feb. 1650 Payne wrote: ‘I have since sent a reply to an answer I received from Paris, but kept no originall or copy, least it might tempt me to committ another error like the former, which I hope you have by this time pardoned.’ The error here referenced is obscure, but perhaps Sheldon was nervous about correspondence with 85 Payne to Sheldon, 19 Aug. 1650, ibid., no. 130. the exiled court. Payne to Sheldon, 4 Feb. 1650, ibid., no. 173.

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acts thereof without leave from the soveraigne’. Sheldon’s undoubted interest in dissuading Hobbes from this ecclesiological position was evidenced by his request for a more ‘particular account’ of the dispute.86 Moreover, Payne and Sheldon understood Hobbes’s Erastianism as an appeal to the dominant religious ideology of the day. Payne specifically characterized Leviathan as a justification of the revolutionaries who had attacked the bishops, and concluded that Leviathan ‘seemes to favour the present government’.87 Hobbes had ‘engaged’ himself to the Erastian project of the Revolution. In the summer of 1651, Sheldon seems to have read Leviathan for himself.88 Undoubtedly discouraged that Payne’s effort to soften its Erastianism had failed, and fully aware of the role played by the episcopal clergy in undermining Hobbes at the exiled court,89 Sheldon did his best to limit Hobbes’s influence among the churchmen still in England. Both Sheldon and Henry Hammond feared that Leviathan might influence wayward clergy to abandon episcopacy in deference to the Interregnum government’s new religious order. When Sheldon, in the summer of 1654, attended a secret conference at Richmond designed to prevent episcopalians from obeying Cromwell’s prohibition on the use of the Prayer Book, Hammond encouraged him to ‘countermine those heathen principles which Leviathan I heare is laying [there]’.90 Thus did the Interregnum’s two leading churchmen read Hobbes’s masterpiece as, in part, a vindication of Cromwell’s authoritarian religious policies. Sheldon was no theologian, and he never published a critique of Hobbes. That he, like Thorndike, associated Hobbes with the Cromwellian Independents is, however, indirectly suggested by the Restoration writings of John Eachard. A university student during the Interregnum, Eachard eventually became Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge and wrote two popular dialogue satires against Hobbes.91 Eachard’s Dialogues provide a window onto the probable opinion of Gilbert Sheldon, for Eachard was his client and friend.92 Both of Eachard’s dialogues were dedicated to Sheldon and were written at his encouragement.93 Eachard, like many of Hobbes’s critics, was appalled by his Erastian conflation of the church and state, and by his surrender of scriptural interpretation to temporal sovereignty.94 Further, his dialogues reveal how, even late in the Restoration, Anglican memory associated the threat of Hobbesian Erastianism with Cromwell’s godless church regime. ‘There is not one thing [Cromwell] and his rogues did’, Eachard upbraided Hobbes, ‘but upon your principles may be easily defended’. Hobbes had set Cromwell up as a ‘mortal God’, endowed with the ‘arbitration of heaven and 86 Payne to Sheldon, 4 Feb. 1650, ibid., no. 173. On another occasion, Payne indicated that Sheldon was reading Hobbes’s letters. Payne to Sheldon, 25 Apr. 1649, ibid., no. 134. 87 Payne to Sheldon, 19 Aug. 1650 and 6 May 1651, ibid., nos. 130 and 132. 88 Payne to Sheldon, 20 July 1651, BL Add. MS 34727, no. 88. The author of this letter is misidentified as ‘B.P.’ (rather than ‘R.P.’) in the library catalogue. 89 Payne kept him abreast of Hobbes’s relations with the court clergy. Payne to Sheldon, 7 Mar. 1650, BL Harleian 90 Hammond to Sheldon, 23 Jun. 1654, ibid., no. 27. MS 6942, no. 127. 91 John Eachard, Mr Hobb’s State of Nature Considered in a Dialogue Between Philautus and Timothy (1672); Mintz, 92 Bowle, Hobbes and his Critics, 138. Hunting Lev., 144; Goldie, ‘Reception’, 606. 93 John Eachard, Some Opinions of Mr. Hobbes Considered in a Second Dialogue between Philautus and Timothy 94 Ibid. 25–6, 36–7, 277–8. (1673), epistle dedicatory.

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earth’.95 Hobbists and Cromwellians had been in league to inflame the anticlerical passions of the era. Eachard specifically condemned the establishment of the Triers. He blamed the decline of the traditional clergy on ‘those who in late times . . . called themselves God’s special saints’, but ‘in reality were more Oliver’s than God’s’, and on ‘shrewd and judicious Despisers, who have a very strong opinion of Religion, Scripture, and the Clergy . . . the disciples of Mr. Hobbs’.96 In the circles of Gilbert Sheldon, then, long after the church had been restored, Cromwellians and Hobbists were angrily linked as perpetrators of the Erastian usurpation of the 1650s. George Morley provides another case in point. The Oxford-educated Morley was a staunch royalist and defender of the established church. In 1648 he was deprived of the canonry of Christ Church for resisting the Oxford Visitation. By 1649 he had fled into exile and was presiding over English prayer-book services at Saint-Germain. Closely allied with Sheldon, Hammond, and Edward Hyde, Morley served as a conduit between the episcopalians in England and the exiled old royalists.97 Morley thus witnessed the estrangement of Hobbes from the exiled episcopalian faction, and he shared in the general Anglican bitterness at the ‘monster of Malmesbury’. Shortly after the death of Robert Payne in late 1651, Morley wrote to Sheldon and disdained Hobbes’s lack of ‘Modesty and honesty’.98 More substantively, in a Restoration letter to Edward Hyde’s son, Morley offered an extended critique of Leviathan.99 He damned Hobbes as a ‘destructive Monster’ and his Leviathan as ‘engendered betwixt the malice of Satan and the pride of humane fancy’. He echoed Herbert Thorndike’s charge that Hobbes’s scriptural arguments were utterly insincere, rendered meaningless by ‘his often shameless wresting of the line of Scripture against the meaning of it’. This was done, Morley charged, to enable Hobbes’s idolatry of civil sovereignty. Hobbes rendered all men ‘absolutely Slaves to the will of a mortall man . . . whom by Mr. Hobbes’s divinity they are to obey rather than God’.100 Morley rejected Hobbes’s subordination of religion and the church to the dictates of statecraft. ‘For first, what can be more irreligious and anti-Christian’, he wrote, than such a form of Government, wherein first Christs word, or the doctrine of Christian Religion, is not to be received or acknowledged . . . unless the Soveraigne (who perhaps doth not believe it himself or care for it) declare it to be soe. Secondly, though the Soveraigne doe declare the Scripture to be canonicall . . . yet (saith Mr Hobbs) it is not to be understood in any other sense or meaning by the People, nor by their Teachers the Divines themselves neither, than what their Soveraigne or such as are commissioned by him (whether Cleargy or Laymen) shall be please to give it.101 95

Ibid. 244–6. Eachard, Some Observations upon the Answer to An Enquiry into the Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of 97 ODNB; Matthews, Walker Revised, 377–8. the Clergy (1672), 27, 62, 195–6. 98 Morley to Payne, 9 Mar. 1652, quoted in Malcolm, ‘Robert Payne, the Hobbes Manuscripts, and the “Short Tract” ’, in Aspects, 103. 99 Morley to Hyde, 4 July 1674, Bodl. Clarendon MS 87, fos. 198–206. This letter was written in reaction to Hyde’s Brief View and Survey of . . . Leviathan (1676). 100 Morley to Hyde, 4 July 1674, Bodl. Clarendon MS 87, fos. 198–9, 201. 101 Ibid., fo. 200. 96

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Morley’s concerns closely reflected Thorndike’s. Hobbes’s esoteric scriptural argumentation justified an extreme Erastianism. Revelation itself was surrendered to the purposes of sovereignty. The divine church—essential for ‘the professing of a right Faith’ and ‘the worshipping of God in a right manner’—was reduced to a mere servant, employed at the whim of the Prince. Hobbes’s sovereign could force subjects ‘to profess or to renounce what Religion he pleaseth, whether Orthodox or Hereticall, whether Christian, Pagan, Jewish, or Mahometane’. Morley’s charge that Hobbes had fashioned a pliable civil religion out of a ‘pagan divinity’ recalls Thorndike’s characterization of Hobbes as a Machiavellian. Morley also remembered Hobbes’s political theory as a perverse justification of the English Revolution. Partly this was attributable to Hobbes’s theory of political obligation, which legitimized Cromwell’s usurpation. But Morley condemned Hobbes chiefly for his neo-pagan religious instincts, his statist theory of the church, and the ‘profane and atheisticall dispositions’ of his devotees. Hobbes’s primary treason was his ‘malice’ against ‘the best of Churches’.102 Many of these themes were also sounded by Henry Hammond, the church’s greatest Interregnum theologian and one strongly dedicated to shoring up the distressed episcopacy. He too followed the collapse in Hobbes’s fortunes at the exiled court, hopefully reporting (in a 1651 letter to Sheldon) gossip that the future Charles II considered Hobbes ‘the oddest fellow he had ever met with’.103 Fearing a spreading accommodation with Cromwell’s religious regime, Hammond applauded Sheldon’s efforts to counteract the ecclesiological ‘principles of Leviathan’, and he assured Sheldon that his ‘advice concerning Mr. Ho[bbes] being perfectly my own sense, I shall adhere to [it]’.104 In October of 1651 Hammond wrote to Matthew Wren and condemned Leviathan as a ‘farrago of Christian atheism’.105 A week later he offered a fuller evaluation: Mr. Hobbes is the author of the book De Cive, in which he entitles himself a studiis to the king; but having in France been angered by some Divines, and having now a mind to return hither, 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.106

This succinct assessment gestured to the themes more systematically developed by Thorndike. The evocative phrase ‘farrago of Christian atheism’ suggests that Hammond also grasped Hobbes’s efforts to veil an inherently anti-Christian philosophical project with the rhetoric of Protestant Christianity.107 Hobbes’s ‘mad’ divinity, moreover, was purely instrumental, enabling him to destroy proper ‘ecclesiastical authority’. Nor were the political implications of Leviathan lost on 102

Morley to Hyde, 4 July 1674, Bodl. Clarendon MS 87, fos. 199, 200, 203–4, 206. Hammond to Sheldon, 25 Nov. 1651, BL Harleian MS 6942, no. 70. 104 Ibid.; Hammond to Sheldon, 23 June 1654; ibid., no. 27. 105 Hammond to Wren, 14 Oct. 1651, ‘Illustrations of the State of the Church’, in Theologian and Ecclesiastic, ix. 294. 106 Hammond to Wren, 21 Oct. 1651, ibid. 295. This confirmed Hobbes’s earlier fears about the portrait included in De Cive. Hobbes to Sorbière, 12 Mar. 1647, Corr., 157. 107 Tuck, ‘Christian Atheism of Thomas Hobbes’, 111–13. 103

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Hammond. Leviathan had been written, he charged, to ease Hobbes’s return to England. A year later, Hammond published a more formal critique of Thomas Hobbes. His Letter of Resolution to Six Quaeres of Present Use in the Church of England has received little historical attention, but the work’s hostile analysis of Leviathan demonstrates how Interregnum episcopal critics viewed Hobbes’s masterpiece as an apology for Erastian Independency.108 Hammond’s Quaeres considered a number of contested religious questions (infant baptism, divorce, and so forth). The fifth query defended the imposition of hands as a necessary component of ordination. Appealing to Scripture and patristic sources, he argued that the earliest ordinations had been executed not by congregational election, but by apostolic laying on of hands. Ordination designated a class of men with spiritual powers conferred by the independent prerogative of the church. Hammond’s defence of ordination was fundamentally a reassertion of ecclesiological dualism. Considering the ‘office’ created by ordination, he conceded that a priest had no temporal authority, but he insisted with equal vigour that the apostolic priesthood enjoyed a monopoly over spiritual powers such as preaching, baptism, confirmation, excommunication, absolution, and ordination.109 Such Laudian claims were not unexpected from Hammond. But the remarks on ordination in the Six Quaeres illuminate the reception of Hobbes among Interregnum episcopalians. Having set forth a traditional understanding of ordination, Hammond employed it against both Independency and against Hobbism. Indeed, he understood these as kindred phenomena. He expressly rebutted scriptural readings employed by the Independents to render ordination a matter of congregational elections. He blasted the dominant religious mood of the Interregnum for obliterating the clerical–lay distinction, particularly in the ‘office of publick teaching, which is of all others now adays most frequently invaded by those who are not sent’. The ‘unity’ of the church depended ‘in an eminent manner, upon the due qualifications of those which are instructed with the Office of teaching’, on the sanctity of ordained clergy governed by bishops.110 Unity was destroyed by efforts to make ordination a prerogative of independent congregations. Among his chief opponents Hammond numbered ‘Mr. Hobbes in his Leviathan (chapter 42 Of a Christian Commonwealth)’. Strikingly, he rebutted Hobbes’s ecclesiological arguments within the context of his larger case against Independency. Chapter 42 of Leviathan had occasioned the anguished debates between Payne and Hobbes, of which Sheldon and apparently Hammond had been kept abreast.111 Among the most contentious aspects of Leviathan, we have seen, were its denial of successive apostolic authority and its interpretation of the primitive church, which seemed to favour the Congregational Way. Hammond’s Six Quaeres attacked Leviathan precisely on these points. As for Hobbes’s theology proper, Hammond dismissed his ‘Rapsody’ of ‘strange Divinity’ and directly 108 109 110

Packer discusses the Quaeres (Packer, Transformation, 153–5, 167), but ignores its attack on Hobbes. Henry Hammond, A Letter of Resolution for Six Quaeres of Present Use in the Church of England (1653), 632–6. 111 Hammond to Sheldon, 25 Nov. 1651, BL Harleian MS 6942, no. 70. Ibid. 642.

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attacked his views on the question of ordination. Hammond grasped, like Thorndike, that Hobbes’s theology was window dressing for his real ecclesiological project.112 Moreover, he understood that the discussion of ordination in chapter 42 of Leviathan was fundamental to Hobbes’s endorsement of Independency. By undermining ordination as a prerogative of the clergy, Hobbes rejected the paradigmatic status of the apostles. He argued that ecclesiastical authorities were constituted not by apostolic succession but by congregational election, by the election of each ‘particular Church’. Hobbes also denied the primitive church any coercive authority ‘till the Common-wealth had embraced the Christian faith’.113 Hammond astutely recognized how the ‘Congregational Way’ served Hobbes’s Erastian designs, and he responded with a minute textual critique of the Scriptures that Hobbes used to support his case. At issue, we saw in Chapter 5, was Hobbes’s translation of cheirotonia as ‘holding up of hands’. Hobbes, Hammond charged, had completely conflated election and ordination, the former of which might have been permitted to congregations by the apostles, but the latter of which was the prerogative of the apostles alone. This was, he argued, Hobbes’s ‘procreative mistake’. He rebuked Hobbes for conflating ordination with the civil elections of antiquity.114 Hammond charged Hobbes with obliterating the distinction of election and ordination in order to make ordination a prerogative of individual congregations. This in turn would ensure the political subordination of an atomized church to the state. In response Hammond appealed to the ancient dualism of the fathers. He cited Cyprian, Augustine, and Ambrose, all of whom had been explicitly criticized by Leviathan.115 As demonstrated in Chapter 5, Hammond’s response to Hobbes on this point elicited, in turn, a rejoinder from no less a figure than James Harrington.116 Whether Thorndike’s work exerted direct influence over Hammond is impossible to say, but he was certainly in close contact with Hammond and Sheldon during the Interregnum.117 For Hammond, as for Thorndike, Hobbes’s Erastianism violated the ancient tradition of Christian dualism and served to justify the assault perpetrated by the Interregnum regimes on the ‘broken church’. Moreover, both Thorndike and Hammond understood that Hobbes’s endorsement of Independency was central to his Erastian project. For both men, the apostolic authority of the ordained clergy and the unity of the church were fundamentally linked, and they recognized kindred threats in the Erastian ecclesiology of Thomas Hobbes and the ‘evil times’ presided over by the Independents.118 The leading episcopalian critics of Hobbes thus viewed him primarily as a theorist of Erastianism whose account of the church served the political needs of the Cromwellian regimes. 112

113 Lev., 363–5. Hammond, Six Quaeres, 645. Hammond, Six Quaeres, 647–8, 649; Hammond had also condemned Selden for the same error in the case of 115 Lev., 393, 402, 434. Paul, who Selden felt was empowered not by Christ but by the Sanhedrin (pp. 638–9). 116 Hammond’s point was echoed by Edward Hyde in his View and Survey, 273–4. 117 Hammond to Sheldon, 14 Oct. 165[unknown], BL Harleian MS 6942, no. 62; Hammond to Sheldon, 16 Dec. 118 Hammond, Six Quaeres, 642. 165[unknown], ibid., no. 106. 114

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iii This chapter has argued that the reactions of leading Interregnum episcopalians to Thomas Hobbes, though varying in particulars, revolved around a central criticism of his Erastian ecclesiology. It has further argued that this criticism was intensified by anxiety over Hobbes’s ideological compatibility with the Cromwellian Independents. Such an argument, however, is open to the obvious challenge that it seemingly fails to accommodate his most prominent Interregnum critic, Archbishop John Bramhall. Hobbes’s renowned controversy with Bramhall over the issue of free will would seem to provide countervailing evidence against the view that ecclesiological issues, rather than theological ones, fuelled the furious clerical reaction to Leviathan. Indeed, recent readings of Hobbes presenting him as an idiosyncratic Calvinist are partly built on this assumption.119 A close reading of the evidence, however, reveals that Bramhall’s criticism of Hobbesian political theory was strongly motivated by the same fear of revolutionary Erastianism that animated his colleagues. Although their controversy was in the first instance a disagreement over free will, Bramhall and Hobbes also struggled fundamentally over incompatible definitions of the church. Born in Cheshire in 1594, Cambridge educated, John Bramhall entered the service of the English church in 1616. After early service as a priest in Yorkshire, he travelled to Ireland as chaplain to Thomas Wentworth. In 1634 he was consecrated Bishop of Derry and became the leading Laudian reformer of the Irish Church. The civil war brought Bramhall enormous trouble. Along with Wentworth he was impeached by the Irish parliament. He travelled to York to serve the King, but after Marston Moor he fled into exile with the Marquis of Newcastle. Bramhall remained in exile throughout the Interregnum. As an Anglican theologian was surpassed only by Hammond.120 Exile did nothing to diminish his Laudianism, and he helped propel the church’s high-church ascent. In 1660, Bramhall was elevated to the Irish primacy.121 By his death in 1663, his eulogist Jeremy Taylor could declare that Bramhall was ‘known everywhere’ for the ‘piety and acumen’ with which he had combated the doctrines of Hobbes.122 Bramhall met Hobbes at Newcastle’s Paris home. Despite their shared status as clients of the Cavendishes, the two men clashed immediately, partly (we shall see) over De Cive, partly over Hobbes’s determinism. The free-will controversy between Hobbes and Bramhall originated as a verbal dispute that occurred in Newcastle’s company. At Newcastle’s request, Bramhall composed a manuscript stating his position. Hobbes did the same, and Bramhall responded in 1646. There the matter rested for eight years, while Hobbes wrote Leviathan and returned to England. But in 1654, allegedly without authorization, Hobbes’s 119 Martinich, Two Gods of Leviathan; Jürgen Overhoff, Hobbes’s Theory of the Will: Ideology, Reasons, and Historical 120 Spurr, Restoration Church, 117–18. Circumstances (Lanham, Md., 2000). 121 N. J. Sparrow Simpson, Archbishop Bramhall (London, 1927). 122 Jeremy Taylor, A Sermon Preached . . . at the Funeral of the Most Reverend Father in God, John, Late Lord Archbishop of Armagh (1663).

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associate John Davies published Hobbes’s manuscript (along with a preface of his own) as Of Libertie and Necessitie.123 Furious, Bramhall replied in 1655 with a Defense of True Liberty from Ante-cedent and Extrinsecall Necessity, which reprinted Hobbes’s original tract along with both of his own in the format of a dialogue. Hobbes responded later in 1656 with Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance. Bramhall’s next sally, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes his last Animadversions of 1658, included a long appendix (‘The Catching of Leviathan’) attacking Hobbes’s broader philosophy. At this point the Restoration intervened, and Hobbes’s final contribution to the controversy, An Answer to a Book Published by Dr. Bramhall, was published only after both men were dead. One of the great set-piece controversies of the age, the Bramhall–Hobbes dispute was nevertheless a frustratingly inconclusive semantic battle (as Bramhall remarked) ‘about terms’.124 Hobbes defined freedom as a state of physical liberty. A river, in this sense, had ‘freedom’ to flow, and he argued that the will could likewise be physically free (moving from object to object) and yet necessitated. Bramhall, in response, accused Hobbes of confusing freedom with ‘spontaneity’. A truly free will had not just the freedom to drift physically but could freely employ judgement and deliberation. Hobbes’s merely ‘spontaneous’ will, Bramhall argued, reduced the will to an animal instinct or physical process. Against the materialism that undergirded Hobbes’s determinism, Bramhall defended an ontological dualism and an Aristotelian definition of man as a rational being, whose will was moved by a spiritual understanding.125 Neither Hobbes nor Bramhall was willing to foreground the theological implications of their disagreement. To be sure, Bramhall accused Hobbes of undermining moral choice, and thus of either denying sin or heretically ascribing it to God.126 Hobbes replied by accusing Bramhall of blaspheming God by diminishing his omnipotence: ‘The power of God alone, without such help, is sufficient Justification of any action he doth.’127 Hobbes emphasized God’s absolute power, Bramhall his absolute justice and goodness. However, despite these exchanges over the nature of God, neither Bramhall nor Hobbes cast their dispute primarily in theological terms. Neither offered much scriptural interpretation or cited many staple theological authorities. Indeed, Bramhall specifically sought to frame the debate in non-theological terms: ‘the subject of our discourse’, he wrote, was ‘the will in naturall or civil actions’, not in ‘morall or supernaturall acts’.128 Hobbes indulged somewhat more freely in scriptural interpretation, but Bramhall viewed his scriptural and theological arguments as window dressing and tended to pass over them quickly. Hobbes had taken ‘sanctuary under the sacred name of Gods grace, which will afford no shelter for his errour’. Hobbes, Bramhall alleged, echoing Thorndike, made esoteric use of Scripture and theology not to set forth truth, 123 Bramhall refused to absolve Hobbes of responsibility for Davies’s anticlerical preface. Bramhall, True Liberty, ‘to the reader’, 2–3; Bramhall, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes his last Animadversions in the Case Concerning Liberty and 124 Bramhall, Castigations, 118. Universal Necessity (1657), 56–7. 125 Bramhall, True Liberty, 9–17, 30–3. 126 Ibid. 53 127 Quoted ibid. 63. 128 Bramhall, Castigations, 7, 28–9.

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but to conceal falsehood.129 For his part, Hobbes was inclined to accept that his differences with Bramhall were more philosophical than theological, and he did not fundamentally present his determinism in Calvinist terms.130 Despite recent attempts to present Hobbes as a predestinarian theologian, there is little evidence that his determinism emerged from a serious engagement with Reformation theology. Hobbes’s determinism and Protestant predestinarianism were widely understood by contemporaries to be based on different epistemological and ontological assumptions. Even critics who made rhetorical hay out of the fortuitous pairing of Hobbes and Calvin understood this. Thomas Pierce, for instance, the high-church controversialist later to become dean of Salisbury, wrote against predestinarian theology during the Interregnum and included Hobbes among his opponents. This provided him with an opportunity (gleefully seized) to characterize his reformed adversaries as Hobbists.131 But even Pierce, who was influenced by Bramhall’s writings, understood the superficiality of Hobbes’s supposed ‘theological’ position. ‘Whether Mr. Hobbes’, he wrote, defended determinism ‘from his heart, as being really seduced’ by Calvinist principles, or whether he was ‘playing the Drole with religion . . . I leave each reader to pass his own judgment’.132 Richard Baxter, in a manuscript treatise against predestinarian theology, similarly made rhetorical use of Hobbes’s proximity to Calvinist doctrine, but he also conceded that the association was not apt. ‘Mr. Hobbes having in our time’, wrote Baxter, become the most noted advocate ‘for the necessary Causation of all acts of evil, hath been the greatest blow to it that ever it received in England in the judgment of religious men’. Baxter used the ‘Hobbist’ charge as a polemic against ‘religious’ predestinarians, but he confessed that ‘Dominican or Protestant Predeterminants and Mr. Hobbes’ differed in ‘their intents, pretense and use’ of determinism.133 To be sure, Hobbesian determinism could occasionally stir existing religious disputes about free will. At least one prominent Independent, Edward Bagshaw, found Hobbes’s arguments against free will congenial.134 But the leading critics of Hobbes’s determinism grasped that his philosophical notions sprang from sources foreign to Protestant theology.135 129

Ibid. 30. Hobbes refused to accept that stoicism and Christian determinism were two kinds of doctrines, which would seemingly undermine the need for a scriptural defence of determinism. Quote in Bramhall, True Liberty, 140. 131 Thomas Pierce, Autokatakrisis, or, self-Condemnation exemplified in Mr. Whitfield, Mr. Barlee, and Mr. Hickman. With Occasional Reflexions on Mr Calvin, Mr Beza, Mr Zwinglius, Mr Piscator, Mr Rivet, and . . . Master Hobbs (1658), epistle dedicatory, 96, 105; Pierce’s sermons ‘inveighed against the pernicious doctrines of Mr. Hobbes’ as late as 1679. Schuhmann, Chronique, 223. 132 Pierce, Self-Condemnation, 138. The Hobbist charge caused considerable anxiety; see William Barlee, A Necessary Vindication of the Doctrine of Predestination, Formerly Asserted (1658), 131. 133 Richard Baxter, ‘Treatise against the Dominicane Doctrine of Divine Predestination’, Dr William’s Library, 134 Bagshaw to Hobbes, 1 Mar. 1658, Corr., 497–8. Baxter MS 61.14, fo. 16. 135 Neither Martinich nor Overhoff considers the sort of contextual evidence included in this discussion. Martinich simply dismisses arguments that Hobbes might have employed theological arguments insincerely. Overhoff assumes Luther’s influence on Hobbes based on parallels in their thought, again overlooking possible rhetorical strategy on Hobbes’s part. For this alternative view, see Jürgen Overhoff, ‘The Lutheranism of Thomas Hobbes’, History of Political Thought, 18 (1997), 604–23; Martinich, Two Gods of Leviathan, 273–8. 130

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As an ontological dispute over free will more generally, the debating positions of Hobbes and Bramhall were virtually frozen in place by entrenched semantic disputes. The true heat and dynamism of the free-will dispute was provided by political and ecclesiological, rather than theological, differences. Each understood the arguments of the other as esoteric means for pursuing ulterior political ends. Bramhall accused Hobbes of making use of his determinism to serve his theory of political obligation. Hobbes excoriated Bramhall for propounding free-will doctrines in order to affirm clerical authority. Particularly after the publication of Leviathan, political charges of this nature increasingly dominated their dispute. Hobbes’s Erastianism and Bramhall’s dualist ecclesiology shadowed the entire controversy. As one correspondent of Hobbes put it, the dispute with Bramhall was seemingly informed by ‘collaterall considerations’.136 Bramhall argued that Hobbes’s theory of will rendered God little more than a watchmaker and man the ‘Tennis-Balls of destiny’, mere beasts at the mercy of tyranny and usurpation.137 If God were mere power, and if power alone motivated men, then power regulated human interaction independent of justice or morality. Power, in Hobbes’s account, was limited by nothing but its own strength. Further, Bramhall argued that the tyranny of necessity undergirded actual political tyranny: ‘This very persuasion, that there is no true liberty, is able to overthrow all Societies and Commonwealths in the world.’138 Neither justice nor morality could counteract the necessity of force. Hobbes scarcely acknowledged Bramhall’s charge that his determinism merely served his absolutist political theory, but he implicitly answered it with an allegation of his own. If determinism served tyranny, the doctrine of free will served to embolden clerical sedition. Hobbes argued that free-will doctrine depended on the deceptive scholastic categories by which the clergy had long exerted control of philosophical discourse.139 Further, rejecting determinism, clergy maintained the myth of a sphere of morality and justice independent of sovereign power. Justice was thereby incorrectly equated with rational or spiritual transcendence over brute, material existence. The rejection of determinism depended on the duality of the worldly and spiritual spheres, which in turn justified separate institutional spheres for secular and clerical authorities. The dispute between Bramhall and Hobbes continually circled back to these points. At issue, fundamentally, was the status of the church in relation to political power. Bramhall vigorously defended his appeal to church tradition. By rejecting the traditional terms of discourse, Hobbes had arrogantly set himself up against the collective wisdom of generations. ‘His repentance is not that repentance, nor his piety that piety, nor his prayer that kind of prayer, which the Church of God in all Ages hath acknowledged.’140 The crux of the matter, for Bramhall, was Hobbes’s effort to undermine the historical church as a source of intellectual and moral authority. Free-will doctrine placed special importance on the Christian life, on communal existence in the universal church, and particularly on the right 136 138

Philip Tanny to Hobbes, 13 May 1656, Corr., 278. 139 Quoted ibid. 145–8. Ibid. 57, 85–6, 91.

137 140

Bramhall, True Liberty, 41–3, 60. Ibid. 123–4.

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administration of the sacraments. Traditional adherence to free-will theology, in Bramhall’s mind, served to uphold the authority of the visible church. Determinism, alternatively, destroyed sacramentalism, which in turn undermined the independent calling of the clergy. ‘A complete stoic’, wrote Bramhall, ‘can neither pray nor repent nor serve God to any purpose. Either allow liberty, or destroy the church as well as commonwealth, religion as well as polity.’ Piety, Bramhall insisted, could not be reduced to power.141 By Bramhall’s logic Hobbes had placed the church itself under the state’s brute power just as he had subordinated all souls to material necessity. Specifically attacking De Cive, Bramhall charged that Hobbes had found out a more compendious way to heaven: True religion (saith he) consisteth in obedience to Christs Lieutenants, and giving God such honour, both in attributes and actions, as they in their severall Lieutenances shall ordain. That is to say, be of the Religion of every Christian County where you come. To make the Civill magistrate to be Christs Lieutenant upon earth, for matters of Religion; And to make him to be Supreme Judge in all controversies, whom all must obey . . . .142

Hobbesian determinism thus served Hobbesian Erastianism. In defending an omnipotent God against responsibility for evil, Bramhall noted that there was a difference between power and its application. God created power, but man, to whom it was delegated, was responsible for its abuse. ‘If true religion do consist in obedience to the commands of the Soveraign Prince’, wrote Bramhall, ‘then the Soveraigne Prince is the ground and pillar of truth, not the church.’ This violated orthodox Christian dualism, he insisted. Obedience ‘to the commands of Soveraign Princes [was] not always justified in the sight of God’. The visible, collective church could not be collapsed into the state. Hobbes had confounded the ‘Regal Supremacy with a kind of omnipotence’. All of these misunderstandings depended, in Bramhall’s view, on the equation of right and power implicated in Hobbes’s determinism.143 In his culminating and more wide-ranging Catching of the Leviathan, Bramhall hammered home his critique of Hobbesian Erastianism. ‘We are taught in our Creed’, he wrote, ‘to believe the Catholick or Universal church. But T. H. teacheth us the contrary.’ For political ends, Bramhall charged, Hobbes had denied the sacraments, rejected the visible church, derided the divine right of bishops, and stripped all priestly authority from the successors to the apostles.144 The Hobbesian sovereign, he wrote, was to ‘approve or reject all sorts of Theologicall doctrines, concerning the kingdome of God, not according to truth or falsehood, but according to that influence which they have upon political affaires’. The state ruled the church in the service of its own power. ‘He might have been one of Tiberius his Council’, concluded Bramhall of Hobbes,‘when it was proposed to the Senate, Whether they should admit Christ to be a God or not.’145 141 143 144 145

142 Ibid. 252–3; again, this does not support Tuck’s reading of De Cive (see Ch. 2). Ibid. 120–5. Bramhall, Castigations, 428–30, 442. Bramhall, The Catching of Leviathan, or the Great Whale, printed in Castigations, 480–5. Ibid. 493; Bramhall, Castigations, 164–5, 173.

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Bramhall saw Hobbes’s determinism as part of an effort to destroy the independent power of the visible church.146 Hobbes’s atomization of the church was in turn intended to enable the state to exert a Machiavellian control of religion as an instrument of its own power. Whatever scriptural or theological argument Hobbes deigned to offer was merely intended to veil his real project: a schismatic and Erastian assault on the unified church.147 And Bramhall, like Thorndike, Sheldon, and Hammond, firmly located Hobbes’s theory of the church within the religious context of the English Revolution. In their original dispute of the 1640s, debating whether Arminianism or determinism had contributed more to the outbreak of the civil war, Bramhall insisted that Hobbes’s determinism was consistent with the anticlerical spirit of an atheistic and tumultuous time.148 He rejected Hobbes’s assertion that the ‘present troubles’ in Europe could be blamed on usurping churchmen. He linked Hobbes with the destruction of ‘religion and policy, church and Commonwealth’, characterized him as the ‘ringleader of a new’ sect, and lumped him with the ‘Sophisters and seditious Oratours’ troubling the age.149 Presumably motivated by such sentiments, Bramhall had probably played a role in banishing Hobbes from the exiled court. His efforts to expose Hobbes’s enthusiasm for the Erastian spirit of the day only intensified with the publication of Leviathan. Rebuking Hobbes’s reflexive disdain for the traditional scholastic learning of the church, the Bishop observed that ‘such undigested phancies may please for a while, during the distemper and green-sickness fit of this present age . . . but when time hath cured their malady, and experience opened their eyes, they will abominate their former errors, and those who were their misleaders’.150 ‘What times’, asked Bramhall, ‘are we fallen into’ when people conferred more ‘power upon their Law-giver than God himself doth confer’. Specifically referencing Hobbes’s desire to place the power of Scripture under the umbrella of the sovereign’s authority, he wrote: ‘I know not whether he do this on purpose to weaken the authority of holy Scripture or not. Let God and his own conscience be his triers.’ The reference to ‘triers’ here perhaps alluded to Cromwell’s church settlement, thus explicitly linking Hobbes and the Protector’s policies. Considering Hobbes’s opinion that ‘true religion in every Country is that which the Soveraign Magistrate doth admit and injoyne’, Bramhall wished that Hobbes’s ‘deceived followers would think upon what rock he drives them’. Such Erastianism justified all manner of civil action; true religion could not survive it.151 Amidst the ‘grosse, palpable, and pernicious flattery’ contained in Leviathan, Bramhall charged, was the doctrine that ‘the sharpest and most successfull sword, in any war whatsoever, doth give soveraign power and authority to him that hath it, to approve or reject all sorts of Theologicall doctrines concerning the kingdome of God, not according to their truth or falsehood, but according to that influence 146

Thorndike had argued similarly about determinism (Just Weights, 57, 70–6). Henry More (‘Animadversions on Hobbes’, 92) thus praised Bramhall for defending ‘holy orders’ and the ‘kingly, sacerdotal, and prophetic offices of Christ’ against Hobbes. 148 Hobbes’s view of Arminianism was voiced in Beh., 42. 149 Bramhall, True Liberty, epistle dedicatory, 143, 249. 150 Bramhall, Castigations, 70. 151 Ibid. 161–5, 174, 176–8. 147

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which they have upon political affaires’. Composed in 1658, this blast sought to link Hobbes’s de factoist defence of the Interregnum governments with the efforts of those regimes to establish an Erastian control of religion. ‘God help us’, declared Bramhall, ‘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.’152 The convenience of Hobbes’s de factoism to the Cromwellian regimes has been observed by historians, but often overlooked is the extent to which this was perceived by contemporaries as a mechanism by which Hobbes defended the godless Erastianism of the Cromwellian age. Bramhall, who labelled Leviathan the ‘Rebell’s Catechism’, remained constantly aware of this link. He understood Hobbes’s subservience to established power and his conflation of the state and church as common features of the same political project, and he associated both with Hobbes’s allegiance to the Cromwellian regime.153 This reinterpretation of Bramhall should not be pushed too far. His dissent from Hobbes’s determinism was by no means incidental. But if the surface of Bramhall’s anti-Hobbesian critique concerned free will, its inner, propulsive motivation conformed in striking ways with the broader episcopalian response to Hobbes. Bramhall viewed Hobbes’s theology as instrumental and his scriptural interpretation as esoteric. Determinism served to advance Hobbes’s primary political project: the perfection of the Erastian revolution. In struggling to attain this goal, Hobbes allied himself with the worst religious impulses of the Cromwellian age. Bramhall’s critique of Hobbes was fundamentally a political one. In this it was but one salvo in the general barrage of anti-Hobbist sentiment voiced by the exiled church during the Interregnum. To be sure, as the episcopal response to Hobbes streamed from its headwaters to its eddying backwaters, its clarity was muddied. The capacity to read Hobbes on two levels—to look beyond his instrumental scriptural arguments and grasp the importance of his Erastianism—did not consistently typify the writings of less able churchmen. More obscure works, such as Robert Vilvain’s Theoremata Theologica and Alexander Ross’s 1652 Leviathan Drawn Out with a Hook, certainly condemned Hobbes for his Erastianism,154 but they also replied with a somewhat obtuse earnestness to his scriptural arguments and theology. The failure to see that this theology served chiefly to preserve the appearance of Christianity in Hobbes’s work produced some painfully sincere rejoinders to the ‘religion of Thomas Hobbes’. Ross, for example, promiscuously accused Hobbes of reviving the heresies of the ‘Anthropomorphists, Sabellians, Nestorians, Saduceans, Arabeans, Tacians or Eucratists, Manichies, Mahumetans and others’.155 The inferiority of this sort of polemic when measured against the anti-Hobbesian critiques of men such as Hammond and Thorndike is glaring. It is, however, a measure of how 152

Bramhall, Catching of Leviathan, 493–5, 498. ‘Because’, Bramhall concluded his Catching of Leviathan, ‘there hath been much clashing in these Quarters about religion’, and some ‘pernicious principles’, Hobbes aimed ‘to prevent such garboiles in his Common-wealth’ by making ‘his soveraign’ to be ‘Christs lieutenant upon earth, in obedience to whose commands true religion doth con154 Alexander Ross, Leviathan Drawn out with a Hook . . . (1652), 9, 61, 56, 94. sist’. Ibid. 572–3, 515–17. 155 Ibid., ‘to the reader’. 153

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insufficiently the existing historical literature has examined clerical criticism of Hobbes that Ross is by far the most commonly cited of his episcopal foes. Where Hobbes’s clerical critics are not overtly dismissed, their criticisms are conflated with that of minor figures such as Ross.156 But the response of the Interregnum churchmen to Hobbes’s political theory handsomely repays attention. Though Leviathan contained much that offended orthodox theological opinion, it was Hobbes’s ecclesiology that galvanized the critical response to ‘Hobbism’. The Interregnum churchmen understood Hobbes’s Christian rhetoric as an insincere effort to cloak an anti-Christian philosophy. They understood his stringent Erastianism as a means by which to render Christianity a neutered civil religion. Herbert Thorndike’s conflation of Hobbesian Erastianism and Independency was the most prominent critique of Hobbes along these lines, but his was merely the fullest statement of a widespread view. Hobbes’s chief clerical adversaries largely ignored his theological arguments as self-evidently specious, and levelled their fire at his theory of church government. Hobbesian ecclesiology was, in turn, understood as in part an apologia for Cromwell’s Erastian regime. Such a strategic response to Hobbes depended on a sophisticated reading of his work and on an understanding of its esoteric quality. Despite the neglect that has too often met their writings, the Anglicans’ case against Hobbes attained a remarkable perspicuity at its highest levels on these points. The Anglican voices raised against Hobbes during the 1650s spoke for the high-church party that would dominate the early Restoration church. Hobbes’s political betrayal of 1651 would not be forgotten, and Hobbes himself soon realized the peril in which he had placed himself. In the final months of 1659, as the Restoration of the King approached, Hobbes left London. From Derbyshire, he awaited events.157 If his worst fears were never to be realized, the era of public acceptance of his work was over. 156 Martinich presents Hobbes as an orthodox, if ‘non standard’, Christian. He is thus interested in discrediting those contemporaries of Hobbes who felt otherwise, but his efforts to do so entirely ignore the best clerical responses to Hobbes. Instead, Ross—author of ‘anti-Copernican pot-boilers’—stands in as the voice of the 17th-c. clergy. Martinich, Two Gods, 36, 356. Mintz takes a similar tactic, lumping Ross with Vilvain as reactionaries obsessed with revelation, while ignoring Hobbes’s more distinguished clerical critics. Mintz, Hunting of Leviathan, 67–9. Less polemical but similar use of Ross is found in Reik, Golden Lands, 114–15; Bowle, Hobbes and his Critics, 64. 157 ABL, i. 339; an interesting account of Ross as a Laudian and neo-scholastic polemicist is Adrian Johns, ‘Prudence and Pedantry in Early Modern Cosmology: The Trade of Al Ross’, History of Science, 35 (1997), 23–49.

Conclusion Thomas Hobbes remained in Derbyshire throughout the political chaos that marked the year 1659, but he undoubtedly followed the drama closely. Stubbe, indeed, kept him abreast of political proceedings, and particularly of efforts to prevent the political recovery of the Presbyterians.1 In the event the Revolution would suffer an even more severe reversal. In April of 1660 the newly elected Convention parliament voted to restore the monarchy, and within weeks Charles II landed in his recovered kingdom. Hobbes greeted the return of the Stuarts with a justified trepidation. By the late 1650s, the eclipse of the Louvre group at the exiled court was complete, and the old royalists—Hobbes’s most determined foes—had secured a dominant position in the royal councils.2 For Hobbes, this augured ill. ‘Mr Hobbes is my old Friend’, Edward Hyde had written as recently as July of 1659, ‘yet I cannot absolve him from the Mischief he hath done to the King, the Church, the Laws, and the Nation.’3 Within a year Hyde, Nicholas, and the rest of the old royalists had returned to the corridors of power at Whitehall. Most ominously for Hobbes, the adamantine loyalty of the episcopal churchmen secured the recovery of their position. For some time it appeared that Charles, in keeping with his promise in the Declaration of Breda, would comprehend Presbyterians within the resettled church. The staunch Laudians, however, aided by favourable parliamentary sentiment, eventually achieved a more exclusive restoration of the old church.4 Henry Hammond had died in 1660, but Hobbes must have been alarmed at how thoroughly his other intellectual foes among the traditional churchmen recovered ecclesiastical authority. Cosin, Duppa, Lucy, and Morley all received bishoprics, as did Seth Ward. Herbert Thorndike served as a delegate to the Savoy Conference and continued to publish prolifically. Bramhall was installed as primate of Ireland, and Sheldon (after the death of Juxon) as Archbishop of Canterbury. The clergy restored to high office in the Restoration church were thus on record against Thomas Hobbes with an astonishing comprehensiveness. By Hobbes’s own admission, Charles II was ‘displeased for a while’ with him.5 But the odds that he would face serious jeopardy were much diminished by the passage of the Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion. Nevertheless, Hobbes did not rejoin the Cavendishes in London until May of 1661, and even then only after a ‘friendly intimation’ from John Aubrey.6 It is true that Hobbes was soon restored to Charles II’s 1 3 4 6

2 Hutton, Charles II, 118–22. Stubbe to Hobbes, 9 Oct. 1659, Corr., 505–6. Hyde to Barwick, 25 July 1659, Shuhmann, Chronique, 167 5 Mr Hobbes Considered, 28. Hutton, Restoration, 143–8; Bosher, Restoration Settlement, entire. Sorbière to Hobbes, 2 May 1661, Corr., 519; ABL, i. 339–40.

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good graces. After encountering his old teacher on a few random occasions, the King rediscovered Hobbes’s ‘witt and smart repartees’. Charles supposedly had a portrait of Hobbes painted, and granted him a small (and sporadically paid) pension.7 When challenged on his behaviour during the Revolution, Hobbes himself tended to use these royal favours as exculpatory evidence, but too much should not be made of them.8 Charles II, on recovering his traumatized and divided kingdom, necessarily cultivated an indulgent mood towards his subjects. He certainly forgave political sins more grievous than those of Thomas Hobbes. Nor, more importantly, did the King’s personal kindness spare Hobbes the ominous attentions of church and parliament. One may doubt the precise accuracy of Aubrey’s memory that ‘not long after the king was settled, some of the bishops made a motion to have the good old gentleman burn’t for a heretique’, but Hobbes was sufficiently spooked to burn his papers.9 Indeed, the Restoration witnessed regular efforts to silence and censure Thomas Hobbes. The Cavalier House of Commons passed no fewer than four condemnations of Leviathan.10 In 1683 the Oxford Convocation publicly torched Leviathan, along with other works odious to ‘Catholic truth in the Church’ penned by ‘Traiterous Heritics and Schismatics’ (including, notably, John Owen).11 ‘Hobbism’ became a by-word for any number of religious or political sins. One Cambridge fellow, Daniel Scargill, was purged for espousing the ‘cankered stuff of Malmesbury’.12 If Hobbes enjoyed some personal contact with the King, he was nevertheless effectively forbidden from publishing on religion or politics. Hobbes’s defence of Scargill, for instance, which ‘made a mighty quoting out of his Leviathan’, was confiscated by John Berkenhead ‘in order to flatter the bishops’.13 A similar fate, as we have seen, met Behemoth. A great deal of the hostility to Hobbes after 1660 was formed by the mould cast during the Interregnum. To be sure, criticisms of Hobbes diversified as they proliferated. In particular, more of his heterodox theology came under attack. But for many years the clergy continued to recall and castigate Hobbes’s accommodation with the rule of the Cromwellian Independents. In 1661 Hobbes’s antagonist Seth Ward, now a bishop, preached at court in defence of apostolic authority and ecclesiological dualism. Ward warned against the influence of Hobbesian (and Machiavellian) principles that ‘derived’ religion wholly from policy and taught that ‘Religion is an enemy to Government’. He explicitly linked Hobbes’s teachings to the dark days of the Interregnum, when there had been a ‘confusion of all things Civil and Sacred’.14 Herbert Thorndike’s Discourse of the Forbearance or the Penalties which a Due Reformation Requires 7

8 Vita [prose], 19–20. 9 ABL, i. 339. ABL, i. 340; Hobbes to Charles II, [undated], Corr., 774–5. JHC, viii. 636, 687; The Diary of John Milward, ed. Caroline Robbins (Cambridge, 1938), 25. 11 The Judgment and Decree of the University of Oxford past in their convocation, July 21. 1683. against certain Pernicious Books, and Damnable Doctrines . . . (Oxford, 1683), 1–5. 12 Scargill to Tenison, 5 Dec. 1671 and 3 Dec. 1680, BL Add. MS 38693, fos. 127, 130; James L. Axtell, ‘The Mechanics of Opposition: Restoration Cambridge v. Daniel Scargill’, Bulletin of Historical Research, 38 (1965), 102–11. 13 Scargill to Tenison, 3 Dec. 1680, BL Add. MS 38693, fo. 131; ABL, i. 360–1. 14 Seth Ward, Against Resistance of Lawful Powers . . . (1661), 1–3, 24–7, 35. 10

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again exposed the noxious alliance of Hobbism and Independency in an effort to dissuade Charles II from tolerating nonconformists.15 John Eachard’s Dialogues, sponsored by Archbishop Sheldon and insistent on the links between Hobbesian Erastianism and Cromwellian Independency, were published during the agitation over Charles’s Declaration of Toleration (see Ch. 7). Historians may portray Oliver Cromwell (as some portray Hobbes) as a liberalizing tolerationist. The Restoration churchmen, however, remembered Cromwell as a coercive Erastian and an enemy to the corporate church. Hobbes’s terrible sin was to have placed his ‘farrago of Christian atheism’ at the service of this cause. To be sure, the Anglican response to Hobbes had been clarified by the church’s exile. Persecution had intensified the dualist, clericalist tendencies of Laudian ecclesiology. The Restoration, by contrast, reintroduced the paradox of a high-church episcopacy dependent on the legitimacy of the Royal Supremacy. In the face of these changed religious dynamics, the revival of Anglo-Catholic ecclesiology nourished by Laud and his heirs was perhaps destined to fade. The rise of the ‘Latitudinarian’ churchmen, who would eventually attain dominance after 1688, represented a renewed Anglican accommodation with English Erastianism. Sceptical of the divine right of episcopacy, hopeful of comprehending Presbyterians, and markedly deferential to the ecclesiastical power of the state, the Latitudinarians would revive the Erastian ideal of the Tudor church in the more fragmented and pluralistic context of the Restoration. To the Laudians such accommodations with nonconformity and statism ruinously threatened England’s aspirations to provide a model for the catholic, corporate church. It was in this context that high churchmen would hurl the charge of ‘Hobbism’ at Latitudinarians such as Edward Stillingfleet and John Tillotson.16 There was, at times, more than a little merit to this charge, but it is a measure of Hobbes’s estrangement from the episcopal church that this could never be conceded. Charged with Hobbism for his Irenicum, Stillingfleet issued a second edition with a new appendix strongly denouncing Hobbesian principles for having ‘melted down all Spiritual power into the Civil state, and dissolved the Church into the Commonwealth’.17 Stillingfleet joined his fellow Latitudinarian, the future archbishop Thomas Tenison, in punishing the Cambridge Hobbist, Daniel Scargill. Tenison, who was Scargill’s mortified tutor, wrote a treatise against Hobbes that accused him of having ‘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’.18 Even Thomas Barlow, the Erastian bishop who had corresponded with Hobbes during his days as an Interregnum trimmer, condemned Leviathan in 1676 for its endorsement of the Congregationalist model of locally elected church officers. With considerable gall 15

Thorndike, Discourse of Forbearance, 29, 178–9. Marshall, ‘Ecclesiology of the Latitude-men’, 407–27; Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, 88–92. 17 Edward Stillingfleet, Irenicum. A Weapon-salve for the Churches Wounds . . . (2nd edn., 1662), 418. 18 Scargill to Tenison, 19 Jan. 1669, BL Add. MS 38693, fo. 132; Thomas Tenison, The Creed of Mr. Hobbes Examined (1670), 155. 16

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(given his own past), Barlow castigated this as an implication of Hobbes’s ‘wild Erastianisme’.19 Perhaps most instructive of all was the reaction of Samuel Parker, the authoritarian Erastian whose case for religious coercion (A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie of 1670) was derided by Andrew Marvell and answered by John Locke. Very plausibly accused of Hobbism, Parker exerted much fraught energy discrediting the charge.20 Most revealingly, he recognized the polemical value of rehearsing Hobbes’s accommodation with Independency. Blasting John Owen and Cromwell for having repressed the clergy with the ‘iron rod’ wielded by the hand ‘of the Triers’, he condemned the Interregnum church settlement as an ‘Anti-christian Leviathan’. Hobbesian principles, he alleged, had justified a licentious sectarianism and a vicious anticlericalism. Parker specifically characterized Owen and his Independent allies as ‘cubs of the Leviathan’.21 Had Hobbes crafted an Erastian defence of episcopacy during the Revolution, divines such as Barlow and Parker might have been his champions. That they were not reveals how damaging, in the long run, was his political calculation to ally himself with Independency. The developments of the Restoration cut Hobbes off from all the chief religious factions. Presbyterians and high-church episcopalians abhorred him. Erastian churchmen were tellingly alarmed by any association with Hobbism. Independents, such as John Owen, had been scarred by the collapse of their New Jerusalem. They increasingly abandoned the ideal of the Godly Magistrate in favour of a strict separatism that they had once rejected. After 1660, Hobbes could not reasonably hope that any orthodox party would openly adopt his model for a Christianized civil religion. For the remainder of his life, this fall from grace among the forces of order haunted Hobbes. The memory of his accommodation with the Interregnum governments persisted for decades, embellished with unverifiable reports that he had sought a pension from Oliver Cromwell.22 Fending off these charges of disloyalty consumed much of his energy. (He was also increasingly forced to defend himself against heresy charges, which were not covered by the Act of Oblivion.23) Hobbes was partly protected by his friendly personal relations with the King, and by the fact that Charles II was not half as deferential to the bishops as his father had been. He was also sheltered by well-disposed aristocrats such as Devonshire and the Earl of Arlington, although White Kennet reported Hobbes’s fears that the former might ‘deliver him up’ to the tender mercies of the bishops.24 Hobbes also published apologias on his own behalf, and these manifest a revealing pattern that has been explored periodically throughout this book. Faced with charges of disloyalty, he did not repudiate his de factoist theory of obligation 19

Barlow, ‘Animadversions on a MS Tract Concerning Heresy’, Oxford, Queen’s College MS 204, fo. 19. Jon Parkin, ‘Hobbism in the later 1660s: Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999), 85–108. 21 Samuel Parker, A Defence and Continuation of the Ecclesiastical Politie . . . (1671), 66–7, 568–9. 22 John Dowell, The Leviathan Heretical: Of the Charge Exhibited in Parliament against Mr. Hobbes . . . (Oxford, 1683), 137; Ursa major and minor, 19; Morland to [Tenison?], Lambeth MS 931, fo. 6. 23 These attacks occasioned Hobbes’s writings on heresy. Mintz, ‘Hobbes on Heresy’, 409–14. 24 Kennet, Memoirs, 15; Philip Milton, ‘Hobbes, Heresy, and Lord Arlington’, History of Political Thought, 14 (1993), 501–41. 20

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but rather used it as a refuge. He also made a great deal of noise about his preference for monarchy, a preference that had in fact little constrained him during the Revolution itself.25 Strikingly, Hobbes was most voluble in answering the accusation that he had rejected episcopacy and embraced the Erastian cause of the Revolution. To these charges he responded with equal measures of brazen denial and assertive concession. Denial—there was ‘nothing in [Leviathan] against episcopacy’, he blithely assured Charles II—was exceedingly difficult to sustain.26 The 1668 Latin translation of Leviathan, to be sure, included politic textual additions averring that the work contained nothing ‘contrary to the public teaching of our church’, and even purporting to have ‘exposed the ambitious and cunning plans of the adversaries of the Anglican church’.27 Supporting such assertions, however, required that Hobbes expunge inconvenient passages from his masterwork. For instance, an apparent reference to the Anglican church’s ‘unpleasing priests’ was dropped.28 Most audaciously, Hobbes drafted a wholesale revision of Leviathan’s forty-seventh chapter, which had originally contained his endorsement of Independency. The new version silently omitted a critical allusion to the divineright claims of the English bishops, and entirely purged the extensive passage in which he had approved both the abolition of episcopacy and the establishment of Independency.29 In an effort to further confound his critics, Hobbes also tended to make a great show of occasionally conforming to the rites of the restored church (he died, for instance, in ‘all the forms of a very good Christian’).30 Of course, given his willingness to justify even the denial of Christ at the behest of sovereignty, such conformity provides meagre evidence of his sincere views. His constant recourse to them, indeed, often rings of too much protesting. More interesting were Hobbes’s efforts, beneath this mechanical conformity, subtly to preserve the essence of his ecclesiological theory, including its implicit critique of the English bishops. His Vitae, as we have seen, derided the ‘burdensome’ exiled clergy of the old church, castigated them for attacking Leviathan, and celebrated the fall of both episcopacy and presbytery during the Interregnum.31 We have also seen how Hobbes’s most significant Restoration work, Behemoth, offered a religious theory of the civil war that reserved a significant measure of blame for the Laudian church. This feature of the book, indeed, seems to have ensured its suppression. In a brief apology for Leviathan published in 1662, Hobbes obfuscated the ecclesiological implications of the work, and then audaciously suggested that the bishops had condemned him as an atheist because 25

26 Hobbes, Seven Philosophical Problems, epistle dedicatory. Mr Hobbes Considered, 4–5, 20–6, 36–7. Leviathan, ed. Curley, 2, 487–8. 28 Ibid. 74 and note; Professor Curley argues that this barb might have been directed against the Presbyterians. But it is then difficult to see why Hobbes would have felt compelled to omit the remark from a Restoration edition of Leviathan. 29 Leviathan, ed. Curley; compare pp. 478–84 with 485–8. Even if Tricaud is right to conclude that portions of the Latin Leviathan pre-date the English, these particular modifications to the text were almost certainly executed during the Restoration. Their blatant political purpose cannot be convincingly contextualized in any other way, and their rhetorical strategy closely follows that of Hobbes’s other Restoration apologias. 30 Southwell to Ormonde, 13 Dec. 1679, HMC: Ormonde, iv. 567; Vita [prose], 9–10; Seven Philosophical Problems, 31 Vita [verse], 8–9; Vita [prose], 9–10. epistle dedicatory; ABL, i. 353. 27

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they resented his ‘making the Authority of the Church wholly upon the Regal Power’.32 Hobbes’s most extensive defence was his Mr Hobbes Considered in his Loyalty, Religion, Reputation, and Manners of 1662. Reviving their long-standing feud, John Wallis had loosed a broadside of charges against Hobbes’s mathematics, religion, and political past. Wallis accused Hobbes of ‘deserting his Royal Master in distresse’, and of writing in ‘Defense of Olivers Title’. This was partly an indictment of Hobbes’s de factoism, but Wallis also castigated Hobbes’s ‘New Divinity’ and anticlericalism, specifically condemning his Erastian subordination of divine law and Scripture to secular sovereignty.33 These accusations certainly alarmed Hobbes, but to a remarkable degree he proved disinclined to retreat. He predictably scolded Wallis for his own political sins and—as he would in Behemoth— tendentiously portrayed the Revolution as a revolt by usurping clergy of the Presbyterian faction.34 As an effort at asserting his own Erastian credentials and skewering the clergy as ‘Cheaters and Impostors’, this was safe territory. But he could not resist an all but explicit attack on the bishops, again couched in terms that prefigured Behemoth. Defending his own return to England in 1651, Hobbes offered a sharply backhanded defence of those bishops who had not ‘followed the King out of the Land’ and who ‘lived quietly under the Protection, first of Parliament, and then of Oliver’. He all but openly blamed the churchmen who did go into exile (‘reputed wise and learned men’) for having ‘mis-construed’ Leviathan. Most astoundingly, he acknowledged the continued hostility of the ‘Bishops and Episcopable men’, but, after lamely denying that he had attacked any individual bishops in personal terms, he reiterated his opposition to any clergy claiming ‘Divine Right to Govern by virtue of Imposition of Hands, and Consecration’. Among such was found ‘a relique still remaining of the venome of Popish Ambition, lurking in that seditious distinction and division between Power Spirituall and Civill’.35 As for Oliver Cromwell, Hobbes denied that he had written Leviathan on his behalf, but readers might have wondered how thoroughly he had repudiated the Protector. Alongside some harsh criticism, he implicitly credited Cromwell for suppressing the ‘counterfeit’ Westminster Assembly of Divines, argued that the Presbyterians were most guilty of the Regicide perpetrated by the hand of Cromwell, and noted that Cromwell and his army had suppressed Presbyterians in England and Scotland, as the ‘justice of God required’.36 Since the earliest months of the English Revolution the politics of Thomas Hobbes had been governed by a deference to established authority, an absolutist theory of sovereignty, and a strict Erastian ecclesiology. The first of these factors carried generally neutral political implications, and the second inclined him to royalism during the civil war itself. Hobbes’s Erastianism, however, alienated him from the cause of Charles I, whose own deference to a corporatist, sacramental understanding of the clerical estate had become increasingly central to royalism 32 33 35

Seven Philosophical Problems, epistle dedicatory. John Wallis, Hobbius Heauton-timorumenos, 4–6, 10–11, 13–14. 36 Ibid. 14–16. Ibid. 12, 28, 43–6.

34

Mr Hobbes Considered, 6–7, 10–11.

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throughout the 1640s. Faced with catastrophic events, Hobbes had allowed his Erastianism—precisely the factor that most estranged him from the King— increasingly to dominate his published political writings. And to a remarkable degree he continued to espouse his own understanding of religious power after the Restoration. This was, in certain respects, both honest and shrewd. If the Laudians had returned to power in 1660, their hopes of constructing the corporatist, Anglo-Catholic church of Caroline aspirations had dimmed. There was simply too much lost ground to recover, and the broad religious environment became less and less hospitable. A dizzying religious pluralism had emerged, and in confronting it the church was governed by a monarch little interested in providing Anglicanism with a second Stuart martyr. The threat posed by rival religious factions made the official church increasingly dependent on the state’s patronage, and this inevitably eroded the will to resist Erastianism. In trying to reingratiate himself with the Stuarts while maintaining his political critique of Laudianism, Hobbes made an audacious but foresighted calculation. And if Shelden, Thorndike, Bramhall, and the other heirs of Laud managed to blacken the reputation of Thomas Hobbes, their larger struggle was very much a rearguard action. Anglo-Catholic revivals would come and go, but the future of Anglicanism would increasingly depend on an ever less ambiguous statism. Had Hobbes foreseen this during the Interregnum, he might have become the prophet of these developments, and the favoured theorist (rather than the secret indulgence) of those Erastian churchmen who welcomed them. Despite the currently prevalent image of him as the scourge of republicanism, Hobbes’s Restoration influence continued to be felt most strongly among anticlerical, heterodox, and typically republican writers such as John Toland, Charles Blount, John Trenchard, John Gordon, and Robert Molesworth. As their leading historian has observed, these ‘Freethinkers anathematised the Hobbist principle of absolute sovereignty’, but ‘applauded Hobbes’s deconstruction of priestly fraud’ and his ‘rigorous Erastianism’.37 Early Enlightenment republicans shunned those aspects of Hobbesian theory most captivating to modern commentators, but they esteemed his religious thought, which accorded with their anti-Trinitarian scepticism and Machiavellian attachment to civil religion. This line of Hobbesian influence would, of course, reach an apex with Rousseau’s famous synthesis of Machiavellian and Hobbesian religious thought.38 Hobbesian ecclesiology also exerted sway over Dutch republicanism, particularly through the writings of Johan and Pieter de la Court and Spinoza, in which the complete political subordination of the clergy was a constant feature.39 To narrate the history of Hobbes’s Enlightenment reception would require another study entirely. The present one, it is hoped, has located the origins of the story in the age of Oliver Cromwell. 37 Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, 134–5, et passim; Mark Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, in Phillipson and Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse, 209–31. 38 And, to a lesser extent, with Voltaire and Diderot. Denis Diderot, Political Writings, trans. John Hope Mason and Robert Woker (Cambridge, 1992), 27–8; Voltaire, Political Writings, trans. David Williams (Cambridge, 1994), 107. 39 Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the Republic of Letters’, in Visions, 514–17; Dr Malcolm here (pp. 535–7) criticizes Jonathan Israel for minimizing the Enlightenment influence of Hobbes. Jonathan Israel, The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001), 15, 159, 602.

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It is fitting to close this book by observing again the proximity of Thomas Hobbes and early modern republicans on the question of religious authority in the state. Their agreement on that matter is perhaps the most dramatic implication of a proper accounting of Hobbes’s political position during the English Revolution. Both Hobbes and the republicans grasped the catastrophic potential of doctrinal disagreement to destabilize polities, and in this sense they were marked by the age of religious warfare through which they lived. Both responded by subordinating ecclesiastical authority to state power, and by counselling princes to adopt religious toleration, not generally as a birthright but as a prudential measure. In these respects both Hobbes and his republican associates endorsed an instrumental understanding of religion, and they invoked the example of pagan antiquity in doing so. This was more comfortable for the republicans—who were more thorough ‘neo-pagans’—than it was for Hobbes, but he too was essentially a Machiavellian on religious questions. That Hobbes and the early English republicans were, by and large, typified by considerable religious scepticism only encouraged their willingness politically to subordinate the church. Such a religious profile, to be sure, did not always coexist comfortably with the Godly temper of the Cromwellian era. On ecclesiological questions, however, both Hobbes and the republicans were drawn to Cromwell’s Erastian Independency, which combined a strict control of the clergy with a prudent licentiousness towards some (not all) private opinion. This book has interpreted the English Revolution as a struggle to define the nature of religious authority in a state that was on the cusp of rapid modernization. In that fight, the proto-liberal Hobbes and the ‘neo-Roman’ republicans—however animated they might become by the narcissism of small differences—were essentially on the same side. Opposite them were those, fatefully including Charles I, devoted to a dualist and corporatist model of the Christian polity. This was the medieval model of religion and politics that the English Reformation had attacked, and that the English Revolution sought decisively to shatter. Modern historians and theorists (particularly in the Anglo-American world) have become much enamoured with the ideological axis dividing interest-oriented liberals from communitarian republicans.40 Republicanism, as a political model, is supposed to be more accommodating than liberalism to communal goods and moral virtues. But a historically informed understanding of the period that nurtured both of these traditions calls into doubt the saliency of any model that places them in dramatic opposition. It is, moreover, precisely on questions of public religion and morality that it proves very difficult to disentangle early modern republicans and proto-liberals. Such figures, if they existed at all, were more likely to be allies than enemies, and to be enemies alike of the corporatist Christian church. In this sense both the republican tradition of Harrington and the rights-oriented (and thus ‘proto-liberal’) tradition of Hobbes and Locke might be seen as variants 40 Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 4–7; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 196–7; Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, pp. ix–x, et passim; Maurizo Viroli, Republicanism, trans. Anthony Shuggar (New York, 2002), 7, 57–68.

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on a common struggle to modernize the English state. Against an Augustinian, dualist model of the corporate church and corporate commonwealth—in which ‘the universal morality of Christianity was established outside and above secular standards and the sphere of political action’41—they espoused a model in which the monolithic state presided over a polity of atomized individuals. They differed over how state sovereignty was formed, whether it could be dissolved, how it might be institutionally embodied, and so forth, but they fundamentally agreed that a corporate church could share no part in it. Agreement on that point, this book has argued, successfully vied with other factors as a determinant of allegiance during the English Revolution. Eventually, as the struggle against the Laudian church slipped deeper into the past, the English state adopted what might be called a new dualism: the dualism of public power and private religion that so typifies the modern Western world. Once the church had been co-opted by the state and thus stripped of its capacity to harass the state’s masters, religion could be released entirely into a confessional marketplace of free individuals. Politics then surrendered its semi-sacred status and developed more autonomous ideologies of self-justification (including the liberal conceit of the ‘morally neutral state’). The dualism of J. S. Mill replaced the dualism of Augustine. Anticipation of this development might be glimpsed in the writings of a very few seventeenth-century seers. On the whole, however, the seventeenth century was still consumed by the struggle between regnum and sacerdotium. As Behemoth makes perfectly clear, this is how Thomas Hobbes understood the English Civil War. For Hobbes as much as for Harrington, any who were loyal to the Augustinian ecclesiological vision—Catholics, Presbyterians, episcopalians alike—were enemies of order. Other features of the Revolution alienated Hobbes, but as the conflict ripened this ecclesiological struggle increasingly consumed him. And when, after the regicide, a true moment of decision confronted him, it was this issue that tipped his allegiance. Recognizing this recovers for us Thomas Hobbes as a revolutionary theorist. It also goes some way towards justifying the much contested word ‘Revolution’ as a designation of the English Civil War. The word is always a term of art in any case, but where it has been used to argue for an English constitutional or social revolution its aptness has been devastatingly challenged. If, however, the English Civil War is understood as a watershed moment in defining the nature of the British kingdoms as Christian polities, the term ‘Revolution’ seems much more suitable. The demolition of a millennium-old ecclesial structure, the psychologically shattering advent of pervasive religious pluralism, the earliest efforts to make the individual the arbiter of religious obligation: these represented epochal transformations. And when accompanied by mass violence and regime change, such transformations merit the designation ‘Revolution’. So understood, the English Revolution might be viewed as a powerful anticipation of the broader Enlightenment and its coercive patterns of state 41

Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago, 1949), 75.

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building. Enlightenment politics were governed by centralizing states dismantling, often violently, the privileges of rival corporate entities such as aristocratic orders, private armies, guilds, and, most traumatically, the church. In this effort, Enlightenment despots could pose as liberalizers to the extent that they were willing to return certain less threatening privileges or rights back to their individual subjects.42 Individualization—the atomizing of society—and state centralization thus worked together. In many respects the regimes of the English Revolution gestured towards this Enlightenment pattern. This was particularly true of the regime of Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell—with his centrally controlled standing army, efforts at legal reform, hostility towards the clerical estate, and so forth— might be read not just as a Godly Reformation prince, but also as a kind of Enlightened despot. This was above all the case when it came to the fundamental struggle to redefine the English national church and the contours of English religious life. Before the fully liberal order of privatized religion and autonomous politics could emerge to resolve early modern Europe’s ‘theological-political problem’, the antique dualism of temporal and spiritual authority needed to be swept aside.43 In this sense England’s Erastian Revolution, if ideologically fixated on the Reformation battles of the past, nevertheless moved forward by degrees towards the liberal future. 42 Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathologies of Modern Society, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Oxford, 1998), 15–38. 43 Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton, 1995), pp. xvi–xviii, 3–7.

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Index Act of Indemnity and Oblivion ,  Agreement of the People  Saint Ambrose , ,  Ancient Bounds  Anglicanism; see episcopacy, Church of England Apologeticall Narration , , ,  Arianism  Arminianism , , ,  Aubrey, John on Behemoth  on Historia Ecclesiastica  on Hobbes during Interregnum , , ,  and Hobbes after Restoration  Saint Augustine , , ,  Augustus Caesar  Austin, John, alias William Birchley , – Bacon, Francis ,  De Sapientia Veterum –,  Essays ,  Bagshaw, Edward  on Hobbes’s determinism  influenced by Hobbes – Baillie, Robert –, , , ,  Bancroft, Richard  Barebones Parliament; see Nominated Assembly Barlow, Thomas Restoration critique of Hobbes – view of Hobbes during Interregnum  Baronius, Caesar ,  Barwick, John  Basire, Isaac  Bastwick, John  Baxter, Richard , , , , – attacks Hobbes – on Hobbes’s determinism  Holy Commonwealth  Humble Advice  Becket, Thomas  Bellarmine, Robert –, – Berkenhead, John censors Hobbes  Berkley, John – Beza, Theodore  Bilson, Thomas  Birchley, William; see Austin, John

Bishops; see episcopacy Blacklo; see Thomas White Blackloists –, – conspiracy of  –, ,  in exile  and Hobbes; see Hobbes links to Louvre group ,  use of Leviathan – Blount, Charles  Bodleian Library, Oxford ,  Bramhall, John , ,  career ,  Castigations of Mr. Hobbes his last Animadversions  critique of Cromwellian era – critique of Hobbes’s determinism – critique of Hobbes’s ecclesiology – Cromwell on  Defense of True Liberty from Ante-cedent and Extrinsecall Necessity  free will debate with Hobbes – reaction to De Cive ,  Brenz, Johannes , ,  Brereton, William  Bridges, William ,  Browne, Richard  Burroughs, Jeremiah  Butler, James, earl of Ormonde , , , ,  Calvin, John ,  and Hobbes  Calvinism –, ,  Cambridge University , , , , , ,  canons of  –,  Carey, Lucius, Viscount Falkland  Cawdry, Daniel – Cavalier Parliament  Cavendish, Sir Charles , ,  Cavendish, Margaret  Cavendish, William, first earl of Devonshire  Cavendish, William, second earl of Devonshire correspondence with Micanzio  patron of Hobbes –, , –, , ,  politics of –, 

306

Index

Cavendish, William, second earl of Devonshire (cont.) possible author of Horae Subsecivae  Restoration views of Hobbes  Cavendish, William, earl of Newcastle and Elements of Law  exile of ,  in Louvre group , –,  patron of Bramhall ,  patron of Hobbes –,  politics of in early s – censorship  Charles I , , –,  Arminian  execution , , ,  and Laud ,  and the Long Parliament  loyalty to Church of England , ,  and negotiations of  –,  and the Scots , ,  Charles II ,  allied with Scots ,  in exile as prince –, , ,  patron of Hobbes after  – pupil of Hobbes , , –,  restored  returned to exile () – views of Hobbes ,  Chatsworth  Church of England , ; see also episcopacy Anglo-Catholic tendency in ; see also Thorndike, Herbert challenged by pluralism  historical interpretations of  hostility to Hobbes –,  Interregnum leadership  outlawed during Interregnum , ,  political calculations of  post  campaign against Hobbes – Restoration recovery –, , – Cicero , –,  civil religion; see also Hobbes on, humanism among ancients –,  among English thinkers –, , –, –, , –, ,  early study of – Renaissance ideal of – Clüver, Johann  Clüver, Philip  Cobbett, Thomas  coffee house  Coke, John  Coke, Roger ,  Coleman, Thomas , – Committee for Scandalous Ministers  Commonwealth; see also engagement diplomacy of –, ,  as republican polity  religious policies of –, , 

treatment of Hobbes – Congregationalism; see Independency Constantine , ,  contextualism –; see also Skinner, Quentin Convention Parliament  Convocation , ,  at Oxford  Cosin, John attacked by Long Parliament , – loyal to old royalists ,  at Restoration  Cotton, John , –, ,  Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven – Council of Laodicea  of Nicea  de la Court, Johan and Pieter  Cowley, Abraham , , ,  Cromwell, Henry  Cromwell, Oliver and Catholics , –, ,  Chancellor of Oxford  dominance after  –,  early parliamentary career – Erastianism of –, , , –,  Hobbes’s views of; see Hobbes as Independent , –, , ,  military career , , , –, –,  monarchical aspirations –,  and negotiations of  – portrayed as Machiavellian – as possible target of Leviathan – and Presbyterians ,  profile among anti-clerical thinkers – religious policies of – republicans’ views of –, –, – rise of  treatment of the Church of England –, – as viewed by royalists  Cromwell, Richard  Cromwell, Thomas  Cromwellian church settlement function of – Hobbes’s reaction to – opposition to –, –, , , – origins of  position of Anglicans under , – support for , , –, –, –, –, – Crooke, Andrew  Culpepper, John  Saint Cyprian , ,  Dante Alighieri  Davies, John –,  Davenant, William  de Dominis, Marc Antonio – Declaration of Breda 

Index Declaration of Toleration  Dell, William  determinism , , – Digby, Kenelm association with Hobbes ,  in Blackloist faction , , – links with Louvre group , ,  during Interregnum – Diodorus Siculus , – Draper, William  Drogheda  dualism (ecclesiological) –, , , –, , , –, –, , –,  Du Verdus, François , – Dunbar – Duppa, Brian ,  acquainted with Hobbes  career ,  critique of Hobbes  influenced by Herbert Thorndike – Eachard, John –,  Earles, John  Eastern Orthodoxy  Edward III , – Edward VI ,  Edwards, Thomas  Ejectors; see Cromwellian church settlement Elizabeth I , –, , ,  engagement controversy , , , , , , , , ,  English civil war; see English Revolution English Revolution historical interpretations of – as religious conflict – episcopacy assaults on by parliament –, , ,  attacked in Behemoth – attacked in Leviathan  debated in Westminster Assembly  defended –, –, – jure divino , –, , ,  loyal to old royalists , ,  succession crisis of ,  Erastianism , , ; see also Lüber, Thomas, Selden, John and Hobbes, Thomas and the Church of England  during Interregnum –,  history of term  and Independency; see Independency in the Long Parliament; see Long Parliament medieval precursors – and Protestantism – and the Tudors –, –, – in Westminster Assembly , –,  Erastus; see Lüber, Thomas Ergamenes  Eutychius 

307

Evelyn, John  response to Herbert Thorndike – excommunication , , , ,  Ezra  Fairfax, Thomas  Fermat, Samuel  Ferne, Henry  Fitton, Peter , ,  Fox, Edward  free will debate –; see also Bramhall, John Frewen, Accepted  Gallicanism ,  Gardiner, Stephen  Gillespie, George ,  Glanville, Joseph  Godolphin, Francis  Godolphin, Sidney , ,  Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge  Goodwin, John critic of Oliver Cromwell – debate with Marchamont Nedham –,  during Whitehall debates  Goodwin, Thomas leader of Independents –, ,  and Humble Proposals  in Westminster Assembly , ,  Gordon, John  Grand Remonstrance , –,  Grant Winter; see George Leyburn Great Schism  Gresham College  Grimston, Harbottle  Grotius, Hugo , , , , ,  De Imperio Summarum Potestatum Circa Sacra –, –,  Guicciardini, Francesco  Hale, Matthew  Hall, John [of Durham] , , , ,  career  Confusion Confounded – Erastianism of – Grounds and Reasons for Monarchy Considered – and Hobbes –,  Hall, Joseph –,  Hammond, Henry ,  death of  during Interregnum ,  in old royalist faction , ,  Letter of Resolution for Six Quaeres ,  resistance to Cromwell ,  response to Hobbes , , – role in Hobbes’s banishment 

308

Index

Harrington, James –, ,  and civil religion  Commonwealth of Oceana – defends Cromwellian Independency – ecclesiological views –,  life and writings – Pian Piano  Prerogative of Popular Government  response to Hobbes , , – Hartlib, Samuel , –,  Hatton, Christopher  Heads of the Proposals  Henrietta Maria and death of Charles I  and Louvre group –, , – negotiations of   Henry II  Henry III of France  Henry IV of France  Henry VIII , , –, ,  High Commission, court of , ,  Hill, Thomas , ,  Hobbes, Thomas An Answer to a Book Published by Dr. Bramhall  Answer to the Preface before Gondibert  anti-Catholicism , –, ,  associate of Bacon  association with Blackloist Catholics , , , –, , – banished from Stuart court in exile –, ,  Behemoth as account of Laudian church – on apostolic succession  attack on dualism –,  on Charles I ,  composition and efforts to publish –,  on Cromwell –, – on Independency – on the Irish  on the Long Parliament – on Presbyterianism –, –,  on republicanism – suppressed passages  on the University Visitations  on bishops –, , –, , , –, –,  candidate for short parliament – censorship of after  – on Christian history –, , –, – on civil religion –, – client of the Cavendishes , , , –, ,  on clerical usurpers , , –, –, , –, , –, –, –, 

De Cive Anglican reaction to –, –, , , ,  on apostolic succession – attacks Presbyterianism  ecclesiological innovations in –,  initial publication ,  inscription in , – frontispiece of –, n marginalia  on monarchy  Presbyterian reaction to  proposed third edition  as response to Long Parliament – royalism of ,  second edition of – translations and proposed translations of ,  on Cromwell –, , , –, ,  on Cromwellian religious policies –, , –,  De Corpore , , –,  de factoism –, , – departure from Interregnum London  determinism of – Dialogus Physicus  dispute with Bramhall; see Bramhall, John during  – during Interregnum –, –, – education –,  Elements of Law –, , , ,  on enlightened princes , , , – esotericism of –,  and free will debate; see Bramhall, John French exile (–) –, –, –, –, –, –,  and John Hall; see Hall, John and Harrington, James; see Harrington, James Historia Ecclesiastica –, , ,  De Homine ,  hostility to Christianity – and humanism –, –, –,  illnesses of –, ,  Interregnum profile of –, –,  Leviathan as appeal to Commonwealth –, –, , , –,  audience for , , , –,  breaks with royalists  burned  on civil religion – composition of –, –,  on conscience – in context of – , –,  defended by James Harrington  ecclesiology of –, – endorses Independency –, , – on episcopacy , –, , –

Index esoteric nature of – exploited by Blackloists – frontispiece of  general innovations in  Latin translation , n,  manuscript copy of – as mirror for princes text ,  on monarchy  on ordination  popularity of – possibly intended for Oliver Cromwell – on Presbyterians ,  presented to Charles II – proposed translation of , , ,  on Protectors  publication of , ,  reaction of Anglicans to –, –, , –, , – reaction of Presbyterians to – as reformist text – on republicans – on the Sanhedrin  as textbook –, , ,  theology of ,  theory of obligation of ,  Of Liberty and Necessity  preface to – and Louvre group –, , – Markes of an Absurd Geometry –,  Mr Hobbes Considered in his Loyalty, Religion, Reputation and Manners – on miracles and revelation – and Louis du Moulin –; see also du Moulin, Louis and Nedham, Marchamont; see Nedham, Marchamont and John Owen –, , –; see also Owen, John and William Petty; see Petty, William possible atheism of –, ,  on Presbyterians , –, –, , , –, – projection theory of religion  and Protestantism – Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance  reception; see also De Cive and Leviathan generally ,  among Anglican clergy –, – among anti-clerical thinkers –, –,  among clergy generally , –,  among Independents – among republicans –,  religious practice of ,  on republicanism –, ,  Restoration apologias –

309

at Restoration court  Restoration reputation –, , , , – among Anglicans – among republicans – on rhetoric  as royalist , , , –,  rumored pension from Cromwell  on scholasticism –, , , –, , – scriptural interpretation of –, , , , – on sectarians ,  and Selden, John –, –, see also Selden, John Seven Philosophical Problems – Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematiques , – and Stubbe, Henry; see Stubbe, Henry as Tacitean –, ,  theology of –,  theory of sovereignty – on Thucydides – on universities , , , , , , – Vitae , , , ,  as apologetical efforts  and Wallis, John –; see also Wallis, John and Ward, Seth –, ; see also Ward, Seth Holden, Henry , , ,  Hollar, Wenceslaus  Honeywood, Robert  Hooker, Richard , , , ,  Hopton, Ralph  Horae Subsecivae –,  humanism Ciceronian  Tacitean ,  Humble Petition and Advice , – Humble Proposals , , ; see also Cromwellian church settlement Hus, Jan  Hussey, James  Huygens, Lodewijck ,  Hyde, Edward, earl of Clarendon  associate of Hobbes , ,  Brief View and Survey of Leviathan , ,  estranged from Hobbes  leader of old royalists , ,  Saint Ignatius  Independents allied with Erastians , –, , ; see also du Moulin, Louis; Goodwin, Thomas; Nye, Philip; Owen, John dominant at Oxford –,  and free conscience 

310 Independents (cont.) ecclesiology of –, , – endorsed by Hobbes; see Hobbes, Thomas interpretations of  linked to Erastianism by Anglicans –, –, – and republicans; see republicanism religious policies of – rise of – and state power –, –,  views of Hobbes  in Westminster Assembly ,  Interdict Crisis – Interregnum; see Commonwealth, Protectorate “Invisible College”; see Gresham College Ireland , –, , , , ,  Ireton, Henry  Isham, Justinian  Islam; see “Mahometanism” James I –, ,  James, Thomas  Jermyn, Henry, earl of St. Albans –,  Jesuits –, –, ,  Jesus College, Cambridge  Jewel, John ,  Johnston, Archibald  Julius Caesar ,  John, King of England  John of Paris  Kennet, White ,  Kirton, Joshua  Langbaine, Gerard  Latimer, Robert  Latitudinarians  accused of Hobbism – Laud, William , ,  and Arminianism – during the Personal Rule  and episcopacy  impeached ,  portrayed in Behemoth – Laudianism  Lawson, George – career – Examination of the Political Part of Mr. Hobbs, his Leviathan –,  Politica Sacra et Civilis – Leighton, Alexander ,  Levellers  Leyburne, George alias Winter Grant , – liberalism contrasted with republicanism  precursors of , 

Index Lightfoot, John , – Lilburne, John  Lipsius, Justus , ,  Livy ,  Locke, John , ,  Lombard, Peter ,  Lollards  London –, – Long Parliament anti-Catholicism  attacks on absolutist theorists  attacks on Laudians , ,  church settlement scheme of  , ,  Erastianism in –, –, – impeachment of the  bishops  and Presbyterians –,  religious factions in  Louvre group –, , , –, , ,  after Restoration  Love, Christopher , , ,  Lüber, Thomas –, , , , , ,  Lucy, William , , ,  Ludlow, Edmund  Luther, Martin  MacDonnell, Randal, marquis of Antrim  Machiavelli, Niccolò , , –, ,  influence during Interregnum , , , , –, , , , , ,  Magdalen Hall, Oxford  “Mahometanism” , , –, ,  Marsilius of Padua – de Martel, Thomas  Marvell, Andrew  Massachusetts ,  Maynwairing, Roger , ,  Melanchthon, Philip  Mercurius Britannicus – Mercurius Politicus , , – Mercurius Pragmaticus  Mersenne, Marin , , –, , ,  Micanzio, Fulgenzio  Mill, J. S.  Milton, John , ,  Minister’s Petition  Molesworth, Robert  Montaigne, Michel de –,  Montagu, Walter –,  More, Henry ,  Morley, George , ,  career and exile ,  critique of Hobbes – Mornay, Phillippe du Plessis – Morton, Thomas 

Index du Moulin, Louis An Appeal to all Nonconformists in England to God  career – Erastianism of – Independency of – linked with Hobbes  Paraenesis ad aedificatores imperii in imperio , , ,  Power of Christian Magistrates in Sacred Things ,  Proposals… Toward the Settling of a Religious… Government – Of the Right of Churches and of the Magistrates Power over Them ,  view of Hobbes –,  du Moulin, Pierre  National Covenant ,  Nedham, Marchamont –,  career – Case of the Commonwealth Stated ,  Case of the Kingdom Stated  defender of Independency – Erastianism of – Independencie no Schism  True State of the Case of the Commonwealth –,  use of Hobbes –, – Neile, Richard –, ,  neo-Stoicism –,  Neville, Henry  Newcastle Propositions  New Model Army , , ,  Nicholas of Cusa  Nicholas, Edward among old royalists  on Blackloist conspiracy – on Cromwell – critic of Louvre group – reports on Hobbes , ,  Nineteen Propositions  Nominated Assemble , ,  Nottinghamshire Petition –,  Nye, Philip –, , –,  Old Royalists , –, , ,  after Restoration – Osborne, Francis –, – Advice to a Son  Politicall Reflections upon the Government of the Turks – Owen, John advisor to Cromwell – at Oxford , , , , – Discourse about Toleration …  early career , – ecclesiology of –, –, , –, 

311

and Hobbes , – Hobbesian influence in his circle – linked to Hobbes , ,  and Louis du Moulin ,  mixed assessment of Leviathan  On Schism , – Two Questions Concerning the Power of the Supreme Magistrate … – Oxford University , , –, ,  under Independents –; see also Owen, John and Wallis, John Parker, Samuel attacks Hobbes and Independents  Patin, Gui  Payne, Robert –, , ,  Petty, William  career  on Hobbes – religious views of – Pierce, Thomas  Pierrepont, Henry, Marquis of Dorchester ,  Plutarch ,  Pocock, J. G. A. ,  Polybius  Pope, Walter  Popes, Roman Catholic Alexander VI  Boniface VIII  Gelasius  Gregory VII  Innocent III  Julius II  Leo III  Sixtus IV  Zachary  Presbyterianism , , –, , , ,  during Interregnum , , , , , , , ,  campaign against Hobbes ,  at Oxford –, , – sidelined after   Protectorate , , –; see also Cromwell, Oliver providentialism , ,  Prynne, William ,  Public Intelligencer  public sphere  Pym, John – Queen’s College, Oxford  Rainolds, John  Rand, William – Rathmines  reason-of-state  Reformation –, 

312 republicanism during Interregnum – historical treatments of – Hobbes’s view of; see Hobbes Hobbesian tendencies , ,  support for Independency , –, –, –,  Restoration  revisionist historiography of English Reformation ,  of English Revolution –, –, ,  Ridgley, Mr.  Robinson [Humphrey] – Roehampton ,  Roman Catholicism ,  in England , ; see also Blackloists, Hobbes on Root and Branch Petition , ,  Ross, Alexander – Leviathan Drawn Out with a Hook  Rota Club ,  Rousseau, Jean-Jacques ,  Royal Society  Royal Supremacy  and Church of England , ,  defended by Independents  and Laud  parliamentary defences of – royalism , , – royalist court in exile , , –; see also old royalists, Louvre group royalist perceptions of Cromwell – Rudyard, Benjamin  Rump Parliament; see Commonwealth Rutherford, Samuel  Sackville, Thomas  Saint Germain; see royalist court in exile Sallust  Sampson, Richard  Sancroft, William , ,  Sanderson, Robert  Saravia, Hadrian  Sarpi, Paolo –,  Savonarola  Savoy Conference  Scarborough, Charles ,  Scargill, Daniel defended by Hobbes  purged as Hobbist – schism –,  Scots , , –, ,  Scotus Duns  sectarians –, –, , –, ,  Sergeant, John , ,  Selden, John , , , ,  acquainted with Hobbes – on civil religion – De Dis Syris 

Index De Synedriis ,  death of  as Erastian , , –,  History of Tithes ,  during Interregnum – Table Talk  Titles of Honor –,  in Westminster Assembly –, –,  separatism , , , – Sheldon, John ,  career ,  correspondence with Robert Payne –,  in old royalist faction  patron of John Eachard  resistance to Cromwell ,  views of Hobbes – Sibthorpe, Robert  Sidney, Algernon  Simpson, Sidrach –,  Skinner, Quentin –, –, , , , – Smith, Richard  Socinianism ,  Solemn League and Covenant , , ,  Sommerville, Johann , n, n, n Sorbière, Samuel , , –, , –,  Spinoza  Starkey, Thomas  Stationers –,  Stationers Company; see Stationers Sterne, Richard  Stillingfleet, Edward Irenicum  Strabo , – Strauss, Leo , ,  Stubbe, Henry early life  as freethinker – and Hobbes –, ,  later correspondence with Hobbes ,  later separatism  at Oxford –, – on Presbyterians ,  as republican – Suárez, Francisco – Tacitus ,  Taylor, Jeremy  Tenison, Thomas critique of Hobbes  Tew Circle ,  tithe  Thorndike, Herbert  career – condemns the Cromwellian church settlement  critique of Hobbes’s De Cive –

Index critique of Hobbes’s Leviathan – defender of Church – Discourse on the Government of the Churches  Discourse on the… Penalties which a Due Reformation Requires – Discourse on the Right of the Church in a Christian State –, – ecclesiology of – Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England –, ,  general religious outlook  hostile to Erastianism – on Independency – influence of –,  Just Weights and Measures  Letter Concerning the Present State of Religion amongst us  Thucydides – Tiberius  Toland, John  Toleration Act , ,  Trenchard, John  Triers; see Cromwellian church settlement Trinity College, Cambridge ,  Tuck, Richard , –, , , , –,  Tyndale, William  university visitations , , , , – Uxbridge Negotiations  Vane, Henry , , , ,  Varro ,  Verney, Ralph  Vilvain, Robert Theoremata Theologica ,  Vossius, Gerardus –, – Vossius, Isaac  Waldo, Peter  Walker, Clement  Waller, Edmund , , – Wallis, John , ,  critic of Hobbes –,  Due Correction for Mr. Hobbes – Elenchus Geometriae Hobbianae  Hobbiani Puncti Dispunctio  Mens Sobria – Presbyterianism of ,  Restoration attack on Hobbes 

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Walton, Brian ,  Ward, Seth , , ,  In Thomae Hobbi Philosophiam Exercitatio  Philosophicall Essay ,  Restoration attacks on Hobbes  Vindiciae Academiarum – wars of religion , , , , , , ,  French , , – Watson, Leonard ,  Webster, John  Wentworth, Thomas  Westminster Assembly of Divines convened  and Cromwell – debates of –, –, ,  Hobbes’s view of  Westminster School ,  Westrow, Thomas  White, Thomas, alias Blacklo conspiracy of  , – during Interregnum , –, , ,  Ground of Obedience and Government  leader of Blackloists – negotiations of   Whitehall Debates  Whitelocke, Bulstrode ,  Wildman, John  Wilkins, John ,  Wilkinson, John  William I, the Conqueror  William of Ockham  Williams, Roger  Winstad  Winter, John –,  Wood, Anthony ,  Worchester ,  Worden, Blair ,  Worsley, Benjamin – Worthington, John  Wren, Matthew , ,  Wren, Matthew (the elder)  Wycliffe, John –, ,  York House Conference  Zwingli, Ulrich –