Baiting the Bear The Anglican attack upon Hobbes in the later 1660s

Baiting the Bear: The Anglican attack upon Hobbes in the later 1660sAbstract: During the later 1660s Thomas Hobbes clearly believed that he was being targeted by dangerous enemies but to

Baiting the Bear: The Anglican attack upon Hobbes in the later 1660s

Abstract: During the later 1660s Thomas Hobbes clearly believed that he was being targeted

by dangerous enemies but to date little evidence has been brought to substantiate Hobbes’sclaims This paper considers evidence suggesting that Hobbes was in fact in danger fromclerical and lay enemies who regarded the elderly thinker as a dangerous ideological threat tochurch and state What they did, and how Hobbes responded to their actions, helps us tounderstand the philosopher’s place in the politics of the period, but also to explain the timing,nature and purpose of some of his most important later writings

Thomas Hobbes was 80 in 1668, but his age proved to be no bar to his activity as aphilosopher The years between 1667 and 1671 witnessed a remarkable burst of activity fromEngland’s most notorious thinker 1668 saw the publication of the Latin edition of Hobbes’s

works, complete with a significantly revised edition of Leviathan.1 In addition Hobbes also

composed a series of entirely new works: Behemoth, a dialogue account of the civil wars2, the

1 Thomas Hobbes, Opera philosophica, quae latine scripsit, omnia (2 vols Amsterdam, 1668) According to

Schuhmann, this work appeared towards the end of 1668 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed G.A.J Rogers and K Schuhmann (2 vols London, 2003), vol I, 241; K Schuhmann, Hobbes, une Chronique (Paris: Vrin 1998), p

200.

2 Paul Seaward sets out convincing evidence to suggest that work on the book may have begun before July 1666,

but did not finish until sometime between April 1667 and April 1669 in what may have been a complex

composition process T Hobbes, Behemoth, ed P Seaward (Oxford, 2010), pp 6-10 Additional evidence below

confirms this general picture, while suggesting that the work was completed some time after November 1667 at the earliest.

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Dialogue of the Common Laws of England 3, a manuscript concerning heresy law4, the

Historical Narration Concerning Heresy 5 , his extensive Answer to John Bramhall’s The Catching of Leviathan, together with the philosopher’s verse history of the church, the Historia Ecclesiastica 6, all within the space of four years This kind of output was unusual forHobbes, perhaps indeed for any British philosopher before the advent of the ResearchAssessment Exercise

3 This work seems to have been completed after 1668, see Alan Cromarties discussion in Thomas Hobbes,

Writings on Common Law and Hereditary Right, ed A Cromartie and Q Skinner (Oxford, 2005) , xvi ff See

also Milton’s comments in ‘Hobbes, Heresy and Lord Arlington’, History of Political Thought 14 4 (1993), pp

501-46 at p 543-4 The evidence below suggests that the work was certainly completed after April 1668.

4 Samuel Mintz initially dated this piece to 1673 and Robert Willman to some time between 1661-4 See Mintz,

‘Hobbes on the Law of Heresy: A New Manuscript’, Journal of the History of Ideas 29 3 (1968), pp 409-14; R Willman, ‘ Hobbes on the Law of Heresy’, Journal of the History of Ideas 31 (1970), pp 607-13 Philip Milton

suggests some time between October 1666 and early 1668 Milton considers the evidence in ‘Hobbes, heresy and Lord Arlington’, pp.544-5 Evidence presented below suggests that it was written in late March or early April, 1668.

5 Milton suggests that the Historical Narration was written in or about May 1668, and that An Answer to Bishop

Bramhall was completed by this time (the last page of the latter introduces the former) The evidence presented

in this paper points to a composition period for both works between March and June 1668 Milton, ‘Hobbes, Heresy and Lord Arlington’, p 542 That both were certainly in existence by the end of June 1668, is suggested

by Hobbes’s correspondence with Joseph Williamson; Hobbes, The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed N

Malcolm (2 vols Oxford, 1994), vol II, 699.

6 Although there is some evidence suggesting that sections of the Historia Ecclesiastica existed as early as 1659,

Hobbes’s prose autobiography suggests that two thousand verses were written in 1668 There is mention of it in James Wheldon’s account book at Chatsworth indicating that a manuscript was in existence in 1671 Milton,

‘Hobbes, Heresy and Lord Arlington’, p 545 Patricia Springborg’s exhaustive treatment of the evidence points

to a complex history for the work but does not substantially change the dating offered by Milton T Hobbes,

Historia Ecclesiastica, ed P Springborg, P Stablein and P Wilson (Paris, 2008), pp 82-100.

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Recent work on some of these texts has given us a much clearer sense of what Hobbeswas trying to achieve in developing his ideas in the way that he did For example, Paul

Seaward’s work on Behemoth has highlighted the powerful anti-Anglican arguments in that text, while Alan Cromartie has uncovered the way that the argument of the Dialogue of the Common Laws is animated by Hobbes’s concerns about heresy proceedings against him.7 Ithas become increasingly clear that Hobbes believed himself to be in danger from vengefulAnglicans (amongst others) during this period, and this certainly motivated a good portion ofhis writing during the late 1660s However, for all that Hobbes thought himself to be thetarget of dangerous enemies, research into his fears has drawn something of a blank Aside

from Leviathan being mentioned briefly in the House of Commons in 1666, no-one has found

any substantial evidence that Hobbes himself was ever in any real danger Philip Milton’s

7 See Paul Seaward’s recent edition of Behemoth, and Alan Cromartie’s comments in the introduction to the

Dialogue…of the Common Laws in Writings on Common Law and Hereditary Right, ed A Cromartie and Q.

Skinner (Oxford, 2005), especially pp xlv-liii The thought that Hobbes was driven to write for what were primarily defensive reasons was originally explored by Richard Tuck, who used that thought as the basis for his claim that Hobbes was writing in support of religious toleration For Richard Tuck’s argument, see particularly

the argument developed in ‘Hobbes and Locke on Toleration’ in M Dietz, ed., Thomas Hobbes and Political

Theory (Kansas, 1990), pp 153-71, and his comments in Philosophy and Government (Cambridge, 1993), pp.

335-345 Tuck’s thesis is one of the targets of Milton’s ‘Hobbes, heresy and Lord Arlington’ Other commentators have also been sceptical about Tuck’s broader claims that Hobbes was promoting religious toleration during this period, for a recent examples see Justin Champion’s remarks in ‘An Historical Narration Concerning Heresie: Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Barlow and the Restoration debate over ‘heresy’ in D

Loewenstein and J Marshall, eds., Heresy, literature and politics in early modern English Culture (Cambridge,

2006), p 247 For a recent piece in support of Tuck’s thesis see E Curley, ‘Hobbes and the Cause of Religious

Toleration’, in P Springborg, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan (Cambridge, 2007), pp.

309-336.

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authoritative discussion of the evidence leaves one with the feeling that Hobbes’s anxietieswere greatly exaggerated, and perhaps not a little paranoid.8

It is true that Hobbes was sometimes inclined towards forms of paranoia Perhapsinevitably for someone who detected priestcraft in everything from scientific method to thewriting of Homeric epic, it was easy to see dangerous enemies everywhere But just becauseHobbes could be a little paranoid now and then, this did not mean that his enemies, who werenumerous and sometimes highly organised, were not out to get him And in fact I wouldargue that this was the case in the later 1660s In what follows I consider evidence thatsuggests that Hobbes was in fact targeted by particular clerical and lay enemies during thisperiod, in a series of aggressive actions that were designed to intimidate the philosopher, toruin his reputation, to destroy his influence and ultimately to threaten his life In the turbulentpolitics of the time, Hobbes’s enemies clearly believed that he did constitute an increasinglydangerous ideological threat and that something had to be done to neutralize him What theydid, and how Hobbes responded to their actions, would shape the character of his work indistinctive ways Uncovering this Anglican attack upon Hobbes not only helps us to see thatHobbes’s fears may not have been exaggerated, but also to understand the timing, nature andpurpose of some of his most important later writings

Hobbes’s project in the later 1660s

The Restoration had been a profoundly ambiguous event for Hobbes Although he managed

to patch up his relationship with Charles II and was welcome at court9, the regime-change of

8 See Milton, ‘Hobbes, heresy and Lord Arlington’, where various claims about proceedings against Hobbes are

systematically debunked.

9 Hobbes was reconciled to Charles a few days after his return from exile, meeting him on the Strand (where

Hobbes resided at the Devonshire residence of Little Salisbury House) and subsequently attending him at a

sitting in Samuel Cooper’s Covent Garden studio Aubrey, Brief Lives, i.340 Charles apparently later purchased

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1660 brought a large number of his personal enemies into positions of power In particular,the return of the royalist exiles meant that he had to face many of the individuals who had

taken the lead in condemning Leviathan’s doctrines, and who had been instrumental in having

him expelled from the court in exile in France in 1651

Arguably the most serious danger to Hobbes came from Edward Hyde, who returned

to England as the Earl of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor and one of the most powerful men inthe country Hyde had been concerned about Hobbes and his influence since he had read the

manuscript of The Elements of Law in 1640, a concern that only deepened with his reading of

De cive in the mid 1640s.10 Hyde came to believe that Hobbes’s abstract science ofabsolutism and self-preservation had the effect of unravelling the historically conditionedconstitutional fabric that underpinned political stability in the English state Paradoxically,and to an extent perhaps not previously recognised, Hyde shared with Hobbes many basicpolitical beliefs about the importance of sovereignty and the role of the church but he waspersistently anxious about the practical political effects of Hobbesian language, believing thatthe rhetoric of unrestricted sovereignty, conditional obedience and erastianism would do more

in practice to destroy stability than foster it.11

This anxiety motivated an almost obsessive concern about the spread of Hobbismwithin the court in exile during the 1640s as Hyde worried that Hobbesian values were

Cooper’s portrait of Hobbes, which was kept in his closet at Whitehall Aubrey, Brief Lives (Oxford, 1898), i

338, a story corroborated by Samuel Sorbière in his Relation d’Un Voyage en Angleterre (Paris, 1664), p 97 Hobbes received an irregularly paid pension of about £100 from the King Hobbes, Correspondence, ii 819

Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon sourly noted that ‘After the King’s return he came frequently to Court,

where he had too many disciples.’ Clarendon, Brief View and Survey (Oxford, 1676), p 9.

10 For Hyde’s response to Hobbes during this period see J Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the

Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640-1700 (Cambridge, 2007), pp 21-4; 50-4

11 For recent discussion of Hyde’s relationship with Hobbes, see J Parkin ‘Clarendon against Hobbes?’ ,

unpublished paper, given to the conference Clarendon 1609-1674, March 2009.

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destroying the royalist cause from within Effectively sidelined during the later 1640s, one ofHyde’s first acts when the Old Royalists returned to favour in 1651 was to use hisconsiderable influence to have Hobbes barred from the Court, a move that effectively putHobbes’s life at risk and which caused him to flee to England Hobbes’s enforced flight alsoconveniently confirmed the Old Royalists’ view of Hobbes as a slippery traitor to the royalcause, ruining his reputation amongst royalists.12 But Hyde didn’t stop there, and even fromacross the channel he sponsored and encouraged anti-Hobbesian work, anxious to forestallthe unchecked Hobbesian corruption that he believed to be spreading in InterregnumEngland, and particularly in the universities.13 In his Brief View and Survey of Leviathan,

composed towards the end of the 1660s, Clarendon suggested that his attitude towardsHobbes had become more conciliatory after the Restoration, but it is unsurprising that even

on Clarendon’s account, Hobbes only visited him once, knowing full well that Hyde detested

the doctrine that Hobbes had put forward in Leviathan, and which he still defended.14

But Clarendon was far from being Hobbes’s only problem The re-establishment ofthe Episcopalian church meant that he also faced a bishop’s bench containing a number ofpersistent enemies Several had written against Hobbes and his ideas during the previous twodecades John Bramhall, who was one of the first of Hobbes’s critics to accuse him of atheism

in the 1640s, returned to London in 1660 to become Archbishop of Armagh Seth Ward,Hobbes’s antagonist since 1652 soon became Bishop of Exeter (1662) and subsequently

12 See Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, pp 103-7.

13 Hyde made his motives clear in correspondence with John Barwick towards the end of the decade, itself part

of an attempt to encourage Matthew Wren to write against Hobbes P Barwick, The Life of the Reverend John

Barwick DD (1724), pp 421-2, 430-1 It is possible that he had some involvement in the production of

Bramhall’s Catching of Leviathan (1658), see Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, p 191 Hyde also alludes to the Hobbism of Cromwellian security measures in Anon., A letter from a true and lawfull member of Parliament

(1656), pp 45-6, 65

14 Clarendon, Brief View and Survey, p 9.

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Salisbury (1667) William Lucy, whose dogged commentary on successive chapters of

Leviathan continued into the 1660s, became Bishop of St David’s in 1660.15 Other members

of the Anglican senior hierarchy may well have harboured private enmities against Hobbes.16

Perhaps surprisingly, given the numbers and eminence of Hobbes’s enemies, thephilosopher appears to have been left alone in the immediate aftermath of the Restoration, anoutcome that perhaps underlines the importance of his reconciliation with the King and theefficacy of the Act of Oblivion and Indemnity However it was typical of Hobbes that therelative protection and patronage that he enjoyed emboldened him to promote hisphilosophical agenda aggressively, at least in terms of his scientific programme In the

15 For Bramhall’s career, and his dispute with Hobbes see Nicholas Jackson, Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics

of Liberty and Necessity (Cambridge, 2007) See also Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, especially pp 37-50, 191-7.

For Hobbes’s difficult relationship with Ward see Parkin, Taming, pp 76, 118-19, 147-50, 164-70 For Lucy, see Parkin, Taming, 164, n 123, pp 233-7.

16 Tim Raylor’s recent work on the clerical campaign to discountenance Hobbes in 1651 suggests that we might

include under this heading some of the clerical associates of Clarendon in exile in France, now key players in the restored church, specifically John Earle, successively Bishop of Worcester (1662) and Salisbury (1663), John Cosin, Bishop of Durham (1660) and George Morley, Bishop of Worcester (1660) and Winchester (1662)

See Raylor, ‘The Anglican attack on Hobbes in Paris 1651’, The Historical Journal 53 (2010), pp 153-164

Raylor has hinted that Earle and Cosin in particular were directly connected with the attack on Hobbes in 1651 All three men knew Hobbes in the 1640s and 50s: Morley from Great Tew, Earle as a fellow-tutor of the future

Charles II and Cosin ministered to Hobbes when he was very ill in 1647 T Hobbes, ed W Molesworth, The

English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (London, 1839-45), 11 vols (henceforth EW) vii, pp 4-6

There is no unequivocal evidence that Earle was personally hostile to Hobbes Morley’s attitude during the earlier period is hard to gauge, but had hardened by the 1670s when he attacked Hobbes in a letter

recommending Clarendon’s Brief View and Survey Cosin was critical of De cive, but enough of a friend of Hobbes to receive a large-paper copy of Leviathan (held in the Palace Green Library in Durham) However, as

we shall see it is clear that he was not comfortable with many of Hobbes’s views The evidence below suggests that this view may also have hardened by the 1660s, when he appears to have played a key role in threatening moves against Hobbes.

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summer of 1660 he mounted attacks upon the mathematics of his Presbyterian opponent JohnWallis, and just twelve months later launched a campaign to get his distinctive approach tonatural philosophy onto the agenda of the newly founded Royal Society.17

It was probably not a coincidence that not long afterwards potentially dangerousattacks on Hobbes were mounted from the pulpit by Seth Ward, the leading Episcopalianscientist His sermon of November 5 1661 very much set the tone for the kind of critique thatwould resurface to dog Hobbes throughout the decade Ward condemned certain ‘Writers of

Politicks’ who had claimed that Christianity might be subversive, and whose remedy

involved enervating the principles of all religion.18 Ward mentioned specifically that they didthis by removing the ‘Doctrine of Good and Evil, the Immortality of the Soul, the Rewardsand Punishments of the world to come; that so Religion may appear wholly to derive fromPolicy.’19 Ward was clearly referring to Hobbes and went on to associate his position with the

thoughts that ‘Might is Right’, that everything is ‘just or unjust ; good, or evil according to the pleasure of the prevailing Force, whom we are to obey till a stronger then he cometh, or

we be able to go thorough with resistance.’20 The thought that Hobbes enervated religion and

subscribed to seditious de factoism wasn’t new, but the changed context made it more

dangerous The accusations, together with references to Hobbes’s atheism, were reiterated byWallis in early 1662 as part of the debate over Hobbes’s science, and apparently as a result ofthis increased pressure Hobbes took the decision to do something about it He produced two

works defending his conduct and his views The first, in published in March 1662, was An Apology for himself and his writings, which prefaced the Problemata Physica, a contribution

17 For the dynamics of this campaign, see particularly D Jesseph, Squaring the circle (Chicago, 1999), ch 6.

18 Seth Ward, Against the resistance of lawful powers (London, 1661).

19 Ibid., pp 2-3.

20 Ibid., p 35.

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to the scientific debate.21 In the Apology Hobbes reacted to the revived accusations of

religious heterodoxy, and offered a brief defence against his enemies in the Church of

England He reminded the King that whatever had been said in Leviathan was covered by the

Act of Oblivion and Indemnity, that he did not maintain its unusual theology, that it containednothing against episcopacy, that no ‘Episcopal-man’ could speak of him as an atheist, that hehad only written against Presbyterians who had made use of ‘the pretence of ChristsKingdom’ and that he showed no evidence of atheism in his life As for his religion, Hobbescalled upon no less a luminary than the Bishop of Durham, John Cosin, to testify to hisorthodoxy during his illness in France in 1647 and finished with an apology for having foughtagainst the King’s enemies with what turned out to be a double-edged sword.22

Having fended off his Episcopalian critics, a few months later Hobbes turned his fire

upon the politically compromised Wallis in his Mr Hobbes considered in his loyalty, religion, reputation, and manners Here Hobbes sought to establish his credentials as a loyal royalist

whose political theory had been aimed at subversive Presbyterians like Wallis In typicallyrobust fashion Hobbes went on to defend himself from the charge of atheism, claiming thathis materialist theology could be sourced in Tertullian He also endorsed an Episcopal churchorder as ‘the most commodious that a Christian King can use for the governing of Christ’sFlock’ and claimed to have been surprised by the uncharitable treatment that he had received.Bishops who held their authority from the King, Hobbes argued, had no cause to be angrywith him Only those who believed that they held their power by divine right were the onesdispleased with him This wasn’t a remark that was likely to endear him to many of the

21 The Apology was read out at the Royal Society’s meeting on 19 March by Hobbes’s friend and admirer Walter

Charleton Birch, History of the Royal Society of London (London, 1756), vol I, p 78.

22 The English translation can be found in Seven Philosophical Problems (London, 1682), sigs A2v-A3v

(English Works vii 4-6) The text is also reproduced in Milton, ‘Hobbes, heresy and Lord Arlington’, pp 506-7.

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restored bishops, many of whom, as Jeffrey Collins has suggested, were advocates of a

peculiarly extreme jure divino doctrine of episcopacy.23

Whether Hobbes was at this stage the subject of attention more substantial thanmalicious talk is not clear Wallis certainly did not respond to Hobbes, and the next few yearswere relatively quiet in terms of critical activity The only dedicated critique to be published

in 1663 was William Lucy’s rambling treatment of Leviathan (composed during the 1650s),

and this work showed no signs that it presaged a legal challenge to Hobbes, even, forexample, passing up obvious chances to denounce Hobbes as an atheist or a Socinian.24

Bramhall’s political critique of Hobbes as a de facto theorist had a walk-on part in a pamphlet

by William Assheton in the same year25, but in general terms the period 1663-5 is unusuallyquiet in terms of anti-Hobbesian polemic, and what little there was seems to have servedpurposes other than harassing the aged philosopher Partly we can explain this apparentsuspension of overt hostility by the fact that Hobbes published nothing during this period, butthis silence in itself was the result of a deliberate policy towards Hobbes and his work If theencounters of the early 60s had shown anything, they had shown that it would be extremelydifficult and problematic to begin formal proceedings against Hobbes and his ideas Hisopponents had learned in the 1650s that it was going to be difficult to make the charges ofatheism stick.26 Hobbes could evade them philosophically and also legally, by invoking theAct of Oblivion and Indemnity Even if Hobbes was brought to trial, he would, on the basis ofhis own principles, recant any of his beliefs in submission to a higher authority The whole

23 J Collins, ‘The Restoration Bishops and the royal supremacy’, Church History 58 3 (1999), pp 549-80.

24 See Parkin, Taming, pp 233-6.

25 W Assheton, Evangelium armatum (London, 1663), pp 58-9.

26 Both Bramhall and Ward, for example, had been forced to admit that Hobbes couldn’t be labelled as a

straightforward atheist Bramhall, Castigations of Mr Hobbes (1657), p 418-19; Ward, Exercitatio Epistolica

(1656), p 340.

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exercise would only provide Hobbes with the publicity that he appeared to be seeking.27 Thealternative seems to have been to contain the problem with censorship and the pre-publicationlicensing measures that came into effect in the summer of 1662 appear to have been deployed

to this end.28 The fact that the production of Hobbes’s Latin works was entrusted to the Dutchpublisher Blaeu in1663 has been taken as evidence to show that a ban covering Hobbes workwas already operating by that date.29

But Hobbes clearly had no intention of simply surrendering to the censorship regime

that now caged him The Opera philosophica offers an interesting example of Hobbes’s

determination to promote his ideas to his countrymen Although the primary audience for theLatin edition might be taken to be continental, there is no evidence to suppose that Hobbeswasn’t, and some evidence to suggest that he was, thinking about the importation anddistribution of this text in England.30

But an even better way of outflanking the censorship regime was for Hobbes to alignhimself with patrons who might be sympathetic to his views and prepared to license hisworks As Clarendon would later note, Hobbes was cultivating disciples at Court It is notclear when Hobbes first became associated with Henry Bennet Bennet had served as theDuke of York’s secretary in exile and it is highly likely that Hobbes had become acquaintedwith him then Gossip from the time suggested that the Duke’s court was a hotbed ofHobbism.31 We don’t know whether Bennet was an early convert, but in 1661 he was

27 See Clarendon’s comments in A brief view and survey, p 189.

28 Milton, ‘Hobbes, heresy and Lord Arlington’, pp 533-5

29 C Schoeneveld, Intertraffic of the Mind in Seventeenth Century Anglo-Dutch Translation (Leiden, 1983), p

43

30 See below for discussion of this evidence.

31 See Edward Nicholas’s comments to Hyde, where he condemns Hobbes as that ‘father of Atheists, who, it is

said, hath rendered all the Queen’s court, and very many of the Duke of York’s family Atheists.’ Nicholas to Hyde, 11 January 1652, BL MS Birch 4180, f 593 Before the autumn of 1651 Bennet was also associated with

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prepared to help the philosopher to present one of his geometrical demonstrations to theKing.32 The following year Bennet replaced the Clarendonian Edward Nicholas as Secretary

of State, and became Baron Arlington in March 1665 Hobbes appears to have increasinglysought out the Secretary’s patronage in the middle years of the decade as Bennet’s powergrew

The first work to indicate this was a mathematical treatise that did make it onto the

bookshelves, De principiis et ratiocinatione geometrarum, dedicated to Arlington.33 It is

possible that he began the composition of the book later to be known as Behemoth around this

time, a work that in due course would also be dedicated to Arlington.34 Put together, thispattern of activity suggests that by 1666 Hobbes was associating himself with the anti-Clarendonian court faction perhaps with the thought that this connection might providecongenial patronage for a major reassertion of his system of ideas With politics shiftingduring the period, it seems that Hobbes had decided that there might be a window ofopportunity for himself and his projects It isn’t clear how much Hobbes’s opponents knew ofthis activity or Hobbes’s plans35, but it is clear that from the autumn of 1666 he would start tocome under new and sustained attack from them

the Queen’s Court and Henry Jermyn in particular, another important associate and perhaps sometime patron of

Hobbes (ODNB)

32 Huygens, Oeuvres Completes (The Hague, 1888-1944), iii 369-70.

33 The dedication of the book referred to Arlington as ‘the greatest solace of my old age’ OL, iv.387, following

Milton’s translation in ‘Hobbes, heresy and Lord Arlington, pp 525-6.

34 In a lost letter dating to July 1666, Hobbes had mentioned to Francois Du Verdus a work that could plausibly

be identified with Behemoth For discussion see Karl Shuhmann, ‘Thomas Hobbes, Oeuvres’ British Journal for

the History of Philosophy 14 (1996), pp 153-64, at p 156 See also Paul Seaward’s comments in Behemoth, pp

6-10.

35 In 1670 Clarendon commented on Hobbes’s ‘obstinacy and perversness’ in upholding his ideas, and his

determination to have them published and ‘confirm’d by autority’ Clarendon, Brief View and Survey, p 310.

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The Parliamentary Attack

The soul-searching that occurred in the wake of the Fire of London proved to be the firstmajor opportunity for Hobbes’s enemies to put Hobbes and his ideas back in their properplace as objects of opprobrium The events of September 1666 allowed the London clergy tonarrate the recent disasters in providential terms as the punishments for national apostasy andcreated political opportunities to transform that narrative into concrete action against thesupposed agents of corruption The two processes can be seen at work in the Parliamentarysession which began in the autumn of 1666, when carefully telegraphed moral messagesappear to have prepared the way for new anti-atheism legislation to be introduced in theCommons On October 3rd 1666 the Commons heard sermons delivered by William Outram,Rector of St Margaret’s, Westminster and John Dolben, Dean of Westminster Their contents(which do not survive) were noted by the Parliamentary diarist John Milward Outram’ssermon established that civil and foreign war, poverty, plague, pestilence and fire werejudgements for sin, and called for ‘true repentance and amendment of our lives’.36 Dolben, aclose ally of Archbishop Sheldon, went further on the same theme, suggesting that if suitablerepentence were not forthcoming God’s response might be worse.37 Dolben’s sermon hasbeen credited with inspiring the events of the following day, when the Commons thanked thepreachers and established a committee to look into the existing laws against ‘Atheism,Profaneness, Debauchery, and Swearing’ to examine whether they were defective orneglected.38 The committee was broadly representative but dominated by religiousconservatives on all sides39; its conclusion was clearly that the existing measures were

36 John Milward, The Diary of John Milward, ed Caroline Robbins (Cambridge, 1938), p 13.

37 Ibid.

38 ODNB, John Dolben House of Commons Journal(henceforth CJ) 8 (1802): 4 October 1666, pp 630-631.

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inadequate and by the 9th the members had speedily drafted a Bill which received its firstreading.40 The Bill proposed to make it an offence for

Any person who shall by word, writing or printing deride or deny, scoff at or dispute against the Essence, Persons, or Attributes of God the Father, Son or Holy Ghost given unto them in the Sacred Scriptures, or the Omnipotency, Wisdom, Justice, Mercy, Goodness, or Providence of God in the Creation, Redemption or Governance of the World, or denys the Divine Authority of any of the bookes of Canonical Scripture contained

in the Old and New Testament, received and established in the Church of England…’41

The preamble undoubtedly raised general issues about the nature of God and scriptureover which Hobbes had been criticised at length by his opponents since the early 1650s.However, those same controversies had revealed that Hobbes would be hard to prosecute onthese terms, since he did not deny or dispute against any of the points mentioned, and itwould be at best difficult to prove that what he had written on those topics, however strange,constituted derision or scoffing, a point that would not go unnoted in subsequent discussion

The following day, the 10th October, two more sermons were delivered to theCommons at St Margaret’s, one of them, by Edward Stillingfleet, rector of St Andrew’sHolborn, referring to the Parliamentary response to the moral crisis.42 It was at this point that

39 P Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the reconstruction of the old regime, 1661-1667 (Cambridge, 1988),

p 256.

40 CJ 8: 9 October 1666, pp 632-633.

41 HLRO Parchment Coll HL 31 January 1667

42 On the 10 th Seth Ward also preached a sermon to the House of Lords where his emphasis on the certainty of

the judgement to come was given a subtly anti-Hobbesian spin harking back to his 1661 sermon: ‘This is no

Politick invention found out to fright thee from thy pleasures, this is no Engine of State devised to keep you in a subordination to your Brethren; this is no vain Thunder or foolish fire, to affright you into a blind obedience,

but it is the Tenor of the Scripture of the voyce of God.’ Ward, A SERMON Preached before the PEERS, IN THE Abby-Church at Westminster (1666), p 3.

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the problem of Hobbes starts to emerge as a distinctive issue Stillingfleet, a rising staramongst the London clergy, had actually been accused of Hobbism earlier in the decade, but

in the later 1660s would position himself as an active public opponent of Hobbes and hisideas.43 Stillingfleet’s sermon elaborated upon the themes established by Outram and Dolben,but towards the end Stillingfleet turned his attention to epicurean immorality (in itself atheme increasingly associated with Hobbism) as a cause of concern, remarking that ‘the

houses of great men in too many places are so near being publick schools of debauchery, rather than of piety and vertue, where men shall not want instructers to teach them to forget both God and themselves.’44 That Hobbes lived under the protection of the Earl of Devonshiremay not have been a point lost on some of those in the audience Intriguingly, Stillingfleetcontinued with a critical glance towards the proposed legislation Nothing, he argued, wouldtend more to the honour and advantage of the nation than the curbing of such excesses, but he

went on to say that ‘I do not mean so much by making new Laws, (for those generally do but

exercise peoples Wits by finding out new evasions) but by executing old ones’ Stillingfleetwas evidently sceptical about the attempt to legislate anew, undoubtedly aware of thedifficulties of making new legislation effective enough to capture slippery atheists

On the 16th the Bill received its second reading, and this time was referred to a muchlarger and more diverse committee, scheduled to meet the following day.45 This committee

43 Stillingfleet would preach against the Hobbesian views defended by the Cambridge Hobbist Daniel Scargill,

in March 1669 Stillingfleet, Fifty Sermons (1699), p 138 He would also write to the University demanding

action against Scargill See the comments in Scargill’s letters to his tutor Thomas Tenison, in BL MS Add

38693, ff 127-32.

44 Edward Stillingfleet, A sermon preached before the honourable House of Commons at St Margarets

Westminster, Octob 10, 1666 being the fast-day appointed for the late dreadfull fire in the city of London

(London, 1666), p 25.

45 CJ 8: 16 October 1666, p 636 The Bill was committed to ‘to Mr Pryn, Sir Robert Atkins, Serjeant Mainard,

Mr Solicitor General, Sir Edw Masters, Sir Charles Harbord, Mr Whorwood, Sir Thom Gower, Mr

15

was tasked with examination of the existing laws with a view to repealing what neededrepealing and reducing all of the extant legislation into one law, alongside a range ofpenalties Milward, who was a member, noted that the committee was required to define keyterms such as atheism, blasphemy, oaths and swearing46, and that to aid in this process it was

to consult with Convocation, or some divines appointed for the purpose The Committee wasscheduled to meet on the afternoon of the 17th We don’t know in detail what happened thefollowing day (Milward was ill overnight, and only found out afterwards) but there wasclearly further discussion of the issue in the House on the morning of the 17th, in which

Hobbes and Leviathan were specifically named as matters of concern to the Committee.47 Theofficial record noted that the committee was further empowered ‘to receive Informationtouching such Books as tend to Atheism, Blasphemy or Profaneness, or against the Essence

or Attributes of God; and in particular, the Book published in the Name of one White; and theBook of Mr Hobbs, called The Leviathan’.48 What Milward heard later in the day suggestedthat more radical measures were actually being contemplated, he was informed ‘that it wasmoved in the House that certain atheistical books should be burned, among which Mr

Hobbes Leviathan was one.’49

Hungerford, Mr Millward, Sir Wm Lewis, Lord Richardson, Sir Edm Pearse, Mr Crooke, Sir Thom Dolman, Colonel Legg, Sir Robert Holt, Sir Edm Wallpoole, Sir Thom Clifford, Sir Thom Allen, Mr Coleman, Sir Lanc Lake, Colonel Birch, Sir Phill Musgrave, Sir John Duncombe, Colonel Reames, Sir Edm Poole, Sir Wm Fleetwood, Mr Dowdeswell, Mr Hardresse, Sir Wm Gawdy, Sir John Holland, Mr Devereux, Mr Sandys, Colonel Phillips, Mr Daniell, Sir Wm Lowther, Sir John Heath, Sir John Goodrick, Mr Crouch, and all the Gentlemen of the House that are of the Long Robe: And all the Members of this House that shall come, are to have Voices.’

46 Milward, Diary, p 25.

47 CJ 8: 17 October 1666, pp 636-637.

48 Ibid White was the Blackloist Thomas White.

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Although the Parliamentary comments are not sourced to particular individuals, theyare perhaps deserving of closer inspection The discussion on the morning the 17th effectivelypersonalised the agenda of the committee in a way that its existing brief had not; someonehad made the judgement that however the legislation was to proceed, it needed to focus more

specifically upon Hobbes and White The idea that Leviathan should be burned was not new.

Richard Baxter had called upon Parliament to burn Hobbes’s book in 1655.50 Perhaps more

relevantly Clarendon later gave reasons to suppose that he did think that Leviathan should

have been burnt during this period51 so it is likely that Milward’s rumour had some basis infact; such a call could plausibly have come from Presbyterians or Hyde’s Episcopalian allies

in the Commons that morning

But another interesting hint about the intellectual source of the discussion aboutHobbes comes from the way that he was paired with the Blackloist Thomas White Thegeneral association of Hobbes and White was not particularly new in that both had been

condemned for their shared political views on several occasions.52 However, the 1666 attack

49 Milward, Diary, p 25 Reports of the incident reached Anthony Wood in Oxford a few days later, who made a

note in his diary that Parliament had ‘censured and condemned Mr Hobbs his Leviathan and Thomas White his book against purgatory holding that torment commeth after this life – both savouring much of Atheisme.’ Wood ,

Life and Times, II, p 91.

50 Richard Baxter, Humble advice: or The heads of those things which were offered to many Honourable

Members of Parliament (London, 1655), p 7.

51 Clarendon, Brief View and Survey, p 188-9 Clarendon thought that Hobbes and his influence only became a

serious problem because he was not subjected to this sort of condemnation Clarendon’s comments suggest that

he thought that the book was a suitable candidate for burning, and the passage leaves one with the unavoidable sense that by 1670 he felt that this sort of shot across the bows, rather than the more lenient censorship regime, should have been deployed against Hobbes.

52 The contractarianism of the two writers had been assaulted together in Roger Coke’s Justice Vindicated

(London, 1660)

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focused upon their theology Anthony Wood’s account of the incident identified White’s book as The Middle State of Souls (1659), a work primarily about purgatory in which White

argued that torments suffered by disembodied souls could be nothing to do with the corporalpunishments inflicted by demons or flames, but rather arose from the inner conflict between asoul’s base desires and a yearning to attain the beatific vision of God.53 White’srationalisation of the nature of posthumous punishment had offended just about everyone

Leviathan also contained an equally heterodox rationalisation of the rewards and punishments

of the afterlife Hobbes’s treatment of this theme in Leviathan was built around his strenuous

attempts to make political and materialist sense of scriptural discussions of heaven and hell.Heaven, for Hobbes, became a place on earth subject to the rule of Christ Hell was alsosituated on earth, and the damned seemed to enjoy an earthly existence before they werefinally annihilated.54

Not a few commentators had been suspicious of Hobbes’s argument here In the year

of Leviathan’s publication, Henry Hammond referred to Hobbes’s theology as ‘a farrago of

all the maddest divinity that ever was read’, accusing him of having destroyed ‘Trinity,

Heaven and Hell’ Hammond returned to this theme in an attack on Leviathan in 1652, where

he singled out the same doctrines.55 The same year Presbyterian booksellers listed Hobbes

53 This was a translation of White’s De medio animarum statu (Paris, 1653).

54 Hobbes’s peculiar scriptural literalism was very strikingly deployed here: If the damned were burnt in a fire, their punishment could not be eternal, but Hobbes chose to make sense of the scriptural idea of eternal

punishment by postulating that after the resurrection the wicked would fuel the fires of hell eternally by

procreating perpetually just as they did before Hobbes, Leviathan, ed E Curley (1994), ch 38.

55 Hammond, A letter of resolution to six quaeres (London, 1653), p 384 Leviathan, argued Hammond, offered

‘a new Trinity, not of persons, but personators, a new Heaven, and Hell, both upon this Earth of ours, the

Heaven consisting of single persons, that are aeternal in their own persons, the Hell of married men, that by the advantage of getting children, are, though their persons be annihilated, aeternized by their successive Posterity,

and a whole scheme of Phaenomena, bearing sutable proportion with these Principles).

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doctrine about posthumous punishment as one of Hobbes’s key blasphemies.56 In 1653Alexander Ross was quick to associate the unfamiliar account of heaven and hell withMahometanism.57 John Bramhall drew scathing attention to Hobbes’s ‘temporary pains of

hell’ in Castigations of Mr Hobbes (1657)58 and in The Catching of Leviathan (1658) made it

clear that he thought that Hobbes’s doctrines (‘without precedent or partner’) were designed

to diminish the traditional role of the rewards and punishments of the afterlife.59 Even ifcommentators were genuinely puzzled by Hobbes’s arguments they were all extremelysuspicious of his motives for reducing divine reward and punishment to earthly states, rightlyperceiving that he was launching a systematic assault upon the traditional clerical accounts ofthe mechanisms of divine justice

The reassertion of the importance of divine rewards and punishments was a commonfeature of Restoration sermon rhetoric, and in the hands of Hobbes’s Episcopalian critics thecomments could often be angled against Hobbes’s arguments Ward’s 1661 sermon alluded tothe way that Hobbesian principles enervated religion (including rewards and punishments) tothe detriment of society60, and stressed that only a properly Christian appreciation of thenature of divine justice could underpin effective political obligation.61 It is also no surprise tofind this theme being amplified from the neo-Laudian stronghold of Oxford University,where the theological legacy of Henry Hammond was being promoted strongly by thetriumvirate of Hammond’s followers at Christ Church the Dean, John Fell, the theologian

56 Luke Fawn, A beacon set on fire (London, 1652), pp 14-15.

57 A Ross, Leviathan drawn out with a hook (London, 1653), pp 50, 73.

58 J Bramhall, The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, John Bramhall, D.D ed J.H Parker (Oxford,

Richard Allestree, and, while he was there, John Dolben.62 The linking of Hobbes and Whitewhich later resurfaced in the Atheism Bill proceedings can be found in the preface to a work

of Hammond’s published posthumously at Oxford by the university printer, Hagieåa theoåu krisis Iudgment worthy of God, or, An assertion of the existence and duration of hell torments

(1665).63 The anonymous author of the preface to Hammond’s defence of the traditionalaccount of hell was not slow in identifying its targets He complained that ‘We have in ourown language been solemnly instructed that the pains of Hell are nothing but the luxuries ofEarth; the drudgery of getting Children [sidenote: Mr Hobbs], and living or'e again that agewhich sensual men would live for ever.[sidenote: Mr White].’64, positions that wouldundermine apprehension of the necessarily dreadful character of God’s judgement of thereprobate

62 Fell was the author of The Life of the most Learned, Reverend and Pious Dr H Hammond (1661) John

Dolben was Sub-dean and Allestree treasurer of Christ Church.

63 The link here is unusual enough to be worthy of note It is likely that one of the three Christ Church divines

(or an associate) penned the preface.

64 H Hammond, Hagieåa theoåu krisis Iudgment worthy of God, or, An assertion of the existence and duration

of hell torments (1665), Sig A10r-v This theme about eternal torments, and the linking of Hobbes and White

would also feature in Allestree’s later sermons to Oxford undergraduates See BL MS Harley 6621, f.53r, recording details of a sermon from March 1671 where Allestree apparently made the following comments: ‘It hath been taught of late by and it hath gained many prosyltes among the Virtuosi of Religion;-After the

Resurrection the Reprobate shall bee [saith hee] in the state of Adam & his Posterity were in after his Sin (i.e.) the state we are now in, Live as we do, Marry & give in Marriage, and was to bee wn they have got some heires

to succeed them in Tophet And after hee has displayed the monstrousness of this opinion adds – Such

Interpretations surely were conjured to make out yt Assertion of yt Roman Priest [Thom de Alb] who says, That those in Hell love to bee there, nay more, if that impossible for God to do any other thing for ym, yn to put ym there.’ The theme seems to have been quite popular – the same notebook records a sermon in November 1670

attacking the same argument from Leviathan Ibid., f.14v.

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Given the prevailing mood of the Parliamentary sermon literature in the autumn of

1666, with their repeated programmatic emphasis upon the character of divine judgement, itwas unsurprising that the two main targets were the theological views of reward and

punishment in the work of Hobbes and White; even the proposal to burn Leviathan could be

taken as an appropriate response to a text in which punishment by fire was not taken seriouslyenough The nature of the attack on the morning of the 17th and its fit with the clerical agendabeing projected at the MPs suggests that it was at least inspired, if not orchestrated, by some

of the Episcopalian critics who had helped to focus the attention of the Commons in Hobbes’sdirection Ward, an inveterate opponent of Hobbes, and Dolben (very closely linked to theOxford neo-Laudians) are likely suspects; both involved in managing Parliamentary businessfor Sheldon and Clarendon they would later take a conspicuous role in promoting thelegislation.65 If the Commons did consult with members of Convocation (where Dolben alsoserved as prolocutor), it is not hard to believe that Ward, Dolben and Stillingfleet, thepreachers who set the mood for the legislative process, were somehow involved

If external clerical pressure may have been prompting discussion of Leviathan this

may explain why the attack on Hobbes and White appeared to vanish into thin air at thecommittee stage of proceedings We don’t know what happened at the Committee meetings,but at the moment there is no evidence that Hobbes and White were in fact either investigated

or discussed by the larger, more diverse body that presumably met later to scrutinise the Bill

65 For Ward and Dolben’s roles as Parliamentary managers, see Andrew Swatland, The House of Lords in the

Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1996), pp 55-6 Dolben’s attention to Parliamentary business led him to

neglect his duties as Dean of Westminster ODNB.

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and devise a suitable tariff of punishments.66 The Committee met again on the 10th

November67, and the chairman, Roger Pepys (cousin of Samuel), reported on 23rd January

1667, proposing a few amendments to the existing proposals that were subsequentlyaccepted, but nothing else that specifically mentioned Hobbes or White.68 On the 31st Januarythe Bill received its final reading, after which Sir Thomas Clargis took it up to the House ofLords.69 The following day the Lords voted whether to make the Bill a matter for the wholehouse, and when this motion was defeated it entrusted the Bill to a smaller select committee.70

It isn’t clear whether this committee actually met before the 8th but the King’s prorogation ofthe Parliamentary session brought the process to a grinding halt

Although the mention of his name in Parliament in October might well have been thecause of some concern to Hobbes, at this stage of the proceedings the Atheism Billconstituted an irritation rather than a major threat to the philosopher’s safety As we haveseen, and as Stillingfleet appears to have realised, the wording of the preamble was sogeneralised that it was unlikely to lead to the conviction of a theological sophisticate likeHobbes But in addition the proposed penalties probably wouldn’t constitute much of adanger even if a conviction were secured For a first offence he would face a £50 fine and berequired to recant (which he certainly would have done, a blow to his pride, but not to hisbody); a repeated offence might trigger banishment to the plantations for five years, but the

66 In many ways this is unsurprising; the proposed committee contained individuals who, even if they had no

time for Hobbes, might have been unsympathetic to a clerically-inspired witch-hunt Interestingly the new committee did not include many of those who had drafted the initial Bill.

67 CJ 8: 10 November 1666, p 648.

68 CJ 8: 23 January 1667, p 682.

69 Ibid., p 686-7 See also House of Lords Journal (henceforth LJ) Volume 12: 31 January 1667, pp 96-97.

70 LJ 12: 1 February 1667, pp 97-99 The Bishops on this committee included Richard Sterne (Archbishop of

York), Henchman (London), Skinner (Worcester), Fuller (Lincoln), Reynolds (Norwich), Hall (Chester), Sparrow (Exeter), Rainbowe (Carlisle), Dolben (Rochester).

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death penalty was only reserved for banished exiles who returned early The attenuated nature

of the Parliamentary threat perhaps explains why Hobbes now did something that would havebeen inexplicable had the legislation left him, as many commentators tend to suppose, in

genuine fear for his life: he embarked upon the Latin translation of Leviathan, the book at the

centre of the controversies over his reputation, in which he would reassert some of his mostunusual political and religious doctrines

A letter of November 1667 from Pierre Blaeu, son of Hobbes’s Dutch publisher, toHobbes gives evidence that Hobbes was at that point two thirds of the way through the

translation of Leviathan.71 Working two hours per day, Hobbes hoped to be finished by Easter

of 1668 The information suggests that Hobbes had probably begun the project towards theend of 1666, shortly after the Parliamentary attack on his name and his book, a rather strikingdemonstration of Hobbes’s refusal to be cowed by the atheism Bill What is even moreremarkable about this letter is that it reveals that Hobbes was not only producing a newversion of his most notorious text, but that he was interested in ensuring that his complete

Latin works, including Leviathan, would be supplied to an English audience.72 It has usually

been assumed that the Latin Opera Philosophica was destined for a purely continental

audience, but it is clear that although Hobbes was forced to publish abroad by the licensinglaws, this did not mean that the republication of his Latin works was not intended fordomestic readers The version of the edition that was eventually published under the imprint

of the English bookseller Cornelius Bee shows that this was intended.73 Indeed, it is possible

to see the publication of the Latin Opera, and the Latin Leviathan, as part of Hobbes’s

domestic campaign to reassert his ideas

71 Hobbes, Correspondence, ii 693-696.

72 Ibid ii 695 Blaeu’s letter reassures Hobbes that he would ‘send a good quantity of copies then to the London

booksellers, so that those who wish to buy copies from them may do so.’

73 As indicated of the titlepage of Wing H2252A.

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The Allestree Sermon

The events of 1667 might have given Hobbes reason to believe that there could be an openingwindow of political opportunity to reassert his projects.74 Clarendon’s administration, alreadytottering at the end of 1666, was headed for the disasters that led to his fall at the end of thesummer of the following year One of the main political beneficiaries of these developmentswas Arlington, very likely to be one of those courtiers who Clarendon believed had beeninfected by Hobbesian principles Even though Archbishop Sheldon was by 1667 noautomatic supporter of the beleagured Lord Chancellor75, few of the Episcopalian clergycould have had any illusions about the ideological dangers posed by the seismic shifts inEnglish politics For all that Hyde had disappointed in other respects he was at leastcommitted to sustaining Episcopal Anglicanism as the bedrock of the Restoration settlement.The priorities of the new order were less certain; the church was facing a growing tide ofcriticism that would lead many to recall the dark days of 1641; the burgeoning confidence ofdissenters generated louder discussion of religious toleration or comprehension that mightwell compromise the status of the established church What an ideologically Hobbesianregime might countenance in these circumstances was the stuff of Episcopalian nightmares

In this atmosphere it is unsurprising that the abortive anti-atheism legislation was reactivatedwhen the Cavalier Parliament, perhaps the last reliable political prop for the establishedchurch, met again in October, and that it was unmistakeably aimed at Hobbes himself

74 See Paul Seaward’s comments in “Chief of the Ways of God”: Form and Meaning in the Behemoth of Thomas

Hobbes’,

75 Sheldon commented to the Ormonde that ‘God knows for these divers yeares I have had litle reason to be fond

of him … I am sure we owe the confusion we are in to his ill management of our affayres, and of himself’ Bodleian Library, MS Carte 45, f 232.

24

The proposed legislation that came before the Lords on the 14th October had actuallybeen amended for this session in a way that emphasised the specifically anti-Hobbesianmessage of the previous year The text now made additional offences of the denial of ‘theImmortality of mens soules, and the resurrection of the body and the eternal rewards inHeaven, and eternal torments in Hell.’76 It isn’t clear who was responsible for these changes,but the wording clearly recalls the anti-Hobbesian rhetoric that had shaped the Parliamentaryattack a year beforehand, and the effect was to aim the Bill more decisively against Hobbes.77

Hobbes himself appears to have been conscious that these changes were aimed at himbecause he ultimately revised or deleted the offending arguments in chapters 38 and 44 and in

the new appendix to the Latin Leviathan offered a specific defence of his position on each of

the matters raised.78 On the 15th October the Bill was referred to a select committee chaired bythe Earl of Bridgewater and including Dolben (now Bishop of Rochester), Ward and theformer Anglican exile and future critic of Hobbes Benjamin Laney (Bishop of Ely).79 On the

19th the Bill was read through in paragraphs and a number of amendments proposed,including one to the preamble which was tasked to Dolben The text that he would eventuallyoffer in December again reinforced the narrative that had shaped the early stages of the Bill inthe Commons, making explicit reference to the fact that the Act offered a response to the

76 HLRO, Main Papers, HL, 14 October 1667.

77 Ward and Dolben again seem to be likely candidates, and the addition reinforces the thought that the 1666

Parliamentary assault was prompted primarily by Hobbes’s clerical opponents.

78 Hobbes, Leviathan, ed Curley, pp 544-5 In fact, the response to the objections against Leviathan seem

calculated to defeat any attempt to convict Hobbes under the terms of the atheism legislation as it was presented

to the Lords.

79 Laney had been associated with the Episcopalians in Paris, and would later go on to compose a critical

commentary published with Hobbes’s Liberty and Necessity (London, 1676) The other four bishops included

were Henry King (Chichester), Herbert Croft (Hereford), Edward Rainbowe (Carlisle) and William Fuller (Lincoln) They were joined on the 17 th by Richard Sterne, the Archbishop of York.

25

judgements of God, again emphasising the programme announced by the sermon literaturefrom 1666.80

If the rhetoric of the Bill was being ramped up by the Bishops in the autumn of 1667,

it wasn’t the only significant clerical assault that Hobbes faced as the Episcopalians zeroed in

on the philosopher and his dangerous ideas With Clarendon languishing under the threat ofimpeachment and authority leaking away from his clerical clients, Richard Allestree, RegiusProfessor of Divinity at Oxford and Provost of Eton, decided to launch a more direct assaultupon Hobbes in front of the King himself.81 As we have already noted, Allestree, togetherwith Dolben and Fell had been one of the intellectual architects of the neo-Laudian regime inOxford.82 As the anonymous author of the best-selling Whole Duty of Man, he was one of the

leading intellectual forces behind the reconstruction of Restoration Anglicanism, a project

80 See HL/PO/JO/10/1/328/92, f 24r: ‘Whereas the excrable and odious Sinnes of Atheisme, prophaneness and prophane cursing and swearing, and other enourmous offences doe very much abound and increase in many places of this Realme to the high dishonour of almighty God The provoking of his fierce wrath, and drawing downe of his most severe and exemplary Judgements upon the kingdome and nation for future punishment suppression and prevention thereof.’ Dolben seems to have played a similar role in providing a contextually specific preamble (this time mentioning plays) in similar legislation proposed in 1674.

81 It isn’t clear whether Hobbes himself was present to hear the attack, but there is no doubt that he was soon

aware of it Allestree regularly attacked Hobbes, see for example his Eighteen Sermons (1669), pp 28, 222-3;

Forty sermons (1684), pp 70-1 and A discourse concerning the period of humane life (1677), p 68 In his

biography of Allestree Fell commented that ‘Withan equal steddiness he asserted the Gospel truth, against the

usurpations of Rome, the innovations of Geneva, the blasphemies of Cracow, and the monsters of our own

Malmsbury’, prefacing Allestree, Forty sermons (1684), Sig E1v.

82 Their role is captured in the famous Lely group portrait of the three men at Christ Church Anthony Wood

grumbled about Fell’s ambition ‘to govern the university’ and also about the way that together with Allestree

and Dolben, Fell was intent on ‘reducing the university to that condition as it stood in Laud’s time.’ Wood, Life

and Times i 348-9 See also, Robert Beddard, ‘Restoration Oxford’ in N Tyacke, ed., The History of the University of Oxford, vol IV: Seventeenth-Century Oxford (Oxford 1997), pp 840-1.

26