An exiled bishop of a now dubious confession and profession was obviously vulnerable to the kind of insults broadcast in England and sent across the North Sea by Hobbes in 1656. In the Questions one might say that Hobbes was acting according to the sound advice: ‘Kick a man while he's down.’ But in view of the broader concern to vindicate and preserve the Caroline–Laudian anglican church of the 1630s, Bramhall might well have considered the philosopher just one among many enemies. Not that Bramhall failed to perceive – or stress – Hobbes's eccentricity; rather, he might easily have placed Hobbes in the broad anti-anglican category that contained independents, presbyterians and Roman catholics. In the few years that preceded the Restoration of 1660, Bramhall was provoked to duel not only the maverick philosopher, but all the others that would divert the would-be king, Charles II, from an allegiance to the church for which his father had died. Hobbes was merely one among an array of those who might contaminate the souls of Charles II, his siblings and royalists in exile, or in England.

By 1656, the harvest of Bramhall's Just Vindication had already come in. Richard Smith, the English Roman catholic bishop of Chalcedon, and John Sergeant, a prolific controversialist of the same confession, had both written answers to it. Smith's book had been published in 1654 as Brief Survey of the Lord of Derry his Treatise of Schism.