As internal temptation allowed the godly, and the not so godly, to engage with the experience of the demonic subversion of the conscience, so a concept of the temptation of the body politic provided a parallel political analogy which gave a focus to the perception of the subversion of the commonwealth. The final part of this study examines the development of this discourse within England's internal politics, from its definition in Elizabethan conflicts over religious subversion and treason, to the Caroline regime's increasing inability to maintain a theocratic opposition between kingship and diabolism, and ultimately to the reactions to the breakdown of government in the 1640s, in which the perception of diabolism pervaded the polemic of both the royalist and the parliamentarian parties.

It has been argued by a number of historians of the early modern period that the English political nation possessed no language of opposition. Political rhetoric was dominated by an emphasis on consensus, and thus conflict originated in disagreements over the practical operation of the constitution. This picture has been supported by recent work on witchcraft, which has highlighted the way in which an equation between witchcraft and rebellion provided, in Peter Elmer's words, a ‘normative system of discourse which fostered unity and concord in the body politic’. Moreover, this discourse could only survive as an instrument of consensus. Its factionalisation during the Civil War, Dr Elmer argues, entirely destroyed witchcraft's political vitality.