Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-s9k8s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-04T06:18:37.045Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - John Locke and Anglican Royalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2023

Mark Goldie
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge and Churchill College, Cambridge
Get access

Summary

Locke's adversaries

Two salient propositions about John Locke's polemical purposes in writing the Two Treatises of Government are now taken for granted. The first is that Locke sought to refute the absolutism, not of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, but of Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha. The second is that, although he revised and published it in 1689, Locke wrote his book during or shortly after the Exclusion Crisis, in around 1680–2, and was providing a contribution to the assault by the earl of Shaftesbury's Whig party upon the regime of Charles II. My purpose is not to doubt either proposition, but to suggest, nonetheless, that as claims to have established Locke's intentions, they have acquired a sufficient rigidity to have become misleading. In what follows I argue, first, that Locke's target was not only Filmer, but more broadly the ideologists of Restoration Royalism, about whom Locke scholars have little to say. Here it will be necessary to dispute a suggestion that Filmer was untypical of the Royalist mainstream. Secondly, I show that there is an important ecclesiological and anticlerical context to the Two Treatises, since the conflict between Anglican intolerance and its critics was ingrained in Restoration politics, in a way in which the novel and contingent problem of Exclusion was not. The consequence of my case will be to perceive in the Two Treatises an attack directed against all the agents of Anglican authoritarianism, but particularly the clerical shapers of opinion, as well as the recognized assault on the monarchical tyranny of the Stuarts. It will also emerge that Locke's commitment to religious toleration needs to be set alongside the secular politics of the Treatises. In this light, the Treatises will seem considerably more ambiguous about the crown, for it was not only Restoration kingship, but also the Restoration church, and a corrupt parliament, which Locke and his fellow Whigs convicted of the most consistent and dogmatic repressiveness.

The enhancement of royal power

In the spring of 1660 the ascendant Presbyterian party, the ancestor of the Whigs, intended to restore Charles II to the throne upon strict conditions, similar to those presented to his father by the Long Parliament during the 1640s. On both occasions they failed catastrophically. In 1648 they were swept aside by a military coup, in 1660 by a Cavalier electoral victory. Charles I was executed; Charles II was exalted.

Type
Chapter
Information
Contesting the English Polity, 1660-1688
Religion, Politics, and Ideas
, pp. 293 - 318
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • John Locke and Anglican Royalism
  • Mark Goldie, University of Cambridge and Churchill College, Cambridge
  • Book: Contesting the English Polity, 1660-1688
  • Online publication: 17 December 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781800106666.015
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • John Locke and Anglican Royalism
  • Mark Goldie, University of Cambridge and Churchill College, Cambridge
  • Book: Contesting the English Polity, 1660-1688
  • Online publication: 17 December 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781800106666.015
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • John Locke and Anglican Royalism
  • Mark Goldie, University of Cambridge and Churchill College, Cambridge
  • Book: Contesting the English Polity, 1660-1688
  • Online publication: 17 December 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781800106666.015
Available formats
×