John Locke’s Politics in the Interregnum Milieu

Locke certainly was not raised a royalist. His father, John Locke, a Somerset attorney and estate steward, had fought for parliament under Alexander Popham, his employer and a prominent Protestant militant during the civil war.Footnote ⁵ The senior Locke, to judge from his memoranda book, shunned church Laudianism and entertained the radical suggestion that ‘the voice of the people be requird’ in the election of ministers.Footnote ⁶ As late as 1658–9, the younger Locke would, in reading notes, describe the divisive Grand Remonstrance of December 1641 as ‘a very excellent remonstrance of the state of these kingdoms’.Footnote ⁷ Popham secured the younger Locke a place at the prestigious Westminster School.Footnote ⁸ The school’s governance was divided during Locke’s attendance. Its examiners included the trimming episcopalian Richard Busby, the Presbyterian Thomas Hill, and the pre-eminent Independent John Owen. It was Owen, however, who apparently patronized Locke. In November 1652, Locke matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, where Owen had been appointed dean in 1651. Locke later recounted that his university studies were dominated by Calvinists. Among the colleges, Christ Church inclined towards Independency, and Locke was tutored by the Independent Thomas Cole (dubiously remembered by Anthony Wood as a ‘fanatical tutor’).Footnote ⁹ Locke was considered, according to his colleague James Tyrrell, one of the ‘most learned and ingenious young men in the College’.Footnote ¹⁰

John Owen was an eminence of Interregnum Independency. As Cromwell’s vice chancellor at Oxford, he pursued university and church reform and agitated on behalf of the Congregational way. Fragmentary evidence suggests Locke’s favourable inclination towards the Independent patriarch. In September of 1655, with Owen at the height of his influence, Locke’s colleague Samuel Tilly described Owen to him as ‘your reverend Deane’ and wished that his ‘honour may be proportionate to his person, and merit’.Footnote ¹¹ In 1658, Locke referred to the reinstitution of Oxford’s academic dress dismissively, implying sympathy with Owen’s effort to abolish it.Footnote ¹² Locke’s correspondent presumed his distaste for the academic traditionalists opposed by Owen.Footnote ¹³ Locke himself suggested as much by gleefully reporting the jeering of the poet Payne Fisher when, in the spring of 1658, he delivered a commemoration of the moderate Archbishop James Ussher.Footnote ¹⁴

Locke’s family identified with those ‘well affected to the commonwealth’.Footnote ¹⁵ Cromwell’s pre-eminence did not faze them. In May 1654, Locke glowingly referenced his reception at Hampton Court and the ‘bounty’ he received there. (That these references were later scratched out may indicate their political significance.Footnote ¹⁶) In the same year, Locke – along with Owen and several of his other clients – published verses honouring the Lord Protector.Footnote ¹⁷ Locke may later have helped draft an obsequious letter to Cromwell on behalf of a friend, effusively thanking him for some morsel of patronage.Footnote ¹⁸

Locke’s patchy, early correspondence suggests sympathy with the army, the Oxford Independents, and the Protectorate. The only notes of estrangement are Locke’s frequent and morbidly fascinated observations about the ‘uncouth’ Quakers.Footnote ¹⁹ But contempt for sectarian antinomianism was perfectly common among the mainstream Independents. Even in 1659–60, Locke betrayed no late flowering royalist or episcopal enthusiasm.Footnote ²⁰ A letter from his friend John Strachey in May of 1659, after the fall of Richard Cromwell, dubbed Locke a ‘man for the good old cause’.Footnote ²¹

We know less than we would like to about Locke’s early opinions; his letters offer mere hints and strands. In September of 1659, however, we are afforded our first full view of his mind on the sharply contested matter of religious toleration. It came in a letter to the physician and writer Henry Stubbe. Stubbe and Locke overlapped at both Westminster School and Christ Church. Stubbe eventually became deputy keeper of the Bodleian Library. His patrons included Henry Vane, on whose behalf he often wrote. He belonged to Owen’s Oxford circle and composed attacks on Presbyterianism and defences of Independency.Footnote ²² In their sole surviving letter, Locke responded to one of Stubbe’s more consequential tracts, his Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause, or, A Discourse concerning the Rise and Extent of the power of the Civil Magistrate in reference to Spiritual Affairs.

Stubbe’s Essay is often tagged as a defence of religious toleration, a characterization suggesting both too little and too much.Footnote ²³ Produced during the chaotic late Interregnum debates over ecclesial and constitutional reform, the work promoted an ‘unequal commonwealth’, reserving full civil rights for defenders of the ‘Good old cause’. Stubbe feared resurgent royalism and worried that in an ‘equal commonwealth’ landed elites might ally with the Presbyterian and episcopal clergy against ‘sectarian-toleration’. A ‘disaffected ministry’ seeking ‘religious sovereignty’ threatened the army and the Independents. Clerical traditionalists, Stubbe warned, continued to lurk at the universities.Footnote ²⁴

Considering ‘whether the Civil Magistrate hath any power in things of Spiritual concernment’, Stubbe offered a qualified denial. He began with natural men, who, out of necessity, promise to obey their governor while securing ‘each individuall in such rights as they respectively shall agree upon towards each other’.Footnote ²⁵ The sovereign was required by this social contract to secure property and rights, including some measure of individual religious liberty; the Old Testament revealed that ‘Magistrates were purely civill, and that though they might have a Nationall religion … yet did they not entermeddle with the particular religion of their subjects, or them that sojourned amongst them.’ Religious persecution was a tool of illegitimate absolute monarchies. Mixed regimes, grounded on consent, permitted religious liberty, though they might also erect establishments to their ‘particular Gods’.Footnote ²⁶

Stubbe’s tolerationism presumed a church establishment of some kind. He avoided adjudicating how much authority sovereigns – justly concerned with restraining clerical power – might wield over these establishments. However, noting the ‘particular sentiments arising from different illuminations and prejudices’, Stubbe did not require individuals to delegate their own religious judgement to the arbitration of sovereignty. The ‘undeniable defect of common evidence in the delivering of spirituall matters’ made such deference unreasonable.

Stubbe’s pamphlet ranged over the early history of Christianity, borrowing from post-Eusebian historians such as Sozomen and Socrates Scholasticus. This excursus into ecclesiastical history, somewhat unusually, foregrounded the history of Byzantine Christianity, using it (rather than Protestantism) to rebuke the growth of Western papalism. It read the early church as ecumenical and ‘tolerationist’, passive towards pagan rulers and indulgent of individual opinion. Coercion was rare and was done only ‘upon a secular and politique account for preservation of the civil peace, when men began to opinionate it, and promote faction instead of religion’.Footnote ²⁷

When ‘humane policy began to mould a Catholique church’, this ‘pragmaticalness’ gave way to persecution. The Independent Stubbe, rejecting any corporate ‘Church organical’, cast the early church as a network of ‘particular’ associations espousing different opinions or ‘heresies’.Footnote ²⁸ Christian emperors generally permitted this salutary pluralism, using their prerogative authority to suspend religious laws. Resisting clerical pressures, they established toleration and even favoured pagans and heretics. ‘Outward actions’ might be ‘commanded’, but ‘affection and mental acts’ were necessarily ‘free and uncontroll’d’. Only for ‘political’ purposes did emperors authorize persecutions.Footnote ²⁹

Stubbe sporadically deployed a language of ‘humane equity and natural right to allowe each man to worship what he thinks fit’,Footnote ³⁰ but his tolerationism relied more on the notion of enlightened sovereignty deploying prerogative power. He cited Bodin, who had implicitly praised the politique Theodosius for overriding the objections of Bishop Ambrose. Even Justinian, the emperor most associated with spiritual coercion, acted for ‘Reason of State’ and was willing to overlook violations of orthodoxy when convenient.Footnote ³¹ Toleration ‘policy’ protected sovereignty from religious faction and clerical usurpation. Stubbe borrowed arguments from John Selden, who had established that the ancient Jewish blasphemy law did not apply to non-Jews and therefore did not bind later non-Jewish polities.Footnote ³² There were thus heavily Erastian overtones to the tolerationism of the Essay.

Stubbe extended toleration in radical directions. He appeared indifferent to Trinitarian doctrine and indulgent of Socinianism. He was willing to tolerate some English Catholics and episcopalians. The latter might enjoy freer practice, he wrote, if they obeyed and prayed for their governors. ‘In like manner’, Stubbe wrote,

Stubbe’s tolerationist tract thus had a disparate profile. Contractarian, explicitly dependent on Selden and Grotius, it invoked the new natural law theory. It viewed conscience as a right and as properly Christian but was more concerned to marshal a politique defence of toleration. Anticlerical and hostile to the ‘organic’ Church, it nevertheless envisioned conditions under which loyalist Catholics and episcopalians might secure indulgence.

This was the work that Locke, in the autumn of 1659, read with ‘satisfaction’ and evaluated with suggestive praise. He commended Stubbe’s ‘strength and vigor’ and his ‘clearnesse of reason’. Specifically mentioning Poland, the Dutch Republic, and France (‘nearest examples have the greatest influence’), he implied slight dissatisfaction with Stubbe’s late imperial models. But Locke agreed that ‘men of different professions may quietly unite (antiquity the testimony) under the same government and unanimously cary the same civill intrest and hand in hand to march to the same end of peace and mutuall society, though they take different way towards heaven’.Footnote ³⁴ He only chided Stubbe for lowering his guard vis-à-vis Catholicism, a subject to which we will return.Footnote ³⁵

Locke foresaw the success of Stubbe’s tract and requested a copy to circulate at Oxford.Footnote ³⁶ In commending Stubbe’s toleration but recommending stricter vigilance of clerical factions, Locke may have spoken for the ‘magisterial Independency’ of the Protectoral period. In his papers, bundled with this letter to Stubbe, survives an undated note recording provisions of the Cromwellian Instrument of Government (Article 37, as promulgated by ‘his Highness the Lord Protector’s special commandment’). These protected Christians in their diverse religious ‘exercises’, excepting only those inclined to ‘popery’ or ‘prelacy’.Footnote ³⁷

Sympathetic to Independency, Stubbe’s tract endorsed a primitive ecclesiology of ‘gathered’ Christian congregations. If Locke did bring a copy to Oxford, he could not have expected either Presbyterian or episcopal appreciation. This likely did not trouble him. In June of 1659, indeed, Locke may have positively referenced another tract attributed to Stubbe, his Sundry Things from Severall Hands concerning the University of Oxford.Footnote ³⁸ This blasted the university’s increasingly conservative clerical leadership and called for the introduction of new learning.Footnote ³⁹

The most extensive airing of his political views surviving from the Interregnum, Locke’s letter to Stubbe thwarts the common view that Locke was by this time a convinced ‘conservative’, ‘authoritarian’, or ‘royalist’. However anxious about disorder, Locke seemingly remained fixed within the Independent circle at Oxford. He appreciated Stubbe’s republicanism, his anticlericalism, his politique tolerationism, and his advocacy of a Congregationalism deferential to state authority.

The letter also suggests the broad Hobbesian influences that may have helped to shape Locke’s early political opinions. It has not, to date, been read within a Hobbesian milieu. By contrast, Locke’s ‘Two Tracts’, composed a few years later, often are. Philip Abrams, in his important edition of the tracts (1967), cast Locke as a ‘conservative’ and conceded the likelihood of some Hobbesian influence.Footnote ⁴⁰ Jon Parkin also places the ‘Two Tracts’ in a ‘Hobbesian vein’.Footnote ⁴¹ There are distinct Hobbesian overtones in the ‘Two Tracts’, as we shall see, and their anti-tolerationist position conforms to a conventional scheme in which a young ‘conservative authoritarian’ is contrasted with the later ‘proto-liberal’ Locke. The tracts are thus taken to represent a brief loss of balance.

This venerable narrative of Locke’s intellectual development is undermined by a close reading of Stubbe’s Essay and of Locke’s praise for it. Locke’s tolerationism of 1659, no less than his anti-tolerationism of 1660–1, was fed by the Hobbesian currents of the Interregnum. Between the letter to Stubbe and the ‘Two Tracts’, Locke no doubt reassessed the political feasibility of toleration. But his underlying logic – of a contractual state serving temporal ends, of a monopolistic sovereignty trumping the liberty of the church and constantly watchful of clerical conspiracy – remained consistent. And that Hobbes might have influenced Locke as he moved from a politique tolerationism to a politique confessionalism should not surprise. Hobbes himself migrated between these two positions during these very years.

Furthermore, situated amidst the Oxford Independents around John Owen, Locke was well positioned to grasp the anticlerical, Independent, and tolerationist potential of Leviathan. Hobbes’s masterwork had reflected his gradual estrangement from the ecclesial politics and political theology of the royalist cause. As early as 1641, Hobbes had tentatively justified the abolition of English episcopacy, on the grounds that the rivalry between spiritual and secular sovereignty was the root cause of civil war. In De Cive, Hobbes had reiterated this thesis and clarified – to clerical outrage – that the diagnosis directly incriminated the English episcopate.Footnote ⁴² By the time Hobbes composed Leviathan, the English bishops and prayer book had been outlawed and an attempted Presbyterian settlement (equally obnoxious to Hobbes) had failed. This result had been achieved by an alliance of Erastians and Independents, the latter of whom sought a national church of autonomous congregations supervised by Godly magistracy. The leading Independents rejected both radical separatism and clerical hierarchy and trumpeted the ‘Congregational way’ as the church form most subservient to sovereign power.Footnote ⁴³ They rejected free-will theology and pursued university reform, in part to cull residual ‘popery’ and clericalism.

Hobbes’s close friend Robert Payne had struggled fruitlessly to dissuade him from publicly abandoning the episcopal church.Footnote ⁴⁴ We now know that much of the anti-Catholic rhetoric of Leviathan was framed to strike the English bishops as well, a fact that they immediately divined and resented.Footnote ⁴⁵ Hobbes implicitly blamed them for the travails of Charles I and explicitly endorsed their abolition (along with Presbyterianism) as relics of ‘praeterpolitical church government’. In an extended and rhetorically powerful appeal, Leviathan endorsed the establishment of Independency. It also offered a suggestive reading of the primitive church as a patchwork of independent congregations without differentiated officers. Leviathan granted the primitive power of excommunication to congregated assemblies (rather than to proto-episcopal, apostolic authorities). It interpreted ancient ordination as a function of individual congregations ‘holding up’ hands, rather than an apostolic-cum-episcopal officer ‘laying on hands’.Footnote ⁴⁶ These historical arguments militated in favour of Independency, as was recognized by friendly and hostile contemporaries.Footnote ⁴⁷ James Harrington borrowed Hobbes’s account of ordination in his own defence of an Erastian–Independent settlement.Footnote ⁴⁸ Henry Hammond and his colleagues attacked Hobbes for precisely the same argument.

Hobbes warned that Independency should be ‘without contention, and without measuring the Doctrine of Christ by our affection to the Person of his Ministers’. But even this oft-misunderstood proviso evidenced his new appreciation of Congregationalism. The proviso is often assumed by sceptical historians to have qualified, or perhaps even revealed as ironic, Leviathan’s Independency.Footnote ⁴⁹ But in fact the qualifier was not of Hobbes’s own devising. He almost certainly borrowed it from Independent apologias, where it served to interpret Paul’s anger at the Corinthians as a rebuke of their lack of charity, rather than the autonomy of their congregations.Footnote ⁵⁰ The latter interpretation was favoured by Presbyterian and episcopal commentators. Hobbes’s proviso against contention did not undermine his endorsement of Independency but embedded within it a Congregationalist interpretation of schism.

Independency appealed to Hobbes partly because it stripped away dangerous clerical hierarchy. It also protected individual conscience on contested points of theology. Leviathan presented Christian orthodoxy as a system of obscurity designed to augment the power of churches. It advanced a minimal slate of theological fundamentals and recommended indulgence outside of these. Conscience liberty was not, for Hobbes, an enforceable individual right, and Leviathan certainly understood restless, conscientious actors as political threats. The book nevertheless insisted on the impossibility, and thus folly, of attempting to coerce consciences. While the realm of conscience was purely internal, Hobbes advised sovereigns, as a matter of prudence, to eschew intricate orthodoxies and heresy hunting. Independency also promised to subject individual consciences to less harassing surveillance. All of this rendered Leviathan a notable, if unexpected, service to the ecclesial agenda of the Interregnum Independents. It also aligned Hobbes, for the first time, with the tradition of politique toleration.

Hobbes’s ecclesiology and views on conscience had thus undergone politically consequential transformations by 1651. Nowhere was this clearer than at Interregnum Oxford, among the members of the set that surrounded Locke. Henry Stubbe, indeed, campaigned to ally Hobbes with Owen’s circle of Oxford Independents.Footnote ⁵¹

Thomas Hobbes, by this time, lived primarily in London, enjoying the ‘learned conversation’ of the revolutionary capital.Footnote ⁵² With the old censorship regime in disrepair, radical and heretical works appeared unmolested – Leviathan prominent among them. Its political deference, theological heterodoxy, and ecclesial Independency incited episcopal and Presbyterian observers. Hobbes stood charged with advancing the religious project of the Cromwellian Independents: a ‘dissolution of Ecclesiastical Power into the Secular’, sheltering sectarian licence on the one hand and using religion to brace civil power in the manner of the ‘Machiavellians’ on the other.Footnote ⁵³

The association of Independency with Hobbesian Erastianism became particularly pronounced after the establishment of Cromwell’s Protectorate late in 1653. Cromwell erected an Independent church establishment, replacing clerical authority with state-appointed, largely lay committees empowered to approve clerical appointments and purge the disaffected. This establishment of atomized congregations was designed to protect not only a measured liberty for some individual subjects but also the power of the state in ecclesiastical matters. Leviathan defended this mixture of sovereign ecclesial control and individual spiritual liberty. Richard Baxter denounced Leviathan before Cromwell’s parliament as an affront to ‘ministerial office’.Footnote ⁵⁴ To the pre-eminent apologist for apostolic episcopacy, Henry Hammond, Hobbes had reduced the church to a mere ‘engine of state, and saecular contrivance’.Footnote ⁵⁵ By contrast, London’s anticlerical propagandists read Leviathan as the manifesto for a new age. Marchamont Nedham, William Petty, Francis Osborne, John Davies, and James Harrington feted Hobbes for exposing the ‘Black-Coats’, who were ‘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’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Hobbes was a master deconstructor of the ‘power ecclesiastical’.Footnote ⁵⁷ His hostility to clerical religion, and his politique tolerationism, spoke to the revolutionary moment. ‘My Hobbs’, reported one hostile contemporary, ‘is at London much caressed, as one that hath by his Writings justified the Reasonableness and Righteousness of their Arms and Actions.’Footnote ⁵⁸ Leviathan, Richard Baxter would later rue, had delighted the ‘Pretorian Sectarian Bands’. Hobbes was befriended by the ‘best wits’ and enjoyed the ‘vogue of those youths that pretend to anything of ingenuity’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Is it possible that John Locke numbered among these ingenious youths? His letter to Stubbe is suggestive. Stubbe was a key promoter of the Hobbesian vogue and tried to deploy Leviathan for the causes of Independency and toleration. Hobbes ‘much esteemed’ him.Footnote ⁶⁰ With Hobbes’s encouragement, Stubbe laboured on an eventually aborted Latin translation of Leviathan. The work strongly resonated with Stubbe’s own anticlericalism and with his belief that free conscience reinforced the religious authority of sovereignty.Footnote ⁶¹ Stubbe enticed Hobbes into the polemical disputes roiling Interregnum Oxford. Hobbes and the Oxford Independents shared enemies, including the future Bishop, Seth Ward and the Presbyterian mathematician, John Wallis.Footnote ⁶² Both assailed Leviathan for ‘furiously attacking and destroying our Universities … and especially ministers and the clergy’.Footnote ⁶³ Hobbes, they charged, had pitched his university and church reform proposals as projects for Oliver Cromwell, John Owen, and the Independents around them.Footnote ⁶⁴ In an acidic riposte, Hobbes skewered Wallis and Ward for propping up ‘incomprehensible mysteries of religion’ and the ‘Power ecclesiasticall’.Footnote ⁶⁵ He excoriated them for resisting Cromwell’s effort to resolve the ‘competition between the Ecclesiasticall and the Civill power’.Footnote ⁶⁶

In October of 1656, Stubbe asked Hobbes to print something further defending Independency.Footnote ⁶⁷ Hobbes responded with a letter, now lost, echoing Stubbe’s own drafted defence of Owen and the Congregational way. Hobbes’s praise, Stubbe wrote, would ‘redound to Dr. Owen’s honor’, who was defending ‘liberty of conscience’ and ‘other fundamentalls of this government’. Stubbe specifically reported that Owen’s Oxford faction included ‘any Westminster scholar, who are Dr. Owen’s creatures now of late’. It was in this context that Stubbe assured Hobbes of his ‘many favourers [at] this university’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Westminster and Christ Church had a close connection, with five or six students of the former elected to college ‘studentships’ (essentially fellowships) yearly. Studentships were for life but, on average, were held for approximately fifteen years.Footnote ⁶⁹ This meant that the college was perpetually full of Westminsters. But Stubbe’s comments suggest that Hobbes’s potential favourers were those younger and often sectarian students connected to Owen, who became Dean of Christ Church in 1651. Westminster graduates who entered Christ Church between 1651 and late 1656 (the date of Stubbe’s letter to Hobbes) numbered nearly three dozen. Many of these are now total obscurities, and others seem unlikely to have favoured Hobbes or the cause of free conscience. Stubbe himself and Edward Bagshaw are the only two Westminster students who have left evidence of direct correspondence with Hobbes. Locke knew them both. (Locke would maintain long ties with many of his Westminster School colleagues.Footnote ⁷⁰) Stubbe clearly considered Locke a supporter of conscience and recommended (or perhaps lent) to him political readings of relevance, including Jeremy Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesying and a large number of works by John Milton.Footnote ⁷¹

Locke, indeed, kept abreast of the latest political writing and corresponded about it with Stubbe and others of the Westminster cohort at Christ Church.Footnote ⁷² Based on Locke’s surviving reading notes, J. R. Milton has argued that Locke’s political reading during his Oxford years was concentrated in the late 1650s.Footnote ⁷³ It was around the year 1659 that Locke provided the first evidence of his interest in Thomas Hobbes. In one of his commonplace books he copied the following quotation from Robert Filmer:

This remark appeared at the start of Filmer’s Observations concerning the Originall of Government, Upon Mr Hobs Leviathan, Mr. Milton against Salmasius, H. Grotius De Juri Belli (1652).Footnote ⁷⁵ Like a large number of the titles recorded in Locke’s notes, this excerpt from Filmer is accompanied by a notation reading ‘C. Stub’. Notations beside other titles read ‘C. Ward’ and ‘C. Barlo’ (presumably Seth Ward and Thomas Barlow, both at Oxford during these years. The former was a vocal foe of Hobbes, the latter a perhaps wary but respectful correspondent of his.Footnote ⁷⁶) The meaning of the ‘C’ in these notes has eluded interpreters, but it seems overwhelmingly likely that they indicate the person who recommended or lent Locke a given title. Henry Stubbe is by far the name most frequently so noted in Locke’s early notebook, indicative of a close intellectual association. It was Stubbe who recommended Filmer to him.

More intriguing still is Locke’s further notation referencing ‘his Chapter of power’. During this period both Filmer and Stubbe composed brief works, none of which (including Filmer’s Observations) were organized into chapters. This raises the distinct possibility that Locke – either following Stubbe’s advice or on his own accord – was here referencing a chapter of Leviathan itself. In that case there would be several candidates from Hobbes’s masterwork. Given the connection to Filmer, the most likely might be Chapter 19, ‘Of several Kinds of Common-wealth by Institution; and of Succession to the Soveraign Power’. Other candidates include Chapter 42, ‘Of Power Ecclesiastical’ (a favourite of Stubbe’s), and (less likely) Chapter 10, ‘Of Power, Worth, Dignity, Honour, and Worthiness’, or Chapter 23, ‘Of the Publique Ministers of Soveraign Power’. In any case, Filmer does not explicitly mention any of Hobbes’s chapter titles, and so Locke’s note (if it indeed referenced Hobbes, as appears likely) must have been based on supplementary knowledge and quite possibly on his own familiarity with Leviathan.

Around this time Locke may also have read the Presbyterian Edward Gee’s The Divine Right and Original of the Civill Magistrate from God. Illustrated and Vindicated.Footnote ⁷⁷ Stubbe apparently recommended or lent it, and Locke recorded the title in his notebook. At the very least Gee represented the kind of advanced thinking about sovereignty that interested Locke’s circle in these years. As demonstrated below, Gee’s book attacked Filmer’s paternalism and borrowed substantially from Hobbes. Stubbe also appears to have recommended to him Matthew Wren’s Monarchy Asserted, where Hobbes was explicitly mentioned and was an obvious influence over Wren’s account of sovereignty.Footnote ⁷⁸

That Locke was reading appropriations of and responses to Hobbes during the late Interregnum and around the time that he wrote his ‘English Tract’ is striking. Laslett misdated the relevant commonplace book to 1667, and so this evidence has not been accommodated by most interpreters of Locke’s ‘Two Tracts’.Footnote ⁷⁹ The conventional ascription of Hobbesian features to those texts (where it is accepted) has relied on textual parallels, but the contextual indications are stronger than those parallels alone might suggest.

The passage from Filmer cannot resolve whether Locke was himself acquainted, at this early date, with Hobbes’s writing, but it seems very likely. Further evidence suggesting that this was indeed the case has recently emerged. Felix Waldmann has brought to light a short memoir of Locke written down by the Huguenot Pierre Des Maizeaux, dating to around 1718. This manuscript purports to record the direct memories of a lifelong associate of Locke’s, almost certainly the theorist and historian James Tyrrell.Footnote ⁸⁰ Tyrrell entered Queen’s College, Oxford, in January of 1657, taking his MA degree in 1663. During these years he came to know Locke and became a sympathetic intellectual associate. The two men later fell out somewhat, but at Oxford, and for decades thereafter, they were close colleagues and correspondents.Footnote ⁸¹ Most famously, the two would compose parallel responses to Sir Robert Filmer during the early 1680s, and Tyrrell acted as custodian of Locke’s books and papers when the latter was in exile in the Netherlands. Of their early acquaintance, Tyrrell reported to Des Maizeaux:

Tyrrell’s suggestion that Locke would deny ever reading Leviathan quite possibly references Locke’s published rejoinders to Richard Willis and Bishop Edward Stillingfleet in 1697 and 1699, where, as we will see, he denied writing any of his own theology under the influence of either Hobbes or Spinoza. If so, Tyrrell exaggerated his point. Locke did not offer Stillingfleet an exceedingly implausible denial of all knowledge of Leviathan (as he presumably would have, if in a position to).

The unfriendly tone of Tyrrell’s account is notable. Before his death Locke had begun to tire of Tyrrell, irritated over trifles such as a small unpaid loan and more serious matters such as public speculation about his authorship of works that Locke had published anonymously.Footnote ⁸³ Later passages in Tyrrell’s reminiscences suggest that he resented Locke’s refusal to acknowledge his own contributions to their collaborative projects. Their relations never ruptured entirely, but – years after Locke’s death – Tyrrell clearly nursed resentments at how Locke had treated him. Nevertheless, the details recorded in Tyrrell’s account are plausible and specific, and fabricating them would have required brazen lies rather than merely uncharitable interpretation. This is particularly true as Tyrrell implicated himself in Locke’s promotion of Leviathan, which would have been unnecessary if his account were entirely fabulous. In later years, as we shall see, Tyrrell seems to have suspected Locke of Hobbesian tendencies. This might be taken as a motive for him, late in life, to invent his report of Locke’s reading Leviathan. But more likely, his suspicions of Locke’s sympathies with Hobbes (to be voiced in the 1690s) were informed by his actual knowledge of that reading and by his long and close intellectual collaboration with Locke.

In short, the account in Des Maizeaux’s hand seems likely to have reflected Tyrrell’s memory, albeit after many decades.Footnote ⁸⁴ It suggests much more than a passing acquaintance with Hobbes on Locke’s part. It is possible that Tyrrell was recalling Locke’s early Restoration career at Oxford. However, the assertion of a youthful insouciance about study might imply an earlier date, before Locke assumed serious teaching duties of his own at Oxford (duties he executed diligently). That the English translation of Voiture’s Letters of Affaires, Love, and Courtship was published in 1657 is suggestive of timing, though not decisively so. That Locke owned this edition, however, may provide modest external confirmation of one detail of Tyrrell’s account.Footnote ⁸⁵ Finally, we have seen that Locke was reading explicitly anti-Hobbesian works in the later 1650s, which makes it unlikely that he was himself unacquainted with the famous target of these works. On the whole, the evidence suggests that Locke was a close reader of – and perhaps promoter of – Leviathan at Oxford during the later Interregnum.

It thus appears likely that Locke may have been among those in mind when Stubbe referenced the Oxford Westminsters devoted to free conscience and susceptible to Hobbes’s influence. Certainly, given the surviving evidence, he is a stronger candidate than any others beyond his associates Stubbe and Bagshaw.Footnote ⁸⁶ Locke was a young Westminster student attached to Owen. He supported free conscience, discussed political writing with Stubbe, read polemical responses to Hobbes, and would shortly produce a manuscript that has long been considered argumentatively and rhetorically Hobbesian. Direct and credible, if retrospective, testimony survives as to his constant reading of Leviathan during these formative Oxford years.

For his part, Hobbes obliged Stubbe with additional printed jibes at Wallis. He spoke favourably of Oxford under the reforming regime of Owen and Cromwell and rebutted Wallis’s attack on Independency. The sovereign must purge such ‘undutiful and seditious principles’ from the churches and surveil clergy who knew all too well ‘how to trouble and sometimes undoe a slack Government’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Delighted, Stubbe reported to Hobbes that both Owen and his ally Louis du Moulin had produced works defending Independency, which ‘subjected the ministry to the Magistracy sufficiently, for which he and Owen are cryed out upon’. In February 1657, Stubbe wrote that Hobbes’s ‘reconcilement to the university pleaseth, and so I give out that du Moulin’s booke and the Vicechancellor’s [Owen’s] are the pieces that have gained your good esteeme’.Footnote ⁸⁸

Hobbes understood Independency – combining a measured liberty for private conscience, hostility to corporate clerical authority, and deference to the state’s religious power – to be fundamentally compatible with his project. Not all Independents were eager for his support. Both Owen and du Moulin would offer conflicted assessments of Leviathan, and they could not afford to let Independency be tainted with heresy. The Presbyterians pressed these difficulties home, and Owen forbade Stubbe from completing his translation of Leviathan.Footnote ⁸⁹ The ‘Presbyterians’, Stubbe informed Hobbes in February of 1657, ‘have so filled men’s eares against you, that none would dare exhibite’ their true ‘respect’.Footnote ⁹⁰

But none of this diminishes the evidence that Hobbes’s ecclesiological doctrines enjoyed a real influence in Oxford circles. Locke seems to have followed the polemics between Owen and the Wallis–Ward faction, which had dragged Hobbes into their swirl.Footnote ⁹¹ And in praising Stubbe’s Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause, Locke praised a work marked by decidedly Hobbesian themes: defence of a strictly individualized free conscience; a pronounced anticlericalism; fear of the political implications of theological obscurantism; and deference to the sovereign’s religious authority.

Locke also knew another of Hobbes’s Oxford admirers, Edward Bagshaw. Bagshaw and Locke had followed similar arcs through the civil war years. The former finished his education at Westminster School in 1646 and was elected to a studentship at Christ Church. He adopted Independency and attached himself to Owen.Footnote ⁹² At Christ Church he rose to the position of senior censor, responsible for supervising the academics and discipline of undergraduates. Known for ‘Commonwealth principles’, he was hostile to the vestigial ‘popery’ of university ceremony.Footnote ⁹³ He certainly agitated against the use of caps and robes in convocation, though whether he forced university disputants to condemn monarchy and episcopacy (as witnesses later claimed) is harder to say. He reportedly participated in John Harrington’s Rota Club.Footnote ⁹⁴

During Stubbe’s campaign to promote Hobbes at Oxford, Bagshaw wrote to Hobbes, fulsomely apologizing as to ‘how much injury they doe to the Commonwealth of Learning, who doe in the least manner, divert you from those great designes you are now upon’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The subject of their one surviving letter was the ‘Excellent Tract about Necessity’ that Hobbes had composed against Bishop Bramhall. In a subsequent work attacking free-will theology, Bagshaw invoked Hobbes as a theological authority.Footnote ⁹⁶

With Hobbes, Bagshaw viewed the ‘idol’ of free will as both a foundation for clerical power and a chain on conscience. The notion that the will (on spiritual questions) was directed by intention served to cast nonconformity as ‘obstinacy’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Though Bagshaw surpassed Hobbes in constraining the magistrate’s authority to enforce conformity, he agreed with Hobbes that the inner conscience could not be effectively coerced. In 1659, Bagshaw published an explicit denial that elect ‘saintship’ conferred a right to rule. This was sustained with scriptural exegesis emphasizing – as Hobbes had – the political quietism of the primitive Christians under pagan sovereigns. It was ‘in the nature of Civil government in general’ that sovereignty belongs to ‘men not as they are Christians, but as they are men’. In a distinctly Hobbesian passage, Bagshaw wrote of contracted sovereignty: ‘When once a man hath sworne, he cannot resume againe that naturall Liberty, which he was before possessed of, because by his owne voluntary Act he hath divested himself of it, and thereby bound himselfe over to Divine vengeance, if he do not performe the Condition of his Covenant.’ Further, ‘no pretence of Sanctitie can absolve us now from such Ties of Obedience’.Footnote ⁹⁸

In later tracts Bagshaw echoed Hobbes in assailing Bellarmine’s case for papal infallibility and by associating the Laudian faction of the Church of England (including Hobbes’s critic Herbert Thorndike) with popery. His insistence that ecclesia, in scripture, denoted only ‘particular Congregations’ also recalled Leviathan.Footnote ⁹⁹ And in a later dispute with Bishop George Morley, Bagshaw attacked high-flying bishops – in fundamentally Hobbesian terms – as enemies of ‘Regal Dignity’ and ‘true and undoubted sovereignty’. The bishops ‘mangled the King’s authority’ with an ‘Absurd and Insignificant distinguishing between Civil and Ecclesiastical Causes’. They left ‘nothing of Supremacy but the Name’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Bagshaw’s Hobbesian credentials coloured – as they did with Stubbe – his dedication to free conscience. Bagshaw was more deferential to conscience than Hobbes, but this did not require wholesale repudiation of the principles of Leviathan. Recognizing this is important if we are to correctly interpret the first work of political thought produced by the young John Locke.

Locke’s ‘Two Tracts’ and the Influence of Hobbes

On the 29th of May, 1660, eleven years after the beheading of Charles I, Charles II returned to Whitehall Palace, scene of his father’s final moments. The fugitive monarch returned triumphantly as a symbol of order. Thousands cheered his progress from Dover to Canterbury and on to London. The capital glowed with celebratory bonfires. ‘I stood in the Strand and beheld it and blessed God’, wrote John Evelyn.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In dying, Charles I had adopted the persona of the suffering Christ, forgiving his enemies and embracing martyrdom for the Church. Through its own sufferings, the episcopal church cultivated the memory of the martyred King. The revised prayer book of 1662 would establish 30 January as a red-letter day of commemoration for ‘K. Charles Martyr’.Footnote ¹⁰²

The motif of a Christ-like triumph through suffering had envisioned the resurrection of the monarchy, and so it came to pass. The Restoration, wrote Evelyn, was ‘the Lord’s doing, et mirabile in oculis nobis’. The sudden event, wrote Bishop Morley, was ‘like the Resurrection from the Dead’.Footnote ¹⁰³ But in truth, the return of the Stuarts was not a true second coming for the church. Charles II was not entirely his father’s son. He had little moral uprightness, no domestic propriety, and his religious observance was decidedly casual. Worse, he betrayed politique impulses when it came to religious governance. In 1650, he had horrified loyal episcopalians by swearing to the Covenant in order to secure the Scottish crown. Later, positioning himself for restoration, he had promised to stabilize England’s fractured religious scene with some measure of toleration. The Declaration of Breda – composed from exile in April of 1660 – promised ‘a Liberty to Tender Consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matters of Religion, which do not disturb the peace of the Kingdom’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The Declaration of Breda was a masterpiece of magnanimous evasion. It promised liberty of conscience but deferred to parliament. It acknowledged England’s traumatic schisms but envisioned a restored ‘unity’. Nevertheless, free conscience for individuals, hedged only by the political calculation necessary to ensure peace, threatened the Church of England. To its servants the church was ‘one, true, holy and apostolic’, not merely a favoured entrant in a religious marketplace. Nor were they inclined to succour those who had dismantled the church and persecuted its devotees. Sensing trouble, Edward Hyde, Charles’s chief minister, had warned royalist clergy to ‘temper’ their ‘unskillful passion’ in the interest of conciliation. The surviving bishops were instructed not to attend the King’s arrival at Dover.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

We now know what contemporaries would increasingly suspect, that Charles II’s tolerationism was partly motivated by his personal Catholicism. The later Stuarts wielded the Royal Supremacy over an alien church. This contradiction would destroy the monarchy of James, but it also destabilized that of Charles. Charles’s promises of toleration had broader aims as well. To sustain power, Charles would placate the nonconformists who had warred against his father. The inviolable religious principles of Charles I gave way to the politique logic of his son.

At Charles’s return, the Church’s prospects were thus unsettled. His subjects watched with varying degrees of expectation, hope, or dread. Thomas Hobbes had reason to worry. His flight from the exiled court, precipitated by Leviathan, had been on the worst of terms. Royalists had considered him a political and religious traitor, and he had done little in the intervening decade to disabuse them of this notion. Mere months before the Restoration, Hyde refused to ‘absolve’ Hobbes ‘from the Mischief he hath done to the King, the Church, the Laws, and the Nation’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Throughout 1659 and early 1660, Hobbes remained at Chatsworth, the Derbyshire estate of his lifelong patrons, the Cavendishes. Hobbes had scant expectation of royal favour and could be assured of the determined hostility of Hyde and the episcopal clergy.

John Locke, much more obscure, had less to fear. With the whole nation ‘reeleing’, he followed events with disquiet. ‘There are few know what probably to hope or desire’, he wrote, ‘and the best and wisest are faine to wish for the generall thing settlement without seeing the way to it.’ Locke was full of indecision. ‘I have a long time thougt the safest condition to bee in armes could I be but resolvd from whome I ought to receive them and for whome to imploy them … I must confesse in this posture of affairs I know not what to thinke, what to say.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ His father died in December of 1660, cutting him off from family counsel.

After the Restoration, Locke may have feared the loss of his studentship. Ousted royalists resumed their places in the church and the universities. In the summer of 1660, a royal visitation to Oxford was launched, and this clearly worried Locke. The university, he wrote in August, was ‘clouded and disturbd by noe ordinary feare’. His own ‘composdnesse’ was ‘shaken with continuall earth quakes and is every minute tottering’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The scrum to retain places surely partly explains the volume of celebratory verses, Britannia Rediviva, produced by Oxford fellows in 1660. Here we find more early verse by Locke, ripely celebrating Charles II as the champion of order against chaos, light against darkness.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The enthusiasm may have been sincere. It certainly followed the general mood. As one correspondent put it in May, not twenty ‘Antimonarticks’ could be found in London, once the capital of anti-Stuart sentiment.Footnote ¹¹⁰

This constellation of factors framed Locke’s first sustained political writing. The country had rallied to the Stuart dynasty, but with hopes of conciliation rather than retribution. The re-establishment of the episcopal church was expected but on terms that remained unknown and were likely to be moderate and to include some toleration. In these circumstances Locke composed two short treatises on the question of church governance. They were never published but are today known as the ‘Two Tracts’. They offer us further possible evidence of Locke’s contact with the Hobbesian milieu of the Interregnum.

The ‘Two Tracts’ are often characterized as defences of the restored Church of England. This is misleading. The ‘English Tract’, by far the more consequential of the two because it was intended for publication, was finished no later than December of 1660 when Locke sent it to his correspondent Gabriel Towerson.Footnote ¹¹¹ (The later Latin version, composed as an academic oration, was probably intended for teaching and almost certainly not for publication.Footnote ¹¹²) Late 1660 was a period of rising hopes for the episcopal party, but no more. The spontaneous return to prayer book worship, and enthusiastic burnings of the Solemn League and Covenant, augured well for the old church. But against this weighed the King’s promises of toleration and his concern to soothe, rather than suppress, religious strife. Presbyterians had expected that the winds of religious conservatism might blow their way, and for a time in 1659 they had.Footnote ¹¹³ Now they hoped for a comprehensive church settlement with a moderated episcopacy ‘assisted’ by presbyters, rather than a relapse into full-blown Laudianism. Independents hoped for some toleration outside of the coming establishment.Footnote ¹¹⁴

None of these hopes were decisively realized or dashed until after Locke’s ‘English Tract’ was finished. When he landed at Dover, Charles had been greeted by a delegation of Presbyterians and none of the surviving bishops.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The conservative Cavalier Parliament, which would prove critical to the eventual church restoration, had not yet been elected. Over the summer of 1660, the Oxford visitation had removed fifty fellows to make way for ejected royalists, but many Interregnum fellows remained in place.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Late into 1660, observers remained uncertain as to whether the church settlement would satisfy the episcopal party.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The Privy Council included both episcopalians and Presbyterians, as did the new cohort of royal chaplains. Charles encouraged Presbyterian proposals for a revised liturgy and a moderated episcopacy. He offered bishoprics to several Presbyterian clergymen. In October, the Worcester House Declaration announced an interim settlement requiring bishops to seek the assistance of presbyters and allowing clergy to omit parts of the prayer book. The plan provided no toleration for sectarians and thus exacerbated the split between Presbyterians seeking comprehension and Independents requiring toleration.Footnote ¹¹⁸ But as an effort at securing ecclesial peace it pleased the King.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The Convention Parliament narrowly rejected the Worcester House Declaration as the basis for a permanent settlement, but by that time, Locke was composing or had completed his ‘English Tract’.Footnote ¹²⁰ The Convention had also signalled moderation with an act confirming the living of any minister ordained in any manner since 1 January 1642, unless an ejected predecessor was still living. The act outraged those who considered episcopal ordination essential.Footnote ¹²¹ In the summer of 1660, rumours circulated that the King would demand ‘that both Episcopall Divines and Presbyterians should mutualy condescend’.Footnote ¹²² In August, a royal letter into Scotland promised to protect the settled government of the Kirk, which had lacked bishops for two decades.Footnote ¹²³

Presbyterian hopes for a mild settlement only died lingeringly. In the elections of March 1661, outside of London at least, a wave swept episcopal loyalists into parliament. Still, at the opening of parliament in May, Chancellor Hyde urged the members to honour the Declaration of Breda. Charles issued an edict forbidding the imprisonment of Quakers for refusing oaths. He also worked to soften the penal laws against Roman Catholics. As late as December of 1661, the informed Presbyterian doyen Lady Frances Hobart held out hope for ‘Liberty in the things of God’ and for ‘private religious exercises’.Footnote ¹²⁴

Gradually, the more unyielding nature of the emerging settlement revealed itself. London’s Bishop Gilbert Sheldon, promoted by Hyde, gathered influence and launched a print campaign for episcopacy.Footnote ¹²⁵ Hyde himself, capable of strategic flexibility, was nevertheless generally loyal to the traditional church constitution.Footnote ¹²⁶ Recovery of the ‘ancestral church’ was the work of a clerical–gentry alliance, obstructing the King’s moderation.Footnote ¹²⁷ Parliament ordered the burning of the Solemn League and Covenant. Bishops were readmitted to the Lords in June of 1661, strengthening the church’s clout.Footnote ¹²⁸ The Oath of Allegiance became mandatory for all religious sects, and their meetings were outlawed. The slowly stirring church courts began to prosecute recusancy, non-payment of tithes, and the failure to baptize children. In Scotland, the King executed a U-turn. The first Scottish bishops were consecrated in December of 1661.Footnote ¹²⁹

At the Savoy Conference, convened in April 1661 to reform the prayer book, the episcopal clergy impeded all significant revisions. In May, the Convocation issued a revised prayer book unacceptable to the Presbyterians.Footnote ¹³⁰ Royal efforts to secure a partial waiver of some of its provisions were defeated. The central pillar of the church restoration, the Uniformity Act, advanced throughout the summer and autumn of 1661. Enacted in May of 1662, it ejected any minister who had not accepted the new prayer book and repudiated the Covenant by St. Bartholomew’s Day.Footnote ¹³¹

However, it was only in late 1661 that the Laudian restoration began to seem inevitable. Even then, as hopes for a moderate, comprehensive establishment faded, they were replaced by monarchical efforts to secure a toleration in the image of Breda. Clarendon proposed an explicit proviso to the Uniformity Act allowing the King – a ‘most discerning, generous, and merciful prince’ – to suspend its ‘sharp’ effect on ‘tender consciences’.Footnote ¹³² The bishops impeded this effort, holding that ‘it was not in the king’s power to dispense with ecclesiastical laws’.Footnote ¹³³ Archbishop Sheldon, writes one authority, ‘called in public opinion to defend his concept of religion against the King himself. It was a manoeuvre he was to repeat with equal success during the next thirteen years.’Footnote ¹³⁴ But Charles resisted. Sir Henry Bennet, Lord Ashley, and other counsellors urged him to strengthen his authority’ and stave off ‘discontented partyes’ by tempering uniformity. Dissenters and Catholics lobbied for a merciful suspension of the penal laws.Footnote ¹³⁵ Clarendon was nervous, but the King was determined to defuse the ‘great spirit of malice abroad’.Footnote ¹³⁶

In December of 1662, the ‘Declaration to Tender Consciences’ was issued. This was a statement of intent, rather than an actual mechanism instituting an indulgence, but it previewed a governing strategy that would roil politics for decades to come. It responded to dissenting and Catholic petitions asserting that the King ‘had in himself the power to dispense in such cases, as he did with the Dutch and French churches’. Independents supposedly rallied to this argument, willing – according to Baxter – to use the Catholics as ‘a means for their own ends’.Footnote ¹³⁷ Defending the Declaration before parliament in February, Charles cleverly associated religious coercion (and thus its present episcopal advocates) with ‘Popish times’. He disavowed any intention of favouring Catholicism and promised to keep the established church ‘pure and uncorrupted’. But if ‘Dissenters will demean themselves peacefully and modestly under government, I could heartily wish I had such a power of indulgence’ to reward them.Footnote ¹³⁸ The King asked parliament to confirm this royal power with a bill that afforded him wide latitude to suspend the Uniformity Act (and potentially the Corporation Act) and to license nonconformist worship. This ‘conjured up a Hobbesian vision of a religion governed by royal decree’.Footnote ¹³⁹ The Commons proved deeply hostile to this ‘schism by law’. In the Lords, the bishops spoke against the design.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Sheldon was its most vigorous enemy, warning the Privy Council that indulgence would ‘not only render the parliament cheap, and have influence over all other laws, but in truth let in a visible confusion upon Church and State’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Indulgence, like comprehension, failed. The victorious bishops, however, now realized that the autonomy and authority of the church could only be cautiously advanced in alliance with the court. Charles’s prerogative authority loomed as a double-edged sword.

John Locke’s ‘English Tract’ must be located not within a context of triumphant, ecclesiastical traditionalism but within a complex, unstable period during which the court and church were often at odds. The tract sought to establish that the ‘Civil Magistrate may lawfully impose and determine the use of indifferent things in reference to religious worship’. It is an error to associate affirmation of this sovereign power with the episcopal cause, or to presume that Locke’s Independent associates would have objected to it. Locke’s ‘English Tract’ was a strictly Erastian intervention, written when the episcopal party did not enjoy the unalloyed support of sovereignty. With a few cosmetic changes, it might well have appeared during the Interregnum, as a Congregationalist apology for magisterial authority over spiritual causes.

From one perspective, Locke’s ‘English Tract’ positioned itself within an intramural dispute between two variations on Hobbesian ecclesiology. The work answered Edward Bagshaw’s The Great Question concerning Things Indifferent in Religious Worship. Bagshaw rejected the notion of an earthly Christian kingdom. He adopted a Hobbesian contractual account of sovereignty and spurned conceits about the sacred qualities of power.Footnote ¹⁴² At the Restoration, Bagshaw retired briefly to the country. The King reportedly attempted to employ him in December of 1662, at the moment when he was issuing his Declaration of Indulgence. The court perhaps envisioned Bagshaw as a hired pen, agitating for a toleration based on a high view of the King’s spiritual authority. A Hobbesian sectarian would have been well suited to such purposes. But Bagshaw demurred.Footnote ¹⁴³ A strong sympathy with the sects, and hostility to the restored church, derailed his career. He did seek episcopal ordination as early as 1659, and he managed to maintain his studentship at Christ Church until 1661.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ But in 1663 he was imprisoned for seditious speech, and in 1671 for refusing the oaths of supremacy. Shortly thereafter, he died. John Owen would memorialize him for ‘patience’ amidst persecution.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Bagshaw’s published controversies with figures such as Bishop Morley and Richard Baxter could be acrimonious.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ But his later reputation as a seditious malcontent should not colour his early controversy with Locke. His full radicalism had not yet emerged. As his episcopal ordination and brief service as chaplain to the Earl of Anglesey indicate, he was capable of trimming his sails (albeit in service to a broad-minded aristocrat who supported dissenters). In the Great Question, he presented himself as a loyal royalist and Church of England man.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ This marriage of tolerationism and loyal monarchism perhaps appealed to the court.

Bagshaw’s tract went through several editions, and in March of 1661 Locke’s associate Gabriel Towerson complained that the work was ‘well liked’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ As late as April of 1661, Bagshaw preached from no less a pulpit than that of Saint Mary’s – the university church – where he apparently prayed for the restored bishops but also swiped at the imposing of ‘ceremonies’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Locke knew Bagshaw at Christ Church. He had followed the war over the re-imposition of caps and gowns that animated his colleague.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Both men belonged to the clientage of John Owen. Towerson would refer to Bagshaw as Locke’s ‘freind’, and though by 1661 this was ironic in some measure, it suggested a growing estrangement rather than distance.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The gap between their ecclesiology and politics should not be exaggerated. Bagshaw was undoubtedly more sympathetic to sectarianism than Locke, and he would eventually become a determined resister of the restored establishment. But in 1660 his background was similar to Locke’s, and he loudly proclaimed his allegiance to the King and bishops. Indeed, Locke never publicly avowed as clearly as Bagshaw did any allegiance to episcopacy and the liturgy.Footnote ¹⁵²

Bagshaw’s Great Question often reads like an effort to flatter and cajole Charles II, urging him to deploy his prerogative to moderate the church’s re-establishment. As to whether the sovereign might legitimately determine the use of indifferent things in religious worship, it offered a qualified negative, hoping to carve out space for diversity within a re-established church and indulgence for those who remained outside it. This programme was not a challenge to Charles II; it closely hewed to the court’s preferred approach.

Bagshaw offered a Pauline reading of primitive Christianity and of that ‘perfect law of Liberty’ which bound us only to God and not to ‘Humane Ordinances and Outside Rites’.Footnote ¹⁵³ He conceded that some aspects of religious observance were ‘indifferent’ but argued that many potentially indifferent practices ‘by Abuse have become occasions of Superstition’ and idolatry. He exemplified this with a list of Laudian practices, such as bowing at Christ’s name, surplices, and kneeling for the Eucharist. Thus did Bagshaw signal his distaste for formalism, even as he avowed devotion to bishops. Such ceremonies were not unlawful but could not be imposed by force.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In this Bagshaw was not commenting on the sovereign’s right as such.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ He viewed political power as a profane inheritance, unbound by the strictures of Christianity. The Christian magistrate was, however, more limited:

Bagshaw’s account of civil sovereignty – as a contracted surrender of natural liberty – did not subordinate it to scriptural revelation. King Charles was constrained as a Christian but not as a sovereign. In light of this, Bagshaw’s tract offered supplementary, prudential arguments against religious coercion. Imposition itself, rather than liberty, he argued, ‘begat all manner of Disorder and Confusion’. ‘Variety’ in Godliness was an ‘excellent and most comely thing’, and ‘liberty is so far from weakening, that it is indeed the security of a Throne’, as it earned princes both popularity and divine protection.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Bagshaw’s Great Question, in short, was partly an effort to counsel Charles II on his Christian duty and partly an effort to reinforce the King’s politique tolerationism. Bagshaw urged ‘all Parties … to referre the whole cause of Ceremonies to his Majesties single Decision’. He was confident that the author of the Declaration of Breda would remove the ‘Apples of Ecclesiastical Contention’, but he promised ‘that should his Majesty be prevailed upon for some Reason of State, to enjoyn Outward Conformity, this writer is resolved by the help of God, either to submit with Chearfullness, or else to suffer with silence … Whatever he cannot Conscientiously do, he thinks himself obliged to suffer for …’Footnote ¹⁵⁸

Bagshaw’s Great Question did not disavow religious authority over indifferent matters as a note of sovereignty but merely as a violation of the religious duty of Christian princes. Bagshaw emphasized the sinfulness of imposition more thoroughly than Hobbes had, but his portrait of the primitive church was compatible with Leviathan, as was his suggestion that ceremonial imposition was an imprudent policy serving clerical, rather than secular, authority. Bagshaw recognized that the scope of religious liberty would be determined by sovereign power and that the sovereign’s relative valuation of pious and worldly considerations would be his own. In many respects these arguments paralleled those advanced by Henry Stubbe a few years earlier. Both began with a contractual account of sovereignty that was likely informed by Hobbes, but they counselled some religious freedom as a matter of prudent statecraft and (particularly for Bagshaw) as a particular religious duty of Christian sovereigns.

John Locke had favoured this position in the latter years of the Interregnum. In 1660 he broke from it, but only in limited ways. Why Locke composed his ‘English Tract’, prepared to print it, and then abandoned it, is obscure. Speculation that he might have written it at the behest of John Fell, who became Dean of Christ Church in November 1660, is without evidence. Fell ascended to power only as Locke’s tract was finished. In any case, the work was not well judged as a piece of advocacy for Fell’s position, which was committed to Laudian ceremonialism and episcopal authority.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Locke’s associate Gabriel Towerson, an All-Soul’s fellow, was certainly involved. Locke and Towerson began their collaboration considering the question of natural law.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Bagshaw’s Great Question appeared in October, when Locke was often in Pensford with his dying father. By November he was back in Oxford. The original epistle to his ‘English Tract’, apparently written to Towerson and later replaced with a more formal preface, was dated 11 December 1660. It indicated that Locke and Towerson had discussed Bagshaw’s tract and that Locke’s response ‘owed [its] original’ to Towerson. He had been ‘careful’, Locke said, to otherwise ‘sequester my thoughts both from books and the times, that they might only attend those arguments that were warranted by reason, without taking any upon trust from the vogue or fashion’.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Locke’s ‘English Tract’ should thus be read not as a party document but as a general commentary on magisterial authority. It has nevertheless been construed as an enthusiastic endorsement of the episcopal church and its forms of worship.Footnote ¹⁶² But neither the ‘English Tract’ nor its Latin version offered a word supporting the restoration of the English episcopal hierarchy, nor the re-imposition of the prayer book. The preface to the ‘English Tract’ did celebrate the Protestant English establishment as the ‘purest church of the later age’, but this imprecise paean (written after the tract itself) did not clearly mark Locke’s allegiances. With the exception of an openness to the use of surplices, neither of the tracts promoted the return of ceremonial formalism or sacramentalism. The ‘English Tract’ denied that crossing oneself, bowing at the name of Jesus, and other notes of formalism might particularly encourage ‘superstition’, but it did so by even-handedly equating them with less formal worship practices.

In truth, Locke’s ‘Two Tracts’ scarcely consider the church at all. The ‘English Tract’ says nothing about the autonomy of the church, its episcopacy order, or its traditional sacraments and ceremonies. Its structuring query, the power of magistrates over ‘indifferent things in reference to religious worship’, did not neatly divide episcopal churchmen from dissenters. Locke’s clearest foils were the radical sects.Footnote ¹⁶³ The tract would not have bothered more Erastian Independents. In fact, its subordination of external worship to sovereignty may have given the neo-Laudians pause. In 1660, the King’s spiritual power was by no means consistently at their service.

The ‘English Tract’ is, moreover, peppered with Hobbesian arguments, closely paralleling doctrines of Leviathan.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The conventional reading of the ‘English Tract’ as Hobbesian focusses on Locke’s account of the state of nature, but the textual parallels between the tract and Hobbes are more extensive than that. Locke based his case for sovereign power over spiritual adiaphora on a contractual theory of sovereignty. Natural and revealed law might constrain sovereignty in the spiritual realm. All religious matters not so restricted might enjoy natural liberty, but natural liberty could be surrendered to another. God’s law, after such a surrender, obliges submission. Indeed,

This understanding of sovereignty strikingly resembled the jus naturalist contractualism of Leviathan (and of Stubbe and Bagshaw).Footnote ¹⁶⁶ The passage evokes Leviathan’s theory of sovereign representation, as well as its claim that civil liberty was no greater in republican Lucca than in despotic Constantinople.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ In marginal notes Locke, with Hobbes, expressed a preference for monarchy, but he defined sovereignty as the ‘supreme legislative power not considering the form’. If supreme power was grounded on popular consent, ‘then it is evident that they have resigned up the liberty of their actions into his disposure, and so all his commands are but their own votes and his edicts their owne injunctions made by proxy which by mutual contract they are bound to obey’. Like Hobbes, Locke construed this political covenant not as an agreement between sovereign and people but as a foundational act of consent among subjects, creating a ‘supreme power’ that would thereafter represent their collective will.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

Locke cannot have written this description of attributed action in ignorance of Hobbes’s revolutionary account. We now have reason to think that he was studying Leviathan diligently, and his reading of Filmer (and perhaps of Gee and Wren) from around this time dealt precisely with these dimensions of Hobbesian theory. Ideally, we would possess Locke’s reading notes from Leviathan. In the absence of such notes, his choice of anti-Hobbesian reading offers suggestive evidence.

Locke’s quotation from Filmer is oddly truncated and implies appreciation for Hobbes, but in the remainder of the sentence, Filmer rejected Hobbes’s account of the creation of sovereignty. Criticism of Hobbes, rather than praise, filled the short but discerning eleven pages that begin Filmer’s Observations, pages that Locke very likely read. Defending his own paternalist monarchism, Filmer rebuffed Hobbes’s depiction of the sovereign as an ‘artificial man’. He rejected the constitutional indeterminacy that typified the ‘person of a Commonwealth’ in Leviathan. He derided the notion of a social contract to which the sovereign himself was not a party.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ He denied that natural individual right had ever existed in a ‘horrid condition of pure nature’, understood as a war of all against all. Filmer accused Hobbes of preserving popular judgement by permitting subjects an abiding right of self-defence. He even implicitly rejected Hobbes’s Erastianism, by preserving the distinction (effaced by Hobbes) of Joshua’s ‘magisterial’ power from the ‘ministerial’ power of Eleazar, the high priest.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

On virtually all of these points, Locke’s ‘English Tract’, and indeed his lifelong views, accorded with Hobbes’s account and rejected Filmer’s. (In this sense, Locke’s later Two Treatises could not have viewed Filmer and Hobbes as alternative possible foils, as is often suggested. Attacking Filmer entailed a defence of Hobbes’s fundamental principles.) In the ‘English Tract’ Locke adopted a version of the state of nature and the social contract that he clearly would have understood as Hobbesian. Locke’s ‘English Tract’, for instance, espoused the equation of civil liberty under republics and monarchies that Filmer expressly rejected as a Hobbesian paradox.Footnote ¹⁷¹

Likely more congenial to Locke was the quasi-Hobbesian theory of sovereignty found in Edward Gee’s The Divine Right and Original of the Civill Magistrate from God. Illustrated and Vindicated.Footnote ¹⁷² Misleadingly titled, this book followed Hobbes in construing ‘divine right’ as an honorific for all warranted sovereigns. Gee’s reformed scholastic terminology would not have appealed to Hobbes, but De Cive numbered among Gee’s favoured authorities. He did reject Hobbes’s undiluted theory of political obligation according to which mere possession of power conferred sovereign right. Only legitimate authority enjoyed the deference counselled by Romans chapter 13. But Gee was no divine right monarchist, and much of his book assailed Filmer’s paternalism. ‘Justifiable’ sovereignty, whatever its constitutional form, relied on an original act of consent. Alongside copious scriptural interpretation, Gee invoked Bodin, Grotius, Selden, and Hobbes to argue from ‘State-maxime’ that ‘Political power is originally in the people, and in the Magistrate only derivatively’.Footnote ¹⁷³ Hobbes provided Gee with crucial aspects of this hybrid theory of a sovereignty that was legitimate and de jure on the one hand and artificial and contractual on the other. From De Cive he borrowed notions of natural human equality, a theory of consent in conditions of conquest, and an account of the link between protection and obligation.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ But chiefly he took from Hobbes what Locke surely did: an account of sovereignty as the artificial construction of men naturally ‘equal and free’ and bound not by any divine constitution but by natural law alone. A ‘common power’ required the union ‘of the wils of many in the will of one man, or of one council’.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Locke also characterized the absence of sovereignty in ways that strongly recalled Hobbes’s state of nature: ‘in its absence no peace, no security, no enjoyments, enmity with all men and safe possession of no thing, and those stinging swarms of miseries that attend anarchy and rebellion’. It is difficult to imagine that Locke wrote this with Leviathan out of mind, particularly given his reading of Filmer, perhaps Gee, and most likely Leviathan itself, as well as his engagement with known Hobbists such as Stubbe and Bagshaw.

This account of contracted sovereignty, Locke wrote, was a thing ‘which I thinke my author [Bagshaw] will not deny’.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ As he wrote to Towerson:

He would not ‘meddle’ with divine right defences of monarchy.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ The claim that the ‘magistrate’s power derived from the people’ was a ‘hypothesis’ dear to tolerationists. (Gee had also declared this ‘of late the Chief Maxime in Politicks’.Footnote ¹⁷⁸) Locke accepted the theory but sought to demonstrate that it would ‘afford but a very weak foundation’ to any denial of magisterial authority over spiritual adiaphora. We must jettison outdated notions of Hobbes’s standing among the ‘patrons of liberty’, which wrongly presume that Leviathan could only have rebuked rather than informed them. Locke cast his ‘English Tract’ as a rejoinder to Bagshaw based upon Hobbesian theoretical precepts that Bagshaw and Locke, and indeed Stubbe, all accepted.

Locke then defended magisterial authority over indifferent things with a series of claims further recalling Leviathan. Importantly, the ‘English Tract’ did not distance itself from the cause of free conscience. Hobbes had asserted that inward conscience and belief could not be forced by the power of law.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Locke agreed: ‘Understanding and Assent’ were in God’s gift alone. Magistrates ‘would in vain assault that part of man which owes no homage to his Authority, or endeavour to Establish his religion by those ways which would only increase an aversion and make enemys rather than proselytes’.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Free conscience was thereby preserved, if only in Hobbes’s narrow, internal sense.Footnote ¹⁸¹ This deflationary understanding of conscience proved the primary point of contention between Bagshaw and Locke. At issue was whether ‘the Magistrate hath an absolute command over all the actions of men whereof they themselves are free and undetermined agents’.Footnote ¹⁸²

Older scholarship generally failed to recognize that Locke and Hobbes offered similar accounts of conscience. In his edition of the ‘Two Tracts’, Abrams’s influential scepticism of Locke’s Hobbism hung on a misreading of Hobbes on this point. Abrams believed that Hobbes espoused a complete ‘alienation of judgement’ to the sovereign. In truth, Leviathan preserved conscience freedom, albeit strictly in the internal realm. Abrams was wrong to distance Locke from Hobbes by saying that the latter ‘eliminates the freedom of conscience as well as that of action’.Footnote ¹⁸³ More recent scholarship on Hobbes’s theory of conscience reveals the compatibility of the young Locke and Hobbes on this crucial point.

Locke adopted the Hobbesian strategy of hedging free conscience into an internal realm and, as regarded outward behaviour, effacing the distinction between temporal and spiritual actions. Conscience could not command action, ‘conscience being nothing but an opinion of the truth of any practical position, which may concern any action as well moral as religious, civil as ecclesiastical’. Leviathan had similarly defined conscience as ‘private opinions’ or individual ‘secret facts and secret thoughts’.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ ‘Indifferent things’, wrote Locke, ‘of civil as well as religious concernment being of the same nature, and will always be so, till our author [Bagshaw] can show where God hath put a distinction between them.’Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Though Bagshaw had limited conscience’s specifically political claims, as Locke admitted, yet ‘if he thinks others would not soe far improve his principles, let him look some years back he will find that a liberty for tender consciences was the first inlett to all those confusions and unheard of and destructive opinions that overspread this nation’. Locke continued:

This important passage contained several Hobbesian themes. Leviathan had denounced as seditious the doctrine that ‘whatsoever a man does against his Conscience is Sinne’. If not, ‘in such diversity, as there is of private Consciences, which are but private opinions, the Common-wealth must needs be distracted, and no man dare to obey the Soveraign Power, farther than it shall seem good in his own eyes’.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Locke’s concern about ‘tender consciences’ mobilizing resistance paralleled this closely. ‘Order and decency’ could not ‘depend wholly on the opinions and fancies of men’. As for Locke’s argument that revolutions and war turned on religious factions, Hobbes asserted the same thesis on many occasions. And Locke’s claim that the promise of a better afterlife trumped all earthly, political interests strikingly recalled Hobbes’s admonition that ‘terrour’ of eternal damnation and hope of eternal salvation would always overtake the sovereign’s temporal punishments and rewards.Footnote ¹⁸⁸

Locke and Bagshaw contested the boundaries of the domain of conscience. Locke followed Hobbes in presenting it as internalized and private. But the dispute was also framed around the related notion of adiaphora.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Bagshaw conceded that indifferent things existed but sought to limit sovereign power over them by arguing that ceremonies of this kind had ‘by abuse become occasions of superstition’.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Against Bagshaw’s wide-ranging understanding of superstition, Locke offered a narrow Hobbesian one. ‘Superstition if I understand it aright’, he wrote, ‘is a false apprehension of god, or of a false god, attended with a slavish feare of severity and cruelty in him, which they hope to mittigate by a worship of their own invention … But that superstition in this sence cannot by applyd to the limitation of Indifferent things is cleare.’Footnote ¹⁹¹ This recalled both Hobbes’s projection theory of religion (as belief in an anthropomorphized abstraction born of fear) and his definition of superstition: ‘Feare of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales’ that were not ‘publiquely allowed’.Footnote ¹⁹² Locke’s ‘false god’ closely resembled Hobbes’s ‘feigned’ gods.Footnote ¹⁹³

Hobbes also anticipated Locke’s expansive definition of adiaphora. Hobbes, contrasting ‘natural and arbitrary worship’, designated some ‘signes of Honour (both in Attributes and Actions)’ as ‘natural’. Prayers, thanks, and obedience were some of these. ‘Others are so by Institution, or Custome of men; and in some times and places are Honourable; in others Dishounourble; in others Indifferent: such as are the Gestures in Salutation, Prayer, and Thanksgiving, in different times and places, differently used.’ These customary matters constituted ‘Arbitrary Worship’, and Hobbes concluded that they might sometimes be ‘Commanded’ by sovereignty and sometimes left ‘Voluntary’. Hobbes, notably, did consider some actions ‘naturally’ honourable or dishonourable and conceded that the latter ‘cannot be made by humane power a part of Divine worship’.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Locke agreed that some worship practices would be forbidden by natural law. But he also categorized, with Hobbes, virtually any ceremonial or linguistic act of worship as adiaphora.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Both men argued that even the heathens – though they worshipped ‘false Gods’ – exercised ‘reasonable’ discretion in ordering their ceremonies and sacrifices as they did.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Bagshaw viewed these practices themselves as superstitious, while Locke and Hobbes limited pagan superstition to the falsity of their gods.

Locke’s ‘English Tract’ was primarily an argument about the extent of sovereignty. The ‘light of reason and nature of government itself’, he wrote, made it ‘evident that in all Societys it is unavoidably necessary that the supreme power (whether seated in one or more), must be still supreme, i.e. have a full and unlimitted power over all indifferent things and actions within the bounds of that society’.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Bagshaw’s tract, however, did not argue a general limitation on sovereignty but particularly limits on Christian sovereigns as Christians. (Locke pressed on this paradox: ‘Tis strange that doctrine that enjoins submission to a Nero, should be thought to free us from subjection to a Constantine.’Footnote ¹⁹⁸) Locke was thus required to respond to Bagshaw’s scriptural interpretations, and here again we find Hobbesian parallels. Locke, like Hobbes, spurned any theory that would ‘strengthen a heathen’ but ‘weaken a Christian’ magistrate.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Interpreting the twenty-third chapter of Matthew, Bagshaw had taken Christ’s rebuke of the Pharisees as a general prohibition on rules concerning indifferent things. Locke followed Hobbes, reading this as a rebuke to the hypocrisy and rigour of the Pharisees but not a denial of their sovereign right (they sit in ‘Moses’ Chaire’).Footnote ²⁰⁰ Bagshaw interpreted John, chapter 8 (where Christ confronts the Pharisees: ‘If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed’) as a radical Christian freedom from imposition. Hobbes and Locke read this as a characterization of the primitive church’s freedom from Jewish ceremonial law, rather than a limitation on the ‘Civill Laws of the State’.Footnote ²⁰¹

Bagshaw thus differed with both Hobbes and Locke over the limitations that Christianity imposed on sovereignty. On behalf of sovereignty per se, Bagshaw accepted very broad power claims and could only urge toleration as a matter of prudent statecraft. This accorded with the tolerationist counsel of Leviathan, and we find similar advice intimated in Locke’s ‘English Tract’. Locke wrote that ‘the magistrate’s concernments will always teach him to use no more rigour than the temper of the people and the necessity of the age shall call for’.Footnote ²⁰² Magisterial impositions were necessary acts of border maintenance in contentious times. ‘If men would suffer one another to go to heaven everyone his own way’, Locke wrote, echoing his letter to Stubbe, ‘our author’s doctrine of toleration might promote a quiet in the world.’Footnote ²⁰³ But as ‘pity and persuasion’ had not typified recent generations, a firmer hand was required. Locke and Bagshaw engaged in an internal dispute over toleration between two men committed to a similar Hobbesian understanding of sovereignty.

Locke certainly offered no defence of restored Laudianism. He did not view the episcopal church as a divine institution, with autonomous powers or hallowed liturgical practices beyond the reach of sovereignty. He did not present Charles II as beholden to the old church. For a church long sustained by the pious deference of Charles I, Locke’s generic defence of an Erastian uniformity might have seemed ambiguous. Perhaps this explains why the ‘English Tract’ was never published. Locke had finished it by December of 1660. In the following March, Towerson complained to him of the troubling popularity of Bagshaw’s tract. ‘You may perhaps doe God and the church a peice of seasonable service’, he wrote, ‘if you would be pleas’d to print your answer to it.’Footnote ²⁰⁴ In a preface drafted later, Locke conceded reluctance. He did not wish to fuel contention or disturb ‘the beginnings of our happy settlement’.Footnote ²⁰⁵ This may sufficiently explain Locke’s hesitation. Towerson and Samuel Tilly worked to dissipate it. In April, the former reported a sermon by Bagshaw which blasted church ceremonies: ‘there may be some necessity that your papers should see the light’.Footnote ²⁰⁶ In December, Tilly – speaking for unnamed ‘others’ who had read Locke’s manuscript – also urged publication.Footnote ²⁰⁷

But by early 1662 the church settlement – defying the King – had assumed a more hard-line form. The ‘English Tract’ was not well suited as a defence of this emerging dispensation. Locke’s preface emphasized the tract’s Erastian and politique elements; he had ‘drawn his sword in the same side with the magistrate, with a design to suppress not begin a quarrel’. He sought to allay ‘suspicions and disquiets’, to encourage ‘a ready and entire obedience’.Footnote ²⁰⁸ Locke characterized ceremonial and liturgical traditions inviolable to the churchmen as ‘occasion of hatred and quarrels amongst us as leeks and onions and other trifles described’ in Juvenal’s Satire 15. Juvenal’s ‘Leeks and Onyons’ had, infamously and vividly, served a similar function in Leviathan.Footnote ²⁰⁹

Given Locke’s religious background, it is probable that he either did not wish to write in support of the emerging Restoration church or did not feel that his Erastian defence of uniformity would be welcomed by those who increasingly dominated it. What in 1660 was a defence of the sovereign’s religious prerogative useful to the designs of Charles II, by 1662 may have seemed poorly suited to the more uncompromising episcopal piety emerging in parliament and the country.Footnote ²¹⁰

While the likely Hobbism of Locke’s ‘Two Tracts’ has at times been conceded, more recent contextual work has tended to present these early Lockean works as deriving from the century-long English Protestant debate over the status of adiaphora. In this reading, Locke arrayed himself with episcopal conformists such as Henry Hammond, Jeremy Taylor, and Robert Sanderson, all of whom wrote in the shadow of the preeminent Hooker. The best case for this interpretation is made by John Marshall and Jacqueline Rose, and some influence is certainly likely.Footnote ²¹¹ Sanderson is the clearest case. But it is important to note that the later and less politically significant ‘Latin Tract’ is the primary source of evidence for textual parallels between Sanderson and Locke. Even there, Abrams makes a compelling case that Locke’s borrowings from Sanderson’s De Obligatione Conscientiae (1660) are more ‘formal’ than substantial and that Locke far outstrips Sanderson’s account of sovereignty, moving in a Hobbesian direction.Footnote ²¹² As for the ‘English Tract’ – more consequential in the present context – Locke referred to Hooker and Sanderson only in response to Bagshaw. He claimed to have read Hooker’s preface but no more, and Sanderson only with ‘haste and inadvertancy’.Footnote ²¹³ Leviathan, by contrast, appears to have been a constant object of his diligent study.

The Anglican debate over adiaphora, measured against Locke, tended to be far more scriptural in flavour, foregrounded questions of natural law and God’s moral pre-eminence, and did not attach itself to the era’s new notions of sovereignty. Particularly in the ‘English Tract’, Locke diverged from these patterns. Though the concept of adiaphora remained important to him, he drew from it more strictly Erastian conclusions. Where Anglicans had found it difficult to cordon Christian conscience into an inner realm, or to fully subordinate it to a voluntarist sovereign, Locke does so. Furthermore, Locke shared none of the concern over ecclesiology and church tradition that marked the work of Taylor, Hammond, and Sanderson. As Marshall notes, where Sanderson understood ‘church governors’ as synodical and canonical, Locke wrote ‘as if church governors meant simply the civil magistrate’.Footnote ²¹⁴ Rose, while emphasizing the traditional, Anglican understanding of adiaphora in her discussion of the ‘Two Tracts’, acknowledges that Locke shared none of its concern for proper ecclesiastical form.Footnote ²¹⁵

Locke and the churchmen also diverged over the nature of conscience. Locke’s ‘English Tract’ parallels Hobbes, defining conscience as ‘nothing but an opinion of the truth of any practical position’.Footnote ²¹⁶ This conflation of conscience with subjective opinion, which would later rile Locke’s orthodox critics, does not resemble Sanderson’s definition of conscience as a ‘faculty’ or ‘light’ implanted in the mind and allowing the ‘discourse of reason’ to be applied to ‘particular moral acts’.Footnote ²¹⁷ For Sanderson, Hammond, or Taylor, the conscience could ‘know’; for Hobbes and Locke, it could merely believe.Footnote ²¹⁸

Locke’s ‘Two Tracts’, while they contained ecclesiological implications, did not offer a positive account of the church. Locke mediated religious obedience between atomized individuals and their sovereigns, within the theoretical horizons provided by the new natural rights theory. On innumerable points – especially regarding the nature of sovereignty and the extent of conscience – Locke echoed the language of Leviathan, which was reportedly constantly at his fingertips. He did so within an intellectual milieu steeped in Hobbesian controversy and in dialogue with figures whom we can identify as enthusiastic Hobbesians. Were a historian seeking to identify the Oxford Hobbists of the Interregnum to have encountered the ‘English Tract’ as the composition of a more obscure university associate of Stubbe, he or she would not hesitate to locate its author within that cohort.

Locke and his opponents took the Hobbesian definition of sovereignty for granted. They disputed whether, given this understanding of politics, the bounds of free conscience should be narrow or broad. In this, they reflected the ambiguities of Leviathan itself. The requirements of stability might suggest, alternatively, the need for an ordered uniformity in worship or for a prudential toleration of nonconformity. Consistently unacceptable was either an enforceable natural right of free exercise or an autonomous church power policing the borders of orthodoxy and proper worship for sovereign and subject alike. Locke’s neglected early writings help us to locate him within the sovereignist revolution launched by the new jus naturalism and particularly crystalized by Leviathan. Locke, in every meaningful sense, had adopted the fundamental doctrines of this new political thinking.

Civil Religion and the Turn to Sovereignty

It is not uncommon to read Locke out of the seventeenth century ‘turn to sovereignty’.Footnote ²¹⁹ Though the terms ‘sovereign’ or ‘sovereignty’ occur more than one hundred times in the Two Treatises, Locke would not offer a clear or consistent, abstract definition. He tended to use these terms to characterize an unlimited power allowable only to God or to pejoratively characterize Filmer’s illegitimate monarchs. However, the claim that Locke rejected ‘all forms of sovereignty except the sovereignty of God’ is an overstatement.Footnote ²²⁰ The phrase ‘civil sovereign’ denotes something other than Filmerian tyrants in the four Letters on toleration, and Locke seems to have intended the terms ‘civil’ or ‘political society’ to signify the ultimate authority of natural individuals acting as one body. But it is Locke’s earliest text, the ‘English Tract’, that offers the clearest evidence of his adoption of a fundamentally Hobbesian understanding of sovereignty, as when he defined a ‘magistrate’ as ‘the supreme legislative power of any society not considering the form of government or the number of persons wherein it is placed’.Footnote ²²¹ Locke’s earliest writings also shared the Erastian hostility to independent religious authority that was pronounced within the theories of sovereignty devised by Bodin, Grotius, and Hobbes.Footnote ²²²

The logic of abstract, contractual sovereignty did not sit well with the Restoration churchmen. Such theory eschewed the divine right that they preferred as a foundation for both monarchy and episcopacy. Most of all, they suspected any failure to construe the Royal Supremacy as a feature of the true church, constituted by providence at the Reformation. The new theories of sovereignty did not understand the Supremacy as a note of the universal church enjoyed only by worthy royal patrons but as a generalized sovereign power over ‘religion’. When Leviathan spoke of the ‘Christian Commonwealth’, it presumed that Christianity did not alter the fundamental requirements of well-maintained sovereignty. Locke’s response to Bagshaw took this as its main challenge: demonstrating, to an advocate of the new contractual theories of sovereignty, that Christianity did not fundamentally alter sovereign powers.

Such thinking threatened the established order of Christendom, not chiefly by advancing Erastianism, or even by advocating toleration, but by amplifying an important discourse of civil religion. Early modern civil religion remains an ill-defined concept. If we take it to denote religion rendered into a political ideology, or religion consciously framed to legitimate power, the term ‘civil religion’ can be redundant to scholars who understand the history of ideas to be a history of ideologies.Footnote ²²³ The historicist and sociological tendency to translate all religion into ‘other factors (economic, ideological, political, and so on)’ can render the specific phenomenon of civil religion all but invisible.Footnote ²²⁴ Critically examining, rather than just adopting, the proto-sociological understanding of ideology that we have inherited from the Enlightenment opens up the possibility of seeing ‘instrumentalized’ religion as a specific and distinct tradition. It also exposes to view a rival tradition of autonomous or ‘prophetic religion’, which often understood itself in explicit opposition to civil religion. Accurate historical reconstruction requires that the viewpoint on religion shared by the Enlightenment’s proto-sociological thinkers be vectored with lines of argument emitting from Christian theology and ecclesiology itself. These were, after all, the two sides of an important early modern debate. Perceptive analysis is offered in Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology. Civil religion, he writes,

Civil religion, O’Donovan concludes (from within the Christian tradition, to be sure), produces an ‘inculturated’ church ‘liable to lose its critical distance on society’.Footnote ²²⁵ The discourse of civil religion can be understood as the conscious effort to buttress and thus benefit from political and social power.Footnote ²²⁶ If such a function is presumed to be an imperative of all religious forms, the category of civil religion is rendered meaningless and a great many religious and political debates of early modernity are obscured.

It is particularly important not to limit the civil religious impulse to the ancient Roman, Machiavellian, or Rousseauian republican traditions that often frame it in historical memory.Footnote ²²⁷ Mark Goldie has perceptively observed that the civil religious tradition has been neglected in part because it seems alien to a ‘liberal’ tradition often defined in anti-republican or anti-totalitarian terms.Footnote ²²⁸ The notion that liberalism privatized or ‘separated’ religion from political power has tended to keep presumed liberal forefathers like Hobbes and Locke distant from the civil religious tradition. But long before Rousseau influentially deployed the term ‘civil religion’, Hobbes wrote of ‘Civill Worship’ in Leviathan, and broad debates over the status of ‘state religion’ proliferated in early modern Europe.Footnote ²²⁹ Whether the project of sanctifying the new ‘manners and institutions’ of the sovereign age could be pursued within a recognizable Christianity was a vital question of the period.Footnote ²³⁰

Civil religion could operate from within a church establishment or from outside it. It could pursue strategies of exclusion or inclusion, of coercion or tolerance. What was required was solely that the purposes of political order, rather than autonomous religious or ecclesial purposes, be prioritized in a conscious way. Equally, thinkers hostile to the notion of civil religion could be found on both sides of the establishment question. The debate over establishment, though it has dominated historical attention, was important but contingent. More basic was the struggle over whether the church should primarily seek autonomy and distance from political power, or whether it should adapt itself in order to legitimate that power. This axis, running between the autonomous and the acculturated church, cut across any axis running between establishment and disestablishment, or between tolerationists and anti-tolerationists. The alternative to civil religion was not necessarily disestablishment or toleration but (to use O’Donovan’s terminology) ‘prophetic religion’.

Arraying the factions of early modernity along an axis dividing ‘prophetic religion’ from ‘civil religion’ can prove a clarifying exercise. It captures the anxieties of a transforming Christendom better than traditional interpretations foregrounding the divide between tolerationists and anti-tolerationists. Civil religion often split apart factions that are assumed to have been united. The logic of civil religion, for instance, could tempt defenders of established episcopacy, but many high churchmen defended their establishment with a highly prophetic notion of the autonomous church. This was a divide that Hobbes exploited in his Restoration polemics.

Most consequentially for the present book, civil religion divided the cause of toleration. Across the later seventeenth century, the presses churned out tolerationist works deploying the logic of sovereignty, prosperity, and stable order. In Sir Charles Wolseley’s Liberty of Conscience the Magistrate’s Interest (1668), for example, any prince interested in his own ‘quiet and repose’ was urged to offer a ‘prudent liberty’ to Protestants. The tract conceded the necessity for a ‘publick Profession’ or ‘State-Religion’, but it was not this state religion that served as the locus for Wolseley’s civil religion. Civil religion – favourable to order and prosperity – thrived in conditions of pluralism and ‘Indulgence’. Indulgence cultivated an ‘equal Tendency in all to love that Prince or State wherein they find favour and protection’. Geo-political power and trading wealth would also follow from toleration and the advance of wisdom that free conscience encouraged. Coerced uniformity merely brought faction and enabled the ‘sinister influence’ of the clergy.Footnote ²³¹ The anonymous Second Thoughts, or the Case of a Limited Toleration counselled toleration as ‘policy’ because tolerated sects would ‘naturally and necessarily fall in sunder, and remain as divided in point of Faction and party as they are in tenets and principles’. Men tended to follow their ‘Interest; how much that over-rules Conscience in all Religions is but too visible in the world’. Dissenters would be pacified with ‘ease and prosperity’, the securing of which was the ‘great art and secret of Government’.Footnote ²³² The sometime Hobbesian Peter Pett, in a 1661 tract that Locke read, also urged toleration as policy. ‘Nor shall I at all in these papers’, he wrote, ‘consider what Liberty to the Consciences of others Religion, but purely what politicall interest prompts us to give.’Footnote ²³³

However, as the author of the Second Thoughts acknowledged, toleration might be defended not just according to ‘Humane prudence’ but also ‘Christian piety’ and the ‘interest of the Church’.Footnote ²³⁴ Some contemporaries were uneasy about subordinating religion to political prudence. The broad-minded jurist Matthew Hale warned that prophetic, scriptural Christianity should never become mere ‘Politick Contrivances, for attaining or upholding Power, Wealth or Interest’. ‘Politicians’ would ‘easily conform religion to State-Policy, and make it indeed a more excellent and incomparable Engine for it, and nothing else’.Footnote ²³⁵

A fuller case against civil religious logic was offered by Jeremy Taylor, the Laudian prelate and chaplain to Charles I.Footnote ²³⁶ His most significant work was the 1647 Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying. This tolerationist work is often presented (by historians and contemporariesFootnote ²³⁷) as an anomalous effort to flatter parliament, based upon the assumption that it cannot be reconciled with Taylor’s otherwise staunch support for bishops and the established church. These charges of inconstancy, in fact, speak to the interpretive confusions generated by the presumption that toleration, or the freedom of ‘prophecy’ and exercise, was the exclusive possession of dissenters. In both his Discourse and his defences of the episcopal establishment, Taylor wrote as a critic of civil religion and the allures of politique statecraft. His tolerationism offered an expansive view of the prophetic purposes of religion, and it constrained the ambit of the state. Politics was a cockpit of turbulent wills, interests, and violence – all antithetical to religious truth. Taylor’s ecclesiology offered an anti-politics: the integrity of theology, church mission, and salvation attainable only through revealed truths, insulated from political violence and carnal ends. This liberated the church and its ‘spiritual authority’ from the ‘corporall institutions’ of sovereigns. Evangelism could not be served by ‘politick consideration’. The ‘ends of a Temporall Prince’ and the ‘honour of Christ’s kingdom’ were too often confused in the manner of the ‘Mahumetan Religion’. Defending both individual conscience and church liberty, Taylor warned Christian princes to resist the ‘whispers [of] some Politiques’, who would subordinate Christianity to temporal interest.Footnote ²³⁸ Taylor’s defences of episcopacy sounded similar themes. ‘Human prudence’ and ‘conveniences’ could not be allowed to corrupt ecclesial governance. Bishops were to ‘instruct the King in righteousness, by their sanctity to be a rule to the Court’. The ‘liberties of the church’ should never be sacrificed to ‘secular interests’.Footnote ²³⁹

It is indication of the cross-cutting nature of the causes of civil and prophetic religion that Taylor’s Discourse became an unlikely authority among more radical dissenting tolerationists. The 1661 Plea for Toleration, by the Baptist preacher John Sturgion, invoked Taylor in asking King Charles to establish toleration not as a matter of prudence but according to the ‘Rule which God himself hath been pleased to lay before you’. Christ was the only ‘Law-giver’ in the church, and ‘Kings sitting in the throne of Government’ were not ‘exempted’ from his laws.Footnote ²⁴⁰ Similarly, an anonymous tolerationist author of 1687 wrote that Taylor was ‘so far from saying that the Prince may Tolerate, that he saith he must, and leaves it not in his choice’. Toleration was no mere ‘measure’, and it was ‘out of the [sovereign’s] power to be concern’d with Men’s Consciences’.Footnote ²⁴¹ This uncompromising, prophetic quality of Taylor (a ‘new way of soul freedom’) appealed to Roger Williams, himself a scourge of ‘Erastian’ state religions.Footnote ²⁴² So too did William Penn appeal to both Taylor and Henry Hammond in asserting free conscience as a ‘divine prerogative’. Mere ‘prudential’ toleration reduced religion to ‘State-policy’. Christianity was threatened where ‘Religion is suited to the Government, and Conscience to its Conveniency.’Footnote ²⁴³

For many tolerationists, the logic of civil religion proved an irresistible strategy for alluring sovereigns with the promise of augmented power. But a significant body of opinion, ranging from high church to low, rallied against such instrumentalism. For them, material concerns must be hedged and inhibited by revealed truth. There was a palpable sense among such figures that the reduction of religion to the calculus of political logic was a waxing threat. Oliver Cromwell had personified the temptation to govern religion with ‘Politick Aphorisms of Machiavells’, but Charles II had also shown himself willing to ‘prevail as a serpent’ rather than ‘suffer as a dove’.Footnote ²⁴⁴

Richard Baxter characterized the ecumenical nature of the resistance to civil religion in his Catholic Unity of 1660: ‘Talk no more childishly about our petty differences in ceremonies and forms of Worship. … There’s a difference between you that is a hundred times greater than these; some of you are for Heaven and some for Earth; some of you live to the Spirit, and some to the Flesh…’ Division was caused by those who allowed the ‘rulers of the world’ to be ‘masters of their religion, more than God’.Footnote ²⁴⁵ Likewise, Andrew Marvell regretted of his times that ‘men instead of squaring their Governments by the Rule of Christianity, have shaped Christianity by the Measures of their Government’.Footnote ²⁴⁶ Again, this rhetoric could appeal within the established church as well. John Gauden blamed civil war and religious schism on the ‘great Statists’ and ‘grave polititians’, who turned ‘piety into Policy, and Religion into reason of State’.Footnote ²⁴⁷

Civil religion allured different strands of sovereignist thinking and could justify divergent strategies of religious governance. It was adaptable, pressing – according to circumstance – either with or against establishment, either with or against toleration. Alternatively, the tradition of prophetic religion could unite high-church clericalists and nonconformists in opposition to the moral domination of the state. According to this understanding, Christianity did not merely serve as an instrument of hierarchy and order but as a potential sphere of autonomous moral thinking and communal action that might justly hamper sovereignty. The antithetical causes of civil or prophetic religion could produce strange alliances. Bishop Taylor could inspire dissenters, but so too could Thomas Hobbes. During the Interregnum, Hobbes had held out his theology and ecclesiology – perhaps the purest theorization of civil religion yet devised – to the attention of the Independents. In the later 1660s, he would use it as an instrument to split the restored episcopal church. The initial theoretical forays of the young John Locke can likewise be understood in these terms. Bagshaw’s considerable sympathy with Hobbesian thinking gave way, ultimately, to a prophetic understanding of Christianity and the requirements it made of Christian magistrates. The young Locke hewed more closely to the logic of the new sovereignty and the Hobbesian politique.

The following chapters will examine the Restoration careers of Hobbes and Locke and will read their writings on religious coercion and freedom against the unfolding of political events. The great issue of ‘toleration’ which so often transfixes us moderns will be of central concern, but that topic must itself be positioned within a broader reading of the period and the new notions of sovereignty that it spawned.

Locke approached the issue of religious governance within an environment saturated with polemical constructions of ‘Hobbism’. Most relevantly, Hobbism denoted a theory of instrumentalized, civil religion. And while ecclesial Hobbism could be construed to defend a priestly hierarchy subordinated to the King, more commonly contingent factors encouraged the equation of Hobbism and politique toleration. These contextual factors included the religious profile of the King and his court, the implications of prerogative indulgence as a governing strategy, and – as we shall now see – the implications of Hobbes’s own late writings.