Richard Browne went to Paris in 1641 as the diplomatic agent of Charles I, and remained in France throughout the interregnum.Footnote ¹ Much of his correspondence from that period survives among the papers of John Evelyn (who married Browne's daughter Mary in June 1647); it shows Browne to have been a very active figure, zealous in the royalist cause, the recipient of news and information from many quarters, and the target of petitions, requests, and demands of many kinds.Footnote ² One short document preserved among Browne's papers is in the unmistakable handwriting of Thomas Hobbes, who was himself a resident in Paris from November 1640 to December 1651; it is endorsed (by Browne) ‘Proposition. E. of Warwick &ct. T. H.’ This document, a policy proposal in which Hobbes urges the royalist side to win over the earl of Warwick (the parliamentary naval commander), has not been published or discussed before. The full text of it is as follows.

This document does not bear any date. At first sight, it might seem to derive from the period in the late summer of 1648 when a serious attempt was indeed made by the royalists to win over Robert Rich, the second earl of Warwick, who was then lord high admiral of the parliamentary navy. At the end of August 1648, during the confrontation in the Thames Estuary between Warwick's fleet and the small royalist fleet commanded by Prince Charles, the prince tried to persuade the parliamentary admiral to return to his allegiance. In the words of a later account by one of his entourage, ‘Tuesday night y^e Prince sent a letter to Warwick by M^r. Seymor to invite him in & joyne to settle y^e Peace of y^e Kingdome, to which hee makes y^e Answer of a Traitor.’Footnote ⁴ Although that invitation was rebuffed, rumours that Warwick might be willing to go over to the royalist side persisted, being strengthened in November 1648 by a mischievous pamphlet issued in his name in which he appeared to threaten to do so if the treaty between king and parliament were not speedily concluded, with ‘the restoring of the king to his just rights’.Footnote ⁵ The plausibility of such rumours sprang, it seems, from two considerations. One was the fact that Warwick's brother, the earl of Holland, had become one of the leaders of the royalist revolt in the spring and early summer of 1648.Footnote ⁶ The other was the fact that Warwick himself did favour the restoration of the king, albeit with his powers severely reduced on parliament's terms; at the beginning of 1647, he had been one of a group of presbyterian peers who had expressed a willingness to support Charles I's position if he accepted the ‘Newcastle propositions’ put to him by parliament in the previous year.Footnote ⁷ One royalist pamphlet of November 1648 quoted a letter from Warwick in which he declared that he was willing to support the restoration of Charles I, but only when the king ‘shall be pleased to satisfie and confirme the Desires of his two Houses of Parliament’.Footnote ⁸ That, it seems, was the fullest extent of the pro-restoration feelings of someone who had, during the Civil Wars, been one of the most energetic commanders on the parliamentarian side.

While this aspect of Warwick's position in 1648 may seem to fit the contents of Hobbes's policy proposal, there are some details in Hobbes's text that make it impossible to date it to that year. The statement that the Swedes ‘are in a manner beaten and driuen towards England by the Germanes’ cannot apply to the very last year of the Thirty Years' War. At that time the Swedes had not been forced to make any retreats by imperial forces; they controlled large parts of Germany (and Bohemia), and indeed it would be several years after the treaty of Westphalia before all their garrisons there were withdrawn.Footnote ⁹ Even more strikingly, Hobbes's reference at the beginning of his text to the threat posed by a Scottish invasion cannot possibly fit the events of 1648; a Scottish army did cross into England in July of that year, but it consisted of ‘Engagers’ who were fighting for the royalist cause.

Instead, the document must relate to the previous occasion on which a Scottish army had crossed the border into England, on 19/29 January 1644. That army had come at the invitation of the English parliament, which had sworn the Solemn League and Covenant in order to obtain this vital military assistance from the Scots. (Hobbes's opening phrase, ‘It is not likely the Scots will depend on y^e will of the Parlam^t for the benefit they ayme at in this inuasion’, shows that the Scottish action was understood to be aligned in some way, at least initially or ostensibly, with the ‘will’ of the parliament at Westminster.) The natural reading of Hobbes's reference to ‘this inuasion’ would seem to be that Hobbes was writing not long after the news of the Scottish invasion had reached Paris (perhaps some time in February 1644); and this dating also fits the reference to the earl of Warwick's command of the navy, since it falls within the earlier period, from December 1643 to April 1645, when Warwick was lord high admiral.Footnote ¹⁰

Hobbes's references to the Swedes are also more easily explicable on the basis of this dating. During 1642–3 a Swedish army under a skilful general, Lennart Torstensson, had conquered Silesia and Bohemia, defeated imperial forces in Saxony, and pressured Brandenburg into conceding a truce on Swedish terms. However, at the end of September 1643, Torstensson reduced many of his garrisons and began to withdraw his main forces from the Silesian region, marching them first northwards and then westwards, until, in the second week of December, they were at the Danish border. In fact, Torstensson was acting on confidential orders from the Swedish chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, to attack Denmark; preserving secrecy about his intended movements was an essential part of the plan (Torstensson's own officers were not even informed of their destination until a very late stage of the march), and the invasion of Denmark which followed on 12 December did take the Danish authorities completely by surprise.Footnote ¹¹ This movement away from the south-eastern German lands might have looked, even in retrospect, like a retreat forced on the Swedes by military circumstances in central Europe; so it is understandable that Hobbes described the Swedes as ‘in a manner beaten and driuen towards England by the Germanes’.Footnote ¹² If he wrote his policy proposal in February or March 1644, he would have been well aware of the attack on Denmark, a geopolitical coup which had been the subject of much comment. But it is possible that he nevertheless misunderstood its significance. On the basis of his assumption that the Swedes had been forced to abandon their earlier conquests by the ‘Germanes’, he may have supposed that the land-grab in Denmark was an attempt to compensate for that loss – not realizing that it was a pre-emptive strike planned by Oxenstierna against the growing power of the Danish state, which threatened to interpose itself as an arbiter in the impending European peace settlement.Footnote ¹³

However, an alternative hypothesis might be that Hobbes wrote his policy proposal before the Scottish invasion of England, at a time when Torstensson's army was on the march, but when its destination was still obscure; Hobbes's presumption might then have been that the Swedish army was heading for England.Footnote ¹⁴ Such a dating of Hobbes's text – to late November or December 1643, after the army had turned westwards – would seem to fit the opening sentence of its second paragraph, with its apparent reference to the future: ‘whether the Scots come in w^th them or without them’. That Hobbes referred so definitely in his first paragraph to ‘this inuasion’ could be explained by the fact that in the final months of 1643 it was widely known that the Scots were preparing to invade England: the first steps towards raising an army had been taken by the Scottish Estates in July and August, the Solemn League and Covenant was sworn by the House of Commons on 25 September, and a formal military alliance between the Scots and the English parliament was completed on 29 November.Footnote ¹⁵ A possible difficulty with this hypothesis is that it requires Hobbes to have had rather accurate knowledge of the movement of Torstensson's army. The wording of Hobbes's proposal would, on this interpretation, imply that the details of this military development were already well known to Richard Browne and therefore did not need to be explained; yet Browne's despatches to the secretaries of state in England, which relayed much of the international political and military news that was available in Paris, contained no mention of Torstensson's manoeuvres until 5/15 January 1644, when Browne commented on ‘the irruption of y^e Sweds into the King of Denmarks Territories’.Footnote ¹⁶ However, the surviving despatches from November and December 1643 may not be the only ones he wrote; so this point is not compelling. While the date of Hobbes's policy proposal cannot be conclusively determined, what can be said with confidence is that it was probably written at some time between November 1643 and March 1644.

As for Hobbes's larger argument, or surmise, about a co-ordination of strategies between the Scots and the Swedes: here too the historical context supplies some relevant details. While the motive attributed by Hobbes to the Swedes, a desire for Lebensraum in England, does seem highly improbable (and is perhaps most easily explained on the assumption that he misinterpreted their Danish campaign as a desperate quest for territory), the idea that there might be some Scottish–Swedish collaboration behind the scenes did rest on factual foundations. Many Scottish officers had served in the Swedish army; Alexander Leslie, the commander of the Scottish force that entered England in January 1644, had been a Swedish field-marshal, and had used his influence with Oxenstierna to gain arms supplies for the Scottish covenanters in 1638–9.Footnote ¹⁷ An envoy from the covenanters to Sweden in 1640, Colonel John Cochrane, had asked for armaments and had also been favourably received.Footnote ¹⁸ The military connections between Scotland and Sweden were the object of real suspicion on the part of some of King Charles's ministers during that period: in a debate in the House of Lords in April 1640, the chancellor of the exchequer, Lord Cottington, exclaimed (with almost Hobbesian paranoia about the Scottish–Swedish nexus): ‘The Scotts are able to draw in the Goth and Vandalls and other great Armies; and when the Swedes are quiett for ought I know they may offer them the Crowne of England.’Footnote ¹⁹ And these connections did reinforce the inclination of Swedish policy-makers to pursue, after the outbreak of the English Civil War, a policy that was favourable to the rebels – especially the Scottish ones. At a major debate on Scotland in the Swedish Riksråd (council of the realm) on 14/24 June 1643, Oxenstierna argued that it would be harmful to Sweden's interests for Charles I to emerge victorious from his civil war, since he was both ‘Catholic’ and pro-Danish.Footnote ²⁰ (Charles was the son of Anne of Denmark and thus the nephew of the Danish king, Christian IV; during 1642–3 Christian did send some weapons and supplies to the royalists in England, though the overall quantity was small, and some were captured by parliamentarian forces.)Footnote ²¹

Oxenstierna's main interest, however, was in getting Scottish – and, possibly, English – help for offensive actions against Denmark; for that reason it was decided at the meeting of the council of the realm in June 1643 to send an envoy to Edinburgh, to find out ‘whether the Scots would be able to help us’.Footnote ²² For several years, Alexander Leslie, who corresponded with Oxenstierna, had been promoting the idea of a confederation between Scotland, England, and Sweden; the Swedish chancellor had been luke-warm about this idea, but in November 1643 the Swedish council of the realm did begin to discuss making a formal alliance with the Scottish and English parliaments.Footnote ²³ Even before the official Swedish envoy reached Britain, a quasi-official ‘agent’ from Sweden, the Dutch merchant and Swedish mine-owner Louis de Geer, arrived in London at the beginning of March, seeking ships to support the Swedish navy and requesting that English and Scottish representatives be sent to Sweden.Footnote ²⁴ On 4 April, the recently established ‘Committee of both kingdoms’ considered a ‘letter from the Committee of both kingdoms residing in the Scotts’ army concerning what correspondence was fit to be held with the Crown of Sweden’ and recommended to the House of Commons that ‘there be some persons in the nature of Agents from both kingdoms sent with all speed to the Swedes with instructions to maintain a good correspondence with the Crown, and such as may be an occasion of nearer alliance with the same’.Footnote ²⁵ The events of March and April 1644 probably post-dated the writing of Hobbes's policy proposal; nevertheless, against this general background it is clear that his assumption about Scottish–Swedish collaboration did have some justification.Footnote ²⁶ And what this suggests is that Hobbes had been taking quite a keen interest in British and European current affairs from his Parisian vantage-point.

Where Hobbes's skill as a political analyst seems to have failed completely is in his confident assumption that the earl of Warwick could be persuaded to come over to the royalist side. The earl's entire record, personal and political, suggested otherwise. He had been an opponent of the Laudian regime in the church, a leader of the ‘godly’ and a patron of many anti-Laudian and pro-presbyterian preachers.Footnote ²⁷ He had resisted the Forced Loan in 1626, supported the Petition of Right in 1628, opposed the imposition of forest fines and ship money in the mid-1630s, and been an outspoken critic of royal policy in the latter part of that decade.Footnote ²⁸ Warwick's military role had been vital even before the outbreak of the Civil War: his decision in July 1642 to enforce parliamentary authority over the fleet had shifted the entire future balance of the war against the royalists.Footnote ²⁹ Thereafter, he had played an important part in raising troops in Essex and marshalling forces for the defence of London in the autumn of 1642; and, with the sole exception of his failure to relieve the city of Exeter in the late summer of 1643, his record as a commander of the parliamentary navy was one of energetic application rewarded by consistent success.Footnote ³⁰ Nothing in Warwick's conduct could encourage the view that he was liable to abandon the parliamentarian cause. So why did Hobbes see that as a real possibility?

One important factor in Hobbes's assessment of the earl of Warwick's character must have been his own personal experience of him, more than twenty years previously. For when Thomas Hobbes became a member of the Virginia Company in 1622 at the behest of his employer and friend, Lord Cavendish (the future second earl of Devonshire), the earl of Warwick was one of the most prominent active members of that company. On six occasions between February and April 1623 both Warwick and Hobbes were present at meetings of the Virginia Company.Footnote ³¹ Both were also members of the Somers Islands Company (which was responsible for the Bermudas); the records of that company have not survived, but the Virginia Company records do mention one of its meetings, in February 1623, attended by Hobbes and Warwick.Footnote ³² While Hobbes joined the Virginia Company only in the summer of 1622 (and the starting-date for his membership of the Somers Islands Company is not known), it is clear that he must have taken a close interest in the affairs of both companies for several years before that; Lord Cavendish was actively involved, and Hobbes, as his secretary, would have been privy to much of the companies' business. The character and motives of the earl of Warwick would have been an object of particular interest, since it was Warwick who played a key role in splitting the Virginia Company into opposing factions – and who, by encouraging royal intervention in support of his own group, brought about the eventual dissolution of the company in 1624. Lord Cavendish was one of the leaders of the group opposed to Warwick; in May 1623, after Warwick had complained to the privy council that a document drawn up by Cavendish and others contained ‘bitter and unnecessarie invectives and aspercions upon the person of the Earle of Warwicke’, Cavendish was placed under house arrest.Footnote ³³ Two months later, after Warwick had accused him of lying at a meeting of the court of the Somers Islands Company, Cavendish challenged him to a duel; both men were apprehended, however, before they could meet in the Netherlands to fight it out.Footnote ³⁴

Warwick's disagreement with what had been the ruling group in the Virginia Company arose at least partly from the fact that they had publicly rejected his attempt to use Virginia as a base for privateering against Spanish ships and settlements in the West Indies.Footnote ³⁵ Between 1616 and 1640, Warwick devoted much of his time and energy to privateering; he had a large private fleet, and sometimes commanded expeditions himself. The target in almost every case was Spanish; Warwick was also a strong proponent of anti-Habsburg geopolitics (in relation to, for example, the defence of the Palatinate), and his enthusiastic involvement in a broad range of trading and colonizing bodies – including the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Amazon Company, and, most notoriously, the Providence Island Company, set up primarily to establish a base for anti-Spanish privateering operations – was an expression of his hope that an English imperial power could be developed to counteract the global power of the Habsburgs.Footnote ³⁶ To any casual modern observer, it may seem that much of this grand vision should be discounted as a mere rationalization of a desire to get rich by plunder. The genuineness of Warwick's religious commitment was questioned by some contemporaries (notably Clarendon), and the precise nature of his beliefs has continued to puzzle modern historians.Footnote ³⁷ That his religious views were somehow bound up with his sense of a national mission seems clear.Footnote ³⁸ The precise mix of religious feeling, national ambition, and sheer self-interest is, however, hard to determine.

On these questions of underlying motivation, Hobbes's policy proposal of 1644 does not take a definite view. Hobbes's statement that ‘whilest the businesse was but for reformation, he could not come of, w^thout condemning his former acts, yet now when the English nation is in danger … he may iustify his comming away’ forms part of a passage explaining how Warwick could present his actions to others, in order to avoid the damaging charge of ‘levity’; it does not necessarily mean that a devotion to the national interest would trump other motives in his mind, and indeed the whole document is concerned with providing him with other motives. A concern for the restoration of his personal wealth does feature on the list, and is in fact the first thing to be mentioned, but the treatment of it is rather perfunctory, as if it played no special role beyond what would be normal for anyone in Warwick's situation. Overall, Hobbes seems to regard Warwick as a man motivated by a desire for ‘greatnesse’, a strong sense of personal dignity and honour, and a desire to maintain his status as a leader of men and a protector of ‘frends and kindred’. Some of this may reflect some Hobbesian assumptions (discussed briefly below) about the psychology of a certain kind of military leader and politician; but it may well be that this was an assessment of character based on personal knowledge and observation.

Personal knowledge was certainly the basis of Hobbes's comments on the other key figure in his proposal, the dowager countess of Devonshire. Christian Bruce, the daughter of one of the leading Scottish counsellors to James I (Edward, Lord Bruce of Kinloss), had married the future second earl of Devonshire in 1608, just a few months before Hobbes began work as the latter's tutor. Widowed in 1628, she had dispensed with Hobbes's services for two years but had then re-employed him throughout the 1630s.Footnote ³⁹ He was thus well placed to know about both her passionate royalism and her devotion to the family of her brother Thomas, the earl of Elgin (whose son, Robert, would later become the earl of Ailesbury).Footnote ⁴⁰ Hobbes also knew that she had long-standing friendly relations with the earl of Warwick and his family. She had been a close friend of Warwick's first wife: in July/August 1623, when the newsletter-writer John Chamberlain reported that her husband and Warwick were about to fight a duel, he added that ‘in the meane time their Ladies forget not their old familiaritie but meet daylie to lament this misfortune’.Footnote ⁴¹ In 1632, her only daughter, Anne, married Robert Rich, the earl of Warwick's eldest son (hence the ‘affinity’ referred to by Hobbes); Anne died in 1638, leaving a son, also named Robert, to whom the countess of Devonshire was devoted.Footnote ⁴² Christian Cavendish seems also to have had close relations with Warwick's brother, the earl of Holland. A eulogistic biography of her, published ten years after her death, asserts that during the first Civil War she employed many ‘earnest solicitations’ to persuade him to come over to the royalist side; it also says that while staying at her brother's house at Ampthill in Bedfordshire, she ‘had continual Corres-pondencies with such Persons, both in England, and Scotland, as she found would assist to the resettlement of the King’, including the duke of Hamilton and the earls of Holland and Norwich.Footnote ⁴³ There is other evidence to suggest that in the latter part of the interregnum she also held discussions with Colonel John Russell, one of the leaders of the secret royalist organization ‘the Sealed Knot’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Hobbes presumably did not have any direct contact with her; but the detail he gives of her residing near Dover at this time (a fact which does not emerge from any other records of her life) suggests that he had a well-placed source of information – possibly her son, the third earl of Devonshire, with whom Hobbes did maintain some contact in the 1640s, or perhaps her chaplain, Robert Gale, with whom Hobbes had previously been on very friendly terms.Footnote ⁴⁵

Personal acquaintance was probably also the basis on which Hobbes submitted his policy proposal to Richard Browne. It is very likely that the two men had got to know each other in Paris in the period 1635–6. Hobbes was there from the autumn of 1634 until late August 1635, and again between June and October 1636; Browne went to Paris in the early summer of 1635 as secretary to the ambassador, John, Viscount Scudamore, with whom Hobbes clearly did develop friendly relations.Footnote ⁴⁶ In November 1644, when the marquess of Newcastle wished to send letters (from Antwerp) to Hobbes and some other English people in Paris, it was to Browne that he directed them, confident that Browne would be able to have them delivered; and Newcastle must have found, during his own stay in Paris between 1645 and 1648, that Browne and Hobbes were well acquainted, since in another letter to Browne from Antwerp in November 1651 he included the request: ‘praye my seruice to M^r. Hobbs’.Footnote ⁴⁷

The strikingly casual, matter-of-fact way in which Hobbes's policy paper embarks on its argument might be taken as evidence of close acquaintance with Browne; there is no trace of the sort of explanatory preamble, establishing the writer's credentials, that would have been needed in a formal approach by a comparative stranger. But on the other hand, there may have been a covering letter for this document which has not survived. That the document is not signed by Hobbes could also have more than one explanation: perhaps he was just jotting down, at Browne's suggestion, the gist of something he had said in conversation, or perhaps he intended this paper to be forwarded by Browne to a superior policy-maker – possibly even the king himself – and did not want to be implicated if it should happen to fall into the wrong hands. (Whether any version of Hobbes's proposal was sent to England is not known; Browne's surviving despatches to the secretaries of state do not contain any mention of it.)Footnote ⁴⁸

For, however informally or indirectly, Hobbes was acting here as a would-be counsellor to King Charles. He may well have felt that he possessed some of the qualities required of a good counsellor:

And he would certainly not have felt that his rather humble status precluded him from giving such advice:

It may also be noted that Hobbes's policy proposal was drawn up in accordance with his own strict stylistic rules for the formulation of advice to a ruler: it was written ‘with as firme ratiocination, as significant and proper language, and as briefly, as the evidence will permit’, and it eschewed all ‘obscure, confused, and ambiguous Expressions, also all metaphoricall Speeches, tending to the stirring up of Passion’.Footnote ⁵¹

As for the substance of the advice: besides the restoration of Warwick's estate, Hobbes located the earl's main springs of motivation in his liking for ‘the prayse of being an able man to command and order people’, his desire for ‘honor’ and ‘greatnesse’, his wish to benefit his ‘frends and kindred’, and his general need to be able to justify his conduct in the eyes of others. (The need for resources with which to win over the men under his command was also included, but this seems to have been much more a practical requirement than a matter of the earl's own motives.) Hobbes's distaste for the shallowness of much of this motivation is audible in phrases such as ‘he affecteth the prayse’ and ‘such employment as may entertayne that humor, and keepe vp his estimation that way’; and the proposal that reference be made to Warwick the Kingmaker (Richard Neville, the sixteenth earl) suggests that Robert Rich (whose father had been given the revived earldom after its second extinction) would be moved by a rhetorical argument that rested on little more than the coincidence of their titles. Yet Hobbes's own analysis of human ‘power’ recognized that power founded in the imagination could be genuine power nonetheless, so long as those doing the imagining were many: ‘Reputation of power, is Power; because it draweth with it the adhaerence of those that need protection.’ Significantly, Hobbes went on in the next sentence of Leviathan to note: ‘So is Reputation of love of a mans Country, (called Popularity,) for the same Reason.’Footnote ⁵² Hobbes had a particular interest in the nature of ‘popularity’. In The elements of law he stigmatized it as the thing aimed at by ambitious demagogues, urging the sovereign to ordain ‘severe punishments, for such as shall by reprehension of public actions, affect popularity and applause among the multitude’.Footnote ⁵³ In Leviathan he twice associated it with military commanders, noting that popularity was the key to the success of Julius Caesar (who was ‘set up by the People against the Senate, having won to himselfe the affections of his Army’), and observing that ‘A Commander of an Army in chiefe, if he be not Popular, shall not be beloved, nor feared as he ought to be by his Army … But this love of Souldiers, (if caution be not given of the Commanders fidelity,) is a dangerous thing to Soveraign Power’.Footnote ⁵⁴ In normal conditions of sovereign rule, Hobbes argued, it was a mistake to think that one could ‘buy with Money, or Preferment, from a Popular ambitious Subject, to be quiet’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Clearly, normal conditions did not apply in England in 1644; but it can readily be understood that when Hobbes proposed offering the earl of Warwick ‘such employment as may entertayne that humor, and keepe vp his estimation that way’, he intended the earl to be given, in the end, more the show of military power than the substance.

Finally, this policy paper is of interest because of the small shaft of light it casts on the question of how Hobbes interpreted the nature of the English Civil Wars. His misinterpretation of the Scottish invasion, especially in relation to the assumed link with the Swedes, has already been mentioned. With the benefit of hindsight, when Hobbes came to write Behemoth in the late 1660s, he omitted all mention of the Swedes in this connection, and observed merely that in 1643 the English parliament had ‘sent to the Scots to hire them to an Inuasion of England’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In his discussion of the hostility of the Scots towards Charles I's religious policies in 1638–9, however, he did emphasize one point that is a strong presupposition of his policy paper: that the Scots were a rival nation pursuing a policy inherently hostile to the interests of the English. ‘I see’, said the first speaker in his dialogue, ‘that, from the emulation of glory between the Nations they might be willing to see this nation afflicted by Ciuill warre, and might hope by aiding the rebells here, to acquire some power ouer the English.’Footnote ⁵⁷ In Behemoth, Hobbes twice mentioned the earl of Warwick, noting as he did so the importance of the fact that, at the beginning of the war, the navy was ‘wholly’ under his command; but he made no comment on the earl's personal or political motivation.Footnote ⁵⁸ By the time he composed that work, Hobbes had come to believe that the roots of the rebellion were to be traced primarily to religious doctrines and their preachers: arcane theological disputations were ‘the cause of all our late mischiefe’, and the doctrine of the presbyterians was ‘the very foundation of the then Parliaments treacherous pretensions’.Footnote ⁵⁹ But during the period of the Civil Wars themselves, Hobbes was much more inclined to give a purely political (or politico-psychological) explanation of the origins of the conflict. In his refutation of Thomas White, written in 1642–3, he declared that the war in England ‘had no other origin than the fact that certain wicked men, who were not called to counsel [sc. high office close to the king], and who thought that their wisdom was valued less fairly than it deserved to be, advised the citizens to take up arms against the king’.Footnote ⁶⁰ (This chimed with the account Hobbes had given before the outbreak of the war, in The elements of law, of those who rebel against their sovereign because they are ‘grieved’ to find themselves ‘postponed to those in honour, whom they think they excel in virtue and ability to govern’.)Footnote ⁶¹

It is noteworthy that when Hobbes wrote his policy proposal in 1644, although the earl of Warwick had been a leading patron of presbyterian preachers, he made no mention of the earl's religious motives, whether real or apparent. Hobbes's phrase ‘whilest the businesse was but for reformation’ may at first sight appear to have a religious significance, and it is true that the term is used once in Leviathan in a religious context (referring to the Genevan church as ‘that Church that hath presumed most of Reformation’).Footnote ⁶² But other uses of the verb to ‘reform’ provide a closer match for Hobbes's usage in his policy paper. In chapter 17 of Leviathan, he writes that ‘amongst men, there are very many, that thinke themselves wiser, and abler to govern the Publique, better than the rest; and these strive to reforme and innovate, one this way, another that way; and thereby bring it into Distraction and Civill warre’; and in chapter 30, he warns that ‘they that go about by disobedience, to doe no more than reforme the Commonwealth, shall find they do thereby destroy it’.Footnote ⁶³ As this policy proposal makes very clear, in late 1643 or early 1644, Hobbes believed that the war up until that time had been fought over the question ‘betweene the k. & y^e Parlament who shall gouerne England’. He already had a psychological and political explanation of why some people had sought to ‘reform’ the government in such a way as to make themselves the real rulers of the country; his religious or theologico-political account of the ultimate reasons for the rebellion was yet to come.