A common problem for intellectual historians is the extent to which a scholar's abstract reasoning is affected by surrounding circumstances. The positions taken by Thomas Hobbes and John Bramhall in their debates during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum have been thoroughly dissected by modern logicians, but few if any such critics have shown, to the extent that Nicholas Jackson does, how those positions may have resulted from the pressure of immediate conditions. Any attempt to sort out the motives behind thinkers' conclusions can draw accusations of excessive speculation, but Jackson admits his guesswork through the incessant use of such phrases as “one might surmise” and “one could argue” as he ably synthesizes philosophical criticism and historical analysis. This valuable study complements recent work on Hobbes by Jon Parkin and George Wright, and on Bramhall by John McCafferty and Jack Cunningham. In addition to its detailed chronological account of the works of Bramhall and Hobbes, it draws on works or correspondence by William Laud, Edward Hyde, Brian Duppa, Robert Baillie, Samuel Pepys, William Cavendish Earl of Newcastle, and many others. Its use of secondary sources is similarly comprehensive.

In the first chapter Jackson gives a brief account of Bramhall's career from 1633 to 1641. The next three chapters describe the activities of Bramhall during the Civil War and of Hobbes during the 1630s and early 1640s, including Hobbes's Elements of Law and De Cive and Bramhall's Serpent Salve, and also each scholar's ties to the Earl of Newcastle, who brought them together in Paris for their 1645 debate on free will. Jackson ties that debate to the Arminian-Calvinist conflict of the 1630s, using “arminianism” in its broadest sense, as adherence to the entire Laudian ecclesiastical program and not simply as a belief in free will. Chapters 3 and 4 describe the debate of 1645–1646 while chapters 5 and 6 describe the two men's activities in the royalist exile community between 1646 and 1651 and their increasing acrimony as each jostled for position near the future Charles II. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the activities of both men in the mid- to late 1650s as their debates, hitherto unpublished, broke out in six printed tracts. Again Jackson provides a rich historical background to the quarrel, noting other issues that concerned each man during this period. Chapter 9 deals with their situations during the Restoration and Hobbes's reply to Bramhall's final sally. Jackson concludes with an excellent discussion of the quarrel in the context of long-running trends within Anglicanism and European intellectual life. While the chronological organization of the book is effective, there is a regrettable degree of repetition. Better editing could have reduced the length considerably with no sacrifice of content.

For Jackson, the two scholars' “most personal and bitter disagreement concerned the relationship between political and religious authority” (2). Again and again as he takes us through the lengthy dispute, Jackson reiterates that Hobbes, though an absolutist, was not truly a royalist, and that Bramhall's defense of jure divino episcopacy was part of a constitutional royalism that defended the right of the subject to lawful disobedience. In 1640–1642, according to Jackson, Hobbes's rejection of jure divino episcopacy placed him on the side of the puritan opponents of episcopacy, and thus made him no “royalist” because he opposed the ecclesiastical government of his sovereign (57). Jackson therefore rejects A. P. Martinich's description of Hobbes as “committed to the cause of the king” (Hobbes [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 121). It is no surprise that Hobbesian theories could be used both for and against the Stuart cause, but when Jackson writes that “Hobbes wrote Leviathan seemingly Janus-faced … in such a way as to allow for submission to any winner of the grand power struggle in England” (179), he may be overemphasizing the pressure of politics and underestimating the philosopher's intellectual integrity. There is a pejorative connotation to Jackson's description of him as “the consummate chameleon … the master theorist—and practitioner—of self-preservation” (179).

Similarly, in speculating that parliamentary opposition to episcopacy was based less on religious principles than on more immediate motives, such as annoyance at a perceived obstructionist bloc in the House of Lords or resentment of lower-class clerics rising to high social status (11), Jackson underestimates the sincere anticlericalist opposition to the wielding of any coercive power by clergymen regardless of whether that coercive power was part of their spiritual functions or wielded through temporal offices. Members of Parliament and Hobbes (see Leviathan III, 42) could seek to strip away this coercive power and still support “episcopacy” by asserting that they were turning the bishop back into what he had been in primitive times: simply a preacher and chairman over ministerial synods. Some MPs who were willing to accept such an episcopacy in early 1641 (Viscount Falkland, Sir Ralph Hopton) later fought for Charles I in the Civil War. Inasmuch as Jackson himself notes the “incoherence” and “disunity” of royalism (17, 61), we should not find it extraordinary that Hobbes, like many others, was royalist only to a degree, and ultimately Jackson does speculate that he was “more royalist than not” (273). Nor should it surprise us, however, that Hobbes's definition of episcopacy could amount to the de facto abolition of episcopal government as it existed in 1640.

Jackson hammers at Hobbes's inconsistency in other respects, in particular his willingness as a layman to pronounce on religious matters while affirming the exclusive right of the monarch to make such pronouncements through “duly ordained Ecclesiastics” (74). This, of course, is one of Bramhall's criticisms, and while other Hobbes scholars have noted inconsistency in Hobbes's philosophy, Jackson's relentless emphasis on it in the context of the debate with Bramhall suggests a view that the bishop was the more principled of the two. This view is consonant with Jackson's diction, in which Hobbes's polemic is described with far more vividly negative metaphors than is Bramhall's. If this does reveal a judgment in the bishop's favor, however, it is one that Jackson backs up with meticulous analysis.