I

Crooke launched his career in the daunting Restoration book market with unusual advantages. Between 1656 and 1663, he was apprenticed to his older kinsman, Andrew, one of the city's most important stationers. And while the earliest moments of his independent career ended in disaster when his shop on Fleet Bridge was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, William was nevertheless able to rejoin Andrew at his shop in Westminster and gradually assume control of the business before the elder Crooke died in September 1674. In the end, William apparently inherited much of Andrew's considerable stock, and, even more importantly, some of his relationships with writers. William's major business initiative in the 1670s and early 1680s appears to have been an attempt to capitalize upon his most prized inheritance: Thomas Hobbes. Between 1637 and the philosopher's death in December 1679, nearly all of Hobbes's works printed in England were published by the Crookes. From at least the 1650s to the early 1670s, Andrew was Hobbes's literary agent: he managed much of his English and Latin correspondence, and arranged the printing, promotion, and distribution of his works. William assumed this role in 1673, continuing Andrew's active and no doubt lucrative promotion of Hobbes and his writing. The younger Crooke's efforts began in earnest when he worked with Hobbes in his shop to orchestrate, in correspondence and in print, Hobbes's dispute with Anthony Wood over the section on Hobbes in Wood's history of the University of Oxford. These passages had been altered by the dean of Christ Church, John Fell, in order to sully further the reputation of England's most able (and elderly) enemy of priestly power.Footnote ³

The shop Andrew left to William was located ‘at the sign of the Green Dragon’, about halfway between Temple Bar and Essex Street, on the south side of the Strand. It sat next to a tavern called the Palsgrave Head, and opposite another called the Ship or the Drake.Footnote ⁴ This area was second only to St Paul's churchyard as a centre for the London book trade.Footnote ⁵ The other major booksellers in the immediate vicinity were notorious. The Machiavellian newshound John Starkey's shop was just within the city limits, on the other side of Temple Bar on Fleet Street; the baptist and republican Francis Smith had the first shop on the Strand beyond Temple Bar until 1673; and the whig Thomas Collins sold his wares at Middle Temple Gate.Footnote ⁶ The area was also full of coffeehouses: both Richard's and the Rainbow were on Fleet Street, near Crooke's shop.Footnote ⁷

The concentration of bookshops, taverns, and coffeehouses at the border between Westminster and the City made the area a prominent site for the circulation, consumption, and discussion of scholarly, religious, and political information. The bookshops, of course, made some of the most intellectually and politically salient books of the day available to passers-by. Collins and Starkey went farther than this, and ran scriptoria in their shops, which produced prized and illicit manuscript information on putatively private proceedings in parliament.Footnote ⁸ All of these materials could then be consumed and discussed in nearby gathering places. In fact, the bookshops themselves were becoming important social spaces in this period. Many people used them as corresponding addresses when they were in London, and their physical layouts were frequently designed to allow customers to linger, read, and talk with the bookseller, other customers, and, occasionally, authors. Many bookshops were coming to rival coffeehouses as centres for information exchange and polite sociability.Footnote ⁹

Crooke's shop fit this profile. His efforts to profit from the milieu of Temple Bar began with his privileged relationship with Hobbes, and with the infamous writer's printed works. Hobbes himself appears to have considered William, like Andrew, to be a loyal, competent, and obedient promoter. Crooke may have been involved in the still-obscure efforts of a number of stationers to produce a new edition of Leviathan in the 1670s. These efforts had come to some sort of fruition by 1678, when the stationer Richard Chiswell advertised copies of Leviathan for sale in his shop, but it is not clear whether this edition of Leviathan was available at the sign of the Green Dragon.Footnote ¹⁰ In any case, as we will see, in the 1670s and 1680s, both before and after the lapse of the Press Act and Hobbes's death, Crooke managed to make his shop an important site for the print publication of the philosopher's works of science, his translations of Homer, and (most importantly in this context) his controversial statements on religion and politics.Footnote ¹¹

Despite the considerable appeal of the printed books Crooke sold in his shop, many of his customers arrived there most excited about the manuscripts on offer. By the middle of the 1670s, Hobbes had deposited at the Green Dragon scribal copies of at least six of his unprinted and most controversial works. Until 1679, they could not be printed legally because the regime's licensers had rejected them, and because Hobbes himself apparently refused to countenance secret printings.Footnote ¹² In the shop, though, one could consult and even purchase copies of the philosopher's ‘Epitome of the Civil Wars of England’; his ‘Dialogue betwixt a student in the common laws of England, and a philosopher’; his ‘Defense of his Leviathan against Bishop Bramhall’; his ‘Historia ecclesiastica Romana’; his ‘Of heresie, and the punishment thereof’; and ‘His life, written by himself’. Crooke went so far as to advertise these in print in 1675, in a catalogue of Hobbes's publications.Footnote ¹³

The ‘Epitome of the Civil Wars’ (later entitled Behemoth) may have been available at the Green Dragon as early as 1670, and both it and the ‘Dialogue’ were available by 1673. Crooke apparently managed to sell numerous scribal copies of Behemoth; at the very least, there was a long chain of copying that began with his copy.Footnote ¹⁴ It is unclear in what sense Hobbes's manuscripts were ‘publicly’ displayed in the shop, but this was certainly a managed form of publication, typical of the tiered publicity favoured by Restoration booksellers.Footnote ¹⁵ As Harold Love argues, essential to the notion of scribal publication was the relinquishing of control over the circulation of a text with the likelihood that the text would enter open-ended channels of communication. Love cites Hobbes's heresy tract as an example of ‘publication through one copy’, but as we will see, Crooke appears to have made his own copies available for sale (thus engaging in ‘entrepreneurial publication’) while also lending out his manuscripts to a select few (and thereby permitting ‘user publication’).Footnote ¹⁶ With the exception of the Historia ecclesiastica, Crooke was quick to have all of these illicit works printed upon Hobbes's death and the expiration of the Press Act. He had clearly attempted to make his way in the book trade by positioning his shop as the primary site for the dissemination of Hobbes's writing in England.

II

What little scholarship on Crooke's shop exists points to the interest it held for a number of freethinking and anti-clerical figures from the period. Hobbes's friend John Aubrey was a frequent visitor, and he apparently alerted others to what they could find there.Footnote ¹⁷ In February 1673, he told John Locke – who already had some familiarity with Andrew Crooke – that Hobbes's ‘Dialogue’ could be read and purchased at the sign of the Green Dragon. ‘I never expect to see it printed’, Aubrey wrote, ‘and intended to have a copy, which the bookseller will let me have for fifty shillings…When you go by the Palsgrave-head Taverne be pleasd to call on Mr William Crooke at the Green Dragon and remember me to him…he will show it to you.’Footnote ¹⁸ By means of advertising, epistolary correspondence, and word of mouth, Crooke's shop assumed a peculiar identity. And that identity made it attractive to readers who had a taste for politically and religiously illicit publications.

In fact, the Green Dragon managed to attract some of the most widely recognized protagonists of the early English Enlightenment. The deist Charles Blount, perhaps the most openly Hobbesian freethinker in Restoration England, had probably known of the Crookes from a young age. His father Henry's famous travel account, A voyage into the Levant, had been sold by the Crookes since 1636. Henry was a friend of Aubrey and Hobbes, and well-connected with coffee-drinking, freethinking circles in London, much like his better-known son. Henry frequented Heycock's ordinary and the Rainbow coffeehouse, which were very near Crooke's shop and the Palsgrave Head.Footnote ¹⁹ Charles too became a repeat visitor to the shop. Between 1681 and 1684, he took notes on Hobbes's Decameron physiologicum and Considerations upon the reputation, loyalty, manners, and religion of Thomas Hobbes of Malmsbury, both of which he would have bought from Crooke. And in 1678, apparently with Hobbes's permission, he read a manuscript of Hobbes's ‘On heresie’ – either the original in Crooke's shop or a copy Crooke had made for him. In a letter he wrote to Hobbes that year, Blount expounded upon the importance of the heresy tract and offered his own discussion of early church history. He had drawn this additional commentary from another clandestine manuscript, an account of the rise of Islam usually attributed to another important early freethinker, the republican polymath Henry Stubbe, who may have also visited Crooke at Temple Bar. Blount used Crooke's shop to bolster his print library and support his work with illicit manuscripts.Footnote ²⁰

Yet contrary to the impression of the Green Dragon one might glean from existing scholarship, Crooke's shop was not simply a space of interest to republicans and tolerationists. In order to appreciate this, his book trading must be evaluated in its entirety, not simply in terms of the publication history of Hobbes's most controversial Restoration works. Crooke pursued not one but a series of co-ordinated strategies in order to prosper in the book trade. All of them fit with the character of the Temple Bar neighbourhood as a centre for somewhat highbrow political engagement, but they also allowed Crooke to establish his own niche alongside figures like Starkey, Smith, and Collins. Some of these strategies are unremarkable, but all of them were part of what was on the whole a distinctive enterprise.

In the 1670s, in order to capitalize on demand for fashionable continental scholarship and literature, Crooke procured both new and old English translations of continental vernacular works (often in co-operation with other stationers). The new translations included Paolo Sarpi's anti-clerical Trattato delle materie beneficiarie and Pierre Nicole's absolutist ‘De la grandeur’ from his Essais de morale; older translations included Trajano Boccalini's politique and republican Ragguagli di Parnasso. From 1679, Crooke also turned his focus to the most common one of English booksellers – divinity – and sold sermons and a wider body of often controversial religious tracts.Footnote ²¹ These had a conformist and authoritarian hue. Many of Crooke's authors were somewhat prominent tory clergymen, including Thomas Manningham, Edward Lane, and Edward Pelling. Manningham and Pelling actually became Crooke's major authors in the 1680s and 1690s, when he published sixteen of their works.

In fact, Crooke's promotion of authoritarian defences of the Church of England dated all the way back to his establishment as Hobbes's man of business. He began his career not with one major author (Hobbes), but with two. The divine whose loyalty Crooke managed to win was a little-known orientalist, apologist, and devotional writer named Lancelot Addison, who was chaplain to Tangier in the 1660s, and in 1683–4 became dean of Lichfield and archdeacon of Coventry on the strength of his pen. Crooke met Addison shortly after his first work, a history of Morocco entitled West Barbary, was printed in 1671 at Oxford's university press. Crooke proceeded to publish all of Addison's works until the bookseller died in 1694.Footnote ²² Crooke's main initial strategy in the book trade, then, seems to have been to promote the works of a spokesman for the Church of England and perhaps the most famously insidious and brilliant challenger of that church, and to attract customers who were interested in their works. This effort was complemented, over the years, by the provision of a handful of translated, continental works on religion and politics by renowned, sceptical authors of varying ideological persuasions, and an increasingly heavy dose of sermons and controversial works by conformist, tory divines besides Addison. What was Crooke up to?

Since we have long been taught that the church and its enemies inhabited two different cultural and social worlds, the only plausible explanation for Crooke's conduct would seem to be that for completely contingent reasons, he sought to profit from attracting two – and only two – entirely distinct clienteles to his shop. The available evidence, however, suggests otherwise. Crooke was carving out a niche in the market by supporting the formation of a single, distinctive public around his shop and his wares.Footnote ²³ This public showcased a dialogue between the leaders of the Church of England and their freethinking enemies, a dialogue focused on the points at which the authoritarian programmes of Hobbes and the Anglican establishment parted ways. This public was the temporary product of a confluence of interests under a set of circumstances that were trying and frustrating for all concerned. It was prudential and pragmatic in its making and its maintenance. It was, to be sure, neither enabled nor reproduced by anything approaching a Kantian commitment to the free exercise of critical, philosophical reason in a role distinct from the official and the economic, or in a sphere independent of home, church, and state. It was the result of voluntary association, but it had no oppositional thrust: dissidents, priests, and government functionaries were all party to it. It amounted less to a moment of untrammelled expression than to a collective act of restraint: self-restraint by the publisher, the writers, and the facilitators, and coercive restraint by churchmen and statesmen – many of whom were also among the writers and the facilitators. It was negotiated, built, and sustained by a socially heterogeneous set of ‘private’ and ‘public’ actors who all operated under normative, material, textual, and spatial conditions that at once enabled and constrained.

Arguably, though, this public was characterized and driven not by these actors, but rather by the made things around which they organized their interactions. Crooke's shop was its spatial fulcrum, the Temple Bar scene an auxiliary. While both spaces enabled and structured access to Crooke's wares and served as sites for their digestion and discussion, only the shop clearly played host to a crucial set of occurrences, from manuscript deposits and book purchases to chats among the writers, the customers, and the stationer. Many shops were designed to guide customers' choices and to influence reading and social interaction.Footnote ²⁴ Yet for all the importance of the shop and the neighbourhood, only the books and manuscripts that populated them should be considered analytically central to Crooke's public. For only they had a simultaneously material and textual or actual and virtual existence, like the public they sustained. The actual dimensions of this public were constituted by the open-ended circulation and discussion of the items on offer in Crooke's shop, its virtual dimensions by the discursive relationships among the items' contents. The confrontation between the church and its enemies thus played out in two dimensions as well. It was a bitter but mutually appreciative struggle over how to realize a set of shared goals in theory and practice, a relationship sustained both by ideological differences and a shared repertoire of concerns, narratives, scholarly tools, and social networks. The public Crooke helped create, of course, constituted only one site for the conduct of this relationship: it intersected and overlapped with other publics with similar constitutions and characteristics. They all ultimately came together in a complex, de-localized realm that was both social and discursive in nature, and marked by competing attempts to address a shared concern – a concern not for delivering mankind from intellectual nonage, but for securing civil peace in the wake of England's mid-century miseries while somehow also securing the truth.

III

The sign of the Green Dragon, like the public it supported, was a space in which social interaction, learned discussion, political engagement, and textual circulation were all structured by the norms of the Republic of Letters, the demands of the English state, and the rigours of the market. It was a venue where Crooke, his authors, and his customers sought somehow to accommodate these often conflicting sets of demands. Many booksellers – especially those who worked, like Crooke, as men of business for a major scholarly figure – were intermediaries between the Republic of Letters and two of the realms from which it was in theory insulated: the literary marketplace and the cockpit of partisan strife. They were, ideally, scholars or virtuosos themselves, but in any case they struggled to square the demands of many authors (and readers) for scholarly rigour and civility with their own concerns for profit, security, and, in some cases, ideological purity.Footnote ²⁵

The works of Hobbes and Addison were well suited to serving as the cornerstones of such a delicate effort. They helped mitigate possible tensions among the scholarly, political, and economic imperatives at play. As Malcolm and Parkin have shown, by the 1670s, Hobbes had become not only a figure of considerable interest in the European Republic of Letters, but also the source of a popular phenomenon – ‘Hobbism’ – in England, as he came to personify the supposedly rising tide of irreligion and libertinism in Restoration society. His most controversial writings were of course extremely sophisticated, but they were rendered accessible and appealing by his literary brilliance. Addison, too, positioned himself between the Republic of Letters and the wider world of English print and politics, albeit in a slightly different way. His writings are certainly under-appreciated, but unlike Hobbes he was no intellectual or scholarly giant. He was himself willing to acknowledge shortcomings in even the most ambitious of his fourteen published works. ‘The next thing which may seem herein omitted’, he wrote in apology for West Barbary, ‘is, that which would have best pleased the Virtuosi, an account of [the Moroccans'] Libraries, for which I was once sollicited by a Letter from a Stranger, in the year 1664, who design'd an Universal Catalogue of Ancient and Modern Writers, and their Books'. Here, Addison registered his excitement at the prospect of aiding another scholar's efforts and impressing the virtuosi. But he then immediately admitted his failure to do so in this instance. ‘Though [the stranger] possess'd me with great hopes of finding great Store of Books in Barbary for his purpose’, Addison explained, ‘upon Enquiry, I met with nothing but Disappointment’.Footnote ²⁶ While his work was used and appreciated by many contemporary scholars and in two cases translated and sold in continental Europe, it occasionally fell short of the standards of his most erudite readers.Footnote ²⁷

Throughout his career, Addison engaged irregularly in the characteristic practices of the Republic of Letters, and appealed and adhered to its norms. His works typified Crooke's effort to situate himself between learned and more middling or at least genteel audiences. Addison clearly sought to grace even his most polemical work with scholarly rigour while making it more widely accessible. Yet not everyone was left satisfied, and one telling example of this will serve to illustrate the pitfalls of enterprises like Crooke's. By the summer of 1678, Addison had completed a draft of a study of the origins and rise of Islam called The first state of Mahumedism. This work synthesized recent northern European orientalist scholarship on the topic. In addition, it offered an historical parallel that included one of the first sceptical accounts of the Popish Plot, and it may also have been a response to Henry Stubbe's anti-Trinitarian account of early Islam.Footnote ²⁸ Here and elsewhere, Addison sought to engage with the work of Hobbes and many of the other radical figures who were familiar with Crooke and his shop.

Once Crooke had Addison's manuscript on Muhammad in hand, the stationer met (presumably at the sign of the Green Dragon) with one of the most learned orientalists in England at the time, the Laudian churchman Thomas Smith. He asked Smith to peruse the work and write a prefatory endorsement of it. Smith was at the time chaplain to a secretary of state, Sir Joseph Williamson, and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. His political and religious attitudes aligned closely with Addison's. But despite knowing Addison (they appear to have met in Tangier)Footnote ²⁹ and sharing with him both a patron and a series of ideological affinities, Smith was stern in his criticism of the manuscript. The reader's report Smith sent to Crooke in a letter on 30 June showed that he was scornfully aware of the balancing act Crooke and Addison were trying to achieve, and the tensions between the Republic of Letters and the wider world of print. Smith refused to write a preface. Noting that the work was ‘capable of improvement’ and still unaware that Addison had written it, he offered a blunt assessment. ‘It would be a great satisfaction’, he pointed out, ‘if the Arabic names were better adjusted, and just authorities cited, for want of which this account of the life of Mahomet will pass only for a legend’. Smith recognized, though, that Crooke, at least, did not have exacting standards in mind. ‘Tis likely the book may sell never a whit worse for that’, Smith sneered, ‘which is the only thing you men of hack look after.’ Smith had broader concerns.

Later that summer, Smith replied to another letter from Crooke on Addison's work, in which Crooke had identified Addison as the author. Smith appeared slightly defensive now, and spoke the language of the Republic of Letters. ‘When you by your importunity extorted from me my opinion of the papers you put into my hands’, he explained, ‘I did not in the least pretend to disapprove or find fault with the design or diligence of the author, whom I very really and heartily esteem, but only wished that some things were mended and others added.’Footnote ³¹ Because booksellers like Crooke seemed to value both profit and the dissemination of knowledge, they were bound to appreciate liminal figures like Addison more than relatively pure scholars like Smith.

Addison was so keen to stake out a middle ground between erudite scholarship and accessible polemic in part because he was concerned to reach the same wider audience to which Hobbes and other freethinkers were appealing, and to further his own competing religious and political agenda among them. Throughout his oeuvre – which ranged from an ethnography of Sephardic Jews in the Maghrib to a treatise on the correct performance of prayer – Addison used advanced forms of late humanist historical learning to make a conformist, clericalist, and authoritarian case for the central role of the established church in the efforts of the English elite to make internecine bloodshed a thing of the past.Footnote ³² Like Hobbes, he promulgated a vision of how to re-engineer society in such a way that the religious turmoil, political upheaval, and sheer destruction of mid-century were all rendered impossible.Footnote ³³

More obvious, perhaps, than the tensions between scholarship and the market were the political pressures under which Crooke operated. Whatever the threat Hobbes himself faced or perceived from public authorities during the Restoration, his agent apparently felt rather secure in setting up his shop as a forum on Hobbism. This clearly had to do not only with the regime's selective approach to repression, but also with the esteem and patronage that crucial state actors bestowed upon both Addison and Hobbes, an esteem that was probably due in part to both writers’ preference for strikingly authoritarian solutions to the problem of civil peace. Addison's patrons included Charles II, Williamson, and the bishop of Salisbury, Seth Ward, all men who took Hobbes very seriously while also disputing aspects of his work. Hobbes himself received a pension from his former mathematics student, the king, and had free access to him. Charles apparently admired Behemoth despite not allowing it to be printed (it had been refused a licence, it seems, because of its radical critique of the church).Footnote ³⁴ Hobbes's friend John Vaughan, chief justice of the common pleas, had similarly enjoyed but refused to license the ‘Dialogue betwixt a student in the common laws of England, and a philosopher’.Footnote ³⁵ The philosopher's status among prominent members of the regime was further secured by the influence of the secretary of state Henry Bennett, Lord Arlington, whom Hobbes had probably met in France when Arlington served as the duke of York's secretary during his mid-century exile. Arlington was the dedicatee of both De principiis et ratiocinatione geometrarum (1666) and a manuscript of Behemoth.Footnote ³⁶

Hobbes also knew Williamson, Arlington's undersecretary between 1662 and 1674, who owned a number of Hobbes's works and also happened to be Addison's main patron.Footnote ³⁷ In June 1668, Hobbes sent Williamson a draft of his defence of Leviathan against the late bishop of Derry, John Bramhall, and his deeply anti-clerical history of heresy. Williamson had apparently seen a previous draft of this dual work, which seems to have been licensed. But he had seen fit to overturn the decision, because he objected to four sentences where Hobbes speculated about whether burnings for heresy had occurred during the time of Charles I's High Commission. Hobbes, anxious to have the work ‘againe licensed’, now told Williamson he preferred that these remarks be left in. But he added that he would consent to the publication of a censored version of the work if Williamson licensed it.Footnote ³⁸ Williamson also apparently had a role in the Oxford University Press's publication of the earl of Clarendon's 1676 tract against Hobbes.Footnote ³⁹ Throughout his career he proved a keen constructor of controlled spaces for the consumption of political information and an active member of the Republic of Letters.Footnote ⁴⁰

It would be surprising if Williamson, Arlington, and even the king had not known of Crooke's shop and the manuscripts on offer there. Despite their deep ambivalence about Hobbes and their opposition to the licensing and printing of his more controversial works, these men appear to have winked at what went on ‘without Temple Bar’, which they may have seen as a more appropriate, controllable form of publicity than licensed print. In fact, as we will see below, a number of other establishment figures whom we might think would be even more vehemently opposed to the publication of Hobbes's works – leading spokesmen for the Church of England – were much more directly involved in and supportive of Crooke's efforts to get them into print. Every authority figure involved seems to have assumed that these tracts would eventually be published whether they liked it or not, and they therefore sought to control the circumstances under which that publication occurred. Hobbes, who clearly did not want to run afoul of the authorities by trying to evade the publication restrictions they imposed, seems to have accepted the arrangement, either as a necessary compromise or, at least in part and on occasion, as an attractive setting for promoting his ideas.

All this undermines the usual assumption that the basic function of scribal publication in this period was determined by the presence of a strict censorship regime. In this instance, scribal publication was almost certainly not providing a means for the circulation of information among the governing class without the knowledge of the governors. And yet the governors’ awareness and enabling of Crooke's activities was not in contradiction with the fact that scribal publication could serve, as Love has argued, to bring together like-minded individuals under conditions of censorship to consider and discuss politically and religiously subversive texts. Crooke's arrangement also shows how closely connected scribal and print culture could be, despite an environment of significant restraints on print publication. Crooke helped to construct not only a ‘scribal community’ but a ‘community of the book’ by showcasing multiple forms of publication in the same place.Footnote ⁴¹

The picture which begins to emerge here is one of a publisher staging the dynamic tension between a single learned culture and its many ideological faces in a constrained but secure political environment. Only if we cease to assume that the central political dynamic of later Stuart England was a struggle for and against the free circulation and implementation of ideas can we begin to appreciate what was going on in these spaces, and thereby develop a less ideologically loaded understanding of political life in the period. This public operated in a fundamentally similar manner both before and after the lapse of licensing. Crooke's efforts before 1679 were not simply attempts to publish Hobbes in a manner that would be acceptable to the licensers appointed by the Restoration regime (though they were certainly that). This end alone cannot explain the confluence of interests and actions that made his efforts possible. By focusing his enterprise on Hobbes and Addison, Crooke was able to make his shop a forum for a discussion of the tensions and conflicts between two generally authoritarian but nevertheless bitterly opposed schemes for national redemption. He appears to have done so with the connivance of a range of establishment figures. Crooke, Hobbes, and those who wanted to rein the philosopher in had been consciously working together to create a polite, public arena in which his works could be assessed.Footnote ⁴²

IV

By turning to specific publishing schemes, we can see Crooke's plan in action. On two occasions, the stationer made explicit attempts to stage a dialogue between Hobbes and prominent, learned Anglican divines in a single printed book. These efforts continued a long tradition of clerical engagement with Hobbes. The first was a 1676 tract that republished, for the first time since the Interregnum, a letter that Hobbes wrote in 1645 to the duke of Newcastle about his opinions on liberty and necessity. This letter first made it into print in 1654, as part of the tract that ignited the famous printed debate between Hobbes and Bramhall.Footnote ⁴³ In this new printing, Hobbes's twenty-page letter was followed by an eighty-page, learned, refutation of it by the bishop of Ely, Benjamin Laney, who had probably met Hobbes during their exile in France in the 1640s.Footnote ⁴⁴ When this tract was entered into the stationers’ register on 21 January 1676, it carried Laney's name in the title.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet in the print version, Laney's name was not specified anywhere in the tract; he was merely identified on the title page as ‘a learned prelate of the Church of England, lately deceased’. Laney had in fact died in January 1675. The work had been licensed on 19 January 1676 by Anthony Saunders, a chaplain to Gilbert Sheldon, archbishop of Canterbury, and the printed work carried Saunders's impimatur. Here, at least, sections of the religious establishment were clearly endorsing a tightly controlled re-entry of some of Hobbes's most controversial writings into print. The next year, Crooke issued a second edition. There is also some evidence that Hobbes issued a response to Laney, but if so it has not survived.Footnote ⁴⁶ What seems to have happened here is that friends of Laney who had access to his literary remains approached Crooke and (directly or indirectly) Hobbes about re-staging the controversy over Hobbes's views on liberty and necessity. Hobbes may simply have accepted this arrangement as the price of republication, or he may have appreciated the way in which these projects made publicly obvious how seriously the ecclesiastical establishment took his ideas. The Laney edition gave readers an opportunity to compare Hobbes's arguments with those of the church, in circumstances that were from Hobbes's perspective far from ideal but undeniably dialogical.

Laney and other establishment authors appear to have been kept ‘anonymous’ in so many exchanges with Hobbes because this tack made it possible to stage more or less civilized public debates in such a way that the orthodox interlocutors could not easily be personally labelled ‘Hobbists’ for self-consciously aping Hobbes's own methods, as so many of them did. In this way, a veneer of Anglican solidarity in opposition to and, most importantly, in utter alienation from radicals like Hobbes – something which never existed in reality – was maintained.Footnote ⁴⁷ There is little reason to think that the primary motivation for this dual edition was the evasion of licensing restrictions by the addition of an orthodox author to an edition of Hobbes. It is well known that the Press Act was commonly ignored when the decision to print a book was made, and, in any case, the Laney scheme was nearly identical to one that was launched after the Act had lapsed.Footnote ⁴⁸

That second project failed in the end, but it nevertheless deserves more attention than the Laney episode, if only because of the quality of the surviving evidence and the fact that the most interesting aspects of the episode, and one crucial piece of evidence, have gone unnoticed by Hobbes scholars. Perhaps the central figure here was Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey, an important intermediary between anti-clerical, dissenting networks and the authoritarian and conformist figures of the period. Anglesey perfectly illustrates the relationships under study here. Before the late 1670s, he had on different occasions sponsored and protected each group's criticisms of the other, while pursuing a studiedly conservative career in the House of Lords and showing sympathy for nonconformists.Footnote ⁴⁹ He was also yet another denizen of Crooke's shop. In the summer of 1676, he seems to have borrowed the original copy of Hobbes's history of heresy from Crooke. After reading it (and apparently having it copied), he went to see his conformist friend Thomas Barlow, who was bishop of Lincoln and Addison's former teacher at Oxford's staunchly royalist Queen's College. Anglesey left the manuscript with Barlow and asked for the prelate's thoughts on it.Footnote ⁵⁰

Barlow was yet another figure who embodied the close personal and cultural links between Anglican churchmen and anti-clerical scholars. While at Oxford during the Interregnum, Hobbes's promoter Henry Stubbe had been Barlow's protégé. During that time Stubbe acted as an intermediary between Barlow and Hobbes himself, and he helped ensure that Hobbes and Barlow became friends and established their own, direct correspondence.Footnote ⁵¹ Crooke, too, was well connected with Barlow. In August, the bishop wrote back to Anglesey with his thoughts on Hobbes's tract. He began with a classic statement of the norms of the late seventeenth-century Republic of Letters, explaining that while he was a friend of Hobbes, he had nevertheless ‘impartially considered’ the manuscript. ‘Though I am not very willing to censure any man's writings, save mine own’, he wrote,

In this context, Barlow thought, he could write against Hobbes for a purpose that transcended and could not damage their friendship – a purpose that had been Hobbes's own when he wrote the tract. In this way, Barlow was claiming, civility and the maintenance of orthodoxy worked hand in hand. Comparing his willingness to criticize Hobbes to Aristotle's willingness to question the wisdom of his friend and master Plato, Barlow wrote, ‘so say I, of Mr. Hobbes and truth: I love both, but truth better. Nor in this any breach of friendship.’

Barlow went on from here to nearly one hundred pages of occasionally angry and always assiduous examination of Hobbes's work. He met Hobbes's own humanism with far more rigorous textual criticism, but he could barely contain his rage and remain civil in his comments. Barlow was perhaps the most learned anti-Catholic polemicist living in England at the time. He clearly appreciated Hobbes's heresy tract as an attack on the Roman church, but he took care to fend off Hobbes's more radical contentions, which he suggested were desperate and unscholarly attempts by Hobbes to prove that he himself was not a heretic. By improving upon Hobbes's own methods, Barlow could claim that he was in fact furthering Hobbes's own work by cleansing it of any objectionable conclusions. While at points he exploded and referred to Hobbes's arguments as ‘wild and wicked opinions’, Barlow was careful to describe his critique as a list of ‘errors, or mistakes’. He was suggesting that everything in the tract that was wrong, and so angered him, was unintentional in its inaccuracy. Yet Barlow did point out that in one particular section, where Hobbes appeared to be arguing that God was the cause of all sin, he had entered dangerous territory. The bishop warned that if Hobbes refused either to explain or to retract these comments, he might be guilty of blasphemy. And if so, Barlow observed, his friend, according to law, deserved death!

Barlow's tract was in many ways a textual counterpart to Crooke's bookselling enterprise. It attempted a complicated balancing act between the norms of the Republic of Letters, the bishop's own ideological perspective, and the laws of the land. Yet for the most part, these demands did not necessarily conflict; rather, Barlow could at least claim that they complemented one another and added to the force of his work on all three levels.Footnote ⁵² This was an important part of the reason why Crooke's venture was feasible. Here and elsewhere, the commitments and keywords of the later seventeenth-century Republic of Letters were hardly straightforward expressions of tolerance and irenicism. They were hotly contested and constantly marshalled for partisan ends, both to challenge and to bolster the religious and political status quo.Footnote ⁵³

It should come as no surprise, then, that Crooke sought to enlist Barlow in his schemes. After the expiration of the licensing laws and especially upon Hobbes's death, Crooke proved eager to profit independently from the Hobbes materials he had in his bookshop.Footnote ⁵⁴ Between 1680 and 1683, he arranged the printing and sale of Hobbes's Rhetoric, Vita, Behemoth, Considerations, De mirabilibus pecci, and Seven philosophical problems. In 1680, he had the Narration concerning heresie printed, but from an imperfect copy, perhaps because the correct version had been lent out.Footnote ⁵⁵ By February 1680, he felt confident enough to advertise the printed Narration in The true domestick intelligence and in his edition of Hobbes's self-defence, the Considerations. He soon began to arrange a second edition of the heresy tract, in part because every copy of the initial edition had been sold.Footnote ⁵⁶

Sometime that same year, Barlow was writing with an unidentified correspondent about printing the critique of the Narration he had originally written for Anglesey in 1676. The correspondent seems to have been close to both Barlow and Anglesey, and to have taken a scholarly interest not only in heresy but also in the broader issues of ecclesiastical and crown jurisdiction raised by the question of heterodoxy. In his letter to Barlow, the only element of the exchange that survives, the correspondent discussed at length the legal aspects of Barlow's answer to Hobbes, and in particular its account of the common law, on which Barlow had apparently solicited his advice. At one point in the letter, the correspondent referred to an account of the legal aspects of the burning of the anti-Trinitarian Bartholomew Legat in 1612. He noted that ‘I have in effect made a decision of this question at large in the preface of my manuscript of the ecclesiastical power inherent in the Crown of England’, which Barlow had apparently seen.Footnote ⁵⁷

Nothing resembling this particular manuscript seems to have survived. Yet, judging from the subject matter of the letter, the evident connections of the correspondent, and a handwriting comparison, one can say with great certainty that the correspondent in question here was Sir Peter Pett, another major figure at the intersection of learning and politics in this period.Footnote ⁵⁸ Pett exemplifies how cutting-edge intellectual endeavour in later Stuart England could take on a rather ‘conservative’ hue.Footnote ⁵⁹ He had a refined, ‘Erastian’ take on matters of church and state, he was one of the most pronounced and explicit Hobbesians of his generation, and he evidently approved of many of the arguments in Hobbes's Narration. Yet he was a stalwart defender of the royal prerogative and James II's claim to the throne. Like Hobbes, he believed that a science of politics could make religiously driven civil conflict a thing of the past. A comparison of the early editions of Behemoth with a passage in Pett's published writing reveals that Pett possessed the authorized edition sold by Crooke.Footnote ⁶⁰ Pett's second major work, a defence of James II's Declaration of Indulgence, was also sold by Crooke, and Pett was behind the publication of both Barlow's literary remains and Anglesey's ‘memoirs’ in 1693. In Barlow's remains, Pett included a selection from the bishop's response to Hobbes, which had remained unprinted. He was, finally, a protégé and close friend of Anglesey, whom he served as a man of business in the 1670s and to whom his great, rambling work, The happy future state of England, was addressed, in the form of a letter written early in 1680.Footnote ⁶¹

‘I was always of opinion’, Pett wrote at the beginning of the letter,

Crooke and Pett appear to have had frequent dealings; apparently Anglesey was even sent the Hobbes manuscript at Pett's request, and Pett evidently returned the manuscript to Crooke. When the heresy tract appeared in print alone in 1680, Pett had pressured Crooke about it. Crooke admitted printing it, but insisted that he had only printed the imperfect copy of Hobbes with the expectation that he would later be able to publish Barlow's ‘answer’ to it. Apparently, Barlow was still revising the manuscript, and Crooke had requested that he receive the final version from Barlow to print, with the understanding that neither the prelate nor Anglesey would distribute scribal copies in the future. Crooke wanted to assume control over what had been a pre-existing but rather selective publication of Barlow's response to Hobbes. Now, however, he and Pett, in co-operation with Anglesey, were considering a slightly different project, one whose clear precedent was Crooke's edition of Hobbes and Laney. Crooke himself tried to pressure Pett, Angelesey, and Barlow into this arrangement by insisting that he would withhold any further distribution of the perfect scribal copy of the Narration (which Barlow had used and evidently copied) until he was given Barlow's manuscript response, in order to print it with the new edition of the Narration. Crooke noted that no other stationer was permitted to print the manuscript in any case, and that the older edition was now sold out. He offered Pett fourteen guineas to procure the manuscript from Barlow.

With the permission of Anglesey, Pett responded to Crooke's offer by stating that it was below him to take money for the manuscript. He demanded instead that part of the revenue from the project benefit the Church of England. ‘I had made Crook promise me’, he told Barlow, ‘that if ever I should put your Lordships manuscript into his hands he should give such a quantity of mony or plate to two Divines of the Church of England that wanted it who were his Lordships friends and whome I named to his Lordship as might be reasonable’. These were divines ‘who might be useful in courting the press by their learning and diligence’. Pett sought to set up the Hobbes edition as an act of philanthropy for budding Anglican polemicists. He wanted to disseminate some of the most learned anti-clericalism of the age in the service of the very priests Hobbes so often vilified. Crooke agreed to the plan and promised to give the perfect Hobbes manuscript to Pett so that he could pass it on to Barlow for use during the final revisions to his own tract. In the letter, however, Pett reported to Barlow that he had not received the manuscript yet. He suspected that Crooke had been stalling in order to find a way to procure the Barlow tract another way and therefore ‘escape the allowing to those two divines that he knew would happen; if the manuscript went by my hands’. Pett had heard that Crooke was trying to get two of his other acquaintances to talk to Barlow about handing over the manuscript free of charge. These contacts were the chancellor of Lincoln (and a chaplain in ordinary to Charles II), Samuel Fuller, and the bishop of Bristol, William Gulston, Lancelot Addison's brother-in-law, whose 1682 visitation articles were published by Crooke (Addison may well have been the intermediary here).Footnote ⁶³ Pett nevertheless hoped that one day Barlow could consult the perfect scribal copy of the Narration, finish revising his critique of it, and send it on to Anglesey, who would have it ‘printed with Hobbes’.Footnote ⁶⁴ In the end, this never happened. Crooke published the perfect version of the Narration in 1682, in an edition with Hobbes's Answer to Bramhall and in a larger collection of Hobbes's works.Footnote ⁶⁵

V

Crooke's projects to have bishops printed with Hobbes were only the most clear and fascinating aspects of an approach that was typical of the stationer's activities during the 1670s. In 1673, he published another anonymous tract, apparently written by a man Crooke referred to as ‘Shafto’ in advertisements, called The great law of nature, or self-preservation, examined, asserted, and vindicated from Mr. Hobbes his abuses. This work had gone from manuscript to print circulation like many of Crooke's publications. After writing the work in 1670 or 1671 and circulating a scribal copy for a few years, Shafto had his book printed, and then arranged for Crooke to sell it in his shop. He seems to have purposely approached Crooke in order to maximize the chances that his work would be read by readers and fans of Hobbes. In his preface to the reader, Shafto noted that many people were sure that Hobbes's understanding of the law of nature ‘takes away all Foundations of Virtue and Goodness’. ‘Yet’, he added, ‘Hobbes is well approved of by many, who would be thought like him, Great Wits, and to have Understandings and Capacities much transcending the Doctrine and Pedantry of Moralists and Divines.’ These wits, the sort of anti-clerical readers who frequented Crooke's bookshop, were Shafto's audience. ‘Knowing therefore with whom I have to do’, he wrote, ‘I have argued chiefly out of Master Hobbes his own Principles, and thereby endeavoured to evince the grosness and folly of his Errours.’Footnote ⁶⁶ In 1679, Crooke sold a similar work, written by an Anglican minister named William Howell, who was only identified on the frontispiece as ‘WH’. This tract, called The spirit of prophecy, was in large part a response to Hobbes, as well as to Martin Clifford's controversial Treatise of humane reason. The work was dedicated to Peter Gunning, Benjamin Laney's successor as bishop of Ely. In the dedicatory letter Howell also directed himself to the wits of the age, and again offered a serious consideration of Hobbes's method. He opted for a common, sideways approach to Hobbes, claiming that the philosopher's work was based upon demonstrative logic, which was utterly inappropriate for the theological questions he was addressing.Footnote ⁶⁷

This pattern of publication, however, was no better exemplified than in the works of Lancelot Addison himself. All of the future dean's writings in the 1670s were politically charged historical works that attempted, in part, either to anticipate or respond to anti-clerical scholarship from this period. They often included clear responses to Hobbes himself, but they were also engaged with learned ‘Hobbism’ as a distinct phenomenon, and a broader tradition of impious erudition. In fact, each work Crooke published for Addison in the 1670s can be read as an engagement with the writing of other men who were apparently familiar with Crooke and his bookshop. In early 1677, for instance, Crooke published A modest plea for the clergy. The work was anonymous in the sense that its author was not named, but by this point in the 1670s, many readers, and certainly those who encountered this book in Crooke's shop, would have already known a lot about the contents and priorities of a book with a title like this that was being sold by Hobbes's publisher. The work was advertised in London in the term catalogue of 12 February, just three days before parliament was reconvened, and two weeks later in the official government newspaper, the London Gazette, just above an advertisement for Hobbes's translations of Homer.Footnote ⁶⁸ It was clearly meant to influence the session on specific fronts, while also addressing the broader intellectual and ideological issues that informed the conduct of the parliament's members. The Plea carried an imprimatur from William Jane, chaplain to Henry Compton, the bishop of London, and it was dedicated to Williamson. All these aspects of the work dramatized the alliance between church and state to which it was attached. Yet Addison's crucial move in positioning the tract was to keep his name from it, and to give the impression throughout that the author was a layman, by referring to the clergy in the third person. This was a basic expression of Addison's penchant for addressing anti-clericalism on its own terms and stressing the lay–clerical partnership that ideally protected the special role of the clergy in English society. The Plea, he told Williamson, was ‘honestly designed for the Vindication of that Order of Men, toward whom your Respects are constantly manifested; and through the sides of whose Contempt both Church and State have ever received their deepest Wounds’. The quotation from Tacitus on the title page was a favourite of radical ‘Erastians’ in this period, and it made Addison's agenda clear. ‘The dignity of the priesthood’, it read, ‘is the support of political power.’Footnote ⁶⁹

Addison introduced the work by addressing himself to the Republic of Letters, and by recognizing the quality and civility of the most vehement scholarly critics of the Anglican clergy, some of whom he may have met in Crooke's bookshop. ‘The Contempt of the Clergy’, he wrote, ‘is not the ruffianly and borish Humour only of the Rude and less-Civilized, but even of many of those, who would be looked upon as the Great Lights of Deportment, and the Refin'd and Philosophical Persons of the Age.’ His own research on the clerical order, he claimed, was spurred on by the fact that

Like Barlow, Addison couched his riposte to anti-clericalism in tropes of civility. He seemed intent on dramatizing how a layman like Hobbes, using Hobbes's own methods, could easily, and more usefully and politely, come to different conclusions about clerical authority than the author of Leviathan had, while still sharing Hobbes's commitment to a generally authoritarian solution to the problem of civil peace.

In the early pages of the Plea, Addison offered a conjectural history of the erection of a priesthood in a Hobbesian state of nature. He insisted that priests had always ‘officiated’ over the ritual circumstances of religion, to the benefit of both piety and political stability, and that the priesthood was therefore a basic ingredient in any effective civil religion. Addison made very clear that his argument was meant to confute sophisticated impugners of the Anglican clergy by arguing on their own terms. He even provisionally accepted the classic Enlightenment thesis that the history of religion was a history of imposture, which he took to be central to ‘the unhappy genius of the Age wherein we live’, and a difficult position to dismiss. Yet, he contended, ‘if by an atheistical supposal it should be granted, That Religion is but a meer Engine of Government, or a politic invention devised to awe the people into subjection and obedience’, it was still true that it was

By pragmatically defending the clerical order as a civilizational necessity, the Plea offered what amounted to a Hobbesian and Machiavellian case for sacerdotalism. The Plea was carefully devised as an intervention in a debate between freethinkers and members of the establishment over how England might escape its bloody past, a debate that Crooke had chosen to showcase at the sign of the Green Dragon.Footnote ⁷² Those who chose to follow this debate could do so either by consulting single volumes like the Laney edition, or by encountering the individual works of Hobbes and Addison, laid side-by-side, in Crooke's shop.

VI

The literary afterlife of Addison's Plea only confirms its significance in the intellectual, cultural, religious, and political life of later Stuart England. In 1709, the nonjuring polemicist and eminent historian George Hickes republished the Plea as an antidote to one of the most important freethinking tracts of the reign of Anne, Matthew Tindal's 1706 Rights of the Christian church. If he had known of the Plea sooner, Hickes admitted, he would have published it immediately as a response to Tindal, instead of writing his own, far more lengthy response, the Two treatises, in 1707. The Plea, Hickes announced, ‘obviate[s] the wicked design of that profane Piece, where Men of the basest Interest, and worst Principles, the Sons of Epicurus, Hobbes, and Spinoza, have said almost all that the wicked daemons could inspire them to speal against the Christian Priesthood’. Hickes recognized that the Plea had anticipated and parried the learned anti-clericalism that was on the rise in the mid-1670s by confronting it on its own terms, and by writing in a style that was ‘neither too high for the Common, nor too low for the Learned Reader’.Footnote ⁷³ What his account of the book's production obscured was how the Plea had emerged within the same cultural and even social and physical environment as the increasingly fashionable attacks on priestcraft it was meant to ‘obviate’.

By 1709, William Crooke had been dead for fifteen years, and the public he had nurtured had been swallowed up in a wider storm of reading, discussion, and discourse in which English elites, working within a single realm of learned inquiry and argument, proffered competing answers to the problems of public religion and civil peace that the English Civil Wars and Revolution had posed, problems that the Glorious Revolution had failed to resolve. These problems had become central to both political and intellectual life, and no one, perhaps, had articulated them so early and so clearly as Hobbes. The fact that so many of the solutions that were offered in the later Stuart period were Hobbesian in orientation testified to the lasting imprint that Hobbes had made upon figures of a wide variety of ideological persuasions.

At this point, we can return to the questions posed by the reception of Hobbes's ideas and his apparent centrality to the early Enlightenment with a plausible answer in reach. The authoritarian implications of Hobbes's materialism clearly demonstrate that those who understand the Enlightenment in terms of emancipation mistake an essentially political or ideological movement for an intellectual one.Footnote ⁷⁴ The only way around this would be to consider Hobbes's philosophy primarily as a form of secularism that sought to emancipate men from priestly power.Footnote ⁷⁵ But what Crooke's venture shows is that this argument is subject to the same criticism as the one it would replace.Footnote ⁷⁶ What is left of the intellectual and cultural significance of an essentially anti-clerical Enlightenment if the tools, networks, media, norms, and concepts used to support it – all the way down to ‘atheistical’ arguments for civil religion – were also those of the Church of England's leading priestly apologists? This tack also perpetuates a persistent but fundamentally inaccurate understanding of later Stuart politics: the view that this period was characterized by an elite conflict between intellectually innovative proponents of relatively progressive stances on matters of church and state and their intellectually ossified and utterly reactionary opponents.Footnote ⁷⁷

Fortunately, Crooke also leads us to a more plausible and fruitful way of understanding an Enlightenment in which Hobbes was central, and a narrative of later Stuart politics in which that Enlightenment is intelligible as a context. The public Crooke helped create is best understood not as a stage for a conflict between Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment, but as an Enlightenment public in toto. It showcased fierce ideological conflict, but that conflict alone cannot account for its existence, coherence, and components. It was instead made possible, sustained, and holistically characterized by a shared set of personal relationships, intellectual resources, communicative norms, and civic ideals. Those shared norms and ideals were the products of specific historical circumstances. The Civil Wars and Revolution had left all the identifiable participants in this public convinced that religious and public life finally needed to be organized in a manner that prevented the fires of zeal from laying waste to civil order. These events had also left in their wake an undeprecedented religious and metaphysical diversity. These circumstances conspired to prompt the two questions that drove this public and did much to characterize the Enlightenment itself. What scheme of social, religious, and political organization could procure civil order for good? And how could such a scheme be defended and legitimized in a manner that contemporaries of widely differing forms and degrees of belief and unbelief could possibly be expected to accept? Neither Crooke's public nor the early Enlightenment yielded a single answer to these questions. Instead, the early Enlightenment – like later Stuart political life, which was ultimately driven by the same civic and religious questions – was a field of struggle, a stage of conflict between competing schemes for defining, defending, and implementing a shared project.Footnote ⁷⁸

Most of all, though, Crooke's project highlights a third set of historical circumstances that made the Enlightenment a distinctive environment for the articulation, defence, dissemination, and implementation of ideas: a novel panoply of media. These media (here the term is to be construed broadly and literally) have long been a central concern for scholars who have sought to develop an ideologically open-ended understanding of the Enlightenment.Footnote ⁷⁹ These media included practices and institutions, both invented and inherited, that underwent important changes after 1650: scholarly methods, learned disciplines, literary genres, rhetorical techniques, voluntary associations, salons, and publics, to be sure, but also universities, academies, churches, governments, and empires. These media themselves, like Crooke's attempts to print bishops with Hobbes, often amounted to partial answers to the Enlightenment's guiding questions.

Crooke's venture exhibits a remarkable number of these media at work in a single situation, and it exemplifies how they often came together in what we might call Enlightenment publics.Footnote ⁸⁰ Such publics could form in contact with many permutations of media, and thereby assume peculiar characteristics while still fitting into broader and more diverse bodies of Enlightenement discourse. In historiographical and conceptual terms, this case-study also suggests how we might resolve an unnecessary tension between traditional accounts of the Enlightenment and more recent media-driven interpretations, which have tended to empty the Enlightenment of any specific ideational or normative content. It reveals the deep compatibility between an ideologically open-ended but still partly philosophical and civic understanding of Enlightenment with an emerging body of work on how to think about Enlightened publicity in a post-Habermasian vein. In fact, dynamics strikingly similar to those described here for early Enlightenment England have already been documented on a much greater scale for the climax of the Enlightenment in Francophone Europe. Much like Hobbes, the philosophes faced off with a large group of Christian antiphilosophes, men whose intellectual position and creative manipulation of media are also best described as Enlightened. This confrontation garnered continent-wide attention, and occurred in large part on the pages of books that were sold in the same places and promoted by the same groups of booksellers.Footnote ⁸¹ It would probably be possible to chart a series of such pivotal public conflicts between rival Enlightenments – in even the most unlikely moments and places – all the way from the second half of the seventeenth century to the later years of the eighteenth.

Like the Francophone Enlightenment, the public Crooke fostered was partly enabled, maintained, and encouraged by the universities, the church, and the regime.Footnote ⁸² To be sure, everyone involved in it was at least implicitly consenting to the formation of a realm of authority that was distinct from the authority of these institutions. But that realm of authority was certainly not understood to be independent of or inherently opposed to these institutions or their role in maintaining civil order. Nor was it essentially devoted to checking or critically evaluating the operation of these institutions. The clergy who participated, in particular, were engaged in practices that were clearly distinct from their pastoral duties and independent of the divine authority they claimed when performing holy functions. But their efforts were nevertheless wholly devoted to bolstering the authority of the established religion as it was constituted at the time. They defended the church by making arguments on secular premises that were appropriate to the supra-confessional public they were addressing. At the same time, their conduct was neither absorbed by political partisanship nor driven by a polite reaction to it. They attempted to conduct themselves in broad accordance with the civil norms of the Republic of Letters even before the rage of party had begun. Yet, the ultimate irony of Crooke's public with regard to any Kantian and Habermasian model surely revolves around the authoritarian visions of politics on offer within it: they required the suppression of the very sphere of publicity in which they had originally been given a hearing. Indeed, there may be no better way to highlight the prudential, pragmatic, and agonistic nature and origins of Enlightenment publics than to juxtapose the liberal ideals they supposedly embodied with the writing and activity of Hobbes – a man who despite his fantasies of silence became integral to many of those publics and to liberalism itself.Footnote ⁸³