In 1626 a pro-Habsburg pamphlet, Altera secretissima instructio gallo-brittano-batava, was published anonymously. It was translated into English in 1627 as “A second most secret instruction Gallo-britanno-batauian,” and in Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years’ War Noel Malcolm argues that the translator and transcriber was Thomas Hobbes. It followed two earlier, widely circulated pamphlets of 1620 and 1622, both entitled Secretissima instructio. Like its predecessors, the 1626 pamphlet (correctly but confusingly translated as the “second”) was Habsburg propaganda masquerading as helpful advice to Frederick V, the Elector Palatine. It claimed, falsely, to have been translated from Dutch and published at The Hague. Malcolm suggests that in fact it originated in Vienna (57) and that its author had access to official imperial sources, most notably diplomatic dispatches. This access explains the detail and density of its assessment of the current state of the continent-wide struggle between Catholic and Protestant powers.

Printed copies of the 1626 pamphlet reached England, but few have survived; as Malcolm points out it was, from the English point of view, a dangerous and subversive work, and its references to England and Charles I were calculatedly offensive. He is able, however, to trace several cases of scribal circulation. The manuscript ascribed to Hobbes is among the papers of Viscount Mansfield (later Duke of Newcastle; British Library Add. Mss. 70499). “A second most secret instruction” has, therefore, a dual interest: as Habsburg propaganda tailored to an international audience, and as evidence that, when critically examined, reveals much about Hobbes's intellectual, social, and political milieu in the 1620s.

Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years’ War can be read in multiple ways. First, it is an editorial tour de force in which Malcolm convincingly makes the case for Hobbes as translator and transcriber of the Latin text. He provides a meticulous (sometimes numbingly so) apparatus relating to Hobbes's methods of translation, to the quotations scattered through the text, and to the pamphlet's multilingual sources. Second, it is a study in the history of ideas, tracing the evolution of the doctrine of “reason of state” from Tacitus and Machiavelli to Lipsius and addressing the reception and variants of the theory, the extent to which it was familiar in England, and its identifying characteristics, among them the primacy of secular self-interest, the value of dissimulation, and the importance of appearance and “reputation” in maintaining power. It was statecraft without religion or morality, a “set of techniques” for the successful ruler, but it was not, Malcolm notes, a “complete political philosophy” (102–8). Nevertheless Hobbes's engagement thus early in his career with a text that frankly justified actions by “reason of state” is clearly of interest to Hobbes scholars and historians of political theory. Third, the book provides a picture of a “mental world.” The account of Hobbes's relations with the Cavendish cousins, the Earl of Devonshire and Viscount Mansfield, and with denizens of Jacobean and early Caroline intellectual circles such as Bacon and Jonson, like his extensive travels, places him in a context in which the politics and diplomacy both of England and of European powers were staples of news and conversation. It helps to explain the interest that led to the translation of this dangerous pamphlet.

Malcolm's commentary is followed by the pamphlet itself, divided into thirty-five “aphorismes,” with the Latin text and the translation on facing pages; again, extensive footnotes explain details and provide authorities for the plethora of incidents, often obscure, and opinions, usually partisan, that are the stuff of the argument. Malcolm is alert to the difficulties of the evidence, noting, for example, when a “claim … is entirely false” or “probably, a piece of mischief-making” (194–95 nn. 294, 297).

In his role of a loyal friend to the Elector, the pamphleteer writes, “I will tell you what you cannot do. Next, what you can,” although “you cannot do much” (130, 132). There follows a survey of the reverses, troubles, and deceptions of all those—including Catholics—opposed to Imperial power. Charles I “hates you out of jealousie,” he tells the Elector, and lists the internal divisions that ensure that no aid can be looked for from England (132–38). Similar analyses, combining hyperbole and shrewd information, explain why none can be expected from any of the nations of Europe. Interest and deceit reign. Only two paths remain for the Elector: “Prayers and Fraud,” but “Forces and Stratagems” will not be enough: “Nothing less than criminal acts and things contrary to divine law” will suffice (188–90).

The extravagant gusto of these declarations helps to explain the pamphlet's appeal. Early seventeenth-century English polemic was vigorous and rarely subtle, and while Englishmen might bridle at attacks on the nation as a whole, there was a ready audience for attacks on Buckingham, Henrietta Maria, foreigners, and Catholics. Furthermore, if Malcolm's tentative dating of the translation to August–September 1627 is correct, it coincided with the period in which English forces were mired in their failing expedition to the Isle of Ré, after years in which English armed interventions in continental affairs had been humiliatingly ill managed and unsuccessful. If English chauvinism and antipopery were satisfied by attacks on France and Spain, disillusion with the efforts of their own government had created readers for whom a sophisticated exposé of the cunning, sins, and follies of friends as well as enemies had considerable appeal. Nor is it necessary to link the appeal of the pamphlet to acceptance of the validity of “reason of state.” English doubts about European intervention had many sources, from reservations about the Elector's claim on the traditional ground that it challenged the sovereign power of a ruling monarch to pragmatic and geopolitical considerations of an equally traditional kind.

Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years’ War does not explore these ramifications. It is a distinguished work of textual scholarship and intellectual history, but as such it is only secondarily concerned with background events. It provides a survey of Palatine politics and English, especially Cavendish, engagement with them, while footnotes gloss the events, scandals, and diplomacy recorded in the pamphlet itself. The result leaves a somewhat patchwork impression of this early stage of the Thirty Years’ War and English responses to it. Here the focus is on the particularities of a single theory, a single text, and a single writer. This is essentially a book for specialists, and an impressive one. Along the way it offers many intriguing insights for nonspecialists.