I

The circumstances attending the reception of Leviathan among the English exiles in Paris and Hobbes's subsequent return to London in February 1652 have been the focus of some recent scholarly attention.Footnote ¹ But while such scholarship has established the broad outline of events leading to Hobbes's dismissal from court and departure from Paris, the interpretation of that outline and the identities of those involved in the move against him remain shadowy and ill-defined. This communication aims to shed a little new light on events by drawing on previously untapped evidence in the form of Anglican sermons delivered in front of the exiled court at the chapel of Sir Richard Browne (Charles II's Resident in Paris), during and immediately after Charles's ill-fated Scottish campaign. These sermons confirm the justice of Hobbes's own later account of an Anglican move against him and allow us to add some clarity to our understanding of its methods and character.

It has been maintained by Richard Tuck that only with the publication of Leviathan in 1651 did relations between Hobbes and the Anglican clergy turn sour.Footnote ² But recent work by Jeffrey Collins, Jon Parkin, and Nicholas D. Jackson has provided a substantial body of evidence in the form of documented hostilities between Hobbes and the bishops dating back, in large part, to the Elzevir edition of De cive in 1647 (through which that work first became widely available), but also, to some extent, to the private dissemination of the first edition in 1642.Footnote ³ Scholars are divided over the degree to which the composition of Leviathan and Hobbes's return to England should be seen as part of a coherent strategy of accommodation with the revolutionary government. To Collins, Leviathan endorsed the constitutional and ecclesiological revolution then being engineered by Cromwell and the independents, and thus represented Hobbes's ticket home.Footnote ⁴ But neither Parkin nor Jackson regards Hobbes as quite so strongly committed to Cromwellian independency: Parkin argues for the open-endedness, flexibility, and indeterminacy of Leviathan in regard to the immediate political situation – a situation which underwent dramatic flux during the composition of the text; Jackson similarly points to a complex of motives and circumstances culminating in Hobbes's decision to return to England.Footnote ⁵ All three scholars, however, concur in situating Leviathan and the royalist response to it within ongoing conflicts between Hobbes and the church of England and agree that the Anglican establishment played a role in ousting the philosopher from the exiled court.

The main lines of that account are sketched by Hobbes in the prose Vita he composed late in life at the request of his friend, John Aubrey. Here the philosopher insisted that he was the victim of an Anglican conspiracy and fled, lacking royal protection, under threat from French Catholic clerics:

There is of course something self-dramatizing about this account; the very existence of such conspiracies and dangers, let alone their possible impact on the philosopher's decision to return to England, has quite reasonably been called into question.Footnote ⁸ Hobbes had been pondering the possibility, at least, of a return for some time; and he was one of many exiles who returned at this period in expectation of government protection (the parliamentary Act of Pardon and Oblivion would pass in February).Footnote ⁹ Yet external testimony suggests that, deprived of court protection, Hobbes was in real danger in Paris. Clarendon later recalled an imminent move against him by the French authorities.Footnote ¹⁰ Such evidence also supports Hobbes's claim that his banishment from the court was a direct consequence of priestly displeasure over Leviathan. In mid-January 1652, the government-sponsored journal, Mercurius politicus, reported that Hobbes had sent a copy of the book to the king,

The copy presented to the king on his return to Paris in November 1651, which Clarendon notes was ‘engross'd in Vellam in a marvellous fair hand’,Footnote ¹² has been plausibly identified with British Library, MS Egerton 1910, and recent scholarship has drawn attention to the presence in the manuscript of numerous marginal annotations: some in the form of neat triangular arrangements of dots (in ink) and others (later) in the form of pencilled crosses. The former point up passages of religious unorthodoxy and may thus represent notations by one of the court clergymen who read it at this time.Footnote ¹³ The identity of the annotator remains a mystery, but Parkin rightly points to John Earle (or Earles), staunch high Anglican and Hobbes's erstwhile fellow tutor of Charles II, as one of the court clerics most likely to have been responsible.Footnote ¹⁴ Earle had probably been involved in an earlier episcopal move against Hobbes.Footnote ¹⁵ Jackson speculates that Bishop Bramhall may also have had a part in the move against Hobbes.Footnote ¹⁶

Not only Anglican clerics, but also their ‘old royalist’ supporters were involved in discrediting Hobbes at court. Writing to Edward Hyde on 8/18 January 1652 Sir Edward Nicholas noted that ‘L^d Percy is much concerned in the forbidding Hobbes to come to court and says it was you and other episcopal men that were the cause of it.’Footnote ¹⁷ Writing in reply ([17/] 27 January), Hyde admitted that he ‘had indeed some hand in the discountenancing my old friend, Mr. Hobbs’.Footnote ¹⁸ But it is not clear what his contribution might have involved; Hobbes's departure from Paris a few days before Hyde's arrival there on [15/] 25 December suggests that it must have been indirect.Footnote ¹⁹

II

New evidence about the clerical effort to discountenance Hobbes appears in John Evelyn's sermon book: a large folio volume, entitled ‘Τ τν Όμιλίων Περιψήματα Τίνα or A breife Accoumpt of divers Sermons recollected at my after Retirements, and begun, Anno Dom[in]i: M. DC. L.’Footnote ²⁰ As its title implies, the volume begins with sermons heard by Evelyn in 1650; it runs until 1687.Footnote ²¹ Although it contains notes on sermons from the 1650s, the entire volume was clearly written up from notes at a later date – perhaps, like the Diary, during the 1680s.Footnote ²² Its opening pages (fos. 2r–26r) detail sermons heard in the private Anglican chapel in the home of Evelyn's father-in-law, Sir Richard Browne, titular English Resident at Paris, between [3/] 13 June 1650 and [28 December 1651/] 7 January 1652.Footnote ²³ These accounts, of sermons by such luminaries of high Anglicanism as John Earle, John Cosin, and Richard Steward, comprise one of the most valuable records of the exiled Anglican community in Paris at a time when it was one of only a few remaining vestiges of the Church of England.Footnote ²⁴

The sermons collected in Evelyn's book demonstrate the dramatic changes in fortune of the Church of England during the years 1650-1. Outlawed at home, its royal defender dead: the Church of England suffered grievously during the year that followed the execution of Charles I. Under the encouragement of Henrietta Maria, and with the lure of financial support, defections to Rome were frequent. The young king's treaty with the Scots, settled at Breda in March 1650, and the push from Henry Jermyn and the Louvre faction to cut a deal in favour of presbytery as the means to regain the English throne, threatened the church with annihilation.Footnote ²⁵ Its clergy and its leading supporters were rendered irrelevant, actively excluded from the highest councils by the Louvrians and the Scots.Footnote ²⁶ The sermons delivered in Browne's chapel during 1650 are despondent, brooding on suffering and affliction, and warning against the temptation to take the easy way out: ‘let us choose rather to suffer afflictions with better then our selues’, intoned John Cosin, preaching on Matthew 4:9 on [30 September/] 9 October 1650, ‘then to enjoy the ease and splendor, and receiue it with homage from any the cursed instruments of the Diuil’ (fo. 4r). In 1651, the growing prospect of a restoration on Scottish terms led to an increased sense of urgency, with warnings against Satanic temptation and the use of unlawful means to secure one's ends. Preaching on [3/] 13 August 1651, just days before the skirmish at Warrington Bridge, with its false omen of royal success, John Earle was ‘inveighing against the vicious lives of severall of the Kings party’ and daringly insisting that ‘The Cause of all present sufferings are our rebellions against God: and in this sence Princes may be Rebells as well as people.’Footnote ²⁷ But with the smashing of the Presbyterian–Stuart alliance at Worcester in September, and the king's ‘miraculous Escape’ and return to Paris at the end of October, the tide turned.Footnote ²⁸ Early in November, Charles had ‘a pretty discourse’ with Richard Steward in which he confirmed that ‘there is no more danger of Presbytery’; he once more summoned the leading ‘old royalists’, Hyde and Nicholas, to court.Footnote ²⁹ In his chapel, high Anglican ceremonial and liturgical practices were reinstated.Footnote ³⁰ The sermons at this time sound a newly confident, even aggressive, note; the Anglicans were back in the game and were determined to let their auditors know it. On [26 October/] 5 November, Cosin preached (on 2 Samuel 22) ‘a Congratulatory Sermon, & Anniversarie of the Powder Conspiracy’, ‘shewing the extraordinary care which God has of his Church, & those who depend upon him’.Footnote ³¹ On [9/] 19 November, Earle preached in front of the king and the duke of York on Psalm 116:11–12, giving thanks for the latter's escape and urging him to ‘testifie his accknowledgements’ for his deliverance by reforming his court, which was ‘for the greatest part but a Colledg of vice’ (fo. 24v). A week later, he insisted upon the ‘The affinity t'wixt a good King and a Priest’, citing ‘the successe of Davids affliction’ to demonstrate ‘the issue which euer attends such affection’ (fo. 25r).Footnote ³² The Anglican move against Hobbes was one aspect of this resurgent episcopalianism, but appears to have predated it.

Over the autumn and early winter of 1651 we find at least one and possibly several allusions to Hobbes and his doctrines in sermons delivered to the exiled court in Browne's chapel. The character of these allusions, and their coherence with the known preoccupations of Hyde, seems to suggest a concerted ‘old royalist’ and Anglican effort to regain the intellectual initiative and taint Hobbes with charges of disloyalty and atheism.

A damning dismissal of moral and political doctrines found in Leviathan appears in Evelyn's account of the sermon delivered in the Anglican chapel by Richard Steward on [1/] 10 September 1651, soon after Hobbes's recovery from a serious illness and a few days prior to the battle of Worcester, at a time when confused and conflicting rumours about the king's fortunes were swirling around Paris.Footnote ³³ This sermon impressed itself greatly upon Evelyn; his account is unusually ample and detailed. Steward preached upon Matthew 5:10: ‘Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven' (fos. 21v–23r). In the midst of applying his text to those auditors who ‘haue forsaken all for a Loyall and a laudable cause’, Steward launched into a gratuitous aside:

He went on to remind his auditors of the misfortunes and indignities endured by David during Absolom's rebellion and to draw attention to an argument from the same source that the right of self-preservation trumps all other obligations: ‘The same persons tell us and giue it out, That Oathes are no longer obligatorie then they conduce to self preservation’ (fo. 22r). While Steward targets those royalists who were then compounding with the revolutionary government, there can be little doubt that he has Hobbes in his sights as the source of the devilish doctrine of reciprocal protection and obedience being cited by such figures to justify their actions. The argument that there was a reciprocal relationship between a government's protection and a subject's obedience was a distinctive and scandalous feature of the recently published Leviathan.Footnote ³⁴ The case for reciprocation was not in itself a new one; it had been a staple of parliamentary propaganda since the early 1640s.Footnote ³⁵ But it was in Leviathan that the doctrine received its most eloquent and notorious expression.Footnote ³⁶ Still more distinctive is the related argument that oaths are only binding as long as they cohere with self-preservation. During the Engagement controversy there was much discussion of oath-taking, and a consistent effort on the part of Engagers to loosen the traditional understanding of oaths as indissoluble to allow ex-royalists to pledge themselves to the new government.Footnote ³⁷ But none of these writers went as far as Hobbes in denying on the one hand the special status of an oath as distinct from a covenant and insisting on the other hand (from De cive on) that the inalienable right of self-protection invalidates any contrary covenant – even the laws of the land.Footnote ³⁸ Steward's insistence that the two doctrines have a common source leaves little doubt that he is aiming at Leviathan.Footnote ³⁹ He might have had in view a passage from chapter 21 in which the two doctrines appear side by side: ‘The Obligation of Subjects to the Soveraign, is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by Nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no Covenant be relinquished’ (p. 114).Footnote ⁴⁰

Although Steward's represents the only explicit engagement with Hobbes I have found among the Paris sermons, two other possible glances at him appear in a cluster of sermons delivered in November, after the church's fortunes had taken a turn for the better. The first appears in John Cosin's gunpowder plot sermon of [26 October/] 5 November 1651, preached on 2 Samuel 22, which opens, in Evelyn's recounting, with the bold assertion ‘That it was a grosse mistake to thinke that the People were the original of Kings’ (fo. 24r). This might involve an allusion to Hobbes's claim in De cive (vii. 11) that ‘Monarchy…is derived from the power of the people.’Footnote ⁴¹ The doctrine of original popular sovereignty was not of course uniquely Hobbesian; a more extreme version of it, which claimed (unlike Hobbes's) that the people had never yielded up their sovereignty and could install or depose monarchs as they pleased was one of the main anti-royalist arguments during the Civil War. Hobbes, concerned about the implications of such a position in the wake of the war, backed away from it somewhat in Leviathan.Footnote ⁴² But his explicit statement of it in his earlier works, which were only recently becoming widely available (though privately printed, De cive was not officially published until 1647; the English translation appeared in print only a few weeks prior to Leviathan) made him a conspicuous proponent of such a view at this time.Footnote ⁴³ This need not mean that Cosin was alluding to him here. And the fact that Cosin did not mark up the relevant passage in his copy of the Elzevir edition of De cive must count against the suggestion that he is doing so.Footnote ⁴⁴

A third possible allusion to the need to banish Hobbes appears in John Earle's insistence, in his sermon of [9/] 19 November, that Charles purge his court. While Earle had in his sights a wide range of undesirables, notably those Louvrians and swordsmen who had until recently been in the ascendant, Hobbes may have been among those implicated. Earle denounced the court as ‘a Colledg of vice’; Hobbes's principles were already regarded by conservatives as prime sources of its corruption. Writing to Hyde on [1/] 11 January 1652, Edward Nicholas rejoiced that:

The familiar Restoration association of Hobbes with atheism and the corruption of the court may thus date from this period.

III

Evelyn's sermon book allows us to identify Richard Steward as one of Hobbes's assailants and provides further circumstantial evidence to support what already seemed likely: that Cosin and Earle were involved in the attack. While Cosin and Earle are well known to modern scholarship, Steward is a more shadowy figure – largely because he died suddenly in 1651 and thus played no part in the re-establishment of Anglicanism at the Restoration. But as dean of the Chapel Royal and titular dean of St Paul's, as a close adviser of both Charles II and the duke of York, he was, along with Cosin and Earle, one of the leading Anglican churchmen in Paris.Footnote ⁴⁶ Among his close friends and associates were other staunch Anglicans: Henry Hammond, George Morley, and Gilbert Sheldon.Footnote ⁴⁷ The stature of Steward, Cosin, and Earle, and their close connections with one another at this time leave little doubt that they were the leading clerical figures in the move against Hobbes. Furthermore, Steward's proximity to the king and his attack on Leviathan in September raises his candidacy as the clerical annotator of the presentation manuscript of Leviathan. His death on [5/] 15 November, after an illness of about two days, weighs somewhat against this view, since if he received the manuscript from the king on their meeting in early November, he would have had at most only two weeks to work through the text.Footnote ⁴⁸ On the other hand, however, Steward had already seen the printed text; nor are the annotations overwhelming in number or widely dispersed: there are 143 of them, focused on seven chapters (12 and 13; 31 through 35), and pointing up Hobbes's heterodox opinions on theology and ecclesiology.Footnote ⁴⁹ It would not have been impossible for Steward to have made them in the two weeks between his meeting with the king and his illness. The matter might be determined should any books from his personal collection reveal the same distinctive annotation marks found in the manuscript of Leviathan; I have failed to find any that do.Footnote ⁵⁰

It would be satisfying if the Evelyn sermon book provided clear evidence for the nature of Hyde's involvement in discountenancing his old friend. Unfortunately, it does not. But while there is nothing to implicate Hyde directly, coincidences between the approaches adopted by Steward and Cosin on the one hand and the concerns of Hyde on the other offer some circumstantial evidence for his involvement as a strategist. Hyde was in contact with all three men on political, ecclesiastical, and scholarly matters during the late 1640s and early 1650s. He had approached Earle in January 1647 for a copy of De cive; in the same month he sought Steward's help in running down a quotation from Grotius.Footnote ⁵¹ On the king's return to Paris after Worcester it was to Hyde that Steward sent an encouraging account of their meeting.Footnote ⁵² In 1652 Cosin wrote a defence of Anglicanism at Hyde's request.Footnote ⁵³ In light of what we know of his character and interests, Steward's decision to attack Hobbes on civil rather than ecclesiological grounds is surprising. He was passionately – in Hyde's view, excessively – devoted to the Church of England.Footnote ⁵⁴ Although Steward must have been outraged by Hobbes's ecclesiology, he avoided attacking him on this front. Instead, he focused on the inherent immorality and disloyalty of Hobbes's theory of the reciprocation of protection and obedience, and his doctrine of the inalienability of self-preservation. These were among the doctrines of Hobbes that particularly outraged Hyde. He would attack them in his Brief view and survey of Leviathan, even quoting the passage in Leviathan in which they appear together (p. 114): a passage which, I suggested above, Steward might have had in mind when composing his sermon.Footnote ⁵⁵ Such objections were not simply retrospective: before the publication of Leviathan, in a letter of November 1646, Hyde singled out ‘y^e new Maxime; y^t p[ro]tecion & subiection are Relatiue, and cease together’, as a grotesque novelty of modern natural law theory.Footnote ⁵⁶ And Hyde's abridgement of passages from the first edition of De cive at about this time focuses on the pernicious implications of Hobbes's view that the right of self-preservation outweighs the obligations of natural law, and of his undermining of the inviolability of oaths and promises.Footnote ⁵⁷ The proximity between Steward's rather surprising angle of attack and Hyde's known concerns about Hobbes's doctrines raises the possibility that the chancellor may have had a hand in drawing up Steward's strategy.

Just as Steward's angle of attack aligns rather more obviously with the political concerns of Hyde than with the ecclesiological agenda of the cleric, so Cosin's dismissal of the notion of original popular sovereignty focuses on another of Hobbes's political doctrines that particularly concerned Hyde. Hyde pointed it up in his notes on De cive, and would later assail it in his Brief view and survey.Footnote ⁵⁸ The fact that Hobbes was currently trying to distance himself from this doctrine is of further interest, because the juxtaposition of contradictory arguments was a strategy recommended and practised by Hyde.Footnote ⁵⁹ In his Brief view and survey, he pointed up several incommensurable definitions of philosophy in Leviathan (p. 301). And much earlier, in a letter to John Barwick of 17/27 June 1659 (in which he urged Matthew Wren to proceed with an attack upon Hobbes) he suggested that ‘he will find somewhat in Mr. Hobbs himself, I mean in his former Books, that contradicts what he sets forth in this’.Footnote ⁶⁰ One might therefore wonder whether Cosin's highlighting of a doctrine with which Hobbes was associated, but from which he was currently trying to distance himself, might not have been part of a strategy engineered by Hyde.

In neither of these sermons is the strategy adopted so distinctive as to constitute firm proof of Hyde's involvement. But the angle of attack adopted by the two clerics is similar enough to the angles and strategies adopted by Hyde to raise the possibility that his hand was at work here.

Whether or not we can discern a broad-based Anglican–‘old royalist’ conspiracy underlying these allusions, the evidence of the Evelyn sermon book is important in confirming that the doctrines of Leviathan were indeed, as Hobbes later claimed, attacked at court as inimical to the royal interest by Anglican clerics. Steward's sermon, in particular, brings into focus a hitherto unnoticed opponent of Hobbes, and permits us a small but tantalizing glimpse of the effort to discredit him in a highly public forum that allowed him no immediate avenue for response. It shows how early the standard weapon of Restoration anti-Hobbism, the pulpit denunciation, entered the Anglican armoury.Footnote ⁶¹