Hobbes Smashes Cromwell and the Rump

The Religious Justifications Supporting Cromwell’s and the Independents’ Rise to Power

What popular religious power base supported Cromwell and his elite allies in Parliament? According to Hobbes in Behemoth, religious sectaries— “Independents and other fanatic[s]”—who favored some version of “liberty in religion” supported him. They were Cromwell’s “best cards” and Cromwell used them to his best advantage. ²⁴ Of course, Hobbes is offering his readers a distorted generalization of the historical facts here. Many sectaries ended up opposing Cromwell because of his religious intolerance. ²⁵ Cromwell was an Independent who was far less radical than many Englishmen hoped or feared and presented him to be in popular texts. ²⁶ Hobbes’s account is therefore imperfect, but historically plausible. Morrill, for example, argues that the “hotter sort of protestants” positioned themselves against the king. ²⁷ These zealots formed a significant part of the New Model Army and they sided with the Independents when Hobbes was presumably writing Leviathan and when a fissure emerged between the Independents and the far more religiously conservative Presbyterian faction. Moreover, for the purpose of my main argument, it is Hobbes’s (perhaps overstated and overgeneralized) opinion that counts, and he claims that religious fanatics flocked to Cromwell and his allies in Parliament in part because this faction claimed to offer some form of religious liberty.

Revisionist historians and political theorists have recently complicated the connection Hobbes forged between Cromwell and the radical sects. Jeffrey Collins, for example, has gone so far as to link Cromwell’s major religious power base with a minority of conservative elites, albeit Independent ones, who feared the radical sectarian masses. ²⁸ Revisionists like Collins have a point—conservative Independent elites did support Cromwell and Cromwell did suppress many radicals—but the revisionists have swung the pendulum too far away from the masses of radical sectaries who fought for Cromwell and the Rump. Famous, although perhaps less fashionable, scholars like Christopher Hill (1972), John Morrill (1984), David Underdown (1985), Michael Walzer (1966), and Perez Zagorin (1954) have provided ample (and still persuasive) evidence that the connection Hobbes announced between Cromwell and the “fanatic” sectaries is neither historically wrong, nor especially obtuse. ²⁹ Taking my cue primarily from Hobbes and from these historical accounts, I assume that a large number of Cromwell’s supporters were religious radicals and they used religious rhetoric to advance Cromwell’s (and their own) power.

What religious rhetoric did the sects offer to justify their support of Cromwell and his faction? How did they justify their own political actions? These questions are difficult to answer because it is hard to distinguish the sects’ religious justifications for authority from those advanced by members of more conservative churches (Anglican or Presbyterian). Thomas argues that by the late sixteenth century clear distinctions between sectarian and more orthodox Protestant outlooks can be drawn. ³⁰ Walsham, however, claims these differences are not so easy to detect, at least between 1560 and 1640. However, both traditional and revisionist accounts agree that during the period Hobbes wrote Leviathan (roughly between 1647 and 1651), sharp differences between sectarian and nonsectarian political and religious outlooks were forming—correctly or incorrectly—in the popular imagination as well as in the popular propaganda of the time. ³¹ Therefore, as a matter of historical fact, conservatives and radicals might have been making the same kinds of religious arguments, but in the popular imagination, distinctions were being drawn between the kinds of arguments each group was making. Additionally, distinctions were being drawn between the legitimacy and the plausibility attending each kind of argument.

Englishmen between the mid-1640s and early 1650s identified the sects as “new lights” in popular rhetoric and academic literature. ³² Perhaps their religious vision was not actually new, but what matters for our purposes is how their vision was characterized during the period Hobbes was writing Leviathan. In Gangraena—one of the most widely discussed religious polemics of the revolutionary period (which is the reason I examine it)—the sects were repeatedly and forcefully characterized as men (and women) who crafted unorthodox arguments to ground their political and religious beliefs. ³³ The sects were commonly said to offer men unusual or heterodox methods for accessing God and divine truth. Concurring with this popular assessment of the radical sects, Hobbes in Behemoth identified their religious justifications for Cromwell’s and his supporter’s rise as “strange.” And like his popular contemporaries, Hobbes said that the sects were “all commonly called by the name of fanatics.” ³⁴ Thus, despite the concrete difficulties historians identify when they try to disentangle sectarian from nonsectarian religious rhetoric, Englishmen like Hobbes disentangled them, and they popularized the differences, even though revisionist historians have shown us that the differences in fact were not at all clear-cut and there remained considerable overlap between religious views and the way men articulated these views.

The second reason why it is difficult to isolate the sects’ religious rhetoric from more traditional views stems from the sects’ ambiguous and fluid nature. ³⁵ The popular Presbyterian Thomas Edwards and the equally famous John Bastwick wrote extensively about the sects during the civil wars and both complained (perhaps for rhetorical effect) that it was extremely difficult to distinguish one sect from another. Consequently, they decided to erase the differences and clump all the sects together. ³⁶ Hobbes generally takes the same approach to the different sects in Behemoth. He identifies all the sects who supported Cromwell as fighting for “liberty of religion” even though different sects had different and competing conceptions of religious liberty and its appropriate scope. Hobbes distinguishes the Independents who favored congregationalism from other sects that pressed for some kind of individual liberty of conscience, but he does not proceed further in his analysis. ³⁷ Needless to say, this hasty typology does not do a particularly good job distinguishing one sect from another. But this failure to distinguish the sects was not uncommon. Many Englishmen tended to associate all the sects (in general) with a number of broad themes, and they presented these to the public. One theme related to the religious rhetoric they offered for Cromwell’s and their own authority. It is to this religious rhetoric that I now turn.

One popular argument the sects used to justify Cromwell’s and their own authority rested on the assertion that Cromwell and his followers were saints. ³⁸ Through the process of divine anointment, the spirit of God was literally within them; the Holy Ghost entered the saints by “effusing,” “pouring,” or “passing” Himself into their soul. ³⁹ Independent theologians quibbled over whether the saints received a transcendent “irradiating motion” from God or whether they received some immaterial “species, whereby supernatural things are conveyed to the natural faculty.” ⁴⁰ However, more conservative Anglicans like Jeremy Taylor, chaplain to Archbishop Laud and to Charles I, showed little respect for such spirit-talk; Taylor, for example, doubted that the in-dwelling spirit was a mark of election; it was more likely a mark of unchristian hubris. ⁴¹

The sects placed tremendous epistemic and political significance upon the assertion that the spirit dwelled within the saints. With respect to knowledge, in a sermon delivered in St. Paul’s Church, the Baptist (later Quaker) William Ames (who joined Cromwell’s army on the Irish campaign in 1649) stated the saints were uniquely “capable and able to understand [Christ’s] will . . . clear[ly], . . . full[y] and undoubted[ly].” ⁴² Ames ascribed certainty to the knowledge the saints acquired not by reading the Scripture but by divine anointment. ⁴³

With respect to politics, several implications followed from the fact that God inhabited the saints. ⁴⁴ First, divine anointment positioned the saints above existing civil and religious authorities. Second, the anointment rendered them (and not the King or the established clergy) God’s divine instruments, and consequently worthy of civil and religious honor, respect, and obedience. Third, their anointment forbade others “to stretch forth [their] hand against” them, because as Psalm 105:15 said it was wrong to touch God’s Anointed. Fourth, their anointment “left [them] at liberty to touch and harm kings” as well as clergy, and to order politics and religion according to their divinely inspired understandings. ⁴⁵ Sainthood therefore challenged the saint’s commitment to “liberty of conscience” because it justified a godly theocracy and collapsed the distinction between church and state. ⁴⁶ It freed the saints from existing religious and civil authority, but it rendered all Englishmen subject to the saints who exercised control over spiritual and civil affairs.

Aware of the political dangers attending the justification from sainthood, conservative critics warned men that Cromwell and his adherents could easily use the sainthood justification to “confound magistracy . . . induce anarchy, [and] . . . extirpate prelacy.” Bastwick explicitly said the saints were proud men who presumed their authority and threatened the establishment. “It is their [the sects in the Army] maxime, that the Saints only ought to rule the world, and to have the sword in their hand.” ⁴⁷ Unlike the old Puritans, who were humble and obedient, the saints were not afraid “to write and publish against Kings, nobles, and Judges of all sorts, both civil and ecclesiastical, and divest them of all their authority . . . assuming sovereignty to themselves, & that from God himself.” ⁴⁸

A second familiar argument the sects used to justify Cromwell’s rise and their own authority rested on millenarianism (chiliasm). ⁴⁹ Lamont has argued millenarian assumptions informed mainstream English thinking in the 1630s and early 1640s and were not at first a threat to royalism or Tudor Anglicanism (the King’s godly rule). However, during Cromwell’s ascent, millenarian assumptions slowly became associated more exclusively first with the Presbyterians and later with the sects and with Cromwell, at least until 1651. ⁵⁰ Similarly, Blair Worden has maintained that although providential arguments are part of the general fabric of mid-seventeenth-century English political life, the zealous Protestantism that we tend to associate with Cromwell and his followers placed a “novel emphasis” on providence, an emphasis that came into conflict with more conservative clergymen who rejected Calvinist determinism and left some space for man’s free-will (Catholics, Arminians, Anglicans). ⁵¹

In the mid- to late 1640s and early 1650s, millenarian assumptions led Crowmell and his zealous followers to claim they were called to establish the Kingdom of God on earth, because this was either the end of days (i.e., the apocalypse), or the halcyon millennium before the end (i.e., the Fifth Monarchy). ⁵² Those who professed this prophecy somehow knew—even though a central tenet of Calvinism was that God was inscrutable—that Cromwell and his adherents had been called by God to rid England, Scotland, and Ireland of the Antichrist and to establish a utopian kingdom on earth. ⁵³

For example, theologian John Owen, Cromwell’s chaplain during the Irish campaign, a divine he appointed Vice Chancellor of Oxford University in 1652 whose views changed considerably in the course of his life, presented a prophetic vision to Parliament in 1651. Owen told the MPs that Cromwell and his allies were “setting up the kingdom of Christ.” Their work was what God “call[ed] his people [to perform] in such a season.” Owen is calling not for Erastianism here, as Collins suggests, he is calling for theocracy. Bringing down “a mighty monarchy, a triumphing prelacy, [and a] thriving conformity” was part of God’s plan. “So it shall be,” Owen proclaimed. ⁵⁴

In their rhetoric, the men who challenged this prophetic account associated it with Cromwell and his followers. Conservative Presbyterians like Bastwick and Edwards denounced their prophecies with vigor. Their conservative religious view was that prophecies lacked authority. With the arrival of the Gospels, the age of prophecy was over (or at least prophecies were so rare and exceptional that Englishmen should not trust in them; they should trust the king and his bishops or presbyters instead). ⁵⁵ Similarly, Richard Baxter claimed that men should not be so bold as to believe they can discern God’s purposes. Even though royalists sometimes delivered providential appeals to advance the royalist cause, providential views were said to thrive within the sects more than anywhere else. ⁵⁶ In his popular Gangraena, Edwards explicitly stated prophesizing was a practice advanced by sectaries within the Independent party: they (not the Presbyterians, according to Edwards) demanded “liberty of Prophecying.” ⁵⁷

With respect to politics, Bastwick warned his readers that prophecies were making the soldiers in Cromwell’s army “run mad to the disordering of all things.” In an anonymous pamphlet, another critic said prophecies were advanced by “fanatical people” in the Army who “laid violent hands upon the Lords Anointed [Charles I], . . . laid aside the dignity of the House of Lords . . . [and then tried to] introduce a most unequal parity [the commonwealth].” ⁵⁸ When placed in the hands of the radicals, prophecies were powerful and dangerous.

If a more conservative Protestant view told ordinary men to suspect prophets and prophecies and to trust more in established authorities like time-tested tradition, reason, prudence, decrees issued in church counsels, and arguments offered by wise church Fathers, how did the radical sects present their support for their radical prophecies? “Some of the Sectaries plead miracles, revelations, [and] visions for their way, and to confirm their doctrine,” explained Edwards. ⁵⁹ As noted above, Ames was known to appeal to divine inspiration; the famous army chaplain John Saltmarsh, a reputed Seeker who eventually turned against Cromwell, was depicted as grounding his prophecies about the Army’s legitimacy in his encounters with God’s voice. ⁶⁰ Other sectaries were famous for interpreting their ambiguous dreams as prophetic. These dreams suggested mystery; mystery signaled divine origin. ⁶¹ Soldiers were explicitly encouraged to “seek God” in these “extraordinary” ways. ⁶²

Critics of Cromwell and the sects in Parliament and in the Army mocked these prophetic foundations. Fifth Monarchists and other sectaries manipulated the people by using “fanatick jestures, enthusiasms, revelations, apparitions . . . [and] wild gesticulations.” ⁶³ One anonymous critic writes that their justifications rested upon “the innovation of brain-sick phantasies.” ⁶⁴ Another stated those who believed in the “pretended spirit of revelation” had succumbed to the “delusion of new and clearer light.” ⁶⁵ Men who established their authority upon “lying oracles” were untrustworthy, false prophets drunk with too much “new wine.” ⁶⁶ Anglican Jeremy Taylor reasoned that even if the Spirit was given to some, rendering them capable of knowing God’s plan infallibly, “because this is but a private assistance, and cannot be proved to others, this infallible assistance may determine [the prophet’s mind] . . . , but shall not enable [the prophet] to prescribe to others . . . unless [the prophet] could prove . . . that [he] has the Spirit [which he can’t].” ⁶⁷

A third religious argument the sects used to justify the rise of Cromwell and the radicals rested on an appeal to conscience. Independent John Cook claimed that men serving Cromwell and his allies in Parliament believed Christ reigned over conscience and all must obey His reign. The radicals freed Christians considerably from a clerical hierarchy and from the clerics who tried to internally oppress them, they aligned their politics with conscience and the Gospels (a liberating force), and thereby made their rule legitimate. ⁶⁸

The argument of conscience drew considerable criticism, however. In his book A free disputation against pretended liberty of conscience, the Scottish Presbyterian Samuel Rutherford blasted the radicals who advanced the authority of conscience and demanded the freedom to live according to it. One anonymous pamphleteer wrote along similar lines: “If their conscience shall dictate anything to them [the Independents], . . . they are bound to do it, because their conscience dictates it unto them.” ⁶⁹ A second anonymous conservative pamphleteer stated, “To walk and rule as they please . . . they call . . . Liberty of Conscience.” ⁷⁰ These anonymous authors challenged the radical appeal to conscience by claiming that action from conscience was either limitless or it amounted to action from appetite, ignorance, or pride. For more conservative religious men, it was much wiser to cleave to different authorities (i.e., elite bishops or presbyters) because the private conscience did not carry a hint of authority; it could not ground Cromwell’s or the radicals’ resistance or claim to rule. There was no reason for a regime to respect conscience or to acknowledge its freedom.

A fourth religious argument the sects used to justify the rise of Cromwell and the radicals rested on divine dispensation. Cromwell’s victory over Charles I, and then over the Irish and the Scots were not of man’s making. God was the cause; Cromwell’s conquests were divinely authored and authorized. ⁷¹ Owen is instructive on this point. In 1644, he upended the view that the age of miracles was over and then relaxed the definition of what constituted a miracle. ⁷² In 1651, he declared that the Army’s victories were nothing short of miraculous. ⁷³

A fifth religious argument the sects used to justify the rise of Cromwell and the radicals rested on Scripture. Challenging sectaries who relied upon extraordinary means to know God’s will, sectary William Walwyn insisted that reading the Word (not accessing the Spirit) was how to understand God’s will. ⁷⁴ Using Scripture to justify authority was not unique to the sects. Presbyterians and Anglicans regularly referenced Scripture to craft their arguments for civil and ecclesiastical authority. However, we can distinguish an Anglican approach to Scriptural authority from a more radical, Calvinist approach. ⁷⁵ Many radical sectaries cleaved to Calvin’s sola scriptura position, arguing that if a claim did not rest upon Scripture then it did not rest upon authority. Anglicans, however, were willing to go beyond Scripture and to defend traditional religious arguments presented by church fathers and great counsels on account of their authority, prudence, or rationality.

Anglicans even employed Scriptural skepticism to undercut claims made by radical, Calvinist, Biblical fundamentalists. Taylor, for example, undermined the radical’s belief that there was a single authoritative Bible that offered a coherent and systematic (Calvinist) truth. He historicized and contextualized Scripture so to expose how contexts, interests, and persuasions could corrupt Scriptural translation and skew Scriptural interpretation. Taylor also insisted with Hooker and other Anglicans that all Scriptural hermeneutics are fallible, and liable to error. He even went so far as to maintain that Scripture is not the very word of God but only man’s interpretation of it. This is not to deny that Scripture was a source of authority for Anglicans; it is to say that Anglicans rejected the Calvinistic notion of sola scriptura, and were less confident (and more humble) in their own interpretations of Scripture. Anglicans supplemented their reading of Scripture with appeals to reason. They also argued that much could be learned by examining church tradition and by considering the writings of learned church men. ⁷⁶

The sectaries were more dogmatic in their approach to the Word. As previously stated, many advanced the sola scriptura doctrine. Additionally, some claimed that because they were God’s anointed their particular interpretation of God’s Word was definitive and infallible. They brushed away the more nuanced account of Scriptural interpretation provided by the Anglicans. The Holy Ghost guided the radicals’ reading of the Word; they did not have to appeal to other bases of authority like reason or tradition, or the writings of learned churchmen. Their unmediated access to the text presented pure, simple, authoritative, systematic, and coherent truth. ⁷⁷

Three methods were used by the sects to connect Scripture to Cromwell and his elite allies: metonymy, syllogizing, and disputation. With respect to metonymy, the sects associated the events they read in Scripture with their conceptions (or verbal accounts) of events in England. ⁷⁸ These imaginative and loose parallels (i.e., similitudes) had tremendous political significance. The Independent catechism, for example, told readers that the troubles described in the Book of Revelationc paralleled—or were synonymous with—the troubles of mid-seventeenth-century England. ⁷⁹ Likewise, men forged parallels between Old Testament accounts of the Jews leaving Egypt and the saints fighting their oppressors in England. Moses delivered his chosen people from oppression; Cromwell and the Army were doing likewise. ⁸⁰ These associations were politically useful because they made the case for Cromwell and his supporters in Parliament.

Syllogizing was a second method the sectaries used to make the Scriptural case for their authority. Proper definitions of words like “church,” “saint,” and “magistracy” were forged out of Scriptural cloth, because the Word was the touchstone of truth and the foundation of freedom (from error and sin). The sects maintained the Catholics, Anglicans, and Presbyterians perverted the faith either because they craftily invented their own definitions or because they wove pagan (i.e., Aristotelian and vulgar) philosophies into the definitions they gleamed from Scripture. The saints, by contrast, reformed the faith by crafting pure definitions—ones rooted in Scripture exclusively. The sectaries then turned their faithful definitions into major and minor premises and deduced spiritual conclusions from them. These conclusions were true in a logical (conditional) sense and in a transcendental (unconditional) sense. Both senses advanced Cromwell’s cause and claim to authority. Transcendental truths discovered by logic were especially potent because they revealed God’s order for man. Critics rebutted the sects’ syllogisms by arguing the radicals’ definitions were not pure reconstructions of the Word; they were human creations used to advance Cromwell’s and the radicals’ power. Their syllogisms were rhetorical enthymemes, frequently muddled or confused and thus either logically invalid or false. ⁸¹

Disputation leading to consensus and expressing consent was the third method the sectaries used to ground their claims for Cromwell’s and their own authority. During the wars, Cromwell and his followers were famous for gathering together for prayer-meetings. Major political decisions were made there and men referenced Scripture to justify their policy positions. Participants spent hours deliberating the claims they gathered from the Word and seeking consensus. That consensus garnered legitimacy. John Cook, an Independent, said the Independents held “persuasion to be the gospellary way.” Men of low and high birth participated in these proto-democratic deliberative sessions. ⁸²

Critics of Cromwell and the radicals found their deliberative method appalling. ⁸³ One conservative claimed it wrongly encouraged men to “forsake all the learned, [to] renounce the wise . . . [and to] follow the Communion of Fools.” ⁸⁴ When simple people debated, another critic maintained, debaters merely “vent[ed] their own private thoughts, and desires, in matters concerning the public and great affairs of the church and state, which can produce no other effect, then the raising and countenancing of contrary parties and factions within the country.” ⁸⁵ Popular deliberation did not lead to consensus or to truth, nor did it generate legitimacy or settle affairs. It brought disaffection and instigated strife. For theoretical and prudential reasons, critics maintained the sectaries should not use the technique to establish political authority or make policy decisions.

Hobbes’s Attack on the Religious Justifications Supporting Cromwell

In the preceding section, I presented six rhetorical arguments Cromwell’s and the Rump’s religious supporters used to justify their rise. These arguments were so familiar to Englishmen at the time Hobbes was writing Leviathan that everyday pamphleteers and popular Anglican and Presbyterian authors who did not support Cromwell or the Rump challenged these arguments directly and forcefully.

Joining the chorus of conservative critics who attacked Cromwell and the Rump, Hobbes (no supporter of the Presbyterians or divine-right Anglicans) worked to undermine the religious foundations for the Rump’s and (later) Cromwell’s authority. Leviathan should be interpreted alongside the popular religious debates about Cromwell’s and his political allies’ claim to rule. Hobbes’s attack on their religion foundations for political authority is politically motivated. His attack need not point to his own atheism. It need not point to some broader secularizing agenda because Hobbes is not opposed to using the same religious foundations to support the royalist cause. This means Hobbes’s attack amounts to a political strategy or rhetoric that need not aim at consistency. In addition to challenging divine-right Presbyterians and divine-right Anglicans, we may interpret Hobbes’s attack on religion foundations in Leviathan as an attack on Cromwell’s and his allies’ claim to authority.

Let me begin with the argument from anointment. Nowhere in the Elements of Law do we find Hobbes attributing acts of sedition to those who possess “the opinion of being inspired.” This foundation for sedition, however, becomes a focal point in Leviathan. Hobbes says men who hold this opinion are making a claim to “rule and reign” and they intend to “destroy those, by whom all their lifetime before, they have been protected, and secured from injury.” ⁸⁶ Hobbes is talking about the rebels here and the death of Charles I; he is not discussing the royalists. He uses first philosophy in Leviathan to attack this claim to rule. The justification from sainthood hinged on a spiritualized (i.e., Aristotelian) metaphysics that presupposed the existence of immaterial species or motions. Hobbes’s philosophically underdeveloped materialism served a political purpose because it uprooted these assumptions by asserting that matter was all that existed. If Englishmen accepted Hobbes’s materialism, then God could not possibly put inherent righteousness into Cromwell and his followers. After reading Leviathan, Englishmen could easily challenge the saints by asserting there was no such thing as “In-blown virtue,” or “In-powred virtue.” The saints’ claim to authority by way of embodied spirit or divine virtue could not hold. ⁸⁷ This was the political point Hobbes was trying to make.

Hobbes’s rigid commitment to materialism is only skin-deep, however. In Leviathan, he is willing to contradict himself and entertain non-materialist assumptions so long as they advance the royalist position. For example, he attributes a form of inherent sanctity to men who endeavor to live according to natural law. That is, he weds metaphysical notions of inherent righteousness to a subject’s unfeigned endeavor to keep his promise to obey the civil sovereign’s absolute authority. ⁸⁸ He supports aligning the existence of metaphysical essences with royalist tenets but not with anti-royalist ones. Obedient subjects who endeavor to stay loyal to the king are men “graced” by spirit of God, according to Hobbes. ⁸⁹

Moreover, in Part III of Leviathan (where we find arguments resting upon faith, rather than strictly upon reason and nature) Hobbes maintains that the king—and only the king—can claim “jure divino.” ⁹⁰ Here, Hobbes aligns himself with the conservative royalists who articulated a divine right account of the king’s political legitimacy. One may imagine Hobbes supporting the Anglican John Gauden’s Eikon Basilike, a text where Charles I is depicted as a pious martyr akin to Jesus vested with divine right and doing God’s holy work. In sum, using materialism rhetorically, the saints’ argument for resistance and for authority by way of metaphysical anointment collapses, but Hobbes is willing to maintain a metaphysical world-view so long as it aligns with loyalty to the king. He presents this metaphysics in Part III of Leviathan where the argument is grounded on Christian bases (not on nature or reason, which are vulnerable to materialism).

Hobbes attacks the prophetic justification for authority that supported Cromwell and his allies in Parliament. In the Elements of Law, Hobbes calls those who prophesize about the end of days “mad,” but he does not emphasize how politically dangerous these mad men are; he merely equates their madness with romantics like Don Quixote. ⁹¹ In Leviathan, however, Hobbes explicitly acknowledges that prophecy has been “a part of human politics” and men use prophecies to “make others more apt to obedience.” ⁹² He also associates prophecy with what he fears most: sedition and rebellion. He writes that if only we could take away the fear of “Prognostiques from Dreams [and] false Prophecies . . . by which crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted than they are for civill Obedience.” ⁹³ Identifying the rebels as false prophets serves Hobbes’s political purpose of undermining the rebel’s authority.

But Hobbes does not eradicate the use of prophecy altogether. In Part III of Leviathan, Hobbes uses prophecy strategically to advance the claims of the monarch. He says men should take “their Christian Soveraign” (i.e., their king) for “Gods Prophet.” ⁹⁴ This is not an argument grounded in nature or reason. That the king is God’s lieutenant is an argument rooted in faith and in Scripture (as Hobbes interprets Scripture). Presenting the king in this manner will make subjects more apt to obey him and this is precisely Hobbes’s political objective.

In Leviathan, Hobbes specifically debunks the way the sects used the Fifth Monarchy prophecy and the post-apocalyptic prophecy to establish their claim to rule. ⁹⁵ We find none of this specificity in the Elements of Law. However, alongside his endeavor to debunk sectarian accounts of the apocalypse in Leviathan, Hobbes develops his own eschatology in Part III to make a case for absolute kingship. He first undermines the sects by establishing that the end of history and the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth is not imminent. Those who claim His rule is imminent are false prophets:

The greatest and main abuse of Scripture . . . is the wresting of it to prove that the kingdom of God . . . is the present Church (or multitude of Christian men now living, or that, being dead, are to rise again at the last day). . . . [The] second coming not yet being, the kingdom of God is not yet come, and we are not now under any other kings . . . but our civil sovereign. ⁹⁶

Hobbes is attacking sectaries like the Fifth Monarchists (who supported Cromwell) here because they declared Englishmen were now subject to Christ the King (and his chosen saints) by virtue of their covenant with Christ.

Construed as a politically legitimating discursive form, Hobbes then uses eschatology in Part III of Leviathan (but not in earlier works) where he emphasizes the realm of faith (not nature or reason) to assert that God intends the present to be a time when nations like England are governed by a hereditary Christian king who maintains absolute right over ecclesiastical government. ⁹⁷ Erastianism or theocracy under the leadership of a Christian king is providential, according to Hobbes in Part III. A commonwealth that provides men with some degree of religious liberty is not. Kingship is an expression of God’s will in time. So Hobbes does not eradicate eschatological argument from the realm of politics. He uses eschatology to challenge the prophecies allegedly advanced by Cromwell and his supporters; he also uses eschatology to bolster the absolute authority of the king.

Hobbes proceeds to attack the saints’ justification for their authority from conscience. In the Elements of Law and in Leviathan Hobbes attempts to sever the relationship between one’s commitment to conscience and the outward acts of political resistance. Moreover, in both works, Hobbes develops his own theory of conscience to advance the royalist cause. He maintains that following one’s private conscience means being committed to peace and, consequently, given his deduction from the first law of nature, it entails obeying civil law and thus the civil sovereign’s will. ⁹⁸ In this formulation, those who possess a clear conscience amount to faithful, obedient subjects to the king and endeavor to keep the peace.

Alan Ryan, Edwin Curley, and Jeffrey Collins have argued that Hobbes shows respect in Leviathan for the workings of a private, internal, and independent conscience—a conscience uninstructed by Hobbes’s own teachings. ⁹⁹ So long as conscience does not lead to sedition or to unlawful behavior, these scholars maintain that Hobbes is an early supporter of religious liberty and religious toleration (a view Collins associates with Cromwell and the Independents). ¹⁰⁰ Karen Feldman, by contrast, has argued that Hobbes could not support the privatization of conscience because a private and individualistic form of evaluation always poses a potential threat to public authority. ¹⁰¹

In Leviathan, Hobbes does seem to respect a private, untutored conscience when he writes that it is commonly “reputed a very evil act, for any man to speak against his conscience: or to corrupt or force another to do so.” But we cannot take Hobbes’s deference seriously, as Ryan, Curley, and Collins do. For one, Hobbes ridicules all but his own account of conscience (the one that ties conscience to loyalty to the king) when he associates its content not with divine origins but with creaturely passions, with dangerous novelty, and consequently with the radical sects: “Men, vehemently in love with their own new opinions, though never so absurd” appeal to and act in conscience’s name. ¹⁰² As Feldman has shown, Hobbes teaches his readers to be skeptical of those who assert the authority of their claims by referencing conscience. Hobbes also teaches readers to disrespect the sects’ authoritative use of conscience by associating the divine knowledge the sects allegedly find in their consciences with shared public opinion, bad education, or with private passion. ¹⁰³ Finally, Hobbes disrespects the “liberty of conscience” doctrine when he writes that although this liberty might be preferred and embraced by many (even by Hobbes himself), this preference is wrong-headed because in practice religious freedom brings “but diversity of opinion, and consequently (as man’s nature is) disputation, breach of charity, disobedience, and at last rebellion.” ¹⁰⁴ The radicals’ appeal to liberty of conscience as a foundation for moral truth, as a justification for resistance, and for the Independents’ authority collapses under Hobbes’s pen. But Hobbes does support one account of conscience: the one that supports near absolute submission to the established sovereign.

Hobbes reveals that conscience is usually socially (not divinely) constructed and he uses this revelation to advance the royalist agenda. A properly constructed conscience, according to this account, is one that echoes the civil sovereign’s moral decrees. ¹⁰⁵ Subjects learn these decrees in church where the sovereign’s loyal ministers teach—that is, persuade—men to take up the authorized minister’s moral beliefs as their own. ¹⁰⁶ Hobbes here aims to undermine independent clerics who engage in conscience-craft to suit their designs, as Curley and Hanin suggest. But Hanin and Curley are incorrect when they argue that by undermining the authority of independent clerics over matters of conscience, Hobbes makes an argument for religious liberty and toleration and is at pains to underscore the inviolability of a private religious sphere. Instead, Hobbes has found a non-coercive means by which to shape and discipline men’s internal consciences. He instructs the civil sovereign to use the pulpit in order to shape men’s consciences in such a way that they remain faithful to his authority.

Collins, by contrast, claims Hobbes shows sympathy to Cromwell and the Independents in Leviathan because Hobbes protects the subject’s private conscience from the powers of command and coercion. ¹⁰⁷ But Collins and other miss a fundamental point. Hobbes does not intend to leave the private conscience free from the civil sovereign’s power. He intends for the sovereign’s chosen ministers to command subjects to gather in congregations so that these ministers can work to accomplish the “inward conversion of the heart.” ¹⁰⁸ The civil sovereign’s selected ministers will engage in conscience-craft. ¹⁰⁹ For Hobbes, it is best if tensions within a man’s “own breast” and the sovereign’s public will are overcome through state-controlled religious education. ¹¹⁰ Once public moral teachings are internalized, Hobbes hopes that subjects will become internally and externally faithful to the civil sovereign.

Cromwell and the Independents, by contrast, encouraged men to consult their unschooled consciences (albeit within defined limits) and to read Scripture privately and with others in local, democratically organized congregations. Taking cues from Tuck, Collins argues that Hobbes reveals himself as warming to Cromwell and the Independents in Leviathan because Hobbes defines a church as an “assembled congregation” and because Hobbes claims that the first (apostolic) churches were democratic congregations possessing some degree of independent authority. ¹¹¹ Collins is misreading what Hobbes intends by these claims. In Chapter 39 of Leviathan, Hobbes begins to catalogue the “vulgar uses” of the word “church.” ¹¹² He attributes the “congregation, or assembly of citizens” definition to the Greeks. There is no reason to assume, as Collins does, that Hobbes gives any normative priority to Greek definitions. Moreover, in the same chapter, Hobbes calls a democratically organized congregation a “confused church” and he links it with “tumultuous and seditious clamour.” ¹¹³ If anything, Hobbes’s account of the term “ecclesia” works to undercut Independency by associating it with confusion and tumult. He fears the idea that local congregations should have the independent authority to establish their own religious belief, practice, and observance.

Unlike the Independents, Hobbes favors bringing order and uniformity to religious belief, practice, and observance. He seeks to vanquish the diversity that emerged in particular locales; he aims to establish a national church under the head of the centralized civil sovereign. Here is his own definition of church: “I,” Hobbes writes, “define a church to be, a company of men professing Christian religion, united in the person of one sovereign, at whose command they ought to assemble, and without whose authority they ought not to assemble.” The “sovereign” here is the central civil authority, and clerical authority derives from the civil sovereign. ¹¹⁴ This centralized, national, and potentially hierarchical form of church governance is not Independency; it shares far more likeness with pre-Laudian Anglicanism. Hobbes’s account of the church undercuts the very “independent” local, organically gathered church that Independents and other radicals wanted.

In Leviathan, Hobbes declared that the local, proto-democratic, congregational form (independency) was the primitive form of the apostolic church, but pointing to the organization of the Apostles’ church does not reveal Hobbes warming to Cromwell, to the Rump, or their supporters, as Collins suggests. Nowhere does Hobbes give normative priority to primitive Christian forms of church governance (i.e., the apostolic tradition). Instead, in Hobbes’s account, the primitive congregational form remained in place only “before the conversion of Kings, and men that had Sovereign Authority in the Commonwealth.” ¹¹⁵ Hobbes historicizes the congregational form. He places this form in sacred history and proceeds to throw that form into the dustbin of history, rendering it normatively irrelevant. Once a Christian King emerges in history, no respect must be given to primitive Christian church forms. ¹¹⁶ Instead of supporting the Independents and Cromwell, Hobbes is assaulting them by trivializing the basis upon which they established their ecclesiological authority.

In addition to challenging Cromwell and the Independents by decimating their arguments from conscience, and for religious liberty and congregationalism, Hobbes also challenges their arguments grounded in divine dispensation. In the Elements of Law, Hobbes already reveals how skeptical he is of those who claimed to know God’s providential ways. In Leviathan, Hobbes again turns this skepticism in an explicit political direction. Miracles, he writes, have been used “for the procuring of credit . . . that thereby men may know, they are called, sent and employed by God, and thereby be the better inclined to obey them.” ¹¹⁷ In the Elements of Law, miracles must conform to Scripture to generate authority. In Part III of Leviathan, he changes his tune and asserts that miracles are identified as true on the basis of their political message. He instructs his readers to view seditious arguments rooted in providence as absurd, and to view royalists’ arguments rooted in providence as plausible. Events that present themselves as miraculous but that generate nonconformity by “stir[ring] up revolt against the king, or him that governeth by the king’s authority,” should not be construed as true miracles. ¹¹⁸ But miraculous events that acknowledge that the “Christian sovereign” is God’s prophet and that encourage conformity to his established religion are true miracles performed by true prophets. ¹¹⁹ Hobbes uses the language of the miraculous and the language of the elect to support allegiance to the king’s established episcopal church against the radical sects who argued for radical reform in church and state on the basis of miraculous events.

Hobbes also challenges the Scriptural arguments that the saints used to justify Cromwell’s and the radical’s authority. He begins this challenge by calling into question the divine authority of Scripture itself. Men who believe that Scripture is God’s Word, having no immediate revelation from God, have no divine basis for their belief. They merely trust the men who say it is so. But who should one trust? Exposing the fact that the words found in Scripture and the meanings attending those words have been molded and shaped by human hands would not disturb famous Anglicans like Jeremy Taylor or Richard Hooker who defended authority and reason and used Scriptural skepticism to attack radical Calvinists. Hobbes’s use of Scriptural skepticism aims to challenge a religious radical who thought his access to the teachings of Scripture was infallible and free from human meddling. In Part III of Leviathan, Hobbes advances his own reading of Scripture. It is one that supports obedience to the established king and to his established religion. This reading does not provide the kind of certainty that a Calvinist radical longs for, but it would perhaps persuade a more conservative Englishmen who reads offered interpretations of Scripture and considers their plausibility (without requiring these interpretations to meet the standard of certainty and infallibility).

Conclusion

By embedding Leviathan within contemporary debates between radical religious sects and their more conservative critics, I have suggested that we should interpret Leviathan not as a politically disengaged work of rigorous and precise civil science or as a decontextualized piece of political philosophy or as Hobbes’s own expression of his innermost beliefs or his will to power. Leviathan is a rhetorical (and inconsistent) text that attacks the religious justifications supporting Cromwell and his allies in Parliament. Hobbes intended his attack to breed disaffection for both. He intended the very disaffection he hoped to create to lead the people to withdraw their support from the emerging, new regime. As he sought to disempower this regime, Hobbes crafted rhetorical arguments in Leviathan intending to create opportunities for the deeply conservative, Anglican Erastian royalists who argued in favor of Charles I’s and later Charles II’s absolute authority over matters civil and spiritual.