Today we are accustomed to thinking of constitutional issues, such as the proper balance of power between king and Parliament, as distinct from religious issues. But in seventeenth-century England, politics and religion were inseparable. Parliament’s audacity in challenging the power of the king was derived in no small measure from the new Protestant faith, which taught that all men had equal access to God’s grace through faith and prayer. Whereas in Catholicism, grace was channeled exclusively through ordained priests endowed with special powers, all Protestant denominations subscribed to the principle of the “priesthood of all believers.” All men, accordingly, were “priests” before God, capable of receiving grace directly from Him. And if all men were equal before God, why should they accept the absolute rule of the king, who was, after all, a man like them?
This Protestant outlook, to be sure, did not mean that the Parliamentarians believed that “all men were created equal.” Far from it. But it did mean that the divine right of kings—men elected by God to rule over the people—was harder to maintain in Protestant England than in Catholic lands, where royal supremacy was buttressed by the authority of the Church. Consequently, the English Parliament was far more aggressive in asserting its rights and powers than its continental equivalents. Whereas Parliament challenged the early Stuarts at every step, the French Estates-General and the Spanish Imperial Cortes soon wilted before the divinely sanctioned authority of their kings.
The intertwining of politics and religion meant that the constitutional struggle between king and Parliament in England was also a religious struggle over the proper forms of worship and their meaning. The Church of England was a compromise reached after sharp swings between radical Protestantism and conservative Catholicism. Under the Elizabethan settlement, the Church retained the Calvinist theology of the radicals but combined it with an institutional structure and liturgy hardly distinguishable from Catholicism. Alone among Protestant denominations, Anglicanism retained bishops, a strict church hierarchy with the king at its apex, and solemn rituals in grand cathedrals conducted by resplendently attired Church grandees. Anglicanism was an uncomfortable marriage of two very different notions of faith and community, but it allowed each of the competing factions to emphasize its own favored aspect of the compromise. Parliamentarians, broadly speaking, emphasized the Calvinist theology with its egalitarian implications; the kings, by contrast, favored the hierarchic, Catholic-like forms. As James I famously put it, “No Bishop, no King!”
By 1640 the rift between Parliament and the king had deepened to the point where the Anglican compromise no longer seemed tenable. The dominant factions in Parliament advocated the abolition of bishops and the entire Church hierarchy, in order to bring Anglicanism more in line with other Protestant denominations. The Stuart kings, meanwhile, flirted openly with Catholicism, and appeared inclined to abandon the Protestant experiment altogether and reunite with Rome. The religious conflict was inseparable from the political crisis, and made the latter ever more difficult to contain. With not just power but also faith and conscience hanging in the balance for both sides, the room for compromise between king and Parliament was shrinking fast. By 1640 it had all but vanished.
When the Long Parliament met in 1640, it began a systematic assault on the authority of both king and Church. It appointed an “Assembly of Divines” to come up with a plan for radical Church reforms, and it prosecuted, and ultimately executed, Charles I’s chief minister, the Earl of Strafford. The dominant Parliamentary party, known as Presbyterians, advocated a Scottish-style Church government, meaning the abolition of bishops and their replacement with councils of lay elders (“presbyters”). Denying the king money to fund an army, they instigated a military crisis by inviting the Scots to invade the northern counties. By 1642, Charles had fled London and was raising an army in the north, with the aim of ousting the rebellious Parliament and reasserting his royal rights. Parliament countered by forming its own militia, and for the next two years civil war raged across England, with neither side gaining the upper hand. Large engagements were few and far between, but the sacking of manors and towns, disease, and devastation were plentiful, bringing misery to the British Isles.
In 1645, frustrated by the costly and inconclusive war, Parliament launched a radical military reform: the traditional local militias, commanded by the leading citizens of each town or shire, would be replaced by a true professional army commanded by professional soldiers appointed for their military prowess, not their social standing. Men would be recruited from all segments of society, and would be promoted for their skill regardless of their origin. Overall command was given to England’s ablest soldiers, Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell. The new creation was known as the New Model Army, and its impact was immediate and dramatic. In the Battle of Naseby, in June 1645, the Parliamentary forces routed the king’s army and, soon after, captured Charles I himself.
Uncertain how to deal with their royal prisoner, the Parliamentarians vacillated. The Presbyterians wanted to reach an accommodation with him, retaining the monarchy but guaranteeing parliamentary powers and Church reforms. By this time, however, the Presbyterians were no longer the dominant party they had been five years earlier, but just one faction among many. Their power had been eclipsed by the more radical Independents, who denounced the Presbyterian Church hierarchy as no better than the Anglican or Catholic hierarchies, and insisted that each congregation rule itself. Even more radical were the Levellers, who advocated a “leveling” of the social order, and numerous sects, known as “enthusiasts,” who claimed divine inspiration and predicted God’s coming vengeance on the propertied classes. All these groups demanded that the captive king be held accountable for his oppression of the people, and many of their members advocated abolishing the monarchy altogether. Much to the Presbyterians’ consternation, such views were especially prevalent in the New Model Army, the instrument of Parliament’s victory.
Sensing division among his enemies, the king stalled for time. He played one group against the other and eventually managed to escape his captors and relaunch the war. All, however, to no avail: the New Model Army made quick work of the Royalist uprising, and by the end of 1648 the king was back in the army’s custody. This time his enemies were determined not to let him slip through their grasp: When some in Parliament tried once again to negotiate with the king, the army purged the body of all but its most hardened radicals. This diminished “Rump Parliament,” as it was known, then appointed fifty-nine commissioners who put the king on trial and quickly sentenced him to death. On January 30, 1649, Charles I was beheaded at the royal palace of Whitehall, in London, the only English king to have been tried and executed.
The beheading of Charles I did not end England’s time of troubles, and it remained a land without a king for more than a decade thereafter. The contest between relative moderates in Parliament and radicals among the soldiery of the New Model Army continued, and control of the state alternated between the two factions. Finally, in 1653, as a way out of the stalemate, a new constitution was passed that declared Oliver Cromwell “Lord Protector of England,” giving him absolute powers. He was likely the only man with sufficient authority and credibility to hold the state together, but even he found it a daunting challenge. Much like the French revolutionaries more than a century later, he chose to divert the passions of the internal crisis by taking England into a series of foreign wars—first against Scotland, then against the Dutch Republic, and eventually against Spain. Cromwell brought great energy and administrative skill to his new role. He maneuvered deftly between the demands of the radicals and moderates, and when political astuteness proved insufficient, he did not hesitate to use overwhelming force. Consequently, under the Protectorate, England enjoyed a period of internal peace and stability, at least compared to what it had endured the previous decade.
But in September 1658, at the age of fifty-nine, Oliver Cromwell died. His son Richard, who succeeded him as lord protector, lacked his father’s a
uthority and the loyalty of the army, and was soon marginalized and forced to resign. With government controls once again removed, the same revolutionary groups that had so frightened the propertied classes in earlier years quickly reemerged. Winstanley’s Diggers may have been gone for good, but many other groups, and unnumbered individuals, emerged to take their place. They varied enormously, from recognizable political parties such as the Levellers of London, to lonely prophets traveling the countryside in search of a following, to everything in between. All, however, rejected the rigid class system of their day and believed that God was omnipresent and accessible to anyone.
Some groups named themselves for their social agenda. The Levellers were the largest and most politically powerful group, pushing to follow up the removal of the king with egalitarian social reforms. The more moderate Levellers wished only to remove the social barriers between the propertied classes, whereas more radical factions sought a complete overthrow of the social order. Other groups were known for their “enthusiastic” religious stance, such as the Seekers and the Ranters, who denied the sinfulness of man and claimed that organized religion was a hoax designed to oppress the poor. The early Quakers, far from the dignified pacifists they would become in later years, were viewed as dangerous subversives, and Fifth Monarchy Men predicted the imminent end of the world, in which earthly hierarchies would be dissolved and God’s elect reign.
To the established classes of England, whether nobles, gentry, merchants, or prosperous yeomen, it seemed as if the gates of hell had opened up and they were staring into the abyss. England, they believed, was on the verge of plunging right back into the darkest days of civil war. If central authority were not restored, the manors and estates of the countryside, the counting houses of London merchants, and the homes and property of gentlemen everywhere could all be swept away by the irresistible tide of an angry, religiously inspired mob.
Faced with a common threat of social revolution, the divided English elite set aside their bitter feud and joined forces. Even Presbyterians, who had fought for decades against royal “tyranny,” now concluded that a king was better than anarchy. They sent feelers out to Charles II, son of the martyred king, who at the time was residing in Belgium with his court in exile. To their inquiry about his conditions for a restoration, Charles responded reassuringly: as king, he would work with Parliament, not against it, and he would not seek revenge against his erstwhile enemies. Even with these assurances, it still took the decisive intervention of the New Model Army to force the issue. In early 1660, General George Monck, commander of the army in Scotland, advanced on London, occupied the city, dissolved the Rump, and convened a new, moderate Parliament in its place. The new body immediately invited the king to return, and on May 25, 1660, Charles II landed in Dover. England was once more a monarchy.
The restoration of Charles II came as a great relief to the English upper classes. With a king once more on the throne, a legitimate government in power, and the Church of England reestablished, the threat of civil war and revolution receded and a degree of public order was restored. But the ghosts of the Interregnum continued to haunt the hearts and minds of Englishmen, and it soon became clear that not much, in fact, had been settled. The return to England of Charles II did not spell a victory for the absolutist dreams of the executed Charles I. In fact, it was not even a return to the status quo of the early 1600s. Before 1640, royal rule was taken for granted. Kings and queens might be overthrown and replaced by others, and the precise limits of their power might be contested, but there was no substitute for a divinely ordained monarch. Few people, if anyone, could imagine England ruled in any other manner.
The restored monarchy, however, was very different: it was not the inevitable continuation of royal rule from time immemorial, but the result of a careful political calculation by certain factions in Parliament and the army. Whatever his personal inclinations, Charles II well understood that his rule depended on keeping key parliamentary blocks, and the interests they represented, on his side. Because of this, he was a lesser creature than his royal forebears, shorn of much of the magical aura of kingship, and surviving as much by political acumen as by his claims to a mystical divine right. What shape the monarchy would take, and what place it would occupy in the life of the nation, were questions that would dominate political life in England for the next half century.
The debate over the character of the new regime was given extra urgency by the specter of the Interregnum, when Parliamentarian “Roundheads” had turned on Royalist “Cavaliers,” Presbyterians on Anglicans, Independents on Presbyterians, Levellers on Independents, and Diggers on Levellers. To Englishmen of standing and means, it was a nightmare that must never be repeated. Even a Presbyterian minister deprived of his living by the returning king conceded that things were better under the king than when “we lay at the mercy and impulse of a giddy hot-headed, bloody multitude” whose “malice and rage was so desperate and giddy and lawless.” The choice, as the diarist Samuel Pepys explained on the eve of the Restoration, was between the “fanatics” and “the gentry and citizens throughout England,” and it was a battle that the “gentry and citizens” could not afford to lose. Even as they debated the shape and structure of the new Restoration regime, they were united by one paramount principle, which any government would be required to uphold: that the dark days of the Interregnum never return.
The state of affairs was in some ways reminiscent of the one the Jesuits found themselves in during the early decades of the Reformation. Then, it had been the ancient Church and the community of Western Christendom that were being rent apart by a multitude of heretical sects, each claiming sole ownership of divine truth. Just as in England a century later, the danger of social revolution was ever present, and memories of the peasant uprising in Germany and the Anabaptist republic in Münster would terrify the ruling classes of Europe for centuries to come. The parallels between their situation and the early Reformation were not lost on the Englishmen who lived through the Interregnum. Even Rev. Henry Newcombe, who had no love for Catholics, acknowledged the similarities, saying that during the Interregnum, England had been terrorized by a “Münsterian anarchy.”
The Jesuits responded to the crisis of the Reformation by reaffirming the power of the Pope and the Church hierarchy as the only fount of absolute divine truth, and the foundation of an eternal universal order. In England, too, there were those who sought to reaffirm the absolute power of the sovereign and the state as the only means of maintaining order and keeping the fanatics at bay. Mostly they were royalists, courtiers and noblemen who had stood by Charles I and Charles II in exile and civil war and who believed that only the strong hand of a king could save the land.
One among them stood out. He was not an illustrious nobleman but an elderly white-haired commoner whose highest position in court was as mathematics tutor to the future Charles II. His appearance and position were unimposing, but his mind was reputed to be among the sharpest in Europe, and his philosophical writings were as bold and irreverent as they come. He fearlessly castigated clerics of all denominations as impostors and usurpers, and denounced the Pope and the entire Catholic hierarchy as the “Kingdom of Darkness.” He despised the Jesuits, but nevertheless had this in common with them: he, too, feared social disintegration, and was convinced that the only answer was a strong central authority. His name was Thomas Hobbes, remembered today as the brilliant and provocative author of Leviathan and one of the greatest political philosophers of all time. He is less well remembered for another interest he shared with the Jesuits, one that he, like them, considered essential to his philosophy: mathematics.
THE BEAR IN WINTER
By the time he published Leviathan, his most famous and celebrated work, Thomas Hobbes was sixty-three years old, an old man by the standards of the day. Indeed, in some ways he must have seemed to his admirers and his enemies alike a man from another age. He was born in 1588 in the village of Westport, near Malmesbury, in Wiltshire, his prema
ture delivery prompted by the shock his mother received when she got news of the Spanish Armada. As Hobbes told it in an autobiography he wrote in Latin verse toward the end of his life, she “did bring forth Twins at once, both Me, and Fear.” That Hobbes was a fearful man we know from his own testimony, for he claimed to be afraid of the dark, of thieves, of death, and (with some justification) of persecution by his enemies. This might seem surprising coming from a man of Hobbes’s maverick reputation, and there was certainly nothing timid about the way he presented his radical new philosophy, or his fearless attacks on the conventions and beliefs his contemporaries held dear. But in a deeper sense, Hobbes may have understood himself best, as his philosophy was indeed founded on fear: fear of disorder and chaos, of the “war of all against all,” of a “Münsterian anarchy” that must be held at bay at all costs.
Hobbes’s father, also named Thomas, was a country vicar apparently known more for his drinking and skill at cards than for his learning. “He was one of the clergie of Queen Elizabeth’s time—a little learning went a great way with him and many other Sir Johns in those days,” wrote Hobbes’s friend and biographer John Aubrey, referring to a time when many of the country clergy were semiliterate, if that. In contrast, the younger Hobbes claimed that he himself was drunk only a hundred times in his entire life, or hardly more than once a year. When he did drink, he had “the benefit of vomiting, which he did easily; by which benefit neither his wit was disturbt longer then he was spuing nor his stomach oppressed.” Aubrey, who reported this and calculated the frequency of Hobbes’s intoxications, considered it a laudable record of sobriety, which it likely was in that age of stupendous drinking.
When Hobbes Senior was forced to leave Malmesbury after an altercation with a parson, his wealthier brother, Francis, took charge of young Thomas’s education. For the next few years, Hobbes was tutored in Latin, Greek, and rhetoric, and at age fourteen he enrolled in Magdalen College, Oxford. He emerged six years later with a bachelor’s degree in hand and an abiding distaste for Scholastic philosophy, which formed the core of the university curriculum at the time. He wanted to study the new astronomy and geography, he wrote years later, not the Aristotelian corpus, and to “prove things after my owne taste,” not according to the narrow Aristotelian categories. His scorn for Aristotle, and his determination to go his own way, would last him a lifetime.
Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World Page 22