Note 2 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

We have seen the state of upper-class and middle-class opinion in France about 1624. It was in Paris in that year that Herbert published his De Veritate, after acting for five years as the English ambassador at the French court—an office from which he was recalled in the same year.2 By his own account the book had been “begun by me in England, and formed there in all its principal parts,”3 but finished at Paris. He had, however, gone to France in 1608, and had served in various continental wars in the years following; and it was presumably in these years, not in his youth in England, that he had formed the remarkable opinions set forth in his epoch-making book.