Note 25 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

With the partial exception of the more refined and graceful Pecock, Hobbes has of all English thinkers down to his period the clearest and hardest head for all purposes of reasoning, save in the single field of mathematics, where he meddled without mastery; and against the theologians of his time his argumentation is as a two-edged sword. That such a man should have been resolutely on the side of the king in the Civil War is one of the proofs of the essential fanaticism and arbitrariness of the orthodox Puritans, who plotted more harm to the heresies they disliked than was ever wreaked on themselves. Hobbes came near enough being clerically ostracized among the royalists; but among the earlier Puritans, or under an Independent Puritan Parliament at any time, he would have stood a fair chance of execution. It was doubtless largely due to the anti-persecuting influence of Cromwell, as well as to his having ostensibly deserted the royalists, that Hobbes was allowed to settle quietly in England after making his submission to the Rump Parliament in 1651. In 1666 his Leviathan and De Cive were together condemned by the Restoration Parliament in its grotesque panic of piety after the Great Fire of London; and it was actually proposed to revive against him the writ de heretico comburendo;25 but Charles II protected and pensioned him, though he was forbidden to publish anything further on burning questions, and Leviathan was not permitted in his lifetime to be republished in English.26 He was thus for his generation the typical “infidel,” the royalist clergy being perhaps his bitterest enemies. His spontaneous hostility to fanaticism shaped his literary career, which began in 1628 with a translation of Thucydides, undertaken by way of showing the dangers of democracy. Next came the De Cive (Paris, 1642), written when he was already an elderly man; and thenceforth the Civil War tinges his whole temper.