The Historical Journal, ,  (), pp.

– Printed in the United Kingdom

#  Cambridge University Press

COMMUNICATION
CHRISTIAN ECCLESIOLOGY AND THE
COMPOSITION OF LEVIATHAN: A NEWLY
D I S C O V E R E D L E T T E R T O T H O M A S H O B B E S*
J E F F R E Y R. C O L L I N S
Harvard University

       This communication presents a newly discovered letter to Thomas Hobbes. It offers

conclusive evidence that the letter was written by Hobbes’s friend, the scientist and Anglican clergyman
Robert Payne, and strong evidence that the letter was in fact received by Hobbes in late †„‰. The
discovered letter was part of a running controversy over questions of church government in which
Hobbes and Payne engaged during the composition of Leviathan. In it Payne tries unsuccessfully to
soften Hobbes’s strident Erastianism, and to defend the beleaguered Church of England from his
criticisms. The letter thus sheds light on the political and religious context in which Leviathan was
composed. Moreover, the letter offers an indirect but intriguing glimpse at underlying assumptions of
Hobbes’s religious thought.

The friendship of Robert Payne was among the most intellectually stimulating
associations in the life of Thomas Hobbes. The two men seem to have met during the
s. Payne, born to a prosperous woollen draper and educated at Christ Church,
Oxford, was appointed chaplain to the earl of Newcastle in the spring of ." Hobbes
had for several years been the tutor to Newcastle’s brother, the second earl of
Devonshire ; after Devonshire’s sudden death in , Hobbes drifted into Newcastle’s
orbit. Payne and Hobbes together helped establish the circle of intellectuals that arose
around Newcastle and his younger brother Charles Cavendish at the earl’s
Nottinghamshire estate, Welbeck Abbey. Hobbes and Payne remained friends and
correspondents until the latter’s death in . The intellectual significance of their
association was considerable. First, Payne was among those habitue! s of Welbeck who
first introduced Hobbes to the world of Galilean science.# The two men shared a
particular interest in optics, a field which seminally shaped early modern epistemology

* The author would like to thank Mark Kishlansky, Richard Tuck, Noel Malcolm, and Susan
Pedersen for their comments on earlier versions of this article.
" Mordechai Feingold, ‘ Robert Payne of Oxford ’, in J. D. North and J. J. Roche, eds., The light
of nature : essays in the history and philosophy of science, presented to A. C. Crombie (Dordrecht, ),
pp. – ; Noel Malcolm, ed., The correspondence of Thomas Hobbes ( vols., Oxford, ), p. 
(Biographical Register : ‘ Robert Payne ’).
# Hobbes met Galileo during a tour of Europe undertaken with the third earl of Devonshire.
Payne’s translation of Galileo’s Della scienza mecanica was likely executed from a manuscript
procured by Hobbes on this trip. Jean Jacquot, ‘ Sir Charles Cavendish and his learned friends ’,
Annals of Science,  (), p. . On Payne’s optical studies, see Feingold, ‘ Payne ’, pp. –.


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   
and psychology. Further, Payne’s efforts to ‘ lay a new foundation for study of the
human mind ’ may have influenced Hobbes’s theory of the passions, which would later
serve as a cornerstone of his political theory.$ But if Payne’s intellectual influence on
Hobbes stemmed largely from his scientific pursuits, his importance to historians of
Hobbes’s thought depends upon his correspondence with the philosopher during the
composition of Leviathan in –.
In , as the political turmoil preceding the English Civil War began to erupt,
Hobbes abandoned England for France. His flight was triggered by fears that the
absolutist political theory contained in his recently completed manuscript ‘ the elements
of law ’ might draw the hostile attention of the Long Parliament.% Hobbes lived in
France during the following decade of turmoil, connected with French scientific circles
and with the exiled English royalists. His two chief works of political theory, De cive and
Leviathan, appeared in  and  respectively. The latter was his masterpiece.
Composed in France and published in London, Leviathan was widely read as a work
friendly to the Interregnum regime. Indeed, the work was intended to expedite
Hobbes’s return to England and it infuriated Hobbes’s royalist associates.& He returned
to England in  or in early , only weeks after the death of his friend Payne.
Payne had corresponded with Hobbes until he died, and particularly during the critical
months of Leviathan’s composition. Unfortunately, the letters of the two men have long
been lost. It is possible that Hobbes himself, who by one report inherited Payne’s papers,
burned most of them along with his own after the Restoration.'
Knowledge of the important Payne–Hobbes correspondence has thus depended to
date on the letters exchanged between Payne and a third party : Gilbert Sheldon. Payne
remained in England during the s, but he suffered the kind of internal exile meted
out to many loyal sons of the Church of England. A royal chaplain after , Payne
was ejected by parliament from the rectory of Tormarton, Gloucestershire in  ; in
, the first parliamentary visitation to Oxford expelled him from the canonry at
Christ Church that he had held since . By some accounts Payne was briefly
imprisoned.( For his remaining years Payne lived with his family in Abingdon,
Berkshire. From there he conducted correspondence with Thomas Hobbes and Gilbert
Sheldon, among others. Sheldon, destined for the archbishopric of Canterbury after the
Restoration, had also been expelled from Oxford and thereafter served as a leader of the
outlawed Anglican clergy.) Payne’s letters to Sheldon have survived, and within them
$ Jacquot, ‘ Cavendish ’, pp. –. Payne apparently served as the intermediary between
Hobbes and the prominent theorist of optics Walter Warner. Payne to Warner,  Oct. , British
Library (BL) Add MS , fos. –. It has been recently argued that the manuscript known as
the ‘ Short tract on first principles ’, which contains key elements of Hobbes’s natural philosophy
and has been widely ascribed to Hobbes, is in Payne’s hand and may have been authored by him.
Richard Tuck, ‘ Hobbes and Descartes ’, in G. A. J. Rogers and Alan Ryan, eds., Perspectives on
Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, ) pp. –. For a rebuttal, see Karl Schuhmann, ‘ Le short tract,
premie' re oeuvre philosophique de Hobbes ’, Hobbes Studies,  (), pp. – ; also Perez Zagorin,
‘ Hobbes’s early philosophical development ’, Journal of the History of Ideas,  (), pp. –.
% Peter Zagorin, ‘ Thomas Hobbes’s departure from England in  : an unpublished letter ’,
Historical Journal,  (), pp. –.
& Hobbes explained the Leviathan to Edward Hyde by saying that ‘ the truth is, I have a mind
to go home ’. Edward Hyde, A brief view and survey of the dangerous and pernicious errors to church and state
in Mr. Hobbes’s book entitled Leviathan (London, ), p. . ' Malcolm, ‘ Payne ’, p. .
( Ibid., pp. , .
) Sheldon passed the Interregnum as a private chaplain in Nottinghamshire. Victor D. Sutch,
Gilbert Sheldon : architect of anglican survival, †„€–†‡… (The Hague, ), pp. –.

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  
is an account of Payne’s correspondence with Hobbes that includes important evidence
concerning the context of Leviathan’s composition. Payne’s letters to Sheldon have thus
been a valuable source for historians of Hobbes (although one only recently exploited).
Among the general disappearance of most of Hobbes’s correspondence, as the editor of
the fine Oxford edition of his letters has noted, the loss of virtually all of Payne’s
correspondence with Hobbes has proved particularly regrettable.* What has long been
thought the only surviving letter from Robert Payne to Hobbes dates from ."! Of
the more consequential correspondence of the late s, nothing to date had been
discovered. Overwhelming evidence, however, establishes that the previously unnoticed
letter printed below was part of the correspondence conducted between Hobbes and
Payne during the composition of Leviathan.
The letter in question is found among the papers of Gilbert Sheldon housed in the
British Library and bound as Harleian MS . This collection contains cor-
respondence sent to Sheldon during the Interregnum, including the above mentioned
letters of Robert Payne. The letter presented here is a draft, bound as number 
within Harleian . Letter  has to date been entirely ignored, but conclusive
evidence identifies it as the most significant letter contained in the collection : the draft
of a letter sent from Robert Payne to Thomas Hobbes. For reasons detailed below, the
letter can be dated to the final months of  with reasonable assurance. The failure
to identify letter  must be blamed on the fact that Nicholas Pocock, who edited and
printed most of Payne’s letters to Sheldon in the nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic
periodical Theologian and Ecclesiastic, apparently failed to attribute the letter correctly,
and excluded it from publication."" Historians of Hobbes have understandably relied on
Pocock’s useful edition, but have none the less suffered for this oversight. Letter  ends
without signature. It bears no address. It can none the less be identified based on the
following textual and contextual evidence.
Again, historians to date have charted Payne’s correspondence with Hobbes by way
of the second-hand account of it contained in his letters to Sheldon. Sheldon and Payne
were longstanding Oxford associates, and they maintained a correspondence during the
years following their ejection from the University. Sheldon and Hobbes knew one
another from their days as members of Viscount Falkland’s Tew Circle. Payne supplied
Sheldon with periodic information about Hobbes, and his testimony has served as a
useful source for historians of Hobbes’s Interregnum career. On  April , Payne
informed Sheldon that Hobbes (his ‘ friend in Paris ’) had reported widespread French
distress at the execution of Charles I, and that Hobbes, intending to visit England, had

* Malcolm, introduction to Correspondence of Hobbes, p. lii. Hobbes was a prodigious composer of

letters, but only  letters to or from him survive. Malcolm considers the lost correspondences
between Hobbes and François du Verdus (–s) and that between Hobbes and Robert Payne
(s–) to be the most significant of all such losses.
"! The letter provides Payne’s assessment of Lord Herbert’s De veritate (), and does not
prove particularly useful for a study of Hobbes’s own development. Robert Payne to Thomas
Hobbes,  Nov. , Malcolm, ed., Correspondence of Hobbes, p. . The newly discovered letter
presented here would be number A in Malcolm’s sequence.
"" This periodical, printed from  to , confusingly underwent three title changes
(Theological and Ecclesiastic, Ecclesiastic, and Ecclesiastic and Theologian) and is now quite difficult to
locate. Pocock’s edition of the known Payne–Sheldon correspondence is contained in a series titled,
‘ Illustrations of the state of the church during the great rebellion ’, which also contains other
clerical correspondence of the Interregnum.

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   
delayed his ‘ designe till he see more hopes of peace ’."# On  March , Payne
commended to Sheldon Hobbes’s Of human nature, which was an unauthorized printing
of the first thirteen chapters of ‘ The elements of law ’."$ But by far the most absorbing
information about Hobbes contained in the Payne–Sheldon correspondence concerns
the composition of Leviathan. We learn that on  May , Payne had written to
Hobbes urging him to execute an English translation of De cive, but Hobbes had
responded that he ‘ hath another in hand, which is politicque, in English, of which ’,
reported Payne to Sheldon, ‘ he hath finished  chapters (intending about  in the
whole) ’."% This new work was Leviathan, the composition of which Hobbes had
concealed from Payne during the previous year."& Despite Payne’s high estimation of
Hobbes’s philosophy, the two men had been engaged in a troubling dispute during the
months running up to May . Hobbes’s new project was to lend added gravity to this
controversy.
Payne kept Sheldon fully informed of his running dispute with Hobbes, which
concerned a topic central to the originality of Leviathan : Hobbes’s Erastian ecclesiology.
Among Hobbes’s most relentless political themes was the danger posed to the stability
of the state by independent ecclesiastical power. His answer to this challenge was an
extreme Erastianism that subordinated all church authority – both jurisdictional (i.e.
excommunication, the tithe, church courts, etc.) and properly spiritual (i.e. adminis-
tration of the eucharist, ordination, etc.) – to the sovereign. Implicit in all of his chief
works, Hobbes’s Erastianism was only fully expounded in Leviathan, where the spelling
out of its implications consumed fully half of the work’s prodigious bulk. On  February
, three full months before he knew that Leviathan was being drafted, Payne
acquainted Sheldon with the state of his disagreement with Hobbes. ‘ The chief, indeed
only thing stuck at ’, wrote Payne :
is that there should be a power in a state, independent of the supreme, with right to execute the acts
thereof, without leave from the soveraigne. My endeavour was to vindicate our Bishops from that
imputation, which I suppose might be don two wayes : , by granting the Bishops had a power (and
by power here I mean not jus but facultatem in that sens as we say, a power of miracles) not
derived from the supreme civil, yet dependent on it for the execution of all acts belonging to that
power. Or , if by power must be meant jus, yet that jus is not granted to them, but with such a
limitation, as ye bishop when he ordaines a priest, gives him Power to preach the word, and
administer sacraments, with this limitation, when thou shalt be thereunto lawfully called. And in

"# Payne to Sheldon,  Apr. , BL Harleian MS , no. . Pocock, ‘ Illustrations ’,
Theologian and Ecclesiastic,  (), p. . For convenience, I have included references to Pocock
where he includes relevant material, but as I have found several significant transcription errors in
the printed edition of these letters, the Harleian MS is quoted throughout.
"$ Payne to Sheldon,  Mar. , BL Harleian MS , no.  ; Pocock, ‘ Illustrations ’,
Theologian and Ecclesiastic,  (), pp. –. A manuscript copy of the Elements had been
provided to the publisher without Hobbes’s knowledge. The political chapters of the Elements were
published as a second book, also unauthorized, at the same time. Payne mistook this for an English
translation of Hobbes’s  treatise of political theory, De cive. He sent a copy along to Sheldon.
Payne to Sheldon,  May , BL Harleian MS , no. . Pocock, ‘ Illustrations ’, p. .
"% Payne to Sheldon,  May , BL Harleian MS , no.  ; Pocock, ‘ Illustrations ’,
p. .
"& Richard Tuck, Philosophy and government, …‡‚–†… (Cambridge, ), pp. –. Tuck is the
first intellectual historian to make extensive use of the Payne–Sheldon correspondence as printed
in Pocock’s edition. Much of the material from this paragraph is fully treated in his work. See
below. Miriam Reik’s biography of Hobbes also makes some use of the Payne–Sheldon
correspondence. Miriam Reik, The golden lands of Thomas Hobbes (Detroit, ).

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  
either of these two senses, I suppose Episcopacy very consistent with the soveraign civil power ; else,
perhaps not."'
Thus, the controversy between Payne and Hobbes during the composition of Leviathan
concerned the question of episcopacy’s consistency with Hobbes’s absolutist theory of
sovereignty. The long habit of reading Leviathan strictly as a piece of secular political
theory, stripped of its critical ecclesiological and theological features, had obscured the
significance of Payne’s testimony until Richard Tuck recovered it in recent years."( As
Tuck has observed, Leviathan was as much intended as a comment on church governance
as on temporal sovereignty, and the chief innovation of Leviathan over Hobbes’s earlier
writing was its obsessive concern with the threat to unified sovereignty posed by
supposedly divine right or apostolic forms of church government.
This feature of Leviathan is of great contextual importance. The English Reformation
was dedicated to ensuring state control of the church, and there was a long tradition of
compliant Erastian ecclesiology among the English clergy. In the early seventeenth
century, however, and particularly under Archbishop Laud, the church had contro-
versially advanced jure divino defences for episcopacy,") so it can hardly have surprised
Hobbes that his vigorous Erastianism infuriated the Laudian churchmen in exile with
Charles Stuart. There is not space here to recount the details of this history, but the
exiled Anglican churchmen, angered by Hobbes’s ecclesiology, played a key role in
estranging Hobbes from the Stuart court. Hobbes had served as Charles’s mathematics
instructor after , but he wrote to the earl of Devonshire in  that ‘ he had lost
the reward of his labours with the Prince by the sinister suggestions of some of the
clergy ’. Though Payne himself disagreed with Hobbes’s extreme Erastian ecclesiology,
he none the less expressed distress to Sheldon that ‘ any of our coat have had the ill
fortune to provoke so great a witt against the church ’. Under the circumstances, Payne
lamented, it was no wonder his arguments against Hobbes’s newly extreme Erastianism
had failed."*
Payne’s initial concern predated his knowledge of the work later titled Leviathan, of
which he learned in May of . In an August letter to Sheldon, Payne updated the
progress of his dispute with Hobbes, now fully informed as to the potential scandal that
might ensue from the publication of Hobbes’s anti-episcopal position. ‘ I have written ’,
he wrote :
to my friend abroad agayne and agayne, since I wrote to you last, and heard from him. He assures
me, he hath no particular quarrel to the tribe, only this position he shall sett downe and confirme,
that the Civil Soveraigns (whether one or more) is Chief Pastor and may settle which kinde of

"' Payne to Sheldon,  Feb. , BL Harleian MS , no.  ; Pocock, ‘ Illustrations ’,
p. . Johann Sommerville, another prominent commentator on Hobbes from the Cambridge
School contextualists, has also made use of the Sheldon–Payne correspondence as edited by
Pocock. See his Thomas Hobbes : political ideas in historical context (New York, ), pp. –, ,
.
"( Tuck, Philosophy and government, pp. – ; see also Tuck, ‘ The civil religion of Thomas
Hobbes ’, in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner, eds., Political discourse in early modern Britain
(Cambridge, ), pp. –.
") Anthony Milton, Catholic and reformed : the Roman and Protestant churches in English political thought,
†€€–†„€ (Cambridge, ), pp. –, et passim ; Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as pastor : the
episcopate of James I (Oxford, ), pp. , –,  ; Peter Lake, Anglicans and puritans ?
Presbyterians and English conformist thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, ), pp. –.
"* Payne to Sheldon,  Mar. , BL Harleian MS , no.  ; Pocock, ‘ Illustrations ’,
p. .

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   
church government he shall think fitt, for ye proper salvation, which will be enough to justify those
who have cashered Bishops already ; and may tempt others, who have not, to follow their example.
The truth is, I fear he is engaged too farre already to retreat, and therefore I have small hops to
prevail. Yet in my last I contended this consideration to him, that all Truths are not fitt to be held
at all times : and if the argument he had undertaken did necessarily require that he should publish
it, yet I should expect, even for the antiquity’s sake of that order (which by the confession of those
who most opposed it, had been received in all Christian churches of the world for nere  years)
it should not be so indifferent to him, but that it should finde, at least so much favour with him,
in regard of Presb[yteranism] and Indep[endency] as monarchy had done in respect of
Democr[acy] and Aristoc[racy]. But all this is sayd to you in your care : and if our tribe have gott
so scharp an adversary, you may guess who we may thank for it.#!

Payne’s gloom over the chances of winning Hobbes to the cause of the persecuted
church was shortly to be justified. On  May , Payne reported the appearance of
Leviathan, complaining that it ‘ seems to favour the present government ’, that Hobbes
wanted it ‘ read in the universities ’, and that Hobbes despised ‘ all censures that may
pass upon it ’.#" On  July, Payne asked for Sheldon’s assessment of Leviathan.## Sheldon
had not complied with this request by September, when Payne, two months before his
own death, offered his final, disillusioned assessment of Hobbes’s masterpiece :
‘ You … can judge out of your owne experience ’, wrote Payne to Sheldon, ‘ what affect
it may worke on the better witts. For my part, I feare the less, not because it is not like
to doe as much that way, more than any private tract I have yet seen, but because the
worst is don already, by a more publique power.’#$ The reference here was perhaps to
the Engagement controversy. Leviathan defended political obedience to de facto
authority, and royalists widely read it as an apologia for the Commonwealth’s bitterly
detested Engagement oath.#% Alternatively, Payne may have feared that Leviathan
would encourage its readers to abandon episcopacy, a concern that he had already
voiced to Sheldon.#& In any case, Payne died sadly confirmed in the knowledge that his
old friend had decisively joined the enemies of both king and church.
This account of the Payne–Sheldon correspondence is necessary in order to
demonstrate that Harleian  letter  is in fact the draft of a letter composed by
Robert Payne and sent to Hobbes during the composition of Leviathan. Letter 
amplifies, in striking fashion, many of the points that Payne reported debating in his
letters to Hobbes. Letter  rebuts at length specific objections raised by Hobbes to the
nature of episcopal power in the old Church of England. The thematic similarities
between the drafted letter and Payne’s second-hand account of his correspondence with
Hobbes (considered more fully below) are so pronounced that Payne immediately rises
to mind as the probable author of the letter.#' Letter  thus fulfilled Payne’s promise

#! Payne to Sheldon,  Aug. , BL Harleian MS , no.  ; Pocock, ‘ Illustrations ’,
p. . #" Payne to Sheldon,  May , BL Harleian MS , no. .
## Payne to Sheldon,  July , BL Add MS , fo. . Note the alternate location of this
letter. Pocock understandably missed it, as it is wrongly identified as a letter from ‘ BP ’ (rather than
‘ RP ’) in the British Library catalogue.
#$ Payne to Sheldon,  Sept. , BL Harleian MS , no. . This letter too appears to
have been omitted by Pocock in his edition of the Payne–Sheldon correspondence.
#% Quentin Skinner, ‘ Conquest and consent : Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement controversy ’
in G. E. Aylmer, ed., The Interregnum : the quest for settlement, †„†–††€ (London, ).
#& Payne to Sheldon,  Aug. , BL Harleian MS , no.  ; Pocock, ‘ Illustrations ’,
p. .
#' BL Harleian MS  contains letters from approximately ten Interregnum correspondents
of Sheldon’s (the vast majority are from Henry Hammond). Based upon handwriting analysis
alone, no candidate other than Payne appears to be represented among this group.

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  
to ‘ vindicate ’ the English bishops from any suggestion that they sought a ‘ power in the
state independent of the supreme ’.#( The use of the concept of a ‘ faculty ’ to characterize
clerical privileges occurs in both letter  and in Payne’s signed letters to Sheldon.
Moreover, there is, as we shall see, a striking thematic correspondence between letter
 and passages in Leviathan itself. More compelling still is the repeated occurrence, in
both letter  and in one of Payne’s signed letters, of the idiosyncratic phrase ‘ the tribe ’
to designate loyal episcopal men.#)
An analysis of the letter’s handwriting further buttresses the conclusion that letter 
is a letter from Payne to Hobbes. The draft letter is naturally in a more hurried hand
than the recopied letters that Payne sent, for instance, to Sheldon. Moreover,
abbreviations occur with more frequency in the draft. But the handwriting of the
drafted letter  and that of Payne’s signed letters to Sheldon present marked
similarities. Handwriting analysis alone does not conclusively prove Payne’s identity,
but it provides important circumstantial evidence and, in conjunction with the textual
evidence, is conclusive.
But if Payne was indeed the author of letter , how did a drafted letter from Payne
to Hobbes find its way into Gilbert Sheldon’s possession ? This proves a problem easily
dispatched. As part of his effort to keep Sheldon abreast of his dispute with Hobbes,
Payne forwarded to Sheldon the original draft of a letter that he had sent to Hobbes in
a fair copy. In a letter dated  December, without a year, Payne wrote to Sheldon : ‘ I
received [a] letter very lately from my friend Mr. H[obbes] at Paris, in answer to that
of mine whereof I sent you the original, which I shall shew you, when God shall be
pleased to lett us meet agayne in peace. ’#* Pocock’s edition of the Payne–Sheldon
correspondence omits this December letter, which contains little of intrinsic interest. But
for the purposes of identifying the author and recipient of letter , the letter of 
December is decisive. As the handwriting and colloquialisms of letter  are Payne’s,
and as the letter conforms precisely to the thematic parameters of the dispute between
Payne and Hobbes outlined elsewhere by Payne, it is overwhelmingly likely that letter
 was the drafted letter Payne forwarded to Sheldon and referenced on  December.
Furthermore, the  December letter allows us to conclude that the drafted letter 
accurately reflected the content of the final copy sent to Hobbes (or else why forward it
to Sheldon ?), that Hobbes received the letter, and that he responded to it.$!
Dating letter  proves somewhat more vexing, but assistance is found in yet a third
letter, which also seems to reference the drafted letter . ‘ I have since sent a reply ’,
wrote Payne to Sheldon on  February , ‘ to an answer I received from Paris, but
kept no originall or copy, least it might tempt me to committ another error like the
former, which I hope you have by this time pardoned. ’$" The error here referenced is
obscure. Perhaps Sheldon feared that the Commonwealth censors might suspect (from
his receipt of drafted letters to Hobbes) that he was in correspondence with the royalist
court. In any case, Payne’s decision to forward Sheldon the draft of a letter to Hobbes

#( Payne to Sheldon,  Feb. , Harleian MS , no.  ; Pocock, ‘ Illustrations ’, p. .
#) See BL Harleian MS , nos. , a. Indeed, both passages refer to a ‘ quarell with the
tribe ’. #* Payne to Sheldon,  Dec.  ? ?, BL Harleian MS , no. .
$! Drafts of letters, in any case, are included by Malcolm in his edition of Hobbes’s
correspondence. In this case, the evidence that this draft accurately reflected a letter actually
received by Hobbes is overwhelming.
$" Payne to Sheldon,  Feb. , BL Harleian MS , no. . That the correspondent in
Paris is Hobbes is indicated by the remainder of the letter, which is cited above and offers an
account of Hobbes’s dispute with Payne over episcopal power.

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   
seems to have occurred only once. Thus, letter  can be dated with reasonable
assurance. A date before  is virtually ruled out by the composition schedule of
Leviathan and the dates of Payne’s other letters to Sheldon. A date after  is ruled out
by Payne’s vow in February  not to keep, or to forward Sheldon, any further drafts
of his letters to Hobbes. Therefore, the  December letter from Payne to Sheldon that
mentions such a draft was almost surely composed in . This in turn allows for the
strong supposition that letter  itself was sent in the final months of that year.
Once its authorship and date have been established, the importance of letter  is
readily evident.$# It permits, for the first time, direct access into the crucial
correspondence exchanged between Hobbes and Payne as Leviathan was taking shape.
Payne’s letter responds, point by point, to a slate of objections raised by Hobbes against
the bishops of the Church of England. The contextual significance of the letter is
various.$$
Only recently have historians of Hobbes’s thought made use of even the second-hand
account of the Payne–Hobbes correspondence available in Payne’s published letters to
Sheldon. Richard Tuck has cogently argued that Leviathan, as a strictly political treatise,
innovated little over Hobbes’s earlier work. Rather, the originality of Leviathan lay in its
much more fully developed theology and ecclesiology.$% Theologically, Leviathan boldly
sought to reconcile Hobbes’s materialist ontology with Christianity by espousing a
mortalist eschatology.$& Ecclesiologically, Leviathan developed Hobbes’s Erastian theory
of church government with vastly increased precision and rhetorical vigour. Neither of
these religious themes figured centrally in Hobbes’s earlier works, but in Leviathan their
thematic importance can scarcely be overstated. And while Hobbes’s unorthodox
theology certainly triggered outraged reaction from contemporaries, Leviathan was a
work most distinctive for its immoderate Erastianism.$' A wide fissure was to open up
between Hobbes and the Anglican church over Christian ecclesiology. The discovery of
one piece of the correspondence between Hobbes and Payne on this very issue sheds
light on how that fissure widened.
Payne, it is clear, found himself on the defensive in this controversy with Hobbes. His
effort to defend the traditional trappings of episcopal authority from Hobbes’s

$# The fortunes of Sheldon’s papers thereafter, including how this batch ended up in the
possession of Robert and Edward Harley, is unclear. No information is contained in Cyril Ernest
Wright, ed., Fontes Harleiani : study of the sources of the Harleian collection of manuscripts (London, ).
$$ The letter may shed some light on to the order in which Leviathan was composed, and indicates
that it was composed in the order of its final presentation. In May of , Payne reported that
Hobbes had finished thirty-seven of Leviathan’s planned fifty chapters (the final work had forty-
seven chapters). If we assume that the work was composed in order, then this would have taken
Hobbes into the middle of part three of Leviathan, ‘ Of a Christian Commonwealth ’, which deals
with the specific ecclesiological issues covered in Payne’s letter. This would make some sense, as
Hobbes had been disputing ecclesiology with Payne throughout late  and early . Nothing
conclusive can be said, but it seems more likely than not that Hobbes composed Leviathan in order
of its eventual publication. $% Tuck, Philosophy and government, pp. –.
$& J. G. A. Pocock, ‘ Time, history, and eschatology in the thought of Thomas Hobbes ’, in
Politics, language and time (London, ), pp. – ; Tuck, ‘ Civil religion ’, passim ; David
Johnston, ‘ Hobbes’s mortalism ’, History of Political Thought,  (), pp. –.
$' For some brief but useful remarks see Mark Goldie, ‘ The reception of Hobbes ’, in J. H. Burns
and M. Goldie, eds., Cambridge history of political thought, „…€–‡€€ (Cambridge, ), p.  ; see
also Jeffrey R. Collins, ‘ Thomas Hobbes and the English revolution ’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard,
), chs. –.

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  
determined assault collided with some of the most forceful conclusions found in
Leviathan. Hobbes dedicated chapter  of Leviathan to a demolition of various church
doctrines and prerogatives that affronted his absolutist theory of sovereignty by erecting
a spiritual authority independent of the sovereign. Leviathan, of course, famously
conflated the church and state completely,$( and empowered the civil sovereign not
only to govern the church in externals, but to administer the sacraments, define
doctrine, and even to determine revelation.$) Traditional privileges of the clerical estate
were systematically undermined by Hobbes, who construed them as efforts to usurp
elements of sovereignty based upon an illegitimate dichotomy between the spiritual and
temporal realms.
Hobbes advanced much of this Erastian argument by using the great counter-
Reformation theorist Cardinal Bellarmine as an interlocutor.$* But Payne’s letter
clarifies the extent to which Hobbes’s Erastian critique was aimed most fundamentally
at the episcopal Church of England that had recently been abolished by the Long
Parliament. This is a point of great contextual significance. Beneath Hobbes’s generic
critique of clericalism, and behind his detailed case against Roman Catholicism,
Leviathan levelled its sights at the distressed English episcopacy. Payne’s letter to Hobbes
isolates those specific grounds on which Hobbes reproached the Church of England.
Payne responded to a menu of challenges from Hobbes, almost all of which would
resurface in chapter  of Leviathan. There, Hobbes went some length to undermine the
proposition that bishops enjoyed an exclusive right either to consecrate one another, or
to ordain lesser clergy.%! The selection of ecclesiastical officers was for Hobbes nothing
more than a political act undertaken by the civil community (represented by the
sovereign). The sovereign, as ‘ Supreme Pastor ’,%" enjoyed a monopoly over both the
ordaining and consecrating power. Payne’s response presented these powers, tra-
ditionally reserved for the clergy, not as divinely given, but as analogous to the creation
of a doctor by an academic faculty. Perhaps Payne’s suggestive analogy was responsible
for Leviathan’s similar parallel between the clergy and academic doctors.%# But it is a
measure of the depth of Hobbes’s disillusionment with the Anglican church that Payne’s
effort at justification failed so demonstrably. Hobbes did not soften the passages in
Leviathan which surrendered consecrating and ordaining power to the state.
So too Payne’s effort to vindicate the traditional language of the Anglican ordination
service failed to placate Hobbes. Leviathan categorically rejected the claim to divine right
authority that had been increasingly made by the Church of England during the early
seventeenth century, and was dominant among Anglicans during the Caroline era and
the Interregnum. The sovereign alone empowered ecclesiastical officers, Hobbes wrote,
and he specifically took the Church to task for using the phrase divina providentia to
characterized the office of bishop. ‘ For in saying, DivinaV providentiaV ’, he wrote, ‘ which is
the same with Dei gratiaV , though disguised, they deny to have received their authority
from the Civill State ; and sliely slip off the Collar of their Civill Subjection, contrary to

$( Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the matter, forme, and power of a commonwealth ecclesiasticall and civill,
ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, ), pp. –. $) Ibid., pp. –, –.
$* Ibid., pp. – ; Patricia Springborg, ‘ ‘‘ Leviathan ’’ and the problem of ecclesiastical
authority ’, Political Theory,  (), pp. –.
%! Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. –, –, –.
%" This designation obviously occurred in Hobbes’s correspondence with Payne. Payne
employed it in explaining Hobbes’s position to Sheldon. Payne to Sheldon,  Aug. , BL
Harleian MS , no. . %# Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. –.

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   
the unity and defence of the Common-wealth. ’%$ Payne defended the phrase divinia
providentia as ‘ not unproper ’ to men of episcopal calling, and argued that it was used out
of ‘ religious gratitude ’ to men of high ecclesiastical responsibility, and did not denote
a jure divino claim on church office.%% Again, Hobbes’s deep disenchantment with the
drift of Anglican ecclesiology running up to and during the Civil War is evidenced by
his refusal to accept Payne’s more utilitarian justification for the language of Church of
England ordinations.
This pattern consistently marked the dispute between Hobbes and Payne. Payne
justified the crowning of monarchs by the ‘ chiefe minister of the religion of a state ’ by
portraying it as ‘ an ancient practise ’ : not as a right, but as a matter of utility convenient
to both church and monarch.%& Hobbes persisted in condemning the practice, and in
Leviathan described the doctrine ‘ that it is necessary for a Christian King to receive his
Crown by a Bishop ’, as a pretence, which seditiously justified the government of the
spiritual realm by an independent church hierarchy.%' As for the authority of church
courts, Payne again tried to defuse Hobbes’s criticism by resorting to an analogy with
other corporate professions : in this case physicians and lawyers, who exercised ‘ faculties ’
in their orders much as clergymen did in theirs.%( But Hobbes had little time for Payne’s
claim that ‘ it was not the principle whence that faculty is derived ’ that potentially
offended sovereignty, but the specific ‘ acts of that faculty ’. Payne conceded that church
courts claimed a spiritual power as ‘ prescribed by Christ ’, but he sought to placate
Hobbes by arguing that Anglicans surrendered to the state the ‘ right to order ’ church
courts.%) Hobbes, however, never accepted the Anglican distinction between power and
the right to execute power,%* and Leviathan persisted in making the case that church
courts and canon law were reliant on a pernicious distinction between ‘ temporal and
ghostly ’ power.&!
That Hobbes’s sharpened Erastianism was aimed primarily at the English bishops is
contextually revealing. A great deal of the religious anxiety of the Long Parliament
concerned the perceived threat posed by the Caroline bishops to the traditional civil
Supremacy over the English Church. Archbishop Laud’s efforts to revive the power of
the church courts, the passage of the canons of  without parliamentary
authorization, and the adherence of the Laudian bishops to divine right episcopal
ecclesiology were all condemned by the Long Parliament as affronts to the state’s
ecclesiastical power. Individual churchmen such as John Cosin were impeached for
%$ Ibid., p. .
%% Payne to Hobbes, , BL Harleian MS , no. a–b. The conclusion of this paragraph
of the letter is unfortunately fragmented, but it seems that Payne is arguing that the phrase Dei
gratia referencing the power of kings should be justified by similar logic : as a mark of respect or
gratitude, rather than as an actual claim on divine authority. Hobbes concluded differently,
arguing that kings only were to employ the phrase, although admittedly as a ‘ mark of their
submission to God onely ’. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. .
%& Payne to Hobbes, , BL Harleian MS , no. b.
%' Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. –. The issue of the use of the phrase Dei gratia in the title of the king
arises again here. Hobbes argued that the practice of bishops crowning kings served to imply that
‘ it were from that Ceremony, that he derives the clause of Dei gratiaV in his title ’.
%( Payne to Hobbes, , BL Harleian MS , no. b.
%) Payne to Hobbes, , ibid., no. b–c.
%* See, for instance, Thomas Hobbes, The questions concerning liberty, necessity, and chance, clearly
stated and debated between Dr. Bramhall, bishop of Derry, and Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, vol.  in The
English works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. William Molesworth (London, ), pp. –.
&! Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. –, –.

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  
advocating episcopal divine right and for thus undermining the Royal Supremacy.
Considerable historical effort has been made of late to portray the English Civil War as
a religious war, but these efforts have largely understood the religious conflict of the
s as a battle over theology proper : a fight to protect English Calvinism against
Arminianism in high places.&" But, in truth, the religious agitation within the Long
Parliament was centrally concerned with ecclesiological issues rather than with pure
theology.&# Securing England’s Erastian religious settlement was the chief aim of the
Revolution, and this often overlooked point is essential to contextualizing Hobbes’s
religious thought.&$
Indeed, Hobbes’s own Erastian proclivities threw him into an awkward sympathy
with the parliamentary revolutionaries on church matters. As early as  Hobbes
endorsed the Long Parliament’s campaign against the authority of the bishops. In a
letter to the earl of Devonshire he announced that the dispute between ‘ spirituall and
civill power, has of late more than any other thing in the world, bene the cause of civill
warres, in all places of Christendome ’, and he endorsed parliament’s dramatic scheme
to replace the bishops with lay commissioners.&% De cive, published in , repeated this
theory of civil war and angered the churchmen in exile with Hobbes by casting implicit
aspersions on the English church.&& Payne’s letter confirms a possibility suggested, but
not explicitly argued, in Leviathan : Hobbes’s belief that the high-handed behaviour of
the Laudian church had constituted a usurpation of sovereignty that had destabilized
the monarchy. Such a devastating critique of the English bishops would work to
estrange Hobbes from the exiled royalists and would prove a permanent drag on his
reputation. For instance, Charles II’s later decision to prohibit the publication of
Hobbes’s history of the Civil War, Behemoth, seems to have been forced by the highly
impolitic aspersions cast upon the Laudian church by Hobbes in that work.&'
Contemporaries often accused Hobbes of having betrayed the Stuart cause, and
historians typically construe these charges as a critique of Leviathan’s de factoist theory
of obligation.&( Far less often noticed by historians, but equally significant for
contemporaries, was the extent to which Hobbes willingly associated himself with the

&" This widely accepted view is found in Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists : the rise of English
Arminianism (Oxford, ). Tyacke has influenced, among other, Conrad Russell, Origins of the
English Civil War (Oxford, ).
&# A point often overlooked, but emphasized throughout the still valuable work of William A.
Shaw, A history of the English church during the Civil World War and under the commonwealth, †„€–††€
( vols., London, ), and in John Morrill, ‘ The religious context of the English Civil War ’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society,  ().
&$ Collins, ‘ Thomas Hobbes and the English revolution ’, ch. , .
&% Thomas Hobbes to William Cavendish,  July . Malcolm, ed., Correspondence of Hobbes,
p. .
&& Thomas Hobbes, De cive : the English version, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford, ),  : .
The marginal notes of the second edition of De cive () answered many of the criticisms that
‘ ecclesiastical persons ’ had made against the work.
&' Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth ; the history of the causes of the Civil Wars of England from †„€ to ††€,
ed. Ferdinand To$ nnies (London,  ; repr. Chicago, ), pp. , . For instance, Hobbes
accuses the Anglicans of vindicating the revolt with their doctrine of passive obedience, and
strongly implies that their jure divino claims on authority hurt the royal cause. John Aubrey
reported to Locke that Charles ‘ dar[ed] not license [Behemoth] for fear of displeasing the bishops ’.
John Aubrey to John Locke,  Feb. , printed in G. S. de Beer, ed., The correspondence of John
Locke,  (Oxford, ), letter .
&( See Skinner, ‘ Conquest and consent ’, pp. –, and elsewhere.

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   
revolutionary Independents, enemies of the episcopal church. The Independents, who
achieved ascendancy over the Presbyterians and were ushered into power by Oliver
Cromwell, were strongly attached to features of the Long Parliament’s Erastianism.
Hobbes infuriated the church by arguing, in one fateful passage of Leviathan, that the
newly dominant Independency of the Interregnum regime was likely to prove the
church form most congenial to absolute sovereign authority over religion.&) Payne’s
reference to Hobbes’s having ‘ engaged too far already to retreat ’ over the issue of
church government implied his distress at Hobbes’s endorsement of Independency.&*
Something needed to ‘ be sayd ’, wrote Payne to Hobbes, ‘ if not to justifye [than] at least
to excuse those actions of our Bishops which in your opinion seem to deserve blame ’.'!
The trappings of clerical power attacked in Leviathan either in general terms or as
‘ Papist ’ innovations were openly portrayed in his correspondence with Payne as
‘ means ’ employed by the English bishops to ‘ preserve the reputation ’ of their own
power.'" That Hobbes’s critique levelled its guns primarily at the English bishops is also
evidenced by Payne’s efforts to deflect Hobbes’s criticism on to the Presbyterians, who
claimed ‘ power from the same principles as the bishops ’, but combined divine right
ecclesiological claims with a seditious doctrine of resistance.'# Hobbes was, of course,
perfectly well disposed to such attacks on Presbyterians. This indeed was a keynote of
Behemoth, which, as a Restoration document, found it more congenial to castigate
Presbyterians than Anglicans for the Civil War. But Payne’s letter makes clear that
Hobbes understood bishops, not presbyters, as his chief adversaries in –, when
the power dynamics were reversed.
Payne’s letter did not attempt to vindicate independent church power generally, but
to improve Hobbes’s disposition toward the episcopal church in particular.'$ He failed
to accomplish this, and Hobbes’s fateful endorsement of Independency was never
forgotten. It certainly earned him the immediate enmity of the exiled church, as Hobbes
reported to Devonshire in a letter that was intercepted and likely read with relish by
‘ the Grandees at Westminster ’.'% Hobbes’s return to England in  was certainly
eased by his convenient theory of political obligation, but the dominant Independents
cannot have been disheartened by his hostility to episcopacy and his endorsement of the
Congregational Way. In so positioning himself, Payne wrote, Hobbes had joined those
parliamentarians who had rendered the bishops’ ‘ persons and office odious ’ in order to
secure power for themselves.'&
Many of the Interregnum’s leading Anglican apologists – including Henry
Hammond, Herbert Thorndike, and Bishop Bramhall – would compose rejoinders to

&)Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. –.

&*Payne to Sheldon,  Aug. , BL Harleian MS , no. .
'!Payne to Hobbes, , ibid., no. a. '" Payne to Hobbes, , ibid., no. c.
'#Hobbes derided the Anglican distinction, which Payne here relied upon, between ‘ passive ’
and ‘ active ’ obedience, a distinction often employed to present Anglicans as more politically
quiescent than Presbyterians, who often espoused resistance theory. Hobbes, Behemoth, pp. –.
For Payne’s rehearsal of the distinction, see Payne to Hobbes, , ibid., no. c.
'$ Payne to Hobbes, , ibid., no. c–d.
'% Payne to Sheldon,  Mar. , ibid., no. . Pocock’s edition misreads this as ‘ Grandees of
the west ’, but the word is clearly an abbreviation for Westminster and refers to the leading army
men (including Cromwell) who had established political control. The correct reading lends the
passage added significance, and may explain why word of Hobbes’s return appeared in the
regime’s news sheet in January of . Mercurius politicus, – Jan. , no. , .
'& Payne to Hobbes, , BL Harleian MS , no. a.

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  
Hobbes. Almost without exception these published responses answered Hobbes’s
Erastianism with unadulterated divine right defences of episcopacy highly reminiscent
of Laudian ecclesiology.'' Payne, however, eschewed such arguments. His was an effort
not to reproach Hobbes, but to persuade him ; thus, whether tactically or from
conviction, Payne set aside the divine right ecclesiology dominant within Interregnum
Anglicanism and defended episcopacy with bluntly utilitarian arguments.
Payne defended such clerical prerogatives as church courts and the right to crown
kings based upon their usefulness. He had an unelevated view of the act of consecration
as analogous to the creation of a doctor by any faculty, and he set aside ‘ whats alledged
for them out of scripture ’. The anointing of monarchs by bishops, far from offending
sovereigns, should please them, argued Payne, for ‘ it serves to render their persons as
sacred to the people, and thereby the people more ready to obey ’. More frankly still,
Payne argued that clerical claims on ‘ some power above in generall ’ was ‘ no more then
what all states whether Christian or heathen, that will enjoy the benefit of religion must
in some sort and degree allow their priests, at least in the opinion of the people, without
which religion would soon loose all its efficacy, and the publicke those benefits they
expect from it ’.'( Implicit in this remark – and in Payne’s insistence that ‘ our bishops
here eyther indeed had or must be thought to have had ’ divine power – was an esoteric
distinction between the wise few and the vulgar herd.') Throughout his dispute with
Hobbes, Payne showed himself willing to come some distance from high church claims
on divine and apostolic sources for episcopal authority. But his open admission that any
state that would ‘ make use of such instruments ’ as bishops must, as a ‘ piece of
prudence ’, allow certain honours and prerogatives to ‘ accrew to their particular ’
constituted a surprisingly Erastian appeal.'* In this regard, Payne’s arguments diverged
from the scriptural arguments found in the chief responses to Hobbes published by more
eminent Anglicans. In most clerical quarters, a demeaning internal exile under a hostile
regime had not readily given rise to such utilitarian ecclesiological thinking.
Payne was doubtless strategically wise to spurn scriptural or jure divino defences for
episcopacy in his dispute with Hobbes. Implicit throughout Payne’s letter is the
assumption that religion should chiefly be viewed as a useful tool of the state. It is the
functionality of episcopal religion, not its apostolic necessity, which was at issue between
Payne and Hobbes. In this regard letter  is an important piece of contemporary
evidence for those interested in Hobbes’s religion. There has long been a divide in the
literature on Hobbes, between those who understand him as a sincere, if unorthodox
Christian,(! and those who understand him as a secret disbeliever who wrote esoterically

'' See, for instance : Herbert Thorndike, Of the right of churches in a Christian state (London, ),
and Epilogue to the tragedy of the Church of England (London, ) ; John Bramhall, The catching of
Leviathan (London, ) ; Henry Hammond, A letter of resolution for six quaeres of present use in the
Church of England (London, ).
'( Payne to Hobbes, , BL Harleian MS , no. b–c.
') Payne to Hobbes, , ibid., no. c. Emphasis added.
'* Payne to Hobbes, , ibid., no. d.
(! The argument that Hobbes’s political theory requires a God in order to oblige men to leave
the state of nature was first made by Howard Warrender, The political philosophy of Hobbes : his theory
of obligation (Oxford, ). Warrender made Hobbes a kind of theist, but F. C. Hood pushed the
Warrender thesis one step further, and presented Hobbes as a Calvinist predestinarian.
F. C. Hood, The divine politics of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, ). This line of thinking has recently
culminated in A. P. Martinich, The two gods of ‘ Leviathan ’ : Thomas Hobbes on religion and politics
(Cambridge, ).

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   
on religious questions.(" There is not space here to undertake a detailed examination of
this dispute, but it might be said that Payne’s letter lends support to the latter point of
view. Payne’s letter to Hobbes takes for granted the functionality of religion and the
need for an esoteric method of public religious discourse. These assumptions, while not
logically incompatible with principled theological and ecclesiological debate in a strict
sense, shared few of the presuppositions that guided most religious controversy in
seventeenth-century England. A functional theory of religion and an esoteric method of
religious discourse also undermine somewhat the earnest scriptural argumentation
offered in Leviathan.(#
Payne, unlike Hobbes’s more illustrious and public clerical critics, accepted (at least
strategically) many of his assumptions about religion and its uses. He nevertheless
offered a shrewd critique of Hobbes’s ecclesiology, arguing that the maintenance of
clerical authority was necessary if religion was to retain its public utility. Men such as
Hammond, Thorndike, and Bramhall defended clerical power as divine ; but Payne,
more attentive to Hobbes’s concerns, defended it as useful. This clashed with Hobbes’s
own project, which was to preserve the usefulness of a modified Christian theology (as
a civil religion) while removing the political challenge presented by an independent
clergy. In the end, Payne failed to make his case, but his effort demonstrated a subtle
understanding of the Hobbesian project and its likely pitfalls. As Payne understood,
Hobbes sought to reconcile two ends : the maintenance of religion’s utility, and the
destruction of clerical authority. Payne feared that the latter mandate, by antagonizing
prevailing sentiment about the respect and authority due the church, would undermine
the former. In this Payne proved prescient : Hobbes’s anticlericalism and Erastianism,
more than any other feature of Leviathan, triggered the hostile reception that crippled his
philosophical project after the Restoration.

B R I T I S H L I B R A R Y, H A R L E I A N M S 6942, no. 153

Sir,($
I take very little delight to saw at a dispute ; lesse with a friend ; least of all with such a one whose
judgement I value so high, as that when it differs from mine I am apt to suspect my self in an errour.
Yet somewhat I concieve might be sayd, if not to justifye at least to excuse those actions of our
Bishops which in your opinion seem to deserve blame. I confesse for those whose designe it was to
throw down therby to possesse themselves of their revenues and power in the state, it was necessary
and not hard to represent all their actions in the foulest shape ; therby to make their persons and
office odious to the people whose hands they wer to use in that godly worke. But one who hath no
such designe nor any quarrell to that whole tribe upon provocation from some one or tow of them,
might allow them a fayrer interpretation. As their consecration of one another and ordination of
ministers, settinge aside whats alledged for them out of scripture, might be construed but as the
creation of a Doctour in any faculty by another of the same faculty.
(" Suffice it to note that commentators as diverse as Leo Strauss and Quentin Skinner have
agreed that, on religious questions, Hobbes did not write with sincerity. Leo Strauss, The political
philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Chicago, ), p.  ; Quentin Skinner, Reason and rhetoric in the
philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
(# The prevailing tenor of Payne’s letter to Hobbes only heightens doubts about the sincerity of
Leviathan’s earnest scriptural argumentation on the issue (for instance) of constituting clergy.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. –.
($ In this transcription, spelling and punctuation are maintained as in the original letter, but
abbreviations have been expanded for clarity. Harleian  is not conventionally foliated, but
rather the letters within it are each assigned a number. The four sides of letter  are indicated
by marks a–d.

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  
So the style of Providentia divina might be construed but in religious gratitude, not unproper for
men of that callinge, whose office it is, as well by their example as doctrine to teach all men to looke
up to that highest cause [b] in all things, whether good or bad. Upon which ground the style
of Dei gratia might be commended (if yet it were so) to be used by Kings, which … is … prejudice
to them.(%
The ceremony of annoyntinge or crowninge kings by the chiefe minister of the religion of a state
is no new invention of the Bishops but an ancient practise of our wiser ancestours, nor is it by any
that I know affirmed necessary otherwise than as custome may in some states make it seeme so ; and
ther seemes to be as good reason why wise kings should desire it as that the other should impose it,
in regard it serves to render their persons as sacred to the people, and therby the people more ready
to obey what is that foundation of power ; and beinge so advantageous to both kings and people can
give no just cause of prejudice or envy to eyther.
Their style of court Christian, which in their sense is but the same with spirituall (in regard the
proceedings and censures in them were such as were prescribed by Christ, and tended only to a
spirituall end) may be construed as well opposed to civill as to heathen. But grant that the Bishops
clayme a power or faculty to some purpose as derived on them from another principle then the
Kinge, do not physitians the like in their order and lawyers the like in theirs ? Yet both without
prejudice to the crowne. But the Bishops claime theirs from heaven, be it supposed so. Yet, if they
professe themselves and are with us as much subject to that civill power in the execution of the acts
of [c] their faculty as physitians and lawyers are in theirs, I cannot devise how they should be
more prejudiciall to it, since it is not the principle whence that faculty is derived, nor the faculty
it self that can hurt or prejudice none but the acts of that faculty, and if there be acknowledged in
my owne power of right to order how can I receive prejudice by them but by my owne consent and
then let me not blame others but my self. But the presbyter clayminge his power from the same
principle as the Bishops, herein differ from him that he professeth a right, nay in some cases a
necessity to execute the acts of that power even against the prohibition of a supreame civill
magistrate ; a difference so considerable to my understandinge as make ye one very subservient to
the other very inconsistent with any civil supremacy. And as for that clayme of some power above
in generall I conceive it is no more then what all states whether Christian or heathen that will enjoy
the benefit of religion must in some sort and degree allow their priests at least in the opinion of the
people, without which religion would soon loose all its efficacy, and the publicke those benefits they
expect from it. So that if our bishops here eyther indeed had or must be thought to have had some
such a power and made use of the meanes you mention to preserve the reputation of that power
without prejudice to civil supremacy it was but a piece of prudence necessary to their office and for
the publicke good. And if therby some advantages accrewed to their particular, they were no other
[d] then what all states must of necessity allow who will make use of such instruments.
By what I have sayd you may see how the same actions appeare in severall shapes accordinge
to the situation or disposition of the beholders eyes and if my fortune have set me in a more
favourable posture towards them so that I have regarded them with more affection then
judgement, which may not be impossible, I may deserve your pardon for putting you to that
penance of seeing my opinion.

(% The ellipses in this sentence occur in the manuscript and seem to indicate an exclusion of text.

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