The conformity of Thomas Hobbes: on the Restoration and Erastian episcopacy

In his Considerations upon the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners, and Religion of Thomas Hobbes, published in 1662, Hobbes addressed his Nonconformists critics:

But it  may be you will say, That the rest of the Clergy, Bishops, and Episcopal men, no Friends of yours, and against whose Office Mr. Hobbes never writ any thing, speak no better of his Religion than you do ...

What is of significance here is not the well-known clerical attacks on Hobbes but, rather, his insistence that he has "never writ any thing" against episcopal order. This, of course, provided a crucial basis for his post-1660 conformity to the restored Church of England. We might, however, somewhat question the statement that Hobbes "never writ any thing" against episcopal order. It is the case that Considerations itself carries a significant critique of the jure divino episcopal claims that had become fashionable and prominent during the Personal Rule. 

All Bishops are not in every point like one another. Some it  may be are content to hold their Authority from the King's Letters Patents; and these have no cause to be angry with Mr. Hobbes. Others will needs have somewhat more, they know not what, of Divine Right, to Govern by virtue of Imposition of Hands, and Consecration not acknowledging their Power from the King, but immediately from Christ. And these perhaps are they that are displeased with him, which he cannot help, nor has deserved ...

For Hobbes, therefore, an episcopal order which rests on an Erastian understanding was to be supported. By contrast, he is unapologetic in his rejection of jure divino episcopal claims. What makes this understanding significant is that it stood within a well-established tradition of English political and ecclesiastical thought. The learned John Selden, who voted against the abolition of episcopacy but supported the Parliament in the conflicts of the 1640s and participated in the Westminster Assembly, had given voice to the Erastian view:

However some of the Bishops pretend to be Jure Divino, yet the Practice of the Kingdom had ever been otherwise ... If you should say you hold your Land by Moses or God's Law, and would try it by that, you may perhaps lose, but by the Law of the Kingdom you are sure of it; so may the Bishops by this Plea of Jure Divino lose all ... They are equally mad who say Bishops are so Jure Divino that they must be continued, and they who say they are so Antichristian, that they must be put away ... To have no Ministers, but Presbyters, 'tis as in the Temporal State they should have no Officers but Constables.

Such an Erastian view of episcopacy, however, was not found only amongst moderate Parliamentarians. It was also the view of episcopal order held by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Charles II's Chancellor, and mastermind of the Restoration. In his account of the requirement of episcopal ordination by the 1662 Act of Uniformity, Clarendon clearly articulates an Erastian understanding, avoiding any jure divino claims:

That the Church of England judged none but her own children, nor did not determine that other Protestant Churches were without ordination. It is a thing without their cognizance; and most of the learned men of those Churches had made necessity the chief pillar to support that ordination of theirs. That necessity cannot be pleaded here, where ordination is given according to the unquestionable practice of the Church of Christ; if they who pretend foreign ordination are His Majesty's subjects, they have no excuse of necessity, for they might in all times have received Episcopal ordination; and so they did upon the matter renounce their own Church; if they are strangers, and pretend to preferment in this Church, they ought to conform, and to be subject to the laws of the kingdom, which concern only those who desire to live under the protection thereof. 

He went on to comment that such an Erastian view was clearly held by many of those who had been ordained by presbytery during the Interregnum:

and very many, who had received presbyterian orders in the late times, came very willingly to be ordained in the manner aforesaid by a bishop; and very few chose to quit or lose a parsonage or vicarage of any value upon that scruple.

The Erastian view of English episcopal order was, therefore, widely shared across the political nation. Indeed, Clarendon also viewed Laud's promotion of the jure divino view of episcopacy - bishops claiming an authority apart from Crown, Parliament, and law - as encouraging a clericalism which disrupted and disordered the communal relationships underpinning and sustaining the Church of England:

For, without doubt, many who loved the established government of the Church and the exercise of religion as it was used, and desired not a change in either ... [t]hey did observe the inferior clergy took more upon them than they had used to do, and did not live towards their neighbours of quality or their patrons themselves with that civility and condescension they had used to do; which disposed them likewise to a withdrawing their good countenance and good neighbourhood from them.

It was also the case that an Erastian view of episcopacy was found within the Restoration episcopate itself. Marcus Harmes' paper 'Protestant Bishops in Restoration England' notes:

bishops and their defenders more likely resorted to historical rather than spiritual grounds in their defence of episcopacy. Restoration churchmen found compelling statements of episcopal power in textual evidence which stressed the distinctively reformed character of the restored English bishops.

Harmes points particularly to the sermon preached by Gilbert Sheldon before Charles II, on 28th June 1660, the day of public thanksgiving for the Restoration:

Sheldon's sermon David's Deliverance celebrated the joint restoration of crown and episcopacy and offered a largely Erastian perspective on the functions of bishops.

Sheldon - who would, of course, be appointed by Charles as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1663 - studiously avoided explicit reference to episcopacy in the sermon, but episcopal order was caught up in Erastian fashion with his rejoicing in the restoration of "our Laws":

and what we have gained, the blessings of Peace, and Kingly Government the best preserver of them; a gracious PRINCE, and together with him our Laws, Liberties, Properties, the free exer­cise of Religious Duties, indeed all that is or ought to be dear to a Christian Common-wealth in this world.

Many 21st century Anglicans, of course, will be instantly dismissive of the Erastian case for episcopacy, condemning it as subordinating the Church to the State. Mindful, however, of how - as Hobbes, Seldon, and Clarendon knew all too well - de jure episcopacy enabled clericalism, we might be rather more understanding of the Erastian view. In it we can recognise a wise and prudent means of ensuring that episcopacy was exercised within - not standing over - the community, with law, other institutions, and communal relationships providing checks and balances on episcopal power and clerical pretensions.

Hobbes' Erastian view of episcopacy was distinctly unremarkable in Restoration England. With deep roots in the political nation, and shared by both parish clergy and an episcopate intensely cautious about repeating Laud's political mistakes, Hobbes' understanding of bishops deriving their authority from the laws of England and the Royal Supremacy - rather than exalted jure divino claims - was a crucial aspect of the Restoration settlement, making for the peace of the realm and the Church. It was the Erastianism of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, not the unsettling, disruptive high-flying claims of the 1630s, which was characteristic of Restoration conformity.