Anticlerical legacies is the first comprehensive study of the reception of Thomas Hobbes’s ideas by the English deists and freethinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Hobbes was one of the most important English philosophers of all time, and his theory had a long-lasting impact on modern political and religious thought. The book offers a new perspective on the afterlife of Hobbes’s philosophy, focusing on the readers who were most sympathetic to Hobbes’s critical and radical ideas in the decades following his death. It investigates how Hobbes’s ideas shaped the English anticlerical campaign that peaked in the early eighteenth century and was essential for the emergence of the early Enlightenment. The book shows that a large number of writers—Charles Blount, John Toland, Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, and others—were more Hobbesian than has been appreciated. Not only did they engage with Hobbes’s ideas consistently, they invoked his authority at a time when doing so was highly unpopular. Most fundamentally, they carried on Hobbes’s war against the kingdom of darkness and used various Hobbesian weapons for their own war against priestcraft. Through analysis of the ways in which they developed their nuanced theories and conducted their heated dialogues with the orthodoxy, the deists and freethinkers emerge from this study as sophisticated and valuable theorists in their own right. The case of Hobbes and his successors demonstrates that anticlericalism was a key component of a much larger programme whose primary aim was to secure civil harmony, peace, and stability.