Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-p566r Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-17T19:03:27.032Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

John Locke, Toleration, and Samuel Parker's A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1669): A New Manuscript

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2021

J. C. Walmsley*
Affiliation:
Independent scholar
Felix Waldmann*
Affiliation:
Christ's College, Cambridge
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: j_c_walmsley@hotmail.com
Corresponding author. E-mail: few23@cam.ac.uk
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The following article prints a new manuscript by John Locke: a commentary on A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1669) by Samuel Parker (1640–88), the religious controversialist. Locke's interest in Parker's work has been known to scholars since 1954, when notes by Locke of roughly one thousand words were purchased by the Bodleian Library. The article reports the discovery of an unknown portion of this commentary: a manuscript of roughly three thousand words in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The article transcribes the manuscript, reconstructs its provenance, and reexamines Locke's engagement with Parker's Discourse. This engagement occurred in the period following Locke's composition of the first recensions of his Essay Concerning Toleration (1667–8), as Locke contemplated a refutation of Parker's ecclesiology. The discovered manuscript provides the first evidence of Locke's commitment to the principle that minimalistic theism would suffice for peaceable coexistence in any civil society.

Type
Articles
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

In April 1667, John Locke departed his lodgings in Christ Church, Oxford for the London household of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Ashley.Footnote 1 Although Locke's day-to-day activities are not precisely known, the writing of the earliest drafts of his Essay Concerning Toleration occurred during this period, specifically after the publication of Sir Charles Wolseley's Liberty of Conscience, the Magistrates Interest in the autumn of 1667.Footnote 2 The impetus for the Essay is a matter of debate. The fall of the Earl of Clarendon after the Dutch raid on the Medway (19–24 June 1667) had spurred nonconformists to press for a new church settlement, reversing or ameliorating the persecutory regime that had taken hold since the Restoration, when Nonconformist worship was assailed by the successive passage of the Act of Uniformity (1662), the Conventicle Act (1664), and the Five Mile Act (1665). The possibility that Charles II would issue a bill for the “comprehension” or “indulgence” of Nonconformity—making his rule congenial to the sizeable corps of Dissenters it had previously discountenanced by comprehending their worship within the Church of England or indulging their worship outside it—prompted a wave of publications on the justification or dangers of religious toleration.Footnote 3 Locke's position on this matter had evolved markedly since 1660–62 and his Two Tracts on Government. The latter had defended the power of the magistrate to “impose and determine” aspects of worship—the wearing of the surplice, for example—that Dissenters had described as “adiaphora” or “things indifferent” to the question of salvation.Footnote 4 The stringency of the Tracts stemmed, in part, from an evident fear of the return of seditious violence, which defenders of the Church of England had attributed to the rise of Nonconformity during the Civil Wars. Yet Locke's position subsequently altered, particularly after his exposure to the religious pluralism of Cleves in 1665–6, when he visited the duchy in the train of a diplomatic mission.Footnote 5 By the following year, having commenced a draft of the Essay, Locke would move towards the rudiments of his Epistola de Tolerantia, in which the imposition of uniformity in matters of worship and “speculative belief” was criticized on several interdependent grounds: soteriological, epistemic, and political.

Locke's path to this position is the subject of considerable scholarship, lately enriched by the meticulous work of Jacqueline Rose and Jeffrey Collins.Footnote 6 The textual milestones on this path—Locke's Two Tracts, his Reasons for Tolerateing Papists Equally with Others, and his Essay—are typically studied alongside a set of notes to A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, a work of 1669 by the Church of England cleric and controversialist Samuel Parker (1640–88). The notes were purchased by the Bodleian Library from a private owner in 1954 and first published—in part—in Maurice Cranston's John Locke, A Biography (1957).Footnote 7 Mark Goldie subsequently provided an abbreviated transcription of the notes in his edition of Locke's Political Essays (1997), after which J. R. Milton and Philip Milton included a full-scale transcription in their Clarendon edition of Locke's Essay Concerning Toleration.Footnote 8 The notes—particularly in those places in which Locke voiced a judgment of his own and departed from ad litteram transcription—appeared to be preparatory to a direct response to Parker's Discourse. But no such work was ever published and no further evidence of the project appeared to survive.

The Miltons were the first to observe that the notes on Parker appeared to be “stray survivors from a considerably fuller body of notes that have since been lost.”Footnote 9 The following article confirms the Miltons’ judgment. In 2016, J. C. Walmsley discovered a set of notes in Locke's handwriting, which constitute at least part—and perhaps all—of the missing notes that the Miltons conjecturally described. The notes are now preserved in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: a manuscript bifolium (now disjoined) of approximately three thousand words, with Locke's remarks and queries regarding the preface and first 158 pages of Parker's Discourse, presented under the headings “Magistrate” and “Church.” The previously known Bodleian manuscripts comprise three bifolia, the first a paraphrase of pages 1–64 of the Discourse, the second a set of queries regarding pages 11–30, and the third a set of queries regarding pages 144–53. Until its discovery in 2016, the Chapel Hill manuscript was unknown to scholars: no publications refer to its existence and no catalogue advertising its sale can be found. The following article provides the first discussion and transcription of the manuscript. It begins by contextualizing Parker's Discourse (section I), before addressing the implications of the discovery for future studies of Locke's theory of toleration and his authorial and secretarial practices, c.1669—in particular, it draws attention to the principal significance of the manuscript, as the first evidence of Locke's commitment to the doctrine that minimalistic theism would suffice for peaceable coexistence in any civil society (section II). The article then turns to a reconstruction of the provenance, structure, and content of the manuscript (section III) and it concludes with a transcription of the manuscript, and a retranscription of its counterparts in the Bodleian (section IV). In providing this full-scale transcription, the article constitutes the first complete edition of Locke's extant commentary on Parker.

Fig. 1. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Wilson Library, Southern Historical Collection, 03406 (Folder 323), fo. 1r.

I

Parker was born in Northampton in September 1640.Footnote 10 He entered Wadham College, Oxford in September 1656,Footnote 11 where he matriculated in October 1657, and graduated BA in February 1659.Footnote 12 His reputation at this time was apparently as an ascetic puritan. According to his vita in Anthony Wood's Athenae Oxonienses (1691–2), Parker was “so zealous and constant a hearer of the prayers and sermons … a receiver of the sacraments and such like, that he was esteemed one of the preciousest young men in the university.”Footnote 13 A contretemps with the warden of Wadham, Walter Blandford (1615/16–75), impelled him to enter Trinity College, Oxford in October 1660, where he graduated MA in July 1663,Footnote 14 and began an association with Ralph Bathurst (1619/20–1704), a fellow of the college.Footnote 15 Parker would later attribute to Bathurst's influence his “first Rescue from the Chains and Fetters of an unhappy Education.”Footnote 16 This eschewal of puritanism was followed swiftly by Parker's ordination in February 1665.Footnote 17 In the same year, his Tentamina de Deo (1665) was dedicated to Gilbert Sheldon (1598–1677), the Archbishop of Canterbury.Footnote 18 The Tentamina was reviewed positively by Henry Oldenburg (c.1619–77) in the first volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,Footnote 19 and supplemented by two elucidations, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie (1666) and An Account of the Nature and Extent of the Divine Dominion and Goodnesse (1666), which were reissued in a conjoined second edition in 1667.Footnote 20 These works had several preoccupations: positing a compatibility between the new natural philosophy and “scholastic theology,” disinfesting Christianity of Platonism, defending the neurology of Thomas Willis (1621–75),Footnote 21 and attacking the Origenist position on the preexistence of the soul and the work of its alleged revivalists Henry More (1614–87) and Joseph Glanvill (1636–80).Footnote 22 With the nomination of John Wilkins (1614–72), Parker was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in June 1666.Footnote 23 In “Michaelmas 1667”Footnote 24 he was chosen to serve as Sheldon's domestic chaplain. In October he was made rector of Chartham in Kent and created MA by incorporation in Cambridge.Footnote 25

In roughly November 1669, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie was published in London, bearing “1670” as its date of publication. Parker's publisher John Martyn (c.1619–80) had entered the work with the Stationers’ Company in September 1669.Footnote 26 A second edition—described as such in the term catalogues, but not the work itself—was issued in February 1670,Footnote 27 with minor corrections to the signatures and pagination, as well as the interpolation of the adjective “External” before the word “Religion” in the subtitle: Wherein The Authority of the Civil Magistrate Over the Consciences of Subjects in Matters of External Religion is Asserted. The Miltons describe Parker's work as a “belated” contribution to the debate of 1667–8 over the prospect of a bill of indulgence or comprehension.Footnote 28 The titular allusion to Richard Hooker's Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (1594–7) served to align its argument with the “the flagship text of late-Elizabethan conformity,”Footnote 29 associating Hooker with a campaign that had—through Sheldon's offices—orchestrated a barrage of rejoinders to tolerationists in the previous year.Footnote 30 A third but substantively unaltered edition, anonymous like the first and second, was issued in November 1670, although dated “1671,”Footnote 31 to coincide with the publication of a separate and still anonymous Defence and Continuation of the Ecclesiastical Politie (1671),Footnote 32 in which Parker reiterated his initial case at greater length—the Discourse was 326 pages, the Defence was 750 pages—and responded to Truth and Innocence Vindicated … A Survey of a Discourse Concerning Ecclesiastical Polity (1669), by John Owen (1616–83), the doyen of Congregationalism.Footnote 33

Owen had initially asked Richard Baxter (1615–91) to respond to Parker.Footnote 34 Baxter having declined, Owen completed the task himself, in a point-by-point confutation of the first six chapters of Parker's work. This was accompanied, in 1669, by A Case of Conscience … Together with Animadversions on a New Book, Entituled, Ecclesiastical Polity by John Humfrey (c.1621–1719), the Nonconformist proponent of comprehension. The impetus for Owen's and Humfrey's interventions was, in part, Parker's unusually intemperate style.Footnote 35 The Discourse teemed with aspersions about Nonconformists: “Brain-sick people,” “Madmen,” “vermin.”Footnote 36 Parker's subsequent preferment is often attributed to the depth of this commitment to “Sheldonianism.”Footnote 37 In May 1670 he was appointed archdeacon of Canterbury.Footnote 38 In July 1671 he was preferred to the living of Ickham in Kent.Footnote 39 In November 1671 he was awarded a DD and “perhaps D. Med.” in Cambridge.Footnote 40 In November 1672 he was admitted to a prebend in Canterbury.Footnote 41 Five months earlier, in June, a posthumous work by John Bramhall (1594–1663) was entered in the term catalogues: Bishop Bramhall's Vindication of Himself and the Episcopal Clergy, from the Presbyterian Charge of Popery, as it is Managed by Mr. Baxter in his Treatise of the Grotian Religion (1672).Footnote 42 Parker contrived to adjoin a separate treatise to Bramhall's critique of Baxter's Grotian Religion Discovered (1658), in which he renewed the Discourse's attack on Nonconformity. Baxter contemplated a response,Footnote 43 but it was Andrew Marvell (1621–78), the parliamentarian and poet, who stridently intervened.

In around April 1672, Marvell commenced work on The Rehearsal Transpros'd.Footnote 44 He completed it in September 1672; it was published in December, pirated twice, and swiftly followed by a second edition in around January 1673.Footnote 45 In response, Parker reprinted his preface to Bramhall's Vindication and completed A Reproof to the Rehearsal Transpros'd (c. May 1673),Footnote 46 to which Marvell answered with a Second Part to his Rehearsal (November 1673), subjecting Parker to withering criticism, partly in the form of a derisive biography.Footnote 47 The controversy soon widened. Henry Stubbe's Rosemary and Bayes (1672) attacked both Marvell and Parker. John Humfrey's The Authority of the Magistrate, about Religion (1672) and Robert Ferguson's A Sober Enquiry into the Nature, Measure, and Principle of Moral Virtue (1673) criticized Parker, without defending Marvell. Edmund Hickeringill's Gregory, Father-Greybeard (1673) defended Parker—and criticized Marvell sufficiently to warrant the latter's ridicule in the Second Part to his Rehearsal.

The debate made Parker synonymous with hierocratic intolerance.Footnote 48 In 1673, this notoriety was compounded by an embarrassing miscalculation, committed in Parker's role of licenser to the press, which he held ex officio as a chaplain to Sheldon. Parker had licensed Mr. Baxter Baptiz'd in Bloud; or, A Sad History of the Unparallel'd Cruelty of the Anabaptists in New England (1673), a work narrated as a truthful tale of the murder by Nonconformist sectarians of “Benjamin Baxter,” a Church of England minister.Footnote 49 In May 1673 the Privy Council investigated the work and found its claims to be entirely fictitious.Footnote 50 Parker was compelled to acknowledge his error before the council,Footnote 51 as John Darby (d. 1704)—in all probability the printer of both parts of The Rehearsal Transpros'd—published an account of the affair.Footnote 52 Notwithstanding his appointment in August 1673 as master of the Hospital of Eastbridge in Canterbury, Parker's rise stuttered to a halt.Footnote 53 In 1673, he seems to have withdrawn from London to Kent, where he remained until 1684.Footnote 54 He declined to publish again until 1678, when he issued his Disputationes de Deo et Providentia Divina. The death of Sheldon in November 1677,Footnote 55 followed by the appointment of Parker's rival William Sancroft (1617–93) to the archbishopric of Canterbury, ended Parker's hopes for promotion to a bishopric—although only temporarily.Footnote 56

In the 1680s, Parker continued to write on matters of theology. A Demonstration of the Divine Authority of the Law of Nature and of the Christian Religion (1681) was joined by The Case of the Church of England Briefly and Truly Stated (1681), An Account of the Government of the Christian Church (1683) and In Religion and Loyalty (1684–5), arguing variously for the necessity of absolute obedience to a temporal sovereign and iure divino episcopacy. The accession of James II changed Parker's fortunes practically overnight.Footnote 57 In July–August 1686 James nominated Parker to succeed John Fell (1625–86) as Bishop of Oxford.Footnote 58 In the following year, Parker endorsed James's Declaration of Indulgence.Footnote 59 In August 1687 he was nominated president of Magdalen College, Oxford, designedly to pressure the fellowship into admitting Roman Catholics.Footnote 60 A purge of twenty-five fellows in November was followed, in the next month, by the publication of Parker's Reasons for Abrogating the Test (1687), which questioned the Church of England's stance on transubstantiation.Footnote 61 Parker's subsequent presidency was characterized by suspicion of his crypto-Catholicism, but it was cut short by illness. He died in March 1688 and he was buried in Magdalen's chapel, without a memorial. His self-authored and tendentious Latin epitaph is reported by Wood:

II

There is no evidence that Locke and Parker ever met, either during the period when they overlapped in Oxford (c.1656–c.1664) or at any subsequent time, prior to Parker's death, when Locke resided in England (1664–75, 1679–83). There are no extant letters between Locke and Parker, and there is no evidence that they ever exchanged letters. A letter of August 1687 from James Tyrrell (1642–1719) to Locke, then an exile in the Netherlands, refers to Parker as “our old Friend Dr: P.,”Footnote 63 but the intimation is sarcastic. Parker's name occurs on only three further occasions in Locke's correspondence: in a letter from Tyrrell of November 1687, referring to Parker's intrusion as president of Magdalen,Footnote 64 in a letter from Tyrrell of July 1690, briskly complimenting Parker's Demonstration … of the Law of Nature,Footnote 65 and in a letter from Benjamin Furly (1636–1714), recalling that he and Locke had “read together” a satire on Parker's Reasons for Abrogating the Test.Footnote 66 Locke's booklists record a copy Gilbert Burnet's eight-page critique (1688) of Parker's Reasons for Abrogating the Test, and a copy of Parker's Reproof to Marvell's Rehearsal Transpros'd.Footnote 67 Locke possessed two copies of the First Part of Marvell's work—the pirated imprint of the first edition and bona fide second edition—and one copy of its Second Part,Footnote 68 a copy of an anonymous contribution to the Parker–Marvell controversy,Footnote 69 and a copy of Hickeringill's Gregory, Father-Greybeard.Footnote 70

Martin Dzelzainis and Annabel Patterson have contended that Marvell, in his search for exempla of “disreputable conduct by figures in the past who could be seen as analogies for Parker,”Footnote 71 made use of Locke's personal library while writing the First and Second parts of his Rehearsal Transpros'd. As an impecunious parliamentarian, deprived of the money to purchase books by the prorogation of Parliament between April 1671 and February 1673, Marvell appears to have relied on the library of his patron, Arthur Annesley (1614–86), the first Earl of Anglesey. The latter's vast collection of books contained all of the titles cited by Marvell in the Rehearsal Transpros'd, save for six works in specific editions that happen to be present in Locke's booklists: Sir William Davenant's Gondibert (1651),Footnote 72 Samuel Butler's Hudibras (1663–4),Footnote 73 Hickeringill's Gregory, Father-Greybeard, Richard Hooker's Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (1666), Martin Del Rio's Disquisitionum magicarum (1600),Footnote 74 and Ammianus Marcellinus’ Rerum gestarum (1609).Footnote 75 The difficulty with this claim is that, excepting the 1666 edition of Hooker, which Locke never owned,Footnote 76 and a copy of Gondibert, which he demonstrably kept in his rooms in Christ Church in July 1681,Footnote 77 we cannot establish when Locke acquired each title, and thus whether they were accessible to Marvell in 1671–3. Marginal dashes and a page list in Locke's copy of Hickeringill suggest that Locke read the work, but this has no bearing on when he acquired it.Footnote 78 Locke's copies of Butler, Del Rio, and Ammianus show no signs of consultation by Marvell, although one should note the intriguing presence of a versified Latin translation in Locke's hand on the flyleaf of his copy of Hudibras, which one might—outlandishly—attribute to Marvell's poetical influence.Footnote 79 Locke's opinion of Marvell's Rehearsal is unknown—his copies do not bear any annotations and he does not refer to Marvell's work in any extant manuscript or publication—and no evidence survives to show that he ever met Marvell, yet an observer as informed as Roger L'Estrange (1616–1704) could wager in 1681 that Marvell was “very particularly acquainted” with the author of a Letter from a Parliament man to his Friend, Concerning the Proceedings of the House of Commons (1675), a pamphlet that probably issued from Shaftesbury's circle.Footnote 80

Notwithstanding the possibility of his collaboration with Marvell, Locke's interest in Parker is recoverable only from his notes to the latter's Discourse. Locke bought a copy of Parker's work soon after the publication of the first edition. A record of the purchase in his memorandum book for 1669 (“Parkers disc.—0—3 〈shillings〉—6 〈pence〉”) occurs between entries on 15 November and 2 December,Footnote 81 which one might safely conjecture delimits the period during which he acquired Parker's work.Footnote 82 If the record of purchase is a terminus a quo in dating his notes to the Discourse, a terminus ad quem is provided by the endorsement he supplied to a portion of the notes: “69.” This is a notation that Locke would have used until 25 March 1670,Footnote 83 although it is possible that Locke might have emended his notes after that date without recording the day or year of the emendation. Locke's notes match only the pagination of the first edition, which could provide an additional temporal delimitation: if the second or third edition were available, Locke might have used it. The absence of the Discourse from Locke's booklists—or any extant copy that can be identified as Locke's own, or any references within the notes to other publications—complicates the task of establishing when Locke desisted in commenting on the work, which is only compounded by the mystery surrounding Locke's activities as a factotum in Ashley's household, c.1667–9.

Locke's intentions in writing his Essay Concerning Toleration remain obscure. The recent recovery of his Reasons for Tolerateing Papists Equally with Others has clarified the matter slightly,Footnote 84 but it is difficult to favour one of several possibilities in explaining the Essay's aims. The Reasons and the Essay might have originated in Ashley's instruction to formulate a rationale for an indulgence of Nonconformists, or even Catholics, in anticipation of Charles II's or the Cabal ministry's designs after the fall of Clarendon. Yet Ashley's inclinations are difficult unambiguously to reconstruct between the aborted Declaration of Indulgence of 1662 and the Treaty of Dover of 1670. The Miltons are thus rightly cautious of attributing the Essay to Ashley's direction, as “no evidence whatever has survived” of it.Footnote 85 The intended audience for the Essay is similarly ambiguous: its use of the second person is too informal to suggest Charles II as a reader, at least.Footnote 86 It is clear that Locke—whether independently of Ashley's purposes, in anticipation of them, or by Ashley's direction—had begun to familiarize himself with arguments in favor of the toleration of Nonconformists in late 1667, when Wolseley's Liberty of Conscience was published. The latter was issued by a coalition of printers and writers surrounding the Earl of Anglesey, including Marvell's publisher Nathaniel Ponder (1640–99) and John Darby.Footnote 87 But the evidence of Locke's connection to the group is tenuous before March 1670, when the “longstanding enmity” that had characterized Anglesey's relationship with Ashley was briefly set aside after the renewal of the Conventicle Act by the Cavalier Parliament.Footnote 88 Ashley dined with Anglesey on several occasions in 1671–2,Footnote 89 and he protected Ponder in January 1673 when the latter was censured for publishing the First part of Marvell's Rehearsal Transpros'd.Footnote 90 It is not hard to imagine Ashley encouraging Locke in a similar enterprise, shortly after the publication of the Discourse. One of the three extant library catalogues of Ashley's grandson, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), records a copy of the Discourse, and one could plausibly assume that it was the copy used by Locke in preparing his notes on Parker's work.Footnote 91 This is not to endorse the contention, pace Dzelzainis and Patterson, that the notes reveal Locke “bringing his views closer to [Ashley's].”Footnote 92 This begs the question. After all, what were Ashley's views? More objectionably, it severs the threads of continuity in emphasis and argumentation between the notes and Locke's Essay Concerning Toleration.

The notes reveal Locke's minute attention to Parker's reasoning. In the Chapel Hill manuscript, more so than in the Bodleian manuscripts, Locke engages in extensive transcription of Parker's wording, studded with queries marked “Q” for “Quaere” and signed “JL” or “L.” The format of the notes is discussed below, but it is important to note the manner in which the notes move from excerpting the text under review to formulating a pointed response or reflection. The effect is similar in the Reasons, in which Locke used Wolseley's arguments as a foil to consider whether the toleration of Nonconformists would inadvertently favor Catholics or whether the toleration of Catholics might find its rationale in the “interest” or prosperity it entrained. Locke's Essay would echo Wolseley on this point, in buttressing a case for toleration by referring to its promotion of domestic “riches,”Footnote 93 and it is not implausible to associate Locke's interest in Parker with an anxiety about the latter's criticism of the court's warmth for Wolseley's politique reasoning, as Collins has recently argued.Footnote 94 In Collins's judgment, Parker jolted Locke out of his sympathy for Wolseley's position, and towards the elaboration of a clearer defence of freedom of speculative belief, detachable from any consideration of the magistrate's “interest.” But this difficulty constitutes only one portion of Locke's transcriptions and queries, which touch on several components of Parker's argument.

The earliest scholarship on the latter had tended misleadingly to characterize it as “Hobbism pure and simple.”Footnote 95 Parker's language, stretching back to a laudatory citation of De Cive in Of the Nature and Extent of God's Dominion (1666),Footnote 96 had drawn on Hobbes's metaphors, to the extent that Parker himself admitted his Discourse had “savour[ed] not a little of the Leviathan.”Footnote 97 It is now generally accepted, however, that the resemblance of Parker's ecclesiology to Hobbes's in Leviathan is “overstated,”Footnote 98 or arose merely from the latter's conceptual and rhetorical “proximity” to the Erastianism countenanced by Anglican royalists after 1660.Footnote 99 Parker never accepted Hobbes's hyper-Erastian empowerment of the civil sovereign to dictate the theology of the established church. Perhaps more importantly, he never endorsed iure humano episcopacy, which he later decried in criticisms of Edward Stillingfleet's Irenicum (1659) and Mischief of Separation (1680).Footnote 100 The irony of Parker's intentions, supposedly to associate Wolseley's “interest”-centered tolerationism with the chimera of a state grounded exhaustively in the areligious self-interest of its inhabitants, or Hobbesianism simpliciter,Footnote 101 was that it was countervailed by a defence of temporal sovereignty so full-throated that it was—in Locke's judgment—indistinguishable from “Mr Hobbs's doctrine.”Footnote 102 The accusation was characteristic of the contemporary association of magisterial intervention in religious worship with “Hobbism” pur sang, and it betokened the flexible and polemical properties of that label. But the accusation stuck insistently to Parker for the remainder of his life. In March 1685 Henry Dodwell (1641–1711) could assure a correspondent that his friend's Discourse was not congenial to Hobbes, in spite of appearances.Footnote 103

Parker used the Discourse to defend the royal prerogative in “Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction,” while insisting that it ought not to be exercised by Charles II in favour of Nonconformity: Charles's principal obligation was to preserve the peace of his subjects, which was securable only via uniformity in outward religious practices. Freedom of “conscience,” in Rose's summary of Parker's reasoning, “was a freedom of judgement, not a freedom of action in worship.”Footnote 104 This was the significance of Parker's interpolation of External in the title page of the second edition. He reserved to the magistrate a power to impose “outward Practices” in religious worship. These “publique and visible” practices were controllable by civil authority, nourishing the allegation of Parker's sympathy for Hobbes's vision of a sacerdotal magistrate. But conscience, Parker maintained, was nonetheless inviolable.

These arguments plainly offended the principles that Locke had adumbrated in the manuscripts of his Essay Concerning Toleration in 1667–8. Parker permitted freedom of speculative belief, but insisted on outward conformity. The Essay had claimed that imposition in matters of conscience lay outside the competence of the magistrate, and this argument applied equally to imposition in matters of worship. Parker's attempt to disassociate freedom of conscience from freedom of external worship was an ingenious response to this proposition, but it could hardly persuade Locke that compulsion of external worship was compatible with the inviolable status of one's conscience. Locke's difficulty lay partly in how he could explain why this was specious, but a more urgent problem stemmed from his claim that religious sects were persecutable if their beliefs or their worship impinged upon civil matters. Catholics were excepted from toleration precisely because their theology required a commitment to the universal sovereignty of the Pope. If Catholicism was intolerable on this basis then so too was any religious sect whose doctrines carried deleterious implications for civil peace. Yet this was the nub of Parker's indictment of Nonconformity, and its force is obvious when one peruses Locke's commentary on the Discourse.

The Chapel Hill manuscript, in particular, focuses on Parker's insistence that unchecked Nonconformity would revive the antinomian political theology of the Civil Wars. Parker's “ecclesiastical politie” is invested with the necessary power to ensure the safety of its subjects. In the Chapel Hill manuscript, Locke concentrates on the scope of this power. “He sets noe bounds to conscience how far it is or is not to be tolerated,” Locke notes, before asking, “What are the due bounds of ecclesiastical authority?”Footnote 105 Is anything, in matters of conscience, invulnerable to the oversight of the magistrate or the established church? Parker inveighs against the invasion by the Catholic Church of the “Fundamental Liberties of mankind.”Footnote 106 But “[w]hat,” Locke asks, “[are] those fundamental libertys of mankinde … which the church of Rome hath invaded?”Footnote 107 Locke adverts to the inconsistency in Parker's reasoning: Rome is contemptible because it invades precisely the liberties that the Discourse denies to Nonconformists.

The notes turn to Parker's emphasis on outward conformity. The dictates of conscience are not matters that can concern the magistrate until they issue in external actions. Only “outward Actions,” Parker argues, are “subject to the Cognizance of Humane Laws.”Footnote 108 “Opinions”—“moral or religious”—are outside the magistrate's cognizance until they are instantiated by action. But “are [opinions] not capable of haveing any influence upon the Publique good or ill of man kinde?” Locke asks.Footnote 109 If the measure of a magistrate's authority is the preservation of civil peace, the latter would require the invigilation of “opinions.” Parker insists that inward judgment is “inviolate.”Footnote 110 If its protection against civil compulsion is assured, “it matters not … what restraints are laid upon our Outward Actions.”Footnote 111 But this can only be true if our outward actions do not violate the dictates of our conscience: “whether … [this] be true in any thing but barely what I judg in its self indifferent,” Locke notes, “but what becomes of those things I judg unlawfull”?Footnote 112 Parker alternates between treating the debate as one pertaining restrictedly to “ceremonies,” which could be said to encompass only adiaphora, and one pertaining capaciously to “religion,” which must encompass one's speculative beliefs, including in matters that are not “indifferent.” Which is it? Locke demands. “Whether haveing in the foregoing §§s & this spoken only of ceremonys he doth not here call ceremonys religion”?Footnote 113 Locke quotes Parker in noting that the “dutys” of religious devotion are not “essentiall parts of religion.” “Devotion” is performed only and superfluously because it tends “to the practise of vertue.”Footnote 114 Following Parker's own logic, imposition in matters of “ceremony” must be dispensable to the “essentiall” object of religious belief, making any insistence on imposition in external worship rather similar to the politique position that Parker ostensibly eschews.

This precedes the most remarkable statement in the Chapel Hill manuscript. Parker observes that “Religion … is the strongest Bond of Laws, and only support of Government.” “[W]hen the Obligations of Conscience and Religion are Cashier'd, men can have no higher Inducements to Loyalty and Obedience, than the Considerations of their own Private interest and Security.”Footnote 115 Parker, however, neglects to define “religion,” yet again. Is it outward conformity, in our performance of mandatory ceremonies, or inward belief, in our assent to an article of faith? After summarizing Parker's position on religious belief as a source of “obligation to obedience,” preferable simply to “self interest,” Locke asks whether “religion” should extend “any farther then a beleife of god in general. but not of this particular worship.”Footnote 116 Belief in God “in general”—detached from any ceremonial or doctrinal appurtenances—is sufficient to ensure the moral conduct of a political subject. Parker's insistence on particular ceremonies in religion—“why soe much stress & stir about ceremonys,”Footnote 117 Locke asks—distracts from the possibility of civil coexistence on the basis of mere theism. It is clear that Locke arrived at this position after carefully considering Parker's reasoning. The compositional layers of the manuscript show that he returned to Parker's point on our “obligation to obedience” only having read and summarized the ensuing pages of the Discourse: his comment on “beleife of god in general” is an interlineation.

The Bodleian manuscripts of Locke's commentary on Parker do not refer to this position. They echo many portions of the Chapel Hill manuscript. “What fundamentall libertys of mankinde were invaded by the church of Rome,” Locke asks again, in one of the Bodleian manuscripts.Footnote 118 They also elaborate on queries that the Chapel Hill manuscript presents only elliptically. In the latter, Locke notes that Parker supposes Nonconformists to be “always in mistakes.” As Locke adds, however, the knowledge of whether their practices or beliefs are erroneous is indeterminable in “indifferent” matters, which is precisely why they are “indifferent.” The Bodleian manuscripts expand on this point by asking whether Parker supposes “the magistrates power to proceed from his being in the right.”Footnote 119 This would postulate a basis for the magistrate's authority—rectitude in theology—that is separable from merely “preserving peace.” But how, Locke asks, can one resolve a contradiction between the imperatives of rectitude in theology and the imperatives of civil peace? The power to preserve the latter, the Bodleian manuscripts continue, “is by every sober man to be allowd.”Footnote 120 But either it can extend to any religious belief that the magistrate considers dangerous to civil peace, a point that is not short of “Mr Hobbs's doctrine,” or it cannot, in which case Parker concedes that there must be limits to the magistrate's authority. If those limits are determined by theology, the debate will return to the same impasse that characterizes the question of “indifferency.” In place of arguing over what is or is not indifferent, Locke implies in the Chapel Hill manuscript, it is easier merely to stipulate a subject's “beleife of god in general.”

The discovery of the Chapel Hill manuscript reveals that Locke had reached this conclusion by c.1669, where it had previously been thought that he had not contemplated it any earlier than c.1671, the point from which the Miltons had dated three manuscript additions to Locke's Essay Concerning Toleration.Footnote 121 These alterations, the Miltons maintained, expressed a “very different outlook” to the Essay: “a significant shift away from the views that Locke had maintained in 1667 and towards those expressed in the Epistola de Tolerantia.”Footnote 122 One of these alterations revealed Locke's hesitation to endorse the stance he had adopted in the “first draft” of the Essay, in which the magistrate was empowered to suppress religious dissent “if the professors of any worship shall grow soe numerous & unquiet as manifestly to threaten disturbance to the state.”Footnote 123 Instead, Locke deprived the magistrate of this power which, if consistently applied, would extend to any “things” which may “occasion disorder or conspiracy in a commonwealth.” “All discontented & active men must be removd,” Locke reasoned, in a reductio ad absurdum, “& whispering must be lesse tolerated then preaching.”Footnote 124 Nonconformism, Locke adds, will only become seditious when it is persecuted. The premises of this position are absent from the earlier versions of the Essay, the Chapel Hill manuscript, and the Bodleian manuscripts of Locke's commentary on Parker, the latter of which expressly concede to the magistrate a power to “restraine seditious doctrines.”Footnote 125 The second and third alterations reported by the Miltons are different, in that both are anticipated by the Chapel Hill manuscript. First, in his revision to the Essay, Locke notes that the determination of “indifferency” is a matter for the individual believer: “when I am worshiping my god in a way I thinke he has prescribd & will approve of I cannot alter omit or adde any circumstance in that which I thinke the true way of worship.”Footnote 126 Second, in his revision to the Essay, Locke notes that atheism is not entitled to toleration. Without “beleif of a deitie,” Locke writes, “a man is to be counted noe other then one of the most dangerous sorts of wild beasts & soe uncapeable of all societie.”Footnote 127 Locke's exception of atheists from toleration, reiterated infamously in the Epistola, is formulated here for the first time. Yet the minimalistic theism in the Chapel Hill manuscript—“beleife of god in general”—is a conceptual prerequisite of both approaches: the “individualistic”Footnote 128 notion of “indifferency” expounded by the revised Essay and the conceit that the absence of a belief in God is an insuperable barrier to our coexistence in any civil society, a doctrine that Locke shared with Parker, and many others, but distinctively coupled with minimalistic theism as its corollary. We now know that both doctrines are present—if only inchoately—as early as 1669.

This brings us to an obvious question about the Bodleian and Chapel Hill manuscripts: their purposes. Locke's queries and responses in the manuscripts are exiguous. It is possible that the manuscripts are only fragments of a larger corpus of notes on Parker, which Locke completed in 1669–70, but which are now not extant. The Essay Concerning Toleration is more far more elaborate and systematic, but it was nonetheless left unpublished. Every extant manuscript of the Essay terminates with a note that Locke would complete it “when I have more leisure.”Footnote 129 The Parker notes terminate in medias res, having reached only page 158 in its commentary on the Discourse.

Locke persistently hesitated to publish works that would attract attention to his political or religious sympathies. In April 1690, he complained bitterly to Philipp van Limborch (1633–1712) when the latter admitted that he had divulged Locke's authorship of the otherwise pseudonymous Epistola to a mutual friend.Footnote 130 It is difficult to attribute this anger to anything other than what Peter Laslett once described as Locke's “obsessive” caution: the Epistola can hardly have endangered Locke in the year of its publication.Footnote 131 It is possible that this same caution inhibited Locke from publishing against Parker. But other alternatives deserve consideration. In 1669–70 Locke became increasingly occupied in collaborating with Thomas Sydenham (1624–89) in medical practice, and he might not have had time to complete a full-scale response to either the Discourse or its Defence and Continuation.Footnote 132 In early 1671 Locke commenced Draft A of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, again depriving him of the “leisure” to complete the Essay Concerning Toleration or a response to Parker.Footnote 133 Richard Ashcraft has suggested that Locke's reading of the Discourse might have served as a fillip for Draft A,Footnote 134 but it would be hard to associate the inspiration for Draft A with Parker's Discourse, tout court, in lieu of works within Locke's reach on the intellect, the soul, logic, medicine, and natural philosophy, to name only a few rival sources of inspiration for Locke's work.Footnote 135 If Locke desisted in responding to the Discourse, it is probably because his interests had settled elsewhere. An alternative possibility is that the impetus behind a response had abated when Locke learned that Anglesey's circle was preparing a response of its own. Locke presumably shelved his notes on Parker and later spectated contentedly, as Marvell entered the fray.

III

The Chapel Hill manuscript is preserved in the Wilson Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where it forms part of a collection donated by Preston Davie (1881–1967), an American attorney, serviceman, and collector.Footnote 136 The manuscript consists of two half-sheets, now disjoined, but apparently once forming a bifolium, each leaf measuring approximately 339 × 228 millimeters. The paper bears a countermark letter “H” (fo. 1) and watermark (fo. 2) of a horn and baldric in a coat of arms surmounted by a crown, followed, in vertical order, by a large “4,” and a combination of the letters “W” and “R”; this watermark closely resembles Heawood 2715.Footnote 137 Locke folded each half-sheet vertically, forming two columns on each page. On the recto and verso of the first leaf, the left-hand column is headed “Magistrate” and the right-hand column “Church.” On the recto of fo. 2, the left-hand column is headed “Magistrate” (again), but there is no heading on the right-hand column, and it appears that Locke's notes on the “Magistrate” continue from the bottom of the left-hand column on this page directly onto the right-hand column, and then conclude at the top of the left-hand column of fo. 2v (which has no heading). This columnar division of the manuscript resembles a similar arrangement in a manuscript of 1674, “Excommunication,” in which Locke and an unidentified scribe divided his observations into two columns: “Civill Society or the State” and “Religious Society or the Church,” on the basis that “There is 2 fold Society of which allmost all men in the world are Members and that from the 2 fold concernment they have to attaine a 2 fold happinesse, viz: That of this world and that of the other.”Footnote 138 This division might have appealed to Locke, in reading Parker, by revealing the limits of an attack on the Discourse as a species of Erastianism. Locke could follow Parker in disentangling the perspective of the “Magistrate” from the perspective of the “Church,” and formulate a response to each, in turn and independently.Footnote 139 The Chapel Hill manuscript is endorsed in Locke's hand (vertically in the left margin of fo. 2v): “S Parker of Toleration.” Immediately underneath this endorsement is another, but in pencil (“Mr Locke's Notes”), possibly written by an auctioneer or a dealer in manuscripts.

The Davie Collection contains a second manuscript with a connection to Locke: a “Draft of act of Parliament for regulation of Elections” in the hand of Locke's friend, the Whig lawyer John Freke (1652–1717).Footnote 140 The Wilson Library does not retain Preston Davie's records of acquisition, and the authors have not found a record of the manuscript's sale.Footnote 141 But similarities to other Locke manuscripts permit a conjectural identification of its provenance. The “Draft” for the regulation of elections is closely related to three manuscripts now held in the Somerset Heritage Centre; these manuscripts discuss the electoral process, date from c.1699, and derive from the activities of Locke's friend Edward Clarke (1650–1710) as an MP for Taunton (1690–1710).Footnote 142 The manuscripts are part of the Sanford papers: a collection formed by Clarke and his descendants, and purchased from the Sanford family of Nynehead, Somerset.Footnote 143 Edward Clarke's daughters, Anne (1683–c.1744) and Jane (1694–1732), married into the Sanford family: Anne to William Sanford (c.1685–1718) and Jane to William's younger brother Henry (fl. 1717). In 1829 the Clarke estate at Chipley was bequeathed to Edward Sanford (1794–1871), the great-great-grandson of Anne Clarke and William Sanford. The electoral manuscripts were deposited in the Somerset Record Office between 1936 and 1942.Footnote 144 The electoral manuscript in the Davie collection resembles the manuscripts in Somerset in handwriting, content and wording, and it is reasonable to conclude that it once formed part of the Sanford collection.Footnote 145

The provenance of the new manuscript on Parker's Discourse appears to share a Sanford connection. In content, as we have argued, the new manuscript and the Bodleian manuscripts must have constituted a single collection of notes, preparatory to a response against Parker. A physical description of the manuscripts strengthens this surmise. The Bodleian manuscripts are presented on three bifolia, each containing a separate set of notes, each discontinuous with the other. It is possible that these three bifolia were grouped together by Locke, but there is no clear evidence to suggest it. The first bifolium (fos. 5–6) was folded vertically down the middle to produce two columns, each leaf measuring 294 × 194 millimeters. The watermark for this paper is an arrangement of grapes on columns, most closely resembling COL.016.1 in the Gravell Watermark Archive,Footnote 146 and there is no visible countermark. It is a different type of paper, in other words, from the new manuscript. The text appears in the left-hand column of fo. 5r, and continues on the verso of fo. 5v for approximately one-quarter of the page. The rest of fo. 5 and all of fo. 6 are blank, excepting an endorsement “Government / 〈illegible〉” written vertically in pencil on the far right of fo. 6v, in a fairly modern hand, possibly dating from the early twentieth century, and probably supplied by an auctioneer or dealer. These notes present a paraphrase of Parker's account of the foundations of civil and ecclesiastical government in the first chapter of the Discourse. As this manuscript has no endorsement by Locke, we have designated it a title from the incipit (“Society is necessary …”) and assigned it the siglum O1.

The second bilfolium (fos. 7–8) was folded vertically to produce a left-hand margin approximately one-quarter of the width of the page, each leaf measuring 230 × 172 millimeters. There is no visible countermark, but the watermark for this paper is the same as the new manuscript: closely resembling Heawood 2715. It is a different type of paper, in other words, from O1, but the same type of paper as the new manuscript. The text begins at the top of fo. 7r and continues onto fo. 7v, ending approximately one-quarter of the way down the page; fo. 8r is blank and fo. 8v is endorsed by Locke “Q〈uerie〉s On S. P〈arker〉s discourse / of toleration. 69.” These notes present a set of queries on Parker's Discourse, with references to the places that prompted Locke's queries in the margin. Locke's handwriting in this manuscript is somewhat freer than was typical, and there are a number of changes of ink as Locke's queries progress. We have designated it a title from the endorsement (“Qs On S.Ps discourse of toleration”) and assigned it the siglum O2.

The third bifolium (fos 9–10) was folded vertically down the middle to produce two columns, each leaf measuring 342 × 233 millimeters. The watermark for this paper is the same as the new manuscript and O2.Footnote 147 The left-hand column presents extracts from Parker, each with a page reference. The right-hand column is headed “Q,” and presents queries salient to the adjacent extracts. There are only two such queries at the top of fo. 9r, the rest of the document being blank, save an endorsement “Religious / Government” written vertically in pencil on the far right of fo. 10v, in a fairly modern hand, probably by the same auctioneer or dealer who endorsed O1. As this manuscript has no endorsement by Locke, we have designated it a title from the incipit (“The vulgar are apt …”) and assigned it the siglum O3.

Though these three bifolia are held in the Bodleian Library, they were not acquired from the Lovelace family with the bulk of the Library's Locke Collection in 1947.Footnote 148 The guardbook in which they are now preserved is an assortment of papers acquired or identified by the Bodleian Library between 1951 and 1957. The Parker manuscripts (O13) were purchased from Sotheby's on 15 March 1954.Footnote 149 The sale catalogue gives no indication of the provenance of the manuscripts, but previous Sotheby's sales provide a clue. Papers related to Locke and Clarke were consigned to Sotheby's by E. C. A. Sanford (1859–1923)—a member of the Sanford family—in (at least) three sales before his death: 1913, 1915 and 1922.Footnote 150 The 1922 sale contained a number of items on the subject of toleration: lots 866 and 867 consisted of Locke's autograph of the Essay Concerning Toleration, which is now preserved in the Huntington Library; lot 868 consisted of the Reasons for Tolerateing Papists Equally with Others, which is now preserved in the Greenfield Library at St John's College, Annapolis; and lot 871 consisted of the following miscellany: “LOCKE (J.) On the Clipping of Money, holograph MS, 2 pp. folio (Sept. 1694); An Essay concerning ‘Whigs and Torys,’ holograph MS, 1 3/4 pp. 4to; Two short Notes in his hand concerning Government; Notes concerning Toleration in another hand, 1¼ pp. 4to.”Footnote 151 Several circumstances suggest that the last three items are O1–3. First, it is clear that Clarke—and, subsequently, E. C. A. Sanford—owned manuscripts by Locke on the subject of toleration. Second, another manuscript from that sale, the Reasons for Tolerateing Papists Equally with Others, bears an endorsement in pencil (“Toleration”) in a hand that resembles the hand of the modern endorsement on O1 and O3. Finally, it is notable that both O1 and O3 bear endorsements with the word “Government,” and are relatively “short”; O2 bears an endorsement with the word “toleration” and its text is one and a quarter pages in length. The catalogue indicates that the last item is not in Locke's hand, but, as we have noted, Locke's handwriting was somewhat freer in O2. An inexpert auctioneer might have mistaken it for “another hand.” These concordances must indicate that the last three items in lot 871 were O1–3.Footnote 152 The latter therefore derived from the Sanford collection. Clarke's possession of three sets of manuscripts on the subject of toleration (Locke's Reasons, Locke's Essay, and O1–3) could point to a purposive act of acquisition on his part, but it is nonetheless probable that the manuscripts were deposited by Locke somewhat indiscriminately, as part of the “many papers” that he sent to Clarke in August 1683, before his departure into exile. Clarke ex hypothesi would have retained the manuscripts after Locke's return to England in February 1689.Footnote 153

We have designated the Chapel Hill manuscript a title from the endorsement (“S Parker of Toleration”) and assigned it the siglum C. C has a number of characteristics in common with O1–3, aside from sharing the same subject. O2, O3, and C appear to have the same watermark and might have derived from the same stock of paper. It is a reasonable conclusion that C and O1–3 share a provenance, and that all four manuscripts came from the Sanford collection. This hypothesis is somewhat supported by the fact that C is endorsed in pencil (“Mr Locke's Notes”) in a hand resembling the endorsing hand in O1, O3, and the Reasons. This must suggest that the four manuscripts passed through the same chain of custody at some point, possibly as part of their shared consignment for sale. That the “Draft of an act of Parliament for regulation of Elections” mentioned above almost certainly derives from the Sanford collection lends circumstantial support to the conclusion that C was purchased with the “Draft” by Davie en bloc from the Sanford family, its representatives, or a dealer in manuscripts.Footnote 154

We cannot assume that the current dispersal of these manuscripts is anything more than an accident of transmission. There is no basis to assume that O13 should be considered as a single unit, or that they were grouped by Locke in a specific order, or deliberately to exclude C. C examines the preface and first 158 pages of Parker's Discourse, making it significantly longer and more comprehensive than O2 and O3. O2 examines pages 11–29 and O3 examines pages 144–53. Moreover, there is no clear reason why Locke ceased taking notes at page 158 of Parker's work, in the middle of Chapter 4. The Discourse comprised eight chapters and the subject matter did not drastically change in the latter half of the book. There are changes of ink in both C and O2, but there is no clear evidence that Locke was making notes on both manuscripts at the same time, using the same implement. This would indicate that Locke set aside his work on the Discourse, which in turn suggests that he made the notes in C, O2, and O3 at roughly the same time, perhaps taking a new sheet for O2 and O3 to make notes when his more comprehensive notes (C) were not ready to hand. O1—written on a different type of paper—presents neither notes nor queries, but rather paraphrases the first chapter of the Discourse (pages 1–64). It might have been written before O23 and C, as a first attempt to summarize Parker's arguments, or it might have been written after O23 and C, as a preparatory sketch for a longer confutation. Our inclination is to favour the former possibility: Locke began a paraphrase, returned to make notes in more detail, and then set the entire project aside. But this reconstruction should be considered no more than a plausible hypothesis. In the transcription below, the manuscripts will be presented together for the first time, and in the following order:

  • C    “S Parker of Toleration” (Southern Historical Collection, 03046, Folder 323).

  • O2  “Qs On S.Ps discourse of toleration” (MS Locke c. 39, fos. 7–8).

  • O3  “The vulgar are apt …” (MS Locke c. 39, fos. 9–10).

  • O1  “Society is necessary…” (MS Locke c. 39, fos. 5–6).Footnote 155

IV

Editorial conventions

Manuscript forms for words such as “ye,” “yt,” “yu,” “yr,” “wch,” “wt,” “spt,” and “agt” have been replaced by the usual printed forms, as have suffixes such as “–mt:” [–ment] and “–cōn” [–tion]. Contractions and abbreviations such as “K” [King], “Bps” [Bishops], “X” and “Xt” [Christ], “Xan” [Christian], “Xanity” [Christianity], “Sts” [Saints], “nāāl” [natural], “meū” [meum] and “ib” [ibidem] have been silently expanded. Locke's “i.e” has been rendered as “i.e.”. Citations of Parker have only been provided in those instances where Locke's citations are missing, incomplete, or erroneous. C, O3, and O1 typically provide Locke's paraphrase of Parker's text, rendering the presentation of Parker's own text otiose. In O2, and in some instances in C, quotations from Parker have been provided to contextualize Locke's comments. O1, O2, and O3 each present material also covered in C. In addition, O2 and O1 also overlap to a certain extent. Cross-references between each of the manuscripts have been provided where appropriate. These references use the siglum of the manuscript, the column in which the reference appears (in the case of C), the page number Locke cited (if any), and the folio on which the reference appears (since there is no duplication of folio numbers amongst the manuscripts, there is no need to cite the full shelfmark to distinguish them).

Editorial signs

  • italics  scribal addition

  • word  scribal deletion

  • mbad  scribal cancellation by superimposition of correction

  • a ()  the letter “a” is conjectural; the next is indecipherable

  • 〈 〉  editorial insertion or substitution in a text

  • { }  editorial excision

Transcriptions

C—“S Parker of Toleration”

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Wilson Library, Southern Historical Collection, 03406 (Folder 323). A series of notes with occasional queries on Samuel Parker's A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie in Locke's hand.

O2“Qs On S.Ps discourse of toleration”

Bodleian Library, MS Locke c. 39, fos. 7–8. A series of queries on Samuel Parker's A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie in Locke's hand.

O3“The vulgar are apt…”

Bodleian Library, MS Locke c. 39, fos 9–10. A pair of queries on Samuel Parker's A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie in Locke's hand.

O1“Society is necessary …”

Bodleian Library, MS Locke c. 39, fos 5–6. A paraphrase of the first chapter of Samuel Parker's A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie in Locke's hand.

Acknowledgment

The manuscript printed in this article was discovered by J. C. Walmsley. The article is a collaboration of the authors, who are grateful for the help provided by Jeffrey Collins, Mark Goldie, Christine Jackson-Holzberg, Duncan Kelly, J. R. Milton, Jacqueline Rose, the Somerset Heritage Centre, and the referees for Modern Intellectual History. The authors are additionally grateful to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for access to the manuscript material presented above and permission to reproduce images of manuscript material in its possession.

References

1 For an overview of this period see J. R. Milton, “The Unscholastic Statesman: Locke and the Earl of Shaftesbury,” in John Spurr, ed., Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury, 1621–1683 (Farnham, 2011), 153–81, at 153–60. The serial numbers in note 33 below refer to Donald Wing, Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, ed. John J. Morrison and Carolyn W. Nelson, 2nd edn (New York, 1982–94); the abbreviation ESTC in note 33 below refers to serial numbers in the English Short Title Catalogue (estc.bl.uk). Dates are New Style, unless otherwise noted.

2 For the relationship between Locke's Essay and Wolseley's Liberty of Conscience see Walmsley, J. C. and Waldmann, Felix, “John Locke and the Toleration of Catholics: A New Manuscript,” Historical Journal 62/4 (2019), 10931115CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 For a summary of the debate see Roger Thomas, “Comprehension and Indulgence,” in Geoffrey F. Nuttall and Owen Chadwick, eds., From Uniformity to Unity, 1662–1692 (London, 1962), 189–253; Paul Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–1667 (Cambridge, 1989), 162–95; John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (Harlow, 2000), 166–79; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Toleration and Other Writings on Law and Politics, 16671683, ed. J. R. Milton and Philip Milton (Oxford, 2006), 152–7 (hereafter ECT).

4 For this work see John Locke, Two Tracts on Government, ed. Philip Abrams (Cambridge, 1967).

5 For this episode see Simonutti, Luisa, “Political Society and Religious Liberty: Locke at Cleves and in Holland,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 14/3 (2006), 413–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Rose, Jacqueline, “John Locke, ‘Matters Indifferent,’ and the Restoration of the Church of England,” Historical Journal 48/3 (2005), 601–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rose, , “John Locke and the State of Toleration,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 64/1 (2013), 112–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jeffrey Collins, In the Shadow of Leviathan: John Locke and the Politics of Conscience (Cambridge, 2020).

7 Maurice Cranston, John Locke, A Biography (London, 1957), 131–3.

8 ECT, 57–70, 192–4, 322–6.

9 ECT, 194.

10 For Parker's biography see Jon Parkin, “Parker, Samuel (1640–1688),” in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols. (Oxford, 2004), 42: 736–8; Jason Jewell, “Authority's Advocate: Samuel Parker, Religion, and Politics in Restoration England” (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 2004), 3–28.

11 Bodleian Library, Wood MSS F 46, fo. 272r, Samuel Parker to Anthony Wood, 20 Aug. 1682.

12 The date of Parker's graduation is the subject of confusion: Anthony Wood, Fasti Oxonienses or the Annals of the University of Oxford, in Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. Philip Bliss, 5 vols. (London, 1813–20), 4: 218, records the date (“Feb. 28”) without clarifying whether it is NS or OS in 1659/60; Joseph Foster, ed., Alumni Oxonienses 1500–1714, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1891–2), 3: 1116, records the date as “28 Feb., 1659–60,” which is reproduced in John Venn and John A. Venn, eds., Alumni Cantabrigienses, pt. I, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1922–7), 3: 308. The date in R. B. Gardiner, The Registers of Wadham College, Oxford, 2 vols. (London, 1889–95), 1: 221, and Parkin, “Parker,” 42: 737, is “28 February 1659.”

13 Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 4: 226, printed in the first edition of Athenae Oxonienses, 2 vols. (London, 1691–2), 2: 616.

14 Wood, Fasti, 266; Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, 3: 1116.

15 For this phase in Parker's life see Thomas Warton, The Life and Literary Remains of Ralph Bathurst (London, 1761), 157–8.

16 Samuel Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie (Oxford, 1666), A3v; Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 4: 226.

17 For the year of his ordination see Clergy of the Church of England database (CCEd, at theclergydatabase.co.uk), ID 6683 (Feb. 1665); Lambeth Palace Library (LPL), Act Books of the Archbishops of Canterbury (AB), vol. 1, fo. 166r (Dec. 1665), Faculty Office (FO), Muniment Books (MB), F I/C, fo. 189r and Fiats, F II/6/71 (Dec. 1665), correcting ECT, 58, which presumably followed William Holden Hutton, “Parker, Samuel,” in Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, eds., Dictionary of National Biography, 63 vols. (London, 1885–1900), 43: 272–5, at 272.

18 Samuel Parker, Tentamina physico-theologica de Deo (London, 1665), a3r–a2v. For Parker's high estimation of Sheldon see Samuel Parker, De rebus sui temporis commentariorum (London, 1726), 27–8; and the copy annotated by Parker's son Samuel Parker (1681–1730), Bodleian Library, 4o Rawl. 325.

19 [Oldenburg, Henry], “An Account of Some Books, Not Long Since Published,” Philosophical Transactions 1/18 (1666), 324–5Google Scholar.

20 For these works see Falconer Madan, Oxford Books, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1895–1931), 3: 210 (2754), 211 (2755), 218 (2779). For Oldenburg's commendation of Parker's Censure see Robert Boyle, The Correspondence of Robert Boyle: 1666–1667, ed. Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio, and Lawrence M. Principe, 6 vols. (London, 2001), 3: 165–9.

21 For Parker's interest in Willis see Caron, Louis, “Thomas Willis, the Restoration and the First Works of Neurology,” Medical History 59/4 (2015), 525–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 550–52; for Locke's interest in Willis see Thomas Willis, Thomas Willis's Oxford Lectures, ed. Kenneth Dewhurst (Oxford, 1980).

22 For these works see Lewis, Rhodri, “Of ‘Origenian Platonisme’: Joseph Glanvill on the Pre-existence of Souls,” Huntington Library Quarterly 69/2 (2006), 267300CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 285–7; Levitin, Dmitri, “Rethinking English Physico-theology: Samuel Parker's Tentamina De Deo (1665),” Early Science and Medicine 19/1 (2014), 2875CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c. 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 2015), 144–5, 496–8.

23 For Parker's election see Michael Hunter, The Royal Society and Its Fellows 1660–1700: The Morphology of an Early Scientific Institution, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1994), 174. Parker was removed from the rolls of the Society after 1684 for nonpayment of dues. Hunter, The Royal Society, 198–9.

24 For this date see Bodleian Library, Wood MSS F 46, fo. 272r; and Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 4: 277. Parkin, “Parker,” 42: 737, dates this to “November 1667,” but the date presumably fell before Parker's appointment to the rectory of Chartham in October 1667 (note 25 below).

25 LPL, AB, vol. 2, fo. 104r; and Vicar General, Diocesan Records (VG), 1/5, p. 18 (31 Oct. 1667); Venn and Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, 3: 308.

26 G. E. B. Eyre and G. R. Rivington, eds., A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers from 1640–1708, 3 vols. (London, 1913–14), 2: 405 (23 Sept. 1669); and Edward Arber, ed., The Term Catalogues, 1668–1709, 3 vols. (London, 1903–6), 1: 21 (22 Nov. 1669). Parkin, Jon, “Hobbism in the Later 1660s: Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker,” Historical Journal 42/1 (1999), 85108CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 97 n. 46, describes the use of “1670” on the title page as an “error,” but postdating by publishers was commonly practiced.

27 Joseph Black, “The Unrecorded Second Edition of Samuel Parker's A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Polity,” Notes and Queries 242 (1977), 187–9. Black omits to note that the second edition was advertised as such in Arber, The Term Catalogues, 1: 28 (17 Feb. 1670).

28 ECT, 58.

29 Jacqueline Rose, “The Ecclesiastical Polity of Samuel Parker,” Seventeenth Century 25/2 (2010), 350–75, at 359; Michael Brydon, The Evolving Reputation of Richard Hooker: An Examination of Responses, 1600–1714 (Oxford, 2006), 120.

30 For Sheldon's coordination of this campaign see Simon, Walter G., “Comprehension in the Age of Charles II,” Church History 31/4 (1962), 440–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 441, 444–5; Victor D. Sutch, Gilbert Sheldon: Architect of Anglican Survival, 1640–1675 (The Hague, 1973), 110–16.

31 Arber, The Term Catalogues, 1: 62 (22 Nov. 1670).

32 For the date of publication of Parker's Defence see Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. N. H. Keeble, John Coffey, Tim Cooper, and Tom Charlton, 5 vols. (Oxford, 2020), 2: 376; Eyre and Rivington, A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, 2: 417 (24 Oct. 1670); Arber, The Term Catalogues, 1: 58 (22 Nov. 1670).

33 Wing gives the serial number P459 to the first edition (= ESTC, R1397), P460 (= ESTC, R2071) to the third edition, and P457 (= ESTC, R22456) to the Defence. The second edition (= ESTC, R227228) is not recorded in Wing. Citations of the Discourse below refer to P459.

34 Baxter, Reliquiae, 2: 376.

35 For Parker's style see Raymond A. Anselment, “Betwixt Jest and Earnest”: Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, Swift, and the Decorum of Religious Ridicule (Toronto, 1979), 94–125; John Spurr, “Style, Wit and Religion in Restoration England,” in Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell, eds., The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited: Essays in Honour of John Morrill (Woodbridge, 2013), 233–60, at 244.

36 Parker, Discourse, iv, l.

37 For this phrase see Martin Dzelzainis and Annabel Patterson, “Introduction: Rehearsal Transpros'd,” in Andrew Marvell, The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. Martin Dzelzainis, Annabel Patterson, Nicholas von Maltzahn, and N.H. Keeble, 2 vols. (New Haven, 2003), 1: 3–40, at 7.

38 LPL, AB, vol. 3, fo. 9r and VG 1/5, p. 34.

39 LPL, AB, vol. 3, fos. 92v, 93v; FO, MB, F I/D, fo. 34v; FO, Fiats, F II/12, fos. 90a–b; VG 1/5, p. 38.

40 For this phrase see Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, 3: 1116; Venn and Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, 3: 308, notes elliptically that Parker was “[p]robably D. D. (Cambridge) 1671 (Lit[eras] Reg[ias]).”

41 The National Archives, Kew, SP 44/27, fo. 39r, F. H. Blackburne Daniell, ed., Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles II, 1672–3 (London, 1901), 73; LPL, AB, vol. 3, fo. 174r; VG 1/5, p. 44; Joyce M. Horn et al., eds., Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1541–1857, 12 vols. (London, 1969–86), 3: 15–21, 8: 75–80.

42 Arber, The Term Catalogues, 1: 109 (24 June 1672); and Eyre and Rivington, A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, 2: 446 (7 Sept. 1672).

43 N. H. Keeble and Geoffrey F. Nuttall, eds., Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1991), 2: 138 (895).

44 For Marvell's Rehearsal Transpros'd see Jon Parkin, “Liberty Transpros'd: Andrew Marvell and Samuel Parker,” in Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis, eds., Marvell and Liberty (Basingstoke, 1999), 269–89; Derek Hirst, “Samuel Parker, Andrew Marvell, and Political Culture,” in Derek Hirst and Richard Strier, eds., Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1999), 145–64; Annabel Patterson and Martin Dzelzainis, “Marvell and the Earl of Anglesey: A Chapter in the History of Reading,” Historical Journal 44/3 (2001), 703–26; Lana Cable, “Licensing Metaphor: Parker, Marvell, and the Debate over Conscience,” in Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, PA, 2002), 243–60; Mark Goldie, “Marvell and His Adversaries, 1672–1678,” in Martin Dzelzainis and Edward Holberton, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell (Oxford, 2019), 703–21, at 714–21.

45 Nicholas von Maltzahn, An Andrew Marvell Chronology (Basingstoke, 2005), 134–8. For these editions see Dzelzainis and Patterson, “Introduction,” 32 n. 74; Andrew Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros'd; and, The Rehearsal Transpros'd, the Second Part, ed. D. I. B. Smith (Oxford, 1971), xxv, xxvii–iii, xxx.

46 British Library, Add. MS 70012, fos. 58r–9v; Andrew Marvell to Sir Edward Harley, 3 May 1673, printed (with errors) in Andrew Marvell, Poems and Letters, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 3rd ed., rev. Pierre Legouis with the collaboration of E. E. Duncan-Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1971), 2: 328–9 (22).

47 Annabel Patterson, Marvell: The Writer in Public Life (London, 2000), 115–16.

48 Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 4: 231; Gilbert Burnet, Bishop Burnet's History of His Own Time, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1823), 1: 451.

49 For the attribution of the work to Parker see Marvell, The Prose Works, 1: 279.

50 The National Archives, Kew, SP 29/335, pt. 2, fo. 158r (235), abstracted in F. H. Blackburne Daniell, ed., Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles II, 1673 (London, 1902), 312 (30 May 1673); W. D. Christie, ed., Letters Addressed from London to Sir Joseph Williamson, 2 vols. (London, 1874), 1: 28 (no. 14).

51 The National Archives, Kew, PC 2/64, p. 30; Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 290, fo. 202r; [John Darby?], Forgery Detected and Innocency Vindicated (London, 1673), 12–13.

52 ECT, 60, which erroneously describes Darby as Marvell's “publisher.”

53 LPL, VG 1/5, p. 47; AB, vol. 3, fo. 201r; Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, 2nd edn, 12 vols. (Canterbury, 1797–1801), 12: 115–35.

54 For evidence of Parker's withdrawal see LPL, MS 639, fos. 163r–70v.

55 ECT, 60, erroneously dates Sheldon's death to “1676.”

56 For Parker's relationship with Sancroft see Jewell, “Authority's Advocate,” 21–8; LPL, MS 674, fos. 57r–60v, Parker to John Spencer, 26 April, 25 Aug., 14 Sept. 1686; Bodleian Library, MS Tanner MS 31, fos. 166r–175v, MS Cherry MS 23, fo. 321r, Parker to Henry Dodwell, 10 Dec. 1680; W. Singer, ed., The Correspondence of Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, 2 vols. (London, 1828), 1: 150–1 (no. CXIX).

57 For Parker's return to London in 1684 see Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 32, fol. 26r, Parker to Ralph Snowe, 16 April 1684; The National Archives, Kew, SP 44/335, pp. 222, 366, SP 44/57, p. 96, abstracted in F. H. Blackburne Daniell and Francis Bickley, eds., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic: Charles II, 1684–5 (London, 1938), 195, 207, 236.

58 For Parker's appointment see LPL, FO, Fiats, F II/27, fos. 65a–b; Bodleian Library, Tanner MS 147, fo. 66r; The National Archives, Kew, SP 44/57, pp. 135, 140, abstracted in E. K. Timings, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic: James II, 1686–7 (London, 1964), 273, 288.

59 Jewell, “Authority's Advocate,” 198; Bodleian Library, Rawl. D 843, fol. 113r.

60 Laurence Brockliss, “The ‘Intruded’ President and Fellows,” in Laurence Brockliss, Gerald Harriss, and Angus Macintyre, eds., Magdalen College and the Crown: Essays for the Tercentenary of the Restoration of the College, 1688 (Oxford, 1988), 83–106.

61 [Samuel Parker], Reasons for Abrogating the Test, Imposed Upon all Members of Parliament Anno 1678 (London, 1688), 9–69.

62 Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 4: 872. For parodic epitaphs of Parker see Thomas Hearne, Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, ed. C. E. Doble, D. W. Rannie and H. E. Salter, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1885–1921), 2: 258; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Osborn MS b209; British Library, Add. MS 21092, fo. 23r; Bodleian Library, MS Don. C. 55, fos. 13v–33v.

63 E. S. de Beer, ed., The Correspondence of John Locke, 8 vols. to date (Oxford, 1976–) (hereafter CJL), 3: 257 (957).

64 Ibid., 3: 288 (no. 973).

65 Ibid., 4: 109 (no. 1307).

66 Ibid., 4: 172 (no. 1344). De Beer identifies the satire tentatively as [John Phillips], Sam Ld. Bp. of Oxon. His Celebrated Reasons for Abrogating the Test and Notions of Idolatry Answered by Samuel, Archdeacon of Canterbury (London, 1688).

67 John Harrison and Peter Laslett, eds., The Library of John Locke, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1971) (hereafter LJL), 203 (nos. 2199–2200).

68 Ibid., 185–6 (nos. 1931–3); and Bodleian Library, Locke 7.256 (= LJL, no. 1932), 7.95 (= LJL, no. 1933). Locke's copy of the Second Part (7.95) has allusive—and, in the context of Locke's bindings, uncharacteristic—lettering on the spine (“Bayes Part II”), referring to the moniker assigned to Parker by Marvell, an allusion to the porte parole of Drydenic stagecraft in Marvell's parodic foil, The Rehearsal (1672) by George Villiers (1628–87), second Duke of Buckingham.

69 LJL, 241 (no. 2792).

70 Ibid., 154 (no. 1447); and Bodleian Library, Locke 7.262 (= LJL, no. 1447).

71 Patterson and Dzelzainis, “Marvell,” 704.

72 LJL, 120 (no. 924a).

73 Ibid., 159 (no. 1530); and New York, Columbia University, Health Sciences Library, PR3338.A71 1663 (= LJL, no. 1530).

74 LJL, 122 (no. 943); and Bodleian Library, Locke 7.293–5 (= LJL, no. 943).

75 LJL, 183 (no. 1896); and Bodleian Library, Locke 9.63 (= LJL, no. 1896).

76 For Locke's ownership of works by Hooker see Felix Waldmann, “The Library of John Locke: Additions, Corrigenda, and a Conspectus of Pressmarks,” Bodleian Library Record 26 (2013), 36–58, at 47.

77 Bodleian Library, MS Locke f. 5, p. 99; and LJL, 274.

78 Gregory, Father-Greybeard was listed in the term catalogues on 16 June 1673 (Arber, ed., The Term Catalogues, 1: 142). Locke 7.262 has a page list (“p. 80, 104, 114”) and marginal dashes on pages 80, 99, 104, 106, 107, 114. Marvell's references to Hickeringill in the Second Part of The Rehearsal Transpros'd do not match these annotations, save for page 104: Marvell, The Prose Works, 1: 226, 231, 233, 251–3, 284–6, 354, 385.

79 For these verses see John Locke, Literary and Historical Writings, ed. J. R. Milton (Oxford, 2019), 12, which attributes the verses to John Harmar (c.1593–1670), on the basis of the attribution in Samuel Butler, Hudibras. The First Part (London, 1704), a7v–8r. The verses translate canto I, ll. 281–6, and canto III, ll. 773–6. Locke's version of III, ll. 773–6, and contemporary copies of the lines in Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Osborn MS fb66, item 32, fo.1r and Bodleian Library, MS Don. e. 6, fos. 37r–41v, differ from Harmar's and each other; it is possible that Locke translated III, ll. 773–6, himself.

80 [Roger L'Estrange], An Account of the Growth of Knavery, Under the Pretended Fears of Arbitrary Government (London, 1678), 5; John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge, 1994), 88. For Locke's use of a phrase (“so comfortable an importance”) supposedly popularized by Marvell's work see CJL, 1: 503 n. 9, 506 (nos. 347–8). Marvell's nephew, William Popple (1638–1708), would later translate Locke's Epistola de Tolerantia.

81 British Library, Add. MS 46470, fo. 40r.

82 For a caveat about the dating of Locke's memoranda see J. R. Milton, “The Date and Significance of Two of Locke's Early Manuscripts,” Locke Newsletter 19 (1988), 47–89, at 49–51.

83 For an example of Locke dating the new year from 25 March see CJL, 1: 263–4 (no. 187).

84 For this manuscript see Walmsley and Waldmann, “John Locke and the Toleration of Catholics.”

85 ECT, 49.

86 Ibid., 49.

87 Walmsley and Waldmann, “John Locke and the Toleration of Catholics,” 1101.

88 Douglas G. Greene, “Arthur Annesley, First Earl of Anglesey, 1614–1686” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 1972), 82.

89 British Library, Add. MS 40860, fo. 39v, partly printed in Historical Manuscripts Commission, Thirteenth Report, Appendix, Part VI: The Manuscripts of Sir William Fitzherbert, Bart., and Others (London, 1893), 263–5.

90 For Shaftesbury's and Anglesey's protection of Ponder see Leicestershire Record Office, Finch Manuscripts, DG7, 4984, IX, p. 9/2, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the late Allan George Finch, Esq., 4 vols. (London, 1913–65), 2: 10; and Patterson and Dzelzainis, “Marvell,” 708–9.

91 The National Archives, Kew, PRO 30/24/23/12, Catalogus Librorum Anglicorum, Gallicorum, Italicorum, &c. utriusque Bibliotheca vizt. Aegidiana, & Chelseyana Comitis de Shaftesbury. Aegidiis Anno Aerae Christianae 1709, fo. 59r, “S PARKER of Ecclesiastical Politie and Toleration. London 1670,” without specifying an edition. The copy is absent from the present earl's collection in Wimborne St Giles and it is not advertised in the three Christie's catalogues (2–4 Nov. 1966, 8 Dec. 1966, and 14 Feb. 1967) that record the only public sales of the collection in Wimborne.

92 Patterson and Dzelzainis, “Marvell,” 720.

93 For this argument see ECT, 289–90, 301.

94 Collins, In the Shadow of Leviathan, 155, 162.

95 A. A. Seaton, The Theory of Toleration under the Later Stuarts (Cambridge, 1911), 159. For echoes of this tendency see Gordon Schochet, “Between Lambeth and Leviathan: Samuel Parker on the Church of England and Political Order,” in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner, eds., Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), 189–208; Gordon Schochet, “Samuel Parker, Religious Diversity, and the Ideology of Persecution,” in Roger D. Lund, ed., The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1995), 119–48.

96 Samuel Parker, An Account of the Nature and Extent of the Divine Dominion and Goodnesse (Oxford, 1666), 2.

97 [Samuel Parker], A Defence and Continuation of the Ecclesiastical Politie (London, 1671), 279.

98 Collins, In the Shadow of Leviathan, 155.

99 Rose, “The Ecclesiastical Polity of Samuel Parker,” 351.

100 Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 36, fos. 255r–6v, Parker to Simon Patrick, [1681–2]; Bodleian Library, MS Eng. lett. c. 28, fos. 3v–4r, Parker to Henry Dodwell, 13 Nov. 1680; Richard Billinge, “Nature, Grace and Religious Liberty in Restoration England” (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2015), 253–5.

101 Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 2007), 255.

102 O3, “p. 144,” fo. 9r. For this siglum and the convention of citing the manuscripts see section III below.

103 Bodleian Library, MS St Edmund Hall 15, fo. 34v, Dodwell to Friedrich Spanheim, 11 March 1685.

104 Rose, “The Ecclesiastical Polity of Samuel Parker,” 359.

105 C, “Church,” “25,” fo. 1r.

106 Parker, Discourse, 24.

107 C, “Church,” “24,” fo. 1r.

108 Parker, Discourse, 90.

109 C, “Magistrate,” “89,” fo. 2r.

110 Parker, Discourse, 95.

111 Ibid., 95.

112 C, “Magistrate,” “95,” fo. 2r.

113 C, “Magistrate,” “104,” fo. 2r.

114 C, “Church,” “p. 70,” fo. 1v.

115 Parker, Discourse, 141.

116 C, “Magistrate,” “140,” fo. 2r.

117 C, “Church,” “p. 70,” fo. 1v.

118 O2, “p. 24,” fo. 7r.

119 O2, “p 12,” fo. 7r.

120 O2, “p.11,” fo. 7r.

121 ECT, 44. The additions appear in Bodleian Library, MS Locke c. 28, fos. 22r and 28v. The Miltons surmise that these additions were probably made only after Locke had copied a separate version of the Essay, which they date to a period no earlier than 1671 (ECT, 173–4, 187–8, 308–10).

122 ECT, 44–5, 188.

123 Ibid., 28, 44, 305.

124 Ibid., 309.

125 O3, “p. 144,” fo. 9r.

126 ECT, 308.

127 Ibid., 308.

128 For an incisive contribution to the issue of Locke's “individualistic” tolerationism see Jacob Donald Chatterjee, “Between Hobbes and Locke: John Humfrey, Nonconformity, and Restoration Theories of Political Obligation,” Locke Studies 19 (2019), 2–34, at 28.

129 ECT, 302.

130 CJL, 4: 61–62 (no. 1285).

131 For Locke's “obsessive” behavior in this connection see John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, student edn (Cambridge, 1988), 6.

132 In 1669 Locke wrote “De Arte Medica” as an expression of Sydenham's medical methodology (The National Archives, Kew, PRO 30/24/47/2, fos. 47r–56v). In 1670 Locke helped Sydenham draft a preface and dedicatory epistle to Ashley for a projected treatise on smallpox (PRO 30/24/47/2, fos. 57r and 60r–69v). This treatise was apparently abandoned after Sydenham expanded the project to suppose that each year had its own epidemic “constitution”—a set of conditions that gave rise to a unique illness with a unique cure in that year. Acting as Sydenham's amanuensis, Locke helped transcribe Sydenham's medical essays over the next several months into a manuscript now known as the “Medical Observations,” containing approximately fifty separable essays. Locke drafted at least seven of these at Sydenham's dictation and made fair copies of ten, while also correcting essays copied by Sydenham and by Locke himself. Locke made his own copies of at least thirty-four of these essays during this period, the last, “Epidemicall diseases of the year 1670,” in the spring of 1671. For these details see Thomas Sydenham, Thomas Sydenham's Observationes Medicae (London, 1676) and His Medical Observations (Manuscript 572 of the Royal College of Physicians of London): With New Transcriptions of Related Locke MSS. in the Bodleian Library, ed. G. G. Meynell (Folkestone, 1991).

133 John Locke, Drafts for the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Other Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, Drafts A and B, ed. Peter H. Nidditch and G. A. J. Rogers (Oxford, 1990).

134 Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics & Locke's Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, 1986), 106–11.

135 For this genre see Serjeantson, R. W., “‘Human Understanding’ and the Genre of Locke's Essay,” Intellectual History Review 18/2 (2008), 157–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

136 For Davie see the obituary in the New York Times, 22 May 1967, 43.

137 Edward Heawood, Watermarks, Mainly of the 17th and 18th centuries (Hilversum, 1950).

138 ECT, 327.

139 We are grateful to Jeffrey Collins for this observation.

140 The manuscript is endorsed “Draft of act of Parliament for regulation of Elections” (fo. 2v) in an unidentified (probably nineteenth-century) hand.

141 Our investigations of the Southern Historical Collection, 03406 in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Preston Davie Papers, Mss1 D2856d in the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond, did not identify any evidence of the acquisition of either the commentary on Parker's Discourse or the “Draft.”

142 Somerset Heritage Centre, DD\SF/13/2/9 (formerly DD\SF/2785), DD\SF/7/1/58 (formerly DD\SF/3842) and DD\SF/13/2/49 (formerly DD\SF/3078). For these manuscripts see Knights, Mark, “John Locke and Post-revolutionary Politics: Electoral Reform and the Franchise,” Past and Present 213/1 (2011), 4186CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

143 For the Nynehead collection see A. C. Fraser, Biographica Philosophica: A Retrospect, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1905), 269–70.

144 Items formerly catalogued DD\SF/1–4510 were deposited between these dates.

145 For inventories of the Sanford library see Mount Holyoke College Library, MS 27, Sanford Family Papers, Box 4, vols. 5–8, Box 6, vols. 21–52; vol. 46, p. 15 lists “Locke John. Three volumes of Manuscript letters and other papers in the handwriting,” without itemizing the “papers.”

146 The Thomas L. Gravell Watermark Archive (www.gravell.org, COL.016.1).

147 The countermark appears to be the letters “I A”.

148 For the accession of Locke's manuscripts to the Bodleian Library see Philip Long, A Summary Catalogue of the Lovelace Collection of the Papers of John Locke in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, 1959), i; and Long, “The Mellon Donation of Additional Manuscripts of John Locke from the Lovelace Collection,” Bodleian Library Record 7 (1964), 185–93.

149 Sotheby and Co., “Catalogue of Valuable Printed Books, Autograph Letters, Historical Documents” (15 March 1954), lot 265.

150 Sotheby and Co., “Catalogue of Valuable Autograph Literary Manuscripts and Historical Documents” (28 July 1913), in Sotheby & Co. Catalogues (hereafter SC) (Ann Arbor, MI, 1973–6), pt. III, Reel 40, lots 194–201; Sotheby and Co., “Catalogue of Valuable Books, Manuscripts and Autograph Letters, Including … Letters of John Locke, the Property of Col. E. C. A. Sanford” (21 Dec. 1915), in SC, pt. III, Reel 45, lots 422–7; and Sotheby and Co., “Catalogue of Valuable Printed Books, Tracts and Pamphlets” (13 March 1922), in SC, pt. III, Reel 64, lot 868.

151 The SC series includes a copy of the auctioneers’ catalogue; the latter bears a handwritten note to indicate that lot 871 was purchased by an individual surnamed “Melton.” This was one of two lots that “Melton” purchased in the sale. The first (lot 870) was a manuscript now generally referred to as “On Allegiance and the Revolution,” which the Bodleian would acquire from Sotheby's in 1982 (“Valuable Autograph Letters, Literary Manuscripts and Historical Documents” (29 June 1982), lot 259) and assign the shelfmark MS Locke e. 18. This manuscript was first discussed in John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, revised edn (Cambridge, 1967), p. 46 n. †, first published in James Farr and Clayton Roberts, “John Locke on the Glorious Revolution: A Rediscovered Document,” Historical Journal 28 (1985), 385–98; and now supplemented by Goldie, Mark, “John Locke on the Glorious Revolution: A New Document,” History of Political Thought 42/1 (2021), 7497Google Scholar. The location of the first two items from lot 871, “On the Clipping of Money” and “An Essay Concerning ‘Whigs and Torys’,” is presently unknown. The latter was resold by Sotheby's in “Valuable Autograph Letters, Literary Manuscripts and Historical Documents” (2 June 1982), lot 260. Felix Waldmann, “New Manuscript Fragments by John Locke,” Notes and Queries, forthcoming.

152 Correcting the assertion made in Waldmann, “New Manuscript Fragments by John Locke”.

153 CJL, 2: 600–3 (no. 771).

154 None of the catalogue listings in the 1913, 1915 or 1922 Sotheby's sales from the Sanford collection describe manuscripts that unambiguously match those in the Preston Davie Collection. The listing for lot 874 in the 1922 sale does describe “Papers related to Edward Clarke of Chipley; with others of Somersetshire interest (a large parcel),” which could conceivably have contained the items acquired by Davie. Yet this seems unlikely, given the attribution of C to Locke in the pencil endorsement. It is possible that the Davie manuscripts were consigned for sale at Sotheby's then withdrawn from auction and sold by private treaty, or by some other route.

155 Our transcription of O1–3 alters the format of the transcription in ECT, 57–70, 192–4, 322–6, but it does not substantively alter the wording of the transcription.

156 Parker, Discourse, xix–xx.

157 Ibid., xlvi–xlviii.

158 Locke leaves a noticeable gap between the terminal word in the sentence and the full stop.

159 Ibid., l–li.

160 Ibid., 7–8.

161 Ibid., 10. See also O2, “p.11,” fo. 7r.

162 Ibid., li–liii.

163 See also O2, “p 12,” fo. 7r.

164 Parker, Discourse, liv–lv.

165 Ibid., 12–13.

166 Ibid., 4–6.

167enormity,”: this word is indistinct in the manuscript, but Parker, Discourse, 14, has “Enormity.”

168 “{debauch}〈debaucht〉”: following Parker, Discourse, 15.

169 See also O2, “p. 18,” fo. 7r; and O1, fo. 5r.

170 Parker, Discourse, 19–20.

171 See also O2, “p 21,” fo. 7r.

172 See also O2, “p. 24,” fo. 7r.

173 See also O2, “p. 25,” fo. 7r.

174 See also O1, fo. 5r.

175 See also O2, “p. 29,” fo. 7r–v and O1, fo. 5r.

176 Parker, Discourse, 31.

177 Ibid., 31–2.

178 “{our}〈our〉”: Locke originally wrote “our selves is”, and meant to delete the phrase, but forgot to delete “our.”

179 See also O1, fo. 5r.

180 See also O1, fo. 5r.

181 Parker, Discourse, 69–70.

182 Ibid., 33–4.

183 Ibid., 52–3.

184 See also O2, “p. 25,” fo. 7r.

185 Locke gives an incorrect page number. Parker, Discourse, 77: “§4. ’Tis certain then, That the Duties of Morality are the most weighty and material concerns of Religion; and ’tis as certain, That the Civil Magistrate has Power to bind Laws concerning them upon the Consciences of Subjects.”

186 Locke gives an incorrect page number. Parker, Discourse, 77: “And therefore is it not strange, that when the main Ends and designs of all Religion are avowedly subject to the Supreme Power, that yet men should be so impatient to exempt its means and subordinate Instruments from the same Authority?”

187 Parker, Discourse, 40–41. The passage Locke cites here precedes that which he cites immediately prior to it.

188CXt

189 Parker, Discourse, 80–82.

190 Ibid. 43–8. See also O1, fo. 5v.

191 “Kingdoms. {.}”: an illegible mark and full stop with no basis in Parker's text, excised for sense.

192 Parker, Discourse, 83–5.

193 See also O1, fo. 5v.

194 Parker, Discourse, 50–51.

195 “meum & tuum”: the distinction between what is mine or one's own and what is yours or another's. OED, “meum,” n.2.

196 Parker, Discourse, 78–80.

197 Ibid., 85–6.

198 Ibid., 86–7.

199 Ibid., 89–90.

200 Ibid., 93–4.

201 “all {}”: an illegible mark that was likely deleted, excised for sense.

202 Parker, Discourse, 92–5.

203 Ibid., 95–6.

204 Ibid., 99.

205 “federal”: relating to or based upon the Covenant of Works, or the Covenant of Grace, OED, “federal,” 1a.

206 Parker, Discourse, 104–5.

207 Ibid., 105.

208 Ibid., 106–7.

209 Ibid., 113–14.

210 Ibid., 126–7: “and therefore that the Well-being of the World is to be entirely attributed to mans Wit, and not to Gods Providence, who sent his Creatures into it in such a condition as should oblige them to seek their own mutual ruine and destruction; so that had they continued in that state of War he left them in, they must have lived and died like Gladiators, and have unavoidably perish'd at one time or other by one anothers Swords; and therefore that Mankind owe the comfort of their lives not at all to their Creator, but entirely to themselves.”

211 Ibid. 120–22.

212 Ibid., 123–4.

213 Ibid., 140–41.

214 See also O3, “p. 144,” fo. 9r.

215 Parker, Discourse, 144–51. See also O3, “p. 144,” fo. 9r.

216 See also O3, “153,” fo. 9r.

217 Parker, Discourse, 158.

218 Vertically down the left-hand side of the page.

219 Horizontally in pencil beneath Locke's endorsement in an unknown early twentieth-century hand, possibly an auctioneer or a dealer in manuscripts.

220 Addition in significantly darker ink.

221 Parker, Discourse, 11–12: “§ 4. First then ’tis absolutely necessary to the Peace and Tranquillity of the Commonwealth, which, though it be the prime and most important end of Government, can never be sufficiently secured, unless Religion be subject to the Authority of the Supreme Power, in that it has the strongest influence upon humane Affairs; and therefore if the Sovereign Power cannot order and manage it, it would be but a very incompetent Instrument of publick happiness, would want the better half of it self, and be utterly weak and ineffectual for the ends of Government.” See also C, “Magistrate,” “12,” fo. 1r.

222 Addition in significantly darker ink.

223 “and this is by every sober man to be allowd” in significantly darker ink.

224mistakes. p. 18” addition in significantly lighter ink, similar to “& …. Martyrs.” below. These additions were probably made at the same time. Parker, Discourse, 18: “And therefore seeing the multitude is so inclinable to these mistakes of Religion, and seeing, when they are infected with them, they grow so turbulent and unruly, I leave it to Governours themselves to judge, whether it does not concern them with as much vigilance and severity either to prevent their rise or suppress their growth, as to punish any the foulest crimes of Immorality?”. See also C, “Church,” “p 18,” fo. 1r, and O1, fo. 5r.

225 Parker, Discourse, 12: “This leads or drives them any way, and as true Piety secures the publick weal by taming and civilizing the passions of men, and inuring them to a mild, gentle and governable spirit: So superstition and wrong notions of God and his Worship, are the most powerful engines to overturn its settlement,” following on immediately from the quotation in n. 221 above.

226 Parker, Discourse, 12: “And therefore unless Princes have Power to bind their Subjects to that Religion that they apprehend most advantageous to publick Peace and Tranquillity, and restrain those Religious mistakes that tend to its subversion; they are no better than Statues and Images of Authority, and want that part of their Power that is most necessary to a right discharge of their Government,” following on immediately from the quotation in n. 225 above. See also C, “Magistrate,” “12,” fo. 1r.

227 “& if soe why Christ … either Seditious or Martyrs.” in a significantly lighter ink, similar to “mistakes. p. 18” above; these changes were probably made at the same time.

228 Parker, Discourse, 21–2: “§ 8. For if Conscience be ever able to break down the restraints of Government, and all men have Licence to follow their own perswasions, the mischief is infinite, and the folly endless … Insomuch that there never yet was any Common-wealth, that gave a real liberty to mens Imaginations, that was not suddenly over-run with numberless divisions, and subdivisions of Sects: as was notorious in the late Confusions, when Liberty of Conscience was laid as the Foundation of Settlement.” See also C, “Magistrate,” “22.,” fo. 1r.

229 Parker, Discourse, 24: “and because the Church of Rome by her unreasonable Impositions has invaded the Fundamental Liberties of mankind, they presently conclude all restraints upon licentious Practices and Perswasions about Religion under the hated name of Popery.” See also C, “24.,” fo. 1r.

230 There is nothing on Parker, Discourse, 25, that matches the argument Locke discusses, but later (Parker, Discourse, pp. 27–8, §10) Parker does state, “And therefore Affairs of Religion being so strongly influential upon Affairs of State, and having so great a power either to advance or hinder the publick felicity of the Common-wealth, they must be as uncontroulably subject to the Supreme Power as all other Civil Concerns; because otherwise it will not have Authority enough to secure the Publick Interest of the Society, to attain the necessary and most important ends of its Institution.” See also note 231 below and C, “Magistrate,” “27.,” fo. 1r.

231 This phrasing is very similar to Parker, Discourse, 35: “In that the end of all Government is to secure the Peace and Tranquillity of the Publick; and therefore it must have Power to manage and order every thing that is serviceable to that end.” See also C, “Magistrate,” “35,” fo. 1v.

232 Parker, Discourse, 29–30: “And the first governments in the world were established purely upon the natural Rights of paternal Authority, which afterward grew up to a Kingly Power by the increase of posterity; and he that was at first but Father of a Family, in process of time, as that multiplied, became Father of a City, or Province: and hence it came to pass that in the first Ages of the World, Monarchy was its only Government, necessarily arising out of the Constitution of humane Nature, it being so natural for Families to enlarge themselves into Cities by uniting into a body according to their several Kindreds, whence by consequence the Supreme Head of those Families must become Prince and Governour of a larger & more diffused Society.” See also C, “29,” fo. 1r, and O1, fo. 5r.

233 Manuscript damaged; missing letters inferred from context.

234 Manuscript damaged; missing letters inferred from context.

235 “jure naturali”: by the law of nature.

236 Parker, Discourse, 146: “There is not any vice so incident to the Common People as Superstition, nor any so mischievous. ’Tis infinitely evident from the Histories and Records of all Ages and Nations, that there is nothing so vicious or absurd but may pass for Religion, and (what is worse) the more wild and giddy Conceits of Religion are ever suckt in by the multitude with the greatest passion and eagerness.”

237 Ibid., 144: “Nothing more concerns the Interest of the Civil Magistrate, than to take care, what particular Doctrines of Religion are taught within his Dominions; because some are peculiarly advantageous to the ends of Government, and others as naturally tending to its disturbance.”

238 Ibid., 145: “For seeing Religion has, and will have the strongest influence upon the minds of men.”

239 Ibid., 147: “And therefore it must needs above all things concern Princes, to look to the Doctrines and Articles of mens Belief; seeing ’tis so great odds that they prove of dangerous consequence to the publick Peace.”

240 See also C, “Magistrate,” “144” and “p. 144 &c,” fo. 2r.

241 See also C, “Magistrate,” “153,” fo. 2r.

242 Endorsed horizontally in pencil on the right-hand side of the page in an unknown early twentieth-century hand, possibly that of an auctioneer or a dealer in manuscripts.

243 All of the text on fo. 5 is written in the left-hand column.

244 Parker, Discourse, 28. See also C, “Magistrate,” “p. 28,” fo. 1r.

245 Parker, Discourse, 28. See also C, “Magistrate,” “p. 28,” fo. 1r.

246 Parker, Discourse, 25–6.

247 Ibid., 27.

248 Ibid., 27.

249 Ibid., 18. See also C, “Church,” “p 18,” fo. 1r; and O2, “p. 12,” fo. 7r.

250 Parker, Discourse, 18. See also C, “Church,” “p 18,” fo. 1r; and O2, “p. 12,” fo. 7r.

251 Parker, Discourse, 18. See also C, “Church,” “p 18,” fo. 1r; and O2, “p. 12,” fo. 7r.

252 Parker, Discourse, 29. See also C, “Magistrate,” “29,” fo. 1r; and O2,“p. 29,” fo. 7r.

253 Parker, Discourse, 30.

254 Ibid., 31.

255 Ibid., 32. See also C, “Magistrate,” “p. 32 … ibidem,” fo. 1v.

256 “though {though}.” Duplicated word excised for sense.

257 Parker, Discourse, 32. See also C, “Magistrate,” “32,” fo. 1v.

258 Parker, Discourse, 33–7. See also C, “Magistrate,” “32,” fo. 1v.

259 Parker, Discourse, 43–8. See also C, “Magistrate,” “48,” fo. 1v.

260 Parker, Discourse, 49–50. See also C, “Magistrate,” “49” and “50,” fo. 1v.

261 Endorsed horizontally in pencil on the right-hand side of the page in an unknown early twentieth-century hand, possibly that of an auctioneer or a dealer in manuscripts.

262 An illegible pair of words horizontally in pencil on the right-hand side of the page in an unknown early twentieth-century hand different from that immediately above, possibly that of an auctioneer or a dealer in manuscripts.

Figure 0

Fig. 1. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Wilson Library, Southern Historical Collection, 03406 (Folder 323), fo. 1r.