Shaftesbury, Locke, and Their Revolutionary Letter? [Corrigendum]

Abstract

A correction of an article originally published in vol 17 (2017). In 1675, the anonymous Letter to a Person of Quality was condemned in the House of Lords and ordered to be burned by the public hangman.  A propagandistic work that has long been attributed to Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, and less certainly to his secretary John Locke, it traduced hard-line Anglican legislation considered in Parliament that year—namely the Test Bill, proposing that office-holders and MPs swear off political militancy and indeed any efforts to reform the Church and State.  Careful examination of the text of the Letter, and that of one of its sources in the Reasons against the Bill for the Test, also circulated in 1675, reveals the presence of highly seditious passages of covert historical allegory.  Hitherto un-noted by modern scholars, this allegory compared King Charles II to the weak and intermittently mad Henry VI, while agitating for armed revolt against a government made prey to popish and French captors.  The discovery compels modification, through chronological revision and also re-assessment of the probability of Locke’s authorship of the Letter, of Richard Ashcraft’s picture of Shaftesbury and Locke as first-time revolutionaries for the cause of religious tolerance in the early 1680s.  Even more significantly, it lends support to Ashcraft’s view of the nature and intent of duplicitous published writings from the Shaftesbury circle, whose members included Robert Ferguson, ‘the Plotter’ and pamphleteer at home in the world of skilled biblical hermeneutics.  Cultivated for stealthy revolutionary purposes, these writings came with designs of engaging discrete reading networks within England’s culture of Protestant dissent.