Locke's adversaries

Two salient propositions about John Locke's polemical purposes in writing the Two Treatises of Government are now taken for granted. The first is that Locke sought to refute the absolutism, not of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, but of Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha. The second is that, although he revised and published it in 1689, Locke wrote his book during or shortly after the Exclusion Crisis, in around 1680–2, and was providing a contribution to the assault by the earl of Shaftesbury's Whig party upon the regime of Charles II. My purpose is not to doubt either proposition, but to suggest, nonetheless, that as claims to have established Locke's intentions, they have acquired a sufficient rigidity to have become misleading. In what follows I argue, first, that Locke's target was not only Filmer, but more broadly the ideologists of Restoration Royalism, about whom Locke scholars have little to say. Here it will be necessary to dispute a suggestion that Filmer was untypical of the Royalist mainstream. Secondly, I show that there is an important ecclesiological and anticlerical context to the Two Treatises, since the conflict between Anglican intolerance and its critics was ingrained in Restoration politics, in a way in which the novel and contingent problem of Exclusion was not. The consequence of my case will be to perceive in the Two Treatises an attack directed against all the agents of Anglican authoritarianism, but particularly the clerical shapers of opinion, as well as the recognized assault on the monarchical tyranny of the Stuarts. It will also emerge that Locke's commitment to religious toleration needs to be set alongside the secular politics of the Treatises. In this light, the Treatises will seem considerably more ambiguous about the crown, for it was not only Restoration kingship, but also the Restoration church, and a corrupt parliament, which Locke and his fellow Whigs convicted of the most consistent and dogmatic repressiveness.

The enhancement of royal power

In the spring of 1660 the ascendant Presbyterian party, the ancestor of the Whigs, intended to restore Charles II to the throne upon strict conditions, similar to those presented to his father by the Long Parliament during the 1640s. On both occasions they failed catastrophically. In 1648 they were swept aside by a military coup, in 1660 by a Cavalier electoral victory. Charles I was executed; Charles II was exalted.