Despite recent attempts (Porter, 1981; A. M. Wilson, 1983; Pocock, 1985a) to lay claim to the Enlightenment as being, at least in part, English territory, the conjunction of the terms ‘English’ and ‘Enlightenment’ still seems almost a solecism: no less an historian than R. R. Palmer has gone so far as to write that ‘the term “English Enlightenment”, would be jarring and incongruous if it were ever heard’ (1976: 608). Was not the Enlightenment essentially a French phenomenon, albeit with pale reflections in Germany and Scotland and even paler reflections elsewhere? In any case what need had eighteenth-century England of an enlightenment when it had achieved many of the goals for which the French philosophes were striving? Influential accounts of the Enlightenment such as those by Hazard or Gay concede the importance of such major English thinkers as Bacon, Newton or Locke in the prehistory of the movement and cite examples drawn from eighteenth–century England, but their views of the Enlightenment are largely framed in terms of debates within France. Since in France the clash between the philosophes and a powerful and privileged ecclesiastical establishment assumed special significance, they emphasise the anti-clerical and even irreligious character of the Enlightenment (Gilley, 1981) – what Hazard (1965) refers to as the phenomenon of ‘Christianity on trial’ and Gay terms ‘The rise of modern paganism’ (1970).