Martin Dzelzainis

Edward Hyde and Thomas Hobbes's Elements of Law, Natural and Politic

Although the existence of materials relating to Hobbess Elements of law and De cive in Bodleian Library MS Clarendon 126 has been known to scholars for some time, the first notice of these in print came as recently as 1987, in an article by Dr J. C. Hayward. The aim of this communication is to provide a full description and analysis of one of these items – the notes and extracts from the Elements – in the hope that this will shed some light on the earlier stages of the relationship between Clarendon and Hobbes.

Marvell and the Earl of Castlemaine

In April 1678, the writer of A Letter from Amsterdam, to a Friend in England, already in the know it would seem about Marvell’s authorship of An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (1677), unhesitatingly identified him as ‘a shrewd man against Popery’. Beyond that, however, ‘his Religion’ was a mystery to the writer and even, so he suggested, to Marvell himself: ‘you may place him, as Pasquin at Rome placed Henry the Eighth, betwixt Moses, the Messiah and Mahomet, with this Motto in his Mouth, quo me vertam nescio’.1 Ever since, scholars have been far from sure which way they themselves should turn when seeking to establish Marvell’s religious identity. For Pierre Legouis, Marvell can be posited somewhere en route to the rationalism of a later age: while ‘all sense of the supernatural had not died out in [Marvell]’, his ‘deistic sallies’ suggest that he was yielding up ‘to infidelity’ theological positions the ‘importance’ of which ‘he did not realize’.2 More succinctly, Annabel Patterson pronounces him ‘in religion, indecisive’.3 Others judge him a conformist, albeit of an occasional and lukewarm kind and without it compromising his steadfast support for Nonconformists.4