David Wootton

The Thirty-Nine Articles required all Englishmen to practise archery on Sundays. For the Elizabethans bearing arms was a duty, not a right. Few of them were allowed to shoot at anything but targets: all game in the kingdom belonged to the Queen and could only be hunted under licence. Bows and arrows, guns and pistols must normally have been kept at home, but every man carried a knife with which to cut his food, and every gentleman a sword. Fights were common, but the law required you, if attacked, to retreat until your back was against the wall: only then could you kill with impunity. After 1604 one particular weapon was singled out as especially in need of control: the Stabbing Act made it always murder, never manslaughter, to kill someone with a knife. This was the one weapon everyone had to hand.

Although Thomas Hobbes lived to be 91, and was one of the most famous philosophers of his day, there are only 211 surviving letters to or from him. This compares with 3656 to or from Locke, some twenty thousand to or from Leibniz. For the last three decades of his life Hobbes suffered from Parkinson’s disease, but he always had the assistance of a secretary, and he seems to have replied to letters whenever he received them. Alas, few people wrote to him. Worse, most of his correspondents were obscure and insignificant. Between the letter from Henry Oldenburg, soon to be secretary of the Royal Society, in 1655 and Leibniz’s of 1670, the only letters between Hobbes and an intellectual of the first rank are two scathing reports transmitted through intermediaries by Christian Huygens. In them he dismisses Hobbes’s claim to have transformed geometry by a number of major discoveries, such as that the value of pi is the square root of ten, as ‘absurd childish nonsense’. Hobbes believed geometry was the queen of sciences because nobody contested the truth of geometrical proofs. It must have been deeply embarrassing for him to discover that his own efforts to square the circle convinced nobody, but provided yet further opportunities for his enemies to attack him. One of the best books on the reception of Hobbes’s philosophy is called The Hunting of Leviathan, and what we find in these two volumes is the correspondence of a philosopher who has been driven out of polite society.

William Lilly was the first to produce a major textbook of astrology in the English language, at a time when the truth of astrology was almost universally recognised. At their peak in the 1650s his almanacs sold up to 30,000 copies a year. From them he may only have netted a modest £70 a year (enough for a gentleman to live on), but they served to advertise his astrological practice, from which we have the surviving records of many thousands of consultations. Lilly advised the rich, famous and powerful; among his friends were leading scientists of the day. And he shaped the course of events. At the Restoration he had to counter the charge that the day the King was executed was chosen to conform to his prognostication. Through the key years of the Civil War he had forecast Parliamentary victory and royal defeat (he predicted victory at Naseby, the key battle of the war), and Royalists complained that his almanacs were worth several regiments to the Parliament. He had helped to ensure his prognostications came true, and had emerged victorious in his own war with the King’s astrologers. Briefly (before his failure to foresee the Restoration or the Fire of London cut his reputation down to size), Lilly seemed to embody the success of a new astrological science.