Chapters 1 and 2 provide a thick description of Milton’s anticlericalism, tracing it through his career, describing its main recurring features and the changing contexts in which these features recur. They show that Milton’s anticlericalism was propositional as well as attitudinal: not merely a dim view of priests (though he certainly had that) but a core element of his thought. The two chapters tell a single chronological story, divided for greater uniformity in length. Chapter 1 describes the first emergence of Milton’s anticlericalism in “Lycidas”; its full-blown emergence in the antiprelatical tracts of the early 1640s; Areopagitica; “On the New Forcers of Conscience.”

Chapter 1 examines the early university career of Locke, detailing his proximity to Oxford Independents during the Interregnum and to more conformist figures after the Restoration. The chapter charts Locke’s possible exposure to Hobbes’s Leviathan and to debates over sovereignty and conscience that were strongly coloured by Hobbesian themes. Central to the chapter are Locke’s connection to figures such as John Owen and Henry Stubbe and early evidence of his political reading. These researches contextualize Locke’s early correspondence and his unpublished ‘Two Tracts’ and suggest the influence of Hobbes on both. The young Locke emerges as a figure versed in the new contractual theories of sovereignty and their implications for religious governance. The chapter also makes a case for deploying the categories of ‘civil’ and ‘prophetic’ religion in historical analysis of the period.