1690
SNOW FELL HEAVILY IN HOLLAND IN THE winter of 1683, and one of the victims of the cold was a lioness that died in the Amsterdam zoo. As Dutch academics gathered for the rare opportunity to dissect the corpse of an exotic beast, they were joined by an English doctor and philosopher, John Locke. Locke had recently arrived in Amsterdam and when he struck up a conversation with Philip van Limborch, a local professor of theology, the exchange between the two men soon extended far beyond the autopsy. They both had an interest, they discovered, in religious toleration – it was a burning issue of the moment – and van Limborch encouraged Locke to set his thoughts down on paper.
Locke, fifty-one, was a political exile in Holland. A small-time lawyer’s son from the Somerset village of Wrington, he had been a teenager during the Civil War, then studied at Oxford University in the years following the death of Charles I. As religious sects quarrelled and the army made and unmade parliaments, the visionary chaos of Cromwell’s England started pushing Locke to consider that there must be some more stable and rational way of government. The essence of civil society, he came to feel, should be a fair working contract between the governor and the governed, and this had inclined him to welcome Charles II’sreturn at the invitation of Parliament in 1660.
But the restored King had proved, for all his charm, to be an absolutist like his father. Locke drifted into the Whig, or anti-royal camp, becoming a friend and medical adviser to Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, who led the Whig attempt to exclude the future James II from the succession. When Charles defeated the third Exclusion Bill in 1681 and determined to rule without Parliament, Shaftesbury fled for his life to the Netherlands, dying there in 1683. Later that year Locke decided that he too would be safer in the Netherlands, and so found himself, soon after his arrival, in the crowd that gathered around the lioness on the dissecting table.
Shadowed by Stuart agents and hiding under a variety of aliases, Locke was working on the philosophical text for which he would become most famous, An Essay on Human Understanding. ‘The highest perfection of intellectual nature,’ he wrote, ‘lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness.’
Looking for happiness in this life might strike many today as the most obvious of goals to pursue, but it was heresy in an age when most people assumed they would only encounter and fully experience their God after they had died. Locke’s suggestion that earthly life was something to be enjoyed here and now jarred on many of his contemporaries as ‘atheistic’.
In fact, the philosopher was a devout Christian, and in the autumn of 1685 he was appalled by Louis XIV’s sudden revocation of the freedom of worship that France’s Protestants, the Huguenots, had enjoyed since 1598 under the Edict of Nantes. As Huguenot refugees fled persecution – England alone welcomed fifty thousand – Locke took up his Dutch friend van Limborch’s suggestion and sat down to compose Epistola de tolerantia, A Letter Concerning Toleration. Spiritual belief, Locke argued, was no business of the state, which should confine itself to the ‘civil interests’ that he defined as ‘life, liberty, health and indolency [freedom from pain] of body, and the possession of outward things such as money, land, houses, furniture and the like’.
A century later Thomas Jefferson would combine these words with the key phrase from Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding to produce his stirring battle cry for ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’. The US Declaration of Independence would echo round the world.
In his own lifetime, however, Locke felt it safer to keep a low profile. Although he came back to England on 12 February 1689 on the same ship as Princess Mary – who, next day, would strike the deal with Parliament that made her husband and herself joint sovereigns – Locke found it prudent to keep some of his crucial essays anonymous. There was no author’s name on A Letter Concerning Toleration: the title page carried scrambled letters that were code for ‘Locke’ and ‘Limborch’, to whom the work was dedicated. Only Locke and the Dutchman knew the code, and Locke acknowledged his authorship of the Letter and other works only in a codicil to his will signed the month before his death in October 1704.
By then, people were coming to see that Locke had put into words the essential values of the Glorious Revolution – and particularly in his Two Treatises on Civil Government that he published anonymously in 1690. Governments, he wrote, may not ‘levy taxes on the people’ without ‘the consent . . . of their representatives’. No government, he argued, could be considered legitimate unless grounded in the consent of the people – and any ruler who attempted to exercise an arbitrary power ‘is to be esteemed the Common enemy and Pest of mankind and is to be treated accordingly’.
Nowadays John Locke is thought of almost exclusively in terms of his political philosophy. He is studied at universities as the apostle of modern Western liberal democracy, as Marx was the apostle of Communism. But in his own lifetime he was a hands-on man of many talents – throwing himself into the vortex of thought and experiment that came to be known as the Enlightenment. Elected a member of the Royal Society, he served on a ‘committee of experiments’, and when his patron Lord Shaftesbury fell ill, he supervised the risky operation that drained an abscess on his liver. Above all, he spoke up for toleration, and was delighted when one of the first statutes of William and Mary’s reign was an act that allowed Dissenters (though not Catholics) to worship in their own licensed meeting-houses.
‘Toleration has now at last been established by law in our country,’ he wrote triumphantly to his lioness autopsy friend, van Limborch. ‘Not perhaps so wide in scope as might be wished for by you . . . Still, it is something to have progressed so far.’