INTRODUCTION: THE CONSPIRATORIAL WORLD OF JOHN TOLAND

John Toland was dying. Bankrupt following a foolish financial foray in South Sea Stock, he was suffering from my old pains in my thighs, reins, and stomach [which] seized me violently two days ago; with a total loss of appetite, hourly retchings and a very high coloured water.1 As the illness progressed, and I grew much worse than I was [and I] relapsed again into all my former symptoms, more frequent and malignant than ever, he gave himself up to the hands of a Physician, who I believe to be an honest man [who] prepares his own medicine and explains everything he does to me.2 Despite the care, he did not prevail, and succumbed in backroom of a carpenters shop in Putney. The year was 1722; he was fifty-two. Yet, even as he was losing his battle with a series of chronic conditions, from rheumatism, the stone and black jaundice, his endemic temperamental suspicion was abrasively on show. He railed vigorously against the treatment he was receiving. An Historical Account of the Life of Mr John Toland takes notice of how There was found upon his table when he died a small Latin tract, intitled, Diatriba contra Medicos, chiefly levelled against the use of Oils and Emeticks, so much late in vogue.3 This was of a piece with a deep-felt antagonism towards doctors, expressed in a letter-cum-pamphlet, addressed to his friend Barnham Goode. Written while he was recovering, indeed though very slowly from an episode of his illness, and composed by fits and starts in my intervals of up-sitting, he attacked the medical profession as consisting of men who, the greatest part of them, ruin nature by art; and who by endeavouring to be always very cunning for others, by making everything a mystery, are frequently too cunning for themselves.4 He declared that as a consequence of the misdiagnosis and mistreatment of his condition, he had finally sworn off future care by the profession, one he caustically observed whose art is founded in darkness and improved by murder.5 This places this pamphlet in relation to the Deist subversion of established authority, attacking the pretensions of those who proposed unmerited claims of a knowledge that was inaccessible to ordinary citizens. As he continued:

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A Political Biography of John Toland They reduce all diseases with their cures right or wrong to certain precarious systems, or hypotheses, according to which he that expresses himself the most volubly or plausibly sets himself up immediately for an able physician and is by others so deemed, tho he knows nothing of anatomy, botany, or any such requisite qualifications; and would sooner kill a man according to the doctrine he has espoused than cure him by following any other method.6

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Yet the pamphlet also points in another direction, suggesting that Toland could perceive in the medical profession a conspiracy of control akin to that he found in the churches: both medics and clerics were guilty of priestcraft. Toland made explicit the shared conceit of an attack on a clerisy which situates this pamphlet into a wider paradigm of freethinking scepticism when he averred The doctors have almost as many jarring sects and incompatible factions among em as the priests, and come little short of hating each other as heartily, that is like devils.7 Hence the purchase of the title, Physic without Physicians, for Toland was convinced that auto-didacticism was the only antidote to the bitter poison of priestcraft. In enabling this second reading, the pamphlet allows a wider interpretation of John Tolands life, thoughts and actions, which runs against the grain of recent studies of the Irish freethinker. Since the revival of interest in Toland began with essays in the late 1960s, much of the criticism has focused on the labile, fluid, allusive quality of his prose. Of this, Robert E. Sullivan has rightly warned of how
Requirements of daily survival combined with imperatives of temperament to lead Toland into compromises in choosing topics, method of presentation and, on occasion, viewpoint. There is nevertheless a risk that concentration on such compromises will foster neglect of the subjective and objective realities which both enabled him to aspire to and sometimes clutch cosmopolitanism and ensured his historical survival.8

Yet, the generality of the recent discussion has, arguably, fallen foul of this temptation and has read Tolands work as an early brand of postmodernism, concerned with how apparently authoritative texts might, by dint of literary scholarship and antagonistic reading, be destabilized, deconstructed and decoded. As his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, written by Stephen H. Daniel, recognizes, Because of Tolands interest in challenging the bounds of propriety, he has been the object of work in hermeneutics, deconstruction, and post-structuralism.9 Daniel himself offers up just such a treatment in his essay on The Subversive Philosophy of John Toland. As he writes:
My remarks indicate that I find certain themes in contemporary philosophic research helpful in understanding Tolands philosophic outlook. Though I do not

Introduction: The Conspiratorial World of John Toland intend to present my comments as a post-structuralist or post-modern reading of Toland, I have suggested that such strategies can retrieve Toland from simple classification as yet another eighteenth-century deist.10

In this rendition Toland is less concerned with the discourse of power and more perplexed by the power of discourse. As among the foremost eighteenth-century theorists of discretion Toland conducted a subversive campaign to highlight how discourse tends towards absolutist uniformity and disregards the idiosyncratic experience of the individual.11 As Daniel explains:
For Toland, when a belief is commonly shared and intelligible to all, it makes the individual holding the belief superfluous, since nuances of individual beliefs introduce only superficial (and bothersome) distinctions for common discourse. But these bothersome idiosyncrasies of meaning by which individuals assert their presence provide Toland with exactly what he needs to acknowledge how guerrilla attacks occur within reasoned argument. According to Toland, reason benefits from the subversive influence of controversy, because dispute draws our attention back to the discursive nature of reason.12

Toland is thus interested, Daniel notes, in toleration of ethnic minorities, in the condition of exile such as he sees Tolands own Irish heritage, [which] makes him a suspect in English debates and in polemics that disrupt received, communal, wisdom.13 Toland is here presented as the exiled or subversive other.14 Perhaps the most significant recent reader of Tolands oeuvre, Justin Champion, has written in this postmodern vein of Tolands mercurial ubiquity, his ambiguity, while promoting him as a maverick, a man on the radical margins, involved in clandestine counter-cultural sodalities, disseminating an esoteric materialism.15 All true, as far as it goes, but the term counter cultural does reveal some of Champions underlying preconceptions. In Republican Learning Champion depicts a Toland dedicated to the promulgation of a form of positive liberty, which rejected religious superstition and favoured the deliberation of independent gentlemen.16 It was Tolands ambition, Champion contends, to replace the rule of tyranny with liberty. It was a libertine if not a libertarian vision, one which Toland fought for by acts of intellectual resistance: In order to achieve that objective he intended to alter the culture in which he lived by changing the way people thought and behaved. He asked them, in other words, to tune into his message, and turn on to his vision,17 dropping out of one social arrangement and entering another, namely a vision of Britain as a classical republic. In Champions rendition,
Tolands strategy for cultural subversion was a subtle and sophisticated matter Exploiting the growing cultural authority of the way of print and especially the ambiguity of reader reception and response, Toland consistently presented himself as a man of learning and theological erudition. Rather than trash the claims of scripture,

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A Political Biography of John Toland the Church Fathers and ecclesiastic tradition, Toland became expert in the knowledge of these discourses. By learning the trade he was able to engage more effectively in deconstructive ambitions, teasing readers and audiences with a variety of ruses and ambiguities By effective capture of the languages of orthodox discourses (in politics and theology) he developed a repertoire of discursive ruses that deconstructed commonplaces, exposed contradictions and appropriated the affective power of key vocabularies to his own purposes.18

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Discursive ruses and deconstructive ambitions: Toland is here being portrayed as a 1960s French intellectual, playful, ironic, erudite and elusive. Nor is Champion alone in rendering Toland as a postmodern avant la lettre; Daniel C. Fouke sees Toland as the author of a philosophical comedy with serious purposes referring to his late and privately published Pantheisticon suggesting that the real subversion that Toland practised was in his style of writing.19 The literary complexity, the overweening scholarship, the layering of notes and commentary, the circular, sometimes self-contradictory quality Fouke identifies in Tolands writing is all the consequence of this central purpose. Toland is consistently puffing up religious forms only to burst them on the pin of his acuity and wit. It is, as the title to Foukes study expresses it, Philosophy in a Burlesque Mode. This reading of Deist style as parodic and subversive also informs the study of James A. Herrick. He identifies a radical rhetoric that plays with notions of subterfuge that covers the discourse of scepticism he associates with the English Deists in general.20 This style was characterised by strategic lying, linguistic camouflage, scandalous allegation, and scathing ridicule.21 To Herrick the most important component of this style was the resort to ridicule, for Ridicule expressed the freedom to inquire into religious questions unrestrained; it was reason flaunting authority and as such appealed to a readers sense of adventure, and, perhaps, latent sense of rebelliousness.22 It also effectively undermined the revelation-based clerical hierarchy mocking its pretensions to learning and the priests access to universal truth. Perhaps most importantly however, ridicule was entertaining, and hence provided a strong antidote to what was considered to be the distracting and soporific effects of religious language, which was also difficult to answer by traditional argument.23 Crucially, ridicule does not appear in discourse as argument; its premises and conclusions are obscure.24 This obscurity of intention also shaped what David Berman termed the art of theological lying, which he sees as indicative of atheistic thought in the period and of which he views Toland as a master. What is involved in this trope is not a subversion of a norm, but its false appropriation. This is, for instance, how Berman reads Toland taking on the persona of a Christian in his writings.25 Strategically, this provides a cover for heterodox ideas; by disclaiming any intention in this direction it protects the author from accusations of heresy. It also, in its

Introduction: The Conspiratorial World of John Toland

use of the formula, communicates to knowing readers that what is involved is in fact a deceit: those who are truly Christian do not need to proclaim it. The very identification highlights that the question is in doubt, and hence the need to read the text with an awareness of heterodox undercurrents. Finally, the assertion that the work comes from the pen of an orthodox mind insinuates heterodox notions into those who actually wish to advocate orthodoxy, misdirecting naive readers and subtly shifting the understanding of Christian norms.26 Reading Toland as subversive, parodic and duplicitous A. B. Worden describes him as one of the great posturers of Anglo-Irish literature places him into the context of a Radical Enlightenment.27 This is a tradition of thought identified, or arguably constructed, by historians like Paul Hazard (whose Crisis of the European Mind was first published in French in 1935, but translated into English in 1953), Margaret Jacob (for whom Tolands Pantheisticon is a key text in the spread of Speculative Freemasonry across Europe), and most recently Jonathan Israel. To Hazard, Toland was a queer personage who had got drunk on reason; it had gone to his head.28 Indeed for Hazard, Toland was at once filled with iconoclastic energy and a purveyor of a synthetic tradition of radical ideas.29 While he was a born mischief maker and scandal-monger, puffed up with vanity, fond of creating an uproar, he was not an original mind.30 Time and again Hazard proposed, as we read him we catch echoes of Fontenelle and Bayle, of Bekker and Van Dale, of Hobbes and Spinoza His head was crammed with things he had read, and the ideas of his predecessors keep cropping up in little shreds and patches in everything he wrote.31 Proof in his being of the existence of a radical Enlightenment, Toland for Hazard was a product of an engagement with continental scepticism. In contrast, for Margaret Jacob, the influence pointed in the other direction, for Toland was, in her view, the central purveyor of English heterodox ideas onto the continent. This unofficial envoy of Freemasonry was one of the most heretical thinkers of his age.32 For Jacob, Toland is primarily a student of the Hermetic tradition of thought, with particular inspiration being drawn from Giordano Bruno. In his hands, she contends,
both Bruno and the Hermetic tradition underwent a necessary transformation. The subtleties and profundities of Brunos thought were lost or ignored, as was the religious, Gnostic goal of the Hermetic view of nature. What evolved was a pantheistic and materialist worldview. In the period under discussion this new world-view became the theology and metaphysics of the natural religion formulated by its proponents. They often formed groups whose organisation and ritual were Masonic; but Freemasonry also had been transformed into a convenient social and intellectual association, within which the members probably found the secrecy and international contacts needed for the promotion of their views.33

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A Political Biography of John Toland

And in the development of this new brand of Speculative Freemasonry, Toland was also complicit, exporting it from London to Holland, prompting those who railed against Toland and his associates [to see] them as an organised, if not conspiratorial, group whose aim was to destroy religion and to undermine the structure of the state.34 While Jacob thus makes Toland a proponent of an old form of esoteric philosophy, Jonathan Israel appropriates Toland as a proponent of a form of a self-consciously modern Spinozism, albeit one that implied not that Spinoza invented the patterns of thought to which Toland adhered but rather that Spinoza was the chief representative and main exponent of a tendency which had allegedly existed since the remotest beginnings of philosophy, and of which too Toland was a major representative.35 In Israels assessment, Tolands
contribution to the radical Enlightenment was in fact rather substantial. Yet, if due to personal shortcomings, he could never shake off an unenviable reputation for superficiality, unreliability and charlatanism, which dogged him until the end of his days, what his most cogent texts demonstrate is that he was a creative Spinozist in the sense generally understood in the Early Enlightenment.36

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If Jacobs insistence on Tolands complex debt to Giordano Bruno pushes him in the direction of Israels depiction of him as a pupil of Spinoza, then the reading of Robert Rees Evans has the merit of retaining a sense of Tolands heterodoxy while insisting on his originality of mind. Evans claims attention for Toland on the ground that he invented and entertained a vision of a new human being dwelling in a new society.37 While, in Evanss view this utopian vision was fashioned in resistance to both Spinoza and Newton both of whom had missed or passed over the quasi-biological basis of cosmos and whose own theories played into the hands of the priestly bureaucracy from want of an adequate biology it was deeply radical in character.38 For Evans, Tolands cosmos was conceived as a metamorphic, hylozoistic [the conjecture that all matter contains some element of life] round. The state, ideally, reflected this as a new incarnation of the classical cosmopolis.39 And crucially, Toland contended there is no overriding purpose for God, church nor priest in a circulating biological universe. Matter in general, moves itself .40 This edifice of scholarship is all in agreement in seeing Toland as a subversive figure, an able illuminator of the inherent instability of text, and as a jester, prankster and polemicist, close to personifying what W. H. Auden determines the characteristic traits of the practical joker:
the practical joker must not only deceive, but also when he has succeeded, unmask and reveal the truth to his victims. The satisfaction of the practical joker is the look of astonishment on the faces of others when they learn that all the time they were convinced that they were thinking and acting on their own initiative, they were actually

Introduction: The Conspiratorial World of John Toland the puppets of anothers will. Thus, though his jokes may be harmless in themselves and extremely funny, there is something slightly sinister about every practical joker, for they betray him as someone who likes to play God behind the scenes.41

This was indeed an accusation levelled at Toland, for his ambition was supposed by opponents to be to head up a religion by the age of thirty.42 The problem with this evocative reading is, however, that Toland is not a postmodern figure. Toland was not even a sceptic, as are many postmodern thinkers. He does not fit the tradition of early modern sceptical thought documented ably by Richard H. Popkin.43 He did not live in a world in which words were slippery and identity unstable. Rather, as the paradigmatic philosopher of the period, John Locke, had it, while their signification [is] perfectly arbitrary [and] not the consequence of a natural connection there is a reasonable presumption that Words are sensible signs, necessary for communication of ideas.44 It can be further inferred that speakers suppose their words to be marks of the ideas in the minds also of other men, with whom they communicate: for else they should talk in vain, and could not be understood.45 Moreover, and critically, words also can be presumed to relate to the reality of things. This presumption is because men would not be thought to talk barely of their own imagination, but of things as really they are; therefore they often suppose the words to stand also for the reality of things.46 It is certainly the case that in making this inference a necessary simplification occurs wherein the appearance of an object, made up of its secondary qualities, becomes a shorthand for a still unknowable essential, or primary quality. Nonetheless, as Locke recognised, there was a working premise of referential accuracy and a presumption that communication could be meaningful. In this light, while habit and prejudice often worked to misshape meaning, there was thought to be a stable reference which knowledge would reveal. It was this process of corrosion that Toland set out to expose, while simultaneously endeavouring to re-establish the stable, reasonable meaning of words. This context is understood by Terry Eagelton, whose own postmodern inclinations lead him to disown Toland as epistemologically naive in hermeneutics and argue there is of course no such form of [universally stable] knowledge.47 Yet Eagleton rightly understands the radical nature of Tolands stance, realizing that as a good rationalist, but also one scornful of lites, Toland is allergic to darkness and uncertitude.48 Indeed,
Given his own experience of calumny and abuse, Toland understands how discourse can maim and incarcerate, how words can starve a man by depriving him of employment, or rhetoric fashion a new religious object for sectarian wangling. In his Enlightenment faith that truth is always and everywhere the same, Toland strikes a radical blow against those who would seek to manipulate texts for their own oppressive political ends. It is a case which our own postmodernists, for whom such re-readings are generally assumed to by subversive, might do well to ponder.49

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A Political Biography of John Toland

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In Eagletons reading Toland comes close to an Orwellian conceit that to take hold of the plain sense of language, with plain speaking pronounced in a plain style is to reveal the truth value of the object under discussion.50 Certainly Toland presumed that the problem with language was not that it is inherently nominal, but rather than its referential capacity is corroded by misuse and prejudice; and by the fallacious understandings promulgated by vested interests and powerful agents of control. In Tolands view language has a stable, coherent and consistent form; a form which can be revealed by a process of purification and reduction. When Toland claimed, for instance, that Christianity is not mysterious, he meant what he said. Scripture could be understood if the words were stripped of the accretions of false meaning developed through traditions of clerical scholastic obfuscation. It is not a sop to social niceties to suggest that Christianity is inherently a rational theology: it is a truth claim that Toland intended for readers to take seriously. The predicate of this study is, therefore, that instead of thinking of him as a jester, there is something to be gained by taking Toland seriously, treating him not as a jester but as a journalist, not as a prankster but as a polemicist, not as a postmodern critic but a political conspirator. In this I follow his clear injunction if you were to know more of him, search his writings.51 The immediate consequence of this decision is unavoidably unsettling. As Physic without Physicians makes amply clear, if one commits oneself to reading Toland flat one finds oneself hearing a very different tone from the ironic academic detachment modern commentators are prone to hear when listening to him. Instead what is articulated is the vigorous terrified voice of a political actor who understands and fears the machinations of power. The reader is being pestered by a believer, not an unbeliever, and being accosted by a writer who believes in the capacity of institutional power, not one who assumes he is dealing with a mirage. In Isaiah Berlins terms Toland was not a fox; he was a hedgehog. Berlin discriminated between two temperaments when writing on Tolstoy, by using a saying of the Greek poet Archilochus: The fox knows many things; but thehedgehogknows one big thing.52 Whereas the fox is adept at deploying a breath of knowledge and appears to have a scale of learning that intimidates, his knowledge is in fact superficial and scattered, with there being no schema, no overarching principles and nothing bringing the learning together into a workable system. As Berlin puts it, foxes pursue many ends, often unrelated, and even contradictory, connected, if at all, in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.53 In contrast to the foxs intellectual fireworks, the hedgehog seems obsessive and pedestrian, with a solid and deep understanding of one thing, in which there is a single,

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universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance.54 Although in first light Toland appears to be a fox, and this is how many of his critics read him, what this book contends is that he was in fact a hedgehog. All of his diverse writings, from historical theology to political pamphleteering, from esoteric schemes for Masonic organizations to public assaults on establishment figures were ultimately devoted to revealing the essential, singular and unitary truth of the historical condition. In other words, Toland did not have an eclectic mind; in fact he was something of a monomaniac, and what follows is, for that reason, a study in idealism. It is however an idealism of a peculiar bent, for in his concern for seeing a teleological pattern in the historical record Toland was prone to uncovering real meaning behind the veil of actuality. It was his persistent belief, from Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) to the A Specimen of the Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning which was amongst his papers upon his death in 1722, that history was to be understood as a narrative of original purity and eventual corruption, against which process Toland railed. Throughout his writings he sought to identify the protagonists who were guilty of driving historical development down the wrong course; those whose interests and power hunger led them to dismiss the claims of the public good in favour of factional benefit and personal aggrandizement. There is no sense in Tolands work of impersonal social forces of the kind later centralized in the historical writings of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers as varied as Adam Ferguson, William Robertson and John Millar. In twinning his sense of history as regressive with an understanding of agency as personal, Toland conceptualized the world in terms of parties and networks, not social groups and economic transformation. These parties often hid their agendas and operations from public view; knowledge elites emerged consisting of those in the know, whose interests lay in the perpetuating of an infrastructure of power and keeping the public in the dark about the actual causes of the events that shaped their lives. Extending this interpretation across society, from the church to the state, Toland became a conspiracy theorist. This may seem rather excessive, although as Robert E. Sullivan insightfully recognized, Like other eighteenth-century writers of every persuasion, Toland detected sinister conspiracies at work beneath the surface of great public events.55 This, Sullivan suggests, is a consequence of the psychological failure to distinguish the man from the argument, for as a group, Augustan pamphleteers seem to have been unable to separate themselves or anyone else from their ideas If he [Toland] spoke with the voice of reason, then his opponents had to be moved by the base motives he imputed to them.56 Indeed, what must be recalled is the conspiratorial quality of late seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury political life a game of ins and outs in which factions, parties and

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cabals scrambled into and fell out of office, all within the shadow of a wide Jacobite conspiracy to overturn the state and return a Catholic monarch to the throne. Toland was hardly unrealistic in thinking of politics in conspiratorial terms when the state was the bounty to be won in a competition composed of palace coups, invasion scares, assassinations, arrests and abdications. This has the ring of a historiographical truism about the period from at least 1678 and the beginnings of the Popish Plot.57 By 1683, when the Rye House Plotters planned to assassinate Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, later James II, the idea of politics being conducted through conspiracy had bled across to how the Protestants understood their own actions and not the projected and feared Catholic other.58 Yet despite these events being much commented on, the structural consequence of their occurrence on how contemporaries conceptualized politics in the period which follows has been less developed. Although Paul Hopkins has written of how the salient fact about the 1690s is that the whole period lay in the shadow of the Popish Plot, in fact little attention has been devoted to the consequences of this structuring of high politics.59 The Williamite Revolution of 168891, for instance, was itself the consequence of a conspiracy, or of interlocking conspiracies, but this is little remarked on, even in the two most formidable recent re-evaluations of the episode; those of Tim Harris and Steve Pincus.60 More helpful is an important essay by Mark Knights on The Conspiracies of Party Politics under the Late Stuarts. Therein Knights contends that
Between 1689 and 1714 oppositional politics could not simply be fought on the grounds of a struggle between liberty and power because power kept shifting hands, to the Tories in the 1690s, early 1700s and 17101714 and to the Whigs in the mid 1690s, mid 1700s and after 1714. These shifts, and corresponding shifts in public opinion, were explained in terms of a conspiracy, not just of self-interested men but also of men who used manipulative rhetorical techniques to manipulate public discourse. The language of party thus articulated and shaped conspiratorial fears.61

This observation can be extended even further to include the shaping fact of the late Stuart regime. After 1688 Jacobite plots absorbed and appalled the body politics for decades. The actual certain existence of a counter-revolutionary movement, with active international support from the arch-enemy France, and with a distinctive Catholic religious profile, provided the grist for numerous invasion scares, for scandalous innuendo, for guilt by association and, shockingly and sickeningly, secret conspiracies and open rebellions. Yet, again, this is not a theme which has been picked up on extensively by historians of the Jacobite movement. One honourable exception to this reticence is Paul Hopkins whose essay Sham Plots and Real Plots in the 1690s attempts to set some of the unsifted allegations, false witnesses and legends in context.62 He asserts that

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A large number of the political nation including probably several of Williams ministers interpreted contemporary politics in the light of what they imagined [the Popish Plot] revealed.63 Although he accepts that there were genuine reasons for alarm he concludes that the ministers looked for assassination plots, and saw sinister patterns in what was merely repetition by perjurers and that across the period the governments belief in so many false tales had, if anything, made detection of the real Assassination Plot [of 1696] more difficult.64 While Hopkins may be correct to suggest that only with Annes accession and the obvious quiescence of English Jacobitism did the number of allegations significantly decrease, the political fears were transposed onto external threats made manifest in 1715 and again less cogently in 1719.65 With the Atterbury Plot of 17202, domestic Jacobitism came to the attention of Hanoverian authorities, and renewed the sense of a regime living with the perpetual possibility of subversion from within by secretive cabals of counter-revolutionaries.66 If conspiracies had shaped politics throughout the fifty-two years of Tolands life, it is unsurprising that he accorded them significance in his thinking about the nature of power. Yet, what is distinct about Tolands work is his commitment to this mode of thought, and not any inoculation from its power. As will be contended throughout this study, Tolands work evokes all the central characteristics of the conspiratorial mind. By this term is meant a commitment to thinking about power relations precisely as structured by conspiratorial activity, by cabals, and secret societies and covert motives. As Brian L. Keely relates, A conspiracy theory is a proposed explanation of some historical event (or events) in terms of the significant casual agency of a relatively small group of persons the conspirators acting in secrecy. In this definition some useful clarifications apply, namely, that it proposes reasons why the event occurred, that is, it ascribes power to human agency in affecting historical change; secondly this potency is, paradoxically, limited for it is because the conspirators are not omnipotent that they must act in secret. Thirdly, they must constitute an identifiable group for a conspiracy of one is no conspiracy at all, but rather the actions of a lone agent.67 This final observation accords with the legal understanding of conspiracy as a completed crime; it is complete when two or more persons agree to do an illegal act by illegal means. Conspiracy is what exists before and without any scheme being carried out.68 This is critical for it places the crime into the discursive practice of the conspirators: it is not that they have acted but that they have discussed their intentions which produces a conspiracy. Three tendencies, Keely proposes, make someone particularly likely to understand the world as shaped by conspiracies, namely a concern for totalized explanations. Conspiracy theorists get distressed by outliers facts that do not sit comfortably within the given narrative of events. Secondly, there is a desire

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to rationalize the world: rejecting conspiratorial thinking entails accepting the meaninglessness nature of the human world.69 Finally, they accord with a pessimistic view of human nature, one in which there exists an almost nihilistic degree of scepticism about the behaviour and motivations of other people and the social institutions they constitute.70 In all three aspects, Toland seems a plausible case for succumbing to this mode of thought. So too, when the issue is considered sociologically, Toland seems to fit snugly into the paradigm. For surprisingly perhaps, belief in conspiracy theory correlates well against higher levels of education. Indeed as Anita Waters observes pithily, believers were by and large better educated than sceptics.71 Conspiracy theories may attract those with pride in their learning, giving them a sense of being in the know and having access to arcana of which others are deprived. Moreover, although believers distrust government institutions, they are not political dropouts.72 In Tolands case he was a persistent petitioner for reform of state systems. In this he was, paradoxically, assuming that the state made a difference to peoples lives. He was, as is the case with conspiracy theorists in general, politicized in the sense that they think that answers to social, spiritual and personal problems can be found within the domain of political debate. Finally, it should be noted that Ted Goertzel has observed how there is a tendency to accumulate conspiratorial explanations once one event seems to accord with this kind of causation. In this they are monological belief systems in that each of the beliefs serves as evidence for each of the other beliefs. The more conspiracies a monological thinker believes in, the more likely he or she is to believe in any new conspiracy theory that may be proposed.73 This is akin to what Richard Hofstadter has termed the paranoid style, the distinguishing element of which was
not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a vast or gigantic conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-andtake, but an all-out crusade.74

Inspired in large part by McCarthyism and written in the shadow of Barry Goldwaters run for the US presidency, Hofstadter perceived a recurring shape to the prose style of a strand of American political life. While he adopted the language of psychiatry to describe this strain of understanding, Hofstadter was at pains to mark out the difference between personal insanity and the political condition he was trying to capture, arguing that
Whereas both tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose and apocalyptic in expression, the clinical paranoiac sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him;

Introduction: The Conspiratorial World of John Toland whereas the spokesman of the paranoiac style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others.75

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He traced the style back to origins in the European response to the French revolution, identifying as founding fathers of a kind the exponents of the thesis that 1789 was the consequence of a Masonic plot: the Edinburgh Professor John Robison and the Jesuit Abb Barruel.76 Yet the style as outlined seems just as apt as a description of the Hanoverian anxiety, or may we call it paranoia, about the Catholic triumvirate (the Pretender, France, and the papacy). Just such a conviction that what was stake was a semi-apocalyptic battle between good and evil convinced the anti-Catholic writers of the British polity. The fate of their community was thus intimately locked into a wider European struggle and a metaphysical conflict in which the souls of millions would be fought over. Indeed, Hofstadter, citing the work of Norman Cohn, recognized that the style he was identifying had a heritage in millenarian perceptions, and actively tied his story to a form of anti-Catholicism that festered through American public life in the nineteenth century he memorably remarks on how Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan.77 Underpinning this concern for a multi-headed and existential threat to the life of the community is a conception of Catholicism as at once subversive, conspiratorial and necessarily secretive in its actions, and as constituting a separate system of loyalty, a separate imperium within the framework of governments, inconsistent with loyalty to them.78 While this description in fact draws from Hofstadters analysis of the structure of the supposed Masonic plot, Williamite Protestants were concerned with not to say obsessed by the question of whether Catholics could keep faith with heretics and with the supposed deposing power of the pope. Finally, as Hofstadter recognizes, the exercise of power did not inoculate the sufferer from the potency of the paranoid style: it was often a defensive act in which the authors felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country that they were fending off threats to a still wellestablished way of life in which they played an important part.79 That captures a key conceit in Tolands work that without vigilance and an active citizenry, the forces of darkness will destroy the republic of liberty Britain represents. None of this is to argue that Toland was an active conspirator, although on certain occasions and in certain ways he was, but rather that he saw the political world as operating on the principle of the inner circle, the cabal, the party. Indeed in 1701 he went so far as to explain his precise fear of the influence of closed factions, penning The Art of Governing by Parties, particularly in Religion, in Politics, in Parliament on the Bench and in the Ministry. Written under the influence of Robert Harley and a plea for a patriotic ministry that would set

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A Political Biography of John Toland

aside familial, local and regional ties the book argued that the Stuarts had been guilty of a secret fraud.80 In his history of the decay of the English constitution across the seventeenth century, the creation of factions, or parties, was a crucial corrosive development, being wilfully created for our destruction.81 In the religious realm Charles II promulgated a policy of harsh orthodoxy, which, paradoxically, would ensure that dissenters could never conform to the establishment:
He perfectly know their main Scruples against Conformity, and having a Parlament of the same temper with his Clergy, he got such Oaths, Tests and Declarations framd, as he was sure they could never swallow, which would neccesitat them (as in effect it did) to form themselves into a separat Party, and notwithstanding their privat Dissentions, to unite together for their Common Liberty against the Court and the Church.82

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The purpose of this counterintuitive insertion of division amongst his subjects was to ensure that, above all, the Protestant Interest was daily weakend by such as most pretended (and most of them no doubt, designd) to support it. The Stuart ecclesiastic policy was thus to disrupt Protestant equanimity and forward the interest of the Roman Catholics. However, Toland reported in relieved tones:
At length the continual Encroachments made on the civil Constitution, under pretence of suppressing Phanaticks, and the barefacd Countenance given at the same time to avowd Papists (being receivd into the chiefest Trust and Confidence) opend all Mens Eyes and discoverd the black designs of the Court.83

The monarchs own plot extended into formal secular political considerations also, as the religious ambition enters into all other Divisions, and is not only the chiefest, but also the most successful Machine of the Conspirators against our Government.84 According to this vision of politics as the consequence of plots and covert schemes, Charles drove forward a policy of emphasizing the royal prerogative to such an extent that
At last the patience of Good Men being quite worn out, they begun to complain loudly of their grievances, and the Creatures of Prerogative as loudly oppossd them, which made them mortally hate one another of course; while the King laughed in his sleeves at the sport, and took special care to keep their animosities alive. The charge of Rebellion was urgd as much by one side, as denied by the other; and both made the highest pretences to Loyalty tho each of them woud wholly Ingross that virtue to themselves. The branded one another with opprobrious Names. In Parliament they were calld Patriots and Loyalists, or the Court and Country Parties: but in all other Places they were distinguishd into Whigs and Tories.85

Not only did the Tories then enact measures to expel Presbyterians from the body politic, they further ridiculd the horrid Plots of the Papists against their

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own Religion, and laboured to fasten them onto their Protestant Brethren.86 The Tories were, to Tolands Whiggish cast of mind, mercenary Drudges of the Court and the Bribd Tools of Popery.87 Thankfully, in his view, Tho the Conspirators and Desertors made a mighty noise, yet their number was contemptible.88 In the face of this covert assault on the Protestant composition of the free constitution, Toland averred: That Party who espousd the defence of Liberty and Property maintaind themselves against the craft and power of Lewd and Arbitrary Kings, against a flattering Clergy, and prostitute Ministry, a corrupt set of Judges, a mercenary Army and Justices purposely chosen to oppress them.89 Thankfully the arrival of William saved the nation and the present King was considered by Toland to be in no way ingagd in the treacherous designs of his Precessors.90 Yet, all was still not well, for theres but too much of these ill humours stirring among us still.91 Toland was imagining a politics of patriotic monarch, who was impartial in his concern for all his subjects. Toland warned that: a King can never lessen himself more than by heading of a Party; for therby he becoms only the King of a Faction, and ceases to be the Common Father of his People.92 Yet, Toland averred, William III, resolvd on first coming here to abolish our infamous distinctions both in Church and State, and intended to receive the good Men of all Parties into equal Favour, Protection and Trust, even extending his liberality to accommodating Tories where he thought that, according to their own declard resolutions, they had quitted such wicked Principles as had lately endangerd their Ruin, he elevated several of them to the most eminent Posts in the Kingdom.93 Sadly, Toland observed that this trust was largely misplaced, for the Tories quickly returned to their Vomit.94 Their incorrigible nature promoted a final shift in policy which Toland favourably related:
The frequent discovery of their [the Tories] Plots, Correspondence and Treacheries, with a universal series of designd mismanagements in every Part of the Government, opend the Eyes of all who were unalterable friends to their Country, and they made the K[ing] so sensible of his own and the Nations most dangerous Condition, that he betook himself to the only proper remedy of saving both, which was by placing the Administration in the Hands of Persons that had opposed the late Usurpations, helpd to advance himself to the Throne, and were all their lives the professd Enemies of Popery and France.95

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Thus the history of conspiracy, of plots and of treason continued beyond the Williamite War and Toland understood his actions as part of a cosmic drama in which the forces of liberty fought the enticements and machinations of despotism. In availing of the concept of conspiracy in relating the history of the previous decades, Toland inaugurated a trope in eighteenth-century Irish political thought.96 As Scott Breuninger has documented, Christianity Not Mysterious was met in Ireland with a repeated use of the idea of a conspiracy of Deists,

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intent on destroying the established Anglican Church of Ireland.97 As late as 1749, Philip Skelton availed of the idea in his omnibus of denunciation, Ophiomaches, or Deism Revealed. Therein the Deists in general, and Toland is a named example, were accused of having precisely the temperamental disorder of which Toland complained, namely a penchant for covert scheming:
The Deists, and indeed the Libertines of all degrees and denominations, are accused as men of dark and deep designs, who artfully attack the principles of other men, and still more artfully conceal their own, seldom declaring themselves by their writings in favour of any particular system of opinions, and when they do, seemingly frequently to contradict one another. I have read over, with all the attention I was master of, the celebrated performances of my Lord Shaftesbury, Mr Collins, Mr Toland, Dr Tindal, and some others of less note; and to my great concern, altho I can perceive what it is they would overturn, yet I cannot so easily discern what they intend to establish, any further than that they labour to recommend the religion and law of nature, instead of revelation; and that their readers may gather, in some few instances, what they maintain by what they deny. This obscurity, proceed it from whence it will, is turned against them by their adversaries, and ascribed by some to the crudity or evil tendency of their tenets, by others to artifice and chicane.98

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For Swift, Toland was at once a covert Catholic priest and the great Oracle of the anti-Christians; yet Swift shared with the freethinker a propensity to see the political world as operating within a conspiratorial framework.99 Indeed, in Gullivers Travels the King of Brobdignag dismisses British history in the seventeenth century as only a heap of conspiracies.100 In the Academy of Lagado, Gulliver opines on how at home, the bulk of the people consisted wholly of Discoverers, Witnesses, Informers, Accusers, Prosecutors, Evidences, Swearers; together with their several subservient and subaltern instruments.101 Commenting on this passage, Jeanne Clegg highlights how the Products of the espionage business are Plots designed to raise the reputations and revenues of their discoverers, reinvigorate governments, to stifle discontents, and manipulate public credit to the private advantage of ministers.102 In this, Swift suggests that politics is made up of competing plots, and the task is to suspect suspicion and look for conspiracy behind conspiracy.103 This tradition culminates in Edmund Burkes understanding of the double cabinet expounded in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770).104 According to Burke,
two systems of administration were to be formed; one which should be in the real secret and confidence; the other merely ostensible, to perform the official and executor duties of government. The latter were alone to be responsible; whilst the real advisors, who enjoyed all the power, were effectually removed from all the danger.105

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The result of this conspiracy would be to degrade the institutions of power through which the people traditionally checked the legislators and to infect the constitution with the sentiments and manners belonging to despotism:
The capital objects, and by much the most flattering characteristics of arbitrary power would be obtained. Everything would be drawn from its holdings in the country to the personal favour and inclination of the prince. This favour would be the sole introduction to power, and the only tenure by which it was to be held: so that no person, looking towards another, and all looking towards the court, it was impossible but that the motive which solely influenced every mans hopes must come in time to govern every mans conduct; till at last the servility became universal in spite of the dead letter of any laws or institutions whatsoever.106

F. P. Lock makes this trope of the double cabinet the centrepiece of his twovolume biography of Burke, while any consideration of the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) must acknowledge the power of the conspiratorial structure on Burkes thinking about the collapse of the ancien rgime.107 Toland appears in Burkes masterpiece in one of his heavily quoted apercu: Who, born within the last forty years, has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb and Morgan and that whole race who called themselves Freethinkers? Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through?108 Perhaps one might remark that Burke clearly had, although he pronounced that
they were and are wholly unconnected individuals. With us they kept the common nature of their kind, and were not gregarious. They never acted in corps, nor were known as a faction in the state, nor presumed to influence in that name or character, or for the purposes of such a faction, on any of our public concerns.

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One recent assessment, that of S. J. Barnett, concurs in seeing the notion of a faction of Deists as a scare story become historical construct.109 But this is not how most historians have construed the English Deists. Justin Champion has written of how infidelity posed a realistic threat to the Established Church of England, and historians with such varied sympathies as J. C. D. Clark, Wayne Hudson, John Redwood, and Jeffrey Wigelsworth concur.110 In all of these works Toland is a central figure. His work retains the power to surprise and, on occasion, annoy. As recently as 1985 his legacy was contested on confessional grounds by an Irish bishop, Jeremiah Newman of Limerick, on the grounds that his heretical ideas must by definition belong to an English, and not an Irish, line of philosophy. The bishop had taken umbrage at Tolands inclusion in a collection edited by Richard Kearney and entitled The Irish Mind.111 In one sense the bishop was right: Toland was not a welcome voice in Ireland in the 1690s; however in a more fundamental sense he was certainly wrong, for if home is where you know who your enemies are, Toland was at home in Ireland. He was equally at home, in this sense, in Scotland and England, for in confront-

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ing clerisy he was to identify enemies in each of the confessional systems that were established across the British Isles. And in that fight against what was then termed priestcraft or the assertion of spiritual authority grounded on discrete knowledge which was inaccessible to a congregant, Toland was to find an ideological sheet-anchor. Tolands story is not one of fluid postmodern play. Rather it is to recount a life lived within the politics of certainty. Each chapter below reconstructs a phase of his life and locates it within a particular geographic location. But it also highlights an aspect of Tolands politics of certainty, and his tendency to thus think in terms of conspiracy theory. The first chapter thus both recounts his period in Ireland and identifies the plot that dominated his thinking and which was first articulated in his signature text, Christianity Not Mysterious (1696). The second chapter explores Tolands life in London in the late 1690s and early 1700s, showing how he relied on a series of patrons to patch together a livelihood within the nascent public sphere. In doing so it emphasizes Tolands reliance on individual agency in his thinking about historical development: if conspiracies are to make sense, after all, someone, not something, must be working behind the scenes. This concern with agency informed his portrait gallery of Commonwealth thinkers, such as James Harrington and John Milton. The third chapter brings Toland to Hanover, and explores his fluctuating relations with his patrons through to 1707. These connections gave Toland a fleeting view of how politics was run, and introduced him to the politics of the closet, highlighting to him the potency of insider knowledge. This fascination continued through Tolands sojourn in Amsterdam, related in Chapter 4, which saw him engaged with the esoteric writings of figures like Giordano Bruno and his participation in protoMasonic societies. Tolands concern for secrecy is here explored, shifting as he did away from a desire to publicize plots, and towards the notion of a conspiracy of the virtuous. In an extended engagement with the Sacheverell affair, Toland found a focus for his ire and a personification of the Tory enemy he despised and which he understood to be the exact counterpoint a conspiracy of the clerics. In Chapter 5, Tolands retreat to Epsom beyond the capitals bounds, is read in the light of his collapsing relationship with Harley. In rejecting Harley, Toland found a cause for paranoia about the actions of individuals and the possibility of deceit. Harley became, for Toland, an icon of insincerity and deceit. The sixth chapter locates Toland in Putney, initially close to a patriotic ministry willing to enact the kind of legislation he thought necessary to support the public weal. This period of his life enables an account of his fundamental comprehension of power both secular and spiritual and underlines his commitment to an idealistic mode of politics from which he found compromise difficult. This idealism set in relief his persistent concern with the motives and machinations of his enemies as he remained concerned about the question of what the powerful were not, tell-

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ing their subject audience. He recovered a lost Gospel that, he claimed had been set to one side as discomforting to the powerful and contradicting doctrinal orthodoxy. By using such outlier information to posit a conspiracy, he further recounted the history of the clerisys plot against the laity, and imagined a conspiracy of the virtuous that would effect a revolution in the governance of men. Tolands life was thereby shaped by a commitment to overthrow the clerical conspiracy he identified at play within the church, and thus to complete the political revolution he associated with the Williamite War by extending it to spiritual affairs. In this, Toland was committed to a broad-based republican heritage that he did much to recover and rehabilitate. He also contributed to an anti-clerical Enlightenment that challenged the hegemony of the Church of England as much as it did Roman Catholic authority elsewhere in Europe. Finally, Toland did much to promulgate the idea that politics is structured by power, self-interest and deceit. His body of work constitutes a conspiracy theory concerning the corruption of liberty by the malevolent forces of arbitrary government and spiritual orthodoxy. Yet, as we shall see, the trouble with this, is that there were enemies who wished to silence him. He was censured, threatened and beaten up for speaking out. His work thus tells us something discomforting about the period in which he lived: a period of fear, jealousy and paranoia, in which conspiracy theories flourished and sometimes turned out to be true; a period much like our own.

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