366 N O T E S A N D Q U E R I ES
holdings and his complete divestment of wealth
in the royalist cause in the years 16427.
Unfortunately, while we have evidence in the
form of the receipt dated 1 February 1647/8
that Hulse paid for the transactions, we can
never know whether there was some undocu-
mented arrangement that Lovelace would buy
back his estates when and if the King was
restored and his fortune reinstated. In the
event, Lovelace died before the Restoration.
His brother Francis received the family's
reward from King Charles II in the form of
the governorship of New York, and dissipated
his opportunity to improve the family fortunes
by losing the colony to the Dutch in 1673.28
Susan A. Clarke
Australian National University
28
Daniel Lovelace, Governor Diplomat, Soldier, Spy: The
Colorful Career of Colonel Francis Lovelace of Kent (1622
1675) (Williamsburg, Virginia, 2001), 30.
TRISMEGISTUS `HIS GREAT
GIANT': A SOURCE FOR THE TITLE-
PAGE OF HOBBES' LEVIATHAN1
THE title-page to Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan
is one of the most famous in book history. It
depicts the colossal `Leviathan' not the bib-
lical beast of Job, but a towering giant, the
literal embodiment of the conjoined imperium
and sacerdotium that defined English sover-
eignty. While scholars have discussed elements
of the title-page, whether its creator, or who
if anyone it is meant to portray, there has
been no comment on the source for the concept
and general posture of the figure. The purpose
of this note is to suggest a possible source for
the image on the title-page, itself identified in a
little known pamphlet published in 1606.
Owing to its title-page, Leviathan is one the
most recognizable books published during the
seventeenth century. In and of themselves,
decorative title-pages were not unusual in
early modern English books.2 One thinks of
John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, Michael
Drayton's Poly-Olbion, or the Authorized Ver-
1
I am grateful to Erik Thomson for several discussions
on Hermeticism, and for his comments on an earlier draft of
this note.
2 6
Margery Corbett and Ronald Lightbown, The Comely
Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-Page in England, 1550
1660 (London, 1979).
December 2004
sion of the King James Bible as examples, but
printed ephemera, whether tracts, pamphlets,
or ballads, were also published with illustrated
title pages.3 In the case of some sensational
political or `murder' pamphlets, the device was
presumably an aid to selling the item.4 In other,
and rarer cases, the illustration served to epi-
tomize the contents, and it is this category into
which Leviathan falls.
The title page depicts the concept of sover-
eignty to which the book is devoted.5 In his
introduction, Hobbes adopted the common
metaphor of the `body politic' to give sense to
his definition of sovereignty, and the `art' of
politics.
For by Art is created that great
LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-
WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS)
which is but an Artificial Man; though of
greater stature and strength than the Natur-
all, for whose protection and defence it was
intended.6
The image of the title-page captures the essence
of this passage: it shows a bearded figure,
crowned, and holding a crosier in the left
hand, and a sword in the right. The figure,
certainly `greater in stature', is comprised of a
host of individuals, symbolizing the covenant
of all with all. Below, the landscape consists of
battlements, churches, and fields; in the fore-
ground is a walled city perched on a promon-
tory. Below the scene, in a series of panels, are
depicted the trappings of sovereignty `civil and
ecclesiastical': a castle and a church, a crown
and mitre, and so on. Indeed, the figure em-
bodies the mutual relation of Church and
commonwealth that lay at the centre of con-
temporary defences of sovereignty; as one
writer put it:
3
Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 15501640
(Cambridge, 1991), ch. 4; Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and
Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003),
ch. 3; The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume
IV, 15571695, ed. John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie with
the assistance of Maureen Bell (Cambridge, 2002), ch. 23.
4
Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Anti-Christ's
Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reforma-
tion England (Yale, 2002), ch. 1.
5
This is covered in some detail by Corbett and Light-
bown, The Comely Frontispiece, 21930.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, OR The Matter, Forme, &
Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, ed.
Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1991), 9.
December 2004 NOTES AND QUERIES 367
368 N O T E S A N D Q U E R I ES
both Common-wealth, and Church are col-
lective bodies, made up of many into one.
And both so neere allyed, that the one, the
Church, can never subsist but in the other,
the Common-wealth. Nay so neere, that the
same men, which in a temporal respect make
the Common-wealth, do in a spirituall make
the Church.7
The metaphor of the body politic was common
in the political discourse of early modern Eng-
land, and has a traceable history in Renais-
sance and Mediaeval ideas.8 As far as scholars
are aware, Leviathan is the first text to present
the metaphor in both text and visual form.
While textual uses of the body politic can be
traced to Plato and Aristotle, we lack a history
of the visual aspect. Where did Hobbes's image
come from?
Admittedly, most work on Hobbes' politics
goes beyond judging the book by its cover. A
number of scholars have approached the
title-page from the point of view of the face
of the figure. Corbett and Lightbown sug-
gested that it depicted Hobbes himself, while
M. M. Goldsmith has considered a range of
possible candidates, from Charles II to
Cromwell.9 Building on previous work on
Hobbesian iconography, Goldsmith con-
cluded that the face of Leviathan was as
ambiguous as the politics of its author.10
Keith Brown, on the other hand, has argued
that the complexity of the text, and the fit
between its core elements and the title-page,
suggest that Hobbes was himself involved in
its design.11 Most recently, Noel Malcolm has
turned to the figures who comprise the body
7
William Laud, A sermon preached before his Maiesty,
on Tuesday the nineteenth of Iune, at Wansted Anno. Dom.
1621. By D. Laud Dean of Glocester, one of his Maiesties
chaplains in ordinary (London, 1621), 6.
8 12
See Kevin Sharpe, `A Commonwealth of Meanings:
Languages, Analogues, Ideas and Politics', in Remapping
Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century
Politics (Cambridge, 2000), 38123.
9
The Comely Frontispiece, 22930; M. M. Goldsmith,
`Hobbes's Ambiguous Politics', History of Political Thought,
xi (Winter 1990), 63973.
10
Goldsmith, `Ambiguous Politics', 639; M. M. Gold-
smith, `Picturing Hobbes's Politics: The Illustrations to
Philosophicall Rudiments of Government and Society
(1651)', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,
xliv (1981), 2327.
11
Keith Brown, `The Artist of the Leviathan Title-Page',
British Library Journal, iv (1978), 2436, at 26.
December 2004
of Leviathan, arguing that they illustrate a
theory of representation.12
One possible source for the concept and
posture of figure of Leviathan can be found
in the preface `To the reader' of Edward
Forset's A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies
Natvral and Politique, published by John Bill in
London in 1606. Forset (d. 1630?), in addition
to the Discourse, was the author of A Defence
of the Right of Kings (1624), which made the
case for the ecclesiastical sovereignty of the
English Crown against the attacks of Catholic
controversialists. In addition to these political
works, Forset also wrote Pedantius, a comedy
acted at Trinity College, Cambridge, and pub-
lished in 1631. He is known to scholars as the
exponent of a theory of sovereignty, and his
Comparative Discourse has figured in a number
of studies of early Stuart political thought.13
However, he has only recently been connected
to Hobbes, and the reader of the Discourse and
Leviathan is struck by the similarity of their
approach to the problem of sovereignty.14 For-
set argued that the optimal condition of sover-
eignty was defined by the `disposing of many to
one service', a statement echoed in many places
in Leviathan.15 A further parallel lies in a
passage from the `Preface' to Forset's Dis-
course where, as Hobbes would do in the
introduction to Leviathan, a comparison is
made between the state and the `body of a
man':
And (by the way) it were a paynes well
bestowed, to observe the good corres-
pondence betweene every the particular
part or faculties in man, and the other dis-
tinct parts, powers, and operations of that
bigger bulke: which seemeth to have been
both freely and soundly conceaved by that
Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), ch. 7.
13
W. H. Greenleaf, Order, Empiricism, and Politics: Two
Traditions of English Political Thought (Oxford, 1964), ch. 4;
Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An
Introduction to English Political Thought, 16031642 (Penn-
sylvania, 1992), 134, 1567; Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and
the Stuart Constitution (Yale, 1996), 63, 701, 75; J. P.
Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology
in England, 16031640 (London, 1999), 16, 17 n. 11, 31, 53.
14
Charles W. A. Prior, ` ``The Regiment of the Church'':
Doctrine, Discipline, and History in Jacobean Ecclesiology,
16031625' (Ph.D diss., Queen's University, June 2003),
ch. 2.
15
Forset, Comparative Discourse, 567.
December 2004 NOTES AND QUERIES
thrice renowned Philosopher Trismegistus,
when he imagined an huge and mightie
Gyant, whose head was above the firma-
ment, his necke, shoulders, and upper parts
in the heavens, his armes and hands reaching
to East and West, his belly in the whole
spaciousnesse under the Moone, his legges
and feet within the earth.16
The parallel with the posture of the figure
depicted on the title-page of Leviathan is strik-
ing. For there too we find a giant who dom-
inates the visible sky, and whose torso is
hidden from view by the horizon. The detail
of the outstretched hands which grasp the
sword and crosier is exact, as is the notion of
correspondence between individuals and the
`bigger bulke'. Was Hobbes or his artist
aware of this reference, and if so, did Forset
or Trismegistus serve as the source for the
posture of the figure?
Forset's own source is of great interest. The
Corpus Hermeticum was a collection of Latin
and Greek texts attributed to Hermes Trisme-
gistus.17 Renaissance historians and theolo-
gians believed that the Corpus was of
profound antiquity, having been set down
before Moses and Plato; hence all of the great
intellectual movements which succeeded it were
thought to have imbibed the knowledge of the
prisci theologi. Patristic authors such as
Augustine and Lactantius believed the Her-
metic `legend' of a `man . . . of great antiquity,
and most fully imbued with every kind of
learning'.18 In an age where the past served to
animate the soul of the present, and where
history and ecclesiology sought the most
ancient roots of the faith, the Corpus had a
powerful claim to authenticity.19
The authority of the Corpus was shattered by
Isaac Casaubon's dating of it to the second or
third century ad well after Christ, Moses, and
Plato.20 Casaubon, Professor of Greek at Gen-
eva, was invited to England by James VI and I
16
Forset, Comparative Discourse, }iiiv.
17
Corpus Hermeticum, ed. A. D. Nock, trans. A. J.
Festugiere (Paris, 194554).
18
Quoted in Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the
Hermetic Tradition (London, 1964), 7.
19
Arthur B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the
Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England (Duke
University Press, 1979).
20
Yates, Giordano Bruno, 398431.
369
in 1610. The King, himself a devoted contro-
versialist and political theorist, granted Casau-
bon a pension in order that he compose a
devastating criticism of the Annales Ecclesias-
tici of Cesare Baronius, a work which relied
heavily on the Hermetic tradition.21 This schol-
arly combat was part of a larger programme
whereby the English Church claimed for itself
the textual tradition of ancient Christianity,
which was essential in defending the legitimacy
of the reformed Church of England against the
attacks of both Roman and Protestant critics.22
In 1605 the problem of Catholic plots was
added to that of Catholic heresy: the attempt
to blow up the houses of parliament led the
King to draft an oath of allegiance which
obliged Catholics to renounce the papal juris-
diction in England, and to affirm the sover-
eignty of the Crown.23 Edward Forset presided
over the trial of the gunpowder plotters, and
his Comparative Discourse was written imme-
diately after these events. Forset writes of the
`late most execrable enterprise and cunningly
contrived treacherie', in the course of a discus-
sion of the threats to sovereignty posed by
faction and treason.24
Hobbes would have been aware of the Cor-
pus Hermeticum. Despite Casaubon's demoli-
tion of their claim to ancient authority, the
texts continued to garner an audience. Thomas
Everard's edition of Divine Pymander was pub-
lished in 1649, and many astrologers continued
21
Isaac Casaubon, Isaaci Casauboni de rebus sacris et
ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI. Ad Cardinalis Baronii pro-
legomena in Annales, & primam eorum partem, de Domini
Nostri Iesu Christi natiuitate, vita, Passione, assumtione.
Londini: [Printed at Eliot's Court Press] ex officina Nor-
toniana apud Ioan. Billium, 1614.
22
Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman
and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought,
16001640 (Cambridge, 1995); Charles W. A. Prior, `Ancient
and Reformed?: Thomas Bell and Jacobean Conformist
Thought', Canadian Journal of History, xxxviii (December
2003), 42538.
23
Michael Questier, `Loyalty, Religion, and State Power
in Early Modern England: English Romanism and the Jaco-
bean Oath of Allegiance', Historical Journal, xl (1997), 311
29. James VI and I contributed to the controversy on the
subject, in his Triplici nodo, triplex cuneus. Or An Apologie
for the Oath of Allegiance (London, 1607). For details of the
controversy, see Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of
the Jacobean Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (London,
1978), ch. 3.
24
Forset, Comparative Discourse, 51. Similarly, Hobbes
remarked that `hostility' against the commonwealth
damaged all within the state (Leviathan, 212).
370 N O T E S A N D Q U E R I ES
to make use of the Hermetic texts.25 Chapters 1
and 2 of Leviathan, `Of Sense', and `Of Imagin-
ation', deal extensively with vision, sound, and
dreams, concepts that occur frequently in Her-
metic texts. A further parallel lies in theories of
correspondence between bodies, and in uses of
the metaphor of the body politic. However,
where the Corpus is clearly concerned with the
mystical, the transcendent, and the superna-
tural, Leviathan is markedly scientific in its
approach to intangibles.
The claim that the allusion to Trismegistus'
giant in Forset's `Preface' served as the model
for the posture of Leviathan would appear to
be stronger. Not only is the description quoted
above indisputably similar to what the title-
page depicts, but the Discourse itself belongs to
the genre of commonwealth literature of which
Leviathan is the epitome. In addition, there are
a number of similarities in argument concern-
ing the reciprocal duties of subjects and sover-
eign, and the nature of the conjoined power of
imperium and sacerdotium that made English
sovereignty complete.26 It seems very likely,
then, that Hobbes was aware of Forset's
pamphlet, and employed the passage from its
preface in the design of the title-page. Pending
the discovery of further sources, this is as
certain a conclusion as is currently possible.
Charles W. A. Prior
University of Cambridge
25
The divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegis-
tus, in XVII. books. Translated formerly out of the Arabick
into Greek, and thence into Latine, and Dutch, and now out of
the original into English; by that learned divine Doctor Ever-
ard., London: printed by Robert White, for Tho. Brewster, and
Greg. Moule, at the Three Bibles in the Poultrey, under
Mildreds Church, 1649.
26
Prior, `The Regiment', ch. 2.
A JOHN DAVIES `GHOST'
THE BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUE,
followed by NCBEL, Donald Wing's Short-
Title Catalogue, 16411700 in its revised
1
Second edn, rev. and ed. John J. Morrison, Carolyn
W. Nelson, and Matthew Seccombe (New York, 1994),
Entry D 388. The ascription was adopted by the Chad-
wyck-Healey database English Poetry 900-1900 (1995), and
their `Literature Online' database.
December 2004
version,1 and other lesser authorities, continues
to attribute to John Davies of Hereford a work
entitled Calmow ueiow. Or a Divine Psalme, or
Song, Wherein Predestination is maintained, yet
the honour of Jehovah preserved and vindicated
. . . By John Davis, `Printed, and are to be sold
by Humphrey Moseley . . . and by Andrew
Kemb', 1652. Although he occasionally signed
himself `Davis', the overwhelming majority of
the Herefordian's published work is signed
`John Davies of Hereford'. Davies died in
1618, and it would be surprising if his Nachlass
had survived intact that long. Examination of
the dedicatees to three of the poems in this
1652 collection suggest that the ascription is
incorrect. One poem is addressed `To his dear
wife Abigail Davis', two others to his brothers
Robert and Samuel. John Davies of Hereford,
born 1564, was married three times, first to
Mary Croft, who died on 1 January 1612, and
for whom Davies had a memorial-inscription
placed on a pillar in his parish church, St
Dunstan's-in-the-West. On 19 July 1613 he
married Dame Julian Preston (widow of Sir
Amyas Preston), who died in May 1614; and at
some point he married again, naming in his will
`my wel-beloved wife Margaret'.2 As for
Davies's brothers, one of the epigrams `To
Worthy Persons' in The Scourge of Folly
(1611) is addressed `To my brother, Mr
James Davies, Master in the Arte of Writing
in Oxford', the one following `To my brother
Mr Richard Davies, Master likewise in the
same faculty of writing'.3 We are obviously
dealing with a different family altogether.
Indeed, a footnote to one poem, `An Elogie
upon the incomparable Divine Patrone of this
little Book, the Sacred Scriptures of the Old
and New Testament', settles the issue. The
poem (line 5) refers to `my juvenility', and the
note helpfully records `Aetatis 23, May 16,
1652' (Sig. F1r ). I suggest therefore, that this
work should be ascribed to John Davis, fl.
1628/9.
Brian Vickers
School of Advanced Study,
London University
2
See The Complete Works of John Davies of Hereford, 2
vols. (privately printed, 1878), `Memorial-Introduction', I,
xvxviii.
3
ibid., II, The Scourge of Folly, 58, col. 2.