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INTRODUCTION.
7

home, so he now showed no unseemly haste to be gone, but for months still continued to share the fortunes and mix in the society of the royalist exiles. Nay, when the young king of the Scots escaped to Paris (about the end of October) after the defeat at Worcester, Hobbes felt himself at perfect liberty to present to the royal fugitive, fresh from the crushing disaster, a specially prepared manuscript copy of his book, 'engrossed' (says Clarendon) 'in vellum in a marvellous fair hand' – an odd proceeding in a conscious traitor. But if he thought that he still stood where he had stood before, there were others that thought differently. It is, indeed, sufficiently absurd to find Clarendon declaring, in almost the same breath with his mention of the gift to the king, that the book was written to support Cromwell's usurpation. This particular charge, afterward commonly current, though refuted by Clarendon's own admission, could not have occurred to any one as early as 1651, when Cromwell was still the servant of the Rump. Nothing, however, could be more natural than that a book like Leviathan should awake suspicion and dislike in the minds of royalists, then at the lowest depths of despair. The exiled clergy in particular, rendered critical by misfortune, and meeting in the book much that jarred upon their honest religious convictions, much, also, that was incomprehensible to their unreasonable loyalty, and, above all, a vein of deep distrust of clerical ambition with an imposing scheme for the utter subjection of spiritual to civil authority, could not but be affected to indignation in every fiber of their being. Accordingly, as different accounts agree in stating, some of them lost no time in working upon the mind of the prince on his return, and for the moment they were able to prevail upon his easy nature. When Hobbes, soon after making his present, sought to pay his respects in person to his former pupil, he was denied the royal presence, and was told by the Marquis of Ormond that he lay under grave