ABSTRACT
The length of Leviathan, its often polemical tone, and Thomas Hobbes delight in intellectual iconoclasm and epigrammatic apercus made an unusually productive source for those in search of mud to sling at political and religious opponents. Imputations of 'Hobbism' were routinely made to castigate or ridicule opponents. Accusations of Hobbism bulked large, for example, in the debate over church organisation that followed the re-establishment of the Church of England after 1660. However, the Latitudinarians faced opposition on the dissenting wing of Protestantism, who resented both the relaxation of the anti-Catholic laws and the 'Clarendon Code' enacted between 1661 and 1665, which enforced Anglicanism's dominance and penalised dissenting minorities. In fact, as Leviathan had been published in 1651, it was covered by the Indemnity and Oblivion Act of 1660, which limited score-settling from the pre-Restoration period to those who had authorised the execution of Charles I.
