Abstract :
About the circumstances surrounding Hobbes’s dismissal from Charles’s court and his
subsequent departure from Paris at the end of 1651 we know little. While recent scholarship has clarified the
broad outline of events, fresh evidence allows us to add some detail, showing that Leviathan was attacked
in a sermon delivered by Richard Steward in the Anglican chapel of Sir Richard Browne, thus confirming
Hobbes’s claim for the involvement of the Anglican establishment in engineering his dismissal from court and
giving us a slightly clearer sense of the source and character of the move against him.
