needed the support of a political faction. Poets and dramatists such as Dryden,
Pope, and Addison could make large fortunes, not so much from the sale of
their works on the open market as in the form of sinecures and subscriptions
raised by their political supporters.^18
Political opportunism and mobility were central to the growth of univer-
salism. Religious doctrines were no longer so cleanly lined up with political
factions. The Whigs, who carried out the Glorious Revolution, were the party
of religious moderation and toleration; and here we find the Deist sympathies
and connections of the Shaftesbury family and of Locke. Once in office, the
Whigs soon fell into intrigues; their leader, Lord Harley, switched to become
head of a Tory government. Tory conservatives, too, defenders of the old
aristocracy and tending toward the old Stuart dynasty, become caught up in
the wheeling and dealing of parliamentary and dynastic politics. The atmos-
phere of sophisticated manipulation carried over into intellectual matters. Lord
Bolingbroke, who led Tory ministries in 1704–1708 and 1710–1714, fre-
quented a literary circle which included Pope, Gay, Congreve, and Swift.^19
Bolingbroke was a conservative; after the fall of his second ministry, he was
accused of plotting to bring back the old Catholic dynasty, and fled to France.
Pardoned, he returned in 1723; never regaining political office during the long
years of Whig ministries, he turned increasingly to literary activities. By the
late 1720s, he was filling Tory periodicals with Deist philosophy, emphasizing
natural religion and the superiority of the state of nature over civil society. One
of his young friends, Lord Chesterfield, originally a Whig, broke with Walpole
in 1730 and went over to the opposition, becoming the Tory secretary of state
in the 1740s; hanging around with the Tory literary crowd, he made his lasting
reputation with backstage advice on worldly success in his Letters to his
(illegitimate) Son.
Philosophically the most significant of the Deists was the third earl of
Shaftesbury, grandson of Locke’s patron, personally educated under Locke’s
tutorship. Shaftesbury’s works appeared soon after Locke’s, in 1699 and in
1708–1711, and built dialectically upon them. Locke’s dismissal of innate ideas
went too far, Shaftesbury held, in implying that there is no intrinsic human
nature and intrinsic morality. To remedy this, he postulated an innate moral
sense, analogous to the sense of harmony or proportion in music and art. The
life of aesthetic appreciation and literary style is Shaftesbury’s ideal; he even
regards God as a good-natured being who can be understood only by those
who have a sense of humor. Religion is taken almost lightheartedly as a subject
for tolerant discussion; religion is secondary to morality, since the latter is
presupposed in concepts such as the wrath and justice of God. Shaftesbury
occupies a space similar to that held by Lord Herbert of Cherbury, whose
epistemology Locke had criticized while supporting Cherbury’s Deism.602 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths