11 - Lawson and Baxter

Summary

At the end of his life Baxter, like Cephalus paying his debts, lavished extravagant and lengthy praise on Lawson, ‘the ablest man of almost any I know in England … a man of great skill in politics, wherein he is most exact’. Indeed, Baxter maintained that Lawson was one of the greatest influences on his life and political judgements. Such praise takes us back to before the publication of the Politica, and to an extent to one side of it, for despite criticisms (A Treatise of Episcopacy) it was the Theo-Politica Baxter most admired, and in A Holy Commonwealth, Lawson's Examination is taken as a sufficient argument against Hobbes. With respect to the Politica, however, I suspect that Baxter's attitude was a good deal more ambivalent; indeed that Lawson may even have been a nameless target in the Commonwealth, Looking at these two works will reveal the full force and the partial disingenuousness of Baxter's remarkable valedictory tribute to George Lawson.

On the surface my thesis here looks perverse, for there has certainly been no reason to regard the Politica as a context for the Commonwealth; after all, the chronology of publication is simply wrong. But when Underhill, who had printed Lawson's Examination, printed Commonwealth in 1659, Lawson and Baxter had known each other for a number of years.