Abstract

Locke composed the Epistola de Tolerantia, in all probability, during the late Autumn of 1685 when he was a prudent exile in Holland, suspected of complicity in Shaftesbury’s plots against Charles II. Before going to Holland, at the age of 51, he had published nothing except some occasional verse; but he had made many notes and drafts on a variety of subjects like political sovereignty, religion, morality, natural law, epistemology—subjects on which he was later to become one of the foremost spokesmen for English philosophy. Toleration was such a subject and a particularly sensitive one, in the circumstances of Locke’s exile and because of the heated controversies it engendered in the Europe of the seventeenth century. His stay in Holland provided the necessary leisure and the conversation of his friends, notably Philip van Limborch, the necessary stimulus. The Epistola de Tolerantia, addressed to Limborch, was published at Gouda in 1689—anonymously, as might be expected, for Locke was an excessively discreet man in such regards. The authorship, however, was soon an open secret; there is a letter of testy remonstrance in which Locke asks Limborch whether he had revealed the secret and Limborch’s reply to the effect that the authorship was widely-known in England and that, when asked point-blank, he could not but tell the truth and confirm it. This exchange took place after Locke had returned to England.