Chapters Four and Five analyse the intractability of the issues raised regarding the relationship between the church and the commonwealth for the Gallican liberties, which would continue into the seventeenth century. This chapter focusses on the works of three important lawyers: René Choppin, whose neglected De Sacra Politia is a crucial text for understanding the shape of League debates in the 1580s, Pierre de Belloy and Louis Dorléans. These works demonstrate the extent to which late medieval controversies about ecclesiastical power were resurrected in the sixteenth century, and the ways in which caricatured ideas of medieval controversialists like William of Ockham and Marsilius of Padua were used to score significant polemical points.

Chapter 6 examines the particular question of John Locke’s position on the toleration of Catholics. This, the chapter argues, was the major area in which his views did not significantly evolve. Recent scholars have tried to establish that Locke softened his position on the intolerability of Catholics by appealing to a ‘loyalist’, oath-taking minority tradition within the Catholic chapter. This chapter refutes this claim and demonstrates Locke’s lifelong refusal to countenance such Gallican (or, in the English context, ‘Blackloist’) solutions to the Catholic question. When these views of Locke are set in their full context, they emerge as another variation on his rejection of the ‘Hobbesian politique’. Loyalist Catholics after the civil war were strongly influenced by the sovereignty theory of Hobbes and on that basis appealed for toleration as an act of monarchical prerogative. Locke’s hardening opposition to such forms of indulgence alienated him from such strategies. Catholics, he came to believe, were irretrievably dominated by either the papacy or the state and thus could not appeal for religious freedom as an inalienable right.