1 ‘To govern is to make subjects believe’ 1 : anticlericalism, politics and power, c1680- 1717’ J.A.I. Champion Department of History Royal Holloway College University of London. Samuel Johnson (1649-1703), educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, ‘after regular Study’ took Holy Orders and was made rector of the parish of Corringham in Essex in 1670 by the generosity of his patron Mr Bidolph. The latter, ‘observing Mr Johnson’s inclination to the study of politicks, advis’d him to read Bracton and Fortescue de Laudibus Legum Anglia, &c. that he might be aquainted with the old English Constitution’. Bidolph far from encouraging Johnson to mix politics and religion in the pulpit insisted that he should by no means ‘make Politicks the subject of his Sermons; because he had taken notice that many Clergymen had given their hearers bad impressions, and fill’d their heads with false notions of those things which they had a very imperfect knowledge of themselves’. Although Johnson took his patron’s advice and ‘never meddled with Politicks in the Pulpit’, he used his knowledge of the ‘English Constitution’ to great effect in his printed writings ‘for no man wrote with more Boldness and Zeal for the legal Polity of his Country’. 2 He became one of the central publicists for the radical Whig cause of the 1690s. 3 His reputation as a patriot and defender of English liberty against ‘Popery and Slavery’ brought him to the position of domestic chaplain to Lord William Russell (d. 1683). Johnson, fiercely committed to opposing tyranny in both political and theological forms, persuaded Russell to stand firm in his advocacy of the principles of political resistance (for which he was executed in 1683) and himself suffered prosecution and