Charles Blount (deist)

Charles Blount (27 April 1654 – August 1693) was an English deist and philosopher who published several anonymous essays critical of the existing English order.

Blount was born in Upper Holloway, Islington, Middlesex, the fourth son of Sir Henry Blount. His father educated him at home and exposed him to freethinking philosophy. In 1672 Charles inherited lands in Islington and the estate of Blount's Hall in Staffordshire. He married Eleanor Tyrrell in Westminster Abbey at the end of 1672; they had three sons and a daughter. Throughout his life he remained at Blount's Hall as a leisured gentleman, although he also travelled to London to participate in courtly life.

Blount's publications were consistently anonymous or written under a pseudonym, and with a radical or Whig slant. In 1673 he wrote Mr Dreyden Vindicated, defending John Dryden's The Conquest of Granada from Richard Leigh's attacks. In 1673 he also penned the anonymous The Friendly Vindication.

In 1678 Blount became a member of the Green Ribbon Club, a group of radical Whig advocates and activists. In 1679 he published An Appeal from the Country to the City under the name of Junius Brutus. It was a strongly Whig piece that suggested that the Popish Plot was entirely real. It painted a lurid picture of what life in London would be like under James II and Roman Catholicism. In this case, the printer was seized and fined, and the pamphlet was burned by the common hangman (i.e. a symbolic execution of the book for treason). The same year, he assumed the name of Philopatris ("lover of his country") to write A Just Vindication of Learning, which was an argument against the act licensing printers. He mimicked John Milton's previous Areopagitica. After the death of Thomas Hobbes Blount produced an anonymous broadsheet of "sayings" from Hobbes' book Leviathan.

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