26 June 2020
A cabal is a group of conspirators or a secret plot or conspiracy; it is also verb meaning to plot or conspire. The word is ultimately from the Hebrew Kabbalah, the set of Jewish, post-biblical, mystical teachings. It comes into English from French in the late sixteenth century, which in turn got it from medieval Latin, which borrowed it from Hebrew. In English use over the centuries, the meaning of the word has shifted from the original sense to generalize into any secret or arcane knowledge, then dropping the knowledge component and keeping the secret, shifting into the realm of conspiracy.
The word appears in English by about 1575 in the sense of Kabbalah. From The Familiar Epistles of Sir Anthony of Gueuara:
The law of Moyses I do not deny, but your Cabal I can in no wise credit, but vtterly defie, & firmly beleue the Gospell of Iesus Christ.
By 1606 it is being used in a more general sense to mean secret or arcane knowledge. In his Foure Bookes of Offices, Barnabe Barnes writes of the mysteries of good governance which commoners are incapable of understanding:
Those secrets of a State, which commonly fore beyond the vulgar apprehension, beeing certaine rules, or as it were cabals of glorious gouernment and successe both in peace and warre (apprehensible to few secret Counsellors in some Commonweales, which either languish or wax vnfortunate) are locked vp in foure generall rules.
And in 1635, David Person uses the word to refer to the secrets of the natural world:
And it is this sort of Knowledge, which properly we call Philosophy, or Physick, which in this Treatise I intend most to handle; and by which, as by one of the principall parts of Philosophy, the reader may have an insight in the Cabals and secrets of Nature.
Unsurprisingly, it is in the run up to the English Civil War that cabal is used to refer to secret plots against the government and the crown. In 1642, the pseudonymous Theophilus Philanax Gerusiphilus Philalethes Decius writes:
Oh but his Majesty hath heard of the License taken by them at their private Cabals to undervalue and vilifie the Kings person, and power: Of their having designed to have taken the Prince his son from him by force; nay to have seised on his own sacred Person: Of a solemn Combination, and Conspiracie entred into by them, for altering the Government of the Church and State
And in 1645, David Buchanon uses it as a verb:
So these number and power of the Slaves of Iniquity growing, they are plotting, caballing, and devising how to supplant another, and increase their sever all faction.
There is an old, incorrect etymology of cabal that you will occasionally see pop up. It says that the word is an acronym for the names of five ministers to King Charles II of England. Gilbert Burnet, writing about events of 1672, records this notion in his 1724 Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time:
And this Junto, together with the Duke of Buckingham, being called the Cabal, it was observed that Cabal proved a technical word, every letter in it being the first letter of those five, Clifford, Ashly, Buckingham, Arlington, and Lauderdale.
Burnet probably did not believe that cabal had an acronymic origin, rather he was saying that in this instance it could coincidentally form one. Nevertheless, people have mistakenly believed that the word was originally an acronym.
While acronyms have been formed from existing words, such as cabal, dating back to antiquity, there are no examples of new words being formed from acronyms until the nineteenth century, and that method of word formation is extremely rare until the twentieth.
Sources:
American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020, s.v. cabal.
Barnes, Barnabe. Foure Bookes of Offices. London: George Bishop, 1606, 28. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Buchanon, David. A Short and True Relation of Some Main Passages of Things. London: R. Raworth for R. Bostock, 1645. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Burnet, Gilbert. Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time, vol 1 of 2. London: Thomas Ward, 1724, 307–08. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Decius, Theophilus Philanax Gerusiphilus Philalethes. An Answer to the Lord George Digbies Apology for Himself. London, 1642, 63. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Guevara, Antonio de. The Familiar Epistles of Sir Anthony of Gueuara. London: Henry Bynneman, c.1575, 403. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. cabal, n.1; cabal, v.
Person, David. Varieties. London: Richard Badger for Thomas Alchorn, 1635, 3. Early English Books Online (EEBO).