When he returned to England, Laud was in the Tower of London, but had taken the precaution to make the Arabic chair permanent. Pococke does not seem to have been an extreme churchman or to have been active in politics. His rare scholarship and personal qualities brought him influential friends, foremost among these being John Selden and John Owen. Through their offices he obtained, in 1648, the chair of Hebrew, though he lost the emoluments of the post soon after, and did not recover them till the Restoration. These events hampered Pococke in his studies, or so he complained in the preface to his Eutychius; he resented the attempts to remove him from his parish of Childrey, a college living near Wantage in North Berkshire which he had accepted in 1643. In 1649, he published the Specimen historiae arabum, a short account of the origin and manners of the Arabs, taken from Bar-Hebraeus, with notes from a vast number of manuscript sources which are still valuable. This was followed in 1655 by the Porta Mosis, extracts from the Arabic commentary of Maimonides on the Mishnah, with translation and very learned notes; and in 1656 by the annals of Eutychius in Arabic and Latin. He also gave active assistance to Brian Walton's polyglot bible, and the preface to the various readings of the Arabic Pentateuch is from his hand.
Post-Restoration
After the Restoration, Pococke's political and financial troubles ended, but the reception of his magnum opusa complete edition of the Arabic history of Bar-Hebraeus, which he dedicated to the king in 1663showed that the new order of things was not very favourable to scholarship. After this his most important works were a Lexicon heptaglotton and English commentaries on Micah, Malachi, Hosea and Joel. An Arabic translation of Grotius's De veritate, which appeared in 1660, may also be mentioned as a proof of Pococke's interest in the propagation of Christianity in the East, as is his later Arabic translation of the Book of Common Prayer in 1674. Pococke had a long-standing interest in the subject, which he had talked over with Grotius at Paris on his way back from Constantinople. Pococke married in 1646. One of his sons, Edward, published several contributions from Arabic literature: a fragment of Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi's Account of Egypt and the Philosophus Autodidactus of Ibn Tufayl. His valuable collection of 420 oriental manuscripts was bought by the university in 1693 for 600l., and is in the Bodleian, and some of his printed books were acquired by the Bodleian in 1822, by bequest from the Rev. C. Francis of Brasenose. Both Edward Gibbon and Thomas Carlyle exposed some "pious" lies in the missionary work by Grotius translated by Pococke, which were omitted from the Arabic text. The theological works of Pococke were collected, in two volumes, in 1740, with a curious account of his life and writings by Leonard Twells.
