You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Of all the forces that shaped the history of seventeenth-century Britain, none ran deeper or reached further than religion. The narrative lessons of this course have traced religion as it erupted at particular moments — Laud's altar rails on the road to civil war, the sects of the Interregnum, the Clarendon Code after the Restoration, the anti-popery that destroyed James II. This lesson does something different. It draws those threads together into a single thematic analysis of religion across the whole period from 1625 to 1701, treating it not as a series of episodes but as one continuous, evolving problem: how a society that assumed religious uniformity was both necessary and enforceable came, by slow and painful stages, to accept religious diversity as a permanent fact of life. That transformation — from the persecuting confessional state of Charles I to the (limited) toleration of 1689 — is one of the most important changes the century produced, and analysing it thematically is exactly the kind of long-range, change-over-time argument that a breadth study is designed to reward.
The story has an underlying logic worth stating at the outset. English Protestantism after the Reformation was never a single settled thing; it contained an unresolved tension between those who thought the Church of England already sufficiently reformed and those "hotter sort of Protestants", the Puritans, who wished to reform it further. Onto that fault line the century poured a series of shocks: Laud's attempt to push the Church back towards ceremony and sacrament; the collapse of all authority in the 1640s that let a hundred sects bloom; the vengeful re-imposition of Anglican monopoly in the 1660s; and the terrifying prospect, twice realised in Charles I's queen and James II's person, of Catholicism at the very heart of the state. Anti-popery — the deep, almost tribal Protestant fear of Rome and all it stood for — was the single most powerful mobilising emotion of the age, and it is the thread that connects the beginning of the story to its end. The lesson closes with the settlement that finally, and only partially, resolved the tension: the Toleration Act of 1689.
Key enquiry: How and why did England move, across the seventeenth century, from the assumption that religious uniformity was both essential and enforceable towards the acceptance of a limited religious toleration in 1689 — and how far was that change driven by principled argument for liberty of conscience as against the sheer practical exhaustion of trying, and failing, to compel a divided nation into one Church?
The century opened with an established Church that most Protestants assumed would, and should, be the only lawful form of worship in the land. Recusant Catholics were a persecuted and legally disabled minority; Protestant separatists were few and driven underground or abroad (the Pilgrim Fathers had sailed in 1620). The working consensus of the Jacobean Church had been broadly Calvinist in doctrine — emphasising predestination and the sovereignty of grace — and relatively restrained in ceremony. What shattered that consensus, and did more than any other single factor to detonate the crisis of the 1640s, was the rise of Laudianism.
William Laud, Bishop of London from 1628 and Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633, drove a programme that struck contemporaries as a deliberate reversal of the Reformation itself. Its elements deserve restating thematically, because they define the "persecuting Church" against which everything that followed was a reaction.
| Element of Laudianism | Why it alarmed contemporaries |
|---|---|
| "The Beauty of Holiness" | Ceremonial worship, ornate decoration, vestments, bowing at the name of Jesus, and above all the railing-off of the communion table, moved altar-wise to the east end of the church. To congregations reared on plainer worship, this looked like a march back to Rome. |
| Arminianism (anti-Calvinism) | The promotion of a theology emphasising free will and the efficacy of the sacraments over predestinarian Calvinism. To committed Calvinists — the mainstream of English Protestantism — this was not a legitimate variation but crypto-popery. |
| Clericalism and the prerogative courts | Laud exalted the authority of the clergy and enforced conformity through the Church courts and the prerogative courts of High Commission and Star Chamber, giving his innovations the menacing backing of arbitrary justice. |
| Savage discipline | The cropping of the ears of the Puritan pamphleteers Prynne, Bastwick and Burton (1637) — gentlemen, publicly mutilated for anti-episcopal writings — shocked moderate opinion and fused religious grievance with the fear of tyranny. |
The thematic significance of Laudianism is that it inverted the normal alignment of English religious politics. For a generation, the "threat" had been understood to come from below — from Puritan zealots wanting more reformation. Laud made the threat appear to come from above, from the Crown and the episcopate, apparently dragging the Church back towards Rome. Nicholas Tyacke's influential argument (in Anti-Calvinists, 1987) is precisely that it was the Laudians, not the Puritans, who were the revolutionary innovators, overturning a settled Calvinist consensus — so that the Puritan reaction was conservative, a defence of the Jacobean status quo against Caroline novelty. Whether or not one accepts Tyacke's reading in full, the effect is not in doubt: Laudianism turned the most powerful emotion in English religious life, anti-popery, against the Crown's own Church, and in doing so it supplied the road to war with its deepest and most mobilising grievance. When the Long Parliament met in 1640, the abolition of the prerogative courts and the assault on "popish" innovation in the Church commanded near-universal support — the measure of how far Laud had alienated the political nation.
The collapse of censorship and Church discipline in the 1640s produced something no one had intended and almost no one welcomed: an explosion of religious diversity that shattered forever the assumption of a single national Church. To understand this thematically, one must first grasp what "Puritanism" was and was not. It was never a single organised body but a temper — the conviction that the Reformation was unfinished and that both Church and society must be brought into fuller conformity with God's word. Within that temper lay a fatal ambiguity about how the reformed Church should be governed, and the moment the bishops fell, that ambiguity split Puritanism apart.
| Puritan tendency | Core position |
|---|---|
| Presbyterians | Wished to replace episcopacy with a national Presbyterian Church on the Scottish model — disciplined, compulsory, and uniform. They were the dominant group in the Westminster Assembly and were committed to by the Solemn League and Covenant (1643). Crucially, they were not tolerationists: they wanted one reformed Church, not many. |
| Independents (Congregationalists) | Held that each gathered congregation of the godly should govern itself, free of any national hierarchy. Strong in the New Model Army, they favoured a measure of toleration for the "gathered churches" — not out of indifference but because they denied that any human authority could compel true faith. |
The failure of the Presbyterians to erect their compulsory national Church — blocked by the Independents and the army — created a vacuum in which a startling proliferation of radical sects flourished in the 1650s, examined in the Protectorate lesson and gathered here for their thematic weight: the Baptists, who denied infant baptism; the Quakers, with their doctrine of the inner light, their refusal of tithes, oaths and social deference, and their alarming growth by the late 1650s; the Fifth Monarchists, awaiting the imminent rule of "King Jesus"; and the shadowy Ranters, whose antinomianism (the belief that the saved were above the moral law) may, as J.C. Davis argued, have owed more to the horrified imagination of the orthodox than to any organised reality.
The thematic point is what this ferment did to the mind of the propertied classes. The spectacle of the world "turned upside down" — of cobblers preaching, of women prophesying, of hierarchy and order dissolving in the acid of religious enthusiasm — terrified the gentry into a conviction that would shape the rest of the century: that toleration meant anarchy. Religious pluralism had arrived in fact, but it arrived wearing the face of social subversion, and that association would poison the case for toleration for a generation. When the propertied nation turned back to monarchy in 1660, it did so in large part to recover the order that unrestrained religious liberty seemed to threaten. The sects thus produced, by reaction, the persecuting settlement of the 1660s — a supreme irony of the theme, in which the high-water mark of religious liberty called forth the fiercest repression of the age.
The Restoration of 1660 might have produced a broad, comprehensive Church that reincorporated the moderate Puritans — and Charles II, in his Declaration of Breda, had gestured at "liberty to tender consciences". It did not. The Church settlement was made not by the tolerant king but by the fiercely Anglican, royalist gentry who dominated the Cavalier Parliament elected in 1661, and their memory of the 1640s and 1650s made them determined never again to permit the religious pluralism that had, as they saw it, destroyed Church, king and social order alike. The result was a body of penal legislation, misleadingly named after the king's minister the Earl of Clarendon (who in fact disapproved of much of it), designed to crush Protestant Dissent — the new name for those Puritans who, after the Act of Uniformity of 1662 ejected some two thousand ministers who would not conform, now stood permanently outside the national Church.
| Statute | Provision |
|---|---|
| Corporation Act (1661) | Required all holders of municipal office to take Anglican communion and renounce the Covenant — purging Dissenters from town government. |
| Act of Uniformity (1662) | Imposed the revised Book of Common Prayer and demanded that all clergy declare their "unfeigned assent and consent" to everything in it; the roughly two thousand ministers who refused were ejected on "Black Bartholomew's Day", creating Nonconformity as a permanent body. |
| Conventicle Act (1664) | Forbade religious meetings of more than five persons outside the forms of the Church of England — striking directly at Dissenting worship. |
| Five Mile Act (1665) | Barred ejected ministers from coming within five miles of any corporate town or their former parishes, aiming to sever Dissenting congregations from their pastors. |
The persecution these laws authorised was real and severe, and it is essential to grasp its thematic meaning. This was the moment when English Protestantism institutionalised its own division: the dream of a single national Church embracing all Protestants was abandoned, and in its place stood a narrow, exclusive, Anglican establishment on one side and a permanent, penalised body of Dissent on the other. Thousands suffered under the Code — John Bunyan wrote much of The Pilgrim's Progress during twelve years in Bedford gaol for unlicensed preaching; the Quakers, who refused on principle to worship in secret, were imprisoned in their thousands. Yet — and this is the deepest thematic irony — the very ferocity of the persecution failed. Dissent was too widespread, too respectable and too tenacious to be crushed; it survived the Clarendon Code intact, and its survival was the practical demonstration, written across two decades of futile repression, that uniformity could no longer be enforced. As John Spurr has emphasised, the Restoration Church's attempt to reassert its monopoly was in the long run self-defeating: it created the very constituency of committed, organised, suffering Dissenters whose eventual toleration became unavoidable.
If Dissent was the problem that divided Protestants among themselves, Catholicism was the spectre that, at intervals, united them in terror. To understand the seventeenth century one must take seriously the depth and the irrationality of English anti-popery — a fear out of all proportion to the tiny numbers of actual English Catholics (perhaps one or two per cent of the population), and rooted in a cluster of associations that made "popery" a synonym for everything the Protestant nation dreaded.
| Root of anti-popery | Association in the Protestant mind |
|---|---|
| Historical memory | The Marian burnings, the Gunpowder Plot (1605), the Irish Rebellion of 1641 with its lurid tales of Protestant massacre — a remembered history of Catholic cruelty and treachery. |
| Foreign threat | Catholicism meant subjection to a foreign power (the Pope) and alliance with the great Catholic monarchies — Habsburg Spain, and above all the France of Louis XIV, whose absolutism and whose revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) seemed to show exactly what Catholic rule meant for Protestants. |
| Political theory | "Popery" was identified with arbitrary government and the destruction of liberty and property; a Catholic king, it was assumed, would necessarily be a tyrant, since Catholicism and absolutism were believed to be inseparable partners. |
The thematic power of anti-popery lies in the way it recurs, at the decisive moments of the century, as the great destabilising force — and always, crucially, when it could be attached to the Crown itself. Charles I was fatally damaged by the Catholicism of his queen, Henrietta Maria, and by the suspicion that Laudianism was popery in disguise. The Popish Plot of 1678, though a complete fabrication by Titus Oates, convulsed the nation and triggered the Exclusion Crisis precisely because it fell upon ground so thoroughly prepared by anti-Catholic fear. And James II was destroyed, within four years, not by his Catholicism as such but by his use of the royal prerogative to advance it — the suspending and dispensing powers, the Catholic army officers, the assault on the Anglican monopoly in the universities and the corporations. The birth of his son in June 1688, threatening a Catholic dynasty rather than a temporary Catholic reign, was the trigger that turned Tory loyalists into revolutionaries. The thematic lesson, and one that a strong breadth essay will draw explicitly, is that anti-popery was the one force capable of overriding even the Anglican-royalist doctrine of non-resistance: the gentry who would suffer almost anything from a Protestant king would not suffer a Catholic one. Tim Harris has made anti-popery central to his account of both the Exclusion Crisis and 1688, insisting that it was a genuine, popular, mobilising ideology and not a mere elite manipulation.
The long, exhausting seventeenth-century argument about religious uniformity reached its resolution — partial, pragmatic, and grudging — in the Toleration Act of 1689. Passed in the wake of the Revolution, it granted freedom of public worship to Trinitarian Protestant Dissenters who took the oaths of allegiance and supremacy and subscribed to most of the doctrinal articles of the Church of England. Dissenting ministers who did so could now preach legally in licensed meeting-houses; the machinery of the Clarendon Code, though not formally repealed, fell into disuse.
It is essential to state the Act's limits as precisely as its provisions, because the gap between them is exactly where the analytical marks lie.
| The Toleration Act DID | The Toleration Act did NOT |
|---|---|
| Grant freedom of worship to Trinitarian Protestant Dissenters (Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Quakers under a separate affirmation) | Extend to Roman Catholics, who were in fact newly barred from the throne, or to anti-Trinitarians (Unitarians) |
| End the era of active persecution for Nonconformist worship | Grant civil equality: the Test and Corporation Acts still barred Dissenters from public and municipal office |
| Make the open, legal coexistence of competing Protestant congregations a permanent fact | Disestablish the Church of England, which kept its privileges, its establishment and its monopoly of the universities |
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.