Contesting the English Polity, 1660-1688: Religion, Politics, and Ideas (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, 49) 9781783277360, 9781800106666, 9781800106673, 178327736X

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STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY Volume 49

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CONTESTING THE ENGLISH POLITY, 1660–1688

Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History ISSN: 1476-9107 Series editors Tim Harris – Brown University Stephen Taylor – Durham University Andy Wood – Durham University Previously published titles in the series are listed at the back of this volume ‎

CONTESTING THE ENGLISH POLITY, 1660–1688 RELIGION, POLITICS, AND IDEAS

Mark Goldie

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Mark Goldie 2023 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation‎ no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval ‎system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, ‎transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means,‎without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Mark Goldie to be identified as the author ‎of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 7‎ 7 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2023 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN-13: 9781783277360 (hardcover) ISBN-13: 9781800106666 (ePDF) ISBN-13: 9781800106673 (ePUB) The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd‎ PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK ‎and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.‎ 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA‎ website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Cover image: Frontispiece of John Ogilby’s Britannia (1675). Drawn by Francis Barlow, engraved by Wenzel Hollar (1607–1677). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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Contents Preface vii Acknowledgements ix Abbreviations x Introduction 1 1 The Theory of Royal Sovereignty

12

2 The Theory of Religious Intolerance

35

3 The Reception of Thomas Hobbes

65

4 Danby, the Bishops, and the Whigs

93

5 Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism

121

6 Toleration and the Godly Prince

139

7 Toleration and the Huguenots

157

8 Andrew Marvell’s Adversaries

176

9 Annual Parliaments and Aristocratic Whiggism

196

10 William Lawrence and the Case for King Monmouth

219

11 Sir Peter Pett, Sceptical Toryism, and the Science of Toleration

240

12 The Political Thought of the Anglican Revolution

265

13 John Locke and Anglican Royalism

293

Index 319

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Preface This book comprises essays on religion, politics, and ideas in Restoration England. With the exception of the Introduction, earlier versions have previously appeared, but in places that are scattered and sometimes hard to retrieve. They are brought together here in order to provide a sustained consideration of the mental world of a deeply divided nation, struggling to cauterize the damage done to England’s social fabric by religiously inspired violence – for that was the legacy of the Reformation, the Civil Wars, and an inconstant monarchy. I have selected essays which have been widely cited and which endure in contemporary scholarship. I have confined the selection to those which deal chiefly with the era we call the Restoration, between the return of Charles II to his thrones in 1660 and the deposition of his brother James II in 1688. The character of these essays is diverse. Some touch on the history of philosophy, some concern politics ‘on the ground’, while others are case studies of individual authors or moments. While some deal in secular ideas, most emphasize the interconnectedness of religious and political thinking, and stress the institutional and ideological salience of the church and its critics. Intellectual, political, and religious history should not be treated as separate pursuits, as too often they still are. Scholars, it is true, are obliged to work within disciplinary boundaries, and a hope is that these essays may find readers in several disciplines: history, political theory, literature, theology, and the history of philosophy. The texts of these essays have been revised to finesse the prose and correct errors. In most cases, the content has not been altered in major ways, although I have sometimes either abridged or supplied additional material. Occasional overlaps remain, where material does service in different contexts. I have especially aimed to update citations in the footnotes to provide a guide to recent scholarship. Each essay is self-contained and may be read independently, as well as in the ensemble. The book is about England. There was no British polity before 1707; Scotland was distinct, and has its own history; as does Ireland. I have not attempted to embrace the thought of all these isles. ‎

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Acknowledgements For assistance at an early stage in revising and preparing these essays for press I am indebted especially to Jacqueline Rose. At Boydell, Peter Sowden has been immensely patient, as have the editors of the series in which this book appears, Tim Harris, Stephen Taylor, and Andy Wood. Thanks are owed to colleagues who read and commented on drafts of these essays when they appeared in their original form, and to the editors of volumes in which they were originally published: Robert Beddard, James Burns, Rick Caldicott, Justin Champion, Martin Dzelzainis, Lionel Glassey, Hugh Gough, Ole Peter Grell, Donna Hamilton, Tim Harris, Edward Holberton, Jonathan Israel, Christine Macleod, John Marshall, John Morrow, Nicholas Phillipson, Steven Pincus, Jean-Paul Pittion, Craig Rose, Jonathan Scott, Paul Seaward, Bill Sheils, Quentin Skinner, John Spurr, Richard Strier, Naomi Tadmor, Sylvana Tomaselli, Nicholas Tyacke, and Richard Tuck. It will become apparent from the footnote citations that Restoration studies presently owe a great deal to, among others: Niall Allsopp, David Armitage, Ronald Asch, Stephen Bardle, Jonathan Barry, Robert Beddard, William Bulman, Justin Champion, Tony Claydon, John Coffey, Jeffrey Collins, Conal Condren, Phil Connell, Cesare Cuttica, Gary De Krey, Anne Dunan-Page, Martin Dzelzainis, Perry Gauci, Natasha Glaisyer, Gabriel Glickman, Jeremy Gregory, Robin Gwynn, Tim Harris, Michael Hunter, Ronald Hutton, Sarah Hutton, Robert Iliffe, Clare Jackson, Matthew Jenkinson, Warren Johnston, Neil Keeble, Geoff Kemp, Newton Key, Mark Knights, Edward Legon, Thomas Leng, Charles-Edouard Levillain, Dmitri Levitin, Kate Loveman, Jason McElligott, Gaby Mahlberg, Nicholas von Maltzahn, Scott Mandelbrote, John Marshall, John Miller, John Milton, Paul Monod, John Morrill, Andrew Murphy, Matthew Neufeld, Jon Parkin, Steven Pincus, John Pocock, Jean-Louis Quantin, Craig Rose, Jacqueline Rose, Julia Rudolph, Lois Schwoerer, Jonathan Scott, Paul Seaward, Brent Sirota, Quentin Skinner, George Southcombe, Scott Sowerby, John Spurr, Grant Tapsell, Stephen Taylor, Richard Tuck, Nicholas Tyacke, Edward Vallance, Rachel Weil, Brian Weiser, Phil Withington, Blair Worden, David Wykes, and Melinda Zook. My approach to history has been immeasurably shaped over many years by William Lamont, John Pocock, and Quentin Skinner, and I am much in their debt. The regular appearance of ‘Woodbridge’ in the citations is testimony to the immense contribution to early modern scholarship made in recent decades by the publisher of this book, the Boydell Press. ix

Abbreviations BL Bodl. Burnet, OT CSPD EHR Grey, Debates

British Library, London Bodleian Library, Oxford Bishop Burnet’s History of his Own Time, vol. 1 (1724) Calendar of State Papers, Domestic English Historical Review Debates of the House of Commons, from the Year 1677 to the Year 1694 (10 vols, 1763) HJ Historical Journal HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission reports Hobbes, Leviathan Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. N. Malcolm (3 vols, Oxford, 2012) JBS Journal of British Studies LJ Journal of the House of Lords Marvell, PW The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, eds M. Dzelzainis, N. H. Keeble, N. von Maltzahn, and A. Patterson (2 vols, New Haven, CT, 2003) Locke, TTG John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge, 1970), cited by treatise and paragraph number ST A Complete Collection of State Trials, eds T. B. Howell, T. J. Howell, and W. Cobbett (34 vols, 1809–35) All works cited were published in London unless otherwise stated. Quotations from primary sources have been modernized, except for poetry and book titles. ‎

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Introduction The people of early modern England believed themselves to belong to two societies, answering to the dual aspect of their human nature, soul and body. They called these societies spiritual and temporal. They also referred to them as ‘church’ and ‘state’, or ‘ecclesiastical’ and ‘civil’. The two societies were understood to have distinct purposes, eternal salvation and earthly welfare, but in practice they were entangled. Thus they were conceptually – or, as philosophers today would say, analytically – distinct; but substantively, in actual life, they were necessarily conjoined. Souls were, on this earth, embodied. People’s lives in this world ought to be godly, and earthly institutions should be imbued with divine purpose. The church had for centuries been deeply involved in temporal affairs, and ministers of religion, besides their spiritual callings from Christ, exercised extensive worldly authority. Conversely, princes demanded oversight of the church, even a ‘royal supremacy’ in matters ecclesiastical. The boundaries between temporal and spiritual realms were consequently fraught with ambiguity and contestation. In theory at least, the two societies were co-extensive, in that all the people were simultaneously members of both societies. The church comprised the commonwealth at prayer, and civil society comprised the godly at work. England was understood to be a godly commonwealth, and subject to godly rule. The commonwealth was godly not only because the two societies were co-extensive, and not only because the ruler was Christian, but also because temporal rulers – the ‘prince’ and the ‘magistrates’ – were held to have a duty to support and uphold the church, by lending the force of the state to the service of the Christian creed, its worship, and its governance. Correspondingly, the rulers of the church, the bishops and the wider hierarchy, had a proper role as counsellors to the prince and the magistrates, and as keepers of the public conscience. The two societies were corporate bodies. Although Christ had said ‘my kingdom is not of this world’, and some critics of the worldly church wished, on that account, to dissolve the corporate church, nonetheless the body of Christ’s people on earth was a legal entity, with jurisdiction and governance. Unlike other corporations, such as an urban borough, the corporate church claimed a national, even a universal, jurisdiction, and one that extended far beyond earthly welfare, for it was armed with another injunction of Christ’s: his donation to the church of the power of the ‘keys’, wherewith to ‘bind in heaven’ whatever it shall ‘bind on earth’.1 Such claims almost unavoidably 1

The Petrine Commission: Matthew 16:18–22.

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entailed a potential for conflict with the temporal state, irrespective of the ideal of harmony and however loudly it was asserted that the distinct purposes and domains of church and state kept them secure in their separate channels. Anyone who reflected on the relationship between church and state was compelled to take a view on whether and how the doctrine of the ‘two societies’ was sustainable. Some said the prince had no right to impugn the corporate spiritual authority of priests, for what Christ has founded cannot be tampered with by any earthly power. Others said that in so far as the church was an earthly corporation it was really no different from a borough or college in its subordination to temporal supremacy. Looming over Protestants was the knowledge that the Roman Catholic Church made exorbitant claims for the supremacy of the papacy over all earthly princes. In response, English Protestants sometimes made of their prince a veritable pastor and prophet, a quasi-sacerdotal figure, for only a monarch divinely endowed with authority could resist and reform the ‘usurpations’ of the papacy. Clouding the Restoration was the further knowledge that, during the Civil Wars, some Protestants had denied that the earthly prince had any jurisdiction whatever over the ‘saints’, the ‘true’ church of Christ’s Elect; while others held that people were entitled to choose their own forms of worship and belief and that, even if erroneous in their choices, neither church nor state could justly suppress their liberty of conscience, so that the notion of ‘governing’ in the religious sphere was altogether spurious. Yet other Protestants – or perhaps they were atheists – contended that all ‘spiritual’ claims were really temporal claims, either because asserted by fallible and quarrelsome human beings, or because any external expression of religion was necessarily worldly, and hence religion belonged entirely within the civil realm. Christians throughout Europe had argued about the relationship between the ‘two societies’ ever since the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the fourth century of the Christian era. Tertullian had called on the Christian church to renounce the secular world; but Eusebius, taking an opposite view, lauded the Emperor Constantine as the agent of divine providence in bringing knowledge of Christ to all the world. In The City of God Augustine constructed an unstable amnesty between these two claims, which he bequeathed to the Christian ‘magisterial’ centuries, that is to say, to the centuries during which magistrates enfolded Christianity into their identity as rulers.2 Historians of ideas, for any period down to at least the eighteenth century, should, if true to the urgent preoccupations exhibited in the texts they study, pay as much attention to political theology as to secular political theory. Ecclesiology is the theory of the nature and governance of the church, including its relationship with the state. In the conditions of secular modernity, ‘ecclesiology’ may sound arcane, a side alley. Liberal modernity parked the church in a cul-de-sac, by 2

R. A. Marcus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine (Cambridge, 1970).

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INTRODUCTION

dissolving, or privatizing, its corporate claims, and rejecting its insistence that it belongs in the square of public life. The present book has much to say about ecclesiology. If this seems to run against the tide of secular modernity, it is because the pursuit of history is about discovering what modernity has rendered unfamiliar to us. Yet, equally, such an emphasis is probably helped along by a currently powerful trend in twenty-first-century scholarship and sensibility, which has been called ‘post-secularist’. Post-secularism is the recognition that modernity has not, after all, buried religion, and that liberalism is not as neutral as it claims to be in divorcing religion from the public sphere.3 As it happens, I am a child of secular modernity and a non-believer, but you cannot be a serious intellectual historian of pre-modern Europe unless you recognize the centrality of theology and ecclesiology in the intellectual life of the Christian centuries. This is not to say, however, that theology and ecclesiology are conceptually alien species, intractable to those who know only secular thought. On the contrary, it turns out that, since humans have only their own thought processes at their disposal, and not God’s, they are apt to think about God’s governance and authority with and through the language of temporal politics. Thus, for example, the attributes of God have tended to be discussed in juridical terms, as a puzzle about the nature and exercise of his ‘laws’, his ‘justice’, and his ‘sovereignty’; and the government of the church has tended to be construed as being ‘monarchical’, in the papacy, or ‘aristocratical’, in bishops, or ‘democratical’, in the congregation. Medieval theologians adapted the jurisprudence and categories of Greek political thought and of Roman law. To speak of ‘Christ the King’ or ‘the Kingdom of God’ or Jesus as ‘Lord’ is to use the language of earthly monarchy: Christianity was born under a system of imperial rule and inherited its vocabulary.4 Theology cannot avoid anthropomorphism: from which you will either deduce that humanity is talking about itself when it purports to be talking about God; or you will adopt a theology of the hidden God, the deus absconditus, holding him to exist but beyond reliable parsing. The third chapter in the present book explores contemporary responses to the towering figure of Thomas Hobbes. We shall see that the authors of the many books which aimed to refute him – or at least to domesticate him – had to confront the philosophical conundrums that are posed by supposing a God who is the ‘sovereign legislator’ of the universe. God, it seems, survived the Enlightenment, although the present book, given its time frame, the Restoration, does not have to strive any harder than to suggest that God survived at least until the Enlightenment. This claim begs the 3

P. Berger (ed.), The Desecularization of the World (Washington, DC, 1999); C. Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2007). For implications for the history of ideas, see A. Chapman, J. Coffey, and B. Gregory (eds), Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (Notre Dame, IN, 2009). 4 This thought upturns Carl Schmitt’s often quoted dictum that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’. Political Theology (Cambridge, MA, 1985), p. 36.

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question: when was the Enlightenment? Since the Enlightenment was centrally about taming the Christian churches’ habit of making exorbitant claims and demands, and their propensity to produce oppression and violence, certainly some intellectual seeds of its taming can be found (among many other places) in Restoration England, not least in its burgeoning culture of anticlericalism. We shall see, especially in the fifth and thirteenth chapters, how ingrained the critique of priestly power was in the emergence of the movement we call ‘Whig’. And we shall find, in the tenth chapter, the extent to which the emerging concept of ‘priestcraft’ could provide a tool for multiple kinds of critique of human practices and institutions. On the whole, however, I avoid the term ‘the early Enlightenment’, anxious that historians do not rush England, or Europe, too speedily towards it. There is a danger of anachronism in the ‘fallacy of premature secularization’.5 In the seventeenth century, the critique of existing religion was not done for the sake of irreligion, the supersession of religion, but, on the contrary, for the sake of continuing and perfecting the reformation of religion. It is, in any case, a wise methodological principle that we should use the optics of those we study, and the people of the late seventeenth century thought of themselves still as people of the Reformation and not of ‘the Enlightenment’. They might speak of ‘enlightenment’, but if they did so they were likely to be committed to a Christian Platonism which taught that reason was a spark of divine illumination in the soul of humankind. Arguably the Restoration was the final period in English history in which the ideal of a unitary godly commonwealth, of two societies perfectly fused and mutually supportive, could be sustained with any plausibility. This puts the Restoration firmly within the domain of the ‘Long Reformation’, a term which a number of scholars have recently used to denote a belief held by Protestants throughout the seventeenth century that the task of the Reformation remained incomplete, and hence that it was a constant programme: a continuing aspiration, rather than a past event.6 Historians of the eighteenth century might immediately contest my implied terminus at or around 1700. Reformation without End is the title of a recent book covering the eighteenth century,7 while the author of an earlier book insisted that England remained an Anglican ‘confessional state’ until it was dismantled around 1830 when Dissenters and Catholics at last became citizens.8 I am 5

D. Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975), p. 41. For the case against a premature Enlightenment, see D. Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c.1640–1700 (Cambridge, 2015). 6 N. Tyacke (ed.), England’s Long Reformation, 1500–1800 (1998); D. Loewenstein, ‘Milton and the Creation of England’s Long Reformation’, Reformation 24 (2019), 165–80. However, for the case for a secularizing Restoration, see A. Houston and S. Pincus (eds), A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration (Cambridge, 2001). 7 R. G. Ingram, Reformation without End: Religion, Politics, and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2019). 8 J. C. D. Clarke, English Society, 1688–1832 (Cambridge, 1985).

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INTRODUCTION

happy partially to concede, but with three caveats. First, the Restoration was the final period in which the church–state was armed with statutory powers of enforcement of both worship and public office as the exclusive preserves of the established Church of England. Several of the chapters below address the problem of religious uniformity and plurality, for the Restoration era was riven by the politics of intolerance. The Act of Toleration of 1689, for all its limitations, marked a crucial break. A plurality of religions within one commonwealth became inescapable, where before there was only ‘schism’. Anglicanism, albeit still the ‘established’ church, had itself now to begin to function within a new world of voluntary religion.9 Second, the politics of the Restoration veered vertiginously between, on the one hand, attempts, theoretical and practical, to sustain a unity between prince and bishop, and, on the other, movements to drive wedges between the civitas and the ecclesia; so that the business of sustaining a harmonious co-equality of the two societies became more and more problematical and prone to crisis. After 1689, while the politics of religion remained highly contested, such destabilizing collisions receded. The near miraculous achievement of political stability in the aftermath of the Revolution10 is matched by, is parcelled with, the cauterizing of religious violence. After 1688 the English church–state by and large stopped fining, jailing, or killing people because of their religion, or irreligion. Third, some drastically radical propositions about the two societies were now abroad. None was more alarming than the ecclesiology that filled the second half of Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) – book III, ‘Of a Christian Commonwealth’, and IV, ‘Of the Kingdom of Darkness’ – in which all human pretensions to know what God requires for our church and society were cast into doubt. And few were more thoroughgoing in detaching church from state than John Locke in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), a theorist who today is routinely credited with a decisive move in the creation of liberalism: the privatization of religion, its banishment from the civil realm. In a short paper called ‘Of the Difference between Civil and Ecclesiastical Power’, left unpublished and dating from about 1674,11 Locke opened with this assertion: There is a twofold society, of which almost all men in the world are members, and that from the twofold concernment they have to attain a twofold happiness; viz. that of this world and that of the other: and hence arises these two following societies, viz. religious and civil.

9

M. Goldie, ‘Voluntary Anglicans’, Historical Journal 46 (2003), 977–90; B. S. Sirota, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680–1730 (New Haven, CT, 2014). 10 J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability, 1675–1725 (1967) remains the classic statement. 11 John Locke, Political Essays, ed. M. Goldie (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 216–21.

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He then drew up two parallel columns, headed ‘Civil society, or the state’ and ‘Religious society, or the church’, and listed a series of comparisons, such as, on the one side, the attainment of ‘civil peace and prosperity [and] the good things of this life’, and, on the other, ‘attaining happiness after this life in another world’. The civil power is entitled to direct us in all things ‘indifferent’, by which Locke meant all things indifferent to God, things which God has not definitely proscribed or prescribed in scripture or by the law of nature. The ecclesiastical power is to direct us in matters of faith, worship, and morality. Each society has its own laws, and Locke spoke of both as having ‘terms of communion’ which make us part of each society, namely our ‘promise of obedience to the laws of it’. Civil society enforces its laws coercively, even by ‘total deprivation’ through capital punishment, while religious society uses spiritual censures, even ‘expulsion’ through excommunication. Thus far, so conventional. But Locke did not proceed to suggest that the prince is the helpmeet, or ‘nursing mother’ or ‘nursing father’ of the church,12 and that the church has a corresponding duty to teach obedience to earthly powers, for the ‘powers that be are ordained of God’,13 which were the sentiments that convention would at this point demand. Instead, some of Locke’s further contrasts would have dismayed his contemporaries, for he now drove the two societies further apart, so much so that the conceit of the parallel begins to tear apart at the seams. Civil society ‘has nothing to do [outside] its own limits, which is civil happiness’; that is to say, it has no role in upholding the church’s mission to assist our salvation, and has no regard to church communion. Consequently, the church has no entitlement to ‘borrow’ temporal power to enforce its creeds and disciplines. At the end of his columns, the parallel collapses altogether. ‘Church membership is perfectly voluntary, and may end whenever anyone pleases without any prejudice to him, but in civil society it is not so.’ Locke closes by turning to examples of different countries. While it is true, he says, that ‘in some places the civil and religious societies are co-extensive, i.e. both the magistrate and every subject of the same commonwealth is also a member of the same church; … whereby they have all the same civil laws, and the same opinions and religious worship’, in others, ‘the religion of the commonwealth, i.e. the public established religion, is not received by all the subjects of the commonwealth’, and ‘the religion of part of the people is different from the governing part of the civil society’. And this latter circumstance, he said, is the case in England. Here Locke recognizes the new plurality of English religion; that the sects and denominations that had emerged during the Civil Wars, and earlier, were not temporary aberrations but permanent phenomena. In the Letter Concerning Toleration he would, at least in the words of his translator from the Latin, William Popple, describe churches as being like ‘clubs for claret’.14 He meant that a church, rightly understood, 12

‘Kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens they nursing mothers’: Isaiah 49:23. The Pauline Injunction: Romans 13:1–2. 14 John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. M. Goldie (Indianapolis, IN, 2010), p. 56. 13

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INTRODUCTION

has about as much status in the civil commonwealth as any other private association. This marked a decisive terminus to the Augustinian centuries of ‘godly magistracy’, though it was scarcely one that many of his contemporaries were yet ready to accept. Just over half-a-century ago William Lamont published Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–1660. He was surprised and rather abashed that this little book had greater impact than his minutely researched and lengthy monographs on the Puritans William Prynne and Richard Baxter.15 His thesis was that, far from it being the case that the Puritan radicals had a monopoly on visions of a godly commonwealth, all shades of opinion had such a vision. His chapters include ‘Godly Prince’, ‘Godly Bishop’, ‘Godly People’, and ‘Godly Parliament’. His claim was a retort to historians who were apt to overlook religion in accounting for the Civil Wars and who saw pious zeal as the preserve of outlandish fanatics. Lamont showed the ubiquity of millenarian belief in the promised overcoming of Antichrist, and that the book of the English Reformation, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (the ‘Book of Martyrs’), continued to provide a framework for thinking about England’s providential role in perfecting God’s work in the earthly institutions of church and state. Lamont demonstrated that some theorists of royal supremacy was so enamoured of the ideal of the prince as the agent of religious reform that they made of the king almost a priest, a simulacrum of those great models, the king-prophet Josiah in the Books of Kings and Chronicles, the Emperor Constantine, who had sat among the bishops in the councils of the early church, and King Lucius, who purportedly converted England to Christianity. He showed that, by contrast, some Laudian clergy, the followers of Charles I’s archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, so zealously preached jure divino – divine right – episcopacy and the rights of bishops to exercise independent jurisdiction over matters religious, that they denied that their king could modify or renounce bishops or the Book of Common Prayer, even to save his throne and his life. A godly challenge to princes was not therefore the monopoly of Puritan radicals. Here was the seed of one of the great paradoxes of the century: ‘high’ churchmen who resisted Stuart kings who strayed from Anglican rectitude, yet all the while preached abject loyalty. The paradox reached its apogee in the resistance of the Anglican hierarchy to England’s last Catholic monarch, James II, explored in the twelfth chapter of the present volume. Hence it was, Lamont concluded, that aspirations for ‘godly rule’ were to be found on all sides and belonged in ‘the mainstream of political thought’.16 The thesis is compelling, both in its general tenor, its realization that the mid-century conflict was a war of religion,17 and in its more particular sense 15

So his widow Linda tells me. His monographs were: Marginal Prynne (1963); and Richard Baxter and the Millennium (1979). 16 W. Lamont, Godly Rule, 1600–1660 (1969), p. 25. 17 J. S. Morrill, ‘The Religious Context of the English Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 34 (1984), 155–78.

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that everyone who reflected on the nature of the public realm had to figure out in what sense temporal rule could and should be godly. But where Lamont made a false step was in holding that visions of godly rule fled from England at the Restoration, fatally compromised by collective horror at the godly violence and saintly repressiveness unleashed by the Civil Wars. He shared with his generation of historians an assumption that 1660 was a great watershed between an old world and a new.18 And perhaps he made millenarianism, and Foxean providentialism, too much the bearers of his thesis, rather than a more ambient and juridically minded political theology. Legal-minded thinking about authority in church and state did not require to be apocalyptic, albeit that the shadow of Foxe’s prophetic monarchy lingered. Juridical construal of the church had greater longevity than the urgent particularities of early Stuart apocalyptic or the special providences unfolded in Foxe’s account of England’s role in bringing down popery. The present book pursues the idea of godly rule, and its competing and contested iterations, into Restoration England. To do so is in keeping with a move, over the past thirty years, to identify ‘the politics of religion’ in Restoration England,19 and with a broader tendency, already remarked, to identify a ‘Long Reformation’. One of the visions embraced during the Restoration we may call ‘Anglican’ (although the word was not yet in use), for it acquired a distinct identity after the trauma of the defeat of episcopacy and the Prayer Book in the 1640s.20 Revived in 1660, its devotees hoped to achieve their own kind of Zion, or New Jerusalem, an idyll of a post-Puritan England. In part this involved refurbishing the ideological armoury of the ‘divine right of kings’, or, to speak more accurately, of godly absolute sovereignty residing in the crown, which is the theme of the first chapter. And in part, as we shall see in the second chapter, it entailed a no less vigorous polemical effort to revitalize a parallel thesis about the duty of earthly powers to enforce religious ‘truth’: in a word, to persecute. These were the two faces of the Anglican Royalist vision, rule over the temporal and over the spiritual spheres, a thesis about politics and a thesis about ecclesiology. To Anglicans, the Puritans were not the embodiments of the unavoidable diversity of Christian consciences, but the dangerous and superannuated detritus of the catastrophe of mid-century, fit for extinction. The restored episcopate sought to arm the crown in order to achieve its Zion, and hence we may speak of a militant Anglican Royalism. The Anglican Royalists believed they had laid solid foundations for their church in the Act of Uniformity of 1662, and the associated legislation called the ‘Clarendon Code’; they refurbished 18

Lamont reneged: Baxter, pp. 9–10. See also his ‘The Religion of Andrew Marvell’, in The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell, ed, C. Condren and A. D. Cousins (Aldershot, 1990), pp. 135–56. 19 T. Harris, P. Seaward, and M. Goldie (eds), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford, 1990); P. Connell, Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope (Oxford, 2016). 20 J. Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, CT, 1991).

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INTRODUCTION

their vision under the ministry of the earl of Danby in the 1670s, a moment that is the subject of the fourth chapter; and they came closest to achieving their aims in the first half of the 1680s, when Puritan Dissent and political Whiggery were brutally suppressed. The ‘Tory Reaction’ of the 1680s marked a second or perfected restoration, for in those years Charles II capitulated to those who insisted they were his best allies, and enabled a thoroughgoing purge of the enemies of Anglican Royalism. Political Whiggism and religious Dissent were destined for annihilation. But, taking the Restoration period as a whole, the crown proved an unreliable partner in this holy alliance, and therein lay an opportunity for inroads for the enemies of Anglican Royalism. While some have written histories of Restoration England in terms of incipient rebellion and underground resistance, of subversive renewals of the ‘Good Old Cause’ of the 1640s, the history recounted here, by contrast, will be of repeated, if intermittent, accessions to public office and influence by those who contested the hegemony of Anglican Royalism, those who rejected what contemporaries called ‘the church party’ and by the 1680s the ‘Tory party’. Much of the politics of Restoration England was about seeking to limit the power of churchmen. Anticlericalism was central to the emergence of Whiggism, as was an Erastian concern that the prince should retain sufficient ecclesiastical authority to restrain priests. At several moments, when the king made a politique resolve to grant religious toleration and to spurn the church hierarchy, he found support from the heirs of the Puritan tradition. The ‘godly prince’ struck a blow against usurping bishops, and polemicists like Andrew Marvell, or groups like the émigré Huguenots now settled in England, as we shall see in the sixth to eighth chapters, found themselves extolling monarchical authority as a proper instrument of God’s work. Thus there were rival models of ‘Restoration’, rival visions of the Christian commonwealth, and rival theses about godly rule.21 We might indeed say that ‘the Restoration’ is a mirage, for the regime of Charles II and James II was by no means univocal, settled, and consensual. The return of monarchy and the church in 1660 preordained very little about the kind of polity that might ensue. The ‘revolution’ of the 1640s was, as a solution to England’s contested polity, simply a failure. Perhaps it will be objected that few people in Restoration England were philosophers or read treatises on ecclesiology. Yet people conduct their practical lives within a field of conceptual possibilities and constraints. They are able to do what their imaginations conceive as possible or desirable, and they act within the confines of mental formations sedimented in their minds.22 They operate within the world views of their times, within what we tend now to 21

Two valuable books which explore the Restoration in similar spirit are: J. Rose, Godly Kingship in Restoration England (Cambridge, 2011); and R. Asch, Sacral Kingship between Disenchantment and Re-enchantment: The French and English Monarchies, 1587–1688 (New York, 2014). See also idem, ‘The Crisis of Sacral Monarchy in England’, in Monarchy Transformed, ed. R. von Friedeburg and J. Morrill (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 319–46. 22 See Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002).

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call the languages or discourses available to them. In this way, the history of philosophy shades into the history of mentalities. To adapt a phrase of John Maynard Keynes, ‘practical people who believe themselves to be exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some philosophy’. What is more, there was a subtle gradation between, at the one pole, ‘high’ philosophy and theology, and, at the other, the everyday nostrums of political pamphlets, popular sermons, conduct books, newspapers, and coffee-house banter. Many of those who published during the Restoration are what today we would call ‘public intellectuals’: they were, often, philosophically and rhetorically trained in the universities, but they were polemically engaged in the public sphere, in partisan political and religious warfare, firing off what contemporaries called ‘paper bullets’.23 Not least of the genres which form a bridge between ‘high’ philosophy and the demotic public domain was the sermon, and recent scholarship has drawn our attention to the salience of preaching in post-Reformation England.24 Our sources for understanding the Restoration thought-world must include multiple media: newspapers (a new invention), pamphlets, parliamentary speeches, sermons, drama, and poetry, as well as formal treatises. This book is about the arguments which fuelled and reinforced political and religious stances, and which had practical, often harsh, consequences for those on the receiving end of ruling ideologies. To take a single instance (which I have explored elsewhere):25 John Hilton was a vicious informer who, in the 1680s, made a living for himself and his gang in the streets and alleyways of London, by hunting down and prosecuting illegal religious congregations – worshippers who rejected the established church. Hilton was a thug and no intellectual, but he did publish a newspaper, The Conventicle Courant, which combined invective against ‘rebels and schismatics’ with inventories of his loyal services to orthodoxy and public order. And behind him stood a legion of Anglican clergymen, parliament men, justices of the peace, and lawyers, who articulated a philosophy and theology of religious persecution. Politics in the street was animated by the dogmas of polemicists, preachers, and theologians. While there was an expanding learned laity – and training in the law characteristically led to public articulacy – many of those who spoke, wrote, and published were university-trained clergy. In the aftermath of the Civil Wars, English people were acutely aware of the ideological power of priests. Anglican Royalists said that the mid-century wars, with all their appalling bloodiness and 23

H. Weber, Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship under Charles II (Lexington, KY, 1996); J. Lander, Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2006). 24 P. McCullough, H. Adlington, and E. Rhatigan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford, 2011). 25 M. Goldie, ‘The Hilton Gang and the Purge of London in the 1680s’, in Politics and the Political Imagination in Later Stuart Britain, ed. H. Nenner (Rochester, NY, 1998), pp. 43–73. See also M. Goldie and J. Spurr, ‘Politics and the Restoration Parish: Edward Fowler and the Struggle for St Giles Cripplegate’, EHR 103 (1994), 572–96.

10

INTRODUCTION

destruction, were provoked by seditious, fanatical Puritan preachers, whose spirit and doctrines remained dangerously alive and must be suppressed. By contrast, Puritans, and later, Whigs, held that Stuart kingship had been, and was still, perverted into the path of ‘arbitrary’, absolute government by the sycophantic doctrines of clergy who talked up the ‘divine right of kings’. Thus some clergy were thought to foster anarchy and others tyranny. Either way, there was an urgently felt need to render religion civil: to find a civil religion. A plausible title for the present collection might have been ‘Whigs and Priests’. Some might retort that the story told here, in so far as it dwells on Whig anticlericalism, is lopsided, and indeed might look like taking the Whigs’ side. A contrasting picture could be painted, in which Anglican clergy sought to create a commonwealth of moderate, peaceable, and ‘sober’ religiosity, against the anarchism and repressiveness of self-appointed Puritan ‘Saints’ and the no less incendiary antics of Whigs whose all-consuming hatred of popery and ‘priestcraft’ filled the commonwealth with violent animosities. Rendering religion civil was thus as much the work of Anglican clergy as of their Whig critics.26 It was certainly possible for intellectuals who were ferociously hostile to Whiggery to offer an eirenic and Erastian vision, as we shall see in the case of Sir Peter Pett in the eleventh chapter. Yet, for as long as the mainstream of the Church of England remained committed to compulsory religious uniformity as a cure for Puritan fanaticism, its own version of the exercise of religious power looked, to its critics, just as pernicious as that which it sought to cure. The questions of toleration and intolerance accordingly were central to the politics and thinking of the Restoration, and they loom large in the essays that follow. The essays in this book hence explore, by examining concepts, crises, movements, and individuals, the contested polity in an England struggling to render religion civil, in which most of the intellectual tools for doing so continued to be those of the Reformation and of the longer Augustinian centuries of Christian magistracy. In so far as the power of institutional religion began successfully to be eviscerated, we may begin to call the intellectual landscape that emerged – setting caveats aside – the early Enlightenment.27

26 W.

Bulman, ‘Enlightenment and Religious Politics in Restoration England’, History Compass 10 (2012), 752–64; idem, Anglican Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2015), Introduction. 27 For a classic discussion, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment’, in Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. P. Zagorin (Berkeley, CA, 1980), pp. 91–111.

11

1 The Theory of Royal Sovereignty Pulling up the roots of sedition

In 1661 the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Edward Turnor, likened republican England after the execution of Charles I to the five-day anarchy permitted among the ancient Persians so that they might appreciate kingly rule. ‘The forms and species of government are various’, he explained, ‘monarchical, aristocratical, and democratical: but the first is certainly the best, as being the nearest to divinity itself.’1 As this remark suggests, civil war and regicide made a generation of gentlemen more, not less, willing to endorse the doctrines that sovereignty lay in the crown, that rebellion was never justified, and that monarchy had something of divinity. It now seemed incontrovertible that the crown’s supremacy was the guarantor of the gentry’s own authority. ‘There can be nothing’, wrote Thomas Hobbes, ‘more instructive towards loyalty and justice than will be the memory, while it lasts, of that war’.2 During the Civil War the Long Parliament’s defenders had deployed, with increasing self-confidence, the arsenal of anti-absolutist arguments developed by Scottish Calvinist and French Huguenot radicals in the late sixteenth century. They asserted that the source of political authority lay in the community, and that the king was an officer of the commonwealth, answerable to the people. The community, incorporated in parliament, might legitimately coerce a tyrannical ruler in defence of its rights. The premise was populist, the conclusion revolutionary. In 1649 the Rump Parliament declared that ‘the people are, under God, the original of all just power’ and ‘the Commons of England, in parliament assembled … have the supreme power in this nation’.3 The legislation of the early 1660s, as Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, put it, ‘pulled up all those principles of sedition and rebellion by the roots’.4 Several statutes provided explicit affirmations of political doctrine, among them the A version of this chapter appeared as ‘Restoration Political Thought’, in The Reigns of Charles II and James VII and II, ed. L. K. J. Glassey (1997), pp. 12–35. I am indebted to Macmillan Press for permission to reproduce material. 1

W. Cobbett (ed.), The Parliamentary History of England (36 vols, 1806–20), IV, 202–3. Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, ed. P. Seaward (Oxford, 2010), p. 106. 3 J. P. Kenyon (ed.), The Stuart Constitution, 1603–1688 (Cambridge, 1986), p. 292. 4 Edward Hyde, The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon (3 vols, Oxford, 1827), II, 97. 2

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Regicide, Militia, Treason, Corporation, and Triennial Acts. They declared that the period of the ‘late usurped governments’ had seen ‘many evil and rebellious principles … distilled into the minds of the people’, which must now be ‘prevented’. Parliament’s war was not a legitimate resistance but a ‘barbarous rebellion’ bred by ‘fanatic rage’. The attempt to enforce regular parliaments had been a ‘derogation of his majesty’s just rights and prerogative inherent to the imperial crown’. The crucial pronouncement was that ‘neither the peers of this realm, nor the commons, nor both together in parliament, or out of parliament, nor the people collectively or representatively, nor any other persons whatsoever, ever had, hath, or ought to have, any coercive power over the persons of the kings of this realm’.5 The Cavalier Parliament instituted an oath embodying these abjurations, which was added to the existing oaths of allegiance and supremacy. Officeholders and clergymen were required to swear that ‘it is not lawful upon any pretence whatsoever to take arms against the king, and that I do abhor that traitorous position of taking arms by his authority against his person or against those that are commissioned by him’. In 1665 yet another oath was devised, although not generally imposed: ‘I will not at any time endeavour any alteration either in church or state.’6 The next element in the disciplining of doctrine was the condemnation of dangerous texts. In 1660 a proclamation ordered the burning of two vindications of the regicide, John Milton’s Defence of the People of England (1650) and John Goodwin’s The Obstructors of Justice (1649). In Scotland, George Buchanan’s Rights of the Kingdom of Scotland (1579) and Samuel Rutherford’s defence of the Covenanters’ war, Lex Rex (1644), were denounced.7 The chief republican theorist of the Interregnum, James Harrington, author of Oceana (1656), was jailed.8 Sir Henry Vane was executed in 1662 after audaciously ‘acknowledging no supreme power in England but a parliament’. He was, said Charles II, ‘too dangerous a man to let live’.9 In 1663 the printer of Mene Tekel was hanged, disembowelled, and quartered. The tract had claimed that scripture ‘doth not forbid a private person to resist … a cruel and tyrannous governor’.10

5

Statutes of the Realm (12 vols, 1810–28), V, 288, 308, 513; cf. pp. 232, 237, 304–5; Kenyon (ed.), Stuart Constitution, p. 349. 6 Statutes of the Realm, V, 322, 366, 575; Kenyon (ed.), Stuart Constitution, pp. 351, 355. On oaths, see D. M. Jones, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth-Century England (Rochester, NY, 1999); E. Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant (Woodbridge, 2005). 7 R. Steele, Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns (2 vols, Oxford, 1910), I, no. 3239; II, pt 2, nos 2188, 2263. 8 For whom see R. Hammersley, James Harrington: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 2019). 9 ST, VI, 119–202; M. Judson, The Political Thought of Sir Henry Vane the Younger (Philadelphia, PA, 1969). 10 Roger James, Meke Tekel, or, the Downfall of Tyranny (1663); J. Hetet, ‘A Literary Underground in Restoration England’ (PhD, Cambridge, 1987), pp. 50–2.

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CONTESTING THE ENGLISH POLIT Y, 1660–1688

Throughout the Restoration, censorship and the law of sedition made it difficult to disseminate radical ideas. In 1677 John Starkey was prevented from republishing Nathaniel Bacon’s Historical Discourse of the Uniformity of Government (1647) and its Continuation (1651), because they argued for the elective and contractual origins of kingship.11 In 1680 Shakespeare’s Richard II – about a king deposed – was banned. In 1686, Dr Henry Edes of Chichester was convicted of high misdemeanour for recommending, during dinner conversation, Philip Hunton’s Treatise of Monarchy (1643), one of the Long Parliament’s principal theoretical defences.12 More famous than these was the fate of the republican Algernon Sidney, executed for treason in 1683, because of a book he had written, but not published, Discourses Concerning Government, which would not see print until 1698. ‘Scribere est agere’ (‘to write is to act’) pronounced Judge Jeffreys at his trial: the very act of composing a treatise on government was deemed a conspiracy against the crown.13 The cult and culture of kingship

During the Restoration era, the cult of kingship flourished as never before. Those who celebrated the majesty and uniqueness of kings drew upon diverse rhetorical and cultural resources, and expressed themselves through a variety of media: drama, poetry, sermons, prayers, treatises, pamphlets, ceremony, and the visual and plastic arts.14 Although this chapter is chiefly concerned with formal juridical doctrine, I begin by briefly sketching six types of monarchical idiom. This serves to remind historians of political ideas that there is a broader cultural history of the defence of monarchy, aspects of which have been richly illuminated especially by scholars of literature.15 11

Hetet, ‘Literary Underground’, p. 115. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Portland, III, 394. 13 J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 14. 14 P. Monod, The Power of Kings: Monarchy and Religion in Europe, 1589–1715 (New Haven, CT, 1999); B. Weiser, Charles II and the Politics of Access (Woodbridge, 2003); J. M. Alexander and C. MacLeod (eds), Politics, Transgression, and Representation at the Court of Charles II (New Haven, CT, 2007); A. Keay, The Magnificent Monarch: Charles II and the Ceremonies of Power (2008); M. Jenkinson, Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660–1685 (Woodbridge, 2010); K. Sharpe, Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–1714 (New Haven, CT, 2013); R. Asch, Sacral Kingship between Disenchantment and Re-enchantment: The French and English Monarchies, 1587–1688 (New York, 2014); C. Jackson, Charles II: The Star King (2016); E. Peters, Commemoration and Oblivion in Royalist Print Culture, 1658–1667 (2017); P. Kewes and A. McRae (eds), Stuart Succession Literature (Oxford, 2019). 15 S. Staves, Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln, NE, 1979); N. Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (Cambridge, 1992); S. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, NY, 1993); L. Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens, GA, 1994); D. Hughes, English Drama, 1660–1700 (Oxford, 1996); S. Owen, Restoration 12

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First, the Augustan. The deployment of Greek and Roman models came naturally to people steeped in classical learning, and the ancient world could be made to yield diverse political lessons. The ‘Commonwealthsmen’ of the Interregnum had drawn inspiration from the virtues of the Roman republic, from the writings of Cicero, Livy, and Plutarch, and from the heroic examples of Cato and Brutus. Royalists, by contrast, extolled the Emperor Augustus, and the courtly encomia written by Horace and Virgil. Augustus represented martial glory, refined arts and manners, and stability in the wake of civil war. Charles II’s coinage depicted the king wearing the imperial laurel wreath. His statues which today stand at Chelsea Hospital and in Edinburgh have him garbed in imperial dress. A contemporary biography of him was called Augustus Anglicus (1686). John Dryden’s Astraea Redux (1660) closed with the acclamation: Oh Happy Age! Oh times like those alone By Fate reserv’d for Great Augustus Throne! When the joint growth of Armes and Arts foreshew The World a Monarch, and that Monarch You.16

Second, the Platonic. Medieval writers had assimilated earthly rule to a cosmology which described God’s government of the universe. The ultimate source was Plato’s Timaeus. The divine principles of unity and harmony were said to be reproduced at each level of creation, in the macrocosm of the heavens and the microcosm of the sublunary spheres. God was monarch of creation, the lion the king of the jungle, the head the ruler of the body, and the monarch the head of the ‘body politic’. To unhinge these correspondences was to violate cosmic harmony. In his Discourse Concerning Supreme Power (1680), Sir John Monson wrote, ‘God is a God of order … his providence upholds all according to the same model by setting a kind of hierarchy and regiment among all the several societies of the creatures.’ Thus, for example, ‘bees, which of all others

Theatre and Crisis (Oxford, 1996); H. Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 1650–1689 (2004); P. Hammond, The Making of Restoration Poetry (Cambridge, 2006); E. Visconsi, Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England (Ithaca, NY, 2008); J. Airey, The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage (Newark, DE, 2012); B. Chua, Ravishment of Reason: Governance and the Heroic Idioms of the Later Stuart Stage, 1660–1690 (Lanham, MD, 2014); R. Willie, Staging the Revolution: Drama, Reinvention, and History, 1647–1672 (Manchester, 2015); J. Clare, ed., From Republic to Restoration (Manchester, 2018); N. Allsopp, Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution (Oxford, 2020). 16 John Dryden, Poems and Fables, ed. J. Kinsley (Oxford, 1962), p. 24. See S. Zwicker, Dryden’s Political Poetry (Providence, RI, 1972); I. Rivers, The Poetry of Conservatism (Cambridge, 1973); H. Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in Augustan England (Princeton, NJ, 1978); P. Harth, Pen for a Party: Dryden’s Tory Propaganda in its Contexts (Princeton, 1993); P. Hammond and D. Hopkins (eds), John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays (Oxford, 2000); J. Lewis and M. Novak (eds), Enchanted Ground: Reimagining John Dryden (Toronto, 2004); C. Rawson and A. Santesso (eds), John Dryden, 1631–1700: His Politics, His Plays, and His Poets (2004). For the ‘Roman mode’ of Restoration panegyric, see also Knoppers, Historicizing Milton.

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maintain a most perfect polity of monarchical government among them … are the best emblems of good subjects’.17 Third, the Davidic. The bible, of course, matched the classics as a pre-eminent cultural resource. Typological explanations of the scriptures were commonplace: people and events in the Old Testament were identified as prophetically foreshadowing the Christian era. What God ordained for his chosen people was prescriptive for modern times. Dozens of sermons dwelt on 2 Samuel, chapters 19–22, and compared Charles II with King David. In his Parallela (1660), Simon Ford declared that David’s return after Absalom’s rebellion seemed ‘verbatim … a chronicle of these times’. In Dryden’s great Tory poem, Absalom and Achitophel (1681), Charles is the ‘Godlike David’, whom ‘the sober part of Israel’ proclaim their ‘Lawful Lord’.18 Fourth, the cultic. The restored king’s father, Charles I, was accorded saintly status, and several new churches, such as that at Tunbridge Wells, were dedicated to Charles the Martyr. The allegation was that the king had submitted to death rather than sacrifice his religion to Puritan destruction. The anniversary of his execution, 30 January, was appointed a day of annual remembrance, and, together with 29 May (Charles II’s accession day) and 5 November (Gunpowder Plot day), installed among the liturgies in the Book of Common Prayer. Sermons on Charles the Martyr were vehicles for inculcating the new political orthodoxies. They dwelt upon the sacredness of majesty, the damnableness of rebellion, and the duty of obedience. Charles I’s Eikon Basilike (1649) was a bestseller: its frontispiece showed the pious king holding a crown of thorns and bathed by divine rays: he exchanges an earthly for a heavenly crown. Royalist images of kingship drew upon both the awesome majesty of God the Father and the patient suffering of God the Son.19 Fifth, the miraculous. Charles II revived the ancient practice of ‘touching for the King’s Evil’, the royal healing power said to cure scrofula. He touched some 100,000 people during his reign, more than any other monarch in the long era of ‘thaumaturgic’ royal power. Parish authorities signed certificates of candidates 17

John Monson, A Discourse Concerning Supreme Power (1680), p. 405. This style of thought is explored in A. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (New York, 1936); W. H. Greenleaf, Order, Empiricism, and Politics (Oxford, 1964). 18 Simon Ford, Parallela, or, the Loyall Subjects Exaltation for the Royall Exiles Restauration (1660), pp. 1–2; Dryden, Poems and Fables, pp. 190–1. Seventeenth-century scriptural politics has lately received deserved attention. See K. Killeen, The Political Bible in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2017). 19 R. Beddard, ‘Wren’s Mausoleum for Charles I and the Cult of the Royal Martyr’, Architectural History 27 (1984), 36–45; D. Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar (1989), ch. 11; T. Corns (ed.), The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge, 1999); A. Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge, 2003); A. Dailey, The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution (Notre Dame, IN, 2012), ch. 6. The cult of martyrdom was democratized to embrace the sufferings of Royalists at large, and memory of the trauma of civil war could be mobilized: Peters, Commemoration; M. Neufeld, The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England (Woodbridge, 2013).

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for touching and sometimes paid the travel expenses of the poor. The ritual, and the disease’s pathology, were explained by the royal surgeon John Browne in his Charisma Basilicon (1684). He included a poem: The Healing Virtue of the Royal Hand, (Next to our King, the Glory of the Land) Which Heaven on our Monarchs does bestow, To make the Vain, Conceited Rabble know That Pow’r and Government, from Heaven flow.20

Sixth, the feudal. The crown’s feudal rights, the residuum of which were abolished in 1641, were not revived after 1660, but a handful of writers tried to preserve a feudal case for monarchy. In his Tenenda non tellenda (1660), Fabian Philipps argued that feudal tenures were the sinews of stable kingship and that their abolition was a terrible mistake. All landed proprietors ought to have a direct bond of homage to the king; whereas in a freeholding society no obligations would extend beyond the contractual.21 None of these discourses and practices, however, was integral to the dominant style of royalist political theory that developed during the course of Charles II’s reign. It is important to stress, for example, that the ‘royal touch’ played no part in the philosophical defence of absolute monarchy, and it is mistaken to suppose that the formal doctrine of the ‘divine right of kings’ was ‘mystical’ or ‘magical’. It was, as we shall see, starkly juristic, and no less rationalist than its rivals.22 One reason for resisting the supposition that ‘divine right’ theory was ‘mystical’ is that it is false to regard it as a remnant of an ancient and primitive quasi-religion of divine kingship, a thesis once insisted upon by anthropologically minded historians.23 The seventeenth-century theory of monarchical absolutism was modern not ancient, the child of the resurgence of monarchies in Renaissance and Reformation Europe. Parliamentarians and Whigs were right to say that they were combatting a novel and not a medieval intellectual tradition: it was an innovation, and they saw themselves as restoring an older understanding that political authority was rooted in the community. To be sure, the defenders of absolutism were profoundly theological in their 20

John Browne, Charisma Basilicon (1684), sigs D6v–d7r. See Monod, Power of Kings, ch. 5; M. Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France (1973; Les rois thaumaturges, 1924); K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), pp. 227–44; H. Weber, Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship under Charles II (Lexington, KY, 1996), ch. 2; S. Brogan, The Royal Touch in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2015). 21 J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1987), p. 215. 22 This is a central claim of Figgis’s classic Divine Right of Kings (1896). Later accounts of seventeenth-century royalist thought are in its debt. See M. Goldie, ‘J. N. Figgis and the History of Political Thought in Cambridge’, in Cambridge Minds, ed. R. Mason (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 177–92. 23 Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) was an influential anthropological examination of ancient king cults.

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approach, but their theology was juridical. That is to say, they tended to conduct their theology in the language of legal supremacy. When they compared kings to God, they were, in both cases, discoursing on the sovereignty of a supreme being. Few of the cultural manifestations of monarchism that I have sketched entailed unambiguous prescriptions about the distribution of power within the English polity. Paeans to kingship were a commonplace and not confined to those who sought to increase the powers of English kings. Some of the early Restoration panegyrics to Charles were indeed voiced by former Cromwellians who were appealing over the heads of vengeful Cavaliers for royal clemency and liberality.24 Except for a handful of republicans, politicians of every stripe abhorred the regicide and applauded the principle of monarchy. The dignity of the crown was often simply emblematic, the king personifying the majesty of the English polity, secure from rebellion from below and interference from abroad. The royal supremacy was a balm for anarchy and a counterpoise to papal claims for universal empire. Some courtiers did urge Charles II to augment his power in substantive ways. The duke of Newcastle’s Advice (c. 1659) was powerfully influenced by Machiavelli. Newcastle pondered, like his mentor, whether it is best for kings to be loved or feared, and he devised a set of maxims of state. He advised that the power of arms and money is essential: ‘Without an army in your own hands, you are but a king upon the courtesy of others.’ The king must also be vigilant against urban elites, for ‘every corporation is a petty free state against monarchy’. He should also be careful to discipline preaching and the universities, otherwise ‘philosophical book men will raise rebellions’. The creation of peerages should be limited; parliaments should not be prolonged; the press should be censored.25 In the early years of the Restoration such ambitions were only partially achieved, but by the time that the earl of Orrery, in his Treatise of the Art of War (1677), urged Charles II to professionalize his army, many people had come to believe that the character of the regime was in process of drastic alteration in a more authoritarian direction. Absolutism?

Practically all of the Restoration era’s systematic political theorizing belongs to the decade between 1675 and 1685. Before the mid-1670s, a precarious Cavalier–Presbyterian consensus that had made the king’s return to the throne 24 Allsopp,

Poetry and Sovereignty, ch. 6. For monarchy as the fount of equity and mercy, see Visconsi, Lines of Equity. 25 T. Slaughter (ed.), Ideology and Politics on the Eve of the Restoration: Newcastle’s Advice to Charles II (Philadelphia, PA, 1984), pp. 5, 21, 50, 68; C. Condren, ‘Casuistry to Newcastle: “The Prince” in the World of the Book’, in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 164–86; J. M. Hoye, ‘Leviathan Against the City’, History of Political Thought 41 (2020), 419–49.

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possible still obtained. Afterwards, fear of ‘popery and arbitrary government’ generated a Whig sensibility, while fear of ‘Presbyterian fanatics’ generated Tory sentiment. Many individuals would veer from one allegiance to the other, but the ideological fissure was real enough.26 The term ‘Whig’ is distracting: it was not coined until 1679 and was never the exclusive party tag. Contemporaries often talked of the ‘Presbyterian party’. They meant those whose ideals were anchored in the attempts during the 1640s to force Charles I to a negotiated settlement in which significant authority would be transferred to parliament. These aims were embodied in the Newcastle and Isle of Wight treaties of 1646 and 1648. Such projects were revived in 1660, but had been swept aside in the hurried, unconditional restoration of Charles II. The ‘Whig movement’ was the revival of the Parliamentarian ambition of the 1640s to entrench ‘mixed monarchy’. It acquired the religious tag ‘Presbyterian’ because the majority in the Long Parliament which fought the Civil War in the 1640s also had an ecclesiastical demand to abolish episcopacy and the Prayer Book of the Church of England. The Whigs did not share the drive to create a Genevan church discipline, but they did inherit a profound suspicion of the overweening power of the church’s episcopal hierarchy. Presbyterians vehemently insisted that they were not republicans, for they, and the Parliamentarian majority, had been swept aside in the military coup of Pride’s Purge in 1648 that led to regicide a few weeks later. Henry Foulis, an aggressively Cavalier divine, devoted much of his indictment of Presbyterians, his History of the Wicked Plots (1662), to proving, not that the Presbyterians were republicans, for they were not, but that they were guilty of seeking a conditional restoration. He was glad that the Restoration settlement had not ‘chained up his majesty to some Newcastle or Isle of Wight like conditions’.27 In 1675 the king’s chief minister, the earl of Danby, attempted to impose the ‘no alteration’ oath of 1665 upon members of parliament, and was fiercely resisted by the earl of Shaftesbury. In 1675–7 parliament was prorogued for fifteen months, provoking demands that the principle of regular parliaments be upheld. By the close of 1678 fears of a standing army, a ‘pensioner’ or bribed parliament, and popish counsels at court were added to the opposition’s tally. The year 1675 marked a turning point. Tories such as Roger North deeply regretted the failure of ‘Danby’s Test’, regarding it as essential for suppressing ‘the old republican principle that power is in the people’.28 (Here Presbyterians and republicans were elided, in their shared view that civil commonwealths were rooted in the will of the community.) On Shaftesbury’s part, there appeared a tract entitled A Letter from a Person of Quality, in the composition of which his 26

For variant readings of the political fissures, see Scott, Sidney, pt I; M. Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–1681 (Cambridge, 1994); J. Spurr, England in the 1670s (Oxford, 2000); M. Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2004). 27 Henry Foulis, The History of the Wicked Plots and Conspiracies of our Pretended Saints (1674), pp. 158–9. 28 The Autobiography of the Hon. Roger North, ed. A. Jessopp (1887), pp. 61–3.

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protégé John Locke probably played a part.29 It may be regarded as the manifesto of the Whig cause. It opens with the assertion that Danby’s proposed oath was part of a design to ‘declare us first into another government more absolute’ and then ‘make us swear unto it’. The ‘high episcopal man, and the old Cavalier’ would engross to themselves ‘all the power and office of the kingdom’. The ‘great churchmen’ and their lay allies aim to ‘declare the government absolute and arbitrary, and allow monarchy as well as episcopacy to be jure divino’ – by divine right. The ‘first step’ was the Corporation Act and ‘the next step’ the Militia Act, their doctrinal apparatus swept into statute by ‘the humour of the age, like a strong tide’. Now ‘priest and prince’ were to be ‘worshipped together as divine in the same temple’.30 Shaftesbury’s Two Speeches (1675) were no less forthright. ‘My principle is, that the king is king by law, and by the same law that the poor man enjoys his cottage’, and that if the king should govern ‘by an army, without his parliament, ’tis a government I own not, am not obliged to’. The earl singled out for attack the Anglican hierarchy, for systematically encouraging the notion ‘that monarchy is of divine right’.31 Shaftesbury’s party had no doubt that the political theory of absolutism had become state doctrine. Among modern historians the concept of absolutism poses difficulties, especially in the English context. Both the fabric of government – the practical constraints on the crown’s military, fiscal, and prerogative power – and the intentions of individual monarchs – the languor of Charles II – inhibit its application.32 We need to distinguish practical from theoretical ambition, for it is clear that absolutism achieved greater perfection in the ideological than in the governmental sphere. Arguably, absolutist theory served as a substitute for the English crown’s infrastructural weaknesses: ideology was deployed to provide a mirage of royal supremacy. Priests and pulpits, and their influence over popular sentiment, were an effective alternative to soldiery as the palisade of authoritarian monarchy. There is a further inhibition in using the term ‘absolutism’ of the later Stuart crown: paradoxically, no absolutist theorist denied the role of parliament or the rule of law. This was an intellectually coherent position. The aim of the Tory ideologists was not substantially to alter English institutions, but to offer the most persuasive theory to explain existing constitutional arrangements so as to entrench the supremacy of the crown – and of the Anglican Royalist elite which served it. The theory of royal absolutism was not necessarily directed toward increasing the ordinary powers of the crown. It was designed to ensure that the 29 The

Letter is printed in John Locke, An Essay Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, 1667–1683, ed. J. R. Milton and P. Milton (Oxford, 2006), pp. 335–76. I take this to be a crucial pamphlet and refer to it in later chapters. 30 Locke, Essay, pp. 337–8, 375–6. 31 Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, Two Speeches (1675), pp. 10–11. 32 The institutional and infrastructural weaknesses of European ‘absolutism’ are explored in N. Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism (1992); R. Bonney, The Limits of Absolutism in Ancien Regime France (Aldershot, 1995).

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crown’s reserve powers were incontestable, that, in extremis, the king could not be challenged. Restoration absolutists did not seek to abolish parliaments or the common law or the broad ambit of self-government in county and town, but they did seek to establish that, in the last resort – in a contest for final authority – the crown was supreme and the institutions of civil society were subordinate. It was a theory directed toward interpreting and construing the phenomena of England’s complex polity rather than one designed radically to overhaul it. To arbitrate the meaning of the constitution was the prize. Certainly, by the late 1670s, the embryonic Whig movement came to believe that Charles II was aiming to engross unprecedented powers. But the accrual of power was initially conducted through a series of ideological moves: the politics of doctrinal oaths, statutory declarations, and thunderous anathemas.33 In the 1680s practical power was augmented, or at least viciously deployed, with the crushing of the Whig movement after the Oxford Parliament of 1681. No further parliaments met during the remainder of Charles II’s reign, and civil and religious dissidents – Whigs and Dissenters – were subjected to fierce repression. By no means was this the work of the crown alone; it could not have been. It was the work of the crown in conjunction with the Tory and Anglican elite, operating within the institutions of civil society throughout the land. It was the work, too, of popular royalism, of street Toryism, for the nation was by now deeply riven.34 The first half of the 1680s marked the triumph of Anglican Royalism, now wearing the newly minted name of Tory. That the purge, and the articulation of absolute monarchy, in a flood of treatises and sermons, had the fulsome applause of the vast majority of the clergy of the Church of England guaranteed that the politics of Whiggism would prove as much anticlerical as constitutional. The revival of monarchical theory

When, in his Two Treatises of Government (1689), John Locke assaulted Tory political thought, he singled out the ‘false principles’ of Sir Robert Filmer. It is Filmer who stands – alongside King James VI and I – as the most characteristic

33

For surveys, see M. Goldie, ‘Absolutism’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy, ed. G. Klosko (Oxford, 2011), pp. 282–95; J. Sommerville, ‘Early Modern Absolutism in Practice and Theory’, in Monarchism and Absolutism in Early Modern Europe, ed. C. Cuttica and G. Burgess (2012). 34 On popular Toryism and Anglicanism, see T. Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1987); E. Vallance, ‘Loyalty, Addresses, and the Public Sphere in the Exclusion Crisis’, in Religion, Culture, and National Community in the 1670s, ed. T. Claydon and T. N. Corns (Cardiff, 2011), pp. 127–47; B. Sirota, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680–1730 (New Haven, CT, 2014).

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exponent of absolutist theory in Stuart England.35 It is important to say that it was Filmer and not Hobbes who emblematized English Royalism and Toryism, for, in fact, most royalists and Tories abhorred Hobbism. Hobbes’s philosophical foundations were intolerable to them, and especially to the divines of the Church of England, who provided most of the treatises that extolled absolute kingship.36 Filmer’s fame was posthumous. He had died in 1653, having published several tracts on behalf of the Cavalier cause during the Civil War, most notably The Freeholder’s Grand Inquest (1648). However, his chief work, Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings (c. 1630),37 remained in manuscript until 1680, when Archbishop William Sancroft arranged for its publication to bolster the Tory cause.38 Filmer threw down two gauntlets. He claimed that absolute monarchy was ordained by the law of nature, exemplified at the Creation in Adam’s rights as husband, father, proprietor, and king; and he argued that an investigation of medieval English history revealed that parliament was subordinate to the crown. Filmer’s patriarchal and constitutional theories were central to Tory absolutism. Filmer put the case starkly and comprehensively – but he was scarcely a lone voice around 1680. In the decade of Tory absolutism, 1675–85, several works made their mark, notably John Nalson’s Common Interest of King and People (1678), William Falkner’s Christian Loyalty (1679), George Hickes’s Discourse of the Sovereign Power (1682), Edmund Bohun’s Defence of Sir Robert Filmer (1684), Thomas Goddard’s Plato’s Demon (1684), Nathaniel Johnston’s Excellency of Monarchical Government (1686), and, in Scotland, Sir George Mackenzie’s Jus Regium (1684). In wider Tory literature, the genres were diverse – scholarly treatises, sermons, anti-Whig burlesques – yet the ideas were remarkably homogenous, and they were echoed in hundreds of sermons and pamphlets. Their principles were also strikingly continuous with two earlier crescendos of absolutist theorizing: the first decade of the century, when James VI and I and his defenders argued against his Scottish Calvinist and Continental Catholic detractors, such as George Buchanan and Cardinal Robert Bellarmine; and the 1640s, when Charles I’s polemicists denounced the Parliamentarians.39 Rather than surveying this large body of writing, we can instead encapsulate the Tory case by examining a single example: a manuscript tract, which survives 35

Robert Filmer, Patriarcha, ed. J. Sommerville (Cambridge, 1991); James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. J. Sommerville (Cambridge, 1994). 36 For these themes, see Chapters 3 and 13 in this volume. 37 For discussion of the dating, see Sommerville in Filmer, Patriarcha, pp. xxxii–xxxiv; C. Cuttica, Sir Robert Filmer and the Patriotic Monarch (Manchester, 2012), pt 1. 38 G. Schochet, ‘Sir Robert Filmer: Some New Bibliographical Discoveries’, The Library 26 (1971), 135–60; Cuttica, Filmer, pt 2. 39 J. Sommerville, ‘Jacobean Political Thought and the Controversy over the Oath of Allegiance’ (PhD thesis, Cambridge, 1981); idem, ‘From Suarez to Filmer’, HJ 25 (1982), 525–40; idem, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640 (1989); G. Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven, CT, 1996).

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in the Bodleian Library, written by Francis Turner, Master of St John’s College, Cambridge, future bishop of Ely, and a key figure in court circles.40 Turner was a rising man, close to Archbishop Sancroft and to the earl of Clarendon’s sons, Henry Hyde, second earl, and Laurence Hyde, earl of Rochester, and was tipped to succeed Sancroft at Canterbury.41 In 1685 he delivered the coronation sermon at the accession of James II. In 1676 he had published a sharp critique of a tract which favoured religious accommodation, and thereby became the butt of Andrew Marvell’s stinging, serio-comic rebuttal, Mr Smirke; or, The Divine in Mode (1676).42 Turner was a linchpin of the Anglican Royalist nexus and, as Marvell brilliantly captured, the epitome of the temporal and ecclesiastical pretensions which the Whigs came to despise. Written in 1677, Turner’s unpublished manuscript on the nature of kingship was provoked by passages in Shaftesbury’s Two Speeches cited earlier. Turner’s tract is headed ‘Whether the royal power and sovereignty of kings be immediately from God only, and neither from the pope, or people, nor from the laws of the countries where they are kings.’ His uncompromising answer is that ‘monarchy is of divine right’ and that ‘England is an absolute monarchy’.43 The doctrine of sovereignty

Turner’s first move was to claim that ‘supreme power (wherever it be) is, and of necessity must be, absolute’. This is the essence of the doctrine of sovereignty: the notion that in any given state there must be an ultimate source of law and arbitration. Such sovereignty is absolute in the sense that there can be no appeal beyond it: for if there were a further person or body to whom appeal could be made, then that person or body would be the true sovereign. Absolute sovereignty can thus be said to be an analytical entailment of statehood: without sovereign power a civil society cannot constitute a state.44 This concept is a fundamental legacy of early modern political thought, and offered the most difficult challenge to Parliamentarian and Whig theories of constitutionalism and resistance, many of which were evasive on the topic of sovereignty: they were conscious that any theory that suggested divided sovereignty made no sense, and looked like a recipe for anarchy. We chiefly associate the doctrine of indivisible sovereignty with the French theorist Jean Bodin, whose Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576) was written amid the chaos of the French religious wars, and with Hobbes, whose Leviathan (1651) was written 40

Bodl., Rawlinson MS D389, cited below as ‘Royal Power’. Culture and Politics, chs 6, 7; R. Beddard, ‘The Commission for Ecclesiastical Promotions, 1681–1684’, HJ 10 (1967), 11–40; G. Tapsell, ‘Laurence Hyde and the Politics of Religion in Later Stuart England’, EHR 125 (2010), 1414–48. 42 Marvell, PW, II, 1–113. 43 ‘Royal Power’, pp. 3, 12. 44 ‘Royal Power’, pp. 3, 7, 12, 14. 41 Jenkinson,

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against the backdrop of the English Civil War. It was Bodin, more than the philosophically tainted Hobbes, whose influence resounds through English royalist writing.45 It did not follow from Bodin’s or Hobbes’s doctrine that sovereignty must lie in a single person, the king. Turner’s parenthesis – supreme power ‘(wherever it be)’ – concedes this point. Hobbes had been careful to say that sovereignty could lie in a ‘monarch or an assembly’,46 and his account was less a defence of the immutable rights of the House of Stuart than of obedience to de facto power, in whomsoever it lay. When published in 1651, Leviathan, to the consternation of legitimists, read like a plea to accept the new Commonwealth, the possessor of plenary power.47 Sovereignty, although it could not be divided or shared, could be held by a corporate body. Parliament, although a multiplicity of people, was a corporate body, and spoke with one voice when acting as the sovereign legislature. The recognition of this point meant that the idea of sovereignty remained crucial in political thought long after the era of personal monarchy, for the effect of the Revolution of 1688 was to place sovereignty in crown-inparliament. Nonetheless, despite Turner’s concession, it was not until after the Revolution of 1688 that Tory theorists began to accept that sovereignty lay in crown-in-parliament, undivided but corporate.48 The doctrine of patriarchalism

Accordingly, during the Restoration, it was incumbent upon royalists to demonstrate that absolute sovereignty ought to lie personally in a monarch. Turner’s next move was to show that pure monarchy was ordained by God. It was conventional to follow the Greeks and Romans in distinguishing three possible forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy – rule by one, the few, or the many. Plainly, there were in history examples of aristocracies and democracies, but Turner asserts that these were ‘political aberrations and deviations’. In the pristine beginnings of the world, during the first 1656 years after the Creation, down to the Flood, only monarchies had existed. Thereafter, God’s chosen people continued to be ruled by monarchs. Turner thought that one of the most dangerous allegations made by Civil War writers was that for four hundred years Israel was not a monarchy.49 The archetype of all monarchy was Adam’s rule. He was ‘monarch of the world’, and his government began with his ‘dominion over his wife’. Monarchy was the natural form of government, for it was a species of fatherhood. Fathers 45

J. H. M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought (Oxford, 1959); H. A. Lloyd (ed.), The Reception of Bodin (Leiden, 2013). 46 Hobbes, Leviathan, II, 520 (ch. 30). 47 Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics (3 vols, Cambridge, 2002), III, ch. 10. 48 See J. D. Goldsworthy, The Sovereignty of Parliament: History and Philosophy (Oxford, 1999). 49 ‘Royal Power’, pp. 1–2, 7, 51–2.

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were of ‘political and natural’ kinds. Here Turner voiced the commonplaces of contemporary catechisms, which explained the Fifth Commandment in terms of ‘political, spiritual, domestical, and natural’ fathers: princes, priests, masters of servants, and blood fathers.50 Turner’s argument is familiar from Filmer, but marks a fundamental divergence between Hobbes and the mainstream of Tory thought. Hobbes grounds absolute government in the consent of the people, and he imagines an original state of nature of free, ungoverned agents. It is fear of the brutish state of nature that persuades people to accept civil sovereignty. This thought appalled most royalists: absolute authority based on popular consent seemed like a house built on sand, and its premise a blasphemous neglect of scriptural history. The Tories’ rejection of the notion that ‘man was born free’ was categorical: we are not born free, because we are born into families, and hence into subjection, and it has been so since the dawn of time. Tories thought that the contrary notion, of natural liberty, was a recent, and exceptionally dangerous, innovation. It was devised to license the deposition of kings, and it made way for rebellion and anarchy. They attributed its prominence to the teachings of Counter-Reformation Catholics, who wished to diminish the authority of earthly rulers in order to exalt the pope’s dominion. (Catholics urged that the pope’s authority was ordained by Christ, whereas earthly powers had merely human roots.) The teachings of Cardinal Bellarmine, Juan de Mariana, and others had been brought home to English audiences in the European-wide debate over King James I’s Oath of Allegiance of 1606, which followed the Catholic attempt to assassinate the king in the Gunpowder Plot of the previous year. Such doctrines were also familiar from that bête noire of English Protestants, Robert Parsons, the Jesuit author of A Conference about the Next Succession (1594).51 Restoration Tories were steeped in the writings of the Jacobean generation. It led them to treat all radical doctrines about popular and parliamentary rights as being at root ‘papistical’ and ‘Jesuitical’. They talked of the ‘king-killing doctrine of the Jesuits’. And they claimed that English Puritans inherited their teaching from Catholics. These charges remind us that the ‘divine right of kings’ was as much an anti-Catholic as an anti-Puritan and anti-Whig doctrine.52 Turner points out that his treatise is against ‘the pretences of the pope or people’. It is important to stress the anti-Catholicism of these writers, for later generations became inured to the Puritan and Whig charge that royalists and Tories themselves leaned toward ‘popery’. The English absolutists made exactly the opposite charge: any theory of the popular origination of power was as much popish as it was Puritan. Accordingly, for the Tories, patriarchalism must be the authentic political dogma of true Protestants. Just as in its theology 50

‘Royal Power’, pp. 49–53. G. Schochet, ‘Patriarchalism, Politics, and Mass Attitudes in Stuart England’, HJ 12 (1969), 413–41; M. Sommerville, Sex and Subjection: Attitudes to Women in Early-Modern Society (1995). 51 P. Kewes, ‘Robert Parsons’s A Conference about the Next Succession in Stuart England’, in Stuart Succession Literature, ed. Kewes and McRae, pp. 149–85. 52 The point is central to Figgis’s Divine Right of Kings.

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and worship, so also in its political doctrine, the Church of England was held to stand equidistant between Rome and Geneva, Jesuitry and Calvinism, ‘popery and presbytery’.53 Turner augments his biblical patriarchalism with prudential arguments from the ancient Greeks. Monarchy was prescribed not only by God but also by Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle pronounced that monarchy is ‘best’.54 This was characteristic of the royalists’ selective reading of the classics. When they turned to Aristotle’s Politics, they preferred to cite book I, which offered a genetic account of the origin of polities, arising from families and kin groups, rather than book III, with its emphasis on a mixed and balanced polity. Monarchy mere not mixed

It remained to prove that England was a pure monarchy. This was not obvious, for the chief contention of Parliamentarians and Whigs was that England was a ‘mixed monarchy’; that is, that the constitution combined elements of all three of the classical modes of government, and thus, by a harmonious balance of forms, reaped the advantages of each of them. Monarchy was represented in the king, aristocracy in the House of Lords, and democracy in the House of Commons: power was shared between them, and no element could act alone. The Tories energetically repudiated this notion of ‘polyarchy’. Turner called it ‘a simple contradiction’. Monarchy cannot be mixed: if mixed, it is not monarchy, but something else under the guise of monarchy – as in Poland or Venice, where the king or doge is a figurehead in an aristocratic polity. Hobbes had contemptuously called the idea ‘mixarchy’, and Filmer entitled one of his pamphlets The Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy (1648).55 Unfortunately for royalists, the doctrine of mixed monarchy had received its most telling formulation by, of all people, King Charles I. His Answer to the Nineteen Propositions (1642) was issued in a concessionary moment just prior to the Civil War. It expressed the idea with succinct cogency: There being three kinds of government among men, absolute monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and all these having their particular conveniences and inconveniences, the experience and wisdom of your ancestors hath so moulded this out of a mixture of these as to give to this kingdom (so far as human prudence can provide) the conveniences of all three, without the inconveniences of any one, as long as the balance hangs even between the three estates.56 53

‘Royal Power’, pp. 1, 25–6. See J. Rose, ‘Robert Brady’s Intellectual History and Royalist Antipopery in Restoration England’, EHR 122 (2007), 1287–1317. 54 ‘Royal Power’, p. 38; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk 8, ch. 10. 55 ‘Royal Power’, p. 7; Hobbes, Behemoth, p. 263; Filmer, Patriarcha, pp. 131ff. 56 Kenyon (ed.), Stuart Constitution, pp. 21–3.

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Yet, far from marking a decisive capitulation, the Answer was repeatedly disowned by Restoration royalists. It was, Turner wrote, ‘a manifest mistake’, founded on a confusion about the ‘three estates’. The classical ideal of the mixed polity could only be grafted on to the English constitution by equating the three feudal estates with the three classical modes. But that involves a confusion – indeed a dishonest sleight of hand – for the three estates were not king, lords, and commons, but lords spiritual, lords temporal, and commons. Scores of acts of parliament, as well as medieval treatises, could be cited which referred to the king and the three estates. Turner charged that William Prynne, one of the chief defenders of parliament in the Civil War, had ‘falsified the records’. The Parliamentarians’ sleight of hand involved a doubly damnable demotion: of the king, to being merely one among co-equal estates, and of the church, to being no estate at all. That the king was above the estates in parliament could be clinched by noting his acknowledged constitutional powers over parliament. He had the right of veto over legislation, so that it was his will that gave life and force to the law. And he had the right to summon and dismiss parliament when he chose. The king, therefore, had ‘none co-ordinate or equal to him’.57 The supremacy of the king could further be demonstrated by exploring the origins of parliament and the common law. It was a contemporary commonplace that precedence was prescriptive: that the antiquity of an institution lent it legitimacy. Whether crown or parliament was the more ancient institution became a critical question. Filmer had argued that parliament was a relatively modern institution, being no older than the feudal Middle Ages, and that in its original form it was an extension of the king’s council, summoned by the monarch to advise him. It was not, therefore, a body which originated in the community at large, nor was its antiquity so venerable as to be lost in the mists of time, or rooted in the supposedly freer Saxon age. In particular, parliament grew out of arrangements that followed William I’s conquest of England. Turner echoed Filmer in insisting that what had occurred in 1066 was a conquest which had resulted in a complete transformation of the polity. Similarly, the notion that the common law – the law of the community as expressed in the courts – could be traced back indefinitely, and that its antiquity preceded the English monarchy, was a ‘wild assertion, without any just proof’.58 These ideas would achieve fullest expression in the work of the Tory historian, Robert Brady, in his Full and Clear Answer (1681) and Introduction to the Old English History (1684), where he showed that medieval kings decided whom they would summon to parliament, that knights and burgesses were only intermittently summoned, and that these commoners did not at first assemble in a separate House.59 In sum, the monarch was endowed with, to use the Roman law terminology that the 57

‘Royal Power’, pp. 2, 7, 9–10. Lawrence Womock said that Charles I’s Answer was made ‘when he [the king] was fluctuating in the midst of a storm’: Two Treatises (1680), p. 6. 58 ‘Royal Power’, pp. 29–33. Filmer’s account of parliament was available before Patriarcha appeared in 1680, in The Freeholder’s Grand Inquest (1648). 59 Pocock, Ancient Constitution, ch. 8.

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royalists deployed, merum imperium, ‘pure empire’. To say of England that it was a ‘mere monarchy’ meant that it was pure and unmixed. Non-resistance and passive obedience

Having established where supremacy lay, Turner’s final task was to show that subjects had an inviolable duty of obedience to their rulers, and that a right of armed resistance against kings was categorically forbidden by God. His chief proof-text was St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, chapter 13, verses 1–2: ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God … they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.’60 It is the most categorical passage in the New Testament on behalf of obedience to authority. Countless sermons took this as their text and expounded it. For centuries, it was ubiquitous in Christian political writing, whether as a text to be swallowed whole, or to be finessed and qualified. Parliamentarians and Whigs had to draw the sting of the ‘Pauline Injunction’. In order to evade it, the republican Algernon Sidney made the characteristic Whig move of referring to verses 3–4, which pronounced that rulers are ‘the minister of God to thee for good’, and so, by implication, rulers who were wrong-doers were not those to whom St Paul demands obedience.61 But Tories drew no such distinction: kings, whether tyrants or not, must never be resisted. Even tyrants do some good, for the rule of one person is less ruinous than the tyranny of the multitude. Furthermore, tyranny could be held to be a providential punishment for a nation’s ungodliness: tyranny should not be resisted because it was a people’s deserved fate. Tories came to believe that non-resistance amounted to a formal doctrine of the Church of England. Around 1670, a proposal was made that it should be made the Fortieth Article of the church’s official doctrine.62 Before his execution for rebellion in 1685, the duke of Monmouth pronounced ‘I die a Protestant of the Church of England’: but the divines who attended him – Turner was one of them – urged, ‘My Lord, if you be of the Church of England, you must acknowledge the doctrine of non-resistance to be true.’63

60

‘Royal Power’, pp. 42ff. Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, ed. T. G. West (Indianapolis, IN, 1990), pp. 70, 370ff. 62 R. Beddard, ‘Of the Duty of Subjects: A Proposed Fortieth Article of Religion’, Bodleian Library Record 10 (1978–82), 229–36. 63 The Autobiography of Sir John Bramston, ed. Lord Braybrooke (1845), p. 189. 61

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Mitigating absolute monarchy

A juristic theory of sovereignty, a natural law theory of patriarchalism, a scriptural doctrine of non-resistance, and an historical thesis about parliament’s origins – these provided the foundations of Tory absolutism. The strident defence of these claims provoked Whigs to charge that Tories were sycophantic connivers in the growth of Stuart despotism. Yet Tories denied that theirs was a theory of arbitrary power. They insisted that they were friends of parliaments and the rule of law. Integral to Tory absolutism was a series of mitigations. Absolutism was an interpretation of the English polity and not an effort to change its outward forms; or, rather, the polity could be effectively changed precisely through understanding and inculcating its unequivocally monarchic nature. Despite Whig ridicule, patriarchalism did not entail a claim that the legitimacy of the House of Stuart depended upon proving direct hereditary descent from Adam. In principle this descent could be demonstrated, since few denied that Genesis was true history, and until at least the 1630s such genealogies were drawn up.64 Yet the hereditary principle played less of a role in Tory divine right teaching than is generally thought, although the Exclusion Crisis – the Whig attempt to remove the future James II from succession to the throne – did enhance it. Tories recognized that monarchies could be elective, could be acquired by conquest (the jus gladii), and that rules of inheritance differed widely – in France the Salic Law excluded women, while no such law applied in England. Turner argued that there was a crucial difference to be drawn between the authority of the crown and the mode of acquiring it. ‘Authority and dominion’ come from God, but human agency may designate the person who is to hold it. Election, conquest, donation, and inheritance are merely modes of acquisition. Turner suggested parallel examples. A wife chooses who shall be her husband, but the husband’s authority does not derive from her consent: it derives from God and natural law. A town chooses a mayor, but the mayor’s authority comes from a higher power. The cardinals elect the pope, but papal authority is said by Catholics to be God-given. Accordingly, there was ample scope in Tory thinking for consent in the conduct of human affairs, but consent understood as a mode of designation rather than of authorization.65 The clinching argument that sovereign authority must be God-given was that rulers had the right of capital punishment. Since the Commandment enjoins ‘Thou shalt not kill’, the right to take life could not have been transferred by the consent of the people, for it was not a right that the people possess. The monarch’s undoubted right to take life must necessarily have direct divine sanction. 64

William Slatyer, Genethliacon … the Pedigree of King James and King Charles … from Noah (1630). 65 ‘Royal Power’, pp. 13–14.

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The next mitigation lay in the doctrine of non-resistance. It did not follow from Tory doctrine that subjects should blindly submit to any royal command. People did not abandon their duty to make moral judgements about the rightness of what princes and magistrates ordained. They were not obliged to obey a command to do something which was malum in se, wrong in itself – wrong by the laws of God and nature.66 Tories drew a distinction between active and passive obedience: active obedience to godly commands, but passive obedience to ungodly commands. Passive obedience amounted to non-violent resistance. Tories contrasted Romans 13 with Acts 5:29: ‘We ought to obey God rather than men.’ Subjects were therefore entitled to remonstrate with princes and to protest their grievances. They were obliged to refuse ungodly commands, though they must suffer the consequences of disobedience: if they were persecuted for their recalcitrance, they must not rebel. Absolutists were fond of quoting the early Christian Fathers, who had advised patient suffering under the persecutions of heathen emperors. They pointed out that St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans was written in the time of the brutal Emperor Nero. Unquestionably, kings who flouted natural and divine law could be called tyrants. But absolute monarchy should not be equated with tyranny or despotism, although Whigs increasingly refused to tell the difference. Tyranny, Tories insisted, should be defined not in terms of types of government, but of moral rectitude: all modes of polity, including aristocracies and democracies, could become tyrannical, and they did so when they no longer pursued the public good and the moral law. The Interregnum, they claimed, had seen a real tyranny: of swordsmen, fanatical sectaries, and the monstrous multitude. These notions had a number of important consequences. The ‘divine right of kings’ was never a licence for royal immorality or ungodliness. It is sometimes said that the preaching of that doctrine was naive or blind in the face of the visible evidence of Charles II’s libertinism. That misses the point. His God-given sovereignty inhered in the kingly office, not in his personal character. The monarch had the failings of all postlapsarian humanity. There was nothing odd about supposing that a sinful king was a divinely ordained king – any more than a divinely ordained priest was also a sinful human being. Restoration divines were ready to teach divine right, but just as ready to admonish the king for his moral failings or his impiety.67 Such a principle had a vital consequence when the reign of a Catholic king was in prospect. Throughout the turmoil of the Exclusion Crisis, Tories clung to the notion that James, duke of York, the king’s brother and heir, a convert to Catholicism, had a perfect right to inherit the throne, while never demurring from their equally strongly felt belief that his religion was false and repulsive. All human beings, including princes, were sinners, and some were superstitious idolaters, but this did not disbar them from exercising earthly rule. To hold that sin or heresy disbarred a 66

‘Royal Power’, pp. 3, 10. Culture and Politics, ch. 3.

67 Jenkinson,

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person from rule was to believe that ‘dominion is founded in grace’, in effect that only a saint could rule. And that was a small step away from the hideous hubris of supposing that some people on earth were indeed saints, and that their saintliness licensed whatever they chose to command, since sanctity must flow from their commands. That dangerous doctrine was equated with the fanatical Puritan ‘Rule of the Saints’, of the self-appointed saintly; and with its mirror image, the refusal of the self-appointed saintly to obey earthly rulers they deemed godless. The doctrine was no less associated with Catholicism, for it was implied by the alleged Catholic doctrine that the pope could depose any prince he judged to be a godless heretic. Once more Puritan and popish extremes were equated. All such notions were called ‘antinomian’ or ‘enthusiast’ (the latter term approximating to our ‘fanatical’): the doctrine that temporal laws, and human rules in general, have no obligation for the saintly elect. It is in this crux that we see clearly a strong sense in which Tory absolutism was a rationalist and juridical theory, refusing to accept the supersession of natural reasoning about earthly communities by appeals to personal sanctity or to mystic fantasies about the rule of the Elect on earth.68 Accordingly, Tory theorists stuck sternly to the claim that sinners and heretics were set over us as kings. Charles II sinned and James II apostatized; this did not impede their divine right to be kings. Their divinity lay in their position in the natural order of God’s creation and not in personal virtue, spirituality, or charisma. Turner noted the dilemma by remarking that Israel was once well-governed by a gentile, Cyrus: ‘Cyrus (though a pagan prince …) was unctus domini … the Lord’s Anointed’.69 James’s right to inherit his brother’s throne did not trammel the obligation of godly Protestants to critique Catholicism, and Restoration divines were quite prepared to attack the Stuart brothers’ moral and theological failings. They were ready to defend the Church of England and to oppose royal inclinations towards the toleration of papists and Protestant Dissenters. They insisted that they retained a right of judgement, reproof, and remonstration, as interpreters of scripture and guides of conscience. Turner would himself publicly assault Catholicism when James was on the throne, but he never deflected from James’s right to rule, and, after James’s deposition, he remained loyal, becoming a Jacobite and repudiating the Revolution.70 A further mitigation of absolutist doctrine vindicated the role of laws and parliaments. ‘Far be it from me’, wrote Turner, ‘to say or think that the government of this nation is arbitrary or that the rights and liberties of the 68

Hence it may be argued that it was the Anglican clergy who, in their flight from ‘enthusiasm’, shaped an ‘enlightenment’: W. J. Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2015). 69 ‘Royal Power’, p. 2. American evangelical Christians justified support for President Donald Trump by citing the case of Cyrus. 70 For Turner in the Revolution, see R. Beddard, ‘The Loyalist Opposition in the Revolution’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 40 (1967), 101–9; idem, ‘The Guildhall Declaration of 11 December 1688 and the Counter-Revolution of the Loyalists’, HJ 11 (1968), 403–20.

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subjects depend upon the sole will of our sovereign’. Indeed, ‘the power of our kings is limited (without any prejudice to its being absolute)’. That English kingship was both absolute and limited was a standard Tory paradox. How could it be so? Turner begins with the analogy of God’s government of the universe, for God is both absolute and self-limiting. God’s omnipotent will is guided by his reasonableness: he does not act arbitrarily or whimsically, but by the light of his reason. There are many things that God, though omnipotent, cannot do. He cannot lie, for his rectitude is as intrinsic to his nature as his omnipotence. He has written the laws of nature in the hearts of mankind, and he abides by the immutabilities of the natural order which he created. He also limits himself by the promises that he has made to humankind. The government of earthly kingdoms should follow this divine pattern. Absolute will gives force to the laws, but that will ought to be guided by reason. A king should govern wisely as well as forcefully, and should seek wisdom through counsel. This is the role of courtiers, ministers, divines, and parliaments. The single human intellect is deficient: wisdom is best found in the collective wisdom of the community, or at least of its educated elite. In Tory philosophy, parliament was not so much a counterbalance to the crown – the mechanical analogy was inappropriate – as an embodiment of the community’s counsel, lending wisdom to the sovereign will. This was a matter of ethics, not physics: constitutions do not balance rival interests: they shape righteous rule. Constitutionalism must always be conditioned by a grasp of the fact that wise counsel is not law until the sovereign makes it so, for law requires command, promulgation, and punitive sanction.71 Turner argued that kings were limited by ‘their grants, promises, and coronation oath’. The English have a rich legacy of public laws because earlier monarchs, like the divine archetype, had made promises and concessions. In their coronation oaths kings solemnly undertook to uphold the promises of their predecessors. The royal legislative will was, like divine law, channelled through ordinary and regular courses. Every parliamentary statute was a self-limitation by the crown. In the same way, custom and common law were allowed by the king, as prudent self-limitations; although, again, common law had no force without the king’s sanction. This principle of concessio – the sovereign’s concession – generated extensive liberties; but, consistent with the principle of sovereignty, it was important that such liberties should be understood as royal franchises and not as the inherent rights of the people. Tories were careful to stress that kings are kings before they take their coronation oaths: the oath is not a reciprocal contract with the people, but an undertaking before God.72

71

For the theory of counsel, see J. Guy, ‘The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England’, in Tudor Political Culture, ed. D. Hoak (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 292–310; J. Rose, ‘Kingship and Counsel in Early Modern England’, HJ 54 (2011), 47–71; idem (ed.), The Politics of Counsel in England and Scotland, 1286–1707 (Oxford, 2017); J. Paul, Counsel and Command in Early Modern English Thought (Cambridge, 2020). 72 ‘Royal Power’, pp. 5, 10–12.

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Taken together, this system of mitigations in Tory absolutist doctrine produced two fundamental theses: that England’s monarchy was absolute and limited – although not mixed – and that absolute rule was not the same as arbitrary rule.73 The Judgement of the University of Oxford

The philosophy which Francis Turner adumbrated in his unpublished manuscript of 1677 provided the mainstay of Tory thinking during and after the Exclusion Crisis. It achieved its most prominent public imprimatur in 1683 when the University of Oxford issued its Judgment and Decree ‘against certain pernicious books and damnable doctrines, destructive to the sacred persons of princes’, and consigned to a bonfire the books of the authors it condemned. The first five of the twenty-seven propositions which it anathematized were: ‘all civil authority is derived originally from the people’; ‘there is a mutual compact … between a prince and his subjects’; ‘that if lawful governors become tyrants … they forfeit the right they had unto their government’; ‘the sovereignty of England is in the three estates, viz. king, lords, and commons. The king has but a co-ordinate power and may be overruled by the other two’; and ‘birthright and proximity of blood give no title to rule’. Among the authors condemned, and which ‘we interdict all members of the university from … reading’, were George Buchanan, Robert Bellarmine, Robert Parsons, Philip Hunton, Samuel Rutherford, and Thomas Hobbes – Scottish Presbyterians, English Parliamentarians, Roman Catholics, and the sui generis Hobbes.74 It was entirely characteristic that the list comprised both Catholics and radical Protestants, theorists of the power of the

73

Given the paradoxes, it is no surprise that scholars have vexed over the extent to which seventeenth-century royalism was ‘constitutionalist’. See Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots; Burgess, Absolute Monarchy; Cuttica and Burgess (eds), Monarchism and Absolutism; T. Harris, ‘Tories and the Rule of Law in the Reign of Charles II’, Seventeenth Century 8 (1993), 9–27; D. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, 1640–1649 (Cambridge, 1994); J. P. Sommerville, ‘Revisionism and the Case of Absolutism’, JBS 35 (1996), 168–94; P. Seaward, ‘Constitutional and Unconstitutional Royalism’, HJ 40 (1997), 227–39; J. McElligott and D. L. Smith (eds), Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars (Cambridge, 2007); I. Campbell, ‘Calvinist Absolutism: Archbishop James Ussher and Royal Power’, JBS 53 (2014), 588–610; T. Harris, ‘Constitutional Royalism Reconsidered’, in Politics, Religion, and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. J. Champion, J. Coffey, T. Harris, and J. Marshall (Woodbridge, 2019), pp. 19–37. 74 The Judgment and Decree of the University of Oxford (1683). Extracts in Kenyon (ed.), Stuart Constitution, pp. 471–4; D. Wootton (ed.), Divine Right and Democracy (Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 120–6; M. Goldie, gen. ed., The Entring Book of Roger Morrice (6 vols, Woodbridge, 2007), I, 564–7. See R. Beddard, ‘Tory Oxford’, in The History of the University of Oxford, IV, ed. N. Tyacke (Oxford, 1997), pp. 863–906.

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pope and of the people, for, as Filmer famously remarked, ‘monarchy hath been crucified between two thieves, the pope and the people’.75 The Judgment and Decree marked the apogee of Tory absolutism; it was the final phase of ‘the divine right of kings’, the doctrine which so distinguished the intellectual formation of influential clergy and laity during the Stuart century. There was little about its conceptual character in the 1680s that could not be found in its flourishing under James VI and I, in response to Catholic attempts to depose the dynasty, and its character in the 1640s, in response to Puritan attempts to restrain Charles I. It would have many echoes and afterlives beyond the Revolution of 1688, but, for all the caveats of those historians who have argued for its persistence after 1688,76 it undoubtedly ceased to be the dominant doctrine of the English public realm. The Revolution destroyed it.

75 Filmer,

The Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy, in Patriarcha, p. 132. G. Straka, ‘The Final Phase of Divine Right Theory in England, 1688–1702’, EHR 77 (1962), 638–58; M. Goldie, ‘Tory Political Thought, 1689–1714’ (PhD thesis, Cambridge, 1977); J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles (Cambridge, 1977); J. A. W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property: Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Kingston, Ont., 1983); J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832 (Cambridge, 1985); P. K. Monod, ‘Whatever Happened to Divine Right? Jacobite Political Argument, 1689–1753’, in Politics, Politeness, and Patriotism, ed. G. J. Schochet et al. (Washington, DC, 1993), pp. 209–27. 76

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2 The Theory of Religious Intolerance Arguments for intolerance in a persecuting society

Restoration England was a persecuting society. It was the last period in English history when the ecclesiastical and civil powers endeavoured systematically to secure religious uniformity by coercive means. Those who set about this task were not silent about their reasons, and the intellectual defence of religious intolerance was no less vigorous than the practical. We should be in no doubt about how explicitly persecution was demanded. Scarcely a tremor of embarrassment disturbed the voices of divines who called for ‘a holy violence’ and ‘a vigorous and seasonable execution of penal laws’ against the ‘fanatic vermin’ whose conventicles troubled the land.1 Many an assize sermon became a fruitful occasion for rhetorically yoking priest and magistrate together in a godly cause, the sword of the latter animated by the spiritual admonition of the former. When heretics pervert the church’s doctrine, when schismatics disrupt its order, when libertines scandalize its purity, then a bishop ‘must betake himself

A version of this chapter appeared as ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, in From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, ed. O. P. Grell, J. I. Israel, and N. Tyacke (Oxford, 1991), pp. 331–68. I am indebted to Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce material. Important books on its themes are: J. Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (Harlow, 2000); J. Marshall, John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, 2006); A. Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester, 2006); E. Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion, and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2011). Also M. Knights, ‘“Mere Religion” and the “Church-State” of Restoration England’, in A Nation Transformed, ed. A. Houston and S. Pincus (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 41–70; J. Rose, ‘Dissent and the State’, in The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, I, ed. J. Coffey (Oxford, 2020), pp. 313–33. For contrasting approaches, see B. Sirota, The Christian Monitors (New Haven, CT, 2014); W. J. Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2015). For Dissent, see N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity (Leicester, 1987); M. Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (2nd edn, Woodbridge, 2016); G. Southcombe, The Culture of Dissent in Restoration England (Woodbridge, 2019). 1

Thomas Cartwright, A Sermon Preached Before the King (1676), p. 6; Anon., Indulgence to Dissenters is Destructive both to Church and State (1672), p. 11; Nathaniel Bisbie, Two Sermons (1683), p. 29.

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unto his rod and his keys’ and summon the magistrate to undertake ‘the pious use of the sword’.2 Historians have often traced the growth of the idea of toleration3 – in this period dwelling on John Bunyan, John Locke, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, John Owen, and William Penn – and have frequently charted the gruesome realities, and limitations, of persecution,4 but they have rarely offered histories of the theory of intolerance. Perhaps this is because it is difficult for the modern liberal mind to grasp that intolerance was ever anything other than the product of unthinking bigotry. Doubtless it is true that many magistrates were more splenetic than reflective, and no doubt the bailiffs and informers who embezzled the goods they distrained from hapless Quakers gave little thought to theology.5 But if Bunyan’s Mr Badman is an unprepossessing figure, behind him stood an impressively articulate regiment of clergymen, of the sort whom contemporaries honoured as ‘pious, sober, and rational divines’.6 There may be said to be three strands in the Restoration case for intolerance, although this chapter is concerned only with the third and least recognized. They may be called the political, the ecclesiological, and the theological arguments.7 The first is familiar enough: the Dissenters must be crushed because they are vicious rebels who made war upon their king and plunged the nation into twenty years of blood and usurpation. Schismatic conventicles are seed-plots of sedition. It is striking, and understandable, that Restoration churchmen should identify the brood of Presbyterians, Baptists, Independents, and Quakers not as 2

Nathaniel Bisbie, The Bishop Visiting (1686), p. 12; Thomas Sprat, A Sermon Preached before the Artillery Company of London (1682), p. 9. 3 J. Lecler, Toleration and the Reformation (2 vols, 1960); A. Murphy, Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (University Park, PA, 2001); P. Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton, NJ, 2003); B. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2007); J. C. Laursen and C. J. Nederman (eds), Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia, PA, 2011); S. Sowerby, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2013); T. M. Bejan, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (Cambridge, MA, 2017). 4 A standard account is G. R. Cragg, Puritanism in the Period of the Great Persecution, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1957). The will to enforce the penal laws was, however, variable: A. Fletcher, ‘The Enforcement of the Conventicle Acts, 1664–1679’, Studies in Church History 21 (1984), 235–46; J. Spurr, England in the 1670s (Oxford, 2000), ch. 8; J. Miller, After the Civil Wars (Harlow, 2000), pp. 147–52; idem, Cities Divided: Politics and Religion in English Provincial Towns, 1660–1722 (Oxford, 2007). 5 For a case study, see M. Goldie, ‘The Hilton Gang and the Purge of London in the 1680s’, in Politics and the Political Imagination in Later Stuart Britain, ed. H. Nenner (Rochester, NY, 1997), pp. 43–73. 6 John Bunyan’s The Life and Death of Mr Badman (1680) was the sequel to The Pilgrim’s Progress (1978). 7 For discussion of the first and second, see G. J. Schochet, ‘The Act of Toleration and the Failure of Comprehension’, in The World of William and Mary, ed. D. Hoak and M. Feingold (Stanford, CA, 1996), pp. 165–87.

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a manifestation of a universal tendency towards diversity in religious experience, but as the circumstantial product of the 1640s, now anachronistically and truculently fetched up on the shores of a new age. Cavalier anxiety about renewed eruptions of the Good Old Cause mingled with derisive Hudibrastic satire: the people of ’48 seemed at once dangerous and defunct.8 The second argument, taking for granted (as did most of the Dissenters themselves) the desirability of a national and established church, and the hatefulness of schism and disunity, pursued the notion that it was the civil magistrate’s duty to impose ceremonies and formularies for the sake of order and decency in divine worship. This case derived much from the long-standing idea that within the sphere of Christian belief and practice there were many ‘things indifferent’ (or ‘adiaphora’), which Christ had not laid down as necessary for salvation, but which nonetheless required public regulation and uniformity. This ‘adiaphorist’ argument easily became strongly Erastian in tone: the supreme governor may arbitrarily impose creeds and rites, and there is no good ground, because no jure divino ground, for objecting.9 One upshot of this argument was that it could easily look Hobbesian, for Hobbes’s ecclesiology was the reductio of the adiaphorist tradition. Another, and not unrelated, consequence, often overlooked in the Restoration context, is that a liberal theological stance (stressing the wide ambit of ‘things indifferent’) could combine with an authoritarian deprecation of the over-scrupulous consciences of separatists. This is why, paradoxically, those who were reputed to be ‘latitudinarians’ could (at least before 1689) also be thoroughly intolerant. Edward Stillingfleet, Joseph Glanvill, and Simon Patrick all sought, to the horror of high churchmen, to compromise the terms of the Act of Uniformity, but equally, to the anguish of Dissenters, spoke pretty ruthlessly against separatism.10 By far the best-known Restoration books in defence of intolerance are Samuel Parker’s Ecclesiastical Politie (1670) and Stillingfleet’s Unreasonableness of Separation (1680). Both created a furore, the first earning ridicule from Andrew Marvell, the second provoking replies from all the great Dissenting leaders, including Richard Baxter and John Owen; both attracted the critical attention of John Locke. Both broadly adopted the adiaphorist argument and were accused 8

Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1663–78), a squib upon Puritanism, was a popular text among Anglican Royalists. 9 See J. Sommerville, ‘Conscience, Law, and Things Indifferent’, in Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, ed. H. Braun and E. Vallance (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 166–79; J. Rose, ‘John Locke, “Matters Indifferent”, and the Restoration Church of England’, HJ 49 (2005), 601–21; idem, ‘The Debate over Authority: Adiaphora, the Civil Magistrate, and the Settlement of Religion’, in ‘Settling the Peace of the Church’: 1662 Revisited, ed. N. H. Keeble (Oxford, 2014), pp. 29–56. 10 See J. Marshall, ‘The Ecclesiology of the Latitude-Men, 1660–1689: Stillingfleet, Tillotson, and Hobbism’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985), 407–27; R. Ashcraft, ‘Latitudinarianism and Toleration’, in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, 1640–1700, ed. R. Kroll, R. Ashcraft, and P. Zagorin (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 151–77; W. Spellman, The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660–1700 (Athens, GA, 1993), ch. 2.

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of Hobbism.11 They found it hard to shake off the charge of Erastianism, placing as they did considerable emphasis on the magistrate’s right to settle religious affairs, as well as on the claim that the Church of England should be obeyed because it was legally established. Only in a limited sense were they works of theology, and they were not efforts at pastoral commitment or catechesis. Yet this is not the whole picture, and the notoriety of these two books is misleading as to the wider character of the Restoration case for intolerance. To redress the balance, we need to put them aside and consider instead the little-regarded third strand of argument. This offered a more authentically theological case, concerned not just with inducing Dissenters to obey ecclesiastical and civil authority but also with bringing them conscientiously to believe in the orthodox truths of the Church of England. It dwelt less on the desirability of order and decency in public worship, and more upon the nature of persuasion and conviction. Consequently, it involved philosophical questions concerning the character of conscience and sincerity. It was also a strand of argument conspicuously more clericalist – less Erastian and politique – than those so far mentioned, for its emphasis was upon the pastoral activity of the clergy as teachers. The magistrate’s role appears as the bishop’s lictor, the secular helpmeet and ‘nursing father’12 to the teaching ministry, rather than as the supreme arbitrator over ‘things indifferent’. As Robert Conold told the mayor of Norwich in a sermon in 1675, you are ‘by your office a sub-defender of the faith’, and, if ‘the magistrate and the minister … the bench and the pulpit’ were ‘bound up together’, then schismatics would soon be driven from the land. In the same year Miles Barne lectured Charles II on his duty as ‘nursing father’ to ‘enforce spiritual censures by corporal penalties’.13 There is every indication that this style of thinking gained momentum as Charles’s reign wore on, to some degree displacing the Erastian strain. It was a characteristic product of the new high church movement that reached maturity in the decade after 1675.14 It served to avoid the pitfall of Hobbism, especially as, in the wake of the king’s prerogative Declaration of Indulgence of 1672, Erastian 11

On Parker, see below p. 190, n. 57. ‘Kings shall be thy nursing fathers and queens thy nursing mothers’: Isaiah 49:23. A text constantly cited to adumbrate the role of temporal princes in relation to the church. 13 Robert Conold, A Sermon Preached Before the Mayor of the City of Norwich (Norwich, 1675), ep. ded.; Miles Barne, A Sermon Preached Before the King (1675), p. 32. 14 There is not space here to elaborate the case for a developing ‘high church’ tendency in Restoration England. See J. D. Ramsbottom, ‘“Conformists” and “Church Trimmers”: the Liturgical Legacy of Restoration Anglicanism’, Anglican and Episcopal History 64 (1995), 17–36; J. R. Collins, ‘The Restoration Bishops and the Royal Supremacy’, Church History 68 (1999), 549–80; K. Fincham and N. Tyacke, Altars Restored, 1547–1700 (Cambridge, 2007); J. Rose, Godly Kingship in Restoration England (Cambridge, 2011), ch. 3; M. K. Harmes, Bishops and Power in Early Modern England (2013), ch. 6. For doubts, see J. Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, CT, 1991); D. Levitin, ‘Teaching Political Thought in the Restoration Divinity Faculty’, in Politics, Religion, and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. J. Champion, J. Coffey, T. Harris, and J. Marshall (Woodbridge, 2019), pp. 39–57. 12

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arguments seemed poor tools for building an Anglican polity. If the king used his ecclesiastical supremacy to favour Dissenters, then that supremacy was not the best conceptual tool for defending Anglican truth. By the early 1680s the tone of public church doctrine had become sufficiently theocratic for it to be possible to pronounce that ‘the state ought not to allow any public Christian meetings, but such as are approved by the bishops’.15 The essence of the claim being made in this third school of argument was that coercion is a justifiable and effective instrument of education and persuasion. Since this runs radically counter to the intuition that belief cannot be forced, it will be important to identify its purchase. In approaching the topic, it will first be necessary to underscore the overwhelming importance of St Augustine as a source of authority for the argument, noting in passing Pierre Bayle’s decisive challenge to Augustine’s seventeenth-century heirs. Next, we shall inspect some of the philosophical issues implicated in the argument. And, lastly, we shall briefly see how John Locke confronted it when writing in defence of toleration in the 1690s. St Augustine and the Donatists

It was natural that a generation so captivated by the authority of the patristic age should turn to the ipse dixit of the Fathers of the early church.16 It is true that theologians gleaned some support directly from scripture. The Book of Proverbs provided lessons in charitable severity: ‘Withhold not correction from the child … Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shall deliver his soul from hell.’ St Paul’s Epistles were especially valuable. Paul decreed that ‘a man that is an heretic after the first and second admonition reject’. His reproof to the divided Corinthians, torn between the sects of Apollos and Cephas, was a favourite citation.17 But these biblical strictures, delivered under a pagan empire, could not entail the secular magistrate’s impositions. They might license a doctrine of spiritual excommunication but not one of magisterial compulsion. Similarly, the early Fathers (for instance, Lactantius and Tertullian), themselves victims of persecution, were unwilling to argue for coercion in religion. Yet by the late fourth century some Christian writers were ready to defend the use of the civil power to repress heresy and schism, among them St John Chrysostom, St Gregory Nazianzen, St Ambrose, and especially Optatus of Milevis. Restoration divines grasped at their occasional phrases: Ambrose, they noted, praised the

15

William Saywell, Evangelical and Catholic Unity (1682), sig. A7r. For seventeenth-century patristics, see J-L. Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity (Oxford, 2009). 17 Proverbs 23:14; cf. 29:19. 13:24; Titus 3:10; 1 Corinthians 1:10–13, 3:3–4. 16

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Emperor Gratian for acting against the heretic Arians, and Optatus counselled severity against schismatics.18 But Augustine bestrode the Fathers: he wrote more, he was peculiarly self-aware about his reasons and actions, and he was the only patristic authority to write at length in defence of coercing fellow Christians. By identifying themselves with Augustine, the defenders of the Restoration church accrued to themselves a massive conviction of the integrity of their own cause, an overwhelming sense that they stood in the shoes of the greatest of all defenders of orthodoxy. This sense of identification is richly conveyed in the late eighteenth-century pages of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for in rendering Augustine’s opinions with phrases like ‘schismatic conventicles’, he used the language of Restoration England – he had the Anglican prelates of the Stuart age in mind.19 As a bishop and magistrate Augustine punished separatists, and as a writer he exhorted the civil powers so to do. His polemics licensed the mingling of pastoral theology with libel, vitriol, and stories of atrocities committed by dissenters. Augustine has been called the father of the Inquisition, the patriarch of persecutors. In the 390s he was professedly reluctant to sanction coercion, but in the 400s he shifted his ground. In his Retractions and in a series of tracts and letters he explained why. The crucial texts are Epistle 93, to Bishop Vincentius in the year 408, and Epistle 185, to Count Boniface in 417.20 They provide his most compelling and influential statements, and Anglican divines quoted them incessantly. Accordingly, to give an account of Augustine is not a digression, for he was the lifeblood of Restoration Anglican polemic. The object of Augustine’s animus was the great Donatist schism. In the year 311 some North African bishops, including Donatus, repudiated a fellow bishop who had handed over the holy books to the authorities during Diocletian’s last great pagan persecution. It was, they said, a sacrilege that defiled the church and cried out for separation from it. Some years later, the Christian Emperor Constantine sided with the ousted bishop and began an attempt to suppress the Donatists. That the first Christian emperor should, so soon after the cessation of pagan persecution, use the civil power against fellow Christians – heretic Arians as well as schismatic Donatists – was an irony not lost on Enlightenment

18

E.g. Richard Perrinchief, Samaritanism (1664), p. 33; Thomas Long, The Case of Persecution (1689 [written c. 1685]), pp. 3–4, 43–5, 51. 19 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–81), chs 21, 33. See J. G. A. Pocock’s magisterial account of Gibbon and his sources: Barbarism and Religion (6 vols, Cambridge, 1999–2015). 20 Chiefly Epistle 93, chs. 1–5; Epistle 185, chs. 2, 6. The latter is also known as A Treatise Concerning the Correction of the Donatists. Confusingly, seventeenth-century authors cite these Epistles by their earlier enumeration, 48 and 68. English editions include the Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vols 1 and 4 (Grand Rapids, MI, 1886–7; repr. 1974); Augustine, Writings in Connection with the Donatist Controversy, tr. J. R. King (Edinburgh, 1872).

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writers like Gibbon, nor on anti-Christian freethinkers ever since.21 There were executions in the 340s, and one faction of the Donatists, the Circumcellians, turned to terrorist violence against the authorities. The schism grew, and by the end of the fourth century it was well entrenched. Augustine took up the cudgels at a time of renewed repression. In 405 and 411 imperial edicts ordered the disbandment of Donatist churches, authorized the seizure of their property, and exacted fines for not worshipping in the official church. The significance of Augustine’s teaching against the Donatists lies not so much in his attack on the fanaticism of the Circumcellians, for there was little dispute that, if religion drives people to terrorism, they must be restrained. That was a matter of civil prudence, not pastoral theology, although of course the orthodox will play up the propensity to sedition among the unorthodox. Nor is it significant that Augustine thought that the church must sometimes chide, discipline, and excommunicate. Practically all seventeenth-century Christians upheld this ecclesiological fundamental: every communion must have the right of spiritual discipline over its members. What matters is that Augustine legitimated civil coercion as an arm of pastoral theology, giving physical force to a spiritual sanction. The imperial laws were, hence, not an alien intrusion into spiritual work but one means by which the authority of the episcopal shepherd could be suffused throughout society. As Augustine told the imperial governor Boniface, ‘when you act, the church acts’. When the saving gifts of the Catholic Church are in question, then coercive discipline is a charity. Augustine’s phrase in Epistle 93 that ‘it is better to love with severity, than to deceive with indulgence’ seemed purpose-made for use by Restoration divines as an admonition to Charles II.22 Augustine added to his argument a crucial rhetorical gambit: a gloss upon a phrase in St Luke’s Gospel. Jesus tells of a man who held a great supper. When his guests declined to come, he commanded his servants to ‘go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled’ (Luke 14:23). The feast is a figure, said Augustine, for Christ’s Last Supper, and hence for the communion of Christ’s church; and the highways and hedges are ‘heresies and schisms’. Hence, Christ commands that the wayward must forcibly be brought into communion. Augustine’s use of Luke’s phrase, compelle intrare, ‘compel them to come in’, rang down the centuries, becoming the canonical citation in the history of persecution. 21 Choice

examples can be found in The Thinker’s Library series, published by the Rationalist Press Association in the 1930s and 1940s. 22 On Augustine and the Donatists, see G. Willis, Saint Augustine and the Donatist Controversy (1950); W. Frend, The Donatist Church (Oxford, 1952); H. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St Augustine (New York, 1963); P. Brown, ‘St Augustine’s Attitude to Religious Coercion’, Journal of Roman Studies 54 (1964), 107–16; idem, Augustine of Hippo (1967); R. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine (Cambridge, 1970); idem, ‘Christianity and Dissent in Roman North Africa’, in his From Augustine to Gregory the Great (1983), pp. 21–36.

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The phrase acquired an especial resonance in the 1680s during Louis XIV’s onslaught against the Huguenots. In 1682 the Jesuit Louis Maimbourg closed his Histoire du Calvinisme by urging Louis to compel the Huguenots to come into the Catholic Church. In the year of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 1685, the archbishop of Paris, François de Harlay, published La Conformité de la conduite de l’Église de France pur ramener les donatistes à l’Église Catholique. France’s greatest churchman, Jacques Benigne Bossuet, likewise quoted Augustine’s compelle intrare.23 So impeccable was Augustine’s authority that it silenced a number of Catholics otherwise hostile to the Revocation.24 His authority was not even dislodged among the Huguenots themselves. When the redoubtable Calvinist Pierre Jurieu, who fled to Holland in 1681, wished to vindicate ecclesiastical discipline, he readily used the same source. It is indicative of the continuing force of the idea that orthodox magistrates should uphold true religion – strengthened indeed by anxiety at the spread of Arminianism and Socinianism – that even in adversity Jurieu upheld it, differing from the Catholics only as to which religion constituted orthodoxy.25 In 1690 Jurieu would attack Locke’s Epistola de tolerantia (the Latin Letter Concerning Toleration) as being an encouragement to Socinianism.26 Jurieu had the cussedness to preach coercive uniformity while suffering as its victim. By contrast, a more famous Huguenot victim, Pierre Bayle, adopted a tolerationist stance, and when he denounced persecution he did so by refuting Augustine’s compelle intrare. His Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jésus-Christ, Contrain-les d’enter, ou Traité de la tolérance universelle (1686–8) was provoked by Harlay and probably also by Bossuet.27 The third part analyses several of Augustine’s Epistles. As far as the Enlightenment was concerned, Bayle’s book was definitive, needing only to be echoed by later authors, so that, for instance, when Immanuel Kant turned to the topic of religious toleration, he too cited and attacked Augustine’s compelle intrare.28 William Lecky, the Victorian celebrant of the freethinking tradition, pronounced that Bayle had broken the spell of Augustine in the European mind.29 If Lecky was right, then to review the Augustinian case as it was presented in the 1670s and 1680s is to do so at its impending crisis. 23

Jacques Benigne Bossuet, A Pastoral Letter from the Lord Bishop of Meaux (1686). J. Orcibal, Louis XIV et les protestants (Paris, 1951), pp. 114–15. 25 Pierre Jurieu, La vray system de l’église (Dordrecht, 1686); idem, Des droits des deux soverains en matière de religion (n.p., 1687). 26 Pierre Jurieu, Tableau du socinianisme (The Hague, 1690). However, he thought Locke’s anonymous Latin Epistola was written by the Huguenot Jacques Bernard. 27 English edition: A Philosophical Commentary on these Words of the Gospel, Luke 14:23, ‘Compel Them to Come In’, ed. J. Kilcullen and C. Kukathas (Indianapolis, IN, 2005). A translation first appeared in 1708. 28 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundary of Pure Reason, trans. J. W. Semple (Edinburgh, 1838), p. 253. 29 W. Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism (2 vols, 1865), II, 65. 24

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The attention that Bayle paid to Augustine, in contrast to its apparent absence in Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, and the greater notoriety of the persecution of the Huguenots as compared with the contemporary English purge of Dissent, have ensured a recognition of the salience of Augustine’s argument in the French context but not in the English.30 Two circumstances add to the misleading impression that it was not also at work within English polemic. The first is that Bayle’s Commentaire philosophique seems to flatter English peaceableness, for it feigned publication at ‘Canterbury’ rather than Amsterdam, and purported to be a translation of a work by one ‘J. Fox’, thus appealing to England’s great annalist of religious persecution, the author of The Book of Martyrs. The second is that early in 1689 Bayle published a tolerationist tract written by a friend of his, Adrian van Paets, concerning his recent visit to England, and expressing his delight at the cohabitation of religions there.31 It should, however, be noted that Bayle’s and van Paets’s chief ground for commending England was the apparent mutual restraint of a king and a people of opposite religions during James II’s reign. The Popish Plot executions of Catholics in 1679–81 and the steady flow of Protestant Dissenter exiles to Holland in 1681–5 scarcely made England famous for religious liberality, and Bayle’s main point was that a remarkable change had very recently come over England. Bayle’s idealization of England belonged to the brief moment of 1685–6, when it seemed that a Protestant nation and a Catholic monarch might successfully co-exist. His later writings reveal an enthusiasm for James II’s toleration of Dissenters, and he was to be no unambiguous admirer of the Revolution.32 The Donatists of the Restoration

Whatever the force of comparisons between England and France, the use of Augustine’s dicta against the Donatists was as ubiquitous a weapon among the English divines as among the French. When, for example, Richard Perrinchief, prebendary of London and editor of the Works of King Charles the Martyr, 30

On Bayle, Jurieu, and the Huguenot debate on toleration, see G. Dodge, The Political Theory of the Huguenots of the Dispersion (New York, 1947); W. Stankiewicz, Politics and Religion in Seventeenth-Century France (Berkeley, CA, 1960); E. Labrousse, Pierre Bayle (The Hague, 1963); P. Hazard, The European Mind, 1680–1715 (Harmondsworth, 1964); W. Rex, Essays on Pierre Bayle and Religious Controversy (The Hague, 1965); K. Sandberg, At the Crossroads of Faith and Reason (Tucson, AZ, 1966); J. Kilcullen, Sincerity and Truth: Essays on Arnauld, Bayle, and Toleration (Oxford, 1988); J. Laursen, New Essays on the Political Thought of the Huguenots of the Refuge (Leiden, 1995); Marshall, Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture; M. van der Lugt, Bayle, Jurieu, and the Dictionnaire historique et critique (Oxford, 2016). 31 Hadrian van Paets, Lettre de Monsieur H.V.P. à Monsieur B (Rotterdam, 1686). 32 Avis important aux réfugiéz (Amsterdam, 1690) shocked the Huguenot community for its less than wholehearted support for the Revolution. The tract was associated with, and may have been part written by, Bayle.

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published his Indulgence not Justified (1668), an attack on the Comprehension project of 1667, he placed on his title page a quotation from Augustine’s Epistle to Boniface. In 1664 the same author, in vindication of the first Conventicle Act, wrote that Augustine came to see ‘the excellent effort such coercion had’, and that many ‘who at first took upon them the profession [of true religion] under compulsion, afterwards embraced it sincerely and freely’.33 Francis Fullwood’s Exeter assize sermon in the aftermath of the king’s Indulgence of 1672 was based on St Paul to the Corinthians and Augustine on the Donatists. In 1682, in an attack on Richard Baxter and John Owen, William Saywell, Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, appealed to the epistles of ‘that glorious light of the Latin church’, Augustine, for the renunciation of schism. And Roger L’Estrange explained how ‘St Augustine wrote several whole epistles of the evil of tolerating dissenters’, as that to Vincentius, where he ‘expresseth at large his great joy de correctione Donatistarum’.34 The divines did not fail to cite Augustine’s predecessor Optatus, who wrote De schismate donatistarum in c. 365–7. Optatus had coined the popularly recited phrase ‘one altar was set up against another’, and had recounted the atrocities of the Circumcellians, whom he sneeringly called ‘the saints’. When Donatus asked ‘What has the emperor to do with the church?’, Optatus replied, ‘The state is not in the church, but the church is in the state.’ Henry Hesketh, one of the royal chaplains, preaching in 1684 to the Tory lord mayor and aldermen of London, used Optatus to answer the same query of the modern Donatuses, ‘Quid imperatori cum ecclesia?’35 The Anglican temptation to dwell on the Donatists was overwhelming, for the parallels with modern Puritan nonconformity were too obvious to resist. Donatism was a schism not a heresy: the separation of the Donatists began in a renunciation of ecclesiastical authority, and (unlike that of the Arians) not in a deviation in doctrine. They shared with the orthodox church the same scripture and creed, and similar rituals. Their secession seemed to the orthodox to be grounded in trivial and not fundamental differences, their persistence seemed fuelled less by theology than by personal rancour stemming from circumstantial quarrels about events in the recent past. Minor differences had become magnified by the experience of separation and exclusion, and the Donatists had acquired all the psychological traits of sectarian outcasts, a self-image as sufferers for truth in the wilderness, a pure, undefiled elect, confronting the Babylonish worldlings of the pampered establishment. Soon they inclined to the dangerous antinomian doctrine that the true church 33 Perrinchief, Indulgence not Justified (1668), title page; cf. pp. 22–3; Perrinchief, Samaritanism, p. 39 (quoting Epistle 185). 34 Francis Fullwood, The Necessity of Keeping our Parish Churches (1672), p. 11; Saywell, Evangelical and Catholic Unity, sigs A5v, A6v; Roger L’Estrange, Remarks on the Growth and Progress of Uniformity (1682), p. 8. 35 Henry Hesketh, Sermon (1684). The divines discussed the Novation and Priscillianist as well as the Donatist schisms.

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on earth is composed only of the visible elect, the manifestly saved, from whom unrighteous sinners must be cut off. Augustine saw, and mainstream Christians (whether Catholic, Anglican, or Calvinist) have since seen, that the doctrine of the visible elect was catastrophic. In challenging it, Augustine clarified and hardened the historic doctrine of catholicity. The church on earth is cosmopolitan and inclusive, not exclusive; it includes sinners, tares among the wheat. Even its officers are sinners: its ministrations of grace inhere in its sacraments and institutions, and not in the moral character of its priests. The church may be compromised by sin, the world, and politics, but it remains the true church nonetheless. The scandal of impurity in the church is inherent in its earthly nature and is no ground for self-righteous separation from it. Moreover, without the church’s discipline, all kinds of waywardness would break forth. Augustine warned that schism multiplies itself, and tends to lead onward into heresy. Donatism indeed fell prey to sectarian fragmentation, itself being spurned by yet purer bodies of Maximianists and Rogationists, while the Donatists’ aspiration to peaceable respectability was drastically compromised by a guerrilla war conducted by the desert Circumcellians. From time to time the Donatists had flourished under the benign tolerance of the state, but then, in Augustine’s time, there came the restoration of imperial and Catholic discipline. In every particular this account seemed to fit the English Dissenters. The Donatists were the archetype and the Puritans the ectype. As Henry Hesketh told the London aldermen, in the Donatists ‘I hear the story of our schismatics, who so exactly agreed with them.’ Perrinchief wrote that since ‘it would be tedious to survey all’ the schisms of Christian history, one example would suffice, and ‘it shall be that of the Donatists’. Stillingfleet said that the Presbyterian separatist Vincent Alsop would have made ‘a rare advocate’ for the Donatists and would have picked a fight with Augustine. Parker said that Donatus was ‘the very I.O. [John Owen] of that rebellious and schismatical age’.36 In 1685 a body of leading London divines authorized the reissue of a body of their tracts under the title, A Collection of Cases … Written to Recover Dissenters, soon known as The London Cases, which was highly regarded as a definitive refutation of nonconformity. Four of the contributors, William Sherlock, Samuel Freeman, Thomas Tenison, and William Cave, explored the parallel between Donatism and modern Dissent. Cave, a leading patristic scholar, prefigured the drift of twentieth-century studies of Donatism by sketching a sociology of sectarian cohesion. He suggested that it was the cultivation of economic endogamy more than that of theological conviction that perpetuated both ancient Donatism and modern nonconformity. They both ‘upheld their separation … by trading only within themselves, by employing none to till their 36 Hesketh,

Sermon, p. 29; Perrinchief, A Discourse of Toleration (1668), p. 5; Stillingfleet, quoted in Anon., Some Additional Remarks on the Late Book of the Reverend Dean (1681), p. 9; Samuel Parker, Religion and Loyalty (1684), p. 308. John Owen, nicknamed ‘Cromwell’s pope’, was a leader of the Independents or Congregationalists.

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grounds, or be their stewards, but those that would be of their side’. In ‘the trading part of the City … many thousands of the poorer sort of Dissenters’ are held hostage by wealthy Dissenters through economic dependency and social deference.37 The parallels with Donatism did not, however, all run one way. Gilbert Burnet records that, during the Comprehension discussions in 1667, ‘the offers that the church of Africa made to the Donatists’ were recollected in its favour, and that two years later Bishop Robert Leighton had appealed for accommodation with the Scottish Presbyterians, observing ‘the extraordinary concessions made by the African church to the Donatists, who were every whit as wild and extravagant as our people were’.38 Undoubtedly the most sustained effort to enforce a pejorative parallel occurs in The History of the Donatists (1677) by Thomas Long, prebendary of Exeter. He promised to tell ‘how exactly every scene of that horrid tragedy which was first acted in the church of Africa, hath been acted over, and (if I may so speak) over acted in the Church of England’. Those who today propagate novel opinions, lead a faction, vex the governors, and divide the church, are all ‘animated by the spirit of Donatus’, as if he had been born again. Long’s history, with its ecclesiology of catholicity interwoven with patristic erudition, follows the pattern of inference from Donatism to modern Dissent. The Donatist schism is said to have begun ‘upon false or frivolous pretences’, Donatus himself piqued at not getting a bishopric. The Donatists boasted that ‘they alone were the church of God, when there was not any one doctrine of the Catholic church that they could justly cavil at’. Pretended scrupulosity mixed with spiritual pride soon blossomed into antinomian repudiation of ecclesiastical and civil order. The Donatists discovered scandals in the orthodox church where there were none. Even if any could be found, it mattered little, for, as Augustine made plain, ‘the unity of the Catholic church is not to be forsaken [because of] the sins of some that are within it’. Long duly went on to cite Augustine’s epistles, especially 185, and to note his approval for the unity of the church wrought by the disciplinary edicts of the Emperor Honorius.39 A strong subsidiary theme told of the folly of emperors who were lenient. Constantine eventually ‘perceived that his indulgence to the Donatists was not only an occasion of their cruelty to the Catholics, but of great disturbance in his empire’. Unity and peace were then restored by severity. The Donatists, continued Long, were hypocritical in their attitude to the state. They condemned Constantine’s strict laws ‘for the welfare and unity of the church’ as ‘acts of arbitrary power’, yet they readily petitioned the apostate Emperor Julian for toleration and ‘applauded as acts of grace’ his arbitrary edicts of 37

William Cave, A Serious Exhortation (1684), in A Collection of Cases (2 vols, 1685), II, 11–12. OT, pp. 259, 274. 39 Thomas Long, The History of the Donatists (1677), sigs A3r–v, A7r; idem, The Character of a Separatist (1677), pp. 56, 97. 38 Burnet,

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indulgence. This was, of course, a commentary on the Clarendon Code, the 1672 Indulgence, and the proper duty of Charles II. Similarly, Long’s comment on the Emperor Honorius’s issuance of a ‘general toleration’, because of Attila’s attack, in a reign otherwise marked by coercive discipline, is equally a remark upon the 1672 Indulgence, issued during the Anglo-Dutch war.40 Long’s book was an influential manifesto for the earl of Danby’s reconstruction of Anglican discipline, and succeeded in rendering more frequent the recourse to the Donatist parallel in polemics during the great purge of Dissent in the 1680s. At the height of the purge Samuel Parker refurbished Long’s themes in a six-hundred page account of fourth-century North Africa and of the culpability of those emperors who ignored the authority of the church with crack-brained schemes for Comprehension and Indulgence. The saner emperors put aside ‘trimming’, were ‘forced at last to turn persecutor’, and earned Augustine’s blessing. The Emperors Julian and Valentinian gave toleration; Zeno tried comprehension; Constantine wavered, and only granted indulgence under pressure of war; and Theodosius and Honorius piously crushed the schismatics. Parker here well expressed a hierocratic fundamental: the ‘true state of the use of regal power in the government of the church [is] to protect and assist it in the free exercise of its own legislative authority, not to assume and annex it to the imperial crown’.41 In 1684 Thomas Long was offered a bishopric, as his polemical services deserved, but only that of Bristol. He turned it down as too mean for his talents, little knowing that his chance would not come again, for there would be no promotion under James II or William III for those who wrote contra Donatistorum. It should also be said of Long’s History of the Donatists that it is a salutary example of how the ambit of the historian of ideas should not be prejudicially foreclosed, for the patristic arcana of this prebendary of Exeter could scarcely have been more central to the reflections of contemporaries upon the primary issue of their time, the fate of English nonconformity.42 Long was later to be one of the two divines to publish a reply to Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, and there is no doubt that, when Locke wrote his Second and Third Letters, he had in mind Long’s type of Augustinianism.43

40 Long,

Donatists, pp. 90–1, 122–3, 131, 148–9. Religion and Loyalty, pp. 265–384, esp. pp. 303–4, 346–8. Long also returned to his theme in No Protestant, but the Dissenters Plot (1682), pp. 12ff. 42 For a parallel case study, of highly charged polemics concerning a fourth-century emperor, ‘Julian the Apostate’, see J. Rose, ‘Roman Imperium and the Restoration Church’, Studies in Church History 54 (2018), 159–75. 43 Thomas Long, The Letter for Toleration Decipher’d, and the Absurdity and Impiety of an Absolute Toleration Demonstrated (1689). 41 Parker,

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The claims of conscience

The churchmen who took up the cry against Donatism were by no means only appealing for deference to patristic authority, for they followed Augustine into a more substantive argument about the forcing of conscience. In doing so they elaborated a theory of conscience that drew also upon a more systematic exposition available in scholastic teaching, especially in St Thomas Aquinas. The regular invocation of Augustine’s name conveniently served to avoid citing that medieval popish source. Anglican divines were constantly confronted by the tolerationist claim that to use force in religion can only produce either feigned and hypocritical converts, or martyrs. Religious belief can only be induced by persuasion, by the workings of intellectual conviction, and the intuitions of faith, so that the argument for the legitimacy of force is fatally flawed by the sheer inefficacy of force. In Epistle 93 Augustine says he began with the same predilection: ‘no one should be coerced into the unity of Christ’, because Christ’s way was by gentle persuasion, and force produces hypocrites. But he went on to explain his change of mind, and finally concluded that, in an important sense, conscience can be coerced. In the Summa theologica Aquinas also sanctioned the ‘physical compulsion’ of apostates and he duly cited Augustine’s Epistle 93. Elsewhere in the Summa he provided an influential analysis of the relationship between the will and the understanding in the conduct of the conscience. The Anglican divines glossed Augustine in Thomist fashion, and their position may be summarized as follows.44 People have habits of mind. They often think the way they do, not because they have deeply considered the matter, but because they have passively received the views they hold, from their parents, their education, and their social milieu, or just because (consciously or not) it suits their interests to hold such views. They may hold their views sincerely, have good intentions, and follow their best lights. There is a respect due to such sincerity, for there is an obligation upon the will to do what the understanding directs. To have a good conscience is in part to have a will to follow the good as we see it. But sincerity alone is not enough, since what also matters is whether our beliefs are true or not. People may be in earnest, but mistaken. And so we are obliged not only to have a good will, but also to have good reasons for believing the things we do. Hence, prior to the virtue of sincerity lies the duty to inform the understanding. The path from conventional opinion to right understanding can be arduous, and many people do not even begin it: they may be incapable of it, or just mentally lazy. Such indolence is sinful, and the holding of mistaken beliefs is a culpable error. In religious and moral belief the church is our guide, and there is an obligation of intellectual humility to listen to her authoritative teaching. But the church is limited to a non-coercive disciplinary and catechetical apparatus, 44

Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, 1a 2ae, qu. 19, arts 5–8; 2a 2ae, qu. 10, art. 8.

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which in any case may not reach all parts of a community that is fragmented by schism. Thus people who hold false views may become hardened and fixed in their beliefs by force of undisturbed custom and habit, by the reproduction of conventional beliefs within tight-knit subcultures. What is it that might motivate such people to reconsider? Coercion might. The enemies of coercion charge that it is irrational to claim that force can compel belief. But Augustinian churchmen made no such direct claim. Certainly force does not convince directly, but it may work indirectly, for its use can be the occasion for initiating new spiritual exploration. The understanding cannot be compelled, but the will may direct the understanding to undertake study, and the will may be compelled. Penal laws, Augustine wrote, put pressure on the wayward ‘until they become weary in their vain opinions, so that they shall make advance in the truth’. People who are ‘first compelled by fear or pain … might afterwards be influenced by teaching’. Even those who at first feign conformity come to relish the truth that perforce they must now hear; they joyously thank their stern fathers for showing them the way. For Augustine, eruditio (teaching), admonitio, disciplina, and correctio all stood in close relationship. There is simply no firm line between a belief ‘freely’ arrived at, and one brought about by varying degrees of pressure; and there is no special value to be attached to the particular manner by which truth is reached. The sharp disruption of a life, the experience of suffering, can motivate a person to listen to new teachings. It is just such physical and emotional disruptions which so often constitute a key element in Christian accounts of the dawning of a new or a transformed faith. As both Augustine and Aquinas pointed out, God himself wrought St Paul’s conversion in a drastic manner on the road to Damascus. The tolerationist will say that the outer body may be broken but the inner mind remains untouched. The Augustinian will respond that the outer body may enslave the mind: break the body and the mind will be liberated from its bondage.45 When the mind in bondage is lost to Christian truth, and an eternal soul is at stake, then coercive discipline by the magistrate in the service of the Christian pastor is an act of the greatest charity. Indulgence is a ‘mistaken kindness’ and penal laws are an act of love. It may ideally be better to win by gentle persuasion, but unfortunately among the stubborn there is a ‘hardness of heart that cannot be softened by such words’. Accordingly, at the heart of the matter lay the claim that coercion can dispose the mind to reconsider. This is the crux of the case brought against Bayle, Locke, and other tolerationists, and it was constantly at the forefront of Anglican argument. In 1665 Benjamin Laney, bishop of Lincoln, preached before the king at Whitehall on the text ‘Take heed what you hear’ (Mark 4:24). 45

For an intriguing version of this case, see the argument of the virtuous torturer in Anthony Burgess’s novel Earthly Powers (Harmondsworth, 1981), ch. 55. The bishop remarks, ‘there’s some truth in the view that only when a man is in severe danger or excruciating pain can his brain be jerked out of the torpor of an unquestioning conviction’.

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There are, he said, those who say that ‘compulsory means by punishments’ are against the spirit of Christ and lead ‘to a hypocritical obedience’. While ‘it is true that punishments reach not directly the inner man, nor do they teach and inform the judgement, that is, they do not perfect the work’, yet nevertheless they are ‘a good beginning to it; for, fear is the beginning of wisdom, which love must perfect’. ‘The rod indeed doth not teach the child, yet scares him to his book where he may learn.’ If punishments do not ‘accomplish our duty, yet they set us to our studies’, that by ‘diligent search and enquiry’ we may supply the defect of our knowledge. In 1680 Joseph Glanvill, writing just before his death, urged that, ‘while people run on without control in their own ways, they will not hearken, they will not consider … Like the wild ass, they snuff up the wind.’ But ‘when they are chastised … they are more disposed to attend, and weigh the reasons offered without the usual partiality and prejudice. And thus punishments are instruments of real reformation.’46 In 1682 Thomas Ashenden, rector of Dingley in Northamptonshire, preached a forceful sermon at the Leicester assize, called No Penalty, No Peace (a counterpoint to Penn’s No Cross, No Crown). Our church, by applying the soft and gentle remedies of statutable punishments, never intended to force gross blindness, or impose the tyranny of implicit faith upon any man, but rather quite the contrary, she carefully and wisely considered that a little smart might make the scales peel off from men’s eyes, and by some little bitterness she designs no more harm to them, than Tobias did to his old father, by throwing gall in his eyes to make him see.47

In the same year William Saywell insisted that, while he disclaimed ‘all sanguinary punishments, or cruel torments, purely on account of religion’, nonetheless he did ‘move for moderate discipline, to make them hear and consider’, for people who withdraw themselves from the ‘sober instructions or public devotions’ of the church ‘ought by moderate penalties … to be compelled to join with her’, to ‘make them hearken and attend … which generally Dissenters and lazy people will not do’.48 In 1685 Thomas Tenison, future archbishop of Canterbury, granted that ‘no man’s mind can be forced, for it is beyond the reach of human power’, yet ‘good governors do not use severity to force men to dissemble their minds, and to make them hypocrites, but to move them, after a trial of fair means, to greater consideration’. Compulsion, agreed Henry Maurice, Archbishop Sancroft’s chaplain, writing in retort to the duke of Buckingham’s plea for toleration,49 46

Benjamin Laney, A Sermon Preached Before his Majesty (1665), pp. 13–16; Joseph Glanvill, The Zealous and Impartial Protestant (1681), p. 34. 47 Thomas Ashenden, No Penalty, No Peace (1682), pp. 21–2. Tobit 11:11. 48 Saywell, Evangelical and Catholic Unity, sigs A7r, a1r. 49 George Villiers, second duke of Buckingham, A Short Discourse upon the Reasonableness of Men’s having a Religion (1685).

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renders people ‘more teachable, and willing to be instructed’: penal laws encourage people to put aside prejudice, wilfulness, and interest, and to listen to reason. The title page of Simon Patrick’s Friendly Debate between a Conformist and a Nonconformist (1669) quoted Proverbs: ‘he that refuseth instruction despiseth his own soul: but he that heareth reproof getteth understanding’.50 So ingrained was the argument, that it continued to find cautious support among its victims. In 1684 the Dissenting leader Richard Baxter could still write that the Christian magistrate must help his subjects search for salvation and hence had a right ‘to compel them to hear’. As in the case of the Huguenot Jurieu, the argument was being used by its own victims.51 A final example is Henry Dodwell, the most acute and energetic lay theologian of the new high church generation. Starting with the familiar objection that coercion only makes hypocrites, his first response was that that is better than nothing, for it protects weak minds from bad influences, preventing ‘open hostilities against the truth’, and lends authority to the work of the true church. He went on to say, more importantly, that to conform out of fear is not a mere dissimulation of opinion, for fear has often ‘proved the beginning of true wisdom’.52 Fear may induce ‘solid real piety’ in those ‘whom we find less efficaciously moved to their duty by any other means’. Thus ‘exterior compulsion [is] a probable occasion to make men alter their opinions’. To call coercion productive only of hypocrisy is facilely to deny the possibility that people might change their minds, once they are ‘freed from carnal prejudices, which before had blinded or diverted them from a clear discovery’ of the truth. The instruments of force are ‘dispositions to prepare and qualify persons for receiving conscientious arguments’, and thus their use exemplifies a ‘moral diligence’ on the part of a Christian church and state.53 Coercion and catechesis

Three features of this train of argument need to be underscored. The first is the insistence that, if coercion is to be a pastoral tool, it is vital that force be married with edification and argument. There must be, as Dodwell emphasized, the ‘means of information’ as well as the instruments of punishment.54 Augustine wrote in Epistle 93 that it would be an ‘inexcusable tyranny’ if ‘they were only made afraid, and not instructed’. In France the same pastoral concern was expressed by the eminent Jansenist Antoine Arnauld. His distress 50

Thomas Tenison, An Argument of Union, in A Collection of Cases, II, 40; Henry Maurice, The Antithelemite (1685), pp. 17–18, 41; Simon Patrick, A Friendly Debate between a Conformist and a Nonconformist (1669), title page. Proverbs 15:32. 51 Richard Baxter, Catholic Communion (1684), 2nd pagination, pp. 2–3. 52 An echo of Proverbs 1:7 and 9:10; and Psalm 111:10. 53 Henry Dodwell, A Reply to Mr Baxter’s Pretended Confutation (1681), pp. 192–5, 200, 202–3. 54 Dodwell, Reply to Mr Baxter, p. 203.

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at the persecution of the Huguenots was only because of the lack of provision for instruction; his Apology for the Catholics followed Augustine in arguing that ‘coercion may be justified if it makes people willing to listen and examine’.55 As for the means of instruction in England, churchmen pointed to the shelf loads of books and the numberless sermons which they had put before the public since 1660. ‘This is’, pronounced Tenison in 1685, ‘a time of prosecution; and a time of adversity is a proper time for consideration’: listen to your teachers and ‘peruse seriously the books which authority hath set forth’. Richard Lucas, a popular City preacher, persuaded his audience, in 1683, that the present policy of the government was to cure our schisms ‘by summons, by instructions, and by several sorts of admonition, [whereby Dissenters will] be put in mind of their error, invited, and required to amend it’, and only then ‘such as persist wilfully in their division, will fall under ecclesiastical censure’ and duly suffer ‘considerable evils inflicted by the civil power’.56 Nor was writing and sermonizing thought sufficient, for often the divines laboured to engage Dissenters in face-to-face disputation and earnest entreaty. In 1672, during the Indulgence, Bishop Peter Gunning ‘out of his abundant zeal, made a public challenge’ to John Corbet and other Dissenting ministers to dispute before the mayor and people of Chichester. On the appointed day the bishop, ‘having a heap of books about him’, delivered a harangue about ‘schism and rebellion’.57 Another instance is offered by Dodwell, who practised what he preached, for he dedicated his defence of pastoral coercion to his friend Bishop William Lloyd of St Asaph, and when Lloyd toured his diocese in 1682 he took Dodwell with him to add persuasion to discipline. In the town hall at Oswestry in Shropshire on a Tuesday afternoon in September they debated for five or six hours with the Presbyterian minister Philip Henry, in front of ‘divers of the clergy and gentry of the country, with the magistrates of the town’. Much was said ‘pro and con, touching the identity of bishops and presbyters, the bishoping and unbishoping of Timothy and Titus,58 the validity of presbyterian ordination, etc.’ At the end of the day a justice of the peace had the last word: ‘we thank God, we have the sword of power in our hands; and, by the grace of God, we will keep it; and it shall not rust … Look to yourselves, gentlemen, by the grace of God, I will root you out of the county.’ His scarcely concealed anger reveals how precarious was the attempt to marry pious admonition with penal sanction.59 The insistence that penal discipline stemmed from pastoral concern was important in allowing Anglicans to distinguish their own edificatory coercion from the ‘sanguinary’ and nugatory cruelty exacted by the Roman inquisitions. 55

Antoine Arnauld, Apologie pur les catholiques (Liege, 1681). Argument of Union, in Collection of Cases, II, 41; Richard Lucas, Unity and Peace (1683), p. 4. 57 A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934; repr. 1988), p. 136. 58 In ecclesiological controversy much hung upon whether Timothy and Titus in St Paul’s Epistles were or were not bishops. See Quantin, Church of England, ch. 2. 59 Matthew Henry, The Life of the Rev. Philip Henry (1825), pp. 152–4, 380–93. 56 Tenison,

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The papists sought blind faith, but Protestants sought enlightened belief. The papists used capital punishment and loss of limb; but Protestant punishment was tempered by the criterion of persuasive purpose. ‘We do not’, wrote Benjamin Calamy, ‘desire men to pin their faith upon the priest’s sleeve, or to put out their own eyes that they may be better guided and managed by them; but only diligently to attend to their reasons and arguments, and to give some due regard and deference to their authority.’60 Even so, by the 1680s a tone of bellicose exasperation had entered the Anglican voice, some now asserting that the time for persuasion was over, and coercion must now do what argument had failed to do. Bishop Edward Wetenhall wrote in 1682 that his fellow divines would ideally like to argue the Dissenters into the church, but we had now had ‘twenty-one years debate’, ‘so that I must profess I utterly despair of ever seeing the nonconformists disputed into the church’.61 In an exceptionally militant sermon, Thomas Ashenden protested that ‘when good and learned men offer a cure by public writing and dispute, the fruitless consequence shows plainly that the wrong remedy is applied, the malady lying more in the perverseness of the will than the mistake of the intellect’. So, ‘’tis in vain therefore to hope that the strongest and most zealous arguments will ever reduce schism and faction to an amicable compliance’. Consequently, ‘the argumentum bacillinum [argument of the rod] must do the work, no demonstration [being] so convincing as that of penal statute, no persuasion so pressing as that of a legal mulct’. It was, agreed Henry Hesketh, when preaching to the Tory lord mayor of London in 1684, ‘high time … to mince the matter no longer’, for ‘they have superseded a great deal of pains, that we were at before, in persuading men’.62 This was an anger evinced by Bishop Thomas Lamplugh in 1676, when he summoned the Dissenting minister John Hoppin to his palace at Exeter. ‘Being desirous to gain him to the church’, he gave him a safe conduct, ‘it being then a time of great rigour against the dissenters.’ Lamplugh bade him read Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity. Hoppin replied that, had Hooker been alive today, he would be a nonconformist. The bishop pulled the book from the shelf, and Hoppin showed him a passage. ‘His lordship read, and clapping fast the book again, said no more, but with his usual passion, said, go your way: I promised you indeed a safe conduct out and home, but afterwards look to yourself.’ Shortly afterwards Hoppin was thrown into the town prison ‘in the sight of the palace’, where, being in a very cold chamber, he ‘got such a rheumatism, as

60

Benjamin Calamy, A Discourse about a Scrupulous Conscience (1683), in Collection of Cases, I, 20–1. This Calamy is not to be confused with his more famous Presbyterian father, brother, and nephew, all Edmund. For Gilbert Burnet’s ‘horror of spiritual coercion’ and elision of all religious coercion with popery, see T. Claydon, ‘Latitudinarianism and Apocalyptic History in the Worldview of Gilbert Burnet, 1643–1715’, HJ 51 (2008), 577–91. 61 Edward Wetenhall, The Protestant Peace-Maker (1682), p. 113. 62 Ashenden, No Penalty, No Peace, pp. 16–17; Hesketh, Sermon, ep. ded.

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rendered him a perfect cripple to the day of his death … and lived many years in misery’.63 The ethics of belief

A second feature of the argument for coercing conscience, and one which we have already touched upon, is the stress upon the ethics of belief. It is a stress that runs radically counter to the dominant trend of modern discussion, for it is a characteristic modern doctrine that belief is involuntary.64 One consequence of this is the view that the moral value of actions is held to lie only in sincerity, in the honest acting out of the implications of our beliefs, whatever they happen to be. Here lies the whole thrust of Bayle’s argument in the Commentaire philosophique. It is a defence of sincerity: what matters is a good intention to act well according to what seems right to us. Hence, to punish a religious nonconformist for following conscience is a great evil. What is, however, neglected in this argument is the question of whether the conscience is adequately informed, and whether we have true beliefs. The weight is put on the good faith of agents and not upon the objective truth of their beliefs. What underscores this imbalance in modern times is the pervasive scepticism about the possibility of reaching agreement concerning ‘true’ belief. The modern dominance of the virtue of sincerity is a child of pluralism and religious doubt. Bayle’s famous remark about truth being contingent upon which side of the Alps one happens to live was made in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), but the sceptical theme was present in his earlier work. In his study of Bayle, John Kilcullen has written that ‘since the eighteenth century liberal and enlightened men and women have often put a higher value upon sincerity than on actually being right. The earliest exponent of this attitude seems to have been Pierre Bayle; as he says … “it is enough to consult sincerely and in good faith the lights God has given us”.’65 This doctrine was utterly repudiated by the Anglican divines of the Restoration. In doing so, they held fast to scholastic ideas. Aquinas contended that a properly balanced conception of conscience gives equal recognition to a right understanding and a good will. Consequently, in acting rightly, we have two duties, first to acquire true beliefs, and second to act sincerely in respect of those beliefs. An action is right only when both conditions are fulfilled. The importance of distinguishing between the will and the understanding was well recognized in Restoration discussion. In Edward Fowler’s dialogue on Dissent, Theophilus pleads that our understanding is unfree: like the eye, it cannot choose what it apprehends. Philotheles replies that nonetheless the will remains 63 Matthews,

Calamy Revised, p. 276. Sincerity and Truth, pp. 140–3. 65 Kilcullen, Sincerity and Truth, p. 15. This book has been especially valuable in thinking through the topic of this chapter. 64 Kilcullen,

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free, and people are at fault if they choose to be ‘careless of providing their understandings with due helps for making a true judgement’.66 The divines tended to hold that true beliefs of general fundamentals are accessible by all, by the mental faculty which Aquinas called synteresis. But in the application of general truths to particular cases, and in the intricate interpretation of scriptural revelation, the possibility of error is greater, and we have an obligation to consider carefully, and to listen to wiser guides. When people fail in this duty by mental laziness or intellectual pride, they abandon their beliefs to the workings of habit, passion, and prejudice. They are guilty of failing to search out good grounds for the holding of a belief. Our beliefs may thus be said to be voluntary, at least in the sense that we may choose whether or not to make an enquiry, the better to inform our consciences. Consequently, there is at least an ethics of enquiry if not quite an ethics of belief. It is a mistake, wrote Richard Perrinchief, to say we are not at liberty in what we believe, for we have a power over our ‘dispositions’ to receive the truth. There is no virtue, echoed William Cave, in an ‘unexamined belief’.67 Now it is true that theologians have often spoken of ‘invincible ignorance’, by which people may be exonerated from knowing the truth, such as those who have not had the benefit of contact with Christian teaching. This is why Aquinas held that infidels are not to be judged in the same way as apostates, and that the virtuous pagan might be saved. But we should not take advantage of the idea of invincible ignorance as a cover for the wilful ignorance of people in our own society. To do so is to return to an unbalanced emphasis merely on good intentions. The Catholic Arnauld accused the Huguenot Bayle of trading too much on the laxist Jesuit jargon of ‘invincible ignorance’.68 In England Edward Stillingfleet attacked the Dissenters in the same way. ‘Men ought not’, he wrote, ‘to rest satisfied with the present dictates of their consciences’, for ‘no man’s conscience alters the nature of good and evil in things’; to turn to the idea of ‘invincible ignorance’ is a complacent irrelevance; rather we must look to our ‘wilful errors of conscience’.69 The charge has substance, for neither Bayle (notwithstanding his later reputation for scepticism) nor the Dissenters framed their defence in terms of a frontal assault on the hubristic truth claims of their adversaries, but rather relied upon a somewhat casuistical insistence that ‘mistaken belief gives error … the rights of truth’.70 Perhaps the most exact reproduction of Aquinas’s argument in Anglican writing is that offered by John Sharp, future archbishop of York, in his Discourse Concerning Conscience (1684), republished in the London Cases. ‘It is not our business to persuade any man to conform against his conscience: but to convince every man how dangerous it may be to follow a misinformed 66

Edward Fowler, The Principles and Practices of Certain Moderate Divines (1670), pp. 311–12. Indulgence not Justified, pp. 6–7; Cave, Serious Exhortation, p. 2. 68 Kilcullen, Sincerity and Truth, pp. 15ff, 65–6, 107. 69 Edward Stillingfleet, The Mischief of Separation (1680), p. 43. 70 Kilcullen, Sincerity and Truth, p. 66. 67 Perrinchief,

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conscience.’ We may have ‘a right conscience’ or ‘an erroneous conscience’ – ‘we either make a right judgement of our duty, or we make a wrong one’. He concedes that it is wrong to act against conscience, for we must follow ‘the best light which at present we have’. This is what we properly call the criterion of ‘sincerity or hypocrisy’. However, we do not say that ‘every one is a good man that acts according to his judgement’. ‘No, we measure virtue and vice by the rule according to which a man ought to act; as well as by the man’s intention in acting.’ Sincerity is not enough, for it is not merely ‘my judgement or persuasion that makes good or evil … but it is the nature of things themselves’. If strength of persuasion and sincerity were all, then good and evil would be various, and change with the seasons. Again, it may be conceded that a person does not sin if he makes an honest mistake, especially where ‘the man had no sufficient means for the informing himself aright’. But this is to no purpose, for can anyone in England now be exonerated because ‘mispersuaded’ about religious truth? No land is richer and freer in theological writing. Our duty lies in seeking ‘instruction and information’ for our conscience, otherwise we commit the ‘sin of ignorance’. We should free our minds from ‘passion, and interest, and all other carnal prepossessions’, applying ourselves ‘seriously and impartially to the getting right notions and sentiments’.71 That sincerity is not enough reverberated through Anglican writing. The divines deplored the Dissenters’ facile fashion for pleading ‘conscience’, as if it were an inert piece of property which everyone possessed and which the polity had simply to respect as bearing a right. The churchmen protested that the pleaders for conscience neglected the duty of having ‘a well ordered conscience’, and that they sanctified the rights of uninstructed opinion. They thereby ‘condemned us all, to … a slavery to those apprehensions’ that presently happen to infect our understandings.72 How can a society yearn for righteousness when it sinks into a fragmented anarchy of opinion, each voice narcissistically preening itself on the quality of its ‘sincerity’?73 ‘Conscience!’ exclaimed Nathaniel Bisbie in 1682: ‘Oh it is a good and tender thing, but withal it is many times proud and haughty, wilful and erroneous, disorderly and very rebellious.’ Henry Dove agreed: the modish plea on behalf of ‘private conscience’ neglects to ask if it is ‘an erroneous conscience’. William Falkner wrote that, for their ‘passions and disorderly affections’, the Dissenters

71

John Sharp, A Discourse Concerning Conscience (1684), in A Collection of Cases, I, 2, 17, 19, 20, 24, 38. 72 Perrinchief, Indulgence not Justified, p. 6. 73 For discussions of conscience, see G. De Krey, ‘The First Restoration Crisis: Conscience and Coercion in London, 1667–1673’, Albion 25 (1993), 565–80; idem, ‘Rethinking the Restoration: Dissenting Cases of Conscience, 1667–1672’, HJ 38 (1995), 53–83; A. Walsham, ‘Ordeals of Conscience: Casuistry, Conformity, and Confessional Identity in Post-Reformation England’, in Contexts of Conscience, ed. Braun and Vallance, pp. 32–48.

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‘substitute the name of conscience’.74 Truth these days, Bishop Laney bemoaned to the king, is measured only by fervency of persuasion. His sermon of 1665 is a tirade against the popular jargon of conscience. There are complaints of our ‘domineering over conscience’, but we rather have cause ‘to complain at the domineering of the conscience’, for there is ‘a great deal of reason to restrain the conscience [and] there is no reason to give it liberty’ when it errs. In 1668 Sir John Denham told the House of Commons that the conscience pretended by the Dissenters ‘was nothing less than spiritual pride’; and Perrinchief wrote that Dissenting consciences were ‘erroneous, or dubious’.75 There are, bellowed Ashenden, ‘no conceptions so monstrous, no tenets so blasphemous, no practices so mischievous, but will take sanctuary here and plead a little to impunity under pretence of liberty of conscience’. Moreover, conscience seemed so often to stand upon entirely trivial points. ‘Poor Dame Conscience’, sneered Edward Pelling; she will ‘puke the next Sunday at the very sight of a surplice.’76 It is clear from these remarks that Anglican divines located the Dissenters’ mistake as lying in a distorted version of the scholastic twofold doctrine of conscience, which yielded a perverse ethic of sincerity and intention. But increasingly that ethic also came to be grounded not only in a casuistical skewing of scholastic categories, but also in an epistemic conviction that we cannot help what we believe, only how we behave. Those who had gone over to the new, post-scholastic philosophies were apt to hold that our beliefs are involuntary because they lie at the end of a causal chain. Our so-called passions, interests, and prejudiced education are only pejorative terms for the causal background to all our beliefs. To hold such a view might lead to a case for toleration of rival beliefs. But equally it could be used to justify the claim that, while private beliefs are untouchable, public behaviour is the business of the magistrate. This is broadly the Hobbesian approach. It is worth reminding ourselves of it here in order to show how starkly it contrasts with the Augustinian and scholastic argument. Proponents of the Hobbist approach were indifferent to the structure of belief: the content of the mind is not at issue, only decorum in public practice. It is a politique and not a pastoral argument. In his Erastian Ecclesiastical Politie, Samuel Parker seems post-scholastic in his assumptions. Equally, L’Estrange’s Toleration Discuss’d (1663) is not concerned with ‘erroneous conscience’. On the contrary, he insists that public authority is in no sense a judge of conscience, but only of external actions. ‘Though it is not in our power to know and believe as we please, yet to forbear publishing our thoughts, and acting in relation to them, is unquestionably in our power.’77 As indicated earlier, the Augustinian 74

Nathaniel Bisbie, Prosecution No Persecution (1682), p. 30; Henry Dove, Sermon (1682), pp. 11–12; William Falkner, Christian Loyalty (1679), pp. 276–9. 75 Laney, Sermon, pp. 24, 28; C. Robbins (ed.), The Diary of John Milward (Cambridge, 1938), p. 216; Perrinchief, A Discourse of Toleration (1668), p. 16. 76 Ashenden, No Penalty, No Peace, p. 19; Edward Pelling, The Apostate Protestant (1682), pp. 50–1. Puritans objected to the surplice as a popish vestment. 77 L’Estrange, Toleration Discuss’d (1663), p. 34.

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and Thomist argument gradually became dominant in the latter part of the Restoration. A high church sensibility, authoritarian yet plaintively pastoral, prevailed over Erastian arguments – especially when the religious loyalties of the monarch could not be relied upon. The true nature of martyrdom

The third and last feature to be noticed about the argument for the coercion of conscience is its consequence for doctrines about the nature of persecution. Once the modern stress on sincerity becomes dominant, then ‘persecution’ and ‘martyrdom’ will be held to mean the suffering of anybody for any belief fervently held. But orthodox Christians taught that those terms are only applicable to those who suffer for the true religion. To suffer for a mistake honestly believed may have some nobility in it, but it does not qualify as martyrdom. ‘There is an essential difference’, Augustine wrote in Epistle 185, ‘not in respect of his suffering, but because he suffered for righteousness’ sake.’ The intensity of a martyred schismatic’s pain is no moral substitute for being right. Just as the Dissenters’ jargon of ‘conscience’ incensed the divines, so also did their jangle of ‘persecution’, their self-righteous and self-publicizing rhetoric, their ‘vainglorious ostentation’ of martyrdom, their ‘gloriolas concerning persecution’.78 Simon Patrick ridiculed the pompous self-importance of the ejected ministers after the Five Mile Act, who spoke as if Israel was exiled in Egypt just because they had to leave London for Acton or Walthamstow.79 Some Anglicans, it is true, tried implausibly to argue that there was no persecution in England because the Act of Uniformity allowed every family, together with four others, to gather for private worship at home.80 Or, alternatively, some merely asserted that persecution was never as bad as anarchy and schism. But, in the main, the divines upheld a more exact theological position: that severity on behalf of the true religion is by definition not persecution. ‘There is’, wrote Nathaniel Bisbie, ‘a difference between punishment and persecution’ – ‘it is not what we suffer, but why, that will justify our sufferings; not the blood, but the cause, that will make a martyr’. This was a truth rooted in patristic teaching. St Cyprian had said that ‘he cannot be a martyr, who is not of the church’, and St Chrysostom had declared that so-called ‘martyrdom will not expiate the crime of schism’. England’s penal laws, said the Anglicans, were not to be smeared by ‘the odious name of persecution’.81 78 Dodwell,

Reply to Mr Baxter, p. 198; L’Estrange, Remarks on the Growth and Progress of Nonconformity (1683), p. 11. 79 Patrick, An Appendix to the Third Part of the Friendly Debate (1670), pp. 3–5. 80 Glanvill, Zealous and Impartial Protestant, p. 33; Dodwell, Reply to Mr Baxter, p. 198; Perrinchief, Discourse of Toleration, p. 33. 81 Bisbie, Prosecution no Persecution, pp. 18–19. For divergent accounts of martyrdom in George Hickes and Samuel Bold, see below, pp. 165–8.

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Jonas Proast versus John Locke

The arguments and the authors we have been considering provide one context for Locke’s classic formulation of the case for religious toleration. His Letter Concerning Toleration was written in Holland in the winter of 1685 and published in Latin and English in 1689. It was certainly provocative, for, as well as defending a remarkably radical version of the principle of toleration, Locke mingled his claims with attacks on persecuting churchmen. He was answered by two divines. Thomas Long, whom we have met as author of The History of the Donatists, issued The Letter for Toleration Deciphered, one among several of his writings in 1689, for he was busily engaged in defending the Revolution from a Tory standpoint, and active in blocking the Comprehension project in the church’s assembly, convocation. But Locke ignored Long and chose instead to respond to a forceful and stylish tract by Jonas Proast, an Oxford divine, whose only forays into print were three tracts against Locke. For the first time in his career Locke allowed himself to be drawn into exhausting and quarrelsome public polemic. His Second and Third Letters on Toleration (1690, 1692) are attacks on Proast, and take up some five hundred pages. Debate then subsided until belatedly revived in 1704, when the national furore over Tory plans to suppress Occasional Conformity elicited Locke’s last engagement with a great national issue before his death. Proast, accused by a Whig pamphleteer of having fled the field in defeat, went into print again, and drew from Locke an unfinished Fourth Letter.82 Proast’s defiant stand is symptomatic of the reluctance of high churchmen to accept the Toleration Act of 1689, and of the persistence of Restoration orthodoxies.83 More can be said about Proast’s duel with Locke than has yet been said by Locke scholars, but my only purpose here is to note how exactly their quarrel reiterated well-worn themes.84 Proast’s case for intolerance stood squarely in the Augustinian tradition. This is not immediately obvious, for his pamphlets are attractively free of patristic and scholastic pedantry, and Locke deviously insinuated that his arguments were new-fangled and unheard of. But in response to Locke’s sally against his ‘new 82

Jonas Proast, The Argument of the Letter Concerning Toleration Briefly Considered and Answered (1690); idem, A Third Letter Concerning Toleration (1691); idem, A Second Letter to the Author of the Three Letters for Toleration (1704). Repr. in M. Goldie, ed., The Reception of Locke’s Politics (6 vols, 1999), V, 23–128, which also includes Long’s reply to Locke, pp. 1–22. Locke’s Letters (subsequent to the first) are cited below from The Works of John Locke (10 vols, 1801), VI: Second Letter, pp. 59–137; Third, pp. 139–546; Fourth, pp. 547–74. A new edition is in preparation, ed. Teresa Bejan. 83 For Anglican reaction to the Toleration Act, see R. Stevens, Protestant Pluralism: The Reception of the Toleration Act, 1689–1720 (Woodbridge, 2018). 84 See M. Goldie, ‘John Locke, Jonas Proast, and the Politics of Religious Toleration, 1688–1692’, in The Church of England, c.1689-c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism, ed. J. Walsh, C. Haydon, and S. Taylor (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 143–71; R. Vernon, The Career of Toleration: John Locke, Jonas Proast, and After (Montreal, 1997); A. Wolfson, Persecution or Toleration: An Explication of the Locke-Proast Quarrel (Lanham, MD, 2010).

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method of persecution’, Proast retorted that it was ‘at least as old as St Austin’ (i.e. Augustine), and cited the familiar Augustinian epistles. Locke knew the Augustinian sources well enough.85 He also knew the polemics of the 1680s. For instance, he cites John Sharp’s Discourse Concerning Conscience, referred to above, and, again deviously, tries to turn Sharp’s argument round to his own side. He does so in the spirit of Bayle, by selectively quoting Sharp on the respect due to sincerity, and suppressing Sharp on the coequal duty of acquiring a well-instructed understanding. Proast restores the missing part of Sharp’s text, reminding Locke that it is not ‘good divinity’ to speak only of the rights due to an honest but erroneous conscience.86 Proast was concerned almost exclusively with restating Augustine’s claim that the conscience can, in a sense, be coerced, and he did so with peculiar felicity, so that his tract stands as the sharpest formulation of a ubiquitous Restoration argument. He forced Locke to address the point more closely, though somewhat fruitlessly, as both writers rapidly descended into mutually uncomprehending counter-assertion. Proast takes Locke’s central argument to be that, because ‘belief is to be wrought in men by reason and argument, not by outward force and compulsion’, therefore ‘all such force is utterly of no use for the promoting true religion, and the salvation of souls’.87 Noting that Locke concedes that there is a ‘true religion’, the ensuing debate almost wholly concerns the efficacy of compulsion on its behalf. Hence their battle was fought on a narrow front, with limited attention paid to the larger question of the inroads of scepticism upon the idea of ‘true religion’.88 This has the effect (quite properly) of portraying Locke not as a defender of a secular, sceptical pluralism, but as a low church Anglican who differs about the best means to bring people to true religion. Proast nonetheless does accuse him of sloppy indifferentism, for that is precisely what high churchmen thought of low churchmen who accepted the religious settlement of 1689.89 Proast set out to close the gap opened up by Locke’s insistent separation of persuasion and compulsion, and to refute Locke’s incessant iteration that force can never produce internal conviction. He begins with a concession. ‘I readily grant that reason and argument are the only proper means, whereby to induce 85 Proast,

Third Letter, pp. 43, 52; Locke, Second Letter, pp. 87, 123; idem, Third Letter, pp. 262, 292, 450, 529. 86 Proast, Second Letter, pp. 15–16; Locke, Third Letter, pp. 146, 330. 87 Proast, Argument, p. 3. 88 Proast, Third Letter, p. 11. For parallel discussions to that provided in the following paragraphs, see J. Waldron, ‘Locke: Toleration and the Rationality of Persecution’, in Justifying Toleration, ed. S. Mendus (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 61–86; P. Bou-Habib, ‘Locke, Sincerity, and the Rationality of Persecution’, Political Studies 51 (2003), 611–26; R. Vernon, ‘Tempers and Toleration: Re-Reading Locke’s “Irrationality” Argument’, History of Political Thought 42 (2021), 252–68. 89 For accounts of Locke’s religion in context, see Marshall, Locke: Resistance; idem, Locke, Toleration.

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the mind to assent to any truth … and that force is very improper to be used to that end instead of reason and arguments.’ But Locke had rested content with a truism, for ‘who knows not, that “the nature of the understanding is such, that it cannot be compelled”’. Yet, notwithstanding this, if force be used, not instead of reason and arguments, i.e. not to convince by its own proper efficacy (which it cannot do), but only to bring men to consider those reasons and arguments which are proper and sufficient to convince them, but which, without being forced, they would not consider

then in such circumstances compulsion ‘indirectly and at a distance’ may ‘be serviceable to the bringing men to receive and embrace truth’. For such is the weight of custom, habitual thinking, and intellectual prepossession, ‘that neither the gentlest admonitions, nor the most earnest entreaties’ will provoke ‘care and diligence’ in searching after truth. ‘What means are left … but to lay thorns and briars’, so that ‘uneasiness … may at least put them to a stand, and incline them to lend an ear to those who tell them they have mistaken their way’? Consequently, it was a necessary condition of coercion that its victims have ‘sufficient evidence tendered them’. In short: no coercion without catechesis. Thus the purpose of coercion is to alter the structure of people’s disposition to search after truth. And therefore ‘we see how little of truth there is’ in Locke’s claim that ‘all outward force is utterly useless’.90 It followed from such a doctrine that the severity of penal laws must be ‘duly proportioned to the design of it’. There must be ‘such penalties … as may balance the weight of those prejudices which incline them to prefer a false way’. It is this principle of proportionality which outlaws popish cruelty and draws a sharp distinction between English penal laws and the ‘unjustified severity’ of the French, and so, declared Proast, ‘I perfectly agree’ with Locke that maiming and killing for religion are evil. Proast deplored Locke’s wild and reductive talk of ‘fire and faggot’, as if England’s penal laws were but an emulation of the Roman Inquisition.91 Proast deduced that, since force can be efficacious in the cause of true religion, it followed that it was within the rights of a magistrate to exercise it. Only the secular magistrate could be the agent of such force, for spiritual persons have no intrinsic coercive power. However, Proast added the rider that he saw no reason why the clergy could not exercise such punitive power when authorized by the magistrate, a remark calculated to cause Locke to erupt at the ‘itching of your fingers to be handling the rod’.92 Proast challenged Locke’s 90 Proast,

Argument, pp. 4–5, 10–11; idem, Third Letter, pp. 16ff; Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. M. Goldie (Indianapolis, IN, 2010), p. 13. 91 Proast, Argument, pp. 11–12; idem, Third Letter, pp. 19, 21, 44–5, 49; idem, Second Letter, pp. 2ff; Locke, Third Letter, pp. 199–200, and ch. 4 generally. 92 Proast, Argument, p. 17; Locke, Third Letter, p. 171; cf. p. 223; idem, Second Letter, p. 115.

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insistence that commonwealths exist for civil concernments only, responding that commonwealths exist for the attainment of benefits, and the magistrate may serve our spiritual well-being much as he might protect public morality or prevent false coining. Government, of course, has only an ‘external’ care of souls, yet by church establishments and penal sanctions it upholds and assists pastoral care, for kings and queens are ‘nursing fathers and nursing mothers’ to the church. The care exercised by the Christian magistrate is but a species, although because penal a special species, of the care that should be exercised by all Christian people for the mutual spiritual well-being of all. ‘Every man’s soul ought not to be left to himself alone.’ Proast deprecated what he saw as Locke’s individualistic celebration of spiritual privacy, as if the ideal were a society of mutual epistemic indifference, the citizen left ‘either to take no care at all of his soul … or … to follow his own groundless prejudices’. Locke sacrificed the striving after truth, as a collective activity undertaken by a society, to the chimerical sanctity of private judgement. And he compounded such a barren ideal with a naive optimism that religious truth has a special ability to ‘prevail by its own light and strength’.93 Locke stolidly refused to recognize any psychological truth in Proast’s argument that it is possible by coercion to ‘procure the enlightenment of the understanding and the production of belief’,94 a Cartesian rigidity which left the rational deliberations of the understanding untouchable by any plausible theory about the causal and motivational structure of human beliefs. It was an odd stance, for frequently enough in his writings Locke himself dwelt upon the material circumstances – the prejudices of culture and education, the magnetic pull of interest, the deference paid to institutional truth – which explained what passed unreflectively for truth in ordinary minds. It is true that Proast’s need to defend physical compulsion in ‘the production of belief’ strains to the limit a theory about the psychological circumstances which bring people to reconsider their beliefs. But, as we noted earlier, legal compulsion could be construed as a species of those physical and emotional crises which often provoke reflection and conversion. The pastoral severity of the Restoration church was a re-­enactment of God’s jolting of Paul on the road to Damascus. Locke’s general case, that there is a category mistake in mixing talk of compulsion with talk of mental conviction, is not unassailable.95 Arguably he was more happily employed in the prosaic business of puncturing the divines’ 93 Proast,

Argument, pp. 171–9, 20–1, 27; idem, Third Letter, pp. 7–9, 76. Locke was not the kind of individualist Proast took him to be. There are similar disputes about J. S. Mill’s stance in On Liberty (1859). 94 Proast, Third Letter, pp. 16–17. 95 For Proast’s strength and Locke’s weakness on this point, see Waldron, ‘Locke: Toleration’, pp. 83–4. Proast’s case was recapitulated in 1873 by James Fitzjames Stephen in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, ed. R. J. White (Cambridge, 1967). Stephen, hostile to the spread of Victorian Dissent and liberalism, argued that persuasion and force ‘are neither opposed to nor really altogether distinct from each other’ and that there are cases ‘in which a degree of

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fond notion that the enforcement of the Restoration penal laws was a pastoral and catechetic activity. Legislation cannot be framed ‘to make men consider’, only to punish for non-performance of an outward action. Nonconformity is the crime, not ‘non-consideration’. ‘When any Dissenter conforms, and enters into the church communion’, Locke demanded to know, ‘is he ever examined to see whether he does it upon reason, and conviction?’ Which of our magistrates is well studied in the theology of priestly ordination, the propriety of kneeling at the sacrament, the evidence for episcopacy in the Epistle to Titus? And what of the evil practice of using greedy informers to catch Dissenters? Has not the ‘watchful charity’ of some ‘found out ways to encourage informers’? What actually are the motives of magistrates in punishing Dissenters? Locke reminded his readers of the pertinent fact, remembered with bitterness by the Dissenters, that the Act of Uniformity was put into force so rapidly in the summer of 1662 that many ministers did not have time to study the revised Prayer Book which they were required to swear to uphold. Was that the action of legislators who would have people ‘deliberately to consider’?96 And, finally, is it plausible to suppose that those most in need of thoughtful reflection are the people punished and suffering for their convictions, rather than the ‘ignorant, loose, unthinking conformists’, who have every motive of ease, preferment, and reputation to stick complacently with the church established by law? The Dissenters, standing perilously outside the church, are more likely to be the ones who have taken a thoughtful and considered stand. Locke here opened wide the gap between Anglican pastoral sentiment and actual penal practice. It might be taken for a commentary on that scene at Oswestry in 1682, when several hours of theological disputation were capped by the sulphurous ire of the Tory magistrate. What Proast daintily calls legal ‘discouragements’ to Dissent are in reality vindictive weapons by which ‘men have lost their estates, and lives too, in noisome prisons’.97 If Locke thereby exposed the vacuity of Restoration pieties, he did at least know that he was confronting in Proast a sustained attempt at pastoral theology, and one which carried the impress of St Augustine. He also recognized it to be deeply clericalist, with its vision of the priest at the prince’s elbow ‘to assure him which is the true religion, for which he ought to use force’.98 When Locke attacked the defenders of intolerance, over a quarter-century span, he knew that he was not always facing an identical theoretical target. In 1670 he found in Parker’s Ecclesiastical Politie downright Hobbism,99 but in 1690 he never accused coercion, affecting, though not directly applied to, thought … may attain desirable ends’ (pp. 87, 128–9). 96 Locke, Second Letter, pp. 73, 99, 124, 132; idem, Third Letter, pp. 186, 199, 243–50, 294, 374, 339–40, 383, 387–91, 517. 97 Locke, Second Letter, p. 94; idem, Third Letter, pp. 286–9, 373–4, 391–5. 98 Locke, Third Letter, p. 425. 99 ‘How far is this short of Mr Hobbes’s doctrine?’: John Locke, Political Essays, ed. M. Goldie (Cambridge, 1997), p. 214.

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Proast of Hobbism. In the heyday of Charles II’s Anglican polity, between 1675 and 1685, and in Proast’s post-Revolution recollection of it, it was not Erastian but Augustinian and scholastic arguments which chiefly sustained the defence of intolerance.100

100 This

chapter has presumed a sharp disjunction between the Restoration theory of intolerance and the position of modern liberalism. But it is possible to argue, as some post-secularists do, that liberalism’s stance is not tolerant, for the marginalization of religion (forcing it out of the public realm) is intrinsic to it, and that liberalism has its own nostrums it is eager to impose. J. C. D. Clark cites the present essay when he remarks: ‘historians have become increasingly aware of the principled reasons for seeking to impose religious uniformity in past societies, reasons closely related to the reasons given for the imposition of secular values in present-day societies’: ‘Secularization and Modernization: The Failure of a “Grand Narrative”’, HJ 55 (2012), 161–94, at 177.

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3 The Reception of Thomas Hobbes Thomas Hobbes is the most original and inflammatory Englishman ever to have written on political theory. His Leviathan (1651) was a spectre that haunted Restoration England. Quickly, the terms ‘Hobbist’, ‘Hobbian’, and ‘Hobbism’ entered the language.1 In many controversies – philosophical, political, theological, ethical, and scientific – it was incumbent upon authors to take a stand vis-à-vis Hobbes. That stand was most often hostile, for Hobbes was reviled as atheistic, immoral, and a friend of arbitrary power. Yet there is a deep paradox about the reception of Hobbes. He was a defender of absolute monarchy, yet many of his most stentorian critics were themselves Anglican Royalists. Indeed, for these intellectuals, to write against Hobbes came to be, alongside attacking popery and Puritanism, a badge of polemical prowess and public virtue, even a rite of passage towards preferment. For them, Hobbes

A version of this chapter appeared as ‘The Reception of Hobbes’ in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns and M. Goldie (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 589–615. I am indebted to Cambridge University Press for permission to reproduce material. The English reception of Hobbes is treated in J. Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England, 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 2007). Also: S. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan (Cambridge, 1962); S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton, NJ, 1985); Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics (3 vols, Cambridge, 2002), III, chs 9–12; P. Springborg, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (Cambridge, 2007), pt 5; C. Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton, NJ, 2012), ch. 5; J. Parkin, ‘Hobbes and the Reception of Leviathan’, Journal of the History of Ideas 76 (2015), 289–300; K. Sheppard, Anti-Atheism in Early Modern England, 1580–1720 (Leiden, 2015), ch. 5; E. Carmel, ‘The Whig Legacy of Thomas Hobbes’, Intellectual History Review 29 (2019), 243–64; N. Allsopp, Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution (Oxford, 2020); J. R. Collins, In the Shadow of Leviathan: John Locke and the Politics of Conscience (Cambridge, 2020). For Ireland: M. Ward, ‘Thinking with Hobbes: Political Thought in Ireland, 1660–1730’ (DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 2020). For Europe: N. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), ch. 14; T. Christov, Before Anarchy: Hobbes and his Critics in Modern International Thought (Cambridge, 2015). For France: R. Douglass, Rousseau and Hobbes (Oxford, 2015). For Germany: H. Dreitzel, ‘The Reception of Hobbes in the Political Philosophy of the German Enlightenment’, History of European Ideas 29 (2003), 255–89. 1

Speedier than indicated by the Oxford English Dictionary. Early English Books Online gives the first instances, respectively, in 1655, 1657, and 1679.

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built, as to civil government, the desired house, but upon disastrously mistaken metaphysical foundations. As to ecclesiastical government, he hatefully undermined churchmen and enslaved the church to the state. Consequently, the Anglican Royalist regime was unfavourable to Hobbes, who lived until 1679. His books were banned, and notoriously, as John Aubrey reports, ‘the bishops made a motion, to have the good old gentleman burned for a heretic’.2 Yet his person was protected by the king, and during the interval of the Cabal regime between 1667 and 1673 his authority served the ministry, albeit circumspectly. Those who found Hobbes’s arguments persuasive had to express themselves indirectly or clandestinely. Consequently, documenting his positive reception presents a forensic puzzle. To the paradox and the puzzle must be added a hermeneutic morass: what Hobbes meant, or at least whom and what he intended to support, became (and remains) profoundly contested. Hobbes was appropriated by, and deprecated as the patron of, contradictory causes. Hobbes’s reception was European-wide. The focus of the present chapter is upon England, although it is appropriate to begin with Gottfried Leibniz, whose short essay ‘Meditation on the Common Concept of Justice’ (c. 1702) is worth reading not only for its commentary on Hobbes but also as a brilliant epitome of central dilemmas in the history of political thought from Plato onwards.3 The polemic against Hobbes: the theological premises

The German philosopher Leibniz, the most persistent and percipient of Hobbes’s continental critics, believed that the crux of the quarrel between them lay in Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma. Socrates wanted to know of Euthyphro whether a thing was ‘just’ (or ‘good’ or ‘true’) by virtue of God having willed it, or whether God willed it because it was of itself just.4 If the former, then justice is arbitrary, having no essential nature; it subsists contingently, by divine fiat, and can be humanly known only as empirical knowledge of the facts of God’s utterances. This is called the voluntarist, or nominalist, doctrine. But if the latter answer is correct (and Socrates thought it was), then justice does have an essence distinct from its being willed, and it can be intuited by rational agents. This answer is known as the essentialist, or realist, or intellectualist, doctrine. In the biblical terms of seventeenth-century debate this dilemma was expressed as the choice between the awesome, peremptory God of Abraham and Isaac, or of Job, and, by contrast, the philosophical, rational God of the Johannine 2

John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A. Clarke (2 vols, Oxford, 1898), I, 339. P. Riley (ed.), The Political Writings of Leibniz (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 45–64; Leibniz, Philosophical Papers, ed. L. E. Loemker (2nd edn, Dordrecht, 1969), pp. 561–73. 4 Plato, Euthyphro, 9e-10e; Leibniz, Political Writings, p. 45. Plato in fact discusses ‘holiness’, but this gloss on Euthyphro was standard. See Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 146–9. 3

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Logos.5 Because God told Abraham to kill Isaac it seemed that killing one’s son was not an immutable evil, but only evil until God commanded otherwise: justice is contingent upon God’s command. Yet if, on the other hand, God is the supreme light of reason – and God’s angel did stay Abraham’s hand – then he will act only in accordance with self-consistent rules embodied in the natural order. While the former view guarantees God’s omnipotent will, it does so at the cost of his reasonableness. The latter view, conversely, establishes divine wisdom, but at the risk of reducing God to a metaphor for Reason and Nature. This is the cardinal dilemma in the theology of God’s government of the world. And because its terms are immediately translatable into the temporal jurisprudence of the sovereign’s government of the state, and into the moral government of individuals over themselves, it is fundamental in political and ethical theory too. Is justice constituted by the will of the sovereign (or the self) in vacuo, or does justice flow from, and participate in, the essential nature of things? Plato, Aristotle, and the medieval scholastics of the school of Aquinas were essentialists, and Leibniz agreed with them. He was emphatic about this when engaged in refuting Hobbes’s overwhelming insistence upon the voluntarist answer.6 Hobbes’s predication of justice, goodness, and truth upon will and power alone was, Leibniz thought, fraught with appalling consequences for human conduct. In the second half of the seventeenth century many English and continental philosophers challenged Hobbes on the same ground. To study the reception of Hobbes is to discover, among his enemies, a powerful continuation of scholastic Aristotelian styles of philosophy, and, among his allies, an urgent campaign to dethrone scholasticism.7 Archbishop John Bramhall was the most penetrating of Hobbes’s English critics and his quarrel with Hobbes, privately in the 1640s and publicly in the 1650s, laid out all the main points in contention.8 The controversy, vigorous and vivid through several decades, 5

Genesis 22; John 1. This approach is indebted to N. Malcolm, ‘Thomas Hobbes and Voluntarist Theology’ (PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 1983). For a similar emphasis on voluntarism, see P. Riley, Will and Political Legitimacy (Boston, MA, 2013). For a parallel discussion, see S. Burton, ‘Samuel Rutherford’s Euthyphro Dilemma’, in Reformed Orthodoxy in Scotland, ed. A. C. Denlinger (2015). 7 It has been suggested that the argument presented here overstates the continuing influence of scholasticism: M. Feingold, ‘The Mathematical Sciences and New Philosophies’, in The History of the University of Oxford, IV, ed. N. Tyacke (Oxford, 1997), pp. 359–448. Conversely, recent scholarship has stressed the resilience of neo-scholasticism: see M. W. F. Stone, ‘Scholastic Schools and Early Modern Philosophy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, ed. D. Rutherford (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 299–327; M. Edwards, ‘Aristotelianism, Descartes, and Hobbes’, HJ 50 (2007), 449–64. 8 The appearance of Hobbes’s Liberty and Necessity (1654) provoked in turn: John Bramhall, A Defence of True Liberty from Antecedent and Intrinsicall Necessity (1655); Hobbes, Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (1656); Bramhall, Castigations of Mr Hobbes and The Catching of Leviathan (1658). See N. D. Jackson, Hobbes, Bramhall, and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity (Cambridge, 2007). 6

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exhausted itself by the time Leibniz endorsed Bramhall’s position in his Theodicy (1710). The arguments are best epitomized and most accessible in Leibniz’s essay, Meditation on the Common Concept of Justice (c. 1702).9 Because the civil and ethical aspects of Hobbism – notions of sovereignty, morality, and ecclesiology – were taken to be derivations from the Euthyphro Dilemma, much of the debate was metaphysical and theological in character. This pervasiveness of philosophical theology is not properly recognized in modern histories of political thought written from a secular standpoint. But this familiarity, with its easy transitions between talk about God’s nature and talk about political society, was taken for granted even in the demotic ‘Dialogues’ and ‘Characters’ designed for the coffee-houses of Restoration England. Accordingly, we shall need at each step to take account of the metaphysical crux which Leibniz posed. The source material here is primarily English, but the responses of such writers as Samuel Pufendorf, Baruch Spinoza, Pierre Bayle, and especially Leibniz will also be noted. Concerning God’s attributes, there was no difficulty in identifying Hobbes’s unequivocal position. God was sovereign power. Leibniz complained that Hobbes (like Spinoza) held that in respect of God, truth, goodness, and justice were fictions, conjured by his omnipotent will. The outcome was that creation was emptied of its moral economy: goodness was a superaddition of God’s categories upon the amoral chaos of nature. For Hobbes, truth and worth were not instantiated in natural substances but were ‘arbitrary because they depend on nominal definitions’.10 God’s utterances bind only because grounded in God’s power. Hobbes ‘maintains that all that which God does is just, because there is none above him with power to punish and constrain him’. And he who has power of defining may redefine without rhyme or reason. Hobbes’s God is sovereign, but is also a tyrant.11 The future archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Tenison similarly objected that, for Hobbes, ‘there is no rule God may not most justly break, because he is almighty’, since ‘power irresistible justifieth all actions’. John Eachard, master of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, asserted that Hobbes ‘had turned all the attributes of God … into power, making divine goodness, divine mercy, and divine justice to be nothing but power’.12 The critics’ own position concerning God’s attributes was, however, more equivocal. They were anti-voluntarists, but as Christians they could not allow God to be merely a metaphor for reason, nor permit that goodness subsisted regardless of his volition. Hence they wished to say that uniquely in God a perfect knowledge of the good is harmoniously and inseparably united with his sovereign power. Leibniz constantly asserted that God has knowledge and 9 Leibniz,

Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil, ed. A. Farrar (1952). 10 Leibniz, Political Writings, pp. 45ff. 11 Leibniz, Theodicy, p. 394. 12 Thomas Tenison, The Creed of Mr Hobbes Examined (1670), p. 144; John Eachard, Mr Hobbes’s State of Nature Considered (1672), p. 79.

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understanding as well as power and will. God discovers the good in his intellectual nature, wills what he knows to be good, and by his power transforms right into fact. God’s nature ‘is based not only on the sovereign power but also on the sovereign wisdom which he possesses’. His omnipotence gives existence to what ought to be, and the ‘ought to be’ of goodness and justice ‘have grounds independent of will and force’.13 Richard Baxter, the eminent Puritan divine, likewise insisted that God has ‘sapiential excellencies’ as well as ‘potencies’. He rules in virtue of his creative and causal power, but also morally, as a rational agent governing a community of angelic and human rational agents. God is both dominus and rector.14 The critics’ formula was, in a nutshell, that Justice equals Will plus Understanding. The relationship between Will and Understanding is at the heart of the Hobbes debate. Hobbes’s failure lay in his suppression of the latter half of the equation. Bramhall argued that ‘as the will of God is immutable, always willing what is just and right and good, so his justice likewise is immutable’. It is true that ‘nothing is impossible to God’s absolute power’, but since his power ‘is disposed by his will’, of which good is the object, ‘he cannot change his own decrees, nor go from his promise’. Tenison protested against Hobbes that ‘by the absolute sovereignty of God, you affront his other attributes’, for it was a deep mistake to say that God’s ‘arbitrary government and … imperious will’ allows him to change his rules. Justice is a perfection eternally present in God’s mind, so that justice is ‘inseparable from the First Cause’. Leibniz, echoing Bramhall, asserted that God did not in fact will that Abraham kill Isaac, for God could not will an intrinsically wrong act.15 This redressing of Hobbes’s unbalanced theology was also undertaken by his ostensible followers. Pufendorf, whom Leibniz contemptuously regarded as Hobbes’s poodle, devoted considerable energy, in his massive De jure naturae et gentium (1672), to the need to give a ‘favourable interpretation’ to the master’s overstatements, often softening the starkness of Leviathan by citations from the more circumspect De Cive (1642). God’s right of command ‘should in no way be derived only from his bare omnipotence’ for ‘it does not seem consonant with God’s goodness’. In De Cive, Hobbes had properly said that honour to God is an opinion of power ‘joined with goodness’.16 Another theorist who broadly followed Hobbes’s jurisprudence was Richard Cumberland. In his De 13

P. Riley, ‘An Unpublished MS of Leibniz on the Allegiance due to Sovereign Powers’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 11 (1973), 319–36, at 34; Leibniz, Political Writings, pp. 46, 50. 14 Richard Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth (1659), pp. 17–18, 36. Abridged modern edition: ed. W. Lamont (Cambridge, 1994). See also George Lawson, An Examination of the Political Part of Mr Hobbes his Leviathan (1657), pp. 150–1; W. Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millennium (1979), pp. 136–41. 15 Bramhall, Defence of True Liberty, p. 85; idem, Castigations, p. 154; Tenison, Creed of Mr Hobbes, pp. 144–5; Leibniz, Theodicy, pp. 401–2. 16 Samuel Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium (2 vols, Oxford, 1934), 97, 158–9, 1245–6.

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legibus naturae (1672), he made a similar crucial adjustment, saying that Hobbes was mistaken in ‘resolving the divine dominion into his irresistible power’, for there is no licit dominion without right annexed.17 A further example is Samuel Parker, in his manifesto of ‘Modern’ against ‘Ancient’ philosophy, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophy (1666). In part II he considered ‘the nature and extent of the divine dominion’. God’s dominion is in accordance with right reason, and is hence ‘the lawful use of power’, so that God will only do those things ‘that will comply with the reputation of his other attributes’. Despite this, however, Parker praised De Cive and followed Hobbes in placing greatest weight on divine dominion, for he thought it a Platonic, essentialist mistake to make ‘all the effects of God’s power be the natural emanations of his goodness’, whereas ‘the notion of him in scripture never refers to his essence, but always to his power and empire’.18 Because of this, Parker was regularly denounced for Hobbism. For Hobbes’s enemies, human beings are rational subjects of God’s universe and not merely craven slaves of divine will. An important context of this claim was the furious debate concerning the means of salvation, the quarrel between the strict Calvinist doctrine of predestination, and the Arminian reassertion of the Thomist and Catholic notion of human co-operation in salvation. Voluntarist philosophy was instinctively associated with the view that people are saved or damned by God’s arbitrary election, and Hobbes was repeatedly linked with Luther, Calvin, and with their medieval nominalist-voluntarist predecessors, particularly William of Ockham. This association is conspicuous in Baxter (among the moderate Presbyterians), in Thomas Pierce (among the high Anglicans), and in Ralph Cudworth (among the Cambridge Platonists).19 Leibniz echoed them, saying that ‘Ockham himself was not more nominalistic than is Thomas Hobbes’, and that an intellectual descent lay in ‘Bradwardine, Wyclif, Hobbes, and Spinoza’.20 It is odd to find Hobbes cast as a Reformation theologian by those who were abandoning Reformation Calvinist orthodoxy, but what prompted them was an intense fear of the antinomian consequences of Calvinism, coupled with the conviction that Hobbes offered (as we shall see) a kind of secular antinomianism. Hobbes, like strict Calvinists, emptied the world of its natural moral economy, and left humanity at the mercy of preponderant or anarchic wills. 17

Richard Cumberland, A Treatise of the Laws of Nature (1727), p. 319. Modern edition: ed. J. Parkin (Indianapolis, IN, 2005). 18 Samuel Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure (Oxford, 1966), pp. 2, 25–6. The second part is entitled ‘An Account of the Nature and Extent of the Divine Dominion and Goodness’. 19 Lamont, Baxter, pp. 136–45; Thomas Pierce, Autokatacrisis (1658); Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678); Tenison, Creed of Mr Hobbes, p. 144. See also Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, ed. S. Hutton (Cambridge, 1996). 20 Leibniz, Philosophical Papers, 128; Leibniz, Theodicy, pp. 159–60, 234, 395. Ockham and Bradwardine were pre-eminent medieval nominalists.

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Hobbes’s critics, albeit Protestants, were unabashed about conceding that the most satisfying modern synthesis of God’s intellect and will was that of the Jesuit neo-Thomist Suárez. Baxter, noting that ‘it is a great controversy whether it be the Reason or the Will … that informeth laws’, and that the chief contenders on each side were Aquinas and Ockham, judged that Suárez was right to say ‘that it is both’, for God is not God, nor is a person a person, nor is a law a law, without both ‘intellect and will’. Bramhall likewise wished that Hobbes was better versed in Suárez’s works ‘that he might not be so averse from the Schools’.21 But Suárez notwithstanding, it was difficult not to construe the debate in simpler terms, as a war between Hobbes and Aristotelianism. There is barely a chapter in Leviathan, and, it seems, hardly a coffee-house virtuoso, not engaged in guerrilla operations against the neo-Thomism which still formed the backbone of Protestant academic education, and which indeed was enhanced in defence of crown and church in the wake of the Puritan Revolution.22 Alexander Ross’s Leviathan Drawn out with a Hook (1653) is chiefly a paean to ‘the prince of philosophers’, Aristotle, whose ‘brightness doth so much dazzle his [Hobbes’s] weak light’. ‘Why should not divines thank … Aquinas and other Schoolmen’ for correctly holding that ‘we honour God not so much for his greatness … as for his goodness?’23 George Lawson, a Puritan friend of Baxter, complained that Hobbes ‘undervalues the Philosopher [Aristotle] so much, as far below him, though he was far above him’.24 The schoolmasterly Bramhall lectured Hobbes on the concepts of the ‘Schoolmen’ and ‘Doctors of the church’, defending them from ‘new-fangled speculations’ and from Hobbes’s ‘paroxysm … of inveighing against them’.25 The polemic against Hobbes might be summarized as the last gasp of scholastic Aristotelianism. Sovereignty and constitutionalism

We may now consider the ways in which the scholastic doctrine of the duality of God’s attributes was applied to civil jurisprudence. Civil sovereignty was said to have an identical form with divine sovereignty because human government was a microcosm of, and participated in, providential government. Thus legitimate sovereignty was said, like God’s rule, to be a fusion of will with wisdom and virtue. If the latter elements go missing, then sovereignty becomes tyranny, and rational citizenship gives way to the master–slave relationship. In Aristotle’s terms, despotical relations replace political ones. The crucial difference between 21 Baxter,

Holy Commonwealth, p. 323; Bramhall, Catching, p. 69. For Hobbes and Oxford, see Feingold, ‘Mathematical Sciences and New Philosophies’, pp. 413–19. 23 Alexander Ross, Leviathan Drawn out with a Hook (1653), pp. 16, 96–7. 24 Lawson, Examination, p. 93. See C. Condren, George Lawson’s Politica and the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 173–80. 25 Bramhall, Defence, pp. 156–7, 200; Bramhall, Castigations, p. 341. 22

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God’s rule and human regimes is the propensity of the latter to exercise power in the absence of, or through faulty, right reason. The temporal sovereign, unlike God, has limited resources of virtue and wisdom, which is why Christian princes need education and counsel. This is where customs and constitutions, laws and parliaments, come in, for they supply the defect of the single human intellect.26 The institutions of temporal magistracy are therefore embodiments of both will and understanding, and they replicate in human affairs God’s own nature. Grasping this idea will resolve for us a puzzle about early modern political theory. It tends to be supposed that in examining seventeenth-century writers, they shall be found to be either constitutionalists or absolutists, depending upon whether binding institutional checks or rights of popular resistance are asserted or denied. It is clear that English Parliamentarians and Whigs took up constitutionalist theories. But there is disagreement about the position of Royalists and Tories, and it was they, not the Whigs, who wrote most of the critiques against the absolutist Hobbes. Where, then, do Hobbes’s critics stand in relation to Hobbes’s theory of absolute sovereignty? Once again there was no ambiguity about Hobbes’s own view. He aimed at monarchical absolutism by a strict doctrine of sovereign power. According to Lawson, his ‘intention is to make men believe, that the kings of England were absolute monarchs … the parliaments of England merely nothing but shadows’. Lawson thought Leviathan was addressed to a precise contemporary issue. Hobbes’s insistence (in chapter 20) upon the nullity of any grant of powers to subjects by the sovereign such as would incapacitate his sovereignty, was, Lawson believed, a repudiation of the proposed Isle of Wight treaty of 1648 by which Charles I almost came to terms with the victorious parliament.27 The treaty was overtaken by the army coup and the king’s execution, but thereafter parliamentary Presbyterianism, and the Whiggism of 1688, were projects for the fulfilment of 1648. Many talked of an ‘Isle of Wight’ regime as a ‘mixed monarchy’, because it was a monarchy balanced with elements of aristocracy and democracy, a concept for which Hobbes had unmixed contempt. There is doubt about where most Royalists stood. One study of Hobbes’s critics, most of whom were Royalist divines or lawyers, takes them to be committed to common law, custom, and the representative institutions which restrained monarchical fiat, a conservative constitutionalism which differed from that of the Parliamentarians only in degree.28 It has often been said that when Edward Hyde (later earl of Clarendon) persuaded Charles I to issue the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions in 1642 (which Hobbes also denounced), Royalism was set on the path of moderation. In another version of this view, it has been argued that Sir Robert Filmer, the most prominent Royalist theorist 26

On counsel, see above p. 32, n. 71. Examination, pp. 37, 73–5. For the immediate context of the composition of Leviathan see N. Malcolm, Introduction, in Hobbes, Leviathan. 28 J. Bowle, Hobbes and his Critics (1951). 27 Lawson,

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and Locke’s adversary in the Two Treatises, was close to Hobbes in adopting a strict legal positivism, and was correspondingly distant from his Royalist contemporaries, who remained wedded to the customary diffusion of powers in the ancient constitution.29 These arguments place Hobbes and Filmer in sharp contradistinction from the majority of Royalists, whose moderate constitutionalism emerges in their hostility to Hobbesian absolutism. Yet it has also been argued that, on the contrary, most Royalists agreed with Hobbes about the king’s sole sovereignty, perhaps blenching only at his impatient boldness of formulation. This is the more plausible view, although one which will need qualification. The Royalists all grasp the indefeasible and illimitable nature of sovereignty and locate it firmly in crown not parliament. They rehearse the standard corollaries. There can be no appellate jurisdiction above the king, for, if there were, then that jurisdiction, and not the king’s, would be sovereign (as was said to be the case in the merely nominal kingdoms of Poland and ancient Sparta). Common law, they said, was not properly law, and parliaments did not exist by right, except insofar as they are deemed laws and rights by the king’s will and concession. England is a pure monarchy, without admixture of aristocracy or democracy, and the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions was mistaken in saying otherwise. They constantly recite the Roman law dictum that princeps is legibus solutus – the prince is not bound by the law – and by implication stands above the law. All these points coincide with Hobbes’s teaching in Leviathan, Behemoth, and the Dialogue of the Common Laws. The Royalists usually acknowledge a debt to Bodin and his epigoni Henning Arnisaeus and Christian Besold, but occasionally they cite Hobbes too. Filmer, who published the first sustained commentary on Leviathan, wrote that ‘with no small content I read Mr Hobbes’s book De Cive, and his Leviathan, about the rights of sovereignty, which no man, that I know, hath so amply and judiciously handled’. Tenison likewise conceded that ‘in some things you are just to the prerogative of kings’. Moreover, Royalist commonplaces about royal absolutism quickly came to be called Hobbesian by their critics. In 1661 Henry Oldenburg reported ‘the asserting of Hobbes’s principles in parliament’: he was referring to a speech by the Speaker of the House of Commons in praise of the king’s sovereignty and in denigration of aristocracy and democracy. In 1680 the Whig lawyer William Petyt wrote of ‘our new politicians the Hobbists, who place all the virtue of the French government in its absoluteness’.30 A thoroughgoing absolutism is certainly to be found in Restoration England, which did not quarrel with Hobbes’s concept of sovereignty. Yet Royalist treatises are admittedly initially confusing. They criticize Parliamentarians and Whigs, as did Hobbes, for the conceptual muddles and 29

J. Daly, Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought (Toronto, 1979). See ch. 13 below. Filmer, Observations Concerning the Originall of Government (1652), in idem, Patriarcha, ed. J. P. Sommerville (Cambridge, 1991), p. 184; A. R. Hall and M. B. Boas (eds), The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg (13 vols, Madison, WI, 1965–86), I, 410; William Petyt, Britannia Languens (1680), p. 245. 30 Robert

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desperate dangers of ‘mixed’ or ‘balanced’ polities, and they condemn rights of resistance, but they also fulsomely defend customary rights and the necessity of parliament, condemn arbitrary rule, and stress the obligation of subjects in some cases to disobey kings. Roger Coke’s Justice Vindicated (1660) is a case in point. On the one hand, ‘the common law and statute law of this realm were nothing but the declared will of the king’; a monarch is ‘not obliged by his own laws’, and it is folly to say any law can oblige the maker of it, ‘unless a man will grant that an effect may be prime and superior to the cause’. On the other hand, laws must certainly be made in parliament, and the king must abide by ‘custom and usage’, and by those things ‘which have been so time out of mind’. Moreover, ‘princes ought not to be obeyed, when they command in derogation of God’s majesty’.31 The resolution of this paradox lies in understanding the Suárezian union of will and intellect. We shall not find, in any but an arrant voluntarist, an unqualified defence of arbitrary fiat, but neither do we find an extreme Thomist view that laws can subsist in the absence of agents to promulgate them and apply coercive sanctions. Hobbes’s Royalist critics were clear that a precept, when given by a subject, or by custom, was not a law properly so-called, for there is no law without proper signification by sovereign power and without the sword. These are attributes annexed only to sovereignty – and to expatiate on them is to sound Hobbesian. But, correlatively, there is more to law and politics than swords and significations, for there is also virtue and right reason, and counsel – and this is the Aristotelian reproof to Hobbes. Hobbes’s enemies held that sovereignty is not to be construed as mere will, for, like any adequate rational agent, and like God, sovereigns do not exercise volition in vacuo. The sovereign’s will does not simply equate with, or occupy the same space as, justice, for, in legislating he deliberates among many possible goods and means, and gives legal force to some of them. He will do this with a greater or lesser degree of moral success, depending upon the quality of his education as a virtuous prince, and the quality of his consultation with the community’s resources of moral wisdom, his council, parliament, and church. To uphold such institutions was no detriment to the juristic quality of sovereign will nor to the puissance of the sword, but to negate them transforms a landscape of common moral striving into a tyrannical, Hobbesian moral wilderness. There are no legitimate coercive limitations upon a monarch, who is legislatively omnipotent, but there are moral restraints. A virtuous prince will freely choose to constrain his actions within the boundaries of the good, and through channels of rational public deliberation. His sovereignty is not impaired by the plenitude of these concessions, indeed, as a person he becomes freer the more he acts for the common good, and the less in accordance with private passion. Such virtuous practices were held to be so habitual and ingrained in English constitutional procedures that when Royalists descanted upon them they sounded like ‘constitutionalists’. In a sense they were so: England, they 31

Roger Coke, Justice Vindicated (1660), pp. 45, 50, 61, 104, 111–12.

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said, is an absolute and limited regime, but it is not a ‘mixed’ or ‘balanced’ one, for it is counsel and virtue, not mechanical force, or balance of power, which constrains kings. Royalist theologians applauded Charles II’s divine sovereignty, and yet they deplored Hobbism; they believed that while no earthly power should compel a king, nonetheless they were the keepers of the king’s conscience, and if the king did not listen to them he would soon be a tyrant. The same cardinal point about the compatibility of estates (parliaments) and counsel with absolute kingship was put with particular felicity by Pufendorf. ‘Sovereignty does not cease to be absolute by the establishment of … a senate’, for ‘the nature of absolute sovereignty is not that a king may do whatever he pleases … but that he has the final decision on his own judgement in matters which concern the commonwealth’. Therefore ‘although the advice given a king by such a senate does not obligate him of itself … it nevertheless furnishes the occasion for an obligation, insofar as it calls to his attention the manner in which he can fulfil his duty’.32 When, therefore, English absolutists cited, as they frequently did, the authority of Bracton and Fortescue, often regarded as the canonical medieval ‘constitutionalists’, they were neither muddled nor disingenuous, for they were right to see that the Bractonian sense of the king’s limitations lay in Aristotelian moral philosophy, rather than in political mechanics.33 Theirs was a theory of counsel, not of checks and balances. Hobbes, absolutist though he was, had in common with the Parliamentarian and Whig advocates of ‘checks and balances’ a mechanistic view of the political process. Hobbes accordingly received many lectures out of Aristotle’s Ethics. The critics constantly moved between discussion of God’s attributes, human moral action, and the English constitution, often borrowing vocabulary from one sphere into another, since ‘all created rectitude is but a participation of divine rectitude’.34 Indeed, what is called the theory of the ‘divine right of kings’ often turns out to be a meditation upon the congruence between modes of moral action in all rational agents, divine and human, personal and magisterial. An example is William Falkner’s Christian Loyalty (1679), an able defence of Charles II’s absolutism, yet anxious to dissociate itself from Hobbism, and keen to uphold the church’s independent authority as counsel to the king. Falkner argued that ‘it is neither necessary, nor most suitable to supremacy of government, that the rules by which the governor proceedeth, should be altogether at his own will and pleasure’, for after all, ‘it is no abatement of the high sovereignty of the glorious God over the world, that all his government and executing judgement, is ordered according to the natural and eternal rules and measures of goodness and justice, and not by any such arbitrary will, which excludeth all respect thereto’.35 Bramhall explained more 32 Pufendorf,

De jure, 1075. C. Nederman, ‘Bracton on Kingship Revisited’, History of Political Thought 5 (1984), 61–77. 34 Bramhall, Defence, p. 85. 35 William Falkner, Christian Loyalty (1679), pp. 10–11. 33

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fully. ‘The will which affecting some particular good, doth engage and command the understanding to consult and deliberate what means are convenient for attaining that end.’ The ‘will is the lady and mistress of human actions, the understanding is her trusty counsellor, which gives no advice, but when it is required by the will’. In the public realm, the king embodies will, the counsellors or parliament embody understanding. ‘The greatest propugners of sovereign power think it enough for princes to challenge [i.e. claim] an immunity from coercive power, but acknowledge that the law hath a directive power over them.’ Hobbes was, he continued, correct to say that sovereignty cannot be mixed or overruled, yet he failed to stress that it should be ‘tempered and moderated’. Hobbes thinks that ‘whatever they do by power, they do justly’, and he thereby overthrows all deliberation, counsel, advice, praise, and blame. We have duties not only to act with competency of will and signification, but also to know good ends as objects of the will: there are epistemic duties as well as practical ones. ‘He who hath an erroneous conscience is doubly obliged: first to reform it, and then to follow it.’ Hobbes, by contrast, enslaves the people to the king, and the king to his passions. ‘The dominion of reason, or of a reasonable man, over his sensitive appetite, is not despotical, like the government of a master over his slave, but political, like that of a magistrate over the people.’36 Without the appropriate ethics, Bramhall concluded, Aristotle’s crucial distinction between political and despotical rule becomes meaningless, and Hobbes was repeatedly accused of seeing no difference between monarchy and tyranny or slavery. In Justice Vindicated, Coke provided a manifesto for the restored monarchy predicated upon a refutation of Hobbes’s ‘monstrous and blasphemous’ denial of right reason as a necessary attribute of divine and human sovereignty. Justice, he explained, is not only effective command, but also ‘upright doing’, which, said Cicero, is ‘a habit of mind’ in the virtuous. So it is utterly wrong to say that ‘kings might make their will the rule of their actions’, for ‘there is nothing more to be wished in the world, than that the will of them which command, might be moderated and restrained by reason’. Princes are deserving of blame when they act not for the public good but ‘either by passion, or to pleasure factious men’. As for the compatibility of parliaments with absolute monarchy, the case was simple. ‘It is as clear as the sun at noonday, that a king of England, by the ancient usages of this nation, is as free and absolute in the session of parliament, as out. And the act of a king in parliament, is the free and voluntary act of an absolute monarch.’ This was no different from individual human agency, since ‘my will, being a faculty of my soul … takes information from my understanding or reason’, as ‘counsel is to law’.37 If this duality of will and understanding had its primary application in the concept of law, it had another use in the vexed question of the legitimacy of sovereigns who acquired their power in successful revolutions. Scholars have 36 Bramhall, 37 Coke,

Defence, pp. 30–1, 82–3, 91; idem, Castigations, pp. 305, 309, 527–8. Justice Vindicated, pp. 49–50, 67, 116, 121–2.

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demonstrated the part Hobbes played in the Engagement Controversy in the 1650s in encouraging the view that plenary possession of the civil sword, and thereby of the power to protect subjects, was all that counted for legitimate sovereignty.38 The hereditary right of the House of Stuart played no part in this vision of legitimacy, and this appalled Royalists, while suiting pragmatic, ‘de facto’, defenders of the English Republic. For instance, Marchamont Nedham appended quotations from Hobbes to his Case of the Commonwealth (1650) in order to vindicate his claim ‘that the power of the sword gives title to government’.39 Hobbes’s Royalist critics repeatedly denounced him as a publicist for the ‘usurper’ Oliver Cromwell and pointed to Hobbes’s failure to understand that licit governors must hold authority de jure, by rational rules of legitimacy, and not only de facto, by mere power.40 Ironically, however, in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1688, a number of Hobbes’s erstwhile enemies found themselves dangerously close to his doctrine, that right is predicated on power, because they now wished to support this considerably more acceptable revolution. This is conspicuously the case of Leibniz himself (who had the reversionary interest of his Hanoverian masters to think of), and of the English writer upon whom Leibniz wrote a commentary, William Sherlock, who was the leading Tory defender of King William III’s new regime. Sherlock’s painful attempts to distance himself from Hobbes were unconvincing, then and now.41 This is not to say that Anglican Tory theorists were wholly false to themselves in now leaning towards the sword in revolutions of which they approved. For, as Baxter said, conquest may not create right but it does make the conqueror ‘materiam dispositam’ – capable of receiving right. Any government that lacks effective executive power cannot be sovereign, for it is ‘materia indisposita et incapax formae’.42 As every good Aristotelian knew, reality consists in both form and matter, and it was as dangerous to succumb to a fantasy of pure form (sentimental legitimism) as to the barbarism of mere matter in motion (the naked sword). The willingness of seventeenth-century theorists to accept the conquering sword was an outcome of their sense of the juristic necessity of will and power, in addition to reason and understanding in human affairs.

38 Skinner,

Visions of Politics, III, chs 9–10; K. Hoekstra, ‘The De Facto Turn in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy’, in Leviathan after 350 Years, ed. T. Sorell and L. Foisneau (Oxford, 2004), pp. 33–73. 39 Marchamont Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England, ed. P. Knachel (Charlottesville, VA, 1969), p. 129. 40 Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and Pernicious Errors to Church and State in Mr Hobbes’s Book, Entituled Leviathan (1676), pp. 44–5, 60–1, 189, 317–18; Tenison, Creed of Mr Hobbes, sig. A3v. 41 Riley, ‘Unpublished MS of Leibniz’; N. Jolley, ‘Leibniz on Hobbes, Locke’s Two Treatises, and Sherlock’s Case of Allegiance’, HJ 18 (1975), 21–35. 42 Baxter, Holy Commonwealth, pp. 134, 163. I.e. in Aristotelian terms, the form of legitimacy needs the matter of rule in which to be embodied.

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Most of Hobbes’s adversaries who sought to uphold the claims of right reason against voluntarism were Royalists and Tories, or conservative-minded Presbyterians. We have seen that moderate Presbyterians like Baxter and Lawson were in agreement on metaphysical fundamentals with diehard Cavaliers like Bramhall and Coke. It would, however, be misleading to suppose that the revolutionaries of the Civil War era were by contrast committed to a quite distinct new ‘empirical’ politics. The radical Puritans, the Levellers, Independents, and republicans, were, arguably, not harbingers of democracy or popular consent, in the modern sense of the aggregation of contingent wills, but equally were seekers after communal righteousness. The function of political deliberation was to discern wisdom as the proper precondition for action. According to the Leveller John Lilburne the point about Magna Carta and the Petition of Right was not that they were expressions of the people’s will, but that there were ‘divers things in them founded upon the principles of pure reason’. Hence, as another Leveller John Wildman put it, ‘reason and equity … [are] not prostrate at the feet of the parliament’s will’.43 The mere will of a parliament, whatever its representativeness, was an insufficient claim. The republican Algernon Sidney believed that tyranny in any human relationship was to be defined as dependence on the mere will of another: it is ‘letting will rule for reason’.44 All sides were committed to a classical definition of tyranny: it was any type of regime which failed to serve the public good. In the same way, ‘slavishness’ in an individual was a disposition to follow the blind passions rather than right reason. Despotism was not so much the absence of a constitution as the absence of virtue. Hence pure monarchies might be virtuous, and parliaments and democracies might be despotical. It would be difficult to overestimate the enormous degree of consensus that commonwealths should manifest an objectively rational human order, where ‘reason’ meant roughly what Plato and Aristotle took it to mean. Most seventeenth-century accounts of sovereignty were embedded in moral philosophy and revolved around the relationship between the intellect and the will. There were, of course, theorists who talked about constitutional balances or fulcra, or about the mechanics of power, or the calculus of ‘interests’, and ‘reason of state’. They reflect a philosophical revolution of which Hobbes was a part – but it was a slow revolution. To his critics, Hobbes was pre-eminently a philosopher of the will who overthrew right reason in human affairs. Since he conceived of reason simply as instrumental to the capricious will, he was thought, far from constructing a ‘rationalist’ politics, to have left ‘reason … dejected at the feet of

43

Quoted in M. Dzelzainis, ‘The Ideological Context of John Milton’s History of Britain’ (PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 1984), pp. 197–8. It has been suggested that at the Putney Debates Henry Ireton adopted a quasi-Hobbesian position against the Levellers, insisting on the primacy of contingent volition and the hopelessness of finding common agreement on the substance of ‘right reason’: R. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge, 1979), p. 156; I. Hampsher-Monk, ‘The Political Theory of the Levellers’, Political Studies 24 (1976), 397–422. 44 J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623–1677 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 35ff.

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affection [i.e. the passions]’.45 A commonwealth is a community ‘of reasonable men, not a Leviathan, which is an irrational brute’.46 In spite of the modern presumption that Hobbes produced a ‘rationalist’ politics, this Aristotelian standpoint never wholly fell from sight, and in many respects was to be revived by, among others, Hegel and the Idealist political tradition. Contract and the limits of obligation

Just as Hobbesian sovereignty was seen to be the exercise of contingent and arbitrary will, so too was the act of giving consent in the Hobbesian subject. Hobbes’s opponents understood consent not to be an expression of preference, but the occasion upon which the recalcitrant human will embraced God’s rational purposes – purposes which should be visible to any rightly educated understanding. Hobbes seemed to overthrow the notion of civil society as a natural community engaged in a collective seeking after virtue. He proposed instead a minimal state designed to protect private persons in the pursuit of whatever they took to be good for themselves. The critics were struck by those passages, particularly in De Cive, which seemed to limit the scope of the social contract to the subjects’ sense of what was necessary for ‘the common peace and safety’. Lawson pronounced that it was ‘false and dangerous’ to hold that ‘the sole or principal cause of the constitution of a civil state is the consent of men, or that it aims at no further end than peace and plenty’.47 Leibniz’s Common Concept of Justice reflects on Hobbes’s impoverishment of the aims of political society. Hobbes (who interestingly is here coupled with Filmer) considers the state only from the standpoint of ius strictum, the only precept of which is to keep the peace and to avoid causing harm to others. Both Hobbes and Filmer abandon ‘equity’, ‘piety’, and ‘honeste vivere’ as objects of the commonwealth, rejecting Aristotle’s ‘beautiful’ notion of the mutual striving after virtue.48 In this context, Hobbes’s preference for monarchy was separable from, and philosophically less important than, his insistence that sovereignty, wherever it lay, was simply the embodiment of private wills. It was, therefore, appropriate that his critics should reproach him for encouraging the dangers of democracy. Bramhall reminded him that a law might be unjust although it had the consent of all. He berated him for failing to understand the point of Plato’s account of the death of Socrates at the hands of the Athenian demos – Socrates was a just man, tyrannically but democratically put to death. Lawson commented that some societies proceed by majority vote, yet ‘the major part may err, because they are not infallible’, for ‘men’s votes are inferior to reason’ and it 45 Bramhall,

Defence, p. 182. Examination, p. 5. 47 Lawson, Examination, pp. 1–2. 48 Leibniz, Political Writings, p. 60. 46 Lawson,

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is possible that ‘the major part be a faction … not for public good so much as for private interest’.49 Hobbes’s doctrine at best impoverished the human community, but at worst was downright subversive of civil society. The subversive element was located in Hobbes’s claim in Leviathan that, since the paramount desire of individuals was to preserve their lives, subjects were not obligated to a sovereign who tried to kill them. This caveat seemed the profoundest flaw in an argument otherwise intended to shore up an almost limitless authority. It opened wide the possibility that private subjects might legitimately judge whether the sovereign took adequate care of their welfare. Pufendorf was worried by this theoretical leakiness, for it might lead to holding that nobody was bound to obey further than the point at which the ruler was perceived to be no longer securing peace, safety, or indeed welfare.50 Hobbesian rulership was hence upheld by nothing more secure that the fact that people habitually obeyed. For English Royalists, Hobbes not only thereby legitimized the usurper Cromwell, but also encouraged rebellion. In John Eachard’s dialogue, Philautus remarked that the subject had given up all his power to the sovereign; ‘but’, Timothy replied, ‘by your principles, he can call for it again, when he thinks it for his advantage’. Tenison said Hobbes’s books sowed ‘seeds of sedition’; Clarendon that he gave subjects a ‘wonderful latitude’. Filmer remarked that ‘in his pleading the cause of the people, he arms them with a very large commission of array; which is, a right of nature for every man, to war against every man when he please’. For Cumberland, Hobbes allowed any individual to act upon his opinion that the commonwealth was about to inflict harm upon him, a principle which will ‘excite subjects to rebellion’. The Hobbesian sovereign had feet of clay: ‘Hobbes, while he pretends with one hand to bestow gifts upon princes, does with the other treacherously strike a dagger to their hearts’. Princes and magistrates become victims of the anarchy of the private and arbitrary wills of the individuals who make up the precarious commonwealth.51 Because of the dangers inherent in contract theory almost all Royalists firmly rejected the notion that civil society is the product of individual wills and pacts. It is a concept ‘very absurd and insecure’ thought Tenison. Filmer, in the passage in which he praised Hobbes’s doctrine of sovereignty, went on to say, ‘I consent with him about the rights of exercising government, but I cannot agree to his means of acquiring it’. With Aristotle and Aquinas, the Royalists held that civil society and political authority were natural, not conventional or artificial. Since power does not derive from the people, it cannot revert to them; people do not make government, they find themselves under government; they are born unfree and unequal. The Royalists were patriarchalists in holding that monarchy 49 Bramhall,

Castigations, pp. 495–6; Lawson, Examination, pp. 26–7. De jure, p. 980. 51 Eachard, Some Opinions of Mr Hobbes Considered (1673), pp. 242–3; Tenison, Creed, p. 161; Hyde, Brief View, p. 100; Filmer, Patriarcha, p. 185; Cumberland, Treatise of the Laws of Nature, p. 377. 50 Pufendorf,

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is God’s natural ordinance; fatherhood is the paradigm of all authority; the family is the archetype of the state. They constantly cite book I of Aristotle’s Politics, and the book of Genesis. Roger Coke is typical: ‘from the evidence of all sacred and profane history, no time was ever recorded, in which men were not in subjection to one another’. The ‘highest philosopher’, Aristotle, gives testimony that ‘commanding and obeying is not human artifice or invention’ and that ‘there was never any man born, but was born in subjection’.52 Hobbes was taken to be impious because he denied the Adamic, familial, origins of human authority. His natural state of free and equal people must presuppose the separate appearance of myriad people, a scandalous notion given publicity by the publication in 1656 of Isaac de la Peyrère’s Men before Adam.53 The critics said Hobbes borrowed from the story of Cadmus’ teeth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or that his natural people were ‘mushroom men’ spontaneously generated, or that his source was Epicurus.54 Government was not a construct of contingent and random wills but sprang from the natural association of human beings bound together in the common pursuit of a virtuous and godly life. It is, however, the case that a few untypical Royalist writers did put aside patriarchalism and adopted Hobbes’s contractarian stance. The most conspicuous are Dudley Digges in The Unlawfulness of Subjects Taking up Arms (1643) and Matthew Wren in Monarchy Asserted (1659). Sovereignty, as Wren put it, arises from the ‘compact of every man to part with his private power’.55 Yet, unlike Hobbes, both are emphatic that the right of self-preservation is wholly renounced under the social pact: any continuance into civil society of private natural rights is implicitly subversive.56 If such writers, in the context of the Civil War and after, were anxious to foreclose leakages in the authoritarian deductions from contractarian premises, others were later no less keen to exploit the liberal implications of Hobbism, and deliberately placed boundaries on the scope of political authority. Spinoza’s only explicit emendation of Hobbes was on these lines. ‘The difference … between Hobbes and myself, consists in this, that I always preserve natural right intact, and only allot to the chief magistrates in every state a right over their subjects commensurate with the excess of their power over the power of the subjects.’ That sovereigns have only such powers as were granted them by their subjects is a point more clearly made in his Tractatus politicus (c. 1675): ‘the natural right of 52 Tenison,

Creed of Mr Hobbes, p. 131; Filmer, Patriarcha, p. 184; Coke, Justice Vindicated, pp. 1, 28. 53 R. Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (Leiden, 1987). 54 Pufendorf, De jure, p. 163; Tenison, Creed of Mr Hobbes, pp. 131–3; Hyde, Brief View, pp. 38–9; Eachard, Mr Hobbes’s State of Nature, pp. 76–80; Filmer, Patriarcha, p. 187; Bramhall, Castigations, p. 531. On mushroom men, see Christov, Before Anarchy, ch. 2. The trope was routine, e.g. Mary Astell, Moderation Truly Stated (1704), p. xxxv: ‘men sprung up like so many mushrooms’, ‘a figment of Hobbes’s brain’. 55 Matthew Wren, Monarchy Asserted (1659), p. 100. 56 Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, pp. 102–4.

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every man does not cease in the civil state. For man, alike in the natural and in the civil state, acts according to the laws of his own nature, and consults his own interest.’57 Similarly, Pufendorf seeks to liberalize Leviathan by way of familiar passages in De Cive, and concludes that when Hobbes seems to give sovereigns unlimited power, ‘we must bear in mind the intention or thought with which men made up their minds to establish states’.58 James Tyrrell, an early student of Pufendorf, covered similar ground, cleverly insinuating Hobbes into Whiggism by way of De Cive. Hobbes could be said to hold that ‘nobody is understood to have conferred more power by his will upon the monarch, than a reasonable man can judge necessary to that end’, namely ‘common peace and safety’.59 The liberal state, limited in its scope to the purposes specified by its creators, was discovered in Hobbes at an early stage. Ethical relativism and sceptical politics

In the Puritan Revolution, ‘right reason’ too readily had its outcome in parliamentary or military dictatorship, as surely as ‘right reason’ for Royalists indubitably meant Stuart absolutism. The fact that everyone agreed that civil society should embody rational principles, which all could in principle intuit, did not prevent manifold disagreements about their substantive content. This was the starting point of Hobbes’s scepticism. The light of universal reason shines in desperately variegated ways; so that it may as well be said that it shines not at all. There is no consensus about rational principles, and what is called the ‘law of nature’ often turns out to be custom, prejudice, or preference. Some said that this was only because of the weakness of the human intellect, but Hobbes took the radically sceptical standpoint that it was because justice had no universal essence, so that there could be no common intuition of it. One way out of the human chaos this might cause, was to hold, voluntaristically, that although there is no innate knowledge of the good, nonetheless God has given humanity moral rules pellucidly in scripture.60 In other words, it can be held that truth and rightness are nominal to God, because he makes them, and yet they are real and absolute for humans, because given in revelation. But for Hobbes not only was humanity not possessed of innate knowledge of the good, but was also not possessed of an infallible hermeneutic for knowing the meaning of scripture. God’s ways are unknowable and he has left us to our own moral and epistemic devices. Consequently, God’s arbitrariness is exactly mirrored in human arbitrariness. Both his and our volition operate in vacuo. 57

Baruch de Spinoza, Chief Works, ed. R. H. M. Elwes (2 vols, 1909), I, 302; II, 369. De jure, p. 1077. For his numerous adjustments of Hobbes, see pp. 25–6, 124, 158–9, 171–2, 383, 1138. His general drift is that some knowledge of the law of nature is after all possible, and therefore some justice precedes human covenants. 59 James Tyrrell, Patriarcha non Monarcha (1681), p. 257. 60 Lawson, Examination, pp. 159–63. 58 Pufendorf,

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Accordingly, the human sovereign, lacking firm divine guidance, must fabricate such laws of good and evil as shall seem necessary for social peace. The sovereign is the interpreter of the will of God, which must seem like saying that the will of God is what the sovereign says it is. Hobbes did, of course, talk of laws of nature, and of things which all humanity knew to be true about human nature. But his critics were struck by what seemed the minimal extent of these, and they were appalled by his extreme scepticism, his Pyrrhonism. Coke and Tenison likened his doctrine to the classical sceptical relativism of Carneades.61 They stressed Hobbes’s denial of innate moral knowledge, and the subjectivist ethics which followed. Eachard’s dialogues had a clever way of encapsulating Hobbism in the character of Philautus. Philautus remarks on the ‘perpetual lamps, that some philosophers speak of, which have got a trick of going out always when people go to see them’; and he complains that ‘metaphysical term-drivers do love to talk of intrinsical and essential right and wrong’, when none is apparent. There was no more common remark than Eachard’s that Hobbes allows the sovereign ‘to be the maker of good and evil’. Bramhall said that for Hobbes the names good and evil ‘signify nothing but at the pleasure of the sovereign prince’. Tyrrell remarked on Hobbes’s notion that there is ‘no other measure of good and evil, right or wrong but the prince’s will’. The coffee-house tract The Character of a Town Gallant (1675) held that Hobbes ‘denies there is any essential difference between good and evil’.62 This doctrine, it seemed, had become the fashionable talk of the town wits. These Hobbesians, the critics agreed, denied the scholastics’ constant contention that intuitions of the good are ‘writ in the hearts of men’, ‘imprinted’, ‘innate’, the ‘noble light of the soul’.63 The dangerous outcome of Hobbes’s ethical scepticism was seen to be downright libertinism. In Leviathan he pronounced that ‘where law ceaseth, sin ceaseth’.64 In the late 1660s an intensification of the attack on Hobbes was combined with moral outrage at the licentiousness of Charles II’s court, which also protected the ageing Hobbes from ecclesiastical wrath. The theologian Herbert Thorndike called for a renewal of ecclesiastical excommunication against the three great unpunished evils of the day, adultery, duelling, and Hobbes, for ‘the law of the land lays no hold’ on them.65 The divines pressed 61 Coke,

Justice Vindicated, sig. b4r; Tenison, Creed of Mr Hobbes, p. 162. See R. Tuck, ‘Grotius, Carneades, and Hobbes’, Grotiana 4 (1983), 43–62. 62 Eachard, Mr Hobbes’s State of Nature, pp. 110, 146; Bramhall, Castigations, pp. 571–2; Tyrrell, Patriarcha non Monarcha, p. 236; Anon., The Character of a Town Gallant (1675), p. 7. 63 E.g. Bramhall, Defence, p. 100; idem, Castigations, pp. 187, 201, 467. For Hobbes and the wits, see R. D. Lund, ‘The Bite of Leviathan: Hobbes and Philosophic Drollery’, English Literary History 65 (1998), 825–55; C. Condren, Hobbes, the Scriblerians, and the History of Philosophy (2012). 64 Hobbes, Leviathan, II, 454 (ch 27). 65 Herbert Thorndike, Theological Works (6 vols, Oxford, 1844–56), V, 463; cf. pp. 336, 374–5.

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their point home in the recantation which Daniel Scargill, a Cambridge scholar expelled for Hobbism and ‘great licentiousness’, was forced to make in 1669, Scargill in all likelihood being made to stand proxy for the king’s libertine court. The beliefs which he professed (the recantation was probably drafted for him by the university authorities) included ‘that all right of dominion is founded only in power’, and ‘that all moral righteousness is founded only in the law of the civil magistrate’. His notion that ‘God’s law is founded in power’ he now confessed was ‘inconsistent with the being of God, and destructive to human society’.66 The gamut of the Hobbes controversy was encapsulated in this recantation. We can see here, once more, a perception of the way in which politics and ethics were deduced from metaphysical and theological premises. A sense of these connections was enhanced by the considerable éclat of Hobbes’s brief tract, Liberty and Necessity (1655), part of the Bramhall debate, which arguably was more widely read than his major works. Unlike the big folio Leviathan, it was small enough to be carried about in a pocket. Pierce and Eachard gave it great attention.67 Samuel Pepys read it in bed, several years before acquiring a copy of Leviathan.68 Thomas Shadwell’s play The Libertine (1675) includes verbatim quotations from it. Leibniz debated it in his Theodicy, and the freethinker Anthony Collins used it in his Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1717). And with it Tenison could reduce Hobbes’s whole teaching to a few phrases: ‘God Almighty is incomprehensible’ and so ‘that which men make among themselves here by pacts and covenants’ they ‘call by the name of justice’.69 The Liberty and Necessity controversy also served to publicize a profound ontological dilemma that stalks the metaphysics of all the debates we have been examining. For Bramhall and Leibniz, God in his creativity must be said to choose freely among possibilities, for such choice is an activity of his intellectual and virtuous nature. By his power he turns prior right into created fact. Thus, essence precedes existence, and this world is the best of all possible worlds, for God chooses the best. But if so, the impieties seemingly entailed are that there are things which precede God’s creativity, and that his creativity is not exhaustive. To avoid this impiety Hobbes and Spinoza insist that existence exhausts essence; there are no non-existing essences, and this world is the only possible one. This doctrine in turn has its own blasphemy: that God does not have the good for 66

The Recantation of Daniel Scargill (Cambridge, 1669), pp. 1–2, 4. See J. Axtell, ‘The Mechanics of Opposition: Restoration Cambridge versus Daniel Scargill’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 38 (1964), 102–11; P. Milton, ‘Hobbes, Heresy, and Lord Arlington’, History of Political Thought 14 (1993), 501–46; J. Parkin, ‘Hobbism in the Later 1660s: Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker’, HJ 42 (1999), 85–108; M. Jenkinson, Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660–1685 (Woodbridge, 2010), ch. 3. For Restoration scepticism as a source of political absolutism, see S. Ellenzwieg, The Fringes of Belief (Stanford, CA, 2008), ch. 1. 67 Pierce, Autokatakrisis; Eachard, Some Opinions of Mr Hobbes. 68 Samuel Pepys, Diary, 20 November 1661. 69 Tenison, Creed of Mr Hobbes, pp. 27, 29.

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his object and purpose. Once again the metaphysical dilemma had a political metonym. For the Aristotelian, the temporal sovereign, in legislating, chooses between several alternative goods; he operates in a pre-existent moral landscape. But for Hobbes, the good is what the sovereign says it is: his legislative activity coincides with, and exhausts, the possibilities of justice. Beyond it there lies only an amoral chaos, for there cannot be said to be determinable essences of justice which have failed of existence.70 The anti-libertine critics of Charles II’s court believed that too many essences were failing of existence: if the good was what the sovereign willed, and the sovereign bedded Nell Gwyn, then it was difficult, on voluntarist grounds, to say that fornication and adultery were wicked. The libertine Restoration poets and dramatists seemed indeed to have drawn this conclusion. The position is captured by John Crowne in his play Calisto (1674), in which the Hobbesian Jupiter declares: ‘No Action is by Nature good or ill; All things derive their Natures from my will.’ He repeats the theme in Caligula (1698), in which the emperor attempts a seduction with the words, ‘Madam, ’tis treason to be chaste’ for ‘I’m the fountain whence all honour flows’.71 Given the degree to which, for the neo-scholastics, ethical rules and theological dogmas were seen to depend upon human intuitions of the divine essence, it is not surprising that in the next generation Locke’s attack on innatism in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) was seen by many to be continuous with Hobbes’s subversion of Christian certitude. The salient instance is Leibniz, who at many points in his New Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1703–5) took Locke to task for crypto-Hobbism, and presumed Locke’s epistemological project to have a similar political and theological bearing.72 Similarly Isaac Newton’s initial response to Locke’s Essay was to say that the denial of innate ideas ‘struck at the root of morality’, so that ‘I took you for a Hobbist’.73 The ‘Hottentot’ in Charles Leslie’s Finishing Stroke (1711), a book aimed against Whiggism, is a figure compounded of Hobbesian and Lockean anti-essentialism: the Hottentot, lacking in his state of nature the imposition of sovereign will, holds the maxim ‘quod libet, licet … we may justly do, whatever we have power to do’. Again, William Oldisworth’s Dialogue (1709) links Hobbes and Locke as exponents of the doctrine epitomized ironically as 70 Leibniz,

Philosophical Papers, 561ff. Culture and Politics, p. 118 and ch. 4; L. Teeter, ‘The Dramatic Use of Hobbes’s Political Ideas’, English Literary History 3 (1936), 140–69. Cf. Pufendorf’s citation of Seneca: ‘She is not unchaste who is summoned by the tyrant’: De jure, p. 1141; cf. pp. 1137–8. On Hobbes and the stage, see W. Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (Cambridge, 1995). For the allegation that Hobbism promoted libertinism, see N. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and Sexual Desire’, Hobbes Studies 28 (2015), 77–102. 72 N. Jolley, Leibniz and Locke (Oxford, 1984). 73 John Locke, Correspondence, ed. E. S. De Beer (8 vols, Oxford, 1976–89), no. 1659. Locke’s debt to Hobbes has been afforced by J. R. Collins, In the Shadow of Leviathan: John Locke and the Politics of Conscience (Cambridge, 2020), and F. Waldmann, ‘John Locke as a Reader of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan’, Journal of Modern History 93 (2021), 245–82. 71 Jenkinson,

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‘self-love … the only innate principle’.74 On this view, the point about Hobbes’s state of nature is not that it is characterized by physical violence – the tendency to viciousness in fallen humanity was not news – but that it is a state in which people could not know what the good is. Hobbes had dissolved the human essence and presented ‘pure terse human nature’, with ‘nothing more divine … than matter and motion’.75 The state of nature was a vale of tears because it existed behind a veil of ignorance. Hobbes also arguably neglected the acquired, habituated, and experiential moral knowledge which society historically accumulates, which becomes ‘second nature’, and which can stand in for the lack of innate moral knowledge. Later moralists were to repair this lacuna. Early followers of Hobbes in this regard were Cumberland, Pufendorf, and Matthew Hale.76 Some writers (later aided by Locke’s Essay) began to explore the notion of acquired moral propensities through a psychological account of sensation and sympathy. This, the dominant style of eighteenth-century moral philosophy, was apparent early, in for example Walter Charleton’s Natural History of the Passions (1674). A striking example of the endorsement of Hobbes’s account of natural moral ignorance is given in Thomas White’s Grounds of Obedience and Government (1655), a defence of allegiance to Cromwell. There is, White contends, much noise about laws of nature, but these laws turn out to be rules by ‘custom and consent’, for it cannot be shown that ‘there be, in nature, radicated such an order of rights and [things] naturally just or due’. By nature we are left to our own epistemic devices. Most of what we say we ‘know’ we take on trust; we do not suppose our physician is infallible, but we trust him. Life is too short and hazardous for us not to proceed probabilistically. We ‘must rely on the credit of others’, because ‘rational belief [i.e. probable truth] is necessary to human action’. By the social compact the subject has ‘made away all power of judging and caring for the common good’. The sovereign might make mistakes about what is best, but he is more likely to be right than we, who are busy on private affairs, and there is an overwhelming probability of social disaster if we challenge him. If the subject ‘interpose his opinion’, he ‘breaketh his promise and engagement to his governor’. Rebellion is defined as the setting up of ‘another judge or knower’, it is a failure ‘to keep the subject in the nature of ignorance, in which is grounded his being a subject’.77 Similar themes are pursued in John Hall’s Of Government 74

Charles Leslie, The Finishing Stroke (1711), p. 135; William Oldisworth, A Dialogue (2 vols, 1709–10), I, 19, 23. 75 Eachard, Mr Hobbes’s State of Nature, p. 89; Tenison, Creed of Mr Hobbes, p. 105. 76 Cumberland, Treatise, pp. 15ff; Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, pp. 162ff. See D. E. C. Yale, ‘Hobbes and Hale on Law, Legislation, and the Sovereign’, Cambridge Law Journal 31 (1972), 131–56; G. J. Postema (ed.), Matthew Hale on the Law of Nature, Reason, and Common Law (Oxford, 2017). 77 Thomas White, The Grounds of Obedience (1655), pp. 12, 37–9, 88, 98–9, 101–2, 110. White was a Catholic. See J. R. Collins, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Blackloist Conspiracy of 1649’, HJ 45 (2002), 305–31; idem, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005).

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and Obedience (1654), which is full of Hobbesian dicta: in the state of nature we are ‘gods unto ourselves, in the knowledge of good and evil’; rebellion is private judgement – ‘private equity is public iniquity’.78 Hobbes’s critics constantly rebuked him for his obliteration of natural moral judgement. Hobbes ‘taint[s] the very foundation of practical reason’, he dissolves ‘synteresis’.79 Nobody in the mainstream of Royalist and Tory theory wished to deny that moral judgements could and should be passed upon wayward monarchs, however august and absolute. To pass judgement was not, however, to rebel, and the one did not license the other. Some Whigs argued that the Tories must be Hobbesians for they refused to judge tyrants, yet they did not refuse to judge: rather, their refusal was of the legitimacy of coercion against earthly rulers. The Whig Tyrrell pressed Filmer on this score: he wished to force Royalists to concede either that they renounce all judgement, like Hobbes, or that they allowed resistance, like Locke and the Whigs. The standard Royalist response was the doctrine of ‘passive obedience’ – in fact a doctrine of passive resistance or civil disobedience. ‘Passive obedience’, Bramhall explained, ‘is a mean between active obedience and rebellion. To just laws which are the ordinances of right reason, active obedience is due. To unjust laws which are the ordinances of reason erring, passive obedience is due’.80 Tyrrell thought Filmer was close to Hobbes, for in Patriarcha Filmer had said that a servant (or subject) has ‘no authority or liberty to examine and judge whether his master sin or no’. This, said Tyrrell, ‘savours of Mr Hobbes’s divinity’.81 And so it did. Yet most Royalists were ready to examine and judge their kings. Charles II was absolute, but also immoral. James II was absolute, but also popish. Erastianism, toleration, and the power of the church

Not the least of Hobbes’s deductions from voluntarist and sceptical premises was what Leibniz called the ‘strange and indefensible’ claim that ‘doctrines touching the divinity depend entirely upon the determination of the sovereign’.82 Since, for Hobbes, our knowledge of God is limited to the proposition that he is the omnipotent First Cause, it followed that no further questions about creeds or forms of worship were resolvable with certainty. They were ‘things indifferent’ and there was never good ground in conscience to disobey the arbitrament of the sovereign. To allow that private conscience, or the church, might be judge of religious truth immediately opened a Pandora’s box of religious warfare and persecution, the conflict of state, church, and disaffected 78

John Hall, Of Government (1654), pp. 8, 10, 219, 305, 322. Castigations, p. 286; Bramhall, Castigations, p. 201. 80 Bramhall, Castigations, p. 167. For passive obedience as civil disobedience, see ch. 12 in this volume. 81 Tyrrell, Patriarcha non Monarcha, pp. 137–8, 209, 232. 82 Leibniz, Theodicy, p. 394. 79 Eachard,

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sects. Above all, Hobbes sought to construct an ecclesiology which would cure England’s wars of religion. Thus, as the critics noted, for Hobbes the perilous state of nature extends to religious matters: there is, ‘in matters of religion … a state of nature, without any sovereign representative to determine for them, what they shall believe or profess’. People’s rival opinions are such that ‘whatever a man worships, is his God, … though that God may to his neighbour seem a devil’.83 The sovereign must construct a religion that shall seem conducive to the peaceful worship of God; the anarchy of private conscience is, by the social contract, displaced by a ‘public conscience’. Hobbes turned the secular magistrate into the ‘head of the church and judge of faith’; to this sovereign we must trust ‘our eternal salvation, we must captivate our judgement’.84 Hobbes’s ‘public conscience’, the equation of religion and sovereignty, was seen to dissolve wholly the claims of any church against the state. Religious truth was turned into a human fabrication, the shared significations of a civil community. The church’s understanding was collapsed into the state’s will. Hobbes, said Coke, aimed ‘to make all faith, and religion, as well as society, a mere invention and policy of man’. But, protested Bramhall, ‘the church is the ground and pillar of truth, not the sovereign prince’.85 It would be difficult to overestimate the persistence of a neo-scholastic (and ultimately Catholic) account of the nature of the church, within both the Anglican and Presbyterian traditions. The church was a visible society, a self-governing corporation, separate in essence from, even if coterminous with, civil society. ‘Church and state’, wrote Lawson, ‘are two distinct commonwealths, the one spiritual, and the other temporal, though they consist of the same persons’, and it is ‘as great an offence for the state to encroach upon the church, as for the church to encroach upon the state’. Bramhall insisted that though the sovereign was God’s representative, the church was Christ’s, whereas Hobbes made ‘his sovereign to be Christ’s lieutenant upon earth, in obedience to whose commands true religion doth consist’.86 Hobbes dissolved the power of the Keys into the power of the Sword, priesthood into kingship, yet ‘there is a plain difference between civil and ecclesiastical power, between the Sword and the Keys’. Monarchs emphatically do not have sacerdotal power.87 Leviathan was the most ambitious statement of Erastianism on record. Accordingly, on each occasion when Erastianism came to be urgently debated, the doctrines of Hobbes were foremost. This was so in the 1650s, when Hobbes was seen to be a publicist for the Cromwellian regime’s attempt to create a national yet pluralist church, aiming to overcome both the anarchic sects and the theocratic demands of Presbyterians and ‘Prelatists’. Hobbes’s views were 83

William Wotton, The Rights of the Clergy (1706), p. 5; Oldisworth, Dialogue, p. 111. Justice Vindicated, p. 82; Lawson, Examination, p. 156. 85 Coke, Justice Vindicated, p. 30; Bramhall, Castigations, p. 428. 86 Lawson, Examination, pp. 138–9; Bramhall, Castigations, p. 572. 87 Lawson, Examination, pp. 8, 138; Coke, Justice Vindicated, p. 85. The power of the keys refers to church authority, from Jesus’ commission to St Peter: Matthew 16:18–19. 84 Coke,

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associated with, and exploited by, such Cromwellians as Henry Stubbe, John Hall, and Louis du Moulin.88 It was again so after the Restoration when latitudinarians like Edward Stillingfleet and John Tillotson were accused of Hobbism because they stressed the ‘indifferency’ of many creedal and ceremonial matters that divided Protestants. Stillingfleet suffered at the hands of high churchmen for his Irenicum (1661), and was forced to modify his Erastian doctrine of the church as ‘incorporated into the state’ by restating a conventional ecclesiology of the church as a ‘separate society’.89 When Tillotson became archbishop of Canterbury in 1691, Charles Leslie launched a ferocious attack on his ‘superHobbism’. Tillotson’s theology was said to reduce all doctrine and scripture to uncertainty and so to make religion ‘a perfect tool and engine of state’.90 The charge of Hobbesian Erastianism was loudest against Matthew Tindal’s (misleadingly entitled) Rights of the Christian Church (1706), a demand for the supremacy of the Whig state over a disruptive Anglican church. A striking feature of the quarrel with Tindal was the constant association that Tories drew between Hobbes and the low church Whigs, who were engaged in defending the parliamentary church of the Revolution and the Toleration Act of 1689 against high church theocracy. The Tories said that the Whig idea of parliamentary religious supremacy fulfilled Hobbes’s ‘mighty miracles of giving the spirit by vote, and making divines and divinity by the poll’.91 According to Jonathan Swift, behind the Whigs stood ‘their Apostle Tindal’, and behind them all, said George Hickes, ‘their dear Fathers, Hobbes, Selden, and Spinoza’.92 In this context, Hobbism was identified with tolerant indifference, with creeds limited to a few essentials, but a religion free of fanatical ‘enthusiasm’, atheism, and Romish idolatry – the marks, to speak proleptically, of Enlightenment liberal Protestantism. But Leviathan also seemed in principle considerably more outlandish. Hobbes appeared to allow that if the sovereign demanded idolatrous worship from a subject, then the subject would commit no sin in obeying. In other words, the determination of the content of religion lies so exclusively in the sovereign’s hands, that we have no good ground to disobey whatever form of religion he dictates. This was the lesson Hobbes drew from the prophet Elisha’s licensing of Naaman, the Syrian servant, to worship the 88 Henry

Stubbe, in correspondence with Hobbes; John Hall, Government; Louis du Moulin, Paraenesis ad aedificatores imperii in imperio (1656). See J. Jacob, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism, and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983); Collins, Allegiance of Hobbes, ch. 6. 89 J. Marshall, ‘The Ecclesiology of the Latitude-Men, 1660–1689: Stillingfleet, Tillotson, and “Hobbism”’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985), 407–27; Parkin, ‘Hobbism’, pp. 101–7; J. Rose, Godly Kingship in Restoration England (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 141–8, 203ff. 90 Charles Leslie, The Charge of Socinianism against Dr Tillotson (1695), pp. 4–5, 13–16. 91 Oldisworth, Dialogue, p. 388. See D. Levitin, ‘Matthew Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church (1709) and the Church-State Relationship’, HJ 54 (2011), 717–40. 92 Jonathan Swift, The Examiner, no. 19 (1712); George Hickes, Two Treatises (1707), p. xviii. John Selden’s anticlericalism was associated with his History of Tithes (1625) and Table Talk (1689).

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pagan god Rimmon at the command of his master, an instance which appalled Hobbes’s critics.93 Hobbes here seemed to sanction the dissolution of any visible profession of Christ, and showed sovereigns how they might turn ‘the Alcoran [Quran] into Gospel’.94 To call Hobbism ‘the Mahometan religion’ became a commonplace. The exponents of ‘natural religion’, who did away with Christian revelation altogether, also became firmly associated with Hobbes, especially after the publication of Charles Blount’s Miracles no Violation of the Laws of Nature (1683), which contained a series of passages copied from Hobbes and Spinoza. Blount, one of the originators of English deism, was denounced because he ‘overthrows the foundations of both law and gospel, overthrows the credit and authority of divine revelation’.95 Just as outlandish was the occasional association between Hobbism and Catholicism. Under James II, one of Hobbes’s most devoted disciples, Sir William Petty, expended considerable intellectual energy upon reconciling a thorough doctrinal scepticism with Roman Catholicism.96 It is a striking fact that the first reference in print to Leviathan, in August 1651, was in a plea by a Roman Catholic for toleration. This tract quoted Hobbes on the cultural diversity of ways of worshipping God, and the arbitrariness of human symbols. ‘Thus’, concluded the Catholic, ‘in my judgement doth that learned Protestant absolutely clear the papists of idolatry.’ Similarly, White’s Grounds of Obedience, noticed earlier, was a veiled address to Cromwell for toleration for moderate and ‘unjesuited’ Roman Catholics.97 In all these examples Hobbes was taken to lean towards religious toleration.98 But his ecclesiastical reputation remained ambivalent, for Erastianism could 93

Kings 5:17–19; Hobbes, Leviathan, III, 784 (ch. 42); Eachard, Some Opinions of Mr Hobbes, pp. 271–3; Tenison, Creed of Mr Hobbes, p. 199; Bramhall, Castigations, pp. 491–2. 94 Tenison, Creed of Mr Hobbes, sig. A3v. 95 Thomas Browne, Miracles (1683), p. 2. See E. Carmel, ‘Hobbes and Early English Deism’, in Hobbes on Politics and Religion, ed. L. van Apeldoorn and R. Douglass (Oxford, 2018), pp. 202–18. 96 Marquis of Lansdowne (ed.), The Petty Papers (2 vols, 1927), I, 113–45. 97 John Austin, The Christian Moderator (1651), pp. 12–13, quoting Leviathan, ch. 45. See Collins, ‘Hobbes and the Blackloist Conspiracy’; A. Davenport, Suspicious Moderate: The Life and Writings of Francis a Sancta Clara (Notre Dame, IN, 2017), ch. 13. 98 For this case, see A. Ryan, ‘Hobbes, Toleration, and the Inner Life’, in The Nature of Political Theory, ed. D. Miller and L. Siedentop (Oxford, 1983), pp. 197–218; Ryan, ‘A More Tolerant Hobbes?’, in Justifying Toleration, ed. S. Mendus (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 37–59; R. Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Locke on Toleration’, in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, ed. M. Dietz (Lawrence, KA, 1990), pp. 153–71. The case is afforced by those who see Hobbes as supporting, and being supported by, the ‘Erastian Independents’ of the Interregnum: Collins, Allegiance of Hobbes, ch. 6; A. Abizadeh, ‘Publicity, Privacy, and Religious Toleration in Hobbes’s Leviathan’, Modern Intellectual History 10 (2013), 261–91. Similarly, the use of Hobbes by supporters of Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence in 1672, for which see below, pp. 151–2. The interpretation is contested. See A. P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan (Cambridge, 1992); J. Sommerville, ‘Hobbes and Independency’, Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia 59 (2004), 155–73; E. Curley, ‘Hobbes and the Cause of Toleration’, in Companion to

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also justify the repression of religious nonconformity. The most notorious case of this was Parker’s Discourse of Ecclesiastical Polity (1669), the most ferocious of Restoration assaults upon the Dissenters. Although the book explicitly attacked ‘the consequences that some men draw from Mr Hobbes’s principles in behalf of toleration’, it was itself quickly charged with following the ‘divinity of Leviathan’. In a ruthlessly nominalist manner, Parker argued that all public actions, such as religious ceremonies, were ‘arbitrary’, and that external symbols are ‘changeable according to the variety of customs and places’, so that what is piety in one culture is superstition in another. All ‘actions are made significant by agreement’, and once the sovereign’s ‘public conscience’ had pronounced, all ‘clamour’ concerning worship was groundless.99 When Pierre Bayle wrote a largely approving article on Hobbes in his Historical and Critical Dictionary (1696) he dwelt especially on his Erastianism and anticlericalism, arguing that Hobbes restored ‘to the civil powers those rights of which they had been robbed by ecclesiastics in the ages of ignorance’. Hobbes ‘taught that the authority of kings ought to be absolute, and that in particular the externals of religion, as being the most fruitful cause of civil wars, ought to depend upon their will’.100 It was Hobbes’s systematic fusion of Christianity with civil sovereignty that later earned him praise from Rousseau in the chapter on ‘Civil Religion’ in his Social Contract: ‘of all Christian authors the philosopher Hobbes is the only one who clearly saw both the evil and the remedy, who dared to propose reuniting the two heads of the eagle [church and state], and to return everything to political unity, without which no state or government will ever be well constituted’.101 Hobbes himself thought he had been too pusillanimous in this task, remarking that ‘he durst not write so boldly’ as Spinoza had in the Tractatus theologico-politicus. Edmund Waller, who sent Hobbes a copy of the Tractatus, believed, nonetheless, that Hobbes ‘pulled down all the churches, dispelled the mists of ignorance, and laid open their priestcraft’.102 Hobbes’s friends regarded the destruction of priestcraft as both a metaphysical imperative and a practical political task. It required the dissolution of the Aristotelian perversion of Christianity, upon which was built the material power of priestly castes, priests whose talk of innate truths, and of authority and Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Springborg, pp. 309–34; J. T. Hamilton, ‘Hobbes the Royalist, Hobbes the Republican’, History of Political Thought 30 (2009), 411–54; T. M. Bejan, ‘Difference without Disagreement: Rethinking Hobbes on “Independency” and Toleration’, Review of Politics 78 (2016), 1–15. 99 Samuel Parker, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1670), pp. 99, 106–7, 135. There is a good deal of disagreement about Parker’s intellectual relationship with Hobbes. See p. 190, n. 57. 100 E. A. Butler and M. Lee (eds), Selections from Bayle’s Dictionary (Princeton, NJ, 1952), pp. 130–1. 101 Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, ed. V. Gourevitch (Cambridge, 1997), p. 146 (bk IV, ch. 8). 102 Aubrey, Brief Lives, I, 358.

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sovereignty in church and state, were ideological weapons for imposing their own values. Abraham Cowley, in his ode ‘To Mr Hobbes’ (1656) wrote that, before Hobbes, ‘Long did the mighty Stagirite [Aristotle] retain / The universal intellectual reign’. He depicts the ‘barbarous’ schoolmen as being slain by Hobbes, the ‘great Columbus of the Golden lands of new Philosophies’.103 When John Hall in the 1650s, and Matthew Tindal in the 1700s, borrowed Hobbes’s work to construct respectively a Cromwellian and a Whig civil religion, they portrayed the vanquishing of priestcraft as the recovery of true religion from the sway of the scholastic ‘Antichrist’.104 For Hobbes and his disciples, the secularization of politics was an evangelical project: a godly commonwealth was one which excluded priests from politics. Modern secular politics of the Hobbesian sort is voluntarist metaphysics which has shed its theological premises. But those premises remained highly visible in the political theory of Hobbes and his contemporaries.

103 Abraham

Cowley, Poetry and Prose, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford, 1949), pp. 43–4. On Hobbesian anticlericalism see Allsopp, Poetry and Sovereignty. 104 Hall, Government, ch. 12; Oldisworth, Dialogue, p. 373. See J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Time, History, and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes’, in Politics, Language, and Time (1973), pp. 148–201.

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4 Danby, the Bishops, and the Whigs The illusion of restoration and the making of the church party

Our conventional idea of the Restoration involves an illusion. Because monarchy was restored, we tend to suppose that Charles II’s reign was a monolith of Anglican Royalist reaction, and that king and Cavalier were of one mind in reversing the Puritan tide. There are mythologies to bolster this illusion. In Whig and Dissenting memory it was an era of brutal repression of the Good Old Cause, a time of underground conspiracy and heroic suffering. Historians of radicalism tend to find, when looking beyond 1660, a story of defeat and dejection, when Israel was captive in Egypt. The Egyptian taskmasters are made to seem an undifferentiated combination of crown and church, court and gentry.1 Other voices confirm this impression. The paeans chanted by Anglican divines to the sanctity of kingship and to the holy union of crown and altar disguise from us the degree of scepticism that the monarchs themselves, Charles and James, felt towards the dogmas of Cavalier Anglicans. That the royal brothers leaned towards Catholicism is familiar enough. But the surprise is how often they leaned towards Puritans and Dissenters. From the point of view of Anglican loyalists, Charles, from the outset, dangerously favoured the leaders of the old Parliamentarian cause. He pardoned, even employed, the ‘old leaven’, and sorely neglected his most loyal subjects: his privy council included his father’s enemies. He affronted the church and gave succour to her schismatic enemies: he offered bishoprics to leading Puritans. The flood

A version of this chapter appeared under the same title in The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, ed. T. Harris, P. Seaward, and M. Goldie (Oxford, 1990), pp. 75–105. I am indebted to Blackwell Publishing for permission to reproduce material. 1

For instance, C. Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (1984); R. Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Princeton, NJ, 1986); R. Greaves, Deliver us from Evil: the Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–1663 (Oxford, 1986); idem, Enemies under his Feet: Radicals and Nonconformists, 1664–1677 (Stanford, CA, 1990); idem, Secrets of the Kingdom: British Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Revolution of 1688–89 (Stanford, CA, 1992); G. S. De Krey, Following the Levellers, vol. 2, 1649–1688 (Basingstoke, 2018); E. Legon, Revolution Remembered: Seditious Memories after the British Civil Wars (Manchester, 2019).

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of patronage in 1660 to those broadly called the ‘Presbyterian’ party – those who had made war on Charles I but had discovered a passionate royalism once they had defeated him – rendered Cavaliers begrudging partners in institutions surprisingly ‘broad-bottomed’ in their make-up. Cavaliers joked bitterly that the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, the act of forgetting of past crimes against the crown, passed in 1660, meant indemnity for rebels and oblivion for loyalists. They compiled lists of indigent Cavaliers, whose estates had been ruined in their service to Charles I, but now with little sign of recompense.2 Yet these resentments were as nothing to the rage provoked by some of the politics and personnel of the so-called Cabal years, between 1667 and 1673, half-Oliverian and half-papistical, a perverse regime that was to be re-enacted in tragedy by James II in 1687–8. When the second duke of Buckingham briefly reached a pinnacle of influence in 1668 it was said of him both that he was the king’s ‘premier minister’ and that he ‘thinks to arrive to be another Oliver’, for his entourage was peopled with semi-conforming Presbyterians and assorted ex-Cromwellians.3 The king’s short-lived Declaration of Indulgence of 1672 marked his sharpest break with his Anglican Royalist allies. There were later, briefer occasions at which the crown’s policies put ‘the loyal party’ into a blind panic. Early in 1679, after the earl of Danby’s fall, the king constructed a new privy council, which included the Whig leaders, among them Lords Shaftesbury, Holles, Essex, and Russell. It ‘struck the loyal party to an astonishment’ and frightened them to ‘almost despair’ to see the king apparently surrender to his parliamentary enemies. Roger North wrote that during the subsequent months ‘the loyalists were never secure in their own minds, that the king would stand the siege, which had environed him’.4 If the Restoration was at all felt as a ‘triumph’ by Cavalier and Prayer Book loyalists, that feeling was constantly mixed with anxiety and foreboding.5 The fear was less that monarchy would again be violently overthrown, rather that the monarch would overthrow them, his ‘natural’ constituency. Certainly, the regime was sometimes threatened by rebellion, from Venner’s rising in 1661 to Monmouth’s in 1685. But conspiracy and plotting have perhaps loomed too large in the historical literature. Much less visible has been the extent to which politicians of the old Puritan tradition had signal hopes, frequently fulfilled, 2

See P. Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–1667 (Cambridge, 1989), ch. 8; M. Harrington, ‘Reconciling Civil War Division in English Society, 1660–1670’, in Civilians and War in Europe, 1618–1815, ed. E. Charters, E. Rosenhaft, and H. Smith (Liverpool, 2012), pp. 68–83. 3 CSPD, 1667–8, 18 February 1668. 4 A. Jessop (ed.), The Autobiography of the Hon. Roger North (1887), pp. 75–6; Roger North, The Life of the Right Honourable Francis North, Baron of Guilford (1742), pp. 100, 162. 5 On the church and its insecurity, see J. Spurr, ‘Religion in Restoration England’, in The Reigns of Charles II and James VII and II, ed. L. K. J. Glassey (1997), pp. 90–124. The standard account of the church is idem, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, CT, 1991).

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of winning access to the king’s administration. This chapter mainly concerns a period, in the 1670s, when the king did do the bidding of his loyalist friends, but it is important first to see how precarious such a regime could be. Cavaliers and churchmen could never afford the luxury of taking Stuart kings for granted, and the appalling spectre of a ‘Presbyterian’ monarchy never left them. At root, they were churchmen as much as they were Cavaliers, and sometimes more a church party than the king’s party. They had a programme: to defend episcopacy and Prayer Book uniformity, and to crush the spawn of the Civil War, the rebels, fanatics, and schismatics. The king would need persuading of this, or rather, he would need to be forced into a position where he must accept it. After 1660 the heavenly city of the Anglican Royalists was, like the earlier Puritan search for godly reformation, a thing never yet achieved but earnestly to be striven for. Only for a few precious years in the early 1680s, the ‘Tory Reaction’, was something like their desired polity made real. Assuredly their project acquired early and solid foundations in the Corporation and Uniformity Acts of 1661–2, and had (by and large) been nurtured by the earl of Clarendon. But the fall of Clarendon in 1667, the Cabal regime, and the tolerationist projects which culminated in the king’s Indulgence in 1672 had scarcely left those foundations intact. In the 1670s the earl of Danby had to strive anew to persuade Charles II to behave like a true son of Charles the Martyr. Historians who write chiefly of the period after the Revolution of 1688 often say that the Tories did not learn to be a party until the 1690s: before that they were mere auxiliaries of the crown, whereas afterwards the accession of Whigs to office forced them into opposition and autonomy.6 This is misleading, for they learnt autonomy long before. They did not meekly do the king’s will, but told the king what his will should be; and if he did not acquiesce, they campaigned against him. It was bishops and pious gentlemen who repeatedly brought down royal attempts at toleration. Certainly, they upheld high monarchical doctrines, but that only meant they would never resist by arms. It did not deter them from using all means of political and moral persuasion: the counsels of a king who was prone to assist ‘presbytery’ and ‘popery’ must at all costs, short of rebellion, be seized and controlled. The Cavaliers learnt autonomy even before the Restoration. Notwithstanding their own talk of Charles I as a martyr who laid down his life rather than lay aside his church, it was Charles himself who provoked the mistrust of churchmen. In the early 1640s he had agreed to the exclusion of bishops from parliament and to their abolition in Scotland. In the late 1640s he came, in the Isle of Wight and Uxbridge negotiations, within an ace of accepting a Presbyterian church in order to save his throne. His exiled son pursued the logic further. He took the Covenant in 1650 and tried to recover his throne at the head of a Scottish 6

For example, B. Hill, The Growth of Parliamentary Parties, 1689–1742 (1976), pp. 21, 65–6; J. C. D. Clark, ‘A General Theory of Party, Opposition, and Government, 1688–1832’, HJ 23 (1980), 295–325, at 296.

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Presbyterian army. During the 1650s Anglicans and Cavaliers of the school of Clarendon and Ormonde would rather have had no restoration at all than that sort of restoration. The defeats at the battles of Dunbar and Worcester were as much a relief to them as to Cromwell, for they marked the start of an unsteady re-education of Charles in Anglican kingship, the principles of which he would always be reluctant to master. Remarking of the period before 1660, Keith Feiling wrote that an alliance between the crown and Presbyterianism was ‘the ever-present nightmare of the Anglican Cavaliers’.7 It was no less so after 1660. The royal apostasies of 1667–8, 1672, 1679–80, and 1687–8 were reversions to the temptations of 1641 and 1648, and the sin of 1650. The possibility of a Presbyterian or, as it was often called, an ‘Isle of Wight’ kingship, was often associated with Charles II’s Declaration of Breda of 1660, in which he promised liberty of conscience. Before the Cavalier Parliament of 1661 there had been the Convention of 1660, heavily populated by Presbyterian royalists. Later in the reign it became commonplace, among the enemies of the church party, to speak of the vengeful Cavalier legislation of 1661–2 as having destroyed the happy and broader foundations of Breda and the Convention. It was even said that the Presbyterians had restored the king, which had much truth in it. Andrew Marvell, the keenest spokesman for the Puritan Whig tradition, wrote of the Breda Declaration as the product of Charles’s ‘consummate prudence and natural benignity’, which had been overrun when the Anglican Cavaliers won the election of 1661 and staged a revanchist coup. He put that coup down largely to the influence of churchmen: ‘the animosities and obstinacy of some of the clergy have in all ages been the greatest obstacle to the clemency, prudence and good intentions of princes’.8 This was far from being the language of conspiracy against the crown; on the contrary, his aim was to insert other people and other measures into the king’s counsels. Samuel Parker, a passionate anti-Puritan and future bishop, said that ‘the greatest hopes of the faction depended upon their friends at court’; the Presbyterians ‘whispered into the ears of the king’ and told him ‘that so great and powerful a body of men should not be rashly provoked’.9 It might seem that talk of ‘Presbyterian’ and ‘church’ parties is inappropriate by the time we reach the Exclusion Crisis around 1680. Historians of party, chiefly concerned to look forward to the eighteenth century rather than back to the Civil War, tell us that in 1679 England entered the ‘first age of party’, when new alignments and new issues displaced Civil War quarrels. The 7

K. Feiling, A History of the Tory Party, 1640–1714 (Oxford, 1924), p. 75; cf. p. 78. See also B. Wormald, Clarendon: Politics, Historiography, and Religion, 1640–1660 (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 212ff; W. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–1660 (1969), ch. 3; A. Milton, ‘Sacrilege and Compromise: Court Divines and the King’s Conscience, 1642–1649’, in The Experience of Revolution, ed. M. Braddick and D. Smith (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 135–53. 8 Marvell, PW, I, 90–1. For Puritan royalism, see M. Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (2nd edn, Woodbridge, 2016). 9 Samuel Parker, Bishop Parker’s History of his Own Time (1727), pp. 28–9.

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electoral activity surrounding the three short Exclusion Parliaments of 1679–81 was unprecedented. The agitated polling, the surge of printed propaganda, the addresses and instructions to electors and elected, all exhibited features of post-Revolution party politics.10 Yet our notion of party should not be allied too closely with parliaments and electorates, nor with the new party labels that appeared after 1679. If 1679 saw the first general election for eighteen years, the many institutions that made up the wider society beyond parliament had long provided arenas for sharp contests.11 The uneasy truce of the 1660s was breaking down throughout the 1670s, and the year 1679 marked a quickening of tempo. What, even more, has mistakenly marked out 1679 as the start of a new ‘age of party’ is the distracting invention of two new political words, Tory and Whig. Because they are the familiar nomenclature, because they were to have great longevity, we naturally use the terms. But before the Revolution they were never more than one usage among many. Before 1681, when Roger L’Estrange’s Observator popularized them, they were a minority usage.12 The predominant vocabulary of politics remained overwhelmingly that of religious parties and Civil War wounds. The conflict was, in large part, identified as a struggle for control between the friends and enemies of the church. Consider the labels that contemporaries used. Roger North, in his history of those times, wrote of the ‘Church of England and loyal party’; and the ‘church party’ is what Gilbert Burnet said that Danby set himself up as ‘patron’ of in 1674.13 In 1675 the opposition ‘Presbyterian party’ was said to be offering to vote Charles £1 million if he would abandon Danby’s church politics in favour of liberty of conscience. In 1677 the government was described as being in the hands of the ‘old Cavalier party’.14 In 1679 we hear of ‘episcopal tantivies’; in 1680 of ‘the episcopal party’; in 1682 of ‘Tories and prelatical tantivies’.15 Sir John Reresby referred to ‘sectaries and fanatics’ being swept into parliament in 1679. In 1685 Sir George Mackenzie spoke of ‘episcopal and fanatic, Cavalier and republican’.16 When the 10

G. Holmes, The Electorate and the National Will in the First Age of Party (Lancaster, 1976); C. Jones (ed.), Britain in the First Age of Party, 1680–1750 (1987). Later work, less preoccupied with psephology, has realigned the ‘birth of party’ with earlier seventeenth-century politics: J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge, 1991); M. Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–1681 (Cambridge, 1994); idem, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2004). 11 See, for example, P. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns, 1650–1730 (Cambridge, 1998). 12 For which see M. Goldie, ‘Roger L’Estrange’s Observator and the Exorcism of the Plot’, in Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture, ed. A. Dunan-Page and B. Lynch (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 67–88. 13 North, Autobiography, p. 190; Burnet, OT, p. 373. 14 K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford, 1968), p. 393. 15 Charles Blount, An Appeal from the Country to the City (1679), p. 2; Anon., An Account of the New Sheriffs (1680), p. 1; Edmund Hickeringill, The Mushrooms (1682), title page. 16 A. Browning (ed.), Memoirs of Sir John Reresby (Glasgow, 1936), p. 107; Sir George Mackenzie, A Defence of the Antiquity of the Royal Line of Scotland (1685), p. ii.

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Danbyite Lord Lindsey fulminated against his opponents in the 1670s he called them ‘the fanatic or Presbyterian party’; when in 1683 he sought to purge the Exclusionist Whig MPs he spoke of one of them as ‘head of all the Presbyterians in the county’; his own friends were those of the ‘Church of England and the old Cavalier principles’.17 For one Dissenter in 1681 the heart of the Restoration problem was the ‘turning the church into a party’.18 No terms were more pervasive in those years than ‘church party’ and ‘fanatics’. The sheer repetitiveness of the word ‘fanatic’ rendered it scarcely even of much force as a term of abuse: it just became a standard descriptor not only for Dissenters but also for their church conformist friends and for Whigs generally.19 The same pattern is found in Tory animosities displayed in street theatre. On 29 May 1680, Restoration day, a mob burnt a rump ‘in contempt of the Presbyterians’ and planned an assault on Dissenting chapels. In April 1682 a mob burnt an effigy of Jack Presbyter, who held copies of the 1643 Covenant and of the earl of Shaftesbury’s Association of 1680. Shaftesbury’s effigy was burnt too, along with a rump, green ribbons, and old wigs.20 One historian claimed that the use of the term ‘Presbyterian’ by the French ambassador Paul Barillon in the 1670s was anachronistic and out of touch.21 Not so: it was the standard jargon. New Whiggery was but old presbytery.22 The new names Tory and Whig were not only numerically rarer, but also conceptually subordinate to the language of church politics. There is nothing quaint about the fact that the words ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’ had hitherto respectively referred to Irish papist rebels and Scottish Covenanter rebels – for those origins loudly signify a dominant religious frame of reference. The contemporary language of party alerts us to yet another terminological illusion. Our familiar shorthand for the tensions of the years 1678–81 are the ‘Popish Plot’ and ‘Exclusion Crisis’, which throws the weight of emphasis upon Protestant fears of Catholicism. Unquestionably an overwhelming fear of 17

Quoted in C. Holmes, Seventeenth-Century Lincolnshire (Lincoln, 1980), pp. 245–7. On the language of politics, see: J. Miller, ‘Public Opinion in Charles II’s England’, History 80 (1995), 359–81, at 367–71; G. De Krey, ‘Reformation in the Restoration Crisis, 1679–1682’, in Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540–1688, ed. D. Hamilton and R. Strier (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 231–52; idem, ‘Radicals, Reformers, and Republicans: Academic Language and Political Discourse in Restoration London’, in A Nation Transformed, ed. A. Houston and S. Pincus (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 71–99. 18 Edward Pearse, A Conformist’s Plea for the Nonconformists (1681), p. 8. 19 For example, B. D. Henning (ed.), The House of Commons, 1660–1690 (3 vols, 1983), II, 618, 627; G. de F. Lord et al. (eds), Poems on Affairs of State (7 vols, New Haven, CT, 1963–75), II, 423–4. 20 T. Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 168–71. 21 J. R. Jones, The First Whigs: The Politics of the Exclusion Crisis, 1678–1683 (Oxford, 1961), p. 150. 22 R. Davis, ‘The “Presbyterian” Opposition and the Emergence of Party in the House of Lords in the Reign of Charles II’, in Party and Management in Parliament, 1660–1784, ed. C. Jones (Leicester, 1984), pp. 1–35; Goldie, Morrice and the Puritan Whigs.

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popery bloomed in the 1670s, and certainly the bills to exclude James from the succession became the parliamentary manifestation of those fears. But what is liable to go missing, or become inexplicable, in any account dominated by those terms, is the clamorous language of ‘Presbyterian’ and ‘church’ interests, of ‘prelacy’ and its enemies, of uniformity versus reconciliation in church affairs. The unsolved problem of the narrow-based church of 1662 pressed harder than ever. By the late 1670s it was clear that a new repressive drive against Dissent was afoot, and to many the possibility that the 1680 Whig parliament might repeal the penal laws and revise the Act of Uniformity seemed scarcely less important than the Bill of Exclusion.23 The Cavalier Parliament had never countenanced such reforms, measures which would relax the terms and conditions of the national church and re-admit many whose consciences kept them out. Whig plans in 1680 would, in the eyes of Tory churchmen, have rendered the church half Presbyterian. By 1680 it was readily apparent that the backbone of resistance to both conciliation in religion and Exclusion in the royal succession was the church hierarchy, its bishops, its deans, and the young aspiring clergy whose pulpiteering and pamphleteering made straight their path to future promotion. They collided head-on with the Whigs. This was no accidental fact, for to be a Whig was to be anticlerical. Those years were a crisis for the leaders of the restored church. Admittedly few Whigs professed hostility to the institution of episcopacy as such: a ‘moderate’ or ‘primitive’, and state-tamed, episcopacy they could accept. What angered them was ‘prelacy’, a term of art signifying imperious lordliness, political ambition, and a spirit of persecution against ‘tender consciences’. These replicate the sentiments and phrases of the 1630s and 1640s, during the onslaught against Laudianism. Often it was the same people uttering them. To be of the Puritan party in 1640 and 1680 could look remarkably similar. Often it amounted to nothing more elaborate than an intense dislike of prelates and all they stood for. Historians of the Civil War have drawn our attention to the ferocity of attacks on episcopacy in the opening months of the Long Parliament. It is a key element in the claim that we may speak of England’s ‘wars of religion’.24 We must now turn to see in more detail how, forty years later, the fires of those debates were rekindled. The close of the 1670s saw three interrelated crises. First, a crisis of popery, unleashed by Titus Oates’s revelations of a popish conspiracy to kill the 23

On demands for the repeal of ‘the Act of 35 Elizabeth’, by which Protestant nonconformists were prosecuted under anti-Catholic legislation, see T. Harris, ‘Lives, Liberties, and Estates: Rhetorics of Liberty in the Reign of Charles II’, in The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, ed. T. Harris, P. Seaward, and M. Goldie (Oxford, 1990), pp. 217–41, at 228, 235. 24 A. Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (1981); J. Morrill, ‘The Religious Context of the English Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 34 (1984), 155–78; J. Morrill, ‘The Attack on the Church of England in the Long Parliament, 1640–1642’, in History, Society, and the Churches, ed. D. Beales and G. Best (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 105–24; repr. in idem, The Nature of the English Revolution (Harlow, 1993), pp. 69–90.

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king. Second, a constitutional crisis, let loose by a parliamentary attempt to alter the hereditary succession. And third, a crisis for episcopacy provoked by the new prominence of the bishops and by the increasing perception that it was they who were the stumbling blocks to a resolution of the first two. In the tangled skein of politics in those years, only the third strand, hitherto the least noticed, will be drawn out here: the salience of the bishops and the passionate renewal of anti-prelatical politics. Danby’s Test

Shortly after the defeat of Charles II’s intolerable toleration of 1672, a new promoter of Anglican integrity emerged, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby.25 His task was exceptionally delicate, for it was now known that the heir to the throne, James, duke of York, had apostatized to Catholicism. In the dozen years after 1673 it would take nerves of steel to hold fast to a vision of an Anglican polity that would one day be presided over by a popish king. Danby’s agents were, to a remarkable degree, the bishops, together with a new and confident generation of clergy, bred in the purged universities of the 1660s, eager and impatient ideologues, keen to do no less than annihilate the wretched remnants of the regicidal era. When, after the hopeful first steps of Danby’s administration, his projects were plunged into crisis by the Popish Plot revelations and by demands for Exclusion, it was the churchmen above all who gave stomach to the Tory gentry, preventing them from being frightened out of their loyalties by factitious charges of crypto-popery. It was for the clergy that new terminologies emerged: ‘tantivies’ – for they go at a gallop to Rome – and the more long-lived term, ‘high’ churchmen.26 And it was against them that Whig anticlerical wrath was directed. Danby’s aim was to ‘settle the church and state; to defend the one against schismatics and papists, and the other against commonwealthmen and rebels’.27 But it took some time for him to pick his way out of the ruins of Charles’s policies of 1672. Insolvency, an unpopular Dutch war, and opposition to the Declaration of Indulgence forced the king gradually to turn Cavalier again. In January 1674 the newly appointed lord keeper, Heneage Finch, announced to the House of Lords a renewal of the Restoration.28 But it was a stumbling ministry until clarity was achieved around the autumn of that year. In November 25 A.

Browning, Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby and Duke of Leeds, 1632–1712 (3 vols, Glasgow, 1944–51). For politics in the 1670s, see A. Swatland, The House of Lords in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 11; J. Miller, After the Civil Wars (Harlow, 2000), ch. 11; J. Spurr, England in the 1670s (Oxford, 2000); J. P. Montano, Courting the Moderates: Ideology, Propaganda, and the Emergence of Party, 1660–1678 (Newark, DE, 2002). 26 ‘Tantivy’ was a hunting cry. The term ‘high church’ came into circulation around 1680. 27 Lord Lindsey to Danby, August 1675: HMC, Lindsey, p. 376. 28 LJ, XII, 597–8.

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and again the following January the bishops were summoned to advise, and in February a series of Orders in Council emerged. In March, Lord Wharton, doyen of the Presbyterian lords, was arrested at a conventicle. In June, Bishop Morley entered the privy council. An episcopal incubus descended upon the government. Marvell wrote that the bishops ‘sit with the prince in a junto, to consult wisely how to preserve him from those people that never meant him any harm, and to secure him from the sedition and rebellion of men that [neither] seek, nor think, anything more, but to follow their own religious Christian worship’. With a characteristic sweep across the historical landscape he added that the ‘single cause’ of Christianity turning from meekness to persecution ‘was the bishops’.29 A programme for the next four years soon emerged. The laws against Catholics and Dissenters were to be enforced with equal rigour. Papists were removed from court, Catholic priests banned, and a recusancy commission established to take in fines from hitherto unmolested Catholics. The licences for Dissenting conventicles, issued in 1672, were withdrawn. Presbyterians were purged from the county commissions, and sometimes replaced by Anglican clergymen.30 Prosecution of Dissent returned, often driven forward by diocesan bishops. A pro-Dutch and anti-French alliance was forged, and to this end Princess Mary, James’s Protestant heir, was married to the Prince of Orange. The Cavalier Parliament was prolonged yet further, loyal court supporters were nourished with patronage in both Houses, and long prorogations were used to tame opposition. A monument to the martyr king Charles I was erected, and the rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral pressed forward.31 A religious head count, the Compton Census, was taken, to prove to king and nation the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Church of England.32 An attempt was made to constrain public criticism in the coffee-houses.33 The programme of the Danby administration quickly pitched the issue of episcopal authority onto the forefront of the political stage. On three occasions passionate debates about episcopacy were provoked in parliament, in 1675, 1677, 29

Andrew Marvell, Mr Smirke, or, The Divine in Mode (1676), in PW, II, 168–9. On Danby’s programme, see Feiling, Tory Party, ch. 6; Haley, Shaftesbury, chs 17 and 18; Montano, Courting the Moderatews; J. Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973), ch. 7. 30 For political and religious dissension in county communities in the mid-1670s, see: L. Glassey, Politics and the Appointment of Justices of the Peace, 1675–1720 (Oxford, 1979); A. M. Coleby, Central Government and the Localities: Hampshire, 1649–1689 (Cambridge, 1987); V. L. Stater, ‘Continuity and Change in English Provincial Politics’, Albion 25 (1993), 193–216; P. Gauci, Politics and Society in Great Yarmouth, 1660–1722 (Oxford, 1996); J. Miller, ‘A Moderate in the First Age of Party: the Dilemmas of Sir John Holland, 1675–1685’, EHR 114 (1999), 844–74. 31 R. Beddard, ‘Wren’s Mausoleum for Charles I and the Cult of the Royal Martyr’, Architectural History 27 (1984), 36–49. 32 A. Whiteman (ed.), The Compton Census of 1676 (1986). 33 S. Pincus, ‘“Coffee Politicians Does Create”: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture’, Journal of Modern History 67 (1995), 807–34.

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and 1679. In what follows, these will be examined in turn. The first occurred when Danby introduced a bill to impose upon all members of parliament a ‘no alteration’ oath, which required subscription to the proposition that ‘I will not at any time endeavour any alteration of government either in church or state.’34 It was dubbed ‘Danby’s Test’. Heneage Finch, now lord chancellor, urged the bill as a ‘moderate security to the church and crown’, and Bishops George Morley and Seth Ward spoke forcefully for it. In the Lords the upshot was the hardest fought parliamentary confrontation since the Restoration, with the earl of Shaftesbury, the duke of Buckingham, and Lord Holles successfully leading the resistance.35 On 12 May, the Lords debated divine right episcopacy. Lord Wharton demanded to know whether this doctrine entailed the bishops claiming ‘a power of excommunicating their prince?’ The bishops were evasive. The marquis of Halifax said it was just as well that episcopal power had been curtailed at the Reformation. The earl of Anglesey reminded the House that in 1642 the bishops had been flung out of the Lords for their forwardness.36 Commenting on this debate, Richard Baxter, the great Puritan divine, remarked that never since the Restoration had bishops been so furiously assaulted. But he thought that, outside the Lords, people were badly divided. Some ‘saw that the leading bishops had been the great causes of our distractions’, but others, ‘hating the nonconformists more, were still as hot for prelacy and their violence as ever’.37 It was this affair which prompted Shaftesbury (and perhaps his client John Locke) to write the first major denunciation of the Danby regime, A Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country (1675). It uncovered the machinations of a ‘distinct party’ of the ‘high episcopal man and the old Cavalier’. When Katharine Knight was arrested for distributing this pamphlet she was charged, rightly enough, with bringing ‘the king and divers nobles and prelates and the ecclesiastical government of this kingdom into odium’.38 Both sides dated a sharpening of party divides from this time, and detected and encouraged a marked recourse to Civil War labels. Roger North greatly regretted the failure of ‘Danby’s Test’, regarding it as an essential means for suppressing ‘old republican principles’; the defeat gave courage to his enemies and consequently ‘the faction began to set up afresh’. John Nalson, a Danby

34

The oath was the same as that laid upon Dissenting ministers in the Five Mile Act of 1665. See Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, p. 212. 35 Andrew Marvell, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Power, in PW, II, 280ff; Burnet, OT, pp. 383–4; Haley, Shaftesbury, ch. 18; Browning, Danby, I, 149–54. 36 LJ, XII, 668; Davis, ‘“Presbyterian” Opposition’, p. 13; Haley, Shaftesbury, p. 375. 37 Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. N. H. Keeble, J. Coffey, T. Cooper, and T. Charlton (5 vols, 2020), II, 484. 38 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, 1667–1683, ed. J. R. Milton and P. Milton (Oxford, 2006), 337; J. Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records (4 vols, 1886–92), IV, 66–9.

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polemicist, argued that the ‘Presbyterian’ party’s refusal to accede to the Test was proof of their continued adherence to rebellious principles.39 Danby and the limitations scheme

The next attack on the bishops occurred in March 1677, when the Commons defeated a scheme of limitations upon a Catholic successor to the throne. It tends to be supposed that it was the Whig Exclusion project of 1679 which spearheaded a political solution to the ugly prospect of a popish reign. The Whigs would charge their enemies with supine neglect of the impending danger. Yet the Danby government had bitten the bullet at an early stage and was clear-headed about its own solutions, which, though formally loyal, aimed significantly to reduce James’s future prerogatives and enhance church authority. The Danbyites believed that the duke must be allowed to inherit his birthright, but steps must be taken to confine his religion to the privacy of his closet. This resolve seems to have been arrived at in the autumn of 1675. Early in 1676 James’s daughters were put under the care of Bishop Henry Compton, a move which so angered James that he finally abandoned the formality of attending Anglican services.40 The next step was to put this and more extensive measures on a statutory footing. At the opening of the session in February 1677 Lord Chancellor Finch declared the king’s desire that measures be taken for ‘the peace of the church’. Twelve heads of proposals emerged from discussion of the king’s speech, mostly for measures against popery, but also displaying a characteristically even-handed zeal against Protestant Dissent. A fund was to be erected to buy up impropriations in order to finance clergy in ‘the great towns’; the poor were to have no maintenance, and rate-payers to pay double, unless they sent their children to be catechized. A motion was also made to address the king for the regular meeting of the church’s parliament, convocation.41 The main business emerged in the form of two bills introduced in the Lords in March by the archbishop of York, John Dolben, one ‘for securing the Protestant religion’ and the other ‘for the more effectual conviction and prosecution of popish recusants’. The first bill provided for the two archbishops, together with the bishops of London, Durham, and Winchester, to take charge of the education of royal children as Protestants, from the ages of seven to fourteen. More dramatically, it provided for the removal of the future king’s prerogative over ecclesiastical appointments. At the next accession, the bishops, in a quorum of nine, were to tender an oath against transubstantiation to 39 North,

Autobiography, pp. 61–3; John Nalson, The Common Interest of King and People (1677), pp. 275–7. 40 J. Miller, James II: A Study in Kingship (Hove, 1978), p. 80. 41 LJ, XIII, 37, 48, 50 (15, 21, 22 February 1677); H. M. Margoliouth (ed.), The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell (3rd edn, 2 vols, Oxford, 1971), II, 193.

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the new monarch, which, if refused, would bring into play machinery for the filling of vacant bishoprics. The bishops would present a list of three candidates from among whom the king must select; if he defaulted, after thirty days the first named would be consecrated notwithstanding. In this way the offices of the bishops, the sentinels of English Protestantism, would be protected from popery. The proposal reversed the Act of 1534 by which episcopal appointments were placed under the royal supremacy. The crown’s other church patronage was to be administered by the bishops and the lord chancellor.42 The second bill was somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, papists were to be banned from court, prevented from being guardians or executors, forbidden to possess arms, and obliged to contribute to a fund to support papists who converted to Protestantism. But, on the other, a limited toleration was to be granted. Those papists who swore themselves loyal and paid a fee were to be entered into a register and relieved of the full burden of existing penalties. This was an effort at separating peaceable and ‘unjesuited’ papists from those extremists who still upheld the political supremacy of Rome.43 As Finch told the Houses, the recusants could be divided into ‘mistaken souls who deserve to be pitied’ and ‘designing men who deserve to be punished’.44 It was convenient that Shaftesbury and Buckingham were currently out of the way in the Tower, having overplayed their hands in an attempt to pronounce the Cavalier Parliament dissolved. The bishops had solidly voted for their imprisonment. Danby’s party was supreme in the Lords. But most of his measures were to founder in the Commons. The two bills for religion sailed through the Lords, and were lost in the Commons, despite the efforts of secretaries of state Sir Joseph Williamson and Henry Coventry, and the Anglican devots. Sir Job Charlton urged that James must inherit the crown, for allegiance was not limited by his religion: ‘he may be Jew, Mahometan, etc.’, but still had a right to reign. But he was no less insistent that in such cases the king must be hedged with laws to preserve the true religion. Daniel Finch (the chancellor’s son) denied that the bills were a diminution of the royal supremacy: it would merely be that the supremacy would be exercised in and through the prelates – non dominus rex nisi per judiciarios suos – the king is lord only through his judges. Taking a different tack, Sir Edward Dering said that since ‘the king has parted with many things of his prerogative’, why not this? This was odd coming from a high royalist, but it was common to say that the king’s voluntary diminution of his prerogative was no injury to the essence of sovereignty.45 In reality, Danby’s 42

LJ, XIII, 51, 56 (22 February, 1 March 1677). The text of the bill is in Marvell, Growth of Popery, in PW, II, 313–23. (Compare the modern position: after 1977 the prime minister, acting for the crown, chose bishops from shortlists offered by a crown appointments commission; since 2008 the prime minister has left the matter entirely to the church.) 43 LJ, XIII, 51 (22 February 1677); Miller, Popery, pp. 144–7. Cf. William Lloyd, Considerations Touching the True Way to Suppress Popery in this Kingdom (1677). 44 LJ, XIII, 37 (15 February 1677). 45 Grey, Debates, IV, 287, 289, 292, 321 (20 and 27 March 1677).

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men were plainly prepared to make significant inroads on the prerogative in order to defend the church. The consequence was that the bill met with a torrent of attacks upon ecclesiastical hegemony. Sir Harbottle Grimston, claiming that the project was of a piece with the 1675 Test, declared that ‘we must deny the bishops this precedency in ecclesiastical matters’. If the king is deprived of the power to make bishops then ‘sure they are all in a praemunire’.46 In challenging the royal ecclesiastical supremacy, the Danbyites ‘design to pull off the crown from the king’s head’. Why, he demanded, did the bill place the task of tendering the transubstantiation oath in the hands only of bishops, and not lay peers and commoners: are they not Protestants too, ‘and as free to burn’ when the papists come to rule? Edward Vaughan, somewhat extravagantly, contended that whereas the crown was violently deprived of its kingship in the 1640s, now it was to be done legislatively. The laws since Henry VIII’s time had settled the ecclesiastical supremacy in the crown: ‘shall the king give this power away, and lodge it in the ecclesiastics? When the king once passes this into law, he divests himself of his right, and puts it into the bishops’; ‘the bill is fatal to the crown’, for ‘the king is summum caput ecclesiae’ – supreme head of the church. Sir John Malet thought that the bill signalled a prelatical ‘oligarchy’: ‘it sets up nine mitres above the crown – monstrum horrendum!’ There was now ‘a thesis among some churchmen, that the king is not king but by their magical unction’. It was, he judged, the sort of bill we must expect now that the good lords were in the Tower. Sir Robert Howard said ‘we are told that there is no proper way to secure the religion but by ecclesiastics’, but he feared the bishops will ‘make an ill use of this power’, and that the bill will lead to a ‘perpetual quarrel with the clergy’. If the next king refused the proposed test, then twenty-five princebishops would rule the roost. Sir Thomas Lee warned that if ‘the king have not power in ecclesiasticals, it may be [so] in civils also’. Marvell asked whether the Protestant religion could be trusted to bishops, who had been such windvanes in Tudor times. And Sir Thomas Littleton thought the project was the product of the ‘general method’ of ‘a sort of clergy, ever since Archbishop Laud’s time’ of bishops who ‘love dominion’.47 All this was in a long tradition of magisterial Puritanism: an anti-prelatical defence of civil supremacy.48 The second bill got shorter shrift, being summarily demolished by William Sacheverell. It was ‘a toleration of popery’ which would leave Dissenters in a worse condition than papists, and allow anybody to be a papist for fifty-two shillings a year. In an unusual insult to the Lords, the Commons recorded that they put both bills aside because their content belied their titles. As Marvell 46

Praemunire: the crime of asserting an authority beyond or above the realm. Debates, IV, 285–6, 288–91, 294, 319–26 (20 and 27 March 1677); W. Cobbett (ed.), The Parliamentary History of England (36 vols, 1806–20), IV, 853–8. 48 W. D. J. Cargill Thompson, ‘Sir Francis Knollys’s Campaign against the Jure Divino Theory of Episcopacy’, in The Dissenting Tradition, ed. C. R. Cole and M. E. Moody (Athens, OH, 1975), pp. 39–77. 47 Grey,

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put it, they were bills ‘of a very good name, but of a strange and unheard of nature’.49 The Lords reciprocated by ignoring for several months a rival bill against the ‘growth of popery’ sent up from the Commons. Not much reached the statute book, although the medieval writ, de haeretico comburendo, under which heretics could be burnt, was abolished. It is striking that even this brief Act carried a Danbyite proviso upholding the jurisdiction of bishops in acting against ‘atheism, blasphemy, heresy, or schism, and other damnable doctrines and opinions’ – though the word ‘Protestant’ was added, as an amendment, before the word ‘bishops’50 Marvell’s celebrated tract, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, published in December 1677, is chiefly remembered for its ringing opening accusation that there was a design afoot for absolute tyranny and downright popery. The tract is mainly an account of parliamentary proceedings during that year and an attack on Danby’s administration. He thought those two bills ‘of the highest consequence that ever were offered in parliament since Protestancy came in’, and considered their collapse the signal achievement of the session.51 Despite Danby’s failure, limitations on the crown’s ecclesiastical power remained a cherished aim of churchmen. It seems likely that this episode prompted William Falkner to write Christian Loyalty, a treatise held in high regard by the succeeding generation of Anglican loyalists. A long book, finished by mid-1678, and dedicated to Archbishop Sancroft, it was a manifesto for the Tory alternative to Exclusion: accept the succession of the hereditary heir, but protect the true church from him. It argued that spiritual authority belongs to the church alone: the sovereign may direct priests in the exercise of their functions, but he may not perform, prevent, or pervert those functions. Matters of ‘faith, worship, and order, which Christ hath determined’ are ‘unmoveable and unalterable’ by the sovereign power. The consecration and ordination of bishops and priests are among these divine untouchables. The civil supremacy ‘is never designed in any wise to violate, either these divine or Christian institutions, or to assert it lawful for any prince to invade that authority and right’. Falkner’s ecclesiology culminated in the question: what if the sovereign prince should not be of the true church? No ruler, he asserted, was entitled to set up false gods, and any who do must be passively resisted. But, he conceded, it was almost unimaginable that an idolatrous prince should foolishly try to enforce his religion in England. Rather to be expected was a prince who, despite his 49 Grey,

Debates, IV, 335–9 (4 April 1677); Cobbett, Parliamentary History, IV, 861–4; Marvell, Growth of Popery, in PW, II, 310. 50 Statutes of the Realm, V, 850 (29 Car. II. c. 9); LJ, XIII, 99, 104, 109–10 (4, 7, and 11 April 1677). 51 Marvell, Growth of Popery, in PW, II, 310. See J. Wallace, Destiny his Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 215–18; S. Owen, ‘The Lost Rhetoric of Liberty: Marvell and Restoration Drama’, in Marvell and Liberty, ed. W. Chernaik and M. Dzelzainis (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 334–53.

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personal religion, protected the established church, as the gentile princes Darius and Nebuchadnezzer had the Jewish. Falkner concluded with an elaborate proof for a late date for the baptism of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, in order to show that the emperor’s many actions on behalf of the true church were done while still formally a pagan. This was a series of elaborate allegories for what was expected of James: that he practise his popery privately and discreetly, but publicly uphold Protestantism.52 The failed proposals of 1677 provided the model for the equally doomed scheme of limitations introduced by the king in April 1679 as a rival to the Exclusion project. This, too, began with an oath ‘to distinguish a papist from a Protestant successor’ and then set out to ‘limit and circumscribe the authority of a popish successor’. More dramatically, it went on to apply a similar principle to civil and military offices, which would be placed under the authority of parliament. The proposal was once again coupled with a stiff bill against papists, involving civil and ecclesiastical registration of Catholics, a thirty-mile exclusion zone around London, a summary of the penal laws to be read regularly from pulpits, and the compulsory attendance of papists at an annual diocesan sermon for their conversion. In the administration of these provisions the bishops were placed firmly on an equal footing with the lay magistracies.53 The strategy of persuading James of the folly of doing anything other than practising his popery privately, and of giving ecclesiastical government over to his Protestant episcopal allies, remained that of churchmen right down to the Revolution. In 1680 Joseph Glanvill remarked that a ‘chief’ difficulty of the popish succession, howsoever ‘mild and gentle’ the prince in question, was his power to bestow bishoprics. He thought the best solution was simply to abolish the congé d’élire – the king’s instruction to cathedral chapters as to whom to elect – and to revert to the ancient practice by which the dean and chapter freely elected bishops. The universities, he added, should take over the management of royal appointments to church livings.54 Similar proposals resurfaced in Bishop Turner’s regency scheme of the winter of 1688–9, when Tories made their last bid to rescue an Anglican kingship from the dregs of James’s monarchy.55 If the failures of the limitation projects of 1677–9 left churchmen reliant on nothing more concrete than James’s repeatedly sworn promises to uphold the Church of England, the trauma of the Exclusion Crisis gave them good grounds for believing that James understood the soundness of their advice to keep his devotions to his closet, if he were not to provoke rebellion. In 1682 52

William Falkner, Christian Loyalty (1679), pp. 13–16. M. Bond (ed.), The Diaries and Papers of Sir Edward Dering (1976), pp. 188–90; Grey, Debates, VII, 158–9 (30 April 1679); cf. pp. 237–51 (11 May 1679). The king repeated the proposal in the Oxford Parliament, when it was talked of as a ‘regency’ scheme: Grey, Debates, XIII, 313, 317, 326 (25 March 1681). 54 Joseph Glanvill, The Zealous and Impartial Protestant (1681), p. 11. 55 R. Beddard, ‘The Loyalist Opposition in the Interregnum’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 40 (1967), 101–9. 53

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the high Tory Edmund Bohun described the Shaftesburians of 1677 as wreckers, who ‘prevent[ed] all the excellent laws that were then under consideration against popery’. To his mind, it was the Whigs, not the Tories, who were leaving the English church naked in the face of the impending popish prince.56 The 1677 episode is paradoxical. The ‘loyalist’ court party set out to limit the royal prerogative, while hostile opposition MPs – old Presbyterians and future Whigs and Exclusionists – vigorously defended the crown’s prerogatives. At this juncture, the latter’s hatred of the episcopal party led them to dismiss measures to restrain the popish heir. Since a long historiographical tradition leads us to assume that Tories were wedded to high prerogatives and Whigs to constitutional restraints, it is tempting to see the Danby proposals as a strategic attempt, under the duress of growing anti-popish feeling, to forestall more drastic measures against James; and, conversely, to see the opposition’s defence of the prerogative as a mere manoeuvre. Yet there was something deeper to both positions. Anti-popery was, in the Danby years, actively generated by the church party itself, cranked up in 1673 to help bring down the Declaration of Indulgence. It was possible for churchmen to argue, with some justice, that it was they who first addressed the popish danger. An anonymous writer in 1680 wrote that ‘many years before the late Popish Plot was discovered the prelatical party … was not only awake, but honestly gave the nation warning of the danger; and were the only men that did it, for the nonconformists were either then asleep, or so silent, that we could hear nothing of their fears of popery; but they lay still, fondly hugging the Indulgence that was given them’.57 In the mid-1670s it was rising Danbyite divines who cut their teeth, in pulpit and press, as readily against popery as against Dissent. The young Henry Dodwell, a pugnacious theologian of the new high church and high Tory school, started to produce massive anti-popery tomes.58 Churchmen were more than ready to put the popish heir in his place, taming him with the heavy guns of high church ecclesiology. The propensity of a Falkner or a Dodwell to see popery as little different from idolatrous paganism – to see James as a gentile ruling Jews, as a pagan ruling Christians – was as unyielding and insulting as Whig rhetoric could be. James understandably resented churchmen as much as he feared Whigs. In the opposite camp, it is striking how ready Shaftesbury’s and Buckingham’s allies were to defend the royal supremacy. When it came to matters of ecclesiastical authority, there was little sign of a position hostile to the prerogative. Instead, old traditions of royalist Presbyterianism resurfaced, grounded in the idea of the godly prince’s duty to withstand both popish and prelatical machinations. In the 1630s and 1640s Puritans had accused Archbishop 56

Edmund Bohun, The Second Part of the Address to the Freemen and Freeholders of the Nation (1682), p. 31. 57 Jean Daillé [pseud.], A Lively Picture of Lewis du Moulin (1680), p. 20. 58 Henry Dodwell, Some Considerations of Present Concernment: how far the Romanists may be Trusted by Princes of another Perswasion (1675); Dodwell, Two Short Discourses against the Romanists (1676).

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Laud of undermining the royal supremacy: it was one of the charges against him at his treason trial.59 This spirit mingled with a more straightforward anticlerical Erastianism. Sir Harbottle Grimston was a prime case: a veteran from the Long Parliament who had helped lead the attack on the Laudians, now a conforming churchman, but one hostile to prelacy and tender to nonconforming consciences.60 The Whigs’ Exclusion Bills of 1679–81 would touch no flower of the prerogative, and arguably would be innocent of constitutional innovation. In May 1679 Whigs denounced the king’s own limitations scheme as tending to a ‘commonwealth’, as quasi-republican, insisting that the crown’s appointment of bishops and privy councillors was an intrinsic part of the constitution of English kingship.61 Arguably it was an old Puritan fear of prelacy that deterred many MPs from supporting limitations. Exclusion was preferable because it would preserve intact the civil supremacy over the church: the popery of Anglican prelacy had to be guarded against as much as the popery of Rome. Danby’s impeachment and the bishops in ‘cases of blood’

The exorbitant jurisdiction of the bishops remained a fundamental issue throughout the Exclusion Crisis. The occasion of its being so was the impeachment of Danby for treason, which brought his downfall. In the last weeks of the Cavalier Parliament, late in 1678, and in the first Exclusion Parliament the following spring, the bishops stood solidly behind Danby, impeding his committal to the Tower and his trial. If Danby was to be destroyed, the blocking power of the bishops, now referred to by ‘the scoffing term of a deadweight’, had to be removed.62 Shaftesbury (released from his own sojourn in the Tower) came up with a clever ruse. On 14 April 1679 he moved that the bishops, by virtue of their spiritual estate, were not entitled to sit in the Lords in ‘cases of blood’, that is, in capital trials. He explained that, under canon law, priests were particularly enjoined to the gospel duty of mercy and precluded from the shedding of blood, and thus from the infliction of corporal or capital

59

Morrill, ‘Religious Context’, pp. 164–5; Lamont, Godly Rule, pp. 44–52; Lamont, Marginal Prynne, 1600–1669 (1963), pp. 11–27. 60 Henning (ed.), Commons, II, 446–7. For the survival of old Presbyterian ideology, see Lamont, Prynne; and idem, Richard Baxter and the Millennium (1979); also Wallace, Destiny his Choice, pp. 215–16. 61 Grey, Debates, XII, 237ff (11 May 1679); cf. pp. 412–13 (2 November 1680); XIII, p. 316 (26 March 1681). Henry Neville was unusual among Whigs in supporting limitations. See G. Mahlberg, ‘Henry Neville and the Toleration of Catholics during the Exclusion Crisis’, Historical Research 83 (2010), 617–34. 62 Thomas Hunt, Mr Hunt’s Argument for the Bishops Right (1682), p. 280. The phrase seems to have been used as early as 1675: CSPD, 1675–6, 26 December 1675.

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punishments.63 Consequently the Lords Spiritual must absent themselves from treason trials, and could not vote in the Danby case.64 Shaftesbury’s contention was plainly bred of political exigency. It was an odd sight to find him expressing concern for the sensibilities of the clerical estate and insisting on the upholding of canon law, so often denounced as a popish remnant intruding into English law. Nonetheless, his followers enthusiastically pursued the point on 6 May and on several subsequent days. Buckingham, scenting an anti-prelatical field-day, was prompted to take his seat in the House for the first time in the new parliament. Shaftesbury, Holles, Essex, Wharton, Delamare, Bedford, and Paget spoke vehemently against the bishops. Lord Chancellor Finch, Anglesey, Aylesbury, Nottingham, Robartes, and the bishops themselves, contended for a partial episcopal right of presence – Shaftesbury’s claim was sufficiently plausible for it not to be possible to plead for more than a right of presence. The court lords carried a resolution on 13 May ‘that the Lords Spiritual have a right to stay in court in capital cases, till such time as judgement of death comes to be pronounced’. This ruling authorized the bishops to take part in the preliminary stages of the trial, including, crucially, judging the legality of the king’s pardon, which Danby had pleaded. The bishops were apparently reluctant to expose themselves to the furies of the opposition, but the king was determined that Danby should stand upon his pardon, and hence upon the prerogative. The court majority in the Lords was on a knife-edge and depended utterly on the bishops. In a vote on 10 May the court had a majority of two, sixteen bishops voting for Danby and two against. The bishops were the stumbling block and when, on 27 May, a protest was entered against their presence, the twenty-seven who signed constituted a roll-call of the Whig lords.65 Whig anger was exacerbated by two wider issues. First, there was a strong sense that the king’s pardon of Danby undermined all impeachments and hence the answerability of ministers to parliament: if the bishops backed the pardon they were betrayers of English liberties. In the Commons, Sir Thomas Lee pronounced that ‘England is undone, that day this is a good pardon’; and Sacheverell declared that if the pardon were allowed it would make the king absolute and arbitrary. Secondly, there was simultaneously pending the impeachment for treason of five popish lords, Lord Stafford the best known,

63

A present-day echo of this principle is the protocol by which clergymen who are awarded knighthoods (a military honour) do not style themselves ‘Sir’. 64 The same case was made in respect of impeachment of Scroggs: L. G. Schwoerer, ‘The Attempted Impeachment of Sir William Scroggs, Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, November 1680–March 1681’, HJ 38 (1995), 843–73, at 855. 65 Burnet, OT, pp. 460–1; HMC, House of Lords, 1678–88, pp. 31–8; HMC, Ormonde, V, 86–8, 100–8, 115–16; LJ, XIII, 570, 594–5; Bohun, Second Part of the Address, pp. 32–6; Haley, Shaftesbury, pp. 490–1, 509, 522–5; Browning, Danby, I, 334–7; D. Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics in England, 1661–1689 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1969), pp. 127–9.

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who would to be executed in the following year. The spectre was raised of the bishops voting down their impeachments also.66 In the Commons, Silas Titus first raised the question of the bishops’ rights in capital cases on 9 May, and pronounced the bishops sitting during the trial ‘a novel thing, and contrary to all precedents and practice’. On 15 May and on two subsequent days, the Commons gave vent to their fury at the Lords’ resolution of 13 May. Sir Robert Howard objected that the distinction between trial preliminaries and final judgement did not meet the present case, since the question of the legality of the pardon was itself a life and death issue. English liberties would be at naught if the pardon was successfully pleaded, since what was at stake was parliament’s right to scrutinize a criminal minister. And since the decision now lay with the prelates, ‘the law of England is in the power of one body of men’. The bishops, echoed Sir Thomas Clarges, ‘obstruct the justice of the nation’. Harbord, Sacheverell, Lee, Vaughan, and others agreed. Vaughan ominously threatened that if the bishops stood their ground they would find their very office under attack: ‘they pretend to sit upon this pardon of Lord Danby, and I pray God they sit not to pass judgement upon their whole function’.67 Shaftesbury’s stratagem failed. The two Houses became utterly deadlocked, and gave Charles the excuse to prorogue parliament a few days later. In July, to the horror of the Whigs, he dissolved it, and the Exclusion Bill lapsed with it. There were momentous long-term consequences. The bishops were now blamed for the dissolution and hence for the failure to secure a Protestant succession. Shaftesbury was ready to have the heads of those who advised the dissolution. Also, the press was unleashed because the Licensing Act had not been renewed, and for the first time since 1662 there was no censorship. The church, wrote Gilbert Burnet, was ‘exposed to the popular fury’. The whole affair was ominously reminiscent of the campaign of 1640–1 which had led to the exclusion of bishops from the Lords. The bishops accordingly feared ‘a rebellion, and with it the pulling the church to pieces’. But by the same token, the seeds of a Tory reaction were laid, because the cry of ‘’41 is come again’ began to go up. The assault on the bishops would in the end be the undoing of the Whigs.68

66 Grey,

Debates, VII, 297, 299–300 (17 May 1679); cf. pp. 278–85 (15 May 1679); VIII, p. 108 (29 November 1680). Anthony Wood heard a rumour in April that five bishops were to be impeached for complicity in the Popish Plot: Life and Times, ed. A. Clark (2 vols, Oxford, 1895–1900), II, 447. 67 Grey, Debates, VII, 221, 278–85; cf. pp. 292–303, 336–42 (17 and 26 May). 68 Burnet, OT, p. 461. Cf. Bohun, Second Part of the Address, p. 48; J. P. Kenyon, ‘The Acquittal of Sir George Wakeman, 18 July 1679’, HJ 14 (1971), 693–708. For the proposed impeachment of the Bristol high churchman Richard Thompson, see J. Barry, ‘The Politics of Religion in Restoration Bristol’, in Politics of Religion, ed. Harris, Seaward, and Goldie, pp. 163–89, at 173.

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The rights of bishops in parliament

The parliamentary quarrel of May 1679 over the bishops’ rights in capital cases was soon carried over into a wider public controversy. A dozen treatises were published, keeping the issue of the prelates’ secular jurisdiction in the public eye until 1682.69 In this debate three defenders of the bishops are identifiable. Much the most intelligent and trenchant case came from Edward Stillingfleet, one of the most celebrated preachers and theologians of the day, in his The Grand Question, Concerning the Bishops’ Right to Vote in Parliament in Cases Capital, which was widely regarded (Burnet tells us) as clinching the case.70 Stillingfleet’s engagement here was parallel to his notorious assault on the Dissenters in The Mischief of Separation. Lawrence Womock, for his contribution, Two Treatises Proving … the Bishops are a Fundamental and Essential Part of our English Parliament, was rewarded with a bishopric in 1683. But first into the field was Thomas Hunt, whose short invective, The Honours of the Lords Spiritual Asserted, grew into a larger Rights of the Bishops, and became overblown in his Argument for the Bishops’ Rights, which substantially echoed Stillingfleet.71 Leading the attack against the bishops was Lord Holles in his Letter of a Gentleman to his Friend, a large tract which he had ready by June 1679. Holles was an embodiment of the Parliamentarian and Presbyterian traditions; he had entered the fray against the Laudians in 1641; had been one of the Five Members whom Charles I sought to arrest in January 1642; and was a prospective secretary of state in Charles II’s abortive restoration in 1651. Raised to the peerage at the Restoration, he had long served as a privy councillor. His political stature in 1679 has been rather overlooked; Barillon said he was ‘the man in all England for whom the different cabals have the most consideration’.72 He was in the midst of writing a second book, attacking Stillingfleet and Hunt, when, in February 1680, aged eighty, he died. His Remains, prepared for the 69

The probable sequence is: Thomas Hunt, The Honours of the Lords Spiritual Asserted (1679); Denzil, Lord Holles, A Letter of a Gentleman to his Friend, Shewing that the Bishops are not to be Judges in Parliament in Cases Capital (1679); Thomas Barlow, A Discourse of the Peerage and Jurisdiction of the Lords Spiritual in Parliament (1679); Anon., A Rejoynder to the Reply Concerning the Peerage and Jurisdiction of the Lords Spiritual in Parliament (1679); Thomas Hunt, The Rights of the Bishops to Judge in Capital Cases in Parliament Cleared (1680); Edward Stillingfleet, The Grand Question, Concerning the Bishops’ Right to Vote in Parliament in Cases Capital (1680); Lawrence Womock, Two Treatises. The First, Proving both by History and Record that the Bishops are a Fundamental and Essential Part of our English Parliament; The Second, that they may be Judges in Capital Cases (1680); Thomas Hunt, Mr Hunt’s Argument for the Bishops Right (1682); Denzil, Lord Holles, Lord Hollis his Remains (1682). 70 Burnet, OT, pp. 463–4; cf. Bohun, Second Part of the Address, p. 44. 71 Why Hunt, a lawyer with Whig connections, whose lengthy Postscript of 1682 was one of the more notorious Exclusionist tracts, should have published defences of the bishops is perplexing, and contemporaries were themselves baffled. 72 Barillon, 14 December 1679, quoted in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Holles, Denzil’. See P. Crawford, Denzil Holles, 1598–1680 (1979); Goldie, Morrice, pp. 177–85.

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press by the Whig lawyer William Atwood, ensured that his ‘bright flame’ would still continue ‘to enlighten us’. A deep fury drove Holles to overcome illness to write. He thought he had reached an accommodation with the king in January 1679: he would stave off Danby’s impeachment if the king dismissed him, exiled James, and dissolved the Cavalier Parliament. The parliament had been dissolved, but Holles thought that Danby’s pardon, together with a substantial pension and a much-delayed ouster, were gross breaches of faith.73 Holles aside, the one other identifiable writer to take up the case against the bishops was, ironically, himself a bishop, Thomas Barlow. As this stance suggests, he was scarcely typical of the episcopal bench. A man of Erastian sympathies, thought of as a Cromwellian fellow-traveller, his elevation to a bishopric in 1675 had been opposed by Archbishop Sheldon, and he was constantly at loggerheads with Archbishop Sancroft. Barlow thought that the Whigs were ‘champions of the Protestant religion’, and his anonymous Discourse of the Peerage and Jurisdiction of the Lords Spiritual was seen by a critic as coming from the pen of ‘a bitter enemy of episcopacy’.74 Arcane though the subject-matter of these treatises seems to us, the debate is a striking example of how topics in ecclesiastical history could become suffused with party passions and engage the attention of political leaders. With displays of formidable scholarly energy, advertisements of scholarly prowess among the official records kept in the Tower, and much citation from the great antiquaries John Selden, Sir Henry Spelman, and William Dugdale, these contestants picked their way through dozens of medieval precedents. It was plain that historically the bishops had ordinarily absented themselves from capital trials. So the question was how this fact should be interpreted. On the Whigs’ view their absence was proof of their ineligibility. Yet the reason for their absence was the canon law prohibition on spiritual persons shedding blood, and, as we have seen, this put anti-prelatists in a bind, for they were in the uncomfortable position of defending canon law. Anxious not to concede to the ‘popish’ jurisprudence of canon law, their shift was to insist that useful parts of canon law had been incorporated into English law. Thus, Holles insisted that by canon law the clergy were ‘particularly debarred’ from capital trials and that this valuable prohibition was entrenched in common law. The clinching document – which rapidly became the chief exhibit in the debate – was the Constitutions of Clarendon of 1164, by which Henry II, in the wake of his quarrel with Thomas Becket, had sought to tame the bishops. Holles cited Article 11, which specified that bishops should sit in the Lords as barons ‘till it come to require either loss of member or life’. Thus, in great trials of state, the bishops must be excluded.75 73 Holles,

Lord Hollis his Remains, sig. A2v; Lacey, Dissent, pp. 122–6. Discourse, ep. ded.; Anon., Rejoynder, p. 14. 75 Holles, Letter, pp. 61, 67–8, 71; Holles, Lord Hollis his Remains, p. 99, sig. A8v; Barlow, Discourse, pp. 14, 19. 74 Barlow,

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Yet, as Hunt and Womock showed, it was clear that at such trials the bishops had habitually entered a protestation that their withdrawal was not in derogation of their right of judicial presence in the Lords. They produced an example from ‘11 Richard II’ that was on record in the parliamentary rolls. Indeed, sometimes the bishops had appointed a lay proxy to act in their stead, such as Sir Thomas de la Percy in Richard II’s last parliament. Thus the clerical exclusion under canon law had no binding force in English law, and at best represented a moral scruple which custom permitted the clergy to exercise. In any case, the medieval clergy had scarcely been consistent in their scruples: they voted on bills of attainder, and served in the highest legal offices of state, and so had often drawn blood judicially.76 Rising above this parade of precedents, Stillingfleet was able to resolve the canon law question with bolder strokes. He explained that under the European ‘Gothick’ constitutions the clergy had been incorporated by kings into their councils. When the papacy began its project of universal monarchy, it tried to draw off the bishops from their proper role in the king’s service and to make them instead the pope’s dependents: the canon law, with its ‘superstitious fancy’ concerning cases of blood, was the great instrument of this usurpation. The pretence was got into England by Archbishop Lanfranc. Stillingfleet showed that Holles was thoroughly muddled, for he had contrived to insist both that priestly involvement in lay trials, and in politics generally, was a piece of popish clericalism, and also that popish canon law was good law. For Stillingfleet the popery lay in clerical attempts to evade their judicial duties by way of canon law excuses. He showed that Holles’s handling of the Constitutions of Clarendon was upside-down. Henry II’s aim was to hold the clergy to their secular duties, and prevent the development of a separate clerical jurisdiction, an imperium in imperio; far from restricting their civil involvement, he encouraged them to recognize their full incorporation into the commonwealth.77 Like all of Stillingfleet’s productions, his tract vigorously defended the church’s standing in secular affairs without a whiff of suspicion of prelatical jure divino pleading; on the contrary, the case was robustly anti-popish and rested on secular law. He rewrote the whole debate in terms of the centuries-old struggle between England and the papacy, which the English found the most satisfying way of understanding their history. And he made the Anglican bishops seem a natural part of English political life, not a popish cohort intruding into it. The tract was well tuned to appeal to moderate laity, who found Restoration high churchmanship distasteful, but who were also deeply anxious about where Whig attacks on the bishops might lead. Stillingfleet hoped to frighten his audience out of Whig sympathies by suggesting that, under pretence of zeal 76 Womock,

Two Treatises, pp. 3, 8–12; Hunt, Rights, pp. 17–18, 73–9; Stillingfleet, Grand Question, pp. 4, 18ff. Cf. Holles, Letter, pp. 19–21, 26–30. 77 Stillingfleet, Grand Question, pp. 12, 21–9, 62–9; cf. Hunt, Mr Hunt’s Argument, pp. 56–8, 90–8; Anon., Rejonder, p. 13.

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against popery, the factious were intent on destroying the Church of England’s integrity: down that path lay a new civil war. No bishop, no peace. Doleful memories of the Civil War ran through all these tracts. Womock professed to fear a revival of the ‘preternatural ferments of ’42’ and a renewal of the bishops’ sufferings: the Civil War had begun with an onslaught on the prelates and their expulsion from parliament. He recalled that William Prynne had led the way with his Lord Bishops, None of the Lord’s Bishops (1640): Holles was now returning to his old form, and was doing no more than plundering Prynne’s ideas. Hunt in similar vein pronounced, ‘’tis not unknown to any in our English Israel, that there are yet here among us some remainders of the men of ’42’. Another author summoned up the ‘prophetic maxim of King James, “No bishop, No king”’, and went on to remember the ‘Root and Branch’ fanatics of ’41 and the mobs brought into the streets by ‘the anti-­ episcopal party’.78 These fears and memories did not seem groundless. Beyond the immediate issue lay larger ones. Holles had launched a general case that the bishops had no special claim to sit in parliament at all. He argued that bishops did not sit in the Lords as spirituali, but only because of their temporalities as barons; not as one of the three estates with a sacrosanct constitutional position, but only by virtue of their peerages. Bishops were no different from temporal lords, and had no claim distinct from lay holders of baronies. Indeed, their position was rather worse, since they were not peers of the blood; their position was not hereditary.79 Holles did not quite say that the clergy were not a separate estate of the realm, but instead showed that they were convened in that capacity not in parliament but in convocation. In sitting in parliament the bishops did not, in any formal sense, represent the clerical Estate. If the bishops were said to sit in the Lords as an Estate, then it would follow that they had a veto on legislation, and that a parliament without bishops would be invalid, but for Holles they had not and it would not. Edward I, for one, had summoned a parliament ‘clero excluso’, and so ‘their presence is not of necessity for the constituting and sitting of a parliament’. In fact, he concluded, most of the anti-popish legislation of past times had been done over the heads of protesting prelates: to allow them the legislative dignity of being a parliamentary Estate would nullify the Reformation.80 Holles’s gesture of ambiguity about estates was unavailing: he had effectively denied that the bishops were an Estate, and such a claim was, in this period, deeply provocative. Not only did it reek of the Bishops Exclusion Act of 1641, it also hit at royal authority. It was generally agreed in royalist theory that there 78 Womock,

Two Treatises, p. 1; Hunt, Honours, ep. ded.; Anon., Rejoynder, pp. 10, 15. In 1983, amid some controversy, the archbishop of Canterbury cast a vote in the general election. The question was debated in the press: are bishops peers? The archbishop and the returning officer believed he was not. 80 Holles, Letter, pp. 81–97; Holles, Lord Hollis his Remains, pp. 47–9, 71–7, 80–4, 106, 111–12. Cf. Barlow, Discourse, pp. 2–8, 25–7. 79

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were three estates, beneath the king, so that the implication of the bishops not being an estate was that the king was one. Instead of being supreme over the three estates of lords spiritual and temporal and the commons, the king was but a co-ordinate partner with them. This was, as Holles pointed out, what Charles I had himself conceded in 1642 when he issued the famous Answer to the Nineteen Propositions.81 Restoration royalists expended great effort in repudiating Charles I’s solecism, for, as Hunt put it, it is a doctrine that ‘hath a tendency to subvert’ the constitution, ‘to depress the king, and to suppress the bishops’: it is ‘the levelling of sovereignty’. Accordingly, to defend the bishops was simultaneously to defend the king’s supremacy. Stillingfleet insisted that Charles I’s Answer involved ‘unwary concessions’, and led to the dangerous doctrine that crown and parliament were equal and coordinate powers. Womock insisted that ‘in all Christian kingdoms of the Gothick model’ the three estates consisted of the spirituality, the nobility, and the commons, and they were ‘convened at the will and pleasure of the supreme prince’. Thus the bishops were ‘a fundamental and essential part of our English parliament’. While it was true that the bishops did not have a distinct veto in parliament, yet a parliament was null if the bishops were wholly excluded. Acts of parliament ‘are good absente clero, though not excluso clero’.82 In these debates there was a real fear for the position of the bishops in the English polity: the Puritan ‘root and branch’ extirpation of bishops in the 1640s seemed to loom once more. Yet also visible were images of the church party’s hopes for their ideal role, a polity in which bishops were the highest in the land, where, like Moses and Aaron, harmonious amity would prevail between king and priest, in which civil and spiritual jurisdictions were undivided. The vision of Danbyite churchmen was to see clerical and lay magistrates acting in concert at every level, from the king’s council down to the justices’ bench. Running through this controversy was a bold renewal of a general aspiration for the happy union of crown and mitre. Jehoiada had been both chief priest and counsellor to King Joash, and St Ambrose had been civil governor of Milan as well as bishop.83

81 Holles,

Letter, p. 100. Two Treatises, pp. 2–3, 8-9, 13; Hunt, Honours, p. 31; Hunt, Rights, pp. 37ff., 157–8; Hunt, Mr Hunt’s Argument, pp. 121ff., 199; Stillingfleet, Grand Question, pp. 6, 158–73, 171–3, 177–80. For earlier debates on whether the clergy were an Estate, see Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, pp. 132, 165; M. Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Monarchy, the Estates of the Realm, and the Making of the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1985). In general, F. Makower, The Constitutional History and Constitution of the Church of England (1895), pp. 200ff. 83 Hunt, Honours, pp. 1–2, 4, 6, 11. This vision included a mythology about the harmony of church and commonwealth in Saxon times. See R. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688–1863 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 30–4. 82 Womock,

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The electoral politics of anticlericalism

These were elaborate treatises, to be read in the study rather than the coffeehouse. Yet in ephemeral broadsheets and ballads a similar preoccupation with episcopal politics is to be found. Marvell spent the 1670s railing against the new brand of high churchmen, and a Shaftesburian tract of 1676 complained of courtiers being ‘much priest-ridden’.84 But it was the church party’s resolves of 1679, to defend Danby, the hereditary succession, and the existing church settlement, which made them a signal object of fierce and widespread attack. A ballad, Godfrey’s Ghost, published in mid-1679, has the murdered magistrate Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey warning against popery, French influence, Danby’s corrupt courtiers, and the ‘prelate’s false divinity … making a god so partial in the cause’. Charles Blount’s well-known Appeal from the Country to the City, of that autumn, refers to ‘episcopal tantivies’ and ‘over-hot churchmen’ who talk of ’40 and ’41, and who throw suspicion on the ‘fanatics’.85 The great lay tutor of those clergy who were disinclined to do their own thinking was Roger L’Estrange, journalist and former press censor. In late October 1680 he is described as holding court among ‘the tantivy abhorrers at the Levitical clubhouse in Ave Mary Alley’, ‘teaching the minor clergy how to prate’.86 In turn, the clergy posed as tutors to the laity. The Whig Henry Care complained of gentry ‘governed by their … impertinent chaplain or the parson of their parish’, who ‘set up absolute monarchy to be jure divino’.87 A dialogue of 1681 has the character ‘Squire High Churchman’ who ‘swears … he would rather break ten commandments of God than one of the bishops’. L’Estrange in return produced a definition: ‘a Whig is a certain bold kind of a boisterous animal, that will not brook so much as the breath of a king or a bishop’. John Crowne’s play, City Politics, had the Podesta of Naples – Shaftesbury – declaring that he will not be frightened by ‘all the preachings and pulpit charms of your priests’, for ‘a Whig’s a devil can cast out a priest’.88 This anticlerical animus is also visible in the parliamentary elections of these years. This mood coincided with the novel presence of clergy at the hustings. Before 1664, when the church agreed to be taxed through parliament instead of convocation, clergymen did not vote.89 Thus 1679 saw the first general election at which thousands of parsons exercised their new franchise. Suddenly they were 84

Marvell, esp. Rehearsal Transpros’d, and Mr Smirke; Anon., A Seasonable Argument (1677), p. 16. 85 Blount, Appeal, p. 2. 86 Poems on Affairs of State, II, 369–70. 87 Quoted in Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, p. 243; cf. pp. 245–6. 88 Anon., A Dialogue between Two Burgesses (1681); Roger L’Estrange, Observator, I, no. 445 (28 November 1683); The Dramatic Works of John Crowne (2 vols, 1874), II, 120. For popular anticlericalism, see Harris, London Crowds, pp. 123–8. 89 In fact, occasionally they had voted, but controversially: D. Hirst, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge, 1975), p. 240.

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a conspicuous block vote, naturally almost all voting for the church party. At the same time, Tory sheriffs were not averse to lessening their opponents’ tally by disqualifying the votes of excommunicated persons – Dissenters who had been prosecuted in the church courts.90 The best-documented case of trouble is the second Essex election of 1679, when a regiment of 200 clergy turned out to vote against the Whig Colonel Mildmay, ‘an old Rumper and late mob-driver’ as Roger North called him. The clergy were pulled from their horses, had their gowns torn, dirt thrown at them, and were abused with the imaginative array of epithets which contemporaries devised for them: ‘Baal’s priests’, ‘Levites’, ‘Black-coats’, ‘Jesuitical dogs’. The Whig cry was ‘No Courtier, No Pensioner, No Black-Coat’.91 In the February election at Exeter the Whig side shouted ‘Down with the church’ when electing William Glyde, brewer, former mayor, and friend of ‘the fanatics’. In Leicestershire the court candidates had ‘a majority of the gentry and clergy behind them’ against Sir John Hartop, son-in-law of Cromwell’s Major-General Fleetwood.92 A pamphlet of that year complained that the ‘cunning statesmen’ of the Exclusion party everywhere got up an election cry against ‘popish and episcopal plotters’.93 At the Oxford election of 1681 the Whigs were returned amid cries of ‘No Universities, No Scholars, No Clergy, No Bishops’. A few months before, when the duke of Monmouth paraded up the High Street he was met with shouts of ‘God bless the Protestant Duke! No York, No Bishops, No University’. At dinner the toasts included ‘Confusion to the Bishop of Oxford’.94 An election broadside published in February 1679 has a troubled voter saying ‘our parson says I am bound in conscience to vote for those that will have absolute obedience to prince and prelate’, that ‘’tis damnable sin to vote for those that were against persecuting Dissenters, or that enquired into the grievances of the bishops’ courts’.95 One such parson was Dean Dennis Granville. In February 1681 at Easington in Durham he exhorted his congregation to vote for the court candidates; a Dissenter jumped up and denounced him as a favourer of popery; he was indicted for brawling in church, and when acquitted Granville wanted further proceedings against him.96 In 1681 the clergy were 90

For examples of such disqualifications, see Henning, Commons, I, pp. 314, 345, 366; W. T. Gibson, ‘The Limits of the Confessional State: Electoral Religion in the Reign of Charles II’, HJ 51 (2008), 27–47. For Exclusion elections generally, see E. Lipson, ‘The Elections to the Exclusion Parliaments, 1679–1681’, EHR 28 (1913), 59–85; M. D. George, ‘Elections and Electioneering, 1679–1681’, EHR 45 (1930), 552–78; Lacey, Dissent, pp. 112–20. 91 Anon., Essex’s Excellency (1679); Anon., A Faithful and Impartial Account of the Behaviour of a Party of the Essex Freeholders (1679); Henning, Commons, I, 229. 92 Henning, Commons, I, 199, 295. 93 Jones, First Whigs, p. 43; Grey, Debates, VII, 371 (27 October 1680); cf. Anon., An Impartial Account of the Nature and Tendency of the Late Addresses (1681). 94 Jones, First Whigs, p. 164; Henning, Commons, I, 360, Poems on Affairs of State, II, 261, 266. 95 Anon., Plain Dealing (1681), p. 2. 96 Whiting, Crewe, pp. 116–17; cf. Henning, Commons, I, 226.

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said to ‘bespatter [Shaftesbury] in their pulpits’.97 There are plenty of examples of episcopal interventions. At a by-election in October 1675 the bishop of Bristol backed the court candidate John Digby against the candidate supported by Shaftesbury and the Dissenters, sending a circular letter to his clergy urging them to vote for Digby and to encourage their parishioners to do likewise. Digby won overwhelmingly. In February 1679 Bishop Fell was actively electioneering in Oxford, Bishop Sparrow in Norfolk.98 Sometimes the clergy withdrew support from a candidate who failed to remain loyal to the party line. In September 1679 the Kent electors assembled on Pennenden Heath. Edward Dering, son of Sir Edward, one of Danby’s closest allies, had the larger crowd, ‘there being also above forty of the clergy of that county who appeared for him and were drawn up in a body by a wealthy knight’. But young Edward was one of those whose fear of popery got the better of his fear of presbytery, for ‘there is more present danger to church and state from the papists than from Dissenting Protestants’. So he voted for Exclusion. By 1681 the rumour was being put about that he was ‘an enemy of the church, and had drunk a health to the confusion of lawn sleeves’, that is, bishops. His father bemoaned that it was a ‘tale … sufficient to set all the clergy in the county against him, and most industriously do they labour against him’.99 Reflecting on the three Exclusion Parliaments, the Quaker William Penn had an answer to those who said that Dissenters were irrelevant because all the MPs were members of the established church. ‘I know it may be said, the persons chosen were church goers; I confess it, for the law would have them so. But no body were more averse to the politics of the clergy; insomuch that the parson and the parish almost everywhere divided upon the question of their election.’ From the opposite camp, Sir William Smith agreed, when delivering his charge to the Middlesex quarter sessions in April 1682: ‘this is a divided nation, divided into two opposite camps, the church party, I mean the Church of England as by law established, and the anti-church’.100 If the parallels with 1641 were on every lip, the difference was that this time the church party won. In 1681, after the king summarily dismissed the third Exclusion Parliament at Oxford, the crushing of the Whigs began. In the show-trial which heralded the crackdown, that of the ‘Protestant joiner’, the carpenter Stephen College, Lord Chief Justice Francis North and his colleagues made sure that lessons would be learnt. Among the evidence against College, who had gone armed to the Oxford Parliament with Shaftesbury’s entourage, was his distributing the notorious cartoon, A Character of a Popish Successor. One witness, Arthur Charlett, doctor of divinity, friend of bishops, soon master of 97 Anon.,

Some Memoirs, or, A Sober Essay for a Just Vindication of … Shaftsbury (1681), p. 10; Henning, Commons, I, 226. 98 Henning, Commons, I, 211, 321–2, 357; cf. pp. 243, 604. 99 Diaries of Sir Edward Dering, p. 131; Henning, Commons, I, 275. 100 William Penn, Works (2 vols, 1726), I, 766; The Charge Given by S[i]r William Smith (1682), p. 1.

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University College, deputed that he had seen a copy in an Oxford coffee-house and that he was told it was College’s doing. The cartoon, which shows a row of booted and spurred clergymen riding astride a church, was then produced in court. George Jeffreys, the future judge of the ‘Bloody Assize’, asked ‘there are some churchmen, what are they doing?’ Charlett answered: ‘they are a parcel of tantivy men riding to Rome; and here’s the duke of York, half man, half devil, trumpeting before them’. Throughout the trial College’s alleged scheme to seize the king at Oxford was called ‘a Presbyterian plot’. A witness said that about Christmas 1680 College was in conversation in a woollen draper’s shop in St Paul’s churchyard, ‘and was justifying of the late Long Parliament’s actions in ’40’, and had mentioned the sad breaking-off of the Treaty of Uxbridge in 1648 – the negotiations by which Charles I nearly became a Presbyterian king. College was executed in August.101 A Tory ballad jeered ‘Brave College is hang’d, the chief of our hopes, for pulling down bishops and making new popes’.102 The trial was the opening shot in the latest phase of the church party’s attack on Presbyterian kingship. After the trauma of the Exclusion Crisis, the churchand-king loyalists were beginning to take up where Danby had been forced to leave off. The next few years, which we know as the ‘Tory Reaction’, would see the most complete attempt yet to fulfil the dream of a purified Anglican and Cavalier kingdom.

101 Anon.,

The Arraignment, Tryal and Condemnation of Stephen Colledge for High Treason (Dublin, 1681), pp. 25, 31, 51, 58–9, 81. 102 Poems on Affairs of State, I, 449. The phrase ‘making new popes’ harks back to the old Anglican charge that Presbyterianism would set up a petty pope in every parish.

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5 Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism The puzzle of the English Enlightenment

Anticlericalism has long been integral to our idea of the Enlightenment. This used to encourage a heroic mythology of secularization, in which reason did battle with religion, free-thought with bigotry. Few historians today would endorse so Manichaean a picture, for European thought in the eighteenth century is now seen to have been characterized by an ameliorated Christianity rather than by a militant crusade to overthrow it.1 Yet even so, the attack on priestcraft, on clerical dogmatism and religious intolerance, remains stubbornly central to the story of Europe’s passage from Reformation zeal to Enlighten­ment eirenicism. The historical prominence of anticlericalism renders England’s position puzzling. For it is commonly supposed that, in the words of a Times leader in 1984, England ‘has had no intellectually sanctioned tradition of anticlericalism since the Reformation’ – and a forteriori no Enlightenment. John Pocock, deploying one of his more colourful metaphors, has written that ‘to try to articulate the phrase “the English Enlightenment” is to encounter inhibition; an ox sits upon the tongue’. The English, it is held, by disposing of Laudian and A version of this chapter appeared under the same title in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 209–31. I am indebted to Cambridge University Press for permission to reproduce material. Some themes of this chapter are pursued in P. Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1990); J. Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies (Cambridge, 1992); S. J. Barnett, Idol Temples and Crafty Priests: The Origins of Enlightenment Anticlericalism (Basingstoke, 1999); A. Ossa-Richardson, The Devil’s Tabernacles: The Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Thought (2013). See also J. Champion, ‘Anticlericalism, Politics, and Power, c.1680–1717’, in Anticlericalism in Britain, c.1500–1914, ed. N. Aston and M. Cragoe (Stroud, 2000), pp. 42–66; P. Connell, Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope (Oxford, 2016); J. Lancaster and A. McKenzie-McHarg (eds), Priestcraft Special Issue, Intellectual History Review 28 (2018); G. Mahlberg, ‘Machiavelli, Neville, and the Seventeenth-Century English Republican Attack on Priestcraft’, Intellectual History Review 29 (2018), 79–99. 1

K. Haakonssen, Enlightenment and Religion (Cambridge, 1996); B. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998); S. J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion (Manchester, 2003); D. Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ, 2008).

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Calvinist fanaticism in the Civil War, and popery and tyranny in the Glorious Revolution, were able to breathe easily the air of intellectual liberty. On this view, Anglicanism was too etiolated to be provocative. Consequently, there was ‘simply no infâme to be crushed’ and the voices of the intelligentsia lacked the antagonism inflamed by Continental Catholic clergies.2 Despite this, there have been two attempts to give substance to the notion of an English Enlightenment. The first, expressed by Roy Porter, argues that because we have now come to see that it is mistaken to define the Enlightenment monolithically, as an atheistic or revolutionary assault on an ancien régime, it follows that England need not be bereft of an Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was not a crusade but a tone of voice, a sensibility. It preferred civility to enthusiasm, experience to metaphysics, the pursuit of happiness to the rule of the saints, the benevolent ethics of Jesus to the wrath of an unforgiving Father. And these goals ‘throve in England within piety’. Pocock has similarly attempted to shift the ox. The English Enlightenment is not less substantial, if harder to perceive, for being ‘conservative and in several ways clerical’, the property of ruling elites rather than of clandestine rebels, an ‘enlightenment sans philosophes’.3 Unquestionably the temper of English thought underwent a steady transformation in the decades after 1660, and the attempt to trace its modifications is demanding. For who can satisfactorily define a society whose vaunted virtue was an ineffable ‘politeness’, and whose most beloved philosopher, the third earl of Shaftesbury, wrote a rag-bag of coffee-house epistles and allusive essays?4 Some of the most rewarding studies dwell literally on modulations of voice – the manner, for instance, in which the text of Colonel Ludlow’s canting, scripture-sodden Civil War memoir was spruced into Augustan sobriety by its editor John Toland.5

2

J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment’, in Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. P. Zagorin (Berkeley, CA, 1980), pp. 91, 106. See also F. Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971); J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England’, in L’Eta dei Luni: Studi Storici sul Settecento Europe, ed. R. J. Ajello (Naples, 1985), pp. 525–8; idem, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, 1985), pt III. Pocock’s reference is to Voltaire’s cry, ‘Écrasez l’infâme’ (‘crush the infamous’ church). 3 R. Porter, ‘The Enlightenment in England’, in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. R. Porter and M. Teich (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 1–18, at 6; Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce’, p. 528. See also Young, Religion and Enlightenment, pp. 2–3, 20; J. Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1989); B. Worden, ‘The Question of Secularization’, in A Nation Transformed, ed. A. Houston and S. Pincus (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 20–40. 4 See L. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge, 1994). 5 Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower, ed. B. Worden (1978). See also Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (2001). For Toland: J. Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester, 2003).

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The second type of attempt to give substance to the English Enlightenment has no truck with the insipidity of such Fabian approaches. It unabashedly restores to centre stage the guerrilla warfare waged by insurgent atheists against Christianity, and gives pride of place to English writers. The most pronounced proponent of this view is David Berman. The procedure is gnostic: there is held to be an esoteric atheistic doctrine to be unearthed, which fear of persecution precluded from public utterance. In other versions of this approach, conspiracy, arcana, and secret societies are central to the story: hidden beneath the urbane moderate Enlightenment lay the clandestine freemasonry of the radical Enlightenment.6 While historians of the first school decode inflections in the runes, those of the second dig up broadswords. The difficulty with the latter, the histories of atheism, is that they present a sharply disjunctive view of Christianity and infidelity, negating the pervasive intellectual and rhetorical debt owed to theology itself by the critics of the churches. This quest for the origins of irreligion overlooks how profoundly English radical writing remained religiously committed: to a Ciceronian idea of religio, cleansed of superstitio; to the search for the prisca theologica, a ‘pure’ and ‘primitive’ religion; and to the devising of a civil theology fit for a Whig commonwealth, a polity that knew how to distinguish the ‘priest of God from the priest of Baal’.7 We can accept that there was a militant anticlericalism in English political discourse, but we must also recognize that it was grounded in an unfolding tradition of Christian reformism and was rooted in the ‘magisterial’ Reformation, that strand of Lutheranism and Calvinism which looked to the godly magistrate as the agent of reform and the purger of priestly usurpations upon the spiritual liberties of a Christian commonwealth. Atheism, if it existed at all, was marginal. The broad stream of critical reflection on religion was hostile not to piety but to the ‘vanity of dogmatizing’ – the phrase is Joseph Glanvill’s; hostile not to scripture but to theocracy. In the wake of England’s wars of religion, critics sought to transform the Church of England into a civil religion. Pocock takes the essence of this process to be the ‘polemic against enthusiasm’.8 But we should add another facet, the polemic against priestcraft, 6

D. Berman, A History of Atheism in Britain (1988); M. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment (1981). See also: J. Redwood, Reason, Ridicule, and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660–1750 (1976); M. Hunter and D. Wootton (eds), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1992); J. I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment (Oxford, 2001); A. C. Grayling, The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind (2016). For a parallel treatment, see D. Wootton, Paulo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983). For discussion: J. Force, ‘The Origins of Modern Atheism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989), 153–62. 7 The last phrase occurs in John Dennis, Priestcraft Distinguish’d (1715), sig. A1v. For the role of Ciceronianism, see K. East, The Radicalization of Cicero: John Toland and Strategic Editing in the Early Enlightenment (Cham, Switzerland, 2017). 8 And see M. Heyd, The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (New York, 1995).

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for, fundamental to the animus of early Whiggism, was, in Hobbes’s phrase, the ‘unpleasing’ of priests.9 Whigs and priests

The case made here is a prima facie one. It rests upon Whig perceptions as exemplified in their pamphlets. To put the case fully would require an institutional and intellectual history of the Restoration church: the divines would have to be judged independently of Whig barratry.10 Suffice it to say, Whig anticlericalism was not quixotic. Its target, Restoration Anglicanism, was more vigorous, more adamantine, more theocratic, than is generally allowed.11 Or, at least, it became so by about 1675, when there came of age a confident and aggressive style of Anglicanism for which the phrase ‘high church’ was soon coined. When the Anglican phoenix rose from the ashes of the Puritan revolution it had an urgent need to assert its distinctive identity. The groundworks and bastions of the restored church were various: the revanchism of the anti-Puritan gentry in the Cavalier Parliament; the flourishing of patristic theology in the purged universities; the heresy-hunting that Hobbes, Newton, and Locke feared; the censors’ expurgation of Puritan devotional and poetic writing; the stubborn piety visible in churchwardens’ accounts; the pert young divines’ raucous defence of the jure divino authority of kings and bishops.12 But undoubtedly the most tangible element was the repression of nonconformity. The makers of the Act of Uniformity of 1662 and of the subsequent ‘Clarendon Code’ embarked upon the last attempt in English history coercively to create a church that was indefectibly the whole commonwealth at prayer. If the attempt sometimes faltered, by the early 1680s the ‘church party’, gradually acquiring the new name of Tory, had launched what was, with the possible exception of the 1580s, the most ferocious religious persecution of England’s Protestant era. In the 1690s the Whig financier and MP Thomas Papillon could offer the following definitions of Whig and Tory. ‘Under the name of Whigs is comprehended most of the sober and religious persons of the Church of England that 9 Hobbes,

Leviathan, II, 186 (ch. 12). divines are vindicated in W. J. Bulman, ‘Enlightenment and Religious Politics in Restoration England’, History Compass 10 (2012), 752–64; idem, Anglican Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2015). 11 See above, p. 38, n. 14. 12 On the Restoration church, see J. Spurr, The Restoration Church of England (New Haven, CT, 1991); T. Harris, P. Seaward, and M. Goldie (eds), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford, 1990); D. Spaeth, The Church in an Age of Danger: Parsons and Parishioners, 1660–1740 (Cambridge, 2000); J. Gregory and J. Chamberlain (eds), The National Church in Local Perspective: The Church of England and the Regions, 1660–1800 (Woodbridge, 2003); B. Sirota, The Christian Monitors (Manchester, 2014); J. Gregory (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, II (Oxford, 2017); Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment. For patristic theology, see J-L. Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity (Oxford, 2009). 10 The

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… put no … stress on the forms and ceremonies, but look on them as human institutions, and not as the essentials of religion, and are willing that there might be a reformation to take away offence.’ The Tories, by contrast, are those ‘that stickle for the forms and ceremonies, and rail against the endeavour to discountenance all those that are otherwise minded’.13 At issue was not just that a minority of cussed Dissenters were brutally treated. It was that, for many, both inside and outside the church, the Restoration church had embarked on a tragically mistaken project and had exhausted religious energies in ferocious but futile directions. It neglected ‘holy living’, preferring creedal and ritual formalism to moral reformation. John Locke’s Third Letter for Toleration (1692) railed against those who put coercive uniformity above pastoral care and moral discipline.14 The restraining of the Restoration church after 1688 produced, among Whigs, a prolonged sigh of relief. The Toleration Act, the induction into the episcopal bench of latitudinarians, and the lapse of press censorship, marked the end of Archbishop William Sancroft’s vision of a purified Anglican Zion. It was a sea-change that casts doubt on talk of ‘the long eighteenth century’ of a continuing ‘confessional state’ stretching uninterruptedly from 1660.15 In the defeat of those whom the Dissenting diarist Roger Morrice called ‘the hierarchists’ a decisive shift in English culture had occurred.16 This is not to say that the contest between church and state came to an end, nor that the need for vigorous Whig litanies on the evils of churchmen ceased. The high church cry of the ‘Church in Danger’ during the reign of Queen Anne provoked Whigs to try to fulfil their warning.17 A series of polemics stretched into the Walpolean era: the Occasional Conformity controversy, which spilled into the furore over Matthew Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church (1706);18 the Bangorian Controversy (1715–20), which produced John Trenchard’s and Thomas Gordon’s relentlessly anticlerical newspaper The Independent Whig (1720–1);19 the clash between Sir Robert Walpole and Bishop Gibson; and 13

Memoirs of Thomas Papillon, ed. A. F. W. Papillon (Reading, 1887), pp. 374–5. M. Goldie, ‘John Locke, Jonas Proast, and Religious Toleration, 1688–1692’, in The Church of England, c.1689–c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism, ed. J. Walsh, C. Haydon, and S. Taylor (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 143–71. 15 J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1660–1832 (Cambridge, 1985). 16 M. Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (2nd edn, Woodbridge, 2016). 17 A. Walsh, Civil Religion and the Enlightenment in England, 1707–1800 (Woodbridge, 2020). Also R. Susato, ‘Taming the “Tyranny of Priests”: Hume’s Advocacy of Religious Establishments’, Journal of the History of Ideas 73 (2012), 273–93. 18 D. Levitin, ‘Matthew Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church (1706) and the Church-State Relationship’, HJ 54 (2011), 717–40; A. Barber, ‘Matthew Tindal, Censorship, Freedom of the Press, and Religious Debate in Early Eighteenth-Century England’, History 98 (2013), 68–707. 19 It was translated into French by Holbach. Trenchard also published The Natural History of Superstition (1709) and Gordon an edition of Barbeyrac, The Spirit of the Ecclesiasticks (1722). See A. Starkie, The Birth of the Modern Church of England: The Bangorian Controversy, 1716–1721 14

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the quarrels over the Quaker Tithe Bill and Mortmain Acts in the 1730s.20 Selections from these affrays were anthologized in Richard Barron’s four-volume Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken (1768). His preface harmonized with the manifestoes of the Continental philosophes. He offered ‘everlasting reasons for opposing all priests, and an unanswerable argument against all their claims of power and authority’. The aim of his collection was ‘to emancipate the minds of men, and to free them from those chains in which they have been long held to the great disgrace both of reason and Christianity’.21 The anticlerical animus allows us to see Whiggery in an unconventional light, less emphatically in terms of civil doctrines concerning constitutionalism and the right of revolution, and more in terms of ecclesiology: the struggle of temporal and spiritual, regnum and sacerdotium. No historian of medieval political thought would neglect ecclesiology; it behoves historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not to do so either.22 English Whiggism was born as much in anticlericalism as in constitutionalism, and church history was as natural a stamping ground for Whig polemicists as parliamentary history.23 As John Pocock and William Lamont have shown, the Whigs steadily secularized an eschatological drama, inherited from the canonical works of early English Protestantism, and especially from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. It was a vision of history in which the temporal sphere, whether embodied in a godly prince or a godly people, gradually asserted its rights against the pretensions of a usurping clergy, for Foxe’s great work provided not only a

(Woodbridge, 2007); M. McMahon, The Radical Whigs, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (Lanham, MD, 1990). 20 S. Taylor, ‘Sir Robert Walpole, the Church of England, and the Quakers Tithe Bill of 1736’, HJ 28 (1985), pp. 51–77; C. Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 24–5, 188–91. 21 Richard Baron, The Pillars of Priestcraft and Orthodoxy Shaken (4 vols, 1768), I, iii, vi. On eighteenth-century anticlericalism and sacerdotalism, see N. Aston, ‘Anglican Responses to Anticlericalism in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century, c.1689–1830’, in Anticlericalism in Britain, ed. idem and Cragoe, pp. 115–37. 22 For moves toward what may be called ‘neo-medievalism’ in the study of seventeenth-century political thought, see B. Tierney, Religion, Law and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150–1650 (Cambridge, 1982); C. Condren, George Lawson’s ‘Politica’ and the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1989); F. Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant and Order: An Excursion in the History of Ideas from Abelard to Leibniz (Ithaca, NY, 1984). And cf. M. D. Breidenbach, ‘Conciliarism and the American Founding’, William and Mary Quarterly 73 (2016), 467–500. In this tradition, which derives from J. N. Figgis’s From Gerson to Grotius (1907), much hangs on the transference into secular political thought of late medieval ecclesiastical conciliarism; but we lack a history of the persistence of conciliarism within early modern ecclesiology, Protestant as well as Catholic. 23 The importance of ‘sacred history’ to seventeenth-century intellectual life is now receiving prominence. See D. Stolzenberg, ‘John Spencer and the Perils of Sacred Philology’, Past & Present 214 (2012), 129–63; D. Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science (Cambridge, 2015).

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martyrology but also a thesis about godly magistracy.24 In Whig anticlerical eyes, the stuff of medieval history was not only parliaments and barons, but also praemunire and provisors, legates and interdicts, mortmain and mulcts, prelacy and simony. A mind attuned to the struggle against imperium in imperio (a state within a state) did not suspend this mode of explanation with the coming of the Henrician Reformation. Just as there was a centuries-long contest between civil and priestly power prior to the Reformation – Henry II’s battle with Becket, the Constitutions of Clarendon, Wycliffe and the Lollards – so the struggle to perfect the work of the Tudor Reformation remained onerous and unyielding in Protestant times.25 The Whigs borrowed the Foxean vision of history, drained it of its ‘enthusiasm’, but retained its historical and juridical assumptions. The Whig idea of sovereignty remained strongly conditioned by notions of the independence of the temporal sphere from the clerical, an outlook embedded in the Henrician Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome: ‘this realm of England is an empire’. Imperium was the rightful attribute of the state and all priestly seeking after political power was praemunire, or an imperium in imperio.26 The Protestant tradition oscillated between an Erastian reverence for the prince’s role as protector of the commonwealth’s pursuit of godliness and a populist impulse of ‘not tarrying for the magistrate’. In the same way, early Whiggery was as capable of deep respect for sound Protestant kingship, as it was of denigrating monarchs who failed in this role. Foxean rhetoric was pervasive in Restoration writing and the legacy of ideals of the godly prince encouraged profound reverence towards monarchy. When Israel Tonge helped Titus Oates expose the Popish Plot in 1678, that seedbed of the Whig movement, his theme was the history of Romish conspiracies to destroy monarchy – loyalty to the crown was the badge of true Protestant Englishmen.27 Even the plebeian Baptist John Bunyan clung, in the 1680s, to the hope that ‘Antichrist shall not down but by the hand of kings’.28 24

W. Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (1963); W. Lamont, Godly Rule (1969); idem, Richard Baxter and the Millennium (1979); P. Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (Basingstoke, 1988); C. Gribben, The Puritan Millennium (Dublin, 2000). On the ambiguities of the 1684 edition of Foxe, see R. D. Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660–1745 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 25–6. 25 Pocock, ‘Post-Puritan England’; Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft. The Henrician roots are traced in G. Nicholson, ‘The Nature and Function of Historical Argument in the Henrician Reformation’ (PhD, University of Cambridge, 1977). 26 For the persistence of the rhetoric of imperium in imperio, see J. A. W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property (Kingston and Montreal, 1983), ch. 2. 27 Israel Tonge, Jesuitical Aphorisms (1679); idem, The Northern Star (1680). 28 See W. R. Owens, ‘“Antichrist Must be Pulled Down”: Bunyan and the Millennium’, in John Bunyan and his England, 1628–88, ed. A. Laurence, W. R. Owens, and S. Sim (1990), pp. 77–94. For another unexpected version of Whig and Dissenting ideals of godly kingship, see M. Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship, and Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge, 1991).

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The crux in this story is the transformation of the Puritan into the Whig. Puritans believed that the English church was ‘but halfly reformed’29 and that elements of popery remained insidiously intermixed with it. In the 1640s, their answer to Laudian prelacy had been Presbyterian power, a polity governed by a godly ministry schooled in Genevan discipline. But the Covenant, the hectoring Scots, and the heresiographers who damned all rival sects, did not endear themselves. The recoil from them provoked John Milton’s famous judgement that ‘new presbyter is but old priest’, and brought forth the pithy sacrileges of John Selden’s Table Talk.30 The clerical high-handedness of both sides in the 1630s and 1640s also generated the voguish phrases by which the wits would bruise the clerics in Restoration coffee-houses – ‘black-coats’, ‘levites’, the ‘canting tribe’, and ‘Baal’s priests’.31 A substantial number of Protestants came to believe that priestly usurpation took not one but three forms: prelatical and presbyterial as well as popish. As Protestants shed the rule of the saints, this priestly triad came to haunt their search for a civil religion, and in this awakening the Puritan became the Whig. Coining ‘priestcraft’

I take as the cynosure of Whig anticlericalism the birth of a new word in the political lexicon, ‘priestcraft’. Anticlericalism was anciently embedded in English writing: it is in Chaucer and Tyndale. But the term ‘priestcraft’ appeared when the pervasiveness of clerical turpitude among rival, putatively Protestant, churches began forcibly to demand explanation. It was not until the end of the seventeenth century that the term became widely used, and usually as a reflection upon the Restoration church. But the word was coined in 1657.32 It occurs in James Harrington’s Pian Piano, a vindication of his classic defence of republicanism, Oceana, against Henry Ferne, doctor of divinity, archdeacon of Leicester, and Royalist pamphleteer. Ferne thought it ‘lamentable’ that lay authors launched ‘a quarrel against the Church of England’ and were ‘boldly meddling in matters of religion, as if they had forgot or did not understand their article of the Catholic Church’. By ‘Catholic Church’ Ferne meant not the Roman church but Christ’s universal church, of which, he believed, the Anglican was the authentic English branch. He held that it was for divines and not laymen to determine what was ‘the government of the Christian church, 29

The phrase is the Puritan John Field’s, in the 1590s. Milton’s remark occurs in his poem ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience’ (1646). Selden’s Table Talk was posthumously published in 1689. 31 On the wits’ culture of anticlericalism, see Spurr, Restoration Church, pp. 219–27; M. Jenkinson, Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II (Woodbridge, 2010), chs 3, 5. 32 A search of Civil War writing might prove me wrong. Henry Marten, A Corrector of the Answerer (Edinburgh, 1646), p. 7, has ‘clergy craft’. Certainly, there are earlier quasi-usages, in the general sense of the craft of the priests. 30

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the form and functions left by Christ and his apostles, according to which the church acted three hundred years before the civil power became Christian’. The Christian must ever remember that there was a church for three centuries before the Emperor Constantine converted, before the civil arm began to shape the externals of the church.33 Harrington argued, on the contrary, that in ‘every well-ordered commonwealth’, the senate ‘ever had the supreme authority, as well in matters of religion as state’. He thought Ferne’s attitude typical of divines, whose habit was to identify ‘the church’ with themselves alone. ‘Now wherever the clergy have gained this point, namely that they are the Catholic church’, and wherever they have rendered it unlawful for the laity to discuss or make settlements in church government, then in such cases ‘neither government nor religion have failed to degenerate into mere priestcraft’. In such societies, divinity becomes a monopoly trade of the clergy and the religious freedom of the laity is curtailed. If the craft of divines is exemplified in the Roman church, it is by no means limited to it, and because Harrington detected this trait in all priests, he coined his new word. Priestcraft was popery universalized.34 Harrington’s clerical critics accused him of following Hobbes’s Leviathan in matters of religion. This association of the republican with the monarchical absolutist might seem odd. But it does not require too much foreshortening of historical explanation to say of Hobbes that, ecclesiologically, he was a Whig;35 nor of theoretical explanation to say that the Erastian defence of the Christian laity transcended differences over civil constitutions. At the close of Leviathan Hobbes wrote of the ‘three knots’ of presbytery, prelacy, and popedom, which, during the Dark Ages, progressively tied up the freedom enjoyed by the apostolic Christians. The knots began to be untied during the Reformation: the knot of popedom under the Tudors, then the other two in quick succession in the 1640s. We had now, he concluded, arrived once more at ‘the independency of the primitive Christians’, which ‘is perhaps the best’.36 After 1660 Hobbes dissembled this remarkable endorsement of the state-sanctioned congregationalism of the Puritan Revolution.37 Both Harrington and Hobbes were mistakenly sanguine that the Civil War had crushed priestcraft and that the 33

Henry Ferne, quoted by Harrington: Political Works, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 371, 383. 34 Harrington, Political Works, pp. 371–2. See M. Goldie, ‘The Civil Religion of James Harrington’, in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. A. Pagden (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 197–222; idem, ‘Ideology’, in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. T. Ball et al. (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 266–91. And R. Hammersley, James Harrington: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 2019). 35 This thought is pursued in E. Carmel, ‘The Whig Legacy of Thomas Hobbes’, Intellectual History Review 29 (2019), 243–64. 36 Hobbes, Leviathan, III, 1116 (ch. 47). 37 In the Latin edition of Leviathan (1668), ch. 47 was revised and abridged. The extent of Hobbes’s avowal of Erastian Independency has been much debated: see above, p. 90, n. 98.

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grand cycle of the Reformation was complete. The Restoration church would disabuse them: the struggle continued. As Pocock has persuasively shown, Hobbes’s Leviathan was Protestant eschatology refashioned and, as such, was seminal for Whig anticlericals and Erastians in the ensuing decades, as they grappled with resurgent Anglicanism.38 Hobbes, incidentally, did not himself use the word ‘priestcraft’, although his texts abound with synonyms. But when a translator turned his Latin Historia Ecclesiastica into English he did use it, to encapsulate a theme that John Aubrey described as ‘the history of the encroachment of the clergy (both Roman and Reformed) on the civil power’. Aubrey also wrote, when summarizing Edmund Waller’s elegy on Hobbes, that Hobbes had ‘pulled down all the churches, dispelled the mists of ignorance, and laid open their priestcraft’.39 The word ‘priestcraft’ rarely occurs in print before the 1690s, but there was a flurry at the time of the Exclusion Crisis. The impetus came from the opening line of John Dryden’s great anti-Whig poem Absalom and Architophel: ‘In pious times, e’r priestcraft did begin.’ Since Dryden was referring to Charles II’s promiscuity and to a putative golden age when sexual licence was not yet decreed a sin, we may take him to be alluding to the libertine’s habit of treating the laws of marriage as priestly inventions. The replies to Absalom adopted a more narrowly ecclesiastical construal of the term. Samuel Pordage offered a history of popery and its latter-day recurrences, beginning, ‘In impious times, when priestcraft was at its height.’ His moral was that a righteous king was one who drove away Baal’s priests. Another versifier turned the word against the regicide Puritans of the 1640s: ‘the old priestcraft cant: / Who once did consecrated daggers chant’. A third poet was closer to Pordage’s Whiggery. ‘In gloomy times, when priestcraft bore the sway’, then it was that ‘the priest sate pilot even at empire’s helm’. This poet looked forward to great Absalom’s – the duke of Monmouth’s – triumph, when the ‘cowed sanhedrim shall prostrate lie’. For him, the essence of the Whig struggle was to prevent English churchmen building a Protestant popery, in which ‘the mitre … above the diadem soar’d’. The struggle was, in Edmund Hickeringill’s words, against any kind of popery that ‘exalts the mitre above the crown, and the crozier above the sceptre’.40 The

38

J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Time, History, and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes’, in idem, Politics, Language and Time (New York, 1971), pp. 148–201. See J. Jacob, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983). 39 Thomas Hobbes, A True Ecclesiastical History (1722), pp. 77, 127; John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark (2 vols, Oxford, 1898), I, 358, 394. 40 Samuel Pordage, Azariah and Hushai (1682), p. 1; Anon., A Panegyrick on the Author of Absalom (1681); Anon., Absalom Senior (1682), pp. 1, 2, 14, 27; Edmund Hickeringill, Curse ye Meroz (1680), p. 2. Henry Care, Whig journalist, sneered at churchmen ‘whose priestcraft is preferment merely’: The Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome (5 vols, 1678–83), IV, no. 16. Priests of Baal: 1 Kings 18.

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rhetoric of the crisis that gave birth to Whiggery had at its heart the mortal contest between mitre and sceptre.41 The word ‘priestcraft’ suddenly became commonplace in the 1690s. The Folly of Priestcraft (1690) and Priestcraft Expos’d (1691) were the first publications to put the word in their titles.42 In 1691 a Whig gentleman visiting Oxford wrote to a friend that he could no longer stand the university’s ‘air of nauseous priestcraft’.43 In 1692 the Whig Samuel Johnson remarked that William of Orange’s glorious advent was ‘unblessed by bishops, and puzzled by a little priestcraft’.44 In 1695 Locke’s friend William Popple painted a word-picture of a great prelate: ‘The church’s finest pillar: double famed / For orthodoxy and for discipline. / (Terms, without which, all priestcraft would decline.) / In ceremonial forms he was so nice; / Discord in them he more abhor’d than vice.’45 In 1697 John Toland was reported as holding that ‘religion is a plain and easy thing, and that there is not so much in it, as priestcraft would persuade’. Toland opened the new century with a rousing epigram: ‘Religion’s safe, with priestcraft is the war, / All friends to priestcraft, foes of mankind are.’46 In 1702, John Dennis offered a double definition. Priestcraft ‘comprehends all that the arts of designing men cause to pass for religion with the unthinking part of the world’; ‘All that the clergy do to advance their temporal greatness is priestcraft … and consequently such priestcraft is destructive to government.’47 Gilbert Burnet, chronicling the 1690s, recorded that ‘it became a common topic of discourse to treat all

41

This theme is echoed by G. De Krey, ‘Reformation in the Restoration Crisis, 1679–1682’, in Religion, Literature and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540–1688, ed. D. B. Hamilton and R. Strier (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 231–52. 42 The former of these is a play about Catholicism under James II. Other early titles are Nahum Tate, A Poem Occasioned by the Late Discontents … with Reflections upon the Rise and Progress of Priestcraft (1691); Charles Blount, Great is Diana of the Ephesians, or the Original of Priestcraft and Idolatry, in Miscellaneous Works (1695); John Dennis, The Danger of Priestcraft (1702); Edmund Hickeringill, The History of Priestcraft (1705); Edward Ward, More Priestcraft (1705). 43 Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/SF 7/1/6: Henry Thomas to Edward Clarke, 7 November 1691. 44 Samuel Johnston, Works (1713), pp. 265, 306. 45 BL, Add. MS 8888, fol. 96. 46 BL, Add. MS 5853, fol. 385: James Bonnell to John Strype; John Toland, Clito (1700), p. 26. Toland’s first use of the word was on the last page of Christianity Not Mysterious (1696). For Toland, see Champion, Republican Learning; R. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy (Cambridge, MA, 1982); S. Daniel, John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind (Kingston and Montreal, 1984); K. East, ‘Superstitionis Malleus: John Toland, Cicero, and the War on Priestcraft in Early Enlightenment England’, History of European Ideas 40 (2014), 965–83. 47 Dennis, Danger of Priestcraft, pp. 6–7, 15. For other examples, see Charles Blount, The Oracles of Reason (1693), sig. a3r; Matthew Tindal, An Essay Concerning the Power of the Magistrate (1697), pp. 115, 185; idem, A Letter to a Member of Parliament (1698), pp. 21–4.

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mysteries in religion as the contrivances of priests, to bring the world into a blind submission to them: priestcraft grew to be another word in fashion’.48 Histories of religion: the 1690s

We may take as an epitome of the early English Enlightenment Sir Robert Howard’s History of Religion (1694). Howard had been a courtier, a Whig MP, and fashionable playwright since the 1660s; he was now a privy councillor in William III’s government. He announced the subject of his book to be ‘how religion has been corrupted, almost from the beginning, by priestcraft’. The chief characteristic was the pursuit of clerical power by the forcible imposition of unnecessary creeds. The clergy by ‘priestcraft contrived notions and opinions, to engage people to submit implicitly to their directions’. This had been the practice of pagan priests; it was ‘followed to this day, in what is called the Church of Rome’; and he wished that ‘among the most reformed Christians these methods of priestcraft were not so much, and violently pursued’. The true religion of the gospel was ‘plain and easy’, but the gospel had been overlain and the laity gulled by the ‘inventions of priests’, whose manufacture of extravagant doctrines ‘neither reason will justify’ nor ‘religion require’. The doctrine of purgatory – here Howard offered a familiar Protestant instance against Catholicism – was an invention ‘wholly the subject matter of power and profit’: through masses for the dead the priests mulcted the living. Even the conduct of philosophy had been cynically subjugated to serve the hierarchy’s ambition, for the medieval universities had enforced a diet of Aristotelian metaphysics, a system at the heart of curricula wherever priestly power was entrenched. But worst of all, the ‘most cruel contrivance of priestcraft … is persecution’. From the moment that Christianity first received the support of the civil power, under the Emperor Constantine, creed-making, excommunication, and the violent ‘extirpation of heresy’ had been the hallmark of priestly Christianity. The civil power had too often been the church’s compliant arm in punishing schism and heresy, ‘the magistrate their stirrup-dog’.49 Howard’s themes were standard weapons in the Whig armoury. Hostility to Aristotelianism, to the philosophy of the ‘schoolmen’, and to the persecution of speculative opinions as heresies, were keynotes. Howard’s attention to the church of the fourth century was also a common preoccupation; in his remarks lay the seed of that most magisterial of Enlightenment indictments of priestcraft, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). The interpretation of the reigns of Constantine and Theodosius, under whom the secular arm began to invest the church with temporal authority, became the 48

Gilbert Burnet, A History of His Own Time, II (1734), p. 212. Sir Robert Howard, The History of Religion (1694), pp. iv, vii, 5, 22, 27, 43, 69, 74–80, 85–8, 103. 49

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historical fulcrum in the wars of clericalists against Erastians, for, as Gibbon later remarked, ‘the ecclesiastical institutions of his [Constantine’s] reign are still connected by an indissoluble chain, with the opinions, the passions, and the interests of the present generation’.50 Of special importance in Whiggish church history was the Council of Nicea in the year 325, at which St Athanasius secured the creedal definitions that bear his name. To sneer at the Nicene Fathers, among whom the enforcement of speculative theologies began, became an invariable topic for the anticlericals. ‘From this creed-making’, wrote Howard, ‘came persecutions, almost equal to those of the heathen emperors’. What struck him forcibly was that the theological quarrel which had torn Christianity apart hung merely upon a tiny distinction between two Greek words which differently expressed the nature of Christ’s oneness with God. In 1673 Hobbes’s disciple Henry Stubbe called this a dispute ‘about trifles’. In 1676 the Puritan poet Andrew Marvell styled it a quarrel over ‘but one single letter of the alphabet … an iota’. In 1691 Priestcraft Expos’d talked of ‘the destruction of millions … for the sake of an iota’. And a century later Gibbon contrived a famous phrase: ‘the difference of a single diphthong … between the Homoousians and Homoiousians’.51 There is a further significance in Howard’s attention to the fourth century. Constantine had long been a powerful motif in Protestant rhetoric as the archetype of the godly prince. Reformation propagandists had awarded Henry VIII the mantle of the modern Constantine. The secular prince and not the usurping bishop of Rome was the bearer of Christ’s promises, the defender of the faith and head of the visible church. But the Constantine topos was ambiguous. The emperor could be portrayed as a tower of Christian leadership; or as a prince too easily swayed by the prelates around him. Here the imperial image became tarnished, for the prince succumbed to flattery and became the tame agent of ecclesiastical ambition. When Howard, Marvell, and others, discussed the relationship between Constantine and his bishops, they were covertly expounding the relationship between Stuart monarchy and Anglican prelacy. The king should not become the feeble holder of the priest’s stirrup, helping the church into the saddle of a pseudo-popish power. That had been Charles I’s crime, and Milton, in Of Reformation (1641) had brilliantly brandished the image of Constantine against Charles. Similarly, it came to seem that Charles II and James II were victims of prelacy, or of popery itself. 50

Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (12 vols, 1827), II, 237. 51 Howard, History, p. 85; Jacob, Stubbe, p. 123; Andrew Marvell, Mr Smirke, or, The Divine in Mode (1676), in PW, II, 145; Anon., Priestcraft Expos’d (1691), p. 14; Gibbon, Decline, III, 339. Herbert Butterfield has a memorable remark: ‘The twentieth century which has its own hairs to split may have little patience with Arius and Athanasius who burdened the world with a quarrel about a diphthong, but the historian has not achieved historical understanding … until he has seen that that diphthong was bound to be the most urgent matter in the universe to those people.’ The Whig Interpretation of History (New York, 1965), p. 17.

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The 1690s are rich in the history and sociology of priestcraft. Priestcraft Expos’d pronounced that the government of England ‘would be immortal’ if it could return to ‘the conduct of primitive Christianity’. The Reformation had promised such a renovation, until the Stuart age threw up a priesthood ‘panting after Protestant encroachment with no less ardour than their predecessors had done after popish usurpation’. The tract offered a lengthy account of the struggles of medieval monarchs to resist ecclesiastical domineering. Its author had a Puritan voice, for he listed Archbishops Whitgift and Laud among the ‘pontifical prelates … burdensome to the nation’. But he also had a humanist voice in citing Machiavelli and contending that ‘heathen legislators never admitted their priesthood to civil preferments’. He saw the Glorious Revolution as an opportunity for the final crushing of the ‘levitical Orlando Furiosos’.52 The most influential epitome of these doctrines occurred in the preface to Robert Molesworth’s Account of Denmark (1694), a bestseller, especially on the Continent, where Pierre Bayle commended it as full of the lustre of English liberty. Molesworth analysed the relationship between ecclesiasticism and liberty. A simple model, he argued, might suggest that whereas Roman priests have a ‘firm adherence to the most exquisite tyranny’, Protestant clergy are kept in check and ‘have an entire dependence on their kings and princes’. But the simple model was defective, for Protestant societies have too often complacently imagined that their clergies were fully tamed. It was in the nature of any priestly class that it was improbable that ‘the character of priest [will] give place to that of true patriot’. It would be wise to commit education ‘to philosophers instead of priests’, and prudent of statesmen to ‘keep … ecclesiastics within their due bounds, and … curb those who if they had power would curb all the world’.53 John Locke’s books were quickly construed within the same framework of thought. A clerical enemy of his Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) summarized his religion as containing the single truth that Jesus is the Messiah ‘and that our stickling for the rest is only sect and party, and priestcraft, and narrowness of spirit’. Locke’s tract was said to be one of the ‘fashionable papers’ that devalued the clergy as ‘a designing sort of men; nay, their very office [is] exposed as a trade’.54 The Quaker Benjamin Furly applauded Locke, telling him that he was ‘fully assured that priestcraft will fall, and cannot stand long against that light, that has so far opened men’s eyes to see through the tiffany cover of their [the priests’] fulsome authority’. Another admirer wrote of Locke’s works that ‘true and free reasonable religion’ had been rescued by him from ‘the great trade of priestcraft (in fashion in every church)’. His books, said William Molyneux, will ‘abridge the empire of darkness’. Locke’s friends wrote sneeringly of ‘the Druids’, the ‘levites’, and the ‘cassocked tribe’. Even before his death his 52 Anon.,

Priestcraft Expos’d, preface; pp. 1, 15, 19, 26, 44, 57, 63. Robert Molesworth, An Account of Denmark [1694], ed. J. Champion (Indianapolis, IN, 2011), pp. 13–15, 18. 54 Richard Willis [?], The Occasional Paper (1697–8), no. 1, p. 21; cf. pp. 19–20, 40–1; no. 5, pp. 3–4. 53

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admirers were constructing a podium for him, the philosopher who vanquished the priestly darkness of mankind’s infancy.55 Howard’s and Locke’s books were jointly congratulated in William Stephens’s Account of the Growth of Deism (1696), as having done sterling service to ‘a priestridden people’. They had ‘distinguished betwixt religion and priestcraft’ and cleansed Christianity of those ‘circumstantials and appendages’ which were ‘designed to uphold the power of the clergy over the people’.56 Stephens was that rare thing, a Whig Anglican clergyman, and one of his sermons would be reprinted in Barron’s Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken. The main task of Stephens’s Account of Deism was to explain the rise of creedal indifference. He looked back to the 1640s and judged that the priests had only themselves to blame. He noted the habit of Protestant gentlemen of going on a Continental Grand Tour, during which they were encouraged to see how popery was less a religion than a collection of self-serving trickeries. When they returned to England, educated in a sceptical sense of priestly conniving, they witnessed the wrangling of Anglican and Presbyterian parties, and ‘could not forbear to see that both these Protestant parties, under the pretence of religion, were only grasping at power’. Consequently, anyone who had lived in England since the Civil War had ‘no need of going over the water to discover that the name of church signifieth only a self-interested party’.57 Stephens went on to provide an unfamiliar retrospect on Restoration politics. We are accustomed to assume that Whigs identified the autocratic inclinations of the crown as the chief enemy of English liberties. But Stephens took the view that the primary enemy was not the crown, but the re-established episcopal church. The crown was only collusively guilty in so far as it feebly succumbed to the bishops’ supremacy. He sarcastically commented that ‘as certain as the cross is above the crown, so sure a thing is it, that the bishop will be above the king’. This proposition was sufficiently proven by looking ‘back to King Charles’s Restoration’. Charles II, who ‘for two years after his return, reigned in the hearts of all his people, was by the Act of Uniformity reduced to be king of the church party’. That Act betrayed the healing spirit of 1660. This contrast between 1660 and 1662 was a common Whig refrain: through it they avowed their loyalty to monarchy, but not to its subversion by the ambitions of narrowspirited Anglicanism. The tragedy was that the king had succumbed to being the servant of the prelates. England had become little more than a theocracy, ‘the

55

John Locke, Correspondence, ed. E. S. de Beer (8 vols, Oxford, 1976–89), nos. 2221, 2775, 2832. See M. Goldie, ‘John Locke, the Early Lockeans, and Priestcraft’, Intellectual History Review 28 (2018), 125–44. 56 William Stephens, An Account of the Growth of Deism in England (1695), pp. 18, 19, 25. Henry Hill wrote that Stephens had ‘distinguished so nicely between religion and priestcraft that he has made all ambitious priests to stink, even from Aaron down to this day’: A Dialogue between Timotheus and Judas (1696), p. 6. 57 Stephens, Account, 6, 10.

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secular arm directed by the spiritual power’, in which the ‘Protestant high priests do all of them rival the sovereign power’.58 Two features of Stephens’s analysis stand out. The first is a doctrine about the symbiosis of crown and clergy: the claim that the institutional power of the latter is predicated on their ideological services to the former. A ‘posse of the clergy’ preach up absolutism, but in requital the ‘clergy require the king to do their persecuting journey-work’, for ‘if a king will submit to this drudgery, he shall have the vox cleri on his side’.59 Thus jure divino doctrines were not only wrong-headed, but corruptly self-serving. The clergy’s betrayal of their evangelical calling was the essence of their priestcraft, and consequently the defence of Whig constitutionalism must go hand in hand with exposing the trahison des clercs. This maxim of the crown’s and clergy’s corrupt mutuality was repeated countless times in Whig writing. Matthew Tindal wrote that the clergy taught absolute obedience since ‘the only way to secure tyranny in the church was to get it established in the state’. Popple’s version was brusque: ‘church and state … in league combined … / Claw me and I’ll claw thee.’60 The second feature of Stephens’s argument was that he was not hostile to strong monarchy, but only to its perversion. In succumbing to the clergy a patriot prince becomes a servant of a faction, and so by definition a tyrant, one who betrays the common good. The virtuous prince resists the clerical incubus. For Stephens, Restoration history is the story of attempts to counsel Stuart kings in their duty to enhance Christian liberty, and not to mire the commonwealth in the dregs of popery and prelacy. His was the Reformation ideal of the godly prince, now in Whig dress, a continuation of Foxe’s story of the struggle of the secular sphere to put the clerical satan behind it. His tone was Erastian: the governance of religion lay with the secular arm, for the liberty of the Christian believer depends upon the strength of the godly ruler in reminding the clergy that its role was pastoral and not priestly, edificatory and not coercive. None of this precluded Whig civil doctrines about constraints on monarchical prerogative, but it did demand that properly constituted monarchs should exercise supremacy over churchmen. Edmund Hickeringill likewise urged that history warned princes against ‘trusting their supremacy … out of their own keeping’ to popes, bishops, and presbyters. Let not ‘the silly bigot-magistrate’ be ‘the surrogate of the priest’s revenge’.61

58 Stephens,

Account, 9, 23. Account, pp. 5, 7. 60 Tindal, Letter, p. 21; BL, Add. MS 8888, fol. 114. Cf. Locke, ‘Sacerdos’, in Locke, Political Essays, ed. M. Goldie (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 343–5; Dennis, Danger of Priestcraft, pp. 16–17. 61 Hickeringill, Curse ye Meroz, pp. 17, 11–12; idem, The Black Nonconformist (1682), sig. b1v. 59 Stephens,

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Histories of religion: the 1670s

Stephens wrote about the Restoration era in hindsight, but he echoed a view that had been voiced twenty years previously. In 1675 there appeared A Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country. It has good claims to be the manifesto of the Whig party. It was brief, pungent, and deeply shocking to the church’s sensibilities. It was condemned by the House of Lords to be burnt, and the publisher feared that ‘the bishops would prosecute him’. It has often been attributed to Locke, and certainly came from the stable of his patron the earl of Shaftesbury. Pocock has treated the Letter as the seminal text of neo-Harringtonian constitutionalism, for it endorsed the notion that an independent aristocracy was the essential balance in the constitution. But his account omits the fact that the tract was overwhelmingly concerned with ecclesiastical power. It argued that the possibility of a godly prince and a godly church had been destroyed because the true foundations of the Restoration had been fatally undermined. A ‘distinct party’ of ‘the high episcopal man and the old Cavalier’ have plotted to establish absolute monarchy so that they may enjoy ‘all the power and office of the kingdom’. The vital steps were the penal statutes of the 1660s, and especially the Act of Uniformity, by which ‘our church became triumphant’. The tide had been temporarily halted during the Cabal administration (when Shaftesbury was himself in office), but since then it had been inexorable. The projects after 1673 of the earl of Danby’s ‘church party’ were ‘the greatest attempt … against the king’s supremacy since the Reformation’. The ‘great churchmen’ have now captured the king’s government and they planned to perfect their tyranny. The king has become the church’s lapdog, yet the church will be careful to shore up the crown by preaching the divine right of kings. In a rousing peroration the tract declared that the two modern idols are bishop and king who must now be ‘worshipped as divine in the same temple by us poor lay subjects’.62 The same refrains can be found in Andrew Marvell, a friend of Harrington and Milton, and associate of Shaftesbury’s Whigs. One of his most vicious anticlerical satires is Mr Smirke, or, The Divine in Mode (1676). It lampooned an up-and-coming clergyman, a man ‘always upon the heels of ecclesiastical preferment’, destined for a bishopric, and anxious to get into the saddle of prelatical power. The object of Marvell’s attentions was Francis Turner, later bishop of Ely, and, had it not been for the Glorious Revolution, likely heir to Archbishop Sancroft at Canterbury. Turner played a singular role in the evolution of the idea of priestcraft, for as well as being the target of Marvell’s ire, he was, after his arrest in 1690 for Jacobite plotting, also the butt of Priestcraft 62 Anon.,

A Letter from a Person of Quality (1675), pp. 1–3, 8, 24–5, 34; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 406, 415–16. The Letter is printed in John Locke, An Essay Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, 1667–1683, ed. J. R. Milton and P. Milton (Oxford, 2006), pp. 335–76. See J. Spurr, ‘Shaftesbury and the Politics of Religion’, in Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. idem (Farnham, 2011), pp. 127–51.

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Expos’d. Marvell’s satire drew a general moral. ‘If we of the laity would but study our self-preservation, and … be as true to our separate interest as those men [the clergy] are to theirs, we ought not to wish them any new power for the future.’ The aim of the priests, and especially of the bishops, was ‘the engaging men’s minds under spiritual bondage, to lead them canonically into temporal slavery’.63 Mr Smirke closed with ‘a short historical essay, touching general councils, creeds, and impositions in religion’. It expressed, in historical parable, the point of view more overtly put in A Letter from a Person of Quality. Marvell examined the reign of Constantine, for ‘from his reign the most sober historians date the new disease which was so generally propagated, that it hath given reason to inquire whether it … were not inherent to the very function’ of priesthood. The disease disclosed itself ‘first in ambition, then in contention, next in imposition, and after … in open persecution’. The ‘pitiful’ Council of Nicea embroiled the gospel in obscure philosophic terminology: homoousios, hypostasis, essentia, substantia. So began ‘the trade of creed-making’ by which ‘bishops … throw the opposite party out of the saddle’. With every creed came an oath or test, and so ‘the dexterous bishops step by step hooked within their verge, all the business and power that could be catched, … first to a spiritual kind of dominion, and from that encroached upon and into the civil jurisdiction’. Princes have been foolish enough to let them get away with it. The bishops ‘crept … by court insinuations and flattery into the princes’ favour, until those generous creatures suffered themselves to be backed and ridden by them’. But, ‘in persecution the clergy … wisely interposed the magistrate betwixt themselves and the people, not caring … how odious they rendered him’. Marvell’s readers would be in no doubt as to the moral of his sensational tract: Charles II, like Constantine, had the opportunity to be ‘the universal apostle of Christianity’, and yet, like Constantine, was apt to render his regime odious by becoming the cat’s-paw of episcopal tyranny. Marvell did not wish to unking his prince: he wished him to be one.64 To be a Whig in later Stuart England was to be as the Prophet Elias slaying the priests of Baal.

63 Marvell,

PW, II, 42, 52. PW, II, 125–6, 152, 160–1; Anon., Priestcraft Expos’d, p. 12. On Marvell’s anticlericalism, see G. D. Hamilton, ‘Marvell, Sacrilege, and Protestant Historiography’, in Religion, Literature, and Politics, ed. Hamilton and Strier, pp. 161–86; W. Lamont, ‘The Religion of Andrew Marvell’, and C. Condren, ‘Andrew Marvell as Polemicist’, in The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell, ed. idem and A. D. Cousins (Aldershot, 1990), pp. 135–56, 157–87; M. Dzelzainis, ‘Marvell and the Earl of Castlemaine’, and J. Parkin, ‘Liberty Transpros’d: Andrew Marvell and Samuel Parker’, in Marvell and Liberty, ed. W. Chernaik and M. Dzelzainis (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 290–312, 269–89. 64 Marvell,

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6 Toleration and the Godly Prince The Declaration of Indulgence of 1672

By the Act of Toleration of 1689 English Protestant Dissenters achieved freedom of worship. But it was not the first time since the Restoration that the Dissenters had been liberated. Twice, in 1672 and 1687, toleration had been granted, but on those occasions it was the fruit of royal edicts, suspending statutes against nonconformity. The controversy provoked by Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence of 1672 marks a moment in Restoration history in which the ecclesiological dimension of proto-Whiggism was especially manifest. Because the Indulgence was a prerogative act there has been a tendency to construe the episode as a constitutional clash between statute and prerogative.1 Yet, while contemporaries undoubtedly raised the issue of the authority of parliament, the debate had more to do with liberty of conscience, the hegemony of the church, the authority of bishops, and the role of the supreme magistrate in the exercise of godly rule. The controversy was an incident in England’s long Reformation. The ‘great persecution’ was more the work of parliament than the crown. The Clarendon Code, enacted in the 1660s, was brutal: it not only enforced Anglican uniformity but also criminalized all alternative religious meetings. Quakers and Baptists were jailed in their hundreds; Presbyterians and Independents were punished too. The code culminated in the Conventicle Act of 1670, which Andrew Marvell memorably called ‘the quintessence of arbitrary malice’.2 The Act unleashed informers and imposed crippling fines and sequestrations. Yet the king did not share the priorities of the Anglican Royalist establishment and sought conciliation. His motives were to assist Catholics and to appease Puritans. The fact that repression was the work of parliament and liberty the A version of this chapter appeared as ‘Toleration and the Godly Prince in Restoration England’, in Liberty, Authority, and Formality: Political Ideas and Culture, 1600–1900, ed. J. Morrow and J. Scott (Exeter, 2008), pp. 45–65. I am indebted to Imprint Academic for permission to reproduce material. 1

A position restated in C. C. Weston and J. R. Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 162–76. 2 H. M. Margoliouth (ed.), The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell (3rd edn, 2 vols, Oxford, 1971), II, 314.

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gift of kings shadowed the debate over the Indulgence. Since parliament was the source of persecuting laws, a number of Puritans and future Whigs were tempted to defend the Indulgence. The Quaker William Penn did so; so also Marvell, in the Rehearsal Transpros’d.3 Some Puritans who had been Parliamentarians during the Civil War, now defended royal ecclesiastical supremacy. It was a position that perhaps was not so paradoxical after all, because they had adopted a similar stance in relation to the religiously plural church established by the quasi-monarch Oliver Cromwell.4 The Indulgence was not unprecedented. Charles had attempted this device in 1662, but had withdrawn at the behest of parliament. There had been an informal relaxation of the penal laws in 1668–9, which provoked the passing of the Conventicle Act, though the king managed to retain a proviso in the Act reserving his ‘supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs’. In Scotland, in 1669, he secured a Supremacy Act, sacked an archbishop, and issued an Indulgence to Presbyterians. The English Indulgence was issued on 15 March 1672. Under it, prosecutions were suspended and licences granted to Dissenters to allow meetings at stated venues, while Catholics were permitted to worship in private houses.5 Some 1,600 licences were issued, mostly to Presbyterians and Independents (as Congregationalists were still called), and to a few Baptists; the Quakers refused to apply, but were left alone. Eleven months later the king was forced to summon parliament to finance his Dutch war. The Commons speedily resolved that ‘penal statutes in matters ecclesiastical cannot be suspended but by act of parliament’, and on 7 March 1673 Charles cancelled the Indulgence.6 His Cabal ministry collapsed, and two of its leading members, the earl of Shaftesbury and the duke of Buckingham, scuttled toward opposition. The king had buckled under the wrath of parliament. The way was open for the earl of Danby’s reconstruction of Anglican Royalist dominion. In public debate the topic of toleration had ignited earlier, in 1667, after the fall of the earl of Clarendon and the advent of the Cabal, a ministry anxious to amend the Clarendon Code. Attempts at legislative ‘comprehension’ (the readmission of moderate Puritans to the church) and ‘indulgence’ (toleration of sects beyond the pale of the church) had prompted a formidable national controversy. Sir Charles Wolseley published Liberty of Conscience (1668), the Independent John Owen (formerly ‘Cromwell’s pope’) issued Truth and 3

William Penn, ‘Letter to J. H.’, 31 March 1674, in Works (2 vols, 1726), I, 168; Marvell, PW, I, 123, 173, and passim. For Penn, see A. R. Murphy, Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration: The Political Thought of William Penn (Oxford, 2016). 4 P. Connell, ‘Marvell, Milton, and the Protectoral Church Settlement’, Review of English Studies 62 (2011), 562–93. 5 For the text, see J. P. Kenyon (ed.), The Stuart Constitution (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 382–3. For a full account: F. Bate, The Declaration of Indulgence, 1672 (1908). 6 Journal of the House of Commons, IX, 252; LJ, XII, 540; HMC, 9th Report, House of Lords, p. 25.

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Innocence Vindicated (1669), the Quaker Penn his Great Case of Liberty of Conscience (1670), and John Milton, Of True Religion (1673), while John Locke drafted his earliest essay for toleration (1667).7 From the church’s side, there appeared Simon Patrick’s (un-) Friendly Debate (1668) and Samuel Parker’s vitriolic assault on nonconformity and defence of the state’s right to impose uniformity, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1669), to which Marvell retorted in The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672). Claims for the rights of conscience were abetted by politique or ‘reason of state’ arguments on behalf of the economic utility of tolerating the ‘sober industrious trading part of the nation’. In these debates, the means by which toleration might be achieved, whether by parliament or prerogative, was subordinate to the larger question of the desirability of toleration as such. Subsuming the Indulgence under the general cause of religious toleration could not, however, meet the need specifically to defend the crown in apparently violating statutes. A more sustained legitimation of prerogative toleration was called for, and four advocates stand out. Bulstrode Whitelocke was a Puritan lawyer, a former Parliamentarian, a member of the Republic’s Council of State, and a lord in Cromwell’s Upper House. In 1663 he responded to a request from the king to give a positive opinion on the crown’s right to grant indulgence in religion. His memorandum was redrafted in 1672 and published posthumously in 1687 as The King’s Right of Indulgence in Spiritual Matters, now serving to defend James II’s Indulgence.8 Philip Nye was an Independent minister who had opposed a Presbyterian settlement in the Westminster Assembly in the 1640s and had been prominent under Cromwell. Though committed to a conception of the church as a federation of voluntary gathered congregations, he also defended civil ecclesiastical governance, the duty of the magistrate to protect and regulate a gospel ministry. He took out a license under the Indulgence of 1672. His tract, The King’s Authority in Dispensing with Ecclesiastical Laws, was also

7

See G. De Krey, ‘Rethinking the Restoration: Dissenting Cases for Conscience, 1667–1672’, HJ 38 (1995), 53–83; idem, London and the Restoration, 1659–1683 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 100–7, 122–3; Locke, Essay Concerning Toleration. For Locke’s use of Wolseley, see J. C. Walmsley and F. Waldmann, ‘John Locke and the Toleration of Catholics’, HJ 62 (2019), 1093–115. 8 BL, Add. MS 21099: ‘The King’s Right to Grant Indulgence in Matters of Religion Asserted’. See R. Spalding (ed.), The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 1605–1675 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 663–4; idem, The Improbable Puritan: A Life of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 1605–1675 (1975), pp. 237–8, 279. The tract is often attributed to Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey. See A. Patterson and M. Dzelzainis, ‘Marvell and the Earl of Anglesey: A Chapter in the History of Reading’, HJ 44 (2001), 703–26, at 710n. For context: J. Rose, ‘Bulstrode Whitelocke and the Limits of Puritan Politics in Restoration England’, in Politics, Religion, and Ideas in Seventeenthand Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. J. Champion, J. Coffey, T. Harris, and J. Marshall (Woodbridge, 2019), pp. 81–99; idem, ‘A Godly Law?: Bulstrode Whitelocke, Puritanism, and the Common Law in Seventeenth-Century England’, Studies in Church History 56 (2020), 273–87.

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published posthumously in 1687, but composed in 1672.9 As the publishing history of Whitelocke’s and Nye’s works shows, their arguments were pertinent throughout the Restoration, and 1672 but one occasion for their iteration. Henry Stubbe was an idiosyncratic publicist with an intellectual trajectory which ran from Independency to Islam, via friendship with Hobbes and polemics against the Royal Society. His Puritan anticlericalism metamorphosed into a proto-Enlightenment ideal of civil religion. In 1672 he was paid by the king’s minister Lord Arlington to defend the Dutch war, and his Further Justification of the Present War (1673) included a vindication of the Indulgence.10 Finally, John Humfrey was a minister who eschewed denominational partisanship in the 1640s, yet took Presbyterian ordination and was ejected in 1662 because he refused to accept its invalidity. Though he was licensed as a Presbyterian in 1672, he disliked the label. He campaigned persistently for comprehension of moderate nonconformists. In the backlash against the Indulgence, he was briefly jailed in 1673. His key work was The Authority of the Magistrate about Religion (1672).11 These four authors did not adopt identical stances. Whitelocke and Nye were closest to each other, the former citing works by the latter.12 These two were concerned especially with a legal-historical defence of the royal ecclesiastical supremacy. So too was Stubbe, though he belongs among ‘freethinkers’ rather than Dissenters; even so, there was an affinity between Puritan and Hobbesian anticlericalism. Humfrey’s concerns were distinct, directing his attention primarily to the relationship of the Indulgence to his conception of the church. The ambiguities of prerogative

That the king had violated statutory law was unquestionably a key claim of opponents of the Indulgence. Lord Keeper Bridgeman was sacked for refusing to seal the Indulgence. In the Commons’ debate on the Indulgence on 10 February 1673, MPs railed against the breach. When the king initially stood his ground, the Commons retorted that he was in danger of ‘altering the legislative

9 Nye pursued his themes in several further tracts: The Lawfulness of the Oath of Supremacy (1662, 1683); The Best Fence against Popery, or, A Vindication of the Power of the King in Ecclesiastical Affairs (1686); A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Laws, and Supremacy of the Kings of England (1687). 10 This drew on unpublished papers by him: ‘An Inquiry into the Supremacy Spiritual of the Kings of England’, ‘The History of the Spiritual Supremacy’, and ‘An Answer unto Certain Objections formed against … the Declaration’: The National Archives, SP 29/275/220–2. See J. Jacob, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983), ch. 6. 11 See C. Condren, George Lawson’s ‘Politica’ and the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1989), ch. 12. 12 Whitelocke, The King’s Right of Indulgence (1687), pp. 3, 50.

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power’.13 The frankest summary comes from the Venetian ambassador, who reported that it was said that the king acted ‘arbitrarily concerning religion’ and ‘intended to destroy the authority’ of parliament.14 A classic, later, exposition of this position is Gilbert Burnet’s in his History of My Own Time: parliament saw that ‘popery and slavery lay at the bottom’ of the Indulgence.15 Yet we need to be wary of retrospective Whiggery, in which events were subordinated to a rhetoric of ‘popery and arbitrary power’. To be sure, this rhetoric surged in 1673, in a form that would dominate the remainder of the Restoration, and this had much to do with the sudden eruption of fear of France.16 But it was not the sole perspective in 1672–3, and it was rapidly improvised. Burnet’s own account reveals the adventitious nature of the new rhetoric. Churchmen, appalled at Charles’s Indulgence, cast about for arguments to destroy it. Anti-popery naturally was one, and illegality another. ‘Now the pulpits were full of a new strain: popery was everywhere preached against, and the authority of the laws was much magnified.’ About the Scots, Burnet was yet more pointed: ‘the episcopal party, that were wont to put all authority in the king, as long as he was for them, began to talk of law. They said, the king’s power was bounded by the law.’17 Marvell likewise accused English church leaders of stirring up the pulpits. ‘Upon the publication of the Indulgence [they] deliver orders … to beat up the pulpit-drums against popery.’ Churchmen, he said, had been wrong-footed, for the authority of the civil magistrate, which Parker so dogmatically defended against the Dissenters, was now used ‘to a purpose quite contrary to what [he] had always intended’, so that Parker was now ‘terribly angry with the king’.18 Shaftesbury, too, held that the alarm about popery was cynically got up by the bishops, who sent their ‘emissaries the clergy’ into the pulpits; he pointed out that the Indulgence allowed Catholics no more liberty than had been customarily permitted them.19 It was a short step from churchmen preaching against popery to MPs trumpeting the laws as the bulwark of Protestantism. The ‘constitutional’ point was prominent in the Commons’ debates of 1673, but it had played an insignificant role in the pamphleteering of the preceding months. It is 13 Grey,

Debates, II, 15ff; W. Cobbett (ed.), The Parliamentary History of England (36 vols, 1806–20), IV, 518ff. 14 Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, 1671–2, p. 225. 15 Burnet, OT, p. 346. 16 The terms of debate were dramatically changed by Peter du Moulin’s England’s Appeal (March 1673), which forged an association between a pro-French foreign policy and the threat of popery. See K. H. D. Haley, William of Orange and the English Opposition, 1672–1674 (Oxford, 1953). 17 Burnet, OT, pp. 283, 308. 18 Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros’d, in PW, I, 123, 175. For an assault on the popish implications of the Indulgence, see William Lloyd, A Seasonable Discourse (1673). 19 A Letter from a Person of Quality (1675), the drafting of which is often attributed to Locke. Printed in Locke, An Essay Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, ed. J. R. Milton and P. Milton (Oxford, 2006), pp. 335–76; quotations at 344, 343.

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striking that the future Whig, Shaftesbury, defended the Indulgence as late as 1675.20 In longer Whig hindsight the ‘constitutional’ point would render the Indulgences of 1672 and 1687 the principal causes of the condemnations of the royal ‘dispensing’ and ‘suspending’ powers that were enshrined in the Bill of Rights of 1689. Yet even Lord Macaulay, who wanted to call the Indulgences ‘despotic’, conceded the legal ambiguity of the crown’s position, and allowed that it was because the prerogative was used for an abhorrent purpose, to promote popery, that rejection of it became a constitutional principle.21 The English ‘constitution’ was always an artifice generated by political and religious contingencies. As several historians have shown, a weight of legal opinion held that the crown had a power to dispense with laws pro bono publico, a fact recognized in the Bill of Rights which, in condemning the dispensing power, added the caveat, ‘as it has been assumed and exercised of late’.22 For centuries the crown had issued dispensations, with a ‘non obstante’ clause (‘notwithstanding’ laws to the contrary), to exempt individuals from ecclesiastical and economic legislation. It is true that the Indulgence was charged with a more fundamental, wholesale suspension of laws, and the Bill of Rights would enter no caveat concerning the ‘suspending’ power. Yet the Indulgence did not assert any claim to suspend laws, only to suspend the execution of laws, arguably a significant distinction. The crown’s defenders urged that the Indulgence was not a legislative act of repeal, but an executive act of mitigation of penalties. Accordingly, it fell within the crown’s conventional prerogative of clemency. The crown routinely pardoned criminals and ameliorated the severity of punishments, without any suspicion that this nullified the laws. To pardon a traitor was not to repeal the law of treason. The Indulgence could therefore be construed as an act of general dispensation. There was plausibility in this notion that the Indulgence suspended penalties, not laws, for this was precisely what the Toleration Act of 1689 would later do, for its proper title is ‘An Act Exempting their Majesties Protestant Subjects, Dissenting from the Church of England, from the Penalties of Certain Laws’. Phrased thus, it was not a toleration act so much as a statutory indulgence. Its very title denied that the laws for uniformity were being repealed, and churchmen hostile to Dissent continued to argue that the laws still upheld religious uniformity and that the 1689 act merely offered clemency regarding

20

A Letter from a Person of Quality, in Locke, Essay, pp. 340–3. Lord Macaulay, The History of England (2 vols, 1889), I, 108–9. 22 See especially L. G. Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights 1689 (Baltimore, MD, 1981), pp. 59–64; P. Birdsall, ‘“Non Obstante”: A Study of the Dispensing Power of English Kings’, in Essays in History and Political Theory, ed. C. Wittke (Cambridge, MA, 1936), pp. 37–76; C. Edie, ‘Tactics and Stratagems: Parliament’s Attack upon the Royal Dispensing Power, 1597–1689’, American Journal of Legal History 29 (1985), 197–234; E. F. Churchill, ‘The Dispensing Power of the Crown in Ecclesiastical Affairs’, Law Quarterly Review 38 (1922), 297–316, 420–34. 21

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breaches.23 In 1704 Mary Astell averred that the Act was ‘a mere act of grace and indulgence, in barely taking off the penalty of the laws, without any approbation or encouragement of the separation’.24 In 1672 the crown’s Dissenting supporters took up this theme. Whitelocke defined the Indulgence as ‘a relaxation of punishment’, ‘a grant of the prince’s clemency, by which a subject is freed from punishment’.25 Shaftesbury likewise insisted that the ‘executive power [must be] fully enabled to mitigate, or wholly to suspend, the execution of any penal law’.26 Nye had a chapter headed, ‘Our Relief is from the Jurisdiction and Power in his Majesty, to Dispense and Exempt’, and he held that the Indulgence only ‘remit[ted] the penalty or punishment’. He distinguished legislative from executive power: all that was at issue was the executive power of ‘mitigating, exempting, dispensing, licensing, pardoning’, out of mercy or equity, or for the public good in exigent cases. Nobody supposed, he said, that laws should always be ‘executed in their full rigour’. Discretion and prudence should govern enforcement, and ordinary experience showed that magistrates never attempted to enforce every statute. They did not do so against Catholics, against whom there was a battery of savage laws. They did not do so, he lamented, against profanity and immorality. To single out the Dissenters for plenary enforcement was a misguided and vindictive piece of penal policy.27 In these arguments there emerged a strong Puritan ‘anti-formalist’ concern that the civil magistrate should pay more attention to enforcing laws against licentiousness than against nonconformist worship. ‘Holy living’ mattered more than the formalities of religious rituals and rubrics.28 In light of the argument for executive suspension of penalties, the Dissenters justified the Indulgence as an act of royal mercy. In some cases, this evoked high-flown paeans of gratitude. The egregious verses of the Presbyterian poet Robert Wild achieved notoriety, if only because made risible by rival Anglican versifiers. ‘So great, so universal, and so free! / This was too much, great Charles, except for thee!’29 Slight though the panegyric mode seems, the accent on clemency as a cardinal virtue of princes ran deep. The early-modern penal regime was one of harsh laws but selective enforcement, and the role of mercy was large. Clemency was the theme in formal addresses of thanks to the 23 See

R. Stevens, Protestant Pluralism: The Reception of the Toleration Act, 1689–1720 (Woodbridge, 2018). 24 Mary Astell, Moderation Truly Stated (1704), p. 12. 25 Whitelocke, King’s Right, pp. 2, 53. 26 Letter from a Person of Quality, in Locke, Essay, pp. 341–2. 27 Nye, King’s Authority, pp. 2–3, 10–11, 19. Cf. Nye, Discourse, pp. 2–3, 21, 23. 28 The Puritan concern with the failure to punish immorality was strong: Nicholas Lockyer, Some Seasonable and Serious Queries (1670), p. 12; Henry Stubbe, Further Justification of the Present War (1673), p. 67. See J. C. Davis, ‘Against Formality: One Aspect of the English Revolution’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 3 (1993), 265–88. 29 Dr Wild’s Humble Thanks for his Majesties Gracious Declaration (1672), which provoked a series of poetic responses. See G. Southcombe (ed.), English Nonconformist Poetry, 1660–1700 (3 vols, 2012); idem, The Culture of Dissent in Restoration England (Woodbridge, 2019).

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king, such as that of John Owen, as well as in remarks in surviving diaries of preachers, such as Thomas Jolly, who was grateful ‘for what the Lord had done by the king’. Whatever the ‘secret springs’ of the Indulgence, wrote Matthew Henry, for the ‘poor Dissenters’ it was a return to ‘life from the dead, and gave them some reviving in their bondage’.30 A principal voice of the church against the Indulgence was the archdeacon of Totnes, Francis Fullwood.31 He did not argue that the Indulgence was illegal. On the contrary, he accepted the case for suspension rather than repeal, and maintained thereby that the Indulgence offered limited concessions and remained consonant with the laws for uniformity. He read the Indulgence in ways favourable to the church, in order to draw its sting. ‘The Indulgence doth directly … acknowledge that the Church of England is established by law’. The Indulgence states that the church is the ‘standard of the general and public worship’ and is to be ‘preserved, and remain entire in its doctrine, discipline, and government’. To ‘indulge’ or ‘tolerate’ is not to approve or establish. The king had not sanctioned Dissent but merely permitted it, out of clemency and reason of state. ‘In this Indulgence the king doth not command anything contrary to the statutes’; he ‘doth not … uncommand or unenjoin anything which the law properly commands or enjoins’. Nothing in the Indulgence warrants ‘separations, or alter[s] their evil nature’. Through the course of several tracts, Fullwood, although a passionate enemy of the Indulgence, declined to argue that it was illegal: what roused his wrath was the ‘sin’ of Dissenting schism.32 Both friends and enemies of the Indulgence construed it as a threat to the Church of England and its bishops, rather than to parliament and legislators. The Indulgence is ‘an extreme weakening of the Church of England and its episcopal government’, wrote John Evelyn. ‘If this Indulgence signifies anything, the Church of England signifies nothing’, said Edward Vaughan.33 Just as Fullwood tried to mitigate the threat to the church, so the more conciliatory Dissenters took the same tack, insisting that it was absurd to suppose that the Indulgence undermined the church, for it remained secure in its wealth, privileges, benefices, and jurisdictions. Not only had the king said that the church was the ‘rule and standard’, but also he had styled the Dissenters’ assemblies ‘conventicles’, not churches, and their pastors ‘teachers’, not ministers; the Dissenters were furthermore forbidden to preach against the doctrine and

30 Bate,

Declaration of Indulgence, pp. 92–3, and appx 5; H. Fishwick (ed.), The Notebook of Thomas Jolly (Manchester, 1894), pp. 10–11; Matthew Henry, The Life of the Rev. Philip Henry, ed. J. B. Williams (1825), p. 128; CSPD, 1671–2, pp. 332, 355, 527. Cf. John Salkeld, The Resurrection of Lazarus (1673); Anon., Vindiciae libertatis evangelii (1672), pp. 7–14. 31 Francis Fullwood, Toleration not to be Abused (1672); The Doctrine of Schism (1672); Humble Advice (1672); The Necessity of Keeping our Parish Churches (1672). 32 Fullwood, Toleration, pp. 13–14, 17. 33 E. S. De Beer, ed., The Diary of John Evelyn (2006), p. 515; Grey, Debates, II, 21.

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discipline of the church.34 And, indeed, Dissenters complained that licences were refused for public places like guildhalls and disused chapels.35 Other Dissenters, however, were more aggressive and saw the Indulgence as a salutary restraint of ecclesiastical tyranny. In the pamphlets of 1672 the greatest passions were aroused over ecclesiastical and not legislative power. Humfrey was glad that the king’s ‘kind act’ would ‘nettle’ the churchmen. He spoke of ‘episcopal bigots’ who are ‘blinded’ by their ‘god of … uniformity’: ‘blind, obstinate, perverse’. Stubbe wrote of the ‘modern dictators of ecclesiastical policy’.36 Owen rehearsed the ‘severe and destructive penalties’ by which the prelates pressed conformity ‘to the utmost punctilio’. The king’s ‘noble’ disposition toward indulgence ought not to be ‘sacrificed to the interests of any one party’ and to the cruelties of ‘ecclesiastical censures’.37 The Conventicle Act (1670) was a special source of animus. Nicholas Lockyer, formerly chaplain to Cromwell, asserted that the Act was driven ‘by the bishops and their corrupt interest’ and that parliament succumbed to doing the ‘drudgery of the bishops’. He vilified ‘the prelatical interest’, ‘the bishops’ cruel courts … backing the Common Prayer with armies’. Would that parliament had legislated instead against ‘the sordid ignorance, pride, sloth, debauchery and covetousness of the clergy’. Lockyer’s tone was agonistic and exilic. The Dissenters were as the Israelites, in bondage under Egyptian taskmasters; they cried to God for deliverance and, by the hand of a king, they had been succoured.38 Robert Wild pointed to the resentment of ‘angry churchmen’, now that ‘their younger brother Joseph go[es] in [a] coat of divers colours’. Religion had been ‘rescued from informing laws’, and each Sunday the furious Anglican clergy ‘spit’ as they utter the prayer for the monarch. ‘Thy canting tribe, be gone.’39 The king’s own contribution to this anticlerical assault was to allow publication of Marvell’s Rehearsal Transpros’d, as a rebuke to Parker’s attack on the Indulgence.40 The anticlerical animus had become intense after the fall of Clarendon and was encouraged by the Cabal ministers, Buckingham, Arlington, and Ashley (the future earl of Shaftesbury). During Buckingham’s ascendancy in 1667–9 there was much sabre-rattling against the hierarchy. Charles himself encouraged 34 Nye,

King’s Authority, pp. 46; Stubbe, Further Justification, pp. 64–8. Cf. Anon., The Judgement of a Good Subject (1672); Nye, Discourse, p. 23. 35 CSPD, 1671–2, pp. 372, 381–2. 36 Humfrey, Authority, pp. 10–11, 14, 37; Stubbe, Further Justification, p. 69. However, for Stubbe’s politique defence of a national clergy as a check on popular anarchy, see Rosemary and Bayes (1672), pp. 18–19; Jacob, Stubbe, ch. 6. A sub-theme in these debates was the notion that a ruler needed either a clergy or a standing army to overawe the people, and that the former was preferable. Stubbe argued so. Bishops Morley and Sheldon feared the king might displace their influence with an army: J. Miller, After the Civil Wars (Harlow, 2000), p. 211. 37 John Owen, Works, ed. W. H. Goold (15 vols, 1966), XIII, 519–22, 534–5, 523. 38 Lockyer, Some Seasonable, pp. 11–16. 39 Dr Wild’s Humble Thanks; Wild, A Letter (1672), p. 4. 40 HMC, 7th Report, p. 518. Parker’s coded attack on the Indulgence occurs in his Preface to Bishop Bramhall’s Vindication (1672).

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enmity against the bishops. ‘The king’, wrote Burnet, ‘was much offended with the bishops’ and professed to be ‘disgusted at the ambition, covetousness, and the scandals of the clergy’.41 Pepys recorded that government ministers ‘vilify the clergy’, that the ministers ‘will sacrifice the church’ and that ‘the bishops must certainly fall, and their hierarchy’. There was talk of expropriating episcopal wealth, as the Puritans had done in the 1640s, and of reducing bishops to taking ‘salaries out of the Exchequer’, in other words turning them into dependent civil servants.42 Among Shaftesbury’s papers there survive two memoranda, dating from about 1670. One rehearses arguments that ecclesiastical jurisdiction lies in the monarch and not the clergy. The other proposes that the king should ‘recover’ his ecclesiastical supremacy by appointing a vicar-general to govern and reform the church, and ‘chastise … that clergy which hath so much opposed his conduct of late’.43 The godly prince and the magisterial tradition

The Indulgence was held to derive its legitimacy not only from the general prerogative of clemency but also from the special authority of the royal ecclesiastical supremacy. The location of the supremacy had remained deeply ambiguous since the Reformation. That ecclesiastical authority did not lie with Rome was clear enough; where it lay within Protestant England was opaque. Several claims had been advanced: royal, parliamentary, episcopal.44 Parliament had frequently legislated for religion, but, equally, monarchs had personally governed in religion, for they had issued directions for preachers, injunctions and articles of visitation of dioceses, and given authority to church canons. The Indulgence referred to the ‘supreme power in ecclesiastical matters, which is not only inherent in us, but hath been declared and recognised to be so by several statutes’. The prime authorities were the statutory Oath of Supremacy and the monarch’s title as ‘supreme governor’ of the church. The defenders of the Indulgence paraded precedents for the exercise of personal governorship, citing instances of long accepted royal exemptions of persons and groups from religious laws. The most prominent examples were the liberties granted, since Queen Elizabeth’s time, to ‘stranger’ churches, the Huguenot, Walloon, and 41 Burnet,

OT, p. 258. R. Latham and W. Matthews (eds), The Diary of Samuel Pepys (11 vols, 1971–83), VIII, 532, 584, 587, 596; IX, 1, 36, 45, 347, 448, 473, 485; CSPD, 1667–8, p. 238; 1668–9, p. 320. 43 The National Archives, PRO 30/24/6B/427 and 430. One is endorsed by Locke, who has sometimes erroneously been said to be the author. See P. Seaward, ‘Shaftesbury and the Royal Supremacy’, in Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. J. Spurr (Farnham, 2011), pp. 51–76. 44 See J. Rose, ‘Royal Ecclesiastical Supremacy and the Restoration Church’, Historical Research 80 (2007), 324–45; idem, Godly Kingship in Restoration England: The Politics of the Royal Supremacy, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 2011). 42

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Dutch. In London, Norwich, and Canterbury there were flourishing congregations of non-Anglican worshippers, exempt from parish and episcopal authority. Likewise, the permission granted since Cromwell’s time for Jewish worship. Moreover, Elizabeth had sometimes indulged Catholic priests, and in 1586 issued an instruction to suspend enforcement of the recusancy laws. On the Puritan side, she had been lenient over Prayer Book rubrics, to ease vestiarian objections. Monarchs had allowed Catholic chapels for their consorts, and the seventeenth century had seen considerable leniency in the enforcement of anti-Catholic laws. The history of the royal ecclesiastical supremacy was therefore one of royal ‘exemptions, licences, faculties, dispensations, non obstantes’.45 For Whitelocke, the context to which this argument belonged was anti-papal. He placed the supremacy within a grand survey of royal curbs upon papal and prelatical pretensions down the centuries, by French, Spanish, and Hungarian kings as much as by English, signalled especially in their right to appoint bishops. Kings everywhere, at least those who understood their proper estate, had conferred the pastoral insignia upon bishops, in defiance of the papacy. The tradition of Gallican anti-papalism is prominent here, Whitelocke citing the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438, and the fifteenth-century Conciliarist theorist Jean Gerson. The English Henrician repudiation of Rome became, not a pivotal moment, but one incident among many, and no break with anti-papal tradition. Henry VIII had followed Henry II, who challenged Becket, and Edward III, who outlawed praemunire. Curiously, in this mindset there was a strong sense of the continuity of Christendom, not radically disrupted by the Reformation and its theological differences but, rather, divided much earlier, over jurisdiction, between papalists and anti-papalists. It was an argument directed toward the subordination of priestly pretensions generally. What mattered about the crown’s supremacy was that it was lay and secular, and to deny it amounted to clerical and popish usurpation.46 This ‘magisterial’ strain in English Puritanism, its faith in the godly prince as the agent of pastoral reform, was deeply ingrained, though the Restoration era placed it under severe pressure, for it would give way, on the one hand, to despair at the Stuart propensity to embrace popery, and, on the other, to the argument, embraced initially by Independents and by Locke, that the state had no business in religion. The magisterial theme has been called the theory of ‘Protestant imperialism’ – in the sense of ‘empire’ as sovereign independence from external jurisdiction – and it was present in the thinking of Marvell and Richard Baxter.47 It was influenced by Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which set the 45 Whitelocke,

King’s Right, passim, quotations at p. 41; Nye, King’s Authority, pp. 10, 19–21, 25, 40, 60–4; Burnet, OT, p. 347. Cf. Nye, Discourse, pp. 14, 35–7; Grey, Debates, II, 14; Churchill, ‘Dispensing Power’, p. 423. 46 Whitelocke, King’s Right, pp. 22–34; Stubbe, Further Justification, p. 32. 47 W. Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millennium (1979); idem, Marginal Prynne (1963), chs 7, 11; Lamont, ‘The Religion of Andrew Marvell’, in The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell, ed. C. Condren and A. D. Cousins (Aldershot, 1990), pp. 135–56. Prynne’s final work was

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suffering of the Protestant martyrs in the context of England’s providential mission to overthrow papal monarchy. Whitelocke invoked the Foxean translatio Christi: the myth of the transmission of Christianity to England by Joseph of Arimathea, who planted a fragment of the Cross at Glastonbury. This in turn validated the translatio imperii, the repatriation of the imperial sovereignty that the medieval papacy had usurped. The iconic figure of the Emperor Constantine stood as the principal emblem of the godly prince. Defenders of the Indulgence regularly invoked Constantine. Stubbe wrote that Charles II ‘revives the primitive policy of Constantine’.48 Other early Christian emperors were cited too, for the Indulgence was said to be ‘exactly consonant with the edicts of Theodosius the Great’.49 Some defenders of the Indulgence went further and asserted the quasi-­ sacerdotal character of kingship. Whitelocke argued that ‘the king is a mixed person’, ecclesiastical as well as lay; Stubbe that Charles ‘revives the primitive policy of Constantine, and acteth like a bishop’.50 Whitelocke held that originally the offices of king and priest were identical and only with the passage of time had the priesthood become a distinct caste. Adam instructed his sons to make sacrifices to God; Noah, Abraham, and the patriarchs were priests as well as lay leaders; Moses, Joshua, David, and Hezekiah sacrificed at the altar; Deborah was prophetess as well as queen. The early Christian emperors, particularly Constantine, had summoned and presided over church councils. Anglo-Saxon kings had exercised sacerdotal office: Edgar and Canute had made canons and instructed and admonished the clergy. When sacerdotal functions were delegated by kings to priests, the latter were apt to believe that these offices belonged inherently and exclusively to themselves: this misconception was the mainspring of priestly pretensions. This argument took sustenance from the sages of the common law, in their admonitions against the jurisdiction of the church courts. Whitelocke cited Sir John Davies for the view that jurisdiction over marital and testamentary matters had once belonged to the civil courts until usurped by the ecclesiastical.51 Shaftesbury’s memoranda argued that ecclesiastical jurisdiction fundamentally lay not ‘in the clergy but magistracy’, that princes ‘entrust’ bishops with it, ‘as favours derived to them from the crown’, and that they ‘might have given it (if they had so pleased) to justices of the peace’. It was ‘a great mistake’ to hold that ‘all the power in scriptures given to the church was construed of the clergy’.52 the 1,000-page Exact Chronological Vindication [of the] King’s Supreme Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction (1665–6). 48 Stubbe, Further Justification, pp. 32–5, quotation at 32. 49 Stubbe, Further Justification, pp. 59, 67. Cf. Humfrey, Authority, pp. 124–6; Grey, Debates, II, 15. On ‘Constantinian Christianity’, see Jacob, Stubbe, chs 6 and 7. 50 Whitelocke, King’s Right, pp. 32, 35, 37; Stubbe, Further Justification, p. 32. Cf. Stubbe, Rosemary and Bayes, p. 3. 51 Whitelocke, King’s Right, pp. 18–20, 25–7, 31, 37. 52 The National Archives, PRO 30/24/6/430.

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Whitelocke did not confine his argument to the Judaeo-Christian dispensation, for he broadened it into a universal anthropology. The Greek, Persian, and Chaldean rulers had been priest-kings, and Aristotle wrote that, anciently, kings sacrificed to the gods. The pagan Roman emperors ‘joined the pontifical authority with the caesarian power’, and ‘our British kings were supreme over the Druids’.53 There was special point in appealing beyond the Christian dispensation. Faced with a king like Charles II, it was important to intimate that godly magistracy may be exercised by a less than godly monarch. A favourite citation was of King Cyrus. In the Book of Chronicles, this Persian conqueror of Babylon invited the Jews to rebuild the temple at Jerusalem. Thus, even a heathen prince could be God’s instrument.54 It was an impudent instance, implying the current king was heathenish, but it lent credibility to the general case, by diminishing the apparent naivety of the Dissenters’ lauding of Charles, for there was an acknowledged irony in praising godly princes in the presence of a libertine monarch. The Cyrus motif would become even more popular in 1687 when Dissenters thanked the popish James II for his Indulgence. In pursuit of a universal anthropology of sacral kingship, the defenders of the Indulgence moved beyond the ambit of anti-papal Puritanism. The tradition of ‘Protestant imperialism’ would find a future, transmuted into Enlightenment theories of civil religion and critiques of priestcraft. There are parallels with Hobbes, whose account of religion, and deflation of priestly pretensions, can be construed within the frames both of Protestant imperialism and anticlericalism. Stubbe admired Hobbes, and his defence of the Indulgence stood poised between those readings. Neither he nor Whitelocke dared cite Hobbes, but their case for the godly prince recollects the frontispiece of Leviathan, where the prince carries the sceptre in one hand and the pastoral staff in the other. They referred instead to John Selden, whose impact on English anticlericalism was considerable.55 A more cautious case was presented by Humfrey, who was careful to say that kings are not priests, but equally clear that kings have pastoral responsibilities. Kings are earthly ‘keepers of the Tables’, tasked with ‘protecting’, ‘promoting’, and ‘disciplining’ the church. As they command in civil things for the good of the commonwealth, so they command ‘in ecclesiasticals for our spiritual edification’. Monarchs are obliged to ensure that the people are instructed and the Word preached. Humfrey’s task was delicate. He must show that, despite the king’s ecclesiastical power, the king must not coerce people of tender conscience. He deplored Parker’s crushing of liberty of conscience by right of the magistrate. 53 Whitelocke,

King’s Right, pp. 20, 25. Chronicles 36:22–3; Ezra 1:1–4, Isaiah 44:28; Humfrey, Authority, pp. 13, 97; Wild, Letter, p. 6; Anon., Vindiciae, p. 11. 55 Whitelocke, King’s Right, p. 69; Stubbe, Further Justification, pp. 33, 38. For a Dissenter who veered close to Hobbes, Louis du Moulin, see below, pp. 168–74. See also N. Allsopp, ‘Sir Robert Howard, Thomas Hobbes, and the Fall of Clarendon’, The Seventeenth Century 30 (2015), 75–93. 54

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He insisted that to defend the Indulgence is not to defend the state’s coercive authority over the externals of religion, for the Indulgence is permissive. It is Parker who has ‘fallen in with Mr Hobbes’ and with those who teach that there is ‘no God but Leviathan only’. (Hobbes was variously interpreted in this controversy: here the reading is of an intolerant, rather than an anticlerical, even tolerant, Hobbes.) Humfrey had also to disabuse critics who accused him of being excessively permissive in his tolerance: a godly Quaker should be indulged, he held, but not people who spurn godliness altogether, for ‘the magistrate may punish those that keep from [attending] church out of irreligion’. Humfrey’s acknowledged guide was Grotius, chiefly the De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra (1648) but also De jure belli (1625). Grotius provided an acceptable face of the theory of the godly prince, and Humfrey’s enthusiasm for ‘that learned and judicious man’ was considerable. Unlike Hobbes, Grotius had been careful of distinctions. The prince was but the ‘civil’ head of the church and not the ‘constitutive’, and was concerned only with ‘external regiment’. In Humfrey, the claims of private conscience and the powers of the godly prince were finely balanced.56 It was possible, however, to upend the logic of arguments for prerogative and the royal supremacy by making the dramatic claim that since, by the laws of God and nature, civil coercion in religion was never permissible, the Indulgence, far from being the exercise of arbitrary royal power, was instead a renunciation of such power. As Edmund Waller, the poet and future Whig, told the House of Commons, the king had promised ‘to stick to his Declaration’ and thereby ‘not invade our rights and liberties’. This argument appeared in its most paradoxical form in the title page of Humfrey’s tract, which aimed at a ‘confutation of that misshapen tenet, of the magistrate’s authority over the conscience in matters of religion … for vindication of the grateful receivers of his Majesty’s late Declaration’. The central point, Lockyer argued, was that statutes cannot prevail against scripture: the Conventicle Act was against ‘the express word of God … the law and light of nature’ and was ‘null and void’. It had been passed by ‘violent faction, by strength of vote, against all the force of unanswered reason’. William Penn agreed that statutory impositions cannot ‘invade divine prerogative’. Humfrey succinctly concluded that ‘the act of parliament is against the command of God: the king permits what God bids’.57 The same case was maintained at length by John Owen. Liberty of conscience is a natural right. People take up the bonds of society because of the ‘inconveniences’ that would otherwise befall them. In so doing they abandon only those liberties necessary for the purchase of the ‘advantage which public society 56 Humfrey,

Authority, pp. 38–40, 44, 67, 103, 128; on Grotius, pp. 36, 40, 43, 95, 128–9. Cf. pp. 23, 34–5, 97, 129; Anon., Vindiciae, passim. For Puritan Erastianism, see also C. N. Warren, ‘Approaching Milton, Hobbes, and Dissent’, English Literary Renaissance 37 (2007), 118–50. 57 Cobbett, Parliamentary History, IV, 518; Lockyer, Some Seasonable and Serious Queries, p. 13 and title page; Humfrey, Authority, p. 28 and title page.

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does afford’. They do not forgo their religious liberties, which are inviolable. The mind’s assent ‘followeth the evidence which [we] have of the truth of anything’, and coercion can only alter ‘outward actings’, not the ‘inward constitution’ of the mind. True religion can never be obtained by force, and the magistrate can only be concerned with ‘public peace and tranquillity’. Why, therefore, should not the magistrate, ‘knowing their minds and persuasions to be out of his reach and exempted from his jurisdiction’, indulge them? The argument here is close to Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, but it was here used by Cromwell’s chaplain to defend Charles II’s prerogative.58 The avoidance of schism

For the Presbyterians, who were the most conspicuous body among the Dissenters, a principal anxiety of conscience in 1672 concerned the issue of schism. They were committed to the principle of a national, uniform church, and were hostile to separatism. In this, they shared the ecclesiology of the Anglicans, and were heirs to the non-sectarian Puritanism of Elizabethan times. They saw themselves as belonging to the Church of England, and only for particular and temporary reasons were detached from it. Since their ejection in 1662, most Presbyterian ministers had striven to avoid separation, by attending parish churches and by holding their own religious meetings ‘out of church time’, so as to avoid setting up ‘altar against altar’. They were sensitive to the charge of schism and distinguished themselves from the ‘independency’ of the sects. Their hopes for reform rested more on comprehension within the church than toleration outside it. This was an age when the charge of ‘schism’ carried a terrible stain: the church must be ‘one’ and ‘catholic’, as the Christian creed enjoined. Yet now the king invited Presbyterians to take out licences for independent congregations. The fear of the ‘sin of separation’ weighed heavily. Baxter, the doyen among them, was reluctant to take out a licence, because he demurred at the requirement to state what denomination he was of, ‘the name of some sect’. But he finally made an application, refusing to denominate himself. He was, he said, ‘merely Christian’, though ‘Protestant’ in repudiating Rome, and no ‘Presbyterian’, for he did not reject episcopacy in its pure ‘primitive’ form. Only on these terms did he ‘humbly crave his majesty licence to preach the gospel, with a non obstante to my nonconformity’.59 The same tension is visible in the diary of Philip Henry: ‘the danger is … lest the allowing of separate places help to overthrow our parish order, which God hath owned … We are put hereby

58 Owen, 59 Baxter,

Works, XIII, 373, 389, 526–8, 530, 532. Correspondence, I, 140.

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into a trilemma, either to turn independents in practice, or to strike in with the conformists, or to sit down in former silence and sufferings.’60 Not all Presbyterians took such a firm line against separatism. A younger generation of ministers was prepared to be less deferential toward the national church. The experience of ejection and persecution schooled them in quasi-­ independency, and they were prepared to entertain a denominational future outside the church. One reason why the king issued the Indulgence was that his advisers detected a growing rift in the Presbyterian ranks. Sir Joseph Williamson reported that the younger ministers, nicknamed the ‘Ducklings’, were at odds with the older, the ‘Dons’, for they wished to reorientate the Presbyterians: some ‘Presbyterians are growing to Independents’. The Dons included Baxter, William Bates, and Thomas Manton, while the Ducklings numbered Vincent Alsop and Samuel Annesley.61 Anglican churchmen eagerly exploited the Presbyterians’ dilemma. They charged that by accepting the Indulgence they had become sectarians. A sheaf of tracts chorused the accusation of schism and separation, and, because Baxter took out a licence, the Dons were not exempt. Fullwood was quick to point to this ‘sacrilegious desertion’ by the ‘prelate of nonconformity’. In his Doctrine of Schism, he had little to say about the prerogative, for the ‘general question’ was ‘whether it be lawful for the presbyters to refuse communion with our parish churches, and to gather themselves into distinct and separate churches’. He complained of the ‘rash and sudden’ manner in which the Dissenters established new congregations, or ‘anti-churches’, in open competition with parish churches. Presbyterians had long taught, he pointed out, the unity of church communion, but were now reneging.62 A principal strategy of the Anglicans was to demonstrate that the Presbyterians of the 1640s had been deeply hostile to toleration. They reprinted extracts from Presbyterian tracts, and it was not difficult to assemble a parade of Puritans who had vilified the sects. This was the main thrust of Fullwood’s Toleration not to be Abused. ‘They stated toleration intolerable’. Therefore, ‘to gather themselves into distinct and separate congregations is a practice unlawful in the judgement of the Presbyterians themselves’.63 Independents, Baptists, and Quakers had reason to be suspicious of the Presbyterians as double-dealers. These groups had no interest in comprehension and so were more ready to cleave to the religious pluralism that the Indulgence offered. The more radical the Puritan, the more likely they were to accept the Indulgence. (This phenomenon would be especially pronounced in 1687 when 60

Life of Henry, pp. 128–9. CSPD, 1671, p. 496; 1671–2, p. 28. See R. Beddard, ‘Vincent Alsop and the Emancipation of Restoration Dissent’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 24 (1973), 161–84. 62 Fullwood, Doctrine of Schism, pp. 2–3, 32–40, 102, 107. Cf. Fullwood, Humble Advice. 63 Fullwood, Toleration, pp. 2, 6, 9, 11. Cf. Fullwood, Doctrine of Schism. The theme was taken up by Parker in his Preface to Bramhall’s Vindication, and in several anonymous tracts: Indulgence unto Dissent (1673); Toleration Disapproved (1672); The Nonconformist’s Plea for Uniformity (1674); Speculum Baxterianum (1680; written 1672). 61

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the Quakers became the most enthusiastic supporters of James II’s Indulgence.) Their fear was that, if comprehension were achieved, then the Presbyterians readmitted to the church would quickly behave just as they had done in the 1640s: they would be as anti-tolerationist as their Anglican brethren and seek to suppress the sects. In fact, some churchmen were already in this position, for they were former Presbyterians who had accepted the re-establishment in 1662. Fullwood was one such, his arguments for ‘Anglican’ uniformity essentially those of his earlier Presbyterian self: old Calvinist ecclesiology could easily look like Anglican ‘high churchmanship’. Similarly, some supporters of the church were willing to countenance comprehension since, by neutralizing the Presbyterians, it would make the suppression of the more extreme sects easier. The Anglican Edward Seymour told the Commons in 1668 that he was ‘for comprehension … and so an end of nonconformity’.64 All this poses a large, unresolved question about the Presbyterians. When and how did they detach themselves from their intolerance of the 1640s? This is both a sociological question about their institutional transition from ‘church type’ to ‘sect type’,65 and an ideological one about their embrace of tolerationist principles.66 Humfrey, for one, remarked of the generation of the 1640s that ‘they are dead’, and he was clear that, though he distinguished two sorts of Dissenter, and though he wanted comprehension for his own sort, he embraced indulgence for others, and deplored the treatment of the Independent John Owen and the Baptist William Kiffin.67 Yet it is not clear that others were as forward as he. Baxter averred that ‘it was the toleration of all sects unlimitedly that I wrote and preached against’.68 And Adam Martindale remarked that ‘I did so little like an universal toleration, that … if the king had offered me my liberty, upon condition that I would consent that papists, Quakers, and all other wicked sects should have theirs also, I think I should never have agreed to it’.69 One answer to the accusation of schism was to put the case for the Indulgence in pastoral terms. Presbyterians argued that in taking out licences they offered 64

Parliamentary History, IV, 416. See R. Ashcraft, ‘Latitudinarianism and Toleration’, in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–1700, ed. R. Kroll, R. Ashcraft, and P. Zagorin (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 151–77. Ever alert to reasons of state, Stubbe suggested that the Indulgence might force the Presbyterians back toward Anglicanism. ‘Being indiscriminately mixed in such a loathsome company and character [as the sects], may operate upon the minds of many to abate of their preciseness’ (Further Justification, p. 64). 65 E. Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (2 vols, 1931). 66 See J. Coffey, ‘Between Reformation and Enlightenment: Presbyterian Clergy, Religious Liberty, and Intellectual Change’, in Insular Christianity: Alternative Models of the Church in Britain and Ireland, c.1570–c.1700, ed. R. Armstrong and T. O hAnnrachain (Manchester, 2013), pp. 252–71. 67 Humfrey, Authority, pp. 11, 96. 68 Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. N. H. Keeble, J. Coffey, T. Cooper, and T. Charlton (5 vols, 2020), III, 120. 69 R. Parkinson (ed.), The Life of Adam Martindale (Manchester, 1845), p. 198. Nonetheless, he took out a licence.

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no challenge to the unity and structure of the established church. Rather, they augmented the church’s provision for preaching and its mission to inspire godliness in their common flock. Parishes, they urged, were often undermanned and overstretched, a condition exacerbated by the scandal of clerical pluralism and absenteeism. For Puritan clergy to supply an additional afternoon sermon in a populous city parish, or a meeting for worship in an outlying rural hamlet, was nothing so dramatic as ‘schism’ or the ‘setting up of a new religion’, but merely an addition to the church’s pastoral mission. We do not, wrote Humfrey, gather congregations out of competition, strife, or vainglory, but because there is a spiritual hunger. Philip Henry likewise justified his use of the Indulgence by arguing that ‘he looked upon himself but as an assistant to the parish ministers’.70 This ‘semi-parochialism’ acquired plausibility from the evident fact that in the cities people ‘gadded’ to sermons, going in search of preachers who suited them, regardless of parish boundaries and denominational identities. It was possible to extend this pastoral argument by suggesting that the Indulgence amounted to an informal comprehension. According to Humfrey, by licensing ministers, the king ‘does incorporate them as integral parts … with those of the parochial constitution, into the church national’. Presbyterian congregations thereby became quasi-parishes, their ministers having ‘the same authority as the parish priest’. ‘Those particular assemblies, having the authority of the supreme head of the church, equally with the parish churches, they are manifestly constituted thereby parts of the church national.’71 This was Baxter’s view: licensed congregations are ‘parts of the parish church’ and their preachers were ‘chapel curates’.72 He devoted his Sacrilegious Desertion (1672) to pressing the pastoral case: this was a tract prompted by the Indulgence, but his worries had nothing to do with prerogative, parliamentary authority, or even the royal supremacy, and everything to do with avoiding the sins of schism and separation, and providing pastoral sustenance for the spiritually starved. The royal Declaration of Indulgence indubitably provoked a crisis of conscience among the Dissenters, but it was a crisis in ecclesiology, in theories about the nature of Christ’s church and the proper role and limits of the godly prince in reforming that church.

70 Humfrey,

Authority, pp. 25, 56; Life of Henry, p. 132. Cf. Baxter, Sacrilegious Desertion, pp. 11–12. 71 Humfrey, Authority, pp. 24, 27. The point is made in De Krey, London, p. 122. 72 Baxter, Sacrilegious Desertion, pp. 35, 91. Cf. Life of Henry, p. 129.

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7 Toleration and the Huguenots The English dragonnades

The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 marked a watershed in French history. For nearly a century after the Edict’s promulgation by Henri IV in 1598, Protestant Huguenots had been tolerated, the fruit of social and ideological exhaustion after the Wars of Religion. With the Revocation the full force of persecution was unleashed. Tens of thousands of Huguenots were killed, forced to convert to Catholicism, or fled abroad. The Revocation, and the long wars waged by William III and the duke of Marlborough against French domination of Europe, firmly fixed in the minds of eighteenth-century English people the notion that France exemplified popery and despotism, and that England was a beacon of Protestantism and liberty.1 It is true that some years before the Revocation this attitude was already taking shape, as anxieties about the international and domestic ambitions of Louis XIV grew. The French invasion of the Spanish Netherlands in 1667; the impact of William of Orange’s propaganda during the Third Dutch War of 1672–3; the placing of a wooden shoe, signifying French popery, oppression, and poverty, under the

A version of this chapter appeared as ‘The Huguenot Experience and the Problem of Toleration in Restoration England’ in The Huguenots and Ireland, ed. C. E. J. Caldicott, H. Gough, and J-P. Pittion (Dublin, 1987), pp. 175–203. I am indebted to Glendale Press for permission to reproduce material. For the Huguenots and England, see J. Marshall, John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, 2006); A. Dunan-Page (ed.), The Religious Culture of the Huguenots, 1660–1750 (Aldershot, 2006); idem, ‘Roger L’Estrange and the Huguenots: Continental Protestantism and the Church of England’, in Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture, ed. idem and B. Lynch (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 109–30; J. B. Trim (ed.), The Huguenots: History and Memory in Transnational Context (Leiden, 2011); R. D. Gwynn, The Huguenots in Later Stuart Britain (3 vols, Brighton, 2015–23). For an antidote to the present essay, arguing that any sentiments favourable to Catholic France were blind and naïve in the face of its manifest savagery, see J. F. Bosher, ‘The Franco-Catholic Danger, 1660–1715’, History 79 (1994), 5–30. 1

L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, 1992).

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chair of the Speaker of the House of Commons in 1673; and the news of the first dragonnades in the early 1680s; these were all markers in the growth of English hostility to French tyranny.2 And yet there was a tradition of thought that was more favourable to the reputation of France, which survived until a remarkably late stage. The profoundest ambiguity interrupting what, to English Protestant minds, should have been a simple moral contrasts between popish persecution abroad and Protestant liberty at home, was the repression, within England, of Puritan nonconformity under the Clarendon Code. In England Protestant Dissent was outlawed and punished, while the France of the Edict of Nantes could still be offered as a model of religious peace across the divide even of the Reformation itself. It is true that repression in England varied according to the exigencies of national policy and the inclinations of local magistrates and bishops, but it is no less true that it peaked in the first half of the 1680s, in the aftermath of the failure of the Whig movement. By 1683 the leaders of the Dissenters were convinced that nothing less was aimed at than their outright obliteration. At the time of the first dragonnades in France, the militia was being used in England to break up conventicles, and, just as the Huguenot exiles began to arrive, so also the number of prosecutions for nonconformity in England reached unprecedented levels. Paid informers were rife; Dissenting ministers fled to Holland; borough corporations and parish constables found themselves in trouble if they failed to execute the laws for conformity; Dissenting tradesmen were financially ruined by church boycotts; and magistrates gave instructions that poor relief was only to be given to those who frequented their parish churches. Roger L’Estrange, in his paper The Observator goaded Tory churchmen onward, pronouncing liberty of conscience to be ‘against law, reason, nature, and religion’.3 The Dissenting historical tradition, for the next two centuries and more, cultivated a martyrology, dwelling on the tribulations of godly ministers cast into the wilderness after 1662 during the era of ‘the great persecution’: Israel’s bondage in Babylon.4 This was the era of John Bunyan’s twelve-year incarceration in Bedford jail, and of the judge in William Penn’s case in 1670 browbeating a jury to find him guilty of breach of the Conventicle Act. Whatever the exaggerations of that tradition – enforcement was rarely as efficient as enactment, and local 2

See M. Goldie and C.-E. Levillain, ‘François-Paul de Lisola and English Opposition to Louis XIV’, HJ 63 (2020), 559–80; K. H. D. Haley, William of Orange and the English Opposition, 1672–1674 (Oxford, 1953). Dragonnades: the quartering of troops on the Huguenots. The tracts of Pierre Jurieu in English translation were especially influential in reporting the dragonnades: The Policy of the Clergy of France (1681), and The Last Efforts of Afflicted Innocence, Being an Account of the Persecution of the Protestants in France (1682). 3 Roger L’Estrange, The Observator, III, no. 47 (10 June 1685). 4 For example, G. Cragg, Puritanism in the Period of the Great Persecution 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1957); C. Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (1984). For the debt of Hill, a secular socialist, to the Protestant Dissenting tradition, see R. Samuel, ‘The British Marxist Historians, 1880–1980’, New Left Review 120 (1980), 21–96.

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communities were apt to be more accommodating than zealots would wish – it remains the case that religious minorities suffered in Restoration England. The paradox is that those who spoke on their behalf often turned in their polemics to the example of the tolerance of Catholic France in order to reproach the Protestant authorities of England. The paradox was sharp under the reign of James II, once that popish king began to appeal to Dissenters in order to build a coalition for toleration for all, including Catholics. One preacher asked pointedly, ‘shall a heathen king be more tender than Protestant magistrates?’5 Another remarked upon the irony of expecting to ‘find more kindness at Rome, than he did at Jerusalem’.6 The king’s Declaration of Indulgence of 1687 was called a ‘Magna Carta’ for religious liberty – but also, in deliberate allusion to the Edict of Nantes – a ‘perpetual edict’ of toleration.7 Henri IV had promised that the Edict would be ‘perpetual’. James’s Anglican enemies blackened his reputation by referring to news of growing popish persecution across the Channel, but his defenders thought this was a case of motes and beams. Henry Care, Dissenting author of a government-supporting paper, Public Occurrences, hammered away at James’s charity to the Huguenot refugees now arriving, and peppered his pages with accounts of the brutalities suffered until recently by English Protestant nonconformists.8 Another writer observed that constables and militia had broken into English homes and destroyed chapels ‘like so many dragoons’.9 The word signified the ‘dragonnades’ and it was at this period that ‘to dragoon’ and ‘dragooning’ entered the language.10 The hypocrisy of the English church establishment was poignantly addressed by the Catholic convert John Dryden in his poem The Hind and the Panther (1687): If you condemn that Prince [Louis] of Tyranny Whose mandate forc’d your Gallick friends to fly, Make not a worse example of your own, … And let the guiltless person throw the stone.11

John Northleigh, turning to the penal laws against Catholics, remarked that even the French, ‘whose cruelty is decried so much’, do not hang people merely

5

Charles Nicholets, The Dissenters Jubilee (1687), p. 31. Matthew Henry, The Life of the Rev. Philip Henry, ed. J. B. Williams (1825), p. 170. 7 William Penn, Good Advice (1687), p. 45; idem, The Great and Popular Objection (1688), pp. 6, 22; James Stewart, James Stewart’s Answer (1688), p. 4; Henry Care, The Legality of the Court (1688), p. 38. 8 Henry Care, Public Occurrences (1688), passim. Cf. his Animadversions (1687), p. 31. See L. G. Schwoerer, The Ingenious Mr Henry Care, Restoration Publicist (Baltimore, MD, 2001). 9 Anon., Reasons why the Church of England (1687), p. 8. 10 The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1689 for the first usages of ‘dragoon’ and ‘dragooned’ as a verb. Again, translations of Jurieu were influential: La dragon missionaire, or, the Dragoon turn’d Apostle (1686). 11 J. Kingsley (ed.), The Poems of John Dryden (Oxford, 1958), p. 521. 6

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for being a priest.12 Lord Castlemaine, James II’s Catholic ambassador to Rome had, in his Catholic Apology, likewise contrasted English intolerance with Continental lenience.13 In praise of the Edict of Nantes

During Charles II’s reign the example of the Huguenots was often used as a reproof against ‘prelatical’ persecution in England. This was almost inevitably so, given the solecism of the Cavalier Parliament in 1662 in making the ejection of nonconforming ministers take effect on St Bartholomew’s Day – the anniversary of the notorious massacre of Protestants in Paris in 1572. In Dissenter rhetoric the event naturally became ‘Black Bartholomew Day’.14 One figure who likened 1662 to ‘the tragedy of St Bartholomew’ was Algernon Sidney, the republican writer executed in 1683. The comparison came naturally to a member of a family with historic links to the Huguenot cause, and a cosmopolitan sense of the international struggle of the Reformed against the many-headed Babylon. For Sidney, popery was not simply Catholicism tout court, but tyrannizing clericalism under whatever guise. In the mid-1660s, the popish spirit of persecution seemed to him considerably more rampant in England than in France. In 1665 he wrote (though did not publish) a tract called Court Maxims. He castigated ‘the holy assembly of proud and cruel bishops, corrupt lawyers, false witnesses, and mercenary judges, who persecute and endeavour to destroy thy church and people’. The ‘English prelacy endeavour to build a new throne out of the broken pieces of tottering Roman babel’.15 Such was the depth of Sidney’s anguish at the overthrow of the Puritan revolution that he was willing to negotiate for French assistance to bring religious freedom to England. In 1670 we find Louis XIV reporting a conversation between Sidney and the king’s minister the vicomte de Turenne, in which Sidney essayed a scheme by which Louis would help Charles II break free from the episcopal straightjacket and establish toleration. Sidney told Turenne that he personally ‘had less hatred for the Catholic religion that for the rule of the [Anglican] bishops’.16 Unexpectedly, therefore, Sidney supported the 1670 Treaty of Dover 12

John Northleigh, Parliamentum Pacificum (1688), pp. 41, 44. Roger Palmer, earl of Castlemaine, The Catholic Apology (1666). Samuel Pepys noted his argument: The Diary, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews (11 vols, 1971–83), VII, 393–4 (1 December 1666). 14 Burnet, OT, p. 185; John Humfrey, Proposition for the Safety and Happiness of the … Kingdom (1667), p. 54; Northleigh, Parliamentum, p. 17. See D. J. Appleby, Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, Polemic, and Restoration Nonconformity (Manchester, 2007). 15 Algernon Sidney, Court Maxims, ed. H. W. Blom et al. (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 44, 190. See G. Mahlberg, English Republican Exiles in Europe during the Restoration (Cambridge, 2020), ch. 6. 16 Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres Correspondence Politique Angleterre, vol. 99, p. 270. I owe this reference to Jonathan Scott. See his Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623–1677 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 232–4. 13

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between Charles and Louis, in so far as it might give Charles leverage to improve the plight of the oppressed. This scarcely accords with Sidney’s posthumous reputation as a Whig martyr under Stuart despotism and hence as a stout enemy of absolutist France. The Treaty led in 1672 to Charles’s most energetic attempt to liberate the Dissenters, and this train of events seemed to parallel the amity between Oliver Cromwell’s tolerationist regime and Cardinal Mazarin’s France. Sidney and his contemporaries did not think necessarily in terms of narrowly national sentiment, but of an international struggle of the Protestant godly against persecuting priests. Turning from Sidney to William Penn the Quaker, we find a similar ambiguity, and lack of the later Whig clichés about the virtues and vices of Protestant and Catholic regimes. In 1670, in his The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience, he surveyed what he took to be the best examples of toleration in history: among the Hebrews (on the authority of Grotius), among the Romans (following Varro), in Renaissance Florence (as Guicciardini showed), and in contemporary Holland and Germany. Also, he went on, ‘the same in France: who can be so ignorant of their story, as not to know that the timely Indulgence of Henri IV, and the discrete toleration of Richelieu and Mazarin, saved that kingdom from being ruined both by the Spaniard, and [by] one another’. ‘If we look into France’, he insisted, ‘we shall find the indulgence of these Protestants, hath been a flourishing to that kingdom.’17 When Penn later became a publicist for James II, whom he befriended and trusted, he had to adapt his theme in the wake of the Revocation, but the French case still served him. The English, he wrote, were now scandalized by French cruelties, ‘but will not look at home upon greater cruelties’. English magistrates ‘have ploughed as deep furrows, especially within these six and twenty years’.18 He thought it tragic that France had changed course, yet the principles of Henri IV and Mazarin could still be cited, together with those of Cardinal D’Ossat, Henri’s advisor in ecclesiastical affairs. D’Ossat’s Letters were cited very often by English Protestants. Penn called him an ‘extraordinary man’, and noted that ‘the great Lord Falkland said, a minister of state should no more be without Cardinal D’Ossat’s Letters than a parson without his bible’.19 He also cited the amicable relationship between Mazarin and the Huguenot Marshall Turenne as an example of how English Protestants should learn to live with their Romish king: ‘how happy and admirable was this civil union between the Cardinal and Turenne. Two most opposite religions … One says his Mass, t’other his Directory.’ Penn blamed the Revocation more on the French clergy than on Louis, a point in keeping with the frequent Puritan claim that religious intolerance was never in the interests of the civil power, but always in that of the clergy, the church ever seeking to 17

William Penn, The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience (1670), p. 41; Penn, A Perswasive to Moderation (1685), pp. 12–13. For Penn, see A. R. Murphy, William Penn: A Life (Oxford, 2018). 18 William Penn, Great and Popular Objection, p. 9; Penn, Good Advice, pp. 7, 42–3. 19 D’Ossat’s Letters first appeared in 1614.

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flatter the civil power into advancing its own ambitions. Foolish princes allowed themselves to be gulled by apparently obsequious clergy into becoming the handmaidens of church power. It was true that ‘that haughty monarch [Louis] has changed his measures … but no man can give another reason for it, than that he thinks it for his turn to please that part of his own church, which are the present and unwearied instruments of his absolute glory’.20 Penn’s claim that the clergy drummed up the divine right of kings as a quid pro quo for the crown’s support of their own power, was a constant theme among Puritan and, later, Whig writers, and it occurs in both Sidney’s and Locke’s writings. Other writers used the example of France to rebut the Anglican objection that a policy of tolerating several sects within a single nation would be dangerous and produce civil unrest. The Independent clergyman, John Owen, who, during the Interregnum, had been ‘Cromwell’s pope’, remarked sardonically, in 1667, that ‘it is evident that these pretences must be countenanced by some peculiar consideration of this nation and [the] government thereof, seeing the utmost of what is here desired is both established and practiced in other nations. The whole of it is plainly exercised in the kingdom of France’, where Protestants sustain ‘all burdens and offices of the commonwealth equal with others’ and are, unlike English Dissenters, free from ‘ecclesiastical courts, censures, and … penalties for their dissent’.21 Sir Charles Wolseley made the same point in 1668. ‘The king of France hath often with good success employed his Protestant subjects; nay, has often trusted the command of his whole army in the hand of a Protestant’.22 Owen and Wolseley were, like Sidney, formerly men of the Interregnum who, around 1670, saw signs that Charles would take Henri IV and the Edict for an example. ‘The great Henry of France’, pronounced Owen, ‘winding up all the differences [in religion] by granted liberty to the Huguenots, laid a firm foundation of the future peace and present greatness of that kingdom’.23 John Milton, another old Cromwellian, went into print in 1673 with a final plea on behalf of liberty of conscience, remarking that ‘if the French and Polonian [Polish] Protestants enjoy all this liberty among papists, much more may a Protestant justly expect it among Protestants’.24 Henry Stubbe was yet another former Cromwellian. In the last gasp of the Republic in 1659, he begged for toleration, citing the example of the Edict of Nantes. He was again in print in 1673 to defend Charles II against the prelates.25

20 Penn,

Perswasive, pp. 13, 19. John Owen, Indulgence and Toleration Considered (1667), p. 29. 22 Sir Charles Wolseley, Liberty of Conscience (1668), p. 17. Cf. John Corbet, A Second Discourse of the Religion of England (1668), pp. 37–8. 23 John Owen, A Peace Offering (1667), p. 27. 24 John Milton, Of True Religion (1673), p. 8. 25 Henry Stubbe, An Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause (1659), p. 9; Stubbe, A Further Justification of the Present War (1673). 21

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Toleration, migration, and political economy

Alongside these references to the shameful contrast between Protestant repression at home and Catholic leniency abroad, there was an increasingly important genre of writing which stressed England’s economic interests. Around 1670 it began to be de rigeur to argue for toleration on the politique, or ‘reason of state’, ground that it was good for the nation’s commercial well-being. To extrapolate, it is the germ of a modern argument that civil liberty and economic expansion go hand in hand. The argument reflected the increasingly apparent fact that Dissent flourished particularly among the urban trading and artisanal classes. In due course, the Dissenting vote would significantly enhance Whig electoral success in England’s towns. The Whig politician Slingsby Bethel asserted that liberty of conscience was ‘absolutely and indispensably necessary, for … advancing the trade and wealth of the kingdom’. The policy of repression was, in his pithy phrase, a ‘philosophy of poverty’. ‘When England, (neglecting church politics, which are commonly founded in passion, revenge, and self …) will effectually pursue their [sic] true interest, they cannot fail (their natural advantages for trade considered) of being more great and glorious than any other nation.’ England was governed, he complained, by men of narrow horizons, ignorant of the science of wealth creation, ‘country gentlemen, bred only at home … having spent their days in studying books, more than men or things, employing themselves in punishing tender consciences’, instead of in fruitful economic callings, for trade is ‘the true and chief intrinsic interest of England’.26 In Bethel’s economic theory, clerical despotism produced stagnation, while liberty of conscience promoted prosperity. The favourite model for English emulation was the Netherlands, the economic miracle of the age, but France figured prominently too. Writing in 1671, he stressed that the Edict of Nantes, which he called the Huguenots’ ‘Magna Carta’, was the key to French success. According to his rather chilling calculus, ‘the French could never advance by massacres, of which, they are reckoned to have [had] thirty or forty, … nor yet get forward in power and greatness, until they laid aside persecution’.27 When Bethel came, in 1680, to publish a new version of his analysis of the interests of European nations, he had to modify his claims concerning France, and now warned the French of the economic folly of ceasing to tolerate the Huguenots.28 Bethel’s books calibrate the significant shift in perceptions of France between 1670 and 1680. In 1670 France was still a positive model, and this is evident in another trade writer, Roger Coke. He called for the passing of a naturalization act, to allow immigrants to settle freely and so bring their valuable skills to England. Charles II should not listen to xenophobic objections. The French 26

Slingsby Bethel, The Present Interest of England (1671), pp. 7–8, 16–17, 25, 34–5. Interest of England, pp. 15, 20, 74–5. 28 Bethel, The Interest of Princes and States (1680), chs 8, 16. 27 Bethel,

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king, he argued, allowed foreigners to settle and worship unhampered, in order to encourage manufactures, notwithstanding the opposition of ‘the ecclesiastical powers’.29 The most striking exposition of the economic theme occurs in Britannia Languens of 1680, written by the Whig lawyer William Petyt. He had no doubt that France was England’s greatest threat, that war was likely, and that the Huguenots were coming under increasing pressure. Nonetheless, tolerationist France was still a stick with which to beat English policy. Persecution in a Protestant state was, he asserted, ‘incoherent’, and was a remnant of the Romish yoke. Throughout the century, England had done itself great damage by driving nonconformists into emigration. Vast numbers … have betaken themselves to voluntary exile from this their native country, in hopes of a better condition, rather than … endure certain poverty or persecution for conscience at home. Besides those gone into Ireland, and the Plantations, there are many thousands of Protestants gone from us into the Low Countries, into France, into Germany, and into Poland, where being woollen manufacturers, they have taught, and set up this manufacture, and thereby helped to work our ruin.30

Meanwhile, ‘both the Dutch and French, and most other of our neighbouring nations, anything famous for trade, allow liberty of conscience to Protestant dissenters, at least to such a degree, as to enable them to trade’. England’s penalties on Dissent and hindrances to immigration only served to advantage the French and Dutch. Indeed, not long ago, he continued, the French king and the duke of Tuscany bid against each other to offer freedom to the Jews to settle and trade, while in England a Jew cannot so much as legally own property.31 Petyt expressed irritation at those who thought toleration would encourage faction and civil unrest. This was nonsense, he began to argue, but did not trouble to elaborate the point, for ‘why should I labour to evince that which experience hath demonstrated; we have the great instance of France’, as well as Poland, Holland, Switzerland, and parts of Germany. ‘’Tis notorious that before the French toleration many of that national church had, or pretended to have, as fearful apprehensions of the effects of it; but we see what conclusions did prevail even among the popish party … We find France the most powerful of nations, and the French king so confident of his Protestants, that he long entrusted his mighty armies, in the hands of Monsieur Turenne, a Protestant till near his death.’ The manifest success of contemporary France found its starkest contrast in the declining condition of Spain, ‘whose execrable and inexorable cruelties towards dissenters hath mainly assisted in the present poverty and 29

Roger Coke, A Discourse of Trade (1670), p. 46. Cf. his Treatise Wherein is Demonstrated that the Church and State of England are in Equal Danger with the Trade of it (1671), p. 90. 30 William Petyt, Britannia Languens (1680), p. 135. 31 Petyt, Britannia Languens, p. 106.

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weakness of that nation’.32 Petyt, like Bethel, was in 1680 one of the principal publicists for the Whig cause. We chiefly associate that cause with the attempt to exclude the popish James from the throne, but important too was the campaign to reconstruct England’s ecclesiastical regime. No nation, the Whigs argued, worthy of the name of Protestant could share the guilt of Romish persecution, nor conduct a policy of poverty that would take it the way of benighted Spain; France was Catholic but whether it was ‘popish’ in the requisite sense remained ambiguous.33 Defining true martyrdom

The example of the Huguenots’ liberty was, then, extensively used to embarrass the Anglican establishment. English Protestantism was deeply riven by the issue of church authority. Until the passing of the Act of Toleration in 1689, the established church, and parliament, clung to the ancient conception of a unitary church and commonwealth, and of the civil magistrate’s duty to uphold ‘true religion’. The Dissenters, although themselves heirs to Calvinist disciplinarian assumptions, were gradually pushed by the experience of persecution towards the acceptance of pluralism. This was a slow process, and we should not underestimate the continued pull of the old ideal of uniform godly discipline. Richard Baxter, the great Puritan theologian, was reluctant to accept plurality, even though himself a victim of repression. Across north-west Europe the Huguenot community was itself divided in this way. This is famously so in the quarrel between Pierre Jurieu and Pierre Bayle, both exiles in the Netherlands. Jurieu combined hatred of Catholic persecution with a conventional Calvinist belief in discipline by godly ministers and magistrates. The evil of coercion by a false religion was no bar to the virtue of discipline by the true. For Bayle, the case for tolerance cut both ways. He believed it was necessary for civil society to come to terms with the fact that each religious tradition was as fully convinced of the veracity of its own ministrations. To talk of the special rights of the ‘true religion’ begged a question which courted bloodshed.34 This fundamental divergence is exemplified within English Protestantism by contrasting two sermons delivered on the occasion of Charles II’s public appeal for charitable donations to support the arriving Huguenot refugees in 1681.35 The first was delivered by George Hickes, one of the principal ideologues of high church Toryism in the 1680s. He was made a royal chaplain and dean 32 Petyt,

Britannia Languens, pp. 113–14. other appeals for toleration as a spur to prosperity, see Sir William Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces (1673), and Carew Reynel, The True English Interest (1674). 34 For recent work on Bayle and Jurieu, see above p. 43, n. 30. 35 For these appeals see W. A. Bewes, Church Briefs: or, Royal Warrants for Collections for Charitable Objects (1896). 33 For

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of Worcester in reward for services against Whiggism and Dissent. But for James’s and William’s revolutions he would certainly have become a bishop; instead he became a Nonjuror, repudiating the overthrow of the Stuarts. In the early 1680s he was one of those who believed that rebellion by Protestant ‘fanatics’ was a more urgent threat than a Catholic takeover. His sermon for the Huguenots trod a delicate line between deploring their treatment in France while upholding the English penal laws.36 To achieve this, he deployed a standard doctrine of the Catholic theological tradition, inherited in the Anglican, that ‘persecution’ and ‘martyrdom’, properly so-called, pertain only to suffering for the true religion. He warned against the flabby relativism of supposing that any suffering on behalf of a deeply felt cause counts as martyrdom. English Dissenters were no martyrs. Mere sincerity is irrelevant. ‘’Tis no matter how much they are persuaded in their own consciences, and to what degree they suffer.’ The Catholic and apostolic Church of England was the repository of truth, and Romanist and Presbyterian principles were ‘mere human inventions, mere human fancies and opinions’. Persecution ‘consists not in the greatness of any man’s suffering, which inconsiderate [i.e. unconsidering] people chiefly look at, but in the righteousness of the cause’. The Sermon on the Mount was clear about this: ‘blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness’s sake’. Those, therefore, upon whom penalties are inflicted for false doctrines and practices are justly punished. They were schismatic sheep in need of a firm pastoral hand. The Huguenots, by contrast, were truly persecuted by the Roman Church, ‘the mystical Babylon’.37 For Hickes, the dragooning of Quakers, Baptists, and Presbyterians into the fold of Anglicanism had no moral parallel with the Roman Church’s dragooning of French Protestants. At the opposite extreme to Hickes was the sermon of Samuel Bold, who was that very rare thing in the 1680s, a Whig clergyman of the Church of England. Finding himself ‘commanded in the Brief for the persecuted Protestants in France’ to deliver an appropriate homily, he used the occasion for a virulent polemic against the repression of English Dissent, which, from his Dorset parish in 1681, he saw developing apace.38 He passionately denounced the hypocrisy of those who reproved cruel popery abroad while at home ‘using rods, and swords … on the church’s behalf’. He granted there were differences between Romish and Protestant persecution, yet ‘the generality of our fierce and furious persecutors cannot be excused from guilt’, and indeed there is a danger they will ‘out do’ what is reported from France. The king’s Brief tells of the travail of French brethren, but ‘you know not how soon your own condition may be the same with theirs’. If his audience would have some charity for the Huguenots, then also ‘let your bowels yearn over your persecuted neighbours, in this their day 36

George Hickes, The True Notion of Persecution Stated, in a Sermon at the Time of the Late Contribution for the French Protestants (1681); two further editions in 1682. 37 Hickes, True Notion, pp. 3, 6, 8–9, 13–16, 20, 25. 38 Samuel Bold, A Sermon against Persecution (1682). Reprinted in 1720.

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of affliction’. England’s penal laws were a travesty of Gospel compassion and stemmed from ‘insufferable pride and malice’, for ‘there is an absolute necessity that some degree of that popish conceit of infallibility should prevail in all that are persecutors’. Accordingly, it is ‘deplorably apparent’ that they who are ‘most vigorous and active in prosecuting those Protestants who differ from others in some accidental matters, have a great affection for popery’.39 The English persecution was grounded more in material interests than in godly motives, and this mixing of worldly passions with godly professions was of the essence of popery. How appropriate, he concluded, was the epistle of that day, from St Paul to the Galatians: ‘he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the spirit’.40 Once again, ‘popery’ served as a floating signifier, not necessarily attaching to Roman Catholicism. For this impolitic sermon, and for his audacity in repeating its message in his printed Plea for Moderation towards Dissenters (1682),41 Bold was himself persecuted. A charge was brought in the bishop’s court, by whom he was sentenced to a public recantation on pain of suspension from his benefice, and another brought in the assize court, by whom he was jailed for seven weeks. He was charged that he did ‘derogate from, and procure contempt to, the ecclesiastical laws’, and that he had spoken things ‘to the great and grievous scandal and prejudice of the Church of England … and … the lords bishops’. The bishop’s charge was a carefully worded document, for it went to the heart of the nature of persecution. Bold had defined persecution as ‘an endeavouring to trouble, molest, disturb, kill, or any way hurt and injure another person on some religious account’. This is a subjectivist definition, indifferent to the substantive truth claims of any particular religion. His accusers retorted that the godly, tutorial discipline of a Reformed church could never be described by the ‘unchristian character of persecution’. Coercion for the truth could never be persecutory. This definition was premised on the presumption of the rights of ‘true religion’. Consequently, ‘in truth there never was any such thing [as persecution] in the Church of England’. In England, ‘Dissenters are but disciplined’, and discipline, it was pointedly added, ‘hath been exercised even in most of the Presbyterian and Independent pretended churches’.42 Bold succumbed, to save his living, but was scarcely repentant. Later he wrote another tract which, although ostensibly part of the Anglican offensive against James II’s popish regime, again warned

39 Bold,

Sermon, ep. ded.; pp. 6, 8, 22, 25, 27, 33. Galatians 4:29. 41 The title page has a quotation from the eirenic philosopher Jacob Acontius. His Satan’s Progress (1565) was reissued by the Independent John Goodwin in 1648, and Penn quoted extensively from it: An Address to Protestants (1679). See E. R. Briggs, ‘An Apostle of the Incomplete Reformation: Jacopo Aconcio’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society 22 (1976), 481–95. 42 ‘A Brief Relation of the Prosecutions against Samuel Bold’, appended to the 1720 edition of his 1682 sermon, pp. 37–48; Bold, Sermon, p. 6 (emphasis added). 40

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against the Protestant popery of persecution.43 Soon after, Henry Care, the Whig journalist who turned to support James’s drive for toleration, praised Bold in his newspaper, for his brave stand.44 Where Hickes had called his sermon The True Notion of Persecution, Bold’s was called simply A Sermon against Persecution. Between them they articulated the contrast between the traditional Reformed (and indeed Catholic) and what we might call an Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment notion of persecution – for Bold’s subjectivist position is the standard modern one. They provided an English mirror image of the contest between Jurieu and Bayle, between Calvinist discipline and sceptical tolerance. The England of the early 1680s was unsafe for Bold, and was a primrose path toward preferment for Hickes. After the Revolution, the tables were turned. Hickes spent the 1690s under suspicion of Jacobite conspiracy, sometimes in hiding. Bold acquired the laurels of a minor Whig martyr, was befriended by John Locke, and was able freely to publish tracts in defence of Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity.45 The du Moulin brothers at war

Public discussion of the plight of the Huguenots was not, therefore, a one-sided affair. The news from France touched a raw nerve in English politics. A poignant example of these tensions among the Huguenot refugees who settled in England is that of two brothers, both clergymen, who were deeply at odds with one another – Louis du Moulin and Pierre du Moulin the younger. They were the sons of one of the most renowned Huguenot scholars, Pierre the elder, whose own father had served the family of Philippe du Plessis Mornay, the great Huguenot leader of the late sixteenth century, who had narrowly escaped death in the Massacre of St Bartholomew; and they were nephews of another well-known theologian Andre Rivet.46 The brothers were uncles of Pierre Jurieu, of the historian Jacques Basnage, and, confusingly, of another Pierre du Moulin, author of an influential polemical tract of 1673, England’s Appeal, sponsored by William of Orange, which helped break Charles II’s alliance with France.47 43 Bold,

A Brief Account of the First Rise of the Name Protestant (1688). Henry Care, Public Occurrences, no. 8 (10 April 1688). 45 John Locke, Correspondence, ed. E. S. de Beer (8 vols, Oxford, 1976–89), no. 2232 and later letters. 46 Rivet’s notoriety as a defender of intolerance is indicated by the pseudonym adopted by Andrew Marvell on the title page of his satire Mr Smirke, or the Divine in Mode (1676): ‘Andreas Rivetus junior’. 47 Pierre de Moulin the elder (1568–1658) had three sons and a daughter: Pierre (Peter) the younger (1601–84), Louis (c. 1605–80), Cyrus (1608–c. 1680), and Esther. Esther’s son was Pierre Jurieu, who married his cousin, Helene, Cyrus’s daughter. Cyrus’s other daughter, Suzanne, married Basnage. Cyrus’s son, another Pierre du Moulin (c. 1650–76), served Charles II until he joined William of Orange in the Second Dutch War. For this Pierre, see Haley, William of Orange and the English Opposition, passim. He was the probable author of 44

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With such a lineage, the du Moulin brothers had a profound conviction that providence had called their family to play a special role in the struggle against Antichrist. Although they settled in England, they remained conscious of their role in the ‘Protestant international’, publishing their works in French and Latin as often as in English. The struggle against popery was the bedrock of everything they wrote. But beyond this point, their solidarity dissolved, for the cause meant different things to each. Pierre was, now in the English fold, a Cavalier and Anglican; Louis was a Puritan, ‘a fiery, violent, and hot-headed Independent’, according to Anthony Wood.48 They exemplified the two paths taken by the refugees in England (they both arrived in 1630), some conforming to the Church of England, others forming independent congregations outside it. Where Pierre began his polemical career in 1640 in defence of the Laudian church, Louis began his with an attack on the bishops.49 Pierre had to flee to Ireland to escape the Puritan revolution. Louis meanwhile was installed by Parliament as Camdenian professor of history at Oxford, after the purge of the Royalists there. He was a friend of the leading Independent, John Owen, and became a publicist for Cromwell. His weighty treatise of 1656, Paraenesis ad aedificatores imperii in imperio, was dedicated to the ‘serenissimo ac potentissimo principi Olivario’, and provided a European audience with a semi-official vindication of the Lord Protector’s tolerant, congregationalist religious settlement. Louis’s ecclesiastical task was parallel to that of John Milton in defending the regicide against its European critics. His brother, meanwhile, joined the European onslaught against Milton’s defence of the regime.50 Louis’s book was a retort to Moyse Amyraut’s, Jean Daillé’s, and Andre Rivet’s Huguenot critique of English congregationalism, for these French defenders of Genevan discipline were, like the Scottish, no friends to what they saw as the sectarian anarchism and antinomianism rife in republican England.51 His treatise was a frank attempt to reconcile congregational Independency with England’s Appeal (1673). See V. Larminie, ‘The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the du Moulin Connection, and the Location of the Church of England in the Later Seventeenth Century’, in Religious Culture of the Huguenots, ed. Dunan-Page, pp. 55–68; C. Ronchail, ‘La famille Du Moulin et la monarchie anglaise de Jacques Ier a Charles II’, in Les Huguenots dans les îles britannique, ed. A. Dunan-Page and M. C. Munoz-Teulié (Paris, 2008), pp. 105–25. 48 Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, ed. P. Bliss (4 vols, Oxford, 1817), IV, 92. 49 Pierre du Moulin, A Letter of a French Protestant to a Scottishman of the Covenant (1640); Louis du Moulin, Irenaei Philadelphia Epistola (1641). The latter is not listed in the ESTC. 50 Pierre du Moulin, Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum Adversus Parricidas Anglicanus (1652). Milton replied to du Moulin in his Defensio Secunda (1654). 51 For the ‘Erastian Independent’ circle of the 1650s, see J. R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983), ch. 1. See the letters between Stubbe and Hobbes in Hobbes, Correspondence, ed. N. Malcolm, 2 vols (Oxford, 1994), passim. Louis published an English abridgement of his Paraenesis in Of the Right of Churches and of the Magistrate’s Power over them (1658), of which Baxter made considerable use in The Difference between the Power of Magistrates and Church Pastors (1671). See W. M. Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millennium (1979).

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an Erastian concern for the authority of the civil state to govern the church free from priestly interference. Both elements in that intellectual marriage were anathema to the Genevan disciplinarians. When the tables were turned after 1660, the brothers’ fortunes were reversed. Pierre became a respected prebendary of Canterbury and a royal chaplain, while Louis fell into embittered poverty, an ejected and dejected Dissenting divine. Louis was briefly arrested in 1672 for invectives against John Durel, minister of a French Protestant chapel in London, whom he denounced for conforming to Anglican rites.52 He produced intemperate denunciations of the crypto-popery of the re-established church.53 His passionate hatred of the Anglican hierarchy caused his brother to cut off his fraternal charity in 1666, leaving him penniless.54 Pierre hammered away at the necessity of the twin doctrines of unswerving obedience to God’s anointed kings and to Christ’s appointed bishops, and offered long threnodies on the bloodshed and catastrophe brought about by the errors of English and Scottish Puritanism. One aspect of his refrain was a perverse reading of Huguenot history: he contended that Huguenots had never been guilty of rebellion, nor of schism against episcopacy. In 1640 he was appalled that the Scottish Covenanting rebels against Charles I should cite in their defence the Huguenot revolt in 1670s France. In A Letter of a French Protestant to a Scottishman of the Covenant (1640) he argued, with remarkable speciousness, that the Huguenots had never defended the legitimacy of revolution, and those few who had rebelled were morally wrong to have done so. He even contended that the Massacre of St Bartholomew ‘cannot justify the Protestants for taking arms’, though he conceded that that crime took away a ‘great part of the reproach’. He maintained that the Huguenots had never renounced episcopacy. They did not have bishops precisely because they reverenced the institution, wishing to place no schismatic hindrance in the way of reunion with Catholic France the moment its bishops renounced Rome. It was Pierre’s writings in defence of episcopacy which George Hickes used in the sermon discussed earlier, to show that the Huguenots were truly at one with Anglicanism. Pierre cited in evidence the life and work of his revered father. Calvin and ‘my father’ were ‘altogether for episcopacy’. As for civil disobedience, ‘my father’ had strenuously opposed the Huguenot rebellion at La Rochelle in 52

Louis du Moulin, Patronus Bonae Fidei (1672), for which the privy council ordered his arrest: HMC, Finch, II, 12; Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, IV, 92. Durel translated the Church of England Prayer Book into French, and was appointed dean of Windsor in 1677. 53 Louis du Moulin, A Short and True Account of the Several Advances the Church of England hath made towards Rome (1680). 54 Dr Williams’s Library, London (hereafter DWL), Baxter Letters, VI, fols 193–4; Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, ed. N. H. Keeble and G. F. Nuttall (2 vols, Oxford, 1991) (hereafter Calendar), II, 80. The valuable series of letters between du Moulin and Baxter is summarized in D. Nobbs, ‘New Light on Louis du Moulin’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society 15 (1935–6), 489–509, and in Calendar. Baxter’s complete correspondence will be published: gen. ed. Johanna Harris and Alison Searle.

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the 1620s. For the Scots to parallel their supposed oppression under Laudianism with the St Bartholomew’s Massacre was, he plausibly believed, a travesty. The Laudian discipline was no bloody decimation. ‘The French Protestants keep their zeal for religion for higher matters, than a surplice or a cross in baptism.’ He told a story of his father’s visit to England in 1615, at the invitation of James I. Some discontented Puritan nigglers at church conformity had put their grievances to him, for his judgement as an impartial foreign Reformed theologian, but he had dismissed them as ‘frivolous’.55 Pierre later remarked, again of the Scottish Covenanters, that the ‘judicious auditory at Charenton’ – the principal Huguenot congregation in Paris – would be appalled at their ‘fanatical … zeal’ and would quickly clap these Kirk madmen in an asylum.56 In 1652 Pierre was outraged that Milton should implicate the French Reformed church in the evil doctrine of tyrannicide. The true Reformed doctrine was ever one of non-resistance to God’s anointed monarchs: tyrannicide was a Jesuit perversion, which had produced the ghastly murder of Henri IV in 1610. Indeed, the Jesuits were behind the appalling regicide of Charles I: in 1664 Pierre encouraged the widely entertained notion that, somehow, the Jesuits were the real authors of that king’s execution.57 For Pierre, and for Royalists and, later, Tories, anybody, whether Catholic or Protestant, who tried to subvert kings was popish, since to weaken temporal rulers was to enhance papal power. It is no surprise that in Pierre’s version of the history of Huguenot thought, he simply ignored the great theorists of the right of revolution, Mornay, François Hotman, and Theodore Beza, who had been prompted to write their treatises in the wake of the Massacre. Paradoxically, he preferred to quote the politique Catholics Jacques-Auguste de Thou and Cardinal D’Ossat. In Pierre’s picture of French history, the granting of toleration to the Huguenots was a prize for their devout loyalty to the state. ‘The greatest testament to their fidelity, is that famous Edict of Nantes, which was expressly to reward them with privileges, for their constant adhering to their king, in the long calamities of France.’58 This was a fantastical history which erased the radicalism of the Huguenot revolutionaries of the 1570s. Pierre du Moulin began a Cavalier and died a Tory, and believed that Puritan rebels like his brother should be suppressed. Louis began a Puritan and died a Whig,59 and believed that the popish pride of prelates, and their hangers on, like his brother, should be purged. He told Baxter that he would like engraved 55

Pierre du Moulin, Letter of a French Protestant, pp. 2, 5–6, 23, 28, 35, 38–9, 42–3, 46–7. Pierre du Moulin, History of the English and Scotch Presbytery (1659), p. 180. 57 Pierre du Moulin, A Vindication of the Sincerity of the Protestant Religion (1664). This was a reply to the Catholic Henry Janson, Philanax Anglicus (1663), which blamed English revolutionary theory on the Huguenots. See J. H. M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought (Oxford, 1959), pp. 125–6. 58 Pierre du Moulin, Vindication of the Sincerity, pp. 30–2, 35, 100, 122, 124, 126. 59 In 1679–80, just before his death, Shaftesbury and other Whig lords sought donations to get some of Louis’s anticlerical tracts back into print. Louis du Moulin to Edmund Borlase: 56

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on his tombstone the motto, ‘all church power is popery’.60 The history of popery was the history of clerical usurpations upon lay freedom. The pope’s claim to imperium was only the logical extreme of episcopal and Presbyterian demands that the civil power should use its temporal punishments to enforce clerical discipline. Popery, therefore, consisted of any claim that churches, and their temporal props, had a right and duty to coerce for religion’s sake.61 ‘If I could persuade the world that ministers have no other authority than that of persuasion’, then clerical despotism would collapse, and Reformation would be truly accomplished. If we could but settle ‘this controversy about the potestas … of ministers, or magistrates in sacris’ – power in sacred things – it would be ‘the panacea cure, and resolve all controversies’.62 Louis became consumed by anticlericalism and believed his prophetic task was to liberate temporal princes and their subjects from the Antichrist of clerical oppression.63 In the 1670s he quarrelled with his nephew, Jurieu. The latter began his polemical career with a treatise in defence of the authority of church synods and excommunication, against what he saw as his uncle’s sacrilegious defence of state power and congregational anarchism. Because the war against the priests was Louis du Moulin’s overriding concern, he was never much interested in constitutional questions, as distinct from ecclesiological ones. Like many whom we may called Puritan and Whig, his chief concern was to save the secular commonwealth from churchmen. God had chosen lay instruments for the evangelical task of stripping the Whore of Babylon naked. He was a defender of the secular state, of imperium against sacerdotium, in the tradition of Marsilius of Padua, Erastus, Marc Antonio de Dominis, Hugo Grotius, John Selden, and Thomas Hobbes.64 That a devout BL, MS Sloane 1008, fols 242, 268, 273. Celeusma (1679), probably the joint work of du Moulin and William Jenkyn, was dedicated to Shaftesbury and Lord Holles. 60 DWL, Baxter Letters, VI, fol. 176 (c. March 1670); Calendar, II, 85. He had in mind the inscription on Sir Henry Wotton’s tomb: ‘Disputandi pruritus est ecclesiarum scabies’ – ‘the itch of disputing is the scab [disease] of the church’. 61 Louis du Moulin, Of the Right of Churches, ep. ded.; idem, A Short and True Account (1680), p. 50. 62 DWL, Baxter Letters, VI, fol. 33 (29 June 1665); II, fol. 223 (6 September 1669); Calendar, II, 45–6, 77–8. 63 Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. N. H. Keeble, J. Coffey, T. Cooper, and T. Charlton (5 vols, Oxford, 2020), II, 426–7. 64 Aside from the Paraenesis and Of the Right of Churches, his main Erastian works were: The Power of the Christian Magistrate in Sacred Things (1650) (the title echoed Grotius’s De imperio summarum potestatum circ sacra), dedicated to Bulstrode Whitelocke and Algernon Sidney’s brother Lord Lisle; Jugulum Causae (1671); and Papa Ultrajectionis (1668). The last is mentioned in O. Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1934), I, 92; II, 287. See G. Nuttall, ‘Dr Du Moulin and Papa Ultrajectinus’, Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 61 (1981), 205–13. For de Dominus and du Moulin: N. Malcolm, De Dominus: Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist, and Relapsed Heretic (1984), p. 84. Cf. Salmon, French Religious Wars, pp. 107–8; G. H. Dodge, The Political Theory of the Huguenots of the Dispersion (New York, 1947), pp. 82–90.

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Puritan should appeal to such figures as these is a case of strange bedfellows. The truth about church power God ‘strangely discoursed it first to Erastus, a physician … laying upon the grant cheat of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and excommunication, and, which is a greater shame to the ecclesiastical order, … he hath permitted that men [as] ill-principled as Grotius and Selden, yea Hobbes as bad as can be, should come nearer the truth than many good men’.65 This admission, in a private letter to Baxter, that Hobbes was God’s instrument, discloses an arresting marriage between Puritan congregationalism and Hobbesian Erastianism. Puritans needed the power of the state to suppress the power of the church. The affinity between Hobbes and du Moulin seems to have been mutual, for in 1657 Henry Stubbe reported to Hobbes that he was telling his Oxford colleagues that du Moulin’s Paraenesis had ‘gained your good esteem’.66 Louis’s partial approval of Hobbes foreshadows Pierre Bayle’s praise of Hobbes’s anticlericalism in his Dictionnaire.67 Louis du Moulin placed his hopes in a perpetual edict of toleration, most likely from enlightened princes, with Cromwell or Charles II. In 1669 he was in touch with the king’s court. He hoped that a ‘toleration will be the downfall of the hierarchy’. So hostile was he to the English church’s ‘imperio separato’ that, like Algernon Sidney, he claimed that ‘popery or church power is yet more prevailing in England than in France’.68 He sometimes argued that the Gallican Catholic theologians understood church–state relations better than either Anglicans or Huguenots. He was prepared to quote such Gallican authors as Pierre Pithou and Pierre de Marca, the latter an archbishop of Paris whom Louis called ‘a great scholar and very learned in divinity’.69 In 1665 he expressed the hope that Gallican France would soon shake off the papal yoke and set in motion the downfall of Rome, and was excited when French ambassadors read 65

DWL, Baxter Letters, VI, fol. 192 (c. late 1669); Calendar, II. 80. In print, however, du Moulin denounced Hobbes: An Appeal of all the Nonconformists (1681), pp. 21, 27. Baxter remarked that du Moulin was ‘zealous for the magistrate’s power in Erastus’s sense, and went rather further than Dr Stillingfleet in his Irenicum’: Second True Defence (1681), p. 184. The high church theologian Herbert Thorndike subjected Hobbes, Selden, and du Moulin to attack for their Erastianism: The Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England (1659). For Hobbes and the Independents, see J. R. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005), ch. 6. 66 BL, Add. MS 32553, fol. 29; Thomas Hobbes, The Correspondence, ed. N. Malcolm (2 vols, 1994), I, 449. 67 See E. Labrousse, Bayle (Oxford, 1933); Bayle, Political Writings, ed. S. L. Jenkinson (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 79–92. 68 DWL, Baxter Letters, II, fol. 223 (6 September 1669); VI, fol. 198 (c. August 1669); fol. 177 (c. March 1670); Calendar, II, 76, 77–8, 85. 69 Louis du Moulin, Proposals and Reasons … Humbly Offered to the Parliament (1659), pp. 12–13, 15; The Power of the Christian Magistrate, pp. 89–90. The De Concordia Imperii et Sacerdotii (1641) by de Marca (a client of Mazarin, appointed archbishop of Paris in 1662), was often cited by English Protestants to show that Catholic theologians rejected papal supremacy: e.g. William Wake, A Discourse (1687), pp. xii–xiii.

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his latest book with approval. His relish was understandable, since during these years there were rumours that France was about to break with Rome.70 He underestimated the extent to which French policy-makers would soon feel able to combine Gallican anti-papalism with repression of the Huguenots.71 Indeed Louis XIV’s stance of episcopal autonomy from Rome was in part underwritten by his suppression of heretics as a token of his true Catholicity. The great bishop Jacques Benigne Bossuet was an architect of both policies.72 Louis du Moulin died in 1680 before the persecution became fully apparent.73 His grandfather had narrowly escaped the Massacre of St Bartholomew, that quintessence of Catholic Counter-Reformation brutality; a descendant would serve at the court of Frederick the Great, that quintessence of Enlightened absolutism, who gave religious toleration to Prussia. In 1669 he stood on the cusp between Reformation and Enlightenment, for when a Puritan clergyman found truth in Grotius, Selden, and Hobbes, then indeed the Puritan had become the Whig.74 The legacy of Henri IV

Under Charles II and James II Dissenters had, at least periodically, good reason to frame their hopes around the idea of a perpetual edict of toleration. Accordingly, there was a good deal of nostalgia for the world of the first decade of the seventeenth century, when Henri IV brought harmony to France, when the Venetians defied the papacy, and when James I presided over an English and a Scottish church not yet tainted by Laudian and Covenanting extremes. English Protestants of the later seventeenth century frequently expressed their admiration for the eirenic Catholic intellectuals of that era: De Thou, president of the parlement of Paris, whose History of his Own Times became a standard 70

DWL, Baxter Letters, VI, fol. 33 (29 June 1665); Calendar, II, 45–6. Cf. fol. 177. The book in question was either Jugulum Causae or Pape Ultrajectinus. Louis’s reference to ‘three’ French ambassadors must refer the team which arrived in April 1665: Henri de Bourbon, duc de Verneuil; the Comte de Cominges; and Honore de Courtin. For the rumours: Pepys, Diary, VIII, 182 (26 April 1667). For the interest of English Catholics in a Gallican-style reunion of Anglicanism with Catholicism, see G. Glickman, ‘Christian Reunion, the Anglo-French Alliance and the English Catholic Imagination, 1669–1672’, EHR 128 (2013), 263–91. 71 A policy advocated by Paul Hay, marquis de Chatelet, in Traitte de la politique de France (1669), translated as The Politics of France (1680). 72 In the 1690s, however, Bossuet adopted a moderate position toward Anglicanism. See S. Rosa, ‘Bossuet, James II, and the Crisis of Catholic Universalism’, Eighteenth-Century Thought 1 (2003), 37–121. 73 Gilbert Burnet, that frequenter of Restoration deathbeds, procured from the dying Louis an apology for intemperance against the Church of England: The Last Words of Louis du Moulin (1680). 74 For this theme, see M. Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (2nd edn, Woodbridge, 2016).

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source for the events of the St Bartholomew’s Massacre; the Letters of Cardinal D’Ossat, the minister who delicately handled relations between Henri IV and Rome; the treatises of the Gallicans Edmond Richer and Pierre Pithou; and the Venetian anti-papal monk Paulo Sarpi, who defended the city state against the pope’s Interdict.75 Although severely punctured by the French attack on the Huguenot stronghold at La Rochelle, by the Thirty Years’ War, and by the English wars of religion, this intellectual mood survived until late in the century. When, in 1672, John Humfrey defended Charles II’s Indulgence, he drew upon the example of ‘that great prince’ Henri IV and the Edict, and even upon John Barclay, the Catholic politique defender of Henri.76 When, in 1687, Henry Care sought to defend James II’s Indulgence, and its hope for a union of Catholics and Dissenters, against the charge that it was an unnatural alliance, he turned to the France of Henri IV, and cited the writings of D’Ossat.77 For most of the seventeenth century France could still be seen in the image of the Edict of Nantes, and as a moral guide for England. It was an image crushingly dissolved by the Revocation. It could scarcely survive once another new word entered the English language, ‘refugee’, from the French refugié, denoting the plight of thousands of fleeing Huguenots.

75

On the influence of De Thou, see Salmon, French Religious Wars, ch. 7. Burnet stated that his History of the Reformation (1680) was intended to supply an English counterpart to De Thou and Sarpi. A characteristic piece of Huguenot writing, available in English, which combined absolutism, toleration, and Erastianism, which made use of Sarpi, de Thou, and d’Ossat, was Anon., Le Tombeau des Controverses: a Grave for Controversies between the Romanist and Protestants Presented to the King of France (1673). Pithou’s chief work was Les Libertes de l’Eglise Gallicane (1594). On Sarpi: D. Wootton, Paulo Sarpi (Cambridge, 1983). 76 John Humfrey, The Authority of the Magistrate (1672), pp.  123–8. For a Huguenot example of the attempt to keep the politique spirit going, see Isaac d’Huisseau, La Reunion du Christianisme (1670). 77 Care, Animadversions, pp. 14–15.

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8 Andrew Marvell’s Adversaries Andrew Marvell stands at the junction of literature and history, a consummate poet who latterly became a prose writer of stunning virtuosity and forthrightness. His polemics touched upon every political and ecclesiastical crux of the Restoration era. A member of parliament for Hull and a client of aristocrats who were at odds with Anglican Royalism, he encapsulates sensibilities that were at once Puritan and proto-Whig. His Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672–3) brilliantly skewered the persecutory Samuel Parker; his Mr Smirke; or, the Divine in Mode (1676) burlesqued the rising clergyman Fancis Turner, while its appendix, A Short Historical Essay on General Councils, exemplified the partisan weaponizing of the history of the early church. His Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677) was a clarion call of the emerging Whig movement, famed for its opening assertion that ‘there has now for divers years, a design been carried on, to change the lawful government of England into an absolute tyranny’; while his (now obscure) Remarks upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse (1678) delved into the crisis of Protestant soteriology and the dilemmas of Calvinism. Marvell’s career throws a bridge between the Revolutions of 1648 and 1688. During the Interregnum he served alongside John Milton in the task of vindicating the Commonwealth; in his last years (he died in 1678), his confidant was his nephew, William Popple, who would become an intimate of John Locke and translator into English of Locke’s Epistola de tolerantia. To examine Marvell’s adversaries, and his responses to them, is to exhume not only the substance of civil and religious contention during the 1670s but also their manner and form, their rhetorical and performative character. We may capture the latter aspect by reference to a single trope. Marvell took from the second duke of Buckingham’s play The Rehearsal (1672) the character of ‘Draw-can-Sir’, A version of this chapter appeared as ‘Marvell and his Adversaries, 1672–1678’ in The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell, ed. M. Dzelzainis and E. Holberton (Oxford, 2019), pp. 703–21. I am indebted to Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce material. For the chapter’s themes, see A. M. Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton, NJ, 1978); W. Chernaik, The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1983); C. Condren and A. D. Cousins (eds), The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell (Aldershot, 1990); W. Chernaik and M. Dzelzainis (eds), Marvell and Liberty (1999). A recent treatment is F. G. Mohamed, Sovereignty: Seventeenth-Century England and the Making of the Modern Political Imaginary (Oxford, 2020), ch. 4.

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a brawling buffoon, and applied it to Parker, thereby popularizing the figure of the swaggering, bullying authorial swordsman.1 The phrase caught on. One of the critics of the supreme Tory pamphleteer Roger L’Estrange called him a ‘Draw-can-Sir’.2 By 1698 a versifier could casually refer to a ‘Draw-can-Sir’ as a ‘fighting coward and a Tory’.3 Locke surely had such allusions in mind when, in the Second Treatise of Government, he called the defenders of absolute monarchy ‘arrant Draw-can-Sirs’.4 Marvell and the Draw-can-Sirs

Marvell’s four prose works between 1672 and 1678 elicited a sheaf of responses, involving perhaps a dozen adversaries. The number of respondents is indeterminate because virtually all were anonymous, and some still evade identification. His own tracts were, in three cases, interventions in existing controversies, propping up allies floundering under the punches of their enemies. Marvell always stole the show, and it is his works alone that have been reprinted in a modern critical edition. If we include all participants the number is up to around twenty, practically all of them Anglican or Dissenting clergymen. This is indicative of the ecclesiological and theological foci of these debates, but also of the salience of the clerical profession in shaping public doctrine, and the breathtaking pugilism of seventeenth-century divines. Marvell’s first and second interventions were in the Parker and Turner controversies, concerned the nature and grounds of the restrictive church settlement of 1662 and the case for its amelioration in ways that would allow the readmission of Dissenters. The Act of Uniformity had expelled the Puritan nonconformists, who baulked at liturgy they thought unscriptural, at episcopal re-ordination they thought invalidated their ministries, and at an oath renouncing the Civil War Covenant which they had solemnly sworn. Any worship other than in an Anglican church was rendered penal. The Act was the final attempt to coerce the English people to be of one religion, and it was sustained by sophisticated defences of the pastoral use of the magistrate’s sword. ‘The magistrate may and ought to force [each person] … to open his eyes.’5 Amelioration of this regime might mean ‘toleration’, the sufferance of the Dissenters’ independent ministry, but, for others, it meant ‘comprehension’, readmission of the Dissenters to the national church on terms that would not violate their consciences. In these quarrels, the fault line lay not only between Anglican and Dissenter but also between those churchmen ardent for, and those hostile to, coercive uniformity. Thus, when Marvell attacked Parker, he was protecting an Independent, John 1 Marvell,

PW, I, 64–5. The Observator Reproved (1684), p. 4. 3 Anon., Aesop at Richmond (1698), p. 12. 4 Locke, TTG, II, 177. 5 Francis Turner, Animadversions upon a Late Pamphlet Entitled the Naked Truth (1676), p. 12. 2 Anon.,

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Owen,6 but when he attacked Turner, he was defending a bishop of the Church of England, Herbert Croft, who had been foolish enough to speak out for accommodation.7 The third debate was of a different order. In An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government Marvell was the initiator, and the field of fire was the entire panoply of the Restoration regime, parliamentary, ecclesiastical, and geopolitical; and here the adversary was a layman, the most pugnacious publicist for that regime, the censor, pamphleteer, and magistrate, L’Estrange.8 In the final and most arcane debate, Marvell, in his Remarks, seconded the Presbyterian John Howe against a fellow Presbyterian Thomas Danson, and here the subject was the theology of predestination: the problem of the compatibility of divine will and human choice in the economy of salvation. Again, the fault line ran through rather than between the churches, for the intellectual agonies of the theological retreat from Calvinist predestinarianism entangled Anglican and Dissenter alike. Howe belonged to that retreat, and Marvell joined him. Most of the tracts in these controversies proved ephemeral. One text stands out, Samuel Parker’s Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1669), the target of the Rehearsal Transpros’d, which probably merits a modern edition. It is among the handful of canonical articulations of Anglican conformist doctrine, alongside Simon Patrick’s misleadingly titled A Friendly Debate between a Conformist and a Non-Conformist (1669); Edward Stillingfleet’s Unreasonableness of Separation (1681), the target of Locke’s most important unpublished work;9 and Jonas Proast’s post-Revolution replies to Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1690– 1704). One other adversary rightly remains a constant subject of scholarly scrutiny, L’Estrange. And one other work, John Owen’s Truth and Innocence (1669) achieved a Victorian reissue in an edition of his Works, testimony to the resilience of Puritan theology.10 At the opposite pole lie works on the verge of bibliographic oblivion. There survives only one copy in the United Kingdom of John Humfrey’s retort to Parker, Two Points of Great Moment (1672) and only two of the anonymous Sober Reflections, or, A Solid Confutation of Mr Andrew Marvel’s Works (1674). Such near extinction was a common fate 6 Parker’s

A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (‘1670’ [1669]) was critiqued by John Owen, Truth and Innocency Vindicated (1669), which prompted Parker’s retort, A Defence and Continuation of the Ecclesiastical Politie (‘1671’ [1670]). Other certain or probable authors provoked by Parker, cited below, are Robert Ferguson, John Humfrey, and Henry Stubbe. Respondents to Marvell’s Rehearsal Transpros’d are Samuel Butler, Edmund Hickeringill, and Henry Stubbe. 7 Herbert Croft, The Naked Truth, or, the True State of the Primitive Church (1675); answered by Francis Turner, Animadversions upon a Late Pamphlet Entitled The Naked Truth (1676). Other respondents to Croft were Gilbert Burnet and Philip Fell or Peter Gunning. 8 Roger L’Estrange, An Account of the Growth of Knavery (1678); idem, Tyranny and Popery Lording it over the Consciences, Lives, Liberties, and Estates both of King and People (1678). 9 Bodl., MS Locke c. 34. An edition is being prepared by Timothy Stanton, under the title The Nature of Churches. 10 John Owen, Works, ed. W. H. Goold (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1850–5).

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of early modern pamphlets, notwithstanding that Humfrey is an intellectually serious figure.11 Authorial identity is precarious too. In writing of Marvell’s adversaries, we still cannot always be certain of whom we speak. ‘Theophilus Thorowthistle’ is an implausible author.12 A snide aside about the Royal Society in the anonymous Rosemary and Bayes (1672) was sufficient for the author to be outed as Henry Stubbe.13 The Transproser Rehears’d (1673) seems now firmly assigned to Samuel Butler, rather than to Richard Leigh.14 Lex Talionis (1676), a reply to Croft, is perhaps by Philip Fell or Peter Gunning, or neither. Some attributions of S’too him Bayes (1673) still suggest John Dryden, improbably. Any discussion today of Restoration debate must, where possible, refer to identifiable or probable authors in order to avoid intolerable circumlocution – of the sort, ‘the retort of the author of A Further Reply to the author of Animadversions …’ – but this removes us from the labyrinth of anonymity which enveloped contemporary readers, for whom speculative attribution was part of the entertainment.15 The primacy of rhetoric

The Marvell debates demand treatment of style before substance, for they were peculiarly ludic, facetious, and virulent. The unseemly, even oxymoronic, treatment of subjects of high religious and civil seriousness in such playful, irreverent, and foul language was a matter of constant contemporary comment. Here was theology ‘play-book-style’, pursued as if by ‘Billingsgate fishwives’, raillery in place of sober argument.16 The debates were caught in generic profusion and confusion, between earnest theology and coffee-house banter. Print in the public arena, its genres proliferating in new forms of essays, letters, ballads, and dialogues, saw theological disquisition cut its moorings from donnish scholastic 11

C. Condren, George Lawson’s ‘Politica’ and the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1989), ch. 12; J. D. Chatterjie, ‘Between Hobbes and Locke; John Humfrey, Nonconformity, and Restoration Theories of Political Obligation’, Locke Studies 19 (2019), 1–34. 12 Anon., Sober Reflections (1674), title page. 13 Anon., A Common-Place-Book out of the Rehearsal Transpros’d (1673), sig. A2v. On Stubbe, see J. R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism, and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983). 14 N. von Maltzahn, ‘Samuel Butler’s Milton’, Studies in Philology 92 (1995), 482–95. 15 For Marvell’s own commentary on his adversaries, see The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth (3rd edn, 2 vols, Oxford, 1971), II, 328, 346–7. 16 Samuel Butler, The Transproser Rehearsed (1673), p. 8; Anon., Sober Reflections, pp. 3, 5, 32; Anon., Raillerie a la Mode Consider’d, or, the Supercilious Detractor, a Joco-Serious Discourse (1673). See R. Anselment, Betwixt Jest and Earnest: Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, Swift, and the Decorum of Religious Ridicule (Toronto, 1979), ch. 5; S. Bardle, The Literary Underground in the 1660s: Andrew Marvell, George Wither, Ralph Wallis, and the World of Restoration Satire and Pamphleteering (Oxford, 2012); J. Spurr, ‘Style, Wit, and Religion in Restoration England’, in The Nature of the English Revolution, ed. S. Taylor and G. Tapsell (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 233–59.

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protocols and enter the slapstick of urban popular burlesque. It generated a gallimaufry of puzzles and games, feeding a delight in decoding allusions and in witnessing merciless verbal skimmingtons. Marvell’s satiric inventiveness was dazzling, but so was Parker’s aggression. Where Owen and Croft were ponderous, Marvell triumphantly put controversy into a new key. The tricksy jargon and playful raillery of the Rehearsal Transpros’d was the quintessence of the new style. Henry Stubbe sympathized with baffled readers: send for ‘the virtuosi for a key unto it’.17 The anti-Marvellians were not without their own tradition of satire, eminently in Samuel Butler, the author of Hudibras (1663–78), who came to their aid. Marvell’s ridicule of the pomp of episcopalian divines was, in a sense, a riposte to Butler’s ridicule of the hypocrisy of Puritan preachers. Hudibras was on the shelves and tongues of every Cavalier, a zany and hilarious rebuke to the Puritan revolutionaries, to match the sober piety of their other totemic text, King Charles the Martyr’s Eikon Basilike (1649). Now Butler turned on Marvell. If the latter made fun of Parker’s pretentious erudition, Butler exposed Marvell’s gimcrack academicism, his autodidactic plundering of his commonplace book: he snidely remarked that Marvell’s Grub Street eloquence might better turn itself to writing adverts for stagecoaches and cures for the pox. Parker pursued the same line, suggesting that Marvell’s style could be put down to the poverty of his upbringing, ‘your unhappy education among boatswains and cabin boys’, and to the perils of cabin boys acquiring perukes. Butler stooped lower. He looked forward to sheets of the Rehearsal Transpros’d being used in the privy: ‘Here lies in sheets, transpros’d rehearsal; / Condemn’d to wipe his, or her A—hole.’ The voice of Hudibras is also to be heard in the anonymous Common-Place-Book out of the Rehearsal Transpros’d (1673), which makes a passable effort at satire, while the inebriate Sober Reflections (1674) aims to outdo Marvell in un-decryptable argot and jocundity. Written from ‘Noland in the Isle of Silly’, it plays upon the ‘metropolitan knight-errand of this age’, who finds special favour with a ‘female auditory, the water-nymphs of Wapping’ and ‘the sisters of the scolding sodality’ – a figure perhaps borrowed from Butler’s Puritan ‘oyster women’, who were taught to cry religious slogans which they did not understand.18 Parker’s Reproof to the Rehearsal Transpros’d (1673) is the most substantial among ripostes to Marvell, its author complaining that he was ‘condemned’ to the ‘drudgery of this reply’, 500 pages of remorseless indictment, without a chapter break. He failed to find a steady voice, veering between high theology and low facetiousness, wounded dignity and imperious pontificality. His vindication of ‘my grand thesis of the king’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction’ struggles to find space amid hectoring abuse. He was in no position to reproach Marvell 17

Henry Stubbe, Rosemary and Bayes (1672), p. 2. Transproser, pp. 1, 48; cf. 44; Parker, A Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed (1673), p. 227; cf. p. 274; Anon., Sober Reflections, pp. 3–6. 18 Butler,

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for a ‘licentious way of writing’ and for ‘violating the laws of decorum’ in such serious matters as religion, conscience, and public worship.19 His own epithets were torrential: ‘buffoon’, ‘clown’, ‘trifler’, ‘despicable scribbler’, ‘smutty lubber’. Incapable of outdoing Marvell in deftness of satire, he nonetheless seemed to cite more by way of Aesop, William Davenant’s Gondibert, Madeleine de Scudéry’s Le Grand Cyrus, Dryden’s Conquest of Granada, and Thomas Coryat’s Crudities, than from scripture or the Church Fathers. Such was Parker’s own ‘satire and scurrility’, ‘petulancy, wrath, rancour’, that Robert Ferguson convicted him of the same indecorum, unbecoming of ‘the civility of a gentleman, the education of a scholar, the morality of a philosopher, and the profession of a divine’, while John Owen begged from Parker something ‘scholastical and logical, not dramatic or romantic’.20 Parkerian indecorum was self-destructive because Anglicans were, inter alia, struggling to establish an aesthetic case for conformity, the edifying decency of a religion of settled liturgy and parochial habitude, as against the wild anarchy of extempore prayer, gadding to sermons, and the grotesque exhibitionism of the Puritan pulpit, with its ‘antic … grunting … snivelling, whinings’, and provocations to evangelical hysteria. More ‘practice of piety’ was needed and less ‘prating’; more ceremonies of ‘beauty … order and decency’.21 Commentators were deeply conscious that the Marvell debates exemplified the novel profusion of demotic print. Readers had printed politicking thrust upon them in London’s streets: not only the pamphlets displayed on stalls, but the sticking of title pages and prefaces on pillars and posts. It is a ‘horrible affront’ not to be able ‘so much as look at the wall, nor pass by a stall, but he must be out-stared by an impudent preface’. Partisans of Marvell were accused of buying up parcels of the Rehearsal Transpros’d, and receiving complimentary copies as inducements for bulk purchase. It was alleged to be sold as wrapping paper for ‘sugarloaves and comfits’, so that shoppers caught a glimpse of the text willy-nilly; it ‘travels with every pound of candles’.22 The pamphlet world was one where booksellers promoted controversy, teasing contestants to vindicate themselves. It was remarked that though the public might be thought to deserve some quiet during the summer vacation, there is a bookseller in need of ‘eight or ten pounds’ at this slack time. One author felt he must assure readers of his high motives by insisting that ‘the entreaties of a bookseller … weigh little with me’.23

19 Parker,

Reproof, sigs A2r–v, A3v, p. 1. Robert Ferguson, A Sober Enquiry into … Moral Virtues (1673), sig. A6r; John Owen, Truth and Innocence (1669), p. 17. 21 Edmund Hickeringill, Gregory Father-Greybeard (1673), pp. 314, 328; cf. pp. 296–314; Turner, Animadversions, p. 65. 22 Butler, Transproser, pp. 34, 47, 49; Hickeringill, Gregory, p. 28. 23 Parker, Reproof, p. 236; Ferguson, Sober Enquiry, sig. A5r. 20

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Contemporaries were witness also to the emergence of the coffee-house as the premier seat of upstart erudition.24 Butler walked into one, to find it filled with ‘politic cabal men’, a ‘junto of wits’. Through a fug of tobacco smoke, the place ‘rang with nothing but a continued noise of arcana imperii, and ragioni di stato’. In ‘these places … most of our late forms of government were modelled … Machiavelli … was born in a coffee-house’. He was presumably thinking of James Harington’s Rota Club of 1659–60, which had met at Miles’s Coffee House. Not content, though, to find Marvellianism among the middling sort at their coffee, politics must also be associated with uppity ‘cooks and piemen’. In a similar vision, another author sets his tract among the would-be ‘virtuosos [and] ingeniosos’ of the Rainbow Coffee House in Fleet Street.25 The combatants knew that the period of the Declaration of Indulgence was a rare moment of relative press liberty. Though still on the statute book, the Licensing Act of 1662 was in semi-abeyance, the king having motives for letting the church’s critics off the leash. Notoriously – readers knew the fact – the Rehearsal Transpros’d had the king’s own sanction for publication. It came out ‘without the midwifery of an imprimatur’.26 Marvell spoke of press freedom, drawing upon Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), as well he might, since Parker was himself an ecclesiastical licenser. ‘Your beloved press’, sneered Parker, ‘with what zeal and courage have you asserted its liberty from the bondage of imprimaturs and the inquisitions of prelates.’27 Contrast Marvell’s good fortune with the difficulties of the Presbyterian John Humfrey, who had to publish his contribution himself, ‘it being against one of [the] licensers, [so that] none of [the booksellers] durst do it’. His tract was duly seized by the authorities, but he had a few copies available for private distribution. Edmund Hickeringill remarked that there was now widespread contempt for licensed books, because people ‘have taken a prejudice against books so marked in the forehead’.28 The politics of memory

The Act of Uniformity gives the Restoration the appearance of a monolith, a triumphant resurgence of the Cavalier Anglicans. Puritans could but forlornly cite the king’s Declaration of Breda (1660) as the forsaken promise of a more accommodating dispensation, for it had offered ‘liberty to tender consciences’. Puritans and their Whig successors would see themselves as struggling to give substance to Breda, to rewrite the ground rules of restored monarchy, especially 24

S. Pincus, ‘“Coffee Politicians does Create”: Coffee-houses and Restoration Political Culture’, Journal of Modern History 67 (1995), 807–34; B. Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: the Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, CT, 2005). 25 Butler, Transproser, pp. 36, 46; Hickeringill, Gregory, p. 5. 26 Butler, Transproser, p. 8; Marvell, PW, I, 23–4. 27 Marvell, PW, I, 46; Parker, Reproof, p. 191; cf. p. 67. 28 John Humfrey, Two Points of Great Moment (1672), sig. A2r; Hickeringill, Gregory, p. 1.

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in the religious sphere. Yet Cavaliers took limited comfort from their supposed restitution, because another Breda promise had been fully realized in statute, and that seemed to them a slap in the face by a monarch cynically appeasing his father’s enemies. The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (1660) was a veil drawn across the twenty-year troubles: nobody was to be prosecuted for treason against the crown and nobody was required to return property purchased from indigent Cavaliers who had sacrificed their estates for the royal cause. The Act resounded through the Marvell debates. Parker railed against ‘your comfortable Act of Oblivion and Indemnity’, and against the sacrileges which had despoiled the church. Stubbe thought Parker violated the Act by libelling the Puritans and raking over their record of rebellion. The depth of Cavalier resentment is an underestimated sore; it made those whom we think of as resurgent look instead vulnerable, dispossessed, slighted, their families’ blood and treasure spilt, while upstart rebel opportunists were insulated from their guilt and walked tall. They felt especially anxious in the years after the fall of Lord Chancellor Clarendon in 1667, which gave political space to the old Puritans.29 Marvell’s enemies were well apprised of his earlier career, which clinched the case that he was a regicidal rebel who should now be silent. He had been, they reminded their readers, Latin Secretary to the Protectorate, an aide to ‘blind M[ilton]’, and a ‘clerk to the Usurper’, who had taken his salary from the ‘impenitent rout of sequestrators and army officers’. ‘The odds between a Transproser’ and ‘the blind author of Paradise Lost’ are ‘not great’. Marvell was a king-killer in direct line from Milton’s Eikonoklastes (1649) and Defense of the People of England (1651). Butler rehearsed the Cavaliers’, not inaccurate, history of modern political thought: the Calvinist theory of revolution, from George Buchanan and ‘Junius Brutus’ – Philippe du Plessis Mornay’s Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (1579) – to Milton and Richard Baxter.30 The Marvell debates were transfixed by the ‘politics of memory’. Present politics were fought on the battlefield of rival historiographies of the Civil War.31 As soon as Marvell was badged ‘Presbyterian’, the full panoply of Cavalier historiography of the recent catastrophe could be deployed against him. He was ‘champion for the fanatic cause’, spokesman for the rebel saints, the party of ‘demagogues and incendiaries’.32 Butler’s tract was, as we noted, a prose echo of Hudibras. ‘Pulpit officers … fought under the banner of the Lord of Hosts 29 Stubbe,

Rosemary, p. 2; Parker, Reproof, pp. 46, 74, 142; cf. pp. 85, 214, 237, 241, 284. Stubbe, uniquely, critiqued both Marvell and Parker. 30 Common-Place-Book, pp. 36, 48–9; Butler, Transproser, pp. 41, 72, 97–8, 145–7; cf. pp. 32, 128, 136; Parker, Reproof, p. 212. 31 For the ‘politics of memory’, see: M. Neufeld, The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England (Woodbridge, 2013); E. Peters, Commemoration and Oblivion in Royalist Print Culture, 1658–1667 (2017); E. Legon, Revolution Remembered: Seditious Memories after the British Civil Wars (Manchester, 2019); E. Vallance, Loyalty, Memory, and Public Opinion in England, 1652–1727 (Manchester, 2019). 32 Parker, Reproof, p. 3; Hickeringill, Gregory, p. 223.

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(so they called the earl of Essex).’ Psalm-chanting troops had been egged on by army divines; ‘mechanick preachers’ had stalked the land; and ‘every broken shopkeeper made free of the preaching trade’.33 Puritans had transferred their ‘levelling principles’ in religion – the ecclesiastical democracy of independent congregations – into civic politics. The Cavaliers constantly collapsed the sober Puritans into the zany sects, drawing no distinction between Presbyterians and ‘raving’ ‘freaks’.34 This was the period when the idea of ‘enthusiasm’ was taking root: a diagnosis of religious zealotry as a type of pathological hysteria. Few Cavalier ploys were more hurtful and more successful than the verbal creation of ‘nonconformity’ as a monolith, as if Presbyterians, Quakers, Muggletonians, and Fifth Monarchists were all of a kind. As for their own side, the Cavaliers continued their steady canonization of the royal martyrs Charles I and Archbishop Laud. The politics of memory was afforced by the politics of textual reproduction. Crucial for the formation of a continuing parliamentarian tradition was the Historical Collections (1659) prepared by Marvell’s friend John Rushworth, which gave permanent access to the proceedings and documents of the revolutionary years. Marvell’s elevation of Robert Sibthorpe and Roger Manwaring, the Caroline divines who had preached the monarch’s personal right to demand taxes, into the great bugbears who, for the next two centuries, would stalk Whig polemic, was owed to Rushworth. Marvell’s critics complained of his ‘Rushworth-armoury’, his reliance on that hack clerk of Cromwell’s army.35 A clerical counterpart of the Cavalier gentry’s resentment against the ‘fanatics’ was Anglican defensiveness and self-pity. The politics of memory was fought out in rival martyrologies. The Puritans vaunted those who suffered for conscience in 1662, the 2,000 clergy ejected from the national church and stripped of their livelihoods. But the episcopalian clergy had suffered their own holocaust of expulsions and purges during the Civil War.36 Anglican anxiety was enhanced by awareness that many of the doyens of the older generation 33 Butler,

Transproser, pp. 11–12. Common-Place-Book, p. 54; Parker, Reproof, pp. 61, 68; cf. p. 41; Butler, Transproser, pp. 72–5; Hickeringill, Gregory, passim. 35 Marvell, PW, I, 183–8, 312–15; Butler, Transproser, p. 56; cf. pp. 46, 56–69; Hickeringill, Gregory, pp. 142–7, 157; Parker, Reproof, pp. 366–76; Anon., Common-Place-Book, pp. 3–4. For Rushworth, see T. Somers, Ephemeral Print Culture in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2021), ch. 4. 36 M. Neufeld, ‘The Politics of Anglican Martyrdom’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 62 (2011), 491–514; M. Burden, ‘John Walker’s Sufferings of the Clergy and the Church of England Responses to the Ejections of 1660–1662’, and N. H. Keeble, ‘The Nonconformist Narrative of the Bartholomeans’, in ‘Settling the Peace of the Church’: 1662 Revisited, ed. idem (Oxford, 2014), pp. 209–32, 233–62; F. McCall, Baal’s Priests: The Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution (2016); S. W. Clavier, ‘The Restoration Episcopate and the Interregnum: Autobiography, Suffering, and Professions of Faith’, in Church Polity and Politics in the British Atlantic World, c. 1635–1666, ed. E. Vernon, H. Powell, and A. Milton (Manchester, 2020), 242–59. 34 Anon.,

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of English Puritan churchmanship were now popular preachers in fashionable metropolitan Dissenting meeting-houses. Baxter, Owen, and Howe had been expelled from the national church, but their continuing stature and charisma were hard to gainsay: Owen was ‘the cock of the congregation’.37 No less galling were the networks of patronage and support offered by fellow-travelling aristocrats, Puritans within the gates of the established church, not least Marvell’s own patrons Lords Anglesey and Wharton.38 The supposed Restoration ‘triumph’ of Prayer Book episcopalian Anglicanism looked precarious to many who contemplated the fate of the ordinary clergy, for whom anticlerical depictions of clerical imperiousness and covetous luxury were pure fantasy. In reality, an Oxbridge Master of Arts was destined to scrape an ignominious living as a country curate, or be demeaned as a ‘domestic’ tutor-chaplain in a gentry household. Edmund Hickeringill protested against Marvell’s ‘reproach to the clergy’ when many are poor, having ‘scarcely a living’, their ‘cassocks threadbare’. In speaking of ‘the contempt of the clergy’ Hickeringill gave voice to a developing tradition that would inform later high churchmanship. It would dwell on the national neglect of Christ’s priests and would attack the sacrilegious Reformation which had sequestrated wealth once dedicated to God. John Eachard’s Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy (1670) would see numerous editions.39 Parker offered long disquisitions on the honour of the clergy, their ‘sacred office’, the ‘unhappy state of the clergy’, and he lambasted those who ‘prey upon the small remainder of the church’s patrimony’.40 He was possibly the author of the Apology and Advice for Some of the Clergy (1674), defending his own reputation, but especially dwelling on the lack of ‘tenderness to the clergy’ as ‘one of the greatest scandals’ of the age. The divines felt torn to pieces between the Puritan fanatics and the anticlerical coffee-house wits. ‘The clergy are a sort of naked, disarmed men’, yet they are charged with religious tyranny. He counselled urban clergymen against laicizing their lifestyle and idling in coffee-houses: they should be more reserved among ‘this evil generation’.41

37 Parker,

Defence and Continuation of the Ecclesiastical Politie (1671), p. 587; Francis Fullwood, Toleration not to be Abused (1672), p. 20. 38 A. Patterson and M. Dzelzainis, ‘Marvell and the Earl of Anglesey: A Chapter in the History of Reading’, HJ 44 (2001), 703–26; N. von Maltzahn, ‘Andrew Marvell and Lord Wharton’, The Seventeenth Century 18 (2003), 252–65. 39 Eachard’s book proved a two-edged sword. Intended to defend the clerical estate, its remorseless exposure of current failings and irreverent style proved counter-productive. See J. H. Pruett, The Parish Clergy under the Later Stuarts (Urbana, IL, 1978). Also significant is Lancelot Addison, A Modest Plea for the Clergy (1677); see W. J. Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2015). 40 Parker, Reproof, pp. 334–40. 41 Hickeringill, Gregory, pp. 205–8; Parker, Reproof, pp. 77, 334–40; Anon., An Apology and Advice for Some of the Clergy (1674), pp. 7–8, 10–11. Cf. Henry Dodwell, Two Letters of Advice, for the Susception of Holy Orders (1672); Addison, Modest Plea.

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This emphasis on the dignity of the clerical estate entailed a political economy of the church. In the late 1660s, when the fall of Clarendon prompted an Anglican Royalist scare that the churchmen would be side-lined, there was fearful talk that there would be a new expropriation of the church. Churchmen speculated that Dissenting polemic and demands for toleration were masks for an avaricious grab for the patrimony of the church. Marvell was identified as heir to two older Puritan assaults on the church: the ferocious campaign of the anonymous ‘Martin Marprelate’ to destroy episcopacy in the 1580s, and the successful project of the ‘Smectymuans’ in the 1640s.42 Stubbe, indebted to Machiavelli, Harrington, and Hobbes, cast the Anglican argument into secular mode: a securely funded and respected clergy was an essential prop to the social order, for without it the alternatives were a standing army and a despotic monarchy. He wondered if Marvell’s sniping at clerical endowments was a prelude to a new sequestration; certainly, John Humfrey openly said that episcopal wealth should be ‘cast into the labouring ministry’. John Selden’s History of Tithes (1618) was held to have been a provocation to the rebellion of the 1640s, since, by his demolishing the case for the clergy’s sacred right to endowment, the mob had been licensed to bring down the established church. Parker outdid others in disgust for sanctimonious Puritan greed: they ‘talk of their intimate communion with God, while their fingers are in our pockets, and their daggers at our throats’.43 Calvinism in retreat

For all the lack of formal theology in most of the Marvellian debates, these tracts do nonetheless register a theological sea-change. Around 1600 most theologians had cleaved to Calvinist soteriology: they believed in predestination, in God’s untrammelled election of some to be saved, by an act of free grace unmediated by human moral agency. Human depravity renders us incapable of being justified in the sight of God, of meriting salvation, and Christ’s death alone could atone for sin. Yet by 1700 Arminianism reigned supreme, a theology inherited from the Dutch Remonstrant Jacob Arminius, who readmitted meritorious effort into the divine economy, marrying grace with righteousness.44 The causes of this shift are complex, but in England it was accelerated by the trauma of civil war and the rise of the radical sects. It seemed, especially to panicky heresiographers, that Calvinism now licensed antinomianism, the belief 42 Parker,

Reproof, pp. 11, 50, 54, 105, 113, 124; Butler, Transproser, pp. 32, 55; Hickeringill, Gregory, pp. 209, 224. 43 John Humfrey, A Case of Conscience (1669), p. 14; Stubbe, Rosemary, pp. 18–19; Parker, Reproof, p. 48; cf. p. 77. 44 N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism (Oxford, 1987). However, for a persistent strand of Anglican Calvinism, see S. Hampton, Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford, 2008).

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that the Elect were either liberated from all morality or were entitled to govern everyone else. Arminianism hence became a means to check antinomianism. For Arminians, Christ’s death exempted nobody from moral perseverance and from the search for virtues discernible by natural reason. Recidivist Calvinists had opposite fears. For them, Arminians magnified the puny efforts of sinful humans, deposed God’s sovereignty, and elevated natural reason at the expense of revelation and Christ’s unique mission: they charged them with ‘moralism’, which they treated as a slur. Worse, Arminians slid towards Socinianism, which cast doubt on the divinity of Christ and the efficacy of the atonement, rendering the Gospel merely a republication of natural virtue, and leaving Christ no more than a moral exemplar.45 Calvinism lasted longer among the Dissenters. Not least of the dismay felt by older Puritans was that the Calvinist orthodoxy of the national church of their youth was now derided and marginal. (Derided partly because jargon- and syllogism-laden Calvinist scholasticism – not an oxymoron – now seemed utterly rebarbative: Thomas Danson’s De Causa Dei (1678) struggled interminably with divine ontology, the reconcilability of divine omnipotence and beneficence, and the impossibility of justice having an essence independent of divine will, all still argued with the tools of the medieval theologians Duns Scotus and William of Ockham.)46 Some Puritans, meanwhile, were themselves treading a path away from Calvin. The great Puritan Richard Baxter spent his final forty years steering between the Scylla of antinomianism and the Charybdis of Socinianism, in search of a middle way.47 John Howe brought wrath upon himself when he followed Baxter, and it was on his behalf that Marvell intervened. In Howe’s ontology, God’s will is ‘in subserviency’ to his ‘righteousness’: ‘the perfection of any act of will is to be estimated, not by the mere peremptory sturdiness of it, but by its proportion to the goodness of the thing willed’.48 It took only a few verbal steps to move from streetwise raillery to the metaphysics of divine omnipotence and benevolence. The spectre of antinomianism stalked the Marvellian debates. Parker denounced the Dissenters for holding on to Calvinism, which could, he noted, be heard any Tuesday at their prestigious Pinners’ Hall lectures. Given their Calvinism, Dissenters could be accused both of licensing libertinism and of unforgiving rigidity. Parker charged that Calvinists made righteousness the enemy of grace; that they destroyed human virtue and natural law. Fanatics, he said, were debauchees: ‘they protect all their lusts and passions under the 45

P. Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2012). Similarly, John Troughton, A Letter to a Friend, Touching God’s Providence about Sinful Actions (1678). 47 W. Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millennium (1979); T. Cooper, Fear and Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: Richard Baxter and Antinomianism (Aldershot, 2001). For Baxter and Simon Patrick, see M. P. Winship, ‘Defining Puritanism in Restoration England: Richard Baxter and Others Respond to A Friendly Debate’, HJ 54 (2011), 689–715. 48 John Howe, The Reconcileableness of God’s Prescience (1677), p. 116. 46

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privilege of grace’.49 For Hickeringill, the Civil War had given rise to ‘factious libertinism’. For the anonymous author of A Common-Place-Book, the Dissenters were hypocrites: they demand indulgence of ‘tender conscience’ but their ‘absolute reprobation’ of souls was scarcely a tender or tolerant doctrine. For Butler, the patrons of ‘fatal necessity’ (predestination) make ‘all villainy the work of God’.50 In this remark he connected, as was commonly done, the theology of predestination with pagan Democritan and Epicurean determinism, while also lodging the no less familiar charge that a preordaining deity must be the cause of evil as well as of good. The Calvinist John Owen, replying to Parker, bemoaned the slide towards Socinianism, and the hubris of setting up our ‘own righteousness’ as worthy of God’s notice. Parker also seemed guilty of overly extending the domain of matters about which God has not been prescriptive and hence which may be determined by merely human authority. Hence Owen identified Parker as a new sort of secular antinomian, licensing any immorality so long as it was authorized by the sovereign. Parker imprisoned the individual conscience in the iron cage of sovereign rule: we are, like Naaman’s servant in the Book of Kings, whom Hobbes had notoriously cited, required to do whatever our earthly masters demand, without guilt on our part.51 One consequence of Anglicanism’s turn to Arminianism was that it fostered a growing sense of English exceptionalism, implying that the Church of England was more pure than Continental churches. Stubbe reminded Parker that hitherto there had been solidarity among members of the Protestant International. He remarked that the English ambassador at Paris had willingly worshipped at the Huguenot church at Charenton. He complained that grandees of the Elizabethan and Jacobean church, such as Bishop Jewel, would today be accounted ‘fanatics’, for they had been Calvinists.52 It was a complaint of surviving Calvinists that Anglicans were ‘un-churching’ their Continental confreres: how could it be otherwise when, for the first time, in 1662, episcopal ordination was made a formal requirement for ministry. Yet Butler all too gladly made Lambeth the antonym of ‘Geneva … Dort … Bohemia … Zurich … Huguenot … Tweed … New England’.53 The Genevan strand of the English Reformation was being systematically buried, and the English church carefully burnished its self-perception as the via media between Rome and Geneva, and very English. Amid all this, Marvell was hard to place. The instinctive slur was to assume that he spoke for ‘Geneva’ and that he was a predestinarian. But such a position 49 Parker,

Reproof, pp. 60, 102; cf. p. 55. Gregory, p. 214; Anon., Common-Place-Book, pp. 8–9; Butler, Transproser, p. 107; cf. Parker, Reproof, pp. 9–10, 56–7. 51 Owen, Truth, pp. 34, 56, 373; Hobbes, Leviathan, III, 784 (ch. 42). 52 Stubbe, Rosemary, pp. 16–17. 53 Butler, Transproser, p. 18; cf. Gilbert Burnet, A Modest Survey of … Naked Truth (1676), pp. 26–7. 50 Hickeringill,

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hit a baffling hitch once it was observed that he made use of John Hales’s Of Schism (1642), for this meant he could be denounced as a Socinian. In so far as he was a Calvinist, this could be elided with Hobbism, given, as noted, the routine connection made between theological predestination and Democritan necessitarianism.54 The Marvell debates produced one profound treatise of theology, Robert Ferguson’s Sober Enquiry into Moral Virtue (1673), a 300-page disquisition on the relationship of virtue and grace, in response to two of Parker’s works, the Ecclesiastical Politie and the Reproof to Marvell. It is a conventionally scholastic treatise, a work of ‘systematical divinity’, searching hard to reconcile divine omnipotence with morality. Ferguson was a Presbyterian divine, later a Whig conspirator and pamphleteer, and finally a Whig Jacobite (disgusted with William III on Whig grounds); yet always a Calvinist of the old school. His scholastic training ensured that he was happy to cite not only Augustine and the Puritan divines but also Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, and such Catholic neo-scholastics as Suárez. His is high Puritanism of the early seventeenth-century sort, committed to God’s sovereign election of the incorrigibly sinful, yet, with casuistical deftness, retaining enough of natural law and the faculty of human reason to avoid the shoals of antinomianism, ‘enthusiastic frenzies’, and Democritan determinism. The Dissenters do not, he is at pains to say, evacuate natural moral righteousness, nor abandon Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The pagan ancient world offered not only fine treatises of moral philosophy but also persons of eminent personal virtue: Epaminondas, Timoleon, Thrasybulus. But the wisdom of the ancients could neither perfect moral philosophy nor offer the categorical obligatoriness of the moral law which Christianity provides. ‘Nor is there in all the ethics of Grecians and Romans such an inducement and incentive to practical obedience, as the incarnation of the Son of God is; nor such a matchless pattern of universal virtue, as the life of the ever blessed Jesus sets before us.’55 Ferguson’s crux is, in fact, quite close to John Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), another book designed to reconcile divine will and human virtue. The case of Samuel Parker

Parker looms largest among Marvell’s adversaries. It is easy to caricature him as an ecclesiastical thug. Yet he had a nimble and capacious mind and it is mistaken to identify him as a defender of ossified intellectual traditions. He had burst upon the scene, aged twenty-five, with an eloquent defence of Baconian experimental science, melded with the philosophy of Descartes and Gassendi, 54 Anon.,

Common-Place-Book, pp. 5, 9, 12; Butler, Transproser, p. 30; Stubbe, Rosemary, p. 10; Parker, Reproof, pp. 47–55, 135–7. 55 Ferguson, Sober Inquiry, passim, quotations at 155, 267, 299.

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and a searing dismemberment of the current fashion for Platonism.56 He was duly elected to the Royal Society and appointed chaplain to Archbishop Sancroft. It is no less misleading to suppose that the Ecclesiastical Politie was, for all its extremity and brutality, eccentric in its premises, or an embarrassment to the church. Sancroft continued to promote him and colleagues rallied to him. Nonetheless, he continues to baffle. Scholars have called him both ‘high church’ and ‘latitudinarian’; some have agreed with contemporaries who called him a Hobbist, while others accept his own vehement denial of Hobbism.57 The Ecclesiastical Politie is dismayingly difficult to place doctrinally. Though it passionately defends religious uniformity, it is scarcely a theological work. It offers no formal legitimation of the creed, liturgy, or episcopacy of the church, through scriptural or patristic sources. A theological path should lead to Matthew 16:18, ‘Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church’, the covenant by which Christ created an earthly church, in the persons of the Apostles and their successors. Rather, its ecclesiology appears to collapse the church into the state, priest into prince, and resolve church authority into civil magistracy. It is relentlessly preoccupied with providing political reasons for treating Dissenters as seditious. And its principal philosophical position is that claims for the rights of ‘conscience’ are nugatory, for ‘conscience’ is nothing but subjective judgement (‘humour’, ‘fancy’, ‘passion’), which in civil society must be constrained by the public judgement of the supreme power if a stable social order is to survive – or at least that private judgement must remain interiorized while external action must be publicly directed. The thinness of Parker’s ecclesiology stems from a radical commitment to naturalism, to the view that all human institutions, including the church, are the work of human prudence.58 They belong to the natural order, not to the order of grace; to God’s Works and not his Word. We cannot expect to find in scripture prescriptions for the practices and organization of human communities. This being so, it rests with civil authorities to specify how the public aspects of worship and church governance are to be conducted. This 56

Samuel Parker, Tentamina Physico-Theologica de Deo (1665); A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie (1666). See D. Levitin, ‘Rethinking English Physico-theology: Samuel Parker’s Tentamina de Deo (1665)’, Early Science and Medicine, 19 (2014), 28–75. 57 For Parker, see: G. J. Schochet, ‘Between Lambeth and Leviathan: Samuel Parker on the Church of England and Political Order’, in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. N. T. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 189–208; idem, ‘Samuel Parker, Religious Diversity, and the Ideology of Persecution’, in The Margins of Orthodoxy, ed. R. D. Lund (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 119–48; J. Parkin, ‘Liberty Transpros’d: Andrew Marvell and Samuel Parker’, in Marvell and Liberty, ed. Chernaik and Dzelzainis, pp. 269–89; idem, ‘Hobbism in the Later 1660s: Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker’, HJ 42 (1999), 85–108; D. Hirst, ‘Samuel Parker, Andrew Marvell, and Political Culture, 1667–1673’, in Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. D. Hirst and R. Strier (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 145–64; J. Rose, ‘The Ecclesiastical Polity of Samuel Parker’, The Seventeenth Century 25 (2010), 350–75. 58 R. Billinge, ‘Nature, Grace, and Religious Liberty in Restoration England’ (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford, 2015).

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naturalism ensures that the ecclesiastical domain collapses into the civil. Parker’s jurisprudence ensures that sovereignty must, axiomatically, and as the outcome of our needs as vulnerable and capricious beings, be absolute. ‘The supreme government of every commonwealth … must of necessity be universal, absolute, and uncontrollable, in all affairs whatsoever, that concern the interests of mankind, and the ends of government.’59 This minimalism about the demands of the Word in the world, while being, for Parker, rooted in natural law, had a theological counterpart in the Reformation tradition of adiaphorism. Adiaphora means ‘things indifferent’, as opposed to ‘things necessary’, for salvation. Christ specified only that he be worshipped and that people should gather in his name; as to the manner of it, scripture is silent. In the sphere of adiaphora, we are left to our own devices. From this point onward, divergent corollaries might flow: either that the civil power has no business imposing upon us, or alternatively that individual conscience has no business objecting to impositions deemed necessary for public order and decency.60 For Parker, uniform ritual is the outward expression of our solidarity and community as sociable creatures. Similarly, in church governance, episcopacy has proven to be judicious; it is neither required not forbidden by Christ; it is jure humano not jure divino; but it is useful, effective, and consistent with monarchy; and there cannot be rival governments in one commonwealth. The church is not the same as the civil state, for they answer to different purposes, spiritual and temporal; but, on earth, they belong to the natural order, and hence to one supreme governor. Parker’s strict juridical sovereignty had a long-established counterpart in the axioms of the ‘magisterial’ Reformation, which construed the sovereign as guardian, protector, and pastor of the church. The ‘godly prince’ is endowed with ecclesiastical supremacy, and any claim to a rival ecclesiastical jurisdiction is imperium in imperio, an enemy within the gate: both Catholicism and Dissent claim jurisdictions which challenge and imperil the peace and unity of the Christian commonwealth. Put like this, Parker’s position is but a variant of a mainstream doctrine of the Church of England. It is true, however, that his naturalism, driven by visceral Restoration loyalism and revulsion against religious anarchy, led to an extreme emphasis on adiaphora and royal ecclesiastical supremacy. One name for this is Erastianism – crudely that the state must govern the church; and, in the wake of Leviathan, another name for it was Hobbism. It was scarcely prudent for Parker to say that the king ‘may, if he please, reserve the priesthood and the exercise of it to himself’. Or, in the face of those committed to ‘moral reformation’, that it is ‘absolutely necessary to the peace and happiness of kingdoms, that there be set up a more severe government over men’s consciences and

59 60

Samuel Parker, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1670), p. 28. On adiaphora, see above p, 00, n. 00.

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religious persuasions, than over their vices and immoralities’.61 Stubbe declared that Parker made princes into priests, fused crown and mitre, and made the king pontifical; in sum he was ‘the young Leviathan’. John Owen pointed to Parker’s neglect of the Anglican doctrine of the Apostolic Succession: ‘are all the old pleas of the jus divinum of episcopacy … swallowed all up in this abyss of magistratical omnipotency?’ Marvell joined the chorus in speaking of Parker as occupying the ‘territories of Malmesbury’ – Hobbes’s birthplace.62 Parker pre-empted the inevitable charge of Hobbism by devoting a chapter to spelling out his differences from Hobbes’s foundations in the domain of natural law; but it cut no ice, because the superstructures looked precariously similar. Parker’s approach bore similarities with other churchmen too, with Simon Patrick, author of the Friendly Debate, and also (probably) of the Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude-Men (1662), and with Edward Fowler, who defended him in The Principles and Practices of Certain Modern Divines (1670). These figures are often called ‘latitudinarian’. It is a slippery term, and some historians reject it,63 but it points helpfully to an outcome which, for us, seems counter-intuitive. The defence of latitude, of the broad ambit of adiaphora, intended as a refutation of scriptural dogmatism and militant zealotry, might lead to tolerance, to acceptance of religious difference; but, during the Restoration, characteristically it led to an authoritarian insistence on uniformity and civil supremacy.64 If Christ left us latitude, our practices and institutions are a matter for human prudence, and, after the trauma of England’s wars of religion, the prudential calculus pointed to imposition. (And even if latitude gestured toward tolerance, it typically took the form of support for comprehension, latitude within the national church, not toleration of sectarian schism outside it.) Another author who, at the beginning of the Restoration, adopted a position close to Parker’s was the young Locke, in his Tracts on Government (1660–2).65 But by the time he read Parker he had changed his mind and, in private notes, joined the stock chorus: ‘how far short is this of Mr Hobbes’s doctrine?’66 Arguably, Locke’s evolution towards toleration had as much to do with a changing prudential calculus – society need not collapse into anarchy in the face of religious plurality – as with a new conviction that religious conscience has an unimpeachable right to liberty. 61 Parker,

Ecclesiastical Politie, pp. xliii, 110. The anonymous Insolence and Impudence (1669) is a collage of the less palatable passages in Parker. 62 Stubbe, Rosemary, pp. 2–3, 9, 18; Owen, Truth, p. 108; cf. p. 103; Marvell, PW, I, 47, 94; cf. John Humfrey, A Case of Conscience (1669), p. 12. 63 J. Spurr, ‘“Latitudinarianism” and the Restoration Church’, HJ 31 (1988), 61–82. 64 See above, p. 37, n. 10. 65 John Locke, Two Tracts on Government, ed. P. Abrams (Cambridge, 1967). A new edition is being prepared by Jacqueline Rose. 66 John Locke, Political Essays, ed. M. Goldie (Cambridge, 1997), p. 214. For Locke and Parker, see R. Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, NJ, 1986), ch. 2; J. Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (Cambridge, 1994), pt 1.

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Parker’s edifice depended on the adamantine presence of the Act of Uniformity and its definitive exclusion of the Puritans. But he wrote the Politie at a time when the Act was already cast in some doubt by stirrings of schemes for accommodation. The uniformitarian edifice came crashing down with the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672, when Charles II authorized toleration of separated sects. Erastian logic suddenly pointed to tolerance, and Dissenters themselves now appealed to the royal ecclesiastical supremacy and hailed the godly prince, a strand to be found in Marvell also.67 Marvell’s Anglican critics had somehow to navigate the Indulgence which, though abhorrent, was king-given. ‘The Indulgence is a sign of the king’s goodness, more than their deserts’, argued one casuist. It was, the churchmen said, shamefully abused by the Dissenters; it graciously remits punishment for nonconformity, but does not establish schism; and it is no licence to revive rebellion. Marvell was ‘cheaply prostituting the Indulgence for a sign to give notice of his seditious writings’. Parker protested that the Dissenters still dared to claim toleration ‘by virtue of … natural and religious right’ rather than by the king’s gracious concession.68 It is striking that the Act of Toleration of 1689 strictly speaking – and incongruously – did not abolish the Restoration laws for conformity, but only remitted the penalties, which enabled high churchmen to continue to claim that it did not authorize schism, and merely graciously (and perhaps temporarily) granted lenity. The Act’s true title is ‘An Act for Exempting their Majesties’ Protestant Subjects Dissenting from the Church of England from the Penalties of Certain Laws’.69 Parker seems not sufficiently to have anticipated the vulnerability of his position in the face of a monarch who had reasons for placating the religiously excluded. By the time he wrote his Reproof (1673), his tone was less juridically peremptory and more in a mood of counsel to a wayward prince, a king apt to betray his, and the church’s, true interest. He now augmented the natural order with a greater emphasis on those aspects of it which were superseded by Christ; he denied being an Erastian, and ratchetted up his ‘zeal and vehemence’ against Leviathan. While he carefully reprised the magisterial position – all external action, all earthly coercion, all imperium, lies with the prince – he also asserted that the church has a separate spiritual jurisdiction, a duty of counsel, and a licence to admonish, exhort, and reproach princes.70 Here was the perennial dilemma of the post-Reformation English church, forever adjusting the tiller between its Catholic identity as Christ’s independent spiritual domain and its Protestant identity as England’s civil religion.

67 Marvell,

PW, I, 123, 173, 276, 375; John Humfrey, The Authority of the Magistrate, about Religion (1672). 68 Anon., Common-Place-Book, p. 4; Butler, Transproser, p. 147; Parker, Reproof, pp. 163–5. 69 For Anglican response to the Act, see R. Stevens, Protestant Pluralism: The Reception of the Toleration Act, 1689–1720 (Woodbridge, 2018). 70 Parker, Reproof, pp. 22–8, 169–80, quotation at 36.

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Roger L’Estrange

Roger L’Estrange, perhaps the Restoration’s most notorious, certainly most persistent, Anglican Royalist polemicist, comprehensively assaulted Marvell’s Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in his Account of the Growth of Knavery (1678). He had a unique capacity for articulating the Anglican Royalist – soon to be ‘Tory’ – mindset, and he sought to render Marvell the essence of all he loathed.71 He vented Cavalier anguish at the violence done to gentry society, to civility, to estates, and to the beauty of Prayer Book holiness, by the Puritans, incessantly heaping up reports of Civil War and Interregnum sequestrations, forfeitures, arbitrary arrests, and iconoclasm: in sum, the ‘barbarity’ of two decades that had veered wildly between tyranny and mob rule. Just as Edmund Burke would, in his account of the mob entering Marie Antoinette’s bedroom, notoriously imply that the French Revolution amounted to rape, so L’Estrange described the affronts committed by a Roundhead mob upon Lady Rivers.72 He entrenched a caricature of the moralizing Puritan that would last for centuries: the humourless theocrat policing innocent merriment, restricting our very apparel, hair styles, holidays, and sports; Merry England lashed for every petty deviation by bullying hypocrites under the ‘masque of religion’: totalitarians who engross private life under the all-seeing eye of a godly commonwealth. He also pushed onward with the Anglican ‘othering’ of Calvinism: it was foreign, and Scottish, and a ‘Geneva model’. He refurbished a polemic born in the writings of Bishops Bancroft and Bilson in the 1590s, that ‘popery and presbytery’ were equally enemies of church and crown, because they both subverted episcopacy, from above through papal tyranny and from below through clerical democracy, and likewise subverted the crown, through the ‘papal deposing power’ and the doctrine of popular rebellion. The Puritan was the enemy of royal sovereignty, and Marvell the reviver of the Long Parliament’s seizure of that sovereignty.73 L’Estrange’s final twist was to identify Marvell as a close ally of the earl of Shaftesbury, and to elide Marvell’s Account with that manifesto of early Whiggism, A Letter from a Person of Quality (1675). This ‘club’ of authors, wrote L’Estrange, makes kings ‘accountable to the people’ and declares a right to ‘resist’ in the name of ‘our lives, liberties, and estates’.74 When, in 1679, the Popish Plot became the great enabler of Shaftesbury’s Whig assault upon the Restoration regime, Marvell’s Account was reprinted. And so was L’Estrange’s riposte, with a new preface pronouncing that, by posthumously republishing the

71

See A. Dunan-Page and B. Lynch (eds), Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture (Farnham, 2008), P. Hinds, The Horrid Popish Plot: Roger L’Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 2010). 72 L’Estrange, Tyranny and Popery, p. 81. 73 L’Estrange, Tyranny and Popery, pp. 68, 91–4, and passim. 74 L’Estrange, Account of the Growth of Knavery, pp. 4, 13, 30, and passim.

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Account, the Whigs’ aim was ‘to canonize Mr Marvell’.75 For all the adamantine efforts of Marvell’s adversaries to obliterate him, the Whigs would succeed in that ambition.

75 L’Estrange,

The Parallel (1679), To the Reader.

195

9 Annual Parliaments and Aristocratic Whiggism The first chapter of this book outlined the secular political thesis urged by Anglican Royalists: the unimpeachable sovereignty of the monarch. This chapter provides a contrasting account of a principal plank in the secular ideology of the country party opposition that emerged in the 1670s and soon acquired the name Whig: the necessity of regular, free parliaments. The task of the Whigs was to dismantle the political heresy of the claim that the crown was the final arbiter in matters of civil government. This entailed, in their view, the restoration of an ‘ancient constitution’ in which parliaments embodied the uncorrupted will of the political community. Yet faith in parliaments was compromised by fear of the actually existing parliament, the deracinated and seemingly perpetual ‘Cavalier Parliament’, elected in 1661 and still sitting, without any further general election, until 1679. This was the parliament that had imposed harsh penal legislation for religious uniformity, and which, by the mid-1670s, was firmly in the grip of the earl of Danby and his allies. Accordingly, as we have seen, the enemies of Anglican Royalism were deeply ambivalent about parliament. In matters of religion, they sometimes appealed over the heads of parliaments, and prelates, to the wisdom and authority of the supreme magistrate, to rule on behalf of people of all consciences. The present chapter turns to a more familiar, that is to say secular, account of Whig thought, as a parliamentarian retort to absolute kingship. The two Whiggisms – magisterial and parliamentarian – coalesced in an anticipation that regular parliaments, assemblies elected frequently and uncorrupted by ‘placemen’ in the Commons and by the episcopal ‘deadweight’ in the Lords, would cauterize the wounds inflicted on the body politic by that most monstrous of parliaments, the ‘Cavalier’ Parliament. Enshrining frequent parliaments

From the era of the Levellers in the 1640s to that of the Chartists in the 1840s political reformers demanded annual parliaments as a fundamental right of the

A version of this chapter appeared under the same title in Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury, 1621–1683, ed. J. Spurr (Farnham, 2011), pp. 77–100. I am indebted to Ashgate Publishing Limited for permission to reproduce material.

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English people.1 What they generally meant was that, every year, there should not merely be a session of parliament but an election. It is a commonplace that, of the Six Points of the Chartist programme, whereas five – universal suffrage, the secret ballot, equal constituencies, wages for MPs, and an end to property qualifications for MPs – have all been achieved, only annual parliaments has not. Annual parliaments stand alone in seeming utopian and impractical, since so hectic a regime of electioneering would prove intolerable to the citizenry and fatal to coherent government. As we shall see, the notion of annual parliaments was originally a medieval one. Prior to the modern age, this ideal seemed rational, arising in a polity in which elections scarcely yet entailed organized parties or canvassing, and government was conducted by a royal council whose membership was not determined by Commons’ majorities. Paradoxically, parliament’s historic unimportance made the idea of annual elections feasible.2 The demand was, moreover, consonant with established practices for annual elections to parish, ward, and corporation offices, and the role of MP was not regarded as substantially different from these.3 Writing in 1676, Marchamont Nedham, now a servant of the earl of Danby, remarked that although annual parliaments befitted a former age when parliaments were ‘modest’, they would be dangerous in the present age when elections had become occasions for factious incivility, and parliaments abused their privileges by constantly harrying the king’s councillors.4 By the close of the seventeenth century annual parliaments had, in fact, become the norm, but in the different form of annual sessions. After the Revolution of 1688, regular sessions were required to authorize and finance armies and navies to fight wars on an unprecedented scale. Parliaments were now chosen amid intense electioneering by rival political parties, while the crown was increasingly expected to take into the administration those who could secure a legislative programme in the Commons. In such circumstances, the ideal of annual elections yielded to an expectation of regular elections combined with annual sessions. The puzzle is why the aspiration for annual elections revived so vigorously among reformers of the 1770s and 1840s, although arguably it is no more curious than the persistence of other apparently antique shibboleths that contested the terms of an emerging modern polity: ideals of a citizen militia (as against a professional standing army), of independent Members (as against 1

For surveys, see B. Kemp, King and Commons, 1660–1832 (1965); J. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 1640–1832 (Cambridge, 1972). 2 For the nature of parliaments and elections in the seventeenth century, see D. Hirst, The Representative of the People? (Cambridge, 1975); M. Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection (Cambridge, 1986); C. Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979); D. Smith, The Stuart Parliaments, 1603–1689 (1999). 3 See M. Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850, ed. T. Harris (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 153–94. 4 Marchamont Nedham, A Pacquet of Advices and Animadversions … to the Men of Shaftsbury (1676), pp. 47–8. Cf. idem, A Second Pacquet of Advices (1677), pp. 12, 24–5.

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Members who were ‘placemen’ holding office under the crown), and of fullyfunded public finance (as against a national debt).5 This chapter’s purpose is not to solve that puzzle, but to explore an episode during the years 1675–7, when the demand for annual parliaments took centre stage in politics and pamphleteering. I shall argue that the call for annual parliaments constituted a major element in the formation of the Whig movement; that it entailed an ‘ancient constitutionalist’ critique which profoundly undermined the Stuart crown’s prerogatives;6 and that it was embedded within an aristocratic theory of politics which achieved a particular prominence at this time. The controversy formed part of an extended contest between the earl of Danby’s administration and its country party opponents, and demonstrates the extent to which the Restoration regime was seriously challenged prior to the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, the moment which has tended to command historiographical attention.7 I further suggest that attention to the earl of Shaftesbury, conventionally regarded as the Whigs’ leader, should not occlude the leading roles played by two of his colleagues, Denzil, Lord Holles, and George Villiers, second duke of Buckingham.8 It will first be useful to sketch the legislative history of frequent parliaments, to provide a counterpoint to calls for annual parliaments. The Triennial Act of 1641, which Charles I conceded when seeking to appease the Long Parliament, was the first post-medieval statutory specification of regular elections. The Act proved nugatory, for it permitted the Civil War Long Parliament to continue indefinitely, and was repealed by the Cavalier Parliament in 1664 at Charles II’s request. That repeal was also styled a Triennial Act, since it notionally preserved the obligation to hold triennial elections, but, unlike the 1641 Act, provided no machinery for automatic elections in the event of the crown’s dereliction; furthermore, once again it did not apply to the sitting parliament, hence the perpetuation of the Restoration’s own ‘Long Parliament’. Charles was free to flout the Act, and did so in 1684, there having been no election since 1681. 5

For these themes, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ, 1975), pt 3. 6 The classic account of ancient constitutionalism is J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Consti­ tu­tion and the Feudal Law (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1987). See also G. Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (University Park, PA, 1992); J. Sommerville, ‘The Ancient Constitution Reassessed’, in The Stuart Court and Europe, ed. R. M. Smuts (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 39–64; M. Goldie, ‘The Ancient Constitution and the Languages of Political Thought’, HJ 62 (2019), 3–34. 7 For parallel doubts about the centrality of the ‘Exclusion Crisis’, see J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge, 1991), pt 1. 8 For these, see Spurr (ed.), Shaftesbury; K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford, 1968); P. Crawford, Denzil Holles, 1598–1680 (1979); B. Yardley, ‘George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, and the Politics of Toleration’, Huntington Library Quarterly 55 (1992), 317–37; R. Hume and H. Love (eds), Plays, Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings Associated with George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham (2 vols, Oxford, 2007); M. Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (2nd edn, Woodbridge, 2016), ch. 4.

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Under the Triennial Act of 1694 regular elections became a reality, resulting in the greatest frequency of elections in English history: nine in twenty-two years.9 This regime ended with the Septennial Act in 1716, which prevailed until the present-day quinquennial stipulation under the Parliament Act of 1911. The crown’s power of summons was thus permanently curtailed after 1694, although the power to dissolve parliament before the end of its term (today exercised by the prime minister) was not abridged until the Fixed Term Parliament Act of 2011. The Triennial Acts notwithstanding, a prevailing seventeenth-century conception of the desirable frequency of parliaments was annual, rather than triennial. This claim was grounded in two medieval statutes, citation of which was incessantly iterated, the Acts known as ‘4 Ed. III, c. 14’ and ‘36 Ed. III, c. 10’, passed in 1330 and 1362. The first specified that ‘a parliament shall be holden every year once and more often if need be’. The caveat, ‘if need be’, could be awkward (was an election not required if not needed?), but the later act was unambiguous: ‘a parliament shall be holden every year’.10 No champion of annual parliaments doubted that ‘a parliament’ meant a freshly elected body and not merely a session of an existing parliament. These were not statutes to which the late medieval or Tudor polities had paid heed. In a devastating critique of annual parliaments in the climacteric of 1677, Danby’s lord chancellor, Heneage Finch, future earl of Nottingham, pointed out that nothing had been heard of the Edwardian statutes for centuries, that monarchs had not regarded themselves bound by them, that long intermissions between parliaments were commonplace, and that in thirty-five of the forty-four years of Elizabeth’s reign no parliament had sat and no political storms had thereby arisen. Furthermore, Finch claimed that, before the seventeenth century, gentlemen and burghers were apt to regard frequent parliaments as burdensome, being occasions for fiscal demands and personal (or borough) expense.11 Finch was correct to argue that the binding authority of the Edwardian statutes was factitious. Tudor antiquaries had been familiar with their existence but had made nothing of them. It was not therefore new legal-historical discoveries that gave potency to appeals to this branch of the ‘ancient constitution’, but an act of political imagination by which constitutional significance began to be imputed to superannuated statutes. Just as Sir Edward Coke had 9

The classic account is G. Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (1967); also his ‘The Electorate and the National Will in the First Age of Party’, in Politics, Religion, and Society in England, 1679–1742 (1986), pp. 1–33. Cf. C. Jackson, ‘The Rage of Parliaments: The House of Commons, 1690–1715’, HJ 48 (2005), 567–87. 10 Statutes of the Realm (11 vols, 1810–28), I, 265, 374. It was unclear whether ‘if need be’ referred to ‘every year’ or ‘more often’. 11 D. E. C. Yale (ed.), Lord Nottingham’s Chancery Cases (2 vols, Selden Society, 1954–61), II, 984–6. Cf. Sir Peter Leicester, Charges to the Grand Jury, ed. E. Halcrow (Manchester, 1953), pp. 83–4, 91; Nedham, Second Pacquet, pp. 9–25.

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converted a baronial protest called Magna Carta into a foundational charter of English liberties in the 1620s, so also the arcana of the Edwardian statutes now acquired novel significance. Coke cited them in the Commons in 1621, when parliament convened after a seven-year absence, and again during the Petition of Right debate in 1628. The claim for annual parliaments had already been mooted in the 1610s, when a manuscript entitled ‘Motives to Induce an Annual Parliament’ circulated, though this rested its case on the supposed Saxon antiquity of parliaments and King Alfred’s putative annual elections. In the Short Parliament of 1640, after the longest intermission of parliament since the fourteenth century, John Pym pronounced that ‘by two statutes not repealed nor expired a parliament ought to be once a year’. His claim was echoed in county petitions, Northamptonshire gentlemen for example demanding ‘that we may have a parliament once a year as by law we ought’ and duly citing the Edwardian precedents.12 The Triennial Act of 1641 developed from a bill for annual parliaments introduced in December 1640. When some courtier MPs protested that the bill violated the royal prerogative, the annual stipulation was moderated to triennial at committee stage. The Act’s preamble confirmed that the Edwardian ideal remained the paradigm, for it rehearsed the ancient statutes by which ‘parliament ought to be held at least once every year’. Edmund Prideaux stressed that the Act’s purpose was to provide machinery for automatic summons should the crown be derelict for as long as three years. The Grand Remonstrance objected that the Act was less than ‘we ought to have required (there being two statutes still in force for a parliament to be once a year)’.13 Dismay at the Long Parliament’s self-perpetuation ensured that the principle of annual elections became lodged in Leveller rhetoric in the later 1640s. The new fear was of perpetual rather than of absent parliaments, just as would be the case in the 1670s. The Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (1646) urged that elections take place ‘upon one certain day in November yearly’. A Leveller petition of 1648 expected that parliament would make laws ‘for election of representatives yearly and of course [i.e. automatically] without writ or summons’. The first Agreement of the People settled on biennial parliaments and the Second Agreement was nonspecific, but the Third stipulated that ‘the people

12

E. Cope (ed.), Proceedings of the Short Parliament, Camden Society (1977), pp. 155, 275, 258; J. P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (Harlow, 1986), p. 104; P. Croft, ‘Annual Parliaments and the Long Parliament’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 59 (1986), 155–71; idem, ‘The Debate on Annual Parliaments in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Parliaments, Estates, and Representation 16 (1996), 163–74. 13 J. P. Kenyon (ed.), The Stuart Constitution (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1986), pp. 197, 213; Croft, ‘Debate’, p. 13; E. Cope, ‘The Inconveniences of Long Intermissions of Parliament and a Remedy for them’, Albion 13 (1981), 1–11; G. Yerby, People and Parliament (Basingstoke, 2008).

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shall of course choose a parliament every year’, to assemble on the first Thursday of August ‘for ever’.14 Others rehearsed the case during the Interregnum. In A Holy Commonwealth (1659), Richard Baxter recited the Edwardian statutes, remarking that the royal prerogative of calling parliaments did not license a right not to call them. Republicans rested their case on the principle of rotation of office, central to the civic humanist tradition. In Oceana (1656), James Harrington stipulated annual election of one third of the national assembly’s members, to sit for three years, so that annual election could combine with continuity of experience.15 During the first fifteen years of the Restoration such aspirations were all but eradicated, as belonging to the lexicon of rebellion, despite flickering briefly in the debate on the Triennial Act’s repeal, when Sir Richard Temple and John Vaughan objected that repeal was contrary to the Edwardian statutes. Heneage Finch retorted that the 1641 act was ‘seditious’ and a ‘dethroning’ of the king. Four years later Temple introduced a new Triennial Bill, which the Cavalier Commons summarily rejected, despite his judiciously abandoning the Edwardian precedents: annual parliaments, he now averred, would be ‘too frequent’.16 The campaign for dissolution, 1675–7

The demand for frequent parliaments re-emerged dramatically in the autumn of 1675 and reached a crescendo in February 1677. By 1675 the Cavalier Parliament had been sitting for fourteen years. Not only had there been no general election since 1661, but there were also long intermissions between sessions, with only eight months of sittings between April 1671 and the end of 1676. Furthermore, there was increasing dismay at the ‘corruption’ of members, who were prone to absenteeism, cronyism, and complaisance induced by government sinecures – an MP’s independence was said to be suborned if he became a government ‘placeman’. Danby’s opponents concluded that they must press for a dissolution and new elections. Although their project failed and the parliament continued until dissolved amid the Popish Plot crisis in January 1679, the campaign for dissolution generated a furore. The first call for a dissolution occurred in an open letter from the earl of Shaftesbury to the earl of Carlisle on 3 February 1675. Amid a volley of 14

D. M. Wolfe (ed.), Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (New York, 1944), pp. 129, 287, 404; cf. pp. 27, 227, 281. 15 Richard Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth (1659), pp. 479–80; James Harrington, Political Works, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 227–8. Cf. Louis du Moulin, Proposals … to the Parliament (1659), pp. 3–4. 16 Kemp, King and Commons, p. 17; C. Robbins, ‘The Repeal of the Triennial Act in 1664’, Huntington Library Quarterly 12 (1948–9), 121–40; P. Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–1667 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 137–40, quotation at 139.

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proposals, including measures to restrict placemen and strengthen habeas corpus, Shaftesbury pronounced ‘frequent new parliaments’ as being the king’s interest and ‘the people’s right’. Shaftesbury urged Carlisle to show the letter to their colleagues, Lords Fauconberg, Holles, and Salisbury.17 This was an assiduously circulated manuscript publication: ‘among the coffee haunters there [were] found copiers enough to furnish both city and kingdom’.18 On 25 October Sir Harbottle Grimston put a motion in the Commons ‘to set a period to this parliament’, arguing that ‘a standing parliament is as inconvenient as a standing army’. On 20 November a Lords’ motion calling on the king to dissolve parliament was defeated by just two votes, the government benefiting from the block vote of sixteen bishops. Twenty-two opposition peers entered a protest calling for ‘frequent and new parliaments’.19 Their arguments were rehearsed in print in tracts promoted by Shaftesbury’s circle. Two Seasonable Discourses pronounced that ‘according to … the ancient laws and statutes of this realm, … there should be frequent and new parliaments’, and that it was unreasonable for MPs to ‘engross so great a trust of the people’ by avoiding fresh elections.20 Verses on the ‘curse’ of long parliaments circulated. These publications provoked an abortive attempt by the crown in December to close down the coffee-houses.21 At this juncture, a striking feature of the contest was an alliance between Protestant opposition lords and the Catholic and crypto-Catholic followers of James, duke of York. The duke actively sought a dissolution, for he disliked parliament’s aggressive Anglicanism, promoted by Danby, which aimed to restrict his freedom in religion once he became king. The Test Act of 1673 had forced Catholics to resign their offices, and the duke hoped for greater tolerance from a new parliament. This was an intimation of James’s future attempt, as king in 1687–8, to ally Catholics with Whigs. The Danbyite MPs Edward Seymour and Sir Thomas Meres remarked on the ‘conjunction between the fanatic and papist to dissolve this parliament’. This was plain to see, since the 17

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, 1667–1683, ed. J. R. Milton and P. Milton (Oxford, 2006), p. 80; Haley, Shaftesbury, pp. 369–71. 18 Nedham, Pacquet, p. 46; cf. p. 7. 19 Grey, Debates, IV, 341; cf. pp. 342–9; LJ, XIII, 33; CSPD, 1675–6, pp. 413, 518; Two Speeches. I. The Earl of Shaftsbury’s Speech … Together with the Protestation and Reasons of Several Lords for the Dissolution of this Parliament (‘Amsterdam’, 1675); Burnet, OT, pp. 386, 401–3; Haley, Shaftesbury, pp. 401–2; Kemp, King and Commons, p. 19; A. Browning, Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby (3 vols, Glasgow, 1951), I, 183–4; III, 125–6; A. Swatland, The House of Lords in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 220–2, 228. 20 Two Seasonable Discourses Concerning this Present Parliament (Oxford, 1675), p. 1. Cf. The Debate or Arguments for Dissolving this Present Parliament, and the Calling Frequent and New Parliaments (1675); Reasons for a New Parliament, Delivered in the Lords House, Novemb. 20th, 1675 (1676); Haley, Shaftesbury, p. 403. Shaftesbury’s tracts are reprinted in J. Malcolm (ed.), The Struggle for Sovereignty (2 vols, Indianapolis, IN, 1999), II, 563–77, 589–602. 21 CSPD, 1675–6, pp. 338–9; G. de F. Lord et al. (eds), Poems on Affairs of State (7 vols, New Haven, CT, 1963–75), I, 263–5; S. Pincus, ‘“Coffee Politicians Does Create”: Coffee-houses and Restoration Political Culture’, Journal of Modern History 67 (1995), 807–34.

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Shaftesburian Two Speeches contained a list of peers who favoured dissolution, headed by York and the duke of Buckingham.22 The Lords’ November motion was quickly followed by the king’s prorogation of parliament, which he prolonged for an unprecedented fifteen months. It was initially assumed that so long a period must presage a dissolution, and new elections were anticipated. To the fury of Shaftesbury and his allies, however, it became evident that Charles intended to persist indefinitely with his parliament and meanwhile to keep it dormant.23 At what would turn out to be the prorogation’s mid-point, on 24 June 1676, the demand for a new parliament was flamboyantly relaunched by a Cornhill linen-draper, Francis Jenks, in a speech at Guildhall during a meeting of Common Hall, the City of London’s assembly. The occasion was the annual election of sheriffs. Jenks was son-in-law of the Leveller leader William Walwyn, was briefed by another ex-Leveller, John Wildman, and in turn was supported by Buckingham and Shaftesbury. Jenks’s speech ranged widely, alleging a popish conspiracy to destroy the City and deploring French depredations upon English trade, which had ‘beggared many thousands of our honest and industrious weavers’. Turning to the ‘remedy of the many mischiefs and grievances we now groan under’, Jenks called on the City to petition the king to call elections for a new parliament, ‘according to the statutes of 4th and 36th of Edward III’. The words ‘a new parliament’ met with shouts of approval and the sheriffs struggled to bring the meeting to order. Jenks’s intervention was stunning, for the implication was that the king was bound by the statutes and was in breach of them, and that furthermore the crown should be stripped of its prerogative to determine the duration of parliaments.24 Nedham observed that the Jenksites spoke ‘the language of the old Levellers’.25 As the orchestrated cry from the floor reveals, Jenks was not a lone voice. The end of Sir Robert Vyner’s mayoralty in 1675 had marked a shift in the City’s leadership. Vyner was a Danbyite: he planned to marry his step-daughter to Danby’s son; he awarded the freedom of the City to the king, of whom he erected a statue in the Stocks Market. With Vyner’s departure, a phalanx of merchants emerged who would form the backbone of City Whiggism: Sir 22 Grey,

Debates, IV, 345; J. S. Clarke, The Life of James II (2 vols, 1816), I, 504–5; Haley, Shaftesbury, pp. 368, 373, 385, 401; J. Miller, James II (1978), pp. 78–81. Tories later exploited the ‘papist-fanatic’ conjunction of 1675: Edmund Bohun, Address to the Freemen and Freeholders (1682), pp. 39–44; Roger North, Examen (1740), pp. 55, 70–1. 23 BL, MS Stowe 745, fol. 109; CSPD, 1675–6, pp. 444, 457, 499. 24 Mr Francis Jenk’s Speech Spoken in a Common Hall, the 24th of June 1679 [sic] [1676]; An Account of the Proceedings at Guildhall (1676); ST, VI, 1189–90; CSPD, 1676–7, pp. 253–6, 352, 564; E. Thompson (ed.), Hatton Correspondence (2 vols, 1878), I, 132–3; Haley, Shaftesbury, pp. 409–10; J. Spurr, England in the 1670s (Oxford, 2000), pp. 80–1, 170; G. De Krey, London and the Restoration, 1659–1683 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 144–9. 25 Nedham, Pacquet, pp. 50–2; Second Pacquet, p.  31. Nedham had been a republican ideologue in the 1650s but was now Danby’s principal pamphleteer, handsomely paid for writing the Pacquet.

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Robert Clayton, John Dubois, Sir Robert Peyton, Sir Thomas Pilkington, Sir Thomas Player, Samuel Shute, and Patience Ward. Danby had counter-attacked by removing ‘Peyton’s gang’ from the Middlesex bench of justices in the spring of 1676. Within the City, Jenks was confident of support. Copies of his speech rapidly circulated, provoking government proclamations against the press and the seizure of Henry Brydges’s printing press.26 Jenks was promptly interrogated by the privy council, mainly in an attempt to force him to implicate his backers. He was, however, defiant. To Lord Chancellor Finch he retorted, ‘Is it any crime to petition for a new parliament?’ To the king’s demand to say ‘who advised you?’ he refused an answer. Charles remarked darkly, ‘I know whose scholar you are, and I shall take care that none such as you shall have to do with the government.’ Jenks was jailed, the warrant signifying that he did ‘in a most seditious and mutinous manner openly move … to call a new parliament’ and that at council he did ‘in a presumptuous and arrogant manner endeavour to justify the same’. No charge was brought, and his City friends spent three months trying to secure a writ of habeas corpus for his release, which was refused by quarter sessions, the justices claiming they could not overrule the privy council; and refused also by Finch, who claimed the lord chancellor could not grant a habeas corpus, and, when told that Coke had allowed it, responded, ‘Coke was not infallible’. Jenks’s friends next had the public records searched concerning the alternative writ of mainprize. Lord Chief Justice Sir Richard Rainsford eventually persuaded Finch and the king that Jenks must be released. Like the earl of Shaftesbury’s case which followed, Jenks’s case was among the provocations for the passing of the Habeas Corpus Act in 1679.27 By the time Jenks was released in the autumn, his topic had become ‘the universal subject of discourse’. In October it was reported that green ribbons, the old Leveller symbol, were being worn to signify the call for a new parliament. November saw the anniversary of the prorogation. There was ‘great noise and clamour about this long prorogation’. Shaftesbury moved his headquarters from the Strand to Aldersgate: according to Nedham, he ‘hied as fast as he could into the City, with resolution to become a citizen’. It was said that ‘offices of intelligence’ were set up, to coin news for the coffee-houses, and a cabal formed

26

De Krey, London, pp. 147–9; M. Priestley, ‘London Merchants and Opposition Politics in Charles II’s Reign’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 29 (1956), 205–19; D. Allen, ‘Bridget Hyde and Lord Treasurer Danby’s Alliance with Lord Mayor Vyner’, Guildhall Studies 2 (1975), 11–21; L. Glassey, Politics and the Appointment of Justices of the Peace, 1675–1720 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 33–4; K. Sharpe, Rebranding Rule (New Haven, CT, 2013), pp. 124–5. 27 ST, VI, 1190–1208, quotation at 1192–6; CSPD, 1676–7, pp. 184–93, 215, 288–9; G. W. Keeton, Lord Chancellor Jeffreys and the Stuart Cause (1965), pp. 66–7. For the 1679 Act: P. Halliday, Habeas Corpus, from England to Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2010), ch. 7.

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for ‘inventing seditious and treasonable pamphlets’ and for holding correspondence with ‘country agents’.28 The anniversary of the prorogation introduced a vital new element in the case for annual parliaments: the doctrine of automatic dissolution. It was contended that, by virtue of the ancient statutes, the Cavalier Parliament was ipso facto dissolved: no lawful parliament was in existence.29 Throughout the winter this new contention was energetically purveyed. ‘The point was maintained by the partisans at coffee-houses and clubs, as also in numerous pamphlets. One could come into no company, nor be competent for ordinary converse, without being able to argue the point of law, whether the parliament was dissolved or not. Even the withdrawing rooms of the ladies were infected by it’.30 When parliament finally reopened for a new session on 15 February 1677, the opposition lords attempted to forestall its meeting by declaring parliament to be automatically dissolved and so not entitled to sit. They did so to a chorus from the streets: a ‘mob assembly was brought together for the purpose of terror’, threatening a ‘mob dissolution’, in scenes reminiscent of the barracking of the Long Parliament prior to the Civil War. However, the country lords’ stratagem proved a debacle. Danby’s majority held, and the opposition was irresolute. The Lords’ debate lasted five or six hours, Shaftesbury and Buckingham pursuing the strongest line, the latter pronouncing that ‘the prorogation is void’: ‘we are at this time no parliament’. But their colleagues wavered. The staunch old Puritan Lord Wharton spoke, but could not bring himself to assert that parliament was actually dissolved. Holles havered and remained silent, remarkably so, given that, as we shall see, he was at the forefront of the press campaign. The duke of York’s party now hesitated. The country party had overreached itself, and the motion that parliament was ‘dissolved, because the prorogation of this parliament for fifteen months is contrary to the statutes of 4 Ed. III and 36 Ed. III’ fell.31 The Danbyites swiftly retaliated, overriding attempts by middle-way men like the marquis of Halifax to abandon the matter. The House demanded that four leading opposition lords, Shaftesbury, Buckingham, Salisbury, and Wharton, beg the House’s pardon. All refused, Wharton holding that the reprimand 28 Nedham,

Honesty’s Best Policy (1678), p. 11; cf. p. 14; Haley, Shaftesbury, pp. 404, 408, 410–12; E. Legon, ‘The Politics and Memory of Ribbon Wearing in Restoration England and Scotland’, JBS 56 (2017), 27–50. 29 Contrast the decision of the UK Supreme Court in 2019 that the prorogation of parliament on 9 September 2019 was null and void and hence that parliament was ipso facto still in session. 30 North, Examen, p. 67. 31 North, Examen, pp. 66, 70; The Duke of Buckingham’s Speech … Feb. 15th 1676, Proving that the Parliament is Dissolved (‘Amsterdam’, 1677); Buckingham, Plays, Poems, p. xlii; HMC, Rutland, II, 35–9; The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth (3rd edn, 2 vols, 1971), II, 172–9; Browning, Danby, I, 212–19; Haley, Shaftesbury, pp. 412–19; Spurr, England, pp. 242–5; Swatland, House of Lords, pp. 109, 221–2, 228, 247–8.

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breached ‘the privilege of freedom of speech necessary in parliament’. The House imprisoned them in the Tower, where three remained until July, and Shaftesbury until the following February. ‘Thus’, wrote Andrew Marvell, ‘a prorogation without precedent was to be warranted by an imprisonment without example.’ Holles escaped this calamity, although widely suspected of masterminding the popular pamphleteering. When challenged, he pronounced that ‘if any had ought to object against him he was there and ready to answer it in any court of judicature’. This retort brought the House to a ‘long silence’, after which new business was moved and he was left unscathed.32 Shaftesbury faced the longest haul, and, like Jenks, another tortuous habeas corpus proceeding. In June he appealed to King’s Bench for release, arguing that the Lords must show good cause for a commitment and had not done so; that, though the Lords was the supreme court, a subject had remedies in the common law courts; and that his confinement should lapse at the session’s end. His lawyer, Aaron Smith, invoked the hazard of absent parliaments, claiming that if none but the House could release him and if parliament were not reconvened, then his imprisonment could prove perpetual. But the court ruled that it had no jurisdiction against the Lords. This attempt by Shaftesbury to overturn his imprisonment further inflamed the House of Lords which, in February 1678, resolved that his appeal to an inferior court was a breach of privilege. The earl was now required to make an additional apology for the ‘aggravation’ of his former offence. Weary of the Tower, Shaftesbury now succumbed, and Nedham printed his humiliating submission. Danby’s long confinement in the Tower after his own fall in 1679 was subsequently seen as revenge, and in November 1680, when the Whigs were in the ascendant, the Lords voted to void and delete all proceedings against the four lords, ‘destroying such precedents for ever’.33 In leading from the House of Lords, the opposition had misjudged. Members of the Commons were unlikely to take kindly to a proposal which involved their ejection by those who held their seats for life, and many were angered by what they heard from the Upper House. Buckingham had denounced the Commons’ pretension to be a ‘standing senate’ that dared to ‘believe themselves our equals’. From 15 to 17 February 1677 the Commons took up the proposition that parliament was automatically dissolved. Col. John Birch, William Lord Cavendish, Sir John Coventry, William Garway, Sir Harbottle Grimston, William Harbord, Henry Powle, William Lord Russell, and William Sacheverell spoke for the motion. Cavendish demanded an inquiry as to how far the Edwardian acts ‘limit the king in his prerogative’. Harbord pronounced that the Commons did ‘great violence’ to the laws by meeting as though it was a parliament, and that it should not part with ‘the people’s liberty’. Among 32 Marvell,

PW, II, 296–8; Marvell, Poems and Letters, pp. 179, 183; LJ, XIII, 39, 42; ST, VI, 1197–1269; HMC, Portland, III, 355–6; Burnet, OT, pp. 401–3. 33 LJ, XIII, 39, 42–4; ST, VI, 1269–1310; Anon., The Case of Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury (1679); Nedham, Honesty’s Best Policy, pp. 2ff; Haley, Shaftesbury, pp. 419–40.

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speakers opposed to them were Sir Robert Sawyer and Edward Vaughan, who declared the question exceedingly dangerous, for if they were no parliament, their assembling was treasonable; and if the people started saying ‘no parliament’ they might end by saying ‘no king’. The motion was defeated by 193 votes to 142.34 Several MPs alluded to a national debate taking place beyond Westminster Hall. Sir John Malet observed that there had been ‘much discourse abroad and some considerable doubts concerning our coming hither’; Sir John Berkenhead confirmed that ‘books are printed, and papers set upon Westminster Hall door, that we are no parliament’; while Sir Richard Temple declared that ‘the legality of our meeting is questioned by libels without doors’.35 It is to these pamphlets that we next turn. The Hollesian tracts and the right of representation

The speeches in the Houses justifying a dissolution echoed arguments carefully rehearsed in tracts circulating in the weeks prior to the session. Two were in print, The Long Parliament Dissolved and Some Considerations upon the Question whether the Parliament is Dissolved, while a third, ‘The Grand Question Concerning the Prorogation of this Parliament for a Year and Three Months Stated and Discussed’, survives in a single manuscript copy, having been seized at the printing press.36 All three were apparently composed, or at least completed, after the proclamation of 20 December 1676 recalling parliament, and issued in readiness for the reconvening on 15 February following. They were the talk of the town, and one commentator was vexed to see an upholsterer in a coffeehouse absorbed in The Long Parliament Dissolved. The court publicist and censor, Roger L’Estrange, showed a copy of ‘The Grand Question’ to the king, and discussed tactics for a riposte with his fellow pamphleteer John Nalson.37 The authorship of these tracts is uncertain. They closely overlap, echoing one another’s arguments, occasionally verbatim; they evidently derived from the same coterie and were all probably sent to the Baptist bookseller John Darby for printing. Gilbert Burnet alleged that Holles composed a tract in this debate; Buckingham asserted that Shaftesbury wrote part of Some Considerations; L’Estrange believed that Wharton and Shaftesbury were at ‘the bottom of’ these tracts; while Nedham detected the handiwork of ‘pettifogging half-witted 34 Buckingham,

Speech, p. 5; Grey, Debates, IV, 64–95, quotations at 65, 70–1; BL, MS Stowe 211, fol. 139; Marvell, PW, II, 295–6; Marvell, Poems and Letters, pp. 177–9. 35 Grey, Debates, IV, 64, 68, 71. ‘Without doors’: outside parliament. 36 Sheffield City Archives, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, MS 15, cited below as ‘Grand Question’. Only the first sheet was printed before seizure; 1,500 copies had been ordered: LJ, XIII, 55, 65; Goldie, Morrice, pp. 104, 323. There is a manuscript of Some Considerations in BL, MS Harleian 6810, fols 102–5. 37 HMC, House of Lords, p. 70; G. Kitchen, Sir Roger L’Estrange (1913), p. 220. Nalson’s reply was The Common Interest of King and People (1677).

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lawyers’. Collaboration is likely – perhaps involving the lawyer William Petyt – but Holles was probably the principal author, and I shall here dub them the Hollesian tracts.38 Holles was strongly implicated in ‘The Grand Question’ by the arrest, at 2 a.m. on 9 February, of his physician and factotum Nicholas Carey, who was interrogated by the king and privy council. Although Carey refused to name Holles, Charles was convinced of his responsibility, and the shock of this episode probably caused Holles’s reticence in the ensuing Lords’ debate; agonies of gout did not help, and, aged 78, a spell in the Tower might have proved fatal. Carey was fined £1,000 and imprisoned for arranging the printing, but he was secretly comforted by 500 guineas from the French ambassador Paul Courtin, in pursuit of Louis XIV’s current design of destabilizing Charles’s regime. This was a minor instance of the French bribes paid to opposition activists, the revelation of which subsequently shocked late eighteenth-century Whigs.39 At parliament’s sitting, the Lords appointed a committee to investigate the Hollesian tracts, to which ten bishops were appointed. The printer Samuel Smith was questioned; the tracts were censured and ordered to be burnt by the public hangman. In June a proclamation was issued for the arrest of Aaron Smith for impugning the continuance of parliament: he was evidently such a ‘desperate talker’ on behalf of dissolution that the authorities seized him in an attempt to silence public debate. In July Joseph Browne was fined 1,000 marks for publishing The Long Parliament Dissolved.40 These were the most forthright opposition pamphlets published since the king’s restoration in 1660. They are stunning in their effrontery. They declared the king to have acted unconstitutionally, the parliament to be dissolved, and its forthcoming reconvening to be unlawful. Rehearsing the familiar medieval statutes, they opened by deeming it beyond ‘all dispute, that by the law of the land a parliament must be held every year, and the kingdom must not be one whole year without a parliament’. Annual parliaments were venerated by ‘our ancestors’ as essential for the prompt administration of justice, redress of grievances, and the ‘defence of our goods and chattels from the oppression and rapine of persecutors’. This principle constituted ‘a covenant or stipulation between the king and his people’, and ‘the performance of those covenants is an essential part of the government’. Our ancestors had ‘so glorious a value’ of annual parliaments, and so great a ‘kindness for our English liberty, that they 38

N. von Maltzahn in Marvell, PW, II, 188, 293n; CSPD, 1677–8, pp. 691–2; Burnet, OT, p. 401; Nedham, Second Pacquet, p. 9; Crawford, Holles, pp. 223–4; Haley, Shaftesbury, p. 414; D. Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics in England, 1661–1689 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1969), pp. 82–3, 298. 39 The revelation came in Sir John Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland (1773). 40 LJ, XIII, 42–65; Grey, Debates, IV, 165–73; CSPD, 1676–7, pp. 543–65; 1677–8, pp. 47, 135, 188; HMC, House of Lords, pp. 69–79; HMC, Le Fleming, pp. 132–3; Marvell, PW, II, 306; Marvell, Poems and Letters, pp. 182–3, 187; Sir John Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain (3 vols, 1790), I, 380; North, Examen, p. 75; Goldie, Morrice, pp. 104, 184, 206; Kitchin, L’Estrange, pp. 209–21; Spurr, England, p. 172.

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would not trust the guardianship thereof to any under heaven, but to the people themselves’.41 The Hollesian tracts’ next and crucial move was to assert that, in light of these statutes, the king’s prorogation for fifteen months was unlawful. Since the prorogation absented parliament for more than the statutory year, parliament was ipso facto dissolved. The Hollesians did not hazard the next step of suggesting a mechanism for automatic elections, yet dared to claim that the assembly scheduled for February simply would not be a parliament. Either the prorogation must be null and void, or those laws must be null and void: but no man (I think) will say that the laws are so, then it is a necessary consequence that the prorogation must be so: and if the prorogation be null and void in itself, as being contrary to such an essential fundamental law of the land, it can work no effect, nor have any operation to make this parliament meet and sit and act as a parliament. What then follows? The parliament must remain discontinued and sine die, which must terminate in a dissolution.42

The king was guilty of violating fundamental laws. ‘A prorogation … that says directly, there shall be no parliament within a year, is diametrically opposite to this law’, the king ‘forbidding what all those acts of parliament command and enjoin’. The Hollesian tracts urged that though there is a proper sphere for the royal prerogative, the crown may not exercise it in breach of fundamental law, in matters pro bono publico. The crown might dispense particular persons, but could not suspend general public laws that touched the rights, liberties, and properties of the people. Charles’s father had accepted the first Triennial Act of 1641, by which ‘the king’s prerogative was limited both in calling and dissolving parliaments’. The king’s ‘being bound’ manifestly applied in the present case, since frequent parliaments are the sine qua non of all other legislation. If this principle were breached, all laws and parliaments were at risk and ‘an inundation overflows all our freedom’.43 Beyond these core arguments, the Hollesian tracts were intent on countering objections to their case that were evidently bandied about in discussion. If it were objected that no dissolution could occur by default, without the monarch’s express act, then the contrary could be demonstrated, since there were several circumstances in which an automatic dissolution could occur, such as the wholesale destruction of parliament by terrorists (as had nearly occurred in November 1605), the dissolution of a regency on an absent king’s return, or the issuance of defective writs of summons. If it were objected that the crown 41

‘Grand Question’, pp. 1–3; Anon., The Long Parliament Dissolved (1677), p. 4; Anon., Some Considerations (1677), p. 1. 42 ‘Grand Question’, p.  4. Cf. Long Parliament Dissolved, pp. 5–6; Some Considerations, pp. 12–13, 23. 43 ‘Grand Question’, pp. 3. Cf. pp. 6–7; Long Parliament Dissolved, p. 7; Some Considerations, pp. 5–8, 26.

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was entitled to prorogue sine die (i.e. without specifying a date for re-convening), then it could be argued that this would likewise amount to a dissolution, since parliament otherwise would be left in a limbo of indefinite suspension. If it were objected that the crown might make a series of short prorogations each less than a year, this was irrelevant, for if they cumulated, the crown would still be in breach. And if it were said that Queen Elizabeth had prorogued for more than a year, the response was that a single inadvertency in four centuries was no binding precedent.44 A particular difficulty lay in the terms of the Triennial Acts. It was objected that those acts implicitly repealed the laws for annual parliaments, precisely because they enjoined triennial. With some discomfort, this was denied: the triennial requirement was a bare minimum necessity, with leeway given to the crown. The Grand Question argued that the 1641 Act was grounded in the annual principle, albeit that it had graciously deferred the machinery for automatic elections until ‘after three years patience and expectation’ of a monarch. If the crown would not then implement the people’s ‘birthright’, then the people might ‘provide for themselves and for the safety of the kingdom’. What is striking here was the strong implication of a reserve of popular power to act should the monarch default. The Long Parliament Dissolved was particularly aggressive in emphasizing the danger of ‘our ancient rights raped from us and posterity for ever’, and being ‘governed as beasts by will and pleasure’ – the slavery of arbitrary rule.45 The Hollesians extended their case by recollecting three parallel principles taken to be as fundamental as that of annual parliaments and which similarly curtailed the crown’s prerogative. The first was that the crown was obliged to give forty days’ notice of a summons to parliament. This was to ensure a full, and hence fully representative, assembly, and thereby to prevent the hasty passage of court-inspired legislation in a barely quorate body of biddable courtiers, by which practice parliament might effect a ‘total alteration of the government, before any from the country can come up to hinder it’. The second principle was that the Commons’ quorum must be at least forty, since fewer would likewise allow parliament to be ‘packed with ease’. The third was that members had an unlimited right of free speech, without having to answer to the king or ‘at a worse place’, since this was the actual meaning of ‘parle-ment’. Without these principles, the way was open to ‘French tyranny’, the ‘rendering our law arbitrary, and the power of the crown absolute’, thereby to ‘enslave the people by authority of parliament’.46 44 ‘Grand Question’, pp. 4–7, 14–15, 18–23; Long Parliament Dissolved, pp. 10–12, 16; Some Considerations, pp. 10–12, 14, 17–18, 21, 24–5. 45 ‘Grand Question’, pp. 11–13; Long Parliament Dissolved, pp. 3, 10. Cf. Some Considerations, pp. 3–4. For the Triennial Act as a repeal: Nedham, Second Pacquet, p. 16; Leicester, Charges, p. 84; Roger L’Estrange, Observator (3 vols, 1684–7), I, nos 35, 194. 46 Long Parliament Dissolved, pp. 8–9; Some Considerations, pp. 14, 20. The argument here foreshadows Robert Molesworth’s warnings of a parliament-led absolutist coup in An

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The allegation that many MPs were complicit in ‘French tyranny’ echoed a dominant theme in the country party’s critique: corrupt court placemen. The Long Parliament Dissolved was markedly retributive, threatening revenge by a future parliament: under Edward III Chief Justice Sir William Thorp had been sentenced to death for taking bribes, under Richard II Chief Justice Sir Robert Tresilian for allowing the king to breach a statute, and under Henry VII Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley for subverting the laws. If current MPs ‘should by another parliament be found to have usurped the legislative power of England, to the ruin of our laws, and the destruction of the people, they would be sure to answer [for] it, with no less than their lives and fortunes’. The tract ended by threatening that, if a dissolved parliament should usurp by continuing to sit and act, the people might legitimately refuse taxes and obedience, and juries in every court might challenge the validity of its legislation.47 Historians have tended to assume that, before the radicalization of the Whigs in the early 1680s, the language of opposition remained cautious. Yet here, scarcely veiled, was an assertion of a right of popular resistance. It was not a conception of resistance that took the form of a call to arms; rather, resistance was characterized by an orderly suffocation of central government and the devolution of power to citizens acting in the office of judges and jurors. This was characteristic of ancient constitutionalist thinking, which tended to construe the polity as a hierarchy of courts, and an MP thereby a higher juror when sitting in the High Court of Parliament. Beneath the MP, the role of common juror was not confined to passing judgement on criminals, for jurors also articulated the grievances of the citizenry and judged public affairs. The principal bearers of this duty were county grand juries, which often published grievances and were construed as county parliaments. If jurors in the national parliament defaulted, then power devolved to citizen juries.48 This would constitute a dissolution of central government, of an errant king’s rule, but not a dissolution of government tout court, for there remained constitutive resources of governance embedded in the people. The Long Parliament Dissolved took the doctrine of annual parliaments further, implying a republican principle of rotation of office, whereby annually elected MPs would be disbarred from serving after a single term. It argued that the Cavalier Parliament’s 500 members had become perpetual pseudo-representatives, whereas 8,000 different individuals might have served had there been sixteen parliaments in sixteen years, which would have been far more representative of the 20,000 gentlemen of England. Echoing a familiar Aristotelian adage, Account of Denmark (1694). 47 Long Parliament Dissolved, pp. 22–3; cf. pp. 18–21. Cf. ‘Grand Question’, p. 8. 48 Note the title of A Seasonable Argument to Persuade all the Grand Juries of England to Petition for a New Parliament (‘Amsterdam’, 1677). In 1702 Daniel Defoe argued that if the Commons should turn tyrant, then grand juries should act in the people’s defence: The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England. Cf. J. Morrill, The Cheshire Grand Jury, 1625–1659 (Leicester, 1976).

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the tract pronounced that ‘the gentry of England [are] born to have their share in ruling as well as being ruled’. Furthermore, the perpetuation of the Cavalier Parliament disfranchised over half the electors, since nobody under the aged of thirty-eight had participated in a general election. The current parliament was of ‘monstrous duration’: ‘let the people have … their yearly representatives’.49 The Hollesian tracts offered a ringing challenge to Restoration monarchy. Yet their mindset remained resolutely ancient constitutionalist, and in this respect, they were unlike some later Whig polemic provoked by the Exclusion Crisis. They ransacked the past for statutes and precedents, consulting the rolls of medieval parliaments and the opinions of jurists. They had limited affinity with either the humanist classicism of Algernon Sidney’s appeal to the norms of Roman republican citizenship or the ahistorical natural law doctrines of John Locke. All these authors, however, shared similar catch-phrases: the Hollesians spoke of ‘lives, liberties, and estates’, yet, in their case, such phrases were embedded in a legal-historical framework. Holles’s mental world was closer to that of William Prynne, the great Parliamentarian lawyer, whose vast tomes sank under dense catalogues of historical, legal, and parliamentary precedent. Ancient constitutionalism did not disappear during the Exclusion Crisis: it re-emerged forcefully in the works of William Petyt and William Atwood concerning the antiquity of parliament.50 Both were heirs of the Hollesians, and Petyt probably had his apprenticeship in the prorogation controversy, while Atwood sponsored the publication of Lord Holles his Remains (1682). Yet there is a conceptual hiatus between the Hollesians and Exclusionists, chiefly resulting from the impact of the Tory historian Robert Brady, whose decisive move was to politicize the year 1265, ‘49 H III’, as the fons et origo of parliament. Brady argued that there was no evidence for the existence of parliament before the Middle Ages, and that parliament, far from being a timeless embodiment of popular will, was an outgrowth of the post-Conquest monarchy’s desire for counsel. This move forced Whig Exclusionists to appeal beyond the Conquest to a mythology of Saxon parliaments, and to downplay the medievalism of parliaments and the Edwardian statutes. For Petyt and Atwood, writing in 1680–1, it was necessary to stress the witenagemot of King Alfred’s and King Edward the Confessor’s time. The Hollesian tracts were innocent of Brady’s impending threat, though their own allusions to the Saxon mists of time were sufficiently frequent for Nedham to ridicule them for holding that ancient Britons held annual parliaments ‘400 years before Christ’.51

49

Long Parliament Dissolved, pp. 4–5, 18; Aristotle, Politics, VI. 2. Ancient Constitution, ch. 8. 51 Nedham, Second Pacquet, p. 47. Prynne’s Brief Register of Parliamentary Writs (1658–64) accepted that parliament was no older than 49 H. 3 (1265), and the Hollesians agreed: ‘Grand Question’, p. 18. Cf. Pocock, Ancient Constitution, pp. 158–9, 186, 211; W. Lamont, Marginal Prynne (1963), pp. 219–22. 50 Pocock,

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Aristocratic Whiggism

The campaign for annual parliaments was led by noblemen and entailed denigration of a corrupt House of Commons. Accordingly, as well as trumpeting the people’s right to fair representation, the opposition leadership heralded the virtues of aristocratic government. The paradoxes of aristocratic populism did not go unnoticed. Nedham observed, ‘methinks I see John Lilburne putting on robes’ – the allusion was to the Leveller leader of the 1640s. He accused Shaftesbury of seeking dominion through ‘a senate with oligarchs’, ‘a Presbyterian aristocratical or popular tyranny’: his lordship’s simpering rhetoric on behalf of ‘the poor man in his cottage’ was mere cynical opportunism, and the whole platform was both oligarchic and ‘contradistinct to … monarchy’.52 From 1675 onward, opposition peers increasingly expressed fears that a constitutional revolution would displace the ancient mixed and balanced polity with an absolute monarchy on a French or Danish model. One characteristic instrument of absolute monarchy was held to be a standing army, while another was a ‘standing parliament’, enervated by corrupt regal influence. By contrast, a virtuous peerage was the natural support for, and proper constraint on, the crown. A properly representative House of Commons voiced the people’s grievances, while a hereditary peerage in the Lords provided counsel. These themes were constantly iterated in proto-Whig speeches and tracts. Thus it was said in the Lords’ debate on 20 November 1675 that hereditary noblemen ‘keep the balance of the government steady’, and provide ‘the counsel, the wisdom, and judgement of the nation, to which their birth, education, and constant employment … prepares and fits them’.53 The army–peerage dichotomy was voiced in the Shaftesburian tract, A Letter from a Person of Quality, published in the same month: ‘the power of peerage and a standing army are like two buckets, the proportion that one goes down, the other exactly goes up’. The sentiment was echoed in Shaftesbury’s speech of 20 October in a debate on the Shirley v. Fagg case, which concerned the judicial powers of the Lords: ‘there is no prince that ever governs without nobility or an army: if you will not have one, you must have t’other, or the monarchy cannot long support or keep itself from tumbling into a democratical republic’. Having acclaimed the laws by which the ‘poor man enjoys his cottage’, Shaftesbury pronounced that ‘I will serve my prince as a peer, but will not destroy the peerage to serve him’; and, yet more forthrightly, if ever there should be ‘a king governing by an army without a parliament, ’tis a government I own not, was not born under, nor am obliged to’.54 The aristo52 Nedham,

Pacquet, pp. 40, 50, 71; idem, Second Pacquet, p. 62; cf. pp. 4, 27; idem, Honesty’s Best Policy, p. 13. 53 The Debate or Arguments for Dissolving this Present Parliament, and the Calling Frequent and New Parliaments (1675), pp. 3, 4; cf. p. 9. 54 Letter in Locke, Essay Concerning Toleration, p. 374; cf. pp. 114–15, 352; Shaftesbury, Two Speeches, pp. 7, 10. Cf. Shaftesbury, Notes Taken in Shorthand of a Speech in the House of Lords (1675), pp. 3–4; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 415.

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cratic strand in Shaftesbury’s thinking had previously surfaced in the preamble to the constitution devised in 1669 for his proprietary colony of Carolina (which Locke probably had a hand in drafting), which entrenched aristocratic power, implicitly derogating pure monarchy and explicitly seeking to ‘avoid erecting a numerous democracy’.55 Among the proto-Whig peerage, Lord Holles’s stance is as striking as Shaftesbury’s, for his Restoration career was distinguished by his staunch upholding of aristocratic authority. Holles held that, of the three co-ordinate estates, the nobility constituted the fulcrum, balancing king and people, shielding each from the other. Peers were senators, men of weight and wisdom, who counselled monarchs and restrained the populace. Monarch and people were never so wisely governed as when under the tutelage of a virtuous nobility. On the eve of the Restoration Holles had vigorously argued for the restoration of the House of Lords, and his aristocratic vision became more obtrusive after his own elevation to the peerage. He belonged to a broader trend toward enlarging aristocratic jurisdiction which emerged during Charles’s reign, and was involved in the Lords’ energetic assertion of their judicial role, particularly in the cases of Skinner v. East India Company (1667) and Shirley v. Fagg (1675). A clause proposed by Holles and the earl of Anglesey for the Conventicle Bills of 1664 and 1670 outlawing private religious meetings would have exempted the homes of peers from the Act’s provisions.56 A reinforcement of the aristocratic ideal dates from the period Holles and his colleagues moved into opposition in 1675 and is expressed in two tracts which Holles wrote defending the House of Lords as the ‘supreme court of judicature’ and as having a necessary role in fiscal legislation. Their broader aim was to characterize peers as the real tribunes of the people, on behalf of the public good in the face of a delinquent Lower House. The Commons, Holles wrote, was failing to attend to its ‘public service’, with over 200 Members not even deigning to attend. At such times the nobility must ‘interpose, to give relief and ease to the people’. The Upper House is a ‘check’ upon the Lower, and whereas the monarch checks by his ‘negative voice’ (his legislative veto), the House of Lords checks by its ‘deliberative voice’. The Lords were not merely to ‘sit there as so many parish clerks, only to say Amen to what the House of Commons hath resolved’. It was not even the case that the Lords had no say in taxation, as if the Commons were the people’s ‘sole representatives, and … trustees for them’. In vindicating this point, Holles made a rhetorical gesture towards democracy. It cannot be granted, he wrote, that the Commons ‘represent all the people, for how many thousands are there in every county whom they do not represent, and who have no voice in their election, and so confer no trust upon them?’ This

55

The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, in John Locke, Political Essays, ed. M. Goldie (Cambridge, 1997), p. 162. 56 Lacey, Dissent, pp. 53–4, 60; Swatland, Lords, pp. 16, 118, 134–5.

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was of course a tactical move: not a call for a mass franchise, but a strike against the Lower House’s pretension to be the plenary representative of the people.57 Holles’s talk of ‘checks’ upon the Commons was a means of iterating the ‘trinitarian’ thesis about the English constitution which had been so fundamental to the Parliamentarians during the Civil War, but was dangerous to articulate during the Restoration: the notion that the crown was not supreme within the constitution but merely co-equal in a trinity of king, lords, and commons. His insistence that the Lords checked the Commons implied that the Lords equally checked the crown. In Restoration England it was safer to trumpet the Commons’ rather than the king’s need of aristocratic restraint, but the corollary could scarcely be missed. ‘Old’ Whigs and ‘modern’ Whigs

The doctrine of annual parliaments remained a persistent undercurrent during the Exclusion Crisis, submerged under the hue and cry of popery and the succession. William Penn’s England’s Great Interest, published in the year of two elections, 1679, opened by expressing gratitude that ‘it hath pleased God and the king, to begin to revive and restore to us our ancient right of frequent parliaments’; Algernon Sidney insisted on annual parliaments; and so did the election broadsheet An Address to the Freeholders of Middlesex (1680).58 A set of draft constituency instructions to MPs, dating from 1681, placed ‘the right of the people to have annual parliaments’ alongside three other demands: exclusion of the popish heir, prevention of standing armies, and refusal of fiscal supply until the nation was freed from popery.59 Henry Neville’s Plato Redivivus, published the same year, protested against ‘the inexecution of the great law of calling parliaments annually’, and proposed automatic elections without prerogative writs of summons, ‘every year at a certain day … as they do in parishes … to choose officers’. (Note once again the reserve of constituent power in the people should the upper echelon of government default.) The anonymous Vox Populi more vehemently asserted that, since the Popish Plot’s discovery, parliament had been thrice snuffed out prematurely, and the king’s perpetual (Cavalier) parliament was now succeeded by frequent and irregular dissolutions, which 57

Denzil Holles, The Case Stated Concerning the Judicature of the House of Peers (1675), pp. 17, 79, 83; Holles, The Case Stated of the Jurisdiction of the House of Lords (1676), pp. 5, 15, 17, 40, 83. Cf. Holles, The Grand Question Concerning the Judicature of the House of Peers (1669); and manuscript tracts in BL, MS Harleian 6810. 58 William Penn, Political Writings, ed. A. Murphy (Indianapolis, IN, 2002), p. 384; Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, ed. T. West (Indianapolis, IN, 1990), pp. 529–30; Scott, Sidney, pp. 168, 189. 59 The National Archives, PRO/30/24/6B/399; Haley, Shaftesbury, p. 627. The draft is sometimes attributed to Locke, but this is unlikely. Cf. Anon., Vox Patriae … A True Collection of the Petitions and Addresses (1681).

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amounted to ‘the breaking of the government and introducing arbitrary power’. The manifesto of the duke of Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685 included a promise of annual parliaments.60 In the aftermath of the Revolution, the demand for statutory regularity of parliaments persisted until William III conceded the Triennial Act in 1694, but the insistence on annual elections receded. The Bill of Rights was pusillanimous in merely stipulating that parliaments ‘ought to be held frequently’. Late in 1689 a bill was discussed which provided for automatic dissolution after three years. In 1692 the earl of Shrewsbury proposed a bill for annual elections: the Lords amended it to triennial, with a clause for annual sessions. In debates on a further triennial bill in 1693, some Whigs, such as Robert Harley, Goodwin Wharton, and Shrewsbury, still appealed to annualism, holding that an act declaratory of existing law was all that was required. But others, like Lords Montagu and Somers, judged it time to dispense with Edward III’s law. For Montagu, it was ‘antiquated law … never insisted upon’ and its revival would amount to a ‘Venetian’ (republican) constraint on the prerogative. Somers shrewdly argued that medieval parliaments had wielded greater judicial powers than they do now, and had thus been required to sit regularly to administer justice, whereas such business now lay with the courts. An annually elected legislative assembly was no longer needed, and would be a ‘great grievance’, making people ‘weary’ of parliaments. Montagu and Somers thus cast aside ancient constitutionalism and were frank modernists. ‘The constitution … was quite otherwise then’, Montagu said, jettisoning the antiquarian litany. The 1693 debate, while replete with denunciations of Charles II’s ‘perpetual’ and ‘pensionary’ parliament, evinced considerable scepticism about annualism, even among supporters of statutory frequency. New arguments against over-frequency surfaced: that it would fuel endless ‘hot’ elections and ‘animosities’ to disturb the body politic, and that the Commons, if annually elected, would be weakened in relation to the Lords. These arguments reflected worries about the febrile nature of the new politics of party electioneering, and a suspicion that the case for regular parliaments unduly augmented the power of the nobility: an annual MP would be a weak MP.61 It is striking that Locke was on the side of the ‘modern’ Whigs. While 60

C. Robbins (ed.), Two English Republican Tracts (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 144, 172, 191; Vox Populi, or the People’s Claim to their Parliament’s Sitting (1681), pp. 5–6: repr. in Malcolm (ed.), Struggle, II, 656–60; The Declaration of James Duke of Monmouth (1685), p. 5. Cf. CSPD, 1680–1, p. 107; M. Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–1681 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 197–9, 248, 291–2, 312; M. S. Zook, ‘Turncoats and Double Agents in Restoration and Revolutionary England: The Case of Robert Ferguson, the Plotter’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 42 (2009), 363–78, at 371–2. 61 Narcissus Luttrell, Parliamentary Diary, ed. H. Horwitz (Oxford, 1972), pp. 390–416, quotations at 406–7; Grey, Debates, X, 329–31; W. Sachse, Lord Somers (Manchester, 1975), p. 56; J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles (Cambridge, 1977), p. 41; L. G. Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, 1689 (Baltimore, MD, 1981), pp. 98–100. For arguments on the incivility of frequent elections during the Septennial Bill debate, see M. Knights, Representation and

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he recognized that a state’s ‘original constitution’ may require the legislature to assemble ‘at certain intervals’, he argued that ‘constant frequent meetings’ and ‘fixed intervals’ can be ‘burdensome’ and have ‘dangerous consequences’, and accordingly he left the convening of parliaments to the executive.62 William III’s veto of the 1693 Triennial Bill brought a momentary reprieve for annualism, fuelled by radical Whig disillusionment with the new king.63 John Wildman, in An Enquiry, or a Discourse Between a Yeoman of Kent and a Knight of a Shire (1693), appealed once again to the ‘ancient constitution’, angry that so many valuable bills fell at the prorogation that year: legislation was at the mercy of the royal prerogative. Wildman assumed that at the Revolution ‘the ancient, legal course of annually chosen parliaments would have been immediately restored’, without which the ‘Turkish doctrine’ that holding parliaments depends absolutely on the king would hold sway.64 The fullest restatement of the annual principle occurred in Samuel Johnson’s An Essay Concerning Parliaments (1693). Johnson recounted that, in 1689, he had pressed the earl of Devonshire and the future Scottish secretary of state, James Johnstoun, to bring forward legislation for ‘anniversary parliaments’ as the ‘basis of our constitution’. He was anxious to avoid slippage toward triennialism and was categorical that annual parliaments meant annual elections and not merely annual sessions. There was, he argued, no precedent for triennialism prior to 1640, and he repeated the annualist construal of the 1641 Act. Johnson provided the longest rehearsal of the medieval precedents since the Hollesian tracts, extending the case to the ‘yearly folkmote upon the kalends of May’ allegedly held in Saxon times, and citing Alfred and even King Arthur. He likened ‘standing parliaments’ to stinking stagnant ponds.65 The annual ideal did not lapse entirely. It was mooted again in John Toland’s Art of Governing by Partys (1701), though in a more Harringtonian than ancient constitutionalist idiom, for Toland brought the case under the republican principle of rotation as well as under Edwardian precedent. It was a shibboleth in Andrew Fletcher’s manifesto for a reformed Scottish polity in 1703: ‘you all know that parliaments were formerly chosen annually’. It resurfaced in debates on the Septiennial Bill in 1716 and in Cato’s Letters in the 1720s.66 Annualism Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2005), pp. 360–75; for ‘modern’ Whig objections to antique Whig annualism in the 1780s: Kemp, King and Commons, pp. 46–7. 62 Locke, TTG, II. 154, 156; cf. 153, 167, 213. 63 J. J. Carafano, ‘William III and the Negative Voice’, Albion 19 (1987), 509–25. 64 John Wildman, Enquiry (1693), pp. 1–2; cf. James Tyrrell, Bibliotheca Politica (1694), pp. 352, 355, 363, 668. 65 Samuel Johnson, Works (1710), pp. 277, 280, 289, 293. See M. S. Zook, ‘Early Whig Ideology, Ancient Constitutionalism, and the Reverend Samuel Johnson’, JBS 32 (1993), 139–65, at 151, 160; M. Goldie and C. Jackson, ‘Williamite Tyranny and the Whig Jacobites’, in Redefining William III, ed. E. Mijers and D. Onnekink (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 177–99. 66 John Toland, The Art of Governing by Partys (1701), pp. 71–3; Andrew Fletcher, Political Works (1732), p. 335; Cato’s Letters (6 January 1721), in M. Goldie (ed.), The Reception of Locke’s

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tended, however, to become a Platonic ideal rather than a practical demand, and in this form could find favour among country Tories. Reflecting in 1721 on his service with Sir William Temple in the 1690s, Jonathan Swift remarked, ‘I adored the wisdom of that Gothic constitution, which made them annual; and I was confident our liberty could never be placed upon a firm foundation until that ancient law was restored.’ Swift’s meaning, however, was probably not literal: rather, the principle helped citizens recognize that long parliaments were dangerous because ‘there grows up a commerce between the ministry and the deputies’, a ‘traffic’ destructive of liberty. Saxon purity was a beau ideal to remind people of the dangers of overweening executive power. It was surely in this spirit that the Jacobite Sir John Hinde Cotton toasted annual parliaments in 1745. Even the ‘commonwealthman’ Robert Molesworth conceded, around 1711, that, though ‘high Whiggism is for annual parliaments’, he was content with triennial for now. Molesworth inhabited a world in which the Mutiny and Land Tax Acts were, in any case, annualized: parliament had new methods for entrenching annual sessions.67 Thus the matter lapsed until the 1770s and 80s, when annual parliaments re-appeared on the reformist Whig agenda, in the programmes of the Society for Constitutional Information and the Society for Supporters of the Bill of Rights, and finding favour with the Whig scion Charles James Fox and the leader of the utilitarian radicals Jeremy Bentham.68 Its last surviving manifestation is the epitaph that still stands beneath John Cartwright’s statue in Cartwright Gardens, Bloomsbury, London: ‘the firm, consistent and persevering advocate of universal suffrage, equal representation, vote by ballot, and annual parliaments’.69

Politics (6 vols, 1999), II, 250. Cf. George Ridpath, An Historical Account of the Antient Rights and Power of the Parliament of Scotland (1703), pp. iv, viii. 67 Jonathan Swift, Prose Writings, ed. H. Davis et al. (14 vols, Oxford, 1939–63), IX, 32; G. Glickman, ‘The Career of Sir John Hynde Cotton (1686–1752)’, HJ 46 (2003), 817–841, at 824; John Ker, Memoirs (3 vols, 1726), III, 202. 68 Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, pp. 65, 80–4, 96. 69 See G. B. Owers, ‘Common Law Jurisprudence and Ancient Constitutionalism in the Thought of John Cartwright, Granville Sharp, and Capel Lofft’, HJ 58 (2015), 51–73.

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10 William Lawrence and the Case for King Monmouth Dryden’s Absalom and the birth of King Monmouth

In the opening lines of his celebrated political satire Absalom and Achitophel (1681) John Dryden depicts a polygamous golden age when men freely spread their seed, unencumbered by the Christian law of marriage: In pious times, e’r Priest-craft did begin, Before Polygamy was made a sin; When man, on many, multiply’d his kind, E’r one to one was, cursedly, confind: When Nature prompted, and no law deny’d Promiscuous use of Concubine and Bride;1

It was under this dispensation that Absalom, ‘so beautiful so brave’, was born to one of King David’s concubines. Dryden’s David represents King Charles II and Absalom his illegitimate son James, duke of Monmouth, who had been born to a woman called Lucy Walter. Charles had bedded her in 1649, during his exile in France. Now, in the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, Monmouth, ‘the Protestant duke’, staked a claim to the throne against ‘the Catholic duke’, the king’s brother and heir, James, duke of York. The fate of Protestant England, so it seemed to the Whigs, was in the balance, because Monmouth was barred from the throne by his illegitimacy. But what if Monmouth was not ‘illegitimate’ after all? What if ‘promiscuous use of concubine’ was no sin? Dryden ironizes a libertine and anticlerical view that nature’s laws are more liberal about sexual morality than those sanctioned by the church. By imposing a priestly ceremonial apparatus upon marriage, the church had usurped control over the laws of bastardy and inheritance. But by the purer law of nature the duke of Monmouth A version of this chapter appeared as ‘Contextualizing Dryden’s Absalom: William Lawrence, the Law of Marriage, and the Case for King Monmouth’, in Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540–1688, ed. D. B. Hamilton and R. Strier (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 208–30. I am indebted to Cambridge University Press for permission to reproduce material. 1

John Dryden, Poems and Fables, ed. J. Kinsley (Oxford, 1962), p. 190.

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was, quite simply, his father’s eldest son. It was ‘priestcraft’ that excluded the Protestant heir.2 A few months before the publication of Dryden’s poem in November 1681, precisely this case for Monmouth’s legitimacy was argued in a remarkable treatise by an aged Whig lawyer called William Lawrence. The book appeared in two instalments. Marriage by the Moral Law of God Vindicated was published in late summer 1680, but the printing of the rest was interrupted by a government raid against seditious printers. That was galling, for parliament was due to assemble on 21 October, and planned to debate the succession. On the 25th, protesting against ‘the interdiction of the press’, Lawrence sent a copy of the incomplete treatise to the Whig leader, the earl of Shaftesbury, whom he acclaimed as the ‘chief assertor of the Protestant religion and liberties’ – whom Dryden derided as the crafty Achitophel. Lawrence announced that, in the present contest between the lineal and the collateral heir, his book ‘unanswerably proved’ that the king’s eldest son was the true legatee of the crown, and that, notwithstanding ‘all intrigues of court’, parliament should immediately proclaim the Protestant succession.3 In November a bill to exclude the duke of York passed the House of Commons but was rejected by the Lords. The second instalment of Lawrence’s treatise, The Right of Primogeniture in Succession to the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, carries the date 1681 and appeared at the turn of the year. It concluded with an urgent address to parliament. At the end of March another Exclusion Bill failed when the king abruptly dissolved his last parliament. Lawrence lived just long enough to see the Whigs defeated, for he died early in 1682.4 In arguing that the law of nature vindicated Monmouth’s legitimacy, Lawrence challenged the whole fabric of marriage law. He claimed it was nothing but a priestly innovation foisted on European society in popish times. Despite its rambling digressiveness, his 600-page book is remarkable for its sweep, intellectual resourcefulness, and impatiently reformist agenda. Amid 2

There is abundant commentary on Dryden’s politics. See P. Harth, Pen for a Party: Dryden’s Tory Propaganda (Princeton, NJ, 1993); S. N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority (Ithaca, NY, 1993), ch. 5. For context, see J. Cairncross, After Polygamy was Made a Sin: The Social History of Christian Polygamy (1974); F. Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (2012). For new perspectives, see J. A. Gianoutsos, The Rule of Manhood: Tyranny, Gender, and Classical Republicanism in England, 1603–1660 (Cambridge, 2021). 3 The National Archives, PRO 31/24/6A, pt 1, fol. 179. The gifting of the book did not remain confidential, for it was reported in 1681 to the Tory writer John Brydall: CSPD, 1680–1, p. 440. M. Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–1681 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 162. 4 Lawrence’s treatise will be cited here as MML, the two parts indicated as I and II. For previous discussions, see R. Weil, ‘The Politics of Legitimacy: Women and the Warming-Pan Scandal’, in The Revolution of 1688–89, ed. L. G. Schwoerer (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 65–82, at 74, 76; H. Nenner, The Right to be King: The Succession to the Crown of England, 1603–1714 (Basingstoke, 1995), passim; R. Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family, and Political Argument in England, 1680–1714 (Manchester, 1999), pp. 54–8.

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much else, he excoriated the slavery of wives in marriage, advocated divorce, attacked chancery and the church courts, as well as arguing for Anglo-Scottish Union, religious toleration, freedom of the press, and the amelioration of poverty. He wrote like a coffee-house libertine when expounding the phantasmagoric diversity of sexual and marital mores worldwide. But he also wrote like the old Puritan that he was, when condemning the gaudy and priapic rituals that accompanied contemporary, supposedly Christian, marriage celebrations. His point – when he reached it – was that only a conspiracy of priests and Tories was barring Monmouth from the British thrones. Dryden’s poem offers one point of entry to Lawrence’s treatise, John Locke another. ‘Who heir?’ asked Locke in the last and longest chapter of the first of his Two Treatises of Government. In one passage of this relentless attack on Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, he argued that though we may readily accept that monarchs have their rights, the critical question remains: who is the rightful inheritor of the crown? Filmer’s assertion of monarchical supremacy does not resolve whether inheritance should, for example, pass through the female line (as it did in England, but not in France), or whether an enfeebled elder son should give place to a healthy younger son. These are not ‘idle speculations, but such as in history we shall find, have concerned the inheritance of crowns and kingdoms’. Amid this tally, Locke had a further query: Whether the elder son by a concubine, before a younger son by a wife? From whence also will arise many questions of legitimation, and what in nature is the difference betwixt a wife and a concubine? For as to the municipal or positive laws of men, they can signify nothing here.5

Locke implied that, whatever human laws teach, it is an open question whether the law of nature distinguishes between a wife and a concubine. It was the closest Locke came to canvassing Monmouth’s claim. He knew that William Lawrence had advanced the relevant case, for he owned Lawrence’s book – years later, he lent his copy to James Tyrrell and was anxious to get it back. He also wrote the title of Lawrence’s book into one of his bibles. Lawrence was a brother-in-law of Locke’s friend, the physician Thomas Sydenham. As Shaftesbury’s political advisor, Locke may have received Lawrence’s presentation copy of Marriage by the Moral Law.6 The duke of Monmouth’s bid for the crown ended on the battlefield of Sedgemoor and the executioner’s block. In 1685, the year that the duke of York 5 Locke,

TTG, I. 123–4. Cf. II. 109, where Jephtha, ‘a bastard’, is chosen ruler. J. Harrison and P. Laslett, The Library of John Locke (Oxford, 1971), nos 1693–4; John Locke, Correspondence, ed. E. S. de Beer (8 vols, Oxford, 1976–89), nos 1861, 1924; J. Marshall, ‘Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism”, and Unitarianism’, in English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford, 2000), pp. 111–82, at 146. Algernon Sidney explained that ‘in … many … kingdoms, bastards have been advanced [to the throne] before their legitimate brothers’: Discourses Concerning Government, ed. T. G. West (Indianapolis, IN, 1990), p. 168. 6

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became England’s last Catholic monarch, scarcely any of the Whig magnates stirred themselves in Monmouth’s cause, and his rebellion depended on a makeshift army of West Country artisans and farmers. Yet five years earlier, ‘young Jemmy’ had been the darling of the gentry and commonalty alike. As the king’s favourite son, the holder of high office, and a charismatic martial hero, he had impeccable credentials for those who wished to attack ‘old Jemmy’ while avoiding the charge that they were reviving the anarchic anti-monarchism of the Civil War era. With hindsight the claims of William of Orange loom larger, for in 1688–9 he successfully overthrew James II and assumed the throne. But in 1680 Monmouth had enormous éclat and his cause sponsored a wealth of literature. Among one hundred items published about him and his cause, there are accounts of his heroism in Continental wars, his royal progresses, and his cures of scrofula by ‘touching for the King’s Evil’; poems and songs on his surpassing virtue – and overweening ambition; celebrations of his zeal against popery; and allegories and jeremiads on the theme of Absalom, who, in the Book of Kings, rose in rebellion against his father King David. The topos of the biblical Absalom gained such an imaginative hold that Monmouth’s life seemed destined to imitate art. Dryden’s counterblast was a propagandist triumph for the Tories. It was, preened Narcissus Luttrell, ‘an excellent poem against the duke of Monmouth, earl of Shaftesbury and that party and in vindication of the king and his friends’.7 Not least of the genres to which Monmouth gave impetus was the nascent novel, in the bucolic romance The Perplex’d Prince (1682), and in Aphra Behn’s hostile Love Letters from a Nobleman to his Sister (1684).8 In the history of political thought, Monmouth’s cause scarcely figures.9 Admittedly, Lawrence’s book appears to be the only sustained treatise in the duke’s defence of any philosophical ambition. Astonishingly, the treatise is not mentioned in the innumerable modern books about Monmouth and his rebellion.10 For this lacuna there is a simple explanation. The obvious way to remove the impediment of Monmouth’s illegitimacy was to try to prove that Charles II had married Lucy Walter. The question of the putative marriage, and Walter’s character, captivated both contemporaries and historians. Charles published explicit denials of the marriage. But there were 7

In his copy now in the Huntington Library, California: call no. 135868. The imaginative literature spawned by Monmouth’s cause merits more exploration than it has received. On Behn, see M. Zook, ‘Contextualising Aphra Behn: Plays, Politics, and Party, 1679–1689’, in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. H. L. Smith (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 75–93. 9 But see W. Schmidgen, ‘The Last Royal Bastard and the Multitude’, JBS 47 (2008), 53–76. 10 The most recent biography is A. Keay, The Last Royal Rebel: The Life and Death of James, Duke of Monmouth (2016). The best studies of the rebellion are P. Earle, Monmouth’s Rebels (1977); R. Clifton, The Last Popular Rebellion (1984). Lawrence appears also to be absent from Dryden scholarship. 8

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enough doubts to sustain rumours, which prompted much labour to demonstrate the probability of a secret marriage (and to show that Walter was not the low-born whore the earl of Clarendon and John Evelyn took her for). From as early as 1662 Samuel Pepys heard rumours that there had been a marriage and, as Queen Catherine of Braganza’s barrenness became apparent, there was talk of having Monmouth declared legitimate. Relations between the dukes of York and Monmouth collapsed in 1678 when York discovered the omission of the phrase ‘natural son’ in Monmouth’s patent of appointment as Captain General. The most loudly canvassed story concerned the Black Box, supposed to contain a certificate of a marriage in Paris, officiated by John Cosin, later bishop of Durham. This ‘evidence’ was discussed by Monmouth’s publicist, the Dissenting divine and inveterate conspirator, Robert Ferguson.11 The exclusive attention which historians devote to the affair of the Black Box and to Ferguson’s case for King Monmouth ignores Lawrence’s alternative argument. For Lawrence, the search for a putative marriage ceremony was utterly irrelevant. Charles II was ‘married’ to Lucy Walter not because of a superstition about a ceremony, but because sexual intercourse had taken place. The modern laws of marriage and legitimation had no authority under God’s and nature’s laws. They were corrupt artifices. During the Middle Ages popish churchmen had taken marriage under their wing, just as they had usurped authority over other spheres of life. By turning marriage into an ecclesiastical ceremony, requiring an officiating priest, the clergy amassed huge power and wealth. They manipulated kingdoms and estates through their power to adjudicate rules of legitimacy, inheritance, and affinity. The process culminated in the Council of Trent’s decree that all marriages without a church ceremony were null and void, and their issue illegitimate. Among the manifold tasks of the Reformation, Lawrence argued, was the laicization of marriage, and the replacement of metaphysical mummery about ceremonies with a recognition of its real nature: a union grounded in coitus. Lawrence’s book was thus a work of juridical, historical, and sexual anti-popery. It is to this argument that Dryden and Locke alluded, not to Ferguson’s tale of the Black Box. Despite all the rumours about the king’s secret marriage, it is plain that Lawrence’s version of King Monmouth’s case was popular too. A government spy reported of Lawrence’s treatise: ‘I have met with a book cut into two parts by the disturbance of the press … it came out very seasonably last Michaelmas Term and is to be found in all the great sectaries’ libraries.’12 There may also be an echo of Lawrence’s case in John Crowne’s adaptation

11 Ferguson,

A Letter to a Person of Honour Concerning the Black Box (1680); idem, A Letter to a Person of Honour Concerning the King’s Disavowing the Having been Married to the D of M’s Mother (1680). Ferguson was later the author of Monmouth’s insurrectionary Declaration (1685). See M. Zook, ‘Turncoats and Double Agents in Restoration and Revolutionary England: The Case of Robert Ferguson the Plotter’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 42 (2009), 363–78. 12 CSPD, 1681, pp. 440–1 (7 September 1681).

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of Shakespeare’s Henry VI (1681). The cardinal gives voice to a Monmouthite plaint: … at my making there it seems did want Some Holy Ceremonies, for want of which I’m that the Rude Ill-manar’d Law calls Bastard. … the Law has thrust me from Succession.13

William Lawrence, Erastian Puritan

Born about 1613, William Lawrence, of Wraxhall in Dorset, was about thirty when the Civil War broke out and nearly seventy when he published his only book. Educated at Trinity College, Oxford, and the Middle Temple, he became a successful barrister.14 In a life of unostentatious legal sedulousness, his sole period of public prominence was as a Cromwellian judge in Scotland between 1653 and 1660, and a member of the Protectorate parliaments. This experience cast its shadow over his treatise, which echoes Interregnum preoccupations. In its interstices lie recommendations for law reform similar to those enunciated by the Hale Commission in 1652 and by Cromwell’s law reformer, William Sheppard, in England’s Balme (1657). These include the reduction of lawyers’ fees and obfuscatory proceedings, an end to the ‘exotic gibberish’ of Latin and Law French, the alleviation of imprisonment for debt and extortionate bail, the salarying of judges (in place of fees), and the abolition of ecclesiastical courts and excommunication (and particularly the transference of probate to secular courts). Above all, Lawrence stood in the shadow of the Act of 1653 which introduced civil marriage, replacing church ceremonial (and pagan merrymaking) with a simple public declaration before a magistrate. This legislation was praised by John Milton for having ‘recovered the civil liberty of marriage from encroachment’ by priests ‘and transferred the ratifying and registering thereof from the canonical shop to the proper cognizance of civil magistrates’.15 While the Act foundered upon popular attachment to church weddings and its dogmatic denial of the validity of marriages not civilly performed, it did provide an impetus for the evolution of the doctrine of marriage as a civil contract. 13

John Crowne, Henry the Sixth (1681), p. 17. See N. K. Maguire, ‘Factionary Politics: John Crowne’s Henry VI’, in Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration, ed. G. Maclean (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 70–92. 14 For his biography: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, ed. P. Bliss (5 vols, Oxford, 1813–20), IV, 62–3; J. Hutchins, The History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset (4 vols, 1861–74), II, 201–3. 15 John Milton, Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings (1659), p. 76. See S. Achinstein, ‘Saints or Citizens? Ideas of Marriage in Seventeenth-Century English Republicanism’, Seventeenth Century 25 (2010), 240–64. Milton and Locke are discussed in J. Witte, From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition (Louisville, KY, 1997).

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When the Act was attacked in 1657 it was Cromwellian Presbyterians and Independents such as Lawrence’s colleague John Desborough who defended it. Like them, Lawrence stood for secularizing and thereby re-Christianizing marriage: his attack on the ‘Romish hydra of formalities’ was made in the name of godly reformation and the ‘correction of manners’.16 Lawrence’s book was redolent of the Erastian Puritanism of his youth. The Reformation, he says, succeeded only in translating popedom from Rome to Canterbury, though he was content with bishops as pastoral ‘overseers’, so long as they were not lordly prelates.17 His title page has allegorical figures of Religion, Justice, Property, Liberty, and Moral Law, standing against the enemy, Ceremonial Law, the latter represented by a cathedral with noxious beasts prowling, and adorned with a mitre, rosary, candle, and marriage ring. He advocated liberty of conscience within a broad national church, and argued for the election of parish ministers by secret ballot.18 His treatise was a belated exercise in Puritan anti-formalism.19 In 1678 Lawrence, like the rest of the Protestant nation, was badly scared by the revelation of a Popish Plot. He reported panic rumours of a French invasion gripping his native Dorset that winter.20 The emerging Whig party had an overwhelming sense that the king’s government was criminally negligent of Catholicism, if not downright subverted by it. The godly faced the same crisis of ‘popery and arbitrary power’ as they had in 1640.21 Lawrence joined those who took up their pens against popery. He published a translation of an anti-papal satire in the Erasmian tradition written by Ferrante Pallavicino, a Milanese adventurer, libertine, and romancer, who had been executed at the age of twenty-eight in 1644. The Heavenly Divorce, or, Our Saviour Divorced from 16

MML, I, 254ff. See D. Veall, The Popular Movement for Law Reform, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1970); C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972), ch. 15; B. Worden, The Rump Parliament, 1648–1653 (Cambridge, 1974), ch. 5; S. Staves, Players’ Sceptres: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln, NE, 1979), pp. 14, 115–16; N. Matthews, William Sheppard, Cromwell’s Law Reformer (Cambridge, 1984); J. Gillis, For Better, for Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (Oxford, 1985), pp. 126–30; C. Durston, ‘The Regulation of Marriage during the English Revolution’, HJ 31 (1988), 45–59. For anticlerical insistence that marriage was a civil institution, see Weil, Political Passions, ch. 5; K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford, 1986), 278–9, 634; J. Rose, Godly Kingship in Restoration England (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 124–8. 17 MML, I, 375–6, 396–400. 18 MML, I, 58, 343, 375–7, 415–17. 19 See J. C. Davis, ‘Against Formality: One Aspect of the English Revolution’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 3 (1992), 265–88. 20 MML, I, 280. 21 See J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge, 1991); idem, England’s Troubles (Cambridge, 2000). Lawrence, however, despite his anti-popery, advocated liberty of worship (but denial of public office) for Catholics, because the oppressed are tempted to rebel and because recusancy laws were being used against Protestant Dissenters: MML, I, 393, 401, 417; II, 131, 157–60.

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the Church of Rome his Spouse: Provoked by her Lewd and Adulterous Behaviour in the World appeared about the end of 1678.22 Il divortio celeste has three parts. In the first (all that Lawrence translated), the souls of the dead petition heaven asking that Christ repudiate the Church of Rome, ‘by reason of her lewd deportment in the world’. St Paul, acting as God’s investigator, visits Italy to collect evidence. His dossier is predictably filled with scandals: the sale of pardons, the rape of nuns, the nepotism of popes, the assassination of heretic princes, and the plots of Jesuits. A divorce between Christ and his church, that ‘wicked, lustful, cruel, bloody strumpet’, is decreed amid an angelic fanfare. In the second part, the continuing evils of Rome are recorded, and in the third, the Reformed nations, Calvinist and Lutheran, supplicate to be the new spouse of Christ – but God prefers to wait and see. Pallavicino was as much Erastian as Erasmian. He applauded Paulo Sarpi, the theorist of Venetian resistance against the papacy. God gave temporal power to civil states and not to churchmen. This conviction, that ‘lay princes … represent God’, remained equally strong in the English Puritan tradition, and reminds us that the ideal of the godly prince continued to be a mark of Protestant – and Whig – rejection of Rome. In defence of Pallavicino’s chosen genre, Lawrence asked that satiric prose be permitted even in so serious a matter as the fate of true religion, for the cunning of Ulysses is as useful as the courage of Ajax. He added that even to take up his pen required no small courage, for ‘the dangers of Primrose Hill are enough to discourage the boldest of English patriots’: an allusion to the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, the magistrate who first investigated the Popish Plot.23 The natural law of marriage

The Heavenly Divorce is saturated with sexual and marital imagery. So too is Lawrence’s Marriage by the Moral Law, which turned from the allegorical to the legal, historical, and anthropological connections between popery and sexuality. It is a profoundly paradoxical book, at once a defence of sexual freedom and an obsessionally prurient disquisition on the affinity between popery and sexual impurity. In its first guise it is libertine. Whereas the church teaches that coitus before church marriage is fornication, Lawrence holds that ‘fornication’ simply does not exist. ‘Carnal knowledge … is not fornication’: it constitutes

22

For a doubtful suggestion that this was the work of another William Lawrence, see G. Aylmer (ed.), The Diary of William Lawrence (Beaminster, 1961), pp. xxi–xxii. For Pallavicino: N. Davidson, ‘Unbelief and Atheism in Italy, 1500–1700’, in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. M. Hunter and D. Wootton (Oxford, 1992), pp. 55–85, at 79; E. Muir, The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera (Cambridge, MA, 2007), ch. 2. 23 Ferrante Pallavicino, The Heavenly Divorce (1679), sigs A4r, A5v, B1r, B2r, a3v; pp. 69–76.

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‘private marriage’.24 To this extent, Lawrence stands in the Restoration tradition of Epicurean scepticism about traditional Christian morality. The earl of Rochester’s poetic celebrations of promiscuity is this tradition’s most celebrated representative. In Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668), a shipwrecked sailor fathers a whole commonwealth by his harem. Denis Veiras’s utopian novel, The History of the Sevarambians (1675), licenses polygamy.25 In plays and memoirs the fashionable spa of Tunbridge Wells, to which the wits and courtiers regularly decamped, became an emblem of a priapic state of nature. Lawrence sometimes voiced a gratuitous libertinism, as in his retelling of Montaigne’s story of a French woman who was raped, ‘but after often rejoiced, and thanked God she had once in her life so much pleasure without sin’.26 But generally Lawrence is only pornographic when piously refuting priestcraft. He contrived to combine a permissive theory of marriage with a conventional ethical Puritanism, in a manner reminiscent of Milton’s divorce tracts. He disapproved of adultery and prostitution, and his case sometimes hangs quaintly and perilously on the notion that men and women will be faithful to those they first bed. One of Lawrence’s chief grounds for disapproving of conventional marriage ceremonies is that they are occasions of ‘lascivious songs, promiscuous dancings, excessive vanity of apparel’, gluttony, drunkenness, revelling, and the ‘public exposing of virgins … to be the gazing-stocks of the multitude’. The whole charade is an ‘unnecessary publication of what ought to be kept secret’, such that it was, he said, odd that a society which indulges in it should take issue with Diogenes for copulating in the marketplace.27 It was not only the gaudiness but also the mercenary nature of public marriage which disturbed Lawrence. Among the well-off, the practice of giving dowries reduces marriage to a cattle market. It amounts to a price ‘to hire men and women to live together’. It leads to the auctioning of wealthy daughters and to unseemly marriages between young men and rich old widows. It encourages the casual rape of poor women by wealthy men, for ‘though they had beauty to answer their lust, they had no money to answer their covetousness’. Lawrence admired the laws of Sparta and Poland, where dowries were forbidden.28 The

24

MML, I, 101. A. O. Aldridge, ‘Polygamy in Early Fiction: Henry Neville and Denis Veiras’, Publications of the Modern Language Association 65 (195), 464–72; G. Mahlberg, ‘Republicanism as Anti-patriarchalism in Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines’, in Liberty, Authority, Formality, ed. J. Morrow and J. Scott (Exeter, 2008), pp. 131–52; idem, Henry Neville and English Republican Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester, 2009); J. Scheckter, The Isle of Pines: Henry Neville’s Uncertain Utopia (Farnham, 2011). Modern editions: The Isle of Pines [with More, Utopia; Bacon, New Atlantis], ed. S. Bruce (Oxford, 1999); Veiras/Vairasse: The History of the Sevarambians: A Utopian Novel, ed. J. C. Laursen and C. Masroori (Albany, NY, 2006). 26 MML, I, 16. 27 MML, I, 198–200, 103–8; II, 84. 28 MML, I, 70, 113–15. 25 See

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poor do not have dowries, but the appurtenances of church marriage are still a terrible burden to them: The expense of new clothes for man and woman, the wedding dinner, the barrel of beer, the bridal night, the baptizing of children, the godfathers and godmothers, the gossips and churching the women … most commonly bring the poor man so far in debt, that he never recovers out of it as long as he lives.29

Lawrence had embarked on a comprehensive critique of the institution of public marriage. He saw the ceremony itself, the dispensations from impediments of affinity and consanguinity, the churching of women, and the prohibitions on marriage at certain times of the year, as part of the fabric of priestly avarice. The priests had even kept monarchs in bondage. That the Reformation had its origins in Henry VIII’s marital difficulties was not, for Lawrence – as often it was for both Anglican and Puritan divines – an embarrassing distraction from the theological core: it was of the essence. Henry’s thwarting of papal power over the precious business of the royal succession was the very source of England’s ‘Protestant religion and liberty’. Now, in 1680, the Reformation must be renewed as it had begun, by breaking the fetters of popish ceremonial law still seated in the heart of English marriage law. The ‘final causes’ (in the Aristotelian sense of ‘purposes’) of marriage are not to fill priests’ pockets or give ecclesiastics power over inheritances, but to provide helpmeets in life and to procreate.30 Lawrence construed the church’s law of marriage not only in terms of anticlerical rhetoric – it is ‘superstitious’ – but also in terms of nominalist logic – it is ‘unreal’, not grounded in material fact. Canon law grounded marriage in pre-contracts and in verbal promises at the altar, rather than in carnal embrace. In so doing it perpetrated a ‘fiction’ or empty abstraction. It privileged an ‘intention of the mind’ over the ‘real and true’ conjunction of bodies, and turned marriage into metaphysical gibberish.31 Lawrence was deeply hostile in general to ‘the multitudes and miserable mischiefs of fictions and falsities in the spiritual common law and chancery courts in England’, and in this theme he reminds the modern reader of Jeremy Bentham’s denunciations a century later.32 It is striking that Lawrence’s guiding idea – ‘copulation, not contract, makes a marriage’ – was as foreign to the secular notion of contract as to the clerical notion of ceremony, and took him beyond the principle of public civil marriage embodied in the 1653 Act. For him, civil logomachy was as inimical as religious ritual to the natural fact of coitus.

29

MML, I, 199. MML, I, sig. a2r–v; 135. 31 MML, I, 83, 193. 32 Lawrence also critiqued the ‘fictions’ of official oaths, which (Quaker-like) he thought blasphemous hypocrisies. In 1678 he refused the oath of office for sheriff of Dorset. He tried to publish his reasons but was refused a licence by the censor: MML, I, 166–7, 280. 30

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The Catholic Church’s systematic separation of marriage from coitus was of a piece with its perverse principle of clerical celibacy, its prizing of virginity, and legitimizing of unconsummated marriages. The English post-Reformation law of marriage still entailed many fictions inherited from Catholicism: the validity of betrothals, often undertaken by minors, and of pre-contracts; the legitimacy of a wife’s children adulterously conceived; and the legal death of a woman upon marriage.33 This last topic especially animated Lawrence. He deplored the way marriage ‘transubstantiated’ husband and wife into a single legal entity. ‘I shall not here dispute which is the greatest absurdity of transubstantiation, of bread into flesh in the mass, or of the flesh of a woman into the flesh of a man in marriage.’ The law of coverture was destructive to both parties, for each could despoil the other’s estate. The woman of course suffered most, for she was ‘made a slave, incapable of property’, ‘her estate forfeited and consumed by her husband’s vices’. The law treated wives ‘as if they had been bought by him for slaves at a market’. Their inheritance could be squandered on their husband’s ‘women, drinking, dicing, and other viciousness’. If raped, a wife could only litigate through her husband; if ‘beaten by her husband, [she] hath no remedy’. Prostitutes ‘are in better condition than wives’, for the harlot did not lose ‘the property of her goods and rights to him who lies with her’. In short, ‘ladies I pity you’. The remedy lay in giving wives the rights of legal personality claimed by all ‘freeborn Englishmen’.34 Lawrence believed that those who cohabited without formal marriage were better behaved: It is well known men and women of all estates and conditions, if they have not been before a priest in a temple, will live forty years together in one house and dare not rob, beat, or injure one another; because they have liberty to sue for damage, which benefit this sottish sacrament of priests, and lawyers, gives no persons transubstantiated.35

Lawrence’s zealous castigations overlooked the small but significant progress of legal devices – separate maintenance agreements in the form of trusts, dower, and jointure – which had begun to mitigate the legal doctrine of coverture, at least for the well-off. Ironically, Lawrence lambasted the one body which did bring about some improvement in the legal position of women in marriage: chancery. It was the application of equity doctrines which opened the way to married women’s separate property rights.36 But Lawrence saw chancery as an oppressive instrument of royal interference. With the characteristic venom of a 33

MML, I, 186, 193, 197. MML, I, 67–70. 35 MML, I, 70–1. ‘Transubstantiated’: changed by a priest into a married couple. 36 S. Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, MA, 1990); A. Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (1993). 34

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Puritan common lawyer he denounced the ‘terrible oppression’ of the prerogative courts. He did not deny, however, the value of chancery’s equity principles, but believed they should be pleaded in the common law courts, as was done in Scotland.37 Lawrence’s anticlericalism generated other types of legal blindness. It prevented him from acknowledging that canon law had always recognized that the essence of marriage lay in mutual consent – the presence of a priest was not necessary – and that the church courts were in some respects more tolerant of private marriage than the civil. He also failed to concede that the damaging consequences of coverture stemmed largely from common not canon law. Lawrence advocated divorce. Such advocacy was rare, and, except by private act of parliament, divorce remained impossible. A few other writers took up the claim of Reformation theologians that Christ allowed a man to divorce his wife for adultery. This principle underlay the Roos Divorce Bill in 1670 (which all but two of the bishops opposed). That bill had produced a flurry of debate, the most outspoken tract being The Case of Divorce (1673) by Sir Charles Wolseley, who was, like Lawrence, in turn a Presbyterian, a Cromwellian, and a Shaftesburian.38 John Selden’s Uxor Ebraica (1646) had provided a scholarly examination of Christ’s teaching in its Jewish context, but neither he nor Wolseley went further than allowing divorce for a wife’s adultery. Milton had been more radical in his pamphlets of 1643–5: he condemned priestly ceremonialism as well as indissolubility.39 Locke’s allowance of divorce once children had been educated is generally overlooked, but was noticed by eighteenth-century commentators.40 The subject was also canvassed in George Farquhar’s play, The Beaux Strategem (1707).41 In one passage, Lawrence permitted divorce ‘for adultery and other lawful causes’, but in another, more bluntly, ‘divorce by consent’. This was no rash slip: he applauded the ‘free divorce of both parties’ in Roman law, and noted Seneca’s allowance of divorce initiated by wives too.42 His preoccupation with fecundity made him emphatic that barren marriages could be repudiated – the point had force amid murmurs against Charles II’s childless queen, Catherine

37

MML, I, 63. On the Roos case, see Staves, Players’ Sceptres, pp. 157–8; A. Fraser, The Weaker Vessel (1984), pp. 337–49. 39 E. Owen, ‘Milton and Selden on Divorce’, Studies in Philology 43 (1946), 233–57; J. Halkett, Milton and the Idea of Matrimony (New Haven, CT, 1970); C. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (1977), ch. 9; J. Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford, 1987). 40 Locke, TTG, II, 81–2; Thomas Salmon, A Critical Essay Concerning Marriage (1724), pp. 110–11; Patrick Delaney, Reflections upon Polygamy (1737), pp. 37–8. See Staves, Players’ Sceptres, pp. 141–3; N. J. Hirschmann and K. M. McClure (eds), Feminist Interpretations of Locke (University Park, PA, 2007). 41 For ideas of marriage in Restoration drama, see Staves, Players’ Sceptres, ch. 3; G. Alleman, Matrimonial Law and the Materials of Restoration Comedy (Philadelphia, PA, 1942). 42 MML, I, 8, 17, 122–3. 38

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of Braganza.43 Solon’s laws, Lawrence said, allowed divorce for impotence or sterility in either partner. He was also anxious that divorce should be as private as marriage. To insist on ‘public tribunals, is to contradict Christ himself, who speaks of a private divorce … and not a public sentence of any judge’. He put an argument for out-of-court settlements familiar enough today: proceedings in open court ‘make every petty difference between man and wife irreconcilable, and heightens contention’. These claims were accompanied by lengthy historical exemplification. He told of kings who were rid of barren wives, such as Dagobert who ‘repudiated his first wife for barrenness and marrieth Nantildis a nun’, and Pepin who married his concubine in the year 696, by whom he sired a future king, and who killed a bishop for reproaching the marriage. And he retailed the gruesome record, from Clytemnestra onward, of husband-murder deriving from the enforced prolongation of dead marriages.44 Anthropology, philology, and law

Lawrence’s concern to show that the modern law of marriage was a highly contingent artefact of medieval Catholicism led him into an anthropological disquisition on the cultural diversity of marital practices. He sought to show the improbability that European Catholic arrangements carried the force of natural law. At worst, his account becomes an essay in salacious prurience. In Southern and Eastern climates, he suggested (anticipating Montesquieu’s climatic anthropology), there was a propensity for polygamy. In Benin the king had five hundred wives and even the poorest men had five. Among the Medes monogamy was frowned upon and polygamy and polyandry accepted. Some societies allowed incestuous marriages, such as the Pharaohs of Egypt, and the Persians, whose King Cambyses was permitted by the magi to marry his sister. The sale and exchange of wives was widely known in India, China, and Siberia, and allowed in Numa’s constitution for ancient Rome. The practice of making the sexual services of wives available as hospitality to guests was widespread. In some societies, the droit de seigneur was practised:45 the senators of the Canaries used to have ‘the first night’s lodgings with every bride’. In China it was accounted a charity to give money towards brothels for those too poor to pay for prostitutes. At Cambalu the prostitutes organized themselves into a 43

His contemporaries were also preoccupied with securing population growth. William Petty advocated short-term civil marriage contracts and financial rewards for prolific mothers: Marquis of Lansdowne (ed.), The Petty Papers (2 vols, 1927), II, 50. Sir William Temple, in Observations upon the United Provinces (1673), complained that Christianity restricted population growth by its strictures on polygamy. See A. Aldridge, ‘Polygamy and Deism’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 48 (1949), 343–60. 44 MML, I, 19–20, 121, 123. 45 Or jus primae noctis: the alleged right of a feudal superior to deflower a vassal’s bride – famously alluded to in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.

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‘corporation’. Native Americans and Guineans had a simple divorce ‘by the light of nature’. Along the River Quizungo a maid who is to be married goes into the wilderness ‘to bewail her virginity’. And so on.46 Lawrence’s violent anticlericalism led him to extend this survey to the alleged lascivious practices of priests down the ages. He contended that the popish imposition of religious cults upon sexuality amounted to a priestly licensing of copulation, and hence ultimately derived from the pagan worship of Venus and Priapus. The priests of Priapus, in order to establish inheritance rights, issued certificates, for a fee, denoting with whom a woman had copulated. Catholic priests, armed with marital law and the power of the confessional, had, Lawrence believed, a psychological control over men’s wives, beds, secrets, and marital property. Nor did the Catholic Church demur at organized prostitution. ‘All popes are panders-general of all the stews and houses of fornication in Rome and fill their treasuries with the hires of whores.’47 The covetousness of all kinds of priests was matched by their lustfulness: The Benyan Indians give their priests the first fruits of their wives, and think the marriage will not be blessed without it. The Southern Americans in divers parts, think it a great devotion to offer their daughters to be first deflowered by the priest. The Algier Mahometans, and the people of other parts of Africa, think it a meritorious work, to prostitute their wives to their Morabates or holy saints.

In Catholic Europe ‘how often … doth the new married wife return, more skilled for venereous postures, from confession of the priest’. In Catholic lands there was a common taunt: they ‘jeer one another, that their children are fils de pretre’. In the Basque region new wives were offered to the parish priest.48 One striking aspect of Lawrence’s discussion was his approval of Islamic practices. Islam was beginning to serve polemically as a model of a religion relatively free of clericalism.49 Lawrence asserted that the Ottoman laity ‘self-marry without priest, temple, bell, book, or candle’ and, consequently, marriages were more chaste, successions better ordered, and adulteries fewer. Ottoman property law was better: ‘the Turk is not so turkish to rob his wife, who is a free woman, or to transubstantiate the property of her goods to his’. Islam also offered a model for a well-ordered civil religion: ‘all Mahometan priests are chosen by the parish … they have neither consecration nor ordination, but continue as perfect laymen’.50 46

MML, I, 5, 8, 10–14, 53, 127–9. MML, I, 43–4; II, 35–6, 50–1, 120. 48 MML, I, 53–4. 49 J. Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992), ch. 4; N. Malcolm, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450–1750 (Oxford, 2019). 50 MML, I, 68, 377; II, 32. 47

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To gather his evidence, Lawrence plundered a wide variety of sources. For the ancient world he cited Caesar, Diodorus Siculus, Lucan, Ovid, Pliny, Plutarch, and Seneca, together with the anti-pagan diatribes of the early Christian Fathers, including Arnobius and Orosius. His favourite Renaissance sources were Aretino and Cornelius Agrippa. For the extra-European world, he used the travel journals of Rycaut, Purchas, Linschot, and Mendoza. He found much in Bodin’s République and in the historical law books of Alberico Gentili, Charles du Moulin, and Sir John Skene. For medieval history and Catholicism, he used Richard Baker’s Chronicle and Thomas Barlow’s Popery (1679). For contemporary political wisdom he borrowed the politique Whiggery of Slingsby Bethell’s The Interest of Princes (1680). The authority whom Lawrence most revered was John Selden: the De Jure Naturali et Gentium (1640) and Uxor Ebraica (1646), which he repeatedly cited, especially for the practices of the ancient Hebrews and for interpretation of scripture. Selden argued that the religious solemnization of marriage was pagan in origin and not prescribed by scripture, and that the Hebrews had been polygamous and allowed divorce. Milton had cited Selden in his divorce tracts. Selden’s work was immensely influential in conveying Grotius’s natural law theory to England. Theirs was an approach highly sceptical of orthodox ethical teleology. It stressed the amorality of the state of nature, and the manner in which human positive laws supervened in culturally diverse ways. These ideas circulated in the milieu of Selden’s executors John Vaughan and Matthew Hale. Vaughan became chief justice of common pleas. In a characteristic ruling in 1669, concerning the case of a man marrying his great uncle’s widow, Vaughan argued that ‘no copulation of any man with any woman … can be unnatural’, and hence no kind of marriage was intrinsically unnatural. Of course, he continued, many practices came to be proscribed, but this was a matter of historically developed laws and customs. Vaughan recommended Selden’s ‘incomparable work … concerning marriage and bodily knowledge’.51 It was within this Seldenian tradition that Lawrence wrote. Lawrence’s approach was thoroughly bookish. He offers little discussion of the prevailing practices of his own society, which in fact proved strikingly resistant to the strictures of the church. Pre-nuptial fornication, cohabitation, betrothal, trothplight, a variety of forms of plebeian private marriage, divorce, and wife-sale are among the practices now documented by social historians.52 51

R. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 112–5, and chs 4 and 5. Lord Stair, in his textbook of Scots law, grounded marriage in ‘the primitive law of nature … the conjunction of two single persons’: ‘the public solemnity is … not essential to marriage’: Institutes (Edinburgh, 1681), pp. 105, 107, 648–9, 1019. See F. Dabhoiwala, ‘Lust and Liberty’, Past & Present 207 (2010), 89–179, at 131–3. 52 R. B. Outhwaite (ed.), Marriage and Society (1981); J. Gillis, ‘Conjugal Settlements: Resort to Clandestine and Common Law Marriage in England and Wales, 1650–1850’, in Disputes and Settlements, ed. J. Bossy (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 261–86; J. A. Sharpe, ‘Plebeian Marriage in Stuart England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 36 (1986), 69–90; R. Smith,

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Lawrence’s own time saw the heyday of clandestine marriage, and the reasons for it were those he cites: the avoidance of expense, the desire for privacy, the evasion of parental interference, the retention of female property rights. Just occasionally his text offers glimpses of social history. He tells a story of a poor couple whose church marriage was prevented when the priest demanded fees which they could not pay, so instead they ‘went to bed and married themselves the real way’. And he is alert to legal practice, applauding the Scottish law’s partial allowance of private marriage, as well as underscoring that in English law clandestine marriage was valid, so that irregular marriages were not void.53 Lawrence’s encyclopaedic dissection of marriage culminated in the most crucial part of his case. The consequence of the ‘popish’ or ‘ceremonial’ law of marriage of greatest moment for England in 1680 was the illegitimating of bastards. He pronounced that by the law of God and nature illegitimacy and concubinage were empty notions. ‘There was no such word or thing as “bastard” in the whole scripture, or among the ancient lawyers or divines, until the popes and bishops falsely translated the scriptures.’54 This leads to a disquisition on the perversion of the bible in the Authorized Version, which introduced, he says, 848 errors in the text. The Hebrew word ‘pillegesh’, he says, means one woman taken after another, and not a whore or concubine; most of the Hebrew words which were commonly translated as ‘wife’ in fact mean simply ‘woman’; the Greek ‘keturah’ corresponds to the Latin ‘juvencula’ and means ‘young woman’, not concubine; the Hebrew ‘mamzer’ and Greek ‘nothus’ do not mean ‘bastard’; ‘nuptiae’ came to mean a marriage ceremony but originally meant carnal knowledge; and there is no word in scripture to correspond to the ‘uxor’ (‘wife’) of the Latin Vulgate.55 Lawrence’s sources here are Selden and ‘the great linguist’ Hugh Broughton.56 Having rectified scripture, Lawrence concluded that ‘’tis manifest that Christ makes the marriage copulatione to be the ordinance of God’; that ‘marriage by carnal knowledge without ceremony appears by express command of scripture’; that Matthew 19:5–6 defines marriage as the uniting into one flesh; and that in the Old Testament ‘all natural children were legitimate’.57

‘Marriage Processes in the English Past’, in The World We Have Gained, ed. L. Bonfield et al. (Oxford, 1986), pp. 43–99, at 43–6; L. Stone, Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987 (Oxford, 1990), chs 3 and 4; R. B. Outhwaite, Clandestine Marriage in England 1500–1850 (1995). 53 MML, I, 110ff, 199. 54 MML, I, 81; II, 55. 55 MML, I, 142–61; II, 22, 42–5, 67, 79–81. See N. Tadmor, The Social Universe of the English Bible (Cambridge, 2010), ch. 2. 56 1549–1612. A Cambridge Puritan divine and rabbinical scholar, who published on chronology and scripture; Works edited by John Lightfoot (1662). 57 MML, I, 81–2; II, sig. a1r, 69–71, 79–80, 87. The philological material, and several of Lawrence’s themes, are rehearsed in modern form in J. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, IL, 1987).

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Lawrence used an extended parenthesis on the subject of a wife’s adultery to bring home the absurdity of contemporary legitimacy laws. As the law stood, any child of a wife, though conceived by someone other than her husband, was deemed legitimate offspring, and hence an heir of the husband, indeed chief heir if first-born. Equally, if a man married a woman pregnant by another man, the child was deemed his. Justice Rickhill, Lawrence tells us, had adumbrated this legal principle as ‘Who that bulleth my cow, the calf is mine.’ This rule was, Lawrence complained, a licence for adultery by wives and an affront to husbands. In this respect the law favoured women, for it made inheritance lie with the bodily heirs of the wife, ‘beget them who will’, and not with those of the husband. It was a monstrous legal fiction, sanctioned by those two supposed ‘Aristotles for the law’, Sir Edward Coke and Sir Thomas Littleton, lawyers who, he said, had been slaves to popish jurisprudence. It was a fiction compounded by the nonsense that the rule applied only if the husband was ‘within the four seas’ at the time of conception, for even the law could not swallow making a child by adultery legitimate when the husband was beyond the seas.58 Lawrence told several stories of the consequences of the law of legitimacy. One is of an Oxford student conscientious enough to tell his ‘market maid’ that he would provide for a child if she got pregnant, only to be told by her, ‘Oh sir, never trouble yourself for that, for I am appointed to be married within these three days.’ Another is of the Civil War soldier who returned home to find three children where one had been before, and had resignedly to accept the new ones. A third is of the fifteenth-century Portuguese Queen Joan of Castile, required by the infertile king to sleep with a fertile subject in order to bear a ‘legitimate’ heir: the people deposed the ‘heir’ because they could not stomach such an incongruous ‘legitimacy’.59 Though the inheritance of estates and kingdoms preoccupied him, Lawrence had an eye to the practical consequences of bastardy law for the weak and the poor. Women who bore ‘bastards’ outside ceremonial marriage were cruelly treated. We are, he says, shocked at Aristotle permitting the death of unwanted babies by exposure, but common English practice was scarcely better: Whole parishes rise with swords and staves against one poor suckling babe, to exterminate both it, and the mother naked, and to be vagabonds to beg, steal, or starve, only to save so small an alms as aliment to one poor infant, not able to speak or beg for itself.60 58

MML, I, 72–6, 82; II, 48. Lawrence’s own marriage to Martha Sydenham apparently failed, and Anthony Wood claimed that his vehemence was prompted by his wife’s adultery: Athenae Oxoniensis, IV, 62. 59 MML, I, 75, 194–5; II, 57. 60 MML, I, 21. Under the Poor Relief Act of 1662, also called the Settlement and Removal Act, the poor could be forcibly removed from a parish if they could not prove a right of settlement. See M. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987); N. Tadmor, The Settlement of the Poor in England, 1660–1780 (Cambridge, 2023).

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There was, Lawrence insisted, an urgent need to establish a foundling hospital in England, on the model of those in France and Italy. On the Continent, meanwhile, the shame of illegitimacy led to a massacre of innocents by infanticide. A lake in Rome had been drained and six thousand infant skulls discovered.61 Lawrence’s main concern is for a man’s right to have all his natural children acknowledged. The remedy was to abolish the ‘barbarous law of illegitimation’, for the ‘child should not be punished for the father’s sin’, and should be entitled to succeed to the father’s estate and title. This would return the commonwealth to the virtue of earlier times; it would respect the scriptural injunction, ‘if children, then heirs’ (Romans 8:17); it would restore ‘the most excellent law of the Emperor Anastasius, decreeing all natural children to be legitimate’, a law swept away with the ‘diabolical pontifical invention of illegitimation’.62 It is striking that, as an early expression of a characteristic Enlightenment theme, Lawrence’s ‘priestcraft’ thesis concerning the evolution of European marriage remains a template in modern discussion. The anthropologist Jack Goody argued that most ancient Eurasian societies endorsed concubinage, as a means to secure heirs, and that this practice, together with full inheritance rights for the children of concubines, continued in the later Roman Empire, among the Anglo-Saxons, and into Charlemagne’s era. Only in the high Middle Ages did the church – partly from economic self-interest – gradually impose restrictive rules of legitimacy. This constituted a dramatic change in the idea of marriage, ‘leading to a split between sex and marriage, as well as between filiation and parenthood’.63 Whig patriarchalism

Superficially ‘feminist’ though some of Lawrence’s remarks are, particularly those on coverture and divorce, he construed his proposed reform of bastardy law as a restoration of patriarchal rights. His concern to justify Monmouth led him into a lather of enthusiasm for Charles II’s right to be fully father of his eldest son. Priestly laws are seen to be unmanning the king, humiliating his masculinity by depriving him of his sons.64 Lawrence’s descant upon Monmouth as the king-patriarch’s most glorious fruit is exactly the type of exuberant Whig patriarchalism captured in Dryden’s lines: 61

MML, I, 237–8. The London Foundling Hospital was founded by Thomas Coram in 1739. 62 MML, I, 65, 79–80; II, sig. a1r. 63 J. Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 75–7, 191–2, 205. For contrasting approaches: Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society; G. Duby, Medieval Marriage (Baltimore, MD, 1978); P. Stafford, Queens, Concubines, and Dowagers (1983); C. Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford, 1989). 64 MML, I, 245.

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WILLIAM LAWRENCE AND THE CASE FOR KING MONMOUTH Of all this Numerous Progeny was none So Beautifull, so brave as Absalom: Whether, inspir’d with some diviner Lust, His Father got him with a greater Gust; Or that his Conscious destiny made way By manly beauty to Imperiall sway.65

Lawrence’s approach owed much to Bodin’s exploration of the alleged progressive enfeeblement of the institution of patriarchy, the patria potestas, since Roman times.66 It was from Bodin that he took the notion that the Empress Theodora, ‘a common prostitute’, inserted laws into her husband Justinian’s law code ‘for the advantage of the women against the men’. Lawrence was not here speaking approvingly, for he was apt to see bastardy laws as, in part, the revenge of jealous wives. The laws of illegitimacy established a ‘gynarchy’ in violation of ‘that patriarchy [which] was the first form of government instituted in families by God and nature’. The ‘more masculine princes both of Greece and Rome, vindicated their own power … against the priests and the ladies’.67 Lawrence next turned to an historical account designed to show that kings and parliaments had often overcome priestly laws and asserted their right to grant divorces, alter the succession, and legitimize heirs. More particularly, he showed how bastards had become kings. The Emperor Constantine was the illegitimate son of Constantius. Pope Alexander VI sought to create a kingdom for his bastard son Cesare Borgia, which ‘Machiavel in his treatise De Principe proposeth as the only example for kings to imitate’. William the Conqueror ‘was the son of Rollo, duke of Normandy by Arlotte’, to whom he was not married by priestly ceremony. John of Gaunt’s children by his mistress Katherine Swinford were legitimized by statute, and from one of these Henry VII was descended. Edward III’s law of treason encompassed those who oppose the king’s eldest son and applied to those who are sons by his ‘compaigne’ – companion.68 Lawrence’s key case was that of Queen Elizabeth, declared illegitimate by the Catholic Church, but undeniably rightful queen of England. Throughout the seventeenth century Elizabeth was celebrated as a glorious exemplar of godly and puissant rulership. Lawrence laboured to the utmost the parallel between Elizabeth and Monmouth. Both were victims of popish plots, both heroic Protestants, both bastardized by popish laws, both forsaken by their fathers. Elizabeth had even fought a war on behalf of the true doctrine of legitimacy: when Philip II of Spain seized the throne of Portugal from Don Antonio, who had been declared illegitimate, she sent an expedition under Sir Francis Drake.69 Lawrence’s patriarchalism put him at odds with other Whig theorists. He was as committed as any Tory to hereditary right; he simply drastically changed 65 Dryden,

Poems, p. 190 (lines 17–22). Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la République (1576), bk 1, chs 3 and 4. 67 MML, I, 22, 77, 79–80, 83. 68 MML, II, 20–1, 101, 106, 108–9, 119. 69 MML, II, 113–14, 183–6. 66

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the rules of inheritance. Other Whigs scouted hereditary right, mounted a case for elective monarchy, and gave historical accounts of parliaments selecting the person they judged most fit to govern: elective monarchy rendered questions of legitimacy irrelevant. Locke, James Tyrrell, and Algernon Sidney attacked the key Tory text of patriarchal monarchy, Filmer’s Patriarcha. Lawrence’s overt commitment to Monmouth, and willingness to challenge the structure of Christian marriage, led him to take a different stance. His final purpose was to demand that parliament pass an Act of Exclusion of James, duke of York, which would specify the claims of the lineal heir. Once Monmouth’s illegitimacy was refuted, then his candidacy was secured by primogenitary hereditary right. Monmouth ‘is legitimate, and the next lineal and lawful heres sanguinis, heir of blood, for jus sanguinis is the law of God and nature’. Parliament was called upon to perform a declaratory act, not an elective one. Lawrence pressed arguments which were the common stock of Tory defences of the duke of York, such as that to disinherit the heir was to court civil war. With passionate urgency he warned of the dangers to regimes which do not name the successor. Tacitus warned against Alexander the Great’s mistake in not naming an heir. It was imperative that the people should have a firm statutory ground determining the lineal succession should they need to take arms to defend the succession against a popish insurrection.70 It followed from Lawrence’s case that the Tories’ deployment of Filmer’s patriarchalist defence of primogenitary rights was oddly chosen to serve the claims of the king’s brother. In his emphasis upon the rights of the lineal over the collateral heir, Lawrence skilfully de-centred Tory claims to be the party of hereditary legitimism. ‘The general question now in agitation among the people is, Who is the next lawful heir to the crown? The Protestant saith, The king’s eldest son; the papist, a collateral heir.’ The Tories warned that Whiggism led to a renewal of civil war and usurpation of the crown. But those who had the patience to read Lawrence’s treatise would come away with a profound sense that it was the duke of York, the jealous and violent wicked uncle, who was intent upon usurping the crown and fomenting civil war against the king’s son. Lawrence offered, as a parable of Yorkist Toryism, the story of Kenneth III of Scotland, brother of his predecessor, chosen in the year 970 by parliament in preference to the king’s son; Kenneth promptly bullied parliament into passing a law of succession in order to secure his own children, and then became a murderous tyrant. He also recalled Richard III’s murder of his nephews, the princes in the Tower, after declaring them illegitimate. The title page of Lawrence’s book carried an ominously accusatory verse from St Matthew’s gospel: ‘When the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, this is the heir, come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance’ (Matthew

70

MML, II, 63, 114, 135, 212ff.

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21:38).71 Lawrence scarcely hides his accusation that James, duke of York, was a murderous usurper. Neither Charles II nor the majority of the English political elite were convinced by Lawrence’s version of Whig patriarchalism. The bastard son did not inherit the throne. Monmouth, of course, believed in his own monarchical right, and during his rebellion in 1685 he declared himself king. There is one poignant sign that he personally adopted Lawrence’s principles. In the hours before his execution, Anglican divines begged Monmouth, for the sake of his eternal soul, to renounce not only the sin of rebellion but also the sin of adultery. He refused to do either. He had abandoned his duchess, to whom he had been married when he was fourteen and she twelve, and had lived with his mistress Henrietta Wentworth. Gilbert Burnet wrote that ‘both he and she came to fancy, that … their living together was no way offensive to God’.72

71

MML, II, sig. A2r, 2ff, 11, 16–17. Gilbert Burnet, History of His Own Time, ed. T. Stackhouse (1991), pp. 225–6. The remark was excised in the 1724 edition. 72

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11 Sir Peter Pett, Sceptical Toryism, and the Science of Toleration In the charged atmosphere of religious xenophobia in England in the 1680s it was an unusual person who could survey the state of Christendom and the zealotry of his fellow citizens with a detached eye. Such a one was Sir Peter Pett, ‘a virtuoso, and a great scholar, and fellow of the Royal Society’.1 His vast and inchoate book, The Happy Future State of England (1688), is eirenic, Erastian, and Hobbesian in outlook. It is also an exercise in the fledgling science of ‘political arithmetic’. Panoplied with scientific reasoning, it predicted the imminence of a secular age in which the knot of politics and religion would be untied. This chapter will first sketch the background to Pett’s book, then examine his account of the state of Catholicism and Dissent, and lastly appraise his claim that ‘a science of politics’2 could provide a solvent of religious persecution. The treatise and the trimmers

England’s last severe religious persecution spanned the years 1678 to 1686. It began with the Popish Plot frenzy and ended when James II suspended prosecutions against all religious minorities. In its first phase Catholics were the victims. Only 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, exceeded 1679 in the number of English Catholics martyred for their religion, people charged with treasonable conspiracy or with the capital offence of being Romish priests. But when the Whigs exploited the Plot in order to try to exclude James from the succession, A version of this chapter appeared as ‘Sir Peter Pett, Sceptical Toryism, and the Science of Toleration in the 1680s’, in Persecution and Toleration, ed. W. J. Sheils (Studies in Church History 21, Oxford, 1984), pp. 102–36. I am indebted to the Ecclesiastical History Society and Basil Blackwell for permission to reproduce material. For a valuable companion piece, see K. Loveman, ‘Samuel Pepys and the “Discourses Touching Religion” under James II’, EHR 107 (2012), 46–82. 1

John Dunton, Life and Errors (2 vols, 1818), I, 178; see also I, xvii–xviii, 194. Peter Pett, The Happy Future State of England (henceforth HFS) (1688), p. 185. Signature numbers refer to the unpaginated preface written in 1685, page numbers to the main text written in 1681. I have used a Cambridge University Library copy (shelf mark R.2.27): the book survives in variant states. 2

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the tide turned and the Protestant Dissenters, almost all of them Whigs, suffered in the Tory revenge. The Whigs had overplayed their hand, for Protestants loyal to the king’s party began to fear that they, too, would be destroyed by trumped-up charges of ‘popery’, and that the Whigs were using anti-popery as a cloak to engineer a new Puritan revolution. Soon after the parliamentary defeat of the Whigs in 1681, prosecutions under the ‘Clarendon Code’ – the Restoration laws for religious uniformity which aimed to suppress the Puritan sects – reached a peak. Livelihoods were destroyed by fines and sequestration; prominent ministers were put on trial for sedition, while others fled abroad; and militias were used to destroy chapels. About one hundred Quakers died in jail: being sent to a Restoration jail often amounted to a death sentence. The raucous propaganda of the Tory press was, wrote Richard Baxter, designed to show that all Dissenters were ‘a crazed company of fanatics’ and to prepare them ‘for destruction’.3 By the time of James’s accession in 1685 ‘an exemplary pitch of conformity’ was everywhere reported.4 The position of Catholics meanwhile only marginally improved. Tory magistrates and divines prided themselves on a via media in judicial terror against the agents of both Rome and Geneva. As Captain Alford put it, there ‘hath been of late two horrid plots; the one by the papists, and the other by the presbyterians’.5 The prevailing conviction was that only by the most disciplined loyalty in church and state could England weather the coming storm of rule by a popish king, avoiding the Scylla of the fires of Smithfield and the Charybdis of sectarian anarchism.6 The administration which presided over this reaction was dominated by a group of Tory high churchmen who felt that they had the Catholic heir where they wanted him: sufficiently frightened by Whiggery never to dare more than to practice his religion privately. This clique included James’s brothers-in-law, the Hydes, earls of Clarendon and Rochester, together with the archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, and those impeccable embodiments of Anglican rectitude, the duke of Ormonde and Sir Leoline Jenkins.7 One or two voices of restraint did, however, retain a foothold. The most famous of these was the marquis of Halifax. The Whigs hated him for opposing Exclusion, but he was not a natural Tory either, for he was too sceptical and anticlerical, and even given to schemes that could look quasi-republican. He advocated projects for liberalizing the church and for a statute of limitations of the crown’s prerogatives as an alternative to Exclusion. While he was in the 3

Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. N. H. Keeble, J. Coffey, T. Cooper, and T. Charlton (5 vols, 2020), II, 599, 601. 4 Dennis Granville to Archbishop William Sancroft: Bodl., MS Rawlinson D103, fols 2–6. 5 Mercurius Tibicus, 24 March 1680. 6 The ‘fires of Smithfield’ was proverbial for the burnings of Protestant heretics by Queen Mary in the 1550s. 7 For this circle, see G. Tapsell, The Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–1685 (Woodbridge, 2007); idem, ‘Laurence Hyde and the Politics of Religion in Later Stuart England’, EHR 125 (2010), 1414–48.

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ascendant in 1681–2 the Tory reaction was held in check. He deplored what followed. His fortunes briefly waxed again at the turn of 1684–5, at which juncture he circulated in manuscript his celebrated tract The Character of a Trimmer, for which he earned longevity as a philosopher of Tory pragmatism. He defended crown and church, but also appealed for forbearance and an end to travesties of judicial due process. A trimmer, he wrote, sought ‘a mean between the sauciness of some of the Scotch Apostles and the indecent courtship of some silken divines’ – the Presbyterians (the Scottish variant of which, the Covenanters, were a byword for Calvinist fanaticism) and the high church Anglican clergy. He deprecated that ‘mistaken devotion’ by which ‘a devouring fire of anger and persecution breaketh out in the world’.8 A less renowned trimmer was Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey, lord privy seal from 1673 until brought down in a quarrel with Ormonde in 1682. He had been a Parliamentarian in the Civil War and after 1660 was regarded as a Presbyterian peer, although outwardly conforming. He trimmed with each government and for twenty years was able regularly to ameliorate the plight of victims of the penal laws, both Catholic and Dissenting. His personal friendship with papists and simultaneous distaste for popery has been taken to be emblematic of the Englishman’s ‘schizophrenic’ attitude to Catholicism.9 A contemporary critic accused him of being a friend ‘to the Romanists, to the Lutherans, to the Calvinists, to the Arians, anabaptists, antitrinitarians, &c’.10 In March 1686 King James, now beginning to contemplate a move toward toleration, interviewed him and it was reported that, but for his untimely death, Anglesey would have been made lord chancellor or lord lieutenant of Ireland. James told him he wanted him because ‘I would not be priest-ridden’.11 Anglesey wrote a trimmer’s apology, in memoranda of 1682 and 1686, the latter of which was intended to be appended to Pett’s Happy Future State. He argued for acceptance of the Catholic prince’s reign and the desirability of a united Protestant church, yet he sought a tolerant and moderate alternative both to Sancroftian Anglicanism and the imprudence of James’s hard-line Jesuit advisers.12 These trimmers needed a more substantial treatise which, while defending the utmost loyalism, put the case for latitude and forbearance. It would express 8

George Savile, marquis of Halifax, Complete Works, ed. J. P. Kenyon (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 70–4. See H. C. Foxcroft, The Life and Letters of Sir George Savile, First Marquis of Halifax (1898); J. P. Kenyon, Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland (1958), ch. 3. 9 J. Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973), p. 16. 10 Anon., Great News from Poland (1683), p. 1. 11 Earl of Anglesey, Memoirs, ed. Peter Pett (1693), sigs A2r, A8r; Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, ed. P. Bliss (5 vols, 1813–20), IV, 185; Ellis Correspondence, ed. G. Ellis (2 vols, 1829), I, 95–6. 12 The Earl of Anglesey’s State of the Government and Kingdom (1694); Anglesey, Memoirs. For Pett and Anglesey, see A. Patterson and M. Dzelzainis, ‘Marvell and the Earl of Anglesey: A Chapter in the History of Reading’, HJ 44 (2001), 703–26.

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their vision of how the English state should come to terms with religious plurality and a Catholic king – in short, a treatise of sceptical Toryism.13 Sir Peter Pett was their man for the job. He was a natural courtier, a gentleman civil servant, a civic virtuoso. His career moved in three orbits: the Navy, the Royal Society, and the government of Ireland. He was a lawyer from a family of shipbuilders and naval administrators. As a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, in the 1650s, he had met Robert Boyle, with whom he struck up a life-long friendship, and through whom he came to know the luminaries of the early Royal Society.14 He met two people with whom his career would intertwine: the future earl of Anglesey and the statistician and political economist Sir William Petty. The Boyles and Annesleys were well established in Irish affairs. At the Restoration they switched, with alacrity, from Henry Cromwell’s to Ormonde’s vice-regal entourage. In the 1660s Pett, their protégé, was appointed advocate general of Ireland, sat in the Irish Parliament, benefited from Ormonde’s shower of knighthoods, and lined his pockets from the Irish tax farm. In the 1670s Pett was in London, practising law at Gray’s Inn, acting as Anglesey’s man of business, and politicking on the fringes of the earl of Danby’s administration, which crashed in 1679 in the Exclusionist storm. When Halifax engineered Danby’s release from the Tower in 1684, Pett was among the welcoming party, along with Sir Thomas Meres and Danby’s son Lord Latimer. They all belonged to ‘the loyal society or club’ which met in Fuller’s Rents, a group of anti-Exclusionist supporters of the fallen earl.15 During James’s reign Pett came closest to the centre of power. With Petty and Samuel Pepys he discussed naval finance and ship design, and together they plied the king with schemes for commerce, revenue, defence, and Ireland. Pett acquired some influence. In 1685 his friend Bishop Thomas Barlow was threatened with suspension by Archbishop Sancroft, because he never went to his cathedral at Lincoln and was nicknamed ‘the bishop of Buckden’, where his palace stood. In a letter bewailing his plight, Barlow looked to the intercession – the ‘prudence and diligence in managing this affair’ – of Halifax and Pett. In 1688, in conjunction with the moderate Catholic Lord Powys, Pett won a battle against Clarendon, a long-standing and now fallen enemy, concerning a patent for control of the Thames waterfront. In May a loyal address of the seamen and naval manufacturers was orchestrated: Powys presented it to the king and Pett

13

The phrase parallels Duncan Forbes’s notion of the ‘sceptical Whiggism’ of David Hume and Adam Smith, who, though Whigs in politics, were not given to the conventional shibboleths of Whig ideology. See his ‘Sceptical Whiggism, Commerce, and Liberty’, in Essays on Adam Smith, ed. A. J. Skinner and T. Wilson (1975), pp. 179–201. 14 J. R. Jacob, ‘Restoration, Reformation, and the Origins of the Royal Society’, History of Science 13 (1975), 155–76; idem, ‘Restoration Ideologies and the Royal Society’, History of Science 18 (1980), 25–38. 15 D. Allen, ‘The Political Clubs of Restoration London’, HJ 19 (1976), 561–80, at 575–8.

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discoursed on the king’s – and Pepys’s – improvements to the Navy. Pett, like Pepys, was by now badly tarred with the brush of James II’s ‘popish’ regime.16 Meanwhile, he prepared his Happy Future State. For Halifax’s and Anglesey’s practical purposes Pett was, it must be said, useless. Controversialists, like journalists, must submit their copy on time. Pett began his book in 1681 but did not publish it until the turn of 1688. Because of its long gestation, the book’s history is complicated.17 He started in January 1681, just after the dissolution of the Second Exclusion Parliament, in the form of a letter to Anglesey vindicating both him and ‘that great man’ Halifax from the charge of popery brought against them by the Whig leader in the Commons, Sir William Jones. A subsidiary section, called The Obligation Relating to the King’s Heirs and Successors, is dedicated to Halifax, who is represented as the nation’s saviour from the Whigs. Pett quoted lines from John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel which would clinch for later generations Halifax’s place in the pantheon of parliamentary orators.18 Pett scorned the folly of the Whigs in not accepting Halifax’s proposals for limitations. In 1681 Pett’s book was privately circulated but not published. Soon the political influence of Anglesey and Halifax faded. At the turn of 1685, when Halifax’s Character of a Trimmer was circulated, Pett brought his book up to date with a long preface full of confidence for a new regime of humane Protestancy under a tolerant Catholic king. Anglesey’s own trimmer essay was composed shortly afterwards. But again events overtook them. Halifax was dismissed in October 1685 and Anglesey died in April 1686. James changed course and in April 1687 issued his Declaration of Indulgence, which went far beyond melioration of the terms of conformity to the established Church of England and allowed freedom of worship to all Catholics and Dissenters. It was also of dubious legality, for it was a wholesale suspension of the laws for Anglican religious uniformity – a general dispensation for worship outside the law. Halifax, and most Anglicans, drew the line, and soon, in A Letter to a 16

For biographical information: Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, IV, 576–80; Pett, ‘Memoir of Robert Boyle’: BL, Add. MS 4229, fols 33–48; Pett’s letters: BL, Add. MSS 17017, fol. 96; 28015, fol. 312; 28053, fols 390–1; Bodl., MS Ballard 11, fols 28–30, 211–12; Rawdon Papers, ed. E. Berwick (1819), pp. 136–66. Also: Thomas Barlow, Genuine Remains, ed. Peter Pett (1693); Calendar of State Papers, Ireland: 1663–5 and 1666–9; Petty-Southwell Correspondence, ed. Marquis of Lansdowne (1928), passim; Charles Leslie, An Answer to a Book Entitled The History of the Protestants in Ireland (1692), appx, pp. 31–6; C. Webster, The Great Instauration (1975), p. 167 and passim. For Pett’s memoir of Boyle, see Robert Boyle by Himself and his Friends, ed. M. Hunter (1994), pp. xxxii–xxxv, 58–83. 17 The following summary of the bibliographical history of the HFS is pieced together from various copies, and from: Anglesey, Memoirs; BL, Add. MS 28053, fols 390–1; Bodl., MS Ballard 11, fols 211–12. 18 ‘Jotham of ready wit and pregnant thought, / Indew’d by nature, and by learning taught / To move Assemblies, who but onely try’d / The worse awhile, then chose the better side; / Nor chose alone, but turn’d the balance too; / So much the weight of one brave man can doe’: John Dryden, Poems and Fables, ed. J. Kinsley (Oxford, 1962), p. 212 (lines 882–7); HFS, p. 215; 2nd pagination, p. 57.

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Dissenter (1687), the marquis was warning the king that his aggressive public promotion of Catholicism would be his downfall. Pett, however, moved with the times and supported the Indulgence with a new tract called The Obligation Resulting from the Oath of Supremacy to Assist and Defend the … Dispensative Power. This he dedicated to two Catholic peers, the moderate Powys and the immoderate earl of Melfort. At last, at the close of 1687, he set about publishing The Happy Future State, only to meet with the disapproval of the chief minister, the earl of Sunderland, because the book offended the extremer papists. Sunderland permitted publication on condition that Pett’s Indulgence tract was republished with it. For good measure Pett added a grovelling dedication to Sunderland, applauding the ‘glories’ of James’s reign. So Pett’s book, strewn with several incongruous dedications, went on sale as James’s reign moved towards its crisis. Appearing at that time and with that title it was a spectacular piece of bad timing. The book was a flop, ‘lying dead on the bookseller’s hands’. After the Revolution Pett tried to make another go of it. He dropped the preface, the Indulgence tract, and the offending dedications, and gave it a new title, A Discourse of the Growth of England, designed to emphasize its scientific and utilitarian value as a neutral treatise of ‘political arithmetic’.19 He turned his hopes once more towards Danby, to whom he sent a copy in February 1689, a few days after the earl’s appointment as lord president in William III’s government. But to no avail.20 He remained in the wilderness, in mutual commiseration with Pepys. Pett’s treatise, in its successive guises, is a sad palimpsest of the politics of the 1680s. It was a large book – a third of a million words – for a brief moment, and that moment came and went in 1685, the confident dawn of James’s reign. Yet a book can be intellectually significant as well as a practical failure. The transformation of Catholicism

In The Happy Future State of England Pett’s first preoccupation was to account for the anti-popish frenzy and for the way it rebounded on the Whigs. He said that he had begun to write during ‘the turbid interval of the kingdom, the interval of panic fears … when the air of man’s fancies was generally infected’, a period he dubbed the ‘martyrocracy’, an ‘empire of the witnesses’, when innocent Catholics died at the hands of half-crazed informers. Protestants were ‘valuing themselves as the best of men upon their believing what was sworn by the worst’, 19

The full new title was A Discourse of the Growth of England in Populousness and Trade since the Reformation. Of the Clerical Revenue … Of the Number of People of England … and Political Observations thereupon. Of the Necessity of Future Public Taxes … Of the Advancement of the Linen Manufacture. 20 Also in 1689, Pett approached John Locke’s patron the earl of Monmouth seeking his patronage for the publication of Petty’s Political Arithmetic: MS Locke c. 17, fols 72–5; Locke, Correspondence, vol. 9, Supplement, ed. M. Goldie (Oxford, 2023), no. 1208A.

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and demagogue politicians were ‘purchasing … adoration from the people on such easy terms’, for ‘a zeal against popery is a remedy so cheap and so easy to be had’. Pamphlets like Marvell’s Account of the Growth of Popery (1677) had whipped up hysteria and each election ‘produced patriots more zealous for … the extermination of popery’. Pett found the ‘purgatory’ of the Popish Plot years nauseating. It ‘made the English nation appear somewhat ridiculous abroad’. It threatened to destroy his colleagues Pepys, Powys, and Anglesey. England was a ‘bedlam’: he had heard a teacher ‘who seeing his scholar reading a learned book of geometry written by a Jesuit, did with great gravity advise him to read only Protestant mathematics’. The Happy Future State was written to exorcize such nonsense.21 Pett detected that in some ways attitudes to Catholicism were improving during the Restoration. Earlier generations, he noted, held that Catholic worship was intolerable because it was idolatrous. Transubstantiation was of course still ridiculed, but the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius and the Anglican theologians Henry Hammond, Herbert Thorndike, and Jeremy Taylor had exonerated Catholicism from idolatry. Pett was confident that ‘the Grotian divines’ had convinced thinking Protestants that Catholicism was not guilty of the worst of spiritual obscenities. It was, he argued, crucial to realize that, for all the heat and dust concerning ‘host worship’, the Plot crisis really concerned popish sedition and not theological superstition. The ground of fear was not metaphysical absurdity but the politics of papal supremacy. Even so, the political objections themselves seemed overwhelming. Most people were still convinced that the papacy would authorize any atrocity to quell heretics. The papacy claimed the right to depose heretical princes and to authorize Catholics to take the deposition personally in hand. To assert that a prince’s fall from grace was sufficient to disqualify him from temporal rule was the dangerous doctrine that ‘dominion is founded in grace’. Worse still, it could be shown that Catholics believed themselves released from the ordinary rules of morality and promisekeeping in endeavouring to extirpate heretics, since ‘faith need not be kept with heretics’. The massacres of St Bartholomew (in France in 1572) and of the Irish Protestants (in 1641) were the standing examples. And, since the Catholic canonists could be found to have legitimized the burning of heretic cities, many Protestants had no doubt of the papists’ responsibility for the Great Fire of London. Accordingly, in 1678 almost everybody readily believed the revelation that the papists had a plot to kill the king, install his Catholic brother, and destroy Protestantism.22 But the extraordinary paradox of the Exclusion Crisis was that the Whigs themselves quickly came to be thought guilty of an equal and opposite sort of ‘popery’. Once they began recklessly to implicate James in the Plot and denounce all opponents of Exclusion as popish fifth columnists, the suspicion grew that the Plot was fabricated by ‘fanatic’ Protestants for their own rebellious purposes. 21 22

HFS, ep. ded., sigs. A1v–A2v; pp. 1, 19, 150, 199, 229, 285. HFS, sigs C2r, Flr, Q2v; p. 173.

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The Whigs aimed ‘by outcries against the Church of Rome to bring in a Roman republic’. As a result, ‘the deluge of the popular fears [against Catholics] did sensibly decrease after the year 1681’.23 It was fundamental to the Tory mindset that Whiggery – ‘Presbyterianism’ as it was significantly still often called – was the Protestant mirror-image of popery. The radical Calvinists asserted that princes could be deposed for ungodliness. On this ground they had executed Charles I and they now endeavoured to exclude James. This was a Protestant manifestation of the doctrine that ‘dominion is founded in grace’, and if the Whigs threatened political assassination, then they, like the papists, destroyed morality in the name of religion. The Presbyterians were as destructive as the Catholics because they too used a religious principle to destabilize civil states. If the murder in 1678 of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, the magistrate who first investigated the Plot, was assumed to be the work of Catholics, so the murder in 1679 of Archbishop Sharp of St Andrews was the work of fanatical Calvinists.24 These two crimes symbolized the equivalent revolutionary terrorisms of Rome and Geneva. Halifax in his Trimmer, Sir Leoline Jenkins in his renowned House of Commons’ speech against Exclusion, Pett, and all the Tories, insisted that the Exclusion project was itself papistical because it invoked the doctrine that ‘dominion is founded in grace’, that is, it dangerously sought to base civil rule on a religious principle. Their view, to the contrary, was that the religion of the heir to the throne should not bar his inheritance. To exclude – in effect to depose – a prince, even a Catholic one, for ‘irreligion’ was not only wrong in principle but courted a bloody civil war. Pett wrote that the Whigs followed the pope, who is the ‘excluder-general of kings’. Thus, although the Whigs vaunted their zeal against popery, the Tory attack upon them was itself a variant of anti-popery: the ‘popery’ of revolutionary Protestantism had to be stamped out as well as that of the Catholics. This was a world in which ‘popery’ was an amphibious phenomenon and discursively protean.25 Pett made explicit a concept of popery implicit in the Tory attribution of popery to the Whigs. The essence of popery was the specious use of a theological principle to undermine temporal sovereignty. Popery might be said to manifest itself in both Catholicism and Protestantism, although it was not essential to either and could in principle be exorcized from both. Historically it had appeared in both, although it was an empirical question as to whether it still did: that is to say, did adherents of those religions justify resisting rulers on a 23

HFS, ep. ded., sig. C1r; p. 285. J. Coffey, ‘The Assassination of Archbishop Sharp: Religious Violence and Martyrdom in Restoration Scotland’, in Politics, Religion, and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. J. Champion, J. Coffey, T. Harris, and J. Marshall (Woodbridge, 2019), pp. 101–19. 25 HFS, sigs A1v–A2r; pp. 133–9, 326, 331,357, 361; 2nd pagination, p. 16; Halifax, Complete Works, p. 74. See also Barlow, Remains, p. 380. On the ‘popish’ equivalence of Catholics and Dissenters, see J. Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, CT, 1991), pp. 267–8; J. Rose, ‘Robert Brady’s Intellectual History and Royalist Antipopery in Restoration England’, EHR 122 (2007), 1287–317. 24

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pseudo-theological principle? Pett’s advice to both Catholics and Dissenters was that they should convince the world of their renunciation of political popery. He was himself convinced by recent Catholic denials of the papal deposing power – most Catholics ‘have no plot but to get to heaven’. The concept of ‘popery’ could therefore be detached from Catholicism. Catholicism was a creed, a set of theological opinions; stripped of its popery it was a politically indifferent phenomenon. There was thus a vital distinction to be drawn between the ‘religionary points’ and the ‘irreligionary’ or pseudo-religionary, the latter being ‘the anti-monarchical principles of the Jesuits and the Presbyterians’. There were no grounds for punishing people merely for confessional or private opinions in theology and worship, but every reason for suppressing sedition when it masqueraded as religion. Early in the 1680s Pett felt that on balance the penal laws against Catholicism should stand for the time being. In 1687 he applauded the king’s Indulgence of Catholics with the claim that his doubts had now been assuaged. Certainly, he squirmed on the hook when confronted by the king’s dramatic liberation of Catholics, but he had always maintained an Erastian view that toleration was a pragmatic and circumstantial question, and not at root one of theology. Wherever ‘any papist [is] not only willing to change the name papist for Catholic, but the thing papistry for the principles of the Church of Rome under its first good bishops’ then toleration of Catholicism should prevail. Any religion is entitled to toleration if it accepts the first principle of public peace: that nobody is warranted by religion to invade the rights of sovereign princes.26 The apogee of papal temporal claims, Protestants agreed, was the decree of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 which laid down the duty of secular rulers to exterminate heretics and their answerability to Rome in this duty; if they failed they could be deposed. It was much cited in Exclusionist tracts. There was no question, Pett conceded, that for several centuries the papacy sought to effect a ‘universal monarchy’ in Christendom. But he insisted that Protestants had failed to grasp that three epochal events were changing the face of modern Catholicism and were inaugurating the demise of Lateran popery. The first was the Treaty of Westphalia, which had concluded the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. The English, he said, were still mesmerized by the ‘antique’ preaching of earlier generations and ‘seem to have been asleep since the Munster Treaty’. The treaty, he argued, had dissolved the bigotry and warfare not only of Protestant and Catholic but also of Lutheran and Calvinist. Article Seven had entrenched a principle of toleration in the constitution of Europe. ‘On this rock of the Munster Treaty was the holy concord of holy churchman, discordant in 26

HFS, sigs A2r–v, B1r–v, C2r, Klv–K2v; pp. 9–11, 16–17, 19–20, 131, 168–72, 283, 317, 2nd pagination, p. 46. On these themes, see A. F. Marotti, Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN, 2005); G. Mahlberg, ‘Henry Neville and the Toleration of Catholics during the Exclusion Crisis’, Historical Research 83 (2010), 617–34; J. Collins, ‘Restoration Anti-Catholicism’, in England’s Wars of Religion Revisited, ed. G. Burgess and C. Prior (Farnham, 2011), pp. 281–306; S. Sowerby, ‘Opposition to Anti-Popery in Restoration England’, JBS 51 (2012), pp. 26–49.

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opinions, founded.’ And although this ‘perpetual pacification’ was not entirely fulfilled, yet ‘all Christendom was embarked in that treaty and going with full sail, and favoured with a strong gale of nature into its haven of rest’. The pope’s condemnation of the treaty had been brushed aside, the princes agreeing that no church decrees could stand against it. The pope’s power was thereby dimmed, ‘the constellation of the great Roman Catholic kings shining in the Munster Treaty’. Pett did not believe that ‘any Roman Catholic prince now living in the world should favour the usurpation of the papal power’. Catholics are now ‘under no obligation by the Lateran Council to be either persecutors or disloyal’. The modern principle of temporal sovereignty had superseded the medieval papal usurpation of the rights of secular rulers. Since civil supremacy was taking hold in Catholic states, the Catholic Church could be said to have begun its own Reformation. This account of Westphalian Christendom was necessary ‘because the factum of that peace hath not by any writer since our late fermentation (that I know of) been insisted on for the illumination of the people’s understanding in the firm provision made there for men’s being secure in their religion by law established, whatever the religion of their lawful princes may be’. In 1680, Pett noted, a church building dedicated to ‘holy concord and union’ had opened at Fredericsburg in a joint ceremony by Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic divines, while in England, Plot fever raged.27 The second event Pett dilated upon was the papacy of Innocent XI, then reigning. His remarks are startling in the warmth of their approval for Innocent. St Peter’s chair had rarely been ‘filled with a person of so great morality and virtue as the present pope is’. In his determination to reform abuses Innocent had been called by ‘many Roman Catholics … the Lutheran pope’ and by others ‘the Jansenist pope’. A decree of 1678 had suppressed ‘a multitude of indulgences’ and one clause ‘did shake the whole body of indulgences’. Innocent had also tamed the worst excesses of Mariolatry. The bull Sanctissimus Dominus of 1679 was his greatest ‘piece of Reformation’ for it struck at the heart of the Jesuits. It was the Jesuits who, in their search for means to extirpate heresy, corrupted the laws of morality by their lax doctrines of probabilism, and by their casuistical allowance of murder, lying, and calumny. Probabilism was the doctrine that in a case of moral doubt a person might, without sin, follow a course of action which had some probability of being morally correct. It was the foundation of the legend that the Jesuits permitted the end to justify the means. The ‘Christian heroical acts of this pope’ had begun to clear ‘the Augean stable of the casuists’. The ‘tendency of the Jesuits’ principles to the very legitimating’ of massacres, and the casuistical divinity which the English believed to have brought about the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey now stood damned by the pope himself. It was a pity, Pett concluded, that Innocent had not suppressed the Jesuits altogether, but their demise was now inevitable, particularly as one of Europe’s most celebrated books, Blaise Pascal’s Provincial 27

HFS, ep. ded., sigs Flr-Hlr; pp. 275, 292, 325, 363; Anglesey, Memoirs, pp. 274–97.

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Letters (1657), had inflicted wounds from which ‘they can never recover’. The English would be cured of their fears it they understood of what ‘great moment to Christendom’ this present pontificate was.28 The third feature of European Catholicism which, according to Pett, Protestant zealots failed to understand was the tradition of eirenicism within Catholicism. Throughout his book Pett cited with approval those Catholic scholars whom earlier Protestant ecumenicists, like Grotius, Isaac Casaubon, John Selden, and Sir Robert Cotton, had befriended: Paulo Sarpi, the champion of Venice in its quarrel with the papacy and author of the anti-papal History of the Council of Trent (1619); Traiano Boccalini, Sarpi’s friend, whose Ragguagli di Parnaso (1612–13) praised tolerance, confounded Trent and the Habsburgs, and looked to France for Europe’s ‘general reformation’, a tract which appeared in English translation in 1656; and Jacques Auguste de Thou and Nicolas-Claude de Peiresc, the Frenchmen who in the 1610s and 1620s were principal foci in the Republic of Letters. He also cited Erasmus and Thomas More, noting the tolerance of Utopia (1516). Seventeenth-century France he thought was especially important as a guide to the future. Although Pett shared Halifax’s and Danby’s desire to contain French power, he also shared the admiration of English commentators for French intellectual progress. The philosophers, the Jansenists (who insisted on Augustinian moral rigour), and the Gallicans (who asserted the autonomy of the French church) between them were dissolving superstition and popery. Louis XIV’s battle with the pope for jurisdictional supremacy over the Gallican Church was at its height, and in 1682 the Gallican clergy repudiated papal supremacy. Pett concluded: The Roman Catholic Church there doth so much swarm with new philosophers there called Cartesians and Gassendists, whose new philosophy has been there by zealous Catholics observed to have ruined the mystery of the real presence … ’tis no wonder if the growth of the Messieurs les Scavants increasing with the populacy of that realm, makes any man’s belief in his [the pope’s] infallibility pass for a degree of madness, accordingly as Mr Hobbes, Chap. 8 Of Man, well observes, that ‘excessive opinion of a man’s own self, for divine inspiration and wisdom, becomes distraction and giddiness’: and this probably may be the final result of the late fermentation about the regalia, etc., and the pope be tacitly thought so as aforesaid, and his power there insensibly evaporate.29

28

HFS, ep. ded., sigs B1v–B2r, I1r–I2r, S1v; pp. 15, 42–53. The Provincial Letters was published in English translation in 1658 under the title The Mystery of Jesuitism. Innocent XI was beatified in 1956; the process of canonization had been halted in the eighteenth century because of suspicions of Jansenism. The Jesuits were (temporarily) suppressed in 1773. 29 HFS, p. 129; Hobbes, Leviathan, II, 112 (ch. 8). Real presence: of Christ in the eucharist; scavants: savants; regalia: the rights of the crown over the church. For Pett’s use of Erasmus, see G. D. Dodds, ‘An Accidental Historian: Erasmus and the English History of the Reformation’, Church History 82 (2013), 273–92, at 284–6.

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The France of the 1590s and 1600s was instructive too. Henri IV, who had converted from Protestantism to Catholicism, had pacified the religious factions and issued the Edict of Nantes, which De Thou had helped to draft. The Protestant Huguenots, unlike the English Puritans, did not rebel against their king when he turned Catholic. Pett was especially fond of the writings of the tolerant and politique diplomat Cardinal Arnauld d’Ossat, Henri’s agent at Rome and a friend of De Thou. Boccalini had pinned his hopes on Henri IV, and moderates of both religions had anticipated a grand scheme for the pacification of Christendom. They all acknowledged that Henri’s assassination in 1610 was an appalling disaster. Pett’s moral was clear: Henri IV, not Mary of England, was the appropriate model of Catholic monarchy for James II, and the fires of Smithfield were an irrelevant memory.30 In his secularizing endeavours to dissolve the knot which tied religion to politics, Pett was powerfully influenced by Thomas Hobbes and the polemicists of the Royal Society. In his admiration for Hobbes Pett was about as unabashed as anyone could be in the Restoration, given the opprobrium generally heaped upon the ‘monster of Malmesbury’. He called him ‘a great philosopher of our nation’, coupled him with Descartes, ‘those two great masters of wit and philosophy’, and quoted regularly from Leviathan (1651) and Behemoth (1679). The latter, the ‘ingenious’ history of the Civil War, he took to be Hobbes’s posthumous gift, ‘a beneficial providence’, to anti-Exclusion Toryism in its exposure of the Presbyterian rebels’ war against Charles I. He used Hobbes’s more notorious dicta about human psychology without a blush of embarrassment: ‘it hath been well observed by a great enquirer into human nature, that a restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death, is the general inclination of all mankind’. Speaking of his patron Anglesey, Pett echoed one of Hobbes’s more notorious remarks: ‘Your very reputation for power is power, for that engageth those to adhere to you, who want protection.’31 Pett especially admired the chapters on religion in Leviathan, for Hobbes had vividly argued the necessity for ridding the world of all jure divino – divine right – doctrines of jurisdiction. Hobbes had exorcized what Pett called the ‘Manicheanism’ of upholding a separate spiritual kingdom against the civil state. The conclusum est contra Manicheos … that is now vox populi, [and] doth with its full cry pursue presbytery as well as popery, for the making duo summa principia [two supreme principals] in states and kingdoms, and claiming an ecclesiastical power immediately derived from Christ and not dependent on the civil. There is no observation more common, than that popery and 30

HFS, sig. E2r; pp. 70, 73, 206–9, 222, 232, 236, 242, 249. See Barlow, Remains, pp. 302–11. Anglesey, Memoirs, has much on French Catholicism, e.g. pp. 278–81. On Boccalini, see F. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972), pp. 133–6; on the circle of De Thou and Peiresc: P. N. Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT, 2000); also K. Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton, 1586–1631 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 95ff. 31 HFS, pp. 21, 24, 57, 314; Hobbes, Leviathan, II, 132 (ch. 10).

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presbytery that seem as distant as the two poles, yet move on the same axle-tree of a church supremacy immediately derived from Christ; and Mr Hobbes his Leviathan might have passed through the world with a general applause, if no notion had been worse in it than in chapter 44, the making of his kingdom of darkness to consist of popery and presbytery.32

Indeed, the temper of the age was such that in their hatred of ecclesiastical ‘Manicheanism’ people were ‘too apt with Mr Hobbes to thrust the whole nation of spiritual beings out of the world’. Pett evidently believed that Hobbes’s principles led ultimately to toleration, for Hobbes’s concern was to separate the wheat of religion, to which magistrates should be indifferent, from the chaff of the pseudo-religionary pursuit of earthly power. ‘Mr Hobbes saith in his Behemoth “I confess I know very few controversies among Christians of points necessary to salvation. They are the questions of authority and power over the church or of profit, or of honour to churchmen, that for the most part raise all the controversy.”’ Having quoted this, Pett went on to say that it was not the doctrines of transubstantiation or justification by faith which mattered to the magistrate but ‘papal power and the complication of the tenet of that power with those religionary tenets’. A Hobbesian hatred for the ‘kingdom of darkness’, of popery, was therefore compatible with tolerance even of Catholicism.33 For Pett, Hobbes’s other great importance was his contribution to the new philosophers’ demolition of scholasticism. Hobbes was seen to be at one with Descartes, Gassendi, and the Royal Society. ‘In the dividend of our time little will come to the share of metaphysics’. It was an age bent on ‘real knowledge’ which finds ‘very absurd’ enquiries into universals and entitas ‘which Mr Hobbes well Englished, the isseness of a thing’. The age owes a ‘great obligation’ to the Royal Society for its ‘plantation of real knowledge’. Armed thus, the ‘useless cobwebs’ of scholastic divinity are abolished. ‘A general disposition to believe nothing contrary to reason is the cutting of the grass under popery’s feet’. The new age is equipped with the light of reason; ‘neither popery’s nor presbytery’s kingdom of darkness can … overthrow our quiet’. Pett quoted two of the best-known dicta in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), that ‘the universal disposition of this age is bent upon a rational religion’ and that ‘experimental philosophy will enable us to provide beforehand against any alteration in religious affairs which this age may produce’. He recapitulated Sprat’s Baconian account of the light of knowledge emerging from medieval darkness and giving people a power to vanquish irrational fears. The Reformation was ‘the first blind step out of a blind chaos into a paradise of knowledge’. That Pett saw the influences of Hobbes and the Royal Society as comfortably interlocking needs underscoring, for Hobbes’s relationship with the Society was in practice fraught.

32

HFS, p. 133. HFS, sigs, B2v, D1r; pp. 23, 29, 37, 66–73, 76, 243; 2nd pagination, pp. 9, 13, 22, 31, 37. Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, ed. P. Seaward (Oxford, 2010), p. 188. 33

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Pett’s view reinforces the case for saying that no deep ideological divergences excluded Hobbes from the Society.34 Pett’s account of the birth of ‘real learning’ was redolent of the aspirations of the circle of Boyle, John Wilkins, Jan Amos Comenius, and Samuel Hartlib in the 1650s (the ‘Hartlib Circle’), which he had imbibed in his youth: on the one hand, pragmatic and empirical, and on the other, pansophist, optimistic, and mildly Panglossian. It is ‘as a philosopher’ that Pett confidently predicted that the path of history led to the demise of popery. He wrote (from the Book of Revelation 21:1) of the dawning of ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ and cited Johann Heinrich Alsted, the pansophist teacher of Comenius and friend of Hartlib. Pett has been called a millenarian, but he was far from being so in the sense of someone committed to practical, still less subversive, activism to hasten the day. As with many of his contemporaries, millenarianism was a framework for placing human history in providential time. History had a discernible and progressive path, but the antics of the apocalyptic Puritans he found contemptible. He was concerned to put aside ‘the fantastic utopias, oceanas, and new atlantises that our late visionaries and idle santerers [sic] to a pretended New Jerusalem troubled England with’. The way forward is by empirical analysis and piecemeal social engineering, by what he himself calls ‘the science of the politics’, and it is the task of ‘a counsellor of state, and mathematician, to advise his prince’.35 The emphasis is utilitarian, but like much proto-Enlightenment thought it was tinged with gnostic illuminism. Where Pett differed from the mainstream of the Royal Society was in his generosity towards Catholicism. James Jacob has argued that when the new generation of Fellows of the 1680s, particularly Pett’s friend John Houghton, redeployed the ideology of the Society to defend the Tory anti-Exclusionist movement of the 1680s, they quietly dropped anti-popery. Yet, as we have seen, Pett by no means passed by the issue of Catholicism in silence. He shared the Society’s sense that ‘real learning’ will be a bulwark against popery, that the new science will consummate the Reformation, but he was careful to allow that Catholicism might itself be successfully purged of popery. This was the sceptical science of a Tory, a natural philosophy for an English state which must come to terms with its Catholic prince and be rid of Whig sedition. In this, Pett was seconded by another of the Society’s apologists, Joseph Glanvill, who had also been a member of Boyle’s Oxford circle of the 1650s, and latterly a royal chaplain. Shortly before his death in 1680 Glanvill wrote a tract called 34

HFS, pp. 57, 66–76, 243, 251, 272. See Q. Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Politics of the Early Royal Society’, in Visions of Politics (3 vols, Cambridge, 2002), III, 324–45; N. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), ch. 10. ‘Essentia signifies no more, than it we should talk ridiculously of the isness of the thing’: Hobbes, An Answer to a Book Published by Dr Bramhall (1682), p. 144. 35 HFS, pp. 185, 187. For the taming of radical millenarianism, see W. Johnston, Revelation Restored: The Apocalypse in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2011). On Alsted: Webster, Great Instauration, pp. 22–3. Santerers: musers, fantasists.

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The Zealous and Impartial Protestant (1681), in which he argued that there was nothing to fear from James’s succession. James well knew that any attempt to impose popery ‘would hazard the ruining him’. The anti-popish frenzy was a crazy hysteria, and he feared that ‘the time is near … when every friend to the king and church shall be [called] a papist’. The magnifying of the popish threat is an excuse for ‘other plots of as dangerous a nature as theirs’. Glanvill’s tract was another work of sceptical trimmer Toryism and Pett much admired it.36 Anglican latitude and the problem of Dissent

When we turn to Pett’s attitude to Protestant Dissent we find it was a paradoxical but by no means uncommon one in the 1680s. His tolerance is bounded by the strict parameter of conformity to the Church of England. He took for granted that the national church should be a single church, the nation at prayer, and that there were no worthy grounds for separation. Moreover, he added the weight of scientific ‘prediction’ to Tory confidence that Dissent will soon disappear altogether. ‘The numbers of our nonconformists are daily decaying, and the names of their tenets will probably be in a short time forgotten.’ By 1685 Pett was even more enthusiastic: ‘the ebb of their numbers is at this time so apparent’. Dissent was not a living force but the decaying remnant of the Presbyterian and Independent zealots of the 1640s, for ‘it is … observable that most of the race of our old Presbyterian and Independent divines having become extinct … scarce any new ones … have since … propped up the credit of their party’. In short, ‘Dissentership is languishing under its old age’. Pett imprudently argued that the fashion for ‘liberty of conscience’, begun in 1641, had had its last fling in the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672, words which he swallowed in his applause for James’s Indulgence in 1687. Nor did Pett refrain from vilifying Dissenters as heartily as any Tory divine. They would have foisted on England a Genevan dictatorship; they had shown no clear evidence of renouncing the ‘intolerably seditious’ doctrine of the 1640s that ‘if the magistrate will not reform the world, they may’. With a catholicity of citation, he recommended John Bramhall’s Fair Warning (1649) against the Scotch discipline, Tillotson’s notorious ‘Hobbesian’ sermon of 1680 which asserted that it was better to have no revealed religion than to have the fanatics’ religion, and Hobbes’s notion of a clerical ‘kingdom of darkness’. For Pett, it was the Puritans who, among Protestants, were the most priest-ridden.37 At first sight, therefore, Pett seems no tolerationist. But much the same position was adopted by the well-known theological ‘liberal’ Edward Stillingfleet, whose 36

HFS, sigs D1v–D2r, F2r, K1v; pp. 66, 73–4, 130–2, 140–1, 185, 237, 243, 251, 272, 320; Joseph Glanvill, The Zealous and Impartial Protestant (1681), pp. 45–56. See Jacob, ‘Restoration, Reformation’; J. I. Cope, Joseph Glanvill, Anglican Apologist (St Louis, MO, 1956). 37 HFS, sigs B1v, D2r–v, E2v, H1r, I2v–K2v; pp. 29, 133–7, 280–1; John Tillotson, The Protestant Religion Vindicated (1680).

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Mischief of Separation (1679) and Unreasonableness of Separation (1681), which Pett approved of, were the most famous of contemporary assaults on Dissent. Stillingfleet was a latitudinarian who had produced the celebrated Irenicum (1661), and his reputation for latitude exacerbated the anguish of Dissenters like Richard Baxter who published replies to Stillingfleet. Stillingfleet, and Glanvill, held that the worst threat of popery came from Dissent: not only did its persistence weaken the established church and the unity of Protestantism, but its ground for schism, or worse still for political resistance, was itself popish, for it set up imperium in imperio, a state within a state. Schism was a denial of a cardinal tenet of the Reformation, the civil magistrate’s supremacy in religion. Here was the core of Stillingfleet’s latitudinarian ecclesiology, its Erastianism. The way forward for peace and tolerance was seen to lie in the growth of liberal theology within the church and not sectarian schism outside it. Liberal comprehension – inclusion within – rather than plural toleration of outsiders was the ideal. The latitudinarians were ‘tolerant’ in this sense and only by appreciating the strength of the ideal of comprehensive uniformity (and by putting aside our knowledge of its permanent failure in the Act of Toleration of 1689) can we make sense of Stillingfleet’s and Pett’s combination of liberality and latitude with aggressive hostility toward sectarian Dissent. If the church relaxed its terms of conformity, which it had good reason to do, since many of its ceremonies and dogmas were judged inessential, there could be no good ground for standing outside it. The same paradox subsists in Hobbes’s ecclesiology. It is not accidental that Stillingfleet was widely accused of Hobbism and that Pett plainly was a Hobbist.38 The latitudinarians were also impatient with the intransigence of Anglican high churchmen who thought the church’s establishment, episcopacy in particular, was jure divino. Little of this theme emerged in Pett or Stillingfleet – or in Leviathan – because in the 1640s and 1680s the worst danger seemed to come from Presbyterianism. Nonetheless, Pett’s Erastianism and indifferentism marks him out from the high churchmen. Pett had no objection to bishops, but like the latitudinarians he built his hopes on ‘Ussher’s Reduction’, Archbishop James Ussher’s scheme for episcopacy reduced in jurisdiction and moderated by clerical synods. This would create a collegial episcopate, in place of overweening ‘lordly prelacy’. In 1660, in the interval before the Act of Uniformity of 1662, Pett and his friends had publicly called for the institution of Ussher’s broad church. They feared ‘a vindictive retaliation’ by the rigid Anglicans. Although from Pett’s pen, the Discourse Concerning Liberty of Conscience (1661) was the outcome of collaboration with Boyle, Thomas Barlow, and John Dury, the last being one of the most energetic idealists for religious union during the Interregnum. The tract was one of the half-dozen which John Locke had in his library under the heading ‘Tolerantia’, alongside his own Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). Pett’s argument was characteristic of latitudinarian indifferentism of the sort Hobbes espoused. Beyond the obligation that God be soberly worshipped, 38

See above, p. 37, n. 10.

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nothing is jure divino, and the civil magistrate is empowered to institute any form of worship and jurisdiction. The ruler is entitled to coerce acceptance of rigid impositions, and nobody had grounds for sectarian objection. Yet, at the same time, such imposition might be an impolitic move: if it were not necessary to be done, for the sake of civic order, then it was wise that it be not done. In the broad domain of ‘things indifferent’, or adiaphora, the sovereign is free to make a prudential calculus for the common good. In this tract Pett was the mouthpiece of Boyle and the virtuosi. Like Hobbes and Stillingfleet, they shared the Erastian ambivalence: they were suspicious of established clerical power, yet equally had an intense distaste for sectarianism. In the 1680s Pett harked back to Ussher’s Reduction. He pointed out that it had been offered early in the 1640s, before the outbreak of the Civil War: the Presbyterians’ unforgivable crime was their fanatical insistence on the fullness of Genevan theocracy, which had had its outcome in bloody war. Anglesey’s part, as an MP in the Long Parliament, in thwarting the jure divino Scotch discipline earned Pett’s highest praise: the Puritan Anglesey had proven more Erastian than Presbyterian.39 While Pett harked back to Ussher’s scheme, he also, by the 1680s, came to regard the restructuring of the Church of England by schemes for ‘comprehension’ as unnecessary. Optimistically, he hoped that an increasing recognition of the indifference of rubrics, creeds, and jurisdictions meant that Dissenters would drift back into the church. Within the church, ecclesiastical punishment for heresy should lapse. Episcopacy and the rubrics of public worship would become the uncontroversial fabric of good order, while theological speculation would be diverse, private, and unmolested. The tendency of history was towards theological latitude. ‘The old way of arguing about speculative points in religion with passion and loudness … is grown out of use, and a gentlemanly candour in discourse of the same with that moderate temper that men use in debating natural experiments has succeeded in its room.’ The midwives of this trend were ‘that breed of rational divines our Church of England hath been blessed with since the king’s restoration’.40 Pett noted that the most striking evidence for this latitude was the way in which in his own lifetime the tenets of Arminianism ‘have ceased to ferment the 39

HFS, pp. 29, 138; 2nd pagination, pp. 9, 13. See Pett, ‘Memoir of Boyle’: BL, Add MS 4229, fols 33–48; Jacob, ‘Restoration, Reformation’, pp. 157–61; G. H. Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury, and Comenius (Liverpool, 1947), pp. 292, 316; J. R. Jacob, Robert Boyle and the English Revolution (New York, 1977), pp. 134–54; J. Harrison and P. Laslett, The Library of John Locke (Oxford, 1971), no. 2820. On the religious outlook of the early Royal Society: B. J. Shapiro, ‘Latitudinarianism and Science in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past & Present 40 (1968), 16–41; J. R. Jacob and M. C. Jacob, ‘The Anglican Origins of Modern Science’, Isis 71 (1980), 251–67. For Pett’s position at the Restoration: J. Rose, ‘John Locke, “Matters Indifferent”, and the Restoration Church of England’, HJ 49 (2005), 601–21. For a Scottish parallel in Sir George Mackenzie: C. Jackson, Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690 (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 173–5. 40 HFS, sig. E1r–v; pp. 68, 241–3; Anglesey, Memoirs, p. 161.

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state’: the quarrel of Calvinists and Arminians ‘seems lately to be retired to its eternal rest’. (The Arminians had challenged the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and elevated a role for human moral agency in our ‘justification’ before God; by the latter part of the century Calvinist soteriology was in retreat.) He predicted that the next major doctrine which would cease to be controversial was the Trinity. This was a shocking thing to say and it was said on the eve of decades of the Arian or Socinian controversy, which got under way with the appearance in 1687 of Stephen Nye’s Brief History of the Unitarians. Pett blithely asserted that beliefs about the eucharist or justification or the Trinity were merely matters of opinion, that Christendom was coming to see that Christ’s mission was not an ‘errand from heaven to set the world right in speculations of philosophy’, and that the doctrinal quarrels of the day would soon seem as trivial as ancient quarrels over the date of Easter. ‘Heresy’ was gradually returning to its original meaning, merely denoting a speculative opinion, a point which Pett derived from Hobbes’s Historical Narration Concerning Heresy (1680).41 As for Socinianism (a version of Unitarianism), Pett could not see why the holding of John Biddle’s tenets – Biddle had been condemned and punished by parliament in the 1650s – should trouble the magistrate, and that it would not matter if the heir to the throne were a Socinian rather than a Catholic. In the 1680s few others would have dared to say such a thing. It is not surprising that Pett was himself denounced for Socinianism, and he may once have been a member of Biddle’s circle, though there is little evidence that he cared much about the theological issue. His point was that anything could be tolerated so long as it had no leaven of popery in it, no implication for the authority and peace of secular society. Socinus had denied that ‘dominion was founded in grace’: that was all the ruler – or a people contemplating the opinions of their ruler – needed to know.42 When James came to the throne, Pett’s friend Petty prepared some papers outlining the articles of a minimalist ‘natural and universal religion’: God was the first cause; the soul was immortal; there were rewards and punishments after death; sovereigns were God’s lieutenants within their own states; and national 41

For Pett’s involvement in a project to republish Hobbes’s Historical Narration together with a response by Thomas Barlow, see W. J. Bulman, ‘Hobbes’s Publisher and the Political Business of Enlightenment’, HJ 59 (2016), 339–64, at 355–7. 42 HFS, sig. E1r–v; pp. 168, 171, 241–3; Henry Brougham, Reflections on a Late Book Entituled The Genuine Remains of Dr Thomas Barlow (1694), pp. 10–11. Pett’s HFS has been used as evidence for Biddle’s Socinian circle in the 1650s: J. Toulmin, A Review … of … John Biddle (1791), p. 64; R. Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography (3 vols, 1850), III, 186–7; E. M. Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism (Cambridge, MA, 1952), p. 200. Pett’s catholicity did not stop with Unitarians. He proposed enlarging the immunities of the Jews, by recommending creating a post of Justiciar of the Jews, to which he himself should be appointed, to manage relations with the crown and farm their taxes. See HFS, 2nd pagination, p. 46; K. Wolf, ‘Status of the Jews in England after Resettlement’, Jewish Historical Society of England Transactions (1899–1901), 192–3; cf. N. I. Matar, ‘John Locke and the Jews’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 44 (1993), 45–62.

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churches provided for public religious rituals. Beyond this, creedal speculation and private worship were unexceptionable.43 James’s circle of sceptical Tories believed that in time Christianity would be reduced to a deistic civil religion. And since religion was the cause of most persecution and violence, the secular future would be a peaceful one. The political economy of religion

One of the main purposes of The Happy Future State was to demonstrate the contribution of what we would today call empirical social science to government policy. In 1685–6, in the confident beginning of James’s reign, we can envisage an embryonic scientific civil service intent upon rationally planned economic, naval, fiscal, and demographic growth. Pett and Pepys had several interviews with the king concerning their schemes and Pett presented a memorandum on the economy and revenue of Ireland. His brother Sir Phineas Pett and colleague Sir Anthony Deane were appointed Navy commissioners. Among this group we can also number the mathematician Robert Wood, FRS, another friend of Pett from Oxford days, whose interests lay in currency reform and the Irish economy; John Houghton, FRS, who published tracts on agricultural improvement; and Thomas Hale, a projector and member of the old Danby club, who worked with Pepys and Pett to persuade the government to introduce the lead sheathing of ships, and whose Account of Several New Inventions (1691) is full of praise for the Pett family and for Sir Peter’s Happy Future State, a book ‘full of the most useful inventions and discoveries in politics’.44 The term ‘political arithmetic’ was first used by Petty in a letter to Anglesey in 1672 but it did not gain currency until the 1690s when the fiscal demands of warfare made pressing the need for accurate assessments of revenue yields.45 Pett was an energetic propagator of the manifold benefits of ‘political calculations’ for modern government – an ideal of ‘pantometry’ rather than pansophism.46 The perfection of political calculations ‘is the height of human wisdom in the political conduct of the world’. Its keystone was demography. His book would 43

Marquis of Lansdowne (ed.), The Petty Papers (2 vols, 1927), I, 130–2. Also among this circle were Robert Plot, Thomas Sheridan, and Andrew Yarranton. Samuel Pepys, The Tangier Papers, ed. E. Chappell (1935), passim; idem, Naval Minutes, ed. J. R. Tanner (1926), passim; Thomas Hale, An Account of Several New Inventions and Improvements (1691). See Jacob, ‘Restoration ideologies’; E. Fitzmaurice, The Life of Sir William Petty, 1623–1687 (1895), ch. 9; M. Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge, 1981), ch. 5. 45 Petty Papers, I, 158; C. H. Hull (ed.), Economic Writings of Sir William Petty (Cambridge, 1899), I, 240. For Petty: T. McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford, 2009). 46 The term is Sir George Clark’s: Science and Social Welfare in the Age of Newton (Oxford, 1949), p. 131. 44

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‘lay open a new scene of thought’. Statistical research would henceforth be crucial for ‘an inquisitive or philosophical statesman’. Those who proceed to public policy without it were ‘but state-enthusiasts’ – ‘enthusiasm’ here meaning empty fancies.47 Pett honoured the pioneers in demography. He drew upon John Graunt’s work of the 1660s on the population and mortality of London. ‘The thanks of the age are due to the Observator on the bills of mortality, for those solid and rational calculations he hath brought to light, relating to the number of our people’. Pett had discussed these matters with Graunt and Petty and had employed Graunt to procure Walloon craftsmen for migration to Ireland.48 Pett also admired the Observations on the United Provinces (1673), the work of Sir William Temple, another trimmer politician who began his career in the Irish service. Pett’s greatest debt was unquestionably to Petty. Often his book is no more than a mouthpiece for Petty’s opinions, and an impatient one, for Pett used Petty’s unpublished manuscripts and constantly pressed Petty to publish. The opportunity of the new king’s accession in 1685, and Pett’s urgings, did result in the printing of a crop of Petty tracts on population growth and Ireland. Petty ‘never writ anything for the press but what he informed Sir Robert [Southwell] and me of and gave us manuscript copies of’. In The Happy Future State Pett often uses Petty’s slogan that the new science was one of ‘number, weight, and measure’ (Wisdom 11:20). His book is a working out of one item in Petty’s list of the purposes of political arithmetic: ‘From the knowledge of the number of the professors of all religionaries … may be understood the means and difficulties of bringing all to conformity.’49 For Pett a most pressing question was the size of England’s population. Demography was the groundwork for economic, fiscal, religious, colonial, and foreign policy. ‘It is much to be pitied’ that a census of population had not been undertaken, for ‘the knowledge whereof is the substratum of all political measures that can be taken as to a nation’s strength or riches, and the part whereof is spareable for colonies, and the value of the branches of the public revenue, and the equality in proportioning any taxes or levies by act of 47

HFS, ep. ded.; pp. 91, 123; Barlow, Remains, sig. A4r. For Pett in the context of political arithmetic: P. Slack, ‘Government and Information in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past & Present 184 (2004), 33–68; idem, ‘The Politics of Consumption and England’s Happiness in the Later Seventeenth Century’, EHR 122 (2007), 609–63. 48 HFS, pp. 112, 142–3, 149, 155, 157, 189, 248–9; Barlow, Remains, p. 273; Pepys, Naval Minutes, I, 115; Thomas Carte, The Life of James, Duke of Ormond (Oxford, 1851), pp. 283–4. HFS has been used for evidence in a debate over Graunt’s authorship of the Natural and Political Observations … upon the Bills of Mortality (1662): S. Matsukawa, ‘Origins and Significance of Political Arithmetic’, Annals of the Hitotsubashi Academy 6 (1955), 53–79; D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, Population in History (1965), pp. 159ff. 49 HFS, sigs A2r, G2r, O1r; pp. 106, 122, 130, 166, 186, 192–3, 196, 245; Barlow, Remains, p. 321; Bodl., MS Wood F43, fol. 217; Economic Writings of Petty, I, 100, 124, 237; Petty Papers, I, xxiii, 116–43, 172–5, 181–4, 193–8, 253–65, 272–3; II, 47–58, 201, 253–65; Petty-Southwell Correspondence, pp. 60–1, 176.

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parliament, and the satisfying the world about the value of our alliances’. Pett had in mind not just the mercantilist point that population meant power, nor just the Baconian point that knowledge was power, but also the Hobbesian point that reputation for power was power, for he was angered that ignorance laid England open to a barrage of French and Dutch propaganda which asserted that the British Isles had only half the population of France, or that England had only two million people. Pett’s chief concern was to demonstrate that England’s population was much in excess of figures put forward by foreigners or by ‘cautious calculators’. If England’s international standing was one motive for his efforts, the other was the problem of religion. If the population could be shown to be large, then the Catholic and Dissenter communities could be shown to be utterly outnumbered. Once the population was known, the Dissenters would be forced to stop exaggerating their influence and Protestants to cease being frightened of Catholics.50 We cannot here examine the details of Pett’s statistical efforts and his assessments of the methodological strengths and weaknesses of the hearth and poll tax returns and of the Compton Census of 1676.51 His analysis of the Census, which he made available to the king, has been a valuable source for historians. In 1676 Danby and the bishops had wanted to demonstrate to Charles that his endeavours on behalf of Dissent, culminating in the 1672 Indulgence, were an impolitic pandering to a small but self-inflating minority. Bishop Compton surveyed the parishes of the province of Canterbury in order to measure the denominations. That Danby sought to shape policy with social statistics earned Pett’s fulsome praise: his lordship was ‘as great a master of the science of numbers as perhaps ever any that acted in that high sphere of state’. Pett had discussed the data with Danby when he visited him in the Tower. As a chief minister who had fallen victim to Plot fever and whose release depended on the waning of the fever, he had good reason to impress upon Pett the importance of publishing the census figures in order to quell popular fears. In analysing the figures Pett came to the conclusion that the population of England and Wales was at least seven million and conceivably as high as twelve million. This is considerably higher than the present-day estimate of five million and Gregory King’s contemporary estimate of five and a half million.52 Having demonstrated the populousness of England, what conclusions followed for Pett? The first was that France was not to be feared. Neither obeisance nor war was necessary, for it was impossible for France or any other 50

HFS, sigs N2v, O1r; pp. 112, 116. A. Whiteman (ed.), The Compton Census of 1676 (1986). 52 HFS, sig. 1r; pp. 113–19; BL, Add. MS 28053, fol. 390; Hale, Account, pp. xl–xli; Barlow, Remains, pp. 321–3. See A. Whiteman, ‘The Census that Never Was: A Problem in Authorship and Dating’, in Statesmen, Scholars, and Merchants, ed. idem et al. (Oxford, 1973), pp. 1–13. Cf. G. S. Holmes, ‘Gregory King and the Social Structure of Pre-industrial England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 27 (1977), 41–68; repr. idem, Politics, Religion, and Society in England, 1679–1742 (1986), pp. 281–308. 51

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nation to attempt a ‘universal monarchy’. France’s strength could be successfully combated by demographic and economic competition and a powerful navy. This coincided with Petty’s scheme of 1687 for semi-compulsory fecundity in order to double the population within twenty-five years and create such economic and state power that ‘the king will be the greatest in Christendom without war or bloodshed’. The second conclusion was that republican scheming in England was ‘ridiculous’ in modern times, for republics are only feasible in small city-states. Admiration for classical Greek models was anachronistic, and ‘a fantastical Oceana’ or Whig ‘projecting’ of commonwealths was chimerical. ‘Sober political virtuosi’ would see that populousness correlates with monarchy and that as population increases the drift of European progress would be towards centralized monarchies.53 The next conclusion was that the proportion of Catholics in England was small. At most it was 1:150. The Catholics’ own estimates were therefore plausible: he cited Lord Castlemaine’s 1679 estimate of 50,000. These are in fact close to modern assessments, which suggest about one per cent of the population. Pett’s use of the Compton Census to defuse anti-popish paranoia was anticipated in Glanvill’s tract, which Pett cites. It was plain to both of them that a Catholic attempt at domination, let alone a successful armed uprising, was out of the question. What is more, James and his ministers were well aware of the conclusions of their statistical advisers. Pett and his circle hoped James would see the necessity of working with moderate Protestants, and that the nation would be loyal to James, confident that a popish despotism was structurally impossible. In assessing James’s intentions, it is important for modern historians to recognize that he knew this demographic evidence, and it underscores the unlikelihood of his aiming at anything more ambitious than toleration of, and access to office for, his co-religionists. Any project for enforced Catholic domination had data stacked against it.54 The fourth major conclusion Pett drew was that the proportion of Dissenters had been inflated by their promoters, although he recognized that the Compton Census was less accurate here than in the measurement of Catholics. The Census gave 4.4 per cent for Canterbury province as a whole, and 7.3 percent for the diocese of London. This he thought was probably fairly accurate, and that it ought to restrain the Dissenters’ friends from the temptation to ‘magnify their numbers’.55 Pett’s publicizing of the Compton Census was evidently

53

HFS, pp. 124–30, 186, 192–6, 252–3; see Petty Papers, II, 56–7. HFS, sigs D1v–D2r; pp. 97, 104, 128–9, 140–1, 14809, 199; Barlow, Remains, pp. 316, 320–1; Roger Palmer, earl of Castlemaine, Compendium (1679), p. 41; Glanvill, Zealous and Impartial Protestant, pp. 45–9; Economic Writings of Petty, I, xxx; Miller, Popery and Politics, pp. 9–11. An Irish royalist and later Jacobite made use of Pett’s calculations on Catholicism: V. Geoghegan, ‘Thomas Sheridan: Toleration and Royalism’, in Political Discourse in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Ireland, ed. D. G. Boyce et al. (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 32–61, at 57–8. 55 HFS, sig. D2r. 54

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noticed. John Locke, in exile in Holland, copied out the figures for each denomination in his journal, gleaned from a report in the Haarlem Courant.56 Finally, Pett placed his work on population into a broader historical and socio-economic framework. The multiplication of mankind was to be understood as having a necessary relationship to economic development, scientific progress, and the passage of the world from popery towards reason and liberty. Much as Pett disliked the republicanism of James Harrington’s Oceana (1656), he followed its attempt to analyse the relationship between economic substructures and political and ideological superstructures. The steady increase in the world’s population – Pett could not imagine that it was stable or declining – was a fact which ‘must of necessity be fatal to the papacy’, both because it made ‘universal monarchy’ impossible and because it generated ever larger bodies of superstition-resistant intelligentsias. It was ‘a known truth’ that the policy of the medieval church was ‘to depopulate’ states and thereby to subordinate them. It was a common contemporary view that Catholic teaching and practice was demographically negative, and Pett made two familiar points: that depopulation had been partly secured by the institution of celibacy and by the excessive numbers of clergy (he reckoned 120,000 in England on the eve of the Reformation, ten times the number in the 1680s); and that the present occupiers of the former monastic lands (he estimated three million of them) created an immovable interest against restoring the medieval church.57 Pett improved on the conventional account of clerical depopulation by relating it to the agricultural system. The characteristic agriculture of the monasteries was pastoral sheep farming, which maximized clerical income while minimizing the land’s capacity to support population. The monks were ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’ who took too literally Christ’s injunction to ‘feed my sheep’. He cited approvingly the testimony of More’s Utopia, a book not written ‘at the pope’s feet’, and quoted the famous remark that ‘sheep do eat up men’, and the passages where the Utopians are said to have few priests, who are chosen by the civil magistrates and who marry.58 (It does not occur to him that Utopia might be read in the light of More’s later Catholic martyrdom.) Forms of agriculture, Pett maintained, are the economic determinant of a commonwealth’s capacity to support population, trade, the arts and sciences, and the revenue and armies of the prince. He described three distinct stages of agrarian development: pasture, tillage, and market-gardening. It is the increasing intensity of cultivation which is the motor of demographic growth and in turn of civility, progress, and national vitality. When through the divine blessing England shall arrive at the state of being fully peopled, and being got beyond pasture, that first improvement of a 56

Bodl., MS Locke f. 9, pp. 2–3 (March 1688). HFS, pp. 77–81, 87, 92–5, 101, 108–11, 128–9. 58 HFS, pp. 94–5. Thomas More, Utopia, ed. G. M. Logan and R. M. Adams (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 18–19, 53, 101. 57

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thin-peopled country, shall likewise have completed that second of tillage, that our being better peopled will occasion, there will be a third in our view to employ the labours of our consummate populacy, namely that of gardening, and to oblige us that the earth shall produce nothing but what is exactly useful: and instead of going back from tillage to pasture, we must naturally go forward from tillage to gardening, whereby one acre may be made to maintain twenty persons.59

It was foolish to think that popery could be restored in a country ‘going on so fast towards the exactest culture by gardening’. A model for market-­ gardening could, he thought, be seen in Jersey and Guernsey, and there is a ‘pleasant and profitable prospect of such improvement near our metropolis and other great cities’; before long England would be ‘the garden of the world’. Pett’s praise of the earl of Anglesey’s recreation of ‘tillage and planting and gardening’ on his estates was thus an emblem of his patron’s Protestant virtues. It was a theme partly borrowed from the horticultural propaganda of his friend John Houghton.60 Pett’s discussion was fragmentary, its details now seem factitious, and he never lost sight of his polemical endeavour to convince the English that a Catholic king was safe. He was right to insist that Catholicism in the 1680s could never be like the medieval church and that a sense of history revealed as much.61 This insight encouraged him to detach the concept of ‘popery’ from that of ‘Catholicism’. ‘Popery’ was a combination of superstition and clerical despotism which depended upon certain social and demographic formations. In short, popery meant clericalism – and Protestantism could be just as guilty of it. For instance, he believed that it was the economic fact that the capital value of the episcopal and capitular lands in the 1640s was £6 million which had motivated fanatical Presbyterians to devise the superstition of jure divino Presbyterianism in order to legitimate the transfer of those lands and revenues into their own grasping hands. Thus priestly religious dogma masked economic motives. The Presbyterians were popish because they exhibited the medieval church’s conjunction of economic interest, superstitious doctrine, and exorbitant clericalism.62 As humankind progressed, the clerical interest declined. The popish 59

HFS, p. 100. HFS, pp. 94–5, 100–2. See John Houghton, A Collection of Letters for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade (1681–3); J. Thirsk, ‘Seventeenth-Century Agriculture and Social Change’, in Land, Church and People, ed. idem (Agricultural History Review Supplement, 1970), pp. 162–4, 171; N. Glaisyer, The Culture of Commerce in England, 1660–1720 (Woodbridge, 2006), ch. 4. 61 See J. Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (1975). 62 HFS, sig. D2v; pp. 88–9, 108–9. On clerical revenue, see HFS, pp. 81–6, and Barlow, Remains, pp. 271–80; also Petty Papers, II, 227. In 1683 Pepys reported that ‘About religion, Sir P. P. [Pett] did quote somebody, I think Sir W. P., [Petty]… that it will never be well till it be prohibited by the state that any consideration of religion shall be any profit to anybody’: Tangier Papers, p. 317. 60

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and Whig ‘plots’ and the frenzies of fear in the 1680s were superficial eruptions, ‘turbid intervals’, on the surface of a secular trend.63 When a sceptic in the late seventeenth century reflected historically upon the political impact of religion – when he added the insights of Harrington to those of Hobbes – he began to formulate theories of progress, of stages of development, and of the relationship between what we now call ideology and the socio-economic structure. It was, arguably, a prefiguration of the Enlightenment and of what came to be called social science, but it was wrought within a distinctively Protestant consciousness.64

63

HFS, pp. 64–6, 102, 199, 252. For ‘conformist, authoritarian’ figures as initiators of the early Enlightenment, see W. J. Bulman ‘Enlightenment and Religious Politics in Restoration England’, History Compass 10 (2012), 752–64; and idem, Anglican Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2015). For the construal of ‘popery’ as a theory of ideology, see M. Goldie, ‘Ideology’, in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. T. Ball, J. Farr, and R. L. Hanson (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 266–91. 64

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12 The Political Thought of the Anglican Revolution Resisting James II

Almost from the beginning of James II’s reign, Anglican churchmen and their lay followers engaged in extensive and concerted civil disobedience, and did so with the manifest aim of bringing his regime to a standstill. When the king sought the gentry’s acquiescence in opening public office to Catholics, two-thirds of them baulked. When he ordered the clergy to desist from preaching against his religion, they responded with volleys of sermons and pamphlets on the evils of popery. When he imposed upon the universities, the dons withstood him. When he sought addresses of thanks for his Declaration of Indulgence, he met with massive refusals. And when he demanded that the Declaration be read from every pulpit, practically all the clergy disobeyed, and the Seven Bishops who published their reasons stood trial for seditious libel. By the winter of 1688 James had been deserted, in spirit or in fact, by nearly all of the natural allies of Stuart monarchy. And by the following summer nearly all the Tories, lay and clerical, had come to terms with a dynastic change that earlier they would have pronounced abhorrent. How a clerical and gentry elite which, in the shadow of civil war and Whig rebellion, had become so deeply committed to ‘divine right’ principles, came now to engage in systematic resistance has long been a central conundrum of A version of this chapter appeared under the same title in The Revolutions of 1688, ed. R. Beddard (Oxford, 1991), pp. 102–36. I am indebted to Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce material. For parallel treatments, see J.-L. Quantin, ‘Obéissance passive, obéissance primitive? La théologie politique anglicane sous la Restauration’, Revue Française d’Histoire des Idees Politiques 11 (2000), 27–58; J. Rose, Godly Kingship in Restoration England (Cambridge, 2011), ch. 6; R. Asch, ‘The Crisis of Sacral Monarchy in England in the Late Seventeenth Century’, in Monarchy Transformed, ed. R. von Friedeburg and J. Morrill (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 319–46; J. Rose, ‘Roman Imperium and the Restoration Church’, Studies in Church History 54 (2018), 159–75. For contrasting critiques, see S. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT, 2009), chs 4, 5, 7; B. Sirota, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680–1730 (New Haven, CT, 2014), ch. 1; W. J. Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2015), ch. 8; D. Levitin, ‘Teaching Political Thought in the Restoration Divinity Faculty’, in Politics, Religion, and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. J. Champion, J. Coffey, T. Harris, and J. Marshall (Woodbridge, 2019), pp. 39–57.

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the Revolution. This apparent apostasy from the vaunted doctrine of ‘passive obedience and non-resistance’ has forcefully struck almost everybody: the king and his apologists, contemporary Whigs, and generations of historians. James exploded with rage when he interviewed the Seven Bishops and, earlier, the disobedient fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford: ‘this is the standard of rebellion’; ‘is this your Church of England loyalty?’1 John Dryden, in his poetical allegory in defence of James, The Hind and the Panther, has the lines: ‘The Master of the Farm [was] displeas’d to find / So much of Rancour in so mild a kind, / The Passive Church had struck the foremost blow.’ The Whigs’ contemptuous judgement is well captured in John Asgill’s remark, years later: ‘I remember the latter end of the reign of King Charles II, when the pulpits blowed out their anathemas against all that doubted their jus divinum, or scrupled their passive obedience. After that, I don’t forget the reign of the late King James, when this breath was sucked in again.’2 And in the same vein modern historians have said that ‘no logical process could reconcile’ Tory political theory with constitutional and Protestant common sense, and that 1688 offers the classic example ‘of the triumph of political pressure over ideological commitment’.3 The Revolution has seemed, in short, a wholesale abandonment of the avowed principles of a generation – it is the volte-face immortalized in the lines of ‘The Vicar of Bray’, the song about the turncoat clergyman.4 It has rightly become customary to mitigate Tory guilt by stressing that the Revolution settlement was sufficiently ambiguous to allow substantial room for ideological manoeuvre, so that few Tories turned Whig in resolving their consciences. By arguing that James had abdicated and that the Prince of Wales was an imposture, by deferring to a foreign prince’s right of conquest, by alleging God’s special providence, and by allowing limited allegiance to a de facto king, it was plausible to maintain that James had not been forcibly deposed by his subjects.5 The remarkably energetic efforts of post-Revolution Tories to salvage what they could of the Restoration polity produced the ambiguous regimes of William and Anne, and preserved a remodelled Tory ideology for future

1

S. W. Singer (ed.), The Correspondence of Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon (2 vols, 1828), II, 479; ST, XII, 454–5; Henry Fairfax, An Impartial Relation of the Whole Proceedings against Magdalen College (1688), p. 15. 2 John Dryden, Poems and Fables, ed. J. Kinsley (Oxford, 1962), p. 415; John Asgill, The Assertion (1710), p. 5. 3 K. Keiling, A History of the Tory Party, 1660–1714 (Oxford, 1924), p. 203; J. Carswell, The Descent on England (New York, 1969), p. 69. 4 The third verse: ‘Old principles I did revoke, / Set conscience at a distance, / And prov’d religion was a joke, / And a jest was non-resistance’. The song appears to be an early eighteenth-century adaptation of The Religious Turncoat, or, A Late Jacobite Divine turned Williamite (1693). 5 For the literature of the Allegiance Controversy, see M. Goldie, ‘The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 83 (1980), 473–564; J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles (Cambridge, 1977).

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generations to cherish.6 For, as the speeches at the Sacheverell trial of 1710 testified, and as the pronouncements of Edmund Burke against the French Revolution amplified, the Glorious Revolution was astonishingly conservative in its ruling illusions. In the welter of vindicatory words, talk of popular revolution was marginal. A successful invasion by an authoritarian prince, whose career was built upon the wreckage of Dutch republicanism, offered only the roughest approximation to the model of a corporate people vindicating their natural rights against a tyrant. But all this notwithstanding, the oath of allegiance to the new regime undoubtedly embroiled Tory consciences in an agonizing dilemma, and their pamphlets were unquestionably hurried and circumstantial, if monumental, exercises in casuistry. The Jacobites and Nonjurors, the Tories’ erstwhile brethren whose consciences would not bend to the Revolution, denounced the conforming Tories with terrible anathemas. They published anew the doctrine of non-resistance, declaring that nothing could justify the breach of sacred obligations to King James, for the Dutch usurper could no more be legitimized than the tyrant Oliver.7 They were surely correct to believe that, however decorously Tory the Revolution might come to seem in Queen Anne’s reign, it was, from the perspective of Restoration dogma, an irreducibly Whig event. It was the occasion for a recapitulation of the grand tradition of the Calvinist theory of revolution, and it saw the republication of exactly those seditious works which had been consigned to the flames by Tory Oxford in 1683.8 Not only was William of Orange the beneficiary of the deposition of a monarch but also, ironically, his arrival confirmed what James had already so Whiggishly done in shattering for ever the dream of a purified Cavalier and Anglican regime which had so nearly been perfected in the early 1680s. Moreover, the charge of Tory apostasy may be pushed a stage further, for there is no doubt that, apart from the pragmatic need to reconcile consciences in 1689, the shock of James’s regime dislodged a number of churchmen from principles they had previously held. Much the most prominent case is Gilbert Burnet, a vocal clergyman in exile in Holland and a key propagandist in William’s entourage. In 1683 he had, together with John Tillotson, pleaded with the Whig traitor Lord Russell, in his last hours before execution, to renounce the unchristian doctrine of armed resistance.9 Burnet subsequently reconsidered, and in January 1689 published an influential tract on behalf 6

For Tory ideology after 1688, see works cited above, p. 34, n. 76. A key instance is Abednigo Seller, The History of Passive Obedience since the Reformation (1689). 8 Among texts republished in 1689 were George Buchanan, De jure regno apud Scotos (1579), Philippe du Plessis Mornay (attrib.), Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579), and Philip Hunton, A Treatise of Monarchy (1643). These and others were condemned by The Judgment and Decree of the University of Oxford (1683). 9 See Thomas Birch, The Life of John Tillotson (1753), pp. 102–15; L. G. Schwoerer, Lady Rachel Russell (Baltimore, MD, 1988), pp. 130–1, 137, 193, 195. 7

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of the removal of James.10 A lay Tory who changed his mind was Edmund Bohun. In the early 1680s he was Archbishop Sancroft’s literary agent in publishing and defending Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, the flagship of Tory absolutism.11 But in 1687, amid ‘the popish fury’, he set about translating into English John Sleidan’s history of the Schmalkaldic League, the German Lutheran states which had resisted the Catholic Emperor Charles V. The most famous episode in Sleidan’s story is the issuance in 1550 of the Admonition of Magdeburg, which declared that ‘it is lawful for an inferior magistrate to resist a superior that would constrain their subjects to forsake the truth’.12 In 1689 Bohun was one of the first Tories in the field in publishing persuasives to accept the Revolution.13 A third influential case is that of White Kennett, who as an undergraduate in 1681 and a young priest in 1686, published high-flown paeans to Stuart monarchy.14 But in 1706 his Complete History appeared, which became a standard Whig account of Restoration history, a threnody on the tyrannies of Charles and James and the virtues of William. His enemies taunted him with his past, several times reprinting his Tory juvenilia.15 More generally, it is a striking fact that the genre of defences of monarchical absolutism, so prominent in the early 1680s, in the expectation of a papist but Tory-controlled monarchy, wholly lapsed after 1685. The only exception of any note was The Excellency of Monarchical Government, written by one of James’s few Tory collaborators, Nathaniel Johnston, who reaped a reward of ostracism and penury.16

10

Gilbert Burnet, An Enquiry into the Present State of Affairs (1689). To reveal his ‘hypocrisy’, his Subjection for Conscience Sake (1674) was reprinted by Jacobites in 1689 and 1710. See T. E. S. Clark and H. C. Foxcroft, A Life of Gilbert Burnet (Cambridge, 1907), pp. 109–11, 134, 174–6, 194–6, 198, 241–2, 244–5, 335. 11 Bohun wrote A Defence of Sir Robert Filmer (1684) and published the 1685 edition of Patriarcha, from a manuscript supplied by Sancroft. 12 John Sleidan, The General History of the Reformation (1689), p. 496; S. W. Rix (ed.), The Diary and Autobiography of Edmund Bohun (Beccles, 1853), p. 79. On Sleidan: A. G. Dickens and J. Tonkin, The Reformation in Historical Thought (Oxford, 1985), pp. 10–19; A. Kess, Johann Sleidan and the Protestant Vision of History (Aldershot, 2008). 13 Bohun, Diary, pp. 82–3; idem, The History of the Desertion (1689). See M. Goldie, ‘Edmund Bohun and jus gentium in the Revolution Debate, 1689–1693’, HJ 20 (1977), 569–86. 14 White Kennett, A Letter from a Student at Oxford (1681); Kennett, An Address of Thanks to a Good Prince (1686). 15 Anon., White against Kennett (1704); Anon., The Conduct of the Reverend Dr White Kennett (1717). See G. V. Bennett, White Kennett, 1660–1728 (1957), pp. 10–12, 17ff. The high Tory Mary Astell assailed Kennett in An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War (1704). 16 The Excellency appeared in 1686, before James’s change of policy became fully apparent. However, Johnston went on to defend James’s new stance.

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The two revolutions of 1688

Yet if the charge of apostasy carries some weight, there is nonetheless a crucial sense in which it is mistaken. The mistake lies in conflating the aspirations and utterances of the Tories during James’s reign with their response to the unexpected circumstances of his deposition in 1689. Whatever the case for ‘betrayal’ after the fateful resolution by the Convention on 6 February 1689 that the throne was vacant, before that moment Tory resistance to James took place within the boundaries of their existing political catechism. Throughout three years of stentorian remonstration against James nearly all churchmen remained unswervingly committed to his kingship, and to the view that coercive resistance, as opposed to civil disobedience, was never legitimate. What historians have generally taken to constitute the political thought of the Glorious Revolution is the ‘allegiance debate’ that took place in its aftermath. But that was the political thought of William’s revolution, and in this chapter, I turn instead to examine the political theology of the Anglican revolution. We need first briefly to dwell upon this distinction between the two revolutions of 1688. The second, the Williamite, superseded and overwhelmed the first, the Anglican, and led to a dynastic coup of unforeseen magnitude. It is easy to see the trial of the Seven Bishops, which was the climacteric of the Anglican revolution, as a prelude to William’s, but that is misleading. To the prelates and Tory magnates, the Dutch invasion was little short of disastrous for the cause of their impending recapture of the king’s administration. Between 1686 and 1688 they were embarked upon overturning not the monarchy but the monarch’s ministers and policies. If unremarkable measured on the scale of revolutionary overthrow, it was still a momentous enterprise. Contemporaries called it a revolution, and it was what the marquis of Halifax intended when, in his famous tract A Letter to a Dissenter (1687), he spoke of ‘the next probable revolution’.17 ‘Revolution’ here meant not a violent overthrow, but a great change or cycle in affairs. It betokened a ‘reformation’ or ‘restoration’ of former proprieties wrongfully disrupted. It meant the recovery of a wayward sovereign to forsaken principles. The church party aimed to force James back into the mould of the Tory regime of the early 1680s, which James had so brutally curtailed. The church’s campaign was scarcely a muted affair; still less was it an underground conspiracy for William’s benefit. If successful, it would have returned to office the Hyde brothers, the earls of Rochester and Clarendon, the prelates Sancroft and Turner, and the rising Tory peer the earl of Nottingham. Such men remained sanguine that the king’s precarious Catholicizing programme would collapse of its own accord, ‘crippled with the difficulties it every day meeteth with’.18 Their intention was to restore Stuart monarchy to its proper place in the 17

George Savile, marquis of Halifax, Complete Works, ed. J. P. Kenyon (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 116. 18 J. R. Jones, ‘James II’s Whig Collaborators’, HJ 3 (1960), 65–73, at 336. See also Sir John Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland (3 vols, 1790), II, 197, 208–8, 219–20, 235,

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Anglican firmament, to prolong and perfect their vision of what we have come to call ‘Restoration England’. William would bring it to a close. In the summer and autumn of 1688, the Anglican revolution very nearly succeeded. Had James capitulated in the aftermath of the trial of the bishops he would certainly have kept his throne. In October, when the reality of William’s imminent military intervention dawned on him, he did capitulate, abjectly and totally, throwing over everything he had so laboriously constructed, his remodelled magistracies, his electoral machine, his Ecclesiastical Commission, his Catholic college at Oxford. The bishops demanded that he ‘restore all things to the state in which he found them when he came to the crown’.19 The diarist Roger Morrice recorded that the ship of state, having been ‘tossed up and down at sea and ready to sink’, now sought a port: the bishops ‘have now given the vessel a twig to take hold on whereby it may draw itself to land, but they seem yet to keep the hatchet in their own hand, by which they can cut off that twig at their pleasure’.20 The king’s now exhausted bureaucratic machine could scarcely have been rebuilt in the time he was likely to have left to his natural life. In substance if not in name, an Anglican episcopal regency for his newborn son loomed.21 In a gamble to save himself from a worse fate, he resigned himself to being king of the church party, and his experiment in Catholic and Dissenter absolutism was lost. William’s entourage was taken aback by James’s new stance. It spoiled the impact of the Prince’s Declaration of his reasons for intervening in England. He issued an Additional Declaration implying that the bishops’ remedies were inadequate, and repudiating suggestions that a conquest was intended.22 The Williamite Whig clergyman Samuel Johnson was beside himself with fury at the bishops’ coup, for they ‘intended to forestall our expected deliverance’, and ‘by a little priestcraft’ have ‘spoiled’ and ‘puzzled’ the prince’s design. Even more revealing of the tension between Anglican and Williamite objectives is Morrice’s report of his encounter in December with a senior clergyman, who exploded at him ‘with extraordinary passion’, saying that before the Prince of Orange landed ‘they were in a sure way to deliverance’, since ‘all the papists’ councils and endeavours were blasted’. James, this divine was convinced, could now be kept ‘in constant bondage to the hierarchy’, whereas he apprehended ‘they can

237; H. Horwitz, Revolution Politicks: The Career of Daniel Finch, Second Earl of Nottingham (Cambridge, 1968), ch. 4. 19 John Gutch (ed.), Collectanea Curiosa (2 vols, Oxford, 1781), I, 405-, 411; ST, XII, 489–90; G. D’Oyly, The Life of William Sancroft (2 vols, 1821), I, 340. 20 S. Taylor (ed.), The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, IV (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 321 (13 October). 21 For an episcopal scheme in 1677 to control the education of royal children, see above, p. 103. 22 See T. Claydon, ‘William III’s Declaration of Reasons and the Glorious Revolution’, HJ 39 (1996), 87–108.

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never keep the Prince in bondage’.23 The invasion, in short, was unnecessary to the Tories because the holy union of crown and altar had been restored, and James rendered regal but impotent. Even after William’s landing it was by no means obvious that he would become king. He had been careful not to claim the crown, and most people believed that he had come as a regent or protector to restore his uncle’s regime to its senses and to preserve his wife’s inheritance. For so long as James remained on English soil some sort of regency at most was envisaged. If James’s flight drastically altered the balance of expectation, the idea of a regency remained strong until the early days of the Convention in January 1689.24 Consequently, naive though it seems to us, and seemed to them in retrospect, a great body of the political elite were shocked to discover William’s dynastic ambitions. Even the earl of Danby, one of the seven noblemen who sent the letter to William inviting him to intervene, was to protest, at the Sacheverell trial, that ‘he never thought that things would have gone so far as to settle the crown on the Prince of Orange, whom he had often heard say, that he had no such thoughts himself’. His son swore: ‘I take God to witness that I had not thought when I engaged in it … that the Prince of Orange’s landing would end in deposing the king.’25 In the midst of William’s revolution there remained, until the last possible moment, a remarkable ideological punctiliousness about preserving James’s kingship. In December 1688, when William’s army was on the verge of entering the capital, Morrice was amazed to discover that at the elections for the London common council the Tory lord mayor was insisting upon the new councilmen swearing the statutory oath of non-resistance.26 Only after January would Tories be forced to salvage what political and ideological baggage they could from the unlooked for catastrophe of James’s deposition. In the conduct of the Anglican revolution the senior divines of the Church of England bore the brunt of the struggle against James. Contemporaries talked rather of the ‘church party’ or ‘the hierarchists’ than of the Tories. To an unprecedented degree the clergy became the agents of the Tory cause. In part this was because after the autumn of 1685 no parliament sat until early in 1689, so that the ordinary secular channel for voicing grievances was absent. And in part it 23

Samuel Johnson, An Argument Proving (1692), in The Works of Samuel Johnson (1710), pp. 266–7; Morrice, Entring Book, p. 418 (22 December). 24 For the church party’s position in 1688–89, see G. Every, The High Church Party, 1688–1718 (1956); R. A. Beddard, ‘The Guildhall Declaration of 11 December 1688 and the CounterRevolution of the Loyalists’, HJ 2 (1968), 403–20; G. V. Bennett, ‘The Seven Bishops’, Studies in Church History 25 (1978), 267–87. 25 W. Cobbett (ed.), The Parliamentary History of England (36 vols, 1806–20), VI, 847; E. Cruickshanks, ‘Religion and Royal Succession’, in Britain in the First Age of Party, ed. C. Jones (1987), pp. 19–43, at 24. Other examples: A. Browning (ed.), Memoirs of Sir John Reresby (Glasgow, 1936), p. 522; Clarendon, Correspondence, pp. 212, 214, 238; H. Hosford, Nottingham, Nobles, and the North (Hamden, CT, 1976), pp. 107–8, 119. 26 Morrice, Entring Book, p. 353 (1 December).

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was because, under Sancroft’s leadership, the hierarchy had achieved a high degree of political cohesion and self-confidence. The churchmen were prepared to take stands which the lay elite were reluctant to take, or even advised against. This was conspicuously so when the divines resolved to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by James in demanding that the Declaration of Indulgence be proclaimed from the pulpits. Rochester and Nottingham urged compliance, Halifax was noncommittal, and only Clarendon concurred with the divines’ decision to refuse. The clerical character of the enterprise had distinctive consequences for its ideological complexion. That James was embarked on an ambitious scheme of popish proselytizing, that this was mingled paradoxically and frighteningly with an open encouragement of Dissent and of the old Cromwellian ‘fanatics’, and that he barracked the established church with his Ecclesiastical Commission, all unavoidably framed public debate in terms of the fortunes of the Church of England. Moreover, there was little incentive for the resurrection of older constitutionalist positions. It was not the absolutism of James that provoked Tory anger, but the uses to which it was put. Whatever the degree of his exploitation of his prerogative powers, he did not unequivocally step beyond them. And the character of his carefully configured prospective parliament was too much in the balance to underwrite an appeal to parliamentary restraint upon him. The king’s regime may have appalled the political elite, yet in its final months there was no revival of theories of mixed government and still less of Calvinist revolutionary theory. Tories eschewed them, and had devoted themselves to repudiating them; Williamites, seeking to placate English conservatives, were cautious about adopting them; and radical Whigs had either, like John Locke, committed themselves to paper only secretly, or had indeed gone over to James’s side, lured by the prospect of toleration.27 Accordingly, nearly all the voluminous pamphleteering of James’s reign concerned the theology of popery, the advisability of religious toleration, and the rights of the Anglican church. The ideological bulwarks against James were theological and ecclesiological rather than jurisprudential. With the almost complete eclipse in the early 1680s of the public acceptability of most anti-­ absolutist political theory, which the clergy had done so much to secure, it was, ironically, only Anglican political theology which was capable of providing a legitimating ideology for resistance to the crown. Continuing to hold that no temporal power had authority to overthrow even a popish prince, they no less 27

The level of Whig and Dissenter support for James’s grant of toleration has been underestimated. It was driven by desperation after the severity of the repression of Dissent in the early 1680s. See M. Goldie, ‘John Locke’s Circle and James II’, HJ 35 (1992), 557–86; idem, ‘James II and the Dissenters’ Revenge’, Historical Research 66 (1993), 53–88; S. Sowerby, ‘Forgetting the Repealers: Religious Toleration and Historical Amnesia in Later Stuart England’, Past & Present 215 (2012), 85–123; idem, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2013); G. S. De Krey, Following the Levellers, vol. 2, 1649–1688 (Basingstoke, 2018), ch. 7.

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fervently believed in the duty of spiritual pastors to school their prince in true religion, because all Christians were subject to spiritual rebuke. The Anglican revolution was an act of the Reformation, conducted by the clergy against their ungodly king. Non-resistance and civil disobedience

In his classic account of divine right theory, J. N. Figgis showed that Anglican absolutism was essentially a Bodinian or Hobbesian doctrine of sovereignty expressed in the language of Protestant political theology.28 Like Bodin, Hobbes, and Filmer, churchmen had repeatedly insisted that in any state there must be a single, unimpeachable source of authority, and that to suppose that such an authority could legitimately be overturned by the estates, by the pope or by the people, was a contradiction of the nature of sovereignty, and was a solecism fraught with disastrous consequences. Yet, unlike Hobbes – the cases of Bodin and Filmer are less clear – churchmen did not ally this view either with a strict legal positivism, by which ‘law’ can only be said to be the command of the sovereign, or with a philosophical nominalism, by which individual judgement was made subject to the arbitration of sovereigns. Neither law nor conscience were subsumed by the state, and so they might yet challenge the state. Churchmen did not offer an account of political or constitutional rights against the crown, but they did invoke the moral law and constructed a case for the legitimacy of, so to speak, ‘internal flight’ from an ungodly monarch. They also constantly upheld their duty to counsel and admonish kings. It thus would be misleading to suppose that in the absence of a theory of revolution or constitutional rights, churchmen were bereft of a considered case for resistance and that they must lamely acquiesce in anything a monarch commanded. Lord Macaulay considered the divines to be so besotted with Filmer that they gave the crown a divine right to ‘send mutes with bowstrings to Sancroft and Halifax’, a reference to the supposed habit of Turkish sultans of having their political opponents strangled.29 Like many other Whigs, Macaulay failed to distinguish between ‘oriental despotism’ (as the eighteenth century came to call it) and Christian absolutism, or rather between a conception of sovereignty as arbitrary, and the churchmen’s presumption that there are discernible principles of right which, with the guidance of a sound conscience, may be invoked to overrule a wrongful sovereign. The Anglican position was distinct from that of Hobbes, with its unimpeachable sovereign will, and that of Locke, with its insistent right of armed resistance. The twin preoccupation in modern commentary with Hobbes’s nominalist absolutism and with Locke’s 28

J. N. Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings (Cambridge, 1896). Lord Macaulay, The History of England (2 vols, 1889), I, 524. ‘The most slavish theory that has ever been known among men’ (p. 522). 29

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revolutionary violence has tended to occlude the middle ground, a scholastic or ‘church’ absolutism, which made extensive room for a duty of passive resistance. Restoration Anglicanism always contained within itself the seeds of a theory of passive resistance, and in opposing James churchmen did no other than what their doctrines had long allowed. As early as the opening months of James’s reign, on 29 May 1685, Restoration day, William Sherlock made this clear in his sermon before the House of Commons. This sermon has been seen as a characteristic panegyric to divine right monarchy preached in the honeymoon months of the reign. So it was. But it was also a thinly veiled threat to the crown. ‘It is’, he said, ‘a Church of England loyalty I persuade you to’, a qualification which carried a heavy penumbra of meaning. He told his audience that to be ‘true to our prince, we must be true to our church and to our religion’, and that it would not be an act of loyalty ‘to accommodate or compliment away our religion and its legal securities’.30 Two stories are recorded of unheeded warnings given to James. Burnet claimed to have told him in the 1670s of ‘distinctions and reserves’ in the doctrine of non-resistance, and Bishop Morley, on his deathbed in 1684, told James ‘that if ever he depended upon the doctrine of non-resistance he would find himself deceived’.31 These ‘distinctions and reserves’ resolved themselves into two strands of argument. On the one hand, it was contended that the king’s godly subjects had a duty to disobey him if he exposed true religion to intolerable dangers, and if necessary they must do so on such a scale as amounted to a desertion of him. On the other, it was held that the bishops had a special obligation to defend the autonomy of the church against the encroachments of the temporal sovereign, even to the point of divesting him of his ecclesiastical authority. These two strands will be examined in turn. In seeking to defend civil disobedience, the divines’ first move was to recapitulate the position of the early Luther and the (somewhat more ambiguous) position of the early Calvin, in the period before Protestants were driven to more radical positions by Catholic attacks upon them.32 In his tracts of the 1520s, and particularly in Temporal Authority, Luther stressed the subject’s duty to obey and never forcibly to resist God’s ordained minister, the temporal prince. But he also urged upon princes their duties to preserve peace, prevent immorality, and defend true religion. Correspondingly, he called upon subjects to be on their guard against princes who neglect these duties, or, worse, who actually command ungodly acts. While Luther on no account permitted armed resistance, even against tyrants, he no less insisted on the duty to disobey commands contrary to the word of God. If the penalty for such disobedience was punishment or even death, it must be endured, for temporal ease was not 30

William Sherlock, A Sermon Preached at St Margaret’s Westminster (1685), pp. 31–2. OT, p. 359; Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain, II, 289. 32 For the development of Protestant political thought, see Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols, Cambridge, 1978), II. 31 Burnet,

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to be purchased at the cost of the eternal soul. Civil disobedience and public remonstration, together with ‘prayers and tears’,33 were the permitted bounds of resistance. Hence Luther’s followers drew a clear distinction between ‘active obedience’ to godly commands and ‘passive obedience’ to ungodly. The latter phrase was somewhat misleading, for obedience was not due to the ungodly command, but to the duty to suffer the tyrannical prince’s wrath. Accordingly, ‘passive obedience’ amounted to civil disobedience. In defence of this position, Luther quoted St Peter: ‘We must obey God rather than man’ (Acts 5:29). This text, together with the rest of the Lutheran formula, was now remorselessly repeated by James’s Anglican enemies, both during his reign and in self-exculpation afterwards. One pamphleteer put the case as follows. If the king commands something which is ‘beyond that authority which the constitutions of the kingdom have assigned him’ and yet ‘which is not forbidden by the law of God’, then, ‘for the sake of peace’, a people ought to comply. But if, more ‘extravagantly’, the king sets about introducing ‘a false religion’, then, though he may not be repelled by arms, his people are obliged ‘according to their stations, to resist such proceedings, defending themselves and their own rights, not offending him, or retaliating injuries, but refusing to put in execution such illegal designs’. According to another, there was a ‘vast difference’ between ‘the duty of passive obedience and the false pleas for active assistance’ made by those who would have us slavishly obey all the ruler’s commands.34 Bridget Croft wrote that she prayed that the nation will obey the king in all things lawful, but ‘passively suffer when they cannot with a clear conscience actually obey, having no thought of other weapons than prayers and tears’. Another wrote that ‘it is not a necessary consequence of the doctrine of non-resistance, that because we must never resist our prince, whatever he does, therefore he may de jure dispense with what laws he pleases’. In particular, the king’s use of the prerogative dispensing power to propagate false religion could not be justified, and to oppose him in this was ‘not merely a point of law, but a Gospel command’, for there lay upon churchmen an absolute obligation to resist inundation ‘by the popish and fanatic commonwealthmen’.35 These claims went along with a precise concern to distance Anglican resistance from the ‘king-killing’ doctrines of Whigs and papists. John Williams defended Anglican resistance to a Catholic king in the same breath as explaining that it was popery which pulled down princes and Anglicanism which was the only

33

‘Preces et lachrymae sunt arma ecclesiae’ (prayers and tears are the weapons of the church) was a frequently repeated tag. It appears in James VI and I’s Trew Law of Free Monarches (1598): Political Writings, ed. J. P. Sommerville (Cambridge, 1994), p. 72. 34 Anon., The Grand Problem (1690), p. 5; Anon., The Case of the People of England (1689), p. 19. 35 Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, MS HA 1785: Croft to the earl of Huntingdon, 21 August 1688; Anon., Answer to the Late Pamphlet, Intituled, The Judgment and Doctrine … (1687), pp. 4–5.

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religion of princely rights.36 William Lloyd, one of the Seven Bishops charged with sedition, commenced his notes for the trial by urging that ‘holy religion teaches us, under pain of damnation, not to rebel against our king, though he be of another religion’.37 Such self-righteous fastidiousness in the midst of civil disobedience enraged the king’s allies. The attorney general demanded to know why the bishops’ ‘passive obedience’ could not at least have let them wait upon the next parliament, and Thomas Cartwright sneered at churchmen who ‘passively rebel’.38 This allowance of civil disobedience led some Anglicans to note the inappositeness of the conventional terms ‘non-resistance’ and ‘passive obedience’. It now became fashionable to prefer the term ‘non-assistance’, which indeed better conveys the true sense of the phrase ‘passive obedience’. One author went on to claim that, far from being ineffectual, a strategy of passive resistance ‘if they [the people] would unanimously resolve on this’, might ‘be safe, since he [the prince] can never destroy them but by their own hands’. Thomas Bainbridge wrote that if ‘a great part of the people should take up a resolution not to do, but to suffer, a prince would have a very ill bargain’.39 An influential guide to Tory gentry on how to behave during the impending popish reign, Edmund Bohun’s Third Address to the Freeholders, of 1683, counselled that, should James embark on a scheme to rout Protestantism, ‘the bare refusing to aid and assist him in such an enterprise would render it impossible’.40 This train of thought was captured a generation later when Roger North, who pined for the golden days of Charles II’s last years, wrote his Examen, an angry retort to White Kennett’s apostate Complete History, mentioned earlier. He wrote that although church doctrine required ‘a negation of all active force’, it was mistaken to see it thereby as an acceptance of ‘exorbitant prerogative’. ‘Non-resistance’ ought rather to be styled ‘non-assistance’, since, in ‘disowning unlawful commands by patient suffering’, a people had at its disposal ‘one way, and an effectual one, of flying in the face … of an exorbitant power’, so that, far from being a slavish doctrine, it was ‘a principle of liberty and security’. That this was so was demonstrated by the ‘heroic courage’ of the ‘passive obedience men’ under James II. Also writing after the event, in 1691, William Sherlock pushed the case one stage further, arguing that for those ‘who do not drive the king away, but only suffer him quietly to escape … this is no rebellion, no resistance, but only non-assistance, which may be very innocent, for there are

36

John Williams, An Apology for the Pulpits (1688), pp. 3–4, 29. Cf. William Wake, A Discourse Concerning the Nature of Idolatry (1688), pp. vii–xvi. 37 Gutch, Collectanea, I, 370. 38 ST, XII, 401; Thomas Cartwright, An Answer of a Minister (1687), p. 52. ‘The Church of England seemed to be rising up against its supreme governor while kneeling’: Sirota, Christian Monitors, p. 19. 39 Anon., Grand Problem, p. 5; Thomas Bainbridge, Seasonable Reflections (1690), p. 13. 40 Edmund Bohun, Third Address (1683), p. 66.

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some cases, where subjects are not bound to assist their prince; and if ever there was such a case, this was it’.41 Lutheran fatalism and readiness for martyrdom was here modified by a secular appraisal of the political effectiveness of civil disobedience, and is suggestive of the view, widely purveyed in the eighteenth century, that all regimes ultimately rest on the opinion of their citizens. As David Hume would insist, talk of contracts and revolutions were redundant and dangerous abstractions in the face of the simple fact that all government depended on the willingness of people to obey its commands.42 A comparison with Hume should not, however, go too far. The Anglican case, in its inflexible double imperative, to disobey unrighteous sovereigns but never to rebel, is more reminiscent of the rigid formalism of Immanuel Kant’s position. Like the Anglicans of 1688, Kant saw his doctrine as strictly entailed by the concept of sovereignty, but as mitigated by a duty of remonstration and civil disobedience, and as buttressed by a Lutheran political theology of willingness to suffer for righteousness’ sake. Reflecting on St Peter, Kant wrote that the text ‘“We ought rather to obey God than man” means that when men command what is evil-in-itself, that is, what runs directly counter to the moral law, we ought not to obey.’ That Kant also equivocally approved of actual revolutions adds to the parallel. It is a position that has seemed insupportably paradoxical to later commentators, who have had as little patience with Kant as with Tory churchmen.43 The moral law is above the king

Those who resisted James regularly claimed to be standing upon conscience, upon the law of God rather than the law of the land, and indeed had misgivings about standing solely upon temporal law. It is true that constitutional arguments were made by Tory lawyers, for instance by the defending counsel in the Seven Bishops’ case; and the bishops themselves pronounced the Indulgence illegal. Within the framework of Restoration absolutism, Anglican casuists could certainly appeal against the king to laws, customs, and precedents – especially as they conceived the rights of their religion as incorporated into English law – but, in the last resort, they could not baulk at obeying the command of the sovereign in any matter not touching moral or divine law. It is also true that divines were by training less apt than lawyers to construe politics within the 41

Roger North, Examen (1740 [written c. 1706]), pp. 331–2, 338; William Sherlock, The Case of Allegiance (1691), p. 50. 42 See D. Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1978), ch. 3. 43 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundary of Pure Reason, ed. J. W. Semple (Edinburgh, 1838 [1792]), p. 125. See H. S. Reiss, ‘Kant and the Right of Rebellion’, Journal of the History of Ideas 17 (1956), 179–92; L. W. Beck, ‘Kant and the Right of Revolution’, Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (1971), 411–22. Kant commented on the 1688 Revolution: H. Reiss (ed.), Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 83–4.

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framework of the ‘common law mind’, so to examine the political theology of divines is no doubt to distort the picture.44 But it is equally misleading to view the arguments of 1688 too narrowly in terms of a ‘triumph of the lawyers’ and of common law remedies against arbitrary rule.45 It is easy to forget that the church’s refusal to read the Indulgence was grounded chiefly in abhorrence of its unlimited toleration. By the Indulgence, said one clergyman, ‘all religions would be let in, be what they will, Ranter, Quaker, and the like, nay, even the Roman Catholic religion (as they call it)’.46 For the divines, therefore, the critical element at issue was not the distinction between legality and illegality in positive law, but that between lawful and unlawful in divine and natural law. Human positive laws were, they emphasized, of two types: those which were simply regulatory and useful, and those which gave definition and sanction to prior and transcendent principles of a moral or religious kind. In the former case the laws were said to forbid those things which were malum prohibitum, wrong because prohibited for some practical purpose. Here the sovereign was absolutely free to act according to his best judgement. In the latter case, the laws were said to forbid those things which were malum in se, wrong in themselves. Here the sovereign was merely the executive agent of prior laws. He was, in scholastic terminology, ‘accidental’ and not ‘essential’ to those laws, and could not dispense with them at will. In this area, the absolute prince had no licence to be an arbitrary prince. A human command contrary to divine law was not properly a law at all, and to disregard it was not properly disobedience. This was Thomist legal doctrine and it was fundamental to the Anglican conception of law; it was utterly at odds with Hobbes’s. For Hobbes, nothing can be ‘essentially’ wrong, independent of human laws and conventions, and thus we cannot legitimately do other than accept any authoritative command of the authorized sovereign. The claim that James II was commanding things malum in se was at the heart of the debate over the dispensing and suspending powers. It could not plausibly be claimed that the king had no dispensing power, since a weight of legal precedent showed that he had – and since, for an Anglican absolutist, in the last resort the king’s will in purely temporal matters was law. Nor could it be argued that the king could not instruct the reading of declarations from pulpits, since such a power had on earlier occasions been exercised without demur. In 1681 the clergy had read Charles II’s declaration of his reasons for dissolving the Oxford Parliament, and in 1683 a declaration against the Rye House Plot, on both occasions assisting the crown in delivering a coup de grace to the Whigs. But, by contrast, it could be argued that the king must not dispense with the 44

G. Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (University Park, PA, 1992), ch. 5. M. Landon, The Triumph of the Lawyers, 1678–1689 (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1970); H. Nenner, By Color of Law: Legal Culture and Constitutional Politics in England, 1660–1689 (Chicago, IL, 1977); S. Pincus, ‘The English Nationalist Revolution of 1688–89’, in Protestantism and National Identity, ed. T. Claydon and I. McBride (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 75–104, at 85–92. 46 ST, XII, 372; D’Oyly, Sancroft, I, 301; cf. p. 229. 45

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Test Acts and penal laws because they were a fundamental bulwark of true religion. And it could also be held that no churchman could countenance a royal licence of an ‘infinite liberty’ of worship, such that ‘paganism itself might now be publicly professed’.47 When the fellows of Magdalen College in Oxford resisted the king, they stood partly but not ultimately upon their rights under positive law, emphasizing instead the sacred obligation of their oaths. They asserted that the king’s appointment of a Catholic to the presidency of the college overrode the college statutes and that their subsequent ejection from their fellowships violated their freehold properties. But they were careful from the outset to insist that the king commanded worse, a violation of something malum in se, namely their duty upon oath to preserve the college as a seminary of the Church of England, together with their oath of allegiance to their elected Anglican president. By their oath they were ‘reduced to this unfortunate necessity, of either disobeying his [the king’s] will, or violating their consciences by notorious perjuries’. The vice-chancellor told the king that no power under heaven could dispense with the obligation of their oaths.48 Another example is the argument of Bishop Henry Compton’s lawyers when he was arraigned in 1686 for refusing to suspend John Sharp for his anti-popery sermons. The lawyers asserted that the bishop could not have suspended Sharp without a citation and trial, for ‘a citation is jure gentium and can never be taken away by any positive command or law whatsoever’; it is ‘against the law of nature, which is above all positive law’. Consequently, the bishop ‘has not been disobedient’ to the king, for ‘no man can be obliged to do an unlawful act, id non sit, quod non legitime sit: this rule obliges all men in the world, in all places and at all times’.49 Here the idea of ‘lawfulness’ was clearly not dependent upon the positive command of the temporal sovereign. If we turn, by contrast, to the arguments of the king’s defenders, we find them equally concerned to answer not just a case in positive law, but also to meet doubts about the relationship between positive and divine law. Herbert Croft’s tract in justification of reading the Indulgence dwelt not upon its legality under positive law, but upon whether the king had commanded anything contrary to God’s law. He was satisfied the king had not.50 Nathaniel Johnston, in the case of Magdalen College, extensively cited the discussion of oath-taking by the revered Anglican moralist Robert Sanderson, concluding that the king could 47 Burnet,

OT, p. 737. Impartial Relation, pp. 5, 31; J. R. Bloxam, Magdalen College and King James II (Oxford, 1886), p. 91. See G. V. Bennett, ‘Loyalist Oxford and the Revolution’, in The History of the University of Oxford, V, ed. L. C. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell (Oxford, 1986), pp. 9–29. 49 An Exact Account of the Whole Proceedings against Henry Lord Bishop of London (1688), pp. 25–6; ST, XI, 1163. 50 Herbert Croft, A Short Discourse (1688). Croft was a bishop with tolerationist leanings, but he retracted his pamphlet when he felt the wrath of the Sancroftians. 48 Fairfax,

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release a person from an oath where that oath was required under the king’s own laws, and thus that no higher principle was entailed.51 That the king’s apologists shared the churchmen’s premises, but denied the corollaries, is best exemplified in the case which settled the king’s right to dispense with the Test Act, Godden v. Hales. Chief Justice Herbert took the opportunity given to judges to pronounce on abstract points and began his judgement with a series of absolutist propositions: that the king of England was a sovereign prince, that the law-making power belonged to sovereignty, that the dispensing power was inseparable from the prerogative, and that these powers were not a trust granted by the people to the king. He went on to concede that only ‘whatever is not prohibited by the laws of God’ may be dispensed with. Next, he produced an impeccably Anglican syllogism: God and not the prince is the sovereign of the moral law; only a sovereign can suspend a sovereign’s laws; therefore only God can suspend that part of human laws which instantiate divine moral law. Herbert then gave a classic instance: God could command Abraham to kill Isaac, but no earthly prince could command murder. Similarly, no prince could command an act of, say, usury or simony. But having conceded all this, Herbert turned to the case of the Test Act and concluded that it could not conceivably be construed as belonging to this category of fundamental moral laws.52 His conclusion seems transparently obvious to modern minds, Christian and secular: who would now hold that a law confining public office to Anglicans was a divine command? Contemporaries, however, were so convinced that the Test Act embodied the moral law that they concluded that Herbert had gone over to Hobbes’s ‘Turkish’ notion that there were no moral laws outside of sovereign command. Sir John Bramston said the judgement was ‘like which the judges gave Cambises of old. [King Cambises] had a mind to marry his sister, and asked the judges if by the laws of Persia a king might not marry his sister. They answered they met with no such law, but they had a law that the king might do what he pleased.’53 Bramston’s point was that Anglican absolutism was not ‘oriental despotism’. It is clear, then, that in the face of shared absolutist assumptions, the argument crucially turned upon establishing the matter of conscience. It was imperative for the church party to be able to dramatize the issues of the Test and the Indulgence as the crisis of true religion in the face of ‘pagano-Christian’ forces. To read the Indulgence, Bishop Jonathan Trelawny told Sancroft, would be to ‘betray the church’ and he would rather ‘be hanged at the doors’ of his cathedral than do so. A dockyard chaplain at Chatham declared his refusal to read the Indulgence from his pulpit, saying ‘I must choose suffering rather than sin.’ The entire clergy, wrote Edward Gee, were ready to ‘mark themselves 51

Nathaniel Johnston, The King’s Visitatorial Power Asserted (1688). ST, XI, 1192–3, 1195–9, 1253; Sir Edward Herbert, A Short Account of … Sir Edward Hales his Case (1688). 53 The Autobiography of Sir John Bramston (1845), p. 232. Cambyses: Persian emperor, sixth century BC. 52

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out for destruction’, for they ‘valued their religion and their church more than their own safety’.54 The blood of the martyrs

The divines did not construe themselves as patriots struggling for the constitution, but as martyrs suffering for the church. They knew that the final resort in Luther’s position was the willingness to die in witness for the faith. The archetype was Christ’s own suffering at the hands of misguided civil authorities: passive obedience was ultimately ‘a doctrine of the cross’.55 ‘Christianity’, George Hickes wrote in 1681, ‘is a suffering religion … because when the supreme power happens to be infidel, idolater, or heretic, and so sets itself against the Gospel in general … it becomes the duty of all Christian subjects to suffer.’ It was not only to theology the divines turned. Bainbridge invoked Stoic ethics: all the great moralists affirm that no one must flinch from duty for fear of suffering, ‘to do so … is slavish’. Citing Cicero’s Offices and ‘the Pythagoreans’, he concluded that ‘in the exercise of virtue a man must have nothing of the slave in him’.56 Consequently, one of the most striking aspects of the Anglican resistance movement was its noisy self-dramatization as a case of martyrdom under persecution. The mask of Christ-like humility and abnegatory readiness to die was a potent and muscular weapon of defiance. In readiness for physical suffering the churchmen fortified themselves by engendering a mystical vision of re-­ enacting Christ’s ordeal. Throughout the seventeenth century when people suffered brutality, for the sake of Christ as they thought, this ecstatic vision of re-enacting the crucifixion anaesthetized them: it is documented for Alexander Leighton, when he was ear-lopped and tongue-bored in 1630, and for Samuel Johnson, when he was flogged nearly to death in 1686 for inciting James’s troops to mutiny.57 Now, in the summer of 1688, as the Seven Bishops lay in the Tower awaiting trial, the divines readied themselves for similar fates. A print was published showing ‘the bishops who suffered martyrdom for the Protestant faith under the persecution of Queen Mary’ – Cranmer, Ridley, Hooper, and Latimer.58 In a dramatic sermon on 4 November 1688 (the day 54 Bodl.,

MS Tanner 28, fol. 158: 16 August 1688; J. Smith, The Life, Journals, and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys (2 vols, 1841), 126–7: J. Loton to Pepys, 4 June 1688; Edward Gee, Catalogue of all the Discourses (1689), p. 4. 55 Note for example the title of the Nonjuror Robert Kettlewell’s Christianity, a Doctrine of the Cross: or, Passive Obedience … (1691). 56 George Hickes, The True Notion of Persecution (1681), p. 2; Bainbridge, Seasonable Reflections, p. 15. 57 S. Foster, Notes from the Caroline Underground (Hamden, CT, 1978), p. 34; Johnson, Works, p. ix. 58 F. O’Donoghue and H. M. Hake, A Catalogue of Engraved British Portraits (6 vols, 1922), V, 74.

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before William of Orange’s landing), Sherlock spoke of the church as on the verge of destruction and mass martyrdom, recalling that ‘the jail and the stake’ had brought glory to Ridley and Hooper, and praying, in the words of Christ, ‘Lord, let this cup pass from me.’59 Some months earlier, Archbishop Sancroft, who cherished the memory of the ‘martyrdom of … the pious and the glorious’ Charles I, wrote a morbid letter to Princess Mary in Holland. ‘It hath seemed good to the Infinite Wisdom to exercise this poor church with trials of all sorts and of all degrees.’ The church has a ‘steadfast loyalty’ to her prince, but his Catholicism ‘embitters us’ and ‘makes us sit down with sorrow in dust and ashes’. Reflecting on the two royal brothers, Charles and James, he judged that the ‘greatest calamity’ of the century was that God permitted those who barbarously murdered their father to drive the sons into exile in Catholic lands, where their minds became contaminated by popery, ‘as if they had said to them, go and serve other gods’. It was the awful destiny of these wayward Stuart sons to go astray ‘from the inheritance of the Lord’, and the consequent fate of the church to enter upon ‘so dark and dismal a night’.60 If, as Protestants, the divines stood squarely in the tradition of the early Luther and of John Foxe’s Marian martyrology, as Anglicans with a predisposition toward affirming their continuity with the apostolic and universal church, their own sense of their intellectual and spiritual resources lay particularly with the teachings of the Fathers of the patristic age, the first four centuries after Christ.61 They turned especially to the days of the Roman persecution of Christianity. We engage, wrote William Wake, a future archbishop of Canterbury, in the spirit of the ‘primitive church’, when the Fathers accused the emperors of idolatry. ‘The church’, wrote Samuel Freeman, ‘has sometimes been forced to hide … sometimes you find it privately in an upper room, sometimes skulking in caves … now be-smeared with blood.’62 They turned to their copies of Lactantius and Tertullian, the primordial theologians of martyrdom. They endlessly repeated the ancient slogan sanguis martyrum est semen ecclesiae – the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.63 Mentally detaching themselves from the Constantinian world of Christian empire, they imagined themselves confronting the murderous pagan emperor Diocletian. Or, rather, like the subjects of the Emperor Julian the Apostate, they hallucinated into a brutal

59 Sherlock,

Sermon Preached … November 4, 1688 (1689), pp. 24–5, 27; Matthew 26:39. Sancroft, I, 43, 243–6; ST, VII, 434–5; Gutch, Collectanea, I, 300–2. 61 J.-L. Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity (Oxford, 2009). 62 Wake, Discourse Concerning Idolatry, pp. 9–11; Samuel Freeman, A Plain and Familiar Discourse (1687), p. 9. 63 A paraphrase of Tertullian, Apology (AD 197), ch. 50. Other key texts were Tertullian, To the Martyrs (c. 200); Tertullian, On Flight in Persecution (212); Origen, Exhortation to Martyrdom (235); Lactantius, On the Death of the Persecutors (c. 320). 60 D’Oyly,

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tyrant an emperor who was merely pagan.64 By the perversity of their witness on behalf of the exclusive claims of their own church, the Anglicans, like the early Christians, vexed and antagonized a regime otherwise generally predisposed towards tolerance.65 The church is an inviolable corporation

These claims of conscience against the state begged the unavoidable question: who is judge? The rhetoric of martyrdom was also to be found in the literature of the Anglicans’ enemies, the Dissenters, who had suffered persecution at the hands of the bishops themselves, the ‘prelatical Antichrist’.66 The Anglican divines had constantly attacked Dissenters, warning against ‘the anarchy of private judgement’. They had no patience with the diseased consciences of Quakers and Baptists, those flouters of authority who were the spawn of ‘enthusiasm’ and spiritual pride. In hostility against them, they had sometimes been tempted towards the Hobbesian view that the civil sovereign alone must be judge on earth, even of the dispositions of church worship and church government. The essence of Hobbism was that we must submit our judgement and not merely our will to the sovereign’s determination of what is good and right, a doctrine which undermined ‘conscience’. In attacking ‘enthusiasm’ Hobbes had gone out of his way to subvert the pretensions of seekers after martyrdom: the age of martyrdom is past and a modern martyr is but a misguided and dangerous fanatic.67 That the Anglican churchmen now pleaded the rights of their consciences against the king’s indulgence of ‘tender consciences’ was a circumstance fraught with paradox. As Bishop Thomas White told the king, ‘Sir, you allow liberty of conscience to all mankind: the reading this Declaration is against our conscience.’68 The bishops saw no contradiction here; still less had they converted to a belief in the legitimate pluralism of consciences. For it was not to private conscience that they appealed, but to the rightly ordered conscience,

64

The motif of Julian the Apostate runs though these debates. Samuel Johnson’s Julian the Apostate (1682) urged armed resistance against such an emperor. It was rebutted in George Hickes’s Jovian (1684). 65 On the cult of martyrdom: J. R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge, 1993); T. S. Freeman and T F. Mayer (eds), Martyrs and Martyrdom in England, 1400–1700 (Woodbridge, 2007); M. Neufeld, ‘The Politics of Anglican Martyrdom: Letters to John Walker, 1704–1705’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 62 (2011), 491–514. On the cult among early Christians: R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (1986), ch. 9. 66 N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity (Leicester, 1987), ch. 2; L. Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus (Cambridge, MA, 1996). 67 Hobbes, Leviathan, III, 786–8 (ch. 42). 68 Clarendon, Correspondence, II, 479.

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which is the public conscience of the divine corporation of Christ’s church.69 Against the state they asserted not the right of the individual but of the church, of sacerdotium against regnum. In particular, they insisted more forcefully than hitherto the divinely appointed task of the episcopate as governors of consciences and guarantors of the true faith. Seventeenth-century Anglicans had frequently resisted the Erastian tendency to incorporate spiritual power into the civil state. The church was asserted fundamentally to be an independent society, an autonomous corporation or societas perfecta, which had only historically come to be allied with the state. Hence a crucial distinction was to be drawn between the potestas jurisdictionis, the temporal authority and material trappings of ecclesiastics, which was the gift of the secular state, and the potestas ordinis, the spiritual and priestly authority which was the direct gift of Christ, which no prince could tamper with. If it was true that the state was divinely authorized through natural law, it was no less true that the church was directly established in Christ’s revealed law. And if the Pauline injunction to obey ‘the powers that be’ was foundational for the state, so the Petrine commission of the keys of spiritual authority was foundational for the church.70 The temporal prince, even though the very embodiment of the divine economy upon earth, was never a priest: rex was not sacerdos. Christ had promised the keys of the Kingdom to his Apostles, to whom he gave an indefeasible authority in the defence of the church, an authority which bishops in the apostolic succession inherited. All this amounted to a catholic, albeit not Roman Catholic, ecclesiology. Anglican apologists readily used the term ‘catholic’ of themselves, even in the throes of defending their Protestantism against popery. In the special circumstances of James’s reign – a papist king using the Elizabethan royal supremacy to attack the Anglican establishment – the divines had need of defining a position which was both defiantly anti-Erastian and anti-papal, and which also had an eye to the schismatic Dissenters. The outcome was a special emphasis on the character of the visible church as being constituted by an episcopal aristocracy ruling over a federation of dioceses. The fullest articulation of this hierocratic doctrine occurs in The Catholic Balance by Samuel Hill, a Somerset high churchman. His book was honed for a year in private circulation before appearing in print in May 1687. Its third chapter is a thoroughgoing critique of the royal ecclesiastical supremacy, and aimed to ‘fix bars’ against the base principles of ‘Erastian factors’ who would encourage ‘usurpations upon the state ecclesiastical’. He forthrightly contended that no temporal powers ‘have any authority in themselves to inspect, and assist 69

G. De Krey, ‘Rethinking the Restoration: Dissenting Cases for Conscience, 1667–1672’, HJ 38 (1995), 53–83; J. Champion, ‘Willing to Suffer: Law and Religious Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Religious Conscience, State, and the Law, ed. J. McLaren and H. Coward (Albany, NY, 1999), pp. 13–28. 70 Pauline Injunction: Rom. 13:1–2; Petrine Commission: ‘Upon this rock I build my church’: Matthew 16:18.

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with the regular operations of the powers hierarchical’. This was so because the church was an independent society. The Christianizing of temporal states had been an historical contingency which was no necessary part of the providential plan. Consequently, the powers of the state impinge not intrinsically but only accidentally upon the functions of Christian pastorship. Christ has enjoined obligations to the state, but they are obligations which apply as much to heathen as to Christian states. Thus no new powers are invested in princes ‘by their mere Christianity’, and every prince ‘that hopes to be saved by his Christianity’ ought to be ‘conducted in spirituals by the bishops that have the care of his soul’. In a signal ancient case, that of Theodosius and St Ambrose, a Roman emperor had submitted to a bishop for his sins. In citing this case Hill was invoking the most familiar of all hierocratic historical emblems, for if the Emperor Constantine presiding at the Council of Nicea was the archetype of quasi-sacerdotal kingship, then the clericalist counterpoint lay in the famous humbling of Theodosius at the doors of the cathedral of Milan, forbidden sacramental grace until Bishop Ambrose was satisfied with his penance.71 Hill went on to insist that, in the last resort, under an ungodly prince, the church had to right to sever its historic relationship with the state and re-­establish its original autonomy. The essence of the church’s integrity lay in the episcopate, and it was the apostolic succession which preserved the continuity of doctrine. In order to preserve apostolicity and orthodoxy the church could, in particular, abrogate the king’s acquired power of appointing bishops. Indeed, Hill contended, the princely nomination of bishops had dubious precedents, for the patristic canons had regarded the getting of a bishopric ‘through the secular powers’ as no less illicit than simony, and it was the heretic Arian emperors who were the first civil powers to force bishops to consecrate men of their own choosing. Hill was here repudiating that part of the 1534 Act of Annates which gave the crown the right of episcopal appointment. Nor did Hill’s critique of the Henrician settlement stop here. The church was furthermore ‘not bound to advocate’ the Henrician limitation upon the meeting of convocation and the passing of canon laws, for the church as a corporation had an imprescriptible right of self-government.72 The absence of regular and free convocations since the Reformation was an unwarranted ‘cramping’ of the church which gave the papists legitimate cause to deride the English church as no more than a department of state. The convening of convocations and synods was a ‘primitive and fundamental power and duty’ lying in bishops alone, and there was no

71

Samuel Hill, The Catholic Balance (1687), sigs A2r–A3v; pp. 107–8, 113–17, 121. The humbling of Theodosius occurred in AD 390. See P. Collinson, ‘If Constantine, then also Theodosius: St Ambrose and the Integrity of the Elizabethan Ecclesia Anglicana’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 30 (1979), 205–29. 72 The point was pursued in the 1690s: M. Goldie, ‘The Nonjurors, Episcopacy, and the Origins of the Convocation Controversy’, in Ideology and Conspiracy, ed. E. Cruickshanks (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 15–35.

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case for the ‘fetters’ of the Reformation statutes.73 This tract was a stunning denial of the ‘magisterial’ Reformation, and a clarion call for disestablishment. (Throughout its post-Reformation history, Anglican churchmen have called for disestablishment whenever they feel the secular power has become inimical to the church.) An even more forthright dissolution of the Reformation state-church was proclaimed in Ireland by William King, chancellor of St Patrick’s Cathedral.74 King provided the backbone of Anglican resistance to James in Dublin, vigorously preaching and publishing against popery. At this stage he staunchly upheld two cardinal Anglican principles, non-resistance and intolerance. On both scores, his later Williamite writing is misleading as to his pre-Revolution principles.75 On the topic of civil obedience, King was, as late as 27 September 1688, still preaching that ‘it is not lawful on any pretence whatsoever to take up arms against our lawful governors’. And in 1687 he indiscriminately assaulted ‘all Dissenters’, both ‘Presbyterians and papists’. He pronounced that the Presbyterians were guilty of schism and ‘sinful separation’, excommunicate, and thus deprived of grace, a judgement ‘valid and ratified in heaven’.76 The Anglican resistance to popery did not license Dissenter resistance to Anglicanism. King summarized his ecclesiology in an unpublished manuscript called ‘Principles of Church Government’, set out in thirty-five principles and forty-two corollaries.77 His first principle was ‘that the church is a society instituted by Christ, that she has certain rights and privileges bestowed on her by her founder and that those are distinct from the rights and privileges of civil society’. Such a society cannot be at the mercy of civil powers, for it must have the ‘power to do and require all those things that are necessary … to preserve it [as] a society’. It is an impossibility that Christ would leave his society under the ‘imperfection’ of a lack of means of governance, for no corporation is perfect without a right of self-subsistence. (This is in fact theology glossed with an Aristotelian principle of the necessary integrity of human associations, the ability of a society to fulfil its telos.) The magistrate may reward, encourage, and punish pastors in support of 73 Hill,

The Catholic Balance, pp. 121–3. See his later The Rights, Liberties, and Authorities of the Church (1701). 74 The following draws on A. Carpenter, ‘Archbishop King and Dean Swift’ (PhD thesis, University College Dublin, 1970); and idem, ‘William King and the Threats to the Church of Ireland during the Reign of James II’, Irish Historical Studies 18 (1973), 22–8. Cf. J. Richardson, ‘Archbishop William King: Church Tory and State Whig?’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland 15 (2000), 54–76. 75 King’s The State of the Protestants in Ireland (1691) was the most important vindication of Ireland’s Protestant Revolution. King’s apostasy was denounced by the Nonjuror Charles Leslie: An Answer (1692). See King’s autobiographical notes in C. S. King (ed.), A Great Archbishop of Dublin (1906). 76 Carpenter, ‘Archbishop King’, pp. 120, 127, 130–5, 151, 510; King, An Answer to the Considerations which Obliged Peter Manby … (1687), pp. 34–5. 77 Trinity College, Dublin, MS F. 1. 22: in Carpenter, ‘Archbishop King’, pp. 477–512.

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pastoral tasks, but ultimately, ‘in matters that concern these acts the judgement of the church is always to be preferred to the judgement of the civil magistrate, because she is peculiarly entrusted with the execution of them, and they are properly and unappealably tried at her tribunal’. Thus the historical marriage of church and state ‘is only a union of these two societies, without confounding the acts, governments, offices or punishments, and as it began by the mutual agreement of the parties, so it may be broken again’.78 It was true that ‘both these powers and societies being from God, they are obliged to help and assist one another’. Each awards the other privileges, to the state the privilege of nominating bishops, to the church the attachment of civil punishments to spiritual censures. But this compact depends upon mutual benefit, and there are, tragically, circumstances when it is better dissolved ‘as when the civil magistrate turns apostate’. Commenting more directly upon Charles II and James II, King cautions that neither the ‘personal debauchery’ of a libertine prince, nor the mere ‘private opinion’ of an apostate prince, is sufficient to license the sundering of church and state. But the church must resume her inherent power if the prince ‘denies the church her privileges in the state, and makes use of her condescensions to ruin her’. King here adopts on behalf of the church the standard absolutist principle of concessio, ‘condescension’, long used by defenders of monarchy to explain the existence of customary limitations upon intrinsically absolute authority. Normally this doctrine was used to show that civil liberties were merely concessions of – franchises from – the prince; but King turns the idea on its head and asserts that the crown’s ‘rights’ over the church are merely revocable concessions by the church. He asserts that the church has a recoverable reserve of prerogatives, which only by custom and gracious condescension have been lent to the civil magistrate. He does, however, seek equally to deny Romish claims, and goes on symmetrically to insist that it would be wicked for the church to deny princes their own ‘just privileges, or make use of her spiritual weapons to dethrone him, or destroy the kingdom’. In this case the prince has the right to recover his own intrinsic rights, customarily lent to the church: that was the essence of the English Reformation.79 King had, with striking clarity, restated the ‘Gelasian’ doctrine that church and state had coterminous but autonomous spheres, repudiating with equal firmness both papal and caesaro-papal or Erastian pretensions, in the name of the Anglican idea of ‘the catholic balance’.80 When King turned from ‘principles’ to ‘corollaries’ he addressed present circumstances more specifically. He posed and answered a series of questions. What if the prince refuses to nominate bishops (as was already the case in Ireland)? ‘The answer is that the nomination of bishops is absolutely necessary 78

Carpenter, ‘Archbishop King’, pp. 477–8, 480–2, 486. Carpenter, ‘Archbishop King’, pp. 485, 487–8, 491–2. 80 In the fifth century Pope Gelasius formulated a doctrine of the complementary spheres of temporal and spiritual power. Although he began the development of papalist theory, Anglicans could hold that he avoided the excesses of both later papalists and Erastians. 79

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to the subsistence of the society’, and so the church ‘may resume the nomination to herself’. If he nominates somebody wholly unworthy, the church may refuse to consecrate; if he alleges praemunire, it would be an unjust law and hence no law.81 May magistrates forbid clergy to preach the true religion (as James had endeavoured to do)? No, because preaching is an inviolable office of priesthood. May magistrates remove church governors (as James did in suspending bishops)? No, for only bishops may make and unmake bishops, although a prince may remove temporal privileges.82 Finally, King posed the most downright of questions: are magistrates liable to spiritual punishments? ‘It seems no more unreasonable to subject the governors of commonwealths to spiritual punishments than the governors of the church to temporal.’ How far could this go? ‘So far as to deprive him of all those benefits that he can challenge [i.e. claim] as a member of the church … thus when Constantius brought his gifts to the altar none would receive them.’83 In the light of the enormous salience, in the long history of Catholic–Protestant controversy, of the apparently arcane issue of whether princes may be excommunicated, this claim stands as the most shocking in the whole document. King is careful to say that such an excommunication can never extend to temporal punishment of a prince, for it can only remain a spiritual deprivation. That priests might add temporal to spiritual censures was the false corollary of papists, and revolutionary Calvinists. Anglicans saw that the source of modern revolutionary doctrine lay in the medieval Catholic claim that princes may be deposed for ungodliness. That notion was so shocking that many Protestants, and especially Erastians, had denied that princes could be excommunicated at all. But King recognized that this was an overreaction and inconsistent with the duty of spiritual pastors. It was imperative to show that it was right to visit James II with every possible spiritual censure. Hill’s book and King’s manifesto were astonishingly outspoken pieces of what must be called Anglo-Catholicism, in the sense that their doctrine of the church was Catholic, though not Roman. Their sentiments were not isolated ones, and they appear in less systematic form in other writers. Sherlock denied that Protestant churches awarded spiritual authority to princes; on the contrary, ‘in matters of faith the authority of the church is so sacred that all Christians are bound in consequence quietly to submit to her decisions’.84 Freeman similarly 81

Carpenter, ‘Archbishop King’, pp. 488–90, 494. James left the archbishopric of York vacant for two-and-a-half years, and by 1688 one Irish archbishopric and three bishoprics were vacant. Praemunire: the offence of appealing to a foreign jurisdiction. 82 Carpenter, ‘Archbishop King’, pp. 478–9, 494. As well as suspending Compton of London, James deposed two Scottish bishops for non-compliance. 83 Carpenter, ‘Archbishop King’, pp. 489–90. Constantius II, Roman Emperor, reigned 337–61. 84 Sherlock, A Discourse Concerning the Object of Religious Worship (1685), p. 32; idem, A Short Summary of the Principal Controversies (1687), pp. 11–12; idem, A Vindication of some Protestant Principles (1688), pp. 35–7, 23–30, 44, 50.

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argued that ‘kings and princes are not properly officers and governors of Christ’s church, as a church, it being not a civil or secular, but a distinct, spiritual society’. He allowed that princes have ‘external management’ of the church, and that Constantine was called a ‘civil bishop’, but his primary definition of the Catholic Church avoided all reference to civil magistracy, stressing instead the government of ‘pastors and bishops’.85 It was in this spirit that Bishop Compton repudiated the jurisdiction of the Ecclesiastical Commission. The commission especially angered churchmen since it had a power of excommunication and yet a quorum of laymen: the king had, perhaps inadvertently, made the most monstrous of Erastian, even Hobbesian, claims, that secular persons could exercise one of the most fundamental of spiritual offices. Anthony Wood was aghast: ‘the commission grants the temporal power a power of excommunication, which is a pure spiritual act’. Compton asserted that the commission had no jurisdiction to ‘deny the right and privilege of a Christian bishop’. A bishop could, in the conduct of his strictly spiritual authority, be tried only by his fellow bishops, and this ‘by all the laws in the Christian church in all ages’.86 The trial of the Seven Bishops

The trial in 1688 by an apostate prince of seven bishops of Christ’s church was an occasion that demanded a fulsome enunciation of these principles. In the event, the proceedings turned upon prosaic legal technicalities, and thereby gave some respite to James in not allowing a scene all too reminiscent of St Ambrose’s humiliation of the Emperor Theodosius. Had it been otherwise, this trial would have been as ideologically momentous as the Sacheverell trial twenty years later. While the bishops waited in the Tower, John Nalson wrote that the trial would be a ‘most glorious confirmation of the truth, and the sacredness of our religion, which seems to be now brought on a public stage’ – here was an opportunity to show the church’s ‘conformity to what the first confessors embraced’.87 Both Archbishop Sancroft and Bishop Lloyd prepared notes for speeches they did not have the opportunity to deliver. Sancroft explained that the Christian’s duty was to defend the securities of true religion, and in this business Christ’s bishops carried the heaviest burden. ‘His duty, as a prelate’ was ‘to do his utmost endeavour to conserve the profession of the reformed religion’ and ‘to promote the honour and interest of the church’. An absolute liberty of conscience and the abolition of the Tests would be ‘fatal … both [to] the church and religion established’. The Declaration of Indulgence casts aside the discipline of the episcopal church and ‘shook … the very foundation of the reformed Church 85 Freeman,

Plain and Familiar Discourse, pp. 2–3, 6. A. Clark (ed.), The Life and Times of Anthony Wood (5 vols, Oxford, 1891–1900), III, 193–4; ST, I, 1160–1; Compton, An Exact Account, p. 9. 87 Gutch, Collectanea, I, 360. The trial proceedings are in ST, XI, 183ff. 86

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of England’. He tactfully added that the Indulgence also demeaned the king’s supremacy ‘which all good Christian kings have ever exercised’, for it amounted to a renunciation of his duty to support ecclesiastical unity and discipline with the civil sword. Sancroft’s stance was echoed by another of the Seven: Bishop White remarked that although he longed to obey the king in all things, he was prevented by ‘my dread of the indignation of the king of kings’, to whom he must give an account ‘of my managing of the episcopal station’.88 Something of these arguments did surface in the trial, in the speeches of the defence counsel Sir Robert Sawyer and Sergeant Pemberton. Sawyer protested that by the Indulgence ‘not only the laws of our Reformation, but all the laws for the preservation of the Christian religion in general are suspended’. Given this, the hierarchy’s action was legitimate, because the bishops ‘are entrusted with the care of souls’ and are ‘special guardians of the law of uniformity’. Pemberton asserted that the bishops ‘have the care of the church, by their very function and offices; and are bound to take care to keep out all those false religions that are prohibited, and designed to be kept out by the law’.89 Religious laws were not the arbitrary and random injunctions of kings, but the civil protection offered by Christian magistrates to support the spiritual officers of Christ’s church. The same ecclesiology is evident in the iconography of the images of the bishops produced in the aftermath of the trial. There are seven known prints and thirteen portrait engravings, many of them produced in multiple editions, together with eight different medals struck for hanging around pious necks.90 Never have the images of English clerics been so widely dispersed. The most famous picture is of a pyramid of seven portraits of the bishops, entwined with palm and laurel leaves, and surmounted by seven mitres, seven candles, and seven stars.91 One version carries the title ‘Primitive Christianity restored’, and another ‘Immobile saxum’, unyielding rock. All these icons carried biblical texts, many of which signified the triumphs of the righteous. Especially prominent was the Petrine commission: one medal showed the church upon a rock, its steeple held steady by a heavenly hand, and carrying the motto ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against it’.92 There were abundant emblems of the number seven, a Jewish holy number signifying perfection and completion, as, most familiarly, in the ‘seven pillars of wisdom’. Most salient of all was a passage from the Book of Revelation: ‘The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches: and the 88 Gutch,

Collectanea, I, 333, 363–9; ST, XII, 468; cf. 470–3. ST, XII, 362–4, 372. 90 Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, I (1870), pp. 717–18 (nos 1168–73); also pp. 709–10 (no. 1155); O’Donoghue and Hake, Catalogue of Engraved British Portraits, V, 75–6; J. R. S. Whiting, Commemorative Medals (Newton Abbot, 1972), pp. 74–7. 91 Reproduced in J. Miller, Religion in the Popular Prints, 1600–1832 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 130–1; and in History Today 38 (July 1988), p. 12. Another version in W. A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries (Oxford, 1988), pp. 116–17. See W. Johnston, ‘Revelation and the Revolution of 1688–89’, HJ 48 (2005), 351–89. 92 Whiting, Medals, p. 74; Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, I, 717 (no. 1164). 89

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seven golden candlesticks which thou sawest are the seven churches.’ The seven churches of Asia Minor – Ephesus, Smyrna, Philadelphia, and so on – were gloriously transposed to Peterborough, Chichester, Bath, and so on. ‘Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.’93 This apocalyptic last book of the bible, the reverie of St John, a text born of confrontation with pagan Imperial Rome and once a favourite among millenarian Puritans, was here invoked by those who had been accustomed to magnifying the divinity of the Stuart imperium. It betokens the degree to which Restoration divines did indeed succeed in their dearest hope of emulating the Fathers, for, like ‘the first confessors’, they veered precipitately between Eusebius’s glorification of the Emperor Constantine and St John’s and Tertullian’s alienation from earthly powers. St Augustine’s middle way too often eluded them.94 Faced with such loud hierocratic claims against the temporal power, it seems appropriate that James should, after his defeat by the trial jury in the Seven Bishops’ case, have contemplated a new trial on a charge of praemunire, for the bishops ‘did conspire to diminish the royal authority, and royal prerogative, power, and government of the king’.95 It had been a trial of rex versus sacerdos. The divines had brought into the fullest light the ambiguity at the heart of the Tory ideology. No earthly power could legitimately coerce God’s anointed prince, but no anointed prince could violate a Christian’s hope of salvation – as interpreted by the pastors of the Anglican church. Stuart kingship need not bow to secular constitutions, but to Christ’s bishops it must, for, as Edward Stillingfleet bluntly put it, ‘truth is greater than the king’ and, as scripture taught him, ‘the church is the pillar and ground of the truth’.96 Of course what constituted truth in this case was the right of the established episcopal church to impose its doctrines and rituals uniformly upon all the people of England. Although at the time of the trial the hierarchy achieved some accommodation with the Dissenters, it is arguable that this apparent conversion to a more tolerant position was only skin-deep.97 Their priority remained the reconstruction of the politically and religiously intolerant polity they had nurtured throughout the Restoration. 93

Revelation 1:20, 1:11, 2:10. See R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine (Cambridge, 1970). 95 ST, XII, 358. 96 Edward Stillingfleet, A Vindication of the Answer (1687), p. 1; 1 Timothy 3:15. There is a literature, mostly by medievalists, which traces links between medieval ecclesiology and early modern constitutional theory: my point is, rather, that medieval ecclesiology was mobilized in Anglican thought as ecclesiology. See p. 126, n. 22. 97 For a more optimistic view: R. Thomas, ‘Comprehension and Indulgence’, in From Uniformity to Unity 1662–1962, ed. G. F. Nuttall and O. Chadwick (1962), pp. 189–253; M. Knights, ‘“Mere Religion” and the “Church-State” of Restoration England’, in A Nation Transformed, ed. A. Houston and S. Pincus (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 41–70. For Anglican 94

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It is worth, finally, glancing at the king’s beleaguered defenders. Thomas Cartwright was the most forthright among the handful of bishops who supported James. When Sancroft refused to serve on the Ecclesiastical Commission Cartwright had taken his place. His opinions amount to a straightforward Erastian absolutism verging on a definition of the civil sovereign as sacerdos. In judgement on the fellows of Magdalen College he pronounced that the king was God’s ‘vicegerent’ and thus the ‘supreme ordinary’ over the church, a phrase implying Constantine’s office of civil bishop. To this imperial authority Cartwright claimed that Anglican doctrine required ‘an absolute and unconditional’ loyalty. He defended the king’s tolerationist policy, contrasting James’s renunciation of ‘unjust and cruel methods’ with the church’s ‘unchristian heats’. The church’s resistance to their papist king upon a claim of preserving true religion was but a ‘vain pretence’. The divines had gone over to the doctrine they professed to hate, the rebellious papist and Puritan doctrine that ‘dominion is founded in grace’, in other words, the view that a prince’s right to the throne depended on his religion. Drawing the Erastian and tolerationist strands together, he urged that the church’s continued attempt to reduce Dissenters ‘to our way of serving God’ in defiance of the crown was ‘to assume the prerogative of the civil power’. That was a ‘revocation’ of the king’s supremacy, a claim to a rival temporal jurisdiction, a praemunire, and tantamount to popery in its exaltation of clerical power.98 Cartwright had earlier produced a more lapidary summation of his views in a sermon of 1686: ‘the Keys of the Temple were not hung at the high priest’s girdle, but laid every night under Solomon’s pillow, as belonging to his charge’. James, he pronounced, was a King Solomon and an Emperor Constantine – ‘not a Nero but a Constantine the Great to us’.99 In his insistence on the prince’s sacerdotal power, Cartwright and his colleagues were closer to Cranmerian Lutheranism, and to Hobbesian caesaro-papism, than were their orthodox fellow bishops, who were, in the proper sense, more ‘catholic’ than they. For Cartwright, godly duty and civil peace required submission to the prince’s ordering of the Christian commonwealth in those things not manifestly hostile to God’s word, construed in such a way as to amount to practically everything. This was, on some accounts, including Hobbes’s, good Protestantism, but it was not good loyalty to the mainstream of Anglican political theology. James II managed to be both papal and caesaro-papal; his Anglican opponents took care to be neither.

reaction to the Toleration Act of 1689: R. Stephens, Protestant Pluralism: The Reception of the Toleration Act, 1689–1720 (Woodbridge, 2018). 98 Cartwright, Answer, pp. 9, 40–3, 49–50; Bloxam, Magdalen College, pp. 114–17. Cartwright was made bishop of Chester in 1686 against Sancroft’s wishes. 99 Cartwright, A Sermon Preached upon the Anniversary Solemnity of the Happy Inauguration of our Dread Sovereign Lord King James II (1686), p. 15.

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13 John Locke and Anglican Royalism Locke’s adversaries

Two salient propositions about John Locke’s polemical purposes in writing the Two Treatises of Government are now taken for granted. The first is that Locke sought to refute the absolutism, not of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, but of Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha. The second is that, although he revised and published it in 1689, Locke wrote his book during or shortly after the Exclusion Crisis, in around 1680–2, and was providing a contribution to the assault by the earl of Shaftesbury’s Whig party upon the regime of Charles II.1 My purpose is not to doubt either proposition, but to suggest, nonetheless, that as claims to have established Locke’s intentions, they have acquired a sufficient rigidity to have become misleading. In what follows I argue, first, that Locke’s target was not only Filmer, but more broadly the ideologists of Restoration Royalism, about whom Locke scholars have little to say. Here it will be necessary to dispute a suggestion that Filmer was untypical of the Royalist mainstream. Secondly, I show that there is an important ecclesiological and anticlerical context to the Two Treatises, since the conflict between Anglican intolerance and its critics was ingrained in Restoration politics, in a way in which the novel and contingent problem of Exclusion was not. The consequence of my case will be to perceive in the Two Treatises an attack directed against all the agents of Anglican authoritarianism, but particularly the clerical shapers of opinion, as well as the recognized assault on the monarchical tyranny of the Stuarts. It will also emerge that Locke’s commitment to religious toleration needs to be set alongside the secular politics of the Treatises. In this light, the Treatises will seem considerably more ambiguous about the crown, for it was not only Restoration kingship, but also the Restoration church, and a corrupt parliament, which Locke and his fellow Whigs convicted of the most consistent and dogmatic repressiveness.

This is a revised version of an article that appeared under the same title in Political Studies 31 (1983), 61–85. I am indebted to SAGE Publishing for permission to reproduce material. For parallel treatments, see J. Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (Cambridge, 1994); idem, John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, 2006). 1

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge, 1960), Introduction.

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The enhancement of royal power

In the spring of 1660 the ascendant Presbyterian party, the ancestor of the Whigs, intended to restore Charles II to the throne upon strict conditions, similar to those presented to his father by the Long Parliament during the 1640s. On both occasions they failed catastrophically. In 1648 they were swept aside by a military coup, in 1660 by a Cavalier electoral victory. Charles I was executed; Charles II was exalted. Accordingly, radical Whigs, in the Revolution Convention of 1689, would demand that much of the fabric of the Restoration constitution be scrapped. That fabric, entrenched by the statutes of the early 1660s, placed the crown in an unprecedentedly powerful position. Whereas the Long Parliament had challenged the king’s authority over the army and the executive, the Cavalier Parliament made clear that the militia and the appointment of ministers belonged inseparably to the crown’s prerogatives. Whereas the Long Parliament had guaranteed parliament’s continuity by the Triennial Act, Charles II had the Cavalier Parliament remove it, saying that its existence was a stimulus to rebellion. The repeal removed any lawful means for ensuring regular elections.2 With so few restrictions placed upon the crown, Charles and his brother James were able to move England towards the autocracy they enjoyed in Scotland and envied in France. After 1673 the political map achieved greater clarity, with the emergence of Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, as the leading minister. His programme involved the indefinite perpetuation of the Cavalier Parliament, its manipulation through placemen, the further entrenchment of episcopal supremacy, and the imposition of a doctrinal commitment by an oath to make no alteration in church or state. Charles continued the Cavalier Parliament for eighteen years, from 1661 to 1679. He made effective use of prolonged prorogations, and later of dissolutions, signally in the dismissal of the last Exclusion (the Oxford) Parliament after a sitting in 1681 of only one week. In 1680 an important piece of legislation on behalf of the Dissenters, passed by parliament, was conveniently ‘lost’ and never presented to the king for assent into law. After 1681, buoyant tax revenues and a subsidy from France enabled him to dispense with parliament altogether. From 1675 the crown developed practices of dismissing intractable judges and remodelling recalcitrant town corporations and their electoral franchises.3 A standing army was built up, and the king’s troop deployments for the Oxford Parliament made nonsense of Whig gestures toward an uprising.4 Danby fell in 1679 amid the maelstrom of revelations of the Popish Plot, but the outcome of his ministry was the 2

For surveys, see T. Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts (1993); N. Keeble, The Restoration (Oxford, 2002); T. Harris, Restoration (2005). 3 A. F. Havighurst, ‘The Judiciary and Politics in the Reign of Charles II’, Law Quarterly Review 66 (1950), 62–78, 229–52; P. D. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns, 1650–1730 (Cambridge, 1998). 4 J. Childs, ‘The Army and the Oxford Parliament of 1681’, EHR 94 (1979), 580–7.

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consolidation into two camps of court and country, parties which, after 1679, were dubbed Tory and Whig. The Shaftesburian Letter from a Person of Quality (1675), which Locke probably had a hand in writing,5 and Andrew Marvell’s Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677), manifested the country party’s belief that there had been potential for absolute monarchy since 1660. The former specified its grounding in the Corporation, Militia, and Uniformity Acts, while the latter opened unequivocally: ‘There has now for divers years, a design been carried on, to change the lawful government of England into an absolute tyranny.’6 Both tracts held Danby’s and the crown’s activities to be rendering parliament nugatory. Far more substantial a treatise, and one which for a century was held to be a classic equal to Locke’s Two Treatises, was Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government, published in 1698, and for which Sidney was executed in 1683. Sidney attacked not only the crown, but the ministers: Danby, Laurence Hyde (earl of Rochester, son of Edward Hyde, first earl of Clarendon), Lord Clifford, and the earl of Arlington. They, seeing that the Cavalier MPs might be ‘easily deluded, corrupted, or bribed’, were guilty of the political novelty of the age, the ‘making parliaments to be the instruments of our slavery, which in all ages past had been the firmest pillars of our liberty’.7 An attack on ‘placemen’ now came to have a central place in opposition polemic, ‘placemen’ being Members of Parliament who held salaried offices and sinecures under the crown as bribes to ensure their loyalty to the court. The polemic of the English radical tradition began to shift from the old attack upon the crown, which we associate with the seventeenth century, to the new, upon the executive, and its manipulation of parliament, characteristic of the eighteenth.8 In the Second Treatise, Locke takes it as axiomatic that absolute monarchy exists where the king has ‘both legislative and executive power in himself alone’. He that thinks ‘absolute power purifies men’s bloods … need read but the history of this, or any other age to be convinced of the contrary’. In chapter 19 his itemizing of what constitutes tyranny, and hence the dissolution of government, is a commentary upon the practices of the court. He refers to the prince who ‘hinders the legislative from assembling in its due time, or 5

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, 1667–1683, ed. J. Milton and P. Milton (Oxford, 2006), pp. 75–118, 337–76. 6 Marvell, PW, II, 225. For Marvell’s possible influence on Locke, see A. Patterson, ‘Marvell and Secret History’, in Marvell and Liberty, ed. W. Chernaik and M. Dzelzainis (1999), pp. 23–49; idem., ‘The Sport of Bishop-Hunting: Marvell and the Neo-Laudians’, in From Republic to Restoration, ed. J. Clare (Manchester, 2018), pp. 226–44. 7 Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, ed. T. West (Indianapolis, IN, 1990), pp. 571–2; cf. p. 194. On Sidney, see B. Worden, ‘The Commonwealth Kidney of Algernon Sidney’, JBS 24 (1985), 1–40; A. Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage (Princeton, NJ, 1991); J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis (Cambridge, 1991); M. Winship, ‘Algernon Sidney’s Calvinist Republicanism’, JBS 49 (2010), 753–73. 8 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ, 1975), ch. 12.

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from acting freely’ and who alters ‘the electors, or ways of election’. ‘Hinders’ points to the prorogations and dissolutions; ‘acting freely’ suggests threats to the independence of MPs; and altering ‘ways of election’ indicates the innovation of tampering with borough charters in order to adjust franchises. Locke thus describes not only the prevention of parliaments, but also the subversion of sitting and future parliaments. Charles and James generally behaved with formal correctness, not least because they could manipulate membership of the judicial bench, and Locke speaks of such changes making great advances ‘under pretence of lawful authority’.9 Locke also makes plain that not only may the prince be guilty, but also the politicians, collusively, for in ‘so far as the other parts of the legislative [in] any way contribute to any attempt upon the government [i.e. the constitution], and do either promote, or not … hinder such designs, they are guilty, and partake in this, which is certainly the greatest crime men can be guilty of towards another’. Government, he concludes, is dissolved ‘when the legislative, or the prince, either of them act contrary to their trust’, for the legislature may transgress this trust ‘by ambition, fear, folly or corruption’. Locke plainly has corrupt parliaments as well as kings in his sights. The last item, ‘corruption’, alludes to placemen – ‘corruption’ rapidly became a synonym for the use of placemen – and this is clear a few lines later when the prince is spoken of as employing the ‘treasure, and offices of the society, to corrupt the representatives’. If princes by their actions enter into a state of war with their people and thereby become rebels, then acquiescent and complaisant legislators ‘can be no less esteemed so’. Locke makes clear that the Cavalier ministry and Cavalier Parliament, as much as the king himself, were agents of despotism, and, in acknowledging that parliament may share this guilt, he shattered conventional reliance upon the ‘estates’ as the counterpoise to the crown. This perception was arguably decisive in encouraging Locke to locate the agents of revolution in the body of the community and not in the estates.10 The Filmerians

Locke was not only concerned with the politicians, but also with the polemicists. He explains that ‘in this last age a generation of men has sprung up among us, who would flatter princes with an opinion, that they have a divine right to absolute power’. Locke’s image of ‘a generation of men’ needs to be unravelled. The title page of the Two Treatises asserts that the First Treatise is intended to subvert the ‘false principles’ of Filmer ‘and his followers’. In the preface Locke says it would not be worthwhile replying to the long deceased Filmer ‘had not the pulpit, of late years, publicly owned his doctrine, and made it the 9 Locke, 10 Locke,

TTG, II. 91–2, 213–18. TTG, II. 168, 218, 221–2, 227, 242; quotations at 218, 221, 222.

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current divinity of the times’. He encourages his readers to accept that he was attacking Filmer not as aberrant or marginal, but as currently celebrated among Royalists and Tories, albeit a writer who is acknowledged ‘to have carried this argument farthest’. He speaks of those ‘who have so much cried up this book’; of the ‘applause that followed’ the publication of Patriarcha, and of its author as the ‘idol of those who worship’ absolutism.11 Contemporaries agreed: James Tyrrell called Patriarcha the ‘Diana’ of the ‘churchmen’, while Thomas Burnett of Kemnay, writing to Leibniz in 1698, remarked that Patriarcha became the ‘palladium’ of the Stuart court.12 In the years following the publication of Patriarcha Tory plaudits for Filmer were manifold. One pamphleteer asserted that the argument for the Adamic foundation of government against that ‘fantastical chimera’ of a free state of nature was ‘very ingeniously and learnedly done by Sir R. Filmer … from whom … you will receive infinite satisfaction as to this point’. John Brydall, holding that monarchs had no ‘co-partners in the sovereignty’, recommended ‘that most excellent discourse called Patriarcha’. From the pulpit of Rochester Cathedral, John Clerke spoke of Filmer as ‘worthily honoured for his eminent loyalty and learning’. White Kennett urged that the ‘fallacies’ of the ‘grand patriots of rebellion’ and their ‘democratical principles’ are ‘well discovered in the incomparable treatises of … Filmer, Digges, and Falkner’. John Northleigh pointed to the ‘fame and memory of our Filmer’. And John Nalson declared Filmer’s book ‘unanswerable’ against ‘that wild proposition of the sovereignty of the people’.13 Yet Filmer’s fame dated only from the publication of Patriarcha in the spring of 1680, for it was not Filmer’s earlier Royalist tracts which gave him his contemporary éclat. The Freeholder’s Grand Inquest (1648) was influential, but not widely known to be by Filmer – indeed authorial doubts persist.14 By 1680 there were many others besides Filmer to engage Locke’s hostility, and absolutist doctrines had been widely disseminated throughout the Restoration. Locke confronted a broader Royalism. For him, the Tory elite’s raucous laudation of Filmer was the last straw. In characteristically Olympian fashion he makes only collective references to his targets. He writes of ‘the divinity of this last age’, the ‘drum 11 Locke,

TTG, I. 1–2, 3, 5, 13. James Tyrrell, Patriarcha non Monarcha (1681), preface; N. Jolley, ‘Leibniz on Hobbes, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, and Sherlock’s Case of Allegiance’, HJ 18 (1975), 21–35, at 31. For Tyrrell, see: J. Rudolph, Revolution by Degrees: James Tyrrell and Whig Political Thought in the Late Seventeenth Century (Basingstoke, 2002). 13 Anon., Protestant Loyalty (1681), pp. 13–14; John Brydall, The Absurdity of that New Devised State-Principle (1681), p. 4; John Clerke, Sermon (29 May 1684), p. 8; White Kennett, A Letter from a Student at Oxford (1681), p. 14; John Northleigh, The Triumph of our Monarchy (1685), p. 503; John Nalson, Reflections upon Coll. Sidney’s Arcadia (1684), p. 10. Kennett turned Whig after the Revolution. See G. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford, 1975), pp. 213–14; C. Cuttica, Sir Robert Filmer and the Patriotic Monarch (Manchester, 2012), chs 7–9. 14 C. C. Weston, ‘The Authorship of the Freeholders Grand Inquest’, EHR 95 (1980), 74–98; idem, ‘The Case of Sir Robert Holbourne Reasserted’, History of Political Thought 8 (1987), 435–60. 12

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ecclesiastic’, those who ‘preach up passive obedience’, who ‘cry up’ governors as ‘sacred and divine’, and who defend absolutism by their ‘learning and religion’. He repeatedly refers to the ‘flatterers’ of princes.15 Locke’s use of the image of the ‘drum ecclesiastic’ is a nice inversion. It derives from Samuel Butler’s popular Cavalier poem Hudibras (1663–78), where the phrase was used against the Puritan clergy, whom he convicted of exploiting the pulpits to provoke the Civil War; Locke upends its meaning, charging the Anglican clergy with preaching the divine right of kings.16 A passage in the Second Treatise, ostensibly part of an account of the early development of political societies, has venomous contemporary reference. Locke writes of ‘vicious subjects’ who have ‘corrupted men’s minds’ by ‘stretching prerogative’ in pursuit of ‘vain ambition’ and ‘evil concupiscence’.17 The charge of ambition in defence of monarchy could hardly be levelled against Filmer, the forlorn Royalist who published tracts in the nadir of the king’s cause during the Civil War. Nor could Locke’s constant allusions to the clergy refer to the layman Filmer. Locke is making three claims: that his book is directed against the political theory of Restoration Royalism in general; that its proponents were especially the clergy of the Church of England; and that after 1680 Tories recognized in Patriarcha the quintessence of their case. These claims should be taken at face value. Yet, historiographically, the first conflicts with the assumption that Locke’s opponent is, singularly, either simply Filmer or Hobbes. Peter Laslett, editor of the standard modern edition of the Two Treatises, in his proper concern to distract attention from Hobbes, less aptly insisted the enemy was purely Filmer.18 At root is a pervasive assumption that great philosophers only reply to leviathans and other sea monsters, and not to shoals of smaller, but no less dangerous fish, Locke’s ‘generation of men’. Locke was indeed attacking Filmer, but it is important to draw attention to the suffocating plethora of polemic spawned by the triumphant Royalism of the Restoration. Locke’s claim that Filmer epitomized Royalism conflicts with the view that Filmer was a unique and untypical Royalist, and that Locke, Sidney, and James Tyrrell (Filmer’s third principal critic, in his Patriarcha non Monarcha of 1681) were guilty of polemical distortion in saddling Royalism with an extremist. This view is forcefully put in James Daly’s Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought, which contends that Filmer was a proponent of arbitrary monarchical 15 Locke,

TTG, II. 92, 112, 224, 228. Cf. II. 61, 90, 103, 231. On flattery: II. 94, 111, 162, 239. 16 Samuel Butler, Hudibras, pt I, canto 1, 10–11. Locke refers to Hudibras in a letter of 1666; his bookseller sent him a copy of the book in June 1688: The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. de Beer (8 vols, 1976–89), I, no. 182; III, no. 1059. Cf. Marvell’s ‘pulpit drums’: PW, I, 175. 17 Locke, TTG, II. 111. 18 Locke, TTG, ed. Laslett, Introduction, ch. 4. For revaluations of Locke’s relationship with Hobbes, see J. R. Collins, In the Shadow of Leviathan (Cambridge, 2020); F. Waldmann, ‘John Locke as a Reader of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan’, Journal of Modern History 93 (2021), 245–82.

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sovereignty, and that he diverged from his fellow Royalists, who remained within a constitutionalist tradition. He finds little trace of Filmerism in the Restoration.19 The book is admirable in its stress upon the doctrine of royal sovereignty (for Filmer’s vision constituted more than patriarchalism) and in its preparedness to take seriously the broader Royalist tradition. But there remain convincing reasons for the view that Locke was right to bracket Filmer with the mainstream, not least the evidence that Patriarcha was launched by Archbishop William Sancroft as the ideological flagship of Toryism, and was fulsomely defended by Edmund Bohun, who was about as conventional a Tory voice in the 1680s as it was possible to be.20 Locke’s own claim was that the publication of Patriarcha was a ploy in the self-serving sycophancy of courtiers, who ‘give the world to suspect, that it’s not the force of reason and argument, that makes them for absolute monarchy, but some other by interest, and therefore are resolved to applaud any author, that writes in favour of this doctrine’.21 To clarify Locke’s claims about his opponents, we must attempt to identify some of the polemicists he had in mind. He believed that the opinion of the divine right of kings was a ‘novelty’ of ‘this latter age’. That arbitrary monarchs may be resisted had ‘of late’ been denied. He offers what became a Whig cliché in referring to the divines Robert Sibthorpe and Roger Manwaring, disciples of Charles I’s Archbishop Laud, who had become notorious for their views in the 1620s when they preached on behalf of the king’s right to tax his people without parliamentary consent.22 Sibthorpe and Manwaring became mainstays of eighteenth-century Whig histories of Stuart despotism, a position owed to the account of them published in John Rushworth’s Collections.23 Sidney, in his Discourses, provided a longer litany: Sibthorpe, Manwaring, Laud, Hobbes, Filmer, and Peter Heylyn. Indeed, he asserts that Filmer was ‘guided’ by ‘his master Heylyn’.24 Another Whig, Thomas Hunt, likewise claimed that Patriarcha

19

J. Daly, Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought (Toronto, 1979), pp. xi–xii, ch. 6, appx A, and passim. See also idem, ‘John Bramhall and the Theoretical Problems of Royalist Moderation’, JBS 11 (1971), 26–44; idem, ‘The Origins and Shaping of English Royalist Thought’, Canadian Historical Association Papers (1974), 15–35. Also: G. Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven, CT, 1996), chs 4, 11. 20 G. Schochet, ‘Sir Robert Filmer: Some New Bibliographical Discoveries’, The Library 26 (1971), 135–60. On Bohun’s 1685 edition: Cuttica, Filmer, ch. 8. 21 Locke, TTG, I. 13. 22 Locke, TTG, I. 4–5; II. 231. 23 First volume 1659, repr. 1675; second volume, 1680. Richard Baxter wrote that ‘Rushworth’s Collections will tell you the full story of Manwaring and Sibthorpe’: The Nonconformists Plea for Peace (1679), p. 123. Similarly, Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of English Affairs (1682), p. 8. Locke had a copy of the 1659 edition: J. Harrison and P. Laslett, The Library of John Locke (Oxford, 1971), no. 2514. He has an extract from Rushworth in his Journal for 20 Dec. 1680. Marvell used Rushworth on Sibthorpe and Manwaring extensively: PW, I, 181ff. 24 Sidney repeatedly brackets Filmer and Heylyn: Discourses, pp. 11, 12, 24, 46, 55, 66, 67, 123, 134, 284, 328, 437; quotations at 123, 134. See Scott, Sidney, pp. 7, 54, 209, 222.

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was derived from ‘the morose and sour Dr P. H[eylyn].’25 Locke read Heylyn in about 1660 and alluded in the Two Treatises to the fact that Patriarcha was published with an introductory epistle by Heylyn.26 Heylyn was Laud’s devoted protégé and hagiographer, and one of the most influential shapers of Anglican opinion during the Civil War and after.27 His Stumbling Blocke of Disobedience and Rebellion (1658) was one of the most comprehensive statements of the Royalist position. Heylyn had been instrumental in shaping the body of canons passed by the church’s convocation in 1640 which parliament had refused to ratify. These canons, instructed to be read from the pulpits quarterly, pronounced that ‘the most high and sacred order of kings is by divine right’ and that any assertion of an ‘independent co-active power, either papal or popular’ is ‘treasonable against God as well as against the king’. Heylyn recited and defended the canons in Cyprianus Anglicus (1668).28 Locke was contemptuous of the claims of churches to constitute themselves as autonomous law-making bodies. In A Letter Concerning Toleration he snidely referred to ‘the church (if a convention of clergy, making canons, must so be called)’.29 The Shaftesburian Letter of 1675 referred to the same canons, adding that their doctrine ‘that monarchy is of divine right’ had been elaborated by Archbishop James Ussher and Bishop Robert Sanderson, an allusion to Ussher’s The Power Communicated by God to the Prince (1661), which carried Sanderson’s preface. The Letter continues: ‘I am afraid it is the avowed opinion of much the greater part of our dignified clergy: if so, I am sure they are the most dangerous sort of men alive to our English government.’30 Pens for party

It is sometimes said that recourse to the publication of superannuated works by Filmer signified the weakness or absence of Royalist ideologists. This is a strange view. That age found it easy to make the works of the past relevant to present controversies, and republications abounded. The Two Treatises itself appeared in 1689 among the competing works of earlier radicals, books which constitute the tradition sometimes called ‘the Calvinist theory of revolution’, of which his own book was a late exposition: Philippe du Plessis Mornay, the 25

Thomas Hunt, Mr Hunt’s Argument (1682), 2nd pagination, p. 71. Heylyn, ‘whom our Tories so much reverence and admire’: Anon., The Right of Electing Sheriffs (1682), p. 1. 26 J. Milton, ‘Locke’s Early Political Reading’, Locke Newsletters 24 (1993), 81–93, at 92; Locke, TTG, I. 1. 27 A. Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester, 2007). 28 G. Bray (ed.), The Anglican Canons (Woodbridge, 1998), p. 558; Peter Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus (1668), pp. 430–1. See E. Cope, ‘The Short Parliament of 1640 and Convocation’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 25 (1974), 167–84. 29 John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. M. Goldie (Indianapolis, IN, 2010), p. 30. 30 Locke, Essay Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, p. 375. See I. Campbell, ‘Calvinist Absolutism: Archbishop James Ussher and Royal Power’, JBS 53 (2014), 588–610.

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Huguenot revolutionary of the 1570s; George Buchanan, the philosopher of the Scottish Reformation; and the Parliamentarians and republicans Henry Parker, Philip Hunton, John Milton, and George Lawson.31 Similarly, the defence of Restoration monarchy was provided by a combination of the republished works of 1640s Royalist and new works. In the former category belong Dudley Digges’s The Unlawfulness of Subjects Taking up Arms (1643, 1662, 1664, 1679); John Maxwell’s Sacro-Sancta Regum Majestas (1644, 1680, 1686, 1689); Robert Sheringham’s The King’s Supremacy Asserted (1660, 1682); Ussher’s The Power Communicated by God (written c. 1644, published 1661, 1683, 1688); and Heylyn’s Stumbling Block (written c. 1645, published 1658). The category of new books was large. Some defended Anglican civil order against Presbyterian rebellion, such as Henry Foulis’s History of the Wicked Plots and Conspiracies (1662, 1674). There were tracts by Roger L’Estrange, John Nalson, and Marchamont Nedham, commissioned by Danby in the 1670s.32 And there were the products of the Exclusion Crisis such as William Falkner’s Christian Loyalty (1679), Edmund Bohun’s Defence of Sir Robert Filmer (1684), William Sherlock’s The Case of Resistance to the Supreme Powers (1684), and Robert Brady’s historical treatises on the subordinacy of parliament.33 Locke had wide familiarity with Royalist works: by 1662 Digges, Filmer, Sanderson, and Matthew Wren’s Monarchy Asserted (1659); in 1667 he took notes from Filmer and Digges, as well as Heylyn; in 1669 from Samuel Parker’s Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie; and in 1681 from John Kettlewell’s Christian Obedience.34 Although he professed himself an enemy of the ‘scribbling of this age’, he shared the instincts of contemporary polemicists. He nearly published his early tracts of 1661–2, in defence of the new regime, and in writing them was ‘careful to sequester my thoughts, both from books and the times’.35 He prepared, with Tyrrell, a reply to Edward Stillingfleet’s 1681 tract against toleration.36 He collected scores of pamphlets, especially from the Exclusion and Revolution periods, in the latter case purchasing forty out of the nearly 200 pamphlets published in the controversy over the legitimacy of the Revolution.37 31

M. Goldie, ‘The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 83 (1980), 473–564, at 522–3. 32 Roger L’Estrange, An Account of the Growth of Knavery (1678); Marchamont Nedham, A Pacquet of Advices (1676); idem, The Common Interest of King and People (1677); John Nalson, The Complaint of Liberty and Property (1681). 33 Robert Brady, A True and Exact History of the Succession (1681); idem, An Introduction to the Old English History (1684). See J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1987), ch. 8. 34 TTG, ed. Laslett, Introduction, pp. 46–7, 88, appx B; Locke, Two Tracts on Government, ed. P. Abrams (Cambridge, 1969), appx 1; Milton, ‘Locke’s Early Political Reading’. 35 Locke, Two Tracts, pp. 118, 174–5. 36 Bodl., MS Locke c. 34. An edition is being prepared by Timothy Stanton, under the title The Nature of Churches. 37 Goldie, ‘Revolution of 1689’, pp. 482, 517–18; Harrison and Laslett, Library of Locke, passim.

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One of his tasks as Shaftesbury’s assistant was to make purchases for the library. He cannot but have been aware of, if not personally involved in producing, the series of country pamphlets and speeches, of which the Letter from a Person of Quality is the best known, which emerged from Shaftesbury’s circle in 1675.38 The Two Treatises, for all its Olympian qualities – its transcendence of the immediate fray – is a work of current polemic.39 While Locke would, in exile, vehemently deny accusations that he was the author of any published polemics;40 while it has never proven possible to substantiate the third earl of Shaftesbury’s remark that the first earl ‘made use of his [Locke’s] assistant pen in matters that nearly concerned the state and were fit to be made public to raise that spirit in the nation which was necessary against the prevailing popish party’;41 and while the attribution to Locke of authorship of a series of seditious tracts in 1681–4 by Tory informants proves false, the fact that he was so accused is a measure of the assumption by his enemies that he was one of the Whigs’ significant voices.42 Government ministers constantly harried country and Whig authors and printers. Secretary of state Sir Leoline Jenkins kept himself informed about seditious pamphleteering.43 In the Discourses, Sidney sniped at ‘informing and trepanning’, and named Jenkins, the spymaster William Chiffinch, and Sir Stephen Fox, who managed the secret service fund.44 A government secretary John Ellis received information on Locke’s activities from Humphrey Prideaux, a clergyman whose clerical advancement was owed to the patronage of the Tory politicians the earl of Nottingham and Sir Francis North. Prideaux attributed to Locke No Protestant Plot (1681) and both he and the English envoy to the Netherlands accused him of authoring a tract alleging that the Whig earl of Essex had been murdered in the Tower and had not committed suicide (both tracts probably the work of Robert Ferguson).45 If writing Whig tracts was dangerous, writing treatises for the court was a road to promotion. Stillingfleet collected a deanery and archdeaconry, Sherlock became Master of the Temple, George Hickes dean of Worcester, and Brady royal physician and keeper of the crown records. Nedham was alleged to have received £500 for writing A Pacquet of Advices and Animadversions to the Men of Shaftesbury (1676).46 In a begging letter to Archbishop Sancroft in 1683, Nalson 38

K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford, 1968), pp. 414–15. The case is forcefully made in R. Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, NJ, 1986). 40 Letter to the earl of Pembroke, 28 Nov./8 Dec. 1684: Correspondence, II, no. 797. 41 Amsterdam University Library, MS J 20. ‘Popish party’ is Whig-speak for Tories, deemed supine in the face of popery. 42 The Correspondence of John Locke, vol. 9, Supplement, ed. M. Goldie (Oxford, 2023), appx A. 43 Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, MS HM30314–5. 44 Sidney, Discourses, p. 195. 45 Locke, Correspondence, IX, appx A, nos. A1, A9, A13. 46 W. D. Christie, The Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury (2 vols, 1871), II, appx, pp. cxxiv–cxxv. 39

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frankly recorded the relationship between loyalty and career: ‘A little oil will make the wheels go easy … it is some discouragement to see others, in the race of loyal and hearty endeavours to serve the king and church, carry away the prize.’47 It is these kinds of men that Locke intends when he describes the ‘cunninger workmen’, the ‘Egyptian undertaskmasters’, and the ‘servile flatterers’ of absolute monarchy, whom he accuses of ‘vain ambition’ and ‘evil concupiscence’.48 The Bodinians

We need to turn briefly to the substantive content of Tory discourse to discover whether it shared Filmer’s emphasis on the doctrine of absolute sovereignty. James Daly argues for Royalist jurisprudential moderation, in contrast to Filmer’s ‘splendid isolation’ as an exponent of legal positivism, the doctrine that the sovereign’s will alone constitutes law. The Royalists, he says, had a ‘deep reverence’ for that ‘limited government which was characteristic of the English political nation’, whereas Filmer was ‘unEnglish’. Here and elsewhere, Daly expatiates upon a somewhat sentimental view of the Anglo-Saxon political tradition, in which the ‘genius’ of Stuart Royalism is said to have lain in its ‘reconcilement of liberty and authority’, its oneness with the great constitutional legists, Bracton, Fortescue, and Sir Edward Coke, untarnished by ‘exotic importations’ from Europe. This is English exceptionalism, untainted by foreign absolutism.49 Others, too, find that English Royalism was rootedly constitutionalist.50 Yet the Royalist intelligentsia was ‘unEnglish’ in its choice of a source from whom to shape its theory of sovereignty: Jean Bodin, whose Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576) had delivered a decisive retort to the Huguenot revolutionaries.51 What is striking about English Royalists is their general indifference to Bracton and Fortescue and reverence for Bodin and dependence upon him for their formulation of the idea of sovereignty. Locke attacked the divines, more than the legists, of the age. Filmer, though a layman, was the epitome of clerical Royalism because, to caricature, his theory amounted to Bodin plus the bible. Bodin was explicitly recommended or cited by Heylyn in 1658, Bagshaw in 1660, L’Estrange in 1662, Falkner in 1679, Lawrence Womock in 1680, and others besides.52 Heylyn made extensive use of Bodin to demonstrate the 47

Bodl., MS Tanner 34, fol. 80. TTG, II. 111, 239. 49 Daly, Filmer, pp. 55, 103, 148; Daly, ‘Origins of Royalist Thought’, pp. 15–19. 50 See above, p. 33, n.73. 51 J. H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge, 1973); H. A. Lloyd (ed.), The Reception of Bodin (Leiden, 2013). 52 Heylyn, Stumbling Block (1658), pp. 145, 212–13, 233, 235, 249; Edward Bagshaw, The Rights of the Crown (1660), p. 96; Roger L’Estrange, Interest Mistaken (1661), p. 55; William 48 Locke,

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proposition that the king was the sole, omnicompetent, and illimitable source of law. England, Bodin had said, was an absolute monarchy, whereas the ‘limited’ or ‘mixed’ monarchies of Denmark or Poland did not deserve the name of monarchy at all. For Heylyn, two conclusions followed: that parliament was subordinate, not co-ordinate, and that parliament and political rights existed by the king’s gracious permission alone. According to Heylyn, William the Conqueror won his kingdom by the sword and governed by it: he was basileus, absolute sovereign.53 The king, other Royalists agreed, was the sole maker of the law. He gave ‘life’, ‘being’, ‘force’ to the law; parliament advised, petitioned, consented. As Nalson put it in 1677: ‘The king is the sole … foundation of all law; nay the very soul and life of it; for by his royal word he gives it a being … it is but highly reasonable, that he should have the liberty and freedom of the choice of those laws, by which he obliges himself to rule and govern.’54 Heylyn’s second conclusion was what may be called the doctrine of condescending power: that English liberties and limitations upon the crown existed only by virtue of the gracious condescension of kings in past ages. Such liberties were privileges not entitlements; they were customary and not intrinsic or irrevocable limits.55 For Sheringham, the crown was absolute in its intrinsic power, but limited in its exercise. Clarendon likewise insisted that the liberties of the people came only from the ‘voluntary abatements’ of sovereign power. Nalson expressed it thus: ‘The condescensions of our English sovereigns have been so many and so great; and those compliances having been formed into laws, as measures and standards of government; they are the bounds and limits which monarchy has … indulgently been pleased to give itself.’56 ‘Condescension’ was a technical term, denoting privileges which ‘descend’ from above; for Locke it necessarily entailed arbitrary rule, because its benefits for the subject, if such there be, depended upon the mere will of the superior. That a prince might be bountiful was irrelevant to the moral anathema of the subject’s being arbitrarily bound. This was what he accounted ‘slavery’.57 We need not dwell on Locke’s repudiation of Bodinian absolutism except to notice, once more, his constant plurals in referring to his opponents. The ‘blinded contenders’ for absolute monarchy have denied ‘the laws by which princes are constituted … and the conditions under which they enter upon their authority’. Absolute monarchy ‘by some men is counted the only government in the world’. Locke rejects talk of popular liberties being ‘privileges’ rather than ‘rights’. His account of the origin of political societies reverses the Falkner, Christian Loyalty (1679), p. 517; Lawrence Womock, Two Treatises (1680), p. 13. 53 Heylin, Stumbling Block, pp. 233–9, 249–50, 254–76, 267. 54 Nalson, Common Interest, pp. 139–40; George Hickes, The Harmony of Divinity and Law (1684), p. 48. 55 Heylyn, Stumbling Block, pp. 254–76. 56 Robert Sheringham, The King’s Supremacy Asserted (1660), p. 13; Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, A Brief View (1676), pp. 71, 88–90; Nalson, Common Interest, pp. 16, 116. 57 On liberty as non-dependence, see Q. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998).

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‘condescending’ theory; early peoples deigned to entrust prerogatives to chieftains, before the ‘fashion of the age’, ‘covetousness’, and ‘ambition’ gave ‘them any reason to apprehend or provide against it’. He cites Filmer’s quotation of Bodin’s dictum that ‘all laws, privileges, and grants of princes, have no force, but during their life; if they be not ratified by the express consent, or by the sufferance of the prince following’.58 That our rights subsist only by the explicit or implied will of a prince is a doctrine Locke found abhorrent, but, in the 1680s, one that was purveyed all about him. Tory ‘novelism’

In seventeenth-century usage ‘novelist’ was a pejorative term for an inventor of spurious novelties, or (a no less negative term) an ‘innovator’. Whigs held that Tory political thought was novel, a perverse invention of the Stuart age. Locke believed commonwealths to be the contrivance and institution of humankind, a doctrine he thought was ancient. He held that Richard Hooker, in the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594–7), was the last great writer in England to have held unswervingly to this view, and in the Second Treatise he quoted Hooker several times.59 The general abandonment of the notion that civil society was a human convention in favour of the new paradigm of patriarchal naturalism and Adamic sovereignty prompted Locke’s remark in the First Treatise that if Filmerism could be defeated then ‘governments must be left again to the old way of being made by contrivance’. His book was a refutation, he said, of the ‘novelty’ of the current age, for ‘I believe it will be hard … to find any other age … but this which has asserted monarchy to be jure divino.’60 His task was thus restorative of the ‘old way’, though it might take a revolution to achieve such a restoration. Locke pointed to the Laudian generation of Sibthorpe and Manwaring, yet he also went back further, to Hooker’s own time, in citing Thomas Bilson’s Christian Subjection of 1585.61 His citation is apt, for Bilson, together with Bishop Richard Bancroft, in his Dangerous Positions (1593), had urged that the English church’s reverence for untrammelled monarchy set it apart from the 58 Locke,

TTG, I. 3, 8; II. 61, 90, 91, 107. TTG, II. 5, 15, 60–1, 74, 90–1, 111, 134–6, 29. Richard Baxter made a similar move: Hooker ‘maketh legislation the natural right of the body politic, and governing power to be thence derived’: The Nonconformists Plea for Peace (1679), p. 124. L’Estrange rebuked him for skewing Hooker towards ‘the principles of popular power’: The Casuist Uncas’d (1680), pp. 51–2. See R. Eccleshall, ‘Richard Hooker and the Peculiarities of the English: The Reception of the Ecclesiastical Polity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, History of Political Thought 2 (1981), 63–117; M. Brydon, The Evolving Reputation of Richard Hooker, 1600–1714 (Oxford, 2006). 60 Locke, TTG, I. 4, 6. 61 Locke, TTG I. 5; II. 239. See W. Lamont, ‘The Rise and Fall of Bishop Bilson’, JBS 5 (1966), 22–32. 59 Locke,

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seditiousness of both Catholics and Calvinists. A typical Tory pamphlet of 1679, subtitled ‘the Presbyterian unmasked and proved as dangerous as papists’, briefly expatiated on its theme and then referred its readers to Bancroft and Bilson. L’Estrange in 1678 recommended Bancroft (along with Heylyn) as required reading, and the Whig Samuel Johnson later declared that it was Bancroft who ‘transforms several of the English principles into dangerous positions’.62 The Royalist turn against grounding civil authority in human contrivance was most visibly signalled in the opening pages of Filmer’s Patriarcha. There he noted that some of his predecessors – he named Sir John Hayward, Adam Blackwood, and William Barclay, who had written around 1600 – had sought to defend the position of the crown, but had done so on faulty foundations, for they fatally conceded a dangerous premise. They began with ‘the natural liberty and equality of mankind’, whereas if they ‘did but confute this first erroneous principle, the whole fabric of this vast engine of popular sedition would drop down of itself’. Locke quotes this passage at the opening of the First Treatise, and in the Second he describes Barclay as ‘the great champion of absolute monarchy’.63 It was the divines of the 1590s – Bancroft, Bilson, together with Hadrian Saravia – who had made a decisive move that established a new premise for a new century and decisively stamped Stuart political thought.64 Locke’s task was to return political thinking to an earlier premise.65 Tory histories of political thought

In seventeenth-century England, rival construals of the history of political thought were themselves instruments of polemical politics. Locke and the Whigs were vulnerable to a paradoxical and potentially devastating accusation that they were the heirs of popish political doctrines.66 The claim is unexpected for we associate the Whigs with the masterly manipulation of fears of popery and with allegations of the court’s compliance in ‘popery and arbitrary power’. Yet from an early moment in the century Royalists had asserted that Catholic and Calvinist radicalisms coalesced, and that Puritans, and, later, 62 Anon.,

The Cloak in its Colours (1679), p. 8; Roger L’Estrange, Account of the Growth of Knavery (1678), p. 8; Samuel Johnson, A Confutation (1698), p. 34. 63 Robert Filmer, Patriarcha, ed. J. Sommerville (Cambridge, 1991), p. 3; Locke, TTG, I. 4; II. 239. 64 J. P. Sommerville, ‘Richard Hooker, Hadrian Saravia, and the Advent of the Divine Right of Kings’, History of Political Thought 4 (1983), 229–45. 65 One purpose of the Two Treatises was pedagogic, to re-educate the nation in sound principles: it was a work of mental hygiene. See S.-J. Savonius-Wroth, ‘Corruption and Regeneration in the Political Imagination of John Locke’, in Politics, Religion, and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. J. Champion, J. Coffey, T. Harris, and J. Marshall (Woodbridge, 2019), pp. 141–59. 66 For a parallel discussion, see J. Rose, ‘Robert Brady’s Intellectual History and Royalist Antipopery in Restoration England’, EHR 122 (2007), 1287–317.

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Parliamentarians and Whigs, preached versions of the papal ‘deposing power’ and the ‘king-killing’ doctrine of papists. This was the collusion identified by Barclay, Bilson, and Saravia. They argued that the Scottish Reformers, John Knox and George Buchanan, who overthrew Mary Queen of Scots and deracinated the kingship of the young James VI, in effect leagued with the Jesuits, most notably Robert Parsons, in his Conference about the Next Succession (1594), who rejected the claim of the Stuarts to succeed to the English throne. In the first and second decades of the new century English defenders of new Stuart dynasty became, in the European-wide furore over the Oath of Allegiance of 1606, which rejected the pope’s ‘deposing power’, fully schooled in the arguments of the Counter-Reformation theologians, most notably Francisco Suárez and Robert Bellarmine, which asserted that, whereas the church had its authority from Christ, the commonwealth took its grounding from the will of the community, and that a people, suffering under tyranny, or an heretical monarch, might depose its ruler. Parsons’s book shrewdly disguised its Catholic agenda and grounded the commonwealth in the natural equality of humankind and the consent of communities to establish and constrain their governors. The assassinations of Henri III and IV in France, by Catholics, rendered yet more apparent the propensity of papists to dissolve obedience to princes. The most shocking of texts was the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana’s De rege (1599), which allowed for tyrannicide. The doctrine of the divine right of kings was always double-edged, directed against both ‘popery’ and ‘presbytery’, against that unlikely beast ‘Puritano-jesuitismus’.67 As Filmer shockingly put it, monarchy had been crucified ‘betwixt two thieves, the pope and the people’.68 Royalists and Tories could thereby trade on the emotional force of England’s passionate antipathy to Rome, so that Whigs by no means possessed a monopoly. In the Restoration, the canonical presentation of the case was Henry Foulis’s History of Romish Treasons and Usurpations (1671), which was summarized by William Lloyd in his The Difference between the Court and Church of Rome Considered (1673), a copy of which Locke owned.69 Catholic theory was seen to have developed in two stages. As the papacy grew in power in the Middle Ages, it developed a claim to depose ungodly princes, the precedent being set in the eighth century in the deposition by Pope Zachary of Chilperic, last of the Merovingians. The claim was magnified by Pope Hildebrand, and attained official formulation in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 (which also defined that other characteristic doctrine of popish superstition, transubstantiation). The second phase was the abandonment of any requirement, antecedent to deposition, of a papal condemnation, and its substitution by a pure theory 67

The title of a tract by David Owen (1643), a republication of his Herod and Pilate Reconciled (1610). See J.-L. Quantin, ‘Obéissance passive, obéissance primitive? La théologie politique anglicane sous la Restauration’, Revue Française d’Histoire des Idees Politiques 11 (2000), 27–58. 68 Filmer, Patriarcha, p. 132. 69 Harrison and Laslett, Library of Locke, no. 2187.

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of popular sovereignty. This was the radical position of Francesco Suárez, and reached its zenith in the tyrannicide permitted by Mariana, and by Jean Boucher in his panegyric on the assassination, in 1589, of Henry III. An intermediate position was the doctrine of the pope’s indirect power, exercised by a political community, which was argued by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine and deployed in Pius V’s Bull of deposition of Queen Elizabeth in 1570. Foulis cited hundreds of Catholic popes, church councils, and theologians, and was careful to clarify the fact that the theory was not only one of direct or indirect papal power but, by the sixteenth century, one of social contract and the popular origin of government. It was the tradition of the Jesuits and Dominicans (Suárez, Molina, Mariana, Soto, and others), of the French Liguers, who had radicalized Catholicism in anticipation of a Huguenot succession to the French throne, and of English Catholics who responded to James I’s oath of allegiance.70 Foulis wrote another book, The History of the Wicked Plots (1662, 1674), which explained the actions and ideology of the radical Calvinists. The crucial element in the whole account was the linkage between the Catholic and Calvinist traditions: the radical Calvinists were the inheritors of Catholic scholasticism. It was the Catholic neo-Thomists of the Counter-Reformation, drawing upon Aquinas’s absorption of Aristotle’s Politics, who had been the first to articulate that most dreadful of doctrines, that political power lay with the people, who had a right to revolt against their prince – a doctrine which, in Calvinist guise, had ultimately embroiled England in civil war. Catholicism made revolutionary Calvinism possible. Foulis and his fellow Royalists were fond of pointing out that John Major, the Catholic theologian of early sixteenth-century Paris, had been the teacher of the Protestant Buchanan, and that Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex of 1644, the textbook of Scottish Presbyterian revolutionary theory, had recommended the Jesuit Mariana.71 The most damning evidence of the Romish-Whig connection was the direct borrowing by English Protestant radicals from a book by an English Catholic. In A Conference about the Next Succession, the Jesuit Parsons, put the case against the unalterable right of hereditary succession, in the name of the community’s power to choose its ruler. Shrewdly avoiding resting his argument on papal supremacy, in order that he might appeal to a wider constituency in preventing the accession of the House of Stuart, he rested his case on natural law. People are by nature free and they take on citizenship by their voluntary act, and under conditions they specify; rulers are trustees of the people. Its premises are exactly those that the natural law Parliamentarians and Whigs would follow. Foulis disclosed that a republican tract of 1649 called A Conference Concerning the Power 70

Henry Foulis, The History of Romish Treasons (1671), pp. 42–106. Cf. Nalson, Common Interest; Peter du Moulin, A Vindication (1664); David Jenner, The Prerogative of Primogeniture (1685). 71 Foulis, History of Romish Treasons, p. 93; George Hickes, The Spirit of Popery (1680), p. 30. On Rutherford: J. Coffey, Politics, Religion, and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge, 1997).

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of Parliaments Against their Kings, and another of 1655, A Treatise Concerning the Broken Succession, were no other than versions of Parsons.72 The Exclusion Crisis confirmed Foulis’s thesis. In 1681 Parsons’s book was reprinted under its original title, perfectly tuned for the Whig cause. What was worse, the damning revelation was made that one of the most important of Whig pamphlets, A Brief History of the Succession (1681), perhaps written by the future Whig grandee and patron of Locke, John Somers, had drawn heavily upon Parsons. George Hickes and Robert Brady pointed out the parallels.73 Another Whig Exclusionist, Thomas Hunt, was found guilty of the same plagiarism.74 Locke owned copies of Hunt and the 1681 edition of Parsons.75 In 1683 Nalson demonstrated the general debt of Whigs to Mariana and Suárez,76 and in the same year the condemnatory Judgment and Decree of the University of Oxford anathematized, in its fifth proposition, the doctrine that it was lawful to preclude the hereditary heir from the succession, and cited as examples Rutherford, Hunt, Somers, the Whig clergyman Samuel Johnson – and the Catholic Parsons. Oxford’s third anathema was against the doctrine that tyrants forfeited their right to govern: it cited the Protestants Buchanan, Mornay, Rutherford, Milton, Goodwin, and Richard Baxter – and also the Catholic Bellarmine.77 As late as 1710, Tories were exploiting the same emotive association of popery and Whiggery, and a typical litany of the year of the Whig trial of the Tory preacher Henry Sacheverell now included new names: ‘Mariana, Suarez, Bellarmine, Hotman, Buchanan, Bradshaw, Milton, Baxter, Owen, Goodwin, Sidney, Locke’.78 The Tories were scarcely mistaken in their historical judgement, for, in 1690, an anonymous tract appeared, called Political Aphorisms, which skilfully and seamlessly wove together extracts from Parsons and Locke, together with (among others) the leading ideologist of the Civil War Parliamentarians, William Prynne. This was a Whig confection and it became an eighteenth-century bestseller.79

72

Henry Foulis, The History of the Wicked Plots (1662), p. 15. There has been considerable recent attention to Parsons (or Persons). For his reception, see P. Kewes, ‘Robert Persons’s A Conference about the Next Sucession in Stuart England’, in Stuart Succession Literature, ed. P. Kewes and A. McRae (Oxford, 2019), pp. 149–85. 73 George Hickes, Jovian (1684), p. 237; idem, A Discourse of the Sovereign Power (1682), p. 28; idem, True and Exact History, pp. 1–2; idem, Introduction, pp. 353–7. 74 Thomas Hunt, Great and Weighty Considerations (1680); idem, Mr Hunt’s Postscript (1682). Cf. Edward Pelling, The Apostate Protestant (1682), pp. 4, 8–35. 75 Harrison and Laslett, Library of Locke, nos 987, 1533. 76 Nalson, Present Interest of England, p. 20. 77 The Judgment is printed in D. Wootton (ed.), Divine Right and Democracy (Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 120–6. 78 Luke Milbourne, The Measures of Resistance (1710), p. 3. 79 From 1710 it was titled The Judgment of Whole Kingdoms and Nations. See R. Ashcraft and M. M. Goldsmith, ‘Locke, Revolution Principles, and the Formation of Whig Ideology’, HJ 46 (1983), 773–800.

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Locke naturally acknowledged no debt to Catholic political thought. His repetitive deployment of the respectable Richard Hooker arguably indicates his anxiety to demonstrate that his doctrine that political authority derived from the community was Protestant orthodoxy. Yet the anxiety was not so pressing that he could not, rather casually, mention Bellarmine, in ridiculing Filmer’s self-­congratulation at ‘disproving’ the cardinal. ‘He comes to fall on Bellarmine, and, by a victory over him, establishes his [doctrine of] “fatherly authority” beyond any question. Bellarmine being routed by his own confession, the day is clear got’ and thus is ‘proven’ his ‘phantom’ of ‘empire, and unlimited absolute power’.80 It is the nearest Locke came to admitting the Whigs’ affinity with the natural jurisprudence of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The Clarendon Code and ecclesiastical dominion

We need now to turn to the ecclesiological counterpart to secular political theory, and to place the animus of Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration alongside that of the Two Treatises. Both books were published in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution; between them they discern the tension at the heart of Anglican Royalism, the delicate relationship between defence of the crown and defence of the church. Although the Two Treatises displays Locke’s conviction that Charles II’s regime had moved toward absolutism, he also pointed, in the Letter, to the hubristic claims of the clergy for the authority of the church. The pivotal concern of the Anglican establishment was to preserve what they judged to be ‘true religion’ by preventing religious toleration. The Cavalier Parliament had, in the Act of Uniformity of 1662, imposed a rigid and narrow Anglicanism, making no concessions to the Puritans in matters of worship or episcopacy, and imposed severe penalties upon nonconformist worship. It was passed in reaction to Charles’s concessive declarations of 1660, and, when the king attempted to mitigate the Act, Bishop Gilbert Sheldon, whom Pepys described as ‘now one of the most powerful men in England’,81 persuaded the Privy Council to overrule him. This and subsequent Acts, the so-called Clarendon Code, inaugurated two decades of erratic, but sometimes brutal, persecution. The paradox of Restoration politics is that the royal brothers did not share the churchmen’s priorities, and would have preferred a more broad-based and tolerant regime, whether from indifference, politique prudence, or commitment to aiding the minority Catholic cause. On each of the five occasions82 that Charles attempted to give toleration to Dissenters he was resisted and defeated by an Anglican parliament which believed that Puritanism had destroyed both 80 Locke,

TTG, I. 6; and cf. I. 12. R. Latham and W. Matthews (eds), The Diary of Samuel Pepys (11 vols, 1971), III, 86. 82 1660, 1662, 1663, 1668, 1672. 81

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civil peace and Anglican worship and should never be allowed the opportunity to do so again.83 The king was driven by political necessity to capitulate to the deadweight of parliamentary Anglicanism. In appointing Danby in 1673 he ‘surrendered to his friends’.84 The Anglican establishment was not merely an auxiliary to the crown: at times the reverse seemed true, seeking to bend the crown to the service of the church. Dissenters and ‘latitudinarian’ Anglicans faced a dilemma. They might hope for reform through parliament, such as the Whig scheme for a statutory comprehension and toleration in 1680. But against a hostile parliament they were apt, like the philosophes of the Enlightenment, to side with the crown against the established church. There were times when Puritans and Whigs sought to tutor the crown in the use of its ecclesiastical supremacy to constrain the church. During periods when the crown irresolutely succumbed to Anglicanism, the axis familiar to historians emerged, but the Whig confrontation with the crown which held sway during the Exclusion Crisis represents only one axis of Restoration politics. For when the crown attempted to free itself from episcopal hegemony, the church’s enemies rallied to the crown. This latter axis prevailed at two epochs: under the Cabal (1667–73) and in most of the reign of James II (1686–8). Charles’s inclination towards theological indifference, libertinism, and crypto-Catholicism, and James’s desire for liberty for Catholicism led to a royal accord in aims, if not motives, with Dissenters and anticlericals. In these two epochs a somewhat bizarre constellation was visible in the orbit of the court: Dissenters, sceptics, republicans, libertines, Francophiles, and Catholics, united in their Erastianism and anticlericalism. Both epochs culminated in prerogative tolerations, the Declarations of Indulgence of 1672 and 1687, the former defeated by parliament and the latter by William of Orange’s intervention. In 1672 Lord Chancellor Shaftesbury, and, it seems, Locke, and many of the Dissenters supported the king’s policy and, although James II’s repetition of it did not find a defence from Locke, it again attracted substantial Dissenting support.85 ‘Jure divino’ episcopacy

At the centre of the Anglican hegemony was the episcopate, arguably more confident and more powerful than at any time since the Reformation. Where Laud had behaved tactlessly in the 1630s, Archbishops Sheldon and Sancroft were skilful politicians who carried the Anglican parliamentary class with 83

The most stentorian assertion of this position is Samuel Parker, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1670). 84 D. T. Witcombe, Charles II and the Cavalier House of Commons 1663–1674 (Oxford, 1966), p. 136. 85 M. Goldie, ‘John Locke’s Circle and James II’, Historical Journal 35 (192), 557–86; S. Sowerby, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2013).

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them.86 The Restoration hierarchy was better educated and of higher social rank than its predecessors, and with its power came an increasing sense of the episcopate’s mission. (Given Locke’s Oxford background, it is worth remarking that two-thirds of episcopal appointments between 1660 and 1685 were Oxford men and as many as fourteen were of Locke’s college, Christ Church.)87 This episcopate, with few exceptions, belonged to the drift of Anglican ecclesiology in the direction of a Catholic (but not papal) interpretation of their role. They rejected the Erastianism of Selden and Hobbes (much vaunted in the circle of the Cabal) and nourished the tradition of high church ecclesiology, which taught the apostolic origin of episcopacy and the episcopate’s godly responsibility to judge faith and morals. Episcopacy was not a ‘thing indifferent’, but prescribed by Christ in the Gospels, by St Paul in the Epistles, and by the early church Fathers.88 The early defenders of the Anglican via media – John Jewell, John Whitgift, and Hooker – had made moderate claims for episcopacy. Higher, ‘jure divino’ claims, were offered, in response to the rise of Presbyterianism, in the writings of men whose significance has already been discerned, Bancroft and Bilson.89 Stuart kings were not allowed to forget their duty to uphold episcopacy. The Royalist rejection of Charles I’s Answer to the Nineteen Propositions (1642) was doubly vehement: not only did the Answer demote the crown to a mere Estate, but by the same token it demoted the spirituality from being an Estate at all. In 1648 Heylyn was quick to instruct Charles I, who seemed willing to be unremittingly concessive towards his Parliamentary captors, that he had no right to disown episcopacy to preserve his throne.90 In 1658 Heylyn wrote that Bodin’s doctrine was that no two estates could suppress the third, so that any statute against episcopacy was ipso facto null. In 1662 Herbert Thorndike wrote that ‘Erastians acknowledged no visible church founded by God. Their opinion enableth sovereigns to persecute God’s truth by God’s law. Persecuting the truth is … a power … no sovereign can have.’91 Such men, together with Henry Hammond, Henry Dodwell (whom Locke conceded to be ‘the learned 86

I. M. Green, The Re-Establishment of the Church of England, 1660–1663 (Oxford, 1978); J. Spurr, The Restoration Church of England (New Haven, CT, 1991). 87 W. Simon, ‘The Bishops and the Anglican Establishment, 1660–1685’ (PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1954), pp. 2–7. 88 R. D. Cornwall, Visible and Apostolic (Cranbury, NJ, 1993); J.-L. Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity (Oxford, 2009). 89 See W. D. J. Cargill Thompson, ‘Sir Francis Knollys’s Campaign against Jure Divino Episcopacy’, in The Dissenting Tradition, ed. C. R. Cole and M. E. Moody (Athens, OH, 1975), pp. 39–77; J. P. Sommerville, ‘The Royal Supremacy and Episcopacy “Jure Divino”, 1603–1640’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 34 (1983), 548–58. 90 W. Lamont, Godly Rule (1969), ch. 3; A. Milton, ‘Sacrilege and Compromise: Court Divines and the King’s Conscience 1642–1649’, in The Experience of Revolution, ed. M. Braddick and D. Smith (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 135–53. 91 Heylyn, Stumbling Block, pp. 145–213; Herbert Thorndike, Just Weights and Measures (1662), p. 24.

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Dodwell’),92 and Bishops John Fell and George Bull constructed a strong theory of Apostolic episcopacy. In practical churchmanship, Sheldon and Sancroft carried into the Restoration the Laudian commitment to the sanctity of the clerical estate and its moral and teaching authority. The Anglican Royalists upheld, in equal measure, the ‘Pauline injunction’, never to resist (by force) temporal rulers, and the ‘Petrine commission’, by which Christ gave church authority to the Apostles, as the first bishops.93 It is the strength of this tradition which made possible the Seven Bishops’ assault on James II in 1688, and, after 1697, the high church movement’s attack upon Williamite Erastianism in defence of the right of convocation to meet and govern the church.94 The issue of episcopacy was salient in the politics of the 1670s.95 In 1677 Danby and the hierarchy, in their own anticipation of a future Catholic king, introduced bills stripping the crown of its powers to select bishops and appoint to benefices. In the following year Shaftesbury’s party retorted with an assault on the hierarchy, by attempting to exclude the bishops from the House of Lords in judicial cases involving capital punishment, a stratagem to clear the way for the impeachment of Danby. From the high church camp came a series of tracts defending the episcopate, such as Womock’s Two Treatises … Proving … that the Bishops are a Fundamental and Essential Part of our English Parliament (1680). Falkner’s major work of 1679, Christian Loyalty, was elegantly poised, in its two parts, between monarchical absolutism and the emphatic reiteration of the church’s power of the Keys, of consecration, ordination, and preaching, which flowed from Christ to the bishops. No earthly prince could alter the rightful government of the church. The furore over the bishops’ power in capital cases brought about the dissolution of parliament in 1679. The clergy feared that ‘a rebellion, and with it the pulling the church to pieces, was designed’.96 L’Estrange soon began his weekly Observator which, by stirring up anxieties over the church’s impending ruin, helping to turn opinion away from the Whigs, as destroyers of the church.97

92

John Locke, Third Letter for Toleration (1692), p. 264. Romans 13:1–2; Matthew 16:18–19. 94 G. Every, The High Church Party, 1688–1718 (1956); G. V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 1688–1730 (Oxford, 1975); M. Goldie, ‘The Nonjurors, Episcopacy, and the Origins of the Convocation Controversy’, in Ideology and Conspiracy, ed. E. Cruickshanks (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 15–35. 95 For the following, see Chapter 4 in this volume. 96 Falkner, Christian Loyalty, pp. 14–15, 130. 97 See M Goldie, ‘Roger L’Estrange’s Observator and the Exorcism of the Plot’, in Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture, ed. A. Dunan-Page and B. Lynch (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 67–88. 93

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Locke’s anticlericalism

The object of Locke’s attention was the hegemony of persecuting Anglicanism. In the Letter Concerning Toleration his target is unmistakable: the ‘leaders of the church, moved by avarice and insatiable desire of dominion, making use of the immoderate ambition of magistrates and the credulous superstition of the giddy multitude’ had replaced Gospel charity with persecution. At their head were ‘ecclesiastical men, who boast themselves to be the successors of the Apostles’.98 Locke’s library was full of literature on toleration and episcopacy: a pamphlet by John Humphrey on the Indulgence, one by David Clarkson against Apostolic episcopacy, by Edmund Hickeringill on the overweening power of church courts, and several attacks on the prelates.99 Locke maintained that claims to impose conformity coercively for the sake of ‘true religion’ were invariably specious and a cloak for ‘the obtaining of ecclesiastical dominion’. His account in the Letter and the Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) of the origin of established creeds mirrors his account in the Second Treatise of the gullible submission of ancient peoples to overweening princes: lassitude, inadvertence, and fear led men to give themselves up ‘into the hands of their priests’ who ‘fill their heads with false notions of the deity, and their worship with foolish rites’, and ‘what dread or craft began, devotion soon made sacred, and religion immutable’. In his 1681 attack on Stillingfleet, he spoke of the ‘intemperate zeal’ of churchmen, who ‘are very apt to persecute and misuse those that will not pen in their fold’.100 Locke’s reflections on Anglican dominion in the universities and pulpits, in the press and the state, arguably shaped his striking delineation, akin to what we would now call a ‘sociology of knowledge’, of the relationship between knowledge and power, and about the tyranny of opinion. In the First Treatise he warned that if men are not steered by reason they sink into fancy, passion, and fashionable prejudice. ‘And when fashion hath once established, what folly or craft began, custom makes it sacred, and ’twill be thought impudence or madness, to contradict or question it.’ He continues, as if in Rousseau-esque vein, by contrasting the untutored virtue of natural men, who are ‘fitter to give us rules’, with cities and palaces which are inhabited by ‘those that call themselves civil and rational’. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding he analysed the ‘power it gives one man over another, to have the authority to be the dictator of principles, and teacher of unquestionable truths’, and warns that ‘if we could but see the secret motives that influenced the men of name and learning in the world, and the leaders of parties, we would not always find

98 Locke,

Letter Concerning Toleration, p. 60–2. Harrison and Laslett, Library of Locke: on prelacy, nos. 227, 338, 707, 1061; on toleration, nos 378–9, 1162, 2820, 2950, 2954; Humfrey and Hickeringill, nos 825, 1447, 2068. 100 Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, p. 8; John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. J. C. Higgins-Biddle (Oxford, 1999), p. 260; cf. pp. 194, 285; Bodl., MS Locke c. 34, fol. 6. 99

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that it was the embracing of truth for its own sake, that made them espouse the doctrines they owned and maintained’.101 Locke sustained his anticlerical attack in other texts. One of the chief objects of The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) was to show, by the life of Christ, that Christianity and politics were never intended to co-mingle, and that Christ was not to be turned to political account. His thesis was that Jesus scrupulously avoided overt declarations of his identity as the Messiah, because the Jews were ready to make him into a temporal king. This is partly a retort to Fifth Monarchist and antinomian attitudes (the ‘Rule of the Saints’), but Locke also made considerable play of Jesus’ denunciations of the ‘grandees’ of the Jewish religion, of ‘the learned scribes, the disputers or wise of this world’. He took up this theme again in his Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul, where, commenting on the Epistle to the Corinthians, he stressed that Paul’s message was that the Christians of Corinth were corrupted by Jewish and Greek learning and rhetoric, and by ‘pride and vainglory, in affectation of learning and philosophical knowledge’. ‘Glorying in being … scholars’, men ‘fell into divisions and parties’ about religion. In the Third Letter for Toleration (1692) Locke analysed the corruptions which stemmed from the existence of any politically established national church: its tendency to become an engine for preferment; to ‘breathe out nothing but force and persecution’; and its manufacture of ‘needless impositions’. He ridiculed the parochialism of the claim that the Church of England was the one true church.102 In the three Letters on Toleration Locke extrapolated the principles of the Two Treatises to show that religious impositions can be no part of the trust which people bestow on civil government. There is nothing in the ends of civil society but what reasonable people can be supposed to have designed when entering into it. In the state of nature everyone would avoid an attempt to force an opinion on them, and so protection from such an injury is one of the ends of civil society; no person would reasonably consent to a regime of civil punishment of religious opinions and practices.103 In the Third Letter Locke surveyed the penal laws against nonconformity imposed in England since Queen Elizabeth’s reign. He was clear that the Clarendon Code was actively vicious. He wrote of the ‘horrid cruelties’ of the regime and of those who had lost their ‘estates, liberties, and lives in 101 Locke,

TTG, I. 58; idem, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), 1.4.25; 4.20.17; on the tyranny of opinion, 4.20.4–6, 4.16.4, 1.3.22, 2.33.1–7. See J. Dunn, ‘Individuality and Clientage in the Formation of Locke’s Social Imagination’, in John Locke, ed. R. Brandt (Berlin, 1981), pp. 43–73. 102 Locke, Reasonableness, ed. J. C. Higgins-Biddle (Oxford, 1999), pp. 75–7, 100–1, 121–2, 124, 131–4, 163, 147–60, 166, 306–7; idem, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul, ed. A. W. Wainwright (2 vols, Oxford, 1987), I, 181; idem, Third Letter, pp. 84–5, 154–7, 243–5, 235, 348. 103 Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, pp. 13–14; idem, Second Letter, pp. 6–7, 50–3; idem, Third Letter, pp. 60–1.

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noisome prisons’ – the details of which he could read about in the several tracts he possessed on, for example, the sufferings of the Quakers.104 Under the Uniformity Act anyone over the age of sixteen apprehended at a nonconformist meeting was subject to penalties: in the first instance, three months imprisonment or a fine of £5. By the Second Conventicle Act of 1670, passed to spite the Cabal’s tolerationism, a convicted person at whose house a meeting for worship was held could be fined £20; and, in case of inability to pay, his property could be seized. The added refinement of this Act was the institutionalization of informers, who would be rewarded from fines: in many cases this amounted to little short of a licence for perjurers to pillage Dissenters.105 At several points in the Second Treatise Locke, as we saw, spoke of the ‘legislators themselves’ being guilty of invading the people’s liberties and properties, particularly where they are, like the Cavalier Parliament, an entrenched ‘lasting assembly always in being’; and where, despite the old established laws protecting property, they make arbitrary laws disposing of particular men’s property. Fines and sequestrations for religious nonconformity – treatment that amounted to the ruination of livelihoods – was a prime instance of the tyrannical invasion of property.106 Just as the publication of the Two Treatises was not simply an endorsement of the temporal settlement of 1689, so the Letters on Toleration were no straightforward defences of the Toleration Act of that year. Locke naturally welcomed the Act, but thought it inadequate. He continued to write at length on toleration, his Third Letter of 1692 being by far the longest. His own proposals went far beyond what the English would then accept. National churches placed ‘arbitrary limits of communion’ and ‘needless impositions’. The magistrate’s authority adds nothing to religion. A sovereign’s membership of a church was merely incidental. ‘Religion established by law is a pretty odd way of speaking.’107 Locke ridiculed that aspect of the settlement whereby England and Scotland had separate established churches, Anglican and Presbyterian, ‘each contending with so much eagerness’ against the other. He repudiated the Test Acts (passed in 1673 and 1678, and not abolished until 1828), which confined public office to conforming Anglicans, conformity witnessed by a certificate that a person had received the sacrament of the eucharist. Locke held that civil rights and office-holding belonged to citizens regardless of religion, and that religious ‘tests’ led to abuses whereby people took the sacrament ‘to keep their places, or to obtain licences to sell ale’.108 The first of these denoted the practice of 104 Locke,

Third Letter, pp. 104, 125–9; Harrison and Laslett, Library of Locke, nos 2142–7. M. Goldie, ‘The Hilton Gang and the Purge of London in the 1680s’, in Politics and the Political Imagination in Later Stuart Britain, ed. H. Nenner (Rochester, NY, 1998), pp. 43–73. 106 Locke, TTG, II. 138, 277. 107 Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, p. 26; idem, Second Letter, p. 57; idem, Third Letter, pp. 84–5. 108 Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, pp. 57–8; idem, Second Letter, p. 11; idem, Third Letter, pp. 84–5. 105 See

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‘occasional conformity’ whereby nonconformists got their certificates merely to qualify themselves for office; the second referred to the practice of magistrates requiring conformity as a condition of a licence to do business. It is often said that the preface which William Popple, a Unitarian merchant, provided for the first Letter Concerning Toleration misunderstood, or went further than, Locke, in associating Locke’s tract with a plea for ‘absolute liberty’, a view apparently contradicted by the passage in the Essay where Locke said that ‘no government allows absolute liberty’. Popple, however, was not asserting a general proposition about licence which Locke was criticizing in the Essay, that in civil society a person might ‘do whatever he please’.109 Popple was making a plea for further ecclesiastical reform in the direction of the ‘perfect toleration’ to which Locke refers in the Second Letter, in particularly the removal of the Test Acts.110 As Locke told his friend Philipp van Limborch, the Act was ‘not perhaps so wide in scope as might be wished for … I hope with these beginnings the foundations have been laid of that liberty and peace in which the church of Christ is one day to be established’.111 That Locke’s position on toleration went beyond the 1689 Act led his critic, Thomas Long, to tar Locke with the brush of James II’s Indulgence, by associating the Letter Concerning Toleration with the ‘popery and fanaticism’ unleashed by ‘the late king’.112 In 1686 Tyrrell had written to Locke in Holland expressing the ‘wish you would … perfect your intended discourse concerning toleration, and persecution’, drafted against Stillingfleet in 1681, and publish it, because it would dispose people’s minds to toleration, and ‘none but the p[riests]’ would be offended. Tyrrell thought Locke might adopt, as he seems to have done in 1672, a prerogative stance on toleration. There was also talk of Locke obtaining a pardon to return to England.113 But Locke resolutely remained in exile and returned in the wake of William of Orange’s overthrow of James. Oppression by Stuart monarchs trumped oppression by the Anglican hierarchy, but not by much. Castor and Pollux

Locke thus confronted not one, but two claims to jure divino authority, temporal and ecclesiastical. His politics was, accordingly, directed against a regime in which, to quote the Letter from a Person of Quality, ‘Priest and Prince may, like

109 Locke,

Human Understanding, 4.3.18. Locke, TTG, II. 6: ‘A state of liberty … is not a state of licence’. 110 Locke, Second Letter, p. 63. Cf. idem, TTG, II. 22. 111 Locke, Correspondence, no. 1147 (6 June 1689). 112 Thomas Long, The Letter for Toleration Decipher’d (1689), pp. 5, 30. 113 Locke, Correspondence, nos 889, 1019; Goldie, ‘John Locke’s Circle’, pp. 568–9; P. Milton, ‘John Locke, William Penn, and the Question of Locke’s Pardon’, Locke Studies 8 (2008), 125–69.

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Castor and Pollux, be worshipped together as divine in the same temple’.114 The intersection of kingly and priestly power and ideology became an obsession among the Whigs. Their standing charge was that clergies cynically preached up the absolute authority of princes, in order to secure princely assistance to uphold in turn the power of the church. Locke dilated on this theme several times. As early as 1661 he noted the tendency of churchmen to sing the divine right of kings only until kings began to traduce the divine right of the church. He repeated the sentiment in 1690, remarking that the clergy were not inclined to admonish misapplications of temporal power ‘at least, so long as it is misapplied in favour of them, and their party’. In the Letter Concerning Toleration he wrote of the clergy that they seek ‘to promote that tyranny in the commonwealth which otherwise they would not be able to establish in the church’.115 His most extended treatment occurs in a reflection dating from about 1675: The clergy … having, almost ever since the first ages of the church, laid claim to power, separate from civil government, as received from God himself, have, wherever the civil magistrate hath been Christian and of their opinion … pressed, as a duty on the magistrate, to punish and persecute those whom they disliked and declared against. And so when they excommunicated, their under officer, the magistrate, was to execute; and to reward princes for this doing their drudgery, they have (whenever princes have been serviceable to their ends) been careful to preach up monarchy jure divino; for commonwealths have hitherto been less favourable to their power. But notwithstanding the jus divinum of monarchy, when any prince hath dared to dissent from their doctrines or forms, or been less apt to execute the decrees of the hierarchy, they have been the first and forewardest in giving check to his authority, and disturbance to his government.116

Several decades later, the author of the entry on Locke in The British Plutarch remarked that the ‘Castor and Pollux’ theme of the 1675 Letter, which he assumed Locke wrote, had provided inspiration for a whole generation of anticlerical critics. ‘Almost all the tribe of writers who have affected to give us a cast of their wit upon orthodoxy, have acknowledged this letter writer for their master, in copying not only his matter but his manner of expression.’117

114 Locke,

Essay Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, p. 376; idem, Political Essays, ed. M. Goldie (Cambridge, 1997), p. 365. 115 Locke, Two Tracts, pp. 160–1; idem, Second Letter, p. 65; idem, Letter Concerning Toleration, p. 61. 116 Locke, Political Essays, p. 234. 117 Anon., The British Plutarch (1762), IX, 141.

318

Index Abraham  66–7, 69, 150, 280 Absalom  16, 130, 219, 222, 237, 244 Adam  22, 24, 29, 81, 150, 297, 305 adiaphora see things indifferent agriculture  258, 262–3 Alexander VI, Pope  237 Alford, Captain  240 Alfred, King  200, 212, 217 Alsop, Vincent  45, 154 Alsted, Johann Heinrich  253 Ambrose, St  39, 116, 285, 289 Amyraut, Moyse  169 ancient constitution  27, 73, 196, 198, 199, 200, 211, 212, 216, 217, 218 Anglesey, earl of  102, 110, 185, 214, 242–4, 246, 251, 256, 258, 253 Anne, Queen  103, 125, 266, 267 Annesley, Samuel  154 Answer to the Nineteen Propositions 26, 72, 73, 116, 312 anticlericalism  4, 9, 11, 21, 91, 99, 100, 109, 117–20, 121–38, 142, 147, 151, 152, 172, 173, 185, 219, 228, 230, 232, 241, 293, 311, 314–17; see also priestcraft antinomianism  31, 44, 46, 70, 169, 186–9, 315 anti-popery  25, 108, 114, 115, 143, 149, 151, 174, 175, 223, 225, 241, 245, 247, 250, 253–4, 161, 279 Appeals, Act of  127 Aquinas, St Thomas  48, 49, 54, 55, 58, 67, 70, 71, 74, 80, 278, 308 Arians  40, 44, 242, 257, 285 aristocracy  3, 12, 24, 26, 30, 72, 73, 137, 198, 213–16, 284 Aristotle/Aristotelianism  26, 67, 71, 72, 74–9, 80–1, 85, 92, 132, 151, 189, 211, 228, 235, 286, 308 Arlington, earl of  142, 147, 295

armies, standing  18, 19, 20, 186, 197, 202, 213, 218, 294 Arminianism  42, 70, 186–8 Arnauld, Antoine  51, 55 Arnisaeus, Henning  73 Asgill, John  266 Ashenden, Thomas  50, 53, 57 Astell, Mary  145 Atwood, William  113, 212 Aubrey, John  66, 130 Augustine, St  2, 7, 11, 39–49, 51–2, 57, 58, 59–60, 63–4, 189, 250, 291 Augustus, Emperor  15 Baal’s priests  118, 123, 128, 130, 138 Bacon, Nathaniel  14 Baconian science  189, 252, 260 Bainbridge, Thomas  276, 281 Baker, Richard  233 Bancroft, Richard  194, 305–6, 312 Bangorian Controversy  125 Baptists  36, 139, 140, 154, 166, 283 Barclay, John  175 Barclay, William  306, 307 Barillon, Paul  98, 112 Barlow, Thomas  113, 233, 243, 255 Barne, Miles  38 Barron, Richard  126, 135 Bartholomew Day (1572, 1662)  160, 168, 170, 171, 174, 175 Basnage, Jacques  168 bastardy  219–20, 222–4, 229, 234–9 Bates, William  154 Baxter, Richard  7, 37, 44, 51, 69, 70, 71, 77, 78, 102, 149, 153, 154, 155, 156, 165, 171, 173, 183, 185, 187, 201, 241, 255, 309 Bayle, Pierre  39, 42–3, 49, 54, 55, 60, 68, 91, 134, 165, 168, 173 Becket, Thomas  113, 127, 149

319

INDEX

Bellarmine, Robert  22, 25, 33, 307–10 Berkenhead, Sir John  207 Besold, Christian  73 Bethel, Slingsby  163, 165, 233 Beza, Theodore  171 Biddle, John  257 Bill of Rights (1689)  144, 216, 218 Bilson, Thomas  194, 305–6, 307, 312 Birch, John  206 Bisbie, Nathaniel  56, 58 Black Box  223 Blackwood, Adam  306 Blount, Charles  90, 117 Boccalini, Traiano  250, 251 Bodin, Jean  23–4, 73, 233, 237, 273, 303–5, 312 Bohun, Edmund  22, 108, 268, 276, 299, 301 Bold, Samuel  166–8 booksellers  181, 182, 207, 245 boroughs  1, 18, 158, 197, 294, 295, 296 Bossuet, Jacques Benigne  42, 174 Boucher, Jean  308 Boyle, Robert  243, 253, 255, 256 Bracton, Henry de  75, 303 Bradshaw, John  309 Brady, Robert  27, 212, 301, 302, 309 Bramhall, John  67, 69, 71, 76, 78, 79, 83, 84, 87, 88, 254 Bramston, Sir John  280 Breda, Declaration of (1660)  96, 182–3 Bridgeman, Sir Orlando  142 Bristol  47, 119 Broughton, Hugh  234 Browne, John  17 Browne, Joseph  208 Brutus, Junius  15, 183 Brydall, John  297 Brydges, Henry  204 Buchanan, George  13, 22, 33, 183, 301, 307–9 Buckingham, duke of  50, 94, 102, 104, 108, 110, 140, 147, 176, 198, 203, 205, 206, 207 Bull, George  313 Bunyan, John  36, 127, 158 Burke, Edmund  194, 267

Burnet, Gilbert  46, 97, 111, 112, 131, 143, 148, 207, 239, 267, 274 Burnett of Kemnay, Thomas  297 burning of books  13, 137, 208 of effigies  98 of heretics  66, 105, 106, 246 Butler, Samuel  179, 180, 182, 183, 188, 298 Cabal  66, 94, 95, 137, 140, 147, 311, 312, 316 Calamy, Benjamin  53 Calvinism  26, 42, 45, 70, 122, 123, 155, 165, 168, 178, 186–9, 194, 226, 242, 247–9, 257, 272, 288 Calvinist theory of revolution  12, 13, 22, 33, 171, 183, 267, 272, 300–1, 306, 307–9 Cambridge  23, 44, 68, 70, 84 canon law  109–10, 113–14, 150, 228, 230, 285 canons (1640)  300 capital punishment  6, 29, 53, 313 Care, Henry  117, 159, 168, 175 Carey, Nicholas  208 Carlisle, earl of  201–2 Carolina 214 Cartwright, John  218 Cartwright, Thomas  276, 292 Casaubon, Isaac  250 Castlemaine, earl of  160, 261 casuistry  55, 57, 89, 193, 249, 267 Catherine of Braganza, Queen  223, 230 Cato  15, 217 Cave, William  45, 55 Cavendish, William, Lord  206 celibacy  229, 262 censorship  14, 18, 111, 117, 124, 125, 178, 207 Charles I, King  19, 34, 94, 112, 133 concessions by  72, 120, 198, 209, 312 as martyr  16, 43, 95, 101, 171, 180, 184 regicide  12, 13, 18, 19, 130, 169, 171, 247 see also Answer to the Nineteen Propositions

320

INDEX

Charles II, King  9, 20, 21, 64, 93, 97, 112, 160–1, 165, 216, 222–3, 230, 236, 260, 268, 282 admonitions to  38, 41, 47, 95, 133, 138, 162, 163, 174 and Cabal  147, 161 Declaration on the Oxford Parliament 278 Declaration on the Rye House Plot 278 idealisation of  15–18, 75, 96, 145, 150, 173, 219, 294 as libertine  30, 31, 83, 85, 87, 130, 151, 219, 287 Locke’s critique of  293–4, 296, 310–11 prorogations and dissolutions of parliament  111, 198, 203, 204, 208 at the Restoration  13, 19, 135 and Tory Reaction  9, 21, 266, 276 see also Indulgence, Declaration of Charles V, Emperor  268 Charleton, Walter  86 Charlett, Arthur  119–20 Charlton, Sir Job  104 Chartists 196–7 Chaucer, Geoffrey  128 Chichester  14, 52 Chiffinch, William  302 Chilperic, King  307 Chrysostom, St John  39, 58 church courts  118, 150, 221, 230, 314 Cicero  15, 76, 123, 189, 281 civil religion  11, 91, 92, 123, 128, 142, 151, 193, 232, 258 Clarendon, 1st earl of  12, 72, 80, 95, 96, 140, 147, 183, 186, 223, 295, 304 Clarendon, 2nd earl of  23, 241, 243, 269, 272 Clarendon, Constitutions of  113–14, 127 Clarendon Code  8, 47, 124, 139, 140, 158, 241, 310, 315 Clarkson, David  314 Clarges, Sir Thomas  111 Clayton, Sir Robert  204

Clerke, John  297 Clifford, Lord  295, coffee-houses  10, 68, 71, 83, 101, 117, 120, 122, 128, 179, 182, 185, 202, 204, 205, 207, 221 Coke, Sir Edward  199–200, 204, 235, 303 Coke, Roger  74, 76, 78, 81, 83, 88, 163 College, Stephen  119–20 Collins, Anthony  84 Comenius, Jan Amos  253 Common Prayer, Book of see Prayer Book compelle intrare 41–2 Comprehension  44, 46, 47, 59, 140, 142, 153, 154–6, 177, 192, 255, 256, 311 Compton, Henry  103, 260, 279, 289 Compton Census  101, 260, 261 concession, doctrine of  32, 73, 74, 193, 287, 304 conciliarism 149 Conold, Robert  38 Constantine, Emperor  2, 7, 40, 46, 47, 107, 129, 132–3, 138, 150, 237, 285, 289, 291, 292 constitutional royalism  29–33, 298–9 Conventicle Acts (1664, 1670)  139, 140, 158, 214, 316 conventicles  10, 35–6, 40, 101, 146, 158 Convention (1660)  96 Convention (1689)  269, 271, 294 convocation  59, 103, 115, 117, 285, 300, 313 Corbet, John  52 Corporation Act (1661)  13, 20, 95, 147, 152 Coryat, Thomas  181 Cosin, John  223 Cotton, Sir John Hinde  218 Cotton, Sir Robert  250 counsel  1, 32, 72, 74–6, 193, 213, 253, 273 Courtin, Paul  208 Covenant/Covenanters  13, 95, 98, 170, 171, 174, 177, 242 Coventry, Henry  104 Coventry, Sir John  206 Cowley, Abraham  92

321

INDEX

Cranmer, Thomas  281, 292 Croft, Bridget  275 Croft, Herbert  178, 179, 180, 279 Cromwell, Oliver/Cromwellians  18, 77, 80, 86, 89, 90, 92, 94, 96, 113, 118, 140, 141, 147, 149, 153, 161, 162, 169, 173, 183, 184, 224, 225, 230, 243, 267, 272 Crowne, John  85, 117, 223–4 Cudworth, Ralph  70 Cumberland, Richard  70, 80, 86 Cyprian, St  58, 300 Cyrus, King  31, 151 Daillé, Jean  169 Danby, earl of  9, 19–20, 47, 93–120, 137, 140, 196, 197, 198, 201–6, 243, 245, 250, 258, 260, 271, 294–5, 301, 311, 313 Danby’s Test  19, 100–3, 105 Danson, Thomas  178, 187 Darby, John  207 Davenant, William  181 David, King  16, 150, 219, 222 Davies, Sir John  150 de facto power  24, 77, 266 Deane, Sir Anthony  258 Deborah 150 Declarations see Breda; Charles II; Indulgence; William III deism  90, 135, 258 democracy  3, 12, 24, 26, 30, 72, 73, 78, 79, 184, 194, 213, 214, 297 Denham, Sir John  57 Denmark  134, 213, 304 Dennis, John  131 deposing power, papal see papal Dering, Sir Edward  104, 119 Desborough, John  225 determinism  84, 188, 189 Devonshire, earl of  216 Digges, Dudley  81, 297, 301 Diocletian, Emperor  282 divine right episcopacy  7, 20, 102, 114, 124, 191–2, 255–6, 284, 285, 311–14, 317–18 divine right monarchy  8, 11, 17, 20, 23, 25, 29–31, 34, 75, 117, 124,

136–7, 162, 265, 273–4, 296–300, 305, 307, 317–18 divorce  221, 225, 227, 230–1, 232, 233, 236, 237 Dodwell, Henry  51, 52, 108, 312–13 Dolben, John  103 dominion in grace  31, 246–7, 257, 292 Dominis, Marc Antonio de  172 Donatism  39–48, 59 Dove, Henry  56 Dover, Treaty of  160 Dragonnades/dragooning  157–9, 166 Drake, Sir Francis  237 drama  10, 14, 18, 84, 85, 117, 176, 230 Dryden, John  15, 16, 130, 159, 179, 181, 219–23, 236, 244, 266 Dubois, John  204 Dugdale, William  113 Durel, John  170 Dury, John  255 Dutch Wars  47, 100, 101, 140, 142, 157 Eachard, John  68, 80, 83, 84, 185 Ecclesiastical Commission (1686–8)  270, 272, 289, 292 ecclesiastical supremacy, royal  1, 104, 108–9, 152, 156, 284 Edes, Henry  14 Edward III, King, statutes of  199–201, 203, 205, 206, 212, 216, 217, 237 Edward the Confessor, King  212 Eikon Basilike  16, 180 ejection of nonconformists (1660–62), 58, 142, 153, 154, 160, 170, 184 Elect, the  2, 31, 187 elective monarchy  14, 29, 238 Elizabeth I, Queen  148, 149, 153, 188, 199, 210, 237, 308, 315 Ellis, John  302 Engagement Controversy  77 Enlightenment  3–4, 11, 40, 42, 89, 121–3, 132, 142, 151, 168, 174, 236, 253, 264, 311 enthusiasm  31, 89, 122–3, 127, 184, 189, 259, 283 Erasmus  225–6, 250 Erastian/Erastianism/Erastus  9, 11, 37–8, 57–8, 64, 87–91, 109, 113,

322

INDEX

127, 129, 130, 133, 136, 170, 172–3, 191, 193, 224–6, 240, 248, 255–6, 284, 287, 288, 289, 292, 311, 312, 313 Essex 118 Essex, earl of (Capel)  94, 110, 302 Essex, earl of (Devereux)  184 estates, three  26–7, 33, 109, 115–16, 214, 296, 312–13 Eusebius  2, 291 Euthyphro Dilemma  66–7, 68 Evelyn, John  146, 223 Exclusion Crisis  29, 30, 33, 96–7, 98, 99, 100, 103, 106–11, 118, 119, 120, 130, 198, 212, 215, 219, 220, 238, 241, 243, 244, 246, 247, 248, 251, 253, 293, 294, 301, 309, 311 excommunication  6, 39, 41, 83, 102, 118, 132, 172–3, 224, 286, 288–9, 318 Exeter  44, 53, 118 Falkner, William  22, 56, 75, 106–7, 108, 297, 301, 303, 313 Farquhar, George  230 Fathers of the Church see patristics Fell, John  119, 313 Fell, Philip  179 Ferguson, Robert  181, 189, 223, 302 Ferne, Henry  128–9 Filmer, Sir Robert  21–2, 25, 26, 27, 34, 73, 79, 80, 87, 221, 238, 268, 273, 293, 296–99, 300–1, 303, 305, 306, 307, 310 Finch, Daniel  104 Finch, Heneage  100, 102, 103, 104, 110, 199, 201, 204 Five Mile Act (1665)  58 Fletcher, Andrew  217 Ford, Simon  16 Fortescue, Sir John  75, 303 Foulis, Henry  19, 301, 307–9 Fowler, Edward  54, 192 Fox, Sir Stephen  302 Foxe’s Book of Martyrs  7–8, 43, 126–7, 136, 149–50, 282 France  23, 29, 42, 43, 51, 73, 101, 117, 143, 148, 157–75, 208, 210–11,

221, 225, 236, 246, 250–1, 260–1, 294, 307–8 Freeman, Samuel  45, 282, 288 Fullwood, Francis  44, 146, 154, 155 Furly, Benjamin  134 Gallicanism  149, 173–4, 175, 250 Garway, William  206 Gassendi, Pierre  189, 250, 252 Gee, Edward  280 Geneva  19, 26, 128, 169–70, 188, 194, 241, 247, 254, 256 Gerson, Jean  149 Gibbon, Edward  40, 41, 132–3 Gibson, Edmund  125 Glanvill, Joseph  37, 50, 107, 123, 253–4, 255, 261 Goddard, Thomas  22 Godden v. Hales 280 Godfrey, Sir Edmund Berry  117, 226, 247, 249 godly prince  7–9, 108, 126, 127, 133, 136–7, 139–56, 191, 193, 236 Goodwin, John  13, 309 Gordon, Thomas  125 Gothic constitution  114, 116, 218; see also parliaments, annual; Saxons Granville, Dennis  118 Gratian, Emperor  40 Graunt, John  259 Grimston, Sir Harbottle  105, 109, 202, 206 Grotius, Hugo  152, 161, 172, 173, 174, 233, 246, 250 Gunning, Peter  52, 179 Gunpowder Plot  16, 25 Gwyn, Nell  85 habeas corpus  202, 204, 206 Hale, Matthew  86, 224, 233 Hale, Thomas  258 Hales, John  189 Halifax, marquis of  102, 205, 241, 243–4, 247, 250, 269, 272, 273 Hall, John  87, 89, 92 Hammond, Henry  246, 312

323

INDEX

Harbord, William  111, 206 Harlay, François de  42 Harley, Robert  216 Harrington, James  13, 128–9, 137, 186, 201, 217, 262, 264 Hartlib, Samuel  253 Hartop, Sir John  118 Hayward, Sir John  306 Henri III, King, 307 Henri IV, King  157, 159, 161, 162, 171, 174–5, 251, 307 Henry VIII, King/Henrician Reformation  105, 127, 133, 149, 228, 285 Henry, Matthew  146 Henry, Philip  52, 153, 156 Herbert, Edward  280 hereditary right/inheritance  29, 77, 100, 106, 115, 117, 213, 221, 223, 228, 232, 235–8, 247, 308, 309 Hesketh, Henry  44, 45, 53 Heylyn, Peter  299–300, 301, 303–4, 306, 312 Hickeringill, Edmund  130, 136, 182, 185, 188, 314 Hickes, George  22, 89, 165–8, 170, 281, 302, 309 Hildebrand, Pope  307 Hill, Samuel  284–6 Hilton, John  10 Hobbes, Thomas  5, 12, 22, 23–6, 33, 37, 57, 65–92, 124, 129–30, 133, 142, 151–2, 172–3, 174, 186, 188, 192, 240, 250–7, 260, 264, 273, 278, 280, 283, 289, 292, 293, 298, 299, 312 Hobbism/Hobbist  22, 38, 57, 63–4, 65–92, 190, 255, 283 Holland see Netherlands Holles, Denzil, Lord  94, 102, 110, 112–6, 198, 202, 205, 206, 207–15, 217 Honorius, Emperor  46–7 Hooker, Richard  53, 305, 310, 312 Hooper, John  281–2 Hoppin, John  53 Horace 15

Hotman, François  171, 309 Houghton, John  253, 258, 263 Howard, Sir Robert  105, 111, 132–3, 135 Howe, John  178, 185, 187 Hudibras  37, 180, 183, 298 Huguenots  9, 12, 42–3, 51–2, 54, 148, 157–75, 188, 251, 301, 303, 308 Hume, David  277 Humfrey, John  142, 147, 151–2, 155–6, 175, 178–9, 182, 186 Hunt, Thomas  112, 114, 115, 116, 299, 309 Hunton, Philip  14, 33, 301 illegitimacy see bastardy impeachment  109–11, 113, 313 Indemnity Act (1660)  94, 183 Indulgence, Declaration of (1672)  38, 44, 47, 52, 94, 95, 100, 108, 139–56, 175, 182, 193, 248, 254, 260, 311, 314 Indulgence, Declaration of (1687)  159, 175, 244–5, 254, 265, 272, 277–8, 279, 280, 289–90, 311, 317 Innocent XI, Pope  249–50 Ireland  98, 164, 169, 242, 243, 246, 258, 259, 286, 287 Islam  90, 104, 142, 232 Isle of Wight treaty  19, 72, 95–6 Jacobites  31, 137, 168, 189, 218, 267 James I, King  21, 22, 25, 34, 115, 171, 174, 307, 308 James II, King  9 and the Anglican Revolution  265–92 and Catholicism  7, 31, 87, 90, 100, 104, 107, 133, 167, 202, 251, 254, 261, 272, 287 deposition of  31, 222, 266–8, 271, 317 and Exclusion  29, 30, 31, 99, 113, 165, 219, 238–9, 246–7 and scheme of limitations upon  103, 108 and Sir Peter Pett  240–5, 251, 254, 257–8, 261

324

INDEX

and toleration  43, 93–4, 141, 151, 155, 159, 168, 174–5, 272, 311, 317 see also Indulgence Jansenism  249, 250 Jeffreys, George  14, 120 Jenkins, Sir Leoline  241, 247, 302 Jenks, Francis  203–4, 206 Jesuits  25–6, 55, 90, 104, 118. 171, 226, 242, 246, 248, 249, 307, 308 Jewel, John  188 Jews  104, 107, 108, 149, 164 Johnson, Samuel  131, 217, 270, 281, 306, 309 Johnston, Nathaniel  22, 268, 279 Johnstoun, James  217 Jolly, Thomas  146 Jones, Sir William  244 Joseph of Arimathea  150 Josiah 7 Julian, Emperor  46–7, 282 Jurieu, Pierre  42, 51, 165, 168, 172 Kant, Immanuel  42, 277 Kennett, White  268, 276, 297 Kent 119 Kettlewell, John  301 keys, power of the  1, 36, 88, 284, 292, 313; see also Petrine Commission Kiffin, William  155 King, William  285–8 Knight, Katharine  102 Knox, John  307 Lactantius  39, 282 Lamplugh, Thomas  53 Laney, Benjamin  49, 57 Lateran Councils  248, 249, 307 latitudinarians  37, 89, 125, 190, 192, 254–6, 311 Laud, William/Laudianism  7, 99, 105, 109, 112, 121, 128, 134, 169, 171, 174, 184, 299–300, 305, 311, 313 law reform  224 Lawrence, William  219–39 Lawson, George  71, 72, 78, 88, 301 Lee, Sir Thomas  105, 110

Leibniz, Gottfried  66–70, 77, 79, 84, 85, 87, 297 Leigh, Richard  179 Leighton, Alexander  282 Leighton, Robert  46 Leslie, Charles  85, 89 L’Estrange, Roger  44, 57, 97, 117, 158, 177, 178, 194–5, 207, 301, 303, 306, 313 Letter from a Person of Quality  19, 102, 137, 138, 194, 213, 295, 302, 317 Levellers  78, 196, 200, 203, 204, 213 libertinism  30, 35, 83, 84, 85, 130, 151, 187, 188, 219, 221, 225, 227, 236, 237, 287, 311 Licensing Act (1662)  111, 182 Lilburne, John  78, 213 Limborch, Philipp van  317 Limitations Scheme  103–9, 241, 244 Lindsey, Lord  98 Littleton, Sir Thomas  105, 235 Livy 15 Lloyd, William  52, 276, 289, 307 Locke, John on Anglican Royalism  293–318 and anticlericalism  314–17 and Bold  168 and Compton Census  261–2 on divine right  162, 177 on divorce  230 on Dodwell  312–13 on Filmer and Filmerians, 73, 238, 296–303 on hereditary right  221, 223 and heresy  124 and the history of political thought 305–6 on Parker  37 on parliamentary elections  216–17, 296 as popish  306–10 and Popple  131, 176 on Proast  59–64, 178 and seditious tracts  302 and Shaftesbury  102, 137, 214, 221, 29, 302 on Stillingfleet  37, 178

325

INDEX

Locke, John (continued) works of ‘Difference between Civil and Ecclesiastical Power’  5–7 Essay Concerning Human Understanding  85–6, 317 Essay on Toleration 141 Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina 214 Letter from a Person of Quality 20, 102, 137, 295, 317–18 Letters Concerning Toleration  5, 36, 39, 42–3, 47, 49, 125, 149, 153, 176, 178, 255, 310, 314–17 Reasonableness of Christianity 134–5, 168, 189, 314–15 Two Tracts on Government  21, 87, 192 Two Treatises of Government 272, 273–4, 293–3118 Lockyer, Nicholas  147, 152 London  10, 44, 45, 53, 55, 58, 107, 149, 170, 181, 203, 218, 246, 259, 261, 271 Long, Thomas  46–7, 59, 317 Long Parliament (1640s)  12, 14, 19, 99, 109, 120, 194, 198, 200, 205, 256, 294 Louis XIV, King  42, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 174, 208, 250 Lucas, Richard  52 Lucius, King  7 Ludlow, Edmund  122 Luther/Lutheranism  70, 123, 226, 242, 248–9, 268, 274–5, 277, 281, 282, 292 Luttrell, Narcissus  222 Machiavelli  18, 134, 182, 186, 237 Mackenzie, Sir George  22, 97 Magdalen College, Oxford  266, 270, 279, 292 Magna Carta  78, 159, 163, 200 Major, John  308 Maimbourg, Louis  42 Malet, Sir John  105, 207 malum in se  30, 278–9 Manwaring, Roger  184, 299, 305

Mariana, Juan de  25, 307, 308, 309 Marlborough, duke of  157 Marprelate, Martin  186 Marriage Act (1653)  224 Marsilius of Padua  172 Martindale, Adam  155 Martyrdom/martyrology  48, 58, 127, 150, 158, 161, 165–6, 168, 184, 240, 245, 262, 277, 281–3; see also Charles I, King, as martyr; and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs Marvell, Andrew  9, 23, 36, 37, 96, 101, 105–6, 117, 133, 137–8, 139–40, 141, 143, 147, 149, 176–95, 206, 246, 295 Mary, Queen of Scots  307 Mary I, Queen  251, 281 Mary II, Queen  101, 103, 282 Maurice, Henry  50 Maxwell, John  301 Mazarin, Jules  161 Melfort, earl of  245 memory, politics of  12, 93, 182–6, 194, 251, 282 Mene Tekel 13 Meres, Sir Thomas  202, 243 Middlesex  119, 204, 215 Mildmay, Henry  118 militia  158, 159, 197, 241, 294 Militia Act (1661)  13, 20, 295 millenarianism  7, 8, 253, 291 Milton, John  13, 36, 128, 133, 137, 141, 162, 169, 171, 176, 183, 224, 227, 230, 233, 301, 309 mixed monarchy  19, 25–8, 33, 72, 74–6, 213, 215, 272, 304 Molesworth, Robert  134, 218 Molina, Luis de  308 Molyneux, William  134 Monmouth, duke of/Monmouth Rebellion  28, 94, 118, 130, 216, 219–39 Monson, Sir John  15 Montagu, Lord  216 Montaigne 227 More, Sir Thomas  250, 262 Morley, George  101, 102, 274

326

INDEX

Mornay, Philippe du Plessis  168, 171, 183, 300, 309 Morrice, Roger  125, 270, 271 mortmain  126, 127 Moulin, Charles du  233 Moulin, Louis du  89, 168–74 Moulin, Pierre du  168–74 Naaman  90, 188 Nalson, John  22, 102, 207, 289, 297, 301, 302, 304, 309 Nantes, Edict of  158, 159, 160–2, 163, 171, 175, 251 Revocation of  42, 157 Nazianzen, St Gregory  39 Nedham, Marchamont  77, 197, 203, 204, 206, 207, 212, 213, 301, 302 Nero, Emperor  30, 292 Netherlands  43, 59, 101, 158, 161, 164, 163, 164, 165, 186, 259, 260, 262, 267, 269, 302, 317; see also Dutch Wars Neville, Henry  215, 227 Newcastle, duke of  18 Newcastle, Treaty of  19 Newton, Isaac  85, 124 Nicea, Council of  133, 138, 285 nominalism  66, 68, 70, 82, 91, 228, 273 nonjurors  166, 267 non-resistance see passive obedience North, Francis  119 North, Roger  19, 94, 97, 102, 118, 276 Northamptonshire 200 Northleigh, John  159, 297 Norwich  38, 149 Nottingham, earl of  110, 199, 269, 272, 302 Nye, Philip  141–2, 145 Nye, Stephen  257 Oates, Titus  99, 127 oaths  13, 19–21, 25, 32, 102, 103, 105, 107, 138, 147, 177, 267, 271, 279–80, 294, 307, 308 occasional conformity  59, 125, 316 Oceana and oceanas  13, 128, 201, 253, 261, 262

Ockham, William of  70, 71, 187 Oldenburg, Henry  73 Oldisworth, William  86 Optatus of Milevis  39–40, 44 Ormonde, duke of  96, 241, 242, 243 Orrery, earl of  18 Ossat, Arnaud d’  161, 171, 175, 251 Oswestry  52, 63 Ovid  81, 233 Owen, John  36, 37, 44, 45, 140, 146, 147, 152, 155, 162, 169, 178, 180, 181, 185, 188, 193, 309 Oxford Decree  33–4, 267, 309 Parliament  21, 118–20, 278, 294 University  59, 118, 131, 169, 173, 235, 243, 253, 258, 266, 267, 270, 279, 312 see also Magdalen College Paets, Adrian van  43 Pallavicino, Ferrante  225–6 papal claims  2, 18, 29, 149–50, 246, 248–50, 287, 300, 308 papal deposing power  194, 246, 248, 307–8 Papillon, Thomas  124 Parker, Henry  301 Parker, Samuel  37, 45, 47, 57, 63, 70, 91, 96, 141, 143, 147, 151–2, 176–93, 301 parliaments, annual  196–218 Parsons, Robert  25, 33, 307, 308–9 Pascal, Blaise  249 passive obedience/non-resistance  28–30, 87, 171, 266–7, 271, 273–6, 281, 286, 298 patriarchalism  22, 24–6, 29–81, 236–9, 297–300, 305 Patrick, Simon  37, 51, 58, 141, 178, 192 patristics  30, 39–43, 45–7, 48, 58, 59, 124, 133, 181,190, 233, 282, 285, 291, 312 Paul, St  39, 44, 49, 62, 167, 226, 312, 315 Paul V, Pope  308 Pauline Injunction  6, 28, 30, 284, 313 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude de  250

327

INDEX

Pelling, Edward  57 Penn, William  36, 50, 119, 140, 141, 152, 158, 161, 162, 215 Pepys, Samuel  84, 148, 223, 243, 244, 245, 246, 258, 310 Perrinchief, Richard  43, 45, 55, 57 Petition of Right (1628)  78, 200 Petrine Commission  1, 88, 190, 284, 290, 313 Pett, Sir Peter  11, 240–64 Pett, Sir Phineas  258 Petty, Sir William  90, 243 Petyt, William  73, 164, 165, 208, 212 Peyrère, Isaac de la  81 Peyton, Sir Robert  204 Philipps, Fabian  17 Pierce, Thomas  70, 84 Pilkington, Sir Thomas  204 Pithou, Pierre  173, 175 placemen  196, 198, 202, 211, 213, 294, 295, 296 Plato/Platonism  4, 15, 67–8, 70, 78, 79, 190 Player, Sir Thomas  204 plays see drama Plutarch  15, 233 poetry/verse  16, 17, 130, 145, 159, 202, 220, 221, 222, 227, 266, 298 Poland  26, 73, 164, 227, 304 political arithmetic  240, 245, 258, 259 political economy  141, 163–5, 186, 258–64 polygamy  219, 227, 231, 233 Popish Plot  43, 98, 100, 108, 127, 194, 201, 215, 225, 226, 240, 246, 294 Popple, William  6, 131, 136, 176, 317 population 258–62 Pordage, Samuel  130 Powle, Henry  206 Powys, Lord  243, 245, 246 praemunire  105, 127, 149, 288, 291, 292 Prayer Book  7, 16, 147 preaching  7, 10, 11, 18, 11, 136, 137, 143, 146, 148, 151, 153, 156, 184, 185, 248; see also pulpits; sermons against James II  265, 274, 286, 288, 298, 313, 317–18

predestination  70, 178, 186–9, 257 Presbyterianians/Presbyterianism 18–19, 36, 52, 70, 72, 78, 88, 89, 94–9, 101, 103, 108, 112, 120, 128, 135, 139–56, 166, 167, 172, 183–4, 213, 225, 230, 247, 248, 254–6, 263, 286, 294, 301, 306, 312, 316 Scottish  33, 46, 241,308 Prideaux, Edmund  200 Prideaux, Humphrey  302 priestcraft  4, 11, 91–2, 121–38, 151, 220, 227, 236, 270 printed images  119–20, 281–2 Proast, Jonas  59–64, 178 prorogation  19, 101, 111, 201–12, 217, 294, 296 Prynne, William  7, 27, 115, 212, 309 Pufendorf, Samuel  68, 69, 75, 80, 82, 86 pulpits  20, 38, 99, 107, 108, 117, 119, 136, 137, 143, 180, 181, 183, 265–6, 272, 278, 280, 296, 298, 300, 314; see also preaching; sermons Pym, John  200 Quakers  36, 126, 139, 140, 152, 154–5, 166, 184, 241, 278, 283, 316 Rainsford, Sir Richard  204 refugee, as neologism  175 regency  107, 209, 270, 271 regicide  12, 13, 18, 19, 130, 169, 171 Regicide Act (1660)  13 Reresby, Sir John  97 resistance  7, 9, 12, 13, 23, 30, 72, 74, 87, 95, 194, 211, 247, 265–92, 299, 313 Richelieu, Armand, Cardinal  161 Richer, Edmund  175 Ridley, Nicholas  281–2 Rivet, Andre  168, 169 Rochester, earl of (Hyde)  23, 241, 269, 295 Rochester, earl of (Wilmot)  227 Roos divorce  230 Ross, Alexander  71 Rota Club  182

328

INDEX

rotation of office  201, 211, 217 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  91 Royal Society  142, 179, 190, 240, 243, 251, 252, 253 Rushworth, John  184, 299 Russell, William, Lord  94, 206, 267 Rutherford, Samuel  13, 33, 308, 309 sacerdotal kingship  2, 7, 88, 150, 285, 292 Sacheverell, Henry/Sacheverell Trial  267, 271, 289, 309 Sacheverell, William  105, 110, 111, 206 Salic Law  29 Salisbury, earl of  202, 205 Sancroft, William  22, 23, 50, 106, 113, 125, 137, 190, 241, 242, 243, 268, 269, 272, 273, 280, 282, 289–90, 292, 299, 302, 311, 313 Sanderson, Robert  279, 300, 301 Saravia, Hadrian  306, 307 Sarpi, Paulo  175, 226, 250 Sawyer, Sir Robert  207, 290 Saxons  27, 150, 200, 212, 217, 218, 236 Saywell, William  44, 50 Scargill, Daniel  84 schism/schismatics  5, 10, 35–41, 44 -7, 49, 52, 53, 58, 93, 95, 100, 106, 132, 146, 153–7, 166, 170, 189, 193, 193, 255, 286 scholasticism  48, 54, 57, 59, 64, 67, 71, 83, 85, 88, 92, 132, 179, 181, 187, 189, 252, 278, 308; see also Aquinas Scotland  12, 13, 22, 33, 46, 95, 98, 128, 140, 143, 169, 170–1, 174, 194, 217, 221, 224, 230, 234, 238, 242, 254, 256, 294, 301, 307, 308, 316 Scotus, Duns  187 Scudéry, Madeleine de  181 Selden, John  89, 113, 128, 151, 172, 173, 174, 186, 233, 234, 250, 312 Septennial Act (1716)  199 sermons anniversary  16, 281

assize/mayoral  12, 38, 44, 50, 53 coronation 23 as a genre  10, 14, 21, 22, 28, 52, 135, 156, 181, 265, 279 for Huguenot relief  165–8, 170 other  44, 49, 50, 52, 57, 107, 159, 254, 274, 292, 297, 299, 309 see also preaching; pulpits Seven Bishops, Trial of (1688)  265, 266, 269, 276, 277, 281, 289–92 sexuality  130, 219, 221, 223, 226–7, 231, 232, 236 Seymour, Edward  155, 202 Shadwell, Thomas  84 Shaftesbury, 1st earl of  19–20, 23, 94, 98, 102, 109, 109–11, 117, 119, 137, 140, 143, 144–50, 194, 198, 201–7, 213–14, 220–2, 293, 302, 311, 313 Shaftesbury, 3rd earl of  122, 302 Shakespeare, William  14, 224 Sharp, James  247 Sharp, John  55, 60, 279 Sheldon, Gilbert  113, 310, 311, 313 Sheppard, William  224 Sherlock, William  45, 77, 274, 276, 282, 288, 301, 302 Sheringham, Robert  301, 304 Shirley v. Fagg  213, 214 Shute, Samuel  204 Sibthorpe, Robert  184, 299, 305 Sidney, Algernon  14, 28, 78, 160–1, 162, 173, 212, 215, 238, 295, 298, 302, 309 sincerity  38, 48, 54, 56, 57, 58, 60, 166 Sleidan, John  268 Smith, Aaron  206, 208 Smith, Samuel  208 Smith, Sir William  119 Smithfield, fires of  241, 251 Socinianism  42, 187–9, 257 Socrates  66, 79 Somers, Lord (John)  216, 309 Soto, Domingo de  308 Southwell, Sir Robert  259 Spain  149, 164–5, 237, 240 Sparta  73, 227 Spelman, Sir Henry  113

329

INDEX

Spinoza, Baruch  68, 70, 81, 84, 89, 90, 91 Sprat, Thomas  252 Stafford, William, Lord  110 stage see drama standing armies see armies, standing Starkey, John  14 statues  15, 203, 218 Stephens, William  135–7 Stillingfleet, Edward  37, 45, 55, 89, 112, 114, 116, 178, 254–6, 291, 301, 302, 314, 317 Stubbe, Henry  89, 133, 142, 147, 150, 151, 162, 173, 179, 180, 183, 186, 188, 192 Suárez, Francisco  71, 74, 189, 307, 309 Sunderland, earl of  245 Swift, Jonathan  89, 218 Sydenham, Thomas  221

Trimmers  240–5, 247, 254, 259 Tunbridge Wells  16, 227 Turenne, vicomte de  160, 161, 164 Turner, Francis  23–33, 107, 137, 176, 177–8, 269 Turnor, Sir Edward  12 things indifferent (adiaphora)  6, 37, 38, 191–2, 256 Toleration Act (1689)  5, 59, 89, 125, 139, 144, 165, 193, 255, 316 Tunbridge Wells  16, 227 Tyndale, William  128 tyrannicide  171, 307, 308 tyranny  12, 28, 30, 33, 51, 68, 71, 75, 76, 78, 79, 87, 106, 122, 136, 147, 158, 159, 176, 194, 210–11, 238, 267, 268, 274, 275, 283, 293, 295, 307, 309, 316, 318 Tyrrell, James  82, 83, 87, 221, 238, 297, 298, 301, 317

Taylor, Jeremy  246 Temple, Sir Richard  201, 207 Temple, Sir William  218, 259 Tenison, Thomas  45, 50, 52, 68, 69, 73, 80, 83, 84 Tertullian  3, 39, 282, 291 Test Acts (1673, 1678)  202, 279, 280, 289, 316, 317 Theodosius, Emperor  47, 132, 150, 285, 289 Thomism see Aquinas Thorndike, Herbert  83, 246, 312 Thou, Jacques-Auguste de  171, 174, 250, 251 Tindal, Matthew  89, 92, 125, 136 tithes  126, 186 Titus, Silas  111 Toland, John  122, 131, 217 Tonge, Israel  127 touch, royal  17–18, 222 transubstantiation  103, 105, 229, 232, 246, 252, 307 Treason Acts  13, 237 Trelawny, Jonathan  280 Trenchard, John  125 Trent, Council of  223, 250 Triennial Acts (1641, 1664, 1694)  13, 198–201, 209–10, 216–17, 294

Uniformity Act (1662)  8, 37, 58, 63, 95, 99, 124, 137, 139, 177, 182, 193, 255, 295, 310, 316 Ussher, James  255–6, 300, 301 Utopia and utopias  227, 250, 253, 262 Uxbridge Treaty  95, 120 Valentinian, Emperor  47 Vane, Sir Henry  13 Vaughan, Edward  105, 111, 146, 207 Vaughan, John  201, 233 Veiras, Denis  227 Venice  26, 174, 175, 216, 226, 250 Venner’s Rising  94 veto, legislative  27, 115, 116, 214, 217 Vicar of Bray  266 Virgil 15 voluntarism  66–7, 68, 70, 74, 78, 82, 85, 87, 92 Vyner, Sir Robert  203 Wake, William  282 Waller, Edmund  91, 130, 152 Walpole, Sir Robert  125 Walter, Lucy  219, 222–3 Walwyn, William  203 Ward, Patience  204

330

INDEX

Ward, Seth  102 Wentworth, Henrietta  239 Westphalia, Treaty of  248–9 Wetenhall, Edward  53 Wharton, earl of  101, 102, 110, 185, 207 Wharton, Goodwin  216 White, Thomas (alias Blacklo)  86, 90 White, Thomas (bishop)  283, 290 Whitelocke, Bulstrode  141, 142, 145, 149, 150, 151 Wild, Robert  145, 147 Wildman, John  78, 203, 217 William III, King, Prince of Orange  47, 77, 101, 131, 132, 157, 168, 189,

216, 217, 222, 245, 267, 270, 271, 282, 311, 317 Declaration of Reasons (1688)  270 William the Conqueror  27, 237, 304 Williams, John  275 Williamson, Sir Joseph  104, 154 witenagemot  212, 217 Wolseley, Sir Charles  140, 162, 230 women’s property  229, 232, 234 Womock, Lawrence  112, 114, 115, 116, 303, 313 Wood, Anthony  169, 289 Wood, Robert  258 Wren, Matthew  81, 301 Wycliffe, John  70, 127

331

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, ‎POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY Details of volumes I–XXX can be found on the Boydell & Brewer website. XXXI ‎ tuart Marriage Diplomacy S ‎ ynastic Politics in Their European Context, 1604–1630 D ‎Edited by Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson XXXII ‎National Identity and the Anglo-Scottish Borderlands, 1552–1652 ‎Jenna M. Schultz XXXIII ‎Roguery in Print: Crime and Culture in Early Modern London ‎Lena Liapi XXXIV ‎Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain ‎Essays in Honour of Mark Goldie ‎Edited by Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris and John Marshall XXXV ‎The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and Its Empire ‎Edited by Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes XXXVI ‎Age Relations and Cultural Change in Eighteenth-Century England ‎Barbara Crosbie XXXVII ‎The National Covenant in Scotland, 1638–1689 ‎Chris R. Langley XXXVIII ‎ isualising Protestant Monarchy V ‎ eremony, Art and Politics after the Glorious Revolution (1689–1714) C ‎Julie Farguson XXXIX ‎ lood Waters: B ‎ ar, Disease and Race in the Eighteenth-Century British Caribbean W ‎Nicholas Rogers

‎XL ‎The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England ‎Edited by Brian Cowan and Scott Sowerby XLI ‎Africans in East Anglia, 1467–1833 ‎Richard C. Maguire XLII ‎Royalism, Religion and Revolution: ‎Wales, 1640–1688 ‎Sarah Ward Clavier XLIII ‎Painting for a Living in Tudor and Early Stuart England ‎Robert Tittler XLIV ‎Scotland and the Wider World: Essays in Honour of Allan I. Macinnes ‎Edited by Alison Cathcart and Neil McIntyre XLV ‎ rban Government and the Early Stuart State U ‎Provincial Towns, Corporate Liberties, and Royal Authority in England, 1603–1640 ‎Catherine F. Patterson XLVI ‎The National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant, 1660–1696 ‎James Walters XLVII ‎The Restraint of the Press in England, 1660–1715 The Communication of Sin ‎Alex W. Barber XLVIII Conspiracy Culture in Stuart England The Mysterious and Strange Death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey Andrea McKenzie