Religious Toleration

The development of religious toleration in England was an ultimate and wholly unintended consequence of the Reformation. Looking back from the vantage point of the twentieth century, it is possible to see that this was so, and also to classify into its main phases the process by which it came about.

The first phase, which may be said to have opened with the Elizabethan ecclesiastical settlement of 1559, saw a National Church under a Royal Supremacy established in place of the local branch of the Roman Catholic Church, which had looked to Rome for its spiritual direction. This Church neither preached nor practised religious toleration. Yet in so far as Elizabeth and also James I were politique princes who wished to attract the mass of their subjects into their Church and prevent them joining the irreconcilables in the Roman or Puritan camps, official policy endeavoured to make it fairly comprehensive.

It has been remarked that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century the attitude of the government towards diversity of religious opinion was more tolerant than that of the main dissidents, the Roman Catholics of the CounterReformation on one hand, and the Calvinist Puritans on the other. Official policy required uniformity of religious practice in obedience to the national authorities in Church and State.

Neither the members of the National Church nor their main enemies thought it either right or necessary to tolerate serious differences of religious faith or organization. They struggled not for liberty but for domination, for control of the National Church . This was true of the Jesuits and seminary priests who sought at the risk of martyrdom to keep the old religion alive in England , but could not steer clear of plots against the sovereign and alliances with her continental enemies. It was equally true of the Puritans who, professing fanatical loyalty to the throne, tried to alter the Church in accordance with the customs of Geneva .

Religious toleration in England was probably impossible until events had proved that religious uniformity was impossible. This does not mean that religious toleration was unheard of. Professor W. K. Jordan has shown in his great work on the development of religious toleration in the first half of the seventeenth century, that powerful and comprehensive arguments for toleration were raised early in the reign of James I by Baptist writers, while inside the Church itself Socinian and Arminian influence encouraged a current of thought in favour of the widest possible comprehension. But the Baptists were a small and unpopular separatist sect, and the Latitudinarian churchmen were suspected of dangerous Socinian (Unitarian) heresies about the doctrine of the Trinity. Theoretical arguments for toleration came from unpopular minorities, and were in advance of the practical possibilities of the age.

In the history of the whole development of religious toleration in England , the Civil War and Interregnum may be considered the main turning point, yet the fight for religious equality in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was hardly less important. Much has been written, and is still being written, about these later struggles from the point of view of one sect or another, yet few historians have tried to consider them in relation to each other, as parts of a general movement.