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The Godly and Their Neighbours: Puritanism and Religious Pluralism in Early Modern England

Les Godly et leurs voisins : puritanisme et pluralisme religieux dans l’Angleterre de la première modernité
Alexandra Walsham

Abstracts

This essay surveys the relationship between puritanism and religious pluralism between 1559 and 1642. It examines the contradictory instincts towards inclusion and exclusion that were central to its dynamic throughout this period, as well as the tension between its commitment to reforming the Church of England from within and the emphasis on social separatism that pulled it in the direction of congregationalism. It also explores puritan attitudes to popery, heresy, and unbelief and puritanism’s contribution towards critiques of persecution and calls for toleration and liberty of conscience in the mid seventeenth century. Its aim is to tease out some of the intriguing paradoxes of this religious movement and outlook.

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Introduction

  • 1 Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixte (...)
  • 2 Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, Jonathan Cape, 1967), pp. 26-7.

1Puritans had a reputation for being difficult neighbours. By many of their contemporaries they were regarded as spiritually pretentious and morally self-righteous busy bodies. They were thought of as intolerant and interfering people whose presence caused friction, division, anger, and resentment. Their anti-social behaviour was corrosive of community relations. Nothing indexed the tensions that the “hotter sort” of Protestants frequently provoked in English society than the hostile nickname by which they were so frequently labelled: “puritan”. As Patrick Collinson once famously wrote, puritanism was “one half of a stressful relationship”.1 This paper focuses on how puritans interacted with people who did not share their religious convictions and priorities, though it is predicated on the assumption that the differences between them were ones of “theological temperature” rather than “fundamental principle”.2 It is an attempt to understand their mentality from the inside out, as well as how to gauge how other members of English society responded to this in daily life. This dialectic was central to their identity.

  • 3 For the relevant statutes, including the act of six articles of 1539 and the acts of uniformity of (...)
  • 4 Anthony Milton, England’s Second Reformation: The Battle for the Church of England, 1625-1662 (Camb (...)
  • 5 A Catalogue of the Severall Sects and Opinions in England and other Nations. With a Rehearsall of t (...)
  • 6 Within a large literature, see Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Pra (...)

2The aim of the Reformation in England (as elsewhere in Europe) was to establish religious uniformity by converting the populace en masse to the Protestant faith. The legislation issued by the Henrician, Edwardian and Elizabethan regimes sought to abolish “diversity of opinions”, which was regarded as a recipe for disorder and disaster.3 Truth was understood as a singular rather than multistranded entity and unity was seen as essential to the stability and peace of the realm. The Protestant liturgy created by Thomas Cranmer, the Book of Common Prayer, was a key instrument for achieving this ambition. But the unforeseen consequence of the English Reformation was to bring about the very opposite of what was intended: religious pluralism. It not only failed to eliminate Catholicism; it facilitated the emergence of multiple strands and varieties of Protestantism. This situation was exacerbated by the ecclesiastical and political developments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and further entrenched by the religious experimentation that marked the era of the Civil Wars, leading to an explosion of new sects. As described by Anthony Milton in an important recent book, the “second Reformation” of the 1640s and 50s was itself an uneasy amalgam of competing tendencies, each designed to recapture the elusive original essence of apostolic Christianity in a different way.4 Perturbed by the unchecked proliferation of unorthodox opinions, observers sought to catalogue and rehearse “their false and dangerous Tenents .5 For the majority of people in early modern England, the idea of officially tolerating deviant beliefs and practices was deeply disturbing. In practice, however, it became necessary to find ways of living with diversity and coexisting with religious difference. Over the last few decades, historians have devoted much energy to investigating how societies “divided by faith” reconciled their conviction that toleration was wrong with the challenging fact that they came into regular contact with people who adhered to rival creeds.6

3How did puritans respond to the problem of religious pluralism between 1559 and 1642? In what follows, I address this question under three headings. The first and second sections examine two ostensibly contradictory instincts that lay at the heart of puritanism: inclusion and exclusion. The third briefly considers more briefly puritan attitudes to popery, heresy, and unbelief and puritanism’s contribution towards critiques of persecution and calls for toleration and liberty of conscience. In the process, I hope to tease out some of the intriguing paradoxes of puritanism as a religious movement and outlook.

Inclusion

4What marked out puritans was their powerful commitment to the idea of an inclusive national church of which all English people were members. This was rooted in the theological precept that it was not possible for human beings to penetrate the great mystery of salvation. According to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, only a tiny minority were his chosen people, the adopted children whom he had selected to ascend to sit at his right hand in heaven. The rest were doomed to hell. The visible church on earth was a promiscuous mixture of the elect and the reprobate. Puritanism was predicated on the charitable assumption that the people with whom they attended the services of the Church of England each week might be part of this holy remnant. However ungodly their neighbours appeared on the outside, they might actually be part of this spiritual elite. In due course, they might be awakened to knowledge that they were the beneficiaries of his freely given grace.

  • 7 On voluntary religion, see Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English So (...)

5This had three consequences. The first was to convince puritans that they had a duty to remain inside the Church of England and to labour towards further reform of this imperfect institution from within. Its adherence to sound doctrine partially compensated for the deficiencies of its liturgy and institutional structures (which were both tainted with “popish” and “superstitious” residues) and its less than adequate forms of ecclesiastical discipline (which failed to correspond with the blueprint laid out in Scripture and fell far short of the example set by John Calvin’s Geneva). For some, though not all puritans, the retention of bishops was a particular defect: they called for the abolition of episcopal government and its replacement by a presbyterian system of pastors. Even so, the English Church still carried sufficient sparks of godliness to warrant staying within the fold. As long as hope remained alive that the lingering “weeds” and “dregs” of popery would, in due course, be rooted out and removed, then puritans had no justification for seceding from it. To do so would be to commit the grievous sin of “schism”. Such assumptions dissuaded many godly ministers from breaking away to form separate congregations in the Elizabethan and early Stuart era. But awareness of the flaws and shortcomings of the Church of England also compelled them to supplement its services with forms of religious voluntarism. These included “gadding” about the countryside to sermons in other parishes, attending fast days which ended with a festive celebration of communion, instructing their children and servants, singing psalms, and reading the bible and other pious books within the family and household. If these were sources of additional spiritual nutrition for people dissatisfied with the spartan fare provided by the established Church; they were also important agents of community formation. Tom Webster has aptly described this as a species of “godly sociability”.7

  • 8 Arthur Dent, A Plaine Mans Path-way to Heaven (London, 1610; first publ. 1601), p. 125. See Alexand (...)

6The second consequence was that puritans felt obliged to tolerate the presence of the merely nominal Protestants who sat beside them in the pews of their parish churches. Since it was presumptuous to jump to conclusions about the soteriological status of one’s neighbours, one had no choice but to join with them in public worship, however uncomfortable this might feel. Thirdly, these assumptions inspired puritans to work actively towards their edification and regeneration. They strove to bring them to an awareness that they numbered among the select group that God had decided (before their birth and before the beginning of time) to save. Puritan ministers and laypeople sought to bring this about through a variety of mechanisms: through catechising, through preaching, through writing devotional treatises, and through admonishing and correcting their moral faults and failings. Worried by the sea of religious apathy and indifference surrounding them, they regarded it as their responsibility to strive to combat Catholic survivalism and to do what they could to bring those who lingered in darkness to a full understanding of the truth of the Protestant religion. These were people who, in the words of a character in Arthur Dent’s A plaine mans path-way to heaven (1601), still had “a Pope in their belly”. Many were mere conformists or “church papists”.8

  • 9 Stephen Batman, A Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation (London, 1569), sig. G4r.
  • 10 George Webbe, Gods Controversie with England. Or a Description of the Fearefull and Lamentable Esta (...)

7Even where they had formally relinquished their adherence to Rome, a significant part of the population seemed to be lukewarm and to lack sufficient zeal. An emblem incorporated in Stephen Batman’s A christall glasse of Christian Reformation (1569) shows “the enemies of Gods word” plucking a bearded Protestant preacher from the pulpit, with a silent and impassive congregation sitting behind them, “such as are of no religion, not regarding any doctrine, so they may bee quiet to live after their owne willes and mindes”. The “signification” attached to the picture calls them “Nullafidians”. In the eyes of the godly such people were equivalent to atheists.9 They exposed the Church of England to the fate of the Church of Laodicea as described in the book of Revelation 3: 15-16, which because it was neither hot nor cold, was spewed (or vomited) out of God’s mouth. As the Wiltshire preacher George Webbe declared in a sermon on Hosea 4 delivered at Paul’s Cross in London in 1609, it threatened to intensify the controversy that God had with England, as with delinquent Israel before it, and it opened up the possibility that he would extinguish the candlestick of the gospel altogether and give it to another nation. The stark message that England was in a “fearefull and lamentable estate” and that it would surely perish if it did not reform and repent resonated from many pulpits in the course of the period.10 Although this was a common Protestant theme, it was taken up with particular alacrity by puritans, who saw the deficiencies of the Church of England as one of the sources of the Lord’s wrath.

  • 11 See Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700 (Oxford, Oxford Un (...)
  • 12 See John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford, Clarend (...)
  • 13 See Jonathan Willis, The Reformation of the Decalogue: Religious Identity and the Ten Commandments (...)
  • 14 David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London, Font (...)
  • 15 Hutton, Rise and Fall, ch. 6; Bernard Capp, England’s Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and its Ene (...)

8Such sermons gave expression to puritan anxieties about the epidemic of sin that seemed to be engulfing English society. These were replicated in the many treatises that made up the literature of the “reformation of manners.” Such books give us indirect insight into the discourse that the godly deployed in exchanges with their irreligious neighbours. Puritans reproved those who fell short of their exacting standards by swearing, blaspheming, sabbath-breaking, fornicating, drinking and engaging in idle sports and customs like bear-baiting and dancing round maypoles, which they saw as a remnant of pagan idolatry.11 They were critical of activities that too many regarded as innocent forms of ‘good neighbourhood and fellowship’ and legitimate ways of using their leisure time. Recreation fell into the category of adiaphora, or “things indifferent” on which Scripture was silent and which could therefore be lawfully used in keeping with the rules on “Christian liberty,” provided they did not cause scandal.12 Puritan moral rigour was partly driven by fraternal concern for the spiritual welfare of the “weaker brethren” and partly by deep-seated fears about the divine judgements that might fall upon the villages, towns, cities in which they lived as a consequence of flagrant contraventions of God’s law as defined by the Ten Commandments. The godly were also fond of recounting colourful examples of the fitting punishments that God inflicted upon individual sinners. Among those published in the Huntingdon schoolmaster Thomas Beard’s popular Theatre of Gods judgements (1597) was the impious nobleman who went hunting with his hounds instead of going to church and whose wife subsequently gave birth to a child with a head resembling a dog’s.13 The determination of puritans to reclaim sinners and punish sin imparted a sense of urgency to their endeavours, especially in the context of crisis and natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and fire, which contemporaries understood as forms of providential intervention. The devasting conflagration that consumed much of the town of Dorchester in 1613, for instance, provoked the local puritan minister John White to institute a comprehensive scheme to reform it and to turn it into a city on a hill. This reformation entailed strict surveillance and regulation of sin and provoked a backlash from those inhabitants who did not share the same religious and ethical values.14 The revolutionary decades of the 1640s and 50s gave puritans an opportunity to wage war on moral laxity and “merry England” anew, in a series of culture wars that extended from criticising fashionable hairstyles to making adultery a capital crime. Some communities pursued this agenda with success, but in many it met with an equally mixed reception, stirring up trouble and fomenting tension.15

  • 16 Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fayre, in Workes, 3 vols (London, 1641), i. 33.
  • 17 Christopher Durston, ‘Lords of Misrule: The Puritan War on Christmas, 1642-60’, History Today 35 (1 (...)
  • 18 See Susan Hardman Moore, ‘Popery, Purity and Providence: Deciphering the New England Experiment’, i (...)

9From the outside looking in, such initiatives were irritating and aggravating, evidence of the self-satisfied superiority complex that seemed to their enemies a hallmark of puritans. This contributed to caricatures like Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Ben Jonson’s well-known comedy first staged in 1614, Bartholomew Fair, whose intemperate attacks on puppet plays, hobby horses, and other pastimes as the “hooks and baites” of the devil made him an epitome of misplaced puritan rage and hypocrisy.16 Parliament’s decision to abolish Christmas in 1644 prompted similar outrage, further feeding the enduring myth of puritans as spoil-sports and “kill-joys”.17 From their own point of view, however, this was what God expected and required them to do as their heirs of his kingdom. As the storm clouds gathered in the early seventeenth century and the Reformation seemed threatened by both international events like the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War and the disturbing trends in religious policy associated with the rise of Arminianism and the appointment of Archbishop William Laud, some came to regard themselves as the “leaven in the lump”. They thought of themselves as individuals who had been called upon to stand in the breach and who would serve as a shield to hold back God’s impending judgements. Hence the intense dilemmas that surrounded the decision that some puritans began to contemplate taking during the 1620s and 30s: to desert England and seek refuge from the looming calamity in the safe haven of north America.18

  • 19 See Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500-1700 (Mancheste (...)
  • 20 Katherine Ibbett, Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and its Limits in Early Modern France (Philadel (...)
  • 21 Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013), part I (...)

10What made this all the more challenging was their continuing commitment to the ideal of “charitable Christian hatred”.19 Puritans justified the rigour they displayed towards the wayward as a form of tough love. Their crusade against sin was animated by charity towards the sinner who committed it, whom they ultimately sought not to alienate but to reclaim. The texts they wrote and the actions in which they engaged draw our attention to the double-edged emotion of fellow-feeling. As Katherine Ibbett has shown in her work on France during the wars of religion, in the early modern period compassion reinforced divisions and provoked tensions. It was a rhetoric and language of benevolence and pity that both assumed and perpetuated exclusion.20 If it created communities, it undermined them too. Drawing inspiration from recent studies by Alec Ryrie and Abram Van Engen, we might see puritanism as a community of mixed emotions: of charity and hatred, sympathy and severity. These were not opposites but twins, two sides of the same coin.21 The affection of the godly for each other cannot be disentangled from the duty they felt to be their brothers’ keepers and to issue sharp but friendly strictures to their ungodly neighbours.

Exclusion

11However, rubbing shoulders with the unregenerate was also a source of considerable unease. It had the effect of pulling puritans in the other direction, towards social separatism. It led them to distance themselves from the impious in everyday affairs and to shun those who led openly sinful and unrepentant lives. In turn this only sharpened the antagonism of the same people towards them.

  • 22 Peter Martyr Vermigli, A Treatise of the Cohabitacyon of the Faithfull with the Unfaithfull ([Stras (...)

12What was the logic behind this? Many puritan writers felt compelled to provide the godly with advice about how to manage their mundane interactions with the ungodly, and the complex cases of conscience that surrounded this. The problem of what the Italian Calvinist Peter Martyr Vermigli had called “the cohabitation of the faithfull with the unfaithful” was an old one, which had troubled Protestants from the beginning of the Reformation, when they were surrounded by papists. Published in 1555, Vermigili’s tract was written in the context of the persecutions of Mary I’s Catholic regime, when gospellers had to balance the duty of confessing their faith regardless of the dangers against the need to ensure their own survival.22 Elizabeth’s re-establishment of Protestantism in 1559 changed the dynamics of these interactions, which now centred on how godly Christians should conduct themselves in relation to carnal “worldlings”. How could they reconcile their obligation to remain within the embrace of the Church of England with the need to protect themselves from contamination by unbelievers and sinners?

  • 23 Richard Bolton, Some Generall Directions for a Comfortable Walking with God (London, 1626), pp. 73- (...)

13The New Testament, and especially Paul’s letters, supplied crucial guidance. The Pauline epistles provided Elizabethan and early Stuart Puritans, like their Marian predecessors, with a mandate for segregation, for ostracising the ungodly from their company, and for what, in the wake of the pandemic, we might call social distancing. As well as justifying the ecclesiastical excommunication of heretics, they also provided a template for avoiding them in everyday life. 1 Corinthians 5 instructed Christians not to “keep company” with fornicators, idolaters, and other notorious offenders, while 2 Corinthians 6: 14-15 underlined the wickedness of being “unequally yoked together with unbelievers” and having fellowship with the unrighteous. “What communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial?” Puritans like the Northamptonshire divine Richard Bolton took up these texts to provide their disciples with Some Generall Directions for a Comfortable Walking with God in this area. Bolton carefully distinguished “necessary” from “voluntary” exchanges. “Common” and “cold” forms of interaction in civil affairs such as business dealings, buying and selling goods, eating and drinking were permissible, but close acquaintanceship and friendship was unwise and inadvisable. “No member of Christ should exercise familiaritie,” much less “intimate passages of love with a limbe of Satan.” In a treatise entitled The Societie of the Saints (1630), Bolton’s colleague and successor Joseph Bentham was similarly stern about the dangers of having excessive contact with the ungodly, warning that it is “extreame perillous to be sociable with wicked men [...] their society being dangerous and infectious”. At the same time, such writers recognised that complete segregation was impossible “unless we will utterly reject the fellowship of mankind” and “goe out of the world”. Puritans neither required nor recommended that one entirely detach oneself from society and become a recluse. They tempered principle with a degree of pragmatism.23

  • 24 The Diary of Robert Woodford, 1637-41, ed. John Fielding, Camden Society, 5th ser. 42 (Cambridge, C (...)

14If tracts of this kind help us to understand why puritans gained a reputation for being proud and stand-offish, they also add nuance to the stereotypes what were in the process of crystallising. The social history of interactions between the hotter sort of Protestants and their neighbours was far more complex. These were probably less confrontational and more amicable than either the prescriptive literature or anti-puritan polemic implies. Both were angled and slanted to highlight hostility and conflict, the former because being subject to harassment and mockery was regarded as the lot of God’s favoured children, and latter because this fitted with the perception of puritans as aloof and arrogant. On the ground, ties of family and kinship, trust and obligation, transcended and softened religious divisions, while people’s position in the gender, age and social hierarchy complicated everyday encounters. The diaries of the godly reveal that social mingling in alehouses and other public places continued, albeit not without some prickings of conscience. Individuals like Robert Woodford, steward of Northampton, knew that they should withdraw from “keeping company with those that feare not God”, but could not overcome the temptation to drink wine and smoke tobacco with their less pious neighbours “now & then.” Declaring that “my hart smote me” and praying to the Lord to “subdue the power of corrupcon w[i]thin me”, Woodford recorded his remorse and his vow to reform in his journal on 5 November 1638.24

  • 25 See Anne Dunan-Page, L’Expérience puritaine: Vies et récits de dissidents (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle) (Pa (...)

15Alongside this, there is clear evidence that some puritans did follow clerical advice on this subject quite studiously. Many made matches within the ranks of the godly, choosing fellow believers as their life partners. Close-knit clerical families whose sons became ministers and whose daughters married other preachers are suggestive of this developing pattern, as is the emergence of puritan dynasties such as the Henry and Mather families which placed increasing emphasis on passing godliness down the generations through diligent education. Endogamy was one product of the impulse towards exclusion that was intrinsic to puritanism but which, paradoxically, was also essential to forging a sense of their inclusion in the community of the elect.25

  • 26 The East Hanningfield example is cited in Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 349-50. See (...)
  • 27 Cited in William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge (...)

16As the seventeenth century progressed, the strain of remaining within the Church of England intensified, exacerbating the instinct to withdraw from the parish church into a gathered congregation of the elect. One symptom of this the tendency of some ministers to exclude the ignorant and unworthy from receiving the Eucharist, as at East Hanningfield in Essex in the 1580s, where the nonconforming rector expelled as many as nineteen parishioners on one occasion.26 Others went further. In 1623, for instance, the godly people of Chelmsford took the drastic step of nailing shut the gates in the fence that segregated the “houses of prophanation” in the town from the church lest zealous Protestants be disturbed during divine service.27 Sometimes the godly literally erected barriers between themselves and their reprobate neighbours.

  • 28 See Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London 1616-1649 (Cambridge, (...)

17Social separatism and ecclesiastical separatism must be situated on a continuum. Puritanism contained within it the seeds of congregationalism. In the 1630s, under the pressure of events and against the backdrop of anti-Calvinism and Laudianism, some drifted into semi-separatism or went into exile in the Netherlands or New England. The tension between the puritan commitment to an inclusive national church and an ecclesiology that confined church membership to those who demonstrated their election through their outward conduct was stretched to breaking point. Once they took the momentous step into separatism, priorities were reversed: now it was necessary to bar the ungodly rather than try to effect their rebirth. These puritan communities were comprised solely of “visible saints”.28

  • 29 Collinson, ‘Cohabitation’, p. 76.
  • 30 Andrew Pettegree, ‘Coming to Terms with Victory: The Upholding of a Calvinist Church in Holland, 15 (...)

18Inevitably, these tendencies provoked resentment, which in turn encouraged puritans to feel that they were victims of the intolerance of the ungodly. Puritans thrived on the idea of being a beleaguered minority surrounded by enemies. They cultivated the empowering sense that they were the targets of verbal hatred and physical violence, celebrating their harassment by bishops and high commission officials and revelling in the taunts to which they were subjected on a daily basis as evidence of their status as the children of God. Nurtured in the lesson of Hebrews 12:6 (those “whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth”), they eagerly embraced experiences that provided them with the cachet of suffering for the sake of Christ, as in the Bible and in apostolic times. In the absence of real persecution, they found a partial substitute in the “thousand cuts of civil ostracism”.29 Temperamentally ill-suited to security and peace, as Andrew Pettegree has commented, fervent Protestants had difficulty coming to terms with victory. In this respect, they were well-prepared for “the experience of defeat” after the heady years of the puritan revolution in the 1640s and 50s and the renewal of state discrimination of Protestant nonconformity during the Restoration.30

  • 31 Within a large literature, see D. M. Loades (ed.), John Foxe and the English Reformation (Aldershot (...)
  • 32 M. M. Knappen (ed.), Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries, by Richard Rogers and Samuel Ward (Chicago, T (...)
  • 33 See Ryrie, Being Protestant, esp. pp. 416-27.

19Memories of martyrdom, especially the stories of the Protestants killed during the reign of Queen Mary I immortalised in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563 and later editions), endured not only in England, but also, as Adrian Chastain Weimer has shown, in puritan New England.31 Some yearned to be put to the test like their forebears and to face the dangers that had sharpened the faith of past generations. In 1588 an old woman from Essex told the puritan minister Richard Rogers on her deathbed that “if she shoulde be burned at a stake, she shoulde set light by it, for the hope of the glory which was sett before her”. The godly London matron Elizabeth Juxon was likewise “very mindful of the fiery trial which might come upon us: and she for her part looked for it, and prepared for it: Yea, she was minded rather to burne at a stake, then [...] Ever [...] to betray the truth of the Gospell”.32 Such sentiments encapsulate the fear of complacency that encouraged the godly to cultivate crisis and seek out tribulation. This was what it meant to be puritan.33

Interacting with Others

20Thus far this essay has concentrated attention on interactions between puritans and their fellow members of the Protestant Church of England. The final section examines their attitudes towards those who consciously and deliberately stood outside this capacious institution.

  • 34 Stephen Batman, The Doome Warning all Men to the Judgemente (London, 1581), p. 395.
  • 35 Perceval Wiburn, A Checke or Reproofe of M. Howlets Untimely Shreeching in her Maiesties Eares (Lon (...)
  • 36 Anthony Milton, ‘A Qualified Intolerance: The Limits and Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-Catholici (...)

21On paper, puritans were unwaveringly hostile towards Roman Catholics, whom they regarded as guilt of the crime and sin of idolatry and as agents and disciples of the papal Antichrist. Prominent among the controversialists who denounced the doctrines of the Church of Rome, they deployed a rhetoric that was tinged with apocalypticism. Unhappy with the Elizabethan regime’s comparatively lenient treatment of papists, some, including Stephen Batman in his Doome warning all men to the judgement (1581), pressed for harsher punishments against confirmed Catholic nonconformists, including the death penalty.34 Without this the Reformation was both at risk and incomplete. Idolaters could and should not be tolerated in a Christian country. However, to add a wrinkle to this picture, puritans sometimes grudgingly acknowledged the principled behaviour of Catholic recusants. The Rochester preacher, Perceval Wiburn, for instance, described them as “Puritan Catholikes of the hotter and better sort”. Their willingness to suffer the consequences of an act of conscientious objection mirrored how the godly believed they should behave if faced by a similar situation, by standing firm rather than compromising and dissembling.35 At parish level, moreover, sectarian conflict was only episodic and polemical anti-popery was not incompatible with cordial relations with real Catholics: intolerance was often ambiguous and qualified.36

  • 37 William Bradshaw, The Unreasonablenesse of Separation (Dort, 1614). See Peter Lake, ‘William Bradsh (...)
  • 38 On puritan polemic against the Familists, see Christopher Marsh, The Family of Love in English Soci (...)
  • 39 Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Ear (...)

22On the other hand, puritans were fiercely critical of radical Protestants on the far left of the spectrum who refused to tarry for the magistrate and had journeyed into the wilderness of schism. Denouncing the “unreasonablenesse of separation”, they saw this as a dereliction of their religious and pastoral responsibilities towards the “weaker brethren” and to an ecclesiastical institution that was not entirely beyond the pale. Indeed, the very presence of the godly in the “unreformed shell” of the Church of England helped to validate and redeem it.37 This explains why puritans were at the forefront of attacks on the Brownists, Barrowists and the mysterious and cryptic sect known as the Family of Love. The godly preacher John Knewstub not only condemned the “monstrous and horrible heresies” of the Familists from the pulpit and in print but also promoted an unsuccessful parliamentary bill that would have them whipped, branded, and ultimately (if they remained recalcitrant) executed.38 If this was a means of demonstrating their loyalty to the establishment, it was also a manifestation of their commitment to working towards the regeneration of the Church of England from within. It helps to explain the heated and sometimes vicious conflicts that broke out on its fringes in the Jacobean period. Peter Lake’s study of the fractious disputes between the London minister Stephen Denison and the boxmaker, sectmaster and lay prophet John Etherington in the 1620s opens a window into this turbulent world, which has been further uncovered in David Como’s compelling exploration of the antinomian underground, Blown by the Spirit.39

  • 40 Thomas Edwards, Gangraena: or, a Catalogue and Discovery of Many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphem (...)
  • 41 These phrases, which were used by Daniel Cawdrey and Christopher Fowler, are quoted in Blair Worden (...)

23The same imperatives are also the key to understanding how puritans reacted to the opening of Pandora’s box in the 1640s. They account for the vehemence of the presbyterian Thomas Edwards’ Gangraena of 1646 – a colourful anatomy and taxonomy of the errors, heresies and blasphemies of the unruly sects and congregations unleashed by the collapse of censorship and ecclesiastical discipline caused by the outbreak of the Civil War. Ephraim Pagitt’s Heresiography was another passionate indictment of the idea of tolerating religious heterodoxy.40 To these and other puritans, toleration was a device of Satan, “the last and most desperate design of Antichrist” and “the whore of Babylon’s back door”.41 Instead of dismissing this as evidence of benighted bigotry, we need to recognise the powerful imperatives that underpinned the puritan desire to create a godly Protestant society and their fervent belief in an inclusive church of which all English men, women and children were members.

  • 42 Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience, Discussed (London, [1644 (...)

24Finally, how do we reconcile the foregoing discussion with the prominent role that puritan writers such as John Goodwin, William Walwyn and Richard Williams played in denouncing the “bloody tenent” of persecution and advocating liberty of conscience in the 1640s? Some even contemplated the toleration of Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and other unbelievers. In squaring this circle, it is necessary to acknowledge that the toleration for which many puritans called was distinctly limited in practice. It encompassed a small spectrum of godly Protestants, and excluded papists, Anglicans, and members of unruly exotic sects against which they recoiled in horror. The freedom of which he and others spoke was freedom to obey God’s will.42 Secondly, it is important to note the double-edge quality of Christ’s commandment to “love thy neighbour” and the long legacy of puritan ideal of charitable hatred. If this could be the basis for accommodation, it could also justify coercive discipline, it could also open up space for accommodation of those whose eyes might yet be opened to the truth of the gospel. These contradictions are indicative of both the ideological conservatism of puritanism and its capacity to envisage a radically different vision of the New Jerusalem they sought to build on earth.

Conclusion

25In conclusion, this essay has endeavoured to decipher a central paradox at the heart of puritanism: the interplay between its instincts towards inclusion and exclusion, charity and zeal. This tense relationship helped to give puritanism its unique dynamic – its energy, restlessness and fervour, but also its fragility, vulnerability and ambivalence. Although puritanism has often been seen as an agent of individualism, as we have seen, it was in fact deeply committed to the concept of community. Puritans and their neighbours simply had different understandings of what “good fellowship” meant. Nor do they fit easily into standard teleological narratives about persecution and toleration. Instead, they are emblematic of the complex ways in which English society adapted to the fact of religious pluralism and learnt to coexist with difference.

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Bibliography

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Notes

1 Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1988), p. 143.

2 Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, Jonathan Cape, 1967), pp. 26-7.

3 For the relevant statutes, including the act of six articles of 1539 and the acts of uniformity of 1549 and 1559, see Gerald Bray (ed.), Documents of the English Reformation (Cambridge, James Clarke & Co, 1994), pp. 222-32, 266-71, 329-34.

4 Anthony Milton, England’s Second Reformation: The Battle for the Church of England, 1625-1662 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021).

5 A Catalogue of the Severall Sects and Opinions in England and other Nations. With a Rehearsall of their False and Dangerous Tenents (London, 1647).

6 Within a large literature, see Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press, 2009).

7 On voluntary religion, see Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559-1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), ch. 6. See also Andrew Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580-1720 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011). For “godly sociability”, see Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement, c. 1620-1643 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 6.

8 Arthur Dent, A Plaine Mans Path-way to Heaven (London, 1610; first publ. 1601), p. 125. See Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer, 1993), esp. ch. 5.

9 Stephen Batman, A Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation (London, 1569), sig. G4r.

10 George Webbe, Gods Controversie with England. Or a Description of the Fearefull and Lamentable Estate which this Land at this Present is in (London, 1609). See also Sampson Price, Londons Warning by Laodicea’s Luke-warmnesse (London, 1613).

11 See Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994), ch. 4; Martin Ingram, ‘Reformation of Manners in Early Modern England’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1996), pp. 47-88; David D. Hall, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019), ch. 5.

12 See John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1970).

13 See Jonathan Willis, The Reformation of the Decalogue: Religious Identity and the Ten Commandments in England, c. 1485-1625 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017), esp. ch. 5; Thomas Beard, The Theatre of Gods Judgements (1631 edn; first publ. 1597), p. 210.

14 David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London, Fontana Press, 1992), esp. chs 4-5. On providentialism, see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999), ch. 3.

15 Hutton, Rise and Fall, ch. 6; Bernard Capp, England’s Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649-1660 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012).

16 Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fayre, in Workes, 3 vols (London, 1641), i. 33.

17 Christopher Durston, ‘Lords of Misrule: The Puritan War on Christmas, 1642-60’, History Today 35 (1985), pp. 7-14.

18 See Susan Hardman Moore, ‘Popery, Purity and Providence: Deciphering the New England Experiment’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 257-89.

19 See Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500-1700 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2006).

20 Katherine Ibbett, Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and its Limits in Early Modern France (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

21 Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013), part I; Alec Ryrie and Tom Schwanda (eds), Puritanism and Emotion in the Early Modern World (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Abram van Engen, Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Caroline Wigginton and Abram van Engen (eds), Feeling Godly: Religious Affections and Christian Contact in Early North America (Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 2021).

22 Peter Martyr Vermigli, A Treatise of the Cohabitacyon of the Faithfull with the Unfaithfull ([Strasbourg, 1555]). See Patrick Collinson, ‘The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful’, in O. P. Grell, J. I. Israel and N. Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 51-76.

23 Richard Bolton, Some Generall Directions for a Comfortable Walking with God (London, 1626), pp. 73-86; Joseph Bentham, The Societie of the Saints: or, a Treatise of Good-Fellowes, with their Good-Fellowship (London, [1630?]), pp. 6-8. See Peter Lake, ‘“A Charitable Christian Hatred”: The Godly and their Enemies in the 1630s’, in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds), The Culture of Puritanism, 1560-1700 (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1996), pp. 145-83.

24 The Diary of Robert Woodford, 1637-41, ed. John Fielding, Camden Society, 5th ser. 42 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 255.

25 See Anne Dunan-Page, L’Expérience puritaine: Vies et récits de dissidents (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, Les Éditions du Cerf, 2017), pp. 250-5.

26 The East Hanningfield example is cited in Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 349-50. See also Christopher Haigh, ‘Communion and Community: Exclusion from Community in Post-Reformation England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51 (2000), pp. 721-40.

27 Cited in William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 150.

28 See Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London 1616-1649 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977); Geoffrey Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way 1640-1660 (Oxford, Blackwell, 1957).

29 Collinson, ‘Cohabitation’, p. 76.

30 Andrew Pettegree, ‘Coming to Terms with Victory: The Upholding of a Calvinist Church in Holland, 1572-1590’, in Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke and Gillian Lewis (eds), Calvinism in Europe 1540-1620 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 160-81; Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (London, Faber, 1984).

31 Within a large literature, see D. M. Loades (ed.), John Foxe and the English Reformation (Aldershot, Scolar, 1997); John N. King and Christopher Highley (eds), John Foxe and his World (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002); John N. King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006); Adrian Chastain Weimer, Martyrs’ Mirror: Persecution and Holiness in Early New England (New York, Oxford University Press, 2011).

32 M. M. Knappen (ed.), Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries, by Richard Rogers and Samuel Ward (Chicago, The American Society of Church History, 1933), p. 83; Stephen Denison, The Monument or Tombe-stone, or, A Sermon Preached at Laurence Pountnies Church in London, Novemb. 21. 1619 at the Funerall of Mrs Elizabeth Juxon (London, 1620), p. 111.

33 See Ryrie, Being Protestant, esp. pp. 416-27.

34 Stephen Batman, The Doome Warning all Men to the Judgemente (London, 1581), p. 395.

35 Perceval Wiburn, A Checke or Reproofe of M. Howlets Untimely Shreeching in her Maiesties Eares (London, 1581), fo. 117r. See Alexandra Walsham, ‘Ordeals of Conscience: Casuistry, Conformity and Confessional Identity in Post-Reformation England’, in Harald Braun and Edward Vallance (eds), Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 32-48.

36 Anthony Milton, ‘A Qualified Intolerance: The Limits and Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-Catholicism’, in Arthur F. Marotti (ed.), Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1999), pp. 85-115.

37 William Bradshaw, The Unreasonablenesse of Separation (Dort, 1614). See Peter Lake, ‘William Bradshaw, Antichrist and the Community of the Godly’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985), pp. 570-89, at 579.

38 On puritan polemic against the Familists, see Christopher Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550-1630 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 124-32.

39 Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2001); David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil War England (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004).

40 Thomas Edwards, Gangraena: or, a Catalogue and Discovery of Many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and Pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this Time (London, 1646); Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography: or, A Description of the Heretickes Sectaries, and Schismatickes of this Latter Time (London, 1645). On Gangraena, see Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004).

41 These phrases, which were used by Daniel Cawdrey and Christopher Fowler, are quoted in Blair Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, in W. J. Sheils (ed.), Persecution and Toleration, Studies in Church History (Oxford, Blackwell, 1984), pp. 199-233, at 200.

42 Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience, Discussed (London, [1644]). For an emphasis on the limits of puritan toleration, see Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’; J. C. Davis, ‘Religion and the Struggle for Freedom in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal 35 (1992), pp. 507-30; Avihu Zakai, ‘Orthodoxy in England and New England: Puritans and the Issue of Religious Toleration, 1640-1650’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 135 (1991), pp. 401-41. For a more optimistic assessment of the enthusiasm of radical puritans for toleration, see John Coffey, ‘Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal 41 (1998), pp. 961-85; idem, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558-1689 (Harlow, Longman, 2000), ch. 6. See also Nora Carlin, ‘Toleration for Catholics in the Puritan Revolution’, in O. P. Grell and R. Scribner (eds), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 216-30. An earlier influential intervention was William Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York, Columbia University Press, 1955).

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References

Electronic reference

Alexandra Walsham, The Godly and Their Neighbours: Puritanism and Religious Pluralism in Early Modern EnglandRevue Française de Civilisation Britannique [Online], XXVII-3 | 2022, Online since 04 December 2022, connection on 25 March 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/9806; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/rfcb.9806

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About the author

Alexandra Walsham

University of Cambridge

Alexandra Walsham is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. She has published widely on the religious and cultural history of early modern Britain, including Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 1999), The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Generations: Age, Ancestry and Memory in the English Reformations (Oxford University Press, 2022).

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