Plebeian irreligion in 17th century England - Christoper Hill

This paper was given at a conference and first published in Studien uber die Revolution, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 1969.

When we compare or contrast the English Revolution of the 17th century with the French or Russian revolutions, one point which we must bear in mind is that the French revolutionaries had English experience to draw on, and the Russian revolutionaries had French experience as well. But the English Revolution had no comparable predecessors. The 16th century Revolt of the Netherlands anticipated it in some respects: but that was a revolt against alien domination, and a revolt led by Protestants against a regime trying forcibly to maintain Catholic uniformity. Both these features were lacking in England. The English Revolution in consequence lacked a revolutionary ideology: there was no Jean Jacques Rousseau or Karl Marx. There were of course many intellectual, religious and political discontents: but before 1642 they had not crystallised into the form of a revolutionary theory or even an idea that fundamental change might be required. The leaders of parliament in the early 1640s believed themselves to be the true conservatives and traditionalists. They wanted to return to the days of Good Queen Bess, if not further back.

So whereas the trinities of the later revolutions—liberty, equality, fratemnity; peace, bread and land—demanded something new, somethingto be fought for and achieved in the future, the trinity of the English revolutionaries—religion, liberty and property—was intended to defend what already existed, or was believed to exist. Get rid of the doctrinal innovations of Laud, and the true Protestant religion would be safe: get rid of the arbitrary practices of the 11 years personal rule, and liberty and property would be safe. All the early parliamentarian theories were defensive: in place of a theory of revolution they believed that all ills were due to the king's evil councillors, to papists and Arminians in high places. Any theories which probed deeper simply looked further back.

But the further back the golden age is placed, the more uncertain the evidence about it becomes: the greater the possibility of disagreement. In face the really backward looking theory becomes forward looking, creatively revolutionary. The appeal to the good old days of the free Anglo Saxons meant something very different to Levellers and Diggers from what it had meant for Sir Edward Coke1 ; Presbyterians and Quakers drew diverse lessons from the practice of the primitive church.

So when, in the early 1640s, men found themselves unexpectedly and unwillingly facing a revolutionary situation, a situation which demanded new thinking, they were ill equipped for che task. They had to improvise. What lay to hand was the Bible, which for a century had been available in English translation, and which men had been encouraged to study as the source of all wisdom. There are dangerous doctrines in the Bible: denunciations of the rich by Old Testament prophets, suggestions of human equality in the New Testament. The Lutheran doctrine of the priesthood of all believers contains explosive possibilities, for there was no certain means of identifying visible saints. During the post-reformation century social stability had been safeguarded against the logic of Protestant Christianity by a hierarchy of church courts, by ecclesiastical control of the censorship and education, and by the doctrine of the sinfulness of the mass of mankind. In the 1640s the institutional restraints collapsed with the fall of bishops, and the attempt to build up a Presbyterian disciplinary system in their place failed almost as totally. Only sin remained. But religious toleration and the lack of an effective ecclesiastical censorship allowed wholly unorthodox groups claiming to be visible saints to propagate their subversive ideas; even the fundamental dogma of the sinfulness of the majority of men and women could be challenged. Levellers demanded a wide extension of the suffrage, regardless of whether 'the multitude' was godly or ungodly; Ranters and Antinomians were led by the spirit to reject many traditional moral restraints; Quakers saw a spark of the divine in all men, and rejected outward forms of social subordination in the name of Christian equality; Diggers demanded heaven for the poor on earth now. No wonder all conservatives rallied to oppose toleration.

So though at first sight there seems to be nothing comparable in the English Revolution to the dechristianisation of the French Revolution or the militant atheism of the Bolsheviks, and it would be difficult to find a 17th century Englishman who advocated atheism in intellectual terms, the difference is more apparent than real. The critique of the established church made by many of the 17th century sectaries became so radically anti-clerical as to be virtually secularist in content. Almost all the sects (Baptists, Quakers, Muggletonians, many Congregationalists) rejected the whole concept of a state church, together with the tithes which paid for its ministers, and the patronage system which ensured that its clergy were appointed by the ruling class.2 They insisted that ministers should be elected by the congregation and paid by the voluntary contributions of its members; many of them denied the need for a separate clergy at all, and would have had a gifted layman preach on Sunday whilst labouring with his hands the other six days of the week. They advocated toleration for all Protestant sects, rejecting ecclesiastical censorship and all forms of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in favour of a congregational discipline with no coercive sanction behind it. They attached little importance to many of the traditional sacraments of the church. If a programme of this sort had succeeded it would have destroyed the national church, leaving each congregation responsible for its own affairs with only the loosest contact between congregations: the church would no longer have been able to mould opinion in a single pattern, to punish 'sin' or proscribe 'heresy'. There would have been no control over the thinking of the middle and lower classes—which, as we shall see, contained elements of materialist scepticism. When, under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, steps were taken to rebuild a national church, its clergy became Public Enemy Number One for the radicals.

'As for these men called ministers in this nation', declared the Quaker Edward Burroughs, 'the way of their setting up and sending forth, and the way of their maintenance... they are the greatest and most woeful oppression in the nation... The earth is oppressed by them, the inhabitants groan under them...3

It is the object of this article to consider in its historical perspective the anti-clericalism and irreligion of the lower social groups during the English Revolution.

II

We need trace plebeian anti-clericalism and irreligion no further back than the late 15th and early 16th century, though no doubt it existed much earlier. Professor A Dickens has shown how Lollard influence survived in a popular materialist scepticism which makes one 'feel appreciably nearer to the age of Voltaire than is normal in the 16th century'.4 A carpenter in 1491 denied transsubstantiation, baptism, confession and damnation for sin; in 1512 a Wakefield man said

'that if a calf were upon the altar I would rather worship that than the...holy sacrament... The date was past that God determined him to be in form of bread'.5

Priests, an earlier Lollard had declared, were worse than Judas, who sold Christ for 30 pence, whilst priests sold masses for 1/2d6 . The commons, said another, 'would never be well till they had stricken off all the priests' heads.' 'There was a saying in the country', a north Yorkshireman pleaded in 1542, 'that a man might lift up his heart and confess himself to God Almighty, and needed not to be confessed at a priest'. A shearrnan of Dewsbury elaborated on this point: he would not confess his offences with a woman to a priest, 'for the priest would be as ready within two or three days after to use her as he.'7

All the evidence about such men comes from their enemies in the church courts: many similar examples could be given from those who in the later 16th century were loosely called Anabaptists and Familists.8 Londoners in Mary's reign referred to the consecrated bread in the sacrament as 'Jack-in-the-box'.9 Dr Collinson has shown that in many Elizabethan parishes the minister was pushed on by his congregation to reject the ceremonies and vestments of the state church.10 For the breach with Rome and especially the radical measures of Edward Vl's reign had opened up hopes of a continuing reformation which would totally overthrow the coercive machinery of the state church. The Elizabethan settlement bitterly disappointed such hopes that a Protestant church would differ from popery in the power which it allowed to bishops and clergy. The episcopal hierarchy came to be seen as the main obstacle to radical reform. Puritan attacks on this hierarchy are sometimes dismissed as propagandist exaggerations, though whenever we can check them they prove surprisingly reliable. But the most impressive evidence for the unpopularity of bishops and clergy comes not from their opponents but from the pens of their defenders. Laymen 'hate priests', Archbishop Crammer and Thomas Becon agreed.11 In November 1547 a royal proclamation had to be issued against 'insolence and evil demeanour towards priests, as reviling, tossing of them, taking violently their caps and tippets from them.'12

Roger Hutchinson in Edward VI's reign denounced hatred of the clergy as an Anabaptistical opinion, but agreed that it 'cloth infect many'.13

The opening words of Bishop Thomas Cooper's Admonition to the People of England (1589) speak of:

the loathsome contempt, hatred and disdain that the most part of men in these days bear... toward the ministers of the Church of God... He who can most bitterly inveigh against bishops and preachers, that can most boldly blaze their discredits, that can most uncharitably slander their lives and doings, thinketh of himself, and is esteemed of others, as the most zealous and earnest furtherer of the Gospel... The whole state ec-clesiastical...is grown into hatred and contempt, and all inferior subjects disdain in any point to he ruled by them... God hash touched OUT bish-ops and preachers with this scourge of ignominy and reproach for their slackness and negligence in their office... The people...have conceived an heathenish contempt of religion and a disdainful loathing of the ministers thereof.'14

Other bishops confirmed this remarkable confession. 'The ministers of the word', wrote Archbishop Sandys, 'the messengers of Christ...are esteemed tamquam excrementa mundi; 'our estimation is little, our authority is less: so that we are become contemptible in the eyes of the basest sort of people'.15

'If we maintain things that are established', complained the judicious Hooker, 'we have...to strive with a number of heavy prejudices deeply rooted in the hearts of men, who think that herein we serve the time and speak in favour of the present state because thereby we either hold or seek preferment'.16 Or as the gentle Isaac Walton said of Elizabeth's reign, looking back from the revolutionary decade, 'The common people became so fanatic as to believe the bishops to be Antichrist'.17 We recall the oatmeal maker who, on trial before the High Commission in April 1630, said that he would never take off his hat to bishops. 'But you will to Privy Councillors', he was urged. `Then as you are Privy Councillors', quoth he, put off my hat; but as you are the rags of the Beast, I put it on again'.18 Joan Hoby of Colnbrook, Buckinghamshire, said four years later 'that she did not care a pin nor a fart for my Lord's Grace of Canterbury...and she did hope that she should live to see him hanged'.19 (Laud was in fact executed 11 years later, but we do not know whether Joan Hoby was still alive then).

Further evidence of the unpopularity of the whole church establishment is to be found in the popular inconoclasm which broke out whenever opportunity offered: in the late 1630s and 1640s altar rails were pulled down, altars desecrated, statues on tombs destroyed. 'Is it well done of our soldiers', asked The Souldiers Catechisme of 1644, 'to break down crosses and images where they meet with any?' The answer was, rather shamefacedly, confess that nothing ought to be done in a tumultous manner. But seeing God hath put the sword of reformation into the soldiers' hand, I think it is not amiss that they should cancel and demolish those monuments of superstition and idolatry, especially seeing the magistrate and the minister that should have done it formerly neglected it.'20

In 1641 there were 900 petitions against allegedly 'scandalous' ministers, one from every ten parishes in the land. Since they came mainly from the south and east, the proportion in those areas is far higher. 'If the meanest and most vicious parishioner they had could be brought to prefer a petition to the House of Commons against his minister', Clarendon tells us, the latter 'was sure to be prosecuted as a scandalous minister'.21 It was 'the very dregs and scum of every parish' who petitioned against 'the orthodox clergy', a royalist pamphlet of 1643 declared.22 In 1642 we find soldiers plundering all ministers, royalist and parliamentarian, and there was much rabbling of the royalist clergy. In 1641, 'when the glad tidings were brought to Chelmsford that episcopacy was voted down by the House of Commons, all usual expressions of an exulting joy were used', and 'bonfires were kindled in every street'23 Bishop Warner tells us that 'the general opinion and carriage of the people (especially near London at that time) was such to bishops that it was not easy to pass by them without reproach, yea (often) not without danger of their persons'. This was written in 1646, to explain his retreat from Rochester at the beginning of the civil war.24 There is a similar report from Cambridge, where the clerical Fellows of Colleges 'became so hated by the weaker sort of the deceived people that a scholar could have small security from being stoned or affronted as he walked the streets'.25 'So generally peevish and fanaticised were the people'—it is London this time—'that not any particular discontent or personal quarrel with any private clergyman but "These bishops, these parsons"? And the writer explains this to him horrifying state of affairs: 'episcopal government in England being indeed the king's spiritual militia, and the most powerful, as commanding the consciences of subjects'.26

Finally, a real tear jerker from London:

'If any of the clergy, worn out with old age and former calamities, made use of a staff to support his aged weak limbs as he walked along the streets, he was pointed at as one that through drunkenness was not able to govern his steps. If he looked earnestly round about him with his dim eyes to find out any place he was to go in the City, some insolent scoffer would thus reflect upon him: "that person has devoured five fat livings, and see with what prying eyes he is seeking after a sixth".27 '

Such anecdotes tell us rather more than their authors intended. 'The people complain of their ministers, that they are dumb dogs, greedy dogs, which can never have enough', the Rev Edmund Calamy told the House of Commons in 1642.28 They also complained that university educated divines tended to be members of the ruling class, 'full of all outward necessaries'.29 Indeed, one at least of the critics of the radicals suggested that their incitement to refuse the payment of tithes 'is one of the chiefest inducements that the...sectaries have to encourage the silly people and to poison them with their other errors'.30

Levellers, Diggers and Fifth Monarchists all denounced tithes. 'The sheep of Christ', said Winstanley expressively, 'shall never fare well so long as the wolf or Red Dragon pays the shepherd their wages'.31 The sects turned to 'mechanick preachers' or itinerants financed by the voluntary contributions of the faithful. 'By the end of the first revolutionary decade', Mr Maclean observed, 'a militant anti-clericalism was taken as axiomatic in the popular outlook'.32 One other contributory factor which I have discussed elsewhere is to be found in the scientific and mathematical ideas which in London (more than in any European city, Amsterdam perhaps excepted) led to distrust of authority and scepticism about received ideas. 'There is no opinion so prodigious and strange', wrote a Scot in 1614, 'but was either invented or supported in England'. Archdeacon Barlow in 1626 complained that artisans preferred reason and experiment before the literal words of the Bible, and contrasted 'mechanical tradesmen' who favoured the new science with 'men of learning' who disliked it.33

III

So it is hardly surprising that the breakdown of censorship and the establishment of effective religious toleration let loose a flood of speculation that hitherto had only been muttered in secret. 'Religion is now become the common discourse and tabletalk in every tavern and ale-house', said a pamphlet of 1641.34 In England as in Switzerland, 'the lower sort of people being bred in an ancient hatred against superiors' greedily embraced the doctrines of Anabaptism.35 Anabaptists, William Gouge had said in 1626, 'teach that all are alike and that there is no difference betwixt masters and servants'.36

The lower we go in the social scale, Professor Jordan believes, the more tolerance we find — and the more bitter distrust of clerical leadership. The attempt in the 1640s to replace church courts by a Presbyterian disciplinary system, 'to bring us again into Egyptian bondage to keep up and maintain the oppression of tithes', the union of the clergy to 'promote and carry on their Scottish interest'37 — all this led to fierce hostility against what Lilburne called 'the devil and the clergy his agents',38 and a later pamphlet called 'the black guard of Satan'.39 'Without a powerful compulsive presbytery in the church', reflected the Leveller Overton in 1646, 'a compulsive mastership or aristocratical government over the people in the state could never long be maintained'.40

'The necks of the people of the world', thought the Rev William Dell in 1653, 'have never endured so grievous a yoke from any tyrants as from the doctrine and domination of the clergy'. 41

The demand for separation of church and state was a demand for the sub-ordination of the clergy, for an end to their coercive authority 'Under pretence of religion', Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1651, 'the lower sort of citizens...do challenge [liberty] to themselves'.42

The Ranters made this claim specifically on behalf of the poor God, 'that mighty Leveller', intended to cut down 'all men and women that were higher than the middle sort', and to raise up 'those that were lower than the middle sort'. George Foster believed God would establish equality, 'the low and poor equal with the rich'43 Joseph Salmon wished to expedite this process by inciting the army to destroy gentry and nobility.44

'Howl, howl, ye nobles', cried Abiezer Coppe; 'howl ye rich men... Bow before those poor, nasty, lousy, ragged wretches', and let them go free. For God, the real Leveller, would reduce all men to equality.45

Gerrard Winstanley too claimed Jesus Christ as the Head Leveller.46 Others revived the old Taborite doctrine that Christ would come as a robber to the last judgment.47

'Thou last many bags of money' Coppe warned the rich man, 'and behold now I (the Lord) come as a thief in the night, with my sword drawn in my hand, and like a thief, as I am I say "Deliver your purse, deliver sirrah! Deliver or cut thy throat".'48

This was not the God of the propertied class.

Ideas previously contraband were now publicly proclaimed, verbally or in print. In 1644 Jane Stratton of Southwark said that Christ was a bastard. John Hart claimed to have been made by the Earl of Essex and saved by Sir William Waller.49

The church is a spiritual whorehouse, declared Roger Crab; priests are pimps and panders.50 There was no such place as hell, outside a man's conscience, said Thomas Tany, Gerrard Winstanley, Ludowick Muggleton and many others. The doctrine was not new: it goes back to the Waldensians and further. Queen Elizabeth in 1584 had accused the Puritans of propagating it,51 and Marlowe, Kyd and Ralegh had come under suspicion in 1593. But now it was being put to new uses.

Priests, said Winstanley, 'lay claim to heaven after they are dead, and yet they require their heaven in this world too, and grumble mightily against the people that will not give them a large temporal maintenance. And yet they tell poor people that they must be content with their poverty, and they shall have their heaven hereafter. But why may not we have our heaven here (that is, a comfortable livelihood in the earth) and heaven hereafter too, as well as you?'

'While men are gazing up to heaven, imagining after a happiness or fearing a hell after they are dead, their eyes are put out, that they see not what is their birthrights, and what is to be done by them here on earth while they are living... And indeed the subtle clergy do know that if they can but charm the people...to look after riches, heaven and glory when they are dead, that then they shall easily be the inheritors of the earth and have the deceived people to be their servants'.52

The social function of religion was rarely so clearly expressed before Karl Marx: two centuries later a speaker in Felix Holt the Radical almost echoed Winstanley's words.53 Winstanley was only summing up more eloquently what many were saying. In 1646 Thomas Edwards recorded with horror the remark that 'every creature in the first estate of creation was God, and every creature is God, every creature that hath life and breath being an efflux from God and shall return unto God again, be swallowed up in him as a drop is in the ocean'.54 This led on both to Winstanley's magnificent pantheism and to the Quaker principle of the divine in every man: but it also led a Wiltshire man in 1656 to say there was

'no God or power ruling above the planets, no Christ but the sun that shines upon us... If the Scriptures were a-making again then Tom Lampire of Melksham would make as good Scriptures as the Bible. There was neither heaven nor hell except in a man's own conscience, for if he had a good fortune and did live well, that was heaven; and if he lived poor and miserable that was hell, for then he would die like a cow or a horse'.

Another man of the same village said

'God was in all things': 'whatever sins he did commit, God was the author of them all and acted them in him. He would sell all religion for a jug of beer'.55

In 1650 a lieutenant in Cromwell's army declared 'there is no God but what is in himself and whole creation, and that He is alike in beasts as in men'. Lieutenant Jackson also believed 'that he is as perfect now as ever he shall be'.56 Ludowick Muggleton agreed that the devil had no real existence: he personified the spirit of unclean reason.57 Coppe thought that 'there was no devil, that it was God that swore in them' (the Ranters). He added that 'the Scripture to them was no more than a ballad'.58 'The Scripture is so plainly and directly contradictory to itself', Walwyn was reported as saying, 'That makes me believe it is not the Word of God'59 Jacob Bauthumley thought the Bible no better than any book by a good man: it was 'not so safe to go to the Bible to see what others have spoken and writ of the mind of God as to see what God speaks within me, and to follow the ducture and leading of it in me'.60 Laurence Clarkson agreed that 'no matter what Scripture, saints or churches say, if that within thee do not condemn thee, thou shalt not be condemned'. To the pure all things were pure. 'What act sourer is done by thee in light and love is light and lovely', though men call it adultery.61 In this spirit he went about England preaching and seducing any pretty girl he met.62 In December 1654 Thomas Tany (Theauro John) symbolically burnt the Bible 'because the people say it is the Word of God, and it is not.'63 A great deal of scepticism about the Scriptures was expressed: the 1650s seem to have marked a turning point away from arguments based merely on biblical texts, which some attributed to Hobbes's influence, but to which the radical critique must have contributed. In 1657 the House of Commons 'jeered when a man cited a Scripture to confirm what he said'.64 Winstanley explained religious experience in psychological terms.65

From all sides we hear complaints of atheism. In 1642 Thomas Fuller recalled that the Puritan Richard Greenham had said that atheism was a greater danger even than popery.66 Men denied the immortality of the soul. 'Many of my acquaintance did say... "There is no God, but Nature only",' Muggleton tells us of the late 1640s.67 George Fox was tempted to believe this.68 Bunyan in the early 1650s met Ranters who denied the existence of God: he had doubts himself. He thought the Bible might be 'a fable and cunning story', no better than the Koran, whose recent translation into English (1649) had stimulated much speculation. Bunyan hints that he had other and worse thoughts which he dared not reproduce.69

Bunyan thought the early Quakers' ideas were not much better than those of the Ranters, 'only the Ranters had made them threadbare at an alehouse', whilst the Quakers covered the same ideas with 'an outward legal holiness or righteousness'.70 The picture of the jovial Ranters blaspheming over their beer reminds us of the drunken trooper who said,

'If I should worship the sun or moon, like the Persians, or that pewter pot on the table, nobody has anything to do with it'71

or of Captain Francis Freeman, discharged from the army in 1650, who told a cornet that he 'saw God in the table board and in the candle-stick'.72 In 1659 Richard Baxter observed that the profane multitude, the rabble, were hostile to ministers and all religion."73

IV

When we say that the religious ideology of the parliamentarian revolutionaries was Puritanism, therefore, we are in danger of confusing two quite distinct phenomena. There was the Puritanism of the gentry and merchants, who wanted to preserve a state church under parliamentary control, with tithes and the patronage system intact, with university trained Calvinist divines. Thus the advantages of the episcopal church in controlling opinion and maintaining social discipline could be preserved, without any danger of its becoming again an independent tool in the hands of the crown. The conservative parliamentarians (like John Pym) would originally have accepted a modified episcopacy, once the High Commission was abolished and provided the king recognised the necessity of accepting parliamentary supremacy. When Charles refused, the conservatives would have settled for a Presbyterian system as the price of a Scottish alliance, but with parliamentary control at the centre and with elders from the propertied class nominated by parliament. Entirely different was the position of the petty bourgeois radicals of London, East Anglia and parts of the Home Counties, of the Quakers from the North, 'composed and made up out of the dregs of the people'.74 Spontaneously organised in their own independent congregations, with mechanic preachers elected and paid by these congregations, they wanted not only to separate from the state church but to destroy it as an organ of government lest it attempt to reassert the traditional ideological control and disciplinary supervision. They attacked the whole idea of a university educated clergy, because it created a separate clerical caste closely linked with the ruling class. Though the motives of the separatists were religious, the objective content of their demands was secularist. They wanted to separate state and church to deprive the organs of coercion of all the supernatural sanctions which had for so many centuries surrounded them. Roger Williams, a deeply religious Baptist, expressed this secularism in a way which must have seemed little better than atheism to conservative parliamentarians.

'The church, or company of worshippers whether true or false, is...like unto a corporation, society or company of East India or Turkey merchants, or any other society or company in London; which companies may hold their courts, keep their records, hold disputations, and in matters concerning their society may dissent, divide, break into schisms and factions, sue and implead each other at the law, yea wholly break up and dissolve into pieces and nothing, and yet the peace of the City not be in the least measure impaired or disturbed; because the essence or being of the City, and so the well being and peace thereof, is essentially distinct from those particular societies; the City courts, City laws, City punishments distinct from theirs. The City was before them, and stands absolute and entire when such a corporation or society is taken down'.75

The startlingly new proposition here lies in the comparison: it is no more the state's business what church a man joins than what trading company, if any; and disagreements about religion are no more the state's concern than rows inside a City company. This would have shocked Luther and Calvin as much as the Roman or Anglican hierarchies. In such a world there could be no certainty about the visible church, no apostolic succession, no national church exercising supervision and control over the middle and lower classes, no 'compulsive mastership or aristocratical government over the people',

In order to win the war, the support of the sectaries had to be enlisted. They formed the backbone of Cromwell's army, and he himself genuinely believed in the desirability of religious toleration for those with 'the root of the matter in them', ie consistent revolutionaries. He was prepared to give commissions even to Anabaptists: 'if they be willing faithfully to serve [parliament], that satisfies'.76

In consequence the New Model Army became a formidable fighting force and won the war for parliament. Henceforwards there was something very like a system of dual power in the country. The army, committed to a degree of religious liberty, was too powerful to be ignored; and its plebeian rank and file, and some junior officers, were susceptible to radical ideas, religious as well as political. In 1646 a trooper in Northamptonshire 'laid his hand on his sword, and said "This sword should never be laid down, nor many thousands more, whilst there was a priest left in England",'77

In March 1649 six soldiers made a demonstration in the parish church of Walton-on-Thames, within a few miles of which the Digger colony at St. George's Hill was to be started in the following month. They symbolically burned a copy of the Bible, because 'now Christ... imparts a fuller measure of his spirit to his saints than this can afford'.78

Yet over the length and breadth of England the gentry and town oligarchies, the 'natural rulers', whom parliament represented and who in the last resort paid for the army, were irremoveable without a vast social upheaval for which the generals had no mind. After the defeat of the Levellers in 1649, the uneasy balance of the 1650s saw Oliver Cromwell and the leading officers groping their way back to agreement with these 'natural rulers', without whose support a permanent settlement was impossible. In the 1650s men like Lieutenant Jackson, Captain Freeman and Quakers were purged from the army; but similar influences recurred. In 1655 Richard Coppin's rejection of heaven and hell was so influential in Rochester, not only with the 'many-headed monster, the rude multitude'79 but also with the army rank and file, that the Major-General recommended that Coppin should be exiled and the troops posted elsewhere.80 The Cromwellian state church marked a compromise in the religious sphere: tithes and patronage survived, but there was far less doctrinal control or coercive discipline than in the old church, and toleration was extended to independent congregations existing alongside this church, provided their beliefs and practices were not thought to be politically subversive.

Like all compromises during a revolution, this satisfied neither side. Quakers and others disrupted church services, denounced hireling priests and agitated for the overthrow of the state church, tithes and patronage. The clergy organised themselves into 'voluntary associations' in the counties, an attempt to build up a Presbyterian disciplinary system from below. Whenever parliament was in session they lobbied for support, though this was hardly necessary.

For the one consistent fact about mid-17th century politics is that any House of Commons elected on a propertied franchise was bitterly opposed to religious toleration. In the 1640s the Long Parliament tried to impose a Presbyterian disciplinary system, and passed fierce laws against blasphemy. The army's intervention in politics frustrated the operation of these laws, and produced an era of relative freedom; but whenever parliament met it returned to the attack. In 1654 it persecuted the Unitarian John Biddle, and tried to sweep away the tolerant clauses of the Instrument of Government; in 1656 it persecuted the Quaker James Nayler and replaced the Instrument by the much harsher Petition and Advice. But 'consider', a pre-Restoration pamphlet urged, 'can you at once suppress the sectaries and keep out the king?'81 After an interlude of army rule in 1659-60, terminating in near anarchy, the 'natural rulers' came to agree that the restoration of a state church was worth even a compromise with episcopacy. So in 1660 the army was disbanded, bishops came back with Charles II; tithes and patronage were confirmed, the censorship restored. The High Commission was not revived, so church courts lost their coercive power: but so far as the lower classes were concerned this role was taken over by JPs, who gleefully carried out the policy of repression and persecution authorised by parliamentary statute.

The old opponents of 1640 were now united against the threat from lower class dissent and infidelity, which they succeeded in driving underground. In the villages the hegemony of parson and squire was re-established. Nonconformists were driven out of national politics, and from the political life of their main centres of strength, the towns. Deserted by their leaders among the gentry, the radicals emigrated, or took to hopeless plotting, or to pacifist religion: the Quakers, Baptists and Muggletonians abandoned revolutionary political action and became harmless religious sects, who were nevertheless bitterly persecuted and so reduced to a hard core of the faithful. Once the censorship closes down again it is very difficult indeed to find much evidence of the thinking of the majority of the middle and lower classes in the towns who did not turn to the sects.

The author of The Whole Duty of Man agreed with Fuller and Baxter that 'this liberty of discourse hath propagated atheism' and made it fashionable: he believed that for every household in which prayers were held there were ten in which they were neglected,82 In 1669 the fact that atheism had many followers in England impressed a foreign observer.83 In the same year Edward Chamberlayne added that,

'The clergy...are accounted by many as the dross and refuse of the nation... It hath been observed, even by strangers, that the iniquity of the present times in England is such...that of all the Christian clergy of Europe...none are so little respected, beloved, obeyed or rewarded as the present...clergy of England'.84

Six years earlier Robert Blackburne, Secretary to the Admiralty Committee, had observed to Samuel Pepys that

'the present clergy...are hated and laughed at by everybody; ...[they] will never heartily go down with the generality of the commons of England, they have been so used to liberty and freedom and they are so acquainted with the pride and debauchery of the present clergy'.85

The royalist Samuel Butler likewise spoke of the 'general ill will and hatred they [bishops and clergy] have contracted from the people of all sorts... These officers and commanders of the Church Militant are like soldiers of fortune that are free to serve on any side that gives the best pay'.86 But Bishop Isaac Barrow noted, no doubt equally truthfully, that the Church of England enjoys 'the favour of the almost whole nobility and gentry',87

Now of course a great deal of this is the conventional exaggeration about impiety which occurs in every generation. But the references to past history make sense. In 1681 the egregious Bishop Parker testified to the continuing influence of scientific ideas upon artisans: 'plebeians and mechanics have philosophised themselves into principles of impiety and read their lectures of atheism in the streets and highways'.88 This fear of mechanic atheism perhaps accounts for the near panic with which so many of the early members of the Royal Society warded off the accusation that their activities must lead to atheism. The passionate intensity of their denials, and their labours to prove that science reinforced faith, are the strongest possible evidence that faith was in fact being called in question, as well as that the scientists saw the social necessity of maintaining it. Their own guilty consciences made them protest too much, as Professor Westfall sapiently observed.89

V

In the later 18th century, worried by the atheistic influence of the French Revolution, many godly Englishmen suddenly became aware that the mass of the urban population did not go to church. How new this was is still uncertain. In theory all Englishmen until 1640 had been compelled, under legal penalty, to attend their own parish church every Sunday. We do not know how far the very poor and vagabonds in fact attended. They were not worth fining for non-attendance, so the church courts would not bother about them. Many had no clothes in which they were fit to appear before their Maker.90 In a closeIy integrated agricultural village no doubt most of the poor were compelled to attend. But Norden in 1607 tells us of forest squatters, 'given to little or no kind of labour,... dwelling far from any church or chapel', who were 'as ignorant of God or of any civil course of life as the very savages amongst the infidels'.91

The act of 1650, ending compulsory church attendance, must have been a great liberation. It was reversed of course in 1660, but the establishment of licensed nonconformist chapels, temporarily in 1672, permanently after 1689, together with the decline in the coercive power of the church courts, must have made church attendance virtually impossible to enforce in the towns.92 (It was very different in villages, as Addison shows us: Sir Roger de Coverley attended church himself 'in order to count the congregation [and] see if any of his tenants are missing',)93 In many London parishes, indeed, the church could not have held all the inhabitants if they had attended; and the growing habit of renting pews helped to exclude the poor.94 A circular sent round by laymen of the Church of England in 1681 spoke of the necessity of preaching to 'poor people...who cannot...get pews in their parish churches'. In populous parishes, they recommended, there should be at least two congregations, the parish church for the parson and the rich, and a tabernacle at which lay preachers could minister to the poor.95 The object of the circular was to help the national church to compete with nonconformist influence over the poor; but the dissenting congregations too had to rent pews in order to raise funds to pay their un-beneficed ministers. This would help to exclude the urban poor. The main appeal of the sects, after 1660 at least, seems to have been to the urban lower middle class—artisans and small merchants. Provided the poor were docile, they had a fair chance of being ignored. It seems therefore very likely that the Industrial Revolution merely revealed a state of affairs which had long existed in the larger towns, although of course the rapid expansion in urban populations would increase the numbers of those who were able to stay away from church, and so increase the danger from the ruling class point of view.

Between the crude plebeian materialism revealed by Professor Dickens in early 16th century England and the secularism of early 19th century working class radicals there may be more continuity than historians have recognised. The Methodist movement may have been the first serious attempt to convert the labouring class, now expanding so rapidly, as opposed to coercing them into a formal acceptance of outward observances of religion.

• 1I have discussed this at length in ‘The Norman Yoke’, in my Puritanism and Revolution (1958), pp50-122.
• 2This is discussed at length in my Economic problems of the Church from Archbishop Whitgift to the Long Parliament (956); and by M James, 'The Political Importance of the Tithes Controversy in the English Revolution, 1640-60'., History XXVI (1941), pp1-18.
• 3E Burroughs, A Message to the Present Rulers of England (1659), in The Memorable Works of a son of Thunder and Consolation (1672), pp515-516; cf S Fisher, The Russicks Alarm to the Rabbies (1660), in The Testimony of Truth Exalted (1679).
• 4A G Dickens, Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York, 1509-15513 (1959), p13.
• 5lbid, pp9, 17
• 6A F Thomson, The Later Loilards (1965), p247. The jibe was common: see A G Dickens, op cit, p18
• 7A G Dickens, op cit,pp12,48.
• 8See C Burrage, The Early Engish. Dissenters, 2 vols (1912), passim.
• 9H F M Prescott, Mary Tudor (1952), p108.
• 10P Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritian Movement (1967), pp92-97.
• 11T Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters (Parker Society, 1846), p230; T Becon, Early Works (Parker Soc, 1843), p255.
• 12P L Hughes and J F Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, I (1485-1553) (Yale UP, 1964), p407.
• 13R Hutchinson, Works (Parker Soc, 1842), p310.
• 14T Cooper, An Admonition to the People of England (E Arber (ed), 1895), pp9, 102-103, 1 WI, 175; cf pp118-119, 144-145, 148, 159.
• 15Quoted by L Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (1965), p406; Collinson, op cit, p147.
• 16R Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Everyman. edn), 1, p148.
• 17I Walton, The Life of Mr Richard Hooker (1655), in Lives (World's Classics), p185. Thomas Brightman in 1615 confirmed that hostility to the hierarchy 'is now favoured much of the people and multitude' (The Revelation of St John Illustrated, 4th ed, 1644. p139).
• 18See examples quoted by F W X Firicharn, 'Notes from the Ecclesiastical Court Records at Somerset Home', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th Series, pp136,138.
• 19Lambeth MS 943, f721.
• 20The Souldiers Catechisme (1644), pp.20-21.
• 21Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion (1888), 1, p449.
• 22A Letter from Mercurius Civicus to Mercurius Rusticas (1643) in Somer's Tracts (1748-51), V, p415; cf J Nalson, An Impartial Collection (1682), Il, p760.
• 23[B Ryves], Angliae Ruina (1647) p26.
• 24E L Warner, The Life of John Warner, Bishop of Rochester (1901), p33.
• 25[Anon], Querela Cantabrigienis (1646), p13.
• 26[W Chestlin], Persecutio Undecima (1681), pp7, 4. First published 1648.
• 27P Barwick, Life of Of John Barwick (abridged and edited by G F Barwick, 1903), p177. Cf Persecutio Undecima, p6.
• 28E Calamy, England's Looking-glasse (1642). p59.
• 29E How, The Sufficiency of the Spirit's Teaching (8th edn, 1792), p51, and passim, First published in the Netherlands, 1639.
• 30E Pagitt Herisiography (5th edn, 1654), p146.
• 31G Winstanley, A New-Yeers Gift for the Parliament and Armie (1650), p39, in: G H Sabine, The Works of Gerrard Winstanley (Cornell UP, 1941), p387.
• 32J F Maclean, 'Popular Anticlericalism in the Puritan Revolution', Journal of the History of Ideas. XVII, p452. This is a useful pioneering article. Cf the same author's 'The Making of the Lay Tradition', Journal of Religion XXXIII.
• 33Quoted in my Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, pp65-66.
• 34[Anon], Religions Enemies (1641) p6. Attributed to John Taylor, the Water-Poet.
• 35R Blome, The Fanatick History (1660), p5.
• 36W Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1626), pp331-332.
• 37W K Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England (1932-40), IV, pp321,330.
• 38J Lilburne, London's Liberty in Chains (1646), p42.
• 39[Anon], Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1648), p13, in G H Sabine, op cit, p622.
• 40R Overton, A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (1646), p12, in Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, 1638-47, W Haller (ed) (Columbia UP, 1933), III, p362.
• 41W Dell, Several Sermons and Discourses (1709), p638.
• 42T Hobbes, Philosophical Rudiments (1651) in English Works (Sir W Molesworth (ed), 1839.45), Il, p79.
• 43G Foster, The Pouring Forth of the Seventh and Last Viall (1650), Sig A3; The Sounding of the Last Trumpet (1650), pp17,42.
• 44J Salmon, A Rout, A Rout (1649), p4.
• 45A Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll (1649), p7; A Second Fiery flying Rowle (1649), p19.
• 46G Winstanley, A New-Yeers Gift for the Parliament and Armie, p43, in: G H Sabine, op cit, p390.
• 47G Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester UP, 1967), II, p691.
• 48A Coppe, A Second Fiery Flying Rowle, p2; cf J Bunyan, Works (G Offor (ed), 1860), 11 p733.
• 49J R Pitman (ed), The Whole Works of John Lighifoot (1823-1814), XIII, p317.
• 50R Crab, Dagons Downfall (1657), pp4-5.
• 51J E Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1584-1601 (1957), p70.
• 52G Winstanley, An Appeale to all Englishmen (16501 in G H Sabine, op cit, p409; The Law of Freedom (1652), p62, in: G H Sabine, op cit, p569.
• 53G Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical (Warwick ed), ch XXX.
• 54T Edwards, Gangraena, Part I (1646), p21.
• 55B H Cunnington (ed), Records of the Countey of Wilts: being excerpts from the Quarter Sessions Great Rolls of the Seventeenth Century (Devizes, 1932), p231.
• 56Quoted in C H Firth, Cromwell's Army (1902), p408.
• 57L Muggleton, A Transcendent Spiritual Treatise (1711), p38. First published 1652.
• 58Leybourn-Popham MSS (Historical Manuscripts Commission), p57, A Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll, ch 2.
• 59[Anon], Walwins Wiles (1649), p8, in W Haller and G Davies (eds), The Leveller Tracts, 1647-1653 (Columbia UP, 1914), p298.
• 60J Bauthumley, The Light and Dark Sides of God (1650), pp71-84. Bauthumley too thought God was in all creatures, beasts as well as men (p4).
• 61L. Clarkson, A Single Eye (1650), pp12, 9-10.
• 62L. Clarkson, The Lost Sheep Found (1660), passim.
• 63J T Rutt (ed), Diary of Thomas Burton (1828), 1, p cxxxvi.
• 64J D Ogilvie (ed), Diary of Sir Archibald Johnston of Warriston (Scottish History Society), III, p71.
• 65G Winstanley, The Law of Freedoms pp60-61, in G H Sabine, op cit, pp567,569.
• 66T Fuller, The Holy State (1841), pp334.338.
• 67L Muggleton, The Acts of the Witnesses of the Spirit (1764), p18; cf p62. First published 1699.
• 68G Fox, Journal (8th edn, 1902), I, p26.
• 69J Bunyan, Works, 1, pp17-18.; cf p552.
• 70J Bunyan, Works, Il, pp1.82-183.
• 71Quoted by D Masson, Life of John Milton (1859-80), p525. Note the interest in comparative religion again.
• 72F Freeman, Light Vanquishing Darkness (1650), p.3.
• 73R Baxter, The Holy Commonwealth (1659), pp92-94, 226-.229.
• 74E Pagitt, Heresiography (5th edn, 1654), p136.
• 75R Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (Hanserd Knollys Soc, 1848), pp46-47. First published 1644.
• 76W C Abbott (ed), Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (Harvard UP 1937-1947), I, pp277-278.
• 77T Edwards, Gangraena, Part Ill (1646), p173.
• 78[C Walker], Anarchia Anglicana, or the History of Independency, Part II (1649), pp152- 15.3. The soldiers also abolished the Sabbath. tithes, ministers and magistrates.
• 79W Rosewell., The Serpents Subtilty Discovered (1656), Sig A 3, p11.
• 80Thurloe State Papers (1742), IV, p486.
• 81A Coffin for the Good Old Cause (1660), in The Posthumous Works of Mr Samuel Butler (6th edn, 1754), p300., The attribution to Butler is almost certainly incorrect.
• 82The Government of the Tongue, Section III, in The Works of the... Author of The Whole Duty of Man (1704).
• 83[L Magalotti], Travels of Cosmo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany, through England (1821), p428.
• 84E Charnberlayne, Anglia Notitia (1669), pp389, 400-401.
• 85S Pepys, Diary (H B Wheatley (ed), 1946), 1, pp314-315.
• 86S Butler, Characters and Passages from Note-books (A B. Waller ed), 1906), p318.
• 87I Barrow, Theological Works (A Napier (ed), 1859), IX, p577.
• 88Quoted in my Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, p127.
• 89R S Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century England (Yale University Press, 1958), pp107-111.
• 90See my Society, and Puritanism in pre-Revolutionary England (1964), pp472-474.
• 91J Norden, The Surveyors Dialogue (1608), p107.
• 92See my Society and Puritanism, p343.
• 93The Spectator, No 112 (9 July 1711).
• 94See my Society and Puritanism, p484; my Economic Problems of the Church, pp175-182.
• 95Quoted by J Waddington, Congregational History, 1567-1700 (1874), pp615.616.