Dissent Empowered

The collapse of Charles I’s Personal Rule brought the swift reversal of Laudian innovations, and soon led on to the abolition of Episcopacy, Christmas and other festivals, the removal of hundreds of ministers, and the suppression of the prayer-book. The chapter explores Puritan efforts to build a reformed Church and ministry, and shows how reconstruction proved far harder than demolition, with Presbyterianism taking firm hold only in London and Lancashire. The Puritan movement became increasingly fragmented by the rise of Independents, Baptists, and Quakers. The chapter then turns to the parish experience: the ministry and services, and disputes over access to the sacraments, and over weddings and funerals. Finally, it assesses Puritan attempts to drive forward a reformation of manners, through campaigns designed to suppress blasphemy, immorality and profanation of the Sabbath.

Dissent and the State

The relationships between persecution, toleration, dissent, and the state were often paradoxical. The chapter outlines justifications for and forms of persecution and toleration, echoing recent emphasis on how the two were entwined. It argues that, while dissenting identities often emerged in the circumstances of state persecution, dissenters could be as keen on capturing as on rejecting the state, understood in three different ways. First, as an apparatus of enforcement, the state relied on individuals who negotiated demands for persecution or toleration at every level, creating a fragile patchwork of religious freedom and restraint. Second, demands made for persecution of other religious groups by those who felt monarchs were being too tolerant turned obedient subjects into active citizens. Third, dissenters flexibly sought prerogative, parliamentary, or Protectoral aid. While historians have often asked whether the state possessed the power to persecute, they should also consider whether it wielded the authority to tolerate.

Colonial Quakerism

Highly mobile and often confrontational, Quakers came into frequent conflict with magistrates in the Anglo-American colonies. As they endured fines, whippings, and banishment, Quakers put pressure on emerging colonial legal systems, which they denounced as anti-Christian and unjust. In the ‘Quaker colonies’, however, the movement looked quite different. Quakers in West Jersey and Pennsylvania adapted to the roles of organizing institutions and enforcing the law. Across British North America, Quakers maintained strong ties to London. They increasingly developed networks across colonies as well, especially among meetings in Barbados, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.

Dissent in New England

The New England colonies were settled in the early seventeenth century by men and women who could not in conscience subscribe to all aspects of the faith and practice of the Church of England. In creating new societies they struggled with how to define their churches and their relationship with the national Church they dissented from. As their New England Way evolved the orthodox leaders of the new order identified and took action against those who challenged it. Interaction with dissenters such as Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, Baptists, and Quakers helped to further define the colonial religious establishment.

Presbyterians in the English Revolution

This chapter is concerned with English Presbyterians and Presbyterianism during the Civil Wars and the Interregnum. It traces the emergence of an English Presbyterian position from the Puritan and nonconformist networks of the 1630s to the opening of the Westminster Assembly in 1643. The Westminster Assembly and the influence of the Scottish Covenanters are explored in the emergence of the Assembly’s Presbyterian platform. The chapter looks at the ‘Erastian’ controversy with the Long Parliament over the power of parochial presbyteries to suspend and excommunicate the sinful and ignorant from the Lord’s Supper. The issue of toleration and the Presbyterians’ opposition to the Long Parliament granting a wide liberty of conscience is also discussed. The chapter concludes by looking at how English Presbyterians fared under the Cromwellian Protectorate and their journey towards Dissent in the early Restoration.

Women and Gender

The proliferation of nonconformist groups during the English Revolution facilitated an unprecedented level of female involvement in religio-political activity and debate. Women negotiated, and re-negotiated, a number of important roles in the organization and encouragement of dissenting communities, whether that was as prophets, petitioners, church officers, devotional writers, patrons, or dispensers of pastoral care. Such activities were not limited to the brief period 1640–60, despite the moves towards institutionalization of more ‘radical’ groups post-1660. Indeed, while this chapter charts various ways in which women’s authoritative roles were curtailed as the century wore on, it also seeks to highlight various ways in which women adapted to these changing circumstances. Overall, it contributes to a broader historiography arguing for a tradition of female dissent uninterrupted by the Restoration.

Sermons and Preaching

Preaching has always been central to the dissenting Protestant tradition. The fact that sermons were a crucial means of mass communication ensured that ‘hotter Protestants’ would be locked in a perpetual struggle with the ecclesiastical and political authorities for possession of parish pulpits and town lectureships. This chapter explores the means by which dissenting preachers were trained and deployed, and how they managed to deliver their message to a wider audience in the face of often intense official harassment and censorship. Calvinist preaching was always intended to inspire congregations to act as well as listen; a fact which explains both the anxieties of the political authorities regarding public discussion of theological and political matters, and the alarm (even among Puritan clergy) at the growth of unregulated lay preaching. This chapter therefore not only surveys how nonconformist preaching developed during this period, but also how it helped fragment the dissenting movement.

Scotland

This chapter addresses the resistance of Scottish Protestantism to division—and indeed a disinclination towards dissent—over the first century and a half of the Reformation, a fact often overshadowed by the secessions of the eighteenth century and the Disruption of 1843. Despite intense debates over ecclesiastical governance, two principles set out from the beginning of Scotland’s Reformation shaped the nation’s Protestant experience: a widespread belief in a covenanted obligation for national Protestant reform and an emphasis on the rights of the congregation. These principles led to sometimes competing ideals of national uniformity and at the same time a resistance to centralized authoritarian ecclesiastical governance. These impulses are what created the milieu in which the distinctiveness of Scottish Protestantism developed prior to the intervention of the Westminster parliament in 1712.

Presbyterians in the Restoration

This chapter examines the ways in which Presbyterian identity was reluctantly refashioned in the late seventeenth century. It discusses the failure of the Presbyterian political and religious programmes at the Restoration, and emphasizes the implications of these failures for the future of Presbyterianism. It shows how living under the penal code meant that Presbyterians adopted practices that could evolve into a structure independent of the national Church, at the same time as demonstrating that hopes for comprehension continued throughout the period. It traces the ultimate reasons for the failure of comprehension, and the processes by which a distinct Presbyterian identity emerged. It concludes by examining some of the ways in which the history of Restoration Presbyterianism might not simply be a history of failure, and suggests its broader impact on English politics and religion.

Introduction

This chapter begins with a brief sketch of the history of Protestant Dissent in post-Reformation England. It then introduces the influential tradition of denominational historiography, before examining how this ‘vertical’ approach to Dissenting history has been critiqued by historians who take a ‘horizontal’ approach—focusing on the politics of religion in a specific era or moment. Whiggish, teleological, and partisan histories of Anglicanism and Dissent have been displaced by histories that stress political contingency and the fluidity of post-Reformation religious identities. The chapter argues that historians should not overreact to the excesses of denominational historiography; they should recognize that the Stuart era did witness the formation of Dissenting denominations, as religious communities went to great lengths to sharpen the boundaries of group identity. It concludes by surveying recent trends in the historiography, including work on scholarly editions, dissenting women, the literature of dissent, lay experience, theology, exile, and migration.