Making Toleration

Scott Sowerby

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674075931
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte

In the reign of James II, minority groups from across the religious spectrum, led by the Quaker William Penn, rallied together under the Catholic King James in an effort to bring religious toleration to England. Known as repealers, these reformers aimed to convince Parliament to repeal laws that penalized worshippers who failed to conform to the doctrines of the Church of England. Although the movement was destroyed by the Glorious Revolution, it profoundly influenced the post-revolutionary settlement, helping to develop the ideals of tolerance that would define the European Enlightenment.Based on a rich array of newly discovered archival sources, Scott Sowerby's groundbreaking history rescues the repealers from undeserved obscurity, telling the forgotten story of men and women who stood up for their beliefs at a formative moment in British history. By restoring the repealer movement to its rightful prominence, Making Toleration also overturns traditional interpretations of King James II's reign and the origins of the Glorious Revolution. Though often depicted as a despot who sought to impose his own Catholic faith on a Protestant people, James is revealed as a man ahead of his time, a king who pressed for religious toleration at the expense of his throne. The Glorious Revolution, Sowerby finds, was not primarily a crisis provoked by political repression. It was, in fact, a conservative counter-revolution against the movement for enlightened reform that James himself encouraged and sustained.

1

Forming a Movement

James and the Repealers

King James II has not generally been seen as a populist. In most histories of his reign, he is depicted either as defying English opinion or as being oblivious to it. Historians have often suggested that James failed to understand that the English government was weak and that it depended on the support of local elites. As a consequence he foolishly thought he could rule in a top-down fashion. The king’s high-handedness, according to this argument, alienated the English nation, especially the gentry. James’s policies never had much chance of success, in this view, because he failed to appreciate the true underpinnings of his power. England was effectively a monarchical republic, whether the king liked it or not, and he could not survive without the support of the county elites who staffed local government.¹

A different account of the king’s fall better fits the known facts. In this account, James did not misunderstand the nature of English governance, and he did not seek to impose an absolutist system of authoritarian government in England.² Rather, he recognized that English government was weak and that it depended on the consent of local agents. As a result, he sponsored a popular movement to provide him with the extensive network of volunteers he needed to enact social and political change. In appealing to the public for support, James provided occasions for public resistance, thereby enabling the formation of a powerful countermovement to his policies. A foreign invasion then provided a focal point around which that countermovement could rally, becoming the occasion for a widespread rebellion. The victors in that rebellion inscribed in the historical record the view that they had successfully faced down a despot.

This is not to deny that James deployed at times the coercive and bureaucratic tools that he had at his disposal. He would have been foolish not to do so. But the tools at his disposal were limited, and he did not rely exclusively on them. He knew that it was not enough for an English monarch to command assent to innovations without also inspiring support. He was aware that he needed to engage local agents who would join his side voluntarily. At times he made considerable efforts to reach out to the English public. He may have done so because he surrounded himself with men who had experience in political organizing, such as the Quaker William Penn, his close friend and ally, and Sir William Williams, his solicitor general and the former speaker of the House of Commons. Together, the king and his allies sought to rally a popular movement for religious toleration. The formation of this movement began when James made it clear, in the spring of 1687, that he was throwing the resources of the state behind a broad-based campaign for toleration. The movement that subsequently emerged was a curious mixture of top-down state sponsorship and bottom-up popular organizing.

The sophistication of James II’s campaign for religious toleration suggests the depth of his engagement with the public sphere. Yet the king’s printed statements have often been dismissed as ham-handed or duplicitous. Many historians have treated with skepticism the king’s Declaration for Liberty of Conscience of April 1687, in which he proclaimed his belief in liberty of conscience and suspended the execution of the laws and Test Acts that penalized religious nonconformity. Almost as soon as James issued his Declaration, contemporaries questioned his sincerity in issuing it, and historians have expressed similar doubts.

Many of the king’s contemporaries contended that James was engaged in a duplicitous design to divide and conquer his enemies by detaching the Protestant dissenters from the Anglicans and using their support to destroy the Church of England, after which the dissenters themselves would be destroyed. As the marquess of Halifax memorably put it in his warning to the dissenters, “You are therefore to be hugged now, only that you may be the better squeezed at another time.”³ Historians have alleged that James’s priority was to obtain toleration only for his fellow Catholics, which is why he spent the first year of his reign seeking the support of Anglicans for the toleration of Catholics. According to this argument, once the king saw that the Anglicans would not support his policy, he switched his appeals to the Protestant nonconformists and became willing to offer them toleration in an effort to secure their support for Catholic toleration.⁴

James’s defenders, both in his own time and subsequently, noted that he had proclaimed his opposition to religious persecution long before his accession, and thus his Declaration could be said to have stemmed from long-held principle. James told Gilbert Burnet in 1673 that he was “against all violent methods, and all persecution for conscience sake.” In the same year, he met William Penn, who asked him to help to secure the release from prison of the Quaker leader George Fox. James agreed to help, telling Penn that he was “against all Persecution for the sake of Religion.”⁵ Despite this expansive rhetoric, James’s actions as duke of York suggest that he did not yet conceive of liberty of conscience as an indefeasible natural right. He often treated it as a grant that could be given to those who were deemed worthy and withheld from those deemed unworthy. When asked to obtain royal pardons for nonconformists, he frequently agreed to help particular individuals. But he was reluctant to obtain pardons for wider groups. He agreed to help the Scottish Quaker Robert Barclay secure the release of his father from prison in 1677, but he refused to write a letter to free all of the Quakers imprisoned in Aberdeen at the time.⁶

After James’s accession to the throne, he continued to treat toleration as a royal grant to be extended only to those found worthy of it. During Monmouth’s Rebellion in 1685, when many Quakers were imprisoned on suspicion of aiding the rebels, he wrote a letter on behalf of Robert Barclay, indicating that he considered the Scotsman to be exceptional among Quakers for his loyalty: “I have not great re[a]son to be well satisfyd with the Quakers in generall, yet I look on this bearer, Robert Barkley, to be well affected to me.”⁷ Certain favored nonconformists would be granted toleration, but only if their loyalty had been tested and they had been found deserving. The link between toleration and good behavior was made explicit in the king’s grant of protection to the Jews of London in November 1685. He ordered that these men and women, who were being harassed by informers, should not be prosecuted on account of their religion, “but [may] quietly enjoy the free Exercize of their Religion, whilst they behave themselves dutifully and obediently towards his Government.”⁸ The grant of liberty of conscience was made conditional on good behavior and was depicted as a gift, not as a right.

The first year of James’s reign proved to be a bitter disappointment for the Quakers and other nonconformist friends of the new king. The king had floated the idea of a general toleration, or at least a general pardon, to coincide with his coronation, but he withdrew these proposals after opposition from some of his councillors.⁹ Yet even as Quakers and Baptists languished in jail, James took steps, both in England and in Scotland, to free Catholics from their legal disabilities right from the outset of his reign.¹⁰ Some contemporary evidence indicates that the king told the archbishop of Canterbury at the time of his accession that he would never grant toleration to Protestant nonconformists. The king was especially suspicious of the loyalties of nonconformists in the wake of Monmouth’s Rebellion in the summer of 1685, which had attracted the support of some of the English dissenters. Many English nonconformists, including about 1,400 Quakers, remained in prison during the first year of James’s reign.¹¹ James later claimed that he had waited to grant toleration to English nonconformists because of the importunities of some of his advisors who belonged to the Church of England.¹² But surely some of his hesitation stemmed from his own sense that nonconformists were politically suspect. The king’s reluctance to liberate potentially rebellious nonconformists was even more evident in Scotland, where he never offered a complete toleration to the Presbyterian field conventiclers at any point in his reign, instead seeing their activities as a threat to his rule.

The nonconformists imprisoned in England were eventually freed about a year after the king’s accession by the general pardon of March 1686. In the same month, James ordered that all prosecutions of Quakers for recusancy, or absence from Church of England services, should cease.¹³ The king’s general pardon erased all previous prosecutions for religious nonconformity. But it did not protect nonconformists from being penalized again in the future, with the exception of the Quakers, whom the king specifically shielded from future prosecution. A further policy launched in June 1686 helped to correct this flaw. Certain nonconformists who were deemed to be loyal were encouraged to take out a royal patent dispensing them from having to comply with any of the laws against nonconformity. If cited before a court, they could produce their patent and plead immunity under the royal dispensing power. The issuing of these patents was supervised by the Catholic lawyer Robert Brent, who later became a key player in the king’s regulation of the parliamentary boroughs. Many Baptists, in particular, took out patents.¹⁴ This policy endured until the king proclaimed his Declaration for Liberty of Conscience in April of the following year, which suspended entirely the execution of laws against nonconformity. The king made this bold move even though it was unclear whether the high court ruling in Godden v. Hales, which had affirmed the king’s more limited power to dispense from the laws in individual cases, could legitimately be stretched to justify a royal suspending power.¹⁵

The king’s ambivalent attitude toward Protestant nonconformity in the early years of his reign can also be detected in his response to Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in October 1685. The French king’s actions caused an uproar among Protestants in England. James was unhappy with the methods taken by Louis, but he was also worried about the political principles of the Huguenots. He told Sir William Trumbull on 30 October 1685 that “though he did not like the Huguenots (for he thought they were of Anti-Monarchicall Principles) yet he thought the Persecution of them was Unchristian, and not to be equalled in any Historie since [the birth of] Christianity: That they might be no good men, Yet might be us[e]d worse than they deserv[e]d, and it was a proceeding he could not approve of.”¹⁶ The king’s ambivalence resulted in a curious set of actions. He ordered the public burning of copies of Jean Claude’s Account of the Persecutions and Oppressions of the Protestants of France, though he told the French ambassador that he did this because the work had insulted the French king, and kings, in his view, should stick up for each other.¹⁷ At the same time, he permitted the French Protestants to migrate to England to escape persecution, and he issued a brief for moneys to be collected to assist them. Yet the brief included an uncharitable clause requiring any Huguenot who wished to receive assistance to conform to the liturgy of the Church of England. Some Huguenots were willing to do this, but others were not. The addition of this clause can perhaps be explained by the king’s suspicion that the Huguenots, like other nonconformists, might prove disloyal.¹⁸

A sympathetic account of James’s evolving position would say that he had changed his ideas on religious toleration over time, as he came to see liberty of conscience less as a royal grant and more as a natural right. Like other granters of liberty before him, James may have found that liberties had an expansive power: once he developed a rationale for the granting of liberty to some, he saw that the rationale could be extended to others as well. A less sympathetic account would say that James had altered his position for political convenience. Alternatively, James could have been engaging in motivated reasoning, as he came to believe sincerely in the position that was most helpful to his political interests.

Yet even if the king was being insincere, and it is debatable whether he was or not, the movement for toleration that he created had its own impetus and influence. The king’s inner thoughts are important, but so too are the ways in which his pronouncements were interpreted, acted upon, and reacted to. While many people at the time thought the king was being insincere in advocating toleration, many others thought he was sincere, and even those who doubted the king had to reckon with his followers.

The King’s Tolerationists

Historians have described James II’s tolerationist supporters as atomized individuals responding to incentives from the king. They have emphasized the supposed avarice of these men and the inducements used by the king to promote their compliance. The men and women who participated in the king’s campaign for religious toleration have usually been described as the king’s “collaborators” and have often been portrayed in an unflattering light. The contempt was spread particularly thick by J. R. Western, who characterized the king’s whig supporters as “venal turncoats” who abandoned their principles for money. J. P. Kenyon, with a lighter touch, wrote that “none of them [were] knights in shining armour.” John Miller dismissed them as a “small and motley collection of opportunists, extremists, and men over whom he [the king] had a hold.” These men have generally been described, following a seminal article published by J. R. Jones in 1960, as James II’s “whig collaborators.”¹⁹

In this framework, each individual tolerationist was deemed to be responding to a certain set of selective incentives from the king; the cultural links between one tolerationist and another were rarely examined. This interpretation of James II’s toleration campaign relied on a reductive model of patron-client relations, where anyone who received money or favors from a higher authority was considered to be devoid of any authentic ideological commitments to the cause he or she was espousing. Thus the king’s allies were seen to be doing his bidding rather than following their own inclinations, and they were described as part of a top-down exercise in absolutism rather than a bottom-up exercise in popular politics. The very nomenclature of “collaboration” meant that the ideological affiliations between one collaborator and another were unlikely to be explored, since collaborators do not necessarily possess a shared ideology.

Although the king’s allies have generally been treated as isolated individuals in the historical literature, the assiduous research techniques of twentieth-century historians did mean that the fairly large number of “collaborators” eventually had to be acknowledged. This trend reached its apogee in 1983 with that exercise in prosopography par excellence, the History of Parliament, which identified dozens of “whig collaborators” during James II’s reign.²⁰ This avalanche of identifications created an opening for Mark Goldie to ask, in an important set of articles, whether the men so identified should be described as a small group of “collaborators” since there were so many of them. As an alternative, he suggested that they be described as “James II’s whigs.”²¹ W. A. Speck, foll...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note to Readers
• Introduction
• 1. Forming a Movement: James and the Repealers
• 2. Writing a New Magna Carta: The Ideology of Repeal
• 3. Fearing the Unknown: Anti-Popery and Its Limits
• 4. Taking Sides: The Three Questions Survey
• 5. Seizing Control: The Repealers in the Towns
• 6. Countering a Movement: The Seven Bishops Trial
• 7. Dividing a Nation: The Geography of Repeal
• 8. Dancing in a Ditch: Anti-Popery and the Revolution
• 9. Enacting Toleration: The Repealers and the Enlightenment
• Appendix: A List of Repealer Publications
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Manuscripts Consulted
• Acknowledgments
• Index