Anticlericalism has long been integral to our idea of the Enlightenment. This used to encourage an heroic mythology of secularisation, in which reason did battle with religion, free-thought with bigotry. Few historians today would endorse so Manichaean a picture, for European thought in the eighteenth century is now seen to have been characterised by an ameliorated Christianity rather than by a militant crusade to overthrow it. Yet even so, the attack on priestcraft, on clerical dogmatism and religious intolerance, remains stubbornly central to the story of Europe's passage from Reformation zeal to Enlightenment eirenicism. That even devout Catholics thought it important to clip the wings of Jesuits is a propensity distinctive of the age of Enlightenment.

The historical prominence of anticlericalism renders England's position puzzling. For it is commonly supposed that, in the words of a Times leader in 1984, England ‘has had no intellectually sanctioned tradition of anticlericalism since the Reformation’ – and a fortiori no Enlightenment. John Pocock, deploying one of his more colourful metaphors, has written that ‘to try to articulate the phrase “the English Enlightenment” is to encounter inhibition; an ox sits upon the tongue’. The English, by disposing of Laudian and Calvinist fanaticism in the Civil War, and popery and tyranny in the Glorious Revolution, were able to breathe easily the air of intellectual liberty. Consequently there was ‘simply no infame to be crushed’ and the voices of the intelligentsia lacked the antagonism which Continental clergies provoked.