In the charged atmosphere of religious xenophobia in England in the 1680s it was an unusual person who could survey the state of Christendom and the zealotry of his fellow citizens with a detached eye. Such a one was Sir Peter Pett, ‘a virtuoso, and a great scholar, and fellow of the Royal Society’. His vast and inchoate book, The Happy Future State of England (1688), is eirenic, Erastian, and Hobbesian in outlook. It is also an exercise in the fledgling science of ‘political arithmetic’. Panoplied with scientific reasoning, it predicted the imminence of a secular age in which the knot of politics and religion would be untied. This chapter will first sketch the background to Pett's book, then examine his account of the state of Catholicism and Dissent, and lastly appraise his claim that ‘a science of politics’ could provide a solvent of religious persecution.

The treatise and the trimmers

England's last severe religious persecution spanned the years 1678 to 1686. It began with the Popish Plot frenzy and ended when James II suspended prosecutions against all religious minorities. In its first phase Catholics were the victims. Only 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, exceeded 1679 in the number of English Catholics martyred for their religion, people charged with treasonable conspiracy or with the capital offence of being Romish priests. But when the Whigs exploited the Plot in order to try to exclude James from the succession, the tide turned and the Protestant Dissenters, almost all of them Whigs, suffered in the Tory revenge. The Whigs had overplayed their hand, for Protestants loyal to the king's party began to fear that they, too, would be destroyed by trumped-up charges of ‘popery’, and that the Whigs were using anti-popery as a cloak to engineer a new Puritan revolution. Soon after the parliamentary defeat of the Whigs in 1681, prosecutions under the ‘Clarendon Code’ – the Restoration laws for religious uniformity which aimed to suppress the Puritan sects – reached a peak. Livelihoods were destroyed by fines and sequestration; prominent ministers were put on trial for sedition, while others fled abroad; and militias were used to destroy chapels. About one hundred Quakers died in jail: being sent to a Restoration jail often amounted to a death sentence.