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Religious Toleration and its Enemies: The Independent Divines and the Issue of Toleration during the English Civil War*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

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“Patterns sanctified by great historiographic traditions,” wrote J. H. Hexter, “tend to become fixed. Frequently these patterns are neither logical nor coherent, but the sanction of use and wont behind them is so powerful that researchers tend to force new materials into the time-honored model.” This contention is nowhere more manifest than in the historiography of the Puritan Revolution, where studies of religious developments and struggles during the English Civil War indeed reveal a “time honored model” and tend to convey an almost univocal argument concerning the Independents and the rise of the idea of religious toleration. “As early as 1643,” wrote one expert on the issue of toleration, “when the English Parliament was obliged to ally with the Scots in the Solemn League and Covenant … the issue of toleration came to the fore.” Consequently, because “the Presbyterian Scots wished to impose their Calvinist order on England, against the opposition on the parliamentary side of a core of Independents led by Oliver Cromwell and Sir Henry Vane the Younger,” the Independents “became the leading opponents of Presbyterianism and supporters of a general toleration.”

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Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1989

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Footnotes

*

This study was supported in part by an American Philosophical Society Research Grant, and an American Studies Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. An earlier version of this essay was presented to Professor J. G. A. Pocock's Seminar on “English Historical Thought,” The Johns Hopkins University, 1980. I am grateful to Professors Pocock, John R. Pankratz, and to anonymous readers for Albion, for their valuable comments and insights in preparing this essay for publication.

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