Toleration Implies disapproval or disagreement coupled with an unwillingness to take action against those who are viewed with disfavour in the interest of some moral or political principle. It is an active concept, not to be confused with indifference, apathy or passive acquiescence. In this paper I reexamine, in the light of this strong definition of toleration, the contrast commonly drawn for the world of classical antiquity between a tolerant paganism and an intolerant Christianity. Toleration implies a degree of acceptance as well as a degree of disapproval. In evaluating the attitudes of pagans to other pagans in antiquity we must satisfy ourselves, first, that ancient polytheistic systems were as open and inclusive as is often assumed, and second, that where mutual acceptance might be said to have prevailed, this was not merely casual acceptance, but entailed compromise between competing gods and rituals. Again where religions can be seen to have been seriously at variance with each other, as were the sundry pagan cults with Judaism and Christianity, where therefore toleration was at least in principle a possible option, we must ask how far pagan authorities and (in so far as this can be discerned) ordinary pagans were inclined to choose that option.

The very question ‘to flee or not to flee?’ strikes the historian of the early church as an unusual question. Forneither the martyrologies nor the histories of that persecuted body seem to entertain such. The death of Polycarp at Smyrnaseems to rule out the possibility of flight for subsequent confessors of Christ; and the events of Maximian’s reign (AD 306–13) confirm that identity with Christ, even in death, was the true vocation of the faithful. Eusebius, an eye witness of some of the events of that reign, records examples of weakness and apostasy, but only to set off what was the real character of the Christian church at the time, namely constancy and defiance in the face of persecution. Yet not only does he allude to that constancy, but he records it:

In general modern writers on popular heresy in the high middle ages have shared the opinion of contemporary observers that the capacity of dissident preachers to attract a popular following, stimulate sentiments of intense devotion and loyalty, and canalise resentment of clerical exaction and abuse, constituted a significant threat to the authority of the Church. Hence, more or less explicitly, the extension of the theory and practice of coercion in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has been seen as a defensive reaction designed (with the emphasis according to the preference of the historian) to protect clerical privilege and spiritual authority. There are, however, distinguished exceptions. In one of the few passages in his writings where religious persecution is discussed, Southern accounts for it thus:

Between December 1095 and July 1096 there took place the first pogrom in western European History, a series of events so distressing to the Jewish people that rumours of them reached the Near East in advance of the First Crusade, inspiring the communities there with messianic fervour, while dirges in honour of the martyrs are recited in the synagogues to this day. The first outbreaks seem to have occurred in France soon after the preaching of the crusade and the first evidence of them is a letter written by the French communities to their Rhineland counterparts, warning them of the impending threat. It is possible that persecution was widespread in France, even though the details of it are lost, apart from a reference to an anti-Jewish riot which broke out among men gathering to take the cross in Rouen. Much more evidence is available about events in the Rhineland. On 3 May 1096 the storm broke over the community at Speyer, where a crusading army of Rhinelanders and Swabians under Count Emich of Leiningen had gathered.

Medieval churchmen who became involved in ecclesiastical disputes or in disputes with secular authority, had access to a rich ‘language’ of phrase and imagery with which to strengthen their case. This ‘language’, drawing on Scriptural sources and on standard interpretations of Scripture, could be used to depict almost any dispute as a struggle between good and evil, as the persecution of pious men by the impious, as the renewed persecution of the Church Universal, as a latterday trial and passion of Christ, or as an assault on church liberties.

The anachronistic ascription of membership of the Moslem faith to the persecutors of Christians in the period before the Peace of the Church appears in Anglo-Norman hagiography in the late twelfth century, or early thirteenth, and in English lives later in the thirteenth century. It may be, at least in part, the result of the corruption in meaning of a derivative of the word Mahomet, found in Anglo-Norman as mahumez in the early twelfth century and in English by the end of the same century in the form of maumez, idols. The confusion in identification was made possible by the attribution of the rôle of the Roman officials to the Moslems—both groups martyred Christians in large numbers—and by an association of practices and qualities based on the opposition, real or alleged, of both Romans and Moslems to the Christian faith.

In the course of his lengthy arguments in the Defensor Pacis against the right of the priesthood to exercise coercive jurisdiction over men in this life, Marsiglio of Padua deals with the problem of the persecution of heresy, pausing in one place to remark:

Clement VI was a pope who appeared to face both ways. This impression is confirmed by the fact that some historians have hailed him as a humanist pope, if not the first humanist pope, whereas his conception of the Christian society and of papal sovereignty followed thoroughly traditional and authoritarian lines. A glance at his best known political sermon, that preached in 1346 to approve the future emperor Charles IV as king of the Romans, would suffice to show this. His attitude to infidels and Jews also appears paradoxical, for he persecuted the one and tolerated the other, and this despite the threat presented by both to the purity of the Faith. This is not to suggest that Clement was the only pope to exhibit this dichotomy, for it was a common enough one: it was just that his views on infidels and Jews were more extreme than those of others, and the contrast therefore more pointed.

Reginald Pecock, bishop of St. Asaph and subsequently of Chichester, has surely been one of the most misrepresented of men. Condemned in his later years as a heretic, he was grossly misunderstood by that garrulous prophet of doom, Thomas Gascoigne, who described him as this ‘Pacock’ who loosed arrows at the sun, one of which by the just judgment of God fell upon his own head. John Foxe allotted him a place as a protestant confessor and Father Robert Parsons wished the martyrologist joy of one who had [allegedly] denied three articles of the Creed and ‘perjuriously abjured’ against his conscience.

The example of co-existence between Christians, Jews and Muslims in medieval Spain should, in theory, be an inspiration to those who hope for a successful multi-faith society today. On the other hand, the expulsion in 1492 of Jews who refused baptism, and of Muslims who adopted a similar attitude, from Castile in 1502 and Aragon in 1610, implies that the Spanish example should rather be seen as a warning of the consequences of failure. The question of interfaith relations will be considered here mainly from the point of view of Christians who attempted to cope with the proximity of the other two ‘religions of the book’. It will, however, be possible to look at the feasibility of the long-term existence of Jewish and Muslim communities in Spain, and at the problems faced by converts from these two faiths to Christianity.

Persecution is self-explanatory, but toleration, when one starts to consider it, blurs like the recollection of a dream. To what, in the first place, does toleration refer: to deviant opinions, deviant practices, or to potentially subversive organisations? Genuine toleration has probably always been very rare—and probably still is. In the sense of complete religious liberty, it was not generally accepted until varying dates in the nineteenth century. Then it had more to do with materialism and indifference than with any generous spirit of tolerance. If, in the sixteenth century, toleration was not entirely unknown—both in theory and in practice—it must be attributed to something more compelling than ‘a disposition to be patient with the opinions of others’—in the OED’s rather engaging definition. For one thing, toleration was not then regarded as a particularly desirable virtue, and therefore not widely entertained as an ideal. The ideal was rather that God, in his mercy and wisdom, should reunite the Church, or churches. This was expressed, for example, in the preamble to the edict of Nantes in 1598, though one could discount it as propaganda.

The century of the Reformation, in England as elsewhere, sharpened all conflicts and augmented persecution. As the unity of Christendom broke up, the rival parties acquired that sort of confidence in their own righteousness that encourages men to put one another to death for conscience sake; an era of moderation and tolerance gave way to one of ever more savage repression. To the openminded willingness which characterized the humanism of Erasmus and More as well as the Rome of Leo X there succeeded the bigotry typical of Carafa, Calvin, Knox and the English puritans; only the gradual evaporation of such passions, produced by each side’s inability to triumph totally, produced a weariness with religious strife which made the return of mutual sufferance possible. That, at least, is the received story. Historians of toleration, as for instance Jordan and Lecler, firmly described the history of persecution in this way. Jordan identified six developments which led to its decline in sixteenth-century England: a growing political strength among dissident sects, the impossibility of preventing splintering and preserving uniformity, the needs of trade which overrode religious hostility, experience of travel, the failure to suppress dissident publications, and finally a growing scepticism which denied the claims to exclusive truth advanced by this or that faction. In other words, only two things moved men, once they had fallen away from the generosity of the pre-Reformation era, to substitute an uneasy toleration for a vigorous persecution: the external pressures of experience and the decline of religious fervour. By implication, men of power called for repression and only those who could not hope to win favoured toleration, until general exhaustion set in. It is a convincing enough picture, and much evidence no doubt supports it. But it is a picture—a general and rather schematic panorama which makes little allowance for the real opinions of individuals. On this occasion I should like to test it by looking at the attitudes of two highly articulate sixteenth-century Englishmen—Thomas More, humanist and loyal son of the universal Church, and John Foxe, humanist and faithful protestant. Both, we know, were men of sensitivity and sense. How did they stand to the problem of persecution?

‘Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature’ (Mark 16: 15). Modern historians find it fashionable to categorise Missions as examples of Cultural Conflict. Members of the ethnohistorical school—concerned especially with the meeting and blending of Indian and European ways of life—present Conversion as a species of Persecution: an infringement of Indian human rights, an exercise in ethnocentrism or exploitative capitalism—part of the Cant of Conquest. Conversion—the colonialisation of a native belief system—means ‘acculturation’, ‘deculturation’, or tragic ‘despiritualisation’. Accounts of the relation between Indians and English colonists in colonial North America take a hint from the complaint of Roger Williams of Rhode Island, writing in 1654 to the authorities of Massachusetts about the destructive wars, cruel and unnecessary, against the tribes of New England. Christianity means conquest, harsh and brutal. Some of this emphasis on atrocities may spring from historians’ indignation at Christian activities apparently so alien to the Sermon on the Mount.

Toleration is a Victorian subject, a monument to Victorian liberalism. ‘To us who have been educated in the nineteenth century’, proclaimed F. A. Inderwick in his book on the Interregnum, ‘any declaration inconsistent with religious toleration would be abhorrent and inadmissible’. His sentiment would not have seemed controversial to a generation raised on such best-selling works as Buckle’s History of Civilisation in England and Lecky’s History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism. It may be that the Victorians, enquiring into the origins of the toleration which they had achieved, were prone to congratulate the past on becoming more like the present. Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when interest in the subject was perhaps at its peak, we can also detect, in the statements on toleration of a Creighton or a Figgis, a fear that the present might become more like the past: that materialism and religious indifference might destroy the moral foundations of toleration, and foster a new barbarism which would persecute Christians afresh.

The denominational writers on late Stuart dissent used to put their emphasis upon the heroism and sufferings of forbears in the faith and on cherished works of spiritual autobiography produced under restraint such as John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding and William Penn’s No Cross, No Crown.’ The most important, and to my mind the most interesting, questions about persecution in this period have therefore gone unasked and unanswered. Aware of the most dramatic cases of malice and brutality, we have too readily accepted that the decades between the Restoration and the Toleration Act can be represented as the period of the ‘Great Persecution’. But how far did the acts which are conventionally summarised as the Clarendon Code represent the settled mind of the Anglican gentry, whose supremacy was confirmed by the political events of 1660 and 1670? How far were these acts actually enforced? How easy were they to enforce? These are large questions, much too large for a short communication. What I shall attempt here is an analysis of the enforcement of two statutes, the Conventicle Acts of 1664 and 1670, in a limited number of counties over a confined period. By 1679 popery, the alternative bogey to dissent, was at the front of magisterial minds and the 1670 act was for the moment largely in abeyance. Greater glory for the Second Conventicle Act was yet to come, with the Tory reaction of 1682 to 1686, but that period is beyond the scope of this paper.

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 countrymen 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, is eirenic, Erastian and Hobbesian in outlook. It is also an exercise in the fledgling science of ‘political arithmetic’. With the panoply of scientific reasoning it predicted the imminence of a secular age in which the knot of politics and religion would be untied. This paper will first sketch the background to this book, then examine its account of the state of Catholicism and dissent, and lastly appraise its claim that ‘a science of politics’ could provide a solvent of religious persecution.

Religion was the ideological motor of politics in the first age of party. Though the distinction between the Whig and Tory positions on religious issues was often small compared to their internal divisions on other matters, religion was felt to be the only real justification for both parties. The Whigs stood for a cosmopolitan Erastianism embracing protestant dissent, the Tories for a stronger, national Church for which religious uniformity was still a worthwhile goal. The Church was inextricably caught up in these national political divisions, and its own internecine warfare between high and low church mirrored them exactly. It naturally followed from this that religious issues were the most passionately upheld by the Whigs and the Tories, and were those which had most impact on national politics. Hence the Tories put themselves out of office in 1704–5 by the zeal with which they tried to push the Occasional Conformity Bill through, even though it was certain to create a constitutional crisis which would paralyse the British war-effort against France. And the Whigs seized the opportunity to ‘roast a parson’ afforded by Henry Sacheverell’s high church ranting on the theme of ‘the Church in Danger’ by trying to impeach him. Their partial success only served to validate and refresh the ‘Church in Danger’ preaching they had hoped to silence, and they were crushed by an avalanche of outraged Toryism in the 1710 election. Since religious issues were the most keenly felt and constituted the central dynamic of the party battle, the translation of religious conflict from the nation at large to Westminster gives us a glimpse of the real strength of religion’s hold on the concept of party, and hence its influence in contemporary politics.