In late November 1670, Andrew Marvell broke dramatically with his preference for preserving his anonymity in print and in public. Constantly vigilant about being discovered as author of his many verse and prose satires, on this occasion he threw caution aside and stood up in the House of Commons to be a singularly outspoken voice in defence of two dissenting citizens of London: the haberdasher John Jekyll and linen-draper James Hayes. Both men, members of nonconformist congregations, had coordinated resistance to the prelacy of the established Church, embodied in the Conventicle Act (1670), in a crisis of order which might be described as a ‘battle for London’. One such action saw Hayes and Jekyll organise a mass demonstration to hinder the attempt by the magisterial elites of London to snatch the Presbyterian minister Thomas Watson whilst preaching at an illegal conventicle in May of that year. The pair were arrested on 28 May under warrants ‘to search for and secure dangerous and suspected persons’. They sued for habeas corpus, though refused to find securities for a bond of £5,000 binding them to good behaviour and to abstain from attending illegal conventicles. They also had the lord mayor of London Sir Samuel Sterling (or Starling) arrested for making a false arrest, and petitioned to have their case heard before the House of Commons.

Sir John Robinson, the staunchly royalist lieutenant of the Tower, and secretary of state Sir Joseph Williamson, the head of the intelligence service, were outraged at the dissenters’ stance, which had led to the threat of them being called before the Privy Council, and were determined to destroy their petition. Robinson boasted to Williamson that ‘he would attend the Council, make their petition a juggling petition, and give them a broadside’. When the case came before the Commons, Sterling claimed that Hayes had attempted to bribe him not to enforce the Conventicle Act. ‘About a fortnight before the Act against Conventicles’ was due to come into effect, he alleged, ‘Mr Hayes visited him, and told him, that it was the opinion of Counsel that it was but 100l. forfeiture on the Magistrate’ if he failed to enforce the act, and that Hayes would pay him ‘that 100l. and 200l. more, if he would forbear putting the Act in execution’. Sterling rejected the offer and expressed surprise that ‘He … should come to bribe a Magistrate’.

This volume is a tribute to Mark Adrian Goldie, from friends and former students, to mark his retirement from the Cambridge History Faculty in September 2019. It is intended to honour both his own scholarly contribution to the field and his role as a teacher and a mentor. Mark's interests have been broad and have grown broader over the course of his career. He is at once an historian of ideas, political historian and historian of religion, while some of his publications have branched into social and cultural history. Although Mark's geographical and chronological focus has been on England under the later Stuarts – the period from the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to the Hanoverian succession of 1714 – he has also written about Scotland and Ireland, continental Europe and colonial North America, and published pieces that go back to the sixteenth century or push forward into the late eighteenth. On his Cambridge University website, Mark describes his research interests broadly as ‘British intellectual, political, and religious history, c. 1650–c. 1800’, a claim vindicated not only by his own publication record but also by the wide variety of topics his graduate students have pursued. Mark has supervised thirty PhD theses to date. Limitations of space meant that we were unable to ask all Mark's former students to contribute to this volume. We endeavoured, however, to solicit contributions that would reflect the breadth of Mark's scholarly endeavours and also the various generational cohorts he has inspired. Contributors were asked to write pieces that in some way engaged with Mark's work and publications. We hope that what is offered here does justice to the man, his scholarship and his mentorship.

Given the range of Mark's interests, we puzzled over how best to write the introduction to this volume. We could highlight some of Mark's landmark articles, essays, edited volumes and books, but which ones? The four editors all have quite discrete interests and scholarly foci, albeit overlapping to some degree, and we each have our own lists of favourites – and they are long! We decided, instead, that each editor should write his own reflection, albeit with briefs to focus on particular areas so as to lend the introduction overall coverage and coherence.

In the preface to the posthumous collection of his miscellaneous works of 1709, the Godly cleric Edmund Hickeringill (1631–1708) was described as being ‘averse to ceremonies and superstition; without a tincture of atheism; he was daring in the field, and prudent in the cabinet. He was a scholar without affectation, a divine without pride, and a lawyer that never took fee.’ Cambridge educated, in May 1652 he was ordained into the Baptist Church at Hexham, North-umberland. While chaplain to Robert Lilburne's regiment, a ‘grievous apostasy’ befell him and he became a Quaker. Although described by one contemporary as a ‘desperate atheist’, from October 1662 until his death in 1708 Hickeringill was a conforming rector of the established Church of England. That his reputation amongst contemporaries was controversial is indicated by two post-humous events. Henry Compton, his diocesan bishop, was reportedly responsible for erasing and defacing his funeral monument in the parish church, removing the phrase ‘Reverendus admodum Dominus.’ Two years later, further aspersions were cast against his orthodoxy when his collected works were cited, in the state trial of Henry Sacheverell, as evidence of the scandalous profanity of the times. To some, Hickeringill was a ‘false brother’; to others he was a devout defender of piety and true religion. Despite his public conformity, the course of his clerical career saw him in almost constant dispute and conflict with ecclesiastical authority. Historiographically, Hickeringill has been described as an example of the transition from the radical puritan critique of ‘popery’ to the deistical attack upon ‘priestcraft’. Hickeringill, it seems, challenged the authority of the established religious and political order at every opportunity.

In the early summer of 1689, after much parliamentary wrangling and debate, the statute of 1 William and Mary Caput 18 ‘An Act for exempting their Majesties protestant Subjects, dissenting from the Church of England, from the penalties of certain laws’ took away many of the legal restraints against religious conscience. Commonly called the ‘Toleration Act’, the statutory reform amounted to little more than the repeal of penalties against Protestant dissidents like Quakers, Baptists and other varieties of sectarian who refused to conform to ritual, ceremonial or doctrinal elements within the Anglican constitution. The passage of the Act has very often been linked with the intellectual defence of the liberty of conscience articulated famously by John Locke in his first, and subsequent, letters Concerning Toleration (1689). That there was a gap between Locke's radical defence of the rights of Christian conscience, and the mere taking away of certain penalties against religious worship, was clear to the man himself. As he wrote, in June 1689, to Phillip van Limborch in the Low Countries,