What, Paul Ricoeur asks in his great trilogy, Time and Narrative, is the basis for the permanence of the proper name that designates an individual or a group? The response to this question, he argues, is condemned to an antinomy with no solution. Either the subject has to possess some fundamental sameness through time, despite apparent change; or, and here he cites Hume and Nietzsche, there is no such permanence: there is in reality no identical subject moving through time that the proper name designates. Ricoeur posits a different concept of identity: not as the same (idem) but as self-same (soi-meme or ipse). “The difference between idem and ipse is nothing more than the difference between a substantial or formal identity and a narrative identity.”Footnote 1

In other words, to answer the question “Who?” is to tell the story of a life. The subject, Ricoeur suggests, is both author and reader of its own life. And the story of that life is continuously reconfigured. The permanence of the proper name as narrative identity, unlike the abstract identity of the same (idem), thus includes change within continuity. This notion of narrative identity is not applicable only to individuals but also to groups, which in similar ways constitute their identity by taking up narratives that become, for them, their real history. The story of a group is constituted in time by a series of modifications to these narratives that both preserve and adjust that group's narrative identity. In other words, their narrated past changes in order to stay the same. Ricoeur points to biblical Israel as such a narrative community: “It was in telling these narratives taken to be testimony about the founding events of its history that biblical Israel became the historical community that bears this name. The relation is circular—the historical community called the Jewish people has drawn its identity from the reception of those texts that it had produced.”Footnote 2 This illuminates, I think, some of the ways in which religious dissent in eighteenth-century England represented itself to itself as a historical community.

Hanoverian Dissent was not a coherent and autonomous entity, moving through time like an object through space. Dissenting identity, like any group identity, was always insecure, haunted by its own fragility, threatened by historical and generational change, endlessly remaking boundaries and reaffirming continuities. The vast majority of its scattered and temporary congregations were formed in the 1660s and 1670s in the brutal aftermath of the Stuart restoration. Dissent remained in the early eighteenth century a complex and disconnected set of groups and congregations with histories as diverse as their theological tenets—Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, Quakers, as well as very many congregations who rejected a denominational title of any kind. It was the policies of Charles II's government in the 1660s that initiated, out of a confusing collection of religious groups, some common identity—nonconformist or Dissenter. It was, of course, a negative identity. A Dissenter, by his or her refusal to conform to the church of England under the rigorous terms of the Act of Uniformity, was, by definition, an enemy of church and state. This was a political device, Rapin the early eighteenth-century historian argued, whereby the large and powerful body of Presbyterians could be excluded from the Restoration state and penalized by associating them with smaller, plebian, and sometimes disorderly sects. “This name of nonconformists, is therefore to be considered as a very ambiguous term, which indeed signifies men who conform not to the church of England, but not in the sense which was given it, namely of a body of men inseparably united, composed of all the dissenters, and acting with the same views, and for the same interest.”Footnote 3

The last surviving ejected minister, Nathan Denton, died in 1720. By the 1720s and 1730s the first generation of Dissenters were gone, as were the Stuarts and the regime that created them as a persecuted minority. Their situation had changed and all the political landmarks had been rearranged. What then was the justification for persisting in Dissent from the established church, with all the disadvantages that persistence incurred? For some there was no longer any justification. Edmund Calamy counted some seventeen ministers who confirmed to the church in the 1720s, among them Thomas Secker, a future archbishop of Canterbury. “They were, generally, persons of sobriety and unblemished character,” he admitted.Footnote 4 There was also a steady leakage of prominent Dissenting families into the establishment. Calamy himself was skeptical about the extent of any overall decline in Dissenting numbers: “whatsover decrease may have appeared in some places, there were sensible advances in others.”Footnote 5 But by the end of the 1720s concern about the decline of Dissent generated anxious public debate.

As a number of important recent studies have shown, by the 1730s the church of England had emerged from a series of crises as a powerful and hegemonic institution, both locally and nationally.Footnote 6 Reaffirmation of the continuing legitimacy of an incipient Dissenting tradition in the face of a resurgent church was thus urgent. To be a Dissenter in eighteenth-century England was to challenge the legitimacy of the current regime within both church and state. It was, then, an active and oppositional commitment—one in which remembering, renewing, and reinforcing an identity with the actions and principles of their forebears played a significant part. The future of Dissent, in other words, required a continuing commitment to the past and the production of meaningful connections with Dissenters of previous generations stretching back beyond living memory. Whether Presbyterian city merchant, Independent shopkeeper, or Baptist village blacksmith, their common status as the heirs of the persecuted victims of the Stuarts, and their High Church Tory allies, provided not merely a negative or passive common identity but an active and politically resistant one. Dissent was, in other words, an identity rooted in a narrative history. One of the ways of exploring this narrative identity is precisely through the Dissenters’ construction and reconstruction of their own history—and memory—in eighteenth-century England. Here I want to focus on the writing of the two most important Dissenting historians of this period: Edmund Calamy and Daniel Neal.Footnote 7

The first attempt to begin to recover Dissenting historical experience—primarily of the great ejection of 1662 and the subsequent persecutions of the Restoration period—was Edward Calamy's An Abridgment of Mr. Baxter's History of His Life and Times. With an ACCOUNT of Many Others of These Worthy Ministers Who Were Ejected after the Restauration of King CHARLES the Second, published in 1702. A second, much expanded, two-volume edition, in which the entire second volume was devoted to detailing the ejected ministers, was published in 1713.Footnote 8 And in 1727 Calamy published, in two substantial volumes, A Continuation of the Account of the Ministers, Lecturers, Masters and Fellows of Colleges and Schoolmasters, Who Were Ejected and Silenced after the Restoration in 1660. Together these volumes constituted a major historical resource for Dissenters and a controversial intervention in political debates about the nature of the Restoration regime, the character of the Glorious Revolution, and the relations between church and state in England in the recent past and in the present.

A Dissenting minister in London, Calamy was the son and grandson of ejected ministers. His grandfather, Dr. Edmund Calamy (1600–1666), had been a prominent Puritan divine, a leading figure in the Westminster Assembly, and one of the authors of Smectymnuus. A member of the Savoy conference of 1661 and briefly a chaplain in the court of Charles II, he refused a bishopric, was ejected from his living of St. Mary’s, Aldermanbury, in 1662, and was briefly imprisoned in 1663. His son Edmund (1635?–85) was ejected from his Essex living in 1662 and was subsequently a Dissenting preacher in London until his death. Born in 1671, Edmund Calamy, the third, experienced as a child the oppressive environment of the 1670s and 1680s. He was frequently sent to Newgate Prison with small presents of money for imprisoned Dissenting ministers. His own father escaped imprisonment, but he had several warrants out against him and, Calamy recalled, “was forced to disguise himself, and skulk in private holes and corners, and frequently change his lodgings.”Footnote 9 On two occasions the young Calamy was present at private meetings for worship that were violently disrupted by magistrates with constables and soldiers—“in both places they were fierce and noisy, and made great havoc.”Footnote 10

As assistant minister to Matthew Sylvester (1636?–1708), who was also the literary executor of Richard Baxter, Calamy became involved in editing the great man's autobiography. This was the beginning of his career as a historian of the Dissenters. As he later recalled in his own autobiography, Sylvester was “chary of it in the last degree, and not very forward to let it be seen.”Footnote 11 Though Calamy himself, of course, looked up to Baxter as the authoritative leader of the Presbyterians, he had no such inhibitions and recognized the value of the autobiography. He pressured an anxious Sylvester and worked through the text with him, suggesting various cuts and amendments. In 1696 it was published as a large folio volume of over 800 pages: Reliquiae Baxterianae; or, Mr. Richard Baxter's Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of His Life and Times, Faithfully Published from His Own Original Manuscripts by Matthew Sylvester. Calamy drew up a detailed summary of the contents and an index.

Baxter's writings, published and unpublished, were an ideal place to begin the work of historical retrieval for Dissenters at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Not only was he one of the central figures in the whole history of Presbyterianism from the 1640s, he had also kept a detailed record of many significant events and discussions of the time. His so-called autobiography was thus a personal testimony of the history of the period. He had done this because he was aware of the eyes of posterity on him and on the cause he represented. Thus, for instance, Baxter justified his persistence in seeking a peaceful accommodation with churchmen after the Restoration in these terms: “I looked to the end of all these actions, and the chief things that moved me next the pleasing of God and Conscience, is that when we are silenced and persecuted, and the history of these things shall be delivered to posterity, it will be a just blot upon us if we suffer as refusing to sue for peace, and it will be our just vindication when it shall appear, that we humbly petitioned for it and earnestly pursued after peace.”Footnote 12 Calamy took on the responsibility of delivering “the history of these things” to posterity, and in 1702 his more succinct and readable version was published as a single volume: An Abridgment of Mr. Baxter's History of His Life and Times. With an Account of Many Others of Those Worthy Ministers Who Were Ejected, after the Restauration of King Charles the Second.

This volume was in fact much more than an abridgment. Calamy made extensive cuts and rewrote considerable sections. He also changed it from a first- to a third-person narrative. Baxter's own narrative had stopped at the beginning of 1685. Calamy continued it up to the time of Baxter's death six years later, including the first full account of his notorious trial before Judge Jeffreys. This was an emblematic moment in the confrontation of Dissent and the regime of James II. On the one side there was the foul-mouthed and drunken Judge Jeffreys, loudly infringing every code of English law. On the other side was the aged Richard Baxter, dragged from his sickbed for publishing a scandalous and seditious book called A Paraphrase on the New Testament and behaving with quiet dignity. “Nothing more honourable than when the Rev. Baxter stood at bay, berogued, abused, despised,” Archbishop Tillotson later enthused; “never more great than then.”Footnote 13 For generations of dissenters and Whigs this trial starkly dramatized the brutal lawlessness of James II's administration, which in 1688 met it nemesis.Footnote 14

Calamy also provided much additional material on the state of Dissent to the end of William's reign. But perhaps the most important addition, signaled in the second half of the book's title, is the massive chapter 9: “A Particular Account of the Ministers, Lecturers, Fellows of Colleges, &c Who Were Silenced and Ejected by the Act for Uniformity: With the Characters of Many of Them.” This chapter, pages 184–497, more than 300 pages out of the Abridgment's total of 700, presented the beginnings of a collective biography of the founding fathers of religious Dissent. Calamy was able to produce a fairly full and detailed list of ejected ministers and to contribute biographical information on more than 500 of them, around a quarter of the total.

Chapter 9 of the Abridgment was, then, a valuable work of historical retrieval recovering a lost history of Restoration England. It also had a critical purpose. Calamy aimed to rebut charges, for instance, from Samuel Parker, James II's bishop of Oxford, that the common claim that there were as many as 2,000 ejected ministers was a vast overestimate. This, Calamy says, “cannot but blacken their Memory hereafter, if they should not be clear’d by a just representation.” Though he acknowledges that calculations based on sketchy sources can never claim absolute accuracy, his list of over 2,400 ejected ministers more than vindicates the common assumption as to numbers.Footnote 15

But more than that, Calamy challenged the hostile portraits that some churchmen had drawn of many of them as individuals. Anthony Wood (1632–95), “the Oxford historiographer,” had taken particular delight in “bespattering” the reputation of a number of the ejected ministers. His Antiquitates Universitatis Oxon and his Athenae Oxoniensis had provoked controversy within the church itself and earned sharp criticisms from Tillotson and Burnet, among others, for its hostility toward particular churchmen. No one had come forward to vindicate the ejected ministers, however: “What must those who come after us think of our supine Neglect, should such malignant Insinuations as his, which so blacken the whole Body of our Ministers, and the most leading Men among them, (very few only excepted) be suffer’d to pass uncontradicted.”Footnote 16 Thus Calamy provided evidence of their educational qualifications and their scholarship to vindicate “the Memory of these Good Men.” Over 1,200 of them had received university education at Oxford or Cambridge, and there were thirty-six college fellows from the former and sixty-eight from the latter. Publications could be listed for some 150 of these ejected ministers. The Abridgment also provided testimonies of their religious and charitable work.

Calamy had said at several points in the first edition of the Abridgment that his work was provisional, and he requested further information from his readers, promising a more complete account of individual ejected ministers. A second and much expanded edition was published in 1713.Footnote 17 Instead of the long chapter 9, the collective biography of the ejected ministers is expanded into a second volume of nearly 850 pages, with a separate title. The material is now arranged by county and in alphabetical order. Calamy was thus able to correct errors and omissions, to expand considerably biographical information on specific ministers, and to provide much more documentation of the illegalities and injustices suffered by those who dissented from the Stuart Church of England.

Calamy's Abridgment was more than a rebuttal of High Church slander against individual ejected ministers. It was a political intervention that provoked considerable controversy. His account of the experience of Baxter and many other ejected ministers painted a harsh picture of the treatment of these men by the Restoration authorities and visibly undercut the kind of history that would serve High Tory interests. Chapter 9, in particular, was uncompromising in the vivid picture it drew of the illegalities, the violence, the injustices of the regime, running from the king and the court down through the church hierarchy to local magistrates, clergy, and laymen. Some ejected ministers lived on quietly through the reigns of the last of the Stuarts. But many others were subject to official harassment, troublesome court appearances and fines, confiscation of property, and spells of imprisonment. They endured violent threats and intimidation, official and unofficial. They were abused in the street. Their private meetings and meetinghouses were broken into during religious worship and minister and congregation threatened and abused. At various times ministers were forced into hiding, living as fugitives separated from their families. Calamy provided names not just of Dissenting victims but also of particular authorities who persecuted them. Chapter 9 began the work of preserving the evidence of the brutal character of the Stuart regime and its local servants, many of them of course still living.

The ejected ministers, by contrast, become heroic figures. His character sketches were, Calamy says, “but a just Debt to the Memory of so many deserving Persons, who suffer’d so bravely to maintain their Integrity, and rather expos’d themselves and their Families to no small Hardship, than they would strain their Consciences.”Footnote 18 Far from being dangerous incendiaries plotting the subversion of crown and church, this first generation of dissenting ministers, some few of them still living, were portayed as mild, pious, and scholarly men, punished for nothing more than being principled Protestants. “To let the Memory of these Men Dye is injurious to Posterity,” he emphasized. The book was a memorial to the victims and martyrs of religious intolerance, of Stuart duplicity, and of High Church bigotry. And far from being a defense of an embattled national church, anti-Dissenting legislation, pushed through by Clarendon himself, was—and by implication remained—an aggressive assault by a cryptopapist and proto-absolutist court and church hierarchy on the enclaves of true Protestantism and liberty within England.

There were all kinds of polemics against the Abridgment in the early years of Queen Anne. In the tenth chapter, Calamy laid out in clear terms the ground of the Dissenters' continuing separation from the church of England. This provoked responses from churchmen, notably Thomas Ollyffe's Defence of Ministerial Conformity, published in three parts between 1703 and 1706, and Benjamin Hoadly's The Reasonableness of Conformity to the Church of England, which went through several editions.Footnote 19 Calamy responded in turn with three volumes of A Defence of Moderate Nonconformity.Footnote 20 These texts provide, William Orme said in 1830, “by far the fullest view of the points in debate between the Church of England and the Nonconformists in our language.”Footnote 21 However, much of the polemic was less polite. Pamphlets, tracts, and sermons attacked Calamy and, with him, Baxter, the Dissenters as a body, and the Puritans of an earlier general.Footnote 22 “I have indeed had my share of reproach,” Calamy wrote in 1713 on publication of the second edition. “For some years there was scarce a pamphlet came out on the Church side in which I had not the honour of being referred to in the invective part of it.”

This reminds us that narrative is often also counternarrative—that narrative identity stands in tension with other narrative identities circulating within any social order. It was in recounting these narratives about Restoration England, the testimony about the founding events of its history, that Dissent became the oppositional historical community that bears this name. The Dissenters of the 1720s, Calamy argues in the long dedicatory preface to the Continuation, held to the same principles as their predecessors, as they in their turn had been loyal to the principles of their own antecedents generation after generation, as far back as those Puritans who had survived under the Tudors. The Reformation in England was incomplete, and each generation, Calamy says, had a duty to continue to represent the principles of liberty of conscience against all who wanted to impose a single human authority. English history had been a series of missed opportunities, and the Dissenters stood witness, generation after generation, to the path not taken: “For besides the Opportunity of an happy Settlement among us at the Restoration, another has been lost at the Revolution, and so that farther Reformation that has been so earnestly fought for from one Reign to another would be altogether desperate, should all now yield to rigorous Imposers, and their groundless Pretences to Church Power.”Footnote 23 If Dissenters were grateful for their protection under the Hanoverian regime and were loyal supporters of the government, they remained uncompromising in their opposition to one of the pivotal structures of the Hanoverian state: the church of England. Their continuing Dissent was a refusal of human authority in matters of religion, a denial of “unscriptural impositions,” and a commitment to the right of private judgment and liberty of conscience: “These were the chief Principles of the old Puritans. They were the principles of our Fathers; and they are also ours.”Footnote 24

The liberty of contemporary Dissenters was not a gift of their rulers; it was earned: “It comes to us as the Fruit of the Prayers and Tears, the Sufferings and Hardships, the Conflicts and Views of our Fathers before us.”Footnote 25 It was the consequence of long and painful resistance to the popish councils of Charles II and James II and their allies within the church hierarchy.

In his historical writing Calamy affirms continuity within discontinuity. He is working to keep alive a past that has now faded from living memory, and he is reasserting its significance for a new generation of Dissenters in a changing political situation. “We” hold to the same principles and are committed to the same project of reformation, though in different circumstances: “we” are essentially and fundamentally the same as our forebears. Calamy's counsel is to forgive and remember, not to forgive and forget. And in case of any amnesia about the subsequent political record of the two sides of that discord, Calamy succinctly underlines it:

The most influential Dissenting history of the eighteenth century was The History of the Puritans by Daniel Neal; or, to give its full title, The History of the Puritans; or, Protestant Nonconformists; from the Reformation in 1517. To the Revolution in 1688: Comprising an Account of Their Principles; Their Attempts for a Further Reformation in the Church; Their Sufferings; and the Lives and Characters of Their Most Considerable Divines.Footnote 27 Caroline Robbins called it “probably the most interesting revelation of dissenting ideas in a secular work in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.”Footnote 28 Calamy's historical writing was a combination of chronicle, historical gazetteer, biographical dictionary, political tract, and religious sermon, and it was frequently organized around a polemical occasion. Daniel Neal's History of the Puritans was, by contrast, a polished and coherent chronological narrative, in four uniform volumes, stretching from the beginnings of the sixteenth century through to the end of the seventeenth. Conforming as far as possible to the protocols of historical writing, which enjoined a tone of dignified impartiality and an avoidance equally of unseemly polemic and dry scholarship, Neal's History aspired to the status of polite literature.

However, in its grander and more magisterial manner, Neal's History was no less concerned than Calamy's to integrate present and past, forging identities between Dissenters in the 1730s and their Puritan antecedents. The History of the Puritans underlined the crucial role that Puritans and, after 1660, Dissenters played in laying the foundations for the liberties of early Hanoverian England. And, like so much of the writing of Calamy, which is cited here in the first sentence, it stressed a familial inheritance and a duty of remembrance:

The message, then, was clear, and it signaled the debt of the present generation to their fathers and grandfathers: the liberties of the present were owing to their heroic sacrifices. Only loyalty to this past will transmit its achievements to the future.

At the same time, The History of the Puritans was inextricably tied to the sharp political exchanges of the 1730s surrounding the Dissenting campaigns for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Thus, one of Neal's central tasks was to rebut charges that Puritans and their Dissenting successors were always and everywhere inherently subversive of the state, requiring therefore continuing legal restraint. Neal labored hard to demonstrate that under Elizabeth and James I, persecution of the Puritan ancestors of the nonconformists was not based on legitimate political grounds. This necessarily involved raising questions about central tenets of the received historical narrative of Tudor and Stuart England.

For a long line of Whig historians the revolution and civil war of the 1630s and 1640s was the particular responsibility of the Stuarts, who in significant ways broke with the constitutional precedents established by the Tudors. Elizabeth especially was conventionally represented as a defender of English liberties and Protestantism. Neal counters this narrative and shows that the arbitrary principles of Charles and his father followed directly from the example of Elizabeth: “She had high notions of the sovereign authority of Princes, and of her own absolute Supremacy in Church Affairs: and being of Opinion that Methods of Severity were lawful to bring her Subjects to an outward Uniformity, she countenanced all the Engines of Persecution, such as Spiritual Courts, High Commission, and Star-Chamber, and stretched her prerogative to support them beyond the Laws, and against the Sense of the Nation.”Footnote 30 Neal detailed actions on the part of the queen that, he pointedly remarks, “cost one of her Successors his Crown and Life.”Footnote 31 It was Elizabeth's active persecution of the Puritans that began the divisions that were to culminate on a scaffold outside Inigo Jones's Banquetting House on Whitehall in 1649. As Neal put it, in an image that Hume was later to appropriate into his History of England, “The breach might easily have been made up at first, but it widened by degrees; the passions of the contending parties increased, till the fire, which for some years was burning under ground, broke out into a civil war, and with unspeakable fury destroyed the Constitution both of Church and State.”Footnote 32

Defense of the Puritans against charges of political insubordination became particularly urgent as The History of the Puritans moved into its longest and most difficult period: the reign of Charles I, culminating in civil war, the execution of the king, and the rule of Cromwell. Eighteenth-century Dissenters were still living with the legal disabilities that followed from their assumed guilt for these events. And to legitimize their call for repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, they needed to question the dominant historical picture of these events. The bishop of London, Gibson, had commented to Zachary Grey in 1736 with some complacency, “surely neither he nor his friends can hope to gain credit to their cause, by a History of the State of Religion, and particularly the conduct of the Puritans, from 1642 to 1660.”Footnote 33 Neal moves into this period with some circumspection, but this is precisely his unavoidable aim: to go some way toward justifying the conduct of the Puritans in the civil war and under Cromwell.

The danger to the constitution under Charles I originated not, as royalists claimed, with a malignant party inside parliament. It was the actions of the king himself that brought about the collapse of his rule: first his governing without parliament and outside of the law, and then his threats of force against parliament in 1641 and 1642. If by 1642 the parliament had gone beyond defensive resistance against royal incursions on its privileges and had begun to invade the prerogative, this was justifiable in the situation. Had they dissolved themselves or merely stood by, inactive, and meekly petitioned the king while he got possession of all the arms and artillery of the nation, of the fleet, and of major garrisoned fortresses, and while Irish and foreign troops were brought in, then, Neal says, “both they and we must in all probability have been buried in the ruins of the liberties of our Country.”Footnote 34 By this point Charles had in effect abdicated: by deserting parliament, by refusing to discharge his duties, and by setting up his standard in the north. Neal draws the parallel with 1688, when in a similar crisis of authority a parliament convened without the king's writ had assumed the authority to rule.

One of the most contentious issues that Neal had to deal with in volume 3 concerned the role of the Puritans in the trial and execution of Charles I. He insists that neither Puritanism itself nor the tenets of any group among the Puritans were responsible for the death of Charles I. The seizure of the king by the army and the subsequent purging of parliament, Neal says, “blew up the whole constitution, and buried king, parliament, and presbytery in its ruins.” Episcopal divines, “in order to throw off the king's misfortunes from themselves, who by their obstinate behaviour had in reality reduced him to the last extremity,” diverted all blame onto the Puritan clergy—as their successors have continued to do to this day, he adds.Footnote 35 Neal has no difficulty in presenting detailed evidence of public statements, petitions, and letters from Puritan ministers in London and throughout the country protesting against the trial of the king and subsequently against his sentence and his execution. Neal says that he knows of only two ministers—Hugh Peters and John Goodwin—who did support the trial and execution of the king. “King Charles therefore died by the Hands of Violence, or by the military Sword, assumed and managed in an arbitrary manner by a few desperate Officers of the Army and their Dependants, of sundry Denominations as to Religion, without any regard to the ancient Constitution of their Country, or the fundamental Laws of Society.”Footnote 36 Neal is adamant that “the king's death was not owing to the distinguishing tenets of any sect or party of Christians,”Footnote 37 and he provides further corroboration from contemporaries to reinforce this challenge to the received wisdom of churchmen past and present. The strongest evidence is the act of attainder of the king's judges drawn up at the time of the restoration of Charles II.Footnote 38 This judgment makes clear that no specific religious party can be held responsible for the execution of Charles I. Nor does it ascribe responsibility to the people via their parliamentary representatives or to the nation as a whole. A small part of the army only are found responsible for the train of events that led to the king's trial, sentencing, and execution.

In his account of Cromwell and the interregnum, Neal treads carefully, though The History of the Puritans provides a defense of key aspects of the English republic. He is, of course, critical of the unconstitutional nature of the regime: “Upon the death of the late king, the legal Government was dissolved, and all that followed till the Restoration of King Charles II was no better than a Usurpation under different shapes.”Footnote 39 The House of Commons, purged of one-third of its members, hardly deserved that name, and the new form of government “had neither the consent of the people of England, nor of their Representatives in a free Parliament.”Footnote 40

Yet, having insisted on this, Neal had high praise for Cromwell and many of the policies of successive governments between 1649 and 1658. Though it was unsupported by any other power than that of the army, he says, “it was carried on with the most consummate wisdom, resolution and success.”Footnote 41 The wise and liberal religious policies of Cromwell—his commitment to toleration for all Christian sects, his sympathy for the Jews, his support for learning and the universities—are acknowledged. The energy and success of his foreign policy is applauded, especially the ascendancy over such hostile Catholic powers as France and Spain. Neal also praises the general character of the protectorate: “The Judges did their Duty according to Equity, without Covetousness or Bribery; the Laws had their full and free Course without Impediment or Delay; Men's Manners were wonderfully reformed, and the Protector's Court was under an exact Discipline. Trade flourished, and the Arts of Peace were cultivated throughout the whole Nation; the publick Money was managed with Frugality, and to the best Advantage; the Army and Navy were well paid, and served accordingly.”Footnote 42 Admittedly Cromwell was a despot, Neal says, but he was “generous and bountiful” to all who submitted to his authority and tolerant of all religious groups, including episcopalians, as long as they did not actively plot against the state.

Other eighteenth-century commentators were impressed by Cromwell's meteoric rise, his military successes, and his foreign policy successes. But assessments, Whig and Tory alike, were generally hostile. In 1721, in Cato's Letters, Trenchard and Gordon had commented that Cromwell “is scarce ever mentioned but with detestation, or thought of but as a monster.”Footnote 43 Neal was not unique in his positive acclaim for the Lord Protector, though it is significant that two out of the three positive biographies of the eighteenth century that Blair Worden can point to were written by Dissenting ministers: Isaac Kimber and William Harris.Footnote 44 But to write in the 1730s that while the Lord Protector did wield power, “no man ever used it to greater public advantage,” was a courageous statement of a minority position. And Neal's final remarks are an uncompromising vindication of Cromwell's position: “He was at the Helm in the most stormy and tempestuous season that England ever saw; but by his consummate Wisdom and Valour he disconcerted the measures and designs of his Enemies, and preserved both himself and the Common-wealth from shipwreck.”Footnote 45 The confusion that followed his death only strengthens the point. Indeed, the remainder of The History of the Puritans, to the revolution of 1688, is a grim narrative of political repression and political disintegration that makes the blue remembered hills of the interregnum look even more attractive.

The Glorious Revolution was, Neal says, “a wonderful revolution” not least because it was “effected with little or no effusion of blood.” However, Neal's account is critical of its outcomes, ascribed to the baleful role of high churchmen. The latter's threat to separate in large numbers from a reformed church of England brought to an end all negotiations and all former promises of a comprehension and an unrestricted toleration. The Nonconformists were betrayed by the latitudinarians within the church in order to conciliate their shared enemies. They were, Neal protests, “sold to the Jacobites, by the timorousness of their Friends.”Footnote 46 An Act of Toleration was passed that removed some of the legislation against them, but they remained unexcepted from the Test and Corporation Acts and excluded from the universities. Indeed, had it been left to the High Church Tories, there would have been no Act of Toleration and a rapid return to the severities of the Stuart regime:

On this disappointed and bitter note The History of the Puritans draws to a close. There are no great fanfares for the wonders of the Revolution settlement. There was instead a jaundiced recognition that 1688 had resolved nothing.Footnote 48 The Tories and the High Church clergy shared in political power under William while conspiring against him; they benefited from the Glorious Revolution while seeking to undermine it and while continuing to be the bitter enemies of the Dissenters. “Nor have these Gentlemen ceased to discover their Enmity to the Dissenters since that time, as oft as the Power had been in their hands.”Footnote 49 And, with some brief references to the persistence of anti-Dissenting legislation under Anne and under George I, over 800,000 words of The History of the Puritans ends.

Creating a historical identity for a new generation of Dissenters in eighteenth-century England had certain limits. Calamy's Continuation of 1727 had been alert to the problems of bridging generational differences within Dissent and rebuilding links between the very different worlds of Restoration and Hanoverian Dissent. Neal's History of the Puritans is alert to a different set of problems having to do with with inclusions and exclusions. The History of the Puritans acknowledges the diversity of Hanoverian Dissent. Nevertheless, Neal also draws some lines demarcating legitimate from illegitimate forms of Dissent. The “we” of legitimate Dissent has theological, political, and social boundaries. Thus some refugees from Germany during the 1540s are described as anabaptists “who, besides the principle of adult baptism, held several wild opinions about the Trinity, the Virgin Mary, and the person of Christ.”Footnote 50 Neal is generally more conciliatory in commenting on the Baptists. Nevertheless, his anxieties about radical sectaries disturbing social order and challenging the intellectual authority of their superiors run through his account of the seventeenth century, with its clear implications for artisan Baptists in Hanoverian England. One of them, the Baptist's own historian Thomas Crosby, grouched about Neal's misrepresentations: “many, even of the learned, and so late an author as Mr Neal, from whom we might have looked for more Christian treatment, have made it their business to represent the Anabaptists, as they are pleased in contempt to stile them, in odious colours, and to write many bitter things, even notorious falsehoods concerning them, nay, to fasten doctrines upon them which they never approved.”Footnote 51

Neal‘s account of the origin and early history of the Quakers in The History of the Puritans signals another set of boundaries within the ranks of eighteenth-century Dssent. Fox's father is described as a “poor weaver,” which he was not. It is implied that Fox abandoned his apprenticeship to a shoemaker, though in fact he completed it. The account of Fox's subsequent actions makes no explicit judgment against him, but in its chill distance it adopts the perspective of the powers that be. “It cannot be expected that such an unsettled People should have an uniform System of rational Principles,” Neal haughtily pronounces, and represents the early Quakers as uneducated, devoid of coherent principles, antisocial in their public behavior, and inculcating no secure set of moral values.Footnote 52 Neal's concluding remarks even endorse the punitive measures of the commonwealth authorities against his fellow Dissenters. He is also icily patronizing about contemporary Quakers: “the Disturbances they gave to the publick Religion for a Course of many Years was so insufferable, that the Magistrates could not avoid punishing them as Disturbers of the Peace; though of late Years they are become a more sober and inoffensive People; and by the Wisdom of their Managers, have formed themselves into a Sort of Body politick.”Footnote 53

The histories of Calamy and Neal did not then include every sector of religious dissent in eighteenth-century England. The Baptists quickly responded with their own history—Thomas Crosby's four volume History of the English Baptists, published between 1738 and 1740.Footnote 54 The Quakers had been especially assiduous in preserving a record of their sufferings and transmitting it to subsequent generations.Footnote 55 And yet, whatever the sectarian tensions, there was a common Dissenting experience of Stuart tyranny that crossed all sections of religious Dissent. The appalling repression that fell upon the defeated supporters of Monmouth, among whom Dissenters figured prominently, was preserved in several editions of the Western Martyrology.Footnote 56 There were accounts of the brutal experience of individual Dissenters, such as that of Rev. Thomas Delaune, a minister who died in Newgate, along with his wife and two children, for publishing A Plea for the Nonconformists in 1684. The treatment of this author, Defoe said in his preface to a new edition in 1706, “will for ever stand as a Monument of the Cruelty of those Times.”Footnote 57 There were also memoirs of prominent ejected ministers that preserved their experience of these years.Footnote 58 There were, above all, the writings of John Bunyan. Pilgrim's Progress had gone through 160 editions by 1792.Footnote 59

These historical texts about the origins of Dissent were merely the most visible forms of the ways in which memories of the Dissenting past were reproduced in the eighteenth century. Much was no doubt transmitted orally in family conversation. Memories were also held in material objects—in buildings, in gravestones and memorial plaques, in the family Bible and other books. Week after week of attendance at a chapel that traced its history back to the same historical moment, and that honored its ancestors and founders, reinforced a congregational identity rooted in narratives of persecution, of resistance to popery and arbitrary power, of unflinching commitment to religious and civil liberty. The weekly sermons of the minister were similarly important in the transmission of memory and of a self-consciously historical identity. Funeral sermons in particular were opportunities for conjuring up the past, reconnecting to the heroic sufferings of a previous generation. Here the strong family roots of Dissent give history a powerful emotional charge. Genealogy and family lore intersected with the political history of the nation. Fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers had suffered for the cause of truth and might even be there, honored, among the 2,000 victims listed by name in the two editions of the Abridgement or in the Continuation. Under the name Edmund Calamy on the title page was added fils et nepos, son and grandson. And when Laurence Echard, in his History of England, made some derogatory remarks on the Puritan preacher Edmund Calamy, his grandson—some eighty years after—declared that he counted it an honor to be descended from him.Footnote 60 Much of the biographical material in his histories had been sent to him by the family relations of ejected ministers so that these texts were, in some degree, a collective work of memory by the Dissenting community of the early eighteenth century. In numberless forms, the memory of the Restoration betrayal, of “the Great Ejection” and “Black Bartholomew Day,” of the persecutions of the 1670s and 1680s were transmitted down the generations in a collective and familial resentment. This was reinforced in numerous pamphlets and tracts and in unpublished sermons. To be a Dissenter was to belong to an embattled minority who were victims of a historical injustice, martyrs for the principles of conscience and religious liberty.

For the two largest and most influential sections of eighteenth-century Dissent, the Presbyterians and the Independents, the histories produced by Calamy and Neal remained founding texts throughout the eighteenth century and a key component of Dissenting culture. To make the work more accessible, Calamy's bulky Abridgement and Continuation were combined and condensed by another Dissenting minister, Samuel Palmer, and published in 1775 as The Nonconformist's Memorial.Footnote 61 “The Protestant Dissenters, of all denominations, have ever been wont to revere their memories,” Palmer said, “as the fathers of their interest, and the worthy pattern of their conduct.”Footnote 62 Over a thousand subscribers were listed in the first edition, including many of the leading ministers of rational Dissent. It was reissued in 1777 and 1778, and a new edition was published in 1802. There was also a continuing demand for Neal's History of the Puritans. It was published in a new two-volume edition in 1754, and a reissue of the first four-volume edition appeared in Dublin in the following year. A further edition, edited by Joshua Toulmin with much additional material, was published in five volumes between 1793 and 1797.

As the memory of the sufferings of Puritans and Dissenters faded into the distant past, it was important to maintain the strength of Dissenting loyalties among each new generation by keeping their history alive. Joshua Toulmin, Dissenting minister, historian, and editor of the 1790s edition of Neal, commented: “The youth of the present day grow up at a great distance of time from the transactions and events, under the immediate and lively impressions of which their ancestors were formed to support, with enlightened minds and consistent firmness, the character of Protestant Dissenters and Advocates of Religious Liberty.”Footnote 63 But, Toulmin advises, there is no shortage of appropriate works of history to keep on the shelves of the family library, and it would encourage younger members of Dissenting families if some of the shorter and more readable of them were “always lying on the table in the parlour.”Footnote 64

One of these Dissenting youths of the present day that Toulmin was anxious to reach was William Hazlitt. Born in 1778, the son of a Dissenting minister, he was educated at a Dissenting academy in the 1790s and sat briefly at the feet of Joseph Priestley in London after the Birmingham riots of 1791. Hazlitt later testified to the impact that Dissenting history had on him. In one of his brilliant political essays of 1819 he recalled with powerful nostalgia the political culture and bloody-minded refusals of the eighteenth-century Dissenters among whom he was raised. They “lived in thought,” as Hazlitt puts it, “with those who had borne testimony of a good conscience” and looked back to the Protestant martyrs of the Reformation. The canonical texts of this Dissenting tradition recalled by Hazlitt included, alongside the bible and Foxe's Book of Martyrs, both Neal and Calamy: “they had Neal's History of the Puritans by heart, and Calamy's Account of the Two Thousand Ejected Ministers, and gave it to their children to read, with the pictures of the polemical Baxter, the silver-tongued Bates, the mild-looking Calamy, and old honest Howe.”Footnote 65 A few years later, in the chapter on Coleridge in The Spirit of the Age, Hazlitt recounted how the radical young poet fell into the world of Dissent in the 1790s and was drawn into its historical narratives of Protestant martyrdom and “so dwelt for a while in the spirit with John Huss and Jerome of Prague and Socinus and old John Zisca, and ran through Neal's History of the Puritans and Calamy's Non-Conformist's Memorial, having like thoughts and passions with them.”Footnote 66

Even at his most pessismistic, writing in The Plain Speaker in 1826, Hazlitt still warmed to the twilight glow of old dissent, referring to Calamy's record of the 2,000 ejected ministers:

But of course the very act of conjuring up these historical images kept that memory alive and refurbished, for a few more years, the narrative identity of religious Dissent. Within hardly more than a decade, a new generation of “retired and inflexible descendants” of the ejected ministers were to make Nonconformity once again a bloody-minded and persistent force of opposition to church and state in Victorian England. And this opposition continued to be informed by Dissenting histories, especially of the seventeenth century.Footnote 68 Indeed, in 1862 the two hundredth anniversary of the great ejection was publicly celebrated far more energetically than any previous anniversary of “Black Bartholomew Day.”Footnote 69