Gilbert Burnet is perhaps the most neglected figure of his age. Whilst the influence of this choleric cleric and prodigious writer was enormous, scholarly interest has been slight. Through his History of the reformation (1679–1715), Burnet determined how his English readership understood their break from Rome until the nineteenth century.Footnote 1 As William III's chief propagandist, he excused a revolution, and a prolonged European war, which transformed England.Footnote 2 Through his Discourse of the pastoral care (1692) and his Exposition of the thirty-nine articles (1699), he defined a churchmanship that would dominate the Georgian establishment; whilst his support for campaigns of moral reform and his efforts as a leading whig politician also had great impact on national life.Footnote 3 Few historians, however, have spent much time on Burnet. He has lacked a full biography since 1907; pioneering research by Andrew Starkie, Martin Greig, and John Marshall has only just begun to lift the veil; and the corpus of scholarship on him is puny compared to that on John Locke, Daniel Defoe, Robert Harley, or Jonathan Swift.Footnote 4 These other figures may have matched Burnet's importance to contemporaries, but none of them greatly exceeded it.
One reason for the historiographical silence may be that we think we know Burnet. In the standard model of the late Stuart age, the established Anglican church was being taken over by a well-understood ‘latitudinarian’ faction, with whom Burnet was closely associated. A group centred on John Tillotson, Simon Patrick, Edward Fowler, and Edward Stillingfleet are thought to have outlined a new approach to the Christian faith under Charles II and then to have captured the great ecclesiastical offices under William III. For his part, Burnet claimed to have fallen in with the ideas of the latitudinarians as a young man, and he seemed to support them for the rest of his life.Footnote 5 He emerged as a key figure in Charles II's court in the 1670s and formed friendships with Tillotson and Patrick. Although he was forced into exile in the Netherlands in the mid-1680s by a clash with James II, this brought him into close contact with William of Orange and ultimately led to his being appointed bishop of Salisbury soon after his new patron became king of England in 1689. Once in post, Burnet appeared to implement a latitudinarian agenda, advancing it through pastoral style, politics, and polemic.
In this view, Burnet shared a moderate view of Christianity with his allies. They agreed that the core of the faith was a small number of plain and uncontroversial beliefs, and its chief purpose was to support an everyday, altruistic morality.Footnote 6 Disputes about doctrinal, ceremonial, or ecclesiastical detail were a distraction from the promotion of human sympathy, whilst persecution of others for their stance on issues outside the creed's core was the antithesis of Christians' duty to charity. Philosophically, Burnet joined other latitudinarians in stressing the compatibility of reason with faith. Natural science confirmed the existence of a beneficent universal designer; Christ's injunctions were logical recipes for the peace, persistence, and prosperity of society; and the revelations of scripture – even of divine mysteries – were rationally supported by their internal consistency, inducement to human kindness, and the well-attested miracles of those who pronounced them.Footnote 7 In politics, such principles led Burnet and his allies to an inclusive view of the Anglican church. Initially, they had hoped the Restoration establishment could be rendered sufficiently flexible to readmit those Protestant dissenters who had been ejected by the 1662 settlement, and in the early 1680s this position inclined them to a ‘whiggish’ view of the world. When such ‘comprehension’ proved impossible, however, they endorsed the 1689 ‘toleration’ act and sought to defend the dissenters' new liberties against intransigent tories. In all these areas, Burnet appeared a loyal supporter of a well-recorded movement. He was a good source of evidence for its triumph – not least because his posthumous History of his own times (first published in abridged form, 1724–34) provided gossipy commentary on his own political involvement – but having been so closely aligned with the latitiudinarians, his career did not demand individual analysis.Footnote 8
Yet for all the neatness of this interpretation, it has difficulties that warrant a longer look at Burnet. First, the category ‘latitudinarian’ has run into deep analytical trouble in the past twenty years. Far from seeing the coherent package of ideas just outlined, scholars have questioned this ‘traditional’ view of latitudinarianism from a number of angles. John Spurr, for instance, did not discern sufficient difference between Tillotson or Stillingfleet and the mainstream of their Anglican colleagues to regard them as a separate group. In the decades after 1660, their chief concerns were hostility to intolerant Calvinism, and a commitment to intense pastoralism to win dissenters, but these were commonplaces among contemporary churchmen.Footnote 9 Others have questioned the supposed ‘moderation’ of this group. Precisely because they believed Christianity had few fundamental doctrines, all of which tended to peace, they utterly condemned the factiousness over petty issues that prevented non-conformists joining the Anglican church.Footnote 10 Meanwhile, Andrew Starkie has seen the group as a loose alliance that would eventually be torn apart along a fundamental fault line. By the early eighteenth century, some ‘latitudinarians’ came to test traditional interpretations of revealed doctrine against reason, whilst others warned that reason should only ever justify the mysteries of accepted faith and never judge them.Footnote 11 Further scholars have pointed to a continuing vagueness in defining exactly what made a ‘latitudinarian’, or have questioned if this group was as closely allied to whig theoreticians, such as John Locke, as had been supposed.Footnote 12
Moreover, even if the scholarly community still fully believed in a coherent latitudinarianism, there is much in Burnet's writing to question whether he was unequivocally part of it. Although he often conformed to the attitudes once understood as ‘latitude’, he was not their slave, and his reasons for adhering to his position did not always fit the moderate and rational philosophy we once thought we knew. Examining the surprises not only renders Burnet more complex and interesting than hitherto supposed, but also deepens unease about the philosophic position he claimed to have adopted from his early years, and into which it has been so tempting to fit him.
I
No one has ever thought Burnet was an absolutely typical latitudinarian. The figures at the core of the group had had remarkably similar early careers, in which the future bishop of Salisbury had not shared. Tillotson, Stillingfleet, and Patrick had all been English clerics who had been sufficiently happy with the ecclesiastical arrangements under Cromwell to enjoy positions at Cambridge, and consequently to fall under the influence of men such as Benjamin Whichcote, Henry More, and Ralph Cudworth. These were the ‘Cambridge Platonists’, a group of thinkers who placed more emphasis on an inner spiritual light than on outward rules for worship or doctrinaire soteriology.Footnote 13 At 1660, a similar commitment to basic Protestant truth over rigid formularies had allowed the latitudinarians to conform to the restored Anglican establishment, but criticism that they were unprincipled time-servers had driven them to seek refuge in sympathetic London parishes. By contrast, Burnet's early career had been in Scotland. Although he had met some of the Cambridge Platonists and young latititudinarians during a trip south in 1662, his formative experiences had been in the turbulent mid-century politics north of the border. Among many other effects, the violent religious divisions between Scots had led to his father being expelled from the country for five years for refusing to swear the rigidly presbyterian Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, and to a vicious rupture between his mother's family, who had supported the Covenant, and the episcopal sympathies of her spouse.Footnote 14
On its own, however, this background did not estrange Burnet from the latitudinarians. The Englishmen's moderation was a reaction to civil war violence in their own country, but Burnet's upbringing left him looking for similar suggestions to calm politics in his. His early influences were men such as the Edinburgh minister, James Nairn, who recommended the principles of the Platonists as a route out of dangerous ecclesiastical division.Footnote 15 The young Gilbert was thus part of a wider search for terms of peace in Scotland at the Restoration, and this eclectic movement was as open to ideas emanating from Cambridge as to the native neo-Stoicism, adiaphoristic Erastianism and credal minimalism which have been studied in such figures as Sir George Mackenzie and Burnet's early mentor, Bishop Robert Leighton.Footnote 16
As a result, Burnet's first publication – a 1665 eulogy to his first patron, Robert Fletcher of Saltoun – reads like a ‘traditional’ latitudinarian manifesto. It most admired Fletcher for having mastered debasing passions. Its hero's moral cleansing had revealed a ‘purified reason’ which was the ‘supreme power’ of man and the engraving of the ‘image of God’ in every soul.Footnote 17 Once Fletcher had come closer to the deity's ideal model for his faithful, he had been an advertisement for rational moderation. He had been humble, temperate, charitable, and patient; he had understood that much contemporary dispute was actually about matters inessential to true Christianity; and he had taken a close interest in natural science (including contacting the new Royal Society) as a route to understanding a comprehensible deity.Footnote 18 Burnet also admired Fletcher's political latitude. His patron had supported the episcopal church which had been imposed in Scotland at Charles II's restoration, but he had thought its rival – the persecuted presbyterian movement – had as good a claim to be valid, and had condemned the two denominations' attacks upon each other as excesses of ‘blind zeal’.Footnote 19
Such sentiments resonated in Burnet after Fletcher's death. Between 1667 and 1673 he supported the efforts of his second patron, John Maitland, the earl of Lauderdale, to adapt the terms of the Scots ecclesiastical settlement to readmit at least the more moderate presbyterian ministers. This included extensive attacks on those whom Burnet blamed for the failure of the proposed schemes, and in good ‘latitudinarian’ fashion, he accused them of elevating unimportant forms and their own pride over the demands of Christian charity.Footnote 20 Disappointment at the frustration of Lauderdale's initiatives helped persuade Burnet to leave Scotland for good in 1674, but the sort of arguments he had deployed in his battles north of the border featured in his new English career. So, rational proofs for the truth of Christianity, and its function promoting altruistic morality, were the stuff of the cleric's best-selling ministrations to the libertine John Wilmot, earl of Rochester.Footnote 21 Charity was to the fore in Burnet's numerous sermons: not least those to the societies for the reformation of manners, to the governors of London hospitals, and to monarchs he exhorted to lead subjects by their moral example.Footnote 22 Appeals for religious forbearance rang through his works in the late 1680s, when attempts were made to heal divisions between Anglicans and non-conformists, and again during Queen Anne's reign as Burnet resisted tory attacks on dissenters.Footnote 23 Interest in natural science was underscored by his 1691 eulogy for Robert Boyle; Bishop Burnet told his parish ministers their chief duty was to lead flocks to charitable and temperate lives; and preaching at John Tillotson's funeral in 1694 he summarized the ‘great design’ of Christianity as ‘reforming men's natures … restraining their appetites … softening their tempers and sweetening their humours’.Footnote 24
Even ‘problem’ texts can be fitted into the pattern. Both contemporaries and later historians noted two mid-1670s sermons that flirted with royal absolutism, and thereby seemed to contradict Burnet's later ‘whiggish’ acceptance of resistance to authority during the 1688 revolution.Footnote 25 Yet if this early preaching is read as an exercise in latitude, the difficulty resolves. Burnet did not advance a high view of the divine right of kings, but rather argued for obedience on the grounds that rebellion brought human misery and was rooted in such malicious sins as ambition, avarice, or disruptive meddlesomeness.Footnote 26 In these sermons, Charles I had not deserved authority for his God-like status, but had earned it through concern for his subjects' welfare.Footnote 27 Since this was the foundation of Burnet's thought, there was room for manoeuvre once James II's reign had demonstrated that misuse of the prerogative could endanger human happiness as seriously as revolt. Burnet's post-1688 writing thus mixed whig constitutionalism with the argument that attempts to reverse the revolution would bring more pain than benefit.Footnote 28
For all that Burnet lacked a Cambridge education, therefore, the ‘traditional’ model of latitudinarianism provides useful insights into the man. Yet it does not cover key features of his thought, and we risk misunderstanding Burnet if we think he was simply a latitude man as this was once conceived. Here, importantly, we are not talking about his passionate attacks upon others. Burnet's anti-popery was deep and persistent; he denounced Scots and English non-conformists; and he had a disturbing streak of anti-Semitism.Footnote 29 Such attitudes would be shocking if we confused latitudinarianism with liberalism or relativism, but the traditional view of latitude always allowed censure of others, even before scholars began to question its supposed tolerance. Reasonable and altruistic men could view superstitious Catholicism as a perversion of rational faith.Footnote 30 They could also accuse dissenters of breaching Christ's charitable union, and they might – at a stretch – share Burnet's disapproval of Jews since he concentrated on their alleged cruelty to apostates rather than on race or on the doctrinal tenets of Judaism – some of which he quite admired.Footnote 31 Instead of such only-imagined inconsistencies, therefore, we need to examine elements of Burnet's worldview more clearly outside ‘traditional’ descriptions of latitude. The first was his wide-ranging and providential view of history, whilst the second was his deep and particular sense of the battle between ‘true’ and ‘false’ churches.
II
Burnet's historical turn of mind should not surprise, given that he was best known among contemporaries for his History of the reformation, and that he is primarily remembered today for his History of my own times. Yet despite some attention to Burnet's Tudor studies, his vision of the past has not been fully understood and its controlling influence has not been appreciated. In fact, Burnet's interest in history marked most of his writing. Aside from the works just mentioned, the prefaces to the author's other major contributions – the Discourse of the pastoral care, and the Exposition of the thirty-nine articles – centred on the fortunes of Protestantism since its emergence, whilst substantial passages elsewhere either summarized or excerpted all of Christian history.
As recovered from this material, Burnet's view of the past remained consistent through his career and was largely a familiar Protestant account of religious decline and recovery. In the first centuries after Christ, Burnet insisted, the messiah's adherents had preserved his doctrine and moral example. This meant that the true faith could be recovered through patristic research, although such scholarship also revealed corruption.Footnote 32 Burnet agreed with most Protestant commentators that soon after Christ has ascended, a papally led clergy had become greedy for worldly wealth and power. They had perverted doctrine to encourage believers to donate money and had advanced exaggerated claims for the clerics' own spiritual and temporal authority.Footnote 33 With this degeneration, the stage was set for medieval darkness. From around the year 800, an ‘excessively vicious’ church had oppressed the Christian community, and for over seven centuries, the true faith had survived only in isolated pockets, such as among the Waldensians of the Alpine valleys.Footnote 34 Rescue from this thrall had been sudden. After false dawns, a series of sixteenth-century reformers had proclaimed Christianity in its original form, and had secured the support of earthly rulers. Whilst this last part of the story was outlined magisterially in the History of the reformation, it also emerged elsewhere, especially in Burnet's keen sense of God's hand in the birth of Protestantism, and in his repeated insistence that the Tudor church of England had reverted to patristic example for correct practice.Footnote 35
Thus far, Burnet's view of the past was fairly conventional, if strongly stated and repeated to the point of tedium. His understanding of the post-reformation era was also unremarkable. Agreeing with most English Protestants, this Scot understood his adopted country to have entered into an Old Testament style covenant with God on recovering the ancient faith. This had entailed a cycle of blessings and misfortunes as the people had been rewarded for their fidelity, punished for their backslidings, and warned that they might finally be abandoned if they did not respond to salvations with sincere repentance. Along with many others, Burnet used this script to read the changing fortunes of his faith. For him, England's alternating godliness and sin meant that the country had truly deserved the horrors of Mary's Tudor's persecution, the gift of the Elizabethan settlement, the preservation from the Armada and the gunpowder plotters, the descent into civil war, and the miraculous restoration of 1660. Yet though Burnet's vision was familiar, it was also individual. Never departing from the basic Old Testament analogy, the writer provided a grander pattern for his story, which prevented it being the standard trials of a godly nation.
First, Burnet saw the entire European reformation suffering the providential cycle. For this son of Aberdeenshire – who had many overseas correspondents – heaven's chosen people were the Protestants of the entire continent and not just those in the southern half of one island.Footnote 36 Thus England's story must include the Germans, Dutch, Scandinavians, Swiss, and Scots, as well as reformed minorities in France, Savoy, Ireland, and the Danubian basin. As historians have pointed out, this was a reasonably widespread view among English writers, but Burnet's endless emphasis upon it was unusual. He was virtually incapable of telling the national story without including Europe and this tendency extended well beyond his substantial coverage of Germany, France, and Scotland in the History of the reformation.Footnote 37
So, for instance, his account of past Catholic threats supplemented popish attacks on the English in 1588 or 1603 with European examples of Roman cruelty, including Alva's 1560s deprivations in the Netherlands, the 1672 massacre in Paris, the crushing of Czech Protestants in 1618, the erosion of French Huguenots' rights through the seventeenth century, and the 1641 Ulster rising.Footnote 38 Similarly, Burnet's analysis of recent events stressed that domestic court machinations had had foreign dimensions, so he presented attempts to weaken the Anglican privileges in 1672 as part of a simultaneous attack on the Protestant Dutch and he regarded James II's pro-Catholic policies as a manifestation of a pan-European conspiracy.Footnote 39 Most remarkably, Burnet posited a constant correlation of circumstances on either side of the Channel. When the English faced a crisis or secured deliverance, continental Europeans also did so, and two sermons to monarchs laid out this pattern systematically. Although precise details varied in the twenty-four years between the performances, the lists of shared moments that Burnet presented to Mary II in 1690 and to George I in 1714 were similar. They started with the early 1550s, when Mary Tudor's persecutions matched Charles V's advances against Protestant princes in Germany, and continued through later decades. In the 1580s, England had faced the Armada as the Dutch had struggled with Spanish troops and the Huguenots had been attacked by the Catholic League. In the 1620s, Protestants had retreated in the German Thirty Years War, the French reformed had lost their last militarily strongholds, and a popish plot had advanced at Charles I's court. In the 1680s, Louis XIV had removed his non-Catholic subjects' freedom of worship, Lutheran and Calvinist dynasties in Germany had died out to be replaced by Romanists, and James II – an openly Catholic ruler – came to govern England, Scotland, and Ireland.Footnote 40
All these emergencies were resolved by continent-wide deliverances, most miraculously by William III's invasion of England and his rallying European alliances against France.Footnote 41 Yet Burnet's analysis of such salvation produced one more reading of history which he extolled with idiosyncratic clarity. For Burnet, the providential cycle of judgement and rescue was not simply repetitive. It fitted a bigger pattern in which the history of Protestantism could be neatly divided into periods exactly matching the two centuries – or ‘ages’ – in which Luther's message had been heard. In the sixteenth century the reformation had prospered. Each providential cycle had produced more converts for the true faith and a greater security for the true religion. Around 1600, however, the situation had reversed. Protestant Christianity had begun to retreat and was now unsure of its very survival. Burnet once told William III that God had set up a ‘glorious work … in the last age’, but had brought it ‘low in this’, whilst the preface to the Discourse of the pastoral care reported that Protestants had enjoyed extraordinary success in their first decades, but that ‘in this present age, the reformation is not only at a stand, but going back’.Footnote 42 The evidence for this ‘two-age’ model was plentiful as Catholicism had indeed advanced in the seventeenth century. The Protestant share of Europe's population shrank from nearly half to around a quarter between 1600 and 1700, so Burnet had no difficulty citing territories surrendered, liberties withdrawn, and persecutions launched. What was more significant, however, was the writer's explanation for the failures of the second age.
In Burnet's mind, Protestantism had weakened because it had compromised its original purity. No longer an invigorating revival of primitive Christianity, it had lost its exemplary holiness and its adherents had sunk into a spiritual sloth and luxury which prevented evangelization. Certainly the godly cause had suffered misfortunes. Battles had been lost, supportive dynasties had died out, and protective alliances had shifted. For Burnet, however, these were simply divine punishments for moral failings. As he constantly emphasized – and nowhere more clearly than in his fast and thanksgiving sermons during the 1690s – God helped those who helped themselves by living according to his will.Footnote 43 Decline could therefore be blamed on the people, and among their failings, one had been notable. Once Protestants had lost their initial vigour, they had become obsessed with the inessential forms of their faith. Instead of rejoicing in the Christian renewal of human nature, they had defined correct worship ever more narrowly, and – succumbing to sins of pride, wrath, and envy – had argued over unimportant matters. This had divided them in the face of popery, distracted them from conversion to petty internal quarrels, and so angered God that he had put a ‘visible stop … to the progress of the reformation’.Footnote 44 This message rang through Burnet's whole corpus. His Pastoral care was a hymn to pure methods which had once spread the faith, but had now been abandoned; his Exposition aimed to show that internal quarrels about doctrine were needless and that the reformation suffered from them; sermon after sermon warned of the disasters caused by Protestant vice and division; and at moments of particular danger, Burnet lamented that disunity played into papists' hands.Footnote 45
III
This understanding of the past was crucial to Burnet, but we can only appreciate it fully in the context of a closely related part of his worldview: his keen sense of the apocalyptic struggle between the ‘false’ and the ‘true’ church. The idea that human history had been a cosmic battle between Christ's faithful adherents – his ‘true church’ – and its Satanic mirror was of course ancient, dating back at least to St Augustine, and probably to the book of Revelation, whatever its episodic and mystical allegory was intended to convey. Surviving in various forms through the middle ages, this ‘two-church’ vision had been adopted by early Protestants in England who had naturally claimed to be the true ecclesia now revived. They had understood the medieval triumph of the papacy as the prophesied tyranny of their false rival, and had identified the Roman establishment with Revelation's figures of the Beast, Antichrist, and the Whore of Babylon.Footnote 46 Although influential in John Foxe's hugely popular martyrology, and providing a worldview for the radical puritans of the early seventeenth century, the two-church model of the universe was once supposed to have gone into retreat after the civil war. It collapsed, historians used to assure us, when the puritan movement shattered into its myriad sects and could no longer agree on an enemy. It was also supposed to have weakened with the advance of rational ideologies such as latitudinarianism.Footnote 47 This picture, however, has been questioned. Some scholars always doubted any retreat and they have been supported by recent discoveries of rich seams of post-Restoration apocalyptic. Close examination of Burnet strengthens the case for reassessment.Footnote 48
For this writer still took the notion of a battle between the churches seriously. It fitted neatly with his anti-papal view of history and Burnet badged Romanism with apocalyptic labels. Thus, the very title of his first sustained critique of the papacy, The mystery of iniquity (1672), suggested that Rome was the allegorical army of Satan, whilst its text – actually plagiarized from Henry More – argued she was the systemic opposite of gospel faith.Footnote 49 Other, more authentically Burnetine, works were no kinder. They accused Catholicism of idolatry and cruelty, the classic signs of the false church; they confirmed it comprehensively opposed true belief; and they deployed all the standard pejoratives. The papacy was ‘Babylonish Rome’: a ‘mystical Babylon’, which fitted ‘Antichrist's character’ and was ‘drunk with the blood of the saints’.Footnote 50 Moreover, Burnet appeared increasingly convinced that the battle between the churches was reaching the final stage when an almost-defeated faithful would find their foes providentially crushed. It is true that the language of works produced after 1688 tended to be less overtly apocalyptic. Burnet stopped publishing systematic demonstrations that Rome was Babylon, and he deployed terms drawn from Revelation largely as metaphors or similes.Footnote 51 At the same time, however, the assumptions behind his writing became more pronounced after the revolution. Pessimism about the fortunes of Protestantism may have led Burnet to believe that these were the darkest times just before dawn, whilst the extraordinary successes of William III in overthrowing a Catholic regime or of George I in preserving the English throne from papists hinted that God was intervening powerfully in the battle. Thus after Louis XIV launched the war of Spanish Succession by accepting the Habsburg crown for his grandson, Burnet was full of terror that reformed Christianity might finally be extinguished. The disunion of popish Paris and Madrid had thus far preserved the gospel on earth, but Louis's annexation of his southern neighbour threatened this security.Footnote 52 By contrast, Burnet greeted the Glorious Revolution with the hopes for a ‘New Jerusalem’, and the Hanoverians with the observation that God had marked them out ‘with signal characters of amazing providence’.Footnote 53
In the paragraph above, we clarified Burnet's vision by stating that he regarded Rome as Antichrist. Much of his writing made this assumption, but his true view was, in fact, subtly different. There were revealing mismatches between Burnet's vision of the false church and his understanding of Catholicism. Very occasionally, Burnet described the Roman establishment as a part of Christ's true communion, albeit a deeply corrupted one, and he sometimes admitted that it was possible to attain salvation within the papally led institution.Footnote 54 Hence Catholicism, of itself, was not Antichristian. The Roman church's superstition may have marred it, and the ambition of its clergy might have given it many marks of the Beast, but they had not perverted it utterly. Rather, the false church was actually different. It was something in which Rome generally participated and which often made it fully Satanic, but it was also something its adherents had – albeit infrequently – avoided. Looking at Burnet's corpus of writing, this evil was undoubtedly persecution.
Burnet's horror of religious coercion was fundamental. Condemnation of persecution was such a constant in his writing that a supporting footnote could be longer than this article. Extending beyond the mainstream Protestant view that repression of their true faith had been evil, Burnet insisted that using force to impose correct doctrine was equally bad. Effectively, he saw no distinction between policing orthodoxy and persecution: the reformed must never deploy worldly power, not even to advance godly beliefs.Footnote 55 Furthermore, Burnet was clear that the use of force to compel the conscience was so diametrically opposed to Christ's injunctions that it was the one reliable identifier of the false church. When Rome became the Whore of Babylon, it was cruelty to others that effected the transformation. Other faults, though grave, were relatively unimportant. In 1687, Burnet made this claim quite explicitly when he wrote that persecution was ‘a more infallible mark of an Antichristian church, than all the other characters of an infallible church, to which those pretend’, and it emerged elsewhere as the writer's words transposed into the apocalyptic register whenever he described violent intolerance.Footnote 56 Popes had matched heathen pagans in their brutality to those of other faiths, so were ‘drunk with the blood of the saints’; men who promoted their beliefs with force triumphed ‘in the garments of Antichrist’, whilst ‘a church that has substituted this wildfire of rage and cruelty, to the gentle flames of love and charity … is the most opposite thing possible to a society founded on the gospel’.Footnote 57
We can only speculate as to why Burnet was so exercised by persecution that he viewed it as Satan's true signature. Theorizing, however, confirms the strength of the identification. Most obviously, Burnet's tendency to concentrate on the charitable parts of Christ's message would cast coercion as the polar opposite of the gospel. More personally, the banishment of Burnet's father and his own exile during James II's reign may have given him sympathy with those suffering attack, whilst he also witnessed Louis XIV's persecution of the Protestant Huguenots when travelling in France in the mid-1680s. Although French horrors played only a small part in his published account of his journey, they fuelled his fears for Protestantism in its disastrous second age and he worried this ‘melancholiest’ spectacle of his life would always haunt him.Footnote 58 Interestingly, a persistently expressed concern for the persecuted Albigensians also suggests a close engagement with John Foxe.Footnote 59 Foxe's Tudor writings had been appalled by the papacy's military crusade against these heterodox inhabitants of Provence in the high middle ages. If Burnet had picked up his interest in Albigensians from this source, he may also have imbibed Foxe's conviction that cruelty was the anti-faith from the earlier writer's ecclesiology, if not simply from the Book of Martyrs' close description of centuries of tribulation at the hands of religious bigots.Footnote 60 Whatever the roots of Burnet's position, there is no doubting its importance. Within his deeply apocalyptic view of the world, the fact that the false church would reveal itself through persecution provided the key to interpret his universe. In fact, the certainty of Antichrist's intolerant cruelty allows us to understand many of the features of his philosophy noted so far.
It helps, for example, to explain Burnet's European focus. His belief that persecution was Antichristianism made him uncomfortable with the position of his Anglican church in England, and encouraged him to consider the institution in a much wider frame. The problem, of course, was the political dominance of England's established clerics. As Burnet's fellow Anglicans deployed worldly wealth and power against others, they seemed to him to be more akin to a persecuting – and so to a false – church than to the groups of suffering Christians which his ecclesiology convinced him were the true communion. Their errors were many. Never comfortable with diversity in their ranks, Anglicans had been granted an official monopoly of worship in 1662, penal legislation over the next couple of decades had allowed them to punish rivals, and non-conformist activity was tightly circumscribed even after the 1689 toleration act. Burnet's writings betrayed a profound anxiety on this front. Beyond calls for moderation in dealing with dissenters, he repeatedly warned clerical colleagues that they risked becoming the anti-church themselves if they oppressed others. This fear emerged insistently at particular points in Burnet's polemic, including the occasions when he answered Catholic charges that the English church was itself intolerant, so it could not criticize Rome's policing of orthodoxy. Although he responded by suggesting that English chastisement had been gentler than that of papist inquisitions, he also described intransigence as the dross of the old false church which Anglicans were taking a disappointing time to purge.Footnote 61 This complaint was repeated towards the end of Burnet's life when he accused high churchmen of approaching Rome in their zealous intolerance.Footnote 62 Unease also emerged when discussing how the English authorities should deal with their own Catholic community. Despite horror at the papists' corruptions, Burnet insisted that they must not be coerced since this would render Protestants as evil as their enemies. This, indeed, had been a major theme of Burnet's propaganda in 1688 when he had warned people not to launch an anti-popish pogrom or their complaints about Catholic ‘injustice and cruelty’ would be void.Footnote 63
Hence, Burnet worried that Anglican abuse of power in England might enrol his colleagues in the false church. To salve this anxiety, he pleaded with the establishment not to persecute, but he also internationalized his communion to set it in the context of the whole European reformation. If the English church was dominant at home – a situation which tempted it to Antichristian sins – Burnet could comfort himself that it was also part of a varied, but continent-wide, Protestant movement that had always suffered at the hands of papist zealots and was currently hunted by Louis XIV. In this respect, even an established – and so privileged – cleric like Burnet could resemble Foxe's martyrs, or those early Christians under pagan attack. This probably explains why Burnet stressed European crises in his account of Protestant history. These emergencies reminded the audience – but also reassured the author – that the Anglican establishment had not always been a secure institution with coercive power, but had often been threatened itself and was part of a greater communion whose other members fared even less well. The need to be part of a persecuted reformation also accounts for Burnet's constant identification with continental causes, which extended from his warnings that high churchmen's narrow vision of episcopacy would blind them to the fate of the godly abroad, through his welcoming of William and Mary as rulers whose support for Anglicanism was a subset of their sympathy for the broader European reformation, to his appeals to the English to offer all Protestants support and sanctuary in times of need.Footnote 64
Fear about the status of a politically powerful church in England also lay behind one of Burnet's commonest rhetorical ticks. Again and again, he insisted that the English were in immediate danger, as proved by the misfortunes of their co-religionists elsewhere. Given Louis's cruelty, there was a cup of sorrow going round the Protestant churches of which England would ‘drink the dregs’.Footnote 65 ‘Terrible Calamities’, Burnet cautioned, could not be far away when divine wrath was being wrecked on neighbours. England should expect swift judgement when God had ‘visited so many Nations round about us’, and it should be warned by seeing the destruction of Protestants in Hungary, France, Piedmont, and Transylvania, and the constant threat to those in the Netherlands and Ireland.Footnote 66 Such jeremiads would be puzzling if we imagined that Burnet believed England was an elect nation enjoying special protection. Yet it makes sense if we realize that he needed to see his church intimately involved in suffering. The English establishment was not securely privileged, and was part of a persecuted, rather than persecuting, body.
If the key to Burnet's Europeanism was his equation of Babylon with spiritual coercion, similar reasoning underpinned his vision of the two ages of the reformation. As noted earlier, he believed that Protestants had lost their initial fire around the end of the sixteenth century. Sin and division had led to the disasters of the second age, but Burnet detected a yet deeper crime as these failings had combined. Split over inessentials, and fired with a vicious self-regard, those who had defeated Catholics in a particular state had used worldly might to attack other beliefs. They had abandoned the peaceful evangelism that had made Luther's early movement such a success, and had called down providential smiting as they were tempted into the ways of the Beast. The second age of the reformation was therefore another illustration of the evils of persecution. Burnet proved this claim from the history of Germany and the Netherlands – where Protestants suffered once they outlawed each other's stance in doctrinal arguments – but he also, of course, analysed the English case.Footnote 67 In key passages of the Pastoral care which dealt with ministers' relations with non-Anglicans, Burnet accepted that papists were guilty of rank idolatry, and that non-conformists were schismatic, but he nevertheless insisted that such miscreants could only be approached with charitable persuasion. Anglican pastors must let non-conformists know ‘we love them, that we wish them no harm’ and Burnet wished that ministers would work to ‘Reform those of our Communion than rail at theirs’.Footnote 68 This strategy must be adopted in imitation of Christ, but also because the contrasting ages of Protestantism in England had proved that it was the only one which would work. In the sixteenth century, the reformed faith had grown ‘without force or violence’ so that in forty years popery had all but disappeared. Burnet was referring to the period of Elizabeth's reign here, so his claims were questionable given the queen's intolerance of Jesuits and puritans – but in more recent times he accepted that English Protestants had made a disastrous turn to worldly power to enforce their views. In Burnet's words, the law privileging the establishment had been ‘so much trusted to; that that method only was thought sure’, and the result had been a church regressing since 1600.Footnote 69
IV
This deeper appreciation of Burnet's view of history may be interesting, but it does not solve the problem that has emerged in this analysis. In what sense should this author be dubbed a ‘latitudinarian’, if this is still a meaningful category? Burnet said he was a latitude man, and in many ways fitted what this once meant. Yet he adhered to positions not usually thought part of – or even compatible with – such a description. Resolving the paradox is rendered even more difficult because Burnet was not a systematic thinker. He never produced a clear overview of his philosophy and he was quite capable of deploying different arguments according to the rhetorical demands of the moment. Yet perhaps this eclecticism is the way forward. Burnet's latitudinarianism, though sufficiently close to the traditional understanding of that position to be worth the name, was not the closed system focused on ‘reason’ and ‘moderation’ which we outlined. Rather it was highly syncretic in integrating other ideas, including ones once thought outdated by the late seventeenth century. In this, it may have been similar to the worldviews of such contemporaries as Isaac Newton or the victim of Burnet's plagiarism, Henry More. These were men who exhibited many of the traits once ascribed to ‘latitudinarians’, but are now recognized for their more diverse philosophies which incorporated grand prophetic history.Footnote 70 If these are valid comparisons, the significant feature of Burnet's historical apocalyptism may not be the shock of finding it in a latitudinarian. Instead, it could be the compatibility of his two-church analysis and ‘latitude’. The glue, of course, was Burnet's identification of persecution with Antichrist. Once this connection was made, the attitudes that followed were almost – though not absolutely – identical to classic stances of latitudinarianism. Prophecy therefore flavoured, rather than contradicted, rational moderation.
To see this, we can concentrate on Burnet's most consistently argued positions, starting with the horror of spiritual coercion that was such a constant feature of his thought. This was often argued from ‘latitudinarian’ principles, yet it also sprang effortlessly from his apocalyptic, and this is important since it meant that avoidance of the Babylonish blasphemy of persecution could be elevated above the resulting liberty. In fact, Burnet was so worried that using temporal power would transform the godly into Satan's soldiers that he suggested force could not be deployed even to halt persecution.Footnote 71 Thus he was careful to reproduce sections of the Mystery of iniquity that outlined the cruelties of Catholicism but that also insisted that one could not imitate its oppression to stop its march.Footnote 72 Such attitudes also emerged in the ‘exclusion crisis’ of 1678–83 when Burnet feared popery, but nevertheless warned that bitter denunciations of the Roman church would imitate its ‘ill temper of mind’. They were also central to his rejection of action against Catholics in 1688, when he stated ‘I had rather see the church of England fall under a severe persecution from the church of Rome, than see it fall to persecute papists when it should come its turn to be able to do so.’Footnote 73 A focus on the ecclesiological status of persecutors, rather than on any value in liberty per se, also explains the last decades of Burnet's career when he railed against the high church's attack on dissenters, even though he actually agreed that non-conformists were proud schismatics who should never have left the church. Here it was religious coercion that was evil. Spiritual diversity was merely a necessary price.Footnote 74
Another ‘latitudinarian’ feature of Burnet's thought shaped by its simultaneously prophetic foundations was his longstanding demand that Protestants set aside differences to form a broad alliance. This was another position expressed throughout his career. It lay behind his interest in comprehension in Scotland and England before 1689, it attracted him to a reformation of manners movement which united Anglicans and dissenters, it explains his opposition to high church campaigns which divided Englishmen, and it certainly gelled with his European vision. The international Protestant movement was an eclectic federation of theological viewpoints.Footnote 75 Again, this stance might be thought to be typically latitudinarian. It required moderation and consent that debate outside a basic faith was unimportant. Yet again it can also be read as a consequence of associating persecution with Babylon, which gave a peculiar spin to Burnet's latitude. This was clear when he accused those who savaged fellow Protestants of being infected with popery or when he hinted that the reformation had fared badly in its second age because God was angry at such flirting with Antichrist. As he graphically insisted in a sermon from 1680, Protestants who attacked one another over minor details surrendered all the features of a true church. If men sought the ruin ‘of all who differ from them’, he warned ‘this is not far from [Rome's] Extirpating of Hereticks’.Footnote 76 This apocalyptic horror of coercion was important because it allowed calls for Protestant forebearance across extraordinarily wide fissures. Burnet admitted that Calvinists and Lutherans, or predestinarians and Arminians, were too divided even to agree to equivocal formulae, but he still urged them to recognize their opponents had strong arguments in order to dissuade themselves from worldly chastisement. This, he hoped, would lay a foundation for charity, and permit men to maintain communion ‘notwithstanding that diversity’.Footnote 77
In these examples, conclusions from a moderate and rational approach to the world and the consequences of a two-church vision of history were so closely intertwined that we might argue Burnet developed a ‘latitudinarian apocalyptic’. This was a prophetic reading of the past, but was rather different from more familiar types of Stuart prophecy because it avoided exactly the same ecclesiological extremes as the latitude men. Thus it was not the radical millenarianism of civil war puritans that could still be found, in various forms, among opponents of Anglicanism after the Restoration.Footnote 78 Burnet was a lifelong episcopalian, who – whilst he could never agree to persecute others – condemned the heated separatism of schismatics and who reserved some of his most excited apocalyptic language for moments when the church of England was saved from its enemies.Footnote 79 For Burnet, the English establishment remained one of Europe's great providential barriers against the usually Babylonish forces of Rome – just so long as it did not itself use physical force. Yet whilst Burnet shared much with the profoundly anti-dissenting understanding of Revelation which Warren Johnston has revealed as a key plank of Anglican apologetic after 1660, he could not follow it wholesale.Footnote 80 Burnet's church was a flawed hero of its story. Though standing against a persecuting popery, it flirted with Antichristian coercion itself and had to be reminded that it was but one part of a diverse European movement. In place of these rival and polarizing visions, Burnet used the equation of persecution with Antichrist to construct a third, ‘latitudinarian’ apocalyptic. Faced with the shattering of the British Protestant cause in the mid-seventeenth century, Burnet did not reject the prophetic energy that had partly caused the rupture, but instead cast moderation as the godly principle in his interpretation. He thus constructed a position that allowed him to condemn extremes in apocalyptic terms, but it was a stance that has confused later commentators. It combined ‘outdated’ features such as a two-church understanding of the world with ‘modern’ ones such as rational forbearance, and it drew on an astonishingly wide range of influences from Foxe to Scots neo-Stoicism, natural science, and Cambridge Platonism.
V
Recognizing Burnet's syncretism illuminates the richness of his point of view, but it may also suggest something about the wider group of latitude men. After all, although Burnet had a different background to Patrick, Stillingfleet, Tillotson, and the rest, he maintained close contact with them after his first meetings in the early 1660s, and there is also evidence that they shared some of his more surprising patterns of thought. Hence, many of Burnet's key works were written with their active involvement. Introductions to the History of the reformation, the Discourse of the pastoral care and the Exposition of the thirty-nine articles all emphasized that other members of the group had read the volumes before publication. Burnet also worked closely with these colleagues once many had been promoted to the episcopal bench by William III.Footnote 81 Most interestingly, other ‘latitudinarians’ could interpret the world using parts of Burnet's model. All stressed cruelty was the epitome of un-Christian behaviour and some occasionally tripped over into an apocalyptic register. Thus Tillotson welcomed the 1688 revolution as ‘the beginning of the glorious deliverance of his church from the tyranny of Antichrist’; Patrick imagined the same event would establish a millennial age of ‘peace and concord’ under William; and Edward Fowler would later use Daniel and Revelation to suggest that Marlborough's military victories under Queen Anne presaged the ‘gulfilling of that glorious prophecy’, the downfall of Babylon.Footnote 82
If these hints point to a wider latitudinarian apocalyptic, this might allow a re-interpretation of Burnet's allies that could help resolve recent historiographical difficulties. For example, stridency against dissent, which appeared an anomaly in men of moderation, makes sense if they joined Burnet in seeing persecution as Antichrist. This foundation for tolerance stressed the evil of coercion more than the benefits of religious liberty and so allowed stern condemnations of schism in the anti-Babylonian camp. This would also explain the latitudinarians' divergence from Locke. As John Marshall has shown, the tension between Locke and this group stemmed from his advocacy of toleration as a positive political benefit, whilst the latitude men laboured to persuade all English Protestants into a single national church.Footnote 83 Similarly, latitudinarian apocalyptic might explain why a movement so fundamentally divided on the limits of reason took so long to fracture. If all shared Burnet's worldview, the urgent task before the eclipse of the high tories in 1714 was to slay the dragon of persecution. This was so pressing that other philosophical gulfs might remain un-noticed. These may prove fruitful lines of enquiry, but there is no space to pursue them here. The main lesson of this article must remain its insights into its main subject. If only one late Stuart figure developed a latitudinarian apocalyptic, at least it was a man of the energy, impact, and significance of Gilbert Burnet.
This article has benefited from comments by Jeremy Gregory, Sarah Hutton, Clare Jackson, Andrew Starkie, and this journal's referees. The author is grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a grant to finance study leave whilst it was completed.
