What these four very different books have in common is their concern with religion and politics, or better, the politics of religion, since they all deal with religion at a time when one's faith commanded in many instances and circumstances greater loyalty than the state and in fact conditioned and determined that loyalty. The subjects of these studies span the century between the 1580s and the 1680s and, in the case of one of the studies, developments in both England and Rhode Island. None of the four is in any sense methodologically innovative, but all have new things to say and demonstrate the continued fecundity of traditional approaches to the past. Three are by well-established masters of their craft—John Bossy, Peter Lake, and David Loewenstein—and the fourth, by M. B. Weddle, apparently a first book, is nevertheless worthy of the company it keeps.
Bossy's Under the Molehill is a sequel to his earlier Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair and seeks to uncover the complex and devious working of Sir Francis Walsingham's intelligence gathering during the crucial years between 1583 and 1586, when he uncovered evidence of the Babington Plot implicating Mary Queen of Scots in a scheme to eliminate Queen Elizabeth and replace her on the throne of England. Unlike Bossy's earlier study which sought to identify the mysterious Henri Fagot, a chaplain in the household of the French ambassador, as the famous Giordano Bruno, this time Bossy concedes that the identity of Fagot cannot be determined beyond a reasonable doubt. Instead he focuses on the way in which Walsingham penetrated the household of Michel de Castelnau, the French ambassador, and managed to get into his hands copies of the correspondence conveyed by the embassy abroad, including that of Mary Queen of Scots imprisoned in those years in the north at Sheffield. Bossy's dense narrative reconstructs to the degree that it can be a particularly nasty period in which the assassination of William of Orange gave urgency to Walsingham's attempts to discover similar plots against the queen, measures that led to the executions of Francis Throckmorton in 1584, William Parry in 1585, and ultimately of Mary herself in 1587.
Why should we care? First of all, the facts of the case are important. As Bossy mordantly remarks in his last chapter, “One of the pleasures of writing about secret intelligence, in the present state of intellectual haute couture, is that those who are concerned in it are looking for facts. Nobody pays good money for pieces of discourse” (p. 139). Bossy does speculate. Much remains intelligent guesswork at best, but Bossy is scrupulous in distinguishing between what he has good evidence for and what is at best an informed piece of speculation. Although Walsingham was certainly not above setting traps for even the wary queen of Scots, and although he did turn the Catholic George Gifford into a double agent betraying Mary's correspondence, Bossy does believe that there is good reason (and convincing evidence) to suppose that, in the case of the Babington Plot, Mary had truly compromised herself. Beyond establishing the facts of these murky events, Bossy does show us the defeat of the politiques in the increasingly brutal politics of the 1580s; the zealously Protestant Walsingham and the Privy Council manipulating a politique queen; and the urbane Castelnau who had sought as a Catholic ambassador to a Protestant court to keep religion from dictating politics, finding himself replaced at the behest of the Catholic League by Chateauneuf, who arrived in England with a household of Catholic zealots. Bossy does not press the point, but it is obviously a cautionary tale for our times of conspiracies and rising religious fanaticisms.
For all that Peter Lake's The Boxmaker's Revenge focuses on the exchanges between Stephen Denison, a contentious, disagreeable, but theologically quite orthodox and conventional godly preacher in London, and John Ethrington, a literate but not entirely orthodox lay Puritan, a manufacturer of conduits derisively referred to by Denison as a box maker, and for all that the controversy began in the 1620s and continued in print into the 1640s, this is not simply another microhistory, valuable as such studies are, but rather is a vehicle for exploring the nature of early Stuart Puritanism, particularly in London, both in its theological variety and in its sociological setting. Seventeenth-century Puritanism will never look the same again.
Historians of my generation, brought up on Perry Miller and William Haller, imagined that we saw a static Puritanism, wedded to double predestination, preaching a conservative Calvinism, differing amicably over such issues as covenant theology and preparationism, and increasingly embattled as a dynamic Arminianism ceased to be the province of university debates and became the new orthodoxy of the Caroline Church. The explosion of heterodoxy and sectarianism in the 1640s and 1650s remained largely unexplained. Lake has now given us a much more plausible picture.
First of all, early Stuart Puritanism now looks much less conservative and static; rather, what Lake shows us is a scene of considerable theological variety in which disagreements over such issues as whether repentance or justification came first in the order of salvation were preached and debated. Orthodoxy was not so much a settled fact as a managed process. Second, part of the process of management was played both by senior members of the godly community, such as William Gouge, Richard Sibbes, and Thomas Gataker, as well as by such sympathetic episcopal chaplains and censors as Daniel Featley and such bishops as John King. This system, internal to the puritan community, broke down when Archbishop Abbot lost real power to William Laud after 1625, when Laud became Bishop of London in 1628, and when such quarrelsome divines as Denison took their differences not only into print but into the dangerous arena of the Court of High Commission, a body that by 1628 would be turned against even such conformist preachers as Denison himself. Third, as Ethrington's case makes clear, the laity were not simply a passive audience of the preached word but rather active disciples in many cases, giving their support to one or another of the clerical contestants, who competed for their adherence and support. These godly laity were to be found among Londoners ranging from mere artisans to the merchant elite. Further, as hostile clerics contended, these active laymen not only flocked across parochial boundaries to hear popular preachers but participated in discussions of contested issues, which can fairly be termed “conventicles” and which earned Ethrington the opprobrious title of sect master.
In such a turbulent scene orthodoxy lacked a fixed theological definition but was instead a title for which all contestants strove. Thus, even the conspicuously heterodox Ethrington claimed in 1627 that “there be sundry can witness that I have been a means of the withdrawing and dissuading some from schism, separation, anabaptism, familism and other corrupt opinions and unlawful practices” (p. 182). One of the surprises produced by Lake's close attention to these voluminous theological controversies is the evidence for the persistence of familist concepts and language well into the early Stuart period and not least in the thought of an Ethrington who denied any such identity, and not the least merit of this very good study is Lake's ability to sort out and make real the different stakes in theological controversies that most of us avoid as the price of our sanity.
In the light of Lake's study and the forthcoming study of his former student and collaborator, David Como, on early seventeenth-century antinomianism, the explosion of theological heterodoxy and revolutionary sectarianism after 1640 should come as no surprise. The revolutionary politics and political theories of the revolutionaries—of the Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists, and republicans as various as Marchmont Nedham and John Milton—have all been explored in recent years. What David Loewenstein, a well-established Milton scholar, brings to the table is a sensitive analysis of the revolutionary religious rhetoric of John Lilburne, Gerrard Winstanley, Abiezer Coppe, George Fox, and others of their ilk, as well as of John Milton, with results that are illuminating and at times surprising.
That Lilburne and in all likelihood Winstanley eventually became Quakers is well known, but what was news, at least to me, was the fact that Lilburne was using the language of the Lamb's War, a later Quaker phrase, as early as 1638. That Milton held heterodox religious views has long been known, but that in the years of defeat after 1660 Milton continued a friend of Thomas Ellwood and an admirer of the younger Isaac Pennington, both Quakers, was a surprise. We are all familiar with Lilburne, the democrat, and Winstanley, the communist, but what Loewenstein demonstrates convincingly is how much they all—Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Fifth Monarchists, and Quakers—shared a common revolutionary religious rhetoric of apocalyptic hope, of overturning and leveling, of fundamental social and political change, with the coming of King Jesus. And by focusing on their revolutionary rhetoric Loewenstein demonstrates how critical were the events and disappointments of 1649–50, which saw on the one hand the execution of the king, the abolition of the House of Lords, and the establishment of a republic, but on the other hand the persistence of social hierarchy and the sacredness of traditional property arrangements. In this light the coming of the Protectorate represented an even bigger betrayal of revolutionary hopes, opening up a gap between the promises of godly rule and the realities of a semimonarchical Protectorate, a gap that Andrew Marvell and other defenders of the Protectorate recognized but could not bridge.
Having placed Milton among the religious radicals of the revolution, in the second half of his study Loewenstein reexamines the three great poems of the Restoration and argues for the continuity of Milton's revolutionary radicalism. “Seen in relation to the ongoing radical religious culture in the Restoration, the disdainful responses of Milton's Jesus [in Paradise Lost] towards Satan's temptations of regal power and luxury can give this spiritual epic a sharp polemical edge missed by those commentators who suggest that the great poems reveal a Milton who has largely withdrawn from politics into faith” (p. 251). What such bald assertions do not do justice to is the subtle and convincing analysis of language and theme and its kinship both with Milton's earlier writings and with the contemporary radical rhetoric, particularly of the Quakers, in the Restoration.
Meredith Baldwin Weddle's Walking in the Way of Peace demolishes two well-known (but as she demonstrates) quite erroneous assumptions about what Quakers term the peace testimony: first, that their pacifism was a natural and necessary outgrowth of Quaker principles, and, second, that it was situational, a protective device arrived at hurriedly at the Restoration, so as to prevent the authorities from confusing peaceable Quakers with the violent Fifth Monarchists. Their great discovery that the kingdom of God was to be found within, rather than being pie in the sky by and by, did not mean that obedience was not owed to the teachings of the kingdom in the here and now and that magistrates who preserved peace and dispensed justice even by force were not to be supported. Pacifism was in a sense itself situational rather than a principle and behavior required of all members of the Society of Friends, as it became in the early eighteenth century; it was an outgrowth of living in the kingdom, which was expressed in a transforming love that necessarily sought the good, rather than the destruction, of one's fellows. As a consequence, one can find examples of personal pacifism in the 1650s, a renunciation of violence, even by former soldiers turned Quaker. Since peaceableness was the result of righteousness, of an inner condition, as was honest and plain dealing, it was only gradually that the declaration of 1660, which laid out the biblical grounds against war, social violence, or even plotting against King Charles, came to represent one of the corporate testimonies defining membership in the Society of Friends. Again, the later conviction that killing was wrong because there was “that of God” in everyone only gradually came to seem of paramount importance. For the first generation or two, biblical injunctions and the example of Jesus constituted the clinching arguments.
Having established through a close reading of early Quaker texts that pacifism was largely a matter of individual conscience rather than corporate testimony, Weddle then looks at Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations as a test case. Unlike Pennsylvania, founded as a Quaker colony in the 1680s, Rhode Island was not a Quaker colony, although there were Quakers present in that antinomian haven before 1660, and by the 1670s Quakers formed a majority of the colony's magistrates. Like other colonies, Rhode Island's charter required the creation of a militia, and the Dutch wars followed by King Philip's much more deadly and local war meant that the mobilization and use of military force was never merely theoretical. George Fox, who visited the colony in 1672, expressed, “What an honor is it that Christ should be both Priest, Prophet, … Captain and Prince in your colony,” and enjoined the magistrates to glorify God by a godly rule, which preserved “ancient liberties … and privileges … concerning your divine liberty and national liberty” (p. 109). A year later King Philip's war broke out, and in 1673 the magistrates mobilized the militia but also granted their famous Exemption, which argued that the plantation had from the beginning protected “liberty of conscience” and therefore granted an exemption from training or service to those who in good conscience could not “learn war and fight to kill” (pp. 238–39). Connecticut, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay colonies all complained about Rhode Island's nonparticipation in the war, testimony to the Puritan perception that the Quakers were pacifists. But, in fact, although some Quakers blamed the war on the Puritan “spirit of persecution,” the magistrates did provide for the defense of the colony in cooperation with their neighbors while granting exemption to those who scrupled against any participation. Fox wrote to the colony in 1677, expressing concern for their godly reputation but offering no criticism of their wartime actions. As Weddle shows in careful detail, it was only by the end of the century that pacifism had begun to be a corporate testimony enjoined on all Friends.
These four works are exemplary of the fact that we still have much to learn about the politics of religion in early modern England. They suggest that what we think we know may not in fact be supported by the evidence, that the tedious intricacies of Puritan theology repay a careful reading, that in this period religious rhetoric helped shape political perceptions, and that it is a serious error to read later attitudes and ideals back into a period where they did not yet exist with their later clarity. These are all old-fashioned historical virtues, but clearly no less valuable for all of that.
