The place of this essay in a book on Milton and heresy may seem superficially paradoxical, because I shall argue that Milton's earliest radical prose deflects the then crucial controversies about Laudian doctrinal innovation away from issues of belief and toward issues of practice, of discipline, in ways that seek to marginalize doctrine. However, my thesis is that this marginalization is not because Milton is uninterested in doctrine, but because he probably subscribes, as early as 1641, to views deemed heretical by the middle ground of Puritan opinion. His silence is an attempt to win some space for heterodoxy from Presbyterian Calvinism and to site antiprelaticism in anticlericalism.

Thus, the essay explores Milton's developing notion of what may be tolerated, and re-appraises what he has to say about the characteristic practices and beliefs of what is customarily termed Laudianism and, to a less extent, of the sects, in the context of recent historical discussions focused on the place of religious discord in the origins of the English Civil War.

John Morrill has forcefully argued that, of all the impulses driving opposition to the personal rule of Charles I and precipitating open conflict, the determining factor was dissatisfaction with the Caroline church: