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Representing and Misrepresenting the History of Puritanism in Eighteenth-Century England*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
An Englishman living during the mid-eighteenth century would have known that his country had been, at least since the late sixteenth century, a decidedly and, for the long-foreseeable future, an unalterably Protestant nation. But what sort of Protestant nation? One that needed a legally estabhshed church? And, if so, what sort of church should that church as established by law be? Did it, for instance, necessarily require a certain kind of church government? In its relation to the English state, did the church need to be the senior, equal or junior partner? And what rights, if any, should those not conforming to the estabhshed church have? These were vexing questions, and the mid-seventeenth-century civil wars had mostly been an intra-Protestant fight over them. Yet neither those internecine religio-political wars nor the subsequent political revolution of the late seventeenth century had resolved definitively any of the fundamental questions about church and state raised originally by the sixteenth-century religious Reformations. Those who had lived through the Sacheverell crisis, the Bangorian controversy or the fiercely anti-clerical 1730s recognized this all too well: historians, alas, have not.
- Type
- Part I: The Churches’ Use of the Past
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013
Footnotes
*
I thank Bill Gibson, Tony Claydon, Jeremy Gregory, Bill Bulman, Jason Peacey, Noah Millstone and Alex Barber for their advice. Unless otherwise noted, the place of publication is London.
References
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