In early August 1690, the Puritan Roger Morrice noted in his Entring Book an account of a controversy at Ealing in 1647 over keeping Christmas. Morrice's account expanded that of his source, the Memorials of the English Affairs, written by the common lawyer Bulstrode Whitelocke. Four years earlier, Morrice had recorded that Whitelocke's book, advertised in the posthumous auction of the library of the Earl of Anglesey, was banned from sale. Both Puritans, Whitelocke and Morrice were excluded from the centre of politics and religion after 1660 by their dislike of unlimited monarchy and the re-established Church. Since neither printed much, they have been subjected to a second, historiographical, exclusion, for both have been overlooked in modern scholars’ focus on print culture and printed sources. Indeed, both have been studied for their commentary on events – Morrice's of the Restoration, Whitelocke's of the civil wars – more than in their own right.

Mark Goldie's exploration of Morrice's world of Restoration Puritan politics and religion said very little about Whitelocke. Yet at times the latter seems akin to Morrice's Puritan whig associates Denzil Holles and Sir John Maynard. Whitelocke had chaired the committee on the Earl of Strafford's impeachment; Maynard had given evidence. Both were sceptical of claims about plans to raise an Irish army. All three men were involved in peace negotiations in the civil wars; Holles and Whitelocke had been investigated by parliament for unauthorised advice to the king. While Holles distanced himself from the Interregnum regimes, Maynard became reconciled to Cromwell: he supported the offer of the crown, while Whitelocke chaired the committee that drew up the Humble Petition and Advice, having avoided involvement in the regicide, but served under the Commonwealth. After the Restoration, Holles became an ambassador, and Maynard a king's sergeant. Whitelocke received nothing. Has he been subjected to a third exclusion, this time from the ranks of the Morricean Puritan whigs? This essay explores that question by considering both the remarkable similarities and striking differences between the two Puritans.

Whitelocke is a much easier character to track down than the biographically elusive Morrice. The main modern work on him is Ruth Spalding's biography and edition of his ‘Diary’, although the biography said relatively little about his political writing or his post-Restoration life.

To be a Catholic in seventeenth-century England was to court opprobrium, social exclusion, and political suspicion. While in practice Englishmen co-existed with their Catholic neighbours, they feared and reviled the vaguer bogeyman of the papist. The spectre of popery haunted British kings and it twice derailed Stuart monarchs, in the mid-century Civil Wars and in the Revolution of 1688. If Charles I had lost his kingdoms because he was thought to have countenanced creeping crypto-Catholicism at court, and Charles II had been rocked by the Exclusion Crisis partly over fears of a popish successor, what chance did a dedicated overtly Catholic king have? James’s vow upon his accession to ‘preserve the government in Church and State as it is by law established’ might have provided limited reassurance when the nation called to mind similar early promises by the previous Catholic monarch, Mary I. From the incense burned at the Mass which James attended nine days after his accession Protestant nostrils imbibed no holy aroma, but rather the acrid whiff of Smithfield flames.

Nonconformists who sought to use the supremacy to restrain or even abolish bishops were often more antiprelatical than anticlerical. They saw godly clergy as having a role in the church (however organised) and some of them clung to the possibility of a godly bishop. Other theorists were more vehemently anticlerical, perceiving sedition coming from Catholic, Presbyterian, and episcopal sources. These men bemoaned ‘priestcraft’, a word which captured fears about the socio-cultural as well as political power of the clergy. The warriors in this anticlerical campaign included some of the most prominent thinkers in seventeenth-century England: John Selden, Thomas Hobbes, John Harrington, and John Locke. It is, therefore, no surprise that when discussing religious ideas, intellectual historians of the period have been prone to write the history of heterodoxy and unbelief.

The idea of the godly magistrate was common parlance in Restoration England. The depiction of Charles II on the frontispiece of William Prynne’s An Exact Chronological Vindication and Historical Demonstration of our British, Roman, Saxon, Danish, Norman, English Kings Supreme Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction of 1666 (see plate 1, opposite) was an exemplary illustration of the godly ruler. The Church quite literally rests on the royal sword, around which are entwined the words ‘Carol[us] D[ei] G[ratia] fidei et ecclesiae defensor’: Charles by the grace of God defender of the faith and church. Power flows from a heavenly hand to Charles, who wears a closed imperial crown, symbol of his Constantinian sovereignty. And above the church is a banner referring to Isaiah 49:23, the proof-text for royal supremacy: ‘kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers’. This reflected a widespread language of godly kingship in Restoration England. This book provides the first account of the significance of this rhetoric.

The Restoration Settlement endeavoured to erase the events of the Civil Wars, but seemed unable to eradicate the religious pluralism which had flourished in the Interregnum. Politicians and divines treated denominational diversity in a variety of ways. The most fundamental division lay between those upholding a national church coextensive with the polity and those accepting that the established church would become one of several means of worship. Significantly, this fissure did not neatly coincide with that between conformity and Dissent (itself a blurred boundary). Not only was total separation of church and polity rarely advocated, there was also no inexorable rise of toleration. This was partly because prosecution (or persecution, depending on one’s point of view) rose and fell over time, and its impact differed in different areas and on different religious groupings. Informal tolerance or stigmatism also diverged from official dicta. But the prevalence of the idea of a national church made attractive the alternative to toleration: comprehension. This would broaden the church to incorporate those who dissented only on matters ‘indifferent’; not fundamentals of belief, but rites and ceremonies that the Bible did not prescribe; or who objected only to the fact of imposition rather than the items imposed. Those abandoning comprehension in favour of recognising sects outside the Church of England could rarely hope for sympathy from the strongly Anglican parliaments of the Restoration, even when proposing liberty for only Protestant not Catholic recusants. Instead they turned to royal prerogative ‘indulgences’, which unilaterally proclaimed liberty to tender consciences. In a sharp change from previous reigns, after 1660 Protestants dissatisfied with the Church looked to Whitehall, not Westminster. Comprehension was mooted in 1660, 1661, 1667, 1668, 1674, 1675, 1680, and 1689. Indulgences were promulgated in 1662, 1672, 1687, and 1688. Only in 1689 did parliament pass an act of limited toleration.

In the records of parliament, the revolutionary is intermingled with the mundane. In 1533, parliament found time, between making a statute to pave the streets of London and passing an act to prevent ‘excess in apparel’, to redefine the relationship between the king and the church in England. The Act in Restraint of Appeals was not the first assertion of royal independence from clerical jurisdiction, for such claims had been made by medieval kings against popes. But 1533 marked something qualitatively new. It began a process of reconstituting the English church and crown which would fuel debate for the next 150 years.