The Declaration of Indulgence of 1672

By the Act of Toleration of 1689 English Protestant Dissenters achieved freedom of worship. But it was not the first time since the Restoration that the Dissenters had been liberated. Twice, in 1672 and 1687, toleration had been granted, but on those occasions it was the fruit of royal edicts, suspending statutes against nonconformity. The controversy provoked by Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence of 1672 marks a moment in Restoration history in which the ecclesiological dimension of proto-Whiggism was especially manifest. Because the Indulgence was a prerogative act there has been a tendency to construe the episode as a constitutional clash between statute and prerogative. Yet, while contemporaries undoubtedly raised the issue of the authority of parliament, the debate had more to do with liberty of conscience, the hegemony of the church, the authority of bishops, and the role of the supreme magistrate in the exercise of godly rule. The controversy was an incident in England's long Reformation.

The ‘great persecution’ was more the work of parliament than the crown. The Clarendon Code, enacted in the 1660s, was brutal: it not only enforced Anglican uniformity but also criminalized all alternative religious meetings. Quakers and Baptists were jailed in their hundreds; Presbyterians and Independents were punished too. The code culminated in the Conventicle Act of 1670, which Andrew Marvell memorably called ‘the quintessence of arbitrary malice’. The Act unleashed informers and imposed crippling fines and sequestrations. Yet the king did not share the priorities of the Anglican Royalist establishment and sought conciliation. His motives were to assist Catholics and to appease Puritans. The fact that repression was the work of parliament and liberty the gift of kings shadowed the debate over the Indulgence. Since parliament was the source of persecuting laws, a number of Puritans and future Whigs were tempted to defend the Indulgence. The Quaker William Penn did so; so also Marvell, in the Rehearsal Transpros’d. Some Puritans who had been Parliamentarians during the Civil War, now defended royal ecclesiastical supremacy. It was a position that perhaps was not so paradoxical after all, because they had adopted a similar stance in relation to the religiously plural church established by the quasi-monarch Oliver Cromwell.

The Indulgence was not unprecedented. Charles had attempted this device in 1662, but had withdrawn at the behest of parliament.