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Rethinking the Restoration: Dissenting cases for conscience, 1667–1672*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Gary S. de Krey
Affiliation:
St Olaf College

Abstract

On what religious and political grounds did restoration nonconformists argue for ‘ease to tender consciences’, and what did they mean by conscience? These questions are central to any evaluation of nonconformist political thought in the early restoration. Such dissenting thinkers as Slingsby Bethel, John Humfrey, Philip Nye, John Owen, William Penn, and Sir Charles Wolseley authored arguments for conscience during the intense debate about the restoration church settlement that occurred between 1667 and 1672. This essay outlines four different cases for conscience to which these arguments contributed. Two of these cases reconciled claims for conscience with the ecclesiastical authority of the monarch. Two other cases for conscience challenged the traditional religious authority of the crown.

Should any or all of these arguments for conscience be considered radical arguments? The answer to this question requires a definition of the term ‘radical’ – one that is appropriate for the late Stuart period. The grounds upon which early restoration advocates of conscience accepted an indulgence under the royal prerogative in 1672 are also explained.

The essay addresses the historiography of the restoration by considering Christopher Hill's and Richard Ashcraft's views about dissenting thought. It also proposes that the 1667–72 debate about the state and religion raised so many critical issues as to constitute an early restoration crisis about conscience.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 Recent biographies of Charles II characterize the period differently. Jones, J. R. sees Charles himself as the principal political player of this period in Charles II: royal politician (London, 1987), pp. 79107Google Scholar. Hutton, Ronald agrees but also sees this period as ‘the Ministry of Arlington’ in Charles II: king of England, Scotland and Ireland (Oxford, 1989), pp. 254–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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26 For the due du Rohan see Gunn, pp. 36–8. For Rohan's influence upon Algernon Sidney's restoration thought, see Scott, , Sidney and the English republic, ch. 12.Google Scholar

27 Humfrey, , Defense of the proposition, pp. 57–8, 99100Google Scholar. Humfrey was so confident of the success of this religious formula that he alone among the dissenting authors of 1667–72 was prepared to extend the indulgence of conscience to ‘the common Papist’, though not to Jesuits or seminary priests. Ibid. p. 63.

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38 Ibid. pp. 131, 147–8. Also see Penn's ideas as incorporated into Rudyard, pp. 32–48.

39 The Englishman, p. 9.

40 Ashcraft argues that dissenting spokesmen as a whole assigned reason an important role in gaining religious understanding, but Worden points to the distinctiveness of Wolseley's arguments about reason and religion: Ashcraft, , Revolutionary politics, pp. 54–9Google Scholar; Worden, , ‘Toleration’, pp. 232–3.Google Scholar

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49 Ibid. fo. 78; Saints freedom from tyranny vindicated, p. 29.

50 Ashcraft sometimes refers to the debate over conscience as the debate over Samuel Parker's Ecclesiastical politie, and he sometimes treats the dissenting intellectuals as reacting to Parker's arguments: pp. 45, 66, 74. Such suggestions are misleading. This intellectual debate originated not with Parker's important book but rather with a fundamental issue; and the dissenters initiated the debate themselves, as early as 1667, when the original conventicle act was first reconsidered by parliament.

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91 Seaward, chs. 10–11; Pincus, Protestantism and patriotism.