Although later than most topics in this volume, the mid seventeenth-century English revolution must hold a significant place in any discussion of when the age of the Reformation, with its characteristic attitudes to tolerance and intolerance, came to an end. Fifty years ago, most historians would have agreed that the Puritan revolution opened a new epoch in the history of toleration and saw the first manifestations of modern liberalism. In recent decades, however, both revisionist and anti-revisionist historians have denied the modernity of tolerationist views in the revolutionary period, arguing that even the most radical thinkers belonged to the previous age and were limited by their theological inheritance to quite narrow views of who could be tolerated and why.

Such historians quite rightly point out that both Cromwell and Milton, the most ardent defenders of toleration among the Independents, explicitly excluded Catholics. Milton's Areopagitica may disappoint modern readers when he qualifies his apparently general arguments with, ‘I mean not tolerated popery and open superstition … ’ Cromwell's crisp reply to an official in Ireland may also look like a contradiction to modern eyes: ‘I meddle not with any man's conscience’, he wrote, ‘but if by liberty of conscience, you mean liberty to exercise the Mass, I judge it best to use plain dealing, and to let you know, Where the Parliament of England have power, that will not be allowed of.’

This may seem to us as much of a let-down as the later concept of universal suffrage for men only, but recent historians have stressed the gulf between the seventeenth-century context and modern liberal thinking.