One noteworthy feature of the English revolution was the desire of virtually all participants to claim the mantle of moderation. We might, depending upon the magnification of our scholarly lens, attribute this tendency either to the peculiarities of English political culture, or to the lingering Aristotelianism of the long European Renaissance, or to the almost infinite capacity of human beings for rationalization. But whatever the reason, it is striking that moderation was everywhere in early modern England's bloodiest conflict, giving it a somewhat different tone or mood from later European revolutions. John Morrill described nearly four decades ago the intense desire for moderation espoused by neutrals who resisted the ideological extremism that was leading the nation to ruin. But similar rhetoric can be found in the writings of the most committed royalists, levellers, presbyterians, independents, and more or less everyone else. A simple word search of Early English Books Online yields 165 books with ‘moderate’ or ‘moderation’ in their titles published between 1640 and 1660. Notable examples include: The Tablet or Moderation of Charles I, Martyr (1649), a royalist panegyric by John Arnway who also, apparently contradictorily, wrote No Peace ‘till the King Prospers (1645), insisting that Charles make no concessions; Moderation Justified (1644), a sermon to the Long Parliament by the presbyterian Thomas Thorowgood denouncing the celebration of Christmas; an attack on parliament for insufficient zeal in bringing Charles I to justice, particularly condemning the wealth of M.P.s, entitled A Moderate and Cleer Relation of the Private Souldierie of Colonell Scroops and Col. Sanders Regiments (1648); and, perhaps most famously, the revolutionary newspaper and occasional propaganda organ of the Levellers, published in sixty-three weekly issues from June 1648 to September 1649, known simply as The Moderate.

This book has argued that a cluster of ancient ethical ideals organised around ‘moderation’ and the ‘middle way’ acquired new meaning and singular importance in English public life between Henry VIII's break with Rome and the Glorious Revolution. Yet unexpectedly, these ubiquitous moral principles often functioned as aggressive polemical weapons and tools of social, religious and political power. Understanding how and why has taken us back and forth across two centuries, through topics ranging from Reformation theology to imperial expansion to political theory, and deep into the ideological heart of early modern England.

We began with the observation that moderation meant government, with no firm boundary between the ethical governance of the passions and the political governance of subjects. Claims for moderation thus routinely combined notions of interior virtue and exterior restraint in ways that would make little sense today. A moderate person – or, by extension, a moderate Church, state or society – was one in equipoise, neither excessive nor deficient, but that equipoise might result from external government as well as self-control. Conversely, moderation was the active process of restraint that resulted in a virtuous middle way, and that process might entail an array of external pressures ranging from polite admonition to public execution. The early modern concept of moderation, in other words, combined and subsumed the conditions of peace, equanimity and reasonableness with the coercion, exclusion or violence that produced them.

The via media and the moderation of the Church

In the half-century following the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559, influential defenders of the Church of England came to imagine that settlement as a via media in the Reformation and argued that strict adherence to its ordinances was constitutive of religious moderation. This is not to say that they imagined an alternative ‘Anglican’ branch of Christianity between Catholics and Protestants; that vision would not emerge until the nineteenth century. Rather, their via media lay in a straightforwardly Protestant Church between on one side Roman Catholics and on the other side puritans, whose unrestrained calls for further Reformation seemed to threaten the disorder of continental Anabaptism. These early opponents of puritanism, who systematically developed earlier, Henrician ideas of the Church of England as a via media, are known to historians as ‘conformists’, a scholarly term of art recognising their preference for obedience to the Church by-law-established as the basis for an orderly Christian society.

Historians have studied Elizabethan and early Stuart conformists, especially the most famous of them, Richard Hooker, from a variety of perspectives, and we now understand a great deal about their debts to the European Reformed tradition, their relationship to later ‘Anglican’ thought, their polemical engagement with puritanism and other important issues. Yet no one has thought to ask just what the conformists meant by moderation. Since Catholicism and puritanism appear to be near opposite ends of a normative Christian spectrum – from dogmatism to individualism, from outward worship to inward spirituality, from centralisation to fragmentation – it has seemed self-evident that a middle space between them actually existed and that contemporaries would try to claim it. If, however, for early modern thinkers moderation implied not merely peace but governance, and the golden mean was not merely a point on a spectrum but a condition of authority, then conformist moderation may have meant something considerably different than historians have assumed. The purpose of this chapter is thus to demonstrate that the self-proclaimed moderation of the Church of England in its ethical, internal sense – a restrained and reasonable Church rather than an unbridled and fanatical one, a Church virtuously limited in its Reformation and thus a via media between Roman Catholicism and the Radical Reformation – was utterly dependent upon the Church of England's external moderation of its subjects through state power and coercive restraint.

Introduction

Before the 1640s, the state's prerogative to punish religious deviance was almost unanimously praised as moderate, while broad claims for religious toleration were almost unanimously condemned as extremist. It was unimpeachable orthodoxy, backed by centuries of both Catholic and Protestant practice, that Christian princes should wield the sword of correction on behalf of the Church. In England, a self-consciously judicious and temperate defence of religious unity – prosecuting heresy and enforcing obligatory participation in the Established Church, but not ‘making windows into men's souls’ – had been the avowed policy of the government since Queen Elizabeth's reign, defining a middle way between the murderous Inquisition of the Catholics and the libertine permissiveness of the Anabaptists. Even puritans and Catholics who dissented from this version of moderation – positing toleration for ceremonial nonconformity, or separation from the Church of England, as alternative forms of moderation – with rare exceptions would have agreed with the puritan Thomas Cartwright's demand that teachers of heresy be put to death: ‘If this be bloody and extreme, I am content to be so counted with the Holy Ghost.’

By 1689, however, and the passage of the law misleadingly known as the ‘Toleration Act’, this consensus had collapsed. Many people throughout the Restoration Era continued to defend moderate religious coercion; in 1675, for instance, the Lord Keeper called the Test Act ‘a moderate security to the Church and crown’. But now competing visions of moderation suggested that any legal compulsion in matters of conscience constituted an excessive use of magisterial power. Thus, whereas in the 1640s defences of religious coercion routinely contained title phrases like ‘Moderation Justified’ and the ‘Advantages of Moderation’, by 1686 William Penn could write A Perswasive to Moderation defending religious toleration; by 1687 a Yorkshire Justice of the Peace, when asked if he could live ‘friendly with those of all persuasions’, replied that he could do so ‘in as much as I have always loved moderation’; and by 1714 an embattled defender of the old orthodoxy could lament that toleration was now widely accepted by ‘fashionable moderate men’.

Puritan self-government

In 1582, a bookbinder named Thomas Gibson painted disquieting graffiti in a church in Bury St Edmonds. Next to the royal arms, which Queen Elizabeth had erected in every parish church, Gibson wrote God's condemnation of the Laodiceans from Revelation 3:15–16: ‘I know thy works, that thou are neither hot nor cold. I would thou were cold or hot. Therefore because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, it will come to pass, I will spew thee out of my mouth.’ These dangerous sentiments remained for ‘a quarter of a year, in a most public place, without concealment’ until Richard Bancroft, who was passing through the puritan stronghold of Bury to preach against the ‘pretended Reformation there’, notified local officials. According to the later reminiscence of Archbishop Whitgift, Bancroft was ‘greatly maligned, by no mean persons, for doing his duty’. When Church authorities painted over Gibson's quintessentially immoderate text with less provocative verses, he countered by adding Revelation 2:20: ‘Notwithstanding, I have a few things against thee: that thou sufferest the woman Jezebel, which maketh herself a prophetess, to teach and deceive my servants; to make them commit fornication, and to eat meat sacrificed to idols.’ This remarkable incident was remembered the following year by the queen herself, who used it as an opportunity to remind her clergy that the Church of England was a moderate via media between puritans and papists who questioned her authority: ‘I have heard that some of them of late have said that I was of no religion – neither hot nor cold, but such a one as one day would give God the vomit. I pray you, look unto such men…Both of these join together in one opinion against me, for neither of them would have me to be Queen of England.’

This confrontation corresponds to our textbook understanding of puritanism: an almost Manichaean worldview in which the binary opposition of true religion and popery, the godly and the ungodly, left little room for moderation. Puritanism, in this view, was generated by the rejection of compromise – most famously the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 – and was committed to replacing lukewarm conformity with hot, zealous faith. This propensity for continuous Reformation, interrogating every thought and action for signs of compromise with the world, encouraged puritans to generate increasingly radical factions, until in the 1640s the regulatory apparatus that had restrained their centrifugal energies was removed and puritanism itself flew apart into sectarian chaos.

Introduction: the bridle and the square

George Wither was a terrible poet. According to a seventeenth-century anecdote, Wither's writing was so infamous that when he was captured by royalists in the Civil War, the royalist gentleman Sir John Denham ‘went to the king and desired his majesty not to hang him’, on the grounds that as long as Wither lived Denham himself ‘should not be the worst poet in England’. Yet bad poetry is sometimes just blunt enough to make good history, so we begin with an emblem taken from Wither's Collection of emblemes, ancient and moderne (1635). Here, under the words ‘Do not the golden mean exceed / in word, in passion nor in deed’, we see the allegorical figure of moderation holding a horse's bridle in one hand and a carpenter's square in the other. The poem beneath tells us that, like a headstrong horse or mule, our nature is immoderate until ‘grace and reason come to govern us’. Then, explicating the emblem's imagery, Wither explains:

1. The square (which is an useful instrument,

2. To shape forth senseless forms) may represent

3. The Law: because mankind (which is by Nature,

4. Almost as dull, as is the senseless creature)

5. Is thereby, from the native-rudeness, wrought;

6. And, in the way of honest-living taught.

7. The bridle (which invention did contrive,

8. To rule and guide the creature-sensitive)

9. May type forth Discipline; which, when the law

10. Hath schooled the wit, must keep the will in awe.

11. And he that can by these his passions bound,

12. This emblem's meaning usefully hath found.

Here, moderation is anything but peaceful; it is an active force of both moral and legal control. The alliance of internal and external moderation – between the ethical moderation of reason and grace to keep the ‘passions bound’ and the external moderation of law to restrain and civilise human beings in their words and deeds – is precisely the point of the emblem. They are symbiotic: once law has schooled the wit, discipline keeps the will in awe.

Moderate churches

We have seen in Part I, in general and synchronic terms, how the ideal of moderation in early modern England combined ethical restraint and political authority. This did not simply mean, as has often been stated, that self-control authorised external government; this was partly true, as in the paradigmatic cases of idealised manhood and idealised godliness, but at the same time claims for self-government were always at least partially attenuated by the weight of original sin. The point, then, is that at one higher level of abstraction the concept of moderation subsumed and combined internal and external moderation in a dialectical relationship: the moderation of individuals always depended upon them being restrained from the outside, but that external restraint was authorised by the moderation of the individuals who performed it. In a public or political context, this tension produced a suspicion of worldly power as sinful, fallen and in need of restraint, even as it nominated such worldly power as the proper agent of restraint upon a sinful and fallen world.

Moderate rule

We have seen in Part II the rule of moderation in broadly constitutional debates concerning authority in and over the Church. The essential problem was a catch-22 familiar since antiquity: government consists in the restraint of excess, but the power to restrain excess itself requires restraint. Yet, however timeless this agonism, Englishmen building their Church confronted it within unique institutional and ideological contexts. First, the English Reformation established the primacy of civil over ecclesiastical government, erecting a superstructure that all participants had to accept or else step beyond the pale of political legitimacy; for all the theological subtleties used to define religious moderation, it was hard to trump obedience to lawfully constituted authority. Second, humanism and Protestantism converged to emphasise the regenerative powers of virtue or godliness in the world; given the centuries that England had wallowed in anti-Christian corruption, the goal of government was not merely stability but improvement. Third, while both Christian liberty and strong government were essential, belief in the depravity of man and the fallen nature of all human institutions severely attenuated what both liberty and authority might be taken to mean. Time and again, then, the solution offered by English Protestants for navigating these conflicting imperatives was the rule of moderation: government was in some significant sense authorised by its limitation, but the government such limitation authorised was intrinsically interventionist, committed to the goals of discipline and regeneration through the active restraint of its subjects. Since external moderation needed to take over where internal moderation failed, the rule of moderation was committed to peace and harmony through restraint and exclusion, with routinely coercive and sometimes violent results.

Introduction: ‘between the old world and the new’

In 1578, the Elizabethan courtier and magus John Dee introduced his queen to the concept of a ‘British Empire’, in the process outlining the most expansive vision of Tudor authority ever written. In a self-conscious repudiation of Hapsburg claims to lordship over all the world, Dee argued historically and legally that Queen Elizabeth's empire included not only the whole of Britain and Ireland but also Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, great chunks of Germany, the New World north of the forty-fifth parallel and even, via a fourteenth-century marriage treaty, Spain and Portugal and hence the New World in its entirety. Yet the title of Dee's remarkable work – Brytanici Imperii Limites – paradoxically stressed the moderation of his claims: these were the boundaries of Tudor authority, beyond which the law-abiding English would not extend themselves. Throughout the manuscript Dee affirmed the moderation of English aspirations and contrasted them with the excesses of foreign, especially Spanish, imperial projects. In proving English imperium over Scandinavia, for instance, Dee admitted that ‘the common guise hath anciently been with all nations excessively to extol some one of their notable princes’, passing off their ‘registered fantasies’ as history; in other words, most nations invented ancient conquests to make excessive claims to authority. The English, by contrast, relied upon the unimpeachable deeds of ‘our incomparable Arthur’, whose ancient conquests had been affirmed by a counsel of noblemen, scholars and lawyers who swore that ‘so far as they were able, following the path of righteousness and straying neither to right nor to left, they would expound the venerable institutions of their laws and customs, omitting nothing, adding nothing and disguising nothing by prevarications’. The British Empire, then, was moderate regardless of its geographic expanse because it was legitimate, whereas other European empires were immoderate because they usurped lawful English authority.

Introduction: six characters in search of a scaffold

On 30 July 1540, a peculiar procession ambled its way from the Tower of London to the gallows at Smithfield. In the centre, surrounded by soldiers, sheriffs and royal officials, six priests were carried on ‘hurdles’ – wooden sledges upon which, under English law, condemned felons were paraded through the streets to spare them ‘the extreme torment of being dragged on the ground’. Three of these priests – Robert Barnes, Thomas Garret and William Jerome – were evangelical reformers (soon to be known as Protestants) who had been condemned by parliament for heresy. The other three – Edward Powell, Richard Fetherston and Thomas Abel – were Roman Catholics who had been condemned by parliament for treason. Upon each hurdle two men were tied, one evangelical and one Catholic, in a grisly and calculated display of symmetry. When they reached Smithfield, the prisoners found a unique and ghastly sight awaiting them: two adjacent instruments of execution built within view of one another. On one side were three stakes surrounded by kindling, intended to burn men to death, the traditional penalty for heresy; on the other side was a large scaffold and three ropes, with knives close at hand to hack the strangled bodies to pieces, the traditional penalty for treason. Thus did six priests watch each other die, along with the throngs who gathered to observe the epitome of royal justice. The Tudor regime not only inflicted the law upon the bodies of its victims but viscerally imprinted it upon the senses of the crowd: smoke stinging their eyes, blood staining their clothes, the smell of burning flesh, the screams of dying men.

This event was undoubtedly a crucial, founding moment of the Church of England's self-proclaimed ‘middle way’ in the Reformation. In a public display of enormous symbolic significance, Henry VIII and his government defined the boundaries of acceptable religion and declared a whole series of beliefs and practices – on both sides of the emerging Reformation divide – beyond the pale of judicious, temperate English religion. Yet if this elaborate, six-way execution was the founding moment of the Anglican via media, it is worth noticing that it was not by every standard a particularly moderate way to behave. Even by the standards of Henry VIII, this was a bloodbath. Moreover, because the victims were condemned by bills of attainder rather than by juries of their peers, the whole process stank of extra-legality and arbitrary rule. So how can we understand this extraordinary incident? How should we interpret an act of self-conscious religious moderation based upon the public burning and dismembering of human beings?

Introduction: the politics of social moderation

Historians who do not feel comfortable talking about a ‘middle class’ in England before the nineteenth century instead often use the term ‘middle sort’. Whatever sleight of hand may sometimes be inherent in this manoeuvre – for the occupants of the two categories often seem eerily similar – early modern historians console themselves that ‘middle sort’ (or sometimes ‘middling sort’) was at least a bona fide early modern term. Using this term, and trying to understand its contemporary nuances, captures subjective understandings of early modern social relations in ways that more recent and ideologically freighted terms like ‘middle class’ simply do not. Thus a number of historians, most notably Keith Wrightson, have tracked the emergence of the idea of a ‘middle sort’, arguing that the ‘middle sort of people’ were only occasionally identified as such in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but that use of the term increased from the 1620s onwards, accelerating rapidly in the Civil Wars and Revolution, indicating the growing significance and cultural coherence of people whose wealth and status depended upon trade. This view has been nuanced by Henry French, who showed that even after the idea of a ‘middle sort’ came into vogue, the middle sort rarely deployed it themselves. It remained in the seventeenth century a term of theoretical analysis rather than self-identification, and in local contexts the middle sort usually referred to themselves as ‘chief inhabitants’, stressing their ascendancy rather than their mediocrity.

As a result of these valuable investigations we now understand a great deal about the complex social and cultural position of the ‘middle sort’ in early modern England. On the upper end, the middle sort might mimic the qualities of their betters, purchase manors and over generations become gentrified; yet increasingly through our period they also might reject such aspirations and defend the life of useful trade over decadent gentility. On the lower end, the middle sort might claim entry into the oligarchies of their communities through the rhetoric of gentility; yet since a decreasing percentage of tradesmen actually owned their means of production, they might easily fall into dependency and become indistinguishable from wage earners. The seventeenth-century ‘middle sort’ thus appear in the historiography as ancestors of both the bourgeoisie and their skilled employees, and understanding the process of differentiation between these groups has become a significant scholarly enterprise. In sum, by paying attention to the terms by which contemporaries described themselves and others, historians have re-authorised the centrality (for the seventeenth century if not for the sixteenth) of tradesmen, shopkeepers, merchants and capitalist farmers within a cultural rather than a social or Marxist historiography.

Introduction: ‘the mean of liberty’

In modern political thought, we like to imagine ‘liberty’ as a simple antonym of ‘tyranny’, yet a moment's reflection reveals that this dualism is illusory. When we use the word ‘liberty’ in a political context, we implicitly assume a series of appropriate limitations; even the strictest libertarians admit that some forms of coercion and some limits to self-determination are not incompatible with liberty but essential to it. Political liberty, then, is ordinarily presumed to exist on a continuum, and its limitations are as significant as its core in defining what liberty means in particular political contexts. In the seventeenth century, when political ideals were routinely imagined as middle ways between extremes, this idea of limited liberty as true liberty was inevitably expressed in terms of moderation.

The interconnection between liberty and moderation can be found anywhere in early modern England that the idea of liberty came into vogue. But there is no better laboratory for studying this association, and no place where its ideological implications were more significant, than in the great, extended controversy over the nature of liberty we call the English Revolution. So, for instance, as Quentin Skinner has recently noted, Thomas Hobbes described himself in the dedicatory epistle to his Leviathan as responding to ‘those that contend, on one side for too great liberty, and on the other side for too much authority’. Far from being a novel claim for moderation in 1651, this was a commonplace. The parliamentarian theorist Henry Parker, for instance, wrote in 1642, ‘Long it was ere the world could extricate itself out of all these extremities…to avoid the danger of unbounded prerogative on this hand, and too excessive liberty on the other.’ In a tract significantly entitled The Arraignment of Licentious Liberty and Oppressing Tyranny (1647), the erstwhile parliamentarian and future royalist Nathaniel Hardy hoped that ‘neither royal majesty may invade the subjects’ liberty, nor the subjects’ liberty entrench too far on royal majesty’. In 1649, John Lilburne and his fellow Levellers admitted, ‘Though tyranny is so excessively bad, yet of the two extremes, confusion is the worst.’ The republican Marchamont Nedham in 1650 described the English Commonwealth as ‘the only bank which preserves us from the inundation of tyranny on the one side, and confusion on the other’. In 1656, the lawyer Michael Hawke argued that as a conjunction of ‘liberty and principality’ the Cromwellian protectorate was a ‘mean between an abrupt service under the dominion of a tyrant, and dissolute licentiousness…To the best princes the mean of liberty is most pleasing, and so to rule their subjects by reason and law, that they do live civilly without injury and enjoy quietly their properties and liberty.’ The examples are nearly limitless.

This book began as an attempt to answer a deceptively simple question: why was it that whenever the Tudor-Stuart regime most loudly trumpeted its moderation, that regime was at its most vicious? The question had first occurred to me in the context of Henry VIII's remarkable, simultaneous execution of three Catholics and three Protestants in July 1540 as a (literally) flamboyant statement of the Church of England's moderation. But over years of teaching English history, I found that the question seemed to recur in a wide variety of contexts: the claim to punish religious dissidents for their conduct but not to make windows into men's souls; the use of writs of the peace to enforce order and punish offenders without resorting to the courts; claims for the moderation of the English empire compared to the excesses of New Spain; laws promoting religious toleration that established new penalties for blasphemy. The common thread running through these examples was that they were all cases where power was authorised and even amplified by its limitation. My deceptively simple question, I realised, led deep into the ideological heart of early modern England.

My first answer to this question was that moderation was an intrinsically relational and comparative ethical framework, so that every claim to the moderate centre involved the construction and vilification of extremists on the margins. I still stand by this initial answer, and while I am hardly the first scholar to notice it, the intrinsically aggressive character of moderation is far too rarely emphasised. As a historian, however, I soon became unsatisfied with such an ahistorical, structural thesis. If moderation were ‘always already’ aggressive, then there seemed little point in isolating one specific example of it or studying its ideological resonances in a particular time and place. I was uninterested in practising philosophy without a licence; I wanted to understand what made moderation so peculiarly important to early modern England.