Andrew Marvell stands at the junction of literature and history, a consummate poet who latterly became a prose writer of stunning virtuosity and forthrightness. His polemics touched upon every political and ecclesiastical crux of the Restoration era. A member of parliament for Hull and a client of aristocrats who were at odds with Anglican Royalism, he encapsulates sensibilities that were at once Puritan and proto-Whig. His Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672–3) brilliantly skewered the persecutory Samuel Parker; his Mr Smirke; or, the Divine in Mode (1676) burlesqued the rising clergyman Fancis Turner, while its appendix, A Short Historical Essay on General Councils, exemplified the partisan weaponizing of the history of the early church. His Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677) was a clarion call of the emerging Whig movement, famed for its opening assertion that ‘there has now for divers years, a design been carried on, to change the lawful government of England into an absolute tyranny’; while his (now obscure) Remarks upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse (1678) delved into the crisis of Protestant soteriology and the dilemmas of Calvinism. Marvell's career throws a bridge between the Revolutions of 1648 and 1688. During the Interregnum he served alongside John Milton in the task of vindicating the Commonwealth; in his last years (he died in 1678), his confidant was his nephew, William Popple, who would become an intimate of John Locke and translator into English of Locke's Epistola de tolerantia. To examine Marvell's adversaries, and his responses to them, is to exhume not only the substance of civil and religious contention during the 1670s but also their manner and form, their rhetorical and performative character. We may capture the latter aspect by reference to a single trope. Marvell took from the second duke of Buckingham's play The Rehearsal (1672) the character of ‘Draw-can-Sir’, a brawling buffoon, and applied it to Parker, thereby popularizing the figure of the swaggering, bullying authorial swordsman. The phrase caught on. One of the critics of the supreme Tory pamphleteer Roger L’Estrange called him a ‘Draw-can-Sir’. By 1698 a versifier could casually refer to a ‘Draw-can-Sir’ as a ‘fighting coward and a Tory’. Locke surely had such allusions in mind when, in the Second Treatise of Government, he called the defenders of absolute monarchy ‘arrant Draw-can-Sirs’.

Pulling up the roots of sedition

In 1661 the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Edward Turnor, likened republican England after the execution of Charles I to the five-day anarchy permitted among the ancient Persians so that they might appreciate kingly rule. ‘The forms and species of government are various’, he explained, ‘monarchical, aristocratical, and democratical: but the first is certainly the best, as being the nearest to divinity itself.’ As this remark suggests, civil war and regicide made a generation of gentlemen more, not less, willing to endorse the doctrines that sovereignty lay in the crown, that rebellion was never justified, and that monarchy had something of divinity. It now seemed incontrovertible that the crown's supremacy was the guarantor of the gentry's own authority. ‘There can be nothing’, wrote Thomas Hobbes, ‘more instructive towards loyalty and justice than will be the memory, while it lasts, of that war’.

During the Civil War the Long Parliament's defenders had deployed, with increasing self-confidence, the arsenal of anti-absolutist arguments developed by Scottish Calvinist and French Huguenot radicals in the late sixteenth century. They asserted that the source of political authority lay in the community, and that the king was an officer of the commonwealth, answerable to the people. The community, incorporated in parliament, might legitimately coerce a tyrannical ruler in defence of its rights. The premise was populist, the conclusion revolutionary. In 1649 the Rump Parliament declared that ‘the people are, under God, the original of all just power’ and ‘the Commons of England, in parliament assembled … have the supreme power in this nation’.

The legislation of the early 1660s, as Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, put it, ‘pulled up all those principles of sedition and rebellion by the roots’. Several statutes provided explicit affirmations of political doctrine, among them the Regicide, Militia, Treason, Corporation, and Triennial Acts. They declared that the period of the ‘late usurped governments’ had seen ‘many evil and rebellious principles … distilled into the minds of the people’, which must now be ‘prevented’. Parliament's war was not a legitimate resistance but a ‘barbarous rebellion’ bred by ‘fanatic rage’. The attempt to enforce regular parliaments had been a ‘derogation of his majesty's just rights and prerogative inherent to the imperial crown’.

Thomas Hobbes is the most original and inflammatory Englishman ever to have written on political theory. His Leviathan (1651) was a spectre that haunted Restoration England. Quickly, the terms ‘Hobbist’, ‘Hobbian’, and ‘Hobbism’ entered the language. In many controversies – philosophical, political, theological, ethical, and scientific – it was incumbent upon authors to take a stand vis-à-vis Hobbes. That stand was most often hostile, for Hobbes was reviled as atheistic, immoral, and a friend of arbitrary power. Yet there is a deep paradox about the reception of Hobbes. He was a defender of absolute monarchy, yet many of his most stentorian critics were themselves Anglican Royalists. Indeed, for these intellectuals, to write against Hobbes came to be, alongside attacking popery and Puritanism, a badge of polemical prowess and public virtue, even a rite of passage towards preferment. For them, Hobbes built, as to civil government, the desired house, but upon disastrously mistaken metaphysical foundations. As to ecclesiastical government, he hatefully undermined churchmen and enslaved the church to the state. Consequently, the Anglican Royalist regime was unfavourable to Hobbes, who lived until 1679. His books were banned, and notoriously, as John Aubrey reports, ‘the bishops made a motion, to have the good old gentleman burned for a heretic’. Yet his person was protected by the king, and during the interval of the Cabal regime between 1667 and 1673 his authority served the ministry, albeit circumspectly. Those who found Hobbes's arguments persuasive had to express themselves indirectly or clandestinely. Consequently, documenting his positive reception presents a forensic puzzle. To the paradox and the puzzle must be added a hermeneutic morass: what Hobbes meant, or at least whom and what he intended to support, became (and remains) profoundly contested. Hobbes was appropriated by, and deprecated as the patron of, contradictory causes.

Hobbes's reception was European-wide. The focus of the present chapter is upon England, although it is appropriate to begin with Gottfried Leibniz, whose short essay ‘Meditation on the Common Concept of Justice’ (c. 1702) is worth reading not only for its commentary on Hobbes but also as a brilliant epitome of central dilemmas in the history of political thought from Plato onwards.

The polemic against Hobbes: the theological premises

The German philosopher Leibniz, the most persistent and percipient of Hobbes's continental critics, believed that the crux of the quarrel between them lay in Plato's Euthyphro Dilemma.

Dryden's Absalom and the birth of King Monmouth

In the opening lines of his celebrated political satire Absalom and Achitophel (1681) John Dryden depicts a polygamous golden age when men freely spread their seed, unencumbered by the Christian law of marriage:

It was under this dispensation that Absalom, ‘so beautiful so brave’, was born to one of King David's concubines. Dryden's David represents King Charles II and Absalom his illegitimate son James, duke of Monmouth, who had been born to a woman called Lucy Walter. Charles had bedded her in 1649, during his exile in France. Now, in the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, Monmouth, ‘the Protestant duke’, staked a claim to the throne against ‘the Catholic duke’, the king's brother and heir, James, duke of York. The fate of Protestant England, so it seemed to the Whigs, was in the balance, because Monmouth was barred from the throne by his illegitimacy. But what if Monmouth was not ‘illegitimate’ after all? What if ‘promiscuous use of concubine’ was no sin? Dryden ironizes a libertine and anticlerical view that nature's laws are more liberal about sexual morality than those sanctioned by the church. By imposing a priestly ceremonial apparatus upon marriage, the church had usurped control over the laws of bastardy and inheritance. But by the purer law of nature the duke of Monmouth was, quite simply, his father's eldest son. It was ‘priestcraft’ that excluded the Protestant heir.

A few months before the publication of Dryden's poem in November 1681, precisely this case for Monmouth's legitimacy was argued in a remarkable treatise by an aged Whig lawyer called William Lawrence. The book appeared in two instalments. Marriage by the Moral Law of God Vindicated was published in late summer 1680, but the printing of the rest was interrupted by a government raid against seditious printers. That was galling, for parliament was due to assemble on 21 October, and planned to debate the succession.

The illusion of restoration and the making of the church party

Our conventional idea of the Restoration involves an illusion. Because monarchy was restored, we tend to suppose that Charles II's reign was a monolith of Anglican Royalist reaction, and that king and Cavalier were of one mind in reversing the Puritan tide. There are mythologies to bolster this illusion. In Whig and Dissenting memory it was an era of brutal repression of the Good Old Cause, a time of underground conspiracy and heroic suffering. Historians of radicalism tend to find, when looking beyond 1660, a story of defeat and dejection, when Israel was captive in Egypt. The Egyptian taskmasters are made to seem an undifferentiated combination of crown and church, court and gentry. Other voices confirm this impression. The paeans chanted by Anglican divines to the sanctity of kingship and to the holy union of crown and altar disguise from us the degree of scepticism that the monarchs themselves, Charles and James, felt towards the dogmas of Cavalier Anglicans. That the royal brothers leaned towards Catholicism is familiar enough. But the surprise is how often they leaned towards Puritans and Dissenters.

From the point of view of Anglican loyalists, Charles, from the outset, dangerously favoured the leaders of the old Parliamentarian cause. He pardoned, even employed, the ‘old leaven’, and sorely neglected his most loyal subjects: his privy council included his father's enemies. He affronted the church and gave succour to her schismatic enemies: he offered bishoprics to leading Puritans. The flood of patronage in 1660 to those broadly called the ‘Presbyterian’ party – those who had made war on Charles I but had discovered a passionate royalism once they had defeated him – rendered Cavaliers begrudging partners in institutions surprisingly ‘broad-bottomed’ in their make-up. Cavaliers joked bitterly that the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, the act of forgetting of past crimes against the crown, passed in 1660, meant indemnity for rebels and oblivion for loyalists. They compiled lists of indigent Cavaliers, whose estates had been ruined in their service to Charles I, but now with little sign of recompense.

Yet these resentments were as nothing to the rage provoked by some of the politics and personnel of the so-called Cabal years, between 1667 and 1673, half-Oliverian and half-papistical, a perverse regime that was to be re-enacted in tragedy by James II in 1687–8.

The people of early modern England believed themselves to belong to two societies, answering to the dual aspect of their human nature, soul and body. They called these societies spiritual and temporal. They also referred to them as ‘church’ and ‘state’, or ‘ecclesiastical’ and ‘civil’. The two societies were understood to have distinct purposes, eternal salvation and earthly welfare, but in practice they were entangled. Thus they were conceptually – or, as philosophers today would say, analytically – distinct; but substantively, in actual life, they were necessarily conjoined. Souls were, on this earth, embodied. People's lives in this world ought to be godly, and earthly institutions should be imbued with divine purpose. The church had for centuries been deeply involved in temporal affairs, and ministers of religion, besides their spiritual callings from Christ, exercised extensive worldly authority. Conversely, princes demanded oversight of the church, even a ‘royal supremacy’ in matters ecclesiastical. The boundaries between temporal and spiritual realms were consequently fraught with ambiguity and contestation.

In theory at least, the two societies were co-extensive, in that all the people were simultaneously members of both societies. The church comprised the commonwealth at prayer, and civil society comprised the godly at work. England was understood to be a godly commonwealth, and subject to godly rule. The commonwealth was godly not only because the two societies were co-extensive, and not only because the ruler was Christian, but also because temporal rulers – the ‘prince’ and the ‘magistrates’ – were held to have a duty to support and uphold the church, by lending the force of the state to the service of the Christian creed, its worship, and its governance. Correspondingly, the rulers of the church, the bishops and the wider hierarchy, had a proper role as counsellors to the prince and the magistrates, and as keepers of the public conscience.

The two societies were corporate bodies. Although Christ had said ‘my kingdom is not of this world’, and some critics of the worldly church wished, on that account, to dissolve the corporate church, nonetheless the body of Christ's people on earth was a legal entity, with jurisdiction and governance.

The puzzle of the English Enlightenment

Anticlericalism has long been integral to our idea of the Enlightenment. This used to encourage a heroic mythology of secularization, in which reason did battle with religion, free-thought with bigotry. Few historians today would endorse so Manichaean a picture, for European thought in the eighteenth century is now seen to have been characterized by an ameliorated Christianity rather than by a militant crusade to overthrow it. Yet even so, the attack on priestcraft, on clerical dogmatism and religious intolerance, remains stubbornly central to the story of Europe's passage from Reformation zeal to Enlightenment eirenicism.

The historical prominence of anticlericalism renders England's position puzzling. For it is commonly supposed that, in the words of a Times leader in 1984, England ‘has had no intellectually sanctioned tradition of anticlericalism since the Reformation’ – and a forteriori no Enlightenment. John Pocock, deploying one of his more colourful metaphors, has written that ‘to try to articulate the phrase “the English Enlightenment” is to encounter inhibition; an ox sits upon the tongue’. The English, it is held, by disposing of Laudian and Calvinist fanaticism in the Civil War, and popery and tyranny in the Glorious Revolution, were able to breathe easily the air of intellectual liberty. On this view, Anglicanism was too etiolated to be provocative. Consequently, there was ‘simply no infâme to be crushed’ and the voices of the intelligentsia lacked the antagonism inflamed by Continental Catholic clergies.

Despite this, there have been two attempts to give substance to the notion of an English Enlightenment. The first, expressed by Roy Porter, argues that because we have now come to see that it is mistaken to define the Enlightenment monolithically, as an atheistic or revolutionary assault on an ancien régime, it follows that England need not be bereft of an Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was not a crusade but a tone of voice, a sensibility. It preferred civility to enthusiasm, experience to metaphysics, the pursuit of happiness to the rule of the saints, the benevolent ethics of Jesus to the wrath of an unforgiving Father. And these goals ‘throve in England within piety’. Pocock has similarly attempted to shift the ox. The English Enlightenment is not less substantial, if harder to perceive, for being ‘conservative and in several ways clerical’, the property of ruling elites rather than of clandestine rebels, an ‘enlightenment sans philosophes’.

The first chapter of this book outlined the secular political thesis urged by Anglican Royalists: the unimpeachable sovereignty of the monarch. This chapter provides a contrasting account of a principal plank in the secular ideology of the country party opposition that emerged in the 1670s and soon acquired the name Whig: the necessity of regular, free parliaments. The task of the Whigs was to dismantle the political heresy of the claim that the crown was the final arbiter in matters of civil government. This entailed, in their view, the restoration of an ‘ancient constitution’ in which parliaments embodied the uncorrupted will of the political community. Yet faith in parliaments was compromised by fear of the actually existing parliament, the deracinated and seemingly perpetual ‘Cavalier Parliament’, elected in 1661 and still sitting, without any further general election, until 1679. This was the parliament that had imposed harsh penal legislation for religious uniformity, and which, by the mid-1670s, was firmly in the grip of the earl of Danby and his allies. Accordingly, as we have seen, the enemies of Anglican Royalism were deeply ambivalent about parliament. In matters of religion, they sometimes appealed over the heads of parliaments, and prelates, to the wisdom and authority of the supreme magistrate, to rule on behalf of people of all consciences. The present chapter turns to a more familiar, that is to say secular, account of Whig thought, as a parliamentarian retort to absolute kingship. The two Whiggisms – magisterial and parliamentarian – coalesced in an anticipation that regular parliaments, assemblies elected frequently and uncorrupted by ‘placemen’ in the Commons and by the episcopal ‘deadweight’ in the Lords, would cauterize the wounds inflicted on the body politic by that most monstrous of parliaments, the ‘Cavalier’ Parliament.

Enshrining frequent parliaments

From the era of the Levellers in the 1640s to that of the Chartists in the 1840s political reformers demanded annual parliaments as a fundamental right of the English people. What they generally meant was that, every year, there should not merely be a session of parliament but an election. It is a commonplace that, of the Six Points of the Chartist programme, whereas five – universal suffrage, the secret ballot, equal constituencies, wages for MPs, and an end to property qualifications for MPs – have all been achieved, only annual parliaments has not.

This book comprises essays on religion, politics, and ideas in Restoration England. With the exception of the Introduction, earlier versions have previously appeared, but in places that are scattered and sometimes hard to retrieve. They are brought together here in order to provide a sustained consideration of the mental world of a deeply divided nation, struggling to cauterize the damage done to England's social fabric by religiously inspired violence – for that was the legacy of the Reformation, the Civil Wars, and an inconstant monarchy. I have selected essays which have been widely cited and which endure in contemporary scholarship. I have confined the selection to those which deal chiefly with the era we call the Restoration, between the return of Charles II to his thrones in 1660 and the deposition of his brother James II in 1688.

The character of these essays is diverse. Some touch on the history of philosophy, some concern politics ‘on the ground’, while others are case studies of individual authors or moments. While some deal in secular ideas, most emphasize the interconnectedness of religious and political thinking, and stress the institutional and ideological salience of the church and its critics. Intellectual, political, and religious history should not be treated as separate pursuits, as too often they still are. Scholars, it is true, are obliged to work within disciplinary boundaries, and a hope is that these essays may find readers in several disciplines: history, political theory, literature, theology, and the history of philosophy.

The texts of these essays have been revised to finesse the prose and correct errors. In most cases, the content has not been altered in major ways, although I have sometimes either abridged or supplied additional material. Occasional overlaps remain, where material does service in different contexts. I have especially aimed to update citations in the footnotes to provide a guide to recent scholarship. Each essay is self-contained and may be read independently, as well as in the ensemble.

The book is about England. There was no British polity before 1707; Scotland was distinct, and has its own history; as does Ireland. I have not attempted to embrace the thought of all these isles.

Locke's adversaries

Two salient propositions about John Locke's polemical purposes in writing the Two Treatises of Government are now taken for granted. The first is that Locke sought to refute the absolutism, not of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, but of Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha. The second is that, although he revised and published it in 1689, Locke wrote his book during or shortly after the Exclusion Crisis, in around 1680–2, and was providing a contribution to the assault by the earl of Shaftesbury's Whig party upon the regime of Charles II. My purpose is not to doubt either proposition, but to suggest, nonetheless, that as claims to have established Locke's intentions, they have acquired a sufficient rigidity to have become misleading. In what follows I argue, first, that Locke's target was not only Filmer, but more broadly the ideologists of Restoration Royalism, about whom Locke scholars have little to say. Here it will be necessary to dispute a suggestion that Filmer was untypical of the Royalist mainstream. Secondly, I show that there is an important ecclesiological and anticlerical context to the Two Treatises, since the conflict between Anglican intolerance and its critics was ingrained in Restoration politics, in a way in which the novel and contingent problem of Exclusion was not. The consequence of my case will be to perceive in the Two Treatises an attack directed against all the agents of Anglican authoritarianism, but particularly the clerical shapers of opinion, as well as the recognized assault on the monarchical tyranny of the Stuarts. It will also emerge that Locke's commitment to religious toleration needs to be set alongside the secular politics of the Treatises. In this light, the Treatises will seem considerably more ambiguous about the crown, for it was not only Restoration kingship, but also the Restoration church, and a corrupt parliament, which Locke and his fellow Whigs convicted of the most consistent and dogmatic repressiveness.

The enhancement of royal power

In the spring of 1660 the ascendant Presbyterian party, the ancestor of the Whigs, intended to restore Charles II to the throne upon strict conditions, similar to those presented to his father by the Long Parliament during the 1640s. On both occasions they failed catastrophically. In 1648 they were swept aside by a military coup, in 1660 by a Cavalier electoral victory. Charles I was executed; Charles II was exalted.

Arguments for intolerance in a persecuting society

Restoration England was a persecuting society. It was the last period in English history when the ecclesiastical and civil powers endeavoured systematically to secure religious uniformity by coercive means. Those who set about this task were not silent about their reasons, and the intellectual defence of religious intolerance was no less vigorous than the practical. We should be in no doubt about how explicitly persecution was demanded. Scarcely a tremor of embarrassment disturbed the voices of divines who called for ‘a holy violence’ and ‘a vigorous and seasonable execution of penal laws’ against the ‘fanatic vermin’ whose conventicles troubled the land. Many an assize sermon became a fruitful occasion for rhetorically yoking priest and magistrate together in a godly cause, the sword of the latter animated by the spiritual admonition of the former. When heretics pervert the church's doctrine, when schismatics disrupt its order, when libertines scandalize its purity, then a bishop ‘must betake himself unto his rod and his keys’ and summon the magistrate to undertake ‘the pious use of the sword’.

Historians have often traced the growth of the idea of toleration – in this period dwelling on John Bunyan, John Locke, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, John Owen, and William Penn – and have frequently charted the gruesome realities, and limitations, of persecution, but they have rarely offered histories of the theory of intolerance. Perhaps this is because it is difficult for the modern liberal mind to grasp that intolerance was ever anything other than the product of unthinking bigotry. Doubtless it is true that many magistrates were more splenetic than reflective, and no doubt the bailiffs and informers who embezzled the goods they distrained from hapless Quakers gave little thought to theology. But if Bunyan's Mr Badman is an unprepossessing figure, behind him stood an impressively articulate regiment of clergymen, of the sort whom contemporaries honoured as ‘pious, sober, and rational divines’.

There may be said to be three strands in the Restoration case for intolerance, although this chapter is concerned only with the third and least recognized. They may be called the political, the ecclesiological, and the theological arguments. The first is familiar enough: the Dissenters must be crushed because they are vicious rebels who made war upon their king and plunged the nation into twenty years of blood and usurpation. Schismatic conventicles are seed-plots of sedition.

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.

Resisting James II

Almost from the beginning of James II's reign, Anglican churchmen and their lay followers engaged in extensive and concerted civil disobedience, and did so with the manifest aim of bringing his regime to a standstill. When the king sought the gentry's acquiescence in opening public office to Catholics, two-thirds of them baulked. When he ordered the clergy to desist from preaching against his religion, they responded with volleys of sermons and pamphlets on the evils of popery. When he imposed upon the universities, the dons withstood him. When he sought addresses of thanks for his Declaration of Indulgence, he met with massive refusals. And when he demanded that the Declaration be read from every pulpit, practically all the clergy disobeyed, and the Seven Bishops who published their reasons stood trial for seditious libel. By the winter of 1688 James had been deserted, in spirit or in fact, by nearly all of the natural allies of Stuart monarchy. And by the following summer nearly all the Tories, lay and clerical, had come to terms with a dynastic change that earlier they would have pronounced abhorrent.

How a clerical and gentry elite which, in the shadow of civil war and Whig rebellion, had become so deeply committed to ‘divine right’ principles, came now to engage in systematic resistance has long been a central conundrum of the Revolution. This apparent apostasy from the vaunted doctrine of ‘passive obedience and non-resistance’ has forcefully struck almost everybody: the king and his apologists, contemporary Whigs, and generations of historians. James exploded with rage when he interviewed the Seven Bishops and, earlier, the disobedient fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford: ‘this is the standard of rebellion’; ‘is this your Church of England loyalty?’ John Dryden, in his poetical allegory in defence of James, The Hind and the Panther, has the lines: ‘The Master of the Farm [was] displeas’d to find / So much of Rancour in so mild a kind, / The Passive Church had struck the foremost blow.’ The Whigs’ contemptuous judgement is well captured in John Asgill's remark, years later: ‘I remember the latter end of the reign of King Charles II, when the pulpits blowed out their anathemas against all that doubted their jus divinum, or scrupled their passive obedience. After that, I don't forget the reign of the late King James, when this breath was sucked in again.’