Divided by a Common Faith? Protestantism and Union in Post-Reformation Britain*

chapter 8 Divided by a Common Faith? Protestantism and Union in Post-Reformation Britain*

Roger A. Mason

Introduction

‘It is a false and erroneous opinion that a kingdom cannot subsist which tolera- teth two religions’.1 So wrote the poet and polemicist William Drummond of Hawthornden in his History of the Five Jameses, first published in 1655, six years after the author’s own death in 1649. Drummond was referring to Catholics and Protestants – he attributes these words to an unnamed councillor of James v at the onset of the Reformation in Scotland – but the sentiment may well re- flect his own wishful thinking at a time of violent confessional turmoil. For although his History was not published until 1655, it was largely written in the convulsive years between 1639 and 1644, when religious conflict erupted across the Stuarts’ multiple monarchy, not just setting Protestant against Catholic, but Protestant against Protestant. This was anything but an era of religious toleration. Just as the Thirty Years War had split Europe into warring confessional camps, making intolerance the European norm, so in Britain competing vi- sions of a godly society collided with a disintegrative force that made a mock- ery of Drummond’s words. There is not surprisingly a vast scholarly literature not just on intolerance, persecution and religious war, but on the historical dialectic that saw the much prized liberal understanding of toleration develop out of the bloody confla- grations that disfigured early modern Europe.2 A great deal of this literature focuses on seventeenth-century England where, in the eyes of an older school

* This chapter began life as the Reformation Day Lecture delivered at the University of St An- drews in October 2013. The author is extremely grateful to the St Andrews Reformation Stud- ies Institute for the invitation to give the lecture and for the critical comments that helped shape this final version. 1 The History of the Lives and Reigns of the Five James’s, Kings of Scotland, from the Year 1423 to the Year 1542, in The Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh, 1711), p. 106. 2 For a recent survey, see Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Prac- tice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, ma, 2007), which includes (pp. 386–95) a helpful review of the literature.

Divided by a Common Faith? 203 of whig historians, out of the crucible of intense religious conflict, there emerged in 1689, following the ‘Glorious’ Revolution, an Act of Toleration that gave final statutory force to ideas adumbrated by prescient forerunners of modern liberalism such as John Milton and John Locke.3 More recent historians, such as John Coffey, have done much to deconstruct this comforting narrative, while Alex Walsham has explored both the intellectual assump- tions that shaped early modern English attitudes to religious minorities and the myriad ways in which, in practice, religious differences might well lead to conflict but might equally well be negotiated and accommodated.4 More generally, as she and others have reminded us, in the early modern world, toleration was not something to be praised and applauded, but something to be disparaged and denounced. Its meaning in the seventeenth century was much closer to its Latin root in the verb tolero, −are, meaning to bear, to endure, or, more colloquially, to put up with. To tolerate, in other words, was to give reluctant licence to religious beliefs and practices of which one fundamentally disapproved. Far from being the positive value it is for us, toleration was on the contrary a recognition of defeat. In Andrew Pettegree’s more extreme formula- tion, toleration was ‘only ever a loser’s creed’, ‘the party cry of the disappointed, the dispossessed, or the seriously confused’.5 While Pettegree is exaggerating for effect, his words do nonetheless bring home a critical historical point. For if toleration in the post-Reformation world was an admission of defeat, it begs the question of what exactly those who were forced to admit defeat, who were at best reluctant tolerationists, were trying to achieve. The answer, the real opposite of religious toleration, is not so much intolerance and persecution, the antonyms that resonate so powerfully in whig narratives, as the apparently much more prosaic idea of religious uniformity. The Latin phrase cuius regio, eius religio (‘whose realm, his religion’), firmly associated with the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, is familiar to all scholars and students of early modern Europe. For proponents of religious universalism – uniformity of belief and worship across Christendom – Augsburg was a major

3 The classic work of this type is W.K. Jordan’s monumental The Development of Religious Tol- eration in England, 4 vols (London, 1932–40). 4 John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (London, 2000); Al- exandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Man- chester, 2006). 5 Andrew Pettegree, ‘The Politics of Toleration in the Free Netherlands, 1572–1620’, in Ole Grell and Bob Scribner (eds), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 182–98.