History Papers

"The uses of the Old and New Testaments during the debate over Liberty of Conscience, 1644-1649" Chris Farrell

2006-06-06T16:09:00.000-07:00

The historical and societal circumstances behind the tolerationist debate
During the 1640s in England, a Parliamentary challenge to the King’s supremacy precipitated a massive breakdown in authority and stability across the country. This temporary freedom allowed polemicists, pamphleteers and radicals of all categories to publish works and led to a series of fierce debates on contentious topics such as freedom from censorship of printed material, the role of the government in religious affairs, and the merits of liberty of conscience. The latter topic was, at the time, tremendously controversial and produced many very radical pieces, which proved to be important in the development of political thought in British history. The very great body of the printed work in England during the Civil War period came from printing presses in London, which had become ‘a hothouse for radical ideas’. This thesis will focus on the debate regarding religious toleration, or liberty of conscience, with particular emphasis on the biblical language used by proponents of differing ideals. It is the contention of this work that there was an important split between the usage of the Testaments of the Bible by those in favour of liberty of conscience, the tolerationists, and those opposed to it, the anti-tolerationists. The participants in this debate on religious liberty centred their arguments around the poles of two general concepts; the idea of Old Testament Israel as a model for the English state and the proposal to create Jesus Christ’s New Testament kingdom of universal love in the country. This thesis will seek to draw a clarifying line between the use of analogies from the two testaments as models for British religious life with particular focus on the nature of the term toleration. The impetus for undertaking this work derives from references to the tolerationist debate in John Coffey’s two major works on seventeenth century England. In these works Coffey outlines the participants and the course of the tolerationist debate of the 1640s but fails, I believe, to underline the strict dichotomy between the two Testaments over the very notion of liberty of conscience.
The very notion of toleration as a Christian concept was debated vigorously in this period, especially between the years 1644 and 1649, which we will focus on, and there are some very definite dividing lines between the participants in the debate. Most notable was the prevalence of New Testament analogies in favour of the notion of toleration by the tolerationists, and the strict use of Old Testament typology on uniformity and persecution by the anti-tolerationists. 1644 was marked by a the realisation of an inevitable Parliamentary victory on the battlefield and the acceleration by the Presbyterian Church of their religious restructuring of the country. These events heralded the beginning of what we will call ‘the tolerationist debate’. However, before engaging in any sort of detailed analysis of the books and pamphlets written about toleration during these years, it is first necessary to provide an adequate historical backdrop and explanation of religious circumstances including a definition of the common terms and titles both those of the period, and those used to describe the period.
The prevalence of certain terms throughout this work necessitates a clarification and classification of their meanings. The most important elucidation will be of the term ‘toleration’, defined as the 'allowance (with or without limitations), by the ruling power, of the exercise of religion otherwise than in the form officially established or recognized'. The Oxford Dictionary of British History underlines the impact of the term ‘religious toleration’ to people in the seventeenth century, and the commonly held belief that ‘state and church had not only the right but the duty to put down religious dissent’. The ordinary people ‘assumed that religious truth was God-given and absolute; that a country divided in religion would be fatally weakened; that nonconformists were potential traitors; that the exercise of private judgement would, in the end, undermine all authority and produce a shattered and anarchic society, in which everything was permissible’. However, disregarding the ambiguity of the usage of the term toleration the definition consistently used in this work will be the one provided by the American dictionary of Current English. Here toleration is defined as 'the process or practice of tolerating, esp. the allowing of differences in religious opinion without discrimination'. The phrase liberty of conscience will be used interchangeably with toleration throughout this work. Furthermore the OED defines tolerationism as 'the toleration of religious differences as a principle or system' and a tolerationist as 'one who advocates or supports toleration'.
The term Episcopacy will be used to described the church as by law established in England up until the beginning of the Civil War. The interchangeable terms Laudianism and Arminianism, vital to our understanding of the religious battleground of the period, will be analysed in a later chapter. The Puritans who opposed King Charles could be loosely broken down into three groups, Independents, Presbyterians and Sectarians. Presbyterians were the majority grouping which shaped many of the major events of the mid-1640s especially in the lead-up to the second Civil War. They are described as being in opposition to episcopacy but supportive of national church government by ministers and shared their Calvinist religion with the Scottish Covenanters whom they relied upon for military support. Independents, also known as Congregationalists, were in favour of a measure of liberty within a broader church government. The aggressive policies of the Presbyterians in Westminster served to isolate many potentially moderate independents and sectarians and lead them into the pursuit of a more radical agenda as the decade progressed. The Sectarians were not essentially a rigid grouping and the only characteristic they shared was a common schism from the established Church and a desire to be let worship without fear of persecution. The danger which the Presbyterians perceived of the sectaries lay in their denial in the necessity of religious unity which was 'in effect, (a denial) that there was such a thing as society'.
Society, and all aspects of social and even political life, had religious undertones and overtones to it. The fact that even official functions such as 'assizes or meetings of Parliament began with prayers and a mass or a sermon', meant that schism from the established church meant schism from society. Among those termed ‘sectarian’ were Anabaptists, Seekers, and, later on, Quakers. Another common term for sectarians was non-conformists, described as Protestants ‘who did not conform to the disciplines or rites of the Anglican Church’ or the Episcopalian Church in this case.
Other terms frequently encountered throughout the historiography of this debate are radicals and moderates, with appliance strictly to religious beliefs. Radical tolerationists are those, such as Roger Williams, who supported liberty of conscience for all religious denominations, often even including Catholics and Muslims. The issue of the toleration of Catholicism was quite layered during this period, and for the purpose of this debate it is not essentially relevant. Radical anti-tolerationists were often Arminians or Presbyterians who, during this period, argued in favour of uniformity of the National Church and the persecution of dissenters. Moderate tolerationists were in favour of the toleration of individual congregations, often within a loosely formed wider church organisation. Moderate anti-tolerationists were those who saw the need for unity in England and were prepared to tolerate differences in belief among the sectarians so long as it did not challenge the fundamental beliefs of the state. It is important to note that every participant in this debate had their own set of political and social beliefs and the course of their thought was largely dictated by events in the country at large. To Blair Worden even the radicals who encouraged liberty of conscience saw the dangers in granting toleration to the population at large. This debate on toleration took place within a much larger debate on the very future and nature of religion in England, and must be seen as such. The setting of this debate was an England loaded with religious antagonism, teetering on the brink of implosion.
Biblical typology and analogy were common methods in seventeenth century England for adding credibility to political and religious viewpoints. Typology is defined as 'the study of symbolic representation, especially of the origin and meaning of Scripture types' and analogy as 'the equivalency or likeness of relations' in the Oxford English Dictionary. The Civil War period differs only in that the sheer volume of work printed meant that men now squabbled over the meanings of individual lines of scripture more freely and viciously than ever before. The analysing of the Bible was a way of deciphering current political events and determining the best course of action for the English people. It required, nay 'depended upon a commonplace analogy between England and the Biblical people Israel'. Boyd Berry has iterated the importance of typology as a method used to raise events above history, equating the struggle of the Civil War with that of Israel, which served to 'rationalize their revolution as the work of God wrought through his agents on Earth'. Typological readings of the bible implied that a finality or eschatology for both the self and the nation could be found.
It is also important to identify some of the characteristics of the religious denominations involved in the tolerationist debate because religion was in essence one of the major driving forces behind the civil war, stimulating and firing the revolutionary ideals among groups of learned men. It was religion in the form of militant Old Testament Protestantism which defined itself as having an 'obsession with preaching and the message of the scriptures, a penchant for godly discipline, and a vision of the new Jerusalem' which validated wartime actions.
The religious and political circumstances allowing the debate to take place
The Church of England had been the legally established National Church in England from the time of the reformation under Henry VIII, but since the ascension to the throne of Charles I the Church had become dominated by an Arminian clique, especially after William Laud was appointed as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. English Arminians stressed ‘ritual, ceremony and the sacraments rather than the preaching of the word and held a very elevated notion of the importance of the clergy’. These appeared to be suspiciously popish traits for the majority of English Puritans. The Church under James I was a breeding ground for religious discussion; so powerful was its 'authority and influence…(it)…became a battleground for rival visions of English society fought out at court, in Parliament and in the early parishes of Stuart England'. This discussion was contained so long as the Church remained reasonably tolerant of the major religious groupings in the country, and this was not the case under the Arminians. The ceremonial aspects of Arminianism provoked hostility throughout England and by 1640 the term had come to signify ‘absolution in addition to heresy and idolatry’ to many. A hallmark of the Arminian character was their anti-Calvinism and their adherence to the Dutch theologians Arminus’ views on the supreme role of the monarch, both of which appealed to Charles I. As noted above, the term Arminian is used interchangeably with the term Laudian in the study of British history and it was Laud who really gave the movement impetus with his hands-on approach during the 1630s.
As John Fielding highlights, the Church of England’s policies during the 1630s were so radical that 'it is the Arminians and their leader William Laud, who are now portrayed as the revolutionary element, not the Puritans. Nicolas Tyacke has spelled out the principles of Laudianism, including the 'extremely exalted view of episcopacy, both as divinely instituted and an essential mark of the true church'. Laud had a vision of what he wanted the church to be, this vision included 'a wealthier church and one more independent of the laity, to be achieved by an even closer alliance with the monarchy than already existed. The example held forth is that of King David in the Old Testament’. Schism from the established church, as well as being viewed as sinful, was viewed as disloyalty to the monarch to the point of being treasonous. The toleration of sects outside the Episcopalian Church was contrary to the long held policy of both the Tudor dynasty and the Stuarts. Both the Church of England members and the Presbyterians were of the belief that God left one true church on earth, and the unity of that church was a prerequisite for godliness.
The extent to which the Episcopalians viewed themselves as protectors and guides of Kingship is evident from the Canons of 1606. These were to be guidelines for Stuart rule of the church and were adhered to rigidly by Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Canon 20 of book 1 states that the Old Testament role of Kingship was to 'bring up his subjects in fear', being bound to ensure that their subjects had 'no false gods (and) are not idolatrous, nor blasphemous'. The Kings divine right to rule meant that he was directly answerable to the Lord with regards his method of kingship, and therefore subject to his clergy’s interpretations of kingship. Old Testament, and Old Testament-inspired, examples of kingly rule were the norm for the Episcopalians in the seventeenth century, and so the Stuarts and their bishops were comfortable with the need to persecute non-conformists and sectaries. The Canons stated that Kings were bound both by the law of grace and that of nature to bring his subjects up in the true doctrine and might 'compel all their subjects, both clergy and laity, to obey their laws'. Bound to uphold these religious laws and to compel his subjects to live under them, by the late 1630s the King was subject, albeit quite willingly, to the ever growing Arminian element within his own Church which was rapidly polarising the country and creating a radical clique of Puritans determined to abolish episcopacy. These Arminians often quoted heavily from the Bible in order to justify the link between Church and State, the need for religious uniformity and thus their belief the nonconformists were breaking the law. Seventeenth-century England seems to have been structured with the language of biblical imagery more so than it was a century before, and this was to be a crucial factor in the development of religious debate.
With the Laudian reforms the Arminians had attempted to bring every subject of the King into the one unifying church by imposing uniformity of practice and prayer book on the country. The propagators of the ideals of Laudianism consistently leaned on examples of Old Testament Kings of Israel such as David and Solomon who also served as the heads of their Church in order to legitimise their monopoly of power. Laud himself asserted that in keeping with the tradition of Kings such as Hezekiah, Justinian and Charlemagne, the monarchy had every right to reform the church and command the priests to do their will. The separation between Church and state was a fundamental principle to the tolerationists, with many of them, throughout the period of this debate, citing John’s Gospel and Jesus’ declaration that God’s kingdom is not of this world. This desire for separation had political consequences as well; by claiming that there should be a separation between Church and State, the sectaries were giving themselves licence to dissent from a church they did not advocate, without breaking any laws. Richard Reinitz iterates that traditionally ‘biblical support for the power of the state in religious affairs had always been drawn from the example of the Old Testament magistrates’ but tolerationists sought a new order. This is why, as we shall see, men like Roger Williams looked to the New Testament as ‘it sustained his advocacy of an absolute separation of church and state and the complete toleration of religious diversity’.
So, by 1640 with the religious and political policies of Charles Stuart returning to haunt him, English society had divided so as to facilitate the emergence of three relevant religio-political groupings. Religious congregations such as the Presbyterians, the Independents, and the Scottish Covenanters became heavily involved both in the politics of the country and eventually the religious debates. With the interjection and growing power of these groups, and with the remnants of Episcopalianism still obvious, religious tension quite frequently spilt into political life during this period. The religious policies of Archbishop Laud, discussed above, had the effect of 'alienating those who had until then been reconciled to working within the church, of nudging Puritans in the direction of sectarianism'. Nowhere was this more evident than in Scotland, where the Kirk had long held precedence, when, in 1637 Laud introduced a compulsory and uniform prayer book in order to bring the Scottish church into line with the English one. Sedition and hostility turned to outright rebellion in the northern Stuart kingdom and 'when Charles eventually took an army to Scotland in 1639, his own subjects forced a humiliating truce upon him'. The Covenanters then pressed Charles into rapid action in 1640 with their invasion of Newcastle. In order to finance further expeditions to the north Charles called a Parliament in 1640, dismissing it after a month, before calling another at the year’s end, one which would eventually become known as The Long Parliament. This 'opened the floodgates of rebellion in politics and anarchy in the spiritual life in England'. As Mark Goldie states, the summoning of the Long Parliament and the subsequent breakdown in the Kings authority let loose an anarchy of private conscience, which was formulated most effectively through the medium of print.
In May 1641, The Long Parliament obtained an Act of Attainder in order to impeach the Earl of Stafford, one of the King’s most prominent supporters, and then directly challenged Charles with their opposition to the Church of England. That same year the rebellion in Ireland, which should have united all Protestants in England against a common enemy, provided the Presbyterian dominated Parliament an opportunity to further frustrate the King’s power. Also in 1641 Parliament passed the Grand Remonstrance and gathered momentum towards directly opposing the King. This precipitated Charles’ ill-conceived movement against the MPs whom he felt had frustrated his need for finance for the war against the Scottish. These MPs, led by John Pym, escaped into London and Charles was forced to leave the capital, setting up camp at Oxford as hostilities began in earnest in late 1642. By this juncture, with the growing relevance of the Assembly of Divines, a religious assembly set up to help facilitate a new Puritan Church of England, it was clear that 'religion and political grievance…(had become)…most intimately interwoven'. At the Battle of Edgehill Charles’ march to London was halted by the Parliamentary army, newly reinforced with Scottish support following their promise to adopt the Scottish League and Covenant throughout a Presbyterian ruled England. Charles was defeated again on a march to London in 1643, this time from his base at Oxford. That same year Parliament ratified the Solemn League and Covenant with the Scottish and they invaded the Royalist held north of England. The combined army of the Scots, Yorkshiremen (under Thomas Fairfax) and the Eastern Association (under Oliver Cromwell and the Earl of Manchester) defeated the Cavalier Royalist army at Marston Moor in 1644, taking the North of England.
The New Model Army was created as a permanent Parliamentary force in 1645 with General Thomas Fairfax at its head, and it decisively routed the Royalists at Naseby that same year. Also in 1645 came the execution of Archbishop Laud, and soon after, the abolition of episcopacy. This effectively ended the first civil war, and secured the Scottish-backed Presbyterian MPs as the political leaders of England. Although the majority of members of the Commons agreed upon the destruction of Laudianism and the dismantling of the Episcopalian system, there was friction over the exact direction which England should take. The Presbyterians wanted to replace the Episcopalian structure with a Presbyterian church in keeping with the Covenant. The Scottish Army had 'demanded as the price of their allegiance the introduction into England of a religious system like their own, and the persecution of sectaries'. However there were numerous other interested parties, such as the Independents and many of the sectaries, who wanted the freedom of congregation within any National Church as a prerequisite for supporting the Presbyterians.
After the passage of the Grand Remonstrance and the Root and Branch Bill through parliament, the winter of 1642-3 saw the introduction of a bill abolishing bishops. The Parliamentary debates of the time were already showing signs of a division between the two parties, Presbyterian and Independent. Events reached a head in 1643 with the adoption of the Scottish Solemn League and Covenant which made it clear that the Assembly of Divines was working to facilitate the creation of a Presbyterian state. On 3rd January 1644 five Independent members of this Assembly published An Apologetical Narration, in which they pleaded for a moderate, independent-influenced, middle ground between Presbyterians and the sectarians. The names of the ministers Thomas Goodwin, Phillip Nye, Jeremiah Burroughes, Sidrach Simpson and William Bridge were to become synonymous with Independency, and their pamphlet effectively opened the way for a constant stream of religious debate during the Civil War period. The views that these divines expressed on toleration are especially relevant here.
They suggested that 'a right to toleration for dissidents should be written into the assembly’s decision on church government-effectively enshrining nonconformity within the new national church-outraged many in the Assembly'. An important development from this was that from within the Assembly, the opposition to these Independent divines began a 'powerful propaganda campaign against toleration'. This event set in motion a current that would run throughout the political and religious debates of the decade and colour the alliances of the sects and the Independents. The seeds sown in this pamphlet were to be reaped in the mid-1640s when the fortunes of the Independents, and of religious toleration as a whole, 'rose broadly in unison with the growing influence of the New Model Army in politics'. W.K. Jordan cites this period as a critical epoch in the drawing of political lines around religious issues such as toleration of the sects. He claims that by 1644 the House of Commons, in co-operation with the Assembly, 'had begun the consideration of the problem of repressing the strange and multiplying sects which had spread so rapidly since the collapse of the establishment'. Of those present at the Assembly meetings, Robert Baillie, who we will look at in the chapter on anti-tolerationists, was most acutely aware of the danger of the sects, particularly the Baptists.
The Church as legally established in England on the eve of the Civil War, the Episcopalian Church, played an immensely important role in providing communal unity and also had a number of official uses, as noted earlier in this chapter. It provided 'a large part of the country’s legal system; and excommunication, its supreme penalty, was supposed to be what it said, exclusion from society'. It is important to stress therefore how important it was for the establishment to ensure that religious dissent was kept at a minimum. The church was quite an effective branch in the administration of the kingdom and without it Charles I knew he could not rule efficiently. This is perhaps why he and Archbishop Laud, interpreting the fact that parts of the Prayer Book service and ceremonies were being omitted from worship as a sign that things were breaking down, acted as they did in the 1630s. This also goes a long way towards explaining Charles’ blundering policy in Scotland, where he tried to impose a prayer book on the Presbyterians from Whitehall by Proclamation. The Scots were outraged and 'after three years of vain attempts to open dialogue with Charles, (they), in August 1640, appealed for help to their English co-religionists and invaded England'. The Scottish victory at Newburn that same month led Charles to call the Long Parliament in order to be granted funds for war.
Norah Carlin presents the tolerationists as having a consistent political theory insomuch as they all repudiated 'the relevance of Israel in the Old Testament and the idea of a chosen people among Christians'. This notion that God chose a certain people or Church which he would protect and maintain until the last day has its roots in the Old Testament books of Deuteronomy and Kings. The need to justify action against one’s perceived enemy by preaching obscure sermons makes this conflict unique in early modern Europe. On the continent, post reformation military action was almost always backed up with the idea that it was Gods will that the heretics, anti-Christians, dissenters, or idolaters, as the case may be, be crushed. Ronald Hutton has stressed that this war 'set Protestant against Protestant in a manner unknown in any of Europe’s other religious conflicts'. It left its stamp in the guise of a new phenomenon; 'a people who were not Catholics, and yet were either unwilling or unable to be full members of a religion proscribed by a Protestant state'.
It would be wrong to assume that Parliament opposed the King and the Episcopalians for the cause of religious liberty, but arguments for this liberty by a small but significant group of men was an unintended consequence of the Civil War period. It is important to note that the English Civil War was not fought between an intolerant Episcopalian party and a tolerant Puritan clique, the Cavaliers against the Roundheads, to use common names given to the King’s supporters and those of the Parliament, respectively. Conrad Russell hits the nail on the head when he states that the war 'was not fought for religious liberty, but between rival groups of persecutors'. Indeed in the 1630’s and early 1640’s Puritans such as the MP John Pym believed in the necessity of a second reformation due the perceived popery of the Episcopalian Church. Many of these men were driven by the religious exclusion they experienced under Laud, and driven by the desire to recreate Jerusalem in England. The divide between radical Puritans and moderate Protestants was evident in the growth of the Root and Branchers, an intolerant anti-Laud group of religious zealots. They went further than most in their aims of 'reforming the reformation', and calling for 'the Church of England to be purged of false doctrine and Laudian ritual and (demanding) the repression of ‘Papists, Priests and Jesuits’. It was these religious militants, guerriers de Dieu, opposing the staunch Episcopalian Laudians who dragged England to war with itself in the 1640s. Many Puritan groups, such as the Baptists and the Independents, did believe in a degree of religious toleration but it was only with the imminent defeat of Episcopalianism in 1644 did they command an audience.
By 1645 with the establishment of the New Model Army the tide had irreparably turned in Parliament’s favour and that of its increasingly powerful army. With the elimination of the immediate Royalist military threat and the protracted negotiations with an increasingly charlatan king, fissures on the Puritan side became evident. The tension which eventually led to the entry of the New Model Army into London to receive Parliament’s submission in August 1647 fermented during the months immediately after the end of the first Civil War. For tolerationists, Presbyterian bigotry was to be challenged with the gathering together of men from ‘numerous intellectual and religious camps’ and the creation of a coherent ideological opposition based on New Testament analogies. The window of relatively free debate in between these two great sequences of military engagements is one in which arguments about such topics as the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press - most notably in John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) - and toleration of religious belief and practice began to develop. It is clear from the fact that the debate was not between Episcopalians and Puritans, but within the ranks of the Puritan victors, that the cracks in their unity were widening. The failure to create a semblance of concord in terms of policy on liberty of conscience was no great surprise when one considers the different groups and belief systems which had banded together against Charles I and Laudianism. As discussed above, Scottish Covenanters, Presbyterians, Independents and Sectarians had all fought against the King, and once they collectively received the submission of the Royalist armies, they retreated into factions. Undoubtedly the surrender of Oxford and the capture of the King by the Scots in 1646, which ended the first English Civil War, dismantled the façade of harmony between the Presbyterian dominated Parliament and Assembly and the more liberal New Model Army.
The Historiography of the tolerationist debate
With the breakdown of authority and the brief freedom from certain punishment for heretical opinions, this period could be heralded as an epoch of huge significance in the development of English democracy. The emergence of groups like the radical Levellers after the first phase of the civil war, with their prolific output of publications, and liberal views on toleration, opened the arena for internal debate on the role of the church and the state and the relevance of different biblical citations in leading England. The Leveller’s first target was the organised church with its 'monopoly of the spirit' and indifference to the 'free trade of truth'. In turn, the proponents of uniformity of worship viewed the works of the tolerationists as a heretical rebellion, and ‘a threat to society, as much as to salvation’.
Whig historians, such as W.K. Jordan, paint a picture of the glorious black and white victory of human reason and tolerance with the Puritan Revolution. A. S. P. Woodhouse took a similar view in Puritanism and Liberty (1938), addressing the ‘puritan concern for liberty’ and belief in a degree of individualism. Relying heavily on the works of the first wave of civil war historians, Clarendon, Hobbes and Harrington the works of Jordan and Woodhouse are vital starting points in the analysis of seventeenth century England. Their emphasis on the prevalence of the notion of liberty in early modern England is perhaps as much a product of the times they lived in as it is of the era they were writing about. Carlin emphasizes the differences between the traditional view that the Puritan Revolution 'opened a new epoch in the history of toleration' and the revisionist and post revisionist view that even the radicals were confined by their 'theological inheritance'.
W.K. Jordan establishes the precise nature and historical context of the tolerationists in the 1640s. After the defeat of Laud and the Episcopalian ascendancy, the loosely knit group of men who had at first politically and then militarily opposed Charles unravelled and the Presbyterians gained hegemonic status. Puritanism had been driven 'into dissent by the persistent effort of the Anglo-Catholic leaders of the Church to alter the essential character of the national church' during the 1630s. The alliance between Presbyterians and the Scottish helped secure first a victory for Parliament and then, by 1645, the effective leadership of England for the Presbyterians. From here many in Parliament maintained relentlessly 'that Presbyterianism should be established as the exclusive faith, while demanding the destruction of the sects'. This was potentially ruinous to the unity of England at a time when 'sectarianism was imposing upon England a measure of religious peace by means of religious toleration'. The Presbyterians, not being the majority in the country, and not having control over the army were powerless to censor the pamphlets that opened the debate on toleration in 1644. Sectaries could see within their grasp the possibility of toleration, of the creation of Christ’s kingdom, after the defeat of the Arminians, but the reliance of Presbyterian polemics such as Baillie and Gillespie on Old Testament analogies halted the progress of this liberal revolution.
Revisionist historians such as John Morrill have consistently contended that religion was, in essence, the ‘crucial polarising factor’ during the civil war period. This stream of research effectively made the English Civil War the last of the Wars of Religion of the European Reformation and it lays the focus on the evolution of this civil war from a conflict between rival authoritarianisms into a struggle for religious liberty. Among those historians who came to similar conclusions to Morrill were William Lamont, J.C. Davis and Blair Worden who all demonstrated the ‘relative isolation of seventeenth century tolerationists and the continuing vitality of theories of persecution’. Christopher Hill has offered a Marxist interpretation of events, building on S. R. Gardiner’s idea of a Puritan Revolution during the mid-seventeenth century in England. More recently, historians of the period in question have attempted to reconcile the Whiggish notion of a liberal revolution with the revisionists religion centric model. Among these scholars can be listed John Coffey, and Nicolas Tyacke, who take quite a balanced approach in their works, giving adequate thought to all strands of the debate, and basing their interpretation of the seventeenth century heavily on fact, as opposed to the speculation of many Whiggish historians.

The Pro-Toleration side
During the period in question a number of men from different backgrounds with different preoccupations all arrived at similar arguments with regards to liberty of conscience. Most remarkably those in favour of toleration all supported their arguments by marshalling similar biblical references. These men, whom we will look at in this chapter, were predominantly in favour of the use of New Testament analogies to put forward the case for liberty of conscience. We shall also see, in the next chapter, that those opposed to religious liberty argued exclusively from the Old Testament.
Liberty of conscience from an Independent position is highlighted in the anonymous pamphlet The Ancient Bounds printed in 1645. The two things contended for this liberty of conscience were:
‘first to instate every Christian in free, yet modest, judging and accepting what he holds; secondly to vindicate a necessary advantage to the truth, and this is the main end and respect of this liberty’.
The contention that religious conviction could not be forced and that coercion created only martyrs and hypocrites was a central tolerationist argument. Pamphleteers such as John Owen, Samuel Richardson, Joseph Hall, Henry Danvers, Thomas Collier, William Dell and Stephen Marshall were all quite prominent proponents of toleration, and will be examined in an effort to gauge the depth of the ideological split between the use of the Testaments as guides for the correct attitude toward people of different religions. However the bulk of the focus of this chapter will rest on the four men who can justifiably claim to be among the most consistently radical religious pamphleteers of the civil war period; Roger Williams, Henry Robinson, William Walwyn and Richard Overton.
At the inception of this debate the Presbyterians, dominant in the Commons and the Assembly of Divines, had made no secret of their desire for a national Calvinist Church. The character of this new church appeared, superficially, to be open to debate between all of those who risked their life in open opposition to Arminian Episcopalianism. Strategically, however the English Presbyterians saw the establishment of a rigid Calvinist church as their support base, guaranteeing as it did Scottish military backing. London bankers and merchants also favoured a return to church unity and stability. Given these circumstances many in Parliament supported the Presbyterians 'in order to cultivate the support of both the Scots and the powerful interests in London'. By the close of the first Civil War the sects had begun to overcome ‘their inherent centrifugal tendencies (in order) to campaign for toleration of the godly, insisting on their earthly freedom in order to develop their overriding responsibility to God'. This was not a mass movement towards freedom of conscience, the majority of sectaries merely wanted to be free from persecution, and ensure that their religious practices were within the law. But it is the radicals this thesis focuses on, those who believed that they had a duty to promote toleration of all the religious beliefs in the world.
1644 was the breakthrough year for tracts regarding religious toleration with Roger Williams publishing The Bloody Tenet of Persecution and Henry Robinson, Liberty of Conscience. This was the year, of course, in which John Milton’s major work on the freedom of printing, Areopagitica, was circulated, adding to the image of a surge in pre-enlightenment notions of liberty during this period in England. Although any discussion on the Civil War debate on liberty would usually include Milton and his groundbreaking work, he is not analysed here. Milton, in Areopagitica, 'had a secularist approach to the problem of liberty of inquiry and expression, when compared to Robinson, Walwyn and Williams', and it is the religious aspect which is to be highlighted in these chapters.
Roger Williams was 'a New England divine and pioneer of religious freedom' who had withdrawn first from the Church of England, when it failed to meet his standards, and then from the churches of Massachusetts which disappointed him. His life parodies the process by which he claimed men search for a godly rule, and in this search they must go unmolested. Williams was a controversial pamphleteer who Andrew Murphy has described as a proponent of ‘intolerant toleration’, or the failure to curb his views to suit a society perhaps not ready for them. He believed that mankind should keep to the teachings of Jesus as rigidly as possible, suffering the persecution 'of ungodly men rather than trying to persecute others'. The God of the Old Testament led Israel in war and slaughtered any peoples who dared challenge his authority, whereas Williams viewed Jesus Christ’s teachings on conflict quite differently. In the opening paragraph of The Bloody Tenet he stressed that the bloodshed on all sides of the recent religious conflicts, as he saw them, and indeed the religious wars of former ages, was 'not required nor accepted by Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace'. So not only is violence, even in the name of religion not a requisite, it is actually against God’s wishes, an idea that was against the teaching of St. Augustine, widely accepted for hundreds of years as prevalent in Christendom. He stressed the rejection of the Old Testament view of kingship as poor 'examples of piety for Christian emperors'. The Old Testament kings’ 'execution of heretics and of witches, after all, were not models for the magistrate to copy'. However it is Williams views directly regarding toleration which are most striking. Williams begins his Bloody Tenet with an outline of his intended argument, stating boldly that:
‘it is the will and command of God, that since the coming of his Sonne the Lord Jesus a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish or Antichristian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all nations and countries’.
Here, explicitly, Williams writes that only since the coming of Jesus, at the beginning of the New Testament, are these worships to be tolerated, signifying a complete break with the Old Testament with regards to liberty of conscience. Williams backs this up by claiming that Israel as a physical entity is meant only as a figurative kingdom, not a pattern for godly states. According to Williams, God does not require the uniformity which Laud and the Arminians had been trying to press the country into during the 1630s, and which the Presbyterians envisaged for the future. This he viewed as the 'persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants', as the New Testament epistle to the Romans proclaims Christ to exist through and with every person. A central idea of those who advocated toleration was the belief that men needed to be left alone to figure out their own paths to God. Williams himself believed that 'without search and trial no man attaines this faith and right persuasion' citing 1 Thessalonians 5; 'for our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost'. In writing this Williams was arguing that persecution for cause of conscience was not in keeping with the teachings of Jesus Christ, not attempting to parody England’s seventeenth century position with that of Moses and Israel, as Presbyterians like Gillespie and Baillie were doing during the 1640s. This is the break in thinking about scriptural analogies which becomes more prevalent in England during this period compared to anywhere else in Europe due to the aforementioned, and temporary, authority vacuum. 1644 marks not the start of these ideas but the emergence of them into an arena of open debate free from censorship or potential punishment. For the first time in England men such as Williams and Henry Robinson could actively oppose both the Arminian position on uniformity and persecution and the ever rising Presbyterian threat, and offer their own alternatives. The alternative invariably chosen was a break with the prevalence of the Old Testament ideal of England as the modern day tribe of godly people protected from heretics from their all powerful God, who leaves them clear instructions on how to live a sinless life. The idea of an all seeing, vengeful, desert-dwelling, Old Testament God had been used successfully by Church authorities throughout Europe in order to keep the ordinary people in fear and in reliance on their leadership. This desire for power had made persecution the norm, with a convenient ignorance of the teachings of the New Testament among those who advocated it.
In chapter XXIX of his Bloody Tenet Williams uses the New Testament book of St. Matthew, where Jesus explains to the apostles why he pays no heed to the Pharisees who question him, to forward the tolerationist cause. This Gospel, where Jesus is said to have imparted to his apostles, when the 'blind lead the blind, both should fall into the ditch' offers Williams’ readers a relevant analogy of the situation in England at the time. Not only were the apostles instructed to not give offence to the Pharisees, but they were also forbidden from meddling with them, or molesting them in any way, according to Williams.
In A necessity for Liberty of Conscience (1644) Henry Robinson claimed that:
‘we are so far from finding in the New Testament any warrant for using of coercive power that if we read from one end to end unto the other, it will appear that neither our Saviour or his Apostles did so much as lay any of their commands or charges upon any person or persons capable of putting a coercive civil power in execution’.
Old Testament scriptures spoke of God’s wrath and his indifference towards idolaters and non-believers and actively encouraged their persecution, and anyone not under the cloak of the one true Christian church was liable to be labelled as an enemy of God. According to Robinson, Jesus Christ’s kingdom of the meek made Old Testament tribal feuds and religious wars redundant. No longer was killing justifiable in any way, indeed to even contemplate taking another life was deemed sinful. According to Levy, Robinson contended 'that force or compulsion of any kind had no place in matters of religion and argument composed the only allowable weapons'. Throughout this work Robinson maintains that liberty of conscience is the central creed of the church of Jesus, and that the very notion of persecution is the antithesis of God’s will. An issue returned to frequently is the validity of one man’s right to judge another’s religious beliefs or practices, and the contention that this judgement is reserved for God. Robinson claims that Jesus’ teachings in Math. 20: 15. make it ‘lawful for us to doe what we will with our owne’, with the implication being liberty of conscience. Peaceful coexistence is the ends towards which Robinson propounds liberty of conscience as the most obvious route, especially in Chapter III of A necessity for Liberty of Conscience. It is here that he cites Luke 9: 56, ‘The Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them’, a key tolerationist citation in opposition to the interference of the central magistrate in their religious lives. The throne of Jesus Christ, the ‘God of Peace’, must ‘be erected with spiritual and peaceable proceedings’, and the exercising of dominion over men by other men ‘in spiritualitus’ was expressly forbidden. In Chapter IV he clarified Christian liberty as ‘liberty of Conscience from the rudiments of the world, not of the persons subjection to Magistrates and Powers’. Robinson’s focus is on iterating that Jesus Christ leads one into meekness and submission, away from conformity and coercion, and that the allowance of liberty of conscience is the correct path for God’s church. Robinson’s contribution was significant because he offered a measured and scripture-based proposal for the acceptance of a New Testament notion of toleration and peace, noting consistently that Christianity is about the valour shown in suffering, not in persecution.
When looking at the debate on the toleration of religious dissent in the 1640s it is difficult to ignore a group of radical pamphleteers and agitators known as The Levellers. The Levellers were the most radical proponents of individual liberty to gain a national audience after their emergence in 1647 and were particularly active within the ranks of the army and in London, publishing some of the most insightful pieces of the decade. The three major polemicists in this group were William Walwyn, Richard Overton and John Lilburne. Before the Levellers materialised, these men all produced competent bodies of work and were very active in the debates of the day. As a group they represented 'the first great outburst of democratic thought in history', according to Margaret Judson, or 'the first recognizably popular movement in politics', to Derek Hirst. Brian Manning describes the Levellers as 'the left wing of the Parliamentary party which won the English Civil War'. They were brought into being, according to Hirst, through 'the combination of growing hardship and excitement and London’s intensifying controversy over religious toleration'. The Leveller belief that every man should read the Bible for himself and not rely on the teachings of clergymen was typical of their attitude toward organised religion. They were, in essence, a 'petitioning movement', according to Jonathan Scott. Therefore the increase in the level of freedom allowed to the sects during the 1640s was crucial to the Levellers, whose pamphlets and petitions resounded 'with the characteristic sectarian assertion that the spirit transcends the letter of the law'. During the pamphlet debates of the 1640s the Levellers engaged in the use of biblical typology as a means to convey their message to a wide population who often held the memory of popular biblical tales from church readings. Elizabeth Tuttle highlights the importance of the historical circumstance on the progress and development of religious debate. The tolerationist debate was the product of this crucial moment in 'the virtually unkinged community' where religious images 'returned to the forefront within the “saints” ideology as the remedy for disorder'. Of course the Bible was central to the education of the gentry and ‘middling sort’, and the Puritans’ biblical images acted as a ‘common short-hand or code’. Indeed the Puritans 'insisted on the exclusive truths of scripture'. Biblical imagery was not solely a tool of the sects or the Presbyterians, it was a common level about which debate could occur on the best way ordering of civil society. However during the 1640s the Levellers and the sectarians made a concerted effort to alter the direction of their scriptural emphasis. Tuttle points out that
‘As the bishops and, after 1643, the Presbyterians, held up the scriptures of the Old Testament to justify the jure divino authority of ministers over the Christian conscience, the separatist ministers and the Levellers became wary of Old Testament tropes’.
This led the Levellers and the separatist ministers toward the use of the New Testament to ensure a break from the main regimes but a continuation of the ability to rest their arguments on the scriptures. Symbolic of this attitude is a quotation from William Walwyn’s pamphlet, Power of Love (1643); 'nor are you under the law, but under grace; the law was given by Moses whose minister I am not'. Although this was written too early to qualify for inclusion in this study of the tolerationist debate it is important from the perspective that it indicates the attitude of many dissenters towards the reliance on the Old Testament.
William Walwyn, whose tract The Compassionate Samaritane was an important input into the tolerationist debate, has been described, by Joseph Frank, as 'the most consistently radical thinker among the levellers‘. Walwyn cited liberty of conscience as a natural right of man, and believed in the freedom of opinion in religious matters insofar as they did not threaten the stability of the state. It was Walwyn’s refrain throughout the 1640s that the core of Christian ideal lay in 'universal love to all mankind without respect of persons, opinions, societies…churches or forms of worship'. In The Compassionate Samaritane Walwyn argued that man ‘must follow his own reason and arrive at his own conclusions regarding religious belief’.
Richard Overton was an outspoken defender of liberty and member of Thomas Lambe’s General Baptist Church, who co-wrote many of the Levellers political and social manifestos of the later 1640s. His Arraignement of Mr. Persecution, published in 1645, also provided an interesting interjection into the tolerationist debate of the time. Written in the form of an account of the trial of a personified ‘Persecution’, this piece holds at its centre the view that all the blood spilt by men in the Old Testament was purchased in the New by the blood of Jesus Christ, 'who came not to destroy, but to save men’s lives'. Overton cites the New Testament book of Corinthians against those who persecute; 'judge nothing before the time until the Lord come' He follows this up with a warning from the book of Matthew; 'Judge not lest yee be judged', perhaps urging the Presbyterian parliament to heed the New Testament idea of preparation for the Second Coming. With regards to the right of any man to judge another’s faith, Overton quotes John 12: 47, 48., 'if any man hear my words and believe not, I judge him not, for I came not top judge the world, but to save the world: he that rejecteth me and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him, the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him on the last day'. He adds a passage each from the New Testament books of Matthew, 1 Corinthians and the Old Testament book of Isaiah to reinforce his argument on God’s sole right to judge. Overton uses fictional characters, such as ‘John Presbyter’, whose arguments for the role of magistrates in judging religious affairs rests on the Old Testament passages of Psal. 2: 10, 11. and Deut. 17: 19., to include a spectrum of opinions in this piece. The importance of this pamphlet is in Overton’s ability to both satirise the opposition to toleration and present his own case firmly in the same dialogue. He rests his arguments for liberty of conscience in the gospels of the New Testament, and uses language from this book throughout in order to reinforce his call for religious toleration.
John Owen, in his sermon A Vision of Unchangeable Free Mercy (1646), envisioned congregations of sectaries existing peacefully 'alongside parish churches government according to Presbyterian polity'. He, however, was critical of the Episcopalian terms such as 'temple building, Gods Government, Christ’s sceptre, throne, Kingdom' promising that without which 'errours, heresies, sins, spring among us, plagues, judgements, punishments come upon us' which set men against each other as opposed to bringing them together. This spreading of fear among the common people increases persecution of sects and dissenters and is not the act of a godly church. Owen rubbishes the practice of naming the sects so as to distinguish them from the established church:
‘I would therefore that all horrid appellations, as increasers of strife, kindlers of wrath, enemies of charity, food for animosity, were forever banished from among us. Let a spade be called a spade so we take heed Christ be not called Beelzebub’.
The Presbyterian Church, for Owen, would be modelled on the New Testament apostolic church, viewed as the best scriptural guideline for Church Government. In this new Church, toleration would be afforded to the Godly as defined by New Testament standards.
John Hall, a self-styled peace-maker, emphasised the need for the harmonious coexistence of Christians in his 1645 pamphlet, A remedy of discontent. Here he put forward the notion that Christians were the building bricks of the church with Christ as the great and wise master-builder, building on the foundations of the prophets and apostles. Hall believed that if the established church tolerated open debate and dissent within its ranks in a Christian manner then ‘all other circumstances and appendances of varying practices might…be accorded’. He looked to the model of Titus 3: 10. to advocate his belief that those who foment sects and schisms amongst Gods people will receive their doom not from men, but from the ‘blessed Apostle’. His reliance on the New Testament model of toleration is marked, and is latently present in the language of this whole pamphlet.
Some independents not only saw liberty of conscience as a right but often as a stipulation for the godly community. Samuel Richardson, in his 1647 work the necessity of Toleration in matters of Religion based his work on the New Testament idea that religion ought to be free. Richardson claimed that ‘it is Gods way, to have Religion free, and only to flow from an inward principle of Faith and love’, citing John 4: 4. He goes on to question the validity of inflicting corporal punishment upon those accused of errors in religion, providing a wealth of New Testament references to reinforce his views. Richardson draws almost solely on New Testament typology throughout this short work, rooting his thought in the notion that freedom of worship and liberty of conscience are a prerequisite for all Christian congregations.
Another proponent of liberty of conscience was William Dell, who, in 1646 wrote Right Reformation: or The Reformation of the Church of the New Testament represented in Gospel-Light in order to put forward his views on the New Testament reformation. Dell believed that the coming of Jesus Christ signalled a reformation in the Church of God, evident in the Gospels, and a shift away from the ‘outward rites, ceremonies, duties, (and) performances’ towards the new inward doctrine of ‘spirit and life’. This reformation was complete, it was ‘inward’ and ‘thorow’ and essentially spiritual, and most importantly for the purposes of this debate, it rendered teachings of the Old Testament obsolete and, in many ways, false. With a focus on the New Testament as the sole source of the teachings of God, Dell conceives the fundamental message of Christianity to be love and worship of the inward spirit as opposed the outward one.
Henry Danver’s Certain Quaeries Concerning Liberty of Conscience (1649) is concerned with defining liberty of conscience and explaining the values of toleration through the use of the scriptures. He bases his transcript on the notion that the kingdom of God is not on earth and so the church should not strive for uniformity of worship on earth. This short piece focuses primarily on the New Testament teachings on the right of any man to judge another’s conscience and the crime against God that is persecution. Thomas Collier in his 1649 work, A General Epistle to the Universal Church, also focuses on the magistrates duty with regards to religion and the attempt to dispel the fears over granting toleration. Collier cites the New Testament idea that ’God is Love’ and the notion that toleration of men’s conscience is important to Christianity in this pamphlet. Collier wrote two other major pieces of the debate, Certain Queries in 1645, and Spirtuall Whordome discovered in a Sermon in 1647, both using New Testament language and analogies to further press the case for Liberty of Conscience. Moderate Presbyterians such as Stephen Marshall advocated using New Testament analogies to order English society, rather than Old Testament persecution. In the face of calls for a united Presbyterian church in England it is to be remembered that 'unity cannot be granted by the lash of persecution, for the law of Christ is clearly conceived in meekness, ‘not striving, but gently waiting’. Marshall was seen as 'the most powerful of the London root and branch ministers' and he reflected the opinions of many Presbyterians during the first Civil War when the enemy was still the King and episcopacy. The Swords Abuse Asserted, written by John Vernon in 1648, adheres, in basic principles, to the tolerationist model of scriptural analogy. Although Vernon found fault in many of the popular sectarian views on the role of the civil magistrate, he was an adherent of the New Testament model of man and consequently the New Testament model of toleration. Vernon decried the soothsayers who believed liberty of conscience would spell the end for the civil state, declaring that ‘there is no danger of the subverting the State, by reason of every mans worshipping God according to his conscience, for a state cannot be subverted but either by force, or by general consent of the people’. An anonymously written pamphlet entitled Liberty of Conscience Asserted, written in 1649, brings the tolerationist debate in this particular period to a close with a final declaration on Liberty of Conscience. This work sums up the New Testament-based stance of the tolerationists in six pages, relying heavily on the gospels of Matthew and the book of Romans. Throughout, the author emphasis the central arguments against persecution, the lack of moral authority in judgement and the anti-Christian notion of discrimination, and for toleration, including the Christian ideal of universal love and peace.
The New Testament book of Matthew was used consistently by pamphleteers such as Williams and Henry Robinson to propagate their tolerationist ideals. In particular Matthew 18-26 were of value to these ends, and Robinson’s ‘Liberty of Conscience’ quotes heavily from it. In Matt. 22: 37-40, Jesus instructs his disciples on the fundamental principles of his fathers’ word:
‘Thou shalt love the lord with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and all the prophets’.
By the language used, these two commandments appear to take precedence over all the teachings of either testament, and without their practice all else is apparently deemed worthless. The New Testament shows how Jesus Christ favours the persecuted man; 'Blessed are ye when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from your company and shall reproach you and shall cast out your name as evil, for the son of mans sake'. His kingdom is of the submissive; 'love you enemies, bless them that curse you, and do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you, and persecute you'. These are the tracts which the radical tolerationists read in the 1640s and would have seen a different way in which to govern the country, and given the freedom of the Civil War, they expressed their beliefs.
In the New Testament book of Matthew, Jesus is said to have torn up the Ten Commandments, given to Moses by God, upon which Mosaic law was based, and offered his own guidelines along which to worship his father, in an apparent effort to break with Moses and Israel. In these guidelines no room is left for animosity between men, and anger or hatred are expressly forbidden, with tolerance and meekness the defining characteristics of godly Christians. This is reiterated in 2 Tim 24-25. 2.; 'the servant of the lord must not strive but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves' which Williams cites. The persecution of the lambs of God, the sectaries, was, by New Testament standards, unchristian. This made the Arminians and the Presbyterians no better than the Papist idolaters in the eyes of many Independents and sectarians during this time. Richard Overton cited Acts 9: 4. in his Arraignment of Mr. Persecution, by way of showing the anti-tolerationists that when you persecute any man for cause of conscience, 'Christ himself is persecuted'.
The Anti-Toleration side
Also relevant to this thesis are the core of religious conservatives who imbedded their ideas in the Old Testament in an effort to create and maintain a uniformity of worship during the Civil War period. The main proponents of uniformity of religion were horrified at the vocal rise of the sectaries, and they strove to prove that God had left only one church on Earth, for all men to adhere to. That all these men used analogies from the Old Testament in order to oppose the calls for liberty of conscience is cause for this examination. These anti-tolerationists included Daniel Featley, Thomas Case, John Cotton, Thomas Edwards, Robert Baillie and George Gillespie. The focus will rest on the most important figures such as Edwards, Baillie and Gillespie but all of these men made a contribution of some sort during the six-year span of this particular debate. For these men toleration of the gathered churches constituted ‘a grave threat both to the conservative moral code and the established social order of the English State’.
With the war ending, and especially from 1645 onwards, with the King’s surrender, 'for the first time since 1640-1, the religious issue moved to the centre of the political stage at Westminster'. During the years of open conflict with the King and his Cavalier forces the religious divisions in the Long Parliament were obvious but controlled. This was because although the Parliament was polarised between the Presbyterians and the Independents, especially after the Kings supporters walked out in 1642, religious debate had been relegated to the Assembly of the Divines. It was here ‘where a vocal minority, the Dissenting Brethren, had upheld the cause of religious toleration and Independency against majority support for Presbyterian uniformity’. Those in the Assembly in favour of the adoption of the Scottish Covenant and a rigid Presbyterian government believed that ‘religion was about authority and subjection’ and that it was about ‘the community as a whole not just the individual’. This belief included a Presbyterian uniformity, not just the notion of a single church. Presbyterians were among the most vocal in the effort to destroy the bishops, alleging, in the Grand Remonstrance of 1640 that the Episcopalians ‘had been guilty of introducing popery into the church’. However in January 1644 the Presbyterians attempt to dominate affairs in the country was firmly challenged with the publication of An Apologetical Narration, which was looked at in the first chapter. Although An Apologetical Narration was far tamer than the content in Williams’ 1644 work, it was an indication of the manner in which the political landscape of the country was changing so as to allow open dissent and debate on religious norms and practices. The suggestion in this tract that ‘a right to toleration for dissidents should be written into the (Assembly of Divines) decision on church government’ outraged many in the Assembly and ‘provoked a powerful propaganda campaign against toleration’. It must be made clear that in the seventeenth century ‘one of the most important religious endeavours of the Puritans was to avoid the wrath of God and not betray the “covenant” in which they believed’. Freedom of preaching and worship by the sects in Puritan England was something they were certain would anger God, and it seemed therefore completely correct for them to persecute these dissenters.
The Episcopalians were also in opposition to the growth of this liberty of conscience but as Coffey notes, Puritans were more likely 'to hold that Mosaic judicial law was still binding on Christian magistrates'. Men such as George Gillespie cited Old Testament scriptures such as Exod. 22, Zech. 13 and especially Deut. 13, to prove that God willed the destruction of idolaters, heretics and schematics. Anti-tolerationists centred their teachings around men like Moses, Joshua and Josiah, the Holy Princes of the Old Testament, and the extension of God’s rule over Israel to the world. With the tolerationists consciously veering away from Deut. 17, that rule-book for rulers throughout Christendom, it was quite natural that ‘great tolerationist debate from the 1640s onwards was to revolve around the relationship between the Old Testament Israel and the New Testament Church’. Further than this, the very notion of toleration and what it was conceived to be revolved around Old Testament teachings on church authority and New Testament congregationalism.
Thomas Edwards was a zealous Presbyterian whose Gangraena exposed ‘the worst excesses of the sectaries and warned of the consequences of religious toleration’. Published in 1645, Gangraena has been described as ‘a composite polemic against the spread of toleration‘. Hirst described Gangraena as a ‘massive survey of unorthodoxy and dissidence in London’, and that is exactly what it appears to be, a list of general schism and dissent in the capital. Edwards called on the Godly in the land of England to organise against 'toleration...the grand design of the Devil'. Edwards feared that the Presbyterians of England will be judged by their failure to root out sectarianism. He cited several Old Testament passages in an effort to show that liberty of conscience is against the will of God, and that it would result in disastrous consequences for the people of England. Edwards did recognise the benevolent New Testament God but believed that if angered, this God would unleash his wrath in accordance with the teachings of the Old Testament. Edwards provided us with a list of the errors and heresies which he believes the sectaries are guilty of, including the conviction ‘that the scriptures of the Old Testament do not concerne nor binde Christians now under the New Testament’. This idea provided the sectaries with a false faith in ignoring Gods teachings on liberty of conscience and helps to spread a general ignorance on the full word of God, claims Edwards. Another supposedly erroneous belief of the sectaries was Williams’ idea that ‘tis the will and command of God, that since the coming of his son the Lord Jesus, a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and worship be granted to all men in all nations and countries’. Married to this is the notion that ‘for Parliament to use any civill coercive meanes to compell men of different judgement, is one of the greatest sins that can be named’, leaving detractors with just the ‘sword of Gods Spirit’ with which to challenge these tolerationists. Edwards’ allies and friends included such prominent Presbyterians as William Prynne, John Bastwick and Robert Baillie.
The Scots Presbyterian George Gillespie was a commissioner of the Kirk to the Assembly of Divines at Westminster from 1643. Here he engaged such religious figures as Samuel Rutherford and Robert Baillie and obtained first-hand information regarding the merits and details of the Independent definition of liberty of conscience. He was heavily involved, and highly commended, at the Grand Debate, between Presbyterians and Independents in the Assembly, on the merits of Church Government. His intellectual prowess is noted with tales of his involvement in ‘detailed battles of scriptural exegesis with eminent Independent divines such as Thomas Goodwin, Phillip Nye and William Bridge‘. These lengthy musings over scriptural analogies undoubtedly helped form the view that Gillespie put to print in 1645 with the pamphlet Wholesome Severity Reconciled with Christian Liberty. After painting an unflattering picture of tolerationist ideas Gillespie claimed that ‘under these fair colours and handsome pretexts do sectaries infuse poyson, I mean their pernicious, God-provoking, Truth defacing, Church-ruinating and State-shaking toleration’. His work is packed with scriptural typology as he sought a biblical basis for every main point he made, especially concerning the persecution of idolaters, heretics and schismics. With regards to addressing his opposition to toleration, Gillespie rests his argument on two books of the Old Testament; the book of Deuteronomy and the book of Kings. Deut. 13: 6-9. is the basis for Gillespie’s argument in favour of persecution as it is here, he claims, in which the law is laid down concerning people guilty of enticing the Godly to other religions, a charge he lays at the door of the sectaries. This is a cause of social unrest, necessitating the intervention of the civil power in the form of a magistrate and the disunity of the country. Gillespie cites Sarah’s dealing with Hagar in Genesis 16. to draw the conclusion that ‘connivance and indulgence to Heretiks is a cruel mercy: correction is a merciful severity and a wholesome medicine, as well to themselves as to the Church’. He is convinced of the need for a Church Government, he even puts forward a case for the adaptation of the Mosaic laws, and he is suspicious in the extreme of the motives of the sectaries, especially their apparent freedom to recruit and preach. He lays out the reasons why the Christian Magistrate should adopt the judicial laws in order to punish the sins of the sectaries against the moral law citing 2 Chron. 19: 6. ‘and said to the judges, take heed what ye do; for ye judge not for man but for the Lord, who is with you in the judgement’. He follows this up with an attempt to prove that although Jesus failed to stick to the Mosaic Law, when he would not condemn adultery (John 8: 11.), he really meant us to observe it, based on Mathew. 5: 17. 'think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets, I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil'. Citations such as this one, paint Gillespie as a potentially moderate Presbyterian, but with respect to the specific poles of this debate, he is clearly more comfortable on the anti-tolerationist side. He puts forward a middle ground, of sorts, at the close of this piece, decrying toleration in favour of accommodation of dissenters into the Presbyterian fold provided there is agreement on fundamental principles.
Many of the anti-tolerationists focused on what from the Old Testament was explicitly not rejected by the New, such as idolatry. George Gillespie made the point that ‘it seems clear that we are commanded to punish at least idolatry and gross heresy by the moral commandment of the Old Testament, which has not been revoked by the new’. Gillespie has, in this one sentence encapsulated the variation in wavelengths between the two sides in this debate. He, while reading and analysing the Bible as a collection of stories on how best to live life, has failed to grasp the overarching message of the New Testament, as interpreted by the tolerationists. Jesus himself said ‘Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you and pray for them which disrespectfully use you’ (Luke 6: 27, 28). The very notion that a man would punish another for his beliefs is apparently against the word of Jesus, and this was the viewpoint of the men such as William Walwyn in the 1640s.
Robert Baillie was a Scottish Covenanter who constantly attempted to reconcile the New Testament kingdom of peace with a more politically realist agenda, borrowing heavily from the Old Testament. It was Baillie who was the most vocal of the Scots in London during the formative years of the religious conflict between the Presbyterians and the Independents, between 1642 and 1646. He played a major role in convincing the London moneyed interest that 'the erection of a Presbyterian ecclesiastical discipline would be a bulwark against a slide into religious diversity and anarchy'. He cites the Old Testament book of Micah’s vision of the kingdom of Christ, ‘and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more'. But, according to Baillie, this kingdom had not been created yet, and it would not be 'so long as Divine dispensation besets our habitations both spiritual and temporal, the Church no less than the State, with great numbers of daring and dangerous adversaries'. This prevented him from looking to the New Testament for answers to ecumenical questions. He advocated the continuation of God’s judgement against the enemies of his people, citing directly from the Old Testament, 'prepare war...beat you plowshares into swords and your pruninghooks into spears'. Baillie saw the growth of the sectaries as Satan 'building his Babel both in church and State'. According to Baillie, religious reform precipitated the collapse of the village agrarian community and the ‘deterioration in the material conditions of the common people’. He relied heavily on the Old Testament model of persecution as a necessity for the survival of the church.
John Cotton was a Puritan resident of the New England Massachusetts Bay Colony who advocated congregationalism, but sought a solution that would accommodate Presbyterians in the governance of England. He was a nonconformist who, along with John Davenport and Thomas Hooker, declined the invitation, to sit on the Assembly of Divines. His strong opposition to separatism involved him in a lengthy disagreement on principles with Roger Williams during the 1640s regarding toleration and its merits. After Williams’ publication of The Bloody Tenet and Mr Cotton’s letter lately printed, examined and answered both in 1644, Cotton returned with a reply to Mr. Williams and the Bloody tenet, washed and made white in the bloode of the Lambe both printed in 1647. Here Cotton asked ‘How far liberty of conscience ought to be given to those that truly fear God?’ Cotton offered an alternative view of the tolerationist debate, professing that men were not to be punished for conscience sake, but if a man shows signs of fundamental error even after due conviction then he may be punished. In this case he is 'not punished for his conscience, but for sinning against his conscience'. Cotton admits that through this belief it may appear that he still believes in persecution for cause of conscience even though he expressly renounced it. He, as with many others during the religious debates of this period, was bogged down in definitions and in the attempt to remain true to these two bodies of scripture whose fundamental Church structures often seem to contradict each other. This was especially apparent in the interpretation of the vengeful, persecuting God in the Old Testament books of Deuteronomy, Kings and Judges and Jesus’ actions and words in the New Testament gospels by contemporaries of Cotton. Cotton saw the necessity for unity in the country, but not essentially in uniformity, citing the Old Testament book of judges; ‘if the defect in one of the tribe in Israel was a great trouble to all the commonwealth of Israel then sure the breaking up and dissolving of so many particular useful societies' would only impair England’s growth. He was attempting to show Williams that these sectaries, when they were allowed to sin against their own conscience were potentially a seditious threat to the perception of New Jerusalem in England. Although he does not expressly suggest persecuting these groups, the church must be protected against heathens by the civil state, and he uses examples from the Old Testament book of Zechariah to express this need. He who refuses to subject 'his spirit to the spirit of the prophets in the holy Church of Christ' sins against the church and may be punished violently, citing the example of Zedekiah in 1. Kings 22: 24. His Old Testament view of the history of persecution is tamer than Thomas Edwards, especially in his citation of Acts 14: 16, and the claim that 'God in times past suffered all nations to walke in their own wayes'. Turning away from God is unforgivable however; 'but if an Israelite forsake God he disturbeth not only the commonwealth of Israel, but the barks of Pagans and Heathen states as Jonah did this ship (Jonah, 1: 15), by his departure from God'. For Cotton the central argument for tolerance towards those who are not fully aware of the message of God, but punishment for those who have heard the message, been made aware of it, yet reject it. To iterate this, he cites a powerful passage from the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy where the God urges man to stone to death any who dare attempt entice him away into worship for another God; 'and all Israel shall hear, and fear, and shall do no more any such wickedness as this is among you'. John Cotton found himself classed as a moderate during the 1640s, attacked by men as diverse as Williams and Robert Baillie, due to his support of congregational Independency. Although he eventually sought accommodation with Baillie and the Presbyterians during the 1650s, he saw Williams and his like as distrustful and distrusting. It was his ultimate belief that dissenters in fundamentals and those who, out of 'obstinacy against conscience and seducers, to the perdition of souls and to the disturbance of civil and church peace', are not to be tolerated.
Thomas Case was a Presbyterian pamphleteer active during the 1640s and whom the Oxford DNB describes as being 'firmly with the Presbyterians and opposed to the army and the Independents'. Case was an influential London ‘root and branch’ minister, and future chaplain to Charles II. His virulent opposition to toleration he sums up in his tract Toleration Disapproved stating that 'those who called for liberty of conscience only gained...liberty to destroy themselves'. In 1642 he preached a sermon entitled Gods Rising, His Enemies Scattered, which was published in May 1644. In this sermon Case quotes heavily from the Old Testament book of Psalms, indeed the title itself derives from that same book. Case makes a number of observations from the book of Psalms, from which he constructs a list of doctrines fundamental to Christian worship. Against this book he holds the actions, and the very existence of the sectaries in England to be against the wishes of God, indeed to be anti-Christian. One of these fundamental doctrines is expressly aimed at those who would dare to challenge the ascendancy of the Presbyterian Church: 'The Churches enemies are Gods enemies; they that hate the church, hate God. Thine enemies, them that hate thee'. Case was of the belief that one of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity is accepting that God 'seems sometimes to lie still, and sleep'. Again, the book of Psalms was used to emphasis this point with the sectaries being criticised for mistaking God’s silence for contentment; 'because he holds his peace they think he is altogether like themselves'. Case berates the false security felt in the country while the sectaries are free to preach, comparing them with wild animals roaming the streets, for 'hath not God branded malignant spirits with these names in scripture'. He points to the Old Testament book of Jeremiah to warn the English that if they fail to do God’s bidding, they themselves are liable to be punished. New Testament analogies are a rarity in this pamphlet as it seems Thomas Case was prepared, and determined, to live in an England governed by Old Testament norms and examples.
Daniel Featley was a Church of England clergyman and renowned religious controversialist during this period, who contributed significantly to the debate on behalf of the anti-tolerationists. Featley focuses all of his condemnation on the practice of adult baptism and the Baptist movement. His use of New Testament analogies is abundant, as he attempted to counter the Baptist arguments in the passage on the meeting at Southwark in his 1646 pamphlet the Dippers Dipt. Featleys was the sole Episcopalian to take a seat on the Assembly of the Divines and he constantly attempted to prove the importance of the established church, claiming that ‘you sinne against God by your disobedience to lawful authority’ by failing to attend church. His sole political concern was the promotion of Episcopalianism, and so he often ties the actions of the sectaries to sedition, warning of the 'fearful judgement of God in the Old Testament'. It was his belief that the swords of the Civil War needed to be turned into swords of justice, as in Nehem. 4: 17., 'to cut off superstition and idolatry on the one side, and Prophanenesse and Sacriledge on the other'.
Those in favour of Church unity, and the persecution of those who would threaten this unity, used the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy quite consistently. This book contains passages such as on living among non-believers; 'and when the Lord thy god shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shall make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them'. These non-believers ‘will turn away thy son from following me' and incur the wrath of God. In searching for how best to deal with the threat that Englishmen may be worshipping a God they deemed to be false this book proved a useful guide; 'But this shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their alters and break down their images and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire'. This persecution advocated by a God who had freed the Israelites from slavery and protected them in the desert was very powerful and its resonance was felt in seventeenth-century England as believers looked to God to deliver their country from civil conflict. This God has characteristics entirely unfamiliar to the one that was later to appear in the New Testament. This is a God capable of hate; 'and repayeth them that hate him to their face, to destroy them; he will not be slack to him that hateth him, he will repay him to his face'. This is a jealous God; 'For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God'. This God advocates an iron will in the destruction of his enemies; 'And thou shalt consume all the people which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee; thine eyes shall have no pity upon them'. This God encourages the complete destruction of nations from the face of the earth if they be in opposition to his word; 'and he shall deliver their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt destroy their name from under heaven: there shall no man be able to stand before thee, until thou have destroyed them'. Particular mention is made of those who entice others away from the worship of God, which was of particular concern to Gillespie and Baillie. These prophets or dreamers are to be stoned to death so as to pluck evil from out of the midst of Israel. Cities in which idolatry is practiced are to be razed to the ground, their inhabitants slaughtered and their possessions gathered and burned, these acts are deemed right in the eyes of the Lord. The real fear among religious radicals in England at this time was that the nation as a whole would be punished for tolerating the sins of the dissenters. The Lord promises this for the disobedient: 'Cursed shalt thou be in the city, cursed shalt thou be in the field'. Further curses and diseases are promised for those who dare act outside of God’s will, leaving the seventeenth century English Protestant in no doubt of the power and potential anger of his God. There is undoubtedly the appearance of two Gods in the Bible, a vengeful Old Testament one, and a peaceful New Testament one.
Conclusion
John Coffey first put forward a detailed analysis of the tolerationist debate of the 1640s in 1998. Coffey examined Puritan attitudes regarding toleration pre-1640 and in doing so sketches a picture of the dominant strains of Puritanism, especially Presbyterianism. The Presbyterians were supportive of the magistrate’s duty to exterminate heresy and apostasy, so long as they recognised the legitimacy of the ecclesiastical authority. The fear of a return to popish practices with the Arminian emphasis on the ceremonial nature of worship cast a shadow over the Episcopalian church’s legitimacy. The example of the Old Testament Kings, whose solemn responsibility before God to halt the spread of false religion was almost universally believed to apply to Christian magistrates, provided the litmus test for legitimacy. These Presbyterian voices were muffled by Laudianism and any internal Puritan dissension was minimised by the struggle for survival in the face of persecution.
Coffey expanded these views in Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558-1689 (2000). In both these works he mentions the split between the use of Old Testament Israel and the New Testament Church as societal models, and he backs this up by using scriptural analogies from the works of men on either side of the debate. However he stops short at rooting the very notion of toleration, as espoused by men such as Roger Williams and Henry Robinson, in the books of the New Testament. The idea of showing the tolerationist movement as a complete break from the Old Testament world appears to be the natural progression from Coffey’s work. This debate on liberty of conscience was marked by a fundamental spilt in the testaments of the Bible to such an extent that even the use of language in certain contrasting pamphlets distinguishes them. Coffey does insist that the tolerationists argued 'that looking to the example of Israel led to completely erroneous ideas about the nature of the church' and the 'mission of (the) radical Puritans was to wake the church up, to call it back to the patterns of the New Testament'. He does realise that what was being discussed during the 1640s was the replacement of one model for the church in England with another, both being based on scriptural analogies. Coffey points out the while the ‘defenders of uniformity had pointed to prophecies about the Kings of earth binding themselves to the service of Yahweh, tolerationists highlighted prophecies about the peaceable nature of the Messianic kingdom’.
However the very nature of what toleration meant to both the Mosaic Church and to the Church of Jesus requires a clarification which Coffey overlooks. In the Old Testament, tolerating liberty of conscience left the tribes of Israel vulnerable to the corruption of outside influences. Allowing men to preach and pray to a different God was potentially divisive to God’s people, as it may have tempted some worshippers from his Church and thus into opposition to the state and societal hierarchy. This is the view of the Old Testament church, lacking in confidence and suspicious of outside influence. This is the church on which, to some extent, both the Arminians and the Presbyterians wished to model England. To the New Testament church of Jesus however, toleration meant an acceptance into the community at large and the freedom to disseminate the word of God throughout the world. This church was smaller, more open and unconnected to the secular magistrate. This church was a simple congregation of acceptance and stubborn faith, and consequently was never as worried about outsiders as the Mosaic church. Its avocation of meekness is a product perhaps of its small numbers and its desire to create a community of believers solely through preaching, which arose from the danger of being branded as seditious. Toleration meant different things to these two churches; to the Mosaic church it meant control of dissent and to the New Testament Church it was a natural liberty. This term, toleration, therefore meant very different things to the opposing sides of this debate. Coffey does realise the importance of Scriptural analogies yet fails to notice this rupture between the uses of the Testaments. This oversight leads him to neglect the analysis of the relationship between the tolerationists and the anti tolerationists and how they used and refute different scriptural analogies. An emphasis on this strict dichotomy between the usage of the Testaments by those debating the very fundamentals of toleration is the very aim of this work. Its only through an understanding of the way in which contemporaries viewed the world as black and white, good and evil, rigidly adhering to their principles, can we explain the tolerationist debate. This rigid belief system fed into the pairing of the Old Testament with the anti-tolerationist cause and the link between the New Testament and tolerationist agenda. Although Coffey’s work is undoubtedly a valuable addition to the study of the English Civil War and of English Puritanism, it is the contention of this thesis that his argument requires fine-tuning and revision in order to emphasis the strict dichotomy between the scriptural sources cited by both sides of the debate.
References
1 McGregor and Reay put emphasis on the point that during the 1640s in England censorship collapsed, in fact if not officially (J.F. McGregor, B. Reay, Radical Religion in the English Revolution, New York, 1984, p4)
2 Spurr, John, English Puritanism 1603-1689 London, 1998, p110
3 Barry Coward, The Stuart Age: England 1603-1714, 2nd edition, New York, 1994, p 227
4 Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558-1689 (2000), and ‘Puritanism and Liberty revisited: The case for Toleration in the English Revolution in the English Revolution’ (1998).
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10 ‘government of the church by bishops’ (Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds.), The Cultue of English Puritanism, 1560-1700, London, 1996, p200)
11 ‘Pertaining to, or characterized by, government by presbyters or presbyteries; applied to a form or system of church polity; belonging to or maintaining this system’ (“Presbyterian” The Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University College Dublin. 28 June 2005)
12 David Cressy and Lori Ann Ferrell (eds.), Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook, London, 1996, glossary
13 Conrad Russel, , ‘The Reformation and the creation of the Church of England’ in John Morrill (ed.), Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain, Oxford, 2000, p258
14 Ibid., p261
15 "Nonconformist" A Dictionary of World History. Oxford University Press, 2000. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University College Dublin. 28 June 2005
16 Blair Worden cited in Norah Carlin, ‘Toleration for Catholics in the Puritan Revolution’ in Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (eds.), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, Cambridge, 1996, p216
17 “Typology” The Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University College Dublin. 28 June 2005
18 Sharon Achinstien, Milton and The Revolutionary Reader, Princeton, 1994, p18
19 Ibid.
20 J.F. McGregor and B. Reay, Radical Religion in the English Revolution, New York, 1984, p1
21 ibid., p2
22 Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War, London, 1991, p93
23 Kenneth Fincham, (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642, London, 1993, p1
24 Tyacke, Nicolas, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590-1640, Oxford, 1987, p216
25 Ibid., p244
26 Peter Lake, ‘The Laudian Style’ in Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642, London, 1993, p161
27 John Fielding, Arminianism in the localities: Peterborough Diocese, 1603-1642, in Fincham, Kenneth (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642, London, 1993, p93
28 Nicolas Tyacke, , ‘Archbishop Laud’, in Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1993, p59
29 Thomas Lyon, The Theory of Religious Liberty in England, 1603-1639, Cambridge, 1937, p55
30 Ibid
31 Peter Marshall (ed.), The Impact of the English Reformation 1500-1640, London 1997, pp 8, 9.
32 William Laud, , A relation of the conference between W Laud...and Mr Fisher, the Jesuit (London, 1639)
33 Henry Danvers Certain Queries cited in Norah Carlin, ‘Toleration for Catholics in the Puritan Revolution’ in Ole Peter Grell, and Bob Scribner, (eds.), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, p 226.
34 ‘The Typological Argument for Religious Toleration: the Separatist Tradition and Roger Williams’ Journal article by Richard Reinitz; Early American Literature, Vol. 5, 1999.
35 McGregor and Reay, Radical Religion in the English Revolution, p12.
36 To the Scottish this awoke the fear that the Crypto-Papalism rampant in England was spreading north, cited in John Kenyon, , The Civil Wars of England (London, 1988), p15.
37 John Spurr, , English Puritanism 1603-1689 (London 1998), p 95.
38 W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England from the convention of the Long Parliament to the Restoration, 1640-1660 (Massachusetts, 1965) p17.
39 Mark Goldie, ‘The Search for Religious Liberty, 1640-1690’ in John Morrill (ed.), Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain, p. 295.
40 This was a list of grievances of the people to the King passed in Parliament in November 1641.
41 W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, p17
42 If widely subscribed to this covenant would have replaced episcopacy with a Presbyterian organisation, and prayer book ceremonies with the directory for public worship, cited in Cressy, David and Ferrell, Lori Ann (eds.), Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook (London, 1996), p180
43 Jordan, W. K., The Development of Religious Toleration in England from the convention of the Long Parliament to the Restoration, 1640-1660 (Massachusetts, 1965), p24.
44 Barry Coward, The Stuart Age: England 1603-1714 (2nd edition, New York, 1994), p227.
45 Christopher Hill and William Dell, The Good Old Cause, 1640-1660 (2nd edition, London, 1969) p109
46 Coward states that the end of the military struggle saw the split in Parliament, cited in Coward The Stuart Age, p224.
47 Cressy and Ferrell state the this bill represented the urban Puritan reaction to Laudian policy and an attempt to destroy the stringiest uniformity to a sacramental they say as similar to popery, cited in Cressy and Ferrell (eds.), Religion and Society in Early Modern England, p174.
48 Spurr, English Puritanism 1603-1689, pp103, 104.
49 Ibid., p104.
50 Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, Nicolas Tyacke, From Persecution to Toleration (Oxford, 1987), p29.
51 Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, p54.
52 J. F. McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of all Heresy’, in McGregor and Reay, Radical Religion in the English Revolution, p23.
53 John Morrill, (ed.), Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2000), p261.
54 Ibid., p289.
55 Ibid., p 290.
56 Norah Carlin in Grell and Scribner (eds.), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, p 227
57 Ronald Hutton, Debates in Stuart History (New York, 2004), p33.
58 Indeed Jordan notes that it was Presbyterian opposition to religious toleration which forced the Independents to search sectarian allies and eventually led to the second civil war, cited in Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, p58
59 John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558-1689 (London, 2000), p140.
60 Ibid., p136.
61 Keith Lindley, The English Civil War and Revolution: A Sourcebook (London 1998), p145.
62 Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, p18.
63 Ibid., p49.
64 Houston, cited in John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558-1689 (London, 2000) p160
65 Conrad Russel, ‘The Reformation and the creation of the Church of England’ in John Morrill (ed.), Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain, p258.
66 A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty (London 1965), p51.
67 R. C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution (London, 1977), p31.
68 Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England p216.
69 Ibid., p267.
70 Ibid., p271.
71 Ibid., p48.
72 John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558-1689, p3.
73 John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution: Essays, (London, 1993) p394.
74 Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558-1689, p4.
75 R. C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution, p71.
76 A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty (London 1965), p 247.
77 Mark Goldie, ‘The Search for Religious Liberty, 1640-1690’ in John Morrill (ed.), Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain, p. 297.
78 Barry Coward, The Stuart Age: England 1603-1714, p225.
79 Derek Hirst, England in Conflict, 1603-60: Kingdom, Community, Commonwealth (London 1999), p242
80 Leonard Levy (ed.), Freedom of the Press from Zenger to Jefferson (New York, 1966), p93.
81 William M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion 1606-1660 (London 1969), p12.
82 Ibid., p140
83 Andrew R. Murphy, Tolerance, Toleration and the Liberal Tradition, Polity, Vol. 29, 1997.
84 Oxford DNB
85 Roger Williams, , The Bloody tenet of Persecution (London, 1644), p
86 William M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion 1606-1660 (London 1969), p141.
87 Roger Williams, , The Bloody tenet of Persecution, p a2.
88 Ibid., p a3.
89 Romans 6. 4. Cited Ibid.
90 Roger Williams, The Bloody tenet of Persecution, pg b3.
91 Roger Williams, The Bloody tenet of Persecution, p. 53.
92 Henry Robinson, John the Baptist, Forerunner of Christ Jesus: or, A necessity for Liberty of Conscience (London, 1644), p20.
93 Ibid.
94 2Chron. 6: 34, 35; Eccl. 3: 3; Matt. 5: 21-26. Cited Ibid.
95 Leonard Levy, Emergence of a Free Press (Oxford, 1985), p93.
96 Henry, John the Baptist, Forerunner of Christ Jesus: or, A necessity for Liberty of Conscience, p6.
97 Entitled ‘Christ’s instructions, and the Apostles practice for tendering and holding forth the Gospel only in a peaceable way’.
98 Rom. 16: 20., cited ibid., p19.
99 Robinson, John the Baptist, Forerunner of Christ Jesus, p20.
100 By Math. 10. 42-45.
101 Entitled ‘Christ’s Instructions, and the Apostles practice concerning Christian Liberty’
102 Robinson, John the Baptist, Forerunner of Christ Jesus, p21
103 Rom. 12: 14., cited Ibid, p49.
104 Robinson, Henry, John the Baptist, Forerunner of Christ Jesus, p26.
105 Ibid. p51
106 Although eventually becoming better known for their views on political liberty, manning has stated that their whole political programme grew out of their anxiety over freedom of conscience, cited in Brian Manning (ed.), Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (London, 1973), p247.
107 Cited in Levy, Emergence of a Free Press, p91.
108 Hirst, England in Conflict, 1603-60: Kingdom, Community, Commonwealth, p242.
109 McGregor and Reay, Radical Religion in the English Revolution, p65
110 Hirst, Derek, England in Conflict, 1603-60: Kingdom, Community, Commonwealth (London 1999), p242.
111 Brian Manning (ed.), Politics, Religion and the English Civil War, p. 66.
112 Jonathan Scott, Seventeenth Century English Political instability in European Context (Cambridge 2000), p254.
113 Hirst, England in Conflict, 1603-60: Kingdom, Community, Commonwealth(London 1999), p243.
114 Biblical reference in the political pamphlets of the Levellers and Milton, 1638-1654, p63----
115 Kroll, Richard, Ashcraft, Richard and Zagorin, Perez (eds.), Philosophy, Science and Religion in England, 1640-1700 (Cambridge, 1992), p88.
116 Biblical reference in the political pamphlets of the Levellers and Milton, 1638-1654, p68----
117 Ibid.
118 Frank, J., ‘The Levellers’ cited in Levy, Leonard, Emergence of a Free Press (Oxford, 1985) p92
119 Waylwyn, William, The Compassionate Samaritane (London, 1644) cited in Ibid.
120 The Vanitie of the present Churches cited in Scott, Jonathan, Seventeenth Century English Political instability in European Context (Cambridge 2000), p253.
121 Manning, Brian (ed.), Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (London, 1973), p243
122 Citations from Luke 9: 56. and John 3: 17. in Arraignement of Mr. Persecution., pp. 9, 10.
123 I Cor. 4: 5. Cited in Overton, Richard, The Araignement of Mr. Persecution (London, 1645), p14.
124 Matt. 7: 1., cited Ibid, p16.
125 Overton, Richard, The Araignement of Mr. Persecution (London, 1645), p16.
126 Ibid., p19
127 Oxford DNB---
128 Owen, John, A Vision of unchangeable free mercy, in sending the means of grace to undeserved sinners (London, 1646), p 48.
129 Ibid., p 52.
130 1 Cor. 3: 11. Cited in Hall, John, A remedy of discontent (London, 1645), p16.
131 Eph. 2: 20. Cited Ibid., p17
132 Hall, John, A remedy of discontent (London, 1645), p51.
133 Rom. 16, 17, 18., cited Ibid., P58.
134 Richardson, Samuel, The necessity of Toleration in matters of Religion (London, 1647), p4.
135 2 Tim 4., 2., Luke 9: 54, 55., 2 Cor. 10: 4., Matt. 10: 16., Rom. 13, Tit. 3: 10., John. 4., Act. 14: 4, 19, 29, 40., Act. 21: 30, 31.,cited in Richardson, Samuel, The necessity of Toleration in matters of Religion (London, 1647), pp 6-10.
136 Dell, William, Right Reformation: or The Reformation of the Church of the New Testament represented in Gospel-Light (London, 1646), p3.
137 Ibid., pp 6, 7.
138 Ibid., p6
139 John 18: 46., cited in Danvers, Henry, Certain Quaeries concerning Liberty of Conscience (London, 1649), pA2.
140 Danvers cites Mat. 7: 1., Jam. 4: 11., Rom. 14: 4., Rom. 2: 1.
141 Danvers cites 1 Cor. 6: 11.
142 ‘None can settle religion truly, but he who makes Religion’ cited in Collier, Thomas, A General Epistle to The Universal Church of the first born, whose names are written in Heaven (London, 1649), p90.
143 Collier, Thomas, A General Epistle to The Universal Church of the first born, whose names are written in Heaven (London, 1649), pp 91-92.
144 Ibid., p93
145 Ibid., p92-94
146 Particularly relevant are citations 1 Cor. 5: 1-3. and 2 Cor. 13: 1, 2. against church uniformity and persecution in Certain Queries, p4; and citations of the gospels of Matthew and Mark in support of liberty of conscience, in Certain Queries., p10 and 11.
147 Spirtuall Whordome discovered in a Sermon is a general religious text of the time with equal reliance on both Testaments (if anything Collier actually quotes more frequently from the Old Testament), however any mention of toleration and peace are made valid through New Testament citations, especially relevant is pp 13, 14, and p18.
148 Marshall, Stephen, The Moderate Presbyter (London, 1645) cited in Jordan, W. K., The Development of Religious Toleration in England from the convention of the Long Parliament to the Restoration, 1640-1660 (Massachusetts, 1965), p323.
149 Lamont, William M., Godly Rule: Politics and Religion 1606-1660 (London 1969), p11.
150 Vernon, John, The Swords Abuse Asserted (London, 1648), p5.
151 2 Tim. 2: 24. Cited in Vernon, John, The Swords Abuse Asserted (London, 1648), p10.
152 Vernon, John, The Swords Abuse Asserted (London, 1648), p14.
153 Anonymous, Liberty of Conscience Asserted (London, 1649), p2.
154 Ibid., p5.
155 Ibid., p6.
156 Matt. 22: 37-40., King James Bible (London, 1932)
157 Luke 6: 22., in Ibid.
158 Matt. 5: 44. in Ibid.
159 Williams, Roger, The Bloody tenet of Persecution (London, 1644), pg 1.
160 Overton, Richard, The Araignement of Mr. Persecution (London, 1645), p22.
161 Spurr claims that these anti-tolerationist Presbyterians propounded the case for uniformity of religion in innumerable apologies and vindications in an effort to rally against the sin of toleration cited in Spurr, John, English Puritanism 1603-1689 (London 1998), p111.
162 Doran, Susan and Durston, Christopher (eds.), Princes, Pastors and People: The Church and Religion in England, 1529-1689 (London 1991), p113.
163 Coward, Barry, The Stuart Age: England 1603-1714 (2nd edition, New York, 1994), p227.
164 Ibid., p227.
165 Carlin, Norah, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford 1999), p48.
166 It must be noted that it wasn’t just Presbyterians who were not in favour of liberty of conscience, the majority of the Independents were only prepared to go a certain way towards tolerating religious freedom cited in Spurr, John, English Puritanism 1603-1689 (London 1998), p111.
167 Cliffe, J. T., Puritans in Conflict the Puritan gentry during and after the Civil Wars (London 1988), p5.
168 Spurr, John, English Puritanism 1603-1689 (London 1998), p 104.
169 Ibid.
170 Coffey, John, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558-1689 (London, 2000), p 32.
171 Ibid.
172 Cressy, David and Ferrell, Lori Ann (eds.), Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook (London, 1996), p195.
173 Oxford DNB
174 Hirst, Derek, England in Conflict, 1603-60: Kingdom, Community, Commonwealth (London 1999), p 233.
175 Edwards, Thomas, Gangraena (London, 1646), Book 1, p 12.
176 1. King. 11: 1-15. cited ibid, p b1.
177 Levit. 26: 25., 1 Sam. 2: 29-32., 1 Sam. 3: 12-14., 1 King. 10: 19-33., Jerem. 5: 30, 31., Dan. 5: 5. 2: 2, 23, 24-28., Amos. 2: 9, 13. 14., Hag. 1: 2, 4, 5. cited Ibid Pg b2.
178 Edwards, Thomas, Gangraena (London, 1646), preface.
179 Ibid., p16.
180 Ibid., p16-17.
181 Ibid., p17.
182 For a detailed analysis on Edwards Gangraena read Hughes, Ann Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004)
183 Oxford DNB
184 Gillespie, George, Wholesome Severity reconciled with Christian Liberty (London, 1645), p. a3.
185 Ibid., p33.
186 Ibid., p36.
187 Ibid., p7.
188 Coward, Barry, The Stuart Age: England 1603-1714 (2nd edition, New York, 1994), p 225.
189 Mic. 4: 3. cited in Baillie, Robert, Anabaptism, The True Fountaine of Independency (London, 1646).
190 Baillie, Robert, Anabaptism, The True Fountaine of Independency (London, 1646), p2.
191 Joel 3: 9, 10. cited in Baillie, Robert, Anabaptism, The True Fountaine of Independency (London, 1646).
192 Baillie, Robert, Anabaptism, The True Fountaine of Independency (London, 1646), The Espistle.
193 MacLachlan, Alastair, The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England: An Essay on the Fabrication of Seventeenth-Century History (London, 1996), p37.
194 Oxford DNB
195 Cotton, John, The Bloody tenet, washed, and made white in the bloud of the Lambe (London, 1647), Cover Page.
196 Ibid p3
197 Jud. 21: 2, 3
198 Cotton, John, The Bloody tenet, washed, and made white in the bloud of the Lambe (London, 1647), p11.
199 Ibid p14
200 ibid. p20
201 ibid. p22.
202 Deut 13: 11. cited Ibid.
203 Oxford DNB
204 Cotton, John, A reply to Mr. Williams (London, 1647), p 89.
205 Oxford DNB
206 Coffey, John, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558-1689 (London, 2000), p35.
207 Psalm 68: 1, 2: ‘Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered, let them that hate him, flee before him’
208 Case, Thomas, God’s Rising His Enemies Scattered (1646), p2.
209 Ibid., p14.
210 Ibid., p5.
211 Featley, Daniel, The Dippers dipt. (London, 1646), p5.
212 Ibid., p11.
213 Ibid.
214 Ibid., p a3.
215 Deut. 7: 2., King James Bible (London, 1932)
216 Deut 7: 4., in Ibid.
217 Deut 7: 5., in Ibid.
218 Deut. 7: 10., in Ibid.
219 Deut. 4: 24., in Ibid.
220 Deut. 7: 16., in Ibid.
221 Deut. 7: 24., in Ibid.
222 Deut. 13.: 1-5., in Ibid.
223 Deut. 13: 12-18., in Ibid.
224 Deut. 28.: 16, 17., in Ibid.
225 Deut. 28: 15-68., in Ibid.
226 Coffey, John, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558-1689, The Historical Journal, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Dec., 1998), 961-985.
227 Ibid., p963.
228 Ibid., p971.
229 Ibid., p972.
230 Ibid., p973.
231 Coffey, John, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558-1689 (London, 2000), p59.
232 Ibid., pp 30, 31, 32.
233 Ibid., pg 41.
234 Ibid., p 59.
235 Coffey, John, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558-1689, The Historical Journal, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Dec., 1998) p974.

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Chris Farrell

'Islam and Politics: If a democratic route is to be discovered in Muslim countries what shape must it take and why?' Chris Farrell

2006-06-04T05:43:00.000-07:00

Islam and Politics: If a democratic route is to be discovered in Muslim countries what shape must it take and why?

The question of compatibility between the values and structure of Islam and that of what we in the west view as democracy is one which is gaining increasing importance in today’s world. The perceived threat that we in west are to feel from the Muslim terrorists or ‘jihadists‘, as Benjamin Barber (1995) would qualify them, especially since the events of September 11^th 2001 and the ensuing vocal battles over the escalating situations in Afghanistan and Iraq in political and social circles the world over, led to a heightened curiosity in the Western world. The questions of who these ’fundamentalist terrorists’ were and why they had grievances with the United States and indeed the whole Liberal Democratic world, so it seemed, were suddenly pushed into the public forum. The explosion of literature that has subsequently been published on Islam and its past, present and future has led many scholars and politicians into even more debate. If its clear, and it is, that autocratic governments don’t work in the Middle Eastern basin of Islam, and the Iranian Islamic Republican experiment has all but failed, added to the hostility that many feel to western liberal democracy, then its left to academics both within and outside Islam to attempt to find a fourth way. An example that could be put forward is that of Sayyid Qutb, an Islamic militant executed by Nasser’s Egyptian Government in 1966, in the Islamic world and Samuel Huntington (1992) in the West and their analogy that Islam and the west are on a collision course, and therefore it was necessary for Muslim countries not to copy the west but to turn in on themselves and create the perfect and prosperous Islamic orientated state. People like Qutb and Huntington will be referred to at a later stage in this essay but first I wish to give a brief history of Islam and politics; why democracy has been a foreign concept all along, outside interference in a private domain, and the implications that a successful Middle Eastern Democracy could have on world hegemony. During the course of this essay I will often use the terms Muslim, Arabic and the Middle East interchangeable in the full knowledge that they are not the same thing. It is also important to note that this is essentially a political paper on the possibilities of compatibility between Islam and Democracy, offering examples and structures that may be applicable to Iran and Iraq in particular, but are not sufficient to render this a purely policy based composition.

To begin any research into whether Islam and Democracy are compatible we must first reach a definition of each or a least some agreed foundation for their common usage and relevance in the modern world. Democracy is a term that requires a different interpretation in almost every state in which its relevant to. Bernard Lewis (1996) succinctly describes democracy as “a polity where the government can be changed by elections as opposed to one where the elections are changed by the government”1; Tunisian writer Mohamed Elhachmi Hamdi (1996) unreservedly concurs with this. Huntington (1992) prefers to abridge this slightly by claiming that a democracy exists when the state has made two successive and peaceful changes of government with free elections. There is a huge difference in interpretations of democratic theory even among the coalition forces of the United States, where the republic detests the idea of a monarchy, and the United Kingdom, where the existence of a constitutional monarchy seems to have somewhat eased the road not only to internal democracy but also toward exporting their liberal democracy. Bernard Lewis suggests that perhaps this is the way countries like Saudi Arabia could go if they wish for a peaceful transition to communal justice and the abolition of the necessity of being ‘Americas unwilling friend’ in the Gulf. In terms of Iran and Iraq it is impossible for them to consider this, the absence of a monarchic tradition in either country renders this suggestion useless but it is worth noting the impact that a Saudi Arabia at peace with itself would have on the Muslim world. Not only would it bring a semblance of stability to the region, it may also discontinue the sponsoring of terrorist groups and challenge American hegemony in the middle east. Islam itself can be considered either in terms of its purely religious context or also in terms of the much grander picture-the idea of an Islamic civilisation. Lewis suggests that Islam is both a religion with groundings in social justice and a civilisation with no tradition of democracy (indeed of the 53 members of the Organisation of the Islamic conference only one, Turkey, have a political system that resembles a democracy). Its notable that Islamic civilisation allows no translation for the word citizen, the word is absent in Arabic because the idea of participation is not as popular held belief as is in Europe. It does however, as a culture, disapprove of arbitrary rule and telling boast a rich political literature, very important resource material if Muslims are to build their own democracy and avoid mass importation of institutions and practices.

Ever since the coming of the final prophet Mohamed in 610 AD, and the preaching of the Quran, Islamic doctrines and popularity has spread. Mohamed’s preaching and eventual flight to Medina created an original concept in Arabian history, a tribe bound not by blood but by common belief and sheer will to spread the word of Allah. This fostered the already prevalent idea of community and social justice as the basis of civil society. Mohamed has said “he is not a believer who eats his fill when his neighbour beside him is hungry”2 (islamqa.com) and its this fraternity that both Iran and Iraq must remember as they enter the next twelve months, which may prove vital to the creation of the Islamic Democratic ideal. After the final conquest of Mecca in 630 Islam multiplies like wildfire, ironically not essentially through the sword as some may think but through conversion. Being a very practical religion with its roots in the community and emphasis on social justice, Islam had a widespread appeal. It inevitably came into contact with the archaic, post-Roman, Early Medieval Europe when it conquered Spain in 715. Even as Muslim armies reached Poitiers in France in 732, to be defeated be Charlemagne’s grandfather Charles ‘the Hammer’ Martel, it was impossible to consider the Muslims as a unified force. Islam had been adopted by the Arabic, Kurdish, Turkish, North African and Persian communities in different strains with different interpretations. This is especially prevalent with regards to the successors of Mohamed and it is the roots of the most fundamental split in Islam today, the Shiite/Sunni divide. As a religion there was no doubt among the believers at this time that Islam was divine and Allah was the supreme head of all things, on heaven and earth.

However once the idea of politics became intertwined with this idea then splits began to form. The cultural renaissance in Baghdad between 786 and 809 leads to the anthologization of the ahadith which enables the formation of a coherent body of Islamic law (Armstrong, 2002). This went some way toward categorising future governments in the region that used Islam as a political base-including modern day Saudi Arabia, and is quite relevant with most Muslims today as a cultural distinction from ‘Western law‘, which seems, to many Muslims, to have a latent Christian ethos to it. Democracy as Muslims often see it is not a pure form of rule by the representative of the mass of the people for the good of the people but the strategic placing of western friendly leaders who have been elected often fraudulently and care little for the interests of the people. The word ‘Democracy’ has lost its western meaning not in the translation but in the action s and impositions of our ‘democratic’ society on their economically inferior society. When we do encourage actual democracy in the Middle east it is an idea laced with Western cultural norms, such as the role of women and the place of religion. Movement from one culture to another en masse without the consideration of the customs in the new society will only breed hostility in the majority of the polis, as the rise in movements like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah is evidence to.

In terms of interference in the politics of Middle Eastern countries by the capitalist west the effect is quite detrimental to the spirit of democracy that many ‘liberal’ Muslims are trying to foster (the fact that Gai Eaton, a British Muslim calls liberal Muslims ‘Uncle Toms’-a reference to their apparent servitude to their western ‘masters’-is a sign that all is not right, and certainly not as clear cut as we were often led to believe pre-Sept 11^th, within Islamic politics). It makes sense for the west to be involved in regime change and maintenance in the oil-rich Arab world, exporting Western democracy gives the West something it can readily understand, categorise, exploit financially and silence. As Abdel Mahdi Abdallah (2003) claims, “The United States has never linked its aid to a process of democratisation and therefore, this aid was never seen as aid for the people“3 and this seems to be the root problem in Arab politics. Abdullah goes on to say that “the United States can do much to help the Arab people to achieve this goal by solving the Arab-Israeli conflict, withdrawing its forces from the region, and linking America's aid to democratisation programs and improvement of human rights”3. This constant interference by western agents in what most Muslims see as domestic disputes has caused the unique set of circumstances we see in the Middle East today. On one side there is the apparently pure Muslim monarchies (i.e. Saudi Arabia, Jordan) and on the other hand is the increasingly fictitious notion of a glorious Islamic Republic (i.e. Iran) and in between we have the liberals. Buffered of course by secular dictators (Iraq pre-2003, despite Hussein’s pretence at piety his claim that he spoke for Muslims is laughable) and Islamic dictators (Sudan is to an extent while in Syria al-Assad is more of an Islamic fascist than a true believer). On top of this there is the puppeteer, the western financiers and governments, oil barons and property developers. It is not to the benefit of the west if a country like the Saudi Arabia has a strong democratic government with free and fair elections and a vocal populace- as Abdel Bari Atwan (2002) claims that if the Saudis, for example had a democratic regime in place then the American President would find it harder to exert pressure on a leader with a mandate given to him by the people to represent them to his best abilities. That is not to say that this kind of western corruption and interfering will cease to exist, it will just become more difficult for regimes to justify compliance. Democracy will find it difficult to be developed and adopted as a Muslim concept while the West is making money supporting regimes favourable to their economy. In the western Hemisphere during the enlightenment there existed a sort of political fishbowl where thinkers from countries like Germany, France, Italy, England, Spain and the United States could bounce political ideas off each other in order to create the liberal democracy that we now find at the fore in these countries. This is why it is vital that the press in Muslim countries be made free and readily available, and also with the ability to openly criticise the government and promote political resistance.

The Iranian political system, as established by the revolutionary process, beginning in 1979, was to be entrusted to Islamic clergy who had, according to the Ayatollah Khomeini, been appropriately trained in Islamic jurisprudence and theology. With this in mind and with the creation of a tradition of clerical involvement in Iranian politics since 1979 it would perhaps be too radical to immediately initiate a separation of Church and state on a European scale. This is why when we come to look at Iran we must consider the religiopolitical role of the mosques in the running of the country. The system I would propose is a two tiered system of democracy with a secular lower house referring all bills to a upper house predominantly made up of clerics, which is directly applicable to the current situation in Iran. This system will be constructed on the same basis as most western bicameral systems with the upper house acting as a check and balance on the power of the lower house. It can “defend individual, group and regional interests against a potentially oppressive majority in the lower house”4 (Hague and Harrop, 2002) and its members are to be appointed for ten year terms to ensure stability across regimes and to act against stagnation of political proceedings. The idea is that the upper house would slowly become diluted and regain only the individual piety of its members as opposed to a religious grandeur. In a reproduction much like the democratic ‘British exported’ upper houses in many former colonies, this models second chamber would perhaps function best if it was approximately half the size of the lower house to ensure equal participation and a degree of intimacy. Unlike in modern day Iran, where the Supreme Leader and his clerical advisors (often from the assembly of experts) have a vastly disproportionate amount of power with regards to the Islamic Consultative Assembly, these houses will be legally equal. The law and the constitution will be modern interpretations of Sharia Law - applicable to today’s issues. The necessity of reform in Shari ‘a will be dealt with in the next paragraph. Many Iranians believe that if religion really must have a role in the state then it must only be a supervisory one, and this fits in with the use of an upper house dominated by clerics. The power of the clerics in politics and the knowledge that the west does not stand for real democracy for the Muslim people must drive them toward finding a democratic ground for themselves.

In a mini survey conducted by the BBC world service in 2004 with regards to the prospect of introducing Shari ‘a Law to Pakistan’s North West frontier Province all of the workers interviewed claimed that they agreed in principal with the idea of the introduction of Islamic Law but admitted that it needed modernization to fit in with the practicalities of contemporary politics, especially with regards to the role of women. This is particularly with regard to the dress code and the widely held belief that it must not be rigorously enforced, as without the sufficient faith, or knowledge of the faith, it is a meaningless rule, it seems more logical to foster loyalty to the community by allowing freedom of choice in matters of belief. Modern interpretations of Shari ‘a must take one important principle from the west on board - the toleration of the intolerant until they are intolerable - in order to create the kind of equality that will quell the rise of what Salmen Rushdie (2001) calls ’paranoid Islam’. This term includes the radical movements whose popularity among the disaffected and hatred of modern western society make it difficult for the governments in Arab countries to make treaty with the West and keep peace at home. Baqer Moin (2004) asserts that if the Middle East really wants to compete on a level pegging with the west than it must adapt Islamic law with regards to the religious, intellectual and political reform that Western religion and society has gone through. Muslim scholars must today look back on the teachings of men like al-Farabi (870-950 AD) whose Medieval Political Philosophy (2004) advocated the teachings of Aristotle and the idea that the best form of ruler was the philosopher King, not the cleric. Avicenna (980-1937 AD) agreed with this idea that philosophy was a higher ideal than religious duties. Just as these men leaned on the teachings of the ancient Greeks so now must Muslim leaders lean on the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, Paine and Adam Smith to kick start their sovereign political autonomy. Charles Kurzman (1998) believes that there are three tropes of any Liberalised Islam; the ‘liberal Shari ‘a‘, the ‘silent Shari ‘a’ and the ‘interpreted Shari ‘a‘. These are all interpretations of the implications of practical Shari ‘a, just as Hassan Hanafi (2004) writes “that there is no one interpretation of a text but there are many interpretations given the difference in understanding between various interpreters…the conflict of interpretation is essentially a socio-political, not a theoretical one. Theory indeed is only an epistemological cover-up. Each interpretation expresses the socio-political commitment of the interpreter”5. This is exactly the way in which Islamic law must be viewed in order to render it universally compatibly with a state of mixed ethnicity, and mixed religion and to make it friendly towards economic and social policies that governments may need to make for the good of the political community.

Elections have always been a subject of intense scrutiny by Western observers and have often become a fraudulent example of the rotting that is often at the core of many regimes that hold sway over the politics of Islamic countries. When Algeria was on the verge of democratically electing its major Islamic party , the FIS, in 1991/2, a military coup (reportedly backed by French and American agents) took power illegally thus starting a civil war whose flames still burn today. Bahrain held its first elections as a constitutional monarchy in 2002, despite the illegality of political parties and the necessary prominence of political ‘associations’, and events passed off smoothly enough. Egypt’s electoral processes has been deemed undemocratic by human rights groups (BBC World Service 2003) and its not coincidence that The National Democratic Party has dominated the political process since the late 1970’s. Jordan, a Monarchy, recently held elections on the 17^th June 2003, to re-establish a parliament that the King had dissolved in 2000. Kuwait has a National Assembly elected through universal adult male suffrage, but a ban on political parties. In the Palestinian territories elections due to be held in 2003 had to be called off due to the fact that Israeli occupation of the west bank made a free ballot impossible. In Lebanon sectarian militias hold considerable sway over the populace and it doesn’t pay to vote against them, whereas Gaddafi’s Libya is a dictatorship with a façade of popular involvement in the form of committees and congresses. Morocco, Qatar and Oman are Monarchies, all with a degree of representation tantamount to quite little when compared with the demands and actual needs of the people. Saudi Arabians have yet to elect an official, though change is promised on a local scale, while Syrians have a semi authoritarian electoral process to the Peoples Assembly, with a Baath party monopoly. Yemen had had its first president elected by popular vote in 1999, a plus until you consider that the main opposition party were not allowed to field a candidate.

Iran has a number of ways it can go judging by these examples. Democracy can either be slowly grooved into the framework of the state or a constitutional revolution must occur. It is vital that any form of opposition to the government of the day is not militant, this is the first activity that Muslim countries must rid themselves of if they are to be truly considered democratic. Peaceful regime change seems to be quite a difficult concept in the aforementioned countries and it has to be held that this is not through the inclusion of religion in politics, rather from the exclusion. If you make Islamic institutions the framework of your modern state then it renders the Islamic opposition, that the West distrust so much, groundless. This is the Islamic opposition that has a tendency in the past to radicalise due to frustration and cause the instability of the state either through national endeavours or by attracting international attention through terrorist actions. The people in power in many of these countries hold on to it through their vast wealth and military power, and this is often Western sponsored. Iran has a distinct advantage over all other Arabic countries in this respect in that it has not allowed Western interference since the revolution of 1979. This means that, unlike in Algeria (where democracy was brought down, ironically, by its founding fathers, France and the USA) Iran is free to choose, as a people, the path it wishes to choose next, and the signs are good for further development as the president Mohammad Khatami is in favour of greater political and social freedoms. In terms of elections therefore it would perhaps lead to greater stability at the initiation of an Islamic Democracy if all adults got the right to vote in a Proportional System, possibly by list. I recommend this as it guides parties, or political groupings, as opposed to territories (Hague and Harrop, 2001), which is often quite important in middle eastern and African countries, factionalised by colonialism. The old argument that the West had centuries to democratise together and they expect Islamic countries to do it in a matter of years, with the seemingly commonplace hand in hand ideal of ‘Western Democracy - Western Commercialisation’, is applicable to almost all middle eastern countries. Armstrong (2003), however, argues that perhaps the period since the Iranian revolution of 1979 has allowed the Iranians to come to terms with the idea of modernity at their own pace, and on their own terms. Iranians must also expand the ‘re-Islamification’ of society in order to find the overlapping consensus that lets a stable political system emerge around them, this will help them realise the true values of Islam and replace the indistinctness that many of them now feel having grown up with religious oppression.

The slow Democratisation of Iran is only marred by the stubborn insistence of the clerics that they hold power, the common ground has yet to be found but when it is I suspect Persia will discover its Islamic democracy.

Iraq is a Muslim country in transition, having been rid of its dictatorial past by the coalition they now find foreign armies policing their streets and increased acts of urban terrorism as religious tensions heat up. Sura 109, Verse 6 of the Qur’an says “to you your religion, to me my religion”6, therefore any Iraq willingly defiling another’s religious beliefs is in direct conflict with the laws of Allah. Democracy is a compromise, not a defeat, it is often of the supreme necessity and mutually beneficial as Turk Ali Bula (2004) points out with the citation of Mohamed’s treaty with the Jewish tribes of Medina. The Medina document was epochal “a righteous and just, law respecting ideal project aiming for true peace and stability among people cannot but be based on a contract among different groups”7 and fostered a rich diversity within unity. Like Western democracies the people of Iraq must aim towards a peaceful multi religious coexistence which will bring stability and prosperity to this oil rich state. Unlike Western democracies Iraq must not fall into the trap of forgetting is glorious past. Once the centre of learning in the Muslim world, at a time when Europe itself was engaged in barbarous fratricide, Baghdad emanates prestige and power and as soon as the history of the glorious tradition of the Iraqis as a nation (admittedly glorious nationalism is a European characteristic but in Iraq’s case its certainly justifiable) is let shine through the ruins of the Hussein regime, the people can begin to look not to a dictator, the clerics, the Americans or the Fundamentalists for leadership, but to themselves as sovereign, then Iraq will be on the road to stability and power. Hamdi (1996) claims that the condition in many former colonies particularly in Africa and ‘Arabia’ favours not just the domination of one political party but the involvement of all in debate about legislation and the like. This gives rise to a complete severance of direct religious involvement and politics and the dispersion of powers among the major regions, with ‘federal’ power resting in Baghdad. This open participation traditionally breeds slow moving politics but with individual local councils or assemblies being ruled by a modern Shari ‘a whose final interpretation lies with the centre and its judicial system. As Hamdi says “no Islamic state can be legitimate it the eyes of its subjects without obeying the main teachings of the Shari ‘a”8 and this is exactly what Iraq needs particularly when Laith Kubba (1996) claims that the main principles of Islam include “freedom, human dignity, equality, governance by contract, popular sovereignty, and the rule of law”9 all compatible with any form of realistic democracy.

To counter the power that might be accumulated if a central ruler had assemblies that were despotically favourable to his regime there would have to be a functioning President with supreme authority over selecting the Prime Minister of the centre but who is answerable to the individual councils. In other words recent Iraq history has made it necessary for any immediate government to operate a stringent checks and balances policy in order to convince the people of the accountability of their leaders. Added to this the growth of the Iraqi economy would only be helped by measures that favoured local entrepreneuring ventures in favour of importations, that bought local and instead of foreign and limited outside interference by political and economical means; this leads to the replacement of a military struggle with the west with a commercial one, to protect the foundations of Iraqi society. As with almost all former colonies Iraq contains a multi-ethnic populace which could prove difficult if the state wishes to avoid the danger of factions. As a counter to this perhaps the inclusion of a secessionist clause in the constitution would encourage full and equal participation across ethnic and religious boundaries, especially among the Iraqi Kurds (McGarry and O‘Leary, 1996). This would destabilise the state initially but would be beneficial in the long run as every contract with an opt out clause causes the participants to believe that they have the ultimate choice not only as to what extent do the participate but whether they participate at all. It would also provide a check on any leader wishing to centralize power in himself.

A democratic and strong Iraq or a reformed Iran could lead the Muslim world in its rejection of American standards and free the middle eastern region from the shackles of the economic slavery that it has grown accustomed to since colonisation begun in earnest. Like the French Revolution and the effect it had on European thinking, all the Muslim world needs is a stalwart Islamic nation with the support of the people and the involvement of the majority of the population, a nation with pluralism and principles, one that will stand up to outside interference. With a democratic regime in either Iran or Iraq the effect on both the Muslim world and the West would be immense. The domino effect could lead to a broad Islamic consensus on Democratic ideals that are compatible with both Sunni and Shiite Muslims. It could lead to an end of the military resistance of the Palestinian people and relegate Israel’s actions in the occupied territories to acts of terrorism against a democratic people. This would severely de-legitimise the role of the state of Israel and bring everybody involved to the negotiating table in an attempt to remove one of the biggest thorns in Muslim sides since the end of World War II. This growth in Islamic political maturity would lead to a challenge to American world hegemony and would create interesting new relations with Europe. It is vital that if this is to happen that it must occur in a Muslim way, in other words with regard to social justice and with an adherence to a modern interpretation of Islam. Kubba (1996) states that the increasing prominence of Islamises who adhere to those ideals “could become a stabilizing and constructive force with great capacities for developing public institutions and modernizing Muslim societies”9. This re-Islamification of Muslim societies must be the route through which Democracy is fostered in the Middle East and beyond.

References

1. Pp. 4, Hattendorf, John B., Maritime Discovery, Volume 1: The Age of Discovery (Malaber, Florida, Krieger Publishing Company, 1996)

2. Pp. 69, Kruegar, Hilmar C., "Economic Aspects of Expanding Europe." As reproduced in Twelfth-Century Europe and the Foundations of Modern Society, trans. Marshall Clagett, Gaines Post and Robert Reynolds (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961)

3. JTK, www.V.U.GeoMet.com, 23^rd Sept 1996

4. Pp. 74, Kruegar, Hilmar C., "Economic Aspects of Expanding Europe." As reproduced in Twelfth-Century Europe and the Foundations of Modern Society, trans. Marshall Clagett, Gaines Post and Robert Reynolds (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961)

5. www.mariner.org

6. Pp. 59, Phillips, Seymour, "European Expansion Before Columbus: Causes and Consequences." As reproduced in The Haskins Society Journal, ed. Robert B. Patterson, vol. 5 (Woodbridge, U.K.: The Boydell Press, 1993)

7. Pp. 33, Hattendorf, John B., Maritime Discovery, Volume 1: The Age of Discovery (Malaber, Florida, Krieger Publishing Company, 1996)

8. Pp. 72, Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe, Before Columbus (London, Oxford, 1992)

9. Pp. 202-203, Norman Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made. (New York: The Free Press, 2001)

Bibliography

Abdel Mahdi Abdallah

, ‘Causes of Anti-Americanism in the Arab World: A Socio-Political Perspective’ Volume 7, No. 4 - December 2003

Al-Farabi, 870-950, Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (ref/B41.E5), art. 'Islamic philosophy'; R. Lerner and M. Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy (JA82.L4).

Armstrong,Karen ‘Islam: A Short History’, Phoenix, Great Britain 2002

Atwan, Abdel Bari 2002, ‘Debate: Fred Halliday and Abdel Bari Atwan on Islam and Democracy, Monday 22 April 2002 ’
Avicenna, 980-1937, Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (ref/B41.E5), art. 'Islamic philosophy'; R. Lerner and M. Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy (JA82.L4).

Barber, Benjamin, ‘Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World‘, Ballentine Books, New York, 1996

Bula, Ali, BBC World Service 2004

Hague, Rod and Harrop, Martin ‘Comparative Government and Politics: An Introduction’, Palgrave, New York 2002

Hanafi, Hassan, ‘Interpretations of shar’ia’, BBC World Service 2004

Hamdi, Mohamed Elhachmi ’Islam and Liberal Democracy: The Limits of the Western Model’, Journal of Democracy 7.2 (1996) 81-85

Huntington, Samuel, ‘The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order’, Touchstone, New York 1997

Kubba, Laith ‘Islam and Liberal Democracy: Recognizing Pluralism’, Journal of Democracy 7.2 (1996) 86-89

Kurzman, Charles 1998, ‘The Tropes of Liberal Islam’, BBC World Service

Lewis, Bernard ‘Islam and Liberal Democracy: A Historical Overview’, Journal of Democracy 7.2 (1996) 52-63

McGarry and O‘Leary, 1996, Ethnicity (eds. Hutchinson, J. and Smith, Anthony), Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996

Moin, Baqer 2004, ‘Can a modern, democratic system be devised for an Islamic republic?’ BBC World Service, 2004

Rushdie, Salmen BBC World Service, Friday 2^nd November, 2001

The Holy Quran, Wordsworth Classics, Kent, 2000

Wright, Robin ‘Islam and Liberal Democracy: Two Visions of Reformation’, Journal of Democracy 7.2 (1996) 64-75

www.fatwa-online.com

www.islamqa.com

Why are the politics of Irish America expressed through the American party system in the years between 1854 and 1880? Chris Farrell

2006-06-03T15:40:00.000-07:00

In 1854 the old Whig Party of the United States of America was replaced as a political force by the new Republican Party whose rise in popularity enforced the bipolar system which had existed since the beginning of the 19th century. The history of the American system had proved to be one that only sustained two prominent parties, there did not seem to be the support base for a third party. The purpose of this essay is to try and discover reasons why the Irish who had recently arrived and those who were of Irish descent chose to be involved in the organisations they did. We must seek the political preferences of these people, their priorities, the concentration of their political power and analyse the situations they found themselves in both socially and politically. To do this within the timeframe of 1854 to 1880 we must examine both the republican and the Democratic parties of this period, what they stood for and who they claimed to represent. Only with an understanding of these sets of circumstances will we understand the decisions made by many of those of Irish blood and the decisions forced upon them.
By 1854 the most recent huge wave of arrivals from Ireland, escapees from the clutches of the potato famine of the late 1840’s, were beginning to settle themselves in the big cities of the eastern seaboard, attempting to find a political voice and perhaps some elevation on the social ladder whilst mingling with, and inheriting political ideas from, their already settled kinsmen. This huge influx of foreigners into cities like Boston and New York of Irish, Italians and Jews, and the elevation they provided to their community leaders obvious led to a political crossroads for the two major parties. Bailyn et al (1992) note that before the 1850’s the “Whig and Democratic parties both claimed to defend Republican traditions against various kinds of privilege…and also relied on state and local issues for their higher voter turnouts”. Due to the concentration on economic issues in American political debates after the Panic of 1819 and the depression of 1837-43, there had been a lack of attention paid to the staggering influx of immigrants into the States. Their was widespread paranoia at these ‘armies’ of foreigners, often destitute, and many with radically different values to the natives. The Whigs and the Democrats had the options of either excluding these votes or trying to harness them at the risk of disillusioning loyal party supporters. Initially the party machines in the cities had little choice but to incorporate these growing communities in their organisational framework, their mobilisation rendered the Irish in particular quite powerful and they tended to congregate under their regional branch of the Democratic party. The Whig Governor of New York William H. Seward offended many of his party members by canvassing for the support of the Irish and German Catholics in his state, a foreshadow of what was to become as the Whigs were to fragment on their dream of an ordered, homogeneous society.
The inability of the Whigs to oppose the immigrant threat and the compliance of the Democrats with their political ascension alienated many loyal Americans leading to the rise in popularity of the Nativist ’Know-Nothing’ party, a zealously anti-Irish movement, in the industrial north. The Democrats decided quite early on that it would embrace the votes of the new immigrants, possibly seeing the inevitability of their involvement in politics and the lack of any ability they may have to decide who to vote for. While many in the Whig, Republican and especially American National parties thought that the Irish would vote whichever way the Catholic Church would tell them this wasn’t always the case, as Civil War politics within the Irish Catholic communities was to show. The fall of the Whigs and the lack of any clear political alternative to the Democrats, aside from the ‘Know-Nothings’, coincided with the rise of the Republican party who claimed to represent a number of groups including nativists, anti slavery Democrats, Free Soilers and Conscience Whigs, and sought the abolitionist vote on the slavery issue. With the escalation of the slavery question due to the dispute over the legitimisation of slavery in the territories, particularly Kansas, anti Irish nativist were convinced that the black question was more pressing than the immigrant one and the republicans absorbed the ‘Know-Nothing party in the mid 1850‘s.
This did not change the view that the Irish retained that the members of the new Republican Party were anti-Irish WASP‘s, and due to the support given to them by a Democratic party desperate for Northern backing the majority were quite comfortable voting for the Democrats. Even on the question of slavery the Irish traditionally adopted an attitude of apathy, the feeling they had as new comers to this old conflict was overwhelming, many felt they had no right to get involved, on either side. This attitude was coupled with the indifference felt in many Irish communities towards ‘anti-slavery’, where the idea of a ’white’ racial identity was embraced as a primary means of assimilation. Unlike other Northern Democrats the Irish voiced their political opinions through violence particularly during the Draft Riots of 1863. Even during this war period the hostility that many Irish immigrants showed towards blacks in the was testimony to their support of the Democrats, the party who had ‘accepted‘ them upon arrival. Even the pro-Union stance of the Catholic Church and its representative Archbishop Hughes did not deter Irish support of the Democrats, although many Irish just wanted a decent wage and social standing regardless of party politics and it was coincidence that the pro-slavery party offered this. The Civil War and its aftermath served to solidify the two party system in American Politics albeit it with different parties and a seemingly more dynamic agenda. The Whigs had their power slowly eroded by a number of ’pro-American values’ parties, who, realising that they could not split the opposition vote as it would favour the Democrats, fought it out until a majority party emerged, The Republican Party.
The post war period was one of extreme turmoil for American politics as the Republicans, whose alliance had been held together by the war, and the Democrats, attempted to draw up new guidelines for coexistence. The Irish stuck with the Democrats throughout this period which saw the rise of the successful political bosses like Boss Tweed and ’Honest’ John Kelly in New York. The Tammany Hall process of naturalisation ensured a democratic monopoly in New York as immigrants fresh off the boats were given a semblance of ‘voting rights‘, that is they were given the right to vote Tammany. With 176, 000 Irish immigrants in New York city in 1855 (more than one fifth of the cities voters were born in Ireland), political activism grew as the population swelled. With the rise of wealthy Yankees into position of wealth such as lawyers and bankers, a vacuum was left in the big cities that was open to an incoming Irish population which had been raised on the importance of activity in the civic society, as a way of retaining your identity. During this period the Irish strengthened their grip on places like Boston and Chicago and helped promote the involvement of their former country men in jobs working for the city, such as the police. The political power of these machines was often misused but this but this is not confined to the Irish, or the Democrats, American politics at this time was awash with dirty money. As ever this political activity took place in a centralised American system, a federal republic which had recently come to refer to itself as a nation, and reinforced its bipolarity by weathering the storms of post emancipation political unrest.
After 1970 the percentage of new arrivals from Ireland declined as new influx seemed to come from Southern and Eastern Europe. This pushed the Irish up the political and social ladder as did the growth of the Catholic Church in America, and this added to their acceptance as legitimate political leaders with America in mind, rather than the savages they had been viewed as though many retained the opinion that the Irish were barbarians until the second World War. Why did the Irish take part in this political discourse in the era of the American Civil War? Upward mobility played a factor, the promotion of a family dynasty was important to many immigrants especially among the Jews, Italians and the Irish. The need to be recognised for achievements rather than race, hence the reason why in later years politicians like Joseph Kennedy would seek to disassociate himself from the stigma of ‘Irishness‘, when it suited him. Realising potential that lay unfulfilled in a native country that didn’t know freedom. Many of the Irish sought to involve themselves in American Politics precisely because it was such a novelty to them and it offered benefits that they had never been privy to before.
During the phase of time leading up to 1870 and beyond it there was a major push towards expanding the population of American westwards and, especially under organisations such as the Irish Catholic Benevolent Union and the Irish Catholic Association of the United States, the Irish were heavily involved. This had two effects on the Irish involvement in American politics; firstly it served to spread out the incoming population and move second and third generation settlers out of the crowded cities and away from the political machines, and secondly the open range fresh starting ideal of the west should have made many realise their freedom. They were not subject to the necessity of protection within the ’Irish’ community, under the Democratic party, unlike when they arrived and sought immediate refuge in familiarity. The American system was recognisable as similar to the Westminster system so it seemed easier to settle into a category than to form third parties. The opening up of the west presented many opportunities both politically and socially to the immigrant communities and the Irish were no different.
In conclusion to the question of why are the politics of Irish America expressed through the American party system in the years between 1854 and 1880 it must first be reiterated that this party system only sustained two parties so any third party interested had to be assimilated into one of the big two to gain a political voice. Added to this, in the Irish case, here we have a largely destitute lower class of Catholics filling up the big industrial cities mid-19th century America, a people who are disliked for their religion and nationality, and they feel the need for protection, a voice for their community. The party system would render any attempt to set up a purely Irish interest party useless as it would never gain the adequate support to sustain a two party challenge. This means that the Irish must solidify their vote and band under the banner of one party, but which one? The Whigs, the Republicans and their allies offered a WASP ideal of a Protestant America whereas the democrats acted as a catch all party, friendly to immigrants. So it was natural that once the first batch of Irish voters chose democratic then the newcomers into their population would be ’Democratised’, due to the imperative of not splitting the vote. This period was significant as it solidified the Irish vote among the huge population of new arrivals and saw the ascension of many of these Irish to positions of political importance.
1. pp. 560, Bailyn et al (1992), ’The Great Republic’, Volume 1, 4th edition

Bibliography
Bailyn et al, The Great Republic: A History of the American People, Volume 1, 4th Edition, D.C. Heath and Company, Massachusetts 1992
Blanshard, Paul, The Irish and Catholic Power: An American Interpretation, Derek Verschoyle, London 1954
Kenny, Kevin, The American Irish: A History, Pearson Education, New York 2000
Miller, Kirby and Wagner, Paul, Out of Ireland: The Story of the Irish Emigration to American, Robers Rinehart, Washington 1997

Chris Farrell

'Relationship between the Medieval Expansion of Europe and the Great Age of Exploration' Chris Farrell

2006-06-03T15:37:00.001-07:00

The expansion of Europe over time cannot be viewed in terms of separate occurrences, merely different parts of an increasingly successful Europe wide policy. Medieval Europe was a society on the move with the extension of Christendom occurring both in the domain of what we today term ‘Europe’, with the Saxon efforts across the Elbe and the role of the French Knights in Spain, and also outside the continent with the capture of the Holy Lands in the year 1099. Events in this period between this first Crusade and the landing of the Columbus’s Santa Maria on American soil, in 1492 (which this essay will take as the defining moment of the epoch marked ‘the Age of Discoveries’), must be categorised on a timeline of sorts to understand the causes, consequences, reasons and opportunities that enabled Europe to ‘conquer’ trade routes from countries that seemed to be far in advance of them in terms of technology. They must be put against the background of events within Europe and within Christianity, particularly the effect of the Black Death on the economics and the politics of the continent. As well as this we must account for the rise of certain countries and their motivations for pushing the exploration of the seas, especially with the obsession of finding alternative routes to China and India. As Hattendorf (1996) claims, “relations between Europe and the rest of the World…were not new in 1492, the voyages of the great explorers were not isolated events”1. To understand fully the stance of most Europeans, that is the ones whose opinions mattered; noblemen or clergy, we must also delve somewhat into the evolving travel literature of the time and the views of the world that were commonly perceived as truth in literary circles. But above all we must remember that the Great Age of Exploration, no more than the Reformation or the Renaissance, was not a freak occurrence that begun in 1492 but it was a high point in a timeline that had existed in Europe since before Romans times, when trading and raiding were hallmarks of European society and the main function of this peak in exploration was to internationalise European efforts. After 1492 the “pattern simply becomes more striking”1 as new parts of the Atlantic are chartered. Firstly we must define what exactly the term ‘the Medieval expansion of Europe’ means, and contextualise it in the hope of finding its historical background. Our course starts with this first Crusade so reference to the voyages to Vinland by Nordic explorers in the 11th century will be kept to a minimum, despite their importance should the Vinland map of 1444 turn out to be authentic.
If you take this expansionist program to have begun with the Crusades, what Krueger (1961) calls “part of a pan-European expansionist movement that pushed in all directions, partially under the impetus or guise of Christianity”2, then we must disqualify earlier events such as the Norman conquest of England and the Christian community in Greenland. The Crusades were indeed a pivotal event in European history: for the first time in the history of the continent had an multi-national Army joined under the banner of religious belief in order to retake a territory that they had never owned but they believed they ought to own. They “had broken up the inertia or stagnation of European society” and had “unbarred the gates of the East, and let in a flood of light from the sources of science and philosophy”3, according to JTK (1996). This was an continent of ‘take what you can if your neighbour can’t defend it’ and this attitude was prevalent throughout the 14th and 15th centuries. What exactly did the Crusades do for the European imagination?
Coupled with the Mongol advance of the mid-13th century they served to define the point of European naval exercises. They opened up Europe to international trade routes and gave “commerce an international aspect”4 and served create a demand for Oriental goods in the Christian West. It was this trade in commodities such as spices, silk, cotton, pearls, and other such items that was to fuel a lot of the European expansion over the next 400 years, especially among the Italian merchants and later the Iberian royalty, as direct routes to the sources of these goods was sought. Even after the Crusader states of the east had fallen and the ideal of Crusade had been lost the economic effect they had in transforming the market of the Mediterranean was lasting. This concentration on the importance of places like Alexandria, Acre and Constantinople to Venice, Genoa and Pisa led to an reliance on these Italian states by the rest of Europe. Common sense told many that the more middle men involved in the trading exercise the costlier the good so it made as much sense for the Northern Europeans to ’break’ the Mediterranean, as such, and engage directly in trade with the Arabs as it did for the Portuguese to try and bypass the Arabs by circumnavigating Africa. This gives us the picture of expansion as a simple culmination of events, the further one state would go, the next would go that step further then the next further again and it literally was this simple.
This leads us to a further phase in the Medieval expansion of Europe, the clamour for routes to Asia. Unlocked for European merchants in a big way for the first time since the fall of the Western Roman Empire by the Crusading expeditions, Asia was to play a pivotal part in the history of European expansion. With the establishment of a European colony in the eastern Mediterranean, merchants and travellers from Europe had direct contact with the trade routes that stretched all the way east to India and China. The opening up to Europeans of products from these countries like spices and silks led to a greater desire for them and a greater need to cut their prices. A definition that has been put forward for the phrase the Age of Exploration may serve to highlight the importance of the ‘spice trade’; “the search for a sea route to the East led to what is called the Age of Discovery, a time wherein the greatest sea adventure and exploration in history were undertaken”5 (www.mariner.org).
Not to over emphasise the expansion of the Mongols, but it served to further this process as their conquests served to open up the far east not only to trade with the Europeans via the Muslims, thus opening up and linking the European economy to the world one, but to the actual possibility of European missionaries, merchants and travellers visiting the lands of the Great Khan and living in relative peace. Actually the role of the falling of both the Mongol Empire in 1368 and the Byzantine collapse of 1453 both have a huge impact on Europe’s ability to retain contact with the East and further necessitate the need to find an alternative route. Accounts made by the 13th century Polos and envoys like William of Rubruck along with more fanciful efforts from the likes of Sir John Mandeville whet the European appetite for all things Eastern, from commodities to civilisations. Even as late as the mid 1400 travellers like Gonzalez de Clavijo to Samarkland and Niccolo Conti to Indonesia were attracting interest in the West. These texts were widely read among the upper class of European society and served to promote an attractive view of the wider world. What especially seemed to impress of this travel literature was the descriptions of the lands of the Great Khan in China, Phillips (1993) says that “the wealth, the ordered society, the size of the Chinese cities and the extent of their trade, and the technological achievements of Cathay, such as porcelain, paper money, and ship building, were frequently marked upon”6.
What facilitated this period that was to become known as the Great Age of Exploration, what exactly enabled the ‘transformation’ from a Mediterranean centred expansion to a Atlantic centred period of exploration? And why is there a distinction between the Medieval expansion and the Iberian voyages? It must be noted that at the time this distinction was not made, it was evident to many that Europe had indeed entered into a new and exiting period but it was only our need to categorise history that has lead us to view the starting point for European expansion in the late 15th century. This big distinction that remains between the Medieval expansion of Europe and the age of Exploration is the arena; the breeching of the straits of Gibraltar and the rise in prominence of Spain and Portugal tugged the prominence of Italian trade in the Mediterranean away and gave rise to the importance first of the traffic in west African gold and later in a direct route to India. History is littered with circumstances favouring or promoting events and actions. Columbus’s voyage in 1492 enabled Vasco Nunez de Bilbao’s sighting of the Pacific in 1513, which in turn enabled the ultimate voyage initiated by Ferdinand Magellan in 1519 to circumnavigate the globe. If we disregard the supposed distinction between these two perceived periods we see that Gil Eannes clearing Cape Bojador in 1434 enabled Portugal’s crossing of the equator by 1473 which led to Bartholomew Dias reaching Africa’s Southernmost tip, the Cape of Good Hope in 1487. Every ground breaking voyage of this period allowed further expansion, the significance of the discovery of the Americas was the wealth it brought into Europe and the shift in political power that this brought about with snowballing effects to be felt for centuries. Earlier Medieval expeditions were perhaps more subtle and certainly less financially rewarding than the creation if the Iberian sea borne Empires.
The shift was also marked by an increase in interest both in Africa and the Americas, firstly as a route to India though. Whilst people like the Franciscan Giovanni di Piano Carpini and John of Monte Corvino visited and explored places like India, Iran and China, their expeditions were neither military or physically expansive to Europe in any sort of way. What these journeys and their subsequent correspondence with people in the West served to do was to expand Medieval knowledge of the unknown East and drive the desire to gain a foothold or a trading post to bypass the Muslim monopoly. This growing interest in the world outside of Europe caused or allowed a growth in the attention paid to accurate map drawing, a skill that had been severely lacking in post-Roman Europe. These took diverse forms from the written itinerary, like Matthew Paris’s description of the journey to Jerusalem, to the ancient T/O maps. Topographical Maps, which were designed to show the outlines of particular territories or regions were popular in this period, the ’Gough Map’ of Britain (c.1360) being a good example. The evolution of the Portolans was vital in further expansion of Europe as it was now possible to accurately navigate in familiar waters which enabled safe passage to unknown destinations. Some time between 1250 and 1300 Portolans, classical books of sailing direction, were combined with the newly introduced Mariners compass to produce the first Portolan chart, like the ‘Carte Pisane’ from the late 13th century. The information gained by these charts and other sources was then brought together to form the ‘Mappamundi’ world maps, which slowly started to develop the accuracy necessary to greatly ease travel first in the Mediterranean and then beyond to the Atlantic. Examples of these maps date from the Vesconte Map, of 1321, for the purpose of Crusading to the East to the Catalan World Map drawn by Abraham Cresques in 1375. With every new discovery these maps grew, the Fra Mauro Map of 1459 showed recent Portuguese discoveries, after 1488 maps contained the Cape of Good Hope, after 1492 they contained American islands, as the evolution in cartography was made necessary by drastic changes. What caused this advance in European navigational practices so as to surpass the practices of the Arabs and the Chinese? According to Hattendorf (1996) “because of governments and because of the success of the merging of science and practice over time, European sailors were better able to use celestial observations to decide on their positions”7. Simand (cited at www.mariner.org) reiterates this by saying the during the 13th century “development of the tools for discovery and conquest”5 reached an epoch, including the maturity in the growth of “the ships for world exploration, the compass and the means of using it, and the tentative tools of early capitalism”5. What exactly were these ships and navigational aids the allowed Europeans to take the Medieval expansion of their lands to another level with the conquest of the Atlantic?
Europe expansion is unique in history, it holds precedence over the expansions of all other sea borne enterprises for one reason; Europe is the only place where “imperial and commercial ends have been pursued without restraint”8, according to Fernandez-Armesto (1992). He also comments on the physical means that were available, or made available to Europe over the centuries to smooth the progress of Atlantic commerce, notably the “the cogs and carracks of the high middle ages and the caravels of the 15th century”8. Phillips (1993) reiterates the factors that made European expansion possible, claiming the 15th century period of development “was the product of opportunity, of need, of inclination, and of the possession of the necessary technical resources in shipping and navigation”6. It important to remember that these new ships that emerged during the ‘age of exploration’ were not new at all, many existed before 1300 and most before 1400. However the 15th century did see the development of the caravel, a ship capable for sailing in shallow waters and, with its triangular sail, it was possible to sail against the wind. It was a enlargement of a fishing vessel used in the Atlantic since the 12th century and proved invaluable during the exploration of the African coasts. The mid 15th century also saw the introduction of the Quadrant as a means of calculating the height of the sun above horizon at noon thus enabling the calculation of latitude. This was used by the Venetian Cadamosto, sailing for the Portuguese, as many Italians did, in his expedition in West Guinea in 1460. The widespread usage of these improvements, and the reliance by Europeans on them in the future, did not mean that extensive voyaging was impossible without them, as the rounding of Cape Bojador in 1434 is evidence to. The situation was such that due to the study of Greek astrology, Muslim geography and the development in western learning and exploration by the 15th century many sailors were able to boast an array of exploration aids including a mariners compass, portolan charts, a sand glass, a trailing log, and a steady ship such as a Galley or a Caravel.
In Europe what events marked this culmination or decided what players would gain prominence in the fruition of European efforts at economic advancements. Two events in particular must be set aside as being distinct and explanatory in the grand scheme of European internal meanderings; The Hundred Years War and the Black Death. Norman Cantor (2001) calls the Black Death of 1348-49 “The greatest biomedical disaster in European and possibly world history”9, and rightly so; this pestilence swallowed up around a third of Europe’s population in the last years of the 1350’s. The effects were far reaching and dramatic, socially it put strains on the very notion of civilisation, it slowed down the process of advancement as a stable and viable community and put pressure on the economic and political bonds that held people together. What effect did this have on the process of expansion and enlargement of European societal values and trade and industry? Cantor cites two differing opinions on the matter, that of David Knowles (1962), who believed that the disaster was just that, a destroyer of everything, and that of David Herlihy (1995) who took the view that the plague served to break up the old culture, thus liberating the new. It is this latter view that we must look at to clarify the bearing that this cataclysmic happening had on Europe’s relationship with the world, as Herhily claims that it “accelerated the decline of serfdom and the rise of a prosperous class of peasants”9. The marked improvement in living standards in post pestilence cities was testimony to the obliteration caused by the disease, it reverted many communities to a sort of state of nature environment where resources were once again plentiful and overpopulation was not even considered. This created the tools necessary, or at least facilitated their creation, for the entrepreneurial probing that had been tentatively occurring throughout European history to accelerate as private enterprises mushroomed. It is undoubted that once the heaps of bodies had disappeared Europe felt a new independence which evolved into confidence over time as the tracks were laid for global development. The hundred years war was less important to the expansion of Europe as a whole but it served to occupy and slow down the progress of two major Western powers; France and England. Culminating with a French victory at Castillon in 1453, this series of drawn out battles wore down the two countries who were overshadowed by their Southern European neighbours.
Europe has been driven by three factors since the beginning of the reign of Charlemagne; Gold, Glory and God and this didn’t change during the Medieval period, it didn’t change after it and up until today has suffered minor variations. The desire for wealth permeated the radical ideologies of the Romans, the Franks, the Vikings and their contemporaries; they were all at one stage part of the trading and raiding tradition. Allied to this was the fanaticism with which many craved to spread the Gospel around the world and the blood and guts warrior tradition that societies were built upon. Adventure and a sense of advancement led the evolution of the navigational aids and ships, and the growing zest for old knowledge within the academic circles of the West led to the acceleration of a process that was well under way by the time either Africa was rounded or the Aztecs encountered. So to answer the above question as to what is the relationship between the Medieval Expansion of Europe and the Age of Discoveries the facts must be compiled to show that the distinction was made in hindsight as one was an fruition and acceleration of the other and cannot be viewed as separate episodes.

References
1. Pp. 4, Hattendorf, John B., Maritime Discovery, Volume 1: The Age of Discovery (Malaber, Florida, Krieger Publishing Company, 1996)
2. Pp. 69, Kruegar, Hilmar C., "Economic Aspects of Expanding Europe." As reproduced in Twelfth-Century Europe and the Foundations of Modern Society, trans. Marshall Clagett, Gaines Post and Robert Reynolds (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961)
3. JTK, http://www.v.u.geomet.com/, 23rd Sept 1996
4. Pp. 74, Kruegar, Hilmar C., "Economic Aspects of Expanding Europe." As reproduced in Twelfth-Century Europe and the Foundations of Modern Society, trans. Marshall Clagett, Gaines Post and Robert Reynolds (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961)
5. www.mariner.org
6. Pp. 59, Phillips, Seymour, "European Expansion Before Columbus: Causes and Consequences." As reproduced in The Haskins Society Journal, ed. Robert B. Patterson, vol. 5 (Woodbridge, U.K.: The Boydell Press, 1993)
7. Pp. 33, Hattendorf, John B., Maritime Discovery, Volume 1: The Age of Discovery (Malaber, Florida, Krieger Publishing Company, 1996)
8. Pp. 72, Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe, Before Columbus (London, Oxford, 1992)
9. Pp. 202-203, Norman Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made. (New York: The Free Press, 2001)
Bibliography

Polo, Marco, The Travels of Marco Polo: The Venetian. ed. John Masefield (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1921)
Di Balduccio Pegolotti, Francesco, The Practice of Commerce. As reproduced in Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World, ed. Robert S. Lopez and Irving W. Raymond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955)
Phillips, Seymour, "European Expansion Before Columbus: Causes and Consequences." As reproduced in The Haskins Society Journal, ed. Robert B. Patterson, vol. 5 (Woodbridge, U.K.: The Boydell Press, 1993)
Norman Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made. (New York: The Free Press, 2001)
Azurara, Gomes Eannes de. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea. trans. C. Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage (London: Hakluyt Society, 1896, 1897)
Kruegar, Hilmar C., "Economic Aspects of Expanding Europe." As reproduced in Twelfth-Century Europe and the Foundations of Modern Society, trans. Marshall Clagett, Gaines Post and Robert Reynolds (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961)
Norman Davies, Europe: A History. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)
JTK, http://www.v.u.geomet.com/, 23rd Sept 1996
Philips, J.R.S., The Medieval Expansion of Europe, second edition (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998)
Chaum, Pierre, European Expansion in the later Middle Ages, (Amsterdam, North Holland Publishing, 1979)
Hattendorf, John B., Maritime Discovery, Volume 1: The Age of Discovery (Malaber, Florida, Krieger Publishing Company, 1996)
Parry, J.H., The Discovery of the Sea (London, Weirenfield and Nicholson, 1975)
http://www.mariner.org/
Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe, Before Columbus (London, Oxford, 1992)

Chris Farrell