Chapter 1: Introduction

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1

Introduction

RELIGION AND HISTORY FROM RESTORATION TO ENLIGHTENMENT

'When Hilkiah the high priest found the original complete book of the Mosaick Law, he was not reprimanded and discouraged from producing it but had it carried immediately by Shaphan the scribe to good King Josiah, and found presently a reformation according to it undertaken by him.' ^[1]

'Religion is the pillar on which the great fabric of the microcosm standeth. All humane societies, and civil associations, are without Religion, but ropes of sand, and stones without mortar, or ships without pitch.' ^[2]

'That religion doth now consist, not so much in obeying the dictates of the Holy Spirit, as in defending Men's own fantastical opinions; Charity is now no part of religion, but discord and implacable hatred pass under the masque of Godly zeal.' ^[3]

Writing in the late 1670s to the libertine Rochester, Charles Blount (1654-93), early deist and Freethinker, commented upon Averro's idea that the whole world was deceived by religion, 'for supposing that there were but three laws, viz. that of Moses, that of Christ, and that of Mahomet: either all are false, and so the whole world is deceived; or only two of them, and so the greater part is deceived'.^[4] This idea of religion as the politic device of the three great impostors is most commonly attributed to the radical French treatise Le Traité des trois imposteurs published in 1719. The French text is considered by scholars of eighteenth-century ideas to be one of the primary documents of Enlightenment Freethought; or as the introduction to the treatise succinctly commented, 'a complete system of <2> atheism'. ^[5] As the title of the work suggests, the author (or authors) of the work indicted all organized religion (Judaism, Islam and Christianity being merely the main examples) as fictional imposture. All religion is the combination of human ignorance, historical circumstance and priestly corruption. Priests and monarchs have (and by implication always will have) created false revelations to gain political obedience from an ignorant and fearful laity. Prejudice, passion and fear were the components of popular belief: theology was human contrivance. As one historian has commented, the Traité was a digest of all the most radical irreligious arguments of the period. ^[6]In both the published and clandestine work, the sacred histories of Moses, Christ and Mohammed are given a Machiavellian turn. ^[7] The theologies of the Judaeo-Christian orthodoxy were exposed as corrupt opinion rather than transcendent divine truth: the orthodox idea of the soul, of heaven and hell, and the very conception of a divinity, were products of the 'absurd imagination'. The 'empire of fable' described the nature of all organized religion rather than the empire of truth. ^[8] In France this work was perennially popular throughout the eighteenth century and has perhaps become identified as the epitome of the Voltairean assault upon the Church of the ancien régime. In English historiography the work is virtually unknown. ^[9]

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Why then, given that the concern of this book is to examine the confrontation between priest and Freethinker in England between 1660 and 1730, have I started with a brief account of a French work published in 1719? My point is historiographical. Analyses of the Traité des trois imposteurs are almost exclusively Francocentric if not Francophone. Although the most recent scholarship has indicated that the composition of the treatise is a bricolage of classical, Renaissance and materialist sources (ranging in time and place from the Roman Cicero, the Italian Vanini, to the English Hobbes), discussions of the intellectual context which generated the work describe it as uniquely Continental. The only discussion of the treatise with reference to England is to be found in the speculations of M. C. Jacob concerning the involvement of the radical Republican writer John Toland (1670-1722) with the Franco-Dutch coterie that was involved, if not in the composition, then certainly in the circulation of the Traité.^[10] The lack of emphasis upon the English connection is puzzling; and not just for chauvinistic reasons. The conundrum has, I believe, two elements. First, this lack of emphasis is a reflection of the paucity of sources: as noted above, there are only two surviving English translations of the Traité, compared with a massive distribution in France.^[11] Given the profound irreligion of the text, it ,seems odd that so few copies exist in England, but even more curious that there is little or no reference to the existence of such a radical work, even by hostile orthodox contemporaries. While it is perhaps valid to argue that the Traité was not a specific source that radicals in England had access to, or even that Churchmen needed to rebut, it is certainly not acceptable to argue that the central ideas of the work were elusive in England. The second element in the conundrum is that the main components of the Traité were manifest in England prior to the publication of the French work in 1719. The radical and public discourse against 'priestcraft' conducted by Republicans like Toland against the Church of England between 1680 and 1720 pre-empted the Traité in developing ideas of organized religion as imposture, and the political accounts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It will be the ambition of this book to argue that if there was a discourse directed against the English clergy by a body of radical Republican theorists that publicly pre-empted the clandestine literature of French atheism, then it is perhaps time to re-examine the commonplace characterization of the nature of what has been succinctly identified as the 'crisis' of the European mind and the 'origins' of the Enlightenment as a Continental rather than English moment.

The period from the Restoration to the early years of the Hanoverian <4> monarchy has been commonly termed an age of transition, from the prerogatives of faith to the claims of reason.^[12] According to this interpretation the shackles of established religion were unlocked, banishing the dark shadows of superstition and Christian mystery. Recent work has tended, at least in dealing with the political and institutional conflicts of the period, to reject this proleptic and whiggish vision by reaffirming the centrality of religious controversy. ^[13] While there has been much scholarly endeavour in delineating the evolutions, contortions and contradictions of civil political ideas during the period, there has been only a frugal examination of the arguments and languages of religious thought. ^[14]

Contemporary intellectual history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is preoccupied with the history of liberty, and with issues of political sovereignty and obligation. One result of this pattern in the history of political thought has been the concentration upon the great texts of the period. For example, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651) has been treated almost exclusively as a founding text of modern political philosophy: this interpretative enterprise has been possible because only Books I and II (the <5> political parts) of Leviathan have been the subject of investigation at the expense of the second half of the work which deals with (in modern terms) the marginal issues of theology and is thus considered theoretically redundant for the concerns of modern secular Society.^[15] Modern history of political thought (even given Pocock's, Dunn's and Skinner's injunctions on the necessity of a rigorous contextualism) studies politics in a modern sense: theology, religion and the Church are excluded from this secular idiom.^[16]

Between 1660 and 1730 the Church of England retained its social power. The Restoration in 1660 was heralded by a reassertion of the political role of the Church. Francis Atterbury, in sermonizing upon the blessed memory of the martyred Charles I, gave an apt description of Anglican perceptions of the Restoration. He wrote, 'At last the storm ceased, the clouds dispersed, and the sun shone out again in his strength; the Royal family returned, and with it our old constitution in Church and state.'^[17] The Clarendon Code enshrined the principles of Anglicanism with severity. The cause of monarchy and Church were firmly riveted together against all challenges. ^[18] The Church reacted sternly against any attempt to loosen its monopoly of clerical authority. The dynamic between the claims of a liberty for religious <6> toleration, the idea of comprehension within a broad Church settlement, and arguments for the necessary exclusivity of the Anglican Church, provided the axis for both religious and political disputes during the period.^[19] With the accession of William and Mary the close identification between Church and state became blurred: after the failure of Lord Nottingham's comprehension scheme, the 1689 Toleration Act established some measure of religious liberty. Many churchmen lamented the decline of their monopoly of theological and moral discipline, but the Church of England still remained a potent if threatened force in society. This book is concerned with the intellectual confrontation between those who defended, and those who attacked, the position the Church held in society. It is the intention of this work to focus in detail upon the religious nexus of debate identified in the clash between Freethinker and priest over the nature of true religion. The relationship between Church and state, and the very definition of these institutions, was a catalyst of political change. Debates about the nature of monarchical sovereignty necessarily intersected with discussions about the competence and independence of the Church. Conformity to the Church settlement was analogous to political obedience, while theological innovation was often considered a form of secular sedition. To define the sacerdotal competence of the priest in a certain manner held implications for conceptions of civil authority. To argue for one form of Church government was to negate the legitimacy of a related form of civil administration. There was no conceptual separation between issues of Church and state, religion and politics.

Issues of theological belief and religious duty permeated almost every facet of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century life. The child was ushered into the world with the incantations of religious ceremony. The pace of life, be it rural or urban, was set by theological co-ordinates. Catechisms, prayers, festivals and Holy Communion marked the passage of the religious year. ^[20] The focal <7> point of this society was the Church and the parson. The sermon confirmed both the injunctions of Christ and the political order in the minds of the congregation. The distribution of the Eucharist was symbolic of the moral, social and political status of the individuals in a community.^[21] The Church was teacher (the pulpit was the most effective means of communication with the populace), landowner and judge. ^[22] As Richard Steele wrote in 1713 on the extent of clerical authority: 'You have almost irresistible power over your congregations for circumstances of education and fortune place the minds of the people, from age to age, under your direction.'^[23]

The hegemony of the Church and churchmen (of whatever theological complexion) did not go unchallenged. While there were furious debates within Anglican circles between High Church and Erastian versions of Church government, there were also assaults upon the idea of a Christian confessional state from without. This book intends to examine how radicals like Henry Stubbe, Charles Blount and John Toland set about undermining the clerical edifice, and to explore the historical polemics they mustered in their assault on Christianity. These men congregated in the coffee-houses, the republics of Freethought, rather than before the priestly pulpit, to discuss subversive manuscripts such as Stubbe's account of the history of Mahomet, or the clandestine Spaccio della bestia trionphante written by Bruno and circulated by Toland.^[24] John Toland (1670-1722) is one of the most <8> important figures of this tradition. He travelled widely throughout Britain and abroad. His foreign visits took him to The Hague, Rotterdam and Hanover. The list of his patrons, colleagues and associates is a pantheon of radicalism including, for example, Spencer Compton, later the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Republican Rector William Stephens, Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal, the 'atheistical' Lord Macclesfield, John Methuen, the Duke of Newcastle, the printer John Darby, the City of London Alderman, Sir Robert Clayton, and most importantly, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper. As will be illustrated below, Toland's contribution to the anticlerical attack took a variety of forms. He collaborated with other writers, for example with John Trenchard and Walter Moyle in the standing army debate, and with Shaftesbury in tracts of the late 1690s. He was a central figure in the circulation and translation of subversive manuscripts.

As a biographer and editor of works, Toland is an interesting and important figure. In particular his editions of Milton, Ludlow, Sidney and Harrington between 1697 and 1700 point to the political traditions he applauded. As well as contributing to the Standing Army debates, the issue of occasional conformity, the Hanoverian succession, and the Sacheverell affair, Toland complemented these political works with his own original researches, writing extended dissertations upon theology, natural philosophy, druidical religion and the metaphysics of antiquity. These works were both published and secretly disseminated.^[25] Like the earlier Freethinker, Charles Blount (d. 1693), Toland combined the talents of the plagiarist with originality of purpose. Toland's relationship with such men as the Earl of Shaftesbury and the commonwealthsman Robert Molesworth is testimony both to his political commitments and his undervalued importance in the political and religious controversies of the period.^[26]

The task of this book will be, then, to explore this 'age of transition' not in the sense of discussing the 'birth of modernity', but examining how the <9> Freethinkers set out to challenge the sanctity of the Church. That is to explore what literary or intellectual means the radicals employed to attempt to render the clerical vision moribund.^[27] Implicit in this investigation will be the insistence that the Christianity or Anglican identity of the period was not simply entertained as a collection of propositional beliefs. Religious belief was a complex fabric of doctrine, devotion and institution. It was not enough to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, worship by the Book of Common Prayer or believe in the Trinity. Christian belief also included and absorbed ideas about the legitimacy of government by bishops, the sanctity of Churches, and the truth and authority of the Scriptures. There was, as Greenleaf has commented in another context, a 'hinterland of beliefs'. For the radical Freethinker, however, the whole panoply of corrupt religion (be it Jewish, Christian or Muslim) was reduced to the issue of the authority of the priest and the clergy: the very notion of sacerdos. Their objection was practical rather than philosophical. As Thomas Pope Blount wrote 'these Spiritual Machiavellians' corrupted civil society: 'their chief business is to give a helping hand towards making Princes Arbitrary'.^[28] All the radical objections against Christianity came to a head in their hostility to the role of the Church in politics. For example, in this light, we might read Hobbes' Leviathan (1651) as an indictment, not of disobedient subjects, but of disobedient priests who challenged their ghostly authority against the civil sovereign. Priesthood, not divine ontology, was the rub. Rather than deny God, as this book will show, the radicals were concerned to debunk the false authority of the Church. In examining the discontinuity between the age of faith and the age of reason, the investigation at least for the English context will not address how the voice of reason constructed philosophical and propositional arguments against the existence of God, but how a group of like-minded Republicans compiled a coherent strategy for arraigning the political power of the Church of England.^[29]

Commencing with a disenchantment with the authority of the priest, the radical polemic against priestcraft tended to redefine traditional conceptions of the exclusive 'truth' of Christian belief. This development provided the foundation for what would later become known as an anthropology of religion or the modern idea of Religionswissenschaft.^[30] This study will then eschew the traditional epistemological investigation of the radical assault <10> upon the Church in favour of (in a very loose sense) a sociological examination of the conflict. Thus, the intention is not to assess the veridical nature of either radical or clerical statements about God, Scripture or organized religion, but to examine the confrontation in terms of competing human claims to the authoritative interpretation in these issues. The clash between Freethinker and cleric ultimately concerned who gave the more credit-worthy account of the truth -- rather than the truth itself. Let me clarify the point. Many recent studies have insisted that the achievement of late seventeenth-century English thought was the epistemological separation of reason and revelation. As Emerson has written, English deism belongs 'to a European debate about knowledge more than to an English debate about social and political order … the deistic controversy was about the shape, size, and character of the intellectual world and about how one was to know it'.^[31] In this reading of the crisis the achievement of deism was to absolve and correct the epistemic sin of the age of faith. Elevating the claims of reason and logic, the writings of Locke (the Essay Concerning Human Understanding) and Toland (Christianity Not Mysterious) simply showed contemporaries that theological mystery was wrong. This pointed out the Church capitulated to the logic of reason. In contradiction to this view, it will be the argument of this book that this interpretation is in some sense a misreading of the 'political' context of post-Reformation debates about knowledge. The conflict was not just about the competing epistemological hierarchy of revelation and reason but about who or what institution held the authoritative interpretation of truth. Charles Blount, paraphrasing Hobbes' thought, pointed to the general issue when he commented: 'When we believe another man's Revelation, not from the reason of the thing reveal'd but from the Authority and good opinion of him to whom it was so revealed, then is the speaker or enthusiast the only object of our Faith, and the honour done in believing, is done to him only, and not to him that revealed it: so on the contrary, if Livy says the Gods once made a Cow speak, and we believe it not; herein we distrust not God, but Livy.'^[32] The issue was, as Blount commented, about 'the Authority and good opinion' of the speaker, rather than 'the reason of the thing reveal'd'. The question that the radicals posed was not 'what is the truth' but rather 'how have the priesthood gained a monopoly over what is considered and accepted as the truth'. This was not a purely epistemic debate but attempted to address <11> the social 'power' that lay behind the priestly claim to be sole interpreters of true knowledge.^[33]

This book will, then, treat the deist controversy not just as an argument in favour of the competence of human reason, but as an attack upon the perceived injustice of the distribution of authority in society. Since the 'power' of the Church and priest was entrenched in the whole conception of a Christian identity it was not enough to claim the 'truth' of reason as a simple proposition to topple their authority. The radical attack developed a broader historical perspective. Insisting that contemporary Christianity was corrupt, they turned to the past to exemplify how this corruption had been historically generated. This intellectual confrontation between priest and radical will be examined by considering its impact on the historiography of the period. Both the clergy and their radical assailants shared a common need to be seen to be defending a true and objective set of beliefs about religion. The simple claim to be good, religious and true was not enough: the ability to present a cogent and credible version of the past could shore up such a claim. Churchmen and Freethinkers wished to secure moral convictions in their audiences: one acceptable and even commonplace method of doing so was by writing historical defences of their positions. Because the controversialists of the period considered it necessary to supplement pure theological or philosophical argument with historical perspectives, this work sets out to explore precisely how churchmen and radicals engaged each other in their rival interpretations of the past. Such an enquiry follows the precedent set by J. G. A. Pocock's The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957) and focuses upon the historiographical traditions of the period as a juncture where historical and political theology met. While Pocock's programme undertook to examine the civil and legal idioms of historiography, my concern is to explore religious histories, initially the histories of episcopacy, of the early Church of England, and of the Reformation, but most pertinently the Freethinking counter-histories of priestcraft, classical theology and superstition. As Pocock has shown, historical traditions and the idea of institutional continuity were (and are) an essential feature of all societies: the idea of the past and the establishment of lineage with this past was elemental in a Christian society. Christianity has a specific temporal teleology ranging from the institutions of Christ to the Last judgement. The true Christian society has to define itself within terms of this history. The legacy of Christ as an historical (as well as spiritual) event could only be reconstructed by historical investigation. The Christian past was a necessary determinant (for <12> the Christian) of the morality or truth of the present. For the seventeenth-century Christian an essential part of religious experience was the continual re-evaluation of the present in terms of the past. As history was used by churchmen to authorize the present, so was it employed by the Freethinkers as a tool of criticism.^[34] In order to see how men like Blount, Toland and Trenchard rewrote the past, it will be necessary to give some sense of the Christian interpretation by first examining a selection of the clerical histories of the period.

While the past held a natural authority, the reconstruction of this past into historical writing was governed by rules inscribed in humanist tradition. In discussing the necessary combination of factual and evaluative statements in the histories of the period, some attempt will be made to re-examine the Whiggish story of the rise and origins of modern historical scholarship which is still commonly thought to have started in the early modern period .^[35] In contradiction to this, I wish to argue that the developments in the writing of history were perceived as a means to securing a credible defence of ideological opinions rather than forging more modern ways of writing history. As each disputant attempted to render their prospect of the past authoritative, the need to define credible, true and good history became more pronounced. The apparatus of scholarship (testimony, documents and evidence) became entangled in the business of controversy. Thus, in addition to the contribution of J. G. A. Pocock, D. C. Douglas' English Scholars 1660-1730 (1951) has provided an historiographical framework for this work. While Douglas has dealt admirably with the scholarly achievements of the historians of the period, this book intends to place these achievements in the context of religious debate.

One of the most elegant and thought-provoking accounts of the discontinuity in European culture and society between 1680 and 1730 was the study written by Paul Hazard in 1935, La Crise de conscience européenne.^[36] In this examination Hazard argued for a shift in the way Europeans constructed their worldviews, exemplified most succinctly in his assertion that one day Europe thought like Bossuet, defender of the Church and indicter of heresy and schism, and the next day like the shibboleth of Enlightenment thought Voltaire. ^[37] Unashamedly idealist as his account was, Hazard portrays the achievement of the period as the progress and unshackling of reason in <13> history. The clerical world was unpicked by a collection of great minds. Although primarily Continental, Englishmen like Newton, Locke and even the minor luminary Toland, acted as tributaries to the common stream of rationality. Natural philosophy, travel literature and history lit the beacons of reason that illuminated the shadows of ignorance. Reason replaced revelation.^[38]

That there was a transition or crisis in European thought and society is now unchallengeable. The nature of this transition and how to interpret it is less certain. In general the period has been considered as a 'moment' at the origins of modernity: either as the birth of a fledgling reason, or as the emergence and triumph of a hidden atheism.^[39] As asserted by my opening paragraphs a recurrent theme of these writings is the concern to emphasize the centrality of the French context. Indeed eighteenth-century intellectual studies have been dominated by the need to understand the French Enlightenment, and in particular the relationship between this culture and the coming of the French Revolution of 1789. ^[40] There have, however, been some notable attempts to examine or address the idea of an English Enlightenment, although in the memorable phrase of one of the more thoughtful assessments, when doing so an ox sits upon one's tongue. ^[41] This literature has one broad common theme: that is, if one is to write of an <14> Enlightenment in England then it should be delimited by the words 'conservative', 'polite' or 'sociable'. As Pocock would have it: the English Enlightenment was inscribed from within the prophetic.^[42] In England, according to this interpretation, the Aufklärung was generated from within, and broadly assimilated by a civic Protestantism.^[43] Unlike France where the priest held intellectual power and political authority, in England it was the cleric who drafted the first essays in reason: in doing so religion rather than being crushed was made 'reasonable'.^[44] In England, then, deist and Christian worked hand in glove.^[45] There has, however, been a revision of this notion of the 'conservative' Enlightenment. M. C. Jacob argues for a duality between a conservative (or Newtonian) and a radical (pantheistic) Enlightenment.^[46] Jacob's argument rests upon her conception of the triumph of 'liberal Christianity' after the Glorious Revolution of 1689. Parliamentary sovereignty, Newtonian science, and a latitudinarian conception of the Church of England dominated the early eighteenth century. Ranged against this 'liberal Christianity', for Jacob, was a radical, clandestine, and shadowy coterie of materialists. This radical Enlightenment 'tended inevitably in a socially levelling direction because it undermined the theoretical foundations for established Churches and their priestly caste'. It was this English attack directed against the 'new order' of a rational Christianity that laid the foundations for the 'High Enlightenment' of 'the great salons of Paris and that is best represented in the writings of Baron d'Holbach and his atheistic <15> friends'.^[47] In Jacob's assessment it is clear that there is a profound gap between the desires of the English radicals and those of even the rational churchmen: here infidel confronted priest. Although it seems clear that Jacob's speculations about the shadowy links between English Freethought, Continental Freemasonry and the French salons of the 1770s are dubious, and that she has understated the persistence of High Church sacerdotal Anglicanism, her implicit suggestion that there is some historical connection between English Republicanism and Enlightenment Freethought is valuable. The precise nature of this connection remains in Jacob asserted rather than explored since it is her intention to explore the 'origins' of the 'high Enlightenment' rather than the contextual intentions of English radicals between 1680 and 1730. This suggested link (both historical and conceptual) between the Republicanism of the 1650s and the 1700s is thought-provoking, although I will argue below that Jacob's levelling conception of Republicanism has forced her into characterizing the radical Enlightenment as a democratic and liberal phenomenon against the grain of the sources.

Underpinning the central notion of a conservative or clerical Enlightenment is the suggestion that Christianity and the power or authority of the priest was on the wane in England by 1700, unlike the French experience.^[48] In understating the central role (and power) of the Church, this interpretation correspondingly makes an under-assessment of the radical agenda of the Freethinkers between 1680 and 1730. To put it succinctly: if there was no religion, then anti-religious opinions had no significance. The issue of the persistence of religion is, then, a central theme of this book.^[49] In stressing the <16> religious context, the intention is to place the study of the radical assault upon the 'halo of sanctity' within the broad historiographical rethinking that has been undertaken within the last few years. This reorientation looks backward to the seventeenth century, as well as forward to the eighteenth. Traditionally the seventeenth century has been considered as the theatre for constitutional and political innovation: the era of revolutions and social change. In many respects, as one recent historian has phrased it, the seventeenth century is fractured, 'broken in the middle', by the great upheaval of the 1640s. Restoration England heralded the age of party and political stability. The confrontation of sovereignty between king and Parliament was resolved finally in 1689: politics achieved autonomy from religious reference.^[50] The scholarly reinterpretations of the pre-revolutionary period now tend towards emphasizing the religious context of the conflict. Interregnum accounts deal centrally with religious themes. It is even now possible to write a 'politics of religion' in the post-Restoration period.^[51]

The most revisionist suggestion of recent years has been that in treating the seventeenth century as an 'essential unity' the emphasis must be laid upon the continuity of crises that was the English experience in the period. Scott identifies three 'crises of popery and arbitrary government of 1637-42, 1678-83, and 1687-9, [that] were fundamentally about religion'.^[52] This series of crises of popery can be legitimately extended from 1689 to the 1720s if we widen the ambit of 'popery' to encompass the central idea of the sacerdotal authority of the Church of England. This wider reading of popery, particularly for the post-1689 period, suggests that what was at issue in the three crises as reread by Scott was not just the link between a corrupt theology and arbitrary civil authority drawn from the Continental model of Catholic absolutism but the central relationship of Church and state. The conflict was not between monarch and Parliament but between sacerdos and <17> regnum. Clearly Scott's emphasis upon the real danger of the French or Spanish example of popish tyranny intermeshed with this English debate which lay ambiguous since the days of the Reformation. In this reading the period post-1689 saw the battle moving in even more closely upon the very nature of sacerdos. The anti-popish criticism of the theology and discipline of the Laudian Church evolved into a fully blown anticlericalism by the 1700s. So the hostility of the late sixteenth century of, for example, the Marprelate tracts which, while indicting episcopacy, still upheld sacerdos in the Church, became the Erastian radicalism of Blount or Toland which denied the very notion of sacerdos.

The attack of the Freethinkers, of the deists, or of the radical Republicans, should then be appreciated as part of the continuing problem of the relations between priest and civil society that periodically convulsed England in the seventeenth century. Interestingly, although the majority of historical studies have avoided such a suggestion, it was an argument put forward by at least one contemporary. William Stephens, the radical Whig cleric, in his An Account of the Growth of Deism in England (1696) gave precisely this analysis of the irreligion of the 1690s. The premise of his argument is couched in the language of popery which was defined not in specific Roman Catholic terms but as a 'device of the Priesthood, to carry on a particular interest of their own'. Popery was a phenomenon not just of the Italian Church but also the 'Protestant High-Priests'. In anecdotal form Stephens narrated how an individual might come to deism. It was a tradition for young gentlemen to travel abroad as a device to appreciate the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church and priesthood. Such a young gentleman travelling in the days of Charles I would return to England and 'with those very eyes which he had so lately cleared up in Italy and France, he could not forbear to see that both these Protestant Parties [the Laudian and the Presbyterian], under the pretence of religion, were only grasping at power, and that the controversy at bottom, was not who's Religion was best, but only what sect of clergy should make the best market of the meer lay-men.'^[53] This perception set the individual on to a 'further step towards Deism'. The last step of the Freethinking path was to consider that if modern priests behaved in such a manner it was probable that the 'antient clergy' were of a similar inclination. Thus the Scriptures might be forged to uphold the interest of the priest rather than religion. This led Stephens to the remarkable statement, 'and if Jesus Christ their patron, laid the foundation of those powers, which both Popish and Protestant Clergy claim to themselves from <18> under him, I think the Old Romans did him right in punishing him with the death of a slave'.^[54] Stephens completed this analysis by suggesting that such sharp invective 'against the Clergy' made him 'almost a Christian: for he who loveth the institution of Christ, but cannot respect those who are the ministers thereof'.^[55] This anecdotal account of the passage from believer to Freethinker by Stephens neatly illustrates the domestication of popery in the course of the seventeenth century. It also suggests that the most significant element in the Freethinking attack was its anticlericalism rather than irreligion.

The most recent contradiction of the commonplace historiographical neglect of religious belief and Church politics is J. C. D. Clark's English Society 1688-1832 (1985). Writing against both the Whiggish and marxisant histories of secularization Clark has forcefully and convincingly reaffirmed the centrality of the Church. The broad argument of his book is important to historians of politics and political thought: the illustration of the persistence of the confessional state until Catholic emancipation in 1828; the rejection of the historiographical fiction of a Lockean consensus in eighteenth-century political ideology, the consequent emphasis upon the vigorous tradition of de jure divino Filmerism in grand political thought, and the resilience of equivalent ideas in popular culture, are all crucial scholarly arguments. The most important (and certainly most applaudable) thesis of English Society 1688-1832 is for the theological tenor of all political, social, and cultural structures during the period. George Lawson's dictum, 'that politics, both civil and ecclesiastical, belong unto theology, and are but a branch of the same' fully displays Clark's position.^[56] Since religion was so <19> central to seventeenth-century political culture we need to take its significance as a starting-point from which to examine and locate the precise critical attentions of the radicals who attempted to destroy clerical power. Given that this book intends to counter the traditional secular account of the Freethinking challenge to the Church, the problem of how to evaluate religious belief becomes even more acute. In emphasizing the persistence of theology Clark has gone some way towards revising the commonplace view of the men of reason establishing an easy ascendency over a waning religious order by insisting that early modern political radicalism originated in theological heterodoxy. However, the general tenor of his work (in chapter 5, 'The Ideological Origins of English Radicalism') is to marginalize the religious thought of men like James Harrington, John Toland and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Although Clark notes the logical connection between Republicanism and anticlericalism in the need of the radicals to argue against the prevalent de jure divino claims of the status quo, in defining Republicanism as religious heresy he has to some extent given himself grounds to ignore it since he claims the dominance of Christianity.^[57]

Since the central polemic of Clark's work is against the prevailing materialist assumptions of modern historians and the resultant secular idiom in which historiography had placed the radicalism of the period, he objects to the commonplace analysis of religion as the ideological expression of a rising bourgeoisie or the legitimation of capitalist property relations. In his view historians have concentrated upon elements of the radical polemic which could be identified as modern (the rights of revolution, parliamentary reform, or the rise of liberalism) which has led to a neglect of religion, or to the other sin of interpreting religion in terms of economic structure and political change. Clark's own strictures insist upon the centrality of the theological component of commonwealth ideology. He shows clearly the general radical uninterest in issues of parliamentary reform and government structure. In place of the Whiggish interpretation Clark proposes an understanding of radicalism that directed its strength to undermining the role of the Church of England in society. Broadly characterized, the Republican programme as presented by Clark is crudely Erastian: a negative movement <20> concerned more with destroying the past than providing the conditions for the future. Since the traditional order survived intact and solid until the 1830s, radicalism was necessarily (in Clark's view) a failure. For Clark, one need spend no historical acuity on failure. While sensibly deconstructing the commonplace assumption that anticlericalism implies secularism, Clark seems blind to the premise of his own work that religion implies Anglicanism.^[58]

This book is concerned with the historical dimensions of the disputes between priest and deist, how these disputes were presented as impartial history, and the development of Freethinking ideas of religion. The starting-point for the study is a discussion of received ideas of the practice of history in the Restoration period placed firmly in the context of religious and intellectual debate. Historiography in the period was caught between the pure rhetorical model of the humanist notion of res gestae, and the modern idea of history as an autonomous mode of empirical discourse or disciplina. The argument is premised on the humanist insistence that 'history is or should be the best philosophy, or ethics in perfection', that apologists in the period accepted implicitly the Renaissance aspiration to use history as an instrument of moral and civic persuasion, but grafted on to this an empirical idea of probable and certain evidence.^[59] If the historiography of the period does begin to adopt a more empirical and autonomous stance this was, as I <21> argue, an attempt by its practitioners to gain the moral high ground for their particular principles: a fact that opponents were swift to point out.

As history was an essential means for making moral defences of ideological positions, so religious histories assumed a high profile. A secure and authoritative history of the Church had been an ambition of Anglican apologists since the days of the Reformation. Because the overarching purpose of this book is to explore the radical Republican and Freethinking attacks on the Church of England, chapter 3 sets out to give a necessarily selective but illustrative account of the rival type of clerical histories written in the Restoration. This chapter does not claim to present a systematic and comprehensive account of Church apologetics, but to give some sense of the ideological dimensions of commonplace ecclesiological argument. Accepting that much clerical dissension revolved around the axis of Reformation theorizing about the relative hierarchies of regnum and sacerdos the intention has been to illustrate the wide spectrum of different and opposing interpretations. Peter Heylyn has been chosen as a representative of the High Church defence of an independent clerical authority in extremis. Without wishing to make precise historical claims for Heylyn's vision of the Church as an accurate representation of the nature of Restoration ecclesiastical politics, ideologically Heylyn was taken by men of unimpeachable radicalism like Locke and Sidney to be typical of the High Church position.^[60] To balance this clericalist defence of the independence of priest and Church from civil sovereignty the persistent importance of the Reformation and its associated ecclesiologies is illustrated by a detailed examination of the two major scholarly histories: Edward Stillingfleet's Origines Britannicae (1685) and Gilbert Burnet's History of the Reformation (1679-1714). These two works, both accepted in England and on the Continent as works of profound scholarship, are taken as epitomes of the early modern fusion of history as a rhetorical and empirical science. Although presented as impartial matter of fact the works were identified by contemporaries as controversial. In particular, the disputes displayed in the historical treatment of the English reformation and Archbishop Cranmer indicate the growing conflict between the latitudinarian defence of the royal supremacy and the High Church objections to the Erastian implications of this scheme.

While chapter 3 involves a selective rather than all-encompassing account of the complex history of Restoration apologetics, the intention is to describe the general shape of ecclesiological argument which radicals like Toland, Tindal and Gordon reacted against. Certainly the ecclesiological ideas proposed by theologians like Heylyn and Burnet were not innovative but firmly rooted in themes defined in the English Reformation. Reformation ecclesiologies had concentrated upon jurisdictional issues: questions of the <22> relative hierarchies of the Church or state. In order to sanctify the English Reformation, early Anglican apologists such as Jewel had defended the Church of England as a theological renovation of the Primitive Church, conducted under the aegis of the jurisdictional dominium of the imperial royal supremacy. Implicit in this ideological defence was the insistence that although the Church abdicated a false popish jurisdictio it necessarily retained its spiritual auctoritas. Anglican apologists from Jewel to Burnet were careful to point out that the civil sovereign could claim no spiritual competence: while the clergy could not challenge monarchical jurisdiction, regnum certainly did not imply potestas ordinis.^[61] Within the logical terms of this defence, with its different components (broadly the royal supremacy and the idea of a clerical sacerdos), there were various ways Anglicanism could be presented, as the painstaking ecclesiological manoeuvres of the sixteenth and seventeenth century illustrate.

The rest of the work is devoted to the various assaults upon the Church and its clericalist histories. In chapter 4 the focus is upon the Trinitarian disputes of the 1690s. I show how the Unitarian polemicists displayed a history of monotheistic Islam to indict the deviations of orthodox Anglicanism. From a consideration of the Unitarian use of the pattern of Islam the chapter continues to explore the radical usage found in Henry Stubbe's manuscript account of Mahomet and John Toland's Nazarenus (1718). These men extended Unitarian reformism to an open assault upon Christianity in the development of an idea of civil theology. The following chapter is concerned to document the varieties of histories the Freethinkers and Republicans constructed to indict the corruptions of a religion founded upon the principle of priestcraft. Using a much ignored text, Edward Herbert's comparative study of heathen theologies, The Antient Religion of the Gentiles (Latin version published at Amsterdam 1663, and an English translation at London 1705), the chapter illustrates how the Restoration Freethinkers adopted the history of paganism. I show how Charles Blount's historical polemic in such works as Great is Diana of the Ephesians (1680) and Anima Mundi (1679), drew upon and radicalized Herbert's more eirenic arguments. This involves a revaluation of the general intellectual relationship between Herbert and Blount and also the suggestion that the Dialogue between a Tutor and a Pupil (1768) traditionally attributed to Herbert was in fact the product of Blount's pen. Following from this analysis the chapter continues to deal with the radical statements of John Toland's Letters to Serena (1704) -- which combined (amongst other sources) both Herbert's researches and Blount's adaptation -- and John Trenchard's A Natural <23> History of Superstition (1709). In narrating the heathen origins of natural worship and the historical decline of this unsacerdotal religion the radicals attacked Christianity.

In chapter 6 the Republican applause for the ancient model of civil religion is discussed along with their prescriptions for the replacement of Anglicanism by a national Church devoted to the pursuit of virtue rather than mystery. The focus is upon the transmission of the historical model of the politic legislator in the classical writings of men like Cicero, Plutarch, and Dionysus of Halicarnassus, and Renaissance works like Machiavelli's Discourses, to such Republican texts as James Harrington's Oceana (1656, but importantly in John Toland's 1700 edition) and most importantly Walter Moyle's Essay on Roman Government (written mid-1690s, published 1726). In arguing this point my suggestion is that Republicanism in the period (J. G. A. Pocock's Neo-Harringtonians, C. Robbins' commonwealthsmen, Z. Fink's classical Republicans, and M. A. Goldie's true Whigs) should be given a broader definition, and one that envelops the religious dimension to their thought. The final chapter investigates the relationship between Republicanism and deism, arguing, contrary to modern secularistic interpretation, that the civil theologies promoted by such men as Harrington, Toland and Shaftesbury were profoundly religious enterprises. In particular, the chapter will focus upon an important but under-studied work, Shaftesbury's An Inquiry Concerning Virtue (1699), which is of especial interest because of John Toland's involvement in its unauthorized publication and its centrality to the tradition of civil theology.

The polemical thrust of the second half of this work is to revise the commonplace historiographical description of the radical tradition as a secularistic and modern project. In both the Marxist and Whiggish visions the radicals evangelized the process of secularization: divinity and transcendent principle were banished from social, political, and economic life. It would be more fruitful to consider the ecclesiological ideas of the radical tradition than to confront their supposedly modern political theory. While the rise of deism and the origin of the Enlightenment has been characterized as a 'trial of God', a more informative description would be as a 'trial of the priests'. Recently historiography has been concerned to consider the continuity (or lack of it) of the radical theorizing of the English Revolution with the radicalism of the Restoration and after. In terms of the grand themes of political theory (the right of revolution, the extent of suffrage and franchise, and political obligation) the Good Old Cause appears to have withered with the return of the Stuart monarchy. It has been a mistake of current historiography to search for some pre-type of modern rights theories (at least within Republican environs). In eschewing Lockean individualism, theorists like Harrington, Toland and Shaftesbury promoted more holistic concep <24> tions of the relationship between individual and community. This conflation of ethics and politics can be most readily identified if we take seriously the radicals' religious opinions. The radical anticlericalism of the 1690s is also an easy route to establish continuities with the revolutionary traditions of the 1640s and 1650s. The radical programme was not to destroy religion, but to deprive the corrupt Christian priesthood of all independent political power. The traditional interpretative fault has been to mistake the deconsecration of Anglicanism for a desecration of all religion, and therefore by necessity a secularistic movement. For the Republican, the Anglican priest was an instrument of both irreligion and social tyranny. To overthrow priestcraft was to purify both religion and Society.^[62]