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The Politics of Anglican Martyrdom: Letters to John Walker, 1704–1705

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2011

MATTHEW NEUFELD
MATTHEW NEUFELD
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL; e-mail: m.neufeld@warwick.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article explores the political significance of past Christian suffering at the dawn of the Augustan era through an analysis of correspondence containing accounts of hardships endured by conforming clergymen during the English civil wars and Interregnum. The politics of martyrdom to be derived from letters to John Walker was grounded on the correspondents' conviction that their epistles conveyed accounts of sequestered clergymen and their families who had suffered for their profession of Christian truth. The persecutions that loyal clergy had endured during the 1640s and 1650s were signs that the Church by law established, both then and now, was the true English Church. Furthermore, as documentary witnesses to oral testimonies which identified the genuine sufferers for Christian truth within recent memory, the epistles themselves aspired to be martyrological relics.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 491 - 514
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 This material is drawn from Clark's letter to Hill (no date), whose Christian name is not recorded, now part of the Walker papers at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms J Walker c[entury]. 1, fos 139, 188.

2 The Long Parliament's various campaigns against clergymen regarded as delinquents are outlined by Green, I. M. in ‘The persecution of “scandalous” and “malignant” parish clergy during the English civil war’, EHR xciv (1979), 507–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Judith Maltby argues that efforts during the civil wars and Interregnum to suppress the Book of Common Prayer, the ritual calendar and episcopal oversight were crucial factors for fostering late seventeenth-century conforming Christian identity: ‘Suffering and surviving: the civil wars, the Commonwealth and the formation of “Anglicanism”, 1642–1660’, in Christopher Durston and Judith D. Maltby (eds), Religion in revolutionary England, Manchester 2006, 158–80.

3 Ann Laurence, ‘“This sad and deplorable condition”: an attempt towards recovering an account of the sufferings of northern clergy families in the 1640s and 1650s’, in Diana Wood (ed.), Life and thought in the northern Church, c. 1000–c. 1700: essays in honour of Claire Cross, Woodbridge 1999, 465–88, and ‘“Begging pardon for all mistakes or errors in this writing I being a woman and doing it myself”: family narratives in some eighteenth-century letters’, in James Daybell (ed.), Early modern women's letter-writing, 1450–1700, London 2001, 194–206.

4 Burke Griggs, ‘Remembering the Puritan past: John Walker and Anglican memories of the English civil war’, in M. C. McClendon, J. P. Ward, and M. MacDonald (eds), Protestant identities: religion, society, and self-fashioning in post-Reformation England, Stanford 1999, 158–91.

5 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, history, forgetting, trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer, Chicago 2004, 136–7; Jörn Rüsen, History: narration, interpretation, orientation, Oxford 2005, 2–4, 10–12. See the plea from Paulina Kewes for students of early modern British historical writing to include religious historiography in their analysis in ‘History and its uses: introduction’, Huntington Library Quarterly lxvii (2005), 10–11Google Scholar.

6 Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at stake: Christian martyrdom in early modern Europe, Cambridge, Ma 1999. For a review of several recent works focused on the English context see Glickman, G., ‘Early modern England: persecution, martyrdom and Toleration?’, HJ li (2008), 251–67Google Scholar.

7 For an introduction to Foxean scholarship see the essays in David Loades (ed.), John Foxe and the English Reformation, Aldershot 1997.

8 Anne Dillon, The construction of martyrdom in the English Catholic community, Aldershot 2002, 77, 83–4; cf. Thomas M. McCoog, ‘Constructing martyrdom in the English Catholic community, 1582–1602’, in Ethan H. Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant nation’: religious politics and identity in early modern England, Manchester 2005, 95–127.

9 Eikōn basilikē, the portrature of his sacred majesty in his solitudes and sufferings, London 1649 (Wing R. 18840); Andrew Lacey, ‘“Charles the First, and Christ the Second”: the creation of a political martyr’, in Thomas S. Freeman and Thomas F. Mayer (eds), Martyrs and martyrdom in England, c. 1400–1700, Woodbridge 2007, 203–20.

10 James Heath, A new book of loyal English martyrs, London 1665 (Wing H.1336); David Lloyd, Memoirs of the lives, actions, sufferings and deaths of those noble, revered, and excellent personages that suffered … in our late intestine wars, London 1668 (Wing L.2642).

11 Thomas Freeman, ‘Imitatio Christi with a vengeance: the politicisation of martyrdom in early-modern England’, in Freeman and Mayer, Martyrs and martyrdom, 63–5.

12 On this genre more generally see Gary Schneider, The culture of epistolarity: vernacular letters and letter writing in early modern England, 1500–1700, Newark, NJ 2005.

13 ms J Walker c. 2, fo. 46; Alexander Du Toit, ‘Walker, John (bap. 1674, d. 1747)’, ODNB [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28496, accessed 11 Feb. 2009].

14 The contemporary use of circulated queries to gain geographic and antiquarian knowledge is explored in Withers, C., ‘Reporting, mapping, trusting: making geographical knowledge in the late seventeenth-century’, Isis xc (1999), 511–15Google Scholar, and Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: the discovery of the past in eighteenth-century Britain, London 2004, 12–13, 51–2. On Foxe's use of queries see Freeman, ‘Concepts of martyrdom’, 29 n. 136.

15 Stuart Piggott, William Stukeley: an eighteenth-century antiquary, New York 1985, 23; Edward Lhuyd, Parochial queries in order to a geographical dictionary, a natural history, etc. of Wales, London 1697 (Wing L.1947).

16 ms J Walker c. 2, fo. 326. On the background to topographical queries see Charles Withers, W. J., ‘Geography, natural history and the eighteenth-century enlightenment: putting the world in place’, History Workshop Journal xxxix (1995), 136–63Google Scholar.

17 G. B. Tatham, Dr John Walker and The sufferings of the clergy, Cambridge 1911, 86–7.

18 Daniel Woolf, The social circulation of the past: English historical culture, 1500–1730, Oxford 2003.

19 Thomas Freeman, ‘Introduction: over their dead bodies: concepts of martyrdom in late-medieval and early-modern England’, in Mayer and Freeman, Martyrs and martyrdom, 20–7.

20 On Heylyn as a historian see Anthony Milton, Laudian and royalist polemic in seventeenth-century England: the career and writings of Peter Heylyn, Manchester 2007, and J. A. I. Champion, The pillars of priestcraft shaken: the Church of England and its enemies, 1660–1730, Cambridge 1992, 64–77.

21 The idea of ‘publics’ as self-organised discursive domains, often acting in competition with ‘counterpublics’, seems better suited to the realities of early modern communicative practices than a singular public sphere: Michael Warner, Publics and counterpublics, New York 2002, 67–124.

22 Mark Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs: the Entring book of Roger Morrice, 1677–1691, i, Woodbridge 2007, 243–5; John Coffey, Persecution and toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689, Harlow 2000, 198–206.

23 Goldie, Morrice and the Puritan Whigs, 208; William Gibson, The Church of England, 1688–1832: unity and accord, London 2001; John Spurr, The post-Reformation: religion, politics and society in Britain, 1603–1714, Harlow 2006, 193–234.

24 Goldie, Morrice and the Puritan Whigs, 23.

25 Craig Rose, England in the 1690s: revolution, religion and war, Oxford 1999, 171–80. For clerical fears about Nonconformists see Donald A. Spaeth, The Church in an age of danger: parsons and parishioners, 1660–1740, Cambridge 2000, 10–19.

26 See, for example, Lawrence Hyde, earl of Rochester, ‘The dedication’, in The history of the rebellion and civil wars in England begun in the year 1641 … written by the right honourable Edward earl of Clarendon … volume the third, Oxford 1704, sig. B1v, and Rose, England in the 1690s, 268.

27 On the politics of religion at the beginning of Anne's reign see Geoffrey Holmes, British politics in the age of Anne, London 1987; J. P. Kenyon, Revolution principles: the politics of party, 1689–1720, Cambridge 1990; and Julian Hoppit, A land of liberty? England, 1689–1727, Oxford 2000.

28 Holmes, British politics, 97–103; Hoppit, Land of liberty, 231; Goldie, Morrice and the Puritan Whigs, 197.

29 Richard Baxter An abridgment of Mr. Baxter's history of his life and times: with an account of many others … by Edmund Calamy, London 1702.

30 David L.Wykes, ‘“To let the memory of these men dye is injurious to posterity’: Edmund Calamy's Account of the ejected ministers', in R. N. Swanson (ed.), The Church retrospective (Studies in Church History xxxiii, 1997), 383–7; David J. Appleby, Black Bartholomew's day: preaching, polemic and Restoration non-conformity, Manchester 2007.

31 On Calamy's ambition to foster an enduring religious identity for Dissenters through stories of ejected ministers see Seed, John, ‘History and narrative: religious dissent and the politics of memory in eighteenth-century England’, Journal of British Studies xliv (2005), 46–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 I was reminded of this important point by Stephen Taylor. Thomas S. Freeman argues that Foxe's conception of a martyr as one who suffers and dies for the truth became dominant among early modern English Protestants and Catholics: ‘Concepts of martyrdom’, 20–7, 31. For a literary interpretation of martyrological writings see Susannah Monta, Martyrdom and literature in early modern England, Cambridge 2005.

33 Thomas Long, A rebuke to Mr Edmund Calamy, Exeter 1704. Long's living had been sequestered in 1652.

34 Tatham, Walker, 11.

35 Ibid. 16.

36 Daniel Defoe, A new test of the Church of England's honesty, London 1704, 25. He added that he hoped that the book would not omit ‘a true List of how many of their Clergy were turn'd out for Sodomy, Incest, Adultery, Drunkenness, Blasphemy, and other scandalous Crimes’.

37 John Walker, An attempt towards recovering an account of the numbers and suffering of the clergy of the Church of England … scholars, etc., who were sequester'd, harrass'd, etc., in the late times of the Grand Rebellion, etc., London 1714.

38 On the need to take note of the practices surrounding remembering and writing about the past see Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating our pasts: the social construction of oral history, Cambridge 1992, 3ff.

39 ms J Walker c. 1, fos 108, 204; c. 2, fos 217, 231, 244. These correspondents thus drew their information directly from an aggregate fund of lived experience, or what Avishai Margalit calls ‘common memory’: The ethics of memory, Cambridge, Ma 2002, 51.

40 ms J Walker c. 2, fo. 245.

41 Ibid. c. 1, fos 333, 204.

42 Thirty correspondents claimed to be the son, daughter, nephew or grandson of a sufferer; a further eight were probably sons of clergy on account of their names but did not explicitly state it within the letter, for example, ibid. fo. 190.

43 I was able to identify four female composers from the first 200 letters sent to Walker. A number of anonymous letters which include stories of violence against women, or the defiance of a minister's wife toward her persecutors, may well have been written by women, such as c. 1, fo. 264. On early modern female correspondents generally see James Daybell, Women letter-writers in Tudor England, Oxford 2006.

44 ms J Walker c. 2, fo. 340.

45 Laurence, ‘Sad and deplorable condition’, and ‘Begging pardon’, 201. This lends support to Daniel Woolf's point that the family was at the centre of female understandings of the past, either as a subject itself or as a lens through which to make sense of broader events: ‘A feminine past? gender, genre, and historical knowledge in England, 1500–1800’, American Historical Review cii (1997), 655Google Scholar.

46 For example, John Gilbert from Warwickshire claimed that his predecessor's wife, refusing to leave her home, had her hands torn as she hung on to the parsonage door: ms J Walker c. 2, fo. 15v. I owe the point about exciting pity to Sylvia Brown.

47 Ibid. c. 1, fo. 211v.

48 Ibid. c. 2, fos 367, 233.

49 Ibid. c. 1, fos 161, 265.

50 For a similar phenomenon prompted by disputes over ancient customary rights see Adam Fox, Oral and literate culture in England, 1500–1700, Oxford 2000, 259–97, and Andy Wood, The politics of social conflict: the peak country, 1520–1770, Cambridge 1999, 138, 150–62.

51 ms J Walker c. 2, fo. 244.

52 Ibid. c. 1, fo. 228; c. 2, fo. 97.

53 Ibid. c. 1, fo. 213.

54 Different arguments concerning the relative importance for making trustworthy knowledge of expertise versus reputation in late seventeenth-century regimes are offered by Steven Shapin, The social history of truth: civility and science in seventeenth-century England, Chicago 1994, and Barbara Shapiro, A culture of the fact: England, 1550–1720, Ithaca 2000.

55 ms J Walker c. 1, fo. 297.

56 Ibid. fo. 329.

57 R. W. Serjeantson charts the shift in the status accorded to testimony in seventeen-century natural philosophy, from rhetorical confirmation to truthful information, in ‘Testimony and proof in early-modern England’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science xxx (1999), 195–236Google Scholar.

58 For a modern exploration of similar phenomena see Ruth Finnegan, Literacy and orality: studies in the technology of communication, Oxford 1988, 110–38.

59 This is arguably a characteristic of many documents from the early modern period which have survived into the present, perhaps most notably court records: Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the archives: pardon tales and their tellers in sixteenth-century France, Oxford 1987; Churches, Christine, ‘“The most unconvincing testimony”: the genesis and historical usefulness of the country depositions in chancery’, Seventeenth Century xi (1996), 209–27Google Scholar.

60 The documentary basis of much historical scholarship, Paul Ricoeur noted, ‘starts from testimony’: Memory, history, forgetting, 147.

61 As Hobbes noted in Leviathan (iii.xlii.272), ‘Nor is it the Death of the Witnesse, but the Testimony itself that makes the Martyr: for the word signifieth nothing else, but the man that beareth Witnesse.’

62 Spurr, John, ‘“A special kindness for dead bishops”: the Church, history, and testimony in seventeenth-century Protestantism’, Huntington Library Quarterly lxviii (2005), 313–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Mary Astell, An impartial enquiry into the causes of rebellion and civil war in this kingdom: in an examination of Dr. Kennett's sermon, Jan. 31. 1703/4; and vindication of the Royal Martyr, London 1704, 32–3, 58.

64 Freeman, ‘Concepts of martyrdom’, 27–8.

65 ms J Walker c. 1, fo. 356. Northleigh had composed a pamphlet during the Exclusion crisis in which he compared the Protestant Association sponsored by the earl of Shaftesbury to the Solemn League and Covenant: The parallel: or, The new specious association an old rebellious covenant, London 1682 (Wing N. 1301). See Andrew M. Coleby, ‘Northleigh, John (1656/7–1705)’, ODNB [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20331, accessed 11 Mar. 2008].

66 ms J Walker c. 2, fo. 367.

67 Ibid. c. 1, fo. 123. Similarly, the horse troop sent by General Sir Thomas Fairfax in the depths of December to collect Richard Ven for questioning was ‘so severe in executing their orders that they took him as they found him, not permitting him to put on warmer clothes, and carried him away with them in a wet and cold day, it being two days before Christmas’ (c. 2, fo. 333).

68 Ibid. c. 2, fo. 245.

69 Ibid. fo. 311. Several other letter-writers noted the theft of books, such as John Tindall, who related that ‘the Plymouth Soldiers’ took from the Henry Smith's ‘all their goods and his books’ (fo. 278). When Samuel Seaward's house was plundered ‘his study of Books, which was very valuable, and all his manuscripts were violently taken from him, and never restored, which the good man often and deeply lamented, as a thing that went near him’ (c. 1, fo. 172).

70 Ibid. c. 2, fo. 223.

71 Ibid. c. 1, fo. 211.

72 On Foxe's representation of women see Macek, Ellen, ‘The emergence of a feminine spirituality in the Book of martyrs’, Sixteenth Century Journal xix (1988), 62–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Freeman, Thomas, ‘“The good ministrye of godlye and vertuous women”: the Elizabethan martyrologists and the female supporters of the Marian martyrs’, Journal of British Studies xlix (2000), 8–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Megan L. Hickerson, Making women martyrs in Tudor England, Basingstoke 2005.

73 ms J Walker c. 1, fo. 326.

74 This element of female correspondence is discussed in greater depth by Ann Laurence in ‘Sad and deplorable condition’, 465–88.

75 ms J Walker c. 1, fo. 28.

76 Ibid. fo. 283. J. Gilbert also related this incident, albeit with some greater contextual detail. Gilbert had heard stories of Temple's suffering, particularly one concerning ‘his Wife one of a Good Family’, who soon after giving birth during the winter was taken out of her bed one night ‘and cast upon the ground, by which she lost the use of one foot to her dying day’ (c. 2, fo. 15).

77 Ibid. c. 1, fo. 264. The ‘fifths’ were 20% of the annual value of the benefice which Parliament ordered should be paid to the ejected incumbent's family by his replacement.

78 The ability of godly women, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to confute their popish persecutors is another prominent theme in Foxe; see, for example, his account of Anne Askew in the 1570 edition of Acts and monuments (RSTC 11223), 1413–20.

79 This is one argument within a particular strand of early modern women's historiography. See, for example, Ulinka Rublack, The crimes of women in early modern Germany, Oxford 1999.

80 Laurence, ‘Sad and deplorable condition’.

81 ms J Walker c. 1, fo. 3.

82 Ibid. fo. 225.

83 On the Church's complex relationship with the Restoration monarchy see John Spurr, ‘Religion in Restoration England’, in Lionel K. Glassey (ed.), The reigns of Charles II and James VII & II, Basingstoke 1997, 90–124’, Historical Research lxxx (2007), 324–45.

84 ms J Walker c. 1, fo. 88.

85 Ibid. fos 388, 329.

86 ‘A solemn league and covenant for reformation and defence of religion’, in J. P. Kenyon (ed.), The Stuart constitution, 1603–1688, Cambridge 1966, 264.

87 ms J Walker c. 2, fo. 335.

88 Ibid. c. 1, fo. 303.

89 Robert Hanbury's description of Mr Simson Paige of Huntingdonshire: ibid. fo. 177; Joseph Wood on Mr Joseph Stock of Yorkshire, fo. 216; an anonymous author on Dr Whittington of Warwickshire, fo. 283; Ezra Pierce on Mr Henry Owen of Somerset, fo. 295; John Paine on Dr Robert Warren of Suffolk, fo. 309; Richard Paulett on Dr John Crofts of Suffolk, fo. 307.

90 Ibid. c. 2, fo. 296.

91 Ibid. c. 1, fo. 397.

92 Ibid. fo. 184.

93 Ibid. fo. 271 (underscoring and bold in the original).

94 This was, of course, a charge with a long pedigree. Restoration examples included John Davies (attrib.), The civil warres of Great Britain and Ireland, London 1661 (Wing D. 393), sig. A5, and William Dugdale, A short view of the late troubles in England; briefly setting forth, their rise, growth, and tragical conclusion, London 1681 (Wing D. 2492A), 378–84.

95 For an analysis of the contested representations of Dissent in the early eighteenth century see Mark Knights, ‘Occasional conformity and the representation of dissent: hypocrisy, sincerity, moderation and zeal’, in Stephen Taylor and David L. Wykes (eds), Parliament and dissent, Edinburgh 2005, 42–57.

96 Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English apocalyptic visions from the Reformation to the eve of the civil war, Toronto 1978.

97 Johnston, Warren, ‘The Anglican apocalypse in Restoration England’, this Journal lv (2004), 467–501Google Scholar.

98 N. H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s, Oxford 2002, 109–19.

99 ms J Walker c. 1, fo. 161.

100 Ibid. fo. 309.

101 Ibid. fo. 255.

102 Ibid. fos 181, 235.

103 This argument also could be traced back to the origins of the troubles: David Cressy, England on edge: crisis and revolution, 1640–1642, Cambridge 2006, 217, 261.

104 On contemporary notions of legitimacy see Michael J. Braddick, State formation in early modern England, c. 1550–1700, Cambridge 2000, 71.

105 Spurr, Post-Reformation, 236–45. The title of church livings, particularly vicarages and curates, however, tended to belong to lay or ecclesiastical patrons, such as local gentry, an archbishop, a corporation or university college.

106 N. L. Jones, Faith by statute: parliament and the settlement of religion, 1559, London 1982; Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland, Oxford 2003, 117–31, 357–63; Spurr, ‘Religion in Restoration England’, 97–104.

107 I owe these points to J. R. Jones.

108 ms J Walker c. 1, fo. 244.

109 Ibid. fo. 307.

110 Ibid. c. 2, fo. 294.

111 Ibid. fo. 316.

112 Ibid. fo. 231v.

113 Ibid. c. 1, fos 270, 276. See also Alexandra Walsham, Providence in early modern England, Oxford 1999, and Keeble, England in the 1660s, 32.

114 Glickman, ‘Persecution’, 260; Patrick Collinson, ‘Truth, lies, and fiction in sixteenth-century Protestant historiography’, in Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (eds), The historical imagination in early modern Britain: history, rhetoric, and fiction, 1500–1800, Cambridge 1997, 56–8.

115 ms J Walker c. 1, fos 66, 124, 235, 246, 263, 270, 276, 307, 387; c. 2, fos 40, 217, 221, 252, 259, 263, 270, 283, 299, 281, 316, 329, 333.

116 Ibid. c. 1, fo. 40v.

117 I owe the reference to Lactantius to Daniel Woolf.

118 ms Walker c. 1, fo. 387.

119 Ibid. fo. 124. Riland's thanksgiving feast has obvious parallels with the memorial aspects of holy communion. The importance of county feasts and feast sermons as rituals of social affirmation and politicisation in Restoration England is analysed in Key, Newton, ‘The political culture and political rhetoric of county feasts and feast sermons, 1654–1714’, Journal of British Studies xxxiii (1994), 223–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

120 On the willingness within English Protestant culture to read historical events as revelations of the divine will see Ronald VanderMolen, J., ‘Providence as revelation: Puritan and Anglican modifications of John Calvin's doctrine of providence’, Church History xlvii (1978), 27–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I owe this reference to Gary Rivett.

121 For the process whereby oral traditions about Jesus became the written Gospels see E. P. Sanders, Studying the synoptic Gospels, Philadelphia 1989, and O'Neill, J. C., ‘Lost written records of Jesus' words and deeds behind our records', JTS xlii (1991), 483–504CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

122 This imagery had Interregnum precedents in the poetry of Christopher Harvey: Maltby, ‘Formation of “Anglicanism”’, 169–70. I thank the anonymous reader for the reminder about Eusebius.

123 G. V. Bennett, The Tory crisis in Church and State, 1688–1730: the career of Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester, Oxford 1975, 63–70.

124 ms J Walker c. 1, fo. 9.

125 John Morrill, ‘The attack on the Church of England in the Long Parliament, 1640–1642’, in Derek Beales and Geoffrey Best (eds), History, society and the Churches: essays in honour of Owen Chadwick, Cambridge 1985, 105–24.

126 Justin Champion, Republican learning: John Toland and the crisis of Christian culture, 1696–1722, Manchester 2003, 12–14.

127 Claire Cross, ‘The Church in England, 1646–1660’, in G. E. Aylmer (ed.), The Interregnum: the quest for settlement, 1646–1660, London 1972, 104ff; Spurr, Post-Reformation, 101–15.

128 A similar process has been detected among eleventh-century chroniclers by Patrick Geary in Phantoms of remembrance: memory and oblivion at the end of the first millennium, Princeton 1994.

129 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the uses and disadvantages of history for life’, in Untimely meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge 1983, 62.

130 For the sense among Anglicans and Tories that Dissenters, and to a lesser extent Whigs, were latter-day Roundheads see Hoppit, Land of liberty, 2, and Rose, England in the 1690s, 66–8.

131 ms J Walker c. 1, fo. 356.

132 Knights, ‘Occasional conformity,’ 42–57.

133 The reference to ‘a civill war’ suggests that Northleigh had White Kennett particularly in mind.

134 ms J Walker c. 1, fo. 356.

135 I thank J. R. Jones for reminding me of this point.

136 Andrew Lacey, The cult of King Charles the martyr, Woodbridge 2003.

137 One strident attack on the royal martyr tradition was found in John Toland's King Charles I. no such saint, martyr, or good Protestant as commonly reputed, London 1698 (Wing J. 7). On the broader aims of Toland's political theology see Champion, Justin, ‘“Religion's safe, with priestcraft is the war”: Augustan anticlericalism and the legacy of the English revolution, 1660–1720’, European Legacy v (2000), 547–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

138 Maltby, ‘Formation of “Anglicanism”’, 173.

139 The truth of its confession was at the core of the Church's defence of religious uniformity before 1689, and of restricting the public profile of Dissenters after the Toleration Act: Mark Goldie, ‘The theory of religious intolerance in Restoration England’, in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke (eds), From persecution to toleration: the Glorious Revolution and religion in England, Oxford 1991, 350–59; Spaeth, Church in danger, 16–19; Rose, England in the 1690s, 171–93.

140 Andrew Starkie likewise argues that divisions in the Church in the early eighteenth century concerned perceptions of its fundamental nature, that is, whether it was a repository of apostolic truth or a providentially and progressively changing institution: ‘Contested histories of the English Church: Gilbert Burnet and Jeremy Collier’, Huntington Library Quarterly lxviii (2005), 335–43Google Scholar.

141 Rose, ‘Royal ecclesiastical supremacy’; Freeman, ‘Concepts of martyrdom’.

142 Champion, ‘Religion's safe’, 553.

143 On the increasing recourse to the public as the umpire of questions of national import see Mark Knights, Representation and misrepresentation in late Stuart Britain: partisanship and political culture, Oxford 2004, 94–99.

144 On the Church's position after 1689 as a kind of monopoly within the English ‘confessional state’ see J. C. D. Clark, English society, 1660–1832, 2nd edn, Cambridge 2000, 31, 40.