Some forms of religious liberty: Political thinking, ecclesiology and religious freedom in early modern England

Abstract

What did it mean to be a free person in early modern England? Was this freedom a political, religious or moral state? The distinctive answers to this simple question were shaped by context and audience: Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s answer (in the 1540s) may have contradicted that of James II (in the 1680s); republican poet John Milton’s would have been different from that of eighteenth-century high church priest Francis Atterbury, and Thomas Hobbes’s response contradictory to that of Archbishop William Laud.1 One thing is unmistakable, however, and almost without exception: any answer would have not been able to avoid taking into consideration concepts of both civil and religious liberty. These accounts might have included defences of the freedom of the true Christian from oppression by the Antichrist, or the liberty of the ‘conscience’ from persecution by the ungodly, or demands to express a lively faith and true sanctification in acts of free Christian love. Sometimes these languages of religious freedom (exempted from interference by Roman Catholic, Protestant, or sectarian agencies) sat comfortably alongside articulations of civil liberties (the freedoms of citizens from illegal taxation or from prerogative interference in the rule of law). The history of the tensions between these sometimes converging and (more often) conflictual languages was driven by the evolving relationships between subject and state, between churchmen and laity, and between bishop and king over the allocation of correct jurisdictional forms of power and authority.