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.
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Notes
See Q. Skinner, ‘Milton and liberty’, London Review of Books, 30.10 (22 May 2008), 16–18; idem, ‘John Milton and the politics of slavery’, Prose Studies 23 (2000), 1–22.
See the important, but under-recognised, article by J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Religious freedom and the desacralisation of politics: From the English civil wars to the Virginia statute’, in The Virginia Statute for religious freedom. Its evolution and consequences in American history, ed. M. D. Peterson and R. C. Vaughan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 43–73;
M. A. Goldie, ‘The English system of liberty’, in The Cambridge history of eighteenth-century political thought (The Cambridge history of political thought), ed. M. A. Goldie and R. Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 40–78;
see also C. Fatovic, ‘The Anti-Catholic roots of liberal and republican conceptions of freedom in English political thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas 66 (2005), pp. 37–58;
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For an interesting discussion see A. R. Murphy, ‘The uneasy relationship between social contract theory and religious toleration’, The Journal of Politics 59 (1997), 368–92.
For a useful discussion, see, for example, J. Israel, ‘Enlightenment! Which enlightenment?’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 67 (2006), 523–45.
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See T. Gordon, The Works of Tacitus (London, 1728–1731), 2 volumes. Subsequent editions in 1737, 1753, 1770, and 1777; see also idem, The Works of Sallust, Translated into English. With Political Discourses upon that Author. To Which is Added, a Translation of Cicero’s Four Orations against Catiline (London: printed for T. Woodward, and J. Peele, 1744), further editions in 1745, 1762 and 1769. For a brief account see J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume 3, The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 316–24.
Q. Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
For an outline of this account of Hobbes, see J. A. I. Champion, ‘“The Kingdom of darkness”: Hobbes and heterodoxy’, in The intellectual consequences of religious heterodoxy 1600–1750, ed. John Robertson and Sarah Mortimer (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 95–120.
See J. A. I. Champion, ‘Hobbes and biblical criticism: some preliminary remarks’, Bulletin Annuel Institut d’Histoire de la Reformation, 31 (2010), 53–72.
See J. A. I. Champion, ‘An Historical Narration concerning Heresie: Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Barlow, and the Restoration Debate over “Heresy”’, in Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, ed. D. Loewenstein and J. Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 221–53. See also, idem, ‘Le culte prive quand il est rendu dans le secret’; Hobbes, ‘Locke et les limites de la tolerence, l’atheisme et l’heterodoxie’, in Les fondements philosophiques de la tolérance volume 1, ed. Y. Charles Zarka, F. Lessay and J. Rogers (Paris: PUF, 2002) pp. 221–53. For an outline of this view see idem, ‘How to read Hobbes: Independent, heretic, political scientist, absolutist? A review of some recent works on Hobbes’, Journal of Early Modern History, 11 (2007), 87–98. A narrative context for this view can be found in idem, ‘“My Kingdom is not of this world”: The politics of religion after the revolution’, in The English Revolution c. 1590–1720, ed. N. Tyacke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007) pp. 185–202.
See L. Strauss, Hobbes’s Critique of Religion and Related Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
On Hobbes’s reception in the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters see. N. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and especially Chapter 14, pp. 457–546.
P. Miller, ‘“Freethinking” and “freedom of thought” in eighteenth-century Britain’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 599–617;
A. C. Thompson, ‘Popery, politics, and private judgement in early Hanoverian Britain’, Historical Journal 45 (2002), 333–56.
For a more secular defence of toleration see J. A. I. Champion, ‘Respublica Mosaica: John Toland and the Naturalisation of the Jews, 1714’, in Toleration in Enlightenment Europe, ed. R. Porter and O. Grell (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 133–56.
See J. I. Israel, ‘Locke, Spinoza and the Philosophical debate concerning toleration in the Early Enlightenment (c. 1670-c. 1750)’, Mededelingen 62 (1999), 1–19. Some of these themes are also explored in idem, ‘The intellectual origins of modern democratic republicanism (1660–1720)’, European Journal of Political Theory 3 (2004), 7–36.
For a modern discussion see R. Rorty, ‘Anticlericalism and Atheism’, in The Future of Religion, ed. G. Vattimo and R. Rorty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 29–43: For anticlericalism is a political view, not an epistemological or metaphysical one. It is the view that ecclesiastical institutions, despite all the good they do - despite all the comfort they provide to those in need or in despair — are dangerous to the health of democratic societies, so dangerous that it would be best for them eventually to wither away.
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Champion, J. (2014). Some Forms of Religious Liberty: Political Thinking, Ecclesiology and Religious Freedom in Early Modern England. In: Glaser, E. (eds) Religious Tolerance in the Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137028044_3
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