Anthony Milton

A Qualified Intolerance: the Limits and Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-Catholicism

One of the more important findings of recent historians of early modern England has been the extraordinary prominence of anti-Catholicism in that society. Violently anti-Catholic language drenched the religious literature being produced, not just by Puritan fanatics, but by the most learned bishops of the Church of England. The Pope was routinely identified as Antichrist by university professors and Puritan artisans alike, while ‘to many, if not most educated Protestant English people of the period’ (we are told) ‘popery was an anti-religion’. Parliamentary debates were often punctuated by clarion calls for more vigorous persecution of Roman Catholics. At a popular level, in years of political crisis such as the early 1640s, a whole series of local communities was seized by hysterical fears that an armed popish rising was imminent. The outbreak of the English Civil War has been blamed in particular on the escalating fears of a popish conspiracy at the heart of Charles I’s court directed against Englishmen’s religious and civil liberties.

A Missing Dimension of European Influence on English Protestantism: The Heidelberg Catechism and the Church of England, 1563–1663

ABSTRACT While historians of the early-modern Church of England have become familiar with the influence exerted upon it by Genevan and Zurich theologians, the impact of Heidelberg University and the Rhineland Palatinate was arguably equally important and has hitherto been neglected. That influence is charted here through the impact of the Heidelberg Catechism and the commentaries upon it by the Heidelberg divines Jeremias Bastingius and especially Zacharias Ursinus. While these were almost ubiquitous in the late-Elizabethan and Jacobean churches, Heidelberg divinity nevertheless came increasingly to be viewed with suspicion by churchmen under Charles I because of its alleged (and not entirely illusory) links to puritanism. It is argued here that with the creation of the Westminster Greater and Lesser Catechisms, the Heidelberg Catechism and commentaries on it no longer served a useful purpose even for puritans, and that later churchmen were unfamiliar with the influence that it had exerted in the recent past.

Church and State in Early Modern Ecclesiastical Historiography

‘Church and state’ is a phrase that one rarely meets with in most early modern ecclesiastical history that has been written over the past fifty years. One major exception has been the United States of America, where the phrase even has its own journal. With regard to early modern English history, one rare exception very much proves the rule: Leo Solt’s Church and State in Early Modern England (a synthetic work published in 1990) is the work of an American historian, who admits in his preface that he has chosen to interpret the relationship ‘very broadly’, and that the book ‘might be more accurately entitled “Religion and Politics in Early Modern England”’. The axiomatic status of the separation of church and state in the United States, and its continuing use as a political football, has given the phrase a prominence in public discourse that has naturally been reflected in American historiography, where figures such as Roger Williams invite the application of later terminology to the seventeenth century. Where ‘church and state’ have not been separated (or at least had not been in the early modern period), the term seems to have been less appealing to historians, at least to those working on the period before the assault on established churches in the nineteenth century.