Religion, Culture and National Community in the 1670s

By Tony Claydon and Thomas N. Corns

A significant collection of essays by leading scholars on the vital decade of the 1670s in Britain, Ireland and North America. This was a period of profound tension and uncertainty (culminating in the exclusion crisis of 1678-83),, in which the 1660s restoration settlement began to break down, and debates came to seem much more complex and ambiguous than the earlier simple polarity between royalist Anglicanism and a radical, non-conformist opposition. New issues included the disturbing prospect of open catholicism at court, realisation that religious dissent would not simply be persecuted out of existence, confusion over the correct response to the rise of Louis XIV’s France on the continent, the evident emergence of public opinion in the form of the press and coffee house culture;, new questions about the proper relationship between England, Ireland, Scotland and the North American colonies, and refashionings of national identities connected to all these issues. These essays explore the political, cultural and religious turbulence which resulted; and break new ground in the interdisciplinary study of the newly confusing, but highly innovative world. Taken together they suggest the 1670s was a crucial period in the emergence of ‘modern’ assumptions and concerns.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781783164639

Book preview

Introduction

Living with masquerade: the recent scholar ship of the 1670s in the Stuart realms

TONY CLAYDON AND THOMAS N. CORNS

For many years, study of the Restoration decades has been a poor relation in writing on the Stuart age. Compared with the excitements of the Civil Wars – and the bitter disagreements about their causes – which fed interest in the first half of the seventeenth century, the period after 1660 was a relatively sleepy backwater. Far fewer historical works dealt with the reign of Charles II than with that of his father (though the quality of many of them was extremely high); and if interest in Milton kept literary studies alive, it was curious that this great author tended to be seen as a radical of the mid­century crisis, in ways which ignored the Restoration context of his late masterpieces, Paradise Lost (first edition: 1667), Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (both 1671).

In the last couple of decades, however, the situation has been transformed. Interest in the later Stuart era has grown exponentially and has been fed by a number of intellectual developments which are clearly evident in the essays presented here: in fact, these contributions could be seen as dispatches from the most rapidly ex ­pand ing frontiers of our understanding of Charles II’s epoch. First, scholars across the early modern era have realized the benefits of inter­disciplinarity. For an age when literature was heavily engaged in politics, and for an age obsessed with the troubled issues of representing reality, it is essential that historians, art historians, and literary scholars talk to each other.¹ This conversation has been particularly fruitful for decades in which such canonical writers as Milton, Marvell, Rochester, Bunyan and Dryden intervened actively in the controversies of the day, and when opinion was as likely to be shaped by poetry or satirical print as by prose oratory.² Second, scholars in the whole range of disciplines have been rediscovering the role of religion. Where it was once thought the exhaustion of civil wars and the advance of natural science in the later Stuart age had produced a secularizing scepticism about faith, there is a new realization that politics, society and culture were still crucially in ­fluenced by the varieties of spiritual belief. Even if religious debates had been recast by the experience of the mid­century turmoil, they were every bit as passionate, and as rewarding to examine, as those which led to the disasters the 1640s.³

Third, the endless search for the origins of modernity among the intellectual community has begun to home in on the late­seventeenth century in the Stuart realms. This was partly stimulated by the early work of the German sociologist, Jürgen Habermas, who influentially suggested this time and place saw the earliest emergence of a ‘public sphere’ that would eventually transform relations between rulers and ruled (Habermas, 1980). For the first time, Habermas suggested, forums for public discussion – such as a relatively free press, and places to talk about its contents such as the popular coffee houses of the day – opened a space in which citizens could learn about and comment on public affairs. No longer a passive audience for the projection of authority, ordinary people entered a dynamic and critical relationship with government and began to imagine themselves as the ultimate source of political and cultural legitimacy. This theory in turn led some scholars to suggest this was a vital moment in the development of national identity, even the birth of a modern nationalism. An active public, forging a common opinion through mass discussion, could imagine itself a national community and could start to insist that the defence of its interests, rights, cultural forms and traditions was the highest human goal.⁴ This line of argument was enriched by other emerging analyses, which focused on national identity as part of an attempt to move away from Anglo­centric views of the world. The ‘three kingdoms’ approach that concentrated on England’s early modern interactions with Scotland and Ireland; a ‘new Atlantic’ history that stressed the interactions across England’s first empire; and a new interest in the European context of Stuart society: all questioned any easily definable ‘Englishness’, but simultaneously called attention to the importance of understanding nationhood at this critical moment.⁵

With all these lines of enquiry converging on Charles II’s reign, it is not surprising that the period has sprung from its slumber in recent years: or that this collection is able to present such exciting reports of its activities. What follows exemplifies where we are being taken by literary scholars’ engagement with wider political, religious and cultural issues (in the essays by Hallett, Lynch, Smith, Turner and Visconsi); by investigations of national identity in European, ‘three kingdoms’ or Atlantic contexts (the contributions of Hallett, Jackson and Visconsi); by close engagement with the ferment of divergent spiritual faiths in the Restoration (central to all the work which follows); and by examination of the publications and public action which have been seen at the heart of an emerging public sphere (again throughout the collection, but especially in the pieces by Vallance and Visconsi). Yet by focusing on the 1670s, this collection goes further still. It allows us to suggest that this particular decade was a crucial turning point – and was so at a psychological and cultural level even deeper than the changes already suggested by scholars who noted the emerging constitutional crisis of these years, or described the changes in the literary landscape after the loss of Milton in 1673 and Marvell five years later.

This argument would have to start in the 1660s. The Restoration had seen an attempt to establish stability on a footing broadly familiar from the early Stuart era – but the events of the mid­century had made this a difficult project and within only a few years its major political and theological positions were fragmenting. The earliest stage of Charles II’s reign had been marked by the 1662 Bartholomew’s Day expulsion of Presbyterian ministers, and the subsequent imposition of the ‘Clarendon Code’. This had simplified the relationship between England’s religious groupings into two opposed camps: those who conformed to the requirements and obligations of the Church of England and those nonconformists who did not. At a stroke, this eliminated the Interregnum’s subtle gradations of radic al ism and heterodoxy that spanned from Presbyterians comfortable within a national church through congregational independency to the extremer sectaries and to the Quakers. In the eyes of the law, all were subject to the same penalties and restrictions. The careers of sober, moderate clergy of puritanical orientation were destroyed. Some found themselves in prison, like Milton’s old ally William Spurstowe, incarcerated in 1663 for persisting in his ministry much as Bunyan had suffered in 1660 (though unlike Bunyan he was released in a fortnight: ODNB). At the same time as all kinds of dissent were suppressed Catholicism dropped from the wider pol itical discourse, no longer deemed the threat and anxiety it had appeared in the early Stuart period and the Interregnum. To be hostile to the national church was to be hostile to the restored monarchy, and thus to provoke a sometimes savage persecution.

But by the mid­1660s those polarities were replaced by greater complexity. Catholicism had returned early to disrupt the initial and largely unquestioning loyalism of many of those who had welcomed the king home. Charles II’s choice of a Catholic bride rather than a Protestant princess raised questions about his judgement. His en ­thusi asm for extramarital liaisons had been identified and exploited by Marchamont Nedham and others as early as the late 1650s.⁶ But the king’s sexual indiscretion soon assumed an association with an overfondness for popery. The child he sired on Barbara Palmer, countess of Castlemaine, was rumoured to have been baptized at a Catholic ceremony.

Other events ran counter to the hopes and ambitions of the court. Though the Second Anglo­Dutch War met with some initial success, its later disasters occasioned the downfall of the earl of Clarendon, the king’s first minister, who was both the father­in­law of his brother and the wise statesman whose counsel had substantially advanced the restoration of the monarchy. By then, the policy of fighting fellow Protestants, the Dutch, had, like the evident immorality of the court, occasioned among former loyalists some questioning of royal policy. At the same time, the active persecution of otherwise socially compliant Protestant dissenters engaged few magistrates with the zeal of the early 1660s, as many of them were too preoccupied with raising funds and troops to fight the war to worry about the occasional discovery of a conventicle. Moreover, while Cavaliers had had scores to settle in the immediate aftermath of the Restoration, half a decade on that old anger had gradually faded. Over the period 1665–7 prosecutions under the Conventicle Act fell sharply, and from 1666 even Quakers were meeting relatively freely. Among senior clergy support grew for a wider comprehension (Hutton, 1985: 264–6, reviews the issues).

A chance disaster, the Great Fire of London, promoted a new kind of binary opposition – between Protestants in general (and English ones in particular) and the Catholic French, with whom England was at war, and the indigenous Catholic community. The old doubts about the possible treachery of Catholics, whose primary loyalty seemingly was to pope not monarch, resurfaced. Even as London burnt, its citizens were searching out and attacking supposed incendiaries. A prime victim, Robert Hubert, a French watchmaker, was arrested shortly afterwards, apparently trying to flee the country. His (false) confession confirmed the xenophobic and anti­Catholic frenzy the disaster had aroused. As late as 1681 it was deemed ap ­propriate to add to the Monument commemorating the start of the blaze a Latin sentence asserting that it was ‘begun and carried on by the treachery and malice of the Popish faction’ (Porter, 1996: 86–7, 173; the inscription was finally removed in 1830). The role of the dissenter as public enemy was thus eclipsed by a more identifiable, traditional, and outlandish foe. English Protestants appeared more united by their central principles than divided by their preferences in the style of worship and their models for church government.

By the turn of the decade these shifts were unmistakeable, ushering in a period in which simpler allegiances gave way to more nuanced and conflicted responses. Dissenters realized that both their beliefs and their lives were no longer threatened with extinction, though episodes of renewed persecution would occur from time to time. Men loyal to the Crown nevertheless recognized their right and perhaps responsibility to oppose the king’s ministers when cor ruption, negligence or bad fortune occasioned national disasters. Indeed, the developing concept of a loyal opposition, critical of the court but not subversive of the state, allowed the emergence of an in cipient party system. One could support the king but reprehend his morals, his choice of companions, and his evident toleration of Catholicism. In 1662 the king’s world probably seemed an altogether more straightforward place to govern than it did by 1670.

Yet if Charles’s task in ruling was becoming more difficult by 1670, the subject’s duty to obedience and loyalty was also in creasingly confused: and this produced the cultural and psychological ambiguities which are illustrated in the essays which follow, and which may have transformed political and religious assumptions. Perhaps the most important reason for confusion was the highly ambiguous, and fundamentally dishonest, position of the court. Faced with increasing criticism in England, Charles sought insurance in a clandestine alliance with the French king, Louis XIV, which he sealed in the secret Treaty of Dover of 1670. This introduced multiple layers of duplicity into the court’s stance. Charles committed himself to advancing Catholicism in England and attacking the Protestant Dutch as the price for French financial support; but he could not admit that he had done this to his subjects, and was probably anyway insincere in the promise. As closet Catholic sympathizer he may have supported the aim of greater Catholic freedom, but he would not announce his own conversion or push any anti­Dutch war to a final conclusion if the price in domestic support was too high. As a result, royal policy became inconsistent; and to outsiders unaware of the duplicity, quite inexplicable. Moves in favour of Catholics and against the Dutch were taken and withdrawn in rapid succession. Almost as soon as the king had joined the French war on the Netherlands (1672) and accepted his brother James’s conversion and marriage into the papal church (1673), Charles approved Test Acts which barred James from public office by reason of his new faith, and abandoned Louis’s military effort in order to sign a separate peace with Holland. The picture was similar with Protestant dissent. As a Catholic sympathizer – and probably as a man genuinely disgusted by religious bigotry – Charles had always resisted the intolerant Anglican monopoly of the Clarendon Code. The broader Protestant outlook from the later 1660s gave him a chance to act: but his moves to ease the lot of nonconformists were both correctly suspected as an underhand aid to Romanists, and reversed the moment the loss of Anglican political support proved too grave. The tolerant Declaration of Indulgence of 1672 was therefore withdrawn as soon as the majority of the House of Commons complained about it, and the rest of Charles’s life was spent in wild shifts between suppression and indulgence of dissent.⁷

Whilst all this was going on, the position of leading political figures was complicated by the shift we traced in the late 1660s, when a single, simple polarity (regime / radical opposition) was replaced with a series of less correlated fractures (Anglican / dissenting; court / critic; Catholic / Protestant). Compounded by the uncertain position of the court, the change meant statesmen now had to construct more diverse and transient alliances to achieve their goals, and had to make more dramatic shifts of tactics. This introduced a huge fluidity and uncertainty into public life that was illustrated, for example, in the careers of the first earl of Shaftesbury who moved from defending royal power to denouncing it in his pursuit of toleration, or the duke of Lauderdale who constantly altered his English allies and his religious attitudes in his quest to remain Charles’s deputy in Scotland. At the same time, too, the replacement of a narrow Anglican identity with a broader Protestant vision disrupted important mental categories. Perhaps most significantly, nation hood became more open and blurred. An identity which might have focused (Swedish­style) on membership of a particular church now had to be married with a trans­denominational allegiance.⁸ This entangled all Charles’s subjects with people beyond their particular locality or country – both in other parts of the Stuart realms of England, Scotland, Ireland and America, and across the European continent.⁹ Also, this very broad Protestantism needed some uniting belief. The search for such a thing caused further confusion because some people began to find the solution to the problem of diversity by embracing that diversity itself. For increasing numbers of thinkers, the soul of the Protestant faith became the free interpretation of scripture and a tolerant celebration of the variety this brought.¹⁰ This allowed collaboration against a rigid and persecuting Catholicism, but it began to question if any doctrinal, spiritual or moral norms could be imposed, and thus in turn undermined authority in a wide range of spheres.

Taken together, this endless duplicity, confusion and in consist ency created a crisis of loyalty and identity. John Spurr’s authoritative work on the 1670s caught a sense of this – notably in its subtitle, borrowing a phrase from William Wycherley’s play, The Gentleman Dancing Master (1672), to label the decade a ‘masquerading age’ in which nothing could be taken at face value (Spurr, 2000: 1). Yet the essays in this volume demonstrate the crisis too. Again and again, they present people unsure of what loyalty meant when the king’s position could not be tied down; unsure who they were (insiders? outsiders?) as religiously­controlled definitions of the national community altered; finding strange allies as ideological positions re configured; or simply at sea in a treacherous maelstrom of whirling cultural currents. So we see Hallett’s exiled nuns, and Lynch’s John Bunyan, never quite able to think of themselves as aliens to an English nation, because there was always a chance a sudden reversal in official policy would re­include them. The sense of loyalty in Vallence’s addresses was complicated – at least partly because so many different groups might imagine the court was sympathetic to them; while Jackson’s Scots, and Visconsi’s Americans, struggled to find a comfortable place in an English empire whose ideological meaning was unclear and constantly changing. Meanwhile, old opposites broke down as Turner’s Rochester found himself more Puritan than Burnet; and as Smith’s writers sought a fluid and com plex variety of ways to cope with a false and illusory age.

Such disorientation was obviously upsetting for the people of the 1670s. Yet it may have been strangely productive. Culturally and psychologically, Charles’s subjects may have been forced into a differ ent – we might dare to say ‘modern’ – world as old certainties collapsed and took comforting and simple polarities down with them. It is remarkable how many assumptions which had been de cisively rejected as those of lunatic fringes as recently as 1660 found new life in the second decade of Charles’s reign, and had become more or less mainstream by the early eighteenth century. These included religious toleration;¹¹ the notion that a constant ‘nation’, rather than a contingent dynasty, should be the root of legitimate authority;¹² the idea that conflict, not harmony, was natural to human beings, and that it could even be creative as struggles between groups or institutions preserved liberty or allowed helpful evolution;¹³ and the idea that virtue might be relative, contextual, socially constructed or paradoxical, rather than God­given and absolute.¹⁴ All these notions seem to mark the modern off from what went before. Yet they were also all the sort of assumptions which could help people understand situations which were more varied, faster­changing and more ambiguous than anything they had hitherto experienced. If this is right, it is unsurprising that these ‘modern’ ideas began to thrive in the 1670s. As this collection shows, this was a decade which forced rapid mental adap tation. It may therefore have encouraged exploration of frightening, but effective, solutions.

Notes

¹ An early, admirable and illustrative example of the trend was Sharpe and Lake (1994).

² Historically informed studies that are particularly illustrative of the trend include Keeble (1987); Corns (1992); Knoppers (1994); Smith (1994); Norbrook (1999); and Achinstein (2003).

³ The classic call to reinstate faith as central to later Stuart politics was Harris, Seaward and Goldie (1990).

⁴ An argument put most forcefully in Pincus (1998: 75–104).

⁵ For recent works on the later Stuart period in these traditions, see Claydon (2007); Harris and Jardine (2008); Harris (2006); Pestana (2004).

⁶ See, for example, the account in Mercurius Politicus , no. 318 (1656), p. 7108, of Charles’s use of his supporters’ funds to provide for Lucy Walters and their son, the future duke of Monmouth.

⁷ Charles and his policies have two definitive accounts: Hutton (1989); Miller (1991).

⁸ For the Swedish situation see Ihalainen (2005: 146–73, 224–36, 288–98).

⁹ For this wider vision even among Anglican clergy from the late 1670s, see Claydon (2007: 300–2).

¹⁰ These sorts of shifts are well chronicled in Coffey (2000).

¹¹ The Anglican monopoly was officially broken by the Toleration Act of 1689 – and de facto toleration rapidly went much further than the somewhat limited terms of the statute: see Israel (1991: 129–70).

¹² An idea perhaps best summarized, and most notably officially endorsed, by the resolution of the 1689 constitutional convention that it was inconsistent with the welfare of ‘this Protestant Kingdom to be governed by a Popish Prince’: Journals of the House of Commons , 10:15.

¹³ An idea central to the ‘neo­Harringtonianism’ of the 1670s and later decades that was traced by Pocock (1975, part 3).

¹⁴ The 1670s might have been some way from Bernard Mandeville’s embrace of moral paradox in his Fable of the Bees (1704), or the socially situated virtue discussed in the post­revolutionary period (see Burtt, 1992), but the contributions to this volume by Smith and Turner show how far discussion in the decade had come from any unambiguous or clear morality.

1

Paradise postponed: the nationhood of nuns in the 1670s

NICKY HALLETT

In 1672 the English Carmelite convent in Antwerp celebrated the fifty­year anniversary of the profession of Anne of St Bartholomew (Ann Downs: 1593–1674). The occasion also marked the period she had spent in exile from her national homeland. When she died two years later her obituary included a copy of ‘the verses made up on the occasion of her jubely’:¹

Full half a hunder’d years agoe

heavens husband man began to sow

in Carmells garden English seed

which doth the virgins dowry breed.

The first fair seed how it did grow

a nobler poets pen should show.

This seed most small in its own eye

to the world dead, did fructify

… solid tree not founded on sand

can thunder stormes and winds withstand

Its vertues branches still increase

stably shadowed ore with peace

even uncorrupt it seems to be

the Lord of Hoasts dwells in this tree.

Thô death quite round about did hew

of no decay this tree, it knew.

  (SHC A1: 186; Hallett, 2007a: 64)

There was clearly a tradition of such verse writing at Antwerp and its associated Carmelite communities. The 1672 obituary of Aloysia Francisca of Jesus (Francis Morgan: 1634–72) notes she ‘had a most sweet devout tallent in Poytre hauing left to us many Poyhims of the Blessed Virgen and the sacred Infant Jesus’; a few years later Teresa Maria of Jesus (Bridget Kempe: c.1635–76) is praised for her ‘spirituall Poyhims wch according to our pious costume she was wont to make att Chrismase’ (DC L13.7: fols 18r–19v). If such