Protestantism, Politics, and Women in Britain, 1660-1714

Melinda Zook

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137303202
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This compelling new study examines the intersection between women, religion and politics in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century in Britain. It demonstrates that what inspired Dissenting and Anglican women to political action was their concern for the survival of the Protestant religion both at home and abroad.

1

Nursing Mothers: Dissenting Women and Opposition Politics

It was the hopes of a Reformation that we fought and suffered …

Richard Baxter¹

Between 1663 and 1665, informants to Secretary of State, Sir Joseph Williamson, reported on one Mrs. Holmes, living at St. Lawrence Lane, London. Jane Holmes was reputed to be a “great patroness of the worst sort of people.” She consorted with regicides and Rump MPs. She frequented prisons and encouraged those that were in “greatest opposition to the government.” A widow of “great estate,” she spent her money liberally among “those that lie in wait to disturb the peace of the kingdom … and gains with her money from the Church daily and under the pretense of charity corrupts many and wanting people.”² She was hardly alone. Spy reports in the 1660s are filled with stories about women of various social groups who were thought to be aiding and abetting political opposition to the government. How so? What exactly were these women doing and what made them so dangerous that the government paid informants to spy on their travels, haunts, friends, and neighbors? Not surprisingly, they were doing what women in persecutory societies have often done throughout Western history. They were nurturing the faith and fortifying the faithful by acting as missionaries and organizers, working for the reprieve and release of political and religious prisoners, publishing and distributing sectarian literature, patronizing preachers, supporting nonconformist families in trouble, and more. Their activities were almost always tied to the care of their confessional brethren and the furtherance of nonconforming churches and sects. In the 1660s especially, this brought them into the Cromwellian orbit of former politicians, officers, and soldiers. Many of these women were themselves married to or were the widows of Republicans and regicides. Their acts of charity and daring, and their sheer tenacity in the face of persecution were politically charged. Like Shaftesbury’s famous image of popery and slavery as two sisters going hand in hand, so Protestant Dissent and opposition politics became joined, even if most nonconformists desired nothing more than to live in peace and worship freely.³ The linkage between religious and political opposition that came out of the Civil Wars and the Protectorate endured during the Restoration as did concerns over disorderly women venturing beyond the domain of hearth and distaff. Little wonder that Mrs. Holmes was thought to be encouraging the underground of political desperadoes and radicals in London; that was a world that shared her zeal for godliness and the gospel ministry. The experience of defeat, following the demise of the Commonwealth and the return of the monarchy, had left many men – politicians, soldiers, and preachers – forlorn and desperate, lost in a political wilderness. Where was Christ’s kingdom now? For women the experience was similar; only they outnumbered men among the nonconformist varieties of Protestantism under attack during the Restoration, and they were fundamental to the preservation of these sects. True enough, women were not likely to carry guns or boldly plot risings in taverns over pots and pipes, but they were conduits of communication, money, and inflammatory literature. They were also there to pick up the pieces in the end, tending to their brethren in the gaol and at the gallows.

Nonconformity and Persecution

The people of God are sad, not knowing what to do or where to go

William Hooke⁴

For three days in January 1661, a small armed group of between thirty-five and fifty men terrorized London. Led by a wine-cooper, Thomas Venner, these Fifth Monarchists sought to overthrow the recently restored monarchy and initiate the reign of “King Jesus” on earth.⁵ Their sudden, if abortive, riot brought a swift end to any illusion about the nation’s universal joy at the return of the Stuarts. At first glance, the Venner rising would seem insignificant enough; it was characteristic of so much of the zealous plotting of the early Restoration that did not have the slightest chance of success. But the specter of a resurgent republicanism coupled with fanatical sectarianism that Venner’s men represented, panicked the restored regime and trigged a cycle of royalist repression and opposition plotting. Within days, a royal proclamation banned all gatherings of Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, and Baptists, and shortly thereafter, over 4,000 Quakers were rounded up and imprisoned.⁶ What followed was the establishment of a secret service through the Secretary of State’s office that constructed an elaborate network of informants to spy on former Cromwellians and Protestant Dissenters. These spies went into the streets, the prisons, the churches, the taverns, and the bookshops. The government’s informants were paid to seek out evidence of conspiracy and that is what they did, whether baseless or not. They read the mail, followed suspicious persons, and flooded the Secretary of State’s office with reports of secret meetings, conspiracies, night ridings, rumors of risings and plots, and hundreds of intercepted letters, warnings, and informations – all of which contributed to a climate of fear and suspicion and conspiracy.⁷

The plots and risings of Restoration England, Ireland, and Scotland, some real, some fabricated, most fantastical and utterly incapable of success, had an extraordinarily negative impact on Protestant nonconformists.⁸ For whatever accommodations that Charles II might have wished to allow the “tender consciences” of his sectarian subjects, the practice of religious liberty was muted by the forces of royalist and Anglican reaction.⁹ The government’s insecurity led to a host of persecutory legislation, targeting all believers outside the Church Established and making curious bedfellows of once mutually hostile groups. Presbyterians and Muggletonians, Independents and Quakers, Fifth Monarchy Men and Baptists were “counted all alike and declared enemies to the state,” so the Independent minister, William Hooke, put it. “The people of God and the late ministry of the Gospel are (generally) in a low estate and, under their severe exercises, suffering under the name of fanatics from the Presbyterian downward.”¹⁰ The result of this coercive legislation was that by 1662 these groups forged a common identity. Writes Neil Keeble, “they faced a common foe and endured a common plight… It was the shared experience of persecution which created Dissent out of the various nonconformities of 1660.”¹¹ “The Independents and Presbyterians, who could scarcely give each other a good word,” as one London informant reports, “on the publishing of the Act of Uniformity, held a great meeting at Great St. Bartholomew’s, Thames Street, received the sacrament together, and have appointed a fast.”¹² Their newfound unity would only increase as the government continued to treat all Dissenters alike and as the culture of the Court appeared increasingly alien to a godly worldview.

Charles II’s administration had numerous Elizabethan and Jacobean statutes at their disposal with which to harass nonconformists, including laws against conventicles and vagrancy, the latter of which could be deployed against iterant preachers.¹³ But the royalist and episcopal party within the Cavalier Parliament sought a deeper level of security for the government and a more painful price for Dissent. The Act of Uniformity of April 1662, which was designed to keep all positions in the church, schools, and universities firmly in the hands of Anglicans, ultimately created a narrow, exclusive Established Church.¹⁴ This act fell most heavily on Presbyterian ministers still hoping for accommodation within the Church. They were required to undergo a re-ordination by an Anglican bishop, invalidating their first ordination by a presbyter, and to consent to everything in the revised Book of Common Prayer of 1662, which many of those living outside of London had never had a chance to review. Those who did not take the necessary oaths by St. Bartholomew’s Day (24 August 1662) were deprived of their livings. Roughly 1,909 men, predominantly Presbyterians, were ejected.¹⁵ Still more penal laws followed. The Conventicle Act (1664) banned any meeting of five persons or more where the Prayer Book was not used. The Five Mile Act (1665) forbade all preachers outside the Established Church from coming within five miles of any town or place where they had once ministered.¹⁶ Known together as the Clarendon Code, the penal laws were utterly unable to compel conformity to the Church of England or eradicate nonconformity. In fact, they endowed these groups with a history of persecution that emboldened many and strengthened their unity and determination. It also forced the most audacious among them to join that soup that made up oppositional politics.

The opposition to the restored regime in the 1660s was indeed a strange cocktail of Protestant Dissenters (including the militant Fifth Monarchy Men and millenarians of various shades), republicans and former Levellers, and Cromwellian officers and soldiers. According to Alan Marshall, who has done invaluable work on the secret service, this amalgamation of various hostile groups posed the gravest threat to the government between 1660 and 1665. The problem all nonconformist Protestants faced was the government’s inability to distinguish between those who were loyal (only desirous for freedom of worship) and those zealots who were willing to bear arms for their beliefs. Even before the most severe penal legislation went into effect, the government received report after report of “preachers [who] go about from county to county and blow the flames of rebellion.” “The wild [or Weald] of Kent is a receptacle for distressed running parsons,” reads a typical report to Secretary Nicholas in October 1661, “who vent abundance of sedition on their new-created lecture days.”¹⁷ The hunger for liberty of conscience and the vicissitudes of suffering often compelled Dissenters into the murky underground of disgruntled soldiers and fanatical plotters. A second period in which Charles II’s administration felt acutely imperiled by plots, both real and fantastic, occurred between 1679 and 1685. This time the opposition was more organized by Whig politicians and their operatives in the streets and conventicles. Once again the opponents of the government were composed of various groups, including old Cromwellians and commonwealthmen, with a wide array of agendas. But the majority of those active in the Whig cause, or more accurately, “the Protestant Cause,” as they themselves called it, were simply Dissenting Protestants. They joined the opposition in parliament and in Whig clubs, processions, petition-drives, and plots in the early 1680s in an effort to stem the tide of encroaching popery and, above all, in search of a liberty of conscience.¹⁸

While Restoration Britain was undoubtedly a persecutory society, the impact of the penal laws differed from region to region and their enforcement, according to John Spurr, “waxed and waned according to the political fears of the day.”¹⁹ Official harassment usually targeted Baptists and Quakers more than Presbyterians and Independents; but in times of real insecurity within the government, such as in the early 1660s and again in the early 1680s, even moderate Presbyterians could be subject to the ferocity of zealous authorities.²⁰ The enforcement of this legislation at the local level was usually in the hands of the country gentry, which meant that it was dependent upon their pleasure. Local sheriffs and JPs might be zealous enforcers of the penal code or they might be sympathetic to their Dissenting neighbors and partial conformist...